Posted on Thursday, December 07, 2006 - 06:48 am:

When the police collect a suspicious letter from you for forensic processing, they may or may not get back with you concerning the results unless they identify a suspect and you are needed for court testimony concerning the receipt and custody of the letter, and other factors concerning your role as the victim of the offense. The police are not performing the examinations for only you personally, but are performing them to attempt to identify and prosecute criminals for the general benefit of your community (society). By the time forensic examinations are completed, the police may have been working on hundreds of other (even more serious) offences requiring their time and attention. Reporting laboratory results to victims is not a normal part of most criminal investigation procedures.

There are other reasons (besides police being busy with new investigations) for not sharing the results of examinations with victims. These reasons include the potential that the perpetrator(s) might be a coworker, friend or family member of the victim(s), and the police would not want the perpetrator(s) to be aware of whether or not the police successfully harvested evidence that could identify the perpetrator(s).

The forensic exams may be much more involved and time consuming than you might imagine. Even though the collecting officer(s) may have told you the document was being collected for prints, it would be unusual that such a letter would not first be processed by Questioned Document (QD) Examiners in a forensic laboratory for the presence of indented writing and other QD exams (including comparison of the document with any similar letters received by other victims). It is always possible that the suspect(s) may have written something on a piece of paper that was on top of the suspicious letter (and/or envelope)... and the indentations transferred from that prior writing might include names, addresses or phone numbers of interest to investigators. Depending on laboratory capabilities, DNA of suspects may be harvested from the adhesive seal of the envelope flap (or from any postage stamps). As Michele explained below, the exams might be completed by Latent Print Examiners as quickly as two weeks after evidence receipt, but the casework backlog in many forensic laboratories is six to 18 months (or more) if such documents are to be completely examined in QD, DNA and Latent Print Divisions.