Saturday, April 18, 1998 | 2:41 a.m.
The two women had been asleep about four hours when the locked bedroom door popped open.
A bluish haze from the living room TV stung their eyes at first, but within seconds they could make out the naked man's outline. And the gun.
He yelled his orders to the 24-year-old woman, throwing at her a pair of dirty white laces from tennis shoes he found in another room. She complied, tying her hysterical 23-year-old friend's hands.
And then the gunman walked the older woman to the living room couch, keeping the revolver on her skin as he cranked the volume up on the stereo. He talked to her briefly, made her kneel by the couch, wedged a black t-shirt in her mouth to muffle her screams and bound her hands before raping her.
Four hours later these awful events had become pages of details in the notebook of Jessie Sams as she made her way through the northeast Las Vegas apartment.
As she walked the path of the two women's terror, Sams noted the evidence: the trail of clothing on the floor; the doorknobs likely to hold the suspect's fingerprints; the bottle of olive oil he left behind on the toilet.
The rape victim at this moment was at University Medical Center undergoing medical evaluation, her body now considered a second "crime scene." Her friend, left traumatized but unharmed, sat with her mother at a glass-topped dinette near the front door, their eyes glazed from lack of sleep as police milled about the apartment.
And as screams from the television's speaker filled the room during Jerry Springer's raunchy episode of "I have a bizarre sex life," Detective Mark McNett hustled Sams through a monotoned recitation of a 20-minute crime -- the call that would begin for her yet another day as a crime scene analyst.
bullet goes here
Sams is one of 34 CSAs and seven supervisors working in the field services section of the Metro Police Criminalistics Bureau -- one of many areas within the department feeling the pressure of escalating crime.
Its staff operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and benefited with a boost in manpower late last year with six new hires. But in a city of a million people that's continuing to swell by an estimated 5,000 new residents each month, crime is out-pacing the bureau.
Cases are backlogged, calls are prioritized and "slow day" is a term you don't hear in this bureau.
Listen to the scanner at almost any hour of the day and the reality will present itself: officers calling for "ID" to come to a crime scene and dispatchers responding that they're just going to have to wait.
And the wait might be as long as a few hours on lower-priority calls -- burglaries, vandalism, minor auto accidents.
Crime scene analysts respond on about 250 calls a week. Their task is to document, collect and process every shred of evidence left behind at a scene.
It's clearly an intriguing career. These specially trained sleuths are among the first to track a criminal's path. They find the hairs, fibers, stains, tool marks, blood trails, cases, weapons and paint chips that are an investigation's building blocks.
Yet the job is also tedious, with constant attention to detail a must, especially in the wake of the O.J. Simpson trial that opened the door for national scrutiny over the methods of evidence collection.
Sams, hired by the department 3 1/2 years ago after getting a bachelor's degree in criminal justice from UNLV, can spend hours on end at a crime scene, sometimes an entire shift plus overtime.
The calls are not for the faint of heart. A CSA sees gruesome homicides, the ugliness of abuse, and the often disturbing letters suicide victims leave behind.
Even so, Sams loves her profession.
"It's not the gory side of it that makes it an interesting job," she explains. "It's the challenge of piecing a case together."
bullet goes here
Every possible angle of a crime scene is photographed, usually with a Nikon FM2, before any of the evidence is touched.
Envelopes and bags for packaging evidence are kept in CSA kits, along with protective white "marshmallow suits" and boots for entering clandestine drug labs, thermometers, casting materials and adhesive lifters, brushes and graphite fingerprint powders, camera lenses, and an array of chemicals and vials for testing and collecting bodily fluid residues.
An ultraviolet light is handy in finding stains and fibers easily overlooked. Ideally a room needs to be darkened. Sams, for example, had to cover the blinds at the rape scene with a blanket to blot out sunlight while using a beam of ultraviolet light to search the beige carpet and light gray couch for clues.
Sure enough she got a hit. The bright beam illuminated a spot on one cushion which, when dabbed with a solution of brentamine, turned a cotton swab a brilliant shade of magenta -- the tell-tale sign of acid phosphotase, a chemical found in semen.
Thousands of pieces of evidence, like the 6-by-6-inch square of fabric Sams cut from the couch where the rape occurred, filter through the sand-colored maze of buildings in Metro's crime lab off West Charleston Boulevard.
One wing houses the chemistry detail, which analyzes controlled substances and toxicology and alcohol samples.
Documents, firearms and latent prints are examined for clues by the bureau's comparative analysis detail.
And a series of rooms is devoted to the biology and DNA detail, perhaps the most rapidly changing field in modern forensics as scientists continue to break down the secrets of genetics.
Tom Wahl had seven years of DNA experience in private labs when he joined Metro 2 1/2 years ago to bring the department into the genetic age.
Some of the most sophisticated computer systems now sit in Metro's DNA lab that was up and running January 13, 1997. To date its team of three scientists and a lab technician have tackled more than 200 cases where identification of a suspect has been made -- and just as often, ruled out -- by examining samples of blood, semen, saliva and hairs containing deoxyribonucleic acid, the ultimate biological ingredient that differentiates individuals.
The serial rapist currently terrorizing the Las Vegas valley left a cap behind after assaulting one of his victims. It, too, has made its way through the lab.
Police work is centered around proving what a criminal did, but the crime lab can just as easily eliminate a person from a list of suspects.
It happens, for example, in rape cases, especially in isolating the predator from several males with whom the victim may have recently been intimate.
