This Detective’s Witnesses Have 6 Legs : Forensics: O.C. entomologist Jim Webb uses his insect expertise to help solve murders.

While other gumshoes strap on their 9-millimeter pistols when called to a murder scene, Jim Webb packs his butterfly net.

Upon arrival, he might not even notice the shell casings, blood splotches or murder weapon, and might step right over the corpse itself.

“I’m not a real cadaver fan,” Webb said. “I’m just interested in the bugs.”

The only forensic entomologist in Orange County, Webb is part biologist and part detective. He is among a new breed of investigators who have made a career out of the simple fact of nature that bugs are often the first--and only--witnesses to murder.

By studying insects found around bodies, Webb can help determine when a victim died, whether cocaine or other drugs were involved and if someone moved the corpse.

The insects themselves can leave helpful clues that sometimes lead detectives to the culprits. Webb once helped link a suspect to a strangling by matching up telltale chigger bites on the suspect and on others who had been at the crime scene.

“The guy can do wonders,” said Bill Green, an investigator for the San Diego County district attorney’s office, who recalled a serial murder case in which Webb used maggots to peg the time of death of one victim and poke holes in the killer’s alibi.

Nationwide, there are fewer than 20 forensic entomologists who do criminal investigations on a regular basis, only three of them in California. Webb, 53, is considered a pioneer in his field and typically handles five to 10 cases a year in Orange and Los Angeles counties, and across the state.

In this esoteric and expanding discipline, Webb and his colleagues talk in terms of Calliphora vicina , Phaenicia sericata and Chrysomya megacephala --all species of blowflies in Southern California that typically are the first insects to hover over a body. (That’s why Webb packs his butterfly net.)

Instead of motive, these sleuths concentrate on the weather, which can hinder or spur insect breeding. They look at crime scenes in terms of the amount of sunlight, not cross streets. Their file cabinets are loaded with critters soaked in alcohol.

Over breakfast at annual symposiums, these scientists swap photos of cadavers infested with maggots and beetles the way new parents show off baby pictures.

“I wake up every day looking forward to coming to work,” said Webb, whose county office is in a dusty Garden Grove trailer, decorated with drawings by his 8-year-old daughter and blowups of rats and maggots and flies.

“This is my job,” he said on recent afternoon, showing off some of his photos. “I love it.”

The scientist wears many hats as Orange County’s foremost insect specialist, including monitoring the hantavirus when it surfaced in California about three years ago. He is sometimes called upon to help people who suffer from a disorder called “delusions of parasitosis,” in which they imagine that there are bugs crawling on their skin. “Some of those cases are very tragic,” he said.

Almost daily, the entomologist said he is asked to identify unusual insects that farmers and other county residents bring to him from their yards.

Webb was first contacted to do detective work in 1982, when Ventura County sheriff’s deputies noticed that a murder suspect had chigger bites similar to the ones investigators at the crime scene had on their waistlines, ankles and behind the knees.

By analyzing the bites, Webb connected Michael S. Nottingham to a dirt road in the outskirts of Thousand Oaks where the naked body of 24-year-old Margie Jane Davidson was found on Aug. 5, 1982. She had been strangled with her own blouse.

“We went out there and did tests in several different locations,” Webb said. “And the only place we found to have been an unusual hot spot for chiggers was a narrow strip near a eucalyptus tree under which the woman was found. We couldn’t find chiggers anywhere else.

“That means he had to have been at the crime scene at some point, which didn’t correlate with his testimony,” Webb said. “He said the last he saw of her was at the bar.”

Nottingham was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole.

Following that case, Webb began organizing seminars at the Orange County coroner’s office about the use of insects in criminal investigations.

“I think [coroner’s medical examiners] are pretty much still in the learning curve phase,” Webb said. “They still get disgusted with the maggots and they wipe them away. . . . But then, I guess I can’t blame them. Working with bugs isn’t all that attractive.”

Using maggots found on a victim’s body, Webb played a key role in building the case against David A. Lucas, who was accused of slashing the throats of two women and a 4-year-old boy, and attempting to kill a third woman in San Diego County.

