It’s 1965, and Henry (27) and Margaret (26) Lee have moved to the USA. She’s working as a schoolteacher, and he’s trying to make ends meet however he can, including by washing dishes at a Chinese restaurant and teaching kung fu. After some hard years — and a long stint in school — Henry Lee secures an academic position at New Haven University and builds its forensic center into a world-class institution. He soon begins working with legal authorities and solving cases.

Being called as an expert witness for the defense in the 1995 OJ Simpson trial cements Henry Lee’s status as a modern Sherlock Holmes. But unlike fictional characters, Lee was human, and humans make mistakes and sometimes also lie. There’s no question Lee made some significant mistakes. Some, however, think he crossed the line into deception. Still, the errors, big or small, can be counted on one hand — most of the roughly 8,000 cases he worked on are not under review.

Stick around after the end for a five-minute reading from Wiki on the 2004 assassination attempt on former Taiwan president Chen Shui-bian, which was, of course, one of the cases Lee was asked to help solve.

To mark the recent passing of Henry C. Lee (李昌鈺), one of the world’s most famous forensic scientists, we examine his extraordinary life. In Part 1, we’re in impoverished postwar Taiwan. Lee is the eleventh of thirteen children. That, and his father dying on “China’s Titanic,” means it’s a childhood marked by tragedy and hardship.

Lee walked barefoot to school to save his shoes. We follow his police training and work, service on Kinmen, a visa-overstay romance, and an unlikely detour running a tiny newspaper in Borneo.

Part 2 follows Lee to the United States, where he rises to international fame through major criminal cases and where his golden reputation is somewhat tarnished by controversy.

John talks with Professor Dafydd Fell of SOAS University about "The Twilight Years of Taiwan’s Sugar Railways", his new book co-written with Wang Xiang, a researcher who has spent years documenting the remains and memories of this once vast railway network. Fell’s own fascination with the sugar railways dates back to the 1990s when he was living in Taiwan. John and Dafydd explore how sugar helped build modern Taiwan, how the narrow-gauge railways moved far more than just sugar cane, and how the network had a Cold War strategic purpose. The episode is full of nuggets, from mystery Belgian locomotives to propaganda train tours.