Crime Scene: Inside the World of the Real CSIs

MORE PRAISE FOR CRIME SCENE

One of the Five Best Nonfiction Books of 2006. — Quad City Times

Want to know what a forensic pathologist’s most important tool is? Connie Fletcher lets a medical examiner tell you. She’s come up with another winner. For crime and mystery writers, Connie’s book is the next best thing to being on a scene.                 —Elmore Leonard, bestselling author of The Hot Kid, Get Shorty, and Out of Sight

This is a fully engrossing book. Fascinating, tragic and telling at the same time, it is impossible to put down. Every story, every anecdote just furthers the addiction. This book goes on the shelf above my desk so it will be within close reach when I need it.                —Michael Connelly, winner of the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, Nero, and Grand Prix awards

Both massively entertaining AND educational. Fletcher’s expertly researched book captures the language, the beat, the nuance, the very essence of her subjects. A terrific book.                —Harlan Coben, bestselling author of The Innocent, Just One Look, and No Second Chance

Connie Fletcher shows again that she is a master interviewer. Trace evidence is truly where the rubber meets the road in crime investigation. Fascinating stories from the front lines, wonderfully told.                —Barbara D’Amato, mystery novelist, winner of the first Mary Higgins Clark Award

Superb reporting skills. Fletcher’s evidence is all the more persuasive because of its no-nonsense presentation. It should also open more than a few eyes.                —Chicago Tribune

An intimate oral history . . . Filled with gruesome, tragic, fascinating, and sometimes even strangely funny details.                —Booklist (Featured Review)

"Right on the mark. This book pertains to the REAL world of murder investigation as opposed to the perception created by CSI." —Vernon J. Geberth, Commander of Bronx Homicide, NYPD (ret.), author of Practical Homicide Investigation

Also by Connie Fletcher

Who Runs Chicago

(with F. Richard Ciccone and Michael Kilian)

What Cops Know

Pure Cop

Breaking and Entering

CRIME SCENE

Inside the world of the real CSIs

Connie Fletcher

St. Martin’s Paperbacks

NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as unsold and destroyed to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this stripped book.

Previously published in hardcover under the title Every Contact Leaves a Trace.

CRIME SCENE

Copyright © 2006 by Connie Fletcher.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006040372

ISBN: 0-312-94740-2

EAN: 9780312-94740-8

Printed in the United States of America

St. Martin’s Press hardcover edition / August 2006

St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / October 2007

St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

One Crime Scene Processing

Two Crime Scene Interpretation—Inside Scenes

Three Crime Scene Interpretation—Outside Scenes

Four Trace Evidence

Five The Body of Evidence

Six DNA

Seven Crime Lab

Eight Cold Cases

Nine Criminal Trials

Career Sketches for Contributors to Crime Scene

This book is for Trygve, Bridget, Nick, and Julie.

Acknowledgments

This book was powered by the willingness of forensic experts to speak candidly about their work to an outsider. I owe a debt of gratitude to the eighty men and women who spoke to the science, but also to the art of crime scene investigation. They were clear in their explanations of forensic science, and often moving in their accounts of crime scenes and criminal investigations.

I owe a special debt to the following people, who guided me to other reliable sources, spoke with me numerous times, let me tour crime lab facilities, or kept checking in with me to see how things were progressing: Chief Tom Cronin of the Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Tribal Police/criminal profiler; Chief George Carpenter and Deputy Chief Brian King of the Wilmette, Illinois, Police Department; Lieutenant of Investigations James Mackert and Detective Roland Jones of the Chicago Police Department; Chicago Police Superintendent Phil Cline; Kara Stefanson, DNA Resource Specialist, Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, Chicago; Commander Joe Murphy and Lieutenant Dave O’Callahan, Chicago Police Department; Norm Gahn, Assistant District Attorney and DNA evidence specialist, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; John Juhala, Commander, Forensic Science Division, Michigan State Police; Vernon Geberth, Lieutenant-Commander, Bronx Homicide, NYPD; Barry A. J. Fisher, Crime Lab Director, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department; Captain Ray Peavy and Sergeant Rich Longshore, Homicide Bureau, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department; Sue Ballou, Program Manager for Forensic Science Research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland; Dr. Sunandan B. Singh, Medical Examiner, Bergen County, New Jersey, and Deputy Medical Examiner Mary Ann Clayton, Bergen County, New Jersey; Donna Fontana, forensic anthropologist, State of New Jersey; Detectives Bill Hamilton and Bill Mclntyre, Atlantic County, New Jersey; Michael Camp, Crime Lab Director, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Chris Plourd, defense attorney, forensic evidence specialist, San Diego, California; Richmond Riggs, prosecuting attorney, Genesee County, Michigan; and Director Frank Dolejsi, former Assistant Director David Petersen; Latent Print Examiner David Peterson, all of the Forensic Science Lab, St. Paul, Minnesota.

