Case Notes 4 – Clothing Examinations

For this set of case notes you will provide the results of the clothing examinations performed in the textbook using the stereo microscope.

We are doing a LOT of sub-itemizing in this one. I apologize in advance for the tedious nature of having to input the year repeatedly. If you ahve a short cut for that like cutting and pasting or a ctrl+F substitution, that’s fine. Just doublecheck to make sure you don’t accidentally input the year into something that should not be a year!

You need to use the PSUCL-001-… system we introduced in the last module.

Thinks to keep in mind: Do I use a dot or a dash? Remember its a dash if the new evidence is found or came to us that way and we do not change its form, and its a dot if its something we the analyst have created. So, hair, fiber, or powder? Thats a dash because we didnt change its form, we just collected it. A stain we swabbed or something we cut? We created a new stain by taking a portion of the original one and transferring it to a new swab, or we cut a hole into the original and made a new piece out of it, so dot. Did we create (.) or find (-) glass chips? Also remember that could mean you have items with essentially the same number, except one might be -01 and the other .01.

I will leave an example of the PSUCL -011 SYSTEM CASE NOTES I HAVE ALREADY COMPLETED THE TEXTBOOK DOWNLOAD WILL BE BELOW AND THE INFORMATION YOU PULL THE CASE NOTES INFORMATION FROM WILL START ON PAGE 95 CHAPTER 5 CLUES IN THE DUST

MORE EXPLANATION ON ITEMIZING FOR CASE NOTES:

The first thing you will have to do for the sexual assault kit is sub-itemize the items in the sexual assault kit. Why do we do this? So we can keep track of the evidence and what is being done to it as it moves through the lab. A secondary purpose is to demonstrate association – as a larger piece of evidence is divided for examination, we need to have a naming convention that let’s us track where that evidence started and how it ended up. So what do I mean by that? Say you have a bag with bloody clothes in it taken from an assault victim. There is a shirt, pants, and underwear in a bag labeled item 2. The clothes are covered in blood. The suspect is currently unknown and you are being asked to test the blood on the items in certain places to see if it all belongs to the victim or if there might be blood from the suspect as well. To do this, you have to examine each of the three clothing items and take swabs and cuttings of multiple stains in multiple places from each garment. How difficult do you think that would be if you had to refer to each garment, stain, cutting, and swab as item 2?! You would either never know which you were talking about, or you’d have to waste time and energy describing each item every time so we knew which item 2 it was you were talking about (item 2 – swab number 4 taken from the second stain on the left shoulder… etc.). Or, instead, you can come up with a naming system that let’s you quickly and easily label evidence in a way that you can keep track of new things being made or found while also letting you follow the provenance (or origin) or each piece. Spoiler alert: we do that second thing.

Naming Convention

Let me start by saying that we are not following the convention in the book that used the parenthese for sub-itemzing. We are following the typical practice used in the PSU Forensic Science program to allow our future majors a chance to learn the naming convention before getting into upper-division courses. If you are struggling with the conversion in the book to our comneclature, let me know.

We start by associating the evidence item with a case number. For us, that is PSUCL##-001 (with the ## being the last two digits of the current year). To individual items of evidence we then add a -01, -02, -03 convention to the end of the case number. For example, PSUCL26-001-03 would be the third item of evidence from the first case received in 2026.

So for the book, Lisa’s SAK is item 1. In our naming convention in the year 2026, we are going to call that SAK bag PSUCL26-001-01.

We’re then going to label each item in the kit with a new designation that shows, while it came from the SAK bag, it is its own evidence item. For this, we are going to add letter as “-A”, “-B”, “-C”, etc.

For our case, that would look like this:

PSUCL26-001-01

Lisa W. Sexual Assault Kit containing:

PSUCL26-001-01-A

Lisa W. Sexual Assault Kit test-tube of blood

PSUCL26-001-01-B

Lisa W. Sexual Assault Kit toxicology blood sample

PSUCL26-001-01-C

Lisa W. Sexual Assault Kit vaginal swab

PSUCL26-001-01-D

Lisa W. Sexual Assault Kit cervical swab

Notice how we can quickly see that each of these items exist within or on a “parent” item, in this case -01 that SAK bag, but with the letter we can also quickly tell that they are different things.

So how do we tell the difference between an item that is as it was found and an item we create as examiners? Great question!

When sampling (in this set of test, we are taking some cutting from a swab), a designation should be used to identify each individual sampling. That letter should be preceded by a dot instead of a dash, indicating that the analyst created the item. For example, if the evidence number for a bloodstained shirt is PSUD25-001-03, the first stain examined should be labeled PSUD25-001-03-A (because we didn’t create the stain, it was aleady there so it gets a dash “-“). If we take a cutting of that stain for DNA analysis, the cutting should be given the number PSUD25-001-03-A.01. Using the dot “.” instead of a dash here lets us and anyone looking at our notes know that this cutting is something we created from the evidence, not something that came to us like that. If we were to take a second cutting from the same stain, we would label that as PSUD25-001-03-A.02, because that stain is A and it’s our second created evidence. But if we took a cutting from a different stain, we would need to identify that it is now stain B and not stain A, and then we would indicate it was the first cutting from that stain like PSUD25-001-03-B.01. And so on.

I won’t lie – it is VERY confusing at first learning this new system. I’ve provided some additional examples of how the system works below that will hopefully help you understand it better. Note that the case number is NOT the one we are using – it’s just an example so do not copy it directly.

EXAMPLE- Sex Assault Kit from Case PSU24-003:

PSU24-003-01 Box containing SAK Kit Specimens

PSU24-003-01-A Envelope marked Hairs

PSU24-003-01-A-1 Hair 1 within a pharmacy fold

PSU24-003-01-A-2 Hair 2 within a pharmacy fold

Notice that in the example above, there are two hairs in the same envelope. Those hairs, being given and not created evidence, are given dashes and not dots in their labeling.

PSU24-003-01-B Envelope labeled vaginal swab

PSU24-003-01-B-01 Swab

PSU24-003-01-B-01-A Hair found on swab (dash is used as this is not analyst created just something that was on there already that was found)

PSU24-003-01-B-01.A Cutting of swab (dot is used because cutting is analyst created)

For the example above, notice that we have two things happening here: 1) there is a hair found on the swab, so we give that a dash and a letter because it was given evidence and not created evidence and 2) the cutting of the swab is called dot and the letter because we created the cutting. So both are named as an “A” because they are the first we identified, but they are delineated by the dot or the dash as to whether they were given/found evidence or created.

PSU24-003-01-C Envelope marked Underclothing

PSU24-003-01-C-01 Underwear

PSU24-003-01-C-01-A Hair on underwear

PSU24-003-01-C-01-B Stain on underwear

PSU24-003-01-C-01-B.01 Cutting of underwear stain

For the example above, notice how there are two additonal found pieces of evidence, -A and -B, and then a cutting was created from one of them, -B.01. Does the naming system make sense when you see it lined up like this?