The incident is detailed in a book called The Washing Away of Wrongs by Song Ci. The investigator determined that a villager was murdered by a sickle. They also knew that blow flies are attracted to human tissue and blood. With these two pieces of knowledge the investigator asked the members of the village to lay their sickles down in the village square. Blow flies soon began to gather on one sickle, the sickle that was covered in the blood of the murdered villager. The owner of the sickle soon broke down and confessed to the murder.
Not only was this the first example of forensic science being used to solve the murder, it was also the first recorded use of insects to solve a crime. It brings to mind the movie The Silence of the Lambs. Buffalo Bill raised a very specific type of moth, the Death Head’s Moth, and he would stuff the pupa down his victim’s throat. In the movie, this fact was instrumental in the investigation and the roots of this type of evidence collection can be traced hundreds of years back to China.
