Shadowing Practice: How bite marks made one man a murder suspect | Part 1 - Learn English Speaking with Video
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At 6.45 in the morning of November 3rd, 1984, a man walked into a police station on the north side of Milwaukee to report
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that he'd found what appeared to be a body lying in a lot near his home.
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That's where police discovered 63-year-old Ayaan Saichas wearing only a pair of white socks and a left shoe.
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Her blue shirt and bra were pulled up behind her head, which was bloody and swollen.
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She'd been beaten to death and possibly raped.
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Neighbors described the victim as a nice woman.
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She was known for collecting aluminum cans and playing bingo at a Ukrainian church on Friday nights.
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That's what she'd been doing the night she was killed.
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And she was let off after midnight by friends who normally dropped her off after the bingo games.
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They observed her walk in front of her home, and those are the last people who saw her alive.
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One of the real challenging things about this case was you had no eyewitnesses, you of course had no confession, you had no motive.
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This was before DNA profiling, before home security cameras were common, there were no fingerprints on the knife they found nearby.
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But the killer did leave one clue.
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He bit her.
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Investigators took 60 photographs of numerous bite marks.
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The bite marks are being analyzed by a forensic dental specialist.
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Dr. L.
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Thomas Johnson, a dentist and professor at Marquette University, examined the bite marks on the victim the day she was found.
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And he gave the cops a lead.
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He told the detectives, you are looking for a guy with an abnormality in one of his upper teeth.
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So, the cops began knocking on doors.
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Three days after the murder, the detectives knocked on the door of Robert Lee Stinson, a quiet 20-year-old whose only criminal record was a fine for shoplifting from when he was younger.
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He lived with his mother and siblings in a house right by the crime scene.
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Stinson told the police that on the night of the murder, he came home from a party around 11.30, went to bed, and slept until morning.
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But what caught the attention of the police was that Stinson had an upper right front tooth missing.
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That missing tooth made one of the detectives believe they got the guy.
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His partner later told the Milwaukee Sentinel that they went back inside and told Stinson some jokes to get him laughing, to confirm that there were those teeth.
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So the state had Stinson appear at a secret hearing before a judge called a John Doe investigation in Wisconsin, where they could have Johnson, the dentist, check his teeth.
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The John Doe is the first time that I met Mr. Stinson.
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But I'm looking at this kid who is very warm, very affable, very cooperative.
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Everything in my gut, my experience in six years in a DA's office of sensitive crimes, you end up like, no way.
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No way did this guy do this." He thought they would eliminate Stinson as a suspect.
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But that's not what happened.
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Johnson looked into Stinson's mouth for 20 seconds, the same amount of time it takes to read this.
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And then Johnson said Stinson's teeth matched a sketch that he and a police artist had made, a sketch of what the suspect's teeth would look like based on the bite marks.
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Nobody brought the drawing to the hearing, but Johnson said, It resembles what I see here.
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Stinson's mouth, he said, certainly is consistent with what I drew.
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It is remarkable.
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And that was enough for the court to order a full dental examination.
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But if they'd had the sketch in the room, they would have seen that it said the suspect would be missing a lateral incisor.
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Stinson was missing a central incisor, his right front tooth.
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But now the dentist was on the record saying that they matched.
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The field of bite mark analysis is one of the so-called pattern matching disciplines in forensic science.
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Fingerprints are the best known example, but the group also includes shoe prints, tire treads, handwriting, and bullet casings.
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We call them forensic sciences, but they developed independently of what we typically think of as the science world.
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the universities and research hospitals, peer-reviewed journals, grant-funding organizations.
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Those institutions of basic research have fed some forensic fields, but many others lack that foundation.
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You go up the street to the University of Wisconsin
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and you look for the Department of Fingerprints or the Department of Shoe Impressions.
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It's not there.
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That's because these fields developed mostly in response to crime scenes and the obligation to study whatever bits of information they contained.
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The examiners look at samples closely and make a subjective assessment of how similar they are.
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You know, it's funny.
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When people watch CSI or think about forensic science, they often think that it's very high-tech and glossy and perfect and often automated.
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And in the real world, the pattern identification sciences do not work like that.
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It's not that subjectivity makes it illegitimate or necessarily incorrect, But we ought to know something about how accurate it is.
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We ought to know something about how accurate it is.
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For the criminal justice system, this is still a new idea.
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So at the time of Stinson's case, nobody knew how accurate or inaccurate bite-mark analysis was.
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The man who examined Stinson's teeth, L.T.
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Johnson, is a forensic odontologist.
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And bite-mark evidence is just part of what they do.
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When we have tragedies, plane crashes, or other kinds of terrible events, sometimes we use teeth that are found to help identify human remains
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and that's an important tool and I believe quite an accurate one.
