In a trailer deep in the woods of rural Vinton County, Ohio, police discovered the body of Kenyon College student Emily Murray wrapped in a rug. She had been shot once in the head. As officers combed the property for clues to the murder, they made another chilling find: scattered human remains, including teeth found in a nearby root cellar.

“At the time we didn’t know if we had one individual whose bones were spread out or three separate individuals,” recalls Special Agent Gary Wilgus of the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, a state agency that assists local law enforcement departments in solving crimes. Police contacted someone who knew bones: forensic anthropologist Nancy Tatarek. Upon arrival at the crime scene, about 30 miles from where she’d recently accepted an academic position at Ohio University, Tatarek mapped out the property and extracted the bones from mud and dirt in the cold, damp days of early winter. She told investigators that the remains belonged to one person, most likely a young male. Another forensic scientist matched the teeth found at the crime scene to dental records of Greg Julious, a 20-year-old Cincinnati man who had been reported missing since the previous May.

“We instantly call somebody like Nancy… We don’t have specialized training, per se, in the area of anthropology to make certain identifications of bones — but that’s the essence of her job,” says Wilgus, who has investigated close to 300 homicides in the past seven years, including this December 2000 case.

BCI — and many law enforcement agencies like it across the country — has become more reliant on scientists such as Tatarek over the past decade to help bring perpetrators to justice and identify victims of crimes. Much of the agency’s new facility in the otherwise sleepy town of London, Ohio, is devoted to laboratories where forensic biologists and chemists analyze DNA, gunshot residue, paint chips from vehicles, and signatures on checks.

Most people are familiar with forensic science. The popularity of television programs such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which draws more than 16 million American households each week, speaks to the public’s fascination with crime and the people who solve it. While the top primetime drama may have increased the public’s appreciation for the technical expertise required for such work, those in the field warn that it also glamorizes and misrepresents forensic science in other ways.

But those in the business of solving crimes agree that forensic science is a fast-changing field, marked by technological advances and new methods that could change the way they catch criminals in the upcoming years. A number of those advances are developed in university laboratories by chemists, biologists, and anthropologists, including those found in another sleepy Ohio town a few hours’ drive from BCI headquarters.

Case One: The Talking Bones

Almost two years after her work on the Gregory Julious case, Tatarek found herself in the Vinton County Courthouse, testifying to what the bones had told her. The owner of the trailer, Gregory McKnight, later was convicted of both murders and sentenced to death.

This was the first time the anthropologist’s expertise was used in the courtroom — most cases don’t lead to such drama. Like many forensic anthropologists who assist law enforcement at crime scenes, Tatarek is an academic who applies her knowledge of bones to the field when police have no other way of identifying remains. She’s worked on 50 cases over the past eight years, half of which resulted in forensic material significant to a criminal case. The other half turned up animal or prehistoric bones.

But Tatarek’s primary work is in the laboratory and classroom, where she studies ways to identify the bones of the dead. Her most recent work suggests that the bones of the feet — even after injury or surgery — hold important clues to identity.

In her office in Lindley Hall, the scientist produces a skeletal human foot from a drawer of her desk to explain how surprisingly unique the bones and joints can be to one person. (“I try not to keep it with my lunch,” she says with a smile while searching for the specimen.) The overall shape of the foot, the way the bones fit together, and abnormalities such as bone spurs hold certain clues. But a study by Tatarek and her colleagues suggests that the spongy interior bone, marked by odd swirls called a “trabecular pattern,” is the most individualized feature.

A person’s foot bones change over time; the way someone walks or even the type of shoes worn can slowly alter the shape and composition.

“If you’re a woman who wears high heels or shoes with pinched toes, you’ll see that,” she says.

Certain medical conditions, such as bone spurs, arthritis, and bone calcifications, as well as surgeries that reshape bone or add a metal pin, also affect the feet. Dr. Dorothy Dean, a forensic pathologist and deputy coroner with the Franklin County Coroner’s Office who has worked with Tatarek on criminal cases, was curious about whether these maladies actually could impede a correct identification of human remains. She recently had published a case study of a man with two clubfeet, whose decomposed remains were identified after a local orthopedic doctor confirmed he had a patient with the rare condition.

