Читать книгу Never Suck A Dead Man's Hand: - Dana Kollmann - Страница 10

Before you even ask the question, the answer is no! No, no, no, no, no! No, you can’t get fingerprints off of rocks! No, I don’t watch CSI! No, crime scene investigators don’t interview suspects! No, I wasn’t interested in the O. J. case! No, I wasn’t a cop (and no, I didn’t decide to do Crime Lab work because I couldn’t get into the police academy)! No, luminol doesn’t glow blue hours after it’s sprayed! No, Crime Lab doesn’t respond to only murders and high-profile crimes! No, I didn’t wear a miniskirt and heels to work. And No, I don’t know who the hell killed JonBenet Ramsey!

So, where did all these misnomers come from? You guessed it—Hollywood. Anyone who has recently done any channel surfing knows that television is flooded with forensic programs. These highly popular shows, like CSI, Without a Trace, Navy NCIS, and Crossing Jordan represent a recent trend in prime-time crime dramas—a trend where scripts no longer revolve around the characters, but around science. In today’s cop shows, state-of-the-art laboratories replace interrogation rooms, microscopes take the place of handcuffs, and the only high-speed action you’ll see is in the form of photography. Through the use of fancy gadgets, wild camera stunts, and a case clearance rate approaching 100 percent, these shows have successfully transformed the stereotype of science from something geeky into a discipline that is now hot and sexy.

There is also an array of fact-based forensic shows such as Cold Case Files, New Detectives, Forensic Files, FBI Files, Autopsy, Body of Evidence, I Detective, and Dr. G.: Medical Examiner—just to name a few. Through the profiling of real cases, these programs validate the methods, techniques, and instruments that viewers see being utilized in the fictional crime dramas and emphasize the fact that forensic possibilities are limitless given the technology we now hold in the palms of our hands.

But this inundation of television with forensic programs, including the fact-based ones, also has a downside. By portraying forensic evidence as the key witness in case after case and in show after show, attorneys are finding that many jurors have unrealistic expectations about what forensic science is, what it can do, and, more important; what it cannot do. We are learning that most jurors actually anticipate the presentation of forensic evidence at trial and await the testimony of experts in the fields of serology, latent prints, firearms, blood spatter, documents, computers, toxicology, footwear, and so on. If forensics doesn’t play a prominent role in a case, or if no forensically valuable evidence was recovered from a crime scene, then interested parties increasingly develop the misguided notion that a case is weak or that the police and CSIs were negligent in their duties. The reality of the matter is that many, many, many cases are still solved on the basis of good detective work and good detective work alone. Forensic evidence is not always there, it does not always solve the crime, and it is not infallible.

Another effect of these prime-time crime lab dramas can be seen on university campuses throughout the country. Over the past few years, there has been a dramatic and well-documented increase in the number of undergraduate-and graduate-level forensic science programs as well as mounting numbers of students declaring forensics as their major. In 2005 at Buffalo State College, over 150 students were enrolled in the forensic chemistry program compared to the 40 who were reported for 1996. At West Virginia University, forensics majors jumped from 4 in 1999 to 400 in 2006, and the renowned John Jay School of Criminal Justice in New York reports similar growth, with the number of majors increasing from 554 to 762 in recent years. An Internet search for “undergraduate forensic programs” results in nearly 1.6 million hits, so I won’t continue with the statistics. Even high schools are getting a piece of the action. If you don’t know how to prepare and evaluate DNA autoradiographs or determine the time of death from blowfly larvae, just ask a tenth grader.

