William MacDonald was originally born in England and migrated to Australia. He committed his first murder in Brisbane sometime in 1961 when he befriended a man by the name of Amos Hurst outside the Roma Street Transit Centre. They headed to one of the local pubs and after a lengthy drinking session headed back to the soon to be victims apartment where they drank more. Eventually MacDonald straddled Hurst and began strangling him; Hurst was so intoxicated he never even realised what was happening to him. Hurst’s cause of death was actually listed as accidental and had MacDonald not confessed to the crime he would not have been charged with it.
In the world of forensics there are an amazingly vast number of tests that can be conducted on a material in order to establish various things that may be useful in a trial. Listed below are just a few of the more commonly used techniques: