Agents used during the commission of a criminal offense of this kind have characteristics of inhalation anesthetics. They penetrate the body through the respiratory tract due to their volatility; they then act on the central nervous system. The reported work involved two complementary methods: gas chromatography with flame ionization detection (GC-FID) and gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (GC-MS), developed for the detection, identification, and quantification of volatile organic compounds. The focus was on the detection of inhalation anesthetics in biological material (blood, urine, and internal tissue specimens) and in various industrial products (glues, cleaning liquids, aerosols, and paints). Because of their high resolution, these methods can also be used in the analysis of multicomponent mixtures, consumption of which could cause poisoning. The usefulness of these methods for forensic purposes was demonstrated in the analysis of blood and unknown liquid samples encountered during routine work. The new methods were successfully used in two cases. The proposed GC-MS method is more versatile than GC-FID, because it enables identification of a mixture of volatile compounds present in various concentrations as well as an inhalation anesthetic in blood at a therapeutic concentration within a single run. The identification is based on two factors; relative retention time and the mass spectra of at least two ions. 5 figures, 1 table, and 21 references