← Back to all episodes
How Is A Cause Of Death Determined?
Dr. Diane Peterson • 2022-10-04
Dylan Carnahan:Welcome to the Simple Questions Podcast. This is your host, Dylan Carnahan. You are listening to Dresser Drawers by Tracer Heights. Formed in 2016, Tracer Heights is a power trio comprised of electric banjo, bass guitar, and drums. This song is off of their first Tracer Heights studio album, First Sight, which was crafted during the pandemic lockdown of 2020. The band sealed themselves in their basement studio for months, working out the arrangements for their first batch of studio recordings. You can listen to Tracer Heights' newest album on all streaming platforms and find out more by going to tracerheights.com. The question for this episode is, how was the cause of death determined? You will learn in this episode, the circumstances for a person's death to be reviewed, the process of performing an autopsy, and how a person's death is investigated. Our guest, graduated from the University of Kansas School of Medicine in 2005, was a Chief Medical Examiner at the Jackson County Medical Examiner's Office, and is now the Chief Medical Examiner at the Johnson County Medical Examiner's Office. I introduce to you, Dr. Diane Peterson. We'll see you later soon. Well, firstly, glad to have you come on the podcast to discuss some fascinating topics today. Let's start with you. What made you want to become a forensic pathologist?
Dr. Diane Peterson:My interests started actually in undergrad. I was in my fourth year of undergrad at K-State, and was on a course to become a PhD, work in a lab, and my boss at the time, I worked in a lab on campus, lost his grant that could pay me, and it really woke me up to the fact that when you are a PhD running a lab, you're working from grant to grant. And so I was trying to think of what else I could do instead. And he encouraged me to go to medical school, but I couldn't think of what I wanted to do in medical school. And I took a two-week course in between my fall and spring semesters on death investigation. And they brought in everybody involved in the death investigation, law enforcement, funeral home, everybody. And we got to go to the Shawnee County Coroner's Office in Topeka and watch an autopsy. And basically, I was hooked after that. So I came to medical school, and then after medical school, continued on with my residency and fellowship, wanting to be a medical examiner and do autopsies. And basically never changed my mind.
Dylan Carnahan:Just that exposure right there. You're on it. That was something you want to do. How common is that to proactively seek that out at that stage?
Dr. Diane Peterson:At that time, it wasn't very common. But I will say nowadays, what with TV and all the other kind of emphasis on death investigation, crime scene investigation, and all of that, we are seeing a lot more people come to us, younger and younger. People in high school, some people even in middle school that have an interest in forensic pathology, either doing what I do and being a forensic pathologist. And doing the autopsies, or doing the death scene investigations, or something along those lines. We are seeing more people earlier in life decide that this is something that they want to do.
Dylan Carnahan:Really? It's just that more of that exposure, right? It gets out in the pop culture, and people see that and kind of strikes a chord. After your fellowship, where does your career go after that? After the educational aspect?
Dr. Diane Peterson:So after medical school, which is basically where you're learning all bits of medicine, then there's residency, where you're learning a specialty, and for me, it was anatomic and clinical pathology. And after residency is the fellowship, which is the forensic pathology, actually learning to do what I do. And from there, it's just a matter of finding a job. And after I did my training, I came to the Jackson County Medical Examiner's Office over in Kansas City, Missouri. And I was there immediately after training. I was there for eight years before I came to Johnson County. And so yeah, once you're done with training, it's just a matter of going out and finding a job and getting to it. And in forensic pathology, there's only about 500 of us nationwide. And there's always job openings across the nation for a forensic pathologist. There's always somewhere that needs a forensic pathologist.
Dylan Carnahan:Wow. That's, that's interesting. Now we've alluded to this, you know, by going through and talking about, you know, your educational career and your career, you know, leading up to now. But what is the job of a medical examiner?
