Henry Lee
30-second overview: Born in 1938 in Jiangsu, he crossed to Taiwan with his mother in 1949. At 22, he became the youngest police chief in Taiwan's history. He went to the United States in 1964 and earned a doctorate from New York University. Over his career he worked on more than 8,000 cases, gaining worldwide fame through the O.J. Simpson trial. But in 2023, a federal court ruled that he had fabricated blood-evidence testimony in a 1985 Connecticut murder case, leading to two teenagers spending more than three decades in prison for crimes they did not commit. On March 27, 2026, Henry Lee died at his home in Nevada at the age of 87.
In December 1987, in the bitter New England winter, police in Connecticut pulled a few bone fragments, half a tooth crown, a fingertip, and several strands of hair from a snow-covered riverbank. The body of missing flight attendant Helle Crafts had long since vanished — fed through a wood chipper by her husband and pushed into the Housatonic River.
The man leading the case was the director of the Connecticut State Forensic Science Laboratory, a police-school graduate from Taiwan. Using those bone fragments, he persuaded a jury to convict a defendant without a corpse — a first in American criminal history.
That is where the name Henry Lee began to be remembered.
From the _Taiping_ to New Haven
Henry Lee was born in 1938 into a salt-merchant family in Rugao, Jiangsu, the eleventh of thirteen children. In 1949, at age eleven, he crossed the Taiwan Strait from Shanghai with his mother, Wang Shuzhen. His father, Li Haoming, never made it: in January of that year, the passenger ship Taiping struck a reef near the Zhoushan Islands and sank. Roughly 1,500 people died. Li Haoming was among them.
The Taiping disaster (January 27, 1949) is one of the deadliest maritime tragedies in the history of migration from mainland China. The vessel was overloaded and sailing without navigation lights at night when it collided with a cargo ship and sank in less than two hours. For decades afterward, nearly every Taiwanese family with a "crossing story" from 1949 carried a similar void.
After his father's death, the family fell into poverty. Henry Lee later said his mother's words — "even if we are poor, we must stay clean" — stayed with him for life. To save on tuition, he enrolled in the Central Police Academy (now Central Police University) on a public scholarship, earning a bachelor of laws in 1960. After graduation he joined the Taipei City Police Department and was promoted to chief inspector at just 22, a record that still stands as the youngest in Taiwan's history.
In 1964, he left for the United States with his savings. He studied criminal science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, then pressed on to a Ph.D. in biochemistry at New York University, graduating in 1975. That same year he joined the faculty at the University of New Haven, building what would later be named the Henry C. Lee Institute of Forensic Science — starting from a single classroom with one fingerprint kit.
In 1979, he was appointed director of the Connecticut State Forensic Science Laboratory and chief forensic examiner, while also serving as a tenured professor at the University of New Haven. He held these posts until 2000, and over those two decades became the most recognized Chinese forensic scientist in the world.
The Wood Chipper, the Simpson Trial, and 319
The Helle Crafts case (1986–1987)
This is the case that made Henry Lee famous in American forensic circles. Helle's husband, Eastern Air Lines pilot Richard Crafts, fed his wife's body through a wood chipper on a winter night. Lee's team sifted through the snow along the riverbank, recovering 2,660 hair cross-sections, 87 bone fragments, a five-centimeter nail segment, and several hundred grams of human fat. These fragments were presented in court, and the jury convicted Crafts of murder without a complete body — establishing the legal precedent that a murder conviction could be secured without a corpse.
He later summarized it with a metaphor: "Some people compare me to Sherlock Holmes or Charlie Chan, but those are fictional characters. In reality, scientists, detectives, and the public must work together… There are no commercial breaks between us."
The O.J. Simpson trial (1995)
In 1995, NFL star O.J. Simpson was charged with the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Lee testified as a defense witness, challenging the prosecution's blood-evidence handling. In court he pointed out serious gaps in how the blood samples had been collected and preserved, displayed crime-scene photographs, and highlighted "a certain imprint pattern" intended to show that the evidence had been improperly stored and potentially contaminated. Simpson was acquitted. The trial broadcast Lee's name into living rooms around the world and introduced the term "forensic science" to millions of television viewers for the first time.
📝 The double-edged sword of forensics The Simpson trial made Lee's reputation — but it also planted a seed in the minds of later critics: a skilled enough expert can make either side's story sound convincing.
