Of ESDA and Ninhydrin on white paper

Just came back from an assessment of my newly learnt skills of Forensic test, I was given a piece of white paper as evidence, and asked me to recover the sample from it. Everybody like me had been in the lab for the past few weeks, will know what we can get from a piece of white paper, writing indentations and fingerprints is the most common.

So here it goes, i used White Crime-Lite and scanned through the surface, well I do saw some indentations but couldn't find any fingerprints. Then this comes to me, if I used Ninhydrin first to recover fingerprints (if there are any), I risked the writings destroyed by the solution, or maybe distorted the whole writing indentation, if I used ESDA to recover the indentations, I may risked the fingerprints destroyed due to "bulk" handling. Amino acids on paper, I really don't know the handling during ESDA will destroy the prints or not. Eventually, I used ESDA first as I totally had no idea where the prints are or they are present or not.

Anyway, had just finished "Perverting the Course of Justice", and a new book had just arrived and started to read it. About the book? Will talk about it in the next post.

Links from www.fosterfreeman.co.uk .