Henry Chang-Yu Lee (Chinese: 李昌鈺; pinyin: Lǐ Chāngyù; born 22 November 1938) is a Chinese (Taiwanese) -American forensic scientist.
Early life and career
The 11th of 13 children, Lee was born in Rugao, then a county in the Chinese province of Jiangsu. He relocated to Taiwan at the end of the Chinese Civil War. His father, who was traveling separately from the rest of the family, diasappeared when the passenger ship Taiping sank. Lee graduated in 1960 from the Central Police College with a B.A. degree in police administration. He worked with the Taipei Police Department, where he rose to the rank of captain at age 22, the youngest in Taiwanese history.[1]
Lee was chief emeritus for the Connecticut State Police during 2000 to 2010, commissioner of Public Safety for Connecticut during 1998 to 2000, and Connecticut's chief criminalist and director of the state police forensic laboratory from 1978 to 2000.
In 2004, a crime documentary series hosted by Lee, Trace Evidence: The Case Files of Dr. Henry Lee, aired on the then Court TV network (now truTV).[4] He has appeared on Chinese television and online programs such as KangXi Lai Le in Taiwan, and Voice and Beyond the Edge in China Central Television on mainland China.[5][6]
His biography, True Crime Experiences with Dr. Henry Chang-Yu Lee was authored by attorney Daniel Hong Deng of Rosemead, California.
He is the founder of the Henry C. Lee Institute of Forensic Science, affiliated with the University of New Haven.[7]
He also was consulted on the 1991 death of investigative journalist Danny Casolaro, who died in a West Virginia motel room. Initially, Lee said the evidence presented to him by police was consistent with suicide. A few years later when additional evidence from the hotel scene was revealed to him, Lee formally withdrew his earlier conclusion and stated, "a reconstruction is only as good as the information supplied by the police.”[9]
Lee was consulted as a blood spatter analyst for defense 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.
In 2007, Lee testified as a prosecution expert witness at the first trial of Cal Harris, an upstate New York car dealer accused of killing his wife on the night of September 11, 2001. Since no body has ever been found, the state's best evidence of foul play was some medium-velocity castoff impact blood spatter on the walls of the house's garage and kitchen. Lee told the jury that it could only have come from someone lower than 29 inches (740 mm) above ground. Harris was convicted at that trial, and a retrial after new evidence emerged,[10] but ultimately acquitted at a fourth trial after his conviction was overturned on appeal.
In May 2007, Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler, the judge in the Phil Spector murder trial, said that he had concluded "Lee hid or destroyed" a piece of evidence from the scene of actress Lana Clarkson's shooting. Lee denied the allegation, and "when he testified before Fidler, Lee said he was astonished and insulted by claims by two former members of Spector's defense team that he had collected a small white object that was never turned over to prosecutors, as the law requires."[12] University of Southern California law professor Jean Rosenbluth said that Judge Fidler's ruling was "very narrow" and noted that the judge had made no finding that Lee had lied on the stand or acted maliciously.[12]
Allegations of error
In June 2019, the Connecticut Supreme Court concluded that Lee had erred in the murder trial testimony of (then) teenagers Shawn Henning and Ralph Birch;[13] Lee said a towel tested positive for blood, but he had not tested it all. Later tests found no blood. The Daily Beast questioned additional cases in which Lee had testified.[14] At a June 17 press conference, Lee said that he had tested the towel, adding that chemical screening tests for blood had been done at the crime scene on the date of the homicide.[15][16]
In July 2023, a federal court found that Lee had fabricated evidence in the Henning-Birch trial. Lee could be held liable in forthcoming civil suits. Henning and Birch spent 30 years in prison before being cleared of the crime.[17]
Lee remarried on December 1, 2018 to Xiaping Jiang, CEO of Jiadi (Hong Kong) Co., Yangzhou Jiadi Clothing Co., Ltd, and Yangzhou Jiadi Senior Care Center.[19]
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