The Evidence Is Their Expertise : It’s the Little Things That Help the County Criminalists Solve Whodunit--and Who Didn’t

They call themselves the bench workers. They hunch over lab tables, studying fibers and hairs and paper scraps found at crime scenes. They tear apart guns, sift through drugs, squint at body tissue, and analyze blood and semen, searching for answers.

The criminalists, toxicologists and technicians at the Orange County crime lab spend painstaking hours at their benches trying to re-create for investigators what happened in a crime--and often, just as importantly, what did not happen.

With the exception of the police in Santa Ana and Huntington Beach, who do most of their own lab work, every police agency in Orange County depends on the county’s crime lab, formally titled the Forensic Science Services Division of the Sheriff-Coroner’s Department.

No case has highlighted the lab’s work like that of Randy Steven Kraft, now on trial in Superior Court charged with killing 16 men in the county. Prosecutors also claim that Kraft killed 29 other people in Southern California, Oregon and Michigan.

In the last 6 weeks, crime lab workers have testified about the alcohol and drug content in the victims’ systems, evidence found at scenes and an array of items found in searches of Kraft’s house and car.

Much of Deputy Dist. Atty. Bryan F. Brown’s case against Kraft relies on commonalities among the killings, and he is using the crime lab experts to tie the deaths together. They discovered, for example, that fibers found on one victim matched the fibers of a rug from Kraft’s house. Fibers on another victim matched the maroon socks from a victim killed a month earlier, and matched a fiber found in Kraft’s car. Also, lab toxicologists, who specialize in drug identification, have shown jurors that most of the victims had drugs in their system that matched drugs from prescription vials found in Kraft’s car.

The Kraft case also shows how closely investigators and criminalists work together. When Sheriff’s Department investigator James A. Sidebotham first searched Kraft’s car, he made sure that criminalists James M. White and Christine Chan were with him. White had already done work on many of the unsolved deaths later attributed to Kraft. Chan had a national reputation for her work with trace evidence--hair, fibers, anything too small for easy measurement.

It was White who found 44 color photographs, including those of several victims, under the floor mat of Kraft’s car. It was Chan who found in the trunk a list in Kraft’s handwriting that prosecutors claim is his own score card of his victims. It had 61 entries.

For Chan, running to crime scenes at odd hours is a big part of the job.

“When you are on call, you can’t make any plans; you have to adjust your life around it,” Chan said. “I’ve had calls while in the shower, out grocery shopping, right after I’ve turned out the lights to go to bed.”

Orange County prosecutors say the crime lab experts’ testimony is often critical. For example, Freeway Killer William Bonin was convicted of four murders in Orange County and 10 in Los Angeles in part because of their work. Orange County criminalists traveled to Alabama, where a green rug found in Bonin’s car had been manufactured, to confirm that fibers from the rug matched green fibers found on some of his victims.

In the Night Stalker case, the Orange County crime lab identified a critical fingerprint on a stolen car that helped lead to the arrest of Richard Ramirez, now on trial in Los Angeles County for 13 killings.

A Textbook Example

Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard M. King says that the Robert L. Sellers case is a textbook example of the quality of Orange County’s crime lab.

Sellers was convicted in the 1979 murder of Savannah Leigh Anderson, 22, in her Irvine apartment.

“The crime lab people were able to re-create that crime for us,” King said. “The way the floor mat was twisted, we knew he had (dragged) her into the bathroom. From the diluted blood stains, they could show us that he had bathed the victim. Evidence from the pillow showed how he had laid it over the dead victim’s face before having sex with her.”

Sellers’ later confession confirmed almost everything that the crime lab experts said had happened.

Another time, Orange County criminalists were asked for a second opinion on some body tissue. The lab, not knowing whose it was, concurred that the death was drug-related.

‘It Was Elvis Presley’

“We did not know it was Elvis Presley until after we had sent in our report,” said Bob Cravey, chief forensic toxicologist.

Cravey, also an expert witness in the Kraft case, has watched with fascination the growth in crime lab work. For example: Toxicologists used to search for signs of drugs taken in 10- to 100-milligram doses, he said. Now the same drug potency is contained in one-tenth of 1 milligram.

“When you are searching for an amount that small, it can be very difficult,” Cravey said. “There is a raft of new drugs on the market introduced in recent years which makes our work more difficult.”

But the reward for strained eyes and aching backs is the joy of the work itself, he said. “There is an analytical challenge to finding chemical compounds in tissues. The challenge is finding out what happened to the victim.”

There was a time when Orange County police agencies devoted little energy to physical evidence. The turning point came in 1947, when prosecutors lost a major murder case in which overwhelming physical evidence existed but was never really explained to a jury.

Created the Crime Lab

After that, the Sheriff’s Department hired W. Jack Cadman, a young, recent graduate of UC Berkeley. He created the crime lab, and his name has been legend in criminalistics in California ever since.

“I had about 5 months to take my time, set up a lab,” Cadman said. “Then I got my first murder case.”

A judge had dismissed charges against five adults and three juveniles accused of beating a young man to death in Stanton. Prosecutors reopened the case, this time using Cadman’s evidence. Through soil samples, blood samples and trace evidence from the spot where the body was found, Cadman showed that all of them had been at the crime scene. This time, the eight were convicted.

“After that, word got around that there was something to this physical evidence business, and I kept pretty busy,” Cadman said.

Cadman got his first assistant in 1953, his second in 1957. By the time he retired in 1976, to go into teaching, the crime lab’s total staff was a little more than 20. Today the lab employs about 100 people.

Lab Moved This Year

The lab, which had been crammed into 5,000 square feet on the second floor of the Sheriff’s Department, finally moved this year to the old social services building on Ross Street two blocks away. There it easily filled up 30,000 square feet.

But facilities were still inadequate, and the 1987-88 Orange County Grand Jury came to the rescue. Its report in June, describing crime lab facilities as woefully inadequate, led county supervisors to order a study for a new building, which will double the size of the crime lab.

While fighting that problem, John L. Ragle, Cadman’s protege who took over the crime lab in 1976, also worried about the county’s low pay scale for his staff. Several key people have left the lab in recent years to accept better offers, he said.

Ragle has met in recent weeks with the county’s personnel office in an attempt to come up with better salaries soon.

“We have lost several of our top people to the competition who are paying better,” Ragle said. “Our lab is 14th in the state in salary right now. That is simply inadequate.”