Dr. Diane Peterson:So my primary duty is to investigate deaths of individuals who die in my jurisdiction. The medical examiner job is really outlined in state statutes. So the types of deaths that get reported to us are dictated by state statute and vary a little bit in the details, but really are essentially the same no matter what state you're in. And those types of deaths include people who die naturally but don't have a doctor to sign the death certificate, and then people who die of non-natural causes, whether it be accident, suicide, homicide, or undetermined. One of the other duties that I have is to identify individuals that pass away. So if identification is an issue either due to decomposition or injury, such as trauma or burn or something like that, then even if it might be a natural death, and even if they might have a doctor willing to sign the death certificate, but we have to really definitively say who it is, then we'll bring them in for that identification piece of it.
Dylan Carnahan:Wow, that is a lot. You brought up kind of your territory, if you will. What kind of volume of these specific cases are you seeing that you're involved with?
Dr. Diane Peterson:So my office primarily covers Johnson County, Kansas. Last year, we investigated, I think, over 2700 deaths, and that's all told. So every case that got reported to us. Now that's not to say that we signed a death certificate on all of those cases. We will decline jurisdiction or decline signing the death certificate if there is a doctor willing to sign, excuse me, sorry, getting over cold here. But we did bring in over 250 individuals for examination. That's our typical caseload for Johnson County. We also do autopsy services for Reno County, Kansas, which is Hutchinson, Kansas. And the only ones that we do for those are the ones that need an examination. So we don't get those decline cases from there.
Dylan Carnahan:Because of where your office is, are there places that may not have a medical examiner like that, that seek you out based upon a need to have that done outside of your jurisdiction?
Dr. Diane Peterson:Yeah, and that kind of brings up the difference between a coroner and a medical examiner. Kansas by state law is a coroner based state, which means every county has a coroner. And in Kansas to be a coroner, you have to be a physician, but you can be any kind of physician. You can be a family practice doc, OB surgeon, whatever. The coroner before me was an emergency room doc. Whereas medical examiners are those of us that have had that forensic pathology training and do the autopsies. So every county in Kansas has a coroner to cover them. But since they are a physician of a different kind, they need someone to do the autopsies for them. A lot of the counties in Kansas use a private forensic pathology group that is based out of KCK. There are other counties that will use the Medical Examiner's Office in Wichita. And then that private group also covers Topeka, Shawnee County. And I think there is a private forensic pathologist out in Western Kansas as well. So the autopsies are done in a variety of places by forensic pathologists, but everybody is covered by a coroner.
Dylan Carnahan:Now, going back to identification, foul play, suspected, all of these different instances, as a pathologist, what areas of science do you have to know to be able to handle that?
Dr. Diane Peterson:Top of the list is anatomy, of course, because we have to know what normal is to be able to know what's abnormal and what's wrong. And it's the abnormality that we're looking for to figure out, okay, what's different, what's not normal, what could have caused their death. And then, unfortunately, to go to medical school, all other areas of science are also required. Biochemistry, physics, organic chemistry, obviously, biology, microbiology, you know, all of it. But on a day to day basis, what I use the most is anatomy, chemistry, and microbiology.
Dylan Carnahan:Okay, and just thinking off the top here, what kind of science would be needed for something, say, like when you run a toxicology report?
Dr. Diane Peterson:The toxicology is chemistry, it's also a bit of biochemistry, pharmacokinetics, pharmacology, all of that, because I have to know what the drug is, and then I have to know its effects on the body, and at what concentrations those effects can become fatal, and at what concentrations are tolerated by the body and not fatal. So there is all of that that has to be known about each drug. Now, I don't have to have it all memorized, of course. There are books that I can refer to and references that I can refer to, but it helps to have a basic understanding of the drugs.
Dylan Carnahan:You have that foundational knowledge. That way, you can understand how that would impact someone and read into that. What about something, do you do much with ballistics?