Thanks to my wonderful editor, Diane Reverand, and to my tireless agent, Nat Sobel, who have seen me through four books, making it fun each time. Thanks to the people at Loyola University Chicago, who freed me up to do the research: Chair Elizabeth Coffman and Dean Isiaah Crawford.

The backdrop to all this is my family: my husband, Trygve, my daughter, Bridget, and my son, Nick, who help me enormously just by making me happy. And thanks to my sister, Julie, who started the stories when she became a Chicago cop.

When you investigate a murder, it’s like you’re looking through a piece of cloth. And you come upon this red thread—that’s something that you think will be an avenue of investigation.

So, you very gently follow that red thread. You keep following that red thread wherever it may go. It almost never goes in a straight line. It goes around, back, and loops in on itself; it crosses, stops and goes, and meanders along. Sometimes it’s a big, wide red thread. Sometimes it’s a tiny little thread. Sometimes it gets bigger. Sometimes it gets smaller. Sometimes the red thread just. . . stops. But then you start looking for the end of the thread again.

You have to follow where the red thread takes you. Always being careful not to put too much pressure on it, or it’ll just break. I tell new detectives: Follow the red thread, wherever it takes you. But be careful.

-Sergeant Jim Givens (Ret.) Commander

Cold Case Squad, Phoenix, Arizona

INTRODUCTION

"IT’S NOT CSI." A FEW YEARS AGO, AS forensic crime shows started splashing across TV screens like so much blood spatter, I started hearing this from cops I know in my family and their friends. I heard it from homicide detectives I’d interviewed for previous books. The cops always stopped, sort of mysteriously, at this three-word review whenever the shows were mentioned.

At the time, I didn’t know any forensic scientists. I didn’t know anyone who worked collecting and processing evidence at crime scenes. I didn’t know anybody who worked in a crime lab. But I did keep hearing cops, when they talked about cases they worked on, give variants of this one-sentence critique of crime shows: "It’s not CSI."

At first, I thought cops’ distaste for crime shows might be some form of professional jealousy, a way of preserving insider status (I’ve found that cops tend to have contempt for all crime shows, with the exception of reruns of Barney Miller). I thought it might be, in the case of homicide detectives, a way of downplaying the importance of science at crime scenes, science that can be intimidating and exclusionary to detectives who do old-fashioned, shoe-leather police work.

Just as an occasional viewer, I found CSI and its minions sort of unsettling, rather than convincing. The tone of the shows, especially CSI, seemed too smug with the science and too in-your-face with body parts (granted, I hold my hands in front of my eyes, saying, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph over and over during horror movies).

But it seemed odd that four people would concentrate on one case at a time, handling all the work from scene processing through analysis at the lab (and why was the lab always so dark?), on through smirking interrogation of suspects. It didn’t ring right. First of all, who would wear designer suits, leather, and suede to places festooned with body parts? Second, what was with all the gloom? The detectives I know are incredibly skilled socially, fun to be with, and humorous, not at all like the grim, condescending troupe of

CSI

So I wanted to see if the cops were right about CSI I had no way to do this except to contact experts about crime scene investigation, the ones who actually collect and analyze evidence. My resolve was not just to see how reality jibed with TV and movie portrayal, but to get an in-depth look at forensic science as it is now applied to crime scenes. I decided an oral history of as many people as possible involved in crime scene work was the way to go because oral history lets people talk factually, talk emotionally, tell stories, give opinions freely. I feel it’s the best way to get a portrait of a different world, from the insiders’ viewpoints.

The forensic science world is not an easy one for an outsider to crack. How do you find and then talk with a DNA analyst buried deep within the DNA section of a lab? How do you get an evidence technician, or a forensic anthropologist, or a medical examiner, to open up about what really goes on? How do you know who the players are? How do you know you’ve gotten to reliable sources? How do you know you’re asking the right questions, rather than woefully ignorant questions?

