From extreme weather to scientific advancements
During Johnny Depp’s defamation trial against Amber Heard, he testified that she had left “human fecal matter” in his bed after an argument during her 30th birthday party in April 2016.
But Heard testified that one of their dogs was responsible. Heard said eating Depp's marijuana as a puppy had given the dog bowel issues.
According to Haines, the evidence used in court included eight of the female dolls, a flat back torso, various heads, and an 11-inch silicone male member, and both sides had to handle and ask questions about the various products.
Though Harris was found and freed 10 hours later, he died the next day. His neighbors found the will scratched into the fender and the Saskatchewan probate court found it met all of the requirements of a valid will and issued letters probate. Those 16 words formed a case precedent for lawyers around the world and is often used as an example in law textbooks on wills and estates.
The judge then ruled that their panties were indeed of sufficient size and they were exonerated. Judge Demers reportedly later said that he hadn’t expected the women to follow through with this in court. The photo appeared in Playboy later that year.
In 1983, undercover investigators took three female exotic dancers to court in Pinellas, Florida, for showing “too much” while working in a nightclub. The charge was indecency, since county ordinance prohibited nudity in places where food and drinks are served. The women's attorney argued to the judge that the women's underwear had been too large to reveal the body parts that the undercover police officers claimed to have seen.
In Saskatchewan, Canada, a will usually must be witnessed to be valid, but the one exception is a completely handwritten or “holographic will” by the deceased. A famous case occurred in 1948 when Cecil George Harris was working with his tractor and became pinned underneath it. Knowing he might not make it, he took out his pocket knife and started scraping words into the tractor's fender: "In case I die in this mess I leave all to the wife. Cecil Geo Harris."
The lawyer then asked that his clients be allowed to show the dance, and since Judge David Demers didn’t want to risk a demonstration in chambers, he allowed a demonstration in court. A court photographer's picture captured two of the three women turned around in front of the judge, presenting their rear ends to him.
In 1897, Elva Zona Heaster Shue of Lewisburg, West Virginia, was found dead at the bottom of the stairs in the log house where she lived with her husband of three months, Erasmus Stribbling Trout Shue. Her body was discovered by a neighbor, a boy of about 11, who did chores for her. Her death was presumed natural by a doctor at the time, who said she died of “an everlasting sigh,” aka a heart attack, but a supernatural experience by her mother would claim otherwise.
The girl’s mother told a lawyer that her daughter’s spirit visited her and described how she was killed by her husband. As it turns out, the husband had stayed mysteriously by his dead wife’s head from the moment she was discovered to placing clothing around her head and neck in the casket to allegedly make her rest easier. Upon further investigation, it was revealed that he’d been married twice before and both wives died under mysterious circumstances. Their exhumed bodies revealed head and neck trauma.
The words of a ghost, known as the Greenbrier Ghost, ultimately also led to an autopsy on the exhumed body, which verified the apparition’s account. On June 22, 1897, the jury returned a verdict of guilty after only one hour and 10 minutes of deliberation, and the husband was found guilty of murder and sentenced to prison.
A Washington trial for drug possession reportedly had as its key evidence a single joint, which was left on a counter during recess. But when everyone returned, it had mysteriously disappeared. Everyone was searched and nothing was found!
Florida man Edward Ates was accused of shooting his son-in-law, and the prosecution offered considerable evidence. In his defense, Ates’ attorney argued that he weighed 285 pounds, so if he climbed the stairs to where the victim was, he'd never have had enough energy to shoot him. The 'fat defense' became infamous, but the jury ultimately found Ates guilty of murder.
One of the “trials of the century” was centered on famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, whose 10-month-old son was abducted from his crib in New Jersey in 1931 and later found by the side of a nearby road. Involving ransom, a botched police investigation, and public outcry, botanical evidence came to the rescue in this trial.
Two impressions in the mud outside the house suggested a ladder had been used, and a homemade ladder with a broken bottom section was later found, along with a carpenter’s chisel. Arthur Koehler, of the Forest Products Laboratory, determined the type and grain of the wood used to make the ladder and found it matched a plank from carpenter Bruno Richard Hauptmann’s attic. The wood showed a matching curvature, number and width of growth rings, plus four nail holes that matched the joists in the attic. Hauptmann was ultimately found guilty.
Infamous serial killer Ted Bundy was convicted in part due to evidence suggesting that bite marks found on victim Lisa Levy matched his teeth. Bite-mark analysis usually involves DNA testing, as well as many measurements and photographs being taken of marks before they disappear.
Sources: (Global News) (Quora) (Tampa Bay Times) (AP News) (Appalachian History) (Engineering and Technology) (Britannica) (CBC) (NPR) (Gizmodo)
For months, police had no leads regarding the killing of Mellory Manning, a 27-year-old woman who was assaulted and murdered in 2008 while working as a prostitute in Christchurch, New Zealand. Police couldn’t say for sure where Manning was killed, though they were suspicious of a gang called the Mongrel Mob who were involved in prostitution and had a warehouse not far from where the body was found. That’s where they called in Dallas Mildenhall, one of very few forensic palynologists, who uses pollen and spores to help solve crimes.