Dr. Diane Peterson:So I recover the bullets from the bodies, and then release the bullets back to the investigating agency to have the ballistics done at the lab. I don't do the ballistics myself. When I look at a bullet, I just in very general terms say, well, it looks like a small caliber bullet, medium caliber, large caliber, and that's as much as I go into.
Dylan Carnahan:Interesting. Moving, you know, we mentioned this a little bit earlier, but under what circumstances is a death reviewed? Now, we mentioned a couple earlier, but I guess maybe to add on to that, you know, I guess what instances would someone, you know, not sign that death certificate?
Dr. Diane Peterson:So to have a doctor to sign the death certificate, the person typically has to have been to a doctor recently. Some people haven't been to a doctor in years, 5, 10, more years. They may not like doctors, but unfortunately, every single one of us needs a physician to sign the death certificate. In the state of Kansas, only physicians can sign the death certificate. And so if no such physician exists when they were living, then I become that physician after they die. There are some physicians who might look at their past medical history of the individual and say, you know what, I think they were healthy. I don't see any reason why they should have died. This doesn't seem to fit. And then that falls on me to do that investigation and to figure out the cause of death. Sometimes I do that based off of just reading the medical records, and sometimes I need to bring them in and actually do an examination. It just all depends.
Dylan Carnahan:Now, when you do your examination, how often does that require an autopsy?
Dr. Diane Peterson:I would say probably about a third to maybe a half of the cases that we bring in actually get a full autopsy. The rest get just an external examination. And in our office, we also have a CT scanner. And so everybody that comes into our building gets a CT at the bare minimum, and everybody gets toxicology as well. And so even if an individual has extensive past medical history, like heart disease, and I can see that heart disease on the CT, we'll still run the toxicology just so that we don't have any unknowns. There's been plenty of cases where I've been surprised, and I see even at autopsy, a heart attack, they've got a history of heart disease, and maybe they're at work, and their toxicology comes back positive for cocaine. Something that I wasn't expecting, but now changes it from a natural death to an accidental death. So we are doing toxicology on everybody, but not everybody gets an autopsy.
Dylan Carnahan:Interesting. Yeah, so those are CT scan and toxicology, or two preliminary screening things that you use to get a more complete picture.
Dr. Diane Peterson:The CT is, yeah. The toxicology, that takes 10 days to two weeks to get back. So I don't have that in the moment that I'm making the decision whether or not to autopsy. I'm making the decision whether or not to autopsy based on the CT scan, based on the circumstances, as well as based on the external exam.
Dylan Carnahan:Understood. The toxicology, that you said 10 days?
Dr. Diane Peterson:Yes.
Dylan Carnahan:That's quite some time. And that, I think, generally, you see on the news, there's been a fatality. There is that lag time between a toxicology, which does provide, in some instances, a lot of information, so it's interesting to hear kind of that time frame.
Dr. Diane Peterson:And that's on a good case, you know. Some of them, if they're more extensive, more positive, can take longer than that. And it's also lab dependent, so there are labs out there that take longer than that. But about 10 days is about the fastest that we get results back.
Dylan Carnahan:Really? So there's even variance to that?
Dr. Diane Peterson:Correct.
Dylan Carnahan:Now, we talk about these preliminary steps. Now, getting to the autopsy, what is an autopsy?
Dr. Diane Peterson:So the autopsy itself is the examination of the inside of the body. So all told, an autopsy includes the external examination, looking at the outside of the body. We're documenting everything we see, eye color, hair color, tattoos, scars, and any injuries that we see. And then the autopsy itself is where we look at the inside of the body, the organs and tissues inside. And we're looking at them with the naked eye, as well as occasionally under the microscope. We'll take little bits of tissue to look at under the microscope. And we're looking for natural disease as well as injury internally as well.
Dylan Carnahan:And how long does that take to complete that process?
