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Articles » Crime Scene And
Physical Evidence
Breakthroughs of Flowers and Murder
Fanny Ngai
Plants have helped solve many crime cases. Criminals and
/ or their victims sometimes pick up plant evidence at the crime scene.
The cross-transfer of evidence can be used to sometimes identify the crime scene.
One example of this was when the pollens of the flowers helped solve a German murder mystery. A grave in Magdeburg was dug up. It had 32 young men buried in it. They all died around 1945 and 1960. Many had assumed that the Soviet secret police killed them all. Reinhard Szibor was a biologist who used the pollen that was found on the victims to determined when they were killed. The pollen is released from the flowers at different times of the years, depending on what types of flowers they are. A test was shown with a student with him blowing his nose for over a year. Then it was proved that these Soviet soldiers died around summertime.
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Reinhard Szibor, Discover, Vol. 20 No. 2, February 1999
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