Pamela Mason Case Essay

On January 13, 1964, fourteen-year-old Pamela Mason replied to a newspaper ad looking for a babysitter. Pamela was picked up by the person who had placed the ad and she was never seen again. 13 days later, she was found stabbed and shot to death in a snowbank in Manchester, New Hampshire. Authorities began investigating the case and found that it had resemblances to the unsolved death of Sandra Valade in 1960, and believed that the two cases were possibly related. A few weeks after Pamela’s murder, a local woman named Rena Paquette started telling people that she knew who was responsible for Pamela's death. Then, on February 3, 1964, Rena was found dead in a barn on her property; burned to death, which was later ruled as a suicide.

On January

In addition to the visual tests, the matching pairs were subjected to comparative refractive index tests. Paper particles obtained were given a Hirshberg stain test. The Hirshberg test is a test of binocular motor alignment by which a penlight is shone at the eyes and the position of the light reflex on the cornea observed, allowing an estimate of the amount of deviation, if present. Finally a solubility test was applied. The witness determined that each matching set was an independent subject from each other matching set, and that by the law of statistical probabilities the victim's clothing, which was the source of one particle in each set, had been in contact with the defendant's automobile or clothing, the sources of the second particle of each

The State called as an expert witness C. Michael Hoffman, an employee of the United States Treasury Department, experienced in the examination of physical evidence by neutron activation analysis. The process, "is fundamentally one where the material to be analyzed is first made radioactive so that it will give off or emit radiation in the form of gamma rays. This radioactive sample is then exposed to a scintillation crystal; and every time a gamma ray interacts with the crystal, it emits a flash of light, which is transformed into an electrical pulse whose voltage is proportional to the energy of the gamma rays. An electronic device will then sort the electrical impulses into different energy groups and will add up the pulses in each group. The results are then graphed on an oscilloscope screen. The graph contains information related to the type and amount of elements in the radioactive sample and can be transcribed immediately or stored on magnetic tape or punched paper tapes for future