The Application of Forensic Entomology in Criminal Investigation

As a specific branch of science aimed at solving crime-and law-related issues, forensic entomology has experienced rapid development during the last three decades. Numeorus scientific papers and books have been written about the use of forensic entomology in crime investigations. The assistance of forensic entomology experts is nowadays widely used by the world crime investigators and other crime fighting institutions both in the investigation and in the prosecution of various kinds of crimes. However, in Croatia this is not the case. Except for occasional application of forensic entomology in the postmortem interval determining, very little of its true potentials is known or used in Croatia, very few papers of Croatian authors on these topics have been published, while entomological expertize is neither requested nor implemented at all. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to present to the wider scientific public the basic theoretical postulates, methods and potentials of this branch of forensic science which is still neglected and unused in Croatia. Through the selected examples, we have attempted to show forensic entomology as a tool for solving numerous and manyfold crime-and law-related issues, illustrating most of all the useful scope of entomological expertize. Definition and a timeline of forensic entomology are given in the introduction, the body of the paper is focused on the possibilities of application of forensic entomology in investigation of crimes. Finally, the practical issues of processing entomological evidence are described, which can be used as a handbook by investigators.