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Dr. I. M. Devious’s house was reported burning by a neighbor.  After quenching the fire, the police examined the exterior and interior of the house.  A kitchen window was found broken from outside, (the point of entry?).  The kitchen was also found to be the point of origin of the fire.  On going to the 2^nd floor  (the fire had been extinguished before a the 2^nd floor was damaged),  Dr. Devious was found murdered in his bed.  Post mortem of the body revealed knife wounds from the front of the body.   A couple set of fingerprints were found on the bedside table, one belonging to Dr.A and one unknown.   Examination of the floor revealed some white tablets.  Dr. Devious was not on any medication, hence the pills must belong to the murderer. 

The accelerant used to start the fire was found to automobile fuel.  Analysis of the white tablets revealed them to be aspirin. 

One of the neighbors told the police they had seen a man in a dark colored sports car leave the premises few minutes before the fire started.

Dr. Devious was a chemistry professor in a big university and had a number of graduate students and technicians working in his laboratory.  On speaking to all the people in the lab, the police had the following information:

One post-doctoral associate and two graduate students had sports car, however only two had dark colored ones.

One of graduate students was out of town for a paper presentation in a meeting.

The post doctoral associate claimed he was sick with a fever at home and the graduate student claimed he was in the library writing up his thesis.

Both were asked to submit the following evidences for testing:

1)      any medication they were taking

2)      the shoes they wore last night (for soil and glass analysis) and

3)      a small sample of the gasoline from their cars.

Analyze all the samples provided and identify the culprit.

(For GC: if you are given a GC spectrogram, you will be asked to compare sample printouts rather than run the sample.)

PS: in case you are interested in the motive J

The post doctoral fellow, Dr. Innovative, had made a new invention that Dr. Devious patented under his own name only and refused to share the patent rights and consequently the royalties with  Dr.Innovative. 

The graduate student, Mr. Burntout, was a very good at his work,  and had been working on his Ph. D. for about eight years and Dr. Devious kept on giving more work to do before he would let him graduate.  Burntout’s peers had noticed the signs of frustration in him over the past few months.