I work with the belief that, for a project like this, the whole world opens up if you can find the right lever. What the outsider needs, as I learned in college anthropology, is a key informant, a reliable source within a group who puts you in contact with other reliable sources. I was lucky enough to have several key informants going into this project. I talk about these people in the acknowledgments. As I interviewed them, one reliable expert would lead me to the next. Experts kept telling me, Forensics is a pretty small world. We all know each other.

It’s one thing for the outsider to get forensic experts to agree to talk; it’s another challenge to the outsider to understand what they’re saying. I’m of a decidedly non analytical bent. I was so hopeless in high school algebra, for example, that I thought they would tell us what x was in senior year. (I thought that it might be an apple.) What saved me in interviews was the fact that I represent the public, and forensic experts are well versed in translating for jurors when they testify in court. Also, scientists are used to working with detectives and attorneys, some of whom may be as English major-y as I am. And I’ve taken a personal vow to always admit ignorance, rather than pass it along to the reader.

What surprised me in interviews, besides the skill (and patience) with which forensic scientists made their material accessible, was how much they sounded like cops. I’m a great admirer of police as consummate storytellers. I never expected scientists to be, but here were DNA analysts telling gripping stories that hinged on afleck of blood, forensic anthropologists waxing poetic about how you can see the traumas of a person’s life in his or her skeleton, trace evidence analysts giving heart-stopping narratives about serial killers caught by a paint chip.

I learned something about their personalities, as well. If you know any latent print specialists with children, ask them about seeing their newborns’ footprints for the first time. You’ll get a sense of the wonder with which they approach their work. They also tend to be artistic, playing the piano or painting in their spare time. I thought DNA analysts would be dull as ditchwater, but they tend to have keen senses of humor (maybe because they can’t talk at all in the lab, they’re less uninhibited talking outside it). Trace analysts confess to being a bit obsessive-compulsive, a good thing when you’re examining fibers, but potentially crazy-making at home. And unlike TV and movie portrayals of the crime scene processor as a totally unemotional machine, the men and women who work crime scenes can be haunted by them.

If you talk to enough forensic scientists, you’ll never walk in the woods again without expecting to find a body. So many times, a forensic anthropologist would say to me, When you find a body in the woods . . . and then tell me exactly what to do when I make this discovery.

Forensic scientists also tend to sound a little like chefs. Many, many times, I felt I was listening to a very bad recipe; for example, one anthropologist who examines skeletal bones in die lab instructed me: First, put the skeleton in a vat and boil off the flesh. Then cut away any remaining tissue . . .

Speaking to homicide detectives, fun as they are, can also be unnerving. When I met them in person, at any pause in the conversation, I’d notice that they’d fix me with a hard stare, the kind of stare that says, We know what you did

I ended up speaking with eighty forensic experts around the country: crime scene processors; members of the National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence; DNA analysts; latent print specialists; trace evidence analysts; bloodstain interpretation experts; toxicologists; forensic anthropologists and forensic archeologists; entomologists; a forensic botanist; firearms examiners; homicide, robbery, and burglary detectives; cold case detectives; medical examiners; crime lab directors; and attorneys. I visited crime labs. And this is what I found out:

It’s not CSI The work is much more time-intensive and demanding (Crime scene processing is a goddamn pain in the ass, if you do it right, said one New Jersey scene supervisor). Solving a crime depends more on a number of forensic sciences meshing with solid investigative work, rather than on one grandstand forensic play (The thing about these shows—everybody thinks that you just run in and scoop up a bucket of DNA and you’re done, says one evidence technician).

Just about every forensic scientist and crime scene investigator I interviewed had the name of an obscure (to the outside world) French criminologist, Edmond Locard, on his/her lips. Crime scene experts often refer to the Locard principle. Locard took what the Sherlock Holmes stories advocated, the examination of microscopic bits of evidence, and built die science of forensics around it. Locard’s famous pronouncement, Every contact leaves a trace, applies to all forensic science. The technology of recent years, not just in DNA testing, but in instrumentation across the sciences, brings the Locard principle into the twenty-first-century crime scene and courtroom every day.

