A bite mark, a forensic dentist, a murder: how junk science ruins innocent lives

Charles McCrory has spent decades in prison for the murder of his wife, convicted on the strength of bite mark evidence. The problem? CSI-style forensics is bad science

Charles McCrory is haunted by a memory from his 1985 trial in which he was accused of murdering his wife, Julie Bonds, in a bloody attack at their home in Andalusia, a small town in deepest Alabama.

What haunts him is the look on the jurors' faces as they listened to the testimony of the prosecution's star witness, a dentist named Richard Souviron. He was a founding father of a cutting-edge branch of forensic science known as bite-mark analysis, which claimed to be able to identify violent criminals by matching their unique dental patterns to the bite wounds on victims' bodies.