LIsa Black
Cape Coral, FL
Female, 49
I spent the five happiest years of my life in a morgue. As a forensic scientist in the Cleveland coroner’s office I analyzed gunshot residue on hands and clothing, hairs, fibers, paint, glass, DNA, blood and many other forms of trace evidence, as well as crime scenes. Now I'm a certified latent print examiner and CSI for a police department in Florida. I also write a series of forensic suspense novels, turning the day job into fiction. My books have been translated into six languages.
The best surfaces for fingerprints are smooth and glossy: clean glass, porcelain, polished marble. It goes downhill from there. The rougher and more porous a surface is, the less chance of finding prints on it. Also if the surface is smooth but if it's covered with dirt or dust--someone who touches it takes away dust instead of leaving a print. Then people's fingers vary greatly in how much sweat and oil will be on the ridges at any given moment--if they're recently washed, if they have dry skin, there will be less chance of leaving prints. Then the environment the object is in--if it's a cool, protected place with steady temperature and humidity, prints can last for years. If it's exposed to light and heat and varying conditions, a print might not last very long at all. Fingerprints are subject to so many variables that we never make an assumption about whether we'll find them or not.
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I actually haven't done DNA analysis in a lot of years, and that was before STRs (the method mostly used now) but from what I pick up from the analysts, yes, it's not like TV where you wait in the hall for your DNA results. It's a time consuming process and at certain points there's no way to do it quickly. First they have to determine if DNA is present. Then they have to estimate about how much is present, to know if they need to 'amplify' the same or not or how much. Then the actual testing is done. During all this they also need to run positive and negative controls and do other quality control measures. There's also paperwork, lunch breaks and I doubt too many labs operate round the clock. Then of course there's first-in, first-out; your case doesn't get to jump the line, so how long it takes depends on how long that line is. At our state lab it used to be close to a year, but things have gotten much better and now it's more like weeks to months. If we want something more quickly, we can send it to a private lab which can promise us a one-week turnaround--for $1800 PER sample. But even disregarding queues and monetary considerations, even if the lab dropped everything else and worked overtime, it would still take a couple days.
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I'm not into the macabre (I don't have skull earrings and I don't watch zombie movies...unless Shaun of the Dead counts because I love Simon Pegg) (nothing against zombie movies, just don't seem to catch them) and the only thing I appreciate about the dead is that they're quiet and they don't give me a hard time. I've always been into detecting, is the thing. The problem is I wanted to be a detective like Ellery Queen, work my own hours and then just call everyone into the library once I've figured it out. But I never wanted to be a cop and have to deal with stressed-out people, so being a detective was never really an option. A CSI is just unusual enough to be interesting but just routine enough to keep my inner homebody/bookworm/wallflower self comfortable.
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Um...no. I've cleared many people but before they were convicted--just routine stuff during the course of an investigation. Of two cold cases that come to mind, in one the guy recanted his confession and eventually won a new trial so I was re-examining evidence, and then just before the new trial he confessed again and went back to jail. Then in the other case, which was quite old, the descendent sued the state for wrongful imprisonment, but the court found that the state had not acted wrongly and still had every reason to think the guy was guilty and no reason to think he wasn't, so that didn't really change anything, either. Unfortunately many of the other cold cases I've worked on are still cold.
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No, I have not. I don't really have any favorites about forensic anatomy in particular, though I borrow Postmortem by Koehler & Wecht from my co-worker often. I also liked the books by Dr. Michael Baden and Dr. Thomas Noguchi. My favorite forensics book is probably Colin Beavan's Fingerprints.
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Oh, where to begin, there are so many.
Okay, #1 biggest: We do not really have a BatComputer! Do you remember the episode where they poured in alphabet soup and it spelled out a message? Real scientific instrumentation does not work that way. We don't have a machine that can accept any type of animal, vegetable, or mineral and tell you exactly what you want to know about it. Instruments might analyze organic material or inorganic material or, like my infrared spectrometer, inorganics but only within certain parameters. For example my atomic absorption spectrophotometer was set up to detect barium, antimony and lead on shooter's hand swabs. The hand could be covered in arsenic and I wouldn't have any way to tell. Materials can be run against a database of similar materials, yes, but databases exist because some lab tech went around rounding up samples of nail polish and created their own. There is no national database of perfume or wall paint or cat food--and even if there was, those items change formula every couple of months. So even if I can easily determine that this fiber is, say, nylon 6,6, there is no database that's going to tell me that it comes from a Halston sweater sold only by Macy's and this is how many they sold in this area and this is who they sold them to and, oh, here's a driver's license photo. Companies do not publish their formulas and stores do not hand out their sales figures (and we certainly cannot 'hack in' and get them). That would most likely be violating SEC and civil liberty laws. Okay, enough of that rant.
#2: Someone like me in Smalltown, Anystate, cannot scan in a latent fingerprint (from a crime scene) and search everyone who has ever been fingerprinted in the entire United States including job applicants and military. Most databases are local, maybe statewide depending on where you are and your software. I can search people arrested in my town, and have been receiving those from the county for a number of years. I do not have access to job applicants, not even our own, and certainly not military. That said, I estimate that in five to ten years I will be able to electronically submit a limited number of latent prints to the FBI's national database, but certainly not yet and certainly not for the past 50 years, as TV shows would have you believe.
Those are the two biggest. Oh, and we very rarely package evidence in plastic, we don't wear skin-tight, designer clothes and high heels to crime scenes (when you work around blood, bleach, dirt and decomp fluid you never wear anything that you'd be upset about if it got ruined), we don't interview suspects or tell the cops who to arrest, and we're not all young, single, sexy and angst-ridden. We're really very ordinary. Though I understand that doesn't make for the most captivating TV character.
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I don't consider myself desensitized. I still say "Oh, that's terrible," when I read about someone's death in the paper. I just don't get sick at the sight of bodily fluids. It seems like you either get used to that instantly, or you get into another line of work. It's not exactly the same thing as having a weak stomach--I've known guys who were homicide detectives for 20 years and still had a weak stomach. But when I'm standing at a crime scene there are so many things to think of (plus the overriding "Don't screw up!") that I don't have time to think about how awful this is. To me it would be more nervewracking to be an ER nurse and have someone's life depending on my instant decisions; at a crime scene, the crime has already been committed, so I couldn't have prevented it and I can't do anything about the fact that it happened. I think also that, without putting it into words, I tell myself that the person died right away. I get more upset at seeing the things the hospital did, the tubes, the halo brace, because I know the person must still have been alive for that to be done. Basically, if this work is going to upset you, do something else. It doesn't help anyone to be traumatized by your daily job.
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