Photographing the eyes of a murder victim

[curious4]

Hello all,

Obviously this wasn´t possible in Victorian times but with the medical and scientific advances which have been made over the last 150-odd years, would there today be a method of getting an image from the retina of a dead person? Extra-sensitive heat cameras, for example, or nano technology?

Of course, the last person a murder victim saw needn´t necessarily be their killer.

Best wishes,
C4

[caz]

Hi Curious4,

Apparently it will never be possible in the case of the human eye, but at the moment, strangely enough, it is theoretically possible in the case of a rabbit's eye!

So don't go shootin' bunnies or you could get caught on camera by some mad but brilliant, mega rich, animal-loving scientist with time on their hands.

Love,

Caz
X

[curious4]

Eye of the rabbit

Hello Caz,

No, not a bunny-boiler yet, but well on the way lol! Why? What´s so different about rabbit eyes? PLEASE tell me where you found this!

Regards,
C4

[Normy]

No pet shops near any of the crime scenes?

[Carol]

Hello all,

Obviously this wasn´t possible in Victorian times but with the medical and scientific advances which have been made over the last 150-odd years, would there today be a method of getting an image from the retina of a dead person? Extra-sensitive heat cameras, for example, or nano technology?

Of course, the last person a murder victim saw needn´t necessarily be their killer.

Best wishes,
C4

Hi there C4!
I'm sorry I can't help you but I will say this:

Trust you to think of that one!

Love
Carol

[caz]

Hello Caz,

No, not a bunny-boiler yet, but well on the way lol! Why? What´s so different about rabbit eyes? PLEASE tell me where you found this!

Regards,
C4

Hi C4,

My amazingly brilliant brother told me - can't remember where he got it from, but he's a doctor of physics and a patents attorney by trade, with an abiding interest in all things biological, and if he says it's so, he's the one person on earth I trust to know it's so.

It's the eye structure that's key, I believe. If so, the Victorian scientists were not quite as daft as they are often painted. Just a matter of the wrong species.

Love,

Caz
X

[Errata]

Hi C4,

My amazingly brilliant brother told me - can't remember where he got it from, but he's a doctor of physics and a patents attorney by trade, with an abiding interest in all things biological, and if he says it's so, he's the one person on earth I trust to know it's so.

It's the eye structure that's key, I believe. If so, the Victorian scientists were not quite as daft as they are often painted. Just a matter of the wrong species.

Love,

Caz
X

Actually optography was available in the Victorian era, and was used. Not in the case of Jack the Ripper, but it was proposed if I recall correctly.

A rabbit eye in the closest thing in form and function to a human eye. That's why they use rabbits to test eye cosmetics. The retina is essentially something like an LED screen in the back of the eye that interprets and reflects images. When a rabbit dies, the "LEDS" that were active at the time of death remain active for some time. Essentially the last thing they saw, assuming it was well lit and high contrast will create a burnout like effect on the retina, preserving the image. Most of the time. One cannot however point a camera at the eye and take a picture. The retina has to be removed. But rabbits eyes are not identical t human eyes. Their retinas are much more reflective (which is what creates that red eyeshine in the dark) and that probably counts quite a bit towards the image being preserved. Thus optography is highly unlikely to translate to the human eye.

And I know all of this because of this freakish book in my optometrist's office about eye technology that I read every time I go in there to remind myself that it could be worse. Glass contact lenses anyone?

[Magpie]

I was reading a couple of years ago that researchers were proposing to re-open the optogram issue, using a different kind of dye on a different part of the retina. I don't know what ever came of it.

[kensei]

I would think that if there was anything on the victims' eyes for a camera to record, it would have been clearly visible to anyone just looking at them. It makes no sense that it would be visible only to a camera. The eyes are much more like mirrors than they are like photographic plates.

[Magpie]

I would think that if there was anything on the victims' eyes for a camera to record, it would have been clearly visible to anyone just looking at them. It makes no sense that it would be visible only to a camera. The eyes are much more like mirrors than they are like photographic plates.

Hi Kensai. Urban myths aside, there's no actual camera involved in optography. The eye itself is the camera--the retina is immediately removed and treated with a purple chemical dye that "developes" the image of what the last thing the victim saw. There's only one existing example of an optogram developed from a human eye--there's definitely a shape there, but nothing at all that was recognizable. The ones from rabbits eyes are very disturbing, btw.

Actually the retina are very much like photographic plates-- rods and cones are filled with chemicals that react to light--although very, very fast, the process does require a constant cycle of impression/deletion, which stops immediately upon death. The theory is that the chemical state of the retina is "frozen" at the point of death until the chemicals break down, and that in that time it is possible to "fix" them and make them visible using a particular die. The "fixing" has to take place literally seconds after death, however, so even if optograms were theoretically possible, the process would have been absolutely useless in crime detection of any sort.

I did a series of posts on this pre-crash (they are preserved over on How's site) where I suggested was that people confused the crime-scene photography at Miller's Court with urban legends about optograms and rumours began to circulate that that is what the police were attempting with Kelly. The fact that Dew (who likely wasn't there) decided to include it in his memoirs and fudged it a bit to make it look like something he'd witnessed, rather than just heard, gave the story a veneer of credence.

[kensei]

I read somewhere (can't remember exactly where but I think it was somewhere on this site) that more crime scene photos of Kelly are rumored to exist or to have once existed, including a closeup of her face. I wonder if the police did actually attempt to photograph her eyes, misguided though they were.

In the 1988 "Jack the Ripper" miniseries starring Michael Caine, Charles Warren is at Miller's Court and says to Abberline, "The eyes of a dead person record the last thing they've seen, that's what I've heard. The photographer's brought a special lens, just in case it's true."

[curious4]

It´s all in the eyes

Hello Everyone,

Many thanks for the input - fascinating! Now I am told by my son (studying at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm), that I have been looking in the wrong place. According to him - not 100% sure tho about this -the place to look is the brain, and experiments where people were told to think of something during a brain scan have been successful in getting partial images. AND, (also according to said son) the brain continues with electric activity for a couple of days after death. Not sure I like the sound of that!

I think I will stick with Caz´s brother here! Thanks Caz.

Yes, Carol, trust me lol!

Best wishes,
C4

[curious4]

Eye, eye!

Just came up with this when googling on the subject:

"In the Eyes of the dead - Bill Jay on photography"

Not 100% sure how seriously it should be taken, however.

Best wishes,
C4:

[Mayerling]

A couple of years after the Whitechapel murders, Jules Verne wrote a novel called THE KIP BROTHERS, in which a murder is solved by photographing the eyes of the victim. Verne's novel was his personal monument for his brother Paul, who had just died. I have only seen it mentioned once by a Ripperologist - Donald Rumbelow, in his THE COMPLETE JACK THE RIPPER, but he named the novel LES FRES KNAP. I have always seen it listed as Kip not Knap.

A 1935 Universal Horror/Science Fiction film THE INVISIBLE RAY has Bela Lugosi photograph the retina of a victim and the image of the killer (Boris Karloff) appears. But Bela then manages to drop and shatter the plate with the image on it.

Jeff

[Archaic]

History of Optograms

Hi everyone, very interesting thread.

Here's a link to a good page about the history of optograms that mentions Jack the Ripper: http://www.college-optometrists.org/...optography.cfm

It's from the College of Optometrists, and includes an optogram taken from one of Kunhe's rabbits- it was looking out a barred window at the moment of death.

I attached another image of the rabbit optogram I found on the internet. It looks like the one on the webpage, though it's darker, and one of the two images appears have been presented upside down.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I found the rabbit optograms very poignant.

Best regards,
Archaic