Forensic Files

Forensic Files builds its cases on what can be measured. A skull, blood spatter, a bullet's path and an old autopsy report carry the story, and the people around each case explain what those details meant. The structure stays the same from case to case. Plain narration lays out the facts, and between those passages investigators, relatives and forensic specialists speak in their own words. Several cases start from an explanation that almost works. In 'Slippery Motives', set in 1986, Ed Post returns from a morning jog near his downtown St. Louis hotel to find his wife dead in the bathtub, and the medical examiner rules it a drowning. The oddities are small ones, like Post making a point of telling hotel staff his name and room, which one interviewee files under 'the book of Who Cares'. Then comes the towel ring. It was tested to see whether a woman Julie Post's size could have pulled it from the wall in a fall, and it is later named as the thing that convicted him. 'Bed Of Deceit' turns on a different account. Cynthia, the wife of retired police officer Dan McDonald, says he took his own life and that she first hid it so the family could collect on his life insurance. X-rays showed the bullet moving back to front and left to right, pointing to a left-handed shooter, and McDonald was right-handed. What links the two cases is a plausible story meeting physical evidence that will not bend to it. 'Broken Bond' starts in a hospital. A two-year-old has seizures and breathing trouble that doctors cannot explain, and his sister raises the possibility of a rare syndrome. Medical detectives in Iowa then go back to the 1984 death of nine-month-old Morgan Reed in Texas, whose autopsy recorded blood clots around the brain. It closes on a hard note, as one voice describes a woman who turned down a deal that would have meant admitting what she had done. 'Headquarters' asks what a skull can say about a life. It includes the disappearance of a pregnant young woman named Belinda who had planned to go back to school, and it ends on the view that forensic art let the dead speak and that the face Karen Taylor put on the skeleton broke the case. 'The Alibi' weighs memory against biology. Crystal, a high school girl, vanished after a party in 1991, and the prime suspect had two alibi witnesses. A man who placed two people by her car later admitted he had been drinking. In one voice's telling, the DNA and the blood made the arrest possible. A good place to start is 'Slippery Motives', where a single object is described as the key to a whole trial. 'Broken Bond' is better left until a listener is ready for a case about an infant's death. A deep archive lies beyond both.