On various TV shows, the medical examiner always shows up at the scene of the and often determines when the poor victim died based on the temperature of their liver.
I assume this is true - a cursory search seems to support it. Why the liver? Does the liver have some special heat-retaining qualities? Why not the spleen, or kidney, or intestines?
The liver is the largest solid organ. The spleen is much smaller, so loses heat more quickly. The heart is hollow, with a large surface area.
Just an aside, TOD is still an estimate. It’s often stated as a four to six hour window if the body has been dead a short time. After 24 hours, TOD is pretty much a guess, based on when the preson was last seen alive.
Also, the TV show, CSI, often mentions pupils as dialated or not… The pupils ALWAY dialate at death. All muscle tone is lost when death occurs. The iris is a muscle.
(tonus)
Ah, makes sense. And yeah, I know the ‘science’ on CSI and other such shows is…optimized for TV. I also knew from some book I’d read about real forensic investigations that your muscles relax upon death; I don’t recall the name of the book but there was a lovely description of a guy who had died some time prior in a full bathtub, and in addition to the normal decay, his, uh, bowels had relaxed, resulting in an absolutely lovely aroma.
The sphincter valves on the bowels and bladder release upon death or shortly after. So even when someone dies in bed ‘peacefully in their sleep’, it isn’t a very dignified end.
There’s an equation for exponential cooling: in simple terms,
T(t) = T(t=0)exp(kt)
where things depend on an initial temperature and a cooling constant.
They also depend on the ambient temperature, too, though. So if that’s not known for the entire period Mr. Boddy was cooling his heels, the time of death can’t be determined, and it could be thrown off if the killer were to stash the body someplace particularly warm or cool for a while. And if the ambient temperature is the same as body temperature, you won’t be able to determine anything at all.