Forensics

S01E05 At 7.30am on a mild, summer morning, a middle-aged woman goes into her backyard to unlock the self-contained unit where her 23-year-old daughter lives alone. She lets her daughter’s dog out and notices a pair of overalls lying on the floor, half-in, half-out of the bedroom. The overalls should be with her daughter who, by now, would normally be on her way to work at a recycling facility. The woman takes a closer look and finds her daughter’s body lying face-down on the bedroom floor, cold. She calls out to her husband, they phone emergency services and the operator tells them to roll over their daughter - her throat has been cut. Ambulance officers and police arrive, the pathologist examines the body. A homicide investigation is underway. ESR scientists and the police fingerprints officer set to work, meticulously examining the scene, taking swabs from the body, from blood stains on the bed and carpet, lifting prints, collecting fibres and hairs, examining a face print on a window, making a cast of damage to the bedroom wall. The work is fastidious. The fingerprints officer can’t get a good lift from the print she finds on a blood-stained door handle so she removes the entire door and relocates it to the station for further examination. Outside the unit, investigators look for clues to how the murderer could have left the scene. ESR scientists test for blood on fence posts and as night descends they use luminol in an attempt to find a trail of blood. They find nothing. We learn that the young woman had received threats; there was a question of a stalker, an overly keen co-worker. Police take her ex-boyfriend to the station for an interview and medical examination where his fingernails are scraped and clipped and his shoes are taken. A detective is at the ex-boyfriend’s house when he returns from the station and the ex-boyfriend is keen to show the detective the bottle of prescribed sleeping pills he claims he’d taken the night before – his alibi.