With the theory that the eye retained an image at the moment of death rampant in the Victorian imagination, police investigators in the late 1800s began considering optography as an investigative technique in murder cases. One of the earliest known attempts at forensic optography occurred in 1877, when Berlin police photographed the eyes of murder victim Frau von Sabatzky, on the chance that the image would assist in solving the crime.

In 1888, London police officer Walter Dew - later known for catching the murderer Dr Crippen - recalled optography being attempted on Mary Jane Kelly in what he called a "forlorn hope" of catching her suspected killer, Jack the Ripper. Ripperologist James Stewart-Gordon believed the technique was attempted on Annie Chapman as well.

W.C. Ayres, an American physician who assisted Kühne in his laboratory and translated his papers into English, dismissed the theory that optography on a human eye could yield a usable image for forensic purposes.

In an 1881 article in the New York Medical Journal, Ayres stated that his own repeated experiments in the field had produced some optogram images, but they were not distinct enough to be useful, and he declared it "utterly idle to look for the picture of a man's face, or of the surroundings, on the retina of a person who has met with a sudden death, even in the most favorable circumstances".

A rare case of forensic optography being admitted as evidence occurred in late 1924, after German merchant Fritz Angerstein had been charged with killing eight members of his family and household staff. Doehne, a professor at the University of Cologne photographed the retinas of two of the victims, yielding what he claimed were images of Angerstein's face and an axe used to kill the gardener. Angerstein was tried, convicted and executed, with Doehne's optographic images included amongst other evidence in the case.

According to the Sunday Express newspaper, when told of the "incriminating" optograms, Angerstein confessed to the murders. The American Mercury magazine called Doehne's testimony "scientific confirmation" of the theory of optography, although in 2011, the German Legal Tribune Online called the use of optographic evidence in the Angerstein case "absurde Kriminalistik" ("absurd forensics").

The most recent serious research into the use of optography in criminology occurred in 1975, when police in Heidelberg asked Evangelos Alexandridis at the University of Heidelberg to re-evaluate Kuhne's experiments and findings with modern scientific techniques, knowledge and equipment. Like Kuhne, Alexandridis successfully produced a number of distinct high-contrast images from the eyes of rabbits, but conclusively negatively assessed the technique as a forensic tool. Reading more ...

If the brain is a computer forever viewing streaming images, or consciousness, the answer is yes. ~ Ellie

They say it's only by being wrong that we learn what's right, and in the field of forensics, scientists had to learn the hard way that you can't catch criminals by taking out eyeballs. The working theory was that the human retina could capture the last thing a person saw by locking it in photosensitive pigments, and that developing their final moments could even reveal a killer. It didn't work, unfortunately, but that didn't stop criminal investigations trying it out on the victims of some of history's most infamous serial killers.