Crime scene analysts talk about how it was in the ‘old days’

Keith Paul

Tuesday, May 21, 2002 | 11:12 a.m.

Long before the hit television show "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" made Metro Police's crime scene analysts and their high-tech gadgets famous, some of their training came from the back of detective magazines.

Times -- and crime scenes -- were different when Officer Buddy Hardy left the patrol unit and joined the three-person crime scene unit for the old Las Vegas Police Department in 1953.

He didn't know how to lift fingerprints, so he did what all crime scene officers did at the time: He took a correspondence course from the back of a detective magazine.

"I knew nothing. I didn't even know what a fingerprint looked like," said Hardy, now 72. "But after three accidents in two months, I thought it was time for me to get off the street."

So Hardy would sit at his dining room table with the correspondence course work, learning about fingerprints. His wife, Gail Hardy, started looking at the material too.

"I thought it was pretty interesting," she said. "(The correspondence course) was how we learned back then. The courses taught you all about the fingerprints, how to compare them."

It was so interesting that she decided she wanted to do it too. But back then all of the crime scene analysts were cops. So Gail Hardy joined the Clark County Sheriff's Office in 1960. The pair retired together in 1984 from Metro, which was formed in 1973 when the Las Vegas Police and Clark County Sheriff's Office merged.

"I really didn't like the uniform. I hated the hat," Gail Hardy, 69, said.

But she liked the work -- work that many may consider gruesome.

"It was not unusual to have pieces of bodies in various states of decomposition in the office," Gail Hardy said. "There was a cab driver that was killed in his cab and they just brought the whole cab, including the body, into the office."

Gail Hardy said body parts didn't bother her, since she knew she was doing important work, trying to solve a crime.

"We were always very respectful," she said.

The work required constant learning in a field in which the science was just starting to mesh with the police work of crime scene evidence collection and analysis.

Gail Hardy said each person on the staff developed expertise in a particular part of the field. She really liked fingerprint analysis.

"She became a better expert than me," Buddy Hardy said.

Gail and Buddy Hardy were two of the pioneers of crime scene analysis in Clark County, according to Sheriff Jerry Keller, who joined the crime scene unit as a young sheriff's deputy in the early 1970s.

"They were there at the beginning of the scientific methods being used in the handling of crime scenes and the analysis of evidence," said Keller, who spent a couple of years in criminalistics as a crime scene analyst.

He said the science and training is much more advanced now than it was back then.

"Our greatest blood technology then was determining A, B, AB or O (blood types), now we have DNA," Keller said. "They do so much now with blood splatter analysis. Back then it was 'Hey, look at this. It looks like it went this way.' "

But Keller said the correspondence course from the Institute of Applied Science was a good course -- even though it was advertised in the backs of detective magazines.

Today's criminalistics unit has specialized analysts who are not police officers -- most have an education in science. Over the years the unit has added more technology features -- such as its own machines to conduct DNA testing, fiber evidence analysis and "alternate light sources," which use light from various spectrums to detect body fluids.

Whether it's high-tech equipment or an old camera with a flashbulb, Keller said the importance of crime scene work remains the same.

"We know when you have physical evidence you have 10 times better of a chance of identifying the suspect in a crime," he said. "It might seem exciting on television, but it's like mining for diamonds -- you have to go through a lot of coal to find it."

Buddy Hardy saw the technology advance from his time with the old Las Vegas Police -- from 1953 until 1964 -- to when he rejoined the department in 1973 and until he retired in 1984.

The Hardys, married for 51 years, were there when the first comparative microscope came in. The equipment was always a help, but Buddy Hardy said he never forgot why they were there.

"You had a job to do and you really wanted to do it well, because you would help solve a crime and put those responsible in jail," he said.

Gail Hardy, now a real estate agent in Pahrump, has never seen the show "CSI: Crime Scene Investigations," but her husband remembers seeing part of one episode.

"I remember thinking, 'That's not what it's like,' " Buddy Hardy said.