And the work is much more innovative than the sci-fi applications of forensics on TV. For example, forensic DNA technology was advanced by the efforts of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York to identify the victims of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Bloodhounds are used in the South to sniff out trace evidence that criminals on the run may be dropping and picking up. Crime scene investigators in Alaska have adapted their methods to a state that has vast reaches and only one real road: Evidence technicians there carry the necessary scene processing equipment in backpacks, and travel to scenes by plane, boat, and snowmobile. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department runs a homicide school for detectives. They reconstruct inside and outside scenes in a hotel they take over for their sessions, using props such as mannequins, shot-up cars, suicide notes, stage blood, and severed limbs from Halloween shops to ratchet up the realism.

The format of this book is oral history. I let the experts speak for themselves (a credit after each quote lets the reader know what the specialist’s job is) in the body of each chapter. Most of the people interviewed had to obtain permission from their department, agency or crime lab to speak with me. One of the conditions was that their comments be kept anonymous. A handful of people are identified by name, with their consent.

My goal is to keep out of the way of the experts as much as possible. I provide an introduction to each chapter, and then present the crime scene processors’ and interpreters’ comments and stories directly. Quotations marks, except as they occur within the quotations themselves, have been omitted.

Readers, however, need to know that these people are reliable guides. All the contributors to this book are listed and given biographical sketches at the end of the book.

This book moves from first discovery of the body through final verdict at trial. The experts talk about their specializations and about what they’ve seen and what it has done to them. Through them, readers will gain access to a world mostly fictionalized by CSI and its spin-offs, or made overly formal in on-camera interviews. If you’re a student thinking of a career in forensic science, this book will introduce you to disciplines and techniques you may never have heard of. For people who protect, process, and interpret scenes, some new approaches and solutions might be found here. If you’re about to enter your first crime scene, this book could help you avoid committing grave mistakes.

This is the experts’ book: their words, their knowledge— and how they read the victims’ stories in the traces left behind.

One

CRIME SCENE PROCESSING

Do it right the first time. You only get one chance. Once things have been moved, once things have been changed, once you lose that little window of opportunity, it’s gone forever.

-Vernon J. Geberth, Commander, Bronx Homicide, NYPD (Ret.), Author of Practical Homicide investigation

A crime scene investigator has to have a positive attitude. You’ve got to believe you’re going to find the evidence. I just learned to play golf. It helps you search the crime scene. My ball goes into the woods. Every time. Now it’s like a crime scene. I always come out with, say, six balls, when I lost two. The positive attitude is the same with golf and the crime scene: You don’t look at the sand traps. You look at the green. Your objective is always to do your best at that crime scene.

-Dr. Henry C. Lee, Chief Emeritus and Director

Forensic Science Laboratory, Meriden, Connecticut

A DROP OF BLOOD ON A GYM SHOE. A PIECE offiber found on a stairway. The impression of a spade used to dig a basement grave. DNA picked up from a sneeze. A few microscopic traces of glass, blown back on the clothing of an intruder.

These have been the first threads of forensic investigations, discovered and collected at crime scenes, leftover particles from actions that have ripped the fabric of people’s lives.

Before any investigation can start, evidence must be collected. The scene itself, whether inside, outside, or mobile, has to be gone over as if the processors were exploring a site on Mars. What’s this? Why is this here? Why isn’t this here? What does this all mean? And—how do we get the evidence back to the lab without destroying it?

Generally, once the police call for assistance from the crime lab, crime scene teams consisting of evidence technicians and any forensic specialists needed—like blood spatter interpreters, trace analysts, firearms examiners—are sent to the scene. These processors start the chain of evidence that may stretch from the scene through the detectives’ investigation, through the crime lab, all the way to trial. Processors and investigators have a term for the ideal: keeping the chain tight. And they have only one shot at picking up the links left at the scene.

This chapter follows crime scene processors, presenting what they’ve found in their own words. Their comments are anonymous, but their expertise is indicated after their quotes (unless an entire section contains one type of expert, indicated before the section). Follow the processors and specialists as they work the scene from the outside in.

IN LATE ’81, THEY WERE TRAINING NEW CRIME SCENE

team members in Minnesota. Of course, none of us was smart enough to ask, "Well, why is everybody who’s been here for a long time getting off crime scene?"

We’re all young and stupid, thinking, This sounds great. Back in those days you started out as a crime scene photographer. We went through the whole course and had to demonstrate our proficiency.

