Capabilities and drawbacks of mass spectrometry in the forensic field: analysis of real cases dealing with toxicology and explosives

Abstract Ever since its invention, mass spectrometry has been seen as a remedy for all of the riddle that an analytical chemist was ever called to answer. Indeed, a good mass expert, provided with a good instrument and an updated library, would be able to answer to the question “what is it?” or “what does it have inside?”. In most of the cases, nevertheless, there is sometimes the need of using other type of techniques in order to avoid misunderstandings and wrong interpretations of the results. Therefore, the aim of this work is to compare real forensic cases where mass spectrometry played a fundamental role to obtain tangible and trustable answers, to other ones where this technique proved to be totally misleading. Those that will be shown, are real, concrete cases – slightly modified in order to make them unrecognisable.