This scenario is from a recent episode of “Waking the Dead”, a British drama about cold case files. While investigating a decades old murder the detectives find out that their main lead, a woman in her 40s/50s, has hanged herself. She’s found wearing a wedding dress and wedding ring and the detectives learn that she was once married, a fact she did not disclose. However, the medical examiners deduce that her relationship with her husband was not typical (a clue that eventually helps break the case) because they could tell that she died a virgin. How did the autopsy help determine this? I assume it has something to do with the state of her hymen, I was wondering if there was some other test/physical trait/methodology for determining whether someone died a virgin.
Hanging ones self may be a clue.
Vaginal intercourse will usually break the hymen (as will the insertion of anything else into the vagina), so if the dead woman had an intact hymen, that’s a sign that she probably never had vaginal sexual intercourse.
But I have read (sorry, can’t remember where) that there are some women whose hymen never breaks. She could have been one of those. Or her first husband could have been impotent.
I’m reading “Mind hunter” right now and they also mention that autopsy examinations are able to tell (sometimes) that a victim was a virgin before a rape/murder (in this case, a 12 year old girl). I assume it would be apparent if the hymen was recently torn and not healed.
In the case of a 40 year old women, it’s possible her hymen was intact for all these years but you might also be able to tell by the condition of the vaginal wall.
I have a CSI episode that also mentions a rape test that was done when some women claimed to have been raped at a party. The show claimed that the test shows she hadn’t had sex for months.
If the hymen is intact I think that is a good indication of virginal status but the reverse is not as clear. As I understand it there are a variety of reasons the hymen may break for reasons other than having had sex so a woman with a broken hymen may very well still be a virgin (assuming the status of “virgin” is only lost via vaginal penetration presumably by a penis but these days I think “virginal” status can be a bit of a gray area).
Please remember that an autopsy isn’t just a checklist. Aside from the presence of the hymen, they would be able to directly assess how durable or elastic it was. While persistent or elastic partial or complete hymens in sexually active women have been recorded in the literature, they don’t just happen by chance. They have properties that allow them to persist, which are not present in most hymens.
In short, it is quite probable that a pathologist could easily determine not just the presence of the hymen, but its ability to survive intercourse. In contemporary Western culture, the first year of marriage typically involves on the order of a hundred acts of intercourse. A single act typically suffices for hymenal obliteration.
“On the order of”, of course, means “within an order of magnitude” (factor of ten), so this is a safe assumption, despite the existence of exceptions.
AFAIK, despite what the television might suggest, there is exactly ONE test that can offer reliable evidence of the timing of sexual activity more than a few days in the past: pregnancy (fetal development can be dated fairly accurately). While rough sex or rape can produce trauma that persists beyond a few days, most sex does not. The vaginal mucosa generally heals fairly rapidly from minor insults.
There is no chemical trace that persists more than a few days in a normal living vagina (much less months as suggested), much less reliably or in a manner that provides accurate dating. One might argue that STDs suggest intercourse, but that is at best a plausible supposition, and the timing of lesions like syphillitic chancres is highly variable. Of course, authors are free to postulate all sorts of unlikely circumstances to allow more deterministic evidence, as the plot requires
- K “who was once accused of being a minor sexual insult himself” P
I would take anything in an autopsy with a grain of salt. An autopsy was required when my father died, and it said he was uncircumcised, which came as a bit of a surprise to my mother.