The unfortunate part about the huge number of wannabe CSIs deluging forensic science programs is that far too many have a Hollywood mentality about a Hell’s Kitchen kind of job. At the risk of sounding clichéd, I have to say that television and the real world really are two entirely separate entities. I have been teaching graduate-and undergraduate-level forensic science courses at a local university for about seven years and while my lectures are designed to give students a basic knowledge of the interdisciplinary facets of the discipline and introduce them to the theory, methods, and techniques of CSI, I find it is just as important to deconstruct the stereotypes of the field that pervade too many of these young and impressionable minds. I feel strongly about this because I know that the dreams of many students, or maybe I should call them starlets, will be shattered when they discover that the job of a real CSI involves duties and a wardrobe nothing like those portrayed on CSI. I don’t recall Gil Grissom responding to any “burglary” calls where the only evidence of the crime was a stranger’s turd found floating in the toilet, and when was the last time Catherine Willows came home after handling a decomp and found a dead maggot in her bra? Did Warrick Brown ever earn overtime because a junkie died after eating the living room sofa? And I must have missed the episode where Sara Sidle was directed to process a tree house for latent prints.

I find that many students think that if they study hard and graduate with a high grade point average, doors to crime labs across the nation will magically open and they will be beckoned inside, handed a fingerprint brush and a jar of powder, and put to work experimenting on the individuality of nose hairs and the possibility of determining the brand of toilet paper from residues recovered from butt cheeks. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Thanks in part to all the forensic programs, there is absolutely fierce competition for positions in the field. Many jurisdictions require CSI wannabes to be a police officer with several years of experience in patrol before they are eligible for a position in the Crime Lab. That isn’t to say that forensic science students need to start jogging a mile a day and practicing their trigger pull, because other departments only allow civilian investigators into the Lab. What catches many job applicants and interns off guard is the background check. Forensics and integrity go together like maggots and a decomp, so those who have been packing funny tobacco into their Philly Blunts, or have had a felony conviction, a recent DUI or misdemeanor conviction, a negative employment history, a poor driving record, recurrent financial problems, or a dishonorable discharge from the military might as well forget it. The closest these people will get to a position in forensics is selling popcorn at the movies for the premiere of Bone Collector II.

If students do land a CSI position in a middle-sized city suburb, they’ll quickly realize that there isn’t time for any of those nose hair or butt cheek experiments because they will be constantly running from call to call to call, and very few of these calls will be of the caliber of those that occur weekly at 9:00 P.M. on the television sets in Las Vegas, Miami, and New York. Within a year, they’ll have handled 150 burglaries, 100 domestic abuses, 75 first-degree assaults, 50 armed robberies, 25 recovered stolen autos, 15 child abuse cases, 10 suicides, 5 rapes, 4 search warrants, 3 patient abuses, 2 arsons, 1 fatal fire, and a partridge in a pear tree for every two homicide scenes they process as the lead investigator. Their workload will prevent them from following up on cases, and news that an arrest was made will often come as a surprise when a court summons magically appears on their desk. Even then, they will probably have to root through the case file to refresh their memory since all the calls they handled in the past months will start to run together.

The new female CSI will soon discover that the heels, skirts, and long face-flopping hair flaunted by the investigators on television don’t work well when you’re climbing inside trash dumpsters in the search for evidence or going up in the fire department’s cherry picker. It won’t be long before Fruit of the Loom long johns replace the Victoria’s Secret water bra and matching panties and the skull cap equipped with a wind liner make the curling iron one of the most unnecessary appliances in their home. The new male investigator will see that a necktie dangling precariously over a gooey dead body is an accident waiting to happen, and starched white shirts and smooth-soled dress loafers are recipes for disaster. The uniforms hanging in their closets are testaments that fashion has been sacrificed for practicality.

The new CSIs will find themselves working outdoor scenes on the hottest of hot and the coldest of cold days and struggling as they try to photograph and sketch evidence before a torrential downpour washes everything into a nearby storm drain. They’ll accept the risk of catching lice, scabies, poison ivy, and other gross things from victims, suspects, and crime scenes but learn not to complain because bugs and bumps are nothing compared to the threat posed by daily contact with biohazardous materials. It’s only a matter of time before an array of gadgets from the Galls police supply catalogue finds their way onto their Christmas list.