Dr. Diane Peterson:It entirely depends on the type of case. If we have a 20-something-year-old overdose who is otherwise healthy, has nothing else going on, that autopsy can be done in about 45 minutes or so. If we have a multiple gunshot wound, multiple stab wound type case, the external of those can take an hour or two hours, depending on how many wounds, because there's a lot of documentation that goes into documenting each and every wound. And then the internal can take another hour to two hours, depending upon how many wounds you have. So one autopsy can take three, four hours if you have a lot of wounds.
Dylan Carnahan:You know, you brought up, say, you know, a shooting, right? You have more of, say, a criminal investigation. Do you go to the scene or is the person brought to you?
Dr. Diane Peterson:In our office, we have death investigators who go to the scenes. They take the reports of death, and then if there's a scene to go to, they'll go to the scene and document it with photographs. And they'll also talk to law enforcement. They'll talk to family. They'll talk to witnesses. And they'll get the circumstances of the death. And they'll put all that into a report that I read, and then I look at the photographs before I do my examination. I personally do not go out to many scenes. The scenes that I go out to primarily are skeletal remains scenes, because those are a little bit more involved, and I want to be there and to see it and document it myself.
Dylan Carnahan:Interesting. And so when they go out to these death investigations and they get these pictures and they document, I guess, what do they document? Just kind of the manner in which things, or are they trying to maybe prevent the crime scene from being contaminated?
Dr. Diane Peterson:So it's law enforcement's job to keep the scene secure. So my investigators, what they're doing, is they're photographing the surroundings. So if, say, the person is in their own residence, the investigators will photograph the room that the person is in and then any other rooms that might be helpful for cause of death purposes and identification purposes, since those are our primary duties. So they might photograph prescription medications. They'll photograph, you know, sometimes they'll photograph calendars or personal books if they have people's names written in them, if we need to, you know, make identification and maybe call some family and try to figure out who this person is. They'll photograph anything in and around the body that might be related to their cause of death. It varies on each scene, but each scene we do have standard photos of the body and of the location where the body is.
Dylan Carnahan:What other kind of causes of death are there? I know we had brought up natural causes or accidental. What are some other causes of death that you would put on that report?
Dr. Diane Peterson:Most of what we do are natural disease, natural deaths. A lot of them are heart disease, some lung disease, diabetes, those kinds of things. Accidental type deaths might be overdoses, traffic fatalities. Those are probably the top accidental fatalities. Any other kind of blunt force injury, any sort of trauma. We do see a fair bit of suicides in Johnson County. A lot of those are gunshot wound suicides. There are some hangings and other means of committing suicide. Thankfully, in Johnson County, we don't have a very high homicide rate. Most of the homicides are gunshot fatalities. And then we have the ones that are undetermined and that we just never really do figure out what was the cause of death. And we have to list the cause of death as undetermined.
Dylan Carnahan:And what kind of weight does that undetermined cause of death hold? I guess what categorizes something as undetermined? And what impact does that have?
Dr. Diane Peterson:Well, an undetermined cause of death means that we don't know exactly why the person died. The impact for that for the families is that they don't have that question answered. And that's very unsatisfying for them that, you know, the families want that answer of what happened, why is my loved one dead? And so the weight there, I would say, is pretty heavy, you know, both for us because we want to provide that answer, but also really for the family. There are cases where we might know a cause of death, say an overdose, but we don't know a manner of death. And the manners of death are that natural accident, suicide, homicide, undetermined. And so we might have a cause of death of an overdose, but the manner of death is undetermined because maybe we're between accident and suicide. And we're not sure did this person take too much of this medication intentionally or unintentionally. And there the weight is a little bit less because we do have an answer of why and what the cause of death was. We just don't have the answer as to what was in the person's head or the reason why there's a lot. So that has less implications, but not zero. I mean, it still has some weight for the families. They still would like to know one way or the other, but we can't always tell.
Dylan Carnahan:What are some other examples or things that would lead to an undetermined outcome?
