Insects Gnaw Out a Niche in Criminology : Forensics: Living clues are becoming tools of the trade for a new breed of sleuth.

The scribbled telephone message was brief, but it spoke volumes to San Diego insect expert David Faulkner.

“Murder,” it said, listing a Ventura County criminal investigator as the caller. “Has larvae preserved. Would like to talk to you about looking at them.” Within days, Faulkner was investigating the killing of 34-year-old Jean Ellen Eubanks, an unemployed construction worker who had been found dead under a pile of rocks north of Ojai. The coroner already had examined her body. Faulkner focused instead on the insects it had attracted.

From the ages and types of larvae he examined, Faulkner established that Eubanks had been slain three weeks before her body was discovered--a date when the prime suspect had no alibi. And last March, after a jury heard Faulkner’s and other testimony, the case investigator called and left another message.

“Got a guilty verdict,” it said.

Faulkner, the 41-year-old chairman of the San Diego Natural History Museum’s entomology department, is among only 20 scientists in the country--and just a few in the state--who specialize in this kind of slimy sleuthing.

The job is not for the squeamish. Faulkner is rarely consulted unless a murder victim has been dead long enough to start decomposing. But Faulkner, a former college football player who has had a lifelong love affair with arthropods, is virtually unflappable. After all, his colleagues note, this is a man who gets maggots in the mail.

“People cringe,” he said recently, describing a common reaction to his work. But Faulkner, who has been known to describe larval specimens as “neat,” is philosophical: “Once the soul has left the body, really, it’s just bug food.”

Until a decade ago, Faulkner’s field, known as “forensic entomology,” was virtually unknown in the United States. But today, experts in insect identification are increasingly being called upon to help criminologists interpret these tiny, living clues.

Faulkner has been hired by both defense lawyers and prosecutors to assist in 30 homicide cases in California, Nevada, Oregon and Texas. And his detective skills can be applied to other cases as well.

Want to know where that big marijuana shipment originated? Want to identify whether an East Coast or West Coast storage company is liable for moth damage on a valuable Persian rug? Or to estimate how long termites have infested a newly purchased home? In cases like these, bug experts are providing the answers.

“We’ve come out of the closet,” said Dr. Bernard Greenberg, a professor emeritus of biological sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago and one of the nation’s pioneering forensic entomologists. Although still relatively unknown, Greenberg says, his field owes its growing notoriety to one simple fact: after a murder, insects are usually the first at the scene.

“Before the police get there, there’s the blowfly. They’re the most precise forensic indicators,” he said. “They have an uncanny olfactory sense. And, of course, this is the way they make their living.”

After these natural undertakers arrive and lay eggs, a succession of developmental stages begins that is so predictable that a trained entomologist can use it to turn back the clock, pinpointing the time--and often the place--of death.

“But,” Greenberg added, “he’s got to know his bugs, backwards and forwards.”

By all accounts, Faulkner knows his bugs. In his third-floor office at the San Diego Natural History Museum, he is literally surrounded by them--a collection of 860,000 specimens, not to mention a library stocked with titles such as “Mealybugs of California,” “The Plant-Feeding Gall Midges of North America” and “The Hungry Fly.”

Since childhood, when he first visited the museum where he now works and experienced the thrill of letting a tarantula crawl up his arm, Faulkner has been enthralled by the jointed legs, the segmented bodies and the exoskeletons of insects. He majored in biology at UC Santa Barbara, got a master’s degree in taxonomy, or the classification of insects, from Cal State Long Beach, and in 1975 was hired as the San Diego museum’s top bug man.

It wasn’t until the early 1980s, when National University invited him to lecture about the legal applications of entomology, that Faulkner first considered applying his knowledge to solving crimes. The literature on the subject was limited, and at first he admits he had to look up the word “forensic” in the dictionary.

But soon, Faulkner was onto his first case. He was hired by the attorneys for Bernard Lee Hamilton, who was accused of murdering and decapitating a Mesa College coed, to help determine a time of death.

Today, Faulkner looks back on the case as a reminder that an entomologist’s conclusions are only as good as his evidence. The victim’s body had been buried long before, so Faulkner was working with only a coroner’s report, which made no mention of fly eggs on the body. But, if the body had been outdoors as long as prosecutors claimed, Faulkner speculated, there would have been significant insect activity.

To test that hunch, Faulkner went so far as to place a headless rabbit atop the same rock in Pine Valley where the young woman’s body was found. Hamilton’s lawyers argued that Faulkner’s rabbit test--which attracted several species of flies--suggested that the young woman’s body must have been dumped later, when their client was nowhere near the area.

