Catch me if you can 

The things that Frank  did that were out of the ordinary was first he impersonated a teacher,  a pilot, then was a “Doctor”, and lastly he impersonated a lawyer. The consequences Abagnale served some time in prison (being isolated). Today Frank is working for the FBI.

  I liked this movie because it was very interesting to watch Frank get into stuff and see how he always seems to get out of it. My favorite part of the movie is when he was supposed to meet his fiancé at the airport, the FBI was so close to catching him and he somehow escaped. 

  The connections of the movie to class was that there were three examples of forgery/fraud were cashing fake checks at the airport, riding for free. Also, everytime he made fake checks and putting sticker like emblems to put on the checks. 


Determine height, angle, and point of orgin

In this lab blood spatter analysis is the examination of shapes, locations, and distribution patterns of bloodstains in order to discover what events lead to the blood loss. The major assumption is that bloodstains and bloodstain patterns are characteristics of the forces that have created them.

Diameter vs. height graph

In this graph you can see the correlation of the points of mainly being a positive scatter plot graph but the graph only became positive when the angle of impact became smaller. Comparing our results to the conventional wisdom which is that higher heights will lead to a  larger diameter. In our experiment we discovered that the diameter of our blood droplets did increase in diameter  the higher we got to dropping them.Blood Spatter Lab

diameterscatter plot

In the lab Width/Length VS Angle, The goal of the lab was to see the different angles of blood spatter. We found that the small angle and degree the longer length and shower width of the spatter.

As you can see in the pictures above the steeper our angle the longer and wider our blood spatters became.

To determine the direction of the blood you need to have a ruler and draw a straight line from the tail down, doing that to each blood droplet and it will point to where it originated. That is the same with determining the area of convergence. The direction and area of convergence is important to the blood spatter because the tail determines where the point of origin is to the blood. The area of the blood spatter shows you if it was a deep wound or not by the size and diameter of the droplet.img_1612

From this experiment I have learned that the further from the ground the blood drops the bigger the blood spatter. Also, if blood drops from an angle there will be a tail pointing from the point of origin.

Angle of impact 



Blood Spatter 

  1. The goal of today’s lab was to measure the diameter of the blood droplets. We found that the higher you dropped the blood the bigger the spatter was. The average of all of the dropl


Comparing soil found at a crime scene

A bike was stolen and the police dropped of a box of soil where the bike was stolen at, before we had the police soil, our group went out to collect some soil then we were to compare both soils and see if where we collected our soil was that of where the bike was stolen.

The purpose of this investigation is to compare the soils and the soil found at a crime scene and then see if these two soils then match up. We are trying to compare soil at a crime scene with the soil found around the school. Last week our group collected soil from around the school, we retrieved from the freshman court yard. We are using this soil to compare it to the crime scene soil.

Soil is important to Forensic Investigations because soils are like fingerprints because every type of soil that exists has unique properties that act as identification markers. The four categories of soil the loam, clay, silt, and sand. Our group was able to determine our soil texture by feeling our soil. We noticed that it was a mixture of clay and silt, possibly making it a silty clay loam.soils

pH is a measure of the hydrogen ion concentrated of a solution. pH test the acidity level and is tested on a zero- fourteen scale, zero being very acidic and fourteen being very alkaline. Between six and seven is a neutral pH. Soil analysis without a crime scene can also be helpful in finding the place where the crime was committed. Having acidic soil is the most common and is simply that the organic matter and minerals that break down in a soil overtime are acidic in nature, thus making the soil acidic. Having alkaline soil also referred to “sweet soil” soil that is alkaline usually contains large amounts of calcium, sodium, and magnesium, and it is less soluble than acidic soil.untitled

In the picture above this shows a comparison of pH levels of the two soils that we found. The soil on the left is our soil that we found at the crime scene was a pH of 8/9 which is more on the alkaline side but not drastic. The soil on the right is the soil that our group collected and had a pH level of 10/11 being even more alkaline than the soil found at the crime scene.

While comparing the soil at our crime scene to the soil we had collected is visually not the same. The soil at the crime scene feels gritty meaning it has sand in it. The soil our group collected is very chalky and a bit sticky with this information we can conclude that this soil contains silt and clay. The crime scene soil is a sandy loam and the soil our group collected is a silty clay loam.


Top: Our group soil.    Bottom: Crime scene soil.

To determine our soil texture by using the soil texture triangle we measured the sand, silt and clay in mm. Then separately we took sand divided by the total amount of soil and then multiplied that by 100 and retrieved our percentage. The percentage for sand was 80%, silt was 16%, and clay was 0.0003%. As we calculate this on our Soil Texture Triangle we learned that our soil that our group retrieved was a sandy loam.

soil texture triangle2


We determined the soil texture by following the map above, In this map we determined the texture of the crime scene soil. When we did this with our soil that we got from around the school that came out to be a sandy clay loam. Clearly these two soils do not match and the soil that our group found was not at the crime scene.

Our group concluded that these samples do not match. I learned from this experiment that you can use soil to determine a crime scene by something as simple as a pH balance test. The question I still have about this soil analysis is that what if the soils do not match but have about the same pH balances? Is it possible that some of the crime scene soil and the soil that we collected have been in the same are? The next steps of this investigation should be to run more soil tests (chemical tests).