History of Forensic Odontology and Landmark Cases

Dental identification predates any formal forensic-science framework. One of the earliest documented cases concerns the identification of a skeleton believed to be King Henry IV of France in 1610, where observers noted a distinctive set of teeth as evidence confirming the identity. In 1453, the body of Hungarian military commander John Hunyadi was reportedly identified partly by dental features. These are not forensic investigations in any modern sense, but they show that people already understood that teeth could anchor an identity when other features were ambiguous.

The most frequently cited early American case is Paul Revere's identification of Joseph Warren in 1776. Warren, a physician and Patriot, was killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill and buried in a mass grave. About a year later, when remains were exhumed, Revere identified Warren by a dental bridge of ivory and silver wire that Revere himself, a silversmith, had constructed and fitted. This is not simply a trivia point: the logic of the case, a craftsman recognising his own work in a patient's mouth - anticipates the comparison methodology that identification still relies on today.

In the same era, Napoleon's battle dead were sometimes identified by soldiers who recognised the distinctive teeth of a comrade. These informal identifications were driven by practical necessity: families wanted their dead, and official records were inadequate. The pattern of opportunistic dental recognition by acquaintances or practitioners would continue until systematic methods were formalised in the twentieth century.

In November 1849, prominent Boston physician George Parkman disappeared after visiting Harvard Medical College to collect a debt from Professor John Webster. Days later, dismembered remains were found in the medical school's furnace and privy vaults. The question of whether the remains were Parkman's was complicated by the condition of the fragments, and it fell to Parkman's dentist, Nathan Cooley Keep, to provide the critical evidence.

Keep testified that he recognised the porcelain teeth and gold dental plate he had fabricated for Parkman, including the peculiar fit they required because of Parkman's unusually projecting jaw. He produced his original plaster models from the fitting appointment, which matched the recovered dental work precisely. The defence brought expert counter-testimony challenging the identification, making this not only the first use of dental evidence in a criminal trial but also the first adversarial dental identification, a two-expert disagreement that anticipates current practice.

I made this plate for Dr Parkman, and these are the teeth I manufactured for him. I know this work as well as I know my own handwriting.

Webster was convicted and hanged. The case was reported internationally and is cited in textbooks across the US and Europe as the origin point of forensic-dental testimony. Its significance is not only historical: the logic Keep used, recognising unique restorative work as a craftsman recognises their own product, remained the core of dental identification for over a century and is still part of it today.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought the profession into contact with mass-casualty identification. A fire at the Bazar de la Charite in Paris in 1897 killed 126 people, many of them from the French aristocracy. Oscar Amoedo, a Cuban dentist practising in Paris, organised the dental identification effort and compiled the case records into a textbook, L'Art Dentaire en Medecine Legale (1898), which is frequently cited as the first systematic forensic-odontology publication and which earned Amoedo the label, largely honorary, of 'father of forensic odontology'.

World War One and World War Two both drove improvements in military identification systems. The scale of fatalities demanded something more efficient than personal recognition. By the Second World War, the United States military had introduced dental records as part of the service member's identification package, alongside blood type and fingerprints on dog tags. The post-war period saw forensic odontology establishing itself institutionally: national societies were formed in Scandinavia and the UK in the 1950s and 1960s, and the American Society of Forensic Odontology was established in 1969.

Ted Bundy was convicted in July 1979 for the murders of two Florida State University students at the Chi Omega sorority house in January 1978. Among the physical evidence was a bite mark on one of the victims, Lisa Levy. ABFO founder Richard Souviron testified that the mark was consistent with Bundy's dentition, including a distinctive chipped and irregular lateral incisor. The jury convicted on both counts, and Bundy was eventually executed in 1989.

The Bundy case was a watershed moment for forensic odontology's public profile. It was heavily covered by American media, and odontologists were portrayed as able to link a killer to a victim through a mark left in skin. The case contributed to a widespread adoption of bite-mark testimony in US courts through the 1980s and 1990s. The ABFO's bite-mark standards published in 1984 reflected this optimism and used language about individualization that later researchers would find difficult to support with data.

The Indian Ocean earthquake of 26 December 2004 and the tsunamis it generated killed more than 220,000 people across Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, and nine other countries. The scale of fatalities, the geographic spread, and the presence of large numbers of foreign tourists, especially in Thailand, created an identification challenge that overwhelmed existing capacity within hours.

The Thai DVI operation became the largest forensic identification effort in history. At its peak, the operation at Khao Lak involved over 400 forensic experts from more than 30 countries working at a temporary mortuary facility. Interpol activated its DVI protocols, designating three parallel identification streams: fingerprints, DNA, and dental. Of the foreign nationals identified in Thailand, dental comparison provided the primary identification for a higher proportion than either fingerprints or DNA, partly because dental records from Northern Europe, Australia, and other high-record-penetration countries were readily retrievable and digitally transmissible, while DNA processing took longer.

The Thai tsunami experience drove several practical improvements in international DVI: standardisation of dental charting software (the PLASS DATA system), pre-event data-sharing agreements between countries for tourist populations, and the expanded use of digital dental radiography, which allowed ante-mortem records to be transmitted by email and compared the same day. It is also cited as evidence that, at scale, dental identification can outpace DNA when records exist and processing pipelines are operational.

Beginning in the 1990s and accelerating through the 2000s, DNA testing began exonerating people who had been imprisoned for serious crimes. A subset of these exonerations involved cases where bite-mark testimony had been presented at trial. The Innocence Project documented a number of such cases, and a 2016 analysis found that in at least 24 cases in the United States, bite-mark evidence had contributed to a conviction that was later overturned or seriously questioned.

The 2009 National Academy of Sciences report was a catalyst. It evaluated all forensic disciplines systematically and found that only DNA analysis had a fully validated scientific foundation. Bite-mark analysis was identified as relying on assumptions about the uniqueness of human dentitions and the fidelity with which that uniqueness is captured in skin wounds, neither of which had been tested in adequately rigorous studies. The report called for foundational research before such testimony continued to be admitted.

The profession's response has been divided. Some practitioners and professional bodies have defended the method while acknowledging the need for more research. Others have called for a moratorium on bite-mark testimony in criminal cases until foundational studies are completed. The debate continues, and the legal picture has shifted: a number of US jurisdictions now place higher evidentiary barriers on bite-mark testimony than they did a decade ago.