Dr. Diane Peterson:Baby cases are frequently undetermined. Especially the infants, the really young infants, if they're not, a lot of the infant deaths are sleep-related and they're in unsafe sleep environments. They're either in an adult bed or they're sharing a sleep surface with another individual or sometimes even more than one other individual. If there's no definitive sign that it's an asphyxia death where their airways were obstructed, then those will be undetermined deaths. And those have a pretty huge weight because it's, again, it's a baby. The family wants answers, but we can't always give them the answers. Other undetermined cases, if somebody's markedly decomposed and there's not much left, then there's not a lot that I can identify as, oh, yeah, this is what it was. This is what was the cause of death. So a lot of those are undetermined as well.
Dylan Carnahan:Now, you bring up the state of decomposition being a large factor in determining cause of death. Let's go through and let's talk about what is the process of decomposition?
Dr. Diane Peterson:So first off, we have enzymes in our pancreas, and they break down the tissues around them in their abdomen. That's the first process. It's called autolysis. After that, and that doesn't last very long. After that, the bacteria basically take over and are the reason for our decomposition. So we have bacteria in our gut, and after we die, they go everywhere, and they drive decomposition from there. And so the changes that you'll see visually, you'll start with a little bit of green discoloration of the abdomen, the stomach area, which is where the bacteria predominantly are. And then that green discoloration just kind of spreads from there. The bacteria can produce gases, and you'll hear about the bloating. The bloating is from the gases that the bacteria cause. They cause a foul odor. There's other things that go on, other discolorations of the body, skin slippage, and lots of other things that go on to the decomposition.
Dylan Carnahan:Now, yeah, obviously, that's going to impact the investigation you do. I guess where in that process does that increase the difficulty of determining a cause of death?
Dr. Diane Peterson:So after that process has been allowed to go on for an extended period of time, which varies depending upon where you are and who you are, what your body makeup is. Eventually, the organs inside our organs and tissues essentially disappear, for lack of a better word. And so it's then when it becomes difficult, when I don't have anything to look at, basically it becomes difficult to determine the cause of death.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Now, in most of the cases of identifying people, are you seeing someone in a decomposed state for the most part, when identity is kind of the center of the investigation?
Dr. Diane Peterson:Yeah, if identity is the issue, it usually is decomposition. Like I said, we do have occasional cases where trauma has caused an issue with identification. If there's trauma of the face and they're not visually recognizable, or if there's burn injury and we can't do fingerprints or something like that, then those are the most common cases.
Dylan Carnahan:After we had mentioned this, I brought this up to you before we had started. Are there instances where you would exhum a corpse and do any kind of investigation there?
Dr. Diane Peterson:Exceedingly rarely. I've been out of training for 12 years and have yet to have to exhum a body. It requires a court order to exhum an individual. And the primary reason would be, you know, if there were some question, I guess, regarding potential cause of death or manner of death, or I suppose if somebody had gotten buried and they weren't yet identified when they got buried, if there was additional need for identification. But those are very, very rare, and I hope to make it through my career without having to do one.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, if, you know, the work has been done very rarely, will, you know, after the fact, there be a need to go inquire further, say, on a cause of death that was determined with, you know, I would presume more information at that time than when you would be exhuming the corpse.
Dr. Diane Peterson:Right, right. The best time to gather all the information is before they are buried, obviously. And so, and there's even state law in Kansas that before we release a body, we make sure that we have everything that we need for identification. We've collected DNA. We've collected fingerprints if they're available. We've done dental x-rays. And so basically, we have all the information already. They can be buried. And if information comes along later on that we need to compare, like the DNA to or something like that, it could be done without the body because we've already collected it.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Now, you know, you talked about, you know, dental records, some of the kind of documentation you do, if you will. What are some other kind of indicators that you're, or things that you're trying to clarify? Cause of death being a large one, I would say also probably like time of death being of importance.
