The recent discovery contained a handful of images taken of the stain in Casey Anthony’s trunk. If you recall, FBI Intelligence Analyst Karen Cowan made the following remarks in an internal email dated September 30, 2008:
Of note, I also requested the photos that were taken in the processing of the trunk. A very interesting photo exists of the trunk liner, which you have, which highlights the very large stain. If you look closely at this photo, there appears to be the outline or silhouette of a child in the fetal position. You can make out what may be the back, bottom, and legs most clearly. The image is best viewed on a computer screen, rather than a printout, but several of us can see this image and agree there is good chance we are seeing something significant. What can we do with this? Can this be enhanced? Can this be used to further process that liner focusing on certain areas of this stain? Would it be beneficial to send the photo and the
liner to the Body Farm for further analysis? Help. I can send you the photo electronically if you would like to query some folks.
On October 2, Richard W. Vorder Bruegge – a Supervisory Photographic Technologist with the FBI – responded with the following:
If you submit the photo to us we can attempt to improve the visibility of detail in the image, including any signs of impressions or stains. I would also request (demand?) that you send us ALL of the photos of the trunk, as we are likely to be able to learn a lot more from multiple photographs of the same features, particularly if taken from different angles and different lighting conditions.
Furthermore, we want to have the original photos shot by OCSO – not prints or photocopies. If they were film negatives, we want the film negatives. If they took digital photos, we want the raw files that were saved on the camera, or EXACT, bit-for-bit duplicates of the images that they took. We DO NOT want images that have been emailed through multiple parties.
If the file names are an accurate indicator, thirteen unique images were color-adjusted in an attempt to highlight different aspects of the trunk stain. Twenty adjusted images were included in the discovery, some representing different adjustments of the same image.
I found three images particularly interesting because they seemed to highlight the stain in significant, but different ways. First is the image found on discovery page numbered 13059 with the file name IMG_2235_red_levels.tif:
The second was an image on page 13064 with the file name IMG_2233_red.tif:
And the last image was on page 13068 with the file name IMG_2227_cyan_levels.tif:
Ideally, we’d have the original color TIF files to look at, but instead we had lousy black-and-white scans. Despite the poor quality of the images, I decided to see if I could combine the three images above to see what kind of picture they might produce.
I imported all three images into Photoshop, and first combined IMG_2233_red.tif with IMG_2235_red_levels, then combined IMG_2227_cyan_levels.tif with the result of the previous step. All three images were taken from slightly different perspectives, so I had to make adjustments to one image in order to get it to align with the other.
In Photoshop I simply imported two images into a single document in separate layers. I adjusted the opacity of the top image so that I could partially see through to the bottom image. I adjusted the size and rotation of the top image to match the bottom image, using the scale within both images as a guide. There were slight differences in perspective that I had to adjust using the free transform tool in Photoshop. This allowed me to properly align certain shapes found in both images.
Also, in the IMG_2227_cyan_levels.tif image, I cropped out the washed-out areas at the bottom and on the left. Because that same image as found in the discovery was cropped at the right, there is an abrupt, artificial line in the resulting image.
After I aligned and cropped images as appropriate, I merged the layers using the “lighten” method so that bright areas in the top layer would be added to the bottom layer. The resulting image is as follows (the abrupt line at the top right is due to the cropping in the final image):
I found several useful images on the web of toddlers right around three years of age in the fetal position. I took one of those images and layered it over the image above. To protect the innocent, I then drew an outline of the child. Note that Caylee was about 36 inches tall, so she would measure in the neighborhood of roughly 20 inches from the top of her head to her hip, give or take. I think this lines up with the scale fairly well.
This is, of course, my own speculation as to how Caylee was tossed into her mother’s trunk based on the rather poor photographs I had to work with. Nevertheless, doing this little piece of work really drove home the indignity of what Casey Anthony did to her daughter.
Related posts:
- The Trunk Liner – where some REAL Chloroform was found
- Some Interesting Observations on today’s Discovery
- Timeline and Discovery updated 05/28/10 – PLEASE NOTE NEW URL
- Correction to this Post on Desktop Files
- Caylee Anthony case: Defense moves to have trunk smell excluded
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