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One
of only eight certified forensic entomologists in America,
M. Lee Goff is at the end of a phone line when the CSI
writers have a question about insects. Read about life
as a bug expert in this interview exclusive to the CSI
website. |
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What qualities are needed to do this line of work?
You need to divorce yourself from what’s going on and
view things as a specimen, not humanity. It takes practice to
learn to detach yourself. You have to try and not think of the
corpse as a person.
In a morgue, a lot of what I view doesn’t look human because
of decomposition, so I get caught up in one little insect pupa,
or the whole microcosm of insect life there.
Also having a bad sense of smell helps too – years of
handling formaldehyde have killed off a lot of my nerve endings.
If I can smell it, it’s gotta be strong!
How does entomology best help to solve murder cases?
Probably 98 per cent of my work is involved in estimating
time of death, based on insect activity on the body. Insects
multiply to a strict timetable; one species arrives, which
attracts another. It’s pretty regimented, but you
have to allow for variables like temperature and where the
body was placed. We help to weed out suspects based on our
findings… and tie others to the scene.
We can also tell if the body’s been moved. For example,
if we find bugs from an urban area and the body’s found
out of the city. Also, we find wounds on decomposed bodies
due to the patterns of invasion. Insects generally come in
and investigate a body’s natural opening, like the nose,
eyes, ears, mouth, anus and genitals. If the same insects
are in the chest as well as the head, there’s got to
be a wound there that was made prior to death – it’s
not normal to have maggots without wounds.
I may not be able to prevent a murder, but hopefully I can
stop an individual from doing it again.
What does your role entail for CSI?
They’ve used some of the cases I’ve worked on
in my book A Fly for the Prosecution as plots. I mainly answer
questions about whether a scenario could work – or how
the production team could make it work better. It’s
always along the lines of ‘a body is found on a mountain,
buried up to the neck. What would happen to the body in those
conditions; what insects would be present?’
Insects and decomposition are widespread, but for the CSI
show they must have a handle on geographic insect activity
for that region. Las Vegas, California and Long Beach are
the areas that I’ve studied.
What’s your favourite insect
and why?
I’m pretty intimate with chigger mites. I have a history
with them. They’re so disliked but are fascinating little
creatures with 500 to 600 different species. On humans they
cause red welts and bites that itch like hell, but oddly after
25 years of working with them I’ve never been bitten
by one!
Has your line of work become more respected because of shows
like CSI?
Yes it has. I used to get just 15 students and now there are
100 in forensics. It’s also attracting a good grade
of ‘strange’ people that might not have thought
about this line of work before. But the general public sometime
anticipates a little too much from us now, especially for
court testimony. We can’t always be as precise as they’d
like if the evidence doesn’t prove it. Since the OJ
Simpson case, the field of forensics has become much more
main stream.
Find out more about this fascinating subject in issues five
and nine of CSI: The Official DVD Collection. |
