TY SGH! Some points I found interesting below:
In Part IV of Howard Blum's investigation into the Idaho student murders, he looks at the people who helped connect the dots.
airmail.news
....(There never was a Suspect Vehicle 2, or, for that matter, 3.) Only they had a problem with the quality of the images. They were flickering, recorded in varying light. The pixels had captured a fast-moving white car—but that was about all the local cops could say for sure.
With the click of a few computer keys, the program searches through a staggering inventory of cars until it ultimately, according to the confident government description, “identifies the make and model of the vehicle in a still image.”
And it worked like a charm on the handful of videos the Moscow cops had gathered. Or more precisely, three charms. The F.B.I. forensic examiner first deduced that Suspect Vehicle 1 was a 2011–13 Hyundai Elantra. Then, “upon further review,” to use the chagrined phrase of the candid Idaho authorities, he decided the mysterious Hyundai might very well be a 2011–16 vehicle.
...the analysts still couldn’t come up with a legible shot of the license plate. They couldn’t even offer a guess. They simply had no idea.
Even more vexing, there wasn’t a single legible image of the driver. The bureau wizards tried all sorts of photographic tricks to pull a face from the blur. In the end, however, the best they could decipher was a dark, murky shadow hovering over the steering wheel.
The problem, however, was that the DNA on the knife sheath, authorities would concede on background, was
less than one hundred nanograms. A whole lot less. A mere fraction, in fact, of a single nanogram. Nothing more than just a handful of microscopic-sized cells. In total, according to knowledgeable sources, about 20 cells. Maybe, they whispered, even fewer.