In retrospect, Faulkner says he believes insects were probably present on the victim’s body but escaped the attention of the coroner. Evidently, the jury thought much the same thing: Hamilton was convicted and sent to death row.

Faulkner, who had gotten his first-ever glimpse of autopsy photos during his investigation of the case, had intense, troubling nightmares. (“Your personal opinion has no bearing on the science,” he says today. “But I wish they’d execute that guy.”)

But he was hooked. Fascinated by the ability of insects to solve mysteries, he began to keep a file of daily weather reports (since temperature has a direct impact on the rate of decay, his clippings come in handy when he researches a new case). And he kept his ears open for other tales of six-legged gumshoes.

He soon found that maggots aren’t the only bugs that solve crimes. There was the case of a Florida murder suspect, whose presence at the scene of the killing was suggested by the preponderance of love bugs found splattered in the grill of his car.

Closer to home, the chigger case remains a standing favorite.

In 1982, after the body of a 24-year-old woman was found in a Ventura County canyon, investigators at the crime scene were stricken with itchy, red welts. They called in James Webb, now an entomologist with the Orange County Vector Control District, who identified the culprit: a tiny mite, known as the chigger, which is so rare in California that it was confined to within half a mile of where the body was dumped.

Later, when the prime suspect was apprehended, he said he had been nowhere near the murder site. But he had chigger bites as well. Due in large part to Webb’s testimony, the man was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

“It was the single crucial factor in the case,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter D. Kossoris, the Ventura County prosecutor, said recently.

Rarely do bugs solve cases all by themselves. Faulkner has examined some insect material, for example, taken from the bodies of the 44 prostitutes and transients murdered in San Diego since 1988. He cannot discuss the cases, but the conclusions he has drawn have not solved the murders--they are still under investigation.

Several years ago in Los Angeles, Faulkner saw a case that stumped him. A dead body had been wrapped in a plastic tarp, sealed at each end with duct tape and dumped near the reservoir in Silverlake. The seal held, shielding the body from bugs, for about a week, Faulkner estimated. But then the tape frayed, exposing its contents to the elements.

Usually, Faulkner knew, specific bugs could be linked to specific step-wise stages of decomposition--blowflies come first, then beetles that eat fly eggs, then immature flies, then other types of beetles. But, in this case, the “cigar-like” wrapping job had created a corpse that exhibited properties of both early and late decomposition.

“Instead of having a clear-cut succession, you got everything coming at once,” Faulkner said. Scientifically, it was a curiosity. Forensically, it was useless--he couldn’t even guess at a time of death.

Other times, entomologists are foiled by the investigators who precede them at the scene of the crime. In the 30 cases he has investigated, he has gathered his own evidence at the scene only twice--toting a green knapsack stuffed with test tubes, alcohol, a trowel and a San Diego Padres cap to block the sun.

In the vast majority of cases, he receives samples or photographs taken by the county medical examiner, sometimes long after the victim’s body is buried. Often, he says, valuable evidence has been destroyed or overlooked.

“Often, forensic entomologists are called when it’s awfully late in the game,” lamented Greenberg, the Chicago professor. “Even though some authorities know better, sometimes they just can’t get it through their noggins.”

Faulkner believes all it will take is one nationally publicized case to make forensic entomology, if not a household term, at least a familiar concept to more criminal investigators. He believes the cameo appearance of a resourceful bug expert in the popular movie “Silence of the Lambs” may be making a difference.

According to Ventura County Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard E. Holmes, however, Faulkner himself--his curiosity, his enthusiasm and best of all, his credible testimony--make him one of his field’s own best advertisements.

In February, when Holmes prepared to put Faulkner on the stand to testify about Eubanks, the slain construction worker who was found near Ojai, the prosecutor was apprehensive.

“I thought everybody would be reaching for their air-sickness bags,” he said.

But, when Faulkner testified that he had found a “cheeseskipper” fly, which usually lays eggs only after a corpse has been dead for about three weeks, jurors listened attentively--and without apparent revulsion--Holmes said. In a largely circumstantial case, he said, Faulkner’s testimony played a vital role in winning a conviction.

“He was crucial to show the time of death. . . . The autopsy could narrow it to a certain extent, but not to the extent that he could,” Holmes said. “I interviewed the jurors afterward, and they found his testimony fascinating. He was fabulous. I would call upon him again in a heartbeat.”