'You need to be right.'
BY GLENN SMITH
Of The Post and Courier Staff
COLUMBIA--The retired doctor lay on the floor of his Richland County home, his 81-year life ended by a gun-wielding thief who broke in to rob the place. Police and neighbors had the same question: Who could have done such a thing?
The answer would come from a most unlikely source.
While searching the crime scene in Forest Acres last month, investigators found the butt of a cheap cigar on the ground outside a shattered window. Its value wasn't in the tobacco but in the saliva found on its surface.
"We put it in the computer system and got a hit just like that," said SLED Chief Robert Stewart. "This was a person we didn't even have as a suspect in the case. We weren't even looking for him."
Stewart speaks with a mixture of pride and awe when he discusses SLED's crime lab, housed in a nondescript, four-story building on the agency's main campus. Inside, some 90 criminalists and technicians work in a warren of offices and labs, using cutting-edge technology and instruments to find the evidence needed to solve crimes throughout the state.
From machines that can develop a "fingerprint" for a car by analyzing traces of motor oil to whizzing robot helpers and a microscope that can scan the interior of a pinhole, the SLED lab is filled with tools and gadgets that were once the domain of science fiction.
Stewart said the crime lab has made such advances largely because of help from U.S. Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., who has secured millions of dollars worth of federal grants for equipment, training and other needs.
About two weeks ago, Hollings' office announced another $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Justice Department. Among other things, the money will help SLED acquire new lab equipment for testing DNA and drugs; for tracing evidence, such as paint samples, from crime scenes; and for analyzing samples for poisons.
"This grant gives our officers tools they need to lock up criminals faster," said Hollings, who also recently announced a $641,000 federal grant to upgrade SLED's system for checking and analyzing criminal records.
SLED processes evidence for law enforcement agencies throughout the state's 46 counties. SLED does this at no charge to police, which saves local agencies thousands of dollars in lab fees each year.
"It's always been SLED's mission to have the same level of law enforcement in every area of the state so that a basic murder in a rural county can get the same attention as a basic murder in Charleston County," Stewart said.
Though police officials are grateful for SLED's services, their chief complaint is that the agency takes too long to process evidence. Some police officials say their departments have waited up to eight months for the results of DNA testing alone.
"The biggest problem SLED has is their backlog," said Sgt. Ray Garrison, a North Charleston police crime scene unit supervisor. "You can request a rush, and they accommodate you when they can; but it's usually first-come, first-served. Sometimes, that can put you down to the wire."
SLED officials say the grant will help improve efficiency, but some delays are inevitable. The crime lab, which is down about a dozen employees because of state budget woes, receives more than 18,000 cases a year from across the state. Each case might have dozens of pieces of evidence to test. Lab workers also must check and recheck findings to ensure the accuracy of test results and maintain its national accreditation.
"It's like we have a truck that backs up and dumps a huge load of cases at our door every morning," said Maj. Joseph Vaught, assistant agency director for forensics. "When those cases go back out, they all have to be perfect."
SLED officials say they have seen heightened interest and expectations for the lab in the wake of television shows like "CSI," which have made forensic science sexy to the public. In real life, most cases aren't solved during an eight-hour shift. It is painstaking, time-consuming work that can require years of training.
When crime lab supervisor Capt. Earl Wells started in the SLED lab in 1969, DNA processing was just a concept and workers did a little bit of everything, from analyzing fingerprints to checking for toxic substances in a person's blood.
"It's much more specialized now," he said. "The knowledge in these fields and the requirements to become proficient in these fields has gotten so great."
In one room on a recent afternoon, a supervisor sat in darkness, using an ultra-violet light to find traces of body fluids left on a rug from a sexual assault. On another floor, a ballistics worker examined a bullet inside a room flanked by display cases holding more than 3,000 guns. Elsewhere, a technician found the make and model of a car involved in a hit-and-run by analyzing a paint chip from the crime scene.
In the trace evidence lab, Lt. Joe Powell studied a computer screen, watching as a camera panned over a rugged landscape of yawning craters, winding canyons and spiral caves. What appeared to be a moonscape was really the surface of a small hand tool magnified to 400,000 times its actual size by a powerful electron microscope.
A few years ago, this technology helped investigators solve a string of sexual assaults that baffled investigators in one South Carolina county. Police were certain one masked man was committing the attacks, but they had no idea who he was. All the women could tell them was that the man smelled oily.
Powell tested clothing from the crimes and found traces of a special dye used to check for flaws in automobile parts. The microscope helped him find several tiny fragments from metals used in the production of race car engines.
Only two shops in the state made the engines; one was in the county where the rapes were occurring. When investigators visited the shop, they learned that only one man there worked with the special dye.
"We picked him up and 15 minutes later he confessed," Powell said.
Stewart said the lab also has cleared many people who emerged as suspects in crimes.
In 1991, the same year the lab began testing DNA, a 17-year-old girl was raped, killed and nearly decapitated in Horry County. Attention quickly focused on one suspect, and a magistrate was ready to issue a warrant for his arrest. A DNA test, however, showed he didn't commit the crime, Stewart said.
SLED tested samples from other area men and found a match. The DNA belonged to a man who had aided in the search for the victim and served as a pallbearer at her funeral, Stewart said. That man, who wasn't a suspect initially, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
"There is no room for error here," Stewart said. "You are talking about pieces of evidence that could save a life or put someone in the electric chair. You need to be right."
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