Hard Evidence

Students also spend three days at the state medical examiner's office in Nashville, where they learn to fingerprint cadavers (a chunk of Silly Putty helps roll prints off decomposing fingers) along with trickier techniques such as lifting prints off thighs and buttocks. The latter can prove crucial to cracking homicides that include rape or physical struggle. But no students in the class had ever mastered the skill before Week 4, when Art Bohanan—inventor of the portable "superglue" fuming technology featured on CSI—taught them to warm the body part to around 70°F, fume it with cyanoacrylate (heated superglue), dust it with magnetic powder, and lift the clearly visible print with contact paper.




The academy's world-class faculty also includes renowned forensic anthropologist and Body Farm founder William Bass, who in Week 5 taught the class how to extract fingerprints from the sloughed off "glove" of skin sometimes found next
to a decomposed cadaver. (Soak the tissue overnight in a bucket of water, and slip your own hand inside the stocking-like glove.) Paulette Sutton, the widely published protégée
of Herbert MacDonnell (the father of bloodstain-pattern analysis in North America), runs blood-spatter week; and forensic biochemist and time-of-death expert Arpad Vass of Oak Ridge National Labs does triple duty with bloodborne pathogens (Week 1), human decomposition (Week 5) and weapons of mass destruction (Week 9).

Day two of burn and bomb week finds the National Forensic Academy's forensic anthropologist Joanne Devlin striding away from a kerosene-doused Chevy Citation she just torched. A burned-bone expert, Devlin teaches fire-fatality and arson investigation, with special emphasis on the recognition and recovery of charred skeletal remains. Her expertise lies in the interpretation of the burn-altered signs of bullet wounds and other trauma. She has also become the academy's designated arsonist, having spent the previous weekend burning down a four-room farmhouse for a Wednesday field practicum.




Today Devlin and her co-instructors intend to teach these CSIs to make preliminary, on-the-scene determinations concerning the possibility of arson—whether for profit (insurance scam), for revenge or to cover up murder. Such quick determinations often prove crucial, because getting results from a crime lab can take weeks to months, and clues missed at the start may be washed away or demolished in the interim.




Already, the class has watched Devlin, veteran fire investigator Mike Dalton and special agent Dennis Kennamer of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives burn two furnished "burn cells" (mock rooms with one wall left open for viewing) to illustrate the aftermath of accelerant-fueled arson and the results of a lighted wastepaper basket strategically placed in the corner of a room.