AUGUSTA — A colorful painting that hangs in the lobby of the Maine State Police Crime Laboratory provides the first set of clues.

The mural depicts a crime scene in which three men are collecting evidence of an apparent homicide. The outline of a body sprawled on its side is traced in black on the floor.

But something is wrong, said Scott Gosselin, the lab sergeant, second in command who manages day-to-day operations there and is responsible for training and safety.

Formerly a detective with the Maine State Police, Gosselin points out the now-outdated techniques and equipment used by crime-scene technicians from an earlier era.

First, they are all men. Today, women also work crime scenes as members of the Maine State Police Evidence Response Team.

None of the men in the painting is wearing latex gloves. Everyone at current crime scenes is gloved. A kneeling man picks up a pair of scissors (possibly the murder weapon) with a pen grasped in bare hands.

“It cracks me up,” Gosselin said. “He’s got his hand right in the crime scene. It’s just crazy to me.”

Another man shoots photographs with what appears to be a film camera. Police went digital in 2003, Gosselin said.

The men are wearing lab coats rather than the current standard-issue Navy-blue battle dress uniforms, coupled with protective booties designed to keep a crime scene free from contaminants.

A rotary phone sits on the floor, its receiver off the hook. Today, detectives can recover details about communications from phone records, but also from cellphone texts, tower triangulation and emails sent and received by smartphones.

The mural reminds Gosselin of how far the technology and equipment of crime-detection, evidence-gathering and testing have come in the past 28 years since the building that houses the state’s crime lab was built.

“It’s really a sign of how people saw us back in 1986,” he said of the mural.

It also reminds Gosselin how much his job has changed in the past 14 years since he first donned the Maine State Trooper uniform.

At that time, he said, officers wrote up reports by pen or typewriter. They communicated on two-way radios.

For decades, fingerprints were the gold standard of crime-scene evidence-gathering for identifying suspects. Now, DNA rules.

“In the last 14, 15 years, things have advanced to such a point that it’s almost beyond recognition” he said.

When he came to the crime lab in 2011, Gosselin talked his bosses into letting him organize a project to redesign the patch worn by the folks who work at the lab to reflect the changes in technology. The lab recruited a graphic artist, Ali Phelps, who is the daughter of one of the lab’s veteran chemists, Alison Gingras.

The former patch featured a prominent fingerprint, front and center. In the new patch, thanks to Gosselin, it’s just one of several icons, including the DNA double helix, that represents work done at the lab.

A new wing was added to the building as a response to the advent of forensic DNA testing, which began to dominate evidence introduced in criminal courts in 1987, a year after the crime lab was built, he said.

The basement of the building had housed a photography studio where crime-scene film was developed and printed, before digital photography rendered film — and the film lab — obsolete.

The crime lab used to be staffed only by sworn officers. Now, civilians outnumber officers 18 to 3. Most crime lab workers today are scientists.

Testing guns, bullets

But some areas of the crime lab remain much the same as they were when it was built in 1986.

Forensic specialist Detective Robert Burns, the lab’s only sworn forensic scientist, works in the firearms and tool-marks section, where guns are tested and identified. Burns is responsible for telling a detective on a case what make and model of gun fired a bullet. He can say with varying degrees of certainty whether a particular gun fired a particular bullet.

To help him perform those tasks, Burns sometimes enters the firing range room at the back of his office that houses a 10-foot-long water tank, used to fire guns suspected of being used in crimes. The resulting patterns of rifling found on bullets and tool markings left on shells by the gun’s firing pins help technicians like Burns match guns to evidence left at crime scenes.

This time of year, Burns said he works largely on illegal hunting cases brought to him by game wardens.

Another instrument that helps Burns do his job is a long metal cylinder filled with Kevlar salvaged from decommissioned bullet-proof vests. It performs a function similar to that of the water tank, Burns said, by slowing a bullet that’s fired by a gun he’s testing.

In one room, Burns can choose from hundreds of types of ammunition to load into the various guns that pass through his department; shelved boxes fill one wall of the room. Or he can assemble his own rounds.

One thing that’s different about his job now is the dual microscope that sits on his desk, which he uses to compare two slugs. The powerful instrument is connected today to a computer monitor that provides a large, colored picture of the contrasting slugs from which he can print a photograph. That picture can be used in a courtroom by a prosecutor to show a jury what Burns sees in his lab.

