IN May 2013, Henry Lee gave an auditorium packed with graduating students a piece of advice. “You must have a winner’s attitude,” he said at Manchester Community College in Connecticut. “The loser always says, ‘There is no way.’ The winner always finds a way.”

Lee likes to stress the importance of winning in his speeches and writings. As the 11th of 13 children, raised without a father by an immigrant mother, success and ambition set him apart from the pack.

Born in East China’s Jiangsu Province in November 1938, Lee fled with his family to Taiwan at the end of the Chinese Civil War in the late 1940s. His father, traveling to the island separately, died when his ship sank in January 1949. Lee was 10.

As a young man, Lee was hired by the Taipei Police Department, where he worked his way up to the rank of captain. In 1965, he moved to the U.S. with just US$65, and graduated from John Jay College with a degree in forensic science seven years later. He went on to get his doctorate at New York University.

After graduation, he volunteered his then-newfangled crime-lab skills to Connecticut prosecutors, but nobody would take him up on it. Instead, a public defender, Charlie Gill, gave him his first job.

Lee’s career took off soon after. In 1979, he landed a job as the director of the Connecticut state crime lab, and eventually offered expertise on blood type, spatter, microscopic hair particles, and fibers. Back then, forensic scientists responded to crime scenes alongside cops and emergency medical technicians (EMTs). “We got called in the middle of the night, on holidays and weekends, and we had to respond,” Lee recalled. “It was not an easy job.”

On the stand, jurors found him credible and even charming. He was quick with a joke, or a moment of levity and could explain complex theories in simple ways.

Lee’s first major case was the horrific Helle Crafts “wood chipper” murder of 1986. It centered on a Danish flight attendant whose airline pilot husband, Richard Crafts, slaughtered her and tossed her body into a wood chipper. Cops found human tissue along with Helle’s hair and blood type in a nearby lake. Lee, who led the forensic investigation, helped determine that her remains had gone through the chipper. Richard was sentenced to 50 years in prison, and the case went down in history as Connecticut’s first murder conviction without a victim’s body, thanks in big part to Lee.

In 1995, Lee shot to international fame when he appeared as the star forensics witness during the televised O.J. Simpson trial, where he challenged the Los Angeles Police Department’s handling of blood samples.

Lee was soon working some of the most sensational cases of the era. He helped investigators with the case of JonBenet Ramsey, a 6-year-old beauty-pageant contestant found beaten and strangled to death in her Colorado home. He spent hours with the defense team of Scott Peterson, a California businessman who was convicted of murdering his eight-months-pregnant wife, Laci Peterson, and their unborn child, examining the remains of her decapitated body, and taking tissue samples.

Several years later, Lee testified on behalf of accused toddler-killer Casey Anthony, which helped lead to the Florida mom’s acquittal in 2011. He helped investigators on the case of Elizabeth Smart, the abducted 14-year-old Utah girl, leading to the conviction of Brian David Mitchell. He also testified on behalf of novelist Michael Peterson, who was convicted of beating his wife to death near the staircase of their North Carolina home. And Lee worked for the defense team of Michael Skakel, a Kennedy family relative accused of brutally murdering teenager Martha Moxley.

(SD-Agencies)