Dr. Diane Peterson:Time of death is something that we get asked about, and it's certainly something on TV that everybody on TV knows the exact time of death. But in reality, unless the death is witnessed, we don't know the exact time of death. And there's no way to know the exact time of death scientifically if it's not witnessed. Despite what TV tells you, I cannot look at an individual who was found and say, oh, well, they died at 11 or 5 PM yesterday. That's just not possible. The decompositional change in individuals has a range. It has a standard deviation. It's not the same. And it is not down to the minute. I might be able to get down to hours, sometimes days, but not the minute.
Dylan Carnahan:That sounds a lot more realistic in thinking about it, talking through it. But yeah, you do have these factors, you know, the individual themselves. I automatically assume weather would play a role, time of finding them. You mentioned that leads to a lot of variance, I would assume.
Dr. Diane Peterson:100%. Absolutely. Yeah. Where you are, are you inside, are you outside? Are you outside in Kansas in August or outside in Kansas in January? You know, are you obese or are you thin? Are you wearing a lot of clothes or not that many clothes? What kind of natural diseases do you have? All of those play a role in how fast the decomposition process goes and the post-pornum changes that we look at. And all of it plays a role, and none of it is the same. And we can't, again, you can't even do a calculation of any kind. They've looked at electrolytes. They've looked at a lot of different factors. And basically, at the end of the day, you cannot get down to the exact time of death. You can get down to an estimation, a range, but I don't really do that. I just say when they were found and leave it at that.
Dylan Carnahan:That's really interesting, especially being, you know, again, that's something that, as you eluded to, that is very popular, kind of like that. That's been kind of in the collective consciousness, you know, okay, time of death. Besides really the cause of death, and kind of now that we've talked through, you know, the time of death, are there any other things that you really look for to document, I guess, in your report?
Dr. Diane Peterson:No, I think we've talked about pretty much everything that I document in my reports. My reports include the circumstances of the death, which is gathered by my investigators, the examination findings, the toxicology, and then basically putting it all together to figure out cause and manner of death. It's not so simple.
Dylan Carnahan:I want to go back. We talked about all these specifics of your profession, your job, the work that you do. I can just imagine a lot of difficult things that you're exposed to while working. So how do you handle those difficult situations while working?
Dr. Diane Peterson:I have a very detached view of what I do. To me, the individual, when I'm performing the autopsy, it's anatomy. I'm there. I have a job to do. I'm looking at the anatomy. It helps that I never knew the person in life frequently. It helps that I didn't have conversations with them. I wasn't attached to them. It is difficult for my investigators, more so than for myself, because they're the ones communicating with the family. They're the ones having conversations with the family and learning about the individual, the family, everything. And so it can be very difficult. And there are ways to decompress and have debriefings with other individuals in the field. We do have support in Johnson County from the Johnson County Mental Health Department, assisting my staff with debriefings after difficult cases, such as infant cases or really bad trauma cases. And it does definitely require a large support system of people that know what we do and just the difficult topics that we come across.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, for sure. You brought up two interesting things there. One, debriefing. You brought that up. Can you explain a little bit more about that?
Dr. Diane Peterson:That's basically just having a conversation with a mental health professional. And getting it all off your chest. This is what I saw. This is what happened. This is how it affected me. This is how I feel about it. And just really getting it all out there and talking about it, which helps.
Dylan Carnahan:Is that something that's standard on all cases? Or is that just something that's available if you deem necessary?
Dr. Diane Peterson:It is available if necessary. On a more informal basis, we will have conversations amongst each other about a case or issues or anything like that. But it is absolutely available if it's needed more than just the informal talking.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, that's good. That's good to hear that you have that available. Going back to you brought up these death investigators that are having to talk to the victim's family, we go back to them being at the scene, right? And they're doing their due diligence, right? We're saying we're taking pictures of medication. Maybe we're looking at calendars to see when they took the medication, right? What kinds of questions and I guess guidance are they providing with the family, like relaying information? What are some of the roles that they fill?