Organized approach

Whenever there’s a homicide in Maine, everyone connected to the investigation convenes in a room upstairs at the crime lab.

Tables are arranged in a square around which are seated evidence technicians (close to the electrical equipment, so they can easily plug into the overhead projector to show crime scene photos and play the 911 call). The crime scene investigators (also detectives) will have interviewed witnesses and suspects about the crime and run the investigation. Attorneys from the Attorney General’s Office who will prosecute the cases are represented, as well as doctors from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, whose building sits behind the crime lab. A doctor from that office will describe the injuries as gleaned from autopsy, including cause and manner of death.

Crime lab workers take their places at the tables, weighing in on issues having to do with chemistry, fingerprints and firearms.

At that meeting, the lab workers will learn about evidence that will be arriving at the lab for identification and testing.

“All of these decisions are made within the first few days after the event,” said Gosselin, who is charged with running those meetings.

“We’ve got a really good model of how to solve homicides here” he said, pointing to the state’s conviction rate of more than 90 percent.

Some of the doctors at the medical examiner’s office have worked homicide cases in other states, including New York; one of them worked on the Oklahoma City bombing case.

Gosselin said those doctors have remarked on the unique nature of Maine’s approach to include everyone associated with a homicide investigation in a single room at the start of the case.

Not like seen on TV

Down the hallway is an office where debris from suspected arson cases comes to be tested.

Unlike on TV, evidence received by the Maine Crime Laboratory is never packaged in plastic. All materials are contained in paper bags or cardboard boxes so they don’t get moldy, except fire debris from arson cases, which come in paint cans or Mason jars to seal in the vapors, Gosselin said.

Charcoal strips are immersed in the samples to absorb the vapors from possible accelerants, or flammable liquids, used to help start a fire.

The strips are then fed into a gas chromatography-mass spectrometry machine, an instrument that charts the various elemental components in a debris sample.

Gosselin stressed that protocols exercised in each section of the crime lab building are focused on maintaining sterile conditions.

“We can never totally eliminate contamination, but we can minimize it,” he said.

Blood type, DNA testing

The chemistry section at the end of the hallway is what Gosselin calls the “bread and butter of the lab.”

Brandi Caron, a forensic chemist, rubbed a treated piece of paper against a reddish brown stain on a pair of dark-gray shorts seized in a homicide case.

If the stain were blood, the paper would turn blue.

If it were to test positive for blood, she would conduct a second test for human blood by cutting a small portion of the clothing and processing the sample with a special kit that may or may not confirm the presence of human blood. If that result were positive, she would cut a second portion of the stain and send it across the hall for DNA testing.

Also on her desk are a blue T-shirt (with tiny spots visible only under a microscope) and a pair of socks (on which she found nothing), she said.

Before DNA testing was available, the blood Caron detected would have been typed, or classified, to help identify whom it came from.

Caron stands and snaps photos of the shorts as she does her testing.

She is also looking for hairs and fibers as well as any other type of biological matter, such as semen or saliva. She can use ultraviolet or infrared light to help her detect those fluids.

Downstairs, she can examine large materials, such as sheets and bedspreads with intricate designs on an oversize table equipped with those same special lights that highlight different types of chemicals, such as semen, blood and even gunshot residue.

Although the technology has been around for a while, the newer oversize table aids in detecting various stains that much faster and with more accuracy, Gosselin said. With the help of a federal grant, his lab was able to get the equipment about four months ago.

At a desk facing Caron is Steve Shargo, a senior lab scientist, who is scrutinizing a shirt for evidence that came from a different homicide scene.

Both Caron and Shargo spend time in court at trials and hearings, testifying about how and what they tested in the lab and explaining their results.

Materials from crime scenes are sorted when they’re brought by law enforcement officers to the downstairs receiving area. That way, the items in need of testing go to the proper sections of the lab, Gosselin said.

A room near the chemistry section is used for examining swabs from rape kits for the presence of sperm cells.

The crime lab is better than in the past about keeping up with testing evidence brought in by law enforcement departments throughout the state, Gosselin said.

Four years ago, the backlog of rape kits meant that it took 18 months for a lab chemist to process the evidence; today, that time has been shortened to about six months, he said. Kits involving violent crimes and active cases are always worked right away with results returned after a couple of weeks. 

Cases are prioritized. Testing of DNA for homicide cases or Class A felonies can be done in 48 hours, Gosselin said.

“It’s got to be critical to go to the top of the list,” he said.

