Charles Waite

Charles E. Waite was an American forensic investigator who, while working as a special investigator for the New York Attorney General's office in the 1910s, examined bullets in the Stielow murder case alongside microscopy expert Max Poser and determined that a convicted suspect's gun could not have fired the fatal bullets. The experience led him to begin compiling the first comprehensive catalogue of firearms manufacturing data to prevent similar misidentifications, and in the 1920s he co-founded the Bureau of Forensic Ballistics in New York City with Calvin Goddard, Philip O. Gravelle and John H. Fisher, the first American laboratory dedicated to firearms identification. He died in 1926, and Goddard continued to lead the bureau until it closed in 1929.