GILEAD – On any given day, state police Detectives Herb Leighton and Mark Lopez could be investigating suspicious deaths, homicides and major crimes.

On Thursday and Friday, the pair watched from the sidelines as more than 40 members of the state police Evidence Response Team attempted to solve a “crime” that Lopez and Leighton concocted at Bog Brook, a military training area off Route 2.

“The purpose of the training was to have a scenario involving a major incident which involved several outdoor scenes to test the communication system between inside and outside units of the ERT as things unfolded,” Leighton said Friday morning.

Connecting the elements discovered at the different crime scenes also figured into the two-day session.

“We wanted them to try and establish what scenes are related, and to see if they’d demonstrate and use scientific methods to come to the proper conclusion on the possibilities,” Leighton said.

On Tuesday, some members of the team were mobilizing for a Baxter State Park case, said member Marcella Sorg, a consulting forensic anthropologist for the Maine Medical Examiner’s Office.

That case involves a human bone fragment found in mid-June by Appalachian Trail hikers near the south end of the park.

Training in parallel

Members of the 2-year-old team of specialists include men and women from the state police, the medical examiner’s office and the Maine Warden Service. It also includes dogs trained to find cadavers.

The training scenario was patterned loosely on the case of Dawn Rossignol, the Colby College student who was abducted early last fall, raped and murdered.

In March, Edward Hackett, a former Utah parolee, was sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping and murdering the 21-year-old.

Leighton said the Rossignol case was the first major case on which the group worked.

“We didn’t want to replicate the scenario of that case, but in evaluating the case, we realized we had to work better on our communications,” Leighton said.

The training scenario began with a report of a person missing from a cabin. Signs at the camp indicated a possible forced entry.

Then, a body was found during an area search. A short distance away, a rape scene was located. Further down the trail, a bra was found.

Added to the mix was a bone from an earlier killing in the area that was protruding from a dug grave, and a possible suicide victim lying beside a car.

Leighton said the training scenario involved a husband and wife staying at a camp elsewhere in the Maine woods. The husband, a philanderer, went to the residence of another cabin owner, abducting her at knife point.

He was unaware that she had killed her first husband 12 years back and buried him near her cabin.

The husband then took the woman to the Bog Brook area, where he raped and killed her. What he also didn’t know, Leighton said, was that his wife was trailing him and had witnessed everything. The angry wife then takes the husband at gunpoint from the area, kills him, and sets it up to look like a suicide.

The A-Team’

“That was the twist in the case, and the team nailed it, and it was all because they used the system,” Leighton said. Seven teams of forensic specialists worked seven sites, then team leaders filtered what they discovered to scene commanders. The evidence then went to an on-site crime lab. “As things progressed, they nailed it. The new system we initiated worked great and to everyone’s satisfaction,” he added.

Leighton said that when he became a detective in 1995 – before the Evidence Response Team evolved – a number of detectives would typically arrive at a homicide scene, only to have a supervisor split them up to do forensic work at the various scenes.

“Under that old system, everyone did everything, but what happened was that we would end up with people doing predominantly what they excelled at,” Leighton said. Out of that evolved the Evidence Response Team.

But Leighton stopped short of comparing the team to the fictional forensic team of the popular television show “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.”

“We’re kinda like the A-Team; we’re specially trained,” he added.