Estimating the postmortem interval of the deceased at the site of the accident is very important in forensic investigation since it is used as critical information to determine the direction, necessity, and scope of investigation as well as the analysis and reconstruction of the case. While initial body phenomena such as decreasing body temperature, livor mortis, and rigor mortis are possible in fresh corpse, in the case of a corpse with advanced decay, there is a limit compared to the fresh corpse due to the loss of the findings.
Necrophagous insects used in forensic entomology are composed of various species, and morphological and molecular biological information for species identification is well established by various domestic and foreign research results. In Europe and the United States, forensic entomology is used as formal investigation techniques to identify insect species collected at the investigation using morphological analysis or molecular biological methods, and to estimate the minimum postmortem interval (PMI-min) using ecological information or larval growth data.
Although research on the field is frequently conducted in South Korea, actual use of the case is insufficient due to the reason that it takes a long time to analyze. Thus, in order to enhance the utilization of forensic entomological methods in the process of dealing with existing cases, the current study attempts to compare the precise estimation results of the PMI-min of necrophagous insects by forensic entomologists with the estimated results of the minimum postmortem interval using total body score(TBS).
This study analyzed 26 cases collected over last two years(2019-2020) in Chungbuk province. The results confirmed that out of the total 26 cases, 2 cases failed to estimate the PMI-min through forensic entomological methods because it was contrary to the last track time, only 2 cases out of 24 cases that not succeeded in analyzing the PMI-min using only the temperature measured at the time of arrival at the site. In addition, in 2 cases out of 26 cases, it was impossible to estimate the PMI-min using the TBS due to heating, and it was confirmed that 6 cases out of 24 cases were inconsistent with the time of the corpse’s last track time.