Estimation of the time since death-Even methods with a low precision may be helpful in forensic casework.

Gold standard for the estimation of the time since death in the early postmortem period is the temperature based nomogram method together with time of death dependent criteria of postmortem lividity, rigor mortis and supravital reactions. There is also a huge literature on chemical methods proposed for estimating the time since death which however play obviously no role in forensic practice. Especially the rise of vitreous potassium has been studied intensively. Also immunohistochemical methods have been proposed for estimating the time since death but obviously not yet applied in casework. We present a case where a woman was found murdered 8 days after having been seen last alive. Due to lack of putrefactive changes postmortem interval was thought to be not more than 2 days. However, immunohistochemical stainings and vitreous potassium concentration revealed that time since death was more than 6 days and the woman was obviously murdered immediately after she was seen lastly alive.