An undercover officer said Leeming had boasted about hiding the raw meat to throw off cadaver dogs and thus hinder a possible police investigation.
In the second-degree murder trial of Robert Leeming, who had already admitted to the murder of his girlfriend Jasmine Lovett but pleaded not guilty to the second-degree murder of her 22-month-old daughter Aliyah Sanderson, prosecutors were given strange photos from the home the couple had shared. Clumps of raw bacon were found placed under the cover of a dry sump hole in the basement floor, as well as near air vents and over the back of a dining room chair.
Mildenhall took pollen samples from Manning’s nose and clothing, and eventually found a strange pollen grain with two pores, which is extremely rare. He deduced that a herbicide had caused a mutation in the pollen, and it turned out the area right next to the Mongrel Mob hangout had been sprayed around the suspected time. In 2014, gang member Mauha Huataki Fawcett was convicted of Manning's murder and sentenced to life in prison.
In October 2016, 19-year-old Maria Ladenburger was murdered on her way home from a party and her body was left on the banks of the Dreisam river in the German city of Freiburg. Hussein Khavari’s phone was a huge source of evidence in the trial, which connected to towers near the crime scene. But it was the Apple Health app that determined Khavari climbed two flights of stairs at around the time Ladenburger died that was incriminating.
Police claimed the health app’s data was a result of Khavari climbing back up the river bank. To demonstrate the reliability of the data in court, police sent an officer of a similar size and body shape up and down the bank with an iPhone and found the app recorded it as climbing stairs. A combination of health and geodata sent Khavari to jail for life in 2018.
Pedro Bravo, from Florida, was on trial for kidnapping and strangling his roommate Christian Aguilar over an argument about an ex-girlfriend. Aguilar’s body was found in a shallow grave in a nearby forest, and phone records showed that Bravo had used Apple’s assistant to help him find a place to hide his roommate’s body, as well as the phone’s flashlight nine times on the day of the disappearance.
According to The Independent, "evidence reproduced from the trial by local news stations, showed that Siri responded "What kind of place are you looking for?" before offering four options: "Swamps, reservoirs, metal foundries, dumps." Gizmodo reports that asking Siri where to hide a body and her responses used to be "jokes.”
Smart devices as witnesses in court are concerning to many, but while Echos are always "listening" for a wake word, the device only actually begins recording once it hears the word "Alexa," "computer," or something similar, according to the company.
Alexa and other smart speakers have now been included in many trials, like in a 2018 New Hampshire murder case and another investigation in Arkansas in 2015 that ended with a judge dismissing the case. In both cases, Amazon pushed back against demands that it release user data.
The infamous Salem witch trials from June 1692 to May 1693 were a series of investigations and persecutions that caused 19 convicted 'witches' to be hanged and many other suspects to be imprisoned in Salem Village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Not only were the accused forced to defend themselves without aid of counsel, but “spectral evidence” was used against them.
Spectral evidence is the victims’ claims that they had seen and been attacked (often pinched, bitten, or contorted) by specters of the accused, whose forms Satan allegedly had possessed. Even while the accused testified on the witness stand, the young women who had accused them would writhe and whimper in the gallery, seemingly adding to the 'evidence' of the demonic presence.
Anyone who argued against the use of this flimsy evidence would similarly be accused of witchcraft, meanwhile those who confessed—or who confessed and named other witches—were spared the court’s vengeance, since Puritans believed God instead would handle their punishment. In 1702, the General Court declared that the trials had been unlawful. It was not until 2001, however, that the last 11 of the convicted were fully exonerated.
You don't have a case if you don't have evidence, and indeed so many of the trials we watch on TV and in films turn upon the drama of obtaining the vital piece of proof to put someone away. Johnny Depp's defamation trial against Amber Heard was another widely watched courtroom drama, with very real consequences and topics of abuse, where the global audience was reminded again of how critical evidence can be in swaying a jury.
The infamous photo of fecal matter on Depp's bed was merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to bizarre, disturbing, and surprising forms of evidence used in trials. Click through to see more.
The most bizarre evidence ever used during trials
A photo of poop on Johnny Depp’s bed is merely the tip of the iceberg!
LIFESTYLE Curiosities
You don't have a case if you don't have evidence, and indeed so many of the trials we watch on TV and in films turn upon the drama of obtaining the vital piece of proof to put someone away. Johnny Depp's defamation trial against Amber Heard was another widely watched courtroom drama, with very real consequences and topics of abuse, where the global audience was reminded again of how critical evidence can be in swaying a jury.
The infamous photo of fecal matter on Depp's bed was merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to bizarre, disturbing, and surprising forms of evidence used in trials. Click through to see more.