Yesterday I solved a case that has been bugging me since 2002. But I didn't solve it on my own. No sir.
Basically what happened was this: a guy got shot in the left ankle in downtown Johannesburg in August 2002 while I was doing research on gunshot wounds at the Johannesburg General Hospital. To cut a long story short, the victim had a nasty fracture of the tibia with a curious projectile lodged in the bone. This projectile was symmetrical and intact, had a contour like nothing I've ever seen before, and was accompanied by multiple lead fragments elsewhere in the wound. The guy's achilles tendon was protruding out of an ugly wound in the heel area. To make things even more mysterious, the victim's newish Nike trainer on the left had multiple breaches with embedded lead, but only one breach perforated to the heel area.
The victim had surgery to plate the limb, but the projectile could not be removed. In fact we got no projectiles at all in that case. The patient was then discharged and I haven't seen him since.
But..I didn't know what the projectile was. Nobody at the hospital knew, and between us we have seen thousands of gunshot wounds with projectiles lodged in bone. So I posted a picture of the X-ray on a forensic forum and several forensic scientists from all around the world posted what they thought the thing was. I ruled them all out because their densities did not match what I had, or the contour was wrong.
Finally a guy in Hungary posted a picture of some components of a Czech Tokarev bullet, manufactured in 1955. This bullet has a steel jacket, lead base and a solid steel 'insert' very much in the armour-piercing design.
I then managed to track down two samples of Tokarev bullets right here in the UK. One I cut in half longitudinally and the other I took apart just to get the insert out intact. I then worked backwards from the original X-rays of the gunshot victim, to establish a possible long axis angle of the projectile embedded in the victim's ankle, and came to a rough estimate of what that angle was. I then got permission to X-ray my samples here in London, using a similar exposure to the one used to X-ray the guy's ankle in JHB. I X-rayed the sample insert at three different angles and I am happy to say that the radiographs prove that the insert in the victim's ankle is exactly the same as a 7.62 x 25mm Tokarev insert. I have been checking to see if that insert is unique to that ammunition. So far all other proposals from the forensic scientists have been ruled out because they don't match the physical dimensions of my sample, or the weight in grains. It's nice that the mystery surrounding the JHB X-rays could be solved 2 years later by getting a few samples and new X-rays in another country. It's nice to have that kind of collaboration and support...just like what we get here on AO actually :-)