Dean, Tatarek, and colleagues asked a foot surgeon in Boston to send 34 pairs of unmarked X-rays of patients before and after surgery to determine if they could properly identify the individuals. The researchers judged the X-rays based on 10 separate factors. They determined that despite the operations, telltale features such as the trabecular pattern led to correct matches in most of the cases, says Tatarek, whose work was published in November in the Journal of Forensic Science.

The findings have immediate application to the field of forensic science, as feet tend to be well preserved by socks, shoes, and boots. It’s also common for people to have X-rays of their feet taken at some point in their lives — whether due to sprains, breaks, or surgeries, she says. A postmortem X-ray could be compared to an earlier image taken during life. Next, Tatarek and colleagues are examining whether ankle bones can be used to identify the dead.

“It appears that this area is more generic. You can still use it, but you need to make sure you have really unique features,” says the scientist, whose research will be featured in a forthcoming textbook for students of forensic medicine.

In the meantime, she’s helping Dean identify the skeletal remains of a woman discovered by a bird watcher in a new housing subdivision near Columbus. Dean has been scouring missing persons databases and other records since April 2002, but the information listed there, such as hair and eye color, isn’t helpful when only the bones are left, the coroner says. She’s hopeful, however, that the woman’s remains one day will be returned to her family.

“Bone can tell you so much about a person,” Tatarek says. “It can talk to you.”

Case Two: Fragments Of Identity

In the weeks that followed the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, the families of some of the victims faced a frustrating dilemma. While their missing loved ones were assumed dead, there was no body to bury. Closure eluded them. As rescue workers searched through the wreckage, they found human remains so damaged, they couldn’t be identified through routine methods such as dental records. Authorities tried DNA analysis, but the fire, explosions, and other impacts of the attack had so badly deteriorated some of the remains, it was impossible to make a match to any missing persons.

A few hundred miles away in Athens, Ohio, forensic scientist Bruce McCord was working on a project that potentially could offer some help. With support from the U.S. Department of Justice, he was trying to solve that exact dilemma: Is there a way to identify an individual from even the tiniest, damaged fragments of DNA? Such a technique could have much wider use than for confirming victims of the World Trade Center disaster. Police may find human remains exposed to the elements for so long, for example, that dental records, fingerprints, tattoos, or even standard DNA analysis can’t be used to identify them.

Consider the search for the perpetrator of a rape or murder. At some crime scenes, the physical evidence linking a criminal to an offense — a blood or semen stain, a strand of hair, dried saliva on an envelope — may provide too little DNA to run an analysis in the lab, McCord says. Some forensic scientists have used a technique called mitochondrial DNA typing in these situations, but “it’s not very informative and you don’t get very good statistics,” he says. “It’s kind of a last resort.”

Mitochondrial material also doesn’t match the growing database of criminal offenders whose DNA is now on file in many states, adds McCord, an associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry who previously worked for the FBI’s DNA unit. It’s not uncommon for those who commit major crimes such as murder and rape to already have a police record, which is why some states are proactively gathering DNA evidence from perpetrators of burglary, property crimes, and other nonviolent offenses.

The Virginia Division of Forensic Science, which boasts one of the largest databases of criminal DNA samples in the country, provides an interesting example of the use of DNA profiling, McCord notes. In 881 cases, the state has linked forensic evidence from crime scenes with no suspect to individuals in the DNA database, according to the division’s Web site. About 82 percent of these “cold hits” would have been missed if the database included only violent offenders; about 37 percent of the violent crimes solved were perpetrated by individuals with previous property crime convictions. Virginia’s database of 18,800 criminals includes infractions such as kidnapping, assault, breaking and entering, drugs, and forgery.

In the case of the World Trade Center attacks, the government had solid leads on the perpetrators, but no comprehensive way of identifying all their victims. Typically, when law enforcement authorities find blood, bone, or other human tissue at a crime site, the sample is taken to a laboratory, where scientists chemically break down the matter to isolate DNA. Next, forensic scientists examine a suite of 13 key genetic markers on the chromosomes, looking for the absence or presence of certain markers, including repeated sequences of DNA. The patterns of these sequences — which researchers have dubbed “genetic stutter” or “junk DNA” — are used to identify individuals, McCord says.