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Rescue workers were there quickly, but they quickly learned that there was no one to rescue.
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The same year he worked on Stinson's case, Johnson led a team identifying victims of a plane crash that killed 31 people.
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He would go on to help identify 11 decomposing victims found in serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment.
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Forensic odontology had been an established field for decades, but it was only in the 1970s
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that they decided to go beyond identifying victims by their teeth and started identifying suspects by bite marks.
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It began with a 1975 case, People vs. Marks in California.
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Edgar Marx was accused of murdering his landlady and leaving a bite mark in the cartilage of her nose.
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The bite mark evidence was deemed admissible even though the appeals court conceded that there was no established science behind it.
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And it became the germinal case
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because all of the precedent establishing cases in high courts across the country cited back to Marx.
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Fast forward a few more years, Ted Bundy goes on trial and there's bite mark evidence in in the Ted Bundy case, and it made movie stars out of a couple of forensic dentists.
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And bite mark evidence took off.
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This norm of precedent of conforming to past decisions, it exists for a reason, but it happens to be the opposite of how science works.
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Precedent is really important in the judicial system.
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We want constancy, predictability, and we have a rule that like cases should be decided the same way.
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Science, by contrast, is inevitably and unavoidably and always contingent,
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progressing, growing, changing, shifting as new research tells us new things and corrects past misunderstandings.
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The legal system's not really designed to adapt to that.
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So a game of judicial telephone convinced the courts that bite mark identification was an accepted area of science,
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when in fact, it had never been tested.
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There's no science that we have seen to support that.
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It's really quite astonishing.
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It's the one thing that gets me truly agitated, because there's just no science to support it.
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A month after Johnson collected models and photographs of Stinson's teeth, he came back with his final conclusion.
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The teeth of Robert Lee Stinson would be expected to produce bite patterns identical to those
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which I examined in this extensive and exhaustive analysis.
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He said the evidence was overwhelming.
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The sketch Johnson referenced at the prior hearing, it was never mentioned again.
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He was showing me, you take this overlay of the pictures of his teeth
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and you put it on the pictures of the bite wounds on Mrs. Sychaz's body
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and you kind of see how they align and they did the same thing with the models.
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But I wasn't completely convinced
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that I could convince a jury based on what Dr. Johnson did that Mr. Stinson was guilty of an offense like this.
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I said, we need a second opinion on this case.
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Johnson recommended Raymond Rawson, who was known as one of the leaders in the field.
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So the detectives flew to Las Vegas to deliver the evidence.
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And they reported that Rawson gave a verbal confirmation of Johnson's finding, but he didn't spend much time on it.
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According to a memo book that one of the detectives kept and later published, Rossin met them at their hotel room at the Four Queens, took a look at the x-rays and the molds,
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and said that was good enough for him.
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Five days later, Robert Lee Stinson was arrested at his home.
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And we decided that to be given a brutal horrific crime like this, we now have two witnesses who are saying it's him.
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And matched against that is what?
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My gut level feeling.
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And so we issued the charge.
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Dr. Johnson seemed to make sense to me.
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We had Mr. Simpson who was lying about his alibi.
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And ultimately the theory is of course the truth will emerge.
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How's the jury decide he must be wrong?
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It's so absurd.
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Speaking Goals for This Clip
This video is perfect for practicing shadowing technique—a key skill for building fluency. By mimicking the natural rhythm and intonation of the speakers, you’ll target the milestone of speaking with conversational flow, even when discussing complex, narrative-driven content. The clip’s mix of factual details and personal anecdotes helps you master pacing, pauses, and emphasis, which are crucial for clear, engaging communication.
Phrase Bank
- "caught the attention of" – Useful for explaining what stands out in a situation.
- "no way did this guy do this" – A natural, colloquial way to express strong doubt.
- "consistent with" – Great for linking evidence to a conclusion.
- "eliminate as a suspect" – Common in crime-related contexts but applicable to any process of ruling out options.
- "subjective assessment" – Helpful for discussing opinions vs. facts.
Fix Your Weak Spots
This clip is ideal for refining shadowspeak—the art of mirroring speech in real time. Notice how speakers stress words like "remarkable" and "no way" to convey emotion. Practice shadowing the detective’s partner’s quote: "they went back inside and told Stinson some jokes to get him laughing"—focus on the smooth transition between "jokes" and "to get," which often trips up learners. Also, pay attention to the pause after "20 seconds" in the line about the dental exam; pausing correctly adds clarity. By using the shadowing technique with this video, you’ll train your mouth to move like a native and your ear to catch subtle rhythm shifts, making your English sound more natural. Ready to try? Press play, pause, and repeat—you’ll be surprised how quickly your speaking improves!
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | were pulled · been beaten · was known |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | head, which was · friends who normally · people who saw |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have fed · have seen |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.