Supravitality. Post-mortem muscle excitability

When somebody dies, various post-mortem changes take place in the body such as body cooling, post-mortem lividity, and post-mortem rigidity. Methods based on these phenomena are used to estimate the post-mortem interval of a deceased human being but are inaccurate when used on their own for this purpose.

Therefore, a so-called compound method is recommended in which the outcome of each method is combined for a more reliable estimation of the post-mortem interval. An additional method to estimate the post-mortem interval is based on a temporary post-mortem excitability of skeletal muscle in the early hours after death. Although known for more than a century from studies abroad, in the Netherlands this method is hardly known and applied in daily practice, nor studied on a large scale. Therefore, a field study was conducted to investigate the applicability of this additional method for PMI estimation.

In this dissertation, Stigter shows that there are no cogent arguments restraining this fast, low-cost, non-invasive, and easy-to-learn method, to be structurally included as an additional tool to estimate the post-mortem interval as part of the compound method. Using this method for estimating the post-mortem interval is beneficial to post-mortem investigations in individual cases, further scientific research on a Dutch national level and above all, serves fairer justice.

Hendrik Stigter is a Dutch forensic physician with a special interest in estimating the post-mortem interval of a deceased human being in the early hours after death.

This dissertation is part of Science in Court, an interdisciplinary collaboration at Maastricht University.

ISBN: 9789463714980