It won’t be long before new investigators realize that there really is very little overlap between their job and the position as it is portrayed on television. Within weeks, they will have seen firsthand the awful things that grown-ups do to kids, and kids do to grown-ups, and people do to animals, and animals do to people, and people do to themselves. They’ll start each shift wondering what unimaginable tasks await them and if they’ll get off on time. Will they go up in the helicopter again to take aerial photos? Perhaps they’ll have to collect another fetus from an abortion clinic for paternity testing in a case of alleged rape? Maybe they’ll photograph another two-year-old who is about to receive skin grafts because he was scalded as punishment for drawing on the wall with a crayon. Will they have to follow another tow truck bringing a car with a dead body inside back to headquarters? Hopefully, the woman who scalped herself and cut her face off is still locked away because one self-mutilation every ten years is more than enough. Where does it end?…or doesn’t it?

Despite the differences between the real world and television, working in a crime lab takes the cake as being one of the coolest places to spend forty hours or more each week. It pains me to think that some poor souls out there sit behind a desk all day. Without bodies, evidence, search warrants, and the morgue to discuss, what do desk-job people like that talk about at the dinner table? The results of their Norton Antivirus scan?

While in graduate school at the George Washington University, I took a law class where the instructor, a federal prosecutor, defined evidence as “stuff we use to prove things.” It wasn’t until I started working as a CSI that I realized that evidence truly is all kinds of stuff that provides detectives with investigative leads, links a victim to a suspect, links a suspect to a crime scene, or corroborates/disproves the statement of victim, suspect, or witness. Evidence isn’t always in the form of a gun, a knife, or a DNA sample—it can be as bizarre as a Styrofoam egg carton, a Big Mac container, a Hooter’s T-shirt, a package of tennis balls, a map of Wyoming, or a leather dildo, all of which contributed in one way or another to the resolution of cases that I was assigned.

Locard’s theory of exchange is the guiding principle in forensic science and provides the fuel that keeps investigators hungry in their never ending search for stuff. At its very core is the notion that whenever a person comes into contact with an object or another person, something is taken and something is left behind. In other words, when a bad guy enters a house with the intent of committing a burglary, he leaves something behind (he might cut himself and leave blood or walk in mud and leave a shoe impression) and he takes something with him (there might be soil from the victim’s flower bed imbedded in the sole of his shoe or paint from the victim’s freshly painted windowsill on his jacket). Determining what stuff a suspect might have left behind, and what he could have taken away from a crime scene sometimes requires thinking outside the box. The ability to think about the stuff in a creative manner is what separates a CSI and a detective from a good CSI and a good detective. It was precisely this resourceful thinking by Canadian investigators and the willingness of scientists to apply their skills in a nontraditional manner that resulted in the conviction of Douglas Beamish in the murder of his estranged common-law wife, Shirley Duguay. While searching for the body of the missing thirty-two-year-old mother of five on Prince Edward Island in 1994, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police discovered a plastic bag containing a bloodstained coat with adhering strands of white-colored hair. Laboratory tests indicated that the hairs did not come from the suspect, as initially thought, but from a cat. It was no coincidence that the bloodstains on the coat were of the same type as Shirley and that Douglas’s parents owned a white fuzzy feline appropriately named Snowball. With no other evidence to follow up on, the strands of hair were sent to the National Cancer Institute’s Laboratory of Genomic Diversity (LGD) in Frederick, Maryland, which was in the process of mapping the feline genome. The LGD established a genetic match between Snowball and the questioned hairs recovered from the jacket. Beamish was subsequently convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. This case set a legal precedent, as it was the first time that animal DNA analysis was allowed in a Canadian court.