Our final test was out at the stockyards in South St. Paul. We were in part of the stockyard that was unused, but there were cows waiting to become steaks kind of all around us. There was this large unused building. They made crime scenes in all these different rooms. They did footprints in snow, so we had to capture those. With crime scene photography, you take an overall picture, and then a medium-range, and then a close-up. So we had to take all these outside shots, in the old stockyards and out in the snow.

I can now appreciate the humor of the gentleman who put us through this whole process—he sat in the heated van the whole time, smoking—because here we are out there, documenting these crime scenes, in these smelly old buildings—they just reeked of cow manure and blood and dead animals. And he made us be out there all day long, doing this, demonstrating what we could do with our abilities on the camera. It was smelly and bad, it was January, which I didn’t appreciate the humor of till later either, and our cameras were freezing up while we were out there, because it was about ten below outside all day long. So we became certified crime scene photographers.

I know now what they were trying to do with us that day. They were trying to get us used to what actual crime scenes are like. They’re smelly. They’re messy. And you’re there for hours and hours and hours, processing them.

CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATOR

WHEN THE NEW PEOPLE IN THE CRIME SCENE RESPONSE team come on board, they’re given a pager, and they watch the news, and then they look at their pager all night long, waiting for it to go off. They call me the next morning and say, We didn’t go on a crime scene! And I said, Well, there’s a reason why you didn’t go to a crime scene. First of all, somebody has to be killed. Definitely. Secondly, their local agency has to call us in. And thirdly, you have to be on call. If all three of those things fall together, then you’ll go.

CSI is very much responsible for this. They’re just so eager.

CRIME SCENE COORDINATOR

IT’S NOT LIKE CSI I THINK I’VE BEEN IN ONE CRIME SCENE that might even look remotely like something from CSI Usually, the scene is in a trailer home, or an older home where there’s piles of garbage around .. . You never get a nice clean scene like on TV.

I’ve got pictures of crime scenes I’ve worked on that I use in teaching. And trainees say things like, "Well, on CSI they can tell if there’s been a struggle because the lamp’s been overturned."

Well, at every scene I’ve been to, the lamps are usually overturned, and they’re laying next to the eighty crushed beer cans laying on the floor—and the White Wolf vodka bottles. I show the trainees a picture of this. The trainee might say to me, How do you tell there’s been a struggle in this room, sir? "Well, see how the garbage has been disturbed in this area, but not over here?"

EVIDENCE TECHNICIAN

I REMEMBER THE FIRST BURGLARY SCENE I EVER WALKED into. The house was totally ransacked. Stuff all over the place. And I just remember standing there thinking, Where the hell do I start?

CRIME SCENE SERGEANT

Getting to the Scene

THE CRIME SCENE CALL COMES IN. YOU FIGURE OUT, first of all, the type of crime committed, whether or not the scene is inside or outside, whether or not there’s a victim still at the scene, and whether or not there’s a suspect. Based on the type of scene, the manner of death, and the information from the desk officer, I put together a crew that covers the various disciplines of science that I would expect to find at that scene.

The call might be, Hey, we got a crime. It’s a double homicide, it’s in a house, the victims have been shot, there’s been forced entry, and it looks like they ransacked the place.

Based on that information, I would put together a couple of latent print people, because there’s gonna be a lot of fingerprints to do, I would make sure there were evidence people to handle footwear and tire tracks and fibers, I would ask a firearms person to handle the shooting end of it, and we would pull in perhaps one more person to help with scene documentation and photographs. So you might have a crew of four, five people.

Then we pick up the equipment truck and take off for the scene.

SCENE SUPERVISOR

I THINK EVERYBODY’S HAD A COUPLE NEAR-DEATH EXPEriences getting to scenes. Like the time we’re doing seventy mph, trying to get to a scene quickly, and the tire blows out, it’s completely shredded and we’re on some back country road. If we were driving a Humvee, like they do on CSI we wouldn’t be in any trouble. But we’re just driving these big old bread trucks.

CRIME SCENE PROCESSOR

WE HAD JUST DRIVEN TO A SCENE ONE TIME. WE’RE standing around outside the scene, waiting for the search warrant to show up. This was not in one of the better neighborhoods. The evidence people and the cops are all waiting around outside the crime scene van. Our van is fully marked, you know, BUREAU OF CRIMINAL APPREHENSION in big letters on the side and everything.

