This article [1] has been retracted at the request of the corresponding author, Yi Ye, after concerns were raised regarding the ethics approval and consent procedures. The corresponding author informed the Publisher that contrary to the ethics statement in the article, the study was undertaken without the approval of their institutional ethics committee. As the study fails to meet the ethical standards required by the Journal, it has been retracted.Yi Ye and Danyan Zhang agree to this retraction. Gang Cao, Mingkun Xie, Xuejun Cui, Li Xiao and Chenchen Tian have not responded to correspondence about this retraction. Reference[1] Zhang, D., Cao, G., Xie, M. et al. Int J Legal Med (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00414-019-02049-6