The firearms lab sees exclusion on a material level. Aided by microscopes and computer imagery, firearms expert Torrey Johnson can determine whether a particular gun seized from a scene was actually used in a crime.
Johnson came to Metro in 1995 after 20 years with the California Department of Justice. His work contributed to many prominent cases, including serial killer Gerald Gallego, who sits on death row for two of 10 murders during his 26-month search for what he called "the perfect sex slave."
While Gallego disposed of the guns he used, he neglected to throw away a box of ammunition. Johnson was able to capitalize on a defect in the lettering on the ammunition to link the killer's crimes.
When detectives have only casings or bullets to work with, Johnson can often provide them with a list of potential weapons their suspect could be using -- information derived from careful analysis of the various markings, or striations, a particular gun left on a piece of fired ammunition.
Latent print experts have similar objectives, spending most of their day looking in magnifiers and interpreting ridge detail. No two people have the same prints.
"What we do is very methodical, very calculating," said latent print examiner Steve Scarborough, who worked for the FBI before joining Metro. "Fingerprinting is an old discipline, tried and true in the courts, that's been used almost 100 years now. We have the advantage because fingerprints are such a positive form of identification ... they are very powerful evidence."
Advances are being made in collecting and enhancing prints, and computers remain among the most valuable tools -- both databases containing millions of Americans' prints and programs that increase visible ridge detail.
Where the human eye can distinguish about 50 shades of gray, a computer can see as many as 256 -- a significant enhancement, Scarborough noted, when looking for a true match.
bullet goes here
Try as one might, the contributions a CSA can make in an investigation won't necessarily crack a case.
"Even if we have shell casings, projectiles, or other physical evidence, it's still useless until we find witnesses who can put it together," said homicide Sgt. Kevin Manning.
"It's not often that physical evidence alone solves cases. The human element is what locks them in."
Investigators like Manning typically work closely with CSAs, sharing tips gained from interviews with informants, witnesses and suspects that can save time.
Professional conflict can arise, however.
Recently homicide asked a CSA to head to University Medical Center, photograph an injured man and recover his clothing. The instructions were simple, yet Manning said the CSA questioned the logic.
"There were no bullet holes or stab wounds on the clothes," he said. "The CSA asked, 'What evidentiary value do the pants have?' As it turned out the pants contained a controlled substance" -- an element homicide needed to explain the injured suspect's behavior.
Investigators can make evidence collection an easier task, trouble-shooting before CSAs arrive by making sure things like sprinklers don't come on and wash blood evidence away.
The night Mark Emerson was murdered, however, crime scene analysts had their work cut out for them.
Blinded by rage and bent on revenge, Gilbert and David Aguilar were looking for blood when they popped 30-round clips into their AK-47-type rifles one hot night in August 1996 and headed off into the darkness searching for a driver who'd knocked Gilbert into a gasoline pump during a fight moments earlier at a nearby 7-Eleven.
They blasted round after round on their rampage through the Atrium Gardens housing complex off Pecos Road and Washington Boulevard. Bullets pierced walls 500 yards away.
The Aguilars never found the man they were looking for. Instead, Gilbert fired at almost point-blank range into Emerson's chest as he stood on his patio, clutching a portable phone he'd used to update 911 dispatchers on the roving gunmen's location.
In all, 56 rounds were sent throughout the complex, across the street, and inside the apartment where the gunmen ditched their weapons, clothes and identification.
CSAs worked an entire shift collecting evidence, returning at least twice in subsequent days as the investigation continued.
They recovered damning proof for the prosecution that resulted in life sentences for the Aguilar brothers.
Through computer imagery and magnifiers, Scarborough matched David Aguilar's palm print with an impression left on one of the weapons.
Johnson was able to microscopically prove the 7.62 mm cartridge that killed Emerson was fired from the rifle that analysis had linked to Gilbert Aguilar.
"The unusual type of bullet could only have come from Russian ammunition associated with Gilbert's gun," Johnson explained. "The location of the Russian cartridge case gave clues to where the shooter stood when the shots were fired."
Emerson's wife, Marla, came face to face with the gunman as she held her dying husband. Her testimony, along with statements from witnesses and Gilbert's wife, sealed the case.
From auto crashes on roadways, to truck beds filled with thieves' loot, to the Lake Mead shoreline where murder and drowning victims turn up, a CSA never knows what each new day will bring.
Getting dressed for work can be tough.
A bulletin board in the office holds a memo forbidding jeans as on-duty attire. A clothing allowance isn't part of the job. Sweaters, blouses, pants and shoes are routinely ripped, stained and ruined in the field.
The turf can be unpredictable. Word has it that no CSA has ever needed to shoot some of the unsavory types drawn to a scene. Food, water and coffee stowed in the car is a plus when simple calls go long.
The recent boost in manpower is a blessing, yet the cramped office now sees two or three CSAs sharing a desk.
The ranks run slim when subpoenas arrive requesting their testimony in court, where accurate, detailed notes are vital. Thousands of cases that pass through the bureau soon blend into a blur of names, streets, crimes, evidence.
Linda Errichetto, today the director of the forensics lab, had to testify recently on a sexual assault case she analyzed almost six years ago while a criminalist.
Tracy Birch, lab manager of the chemistry detail, holds the record for subpoenas -- 33 of them, to be exact -- requesting her testimony on the same day.
Yet this group keeps coming back for more, primarily because of the nature of the job. With crime, no two days are ever the same.
"If I'm doing this job 30 years from now," Sams says, "there will still be something new to learn."
archive
