Keeper of the Clues : Ellen Dickson Is Guardian of Grim Evidence in San Fernando

The oldest full-time employee of this city is familiar enough with the odor of blood to describe it as “coppery,” like the smell of pennies held in a sweaty palm.

For it is part of this trim, silver-haired 65-year-old’s routine to pick up the punctured and slashed clothes of murder victims--garments soaked in the sap of life. She must catalogue each article, hang them all up in a locker, place a plastic tray below and switch on an overhead fan to dry them out.

But Ellen M. Dickson has had even more distasteful tasks in her nearly 20 years as the San Fernando Police Department’s only property officer.

The young, mostly male force with which she works patrols the streets and locks up criminals. Dickson deals with the leftovers: the semen-stained clothing of rape victims, the sawed-off shotgun wrested from a gang member, the circular power saw a man used to kill himself.

It’s a lot of evil to keep track of.

“I just try to keep it in perspective,” she said quietly, leaning on a stainless-steel counter in the evidence preparation room, a space she helped design. The room looks like a kitchen, with plenty of cabinets for storing packing supplies, including boxes for guns and knives, and plastic tubes for storing hypodermic needles.

“Wow. This guy was good and drunk!” she said, reading the blood alcohol content on a package of serologic evidence--one of hundreds she has logged and stored to help prosecute drunk drivers. “Once, we had a BAC as high as .34%,” she recalled. “The laboratory phoned me to make sure it was right. They said he should have been dead.”

There is little room for error in Room 66, where Dickson toils, usually alone. A typographical mistake or a misplaced piece of property could be just the break a bad guy needs to get out of jail.

Dickson, who turns 66 next month and hasn’t even thought about retiring, draws on her years of experience to process everything from crack cocaine to cash, firearms, machetes and stolen diamonds to marijuana plants and packs of blood, urine and sputum. You name the bodily fluid, she has donned rubber gloves and put it in storage, until needed by a lab technician, detective or judge.

She’s been a civilian fixture in the force for two decades, but many in the city probably don’t even know she exists.

Her anonymity suits her well, as does the neat, navy blue uniform that she wears to work every day. A private person by nature, she takes great pleasure in taking meticulous care with her job and supporting her colleagues.

“She’s part of a critical support staff that most people don’t think about,” said Chief Dominick Rivetti. “What’s amazing is that all the property here goes to one person: Ellen.”

Each morning, she checks to see what has come in overnight.

On a recent Tuesday, it was a bag of heroin and semen-stained sheets from a woman who said she had been raped. In a small staging area outside the preparation room, Dickson processes evidence, tags it and assigns it a numbered location on movable shelves in an adjacent storage room, which is a cross between a cluttered basement and a militia armory.

A shelf near the door contains, among other items, a mammoth pair of bolt cutters, some guns, a drug dealer’s scale, stolen car stereos, a heavy brick, a hammer and a billy club. Other shelves hold cloned cellular phones and pagers, cans of spray paint, a tire iron, more handguns and bags of burglar tools.

Dickson, who stands about 5 feet, 5 inches tall, reaches up for the butt of a pistol protruding from a shelf. The .44 magnum she pulls out dwarfs her small hand.

She knows how to shoot. Dickson was required to wear a gun occasionally when she was first hired in San Fernando in 1960 as a clerk-matron to accompany female prisoners during their transportation to other facilities.

In 1964, she took a job as deputy sheriff at the Sybil Brand Institute for Women in Los Angeles, where she supervised maximum and minimum security wings in the jail.

In 1968, because of her earlier affiliation with the San Fernando department, she was asked to organize the first female contingent in the city’s police reserve.

Years ago, she and her late husband, who was a reserve police officer in San Fernando, met O.J. Simpson. Although she has followed the football great’s murder trial closely--particularly the areas related to evidence handling--she is saddened by the contempt raining down on the Los Angeles Police Department.

Her own department came through for her when cancer claimed her husband, Sam, in 1979.

“We’re not all business here,” Rivetti said. “We’re family, too. When Sam died, we did our best to try to fill the void. We couldn’t, but we tried.”

It was the effort that mattered to Dickson.

“I love these kids in here,” she said. “They’re sharper today than they were when I started in law enforcement. It’s not just a job to them. They know it’s a responsibility, a profession. They’re professionals.”

Rivetti described Dickson’s level of professionalism by noting the conditions in which she worked before the department moved into its present location on 1st Street.

“It was a dungeon,” he said. “She was literally working out of an old jail cell.”

Dickson did her job in virtual isolation from the rest of the department for nearly 15 years, Rivetti said. It was there that Dickson learned what blood smelled like.

“We used to hang up the bloody clothes in the shower stall, which was right next to my desk. I’d come in on a Monday morning after a bloody weekend, and that stink would hit when I came down the hall.” She stored property on makeshift shelves in three other jail cells.

When the new station was commissioned, Rivetti asked Dickson to help design the evidence preparation area. She developed a simple, logical system that has become the envy of other property officers in the region.

The bright, tiled and carpeted rooms she now works in open into each other, ending in the storage room. Evidence moves in a logical progression, from preparation to staging to storage.

Standing by the refrigerator where serologic evidence is stored, Dickson thought back to a case still fresh in her memory.

She had received two separate urine samples to store. One sample was taken from a woman who had used the drug PCP shortly before giving birth. The other sample, Dickson learned with horror, was taken from her infant, born high on the deadly narcotic.

Sometimes, the crimes are too outrageous to try to keep in perspective.

The story is but one of hundreds Dickson tells, said Police Clerk Maria Quinonez, 34, who has worked closely with Dickson for 15 years.

“This place is a huge part of her life,” Quinonez said. “Her husband is gone, and a lot of her friends have moved away. People here can appreciate that. She’s always been there for all of us.”