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Phil Rudin
Students locate the murder weapon in
waist-deep water using a waterproof
metal detector.
Opening Davy Jones’s
Locker—Very Carefully
Scuba-trained investigators are learning
protocols for examining watery graves. Rule #1
is not so high-tech: Watch out for ’gators.
By Mark
Schcrope
|
November
2004
Just a
couple miles off the coast of Panama City,
Florida, I descend by scuba to an artificial
reef about 60 feet below the surface. The reef
is teeming with fish and other marine life. It’s
a beautiful sight—save for the dead body.
I am surrounded by a pod of divers, some with
full face masks that include built-in
communication systems. They are taking video,
photographs and measurements, just as you would
expect at a crime scene on dry land. The body is
that of a man clad in a blue wetsuit and tied to
one of the reef’s metal beams. His scuba
regulator has been cut away, four of his fingers
are missing, and his deeply gouged legs bob
slightly, as lifeless as, well, as the day he
came off the mannequin assembly line.
The crime scene is a setup, but the
investigators around me are the real thing. They
are divers from police and fire departments in
places such as Florida and California whose line
of work can put them face to face with
waterlogged corpses (though more likely in a
dark canal than in clear Gulf water). They’re
here at the Panama City campus of Florida State
University to take part in the first
comprehensive training program for underwater
crime-scene investigations. This two-week
intensive seminar is teaching them the latest
aquatic technologies, along with newly developed
protocols that apply to everything from a
scuttled boat to a body to a downed plane. The
aim is to procure data that will stand up in
court in cases of murder, insurance fraud, even
international terrorism. In fact, the program
was inspired in part by the unnerving post-9/11
realization that if debris from the World Trade
Center had fallen into the Hudson River, or if
United Airlines Flight 93 had landed in a lake,
U.S. agencies might not have been prepared to
handle an underwater terrorism crime scene. The
program’s initial funding came in 2002 from the
Defense Department.
The divers around me at the artificial reef are
facing the course’s final challenge. Using the
procedures taught thus far, they must document a
scenario that is loosely based on a crime that
really happened in these parts in 1975. Then
they will present their evidence in a mock court
complete with skeptical lawyers.
A few miles from the reef and the mannequin is a
group of sunken lifeboats that are at the heart
of the story. Students are told that the boats
were used to deliver drugs, until a partnership
went bad over internal dirty dealing and
somebody ended up on top of a lit stick of
dynamite. The explosion sent the boats to the
bottom of Panama City’s harbor; some body parts
were found by police but never identified. At
another site, near shore, the group must find a
gun that was reportedly involved in the crime.
Their job is not to prove the entire case but to
find evidence that corroborates the taped
testimony of a snitch, who told authorities
about the unsolved murder nearly 30 years after
the fact in exchange for a reduced sentence for
a recent crime. This is critical, because after
tattling, the snitch was killed. It turns out
he’s the body at the artificial reef and so
won’t make much of a witness. The students also
have to collect the evidence needed to prosecute
his murder.
The premise of the Florida State class is that
underwater crime scenes must be handled with the
same attention to detail that their dry-land
counterparts receive. On land, it’s standard to
cordon off the area and make sure nothing is
moved until measurements and photos have been
taken and evidence—in the form of fingerprints,
DNA or other samples—has been preserved.
Underwater crime scenes, in contrast, have often
been run like salvage operations (recall the
1996 television images of law enforcement
officers and volunteers traipsing through South
Florida swamps, gathering pieces of a downed
ValuJet plane and throwing them in piles). The
high-tech methods being taught now are modeled
after the meticulous practices of underwater
archaeology, which demands that the precise
location of every scrap and artifact on a wreck
site be mapped and that everything recovered be
carefully preserved. “For years, evidence found
underwater was generally ignored or mishandled
so that it couldn’t be used,” says Michael
Zinszer, a former Navy diver who helped to
establish the Florida State program. “What we’re
saying is that it’s all usable and presentable
in court if handled properly.”