The lab gets about 4,000 items a year from about 1,000 cases that need to be processed. That’s 200 more cases per year than 14 years ago.

Evidence protocol

In the DNA wing of the building, Forensic Biology Supervisor David Muniec explained how samples of stains and swabs, bones and hair sent to his lab are tested for DNA. Anything with biological material can be tested, he said.

No one from any other section is allowed in his lab, a precaution against cross-contamination.

“What we try to do is compartmentalize things,” he said.

Samples are opened in hooded work areas that have a steady stream of sterile air flowing through them, Muniec said.

There, liquid DNA is extracted from the material, a process that can take from four to 12 hours, he said.

If DNA is present in the sample, it will be sent to the profiling section of the lab. There, identifying factors in a DNA profile are used to help match samples with suspects.

All waste from the final testing for DNA in that lab, including protective suits, leaves the building forever in an added effort to prevent contamination.

“And, knock on wood, it’s always worked,” Muniec said.

When there is a DNA match, whether or not it’s the likely suspect, most people regard it as ironclad, Muniec said.

“So, you have to make sure that you did everything right, you didn’t mix anything up. You don’t have contamination. You didn’t accidentally pull up his suspect sample and run it twice,” he said. “So we have all kinds of standards that we have followed pretty much from day one.”

When a DNA profile is completed, it’s first compared to Maine’s collection of DNA profiles of convicted felons that is kept in a state database. The crime lab also has access to a national DNA database, or CODIS (Combined DNA Index System) that aggregates databases from all states across the country.

Since 1996, all Maine felons have had their DNA profiles added to Maine’s database.

A bill introduced four years ago by former Maine legislator Maeghan Maloney, now the Kennebec County district attorney, would have required that DNA samples be taken from all suspects at the time of their arrests.

“Imagine how that bumps up the volume,” Gosselin said. “It’s a huge number.”

Were that type of legislation to pass in a future legislative session, the crime lab would need an additional three or four technicians to handle the added workload, he said.

More than 30 other states collect DNA from defendants before they’re convicted, a lab worker told Gosselin.

In the hallway of the crime lab, a testimonial, of sorts, is posted.

A letter from a prisoner sharing his skepticism about the accuracy of DNA testing, until he was caught, that is: “I must confess that your report is correct and I am the person whose DNA was on these tools and committed the burglary. I still cannot believe how amazing DNA is.”

Matching footprints

In another room in the crime lab building, an assortment of footwear on pegs lines the walls, displaying the tread patterns of various work boots, running shoes and basketball high tops. It’s where technicians match foot impressions with makes and models.

To aid in this effort is another instrument that wasn’t available to Gosselin when he was a detective processing crime scenes. A so-called gel-lift scanner reads prints, impressions, fibers and hairs lifted by an adhesive-backed, rubber-like sheet. The crime lab bought the machine in 2011.

“That’s been another big technology advancement,” Gosselin said. “It’s just this incredible resolution where you can identify ridge detail that we didn’t have before. It’s been really great.”

Crime scene investigator

Gosselin worked for seven years as a rural patrol trooper, four as a member of the Evidence Response Team, before he was promoted to detective. He was promoted again to sergeant when he transferred in 2011 to the crime lab.

He has worked on most of the roughly 70 homicide cases in southern Maine since 2003, he said.

“I never thought my career would end up here,” he said.

Having grown up in the Twin Cities area, Gosselin was assigned as a trooper to patrol Androscoggin County towns. As a detective, he worked out of the Androscoggin County Courthouse office of the Maine State Police.

He had figured on a career as a teacher while in college, graduating with a degree in education. But he “felt helpless” as a high school teacher, he said, frustrated that he couldn’t reach many of the kids he was supposed to help.

By chance, he had minored in criminal justice, likely because he had a family member in Maine law enforcement. His uncle, Camille Carrier, was a detective with Maine State Police. He retired as a one of the state’s honored legendary troopers.

Two framed black-and-white photos hang in the hallway upstairs that show Gosselin in his Evidence Response Team gear at the scenes of two homicides, one at the Black Bear Bed & Breakfast in Newry where three people were murdered (a fourth victim was found murdered in the woods in nearby Upton). The other in Amity where three people, including a young boy from Lewiston, were murdered.

Gosselin doesn’t go to crime scenes as much as he used to and would like to, though he will still respond to scenes in Lewiston.

“That’s my first passion,” he said.

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