Henry C. Lee life and biography

Henry Chang-Yu Lee is one of the world's foremost forensic scientists.The eleventh of thirteen children, Lee was born in Rugao city, Jiangsu province, China, and fled to Taiwan at the end of the Chinese Civil War in the late 1940s. His father, who was traveling separately from the rest of the family, perished when passenger ship Taiping sank on 27 January 1949.

Growing up fatherless, Lee never aspired to attending university; instead, he went on to graduate in 1960 from the Central Police College with a degree in Police Science (Central Police College is a "service academy" in Taiwan, and it is tuition-free, with living stipend provided). Lee then began his work with the Taipei Police Department, where he rose to the rank of captain at age 25, the youngest in Taiwanese history. He later immigrated to the U.S. with his wife in 1965.

In 1972, after coming to the United States to pursue his education, he earned a B.S. in Forensic Science from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. He went on to study science and biochemistry at New York University and earned his M.S. in 1974 and Ph. D. in Biochemistry in 1975.

Lee is currently the Chief Emeritus for Scientific Services for the State of Connecticut and an occasional lecture professor of forensic science at the University of New Haven, where he has helped to set up the Henry C. Lee Forensic Institute and he is also a visiting professor at the East China University of Political Science and Law. Previously, he has served as Connecticut's Commissioner of Public Safety, the Director of the Connecticut State Police Forensic Science Laboratory, and as the state’s chief criminalist from 1979 to 2000.

He currently has a TV show on the truTV network, which was Court TV back then, titled Trace Evidence: The Case Files of Dr. Henry Lee, which highlights his work on many well-known cases.

He has worked on famous cases such as the JonBenét Ramsey murder, the Helle Crafts woodchipper murder, the O.J. Simpson and Laci Peterson cases, the post-9/11 forensic investigation, the Washington, DC sniper shootings and to reinvestigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Following the O.J. Simpson case, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr hired Dr. Henry Lee to join his investigation of the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster, who killed himself in Fort Marcy Park on 20 July 1993.

He also was consulted on the 1991 death of investigative journalist Danny Casolaro. Initially, Lee said the evidence presented to him by police was consistent with suicide, but when additional evidence was revealed to him a few years later, Dr. Lee formally withdrew his earlier statement.

Dr. Lee was consulted as a blood spatter analyst during the trial of Michael Peterson, a fiction writer and politician from North Carolina who, in 2003, was convicted of the murder of his wife, Kathleen Peterson.On May 23, 2007, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler, the judge in the Phil Spector murder trial, said that he had concluded Dr. Henry Lee hid or accidentally destroyed a piece of evidence from the scene of actress Lana Clarkson's shooting.

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