Since Snowball’s debut, prosecutors in the United States have been following Canada’s lead and presenting animal DNA in cases involving poaching, animal cruelty, and Endangered Species Act violations. In Gainesville, Florida, state game officials regularly rely on animal DNA to pursue illegal poachers. It isn’t uncommon for game officers to send confiscated venison for DNA testing if it is suspected that it came from does that were killed out of season. Cattle DNA was used in a California theft case, llama DNA in a Florida animal cruelty case, and big horn sheep DNA in a Montana poaching case. The first-known case involving the presentation of canine DNA evidence in U.S. courts occurred in Seattle, Washington, and revolved around the 1996 shooting deaths of a pit bull mix named Chief along with his humans, Jay Johnson and Raquel Rivera. Prosecutors maintained that the defendants, George Tuilefano and Kenneth Leuluaialii, forced entry into the crime scene after being denied a request to purchase marijuana and killed Chief and his owners. DNA was used to show that blood on the defendants’ jackets matched that from the dead dog, with only one chance in 350 million that the blood belonged to a dog other than Chief.

But why stop with animal DNA? In 1992, the body of a woman was discovered in the Arizona desert. A pager left at the crime scene was eventually traced to Mark Bogan, a man who owned a white-colored pickup truck similar to that reported to have been seen speeding away from the location. Bogan stated that a female hitchhiker stole his pager after an argument, but he denied ever having been at the crime scene. A search of Bogan’s vehicle yielded two seed pods from Arizona’s state tree, the paloverde. Detectives determined that if they could match these seed pods with trees at the crime scene, they could, by extension, place Bogan at the location of the murder. This process was complicated by the fact that genetic variability of paloverde trees had not been previously studied and it was unknown if the seed pods contained enough DNA for a genetic analysis. Once the validity of the test was established and researchers determined that it was in fact possible to identify individual paloverde trees, the process was undertaken. The results placed Bogan at the scene of the crime and he was convicted of first-degree murder.

The utilization of nonhuman DNA in the forensic sciences has tremendous potential. Will it one day be possible to match leaves on a suspect’s clothing to nursery-raised bushes in front of a victim’s home? Can we match wood fibers on a suspect’s jacket with the damaged window frame at a burglary scene? Will we be able to do DNA on leather to place a pair of gloves on a suspect’s hands, or a torn piece of a shoe left at a crime scene with a pair of shoes in a suspect’s closet? I am not a forensic botanist or a forensic serologist—and I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I am thinking outside the box, and that, after all, is all that matters.

With developments in the forensic sciences, we are also taking a new look at some old cases. Take, for example, Lizzie Borden. Did she really give her mother forty whacks and when she saw what she had done, surprise her daddy with forty-one (by the way, those numbers are way off)? Several forensic scientists have revisited this case, and it has even been retried, albeit by a Stanford Law School class a century after the fact. While some remain convinced that Lizzie was indeed the hatchet-wielding maniac she was made out to be, forensic pathological evidence used to reevaluate the time of her stepmother’s death (i.e., the rate of food digestion, algor mortis, and the degree of blood coagulation) supports the original jury’s “not guilty” verdict. U.S. Supreme Court justices William H. Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor served on the Stanford bench during the time of the mock (re) trial where Lizzie was once again acquitted of the charges against her.

Forensics also played a role in the identification of the Romanov family of Russia. On the night of July 16, 1918, Tsar Nicholas Romanov, Tsarina Alexandra, their five children, Olga, Tatiana, Marie, Anastasia, and Alexei, as well as the royal physician, a nurse, and two servants were executed by a Bolshevik firing squad. In 1991, the bodies of four males and five females were exhumed from a clandestine grave in Yekaterinburg, Siberia. Although the presence and quality of dental restorations suggested the decedents were wealthy, and perimortem injuries were consistent with those sustained by the Romanov family, it was mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) that established their identities. Since mtDNA is passed along the maternal line, the fact that Tsarina Alexandra’s great-nephew, Prince Philip of England, shared the same sequence as four of the female skeletons, a common familial origin was established. For Tsar Nicholas, his mtDNA sequence matched that of his great-nephew, James, Duke of Fife. The sequence of one of the females and three of the males did not match those obtained from the tsar’s or the tsarina’s maternal relatives and it was concluded that these bodies were most likely those of the physician, nurse, and two servants. The bodies of the two youngest children, Anastasia and Alexei, remained missing.

