Barbie's dead.
Did Ken do it? How miniature death-scene dioramas are used to teach modern CSI
techniques.
Copyright Jessica
Snyder Sachs, as first published in Popular Science magazine
After the class work in fingerprinting, ballistics and firearm identification, the laboratory exercises in blood spatters, tool marks, shoe prints and drag marks, the death-investigation lectures and the autopsy, the demonstrations in detecting and collecting trace evidence . . . after all that, when Tom Mauriello's students have worked their way through every aspect of crime scene investigation in his renowned criminalistics course, it's time to play with his dollhouses.
You won't find
anything at FAO Schwarz like Mauriello's tiny, gory crime-scene
reconstructions. They look at first glance like some sort of grotesque
joke-violence-drenched outsider art, maybe, or Addams Family playroom props.
Blood is spattered on a little wall. A tiny telephone receiver dangles off a
hook. A red car idles in the closed garage, wisps of fiberglass exhaust curling
out from the tailpipe. And, of course, there are bodies-on the garage floor,
face up on the kitchen linoleum, slumped on a bloodstained carpet, tucked into
bed with a Bible, a gun and a bullet between the eyes.
Mauriello teaches
at the University of Maryland, College Park. Each of his six crime scene
dioramas contains clues to preliminarily determine cause of death-accident,
suicide or homicide-and each comes with a sort of dollhouse docent, a real live
student supplied with reports and findings that are divulged when students ask
the right questions.
In an era of
computer-assisted 3-D blood-spatter pattern analysis and crash-scene
reconstruction software, Mauriello's dollhouse approach seems nostalgic. But he
argues there is no substitute for hands-on experience-even if the hands are on
a tiny rubber deathbed figure, a German doll chosen by Mauriello because he
could bend it into a rigor mortis pose and touch up its skin color with paint
for telltale lividity. The dent in another doll's head matches the shape of a
nearby lamp, indicating blunt trauma.
"I teach my
students to peel the crime scene," he says. "I want them to
physically pull back the bedsheets, turn over the victim, examine the body,
pull out the instrumentation in the laboratory and use it, even if it's on a
miniaturized scale."
This is not
something they can do at a real crime scene, he reminds them. "Access to a
real crime scene is impossible. It's closed off. You'd violate the
integrity." (Mauriello used to take over an entire university house and
convert it temporarily into a life-size crime scene replica. It was a huge job,
taking days to prepare. Dioramas are portable and reusable, thus much more convenient.)
There is
precedent for Mauriello's dollhouses. He modeled his miniatures after a set of
19 death scenes crafted in the 1940s and '50s by the eccentric millionairess
who founded Harvard's department of legal medicine, the nation's first university
program in forensic pathology. International Harvester heiress Frances Glessner
Lee created her famous "nutshell studies" for another of her pet
projects-a yearly homicide investigation seminar that 40 to 50 of the nation's
leading investigators jockeyed to attend.
Between each
colloquium, Lee, an honorary captain in the New Hampshire state police force,
retreated to her mansion in the White Mountains to construct exact
one-inch-to-one-foot-scale recreations of real death investigations, all to
challenge (and often stump) "her boys."
Lee spent as much
as $3,000 on each diorama-you could probably buy a full-size house for that
amount of money back then-and equipped them with working doors, windows and
lights. Magazines, calendars and prescription labels were finely printed.
Bullets and shotgun shells were exquisitely miniaturized. Lee lovingly knitted
the clothing for each victim, using two stickpins and sewing thread.
Jerry
Dziecichowicz, administrator of the state of Maryland's office of the chief medical
examiner, which continues to host Lee's Harvard Associates in Police Science
seminars some 40 years after her death, says several of Lee's most difficult
dollhouses have since been retired. Too hard to crack, he says. "When you
have a room full of guys with guns, you don't like to keep telling them they're
wrong."
In contrast to
Lee's finicky ship-in-a-bottle approach, Mauriello is not above using a gauze
finger bandage for a hold-up man's ski mask or the metal end of a mechanical
pencil for a spent bullet casing. What his crime scene dioramas lack in
obsessive perfection, however, they make up for in modern CSI context.
Mauriello dabs his crime scenes with an invisible compound that fluoresces just
as saliva or semen would when students scan with black lights. A student sharp
enough to spot the stain of urine in the toilet of a hotel-room death scene can
send it for DNA analysis, just as a professional crime scene investigator
would.
Mauriello says it
doesn't take long to spot which students will have difficulty with a real
death-scene investigation: They're always the ones who are reluctant to touch.
"In order to get the answers, they have to examine everything-look inside
bedclothes, turn over dead bodies, pick up the newspaper on the floor to see
the date."
If you don't play
with the dolls, you won't solve the crime.
|Contributing Jessica Snyder
Sachs is the author of CORPSE: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint
Time of Death (Perseus)and Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World (Hill&Wang/FSG).
