WATER-RELATED DEATH INVESTIGATIONS, BAIL FOR MURDER, HERE COMES THE JUDGE, AND RESEARCHING THE NEWS - 025

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​TRANSCRIPT:

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​This week on The Writer's Detective Bureau: water related deaths, bail for murder, here comes the judge, and researching the news. I'm Adam Richardson, and this is the Writer's Detective Bureau.

This is episode number 25 of The Writer's Detective Bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality crime related fiction. If you have your own author business consider joining Patreon. It's free for you and it allows your readers to support you financially through monthly micro-payments. Give your fans a chance to show their support by creating your own Patreon account right now. To learn more visit WritersDetective.com/Patreon. Please join me in thanking the patrons that make this podcast possible, Joan Raymond, Guy Alton, Natasha Bajema, Natalie Barelli, Joe Trent, Siobhan Pope, Leah Cutter, Ryan Kinmil, Richard Phillips, Robin Lyons, Gene Desrochers and Craig Kingsman by visiting the links to their author websites in the show notes, which you can find at WritersDetective.com/25.

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​Speaking of Gene Desrochers, he submits this week's first question. Gene writes, "Hi, Adam. Love the podcast. Succinct and to the point. In my latest novel I'm dealing with time of death in one situation where an older woman drowns in the ocean and is found a week later on the beach. Within how many hours can a not-so state-of-the-art crime lab pinpoint time of death? Minutes, hours, days? She's not been eaten, but she's been nibbled on by smaller fish during this time, and of course on the beach flies and such have gathered. Thanks for your help. Sincerely, Gene."

Gene, first of all, thank you for becoming a patron, and thank you for the question. For starters, I don't know that they would come up with an exact time of death. Knowing that she's been missing and presumed drowned for a week is already a pretty good narrowing down of the time of death window. A week is a long time for a body to be in the water. Now, I say that because from an ecosystem perspective she's a pretty significant food source for everything living in the water, whether, critters big and small are going to start doing their thing pretty quickly. Being on the beach would take less of a toll on the body. I don't think the autopsy would be as focused on the time of death specifically so much as the cause of death, especially if drowning is already the suspected cause. So if they aren't suspecting foul...           Continue reading...