Forensic Week Day 4

Day four was the actual crime scene scenario, this year the crime scene was an elderly woman lying on her bedroom floor, a plastic bag over her head with a rubber band around her neck, and pills on the bedside table and around the body. Upon entering the crime scene we learned that the victim had stage four breast cancer, her husband was downstairs, in a wheelchair, claiming that his wife was dead, patrol officers believed it to be a mercy killing, and the husband was incoherent and would only ask for his priest.

In the crime scene, there was a bedside table just behind the victim that held the prescription drugs, diazepam, as well as a book, The Final Exit, which held different ways to commit suicide when terminally ill. There were several religious magazines at the scene, which we learned was because the victim and her husband were devotee Catholics. The Final Exit was used, it only had her fingerprints on it, and had a chapter bookmarked, Self-Deliverance Using a Plastic Bag, which described the crime scene and the process of suicide, step by step.