Suddenly, you hear gunshots in the neighborhood, and all of a sudden, all the cops are gone. I’m standing there thinking, "This is not good. We’re sitting here with this beacon almost—Come shoot us." We evidence people don’t carry weapons. And all the cops just grabbed their guns out of the van and ran off, leaving us there.

A lot of times, there’ll be the sound of gunshots or news of a high-speed chase comes over the radio, and you can see—all the cops at the scene, supposedly there to protect us, they’ll all come up and ask, Can I go? Can I go? It’s a testosterone thing with them.

CRIME SCENE PROCESSOR

GETTING TO A CRIME SCENE IN ALASKA IS UNIQUE IN THAT, if a crime is reported, timewise it may take a while to get there. Our crime lab covers the whole state.

There’s basically one road that runs up the middle of Alaska, and that goes along the railroad; it goes to Fairbanks and then there’s a four-hundred-mile gravel road up to the North Slope, where the oil is, with essentially no real gas stations on the way up. Out in western Alaska, there are no roads except for maybe a few miles around a town. We have to use snow machines, Ski-Doos, a lot.

Our crime scene investigators have backpacks prepared ahead of time, with most of the essential crime scene processing items in them. Usually, you take commercial aircraft as far as you can go. Let’s say you’re flying to Bethel [about forty miles inland from the Bering Sea]. You take Alaska Airlines to Bethel and then you take a commuter flight from there, and then maybe you get picked up by a department, and from there you go to a remote area. It might be by a four-wheeler or a snowmobile, or by ferry, or small boat. The Department of Public Safety has some small planes also. The weather’s a factor, of course. You can take off in a plane in a snowstorm and not be able to see the end of the runway.

We go to the remotest regions of Alaska. We went to a scene—flew Alaska Airlines out to Bethel. Then I was picked up by the state troopers there and driven to the Kuskokwim River, and then we took a boat five miles up the river to a fishing camp, where the natives dry fish and catch salmon. There was a woman missing who was finally found killed.

I remember one crime scene where the investigators flew to a southeastern area, like Juneau, and then they took a smaller plane from there with floats, and they flew to a little fishing village. Some of the floats on these planes have wheels also. This time, they had to put the wheels down and go up a boat ramp to get up on land and get to the scene.

FORMER CRIME LAB DIRECTOR

Securing the Scene

I WAS TEACHING CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION ONE TIME and a patrolman says, I’m a uniform guy. I’m a patrolman. What does this stuff got to do with me? I said, ’Thank you, God, for asking that question. I said, Stand up and ask it again, son. He did. I said, Contrary to what all the homicide assholes of the world will tell you, you’re the most important guy. That first uniform cop sets the tone, sets the stage for everything that follows. If you do what you’re taught to do in the academy and do it well—protect that scene and protect the evidence—you’re giving us a good start. If you don’t, then everything’s lost. You’re the most important guy there. That’s what it’s got to do with you."

HOMICIDE COMMANDER

FOR FORENSIC PEOPLE, A PRISTINE SCENE WOULD BE: Police are called to do a well-being check at a house. A couple of cops show up and see that the door’s been kicked in. One cop goes inside, sees an old lady dead on the floor, goes up and checks that she is dead. There’s no need to transport that person to the hospital if she’s dead. Why scoop her up and run her to the hospital? A lot of important evidence is going to be on, or nearby, that body. Then the officer withdraws, secures the scene, and calls forensics to come and process it. Now that’s gonna be a terrific scene. And that’s pretty rare. Everybody wants to come and see what’s going on at the scene.

HOMICIDE DETECTIVE

<

WE’VE LITERALLY HAD SCENES WHERE WE’VE ASKED THE officer at the scene how many people have been down to see the body in the basement, and the officer will say, One. Well, we’ll get down there and dust up footwear impressions around the body and find that there’s six or eight or ten pairs of shoeprints in a circle around the body.

FORENSIC SPECIALIST

IF YOU GET A CRIME SCENE IN WINTER, SNOW ON THE ground, an effective way to get rid of extra officers at the scene: Hand them a shovel and say, Here, why don’t you hold onto this with both hands and help me shovel here in a few minutes? You turn around and they’re gone because now they’ve realized they might have to work.

EVIDENCE TECHNICIAN

Working from the Outside In

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT DOING THIS: ANY SCENE YOU WALK into, you have to use any knowledge, capabilities, skills that you have to try to decide, What is the best way to approach this scene? It’s like—If you like jigsaw puzzles, it’s like doing a different jigsaw puzzle every time you go in there. It’s a brand-new puzzle each time.

