How are coroners able to find specific details about a dead body, like the time of death, cause of death, and even the distance between the victim and the attacker?
In: Biology
If you know the temperature where the body is then you can work out rate of heat loss from the body. This will give a time of death if not too much time has passed (it’s going to not be 100% accurate and so will be a range but won’t be like 2 or 3 days, more like 12 to 14 hours). If too long for this method has passed then they can tell from things like which bugs are eating the body and how much decomposition has taken place. Bugs will show up after a certain amount of times before they start to feed on the body especially those which are laid in the body as eggs first. They take time to hatch and then mature.
Cause of death can be rather obvious if they’ve been stabbed, shot, etc. They can even tell if the stabs, etc were while the person was alive due to if the blood was pumped out by a still beating heart or not.
If the victim was shot they can tell if it was close range if there’s powder residue on the victim. This powder residue comes out of the gun when it’s fired but doesn’t travel very far.
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