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How A Forensic Expert Used Bugs To Solve A Lakeside Murder

In 2012, a teenage girl’s body was found by a lake in Italy. The coroner declared it a natural death until forensic biologist Dr Paola Magni proved a suspect was at the scene of the crime.

Crime Insiders: Forensics host Kathryn Fox said, “Her family suspected the man she was seeing. He claimed he was nowhere near the lake. But one tiny organism, invisible to the naked eye, proved otherwise.”

Forensic biologist Dr Paola Magni, who helped solve the case, unpacks what she found on the Crime Insiders podcast:

Dr Magni was called to investigate whether the drowning was a murder.

She used a technique developed by colleagues in the Netherlands that determines whether plankton from a body of water matches clothes from a perpetrator.

Magni collected all the clothes from the suspect’s home to compare with water samples.

“We were able to say that only a number of items were positive to the presence of plankton, and the plankton was matching with the plankton of the lake,” Magni said.

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 Once Magni presented this evidence to police, the case against Federica’s boyfriend was reopened.

“The prosecutor of the case showed me the picture of him at the club that night, and he was wearing exactly the same clothes,” she said.

The boyfriend was convicted of murder and Magni became a pioneer in forensic entomology and aquatics.

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