CRIME SCENE TEAM LEADER

I GET SENT TO A SCENE. I’LL DO A WALK-THROUGH TO SEE what I’m dealing with. My observations usually start on the outside, mainly because one of your main objectives when you’re processing a scene is to identify your fragile evidence and take steps to protect it, to document and collect that first. So, anything outdoors obviously has the potential to be more fragile than evidence indoors, because of the weather and everything else. . .. If there’s a footwear impression in the dirt outside, and there’s a thunderstorm coming, that footwear has just become a piece of fragile evidence.

FORENSIC INVESTIGATOR

WHEN I’M ON A SCENE AND WHEN I TRAIN PEOPLE, I AL-ways tell them, You have to think like a crook. How did the suspect handle this? How did he get in?

Well, he got in by prying this window open. Okay. How did he pry the window open? Well, he took a crowbar and jammed it in the window, got it loose, and he used his hands to push open the window. Right there, what do you have? You have a crowbar and you have pry marks that might have a little gouge on it from the crowbar. We have a rubber cast for this; we can actually cast those imprints, and we have people in the lab that actually get paid to compare stuff like that.

Or you deduce that the guy used his hands to push open the window. Well, are there prints on the outside of the window? Now, the window’s open. How did he get inside? The window’s kind of high, so he probably grabbed up underneath the inside of the windowsill and pulled himself up. You want to look for prints there on the underside of the windowsill.

You wouldn’t believe how many people are sitting in prison in South Carolina now because I went behind them and dusted for fingerprints underneath the windowsill and, lo and behold, there the fingerprints were—upside down. A jury sees that it doesn’t take too much to figure out that the only way those fingerprints could get on there was the burglar was jumping in from the outside.

LATENT PRINT SPECIALIST

YOU HAVE TO HAVE AN EXTREMELY OPEN MIND WHEN YOU go into these places. Nothing’s off-limits. Let your mind wander. Think about it. Think about what this person did, how they did it, where they were, what would they do. You need that thought process to kick in.

For example, we had a homicide case in Kansas. There was a little back porch with a single lightbulb, which wasn’t working. The latent print guy figured that maybe the killer unscrewed the lightbulb before he came into the house. So he took off the lightbulb, got some nice prints from it, and we got the killer.

LATENT PRINT SPECIALIST

THERE WAS A HOMICIDE IN A HOME AND A BLOOD PATH IN the snow, going away from the house. We were trying to figure out where the guy went. It was night, and dark, and out in the middle of nowhere. We actually sprayed Luminol—it reacts with blood and gives a kind of glow-in-the-dark effect—on the snow and we were able to pick out the blood trail.

This was a party. As soon as we showed up, everybody scattered, of course. So there were footprints all over the snow. But we were able to determine which path our wounded person took because of the blood trail that was next to the impressions.

CRIME SCENE PROCESSOR

I MAKE UP KIND OF A MENTAL LIST AS I GO ALONG. SOME-times, especially if it’s a more involved scene, I’ll write down some notes about what I’m seeing and ideas for processing.

I start with the documentation process. Then I start photographing the scene—from the outside to the point of entry through to the crime scene itself. Still photographs for the majority of scenes, sometimes video for homicide cases. You get a feel for the scene before you start collecting anything.

SCENE PHOTOGRAPHER/INVESTIGATOR

SOMETIMES YOU MAY HAVE TO APPROACH FAR ENOUGH into the scene to have a real good handle on what you’re looking for. If a body, say, is in a living room, right inside the front door of the residence, you may wish to enter the house through a back door, and get close in enough to see if the person’s been shot, or stabbed, or what’s going on, and then go back and process your way back into the house correctly, knowing now the manner of death.

EVIDENCE TECHNICIAN

Moving Inside... Protecting Against

Contamination of Evidence

LET’S SAY YOU GOT A SITUATION WHERE-DEAD BODY IN A house. Baseball bat. With a whole lot of blood on the end of it, and the guy’s head is caved in. Cop goes in and, you know, clearly, here’s the murder weapon. So he picks up the murder weapon by the handle and he puts it in a bag. Well. . . is the blood on the end of the bat really that big a deal? No. Because—pretty good guess where it came from. I mean, we’ll want to do the testing,