Chapter 335: Small Dosage

Jiang Yuan spread some photographs on the desktop and began to ponder while looking at them.

This was his habitual operation; many of his cold cases were started from photographs.

The other police officers in the room were either following along to look at the photos, doing their own work, or just playing on their phones to rest for a while.

Song Jinyou paid attention to Jiang Yuan's expression and also stood nearby to look.

These were all photos he had seen before, some of which he had even taken himself. Song Jinyou was unsure if Jiang Yuan could see anything out of them...

"I see that among the onlookers, quite a few people appear repeatedly..." Mu Zhiyang said tentatively.

His guess was the simplest and most natural one. Not to mention criminals returning to the crime scene, generally, after people commit a crime, they will be particularly concerned about the progress of the case investigation.

This is a very natural approach. For most people, having a criminal case under their name would become the biggest thing in their life; it is impossible not to be concerned.

Listening to Mu Zhiyang's words, Song Jinyou glanced at Jiang Yuan and said, "The people in the photos are all villagers, and furthermore, they were all taken two or three days after our case occurred."

Mu Zhiyang couldn't help but let out an "Oh," and he also understood.

With site photos taken two or three days apart, and each photo taken several days apart, it was indeed too low in accuracy to forcibly claim that the perpetrator was among them.

If there was something inappropriate at the scene, the perpetrator would have had two or three days to return and stir up trouble again. As for the curious villagers, the possibility of them being onlookers was very high. After all, it was a village very far from the city, and it was normal for them to watch when a group of outsiders, who were police, suddenly arrived.

Furthermore, the shooting time could not completely cover the time everyone was watching. As such, using the onlookers captured in the photos as a blueprint to make guesses or analyses really didn't have much significance.

"In that case, the perpetrator still has the opportunity to destroy evidence," Tang Jia added from the side.

Song Jinyou nodded: "This is a very troublesome point. The environment of Lanzhu Village is very isolated; we can't even conduct stakeouts. As long as outsiders enter the village, they will be noticed, and the news will spread throughout the village very quickly. There is no possibility of hiding at all."

The expressions of the several police officers present became a bit more solemn.

Although it is said that there must be traces wherever one passes, if a scene is destroyed once, or even destroyed a second time, the difficulty of investigation becomes too high.

Or rather, for ordinary investigators and technical personnel, the traces left behind are indeed different.

This is like taking a problem, transforming it, transforming it again, and transforming it once more, and then asking the examinee to solve it. Certainly, the later it gets, the lower the scoring rate will be.

After all, those who have mastered the subject are in the minority. For the technicians of the police station or the county bureau, when the difficulty reaches this level, it belongs to the category of being beyond the syllabus.

Everyone then looked at Jiang Yuan again.

Jiang Yuan smiled, found a few photos of footprints at the scene from the pile of photos, and said: "My thought is, recognizing faces is unreliable, but footprints at the scene are limited after all, so we can still analyze them."

In a rural environment, surveillance video and even DNA are not particularly useful; the latter decomposes particularly quickly in a rural environment.

However, footprints are relatively useful in rural or wild environments.

On one hand, there are many places with soft soil in rural areas, which are sufficient to preserve footprints; on the other hand, dust can also leave a large number of footprints.

And in the photos taken by Song Jinyou, photos by the fish pond, next to the pig pen, and next to the donkey pen all left a large number of footprint traces.

Jiang Yuan said: "Compared to the photos of the onlookers, the footprints are actually closer to the situation at the scene. I looked at the photos of these three cases; the footprints in the fish pond case are the messiest. It should be that people have been to the scene for several consecutive days, but the footprints in the dead pig and dead donkey cases are preserved quite well. Although there are also footprint traces from multiple days, it is basically possible to distinguish the footprint traces of the day the case occurred, as well as the footprint traces of the following days."

"Eh, can they be distinguished?" Song Jinyou was shocked and asked: "Then, can the footprints stepped on by the same person today and the footprints stepped on tomorrow be distinguished?"

"For the adjacent few days, in this kind of environment, there is a high probability of being able to distinguish them," Jiang Yuan said: "For footprints on this kind of soft ground, you look at the hardness of the edges, as well as the grayscale of the color; they are relatively easy to distinguish..."

Song Jinyou gave a haha laugh and was too lazy to look. Easy to distinguish my foot. If this were easy to distinguish, the trace examiners in the county town might as well jump off a building.

Wang Zhong, who was beside him, also let out a silly haha laugh. He was a trace examiner, the kind with footprint identification at LV0.1; he even had to carefully distinguish between pig hooves and donkey hooves to make a judgment.

"In short, through the footprints, we can filter out a few people." Jiang Yuan was not prepared to lecture them either.

Lecturing people who understand the trade is meaningful. For someone like Song Jinyou—he didn't even need to persuade Song Jinyou; anyway, he could just give orders directly, so there was even less need to explain so much.

