When criminals snack at a crime scene, they leave evidence behind. A bitemark in half-eaten food is one type of evidence. Peckish criminals also leave DNA and fingerprints.

Last week, Ryan Pfeil of the Medford Mail Tribune (Oregon) reported that burglary is a thirsty business. Burglars broke into a house through a garage and stole a flat-screen television, jewelry, and other valuable items. The burglars also took a container of orange juice from the refrigerator, drank from it, and left the container in the garage on their way out. Investigators sent the container to the Oregon State Crime Lab for tests.

Lab techs found DNA and fingerprints on the carton. They also found a match between one DNA sample and a DNA profile in the FBI database. The DNA match led investigators to a 33-year-old man who faces charges of first-degree theft, aggravated theft and burglary.

Around the same time, forensic scientists at the University of Abertay Dunde (Scotland) announced that they recovered latent fingerprints from foods.

“Although there are proven techniques to recover fingerprints from many different surfaces these days, there are some surfaces that remain elusive, such as feathers, human skin, and animal skin,” former crime scene examiner Dennis Gentles explained. “Foods such as fruits and vegetables used to be in that category, because their surfaces vary so much – not just in their color and texture, but in their porosity as well. These factors made recovering fingerprints problematic because some techniques, for example, work on porous surfaces while others only work on non-porous surfaces.”

University scientists overcame the problem by modifying a technique designed to recover fingerprints from the sticky side of adhesive tape. You can learn more about this breakthrough at the Abertay University website.