But the strands of degraded DNA are too short and provide too few of the key genetic markers for identification. McCord and his colleagues are developing a smaller set of reliable DNA markers called a “miniplex” that forensic scientists can use to study tiny pieces of genetic material. In a lab in Clippinger Hall, Ohio University undergraduate student Kerry Opel extracts normal DNA from drops of blood dried on a piece of cloth. From a small refrigerator, she withdraws vials of powdered human bone provided by Tatarek, which serve as examples of degraded DNA. In tiny thimble-sized vials, Opel painstakingly combines the DNA with various liquid compounds, and then places them in a machine to be mixed and analyzed. About four hours later, a computer screen graphs results that suggest “Big Mini,” as it’s known around the lab, can be a viable tool for creating a genetic profile. McCord and his research team recently presented their findings at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.

In November 2001, the scientists received an unexpected chance to test the new method on human remains from the World Trade Center disaster. Collaborator John Butler, a research chemist with the federal National Institutes of Standards and Technologies, sent an experimental test kit to New York City after he received a call from the person in charge of DNA analysis at the site.

“They determined it worked for some situations but didn’t address all the needs they had,” Butler says.

The analyst in New York City, however, sent the technology to the Bode Technology Group in Virginia, which had been contracted to analyze bone samples from the wreckage. McCord, Butler, and several students had set up the basic method to analyze a few individual samples; Bode modified the procedure for use on several thousand bone fragments from the site, Butler explains. In January, the group reported to the Associated Press that it had used the revised method to identify six victims.

McCord and his collaborators are continuing to refine the method, determining if there are limits to how degraded the samples can be for the procedure to work. Several more years of research and testing are needed before the technique can be used in actual criminal cases or adapted for a commercial product, he says.

The scientist doesn’t visit crime scenes himself; his work is centered in the laboratory. But he’s motivated by the impact his research can have on the world outside Clippinger Hall.

“You develop procedures, and in the end, you know you’re helping people out,” McCord says. “That’s a good feeling.”

Case Three: Drug Detectives

Gamma hydroxybutyrate, or GHB, is a popular narcotic among young adults at rave parties, dance clubs, and other social gatherings. But recently it’s gained a more notorious reputation as a date rape drug. Odorless and colorless, assailants slip it into the drink of an unsuspecting person. Victims can lose consciousness within 20 minutes of ingesting the drug, and often have no memory of the assault that follows, according to the National Drug Intelligence Center, part of the U.S. Department of Justice. The drug has been making the news more often over the last few years, including in January, when Andrew Luster, heir to the Max Factor fortune, was convicted of using GHB to drug several women and sexually assault them while they were unconscious or unable to protest. (Luster raised his notoriety by fleeing during the midst of his California trial; he was convicted in absentia.)

But law enforcement officials have faced difficulty in detecting the drug in its victims. GHB is hard to trace, says forensic chemist Peter Harrington, because it lacks a basic nitrogen group that makes it undetectable to ion spectrometers. These devices function as “electronic noses,” he says, as they can identify minute quantities of drugs. The small, portable instrument, which can offer results in several seconds, operates in two separate modes: positive ion mode, for drug detection, and negative ion mode, for the detection of explosives. The device often is used in the latter mode to screen luggage and passengers for explosive residue in airports, says Harrington, an associate professor of chemistry and director of the Center for Intelligent Chemical Instrumentation at Ohio University.

But the scientist and two former students discovered that the explosive detection mode of the device also could recognize GHB. In the recent study, the researchers dissolved .1 gram of the drug in 12 ounces of three different beverages: deionized water, cola, and beer. Next, they rinsed out the glass beakers that contained the drinks with tap water. After the glasses dried, the scientists wiped the interior of the beakers and submitted the samples to the spectrometer. The instrument made a positive identification of the drug - even in trace amounts, according to the study, which was published in November in the journal Spectroscopy.

The research suggests that the ion spectrometer could be used to determine if GHB was present in a beverage of a victim of a sexual assault. Harrington proposes that the method also could be used to pick up residual amounts of the drug on the hands and body of someone who has overdosed on the drug, which could allow doctors to quickly and correctly treat the patient. Harrington¡¯s project is one of several examples of forensic science studies focused on identifying the chemicals in drugs and explosives in criminal cases. While some work is aimed at determining what types of drugs a person - from date rape victims and drug users to job applicants - may have ingested, other research focuses on reducing other crimes, such as terrorist explosions and drug trafficking.