"This footprint is the one that appears with the highest frequency." Jiang Yuan pulled over a photo and drew a circle around a footprint on it with a red pen.

"This footprint also appears with a high frequency, and there are relatively many footprints."

"This one also appears every time; it's the third in frequency."

"And this one, it appeared every time."

Jiang Yuan marked out a total of four footprints and then continued: "The first one is a female, 46 to 47 years old. Height 156 cm, weight about 130 jin."

"The second one is a male, 51 years old, height 165 cm, weight 150 jin."

"The third one is a male, 32 years old, height 172 cm, weight about 170 jin."

"The fourth one is a female, 52 to 54 years old, height about 155 cm, weight 120 jin."

As Jiang Yuan spoke, Tang Jia made records on the side.

After he finished speaking, Jiang Yuan looked at them again and pointed, saying: "From 1 to 4, the foot lengths are 21 cm, 24 cm, 24.5 cm, and 22.5 cm respectively."

Tang Jia recorded them accordingly.

Song Jinyou frowned as he looked at the photos: "You can directly see the length of the footprints from the photos?"

"It's the foot length, not the shoe length, which is to say, it's not the length of the shoe. Remember to measure when you are looking for people." Jiang Yuan paused, then pointed at number four and said: "This one has an outward turning of the toes, and it's the kind that's a bit serious. Make a note of it."

"Okay." Tang Jia hurriedly made a note.

Jiang Yuan then took a photo and gave the paper to Song Jinyou, saying: "I'll trouble Director Song to send people to make a trip, investigate these four people, or bring them over for interrogation."

"Okay, okay." Song Jinyou understood. Was this narrowing the suspects down to 4 people?

If this were really the case, the case would become very simple.

A village only has a few hundred people to begin with. Filtering based on height, foot length, weight, etc., and finally locking onto 4 people is a very easy thing.

Likewise, if he could finally lock onto 4 people, it wouldn't be too difficult to find the real perpetrator.

Song Jinyou immediately pointed out a few people to go on a business trip, and together with the few people from Jiang Yuan's side, they headed straight for Lanzhu Village.

"The road is better now, but I estimate it will be tomorrow before there is news. Let's rest first and have a meal." Song Jinyou's politeness rose by another three levels.

Hearing that Jiang Yuan could solve cases, witnessing that Jiang Yuan could solve cases, and being solved by Jiang Yuan—these were three levels of elevation.

Song Jinyou now looked at Jiang Yuan as if he were looking at a wish-granting Bodhisattva.

The next day.

8 police officers brought back four criminal suspects.

Meng Chengbiao accompanied them back. Before going to the interrogation, he first reported to Jiang Yuan: "The high probability is that it is number one, Gan Jingying."

Jiang Yuan only asked: "Could it be a crime committed by multiple people?"

"No. The rat poison found in her home, the chickens, ducks, geese, and pigs in her home have not been poisoned by others, and she also has grudges with all the victims. In addition, Gan Jingying has an extreme personality and cannot get along with anyone." Meng Chengbiao stated the reasons and then added: "I will also pay attention to asking during the interrogation later."

Jiang Yuan nodded. He still trusted Meng Chengbiao's judgment in this regard.

Meng Chengbiao continued: "As for the other three criminal suspects, their reasons for appearing at the three crime scenes are relatively sufficient. Only Gan Jingying, she didn't go to watch the excitement the first two times, but there were footprints left at the scene..."

Meng Chengbiao went to interrogate with a preset target, which supposedly didn't particularly conform to the standards. But in the world of criminal cases, there was nothing that was standard to begin with.

Gan Jingying had almost no resistance and confessed the criminal process.

During the confession process, Gan Jingying cried bitterly and denounced the oppression and bullying of herself by the villagers...

Jiang Yuan and the others were in the monitoring room, feeling a bit bored listening.

Most criminal suspects are like this; they usually try to explain the justice of their own behavior.

A piece of cold knowledge: most criminals think they are good people.

Therefore, if self-identification is taken as the standard, the education of most parents is very successful.

The sympathy threshold of an old policeman like Song Jinyou was even higher. After listening for a while, he said uninterestingly: "Turns out she's just a coward, only daring to poison in small doses."

"No wonder you couldn't detect poison when you went." Jiang Yuan understood. In the last few months, including the previous few years, this Gan Jingying hadn't just poisoned the things that died. Rather, whenever she was dissatisfied with someone's family, she would throw a little bit of rat poison, and it was often mixed into the feed.

In this situation, some livestock were poisoned to death, like the recent pigs and donkeys, but during this period, there were also other people's livestock that were not poisoned.

And by the time Song Jinyou sent people over, did the extraction, brought them back, and then went to the county bureau to queue for testing, basically nothing could be detected. Of course, it was also because the technical level of the Ningtai County Bureau was not good enough. If people had really died, the testing method would have been different.

"Alright. Let's catch this person next." Jiang Yuan said, exporting a file, which was exactly a small case he had done today and yesterday. ===== CHAPTER 336 =====