The investigation did not end with the recovery and identification of the Romanov family burials. In 1921, a woman who had been placed in a German mental hospital after attempting suicide claimed to be Anastasia Romanov. Going by the name Anna Anderson, she resembled the missing Anastasia, but some suspected she was in fact a Berlin factory worker named Franziska Schankowska. After her death in 1984, hair and tissue samples were compared to those obtained from the Romanovs. The results clearly demonstrated that Anna Anderson was in no way related to the royal family. The DNA was then compared to Schankowska’s maternal grandnephew. The DNA matched and finally established Anna Anderson’s true identity.

New information regarding the death of Napoleon Bonaparte has surfaced thanks to our friends in forensic toxicology. Abdominal cramps, weakness, and vomiting had incapacitated Napoleon since the autumn of 1820, and he succumbed to his mysterious illness in the spring of 1821. The physicians conducting his autopsy diagnosed stomach cancer as the cause of death, but noted changes observed in his liver in addition to the well-nourished appearance of his body. This was inconsistent with the significant weight loss that frequently accompanied cancer. Recent reconsideration of Napoleon’s symptoms has resulted in postmortem diagnoses of everything from scabies and parasitic schistosomiasis to Foehlich’s syndrome and Klinefelter’s syndrome. Other theories, however, suggest that Napoleon was poisoned.

After the suspected poisoning deaths of one of Napoleon’s friends and servants, Napoleon himself feared he might be targeted and expressed his concerns to those who were close to him. Napoleon’s fears may have been justified, as a Swedish dentist named Sten Forshufvud drew a parallel between Napoleon’s symptoms as documented in his memoirs, and those reported in cases of arsenic poisoning. Samples of Napoleon’s hair were subsequently tested and the results revealed a higher-than-normal level of arsenic, and it appeared it had been administered in small doses over a lengthy period of time. It is unknown if Napoleon’s death was the result of a conspired murder plot or if his exposure to arsenic was accidental, but several researchers in the case point to the Scheele’s Green pigment used to tint the green wallpaper in Napoleon’s home. It is possible that mold growing on the home’s damp walls could have released arsenic in the form of a gas to which he was chronically exposed. It is also possible that medications ingested by Napoleon contained arsenic that, in combination with the wallpaper, could have resulted in the elevated levels.

I could write an entire book on the role of forensic science in the resolution of some of histories greatest mysteries. DNA technology put the name of Michael Blassie to the remains interred in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, it subsequently settled the rumor regarding the escape of France’s Louis XVII, and put to rest a century’s worth of gossip regarding the supposedly faked executions and burials of outlaws Wild Bill Longley and Jesse James. With forensic technology, we have identified the body of Josef Mengele, established the forgery of the Adolf Hitler diaries, taken a new look at the Shroud of Turin, and put away Dennis Rader for the crimes he committed as the BTK serial murderer. Forensic evidence utilized in a recent reexamination of the Jack the Ripper case indicates that a man named Walter Sickert might be responsible for the series of slayings, and undermines Albert DeSalvo’s claim that as the Boston Strangler he sexually assaulted the victim Mary Sullivan. High lead levels found in the bodies of members of the Franklin Expedition, presumably from the solder in their tinned food, may have contributed to the deaths of these sailors during their ill-fated journey to chart a Northwest passage from Europe to Asia. There has been an anthropological analysis of trauma to the victims killed and reportedly cannibalized as part of Alfred Packer’s prospecting expedition through the Colorado Rockies and we currently await the forensic anthropological findings of bone recovered from a Donner Party camp to see if science supports history’s accounts of starvation and cannibalism.

Advances in forensic technology and the ability to solve contemporary cases and reexamine older ones have come this far because of astute CSIs, unrelenting detectives, well-trained analysts, and the occasional history buff—all of whom spend their days and nights thinking outside the box. They all dream of cat hair, dog blood, seed pods, lead solder, green wallpaper, and all the other little things that the rest of us just regard as stuff. In the forensic sciences, one man’s trash truly is the CSI’s treasure.