Lab Knows No Criminal Is Clueless

They always leave something behind--a piece of cloth in a dead boy’s mouth, a blood-stained cushion in the back of a rental car, a clump of hair in the clenched fist of a man shot to death in a robbery.

Every criminal leaves behind evidence, say criminalists with the Ventura County Crime Lab, which serves all county police agencies.

The lab, located in the County Government Center off Victoria Avenue, has a good reputation in the county’s law enforcement community for accuracy and reliability.

“They’re invaluable,” said Cmdr. Joe Munoz, who heads up the Oxnard Police Department’s investigation division.

Lab officials hope to step up to another

level of sophistication soon with the opening of a facility for DNA analysis.

Two trace evidence specialists have gone through weeks of DNA training with the U.S. Department of Justice, and three rooms in the lab have been loaded with equipment used to detect genetic markings that can identify people. The Ventura DNA lab will have to go through several months of “validation” before it can be used in criminal investigations, but officials said it should be ready by June.

Local law enforcement agencies--at a cost of $500 to $1,000 for each DNA test--currently send samples to a lab in Maryland. The process can take 60 to 90 days, unless the agencies pay a premium for rush orders.

Munoz said: “I think we spent something like $7,000 on DNA tests in one rape case. . . . So we look forward to having that up and running. I think it could save us some money if we can do some of that in the county.”

The county has a precedent-setting history of using such evidence.

A 1989 murder conviction in Ventura was the first in the state to utilize DNA statistics.

In that case, the district attorney’s office won a conviction against Lynda Axell for murdering a hamburger stand worker. A key piece of evidence was provided by a lab in New York, which was able to identify strands of her long, dark hair in the victim’s clenched fist.

DNA--deoxyribonucleic acid--is found in body tissues and fluids and contains genetic coding unique to an individual. Investigators can compare a suspect’s DNA pattern with the coding found in hair, blood, semen and other substances collected at the scene of a crime.

In another significant case, a Casitas Springs man was freed after DNA evidence showed he had been wrongly accused of a series of rapes. Jason Edward Hawthorne was arrested and charged with 24 felonies in connection with four sexual assaults in the Ojai Valley.

He was released two days later. When DNA tests of semen samples eventually proved conclusively that he was not the culprit, the district attorney’s office dropped the charges and issued a public apology.

The DNA facility is expected to save the county money and improve the efficiency of the department.

Although DNA evidence is an important tool, criminalists will continue to rely on traditional clues such as bullet slugs, blood, fingerprints and semen. Using such evidence, criminalists have provided testimony that proved to be key to convictions in a number of recent cases.

* It was a small piece of cloth used to gag a young murder victim that helped convict Gregory Scott Smith. The former day-care aide from Canoga Park was sent to death row in 1991 for kidnapping, molesting and strangling 8-year-old Paul Bailly, and then setting the boy’s body on fire in Simi Valley to hide the evidence.

*

It turned out that the piece of cloth was torn from a pair of blue shorts owned by Smith. The shorts were found in his mother’s laundry machine.

“We made what I called a jigsaw fit on that case,” said criminalist and trace evidence expert Ed Jones, pointing to a picture that showed how the cloth fit almost perfectly to a torn section of the shorts.

* Jones’ testimony was also important in convicting a man he likes to refer to as the “sweet-toothed bandit.”

The burglar, who robbed a Ventura home in the 1980s, stopped long enough to wolf down about three-quarters of a Betty Crocker chocolate cake left on a kitchen counter.

When the suspect was picked up, a detective scraped some material from his fingernails. Thinking fast, the suspect said he just ate a double fudge brownie from Jack In The Box.

But the man’s alibi was a recipe for disaster.

Jones proved that the few crumbs of chocolate cake under the man’s fingernails could not possibly have been produced by the fast-food restaurant.

“Basically, I was able to show that Jack In The Box never puts wheat starch in their icing, whereas Betty Crocker uses corn and wheat starch,” Jones said.

* In August, the testimony of blood expert Margaret Schaeffer, who also supervises the forensic serology and trace evidence section, proved important in obtaining an indictment against Diana Haun in the slaying of Sherri Dally. Schaeffer testified before the Ventura County Grand Jury that blood soaked into the back seat of a rental car, which was rented under Haun’s name, was consistent with Dally’s.

Criminalists also took samples of grass and dirt from the chassis and trunk of the car. They were able to show that the material was consistent with grass and dirt found in the ravine where Dally’s body was discovered.

* Testimony given to the grand jury by firearms expert James L. Roberts was instrumental in obtaining an indictment of Alan Brett Holland.

Holland is set to stand trial in the slaying of 65-year-old Mildred Wilson during a carjacking July 20 in the parking lot of Ventura’s Poinsettia Mall.

The evidence included a slug from a .25-caliber Phoenix Arms handgun. The slug was taken from Wilson’s body, and Roberts was able to determine what kind of gun was used.

“It’s really incredible what they can do,” said Det. Gary McCaskill, a major crimes investigator with the Ventura Police Department. “We didn’t have a gun, but they were able to tell us what kind of gun was used and then, when Holland was stopped in Long Beach, it was the same make and model that could have been used in the crime.”

Because of the distinctive markings left behind by the firing pin, Roberts, using comparative tests, concluded that the fatal bullet came from the gun Holland had in his car.

Last week, the district attorney’s office decided to seek the death penalty against Holland. He is set to go to trial early next year.

* Renee Artman, who supervises the forensic toxicology section, testified in the trial of Timothy E. Chrestman, who was convicted of murdering another man near Lions campground in 1994. The defense claimed that Chrestman and the victim smoked marijuana together and then were ambushed by a group of gang members.

But Artman proved that to be a lie.

The victim turned out to have only a trace of marijuana in his blood--far below the amount that would have been present if the two had smoked together that day.

*

The lab also does a tremendous amount of photo processing--about 400,000 pictures between July 1995 and July 1996. Most were used to document crime scenes, but they also include about 96,000 mug shots of people being booked into the County Jail.

The photos can be used to reconstruct crime scenes, which helps criminalists visualize the case.

After the shooting death of Simi Valley Police Officer Michael Clark last summer, the crime lab removed a back window from the home of Daniel Allan Tuffree, who was charged with killing Clark in a gunfight with police. The window was used in court as a prop for prosecutors and witnesses to reconstruct the shooting, which occurred as Tuffree and Clark spoke on either side of the glass.

The criminalists testify and sometimes go to the crime scene, but for the bulk of their time they remain cloistered in their lab, looking at the evidence.

‘I think it’s important for people to understand we don’t take sides,” said Capt. Leslie Warren, who heads up the 35-person lab.

“There’s no real emotional investment, if you will,” Warren said. “The criminalists are somewhat removed from the people involved. They are dealing with just the evidence, and if it’s not there, it’s not there.”