Today’s students are divided into three groups.
The one I’ve joined boards a pontoon boat, where
we find a laptop computer displaying a sketchy
red-and-black map of the infamous sunken
lifeboats. Another student group created the map
earlier in the day by dragging a torpedo-shaped
sidescan-sonar instrument back and forth behind
the boat. Such systems, which measure the way
sound bounces off the seafloor to create an
image of its contours, are compact enough now
that they can be used just about anywhere there
is water—they can even be dragged by hand down a
canal. In the future, crime scene divers may be
able to get sonar data on head-up displays,
which would be especially valuable in dark
underwater environments.
Our group moves in for a closer look with a
remotely operated vehicle (ROV) known as a
VideoRay. The size of a toaster, it is equipped
with a video camera and is tethered to a control
station and monitor on the pontoon boat. Once in
the water, its jerky movements make it seem like
a yippy dog eager to please its master. An
instructor drives, or “flies,” the vehicle away
from our boat and down to the site. Within
seconds we have a clear view of the bow of one
of the lifeboats. ROVs are the tool of choice
for initial underwater investigations because
they limit human exposure to the dangers of
scuba diving, polluted water, alligators and
other hazards. They also save time: If you have
to distinguish a dead body from a bunch of junk
in a pond, it’s a lot easier to drop in an ROV
to investigate each potential target than to
send in specially trained divers. At this
particular site, the VideoRay confirms that the
damaged lifeboats look decrepit enough to have
been down there since 1975.
Putting people in the water is still usually
required for such tasks as retrieving evidence
and taking measurements. Descending with my
group, I first make out the same bow I saw
through the ROV’s eyes. But soon I am able to
take in the wider scene. The boats’ orientation
matches the snitch’s story: They look like they
could have once been tied together, and little
remains of the one that took the blast. As at
the reef site, the divers take video, photos and
careful measurements.
The last scene we visit is knee-deep water near
shore. This is where a gun was reportedly thrown
after being fired at the apparently
not-too-personable fellow who also took the
dynamite blow. The group finds the weapon using
a waterproof metal detector, but not before
calling the Environmental Protection Agency to
confirm that the water is clean enough that
protective suits aren’t necessary. Students are
urged to make such precautions routine—in the
drainage ditches and ponds where much
investigative work is done, toxins and sewage
are a serious concern.
Currents underwater can have the same effect
that wind does on a terrestrial crime scene, so
you won’t normally find divers combing for hairs
or pollen grains like the folks on CSI. Still,
evidence such as the handgun the group found can
be collected in sealed containers and analyzed
for fingerprints, which can be lifted for weeks
or more after an object has been dropped
(especially if there’s little current to scour
it clean). Items inside the glove compartment of
a submerged automobile could retain fingerprints
much longer. Students at the Florida State
program learn to keep recovered items in water
until they’ve been tested; a gun will quickly
rust once it’s exposed to air, obscuring the
markings that can be used to tell whether a
particular bullet was fired from it.
After two days working in the water, students
spend a night analyzing their data for
presentation in mock court. They review videos
and compile measurements, plotting them on maps,
and compare all the evidence against the
witness’s testimony. “They put together a great
presentation,” Zinszer says afterward. “They
laid their evidence out in a systematic,
methodical way just like they should.” And then
“the attorneys ate them up and spit them
out”—exactly as planned. Learning to stand up to
tough questioning is a key part of the process,
Zinszer explains. The dive teams had not combed
the reef site thoroughly enough and had missed a
key piece of evidence: a regulator that had
become detached from the victim. And because
they started with a report of exactly where to
find the body, they had neglected to make a
sonar map of the reef, which they could have
used to back up physical measurements of the
body’s location. Next time, in the real world,
the diver-investigators will be more prepared,
Zinszer says: “They just need to get beat up in
court a few times to learn how to put everything
together.”
