Today's guest is Jim Cole, a retired Supervisory Special Agent with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). He shared the case of Daniel Harris—a disgraced former top gun Navy F-18 pilot who sextorted at least 70 child victims around the globe—live on stage at the Magnet User Summit in Nashville. This episode gets deep into the weeds of digital forensics in an extremely complex case. Jim speaks about best practices for working with digital cameras, some very creative forensic techniques that proved the defendant was perpetrating the crimes despite confusing claims of third party hacking, how he defended his case on the witness stand, and much more. 

The eBay Swindler is a fraud case, with tens of thousands of victims and millions of dollars in damages from a criminal using automated tools to rip people off at scale. This case involves man hunts in the real and digital worlds, a ton of digital evidence, and a pretty hilarious arrest. Our guest today is Keith Swanson, a digital forensic investigator with 22 years of experience in law enforcement and a long career in the private sector as both an adjunct professor teaching digital forensics and an incident response manager in the corporate world.

Larry McClain is back by popular demand. You may remember Larry from our first ever episode of DFIRL “Murder in St. Louis - The Remarkable Case of Pam Hupp”. Today, he’s here to discuss his work on another tragic case, the murder of Dorothy Hall by her ex-boyfriend, Terry Culberson. What is interesting about this story is how well it demonstrates one of the biggest strengths that digital evidence has over other kinds of evidence; the ability to show what’s in a criminal’s mind. Whether a crime was intentional or accidental has a big impact on sentencing in our justice system, and Larry’s investigation shows how well digital devices can help us understand a perpetrator’s guilty mind.  

This is the case of baby Eloise, a story about a man found guilty of murder after violently abusing his girlfriend’s 17-month old girl. Please be advised that there are horrific details provided about this case and listener discretion is advised.   This case shows the importance of interplay between digital gathering and old-school detective work. The lead detective establishes a timeline using classic interview techniques and the examiner finds digital evidence along with medical evidence that proves the suspect is lying. Some of our other cases involves more smoking gun digital evidence but this one is illustrating the increasing need for digital evidence to work along side other case details. This episode was recorded live at Magnet User Summit in Nashville Tennessee in April 2022.  In this case we get a different perspective as the prosecutor is joining us, Assistant District Attorney from Nashville Davidson County Jan Norman, alongside Chad Gish detective and forensic examiner form Nashville police Department. 

Part two of our two-part episode, the murder of Mary Yoder. Yoder was a chiropractor in Buffalo N.Y. who was poisoned by Colchicine, and our guest -- Tony Martino -- was the digital forensic investigator who worked through the case.   As a 20-year veteran of the Utica, N.Y., Police Department, Tony Martino is an expert in cybersecurity, computer crime investigation and digital forensics. He's a recipient of the Wallie Howard Jr. Award for Excellence in Law Enforcement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. In this episode, we pick up where Part One left off: the first prosecution of the case ended in a hung jury, and the second trial was about to begin. But between cases Tony and his team found crucial digital evidence: a backup of the prime suspect's phone made before she had wiped key evidence from the device.