Lee was chief emeritus for the
Connecticut State Police from 2000 to 2010, commissioner of Public Safety for Connecticut during 1998 to 2000 and Connecticut's chief criminalist and director of the state police forensic laboratory from 1978 to 2000. In 2004, a crime documentary series hosted by Lee,
Trace Evidence: The Case Files of Dr. Henry Lee, aired on the then
Court TV network (now truTV). He appeared on Chinese television and online programs such as
KangXi Lai Le in Taiwan, and
Voice and
Beyond the Edge in
China Central Television on mainland China. His biography,
True Crime Experiences with Dr. Henry Chang-Yu Lee, was authored by attorney Daniel Hong Deng of
Rosemead, California. He was the founder of the Henry C. Lee Institute of Forensic Science, affiliated with the
University of New Haven.
Famous cases Lee worked on famous cases such as the
JonBenét Ramsey murder case,) the
O. J. Simpson and
Laci Peterson cases, the
9/11 forensic investigation, the
Washington, DC, sniper shootings and reinvestigated the
assassination of John F. Kennedy. He was consulted as a blood spatter analyst for defense during the
trial of Michael Peterson, a fiction writer and politician from North Carolina who in 2003 was convicted of the murder of his wife, Kathleen Peterson. In 2007, Lee testified as a prosecution expert witness at the first trial of
Cal Harris, an
upstate New York car dealer accused of killing his wife on the night of September 11, 2001. Since no body has ever been found, the state's best evidence of foul play was some medium-velocity castoff impact blood spatter on the walls of the house's garage and kitchen. Lee told the jury that it could only have come from someone lower than above ground. Harris was convicted at that trial and a retrial after new evidence emerged, but ultimately acquitted at a fourth trial after his conviction got overturned on appeal. In 2008, Lee was involved in the early stages of investigation in
Orlando, Florida for the missing toddler
Caylee Anthony.
Phil Spector trial In May 2007,
California Superior Court Judge
Larry Paul Fidler, the judge in the
Phil Spector murder trial, said that he had concluded Lee hid or destroyed a piece of
evidence from the scene of actress
Lana Clarkson's shooting. Lee denied the allegation and testified that he was astonished and insulted by claims by lawyers that he had collected an object that was not turned over to prosecutors as required by law. University of Southern California law professor Jean Rosenbluth said that Judge Fidler's ruling was "very narrow" and noted the judge had made no finding that Lee had lied on the stand or acted maliciously.
Allegations of error In June 2019, the
Connecticut Supreme Court concluded that Lee had erred in the murder trial testimony of (then) teenagers Shawn Henning and Ralph Birch; Lee said a towel tested positive for blood, but he had not tested it at all. Later tests found no blood.
The Daily Beast questioned additional cases in which Lee had testified. At a June 17 press conference, Lee said that he had tested the towel, adding that chemical screening tests for blood had been done at the crime scene on the date of the homicide. In July 2023, a federal court found that Lee had
fabricated evidence in the Henning–Birch trial. Henning and Birch spent 30 years in prison before being cleared of the crime. In September 2023, the state of Connecticut agreed to
settle Henning and Birch's federal
wrongful conviction lawsuit against Lee, eight police investigators and the town of
New Milford for $25.2 million. ==Personal life and death==