There is a cigarette pack on my balcony.
This is noteworthy because I don't smoke, and no one has ever smoked on my balcony in the entire history of this building.
This has actually happened a few times over the years - random cigarette packs or cigarette butts ending up on my balcony - and it turns out the wind blew them there. They always show up on a significantly windy day, and sometimes even disappear overnight. (I'm sure as hell not going out on my high balcony on a cold, windy winter day to pick up someone else's dirty cigarette litter, so sometimes they're there for a few days.)
But this makes me wonder about criminal evidence. If detectives were investigating me, they could logically conclude that someone has smoked on my balcony. They could also reasonably conclude that the person whose DNA is on the cigarette has been on my balcony. If the person who smoked the cigarette ended up dead or something, I could turn out to be a person of interest just because of the vagaries of the wind.
From time to time, a hair falls out of my head. I often find them on the floor of my apartment, but surely they sometimes fall out when I'm outdoors too. And if a cigarette pack can be picked up by the wind and blown onto my balcony, a loose hair can certainly also be picked up by the wind and blown somewhere, maybe even further away. It could also stick to someone's coat or shoes and be carried into their home or something. So if I was abducted or murdered and the police were looking for evidence, they might find one of my hairs somewhere I've never been.
In detective fiction, they often find the bad guy based on one tiny bit of physical evidence - a cigarette butt or stray hair DNA showing that a person was in a specific place, and that's what cracks open the case. In real life, I wonder if they take into account that stuff is sometimes blown around by the wind?
3 comments:
I watch a lot of detective shows and I have often had similar thoughts! After windy days, trash collects in a spot outside our front door. This happened in our last place, too - leaves, trash, snow all accumulate in a certain spot.
I've also imagined detectives combing through my home for evidence and finding my stash of painkillers - many of them more than a decade old. Anytime one of us is prescribed pain meds for any reason - post-operative, or after some kind of injury or incident - I have kept any remaining medication. I've wondered if detectives would conclude that I was a substance abuser.
In the case of the cigarette or hair, the detectives would need some corroborating evidence - or they should, anyway. That slim bit of evidence, absence anything else, shouldn't be enough to charge anyone with a crime, and certainly not enough to convict. You know: motive, opportunity, alibi.
I think if you were a substance abuser, your drugs wouldn't be sitting around long enough to be over a decade old.
I've thought of that, too! :)
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