Science Solves Crimes in Surprising Ways

BY DIANE DIMOND

There’s a new forensic tool that’s being developed that’s going to knock your socks off!

Investigative science professor Dr. Glen P. Jackson at West Virginia University spoke with me recently about his advances in crime fighting, and while it’s all kind of science-y, I think you’ll agree it is fascinating.

Professor Jackson and his research team work with an apparatus called an isotope ratio mass spectrometer. It measures the ratios of particular isotopes that are found in different samples of material — specifically, human material like bones, fingernails, teeth and hair. It doesn’t matter if the donor is dead or alive. A person’s individual isotopes, which are atoms that have the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons, speak volumes.

DNA or fingerprints must be matched to a known sample. The isotope procedure can squeeze way more information out of a human sample than other laboratory processes.

Jackson’s team has been focusing on what the human hair can reveal. Hair analysis isn’t new, of course, but the professor says the method he’s working on gives up intimate details. It can tell the donor’s age group and if the donor is male or female, obese or slim, diabetic or on particular medications.

But his team deduces even more. By studying the isotopes in a length of hair, they can determine where a person has been in the world, and when they were there.

Here’s my layman’s translation: The hair soaks up and stores everything a person eats and drinks, and that leaves an isotopic signature in the hair shaft. Oxygen isotopes and rainfall composition vary from region to region, and so do the composition of edible plants and cattle. Since the hair is always absorbing and growing at a predictable rate, science is able to match hair isotope ratios to the region in which the donor ingested certain food and drink.

At one time, the professor used himself as a guinea pig. For nine months, he collected his own beard hair every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, capturing it in a dry electric razor. He continued to do so when he traveled from his home in Ohio to Utah for a conference.

Jackson says his diet didn’t change during the trip; he’s a meat eater wherever he is. But his team found significantly different isotope ratios in his hair — specifically, carbon changes — after his trip to Utah.

“The difference was that in Utah, a lot of the beef is free-range rather than corn fed,” he told me. When corn grows, it takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and, in a slightly different way than other plants, turns it into sugar. Jackson’s hair registered the weeklong switch from corn-fed beef to Utah’s free-range beef.

“Anything or anyone that comes along and eats the corn, or the corn syrup … or the corn husks — which is the cows — they all then ingest those carbon atoms with that signature,” Jackson said.

Imagine how this geographic identification could help track the travel histories of suspected terrorists. Or those involved in cases of human trafficking or drug smuggling. The suspect could swear they had never been in a specific region, but their hair could prove them to be liars.

Worldwide, the isotope ratio mass spectrometer has already provided law enforcement with important clues to help identify the unknown dead. In London, analysis of isotopes in human bones ultimately helped identify “Adam,” a decapitated child whose torso was found in the River Thames. The isotope ratios led investigators to Nigeria, where the 6-year-old had been smuggled out of the country and victimized in a human sacrifice ritual.

In Utah, the remains of a woman dubbed “Saltair Sally” were found near the Great Salt Lake. With no way to identify her, her case remained cold for years. Finally, a dogged detective learned of isotope ratio analysis and submitted Sally’s hair for testing. Her strands acted “like a filmstrip” of her life, and by following its geographic clues, the detective ultimately identified Sally as 20-year-old Nikole Bakoles from Tacoma, Washington.

In Ireland, isotope ratios in the hair, nails and bones of a dismembered body found in Dublin’s Royal Canal helped investigators determine that the man had most likely come from the Horn of Africa. Scientists also determined he had spent seven months in Ireland before his death. This led detectives to arrest the grown daughters of the man’s lover. They were dubbed the “Scissor Sisters” for the murder weapon they used to kill him.

The National Institute of Justice has been contributing funds to research like professor Jackson’s for about five years, but Jackson thinks at the current pace it might be another decade before the science is advanced enough to make its way into a crime lab near you.

Crime fighting is an expensive endeavor. Funding more forensic research like this — helping to create an isotopic map of the world so donor comparisons could be done faster and more reliably — seems like a no-brainer.

Rockland resident Diane Dimond is a syndicated columnist, author, regular guest on TV news programs, and correspondent for Newsweek/Daily Beast. Visit her at www.DianeDimond.netor reach her via email [email protected]

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