Hard Evidence

So goes a typical day in Week 7—arson, bombs and booby traps—at the National Forensic Academy, a joint project of the National Institute of Justice, the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Labs and a host of state and local law enforcement agencies. Students are now more than halfway through a 10-week course that includes units on postmortem fingerprinting, blood spatter, skeletal scatter, grave detection, cybercrime and weapons of mass destruction, and wraps with students resolving a gauntlet of mock crime scenes under the demanding eye of an FBI evidence recovery team.




Now in its second year, the National Forensic Academy aims to establish high national investigative standards for a field that sorely lacks them. The truth is, unlike the highly specialized lab scientists on TV's CSI, most U.S. crime scene investigators come from the rank and file of local police departments and sheriffs' offices. Their training varies as widely as the budgets of their municipalities. The result: Countless cases get dropped when lack of expertise results in missed clues and spoiled evidence; other cases get shredded in court la O.J. Simpson, when defense attorneys attack less-than-perfect crime-scene procedures.




Not that the academy's cadets are greenhorns. Virtually all the men and women in this, the school's fifth session, have already attended a half-dozen or more courses in evidence collection and served years on the CSI beat. Modesto evidence specialist Smith, to name one, arrived with more than 450 hours of training and eight years of field experience under her belt. "But you can't compare sitting in a classroom listening to someone lecture out of a book to coming here and getting hands-on training from the best people in every field," she says.




Indeed, the academy has already earned an international reputation for the sharp realism of its training exercises and the unprecedented caliber of its faculty. One has only to consider the macabre list of school supplies: Each class works with a half-dozen human cadavers, two sets of skeletal remains and several pints of fresh blood. Academy coordinators Jarrett Hallcox and Nathan Lefebvre also scrounge up two cars and a couple of condemned houses for each class to blood-spatter, burn, and bomb.




The academy's hallmark style of extreme authenticity stems in large part from the University of Tennessee's world-renowned forensic anthropology department. Its outdoor anthropological research station—widely known as the Body Farm—is the only place where exercises in grave detection and body recovery involve actual (donated) human remains.




The value of working with "the real stuff" can't be overstated, says Hallcox. "Some of these investigators come from areas where body exhumations are once-in-a-lifetime events. But after our training, they'll be able to meet the challenge with genuine experience." There are limits, Hallcox admits. "We didn't use a real body for the shoe bomb," he explains apologetically during bomb week, "because Nathan and I would have gotten stuck with the cleanup."