In books and movies, we see a damaged body that can only be identified–or not–by a dental record. Does this happen in real life? I mean, is there some massive dental record data base that police/FBI can access? Even if true, my dental records when I was 20 in Colorado would not be my 60 age records in Delaware, so not conclusive. Are dental records a unique identifier same as fingerprints?
Dental records are sometimes used to identify remains when DNA and fingerprints are not available. Dental records, while not as unique as fingerprints or DNA, can often identify a person even if they aren’t particularly current.
There is no national database of dental records, usually a person’s dentist is known by someone close to the victim and that tells forensics where to look for their records. What you see on TV is a dramatization, and it can take many months to positively identify a badly decomposed or burned body no matter what techniques are used.
Not really - IIRC the point was that if the police have an idea who the body is, they seek out the dentist this person used and compare teeth with them. Most dentist will have 1 or more full set xrays. Positions of fillings is also a give-away.
I think it was the movie Charlie Varrick where one person breaks into the dentist’s office and swaps dental records in the paper files (those were the days) to make the badly burned corpse seem to be his.
Not for the general public though there is probably an index system for military. Dental records are normally used to confirm the identity of remains when fingerprints aren’t available. Small databases of known missing persons probably exist.
Even in books and movies it isn’t used to identify a body that just washes up on a beach when the authorities have no idea who it is. It’s used to identify remains when there is some idea of whose remains they might be - for example a badly burned body found in at an apartment building fire is most likely going to be a resident who cannot otherwise be accounted for, so there are a limited number of dental records that will need to be compared
There was a terrorist bombing of a nightclub in Bali in 2002 that killed many locals and Australian tourists. Initial identification of the remains was by family members - but of the 18 identified, nine were incorrect, ie they identified someone else completely half the time.
Its easy to understand how that may have happened. A distressed person looking for a 20s white male friend from an explosion that destroyed a nightclub full of tall, 20s, white males, and so on.
Formal disaster identification protocols were changed after that to require something more than a visual ID. This included confirmation by dental records. The advantage in this case was that the victims were younger and their complete dental records more likely to be with dentists still in operation.
On a side note, using dental records to identify bite marks (long used in criminal trials)
has been recently debunked.
Same as hair matching, which was total woo where the experts said what the prosecutor wanted to hear. I recall a reenactment of a court transcript on CBC radio decades ago, where the defense kept asking the expert:
-So the hairs were identical.
-No, they were similar.
-So they differed? How did they differ?
-They didn’t.
-Then they were identical?
-No, they were similar…
And round and round it went in circles. The hairs were not identical but there were no differences.
I would imagine bite marks, same problem - you’re biting a soft surface like skin, no predicting how much it would stretch or deform during the process to produce the imprint.
It’s shocking how much of “forensic science” is completely scientifically unsubstantiated. Bite mark analysis, hair and fiber analysis, blood spatter analysis, burn pattern analysis – none of these have stood up to rigorous, objective scientific analysis to determine their reliability. And don’t even get me started on criminal profiling. . .
This article says that profiling is accurate enough to have “led to identification of the suspect” in maybe 17% of cases.
However, this is from 1985 and contains a reference to the Boston Strangler, where DNA in 2015 proved the wrong man had confessed and been convicted… so the profile being wrong was irrelevant.
Long ago, Bernard Shaw repeatedly voiced his opinion that forensic ballistics was all bunk, and that he could personally think of half a dozen ways of fooling the so-called experts, had he been so inclined.