Can the rope used to restrain victims tie the suspect to the crime? No pun intended!
The Internet Child Exploitation Unit of a police force caught a suspect known for tying up his victims with rope before abusing them. The police also seized the rope. Suspecting that the criminal was recording his offences, the police also seized several devices, including phones and computers. Aiming to make the most of the rapid and reliable review capability of S21 LASERi-X, the Digital Media Investigator who was assigned the case imported all the data extracted from these devices into a single S21 LASERi-X analysis.
The investigator wanted to find any digital evidence of the rope being used on victims. She was hoping for images depicting the suspect’s involvement in the crime.
Having taken a picture of the seized rope, the investigator loaded the image into S21 LASERi-X and selected a portion of the rope from the image. The investigator then ran a visual search using the selected portion. S21 LASERi-X extracted the distinct visual characteristics of the rope, and searched across all the case material.
In real-time, the search results appeared on the screen, revealing images of what S21 LASERi-X predicted was the same rope. The results were a strong match to the query; they depicted the rope in various scenes, either on its own, or restraining a victim and (perhaps most importantly) some images showed the suspect actually using the rope.
The suspect was charged and convicted based on the overwhelming evidence uncovered by S21 LASERi-X.