The 319 shooting (2004)
On March 19, 2004, one day before Taiwan's presidential election, President Chen Shui-bian and Vice President Annette Lu were shot while campaigning in Tainan. Both sustained minor injuries. The next day, Chen won re-election by roughly 30,000 votes. The pan-blue camp refused to accept the result and called for an international forensic expert to intervene.
Lee led a team of three American ballistics and forensic specialists to Taiwan to conduct a "mobile ballistic reconstruction," analyzing cartridge-case structures and toolmark evidence. His forensic findings supported the "one bullet, two wounds" account, concluding from the physical evidence that the shooting could indeed have occurred. The DPP at the time, however, noted that Lee had served as chairman of the Lien-Soong North American support committee and questioned his impartiality. The case was eventually closed by the Tainan District Prosecutors Office, which identified the shooter as Chen I-hsiung, who had died by suicide, but the political controversy smoldered for years. Lee's role was to provide physical ballistic analysis, and his forensic conclusions were not overturned by subsequent investigations.
1985: A Towel
On December 1, 1985, in New Milford, Connecticut, 65-year-old Everett Carr was murdered in his home: 27 stab wounds, his throat slashed, seven blunt-force blows to the head.
Police arrested two teenagers: 17-year-old Shawn Henning and 18-year-old Ralph "Ricky" Birch. The problem was that the crime scene yielded more than 40 fingerprints, none of which matched either suspect; no blood was found on their clothing or in their car.
At the 1989 trial, Lee — not yet widely known — testified to two points: that a killer at such a bloody scene could still have left no blood on his person, and that a towel found in Carr's bathroom had, when he tested it, "shown a reaction consistent with the presence of blood." The jury convicted both men. Henning was later paroled; Birch remained in prison for more than thirty years until his conviction was vacated and he was released for retrial in 2019.
Later, other experts retested the towel: it was not blood.
In 2020, both men's convictions were overturned. They promptly filed a federal civil lawsuit naming Lee, eight detectives, and the city of New Milford as defendants.
On July 22, 2023, federal judge Victor Bolden ruled that Lee was legally liable for fabricating evidence. The judge's language was unambiguous: "Beyond his claim that he performed testing, there is no evidence in the record that any testing was ever performed. In fact, even Lee's own expert concluded that there were no written records or photographs establishing that he had performed the TMB blood test. And there is evidence in the record that the testing that was actually performed did not reveal the presence of blood."
Connecticut ultimately settled with the two men for $25 million.
When the news broke, Lee denied fabrication, stating: "In my 57-year career, I have investigated more than 8,000 cases and have never been accused of any misconduct or intentional perjury. This is the first case in which I have had to defend myself." His alternative explanation was that the blood may have degraded over the intervening two decades, rendering it undetectable by later tests.
📝 The irony of "letting the evidence speak" Lee's most famous maxim, repeated over decades, was: "Let the evidence speak." The federal judge's ruling placed a question mark beside that maxim. What, exactly, did that towel say?
Taiwan's DNA Lab, and a Pair of Eyes
Within Taiwan's police establishment, Lee's contributions to forensic science are regarded as concrete. In 1993, he helped facilitate the establishment of the first DNA laboratory at the Criminal Investigation Bureau, making DNA analysis a formal part of Taiwan's criminal procedure. He also returned to Taiwan multiple times to assist with crime-scene reconstruction in high-profile cases, including the Liu Bangyou bloodshed case, the Peng Wan-ru murder, the Pai Hsiao-yen kidnapping-murder, and the 2015 Kaohsiung Prison hostage crisis. In these cases, the modern evidence-collection methods and cross-jurisdictional trace-evidence tracking techniques he introduced provided a concrete technology transfer that helped modernize Taiwan's forensic system.
He authored more than 40 professional books, received over 30 honorary degrees, and donated all his speaking fees to educational causes. A few days before his death, he was still completing a book on missing-persons investigations; his family has said the book will still be published.
In a 2014 interview, he said that upon his death he wanted to donate all his organs except his eyes: "because I've made my living with these eyes my whole life."
In November 2025, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. On March 27, 2026, Henry Lee died peacefully at his home in Henderson, Nevada. In accordance with his wishes, no public memorial service was held; the family set up an online message board in lieu of one for people to express their condolences.
Further Reading
Chen Shui-bian and Taiwan White Terror offer two different lenses through which to understand the context of Taiwan's criminal justice system. For the historical backdrop of the 1949 crossing, KMT Government Relocation and Postwar Reconstruction is a starting point. Taiwan Democratization documents Taiwan's transition from authoritarian rule to the rule of law — a process in which Lee both witnessed and participated in the modernization of forensic science.