Harrington and his research team currently are developing a chemical detection method for currency smuggled out of the country related to the drug trade. Right now, U.S. Customs uses drug-sniffing dogs to screen for illegal activity at crossing points and in luggage. A forensic instrument has its advantages over the canines, however, the scientist says. "The instrument doesn't require food or sleep - it can run continuously," he says.

Dogs are taught to detect substances, he continues, but they can't quantify the amount or identify the specific drug. But an instrument can distinguish between cocaine and heroin as well as provide information about how much of each drug is present. McCord also has been exploring the use of such forensic science techniques as electrophoresis and mass spectrometry to test for materials involved in terrorismrelated explosions. In a project funded by Technical Support Working Group, a counter-terrorism agency, the scientist is determining what explosive-like materials already may exist at certain sites, such as on aircraft or at police stations, so police can distinguish between pre- and post-blast chemicals when investigating a terrorist incident. Though McCord has been successful at developing more sensitive explosive-detection methods, he hopes to continue to refine the process to detect even smaller variations in post-blast residue.

Final Report: Fact vs Fiction

Even if they aren't avid television watchers, the acronym CSI is familiar to forensic scientists, law enforcement officers, and coroners. The CBS drama is the highest-ranked program on the tube, the most recent in a long series of film and television crime thrillers that have popularized - and some would argue glamorized - the field of forensic science.

When prospective students for Ohio University's forensic science program tell McCord they crave the thrill of the fictionalized investigators, he knows he's got a problem on his hands. But when they arrive with a solid passion for and background in math and science, he's more confident in their interest. Real forensic work requires a savvy for analytical thought and a predilection for the laboratory. Unlike on television, forensic scientists often don't creep through crime scenes, prodding the mud for evidence, McCord notes. For the most part, police and scientific work are specialized but separate branches of the crime-solving effort.

Television programs also can do a disservice to the viewing public, adds Dean of the Franklin County Coroner's Office, who may expect that real-world crime solvers can deliver results as quickly as their small-screen counterparts.

"I would like people to understand the powers and limitations of the field so they can have realistic expectations," she says.

The use of DNA analysis, for example, has exploded in the past decade, but the demand for such examination of crime scene samples has created a backlog in the nation's forensic laboratories, says Butler of NIST. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft has attempted to remedy the situation by earmarking $100 million for additional manpower and equipment in state labs, adds the scientist, who served on the federal panel that advised Ashcroft on the issue.

Though analyzing one DNA sample takes only a few hours, one criminal case might produce several samples, Butler explains. Because DNA is such a reliable tool, however, NIST and other research institutes have focused on creating more efficient methods of DNA analysis.

BCI's Wilgus looks forward to such technical advances. The agency only began analyzing DNA in 1998, but "it's made a dramatic improvement in the solvability of cases," he says. When the agency constructed the new facility in London in 1999, it devoted much of its third floor to DNA analysis labs (the agency previously outsourced the work to private companies in Boston and other cities). In-house experts also can testify in local court cases, saving the bureau the cost of flying in someone from another state.

Wilgus cautions that DNA analysis isn't the only tool that investigators depend on - basic police work also is important in solving cases. He likens DNA to a spoke on a crime-solving wheel that includes witness testimony, firearm detection, and other factors.

"No one unit exclusively solves the case," he says.

Still, advances in forensic science greatly will aid Wilgus and other investigators in their work. In addition to faster, improved DNA testing, the agent expects that law enforcement will develop better ways to lift fingerprints from bodies and will continue to build a firearm database that will help link bullets found at crime scenes to various guns.

For now, it's time for Wilgus to return to the field to continue his police work. A two-lane country road leads from the slumber of London to the urban veins of the Columbus freeway, which quickly become clogged with rush-hour traffic. The thousands of cars and trucks, the countless dots of illuminated office windows that hold the million citizens of this city call to mind the challenge of searching for one criminal, one victim in a sea of so many people. But today, something so small as an extinguished cigarette butt, a chip of maroon paint from a Honda Civic, a patch of dried blood on a shag carpet, may be all that stands between anonymity and identity.

For more information about the forensic science program at Ohio University, visit the Web at http://main.chem.ohiou.edu/analytical/index.html. For more information about Nancy Tatarek, visit the Web at http://www.cas.ohiou.edu/SocAnth/tatarek.htm.