Abstract
The paper presents a case of a forensic autopsy of a young woman who was murdered and her dismembered body was hidden in soil and water. In the skull of the deceased, in the temporal and occipital regions, the autopsy revealed 3 round, almost identical holes, which looked like small caliber gunshot wounds. Doubts about the cause of these injuries were raised by the fact that despite the decomposition of the body, the continuity of the dura at the site of these holes remained undamaged and the absence of any trace of a bullet’s wound track in the brain, the absence of a foreign body in the cranial cavity, as well as the absence of wounds on the opposite side of the skull that could be exit wounds. A thorough analysis of the investigation and the activities carried out during the search for the missing body allowed to adopt and finally confirm the hypothesis that the above mentioned skull damage occurred during the search for the cut-off head of the deceased in shallow water by means of special tapered conical steel probes used by the rescue/search teams. Due to the structure of such a spike, i.e., a sharp end and then a wide cone, only a superficial puncture of the steel probe tip three times into the skull had taken place, which caused regular, rounded bone damage without damaging the dura and brain. The presented case indicates that sometimes post-mortem artifacts may suggest a completely different origin of wounds, which emphasizes the need for a comprehensive analysis of all possible causes of their occurrence, particularly data concerning the handling of the corpse before it is delivered to the morgue, so as not to make a diagnostic error during autopsy.
Highlights
In the case of hiding a corpse and the longer time that elapsed from death to body discovery, one should take into account the possibility of post-mortem injuries caused both by environmental conditions, by the action of living organisms, as well as by the actions of humans during the search or recovery of the corpse [1,2,3,4]
During the post-mortem examination of the head, after separation of the preserved soft tissues exhibiting decayed lesions, apart from the above mentioned mandibular injuries, an atypical finding was revealed in the form of three round holes, each 0.5 cm in diameter, with smooth external edges located in the right temporal bone and slightly backwards in the occipital bone (Fig. 1)
The only damage caused by the sharp ending of the probe was the round hole in the 0.3-cm thick skull bone (Fig. 6). This case shows how important and helpful is the cooperation between forensic pathologists performing post-mortem examinations and law enforcement and judicial investigators at every stage of an investigation
Summary
In the case of hiding a corpse and the longer time that elapsed from death to body discovery, one should take into account the possibility of post-mortem injuries caused both by environmental conditions (taphonomic changes), by the action of living organisms (insects and their larvae or other animals), as well as by the actions of humans during the search or recovery of the corpse [1,2,3,4]. A young woman, who went missing a month before, was murdered by her boyfriend, who decided to hide the body and complicate its identification, if found For this purpose, he dismembered the body by cutting off the head, torso and limbs, and removing large areas of skin from the body parts, including the face and fingertips. During the post-mortem examination of the head, after separation of the preserved soft tissues exhibiting decayed lesions, apart from the above mentioned mandibular injuries, an atypical finding was revealed in the form of three round holes, each 0.5 cm in diameter, with smooth external edges located in the right temporal bone and slightly backwards in the occipital bone (Fig. 1).
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