While riding with his procession, Sun Deng (孫登), a prince of the Kingdom of Wu, was nearly knocked from his horse by a shot that passed within a hair's breadth of him. One of Sun's guards was no sooner off his mount than he'd apprehended the alleged villain, slingshot and pellets in hand. The man protested his innocence and the guard pummeled him for a confession, but Sun ordered the guard to stop and search for the pellet. It was retrieved and the prince examined it closely, compared it with others in the suspect's bag, and determined the pellet came from elsewhere. The man gained his freedom and forensic science gained a foothold in ancient China.
That story from the History of the Three Kingdoms
"We've seen quite a bit of recent interest in the exhibition for obvious reasons," said David Chang
A former police captain in Taiwan, Lee left in the mid-1960s for further education in the US and went on to become a pioneer in his field in the US. He's worked on over 6,000 cases and rewritten the way police investigators go about their work. He has authored some 20 books and dozens of articles on forensic science. The department of criminology at the University of New Haven bears his name. He hosts his own TV program.
He's also most recently been asked to lead the investigation into the March 19 shootings. While he is attending a seminar in New Zealand and was unavailable for comment, the exhibit he helped design offers unique insight into the job he and his hand-picked team of investigators have in front of them.
Joining Dr Lee are his colleague and protege, Major Timothy Palmbach, supervisor of the state police forensic laboratory in Connecticut, noted pathologist Cyril Wecht, who famously disputed the findings of the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy, and ballistics expert Michael Haas. The three of them arrived in Taiwan last Sunday and worked with local investigators in Taipei and at the scene of the shooting in Tainan before returning to the US on Tuesday evening.
Because of the high-profile nature of the case and the fact that many people believe the whole event was staged in an attempt to garner "sympathy votes" for Chen, the investigators held a press conference before departing where they stressed the independent nature of their work and suggested that their eventual report would not respond to conspiracy allegations.
"Forensic science many times cannot provide all the answers that you might be seeking in an investigation," Palmbach said. "As to why and who and from what consequences did this [assassination attempt] develop, that cannot and will not be answered by the physical evidence.
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