One victim, Anne Swanke, a 22-year-old University of San Diego student, was found by a hiker in a remote area of Spring Valley four days after she disappeared on Nov. 20, 1984.

Defense attorneys argued that the student was murdered sometime in the last three days before her body was discovered, and Lucas had alibis for all three days, investigator Green said. The defense’s contention was bolstered by the hiker who discovered her body. The hiker--a Vietnam veteran who said he had seen many bodies during the war--testified that Swanke looked like she was “just killed,” Green said.

But Webb determined that the larvae found on the corpse came from a particular species of blowfly that reproduce only at temperatures of 68 degrees or higher, Green said.

“It turned out that temperatures only reached those conditions on the first day she disappeared, the day Lucas didn’t have an alibi for,” Green said. “[Webb’s] testimony was critical, absolutely critical.”

Lucas, 40, is now on Death Row.

In another case, this time in civil court, Webb was hired by a fried-chicken restaurant chain that was accused by two customers of serving them chicken with cockroaches in the batter.

By comparing a live cockroach and one that had been fried, Webb showed that the bugs found by the customers had not been exposed to high-level heat, said Costa Mesa attorney Kate Sakal, who represented the restaurant. Webb’s conclusion, Sakal said, led her to believe the bugs might have been planted.

“We couldn’t have gotten the information anywhere else,” she said. “It would have been just speculation on our part.”

Webb’s methods have their roots in 13th-Century China, where an investigator trying to solve the murder of a farmer who was killed with a sickle ordered all the men in his village to line up with their crescent-shaped blades.

The investigator paced by all of them and correctly identified the killer, who confessed to the murder on the spot, according to “Entomology & Death: A Procedural Guide.”

“There were flies on the sickle with blood remnants on it,” said Webb, his eyes beaming as he recalled the story. “You see, the blood was wiped off, but that didn’t fool the flies.”

In the United States, the field was pioneered by a group of forensic entomologists who call themselves the “Dirty Dozen.” Several of these scientists, including Webb, David Faulkner, a San Diego forensic entomologist; and M. Lee Goff, a University of Hawaii entomology professor, met during their college years at Cal State Long Beach.

So far, more than 90% of the work in forensic entomology involves dating decomposing bodies found long after being dumped, but technological advances, as well as a better understanding of insect habits, are expanding the field.

These scientists can sometimes use insects to help determine whether a victim has been raped, Faulkner said. That work is aided by the presence of ants, which are attracted to bodily fluids and cart them to their anthills.

The study of insect larvae also has assisted prosecutors in neglect and abuse investigations. In one Hawaii case, maggots found in the bed of a nursing home patient revealed that the patient had not been cleaned daily, as caretakers had contended, Goff said.

In the future, scientists hope that blood from mosquitoes lingering near a crime might yield blood types, possibly even DNA evidence, that could help police track down the killer.

“We’re only hitting the tip of the iceberg in terms of the potential in this field,” Goff said.

“We’re attracting quite a number of students. But not all of them go through with it. . . . Some get sick. Others realize that at some point or another, you have to take the stand to present evidence, and it’s going to have a very profound effect on somebody’s life. That’s tough for them to deal with as scientists.”

Webb said he was “somewhat frightened” when he first testified in 1982 against Nottingham.

“You’re about 10, 15 feet away from the suspect and he’s glaring at you,” Webb said. “You know that your testimony may help to put this guy in an electric chair. Obviously, that can make you feel a little uncomfortable.

“But you have to try to look at it through the eyes of justice.”

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Profile: Jim Webb

Age: 53

Residence: Anaheim

Family: Wife, Roberta, and four children

Education: Bachelor’s degree in zoology and master’s in biology, both from Cal State Long Beach; doctorate in entomology from Texas Tech University; post-doctoral studies at UCLA School of Public Health

Professional background: Has worked for Orange County Vector Control for about 15 years; duties include monitoring diseases transmitted by insects. First worked as a forensic entomologist in 1982.

On his job: “There’s this mystique about death, and about bugs. You add them together and it makes for an intriguing duo. People are fascinated by it.”

Source: Jim Webb