![]() If he had given the 16th as the latest date, in other words it could have been much earlier, then the prosecution would have called him as their witness: instead, he was called by the defense. That is not correct: Faulkner gave the 16th as the earliest date (and the 18th as the latest). So he respected Faulkner’s opinion (because he was brought onto the case by the police), but said that “Faulkner's testimony only gave mid-February as the latest date when Danielle's body could have been exposed to insects, not the earliest”. He said he “considered all but the first of the five scientific experts on the bug issue 'hired guns' ”. ![]() ![]() The foreman explained that he felt “the field was too subjective to exonerate Westerfield”. Yet the jury rejected that evidence and found him guilty. Goff), gave dates that excluded the defendant by a significant margin - at least four days. The above dates show that all the entomologists, including the prosecution’s expert (Dr. Richard Merritt, a forensic entomologist and professor at Michigan State University, stated that because each scientist has his own method, this can lead to disagreement, but a lot of the disagreements involve a variation of one or two days, not over a week and a half as in the Westerfield case: “If it's that big a time, someone screwed up”. His dates were earlier as he used new data from Canada which gives a significantly slower development for that fly species. Goff insisted that the victim's body was colonized by larvae earlier than the other three entomologists estimated (his dates were February 9 to 14). Faulker argued that forensic entomology established that the body of Danielle Van Dam was dumped in mid-February, which proved to be after Westerfield was already under police surveillance (February 5), while Dr. William Rodriguez, a forensic anthropologist, also testified on this issue. ![]() In this San Diego case, the courtroom became a battle over conflicting reports from four forensic entomologists, Dr. In the United States, forensic entomology became well known through the trial of David Westerfield in 2002 for the abduction and murder of seven-year-old Danielle Van Dam. ![]()
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