Dr. Diane Peterson:So when they're out on scene, they'll typically introduce themselves to the family member and tell them, okay, I'm going to go do this, and then I'll be back and discuss further with you. So then they'll go inside, they'll take their photographs, they'll do their scene investigation, and then they'll have a conversation with the family. And that's where they're asking the family lots of questions about past medical history, how was the person feeling recently, were there any complaints, anything like that. And then they'll give the family the next steps of, okay, here's what's going to happen, this is where the person is, your loved one is going to be brought, this is, you know, it's up to the physician of whether or not an autopsy is done, that the family is able to request no autopsy if, for example, they have religious objections or whatnot, and we take that into consideration. And then that's a time for the investigator and for the family to ask questions of the investigator, of, okay, timelines, you know, how do I do this? What do I need to do? And the investigator helps them. We have a brochure that we give to families that kind of explains our process and contact information. And then we do have a brochure also for families of infants as well as families of suicide victims that have some grief support information on there as well.
Dylan Carnahan:And then do you maintain, you know, that level of contact, say, you know, once you do determine a cause of death?
Dr. Diane Peterson:The families are always welcome to call us with any questions, and they will frequently call, keep, you know, back the next day, next couple weeks, touching base, asking all of the additional questions. And their go-to is typically the investigator that they met with on scene, but if their investigator doesn't happen to be working when they call, then anybody can help answer their questions and direct them however is needed.
Dylan Carnahan:When we talk about, say, in the event of, you know, someone needs to be identified, who is the person that's reaching out to contact that family?
Dr. Diane Peterson:A lot of the times, that will be the investigator as well. If the individual doesn't have fingerprints on file, then we will be trying other means of identification, which includes the dental that we talked about, sometimes x-rays. So say a person had an x-ray done at a hospital, and they have surgical hardware that's in a certain location, then we can compare that to our postmortem or after death x-rays and make an identification that way. So in that case, we'd be contacting the hospital to get a copy of that original x-ray. DNA is down on our list, mainly because it takes a few days. It can take a week or two to have that DNA run in the lab and compared. So if we can identify them other ways, we will. But if we're down to DNA, then yeah, the investigators will call the family and arrange for a family member to come in to provide a sample of their own so that we can use it to compare to the decedent sample to make that identification.
Dylan Carnahan:Wow. That's a lot. Now, going back to kind of those identifiers, if you will, being the time it takes for DNA, you brought up medical hardware and dental. Are there any other kind of indicators of someone's identity outside? I have fingerprints too. We talked about that.
Dr. Diane Peterson:We do use tattoos a lot as well. You know, if somebody has just like a flower on their ankle and that's it, it makes it very hard because there's a lot of flowers on ankles. But if they have a flower on their ankle, maybe a barbed wire on their arm and something else unique on their back, that combination is very unique. And so if we can get the loved ones to say, yeah, well, yeah, they had this tattoo here, this tattoo there, and we can match that with the individual that we're looking at, then we can make an identification right then and there just based off of tattoos. And that's very easy and very quick as well. And we do that a lot.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, that makes sense, right? The more unique, you know, the identifier, the more you can match that to a specific person. Correct. That's... That's a lot.
Dr. Diane Peterson:It is a lot.
Dylan Carnahan:That is a lot. We've... Thank you, Dr. Peterson. We've had a great discussion. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and for serving our community. We greatly appreciate it.
Dr. Diane Peterson:Thank you for the time.
Dylan Carnahan:Thank. That wraps up our conversation with Dr. Peterson. We talked about the ways a body can be identified, how long it takes for a toxicology report to come back, and the process of decomposition. Do not forget to listen to Tracer Heights on Apple Music or Spotify. You can learn more about them by going to their website, tracerheights.com. And lastly, subscribe to the Simple Questions Podcast to get notified when our latest episodes are released. Thank you for listening, and remember to keep asking questions.