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

The trim, silver-haired, 65-year-old woman is familiar enough with the odor of blood to describe it as “coppery,” like the smell of pennies held in a sweaty palm.

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This is the kind of wisdom Ellen M. Dickson has absorbed in nearly 20 years as the only property officer in the tiny San Fernando City Police Department. She picks up the punctured and slashed clothes of murder victims, garments soaked in the sap of life. She must catalogue every article, hang them in a locker, place a plastic tray below and switch on an overhead fan to dry them out.

The young, mostly male force patrols San Fernando’s 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, and 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 says quietly, leaning on a stainless-steel counter in the evidence preparation room. She reads the blood-alcohol content on a package of serologic evidence, one of hundreds she has logged and stored to help prosecute drunk drivers. “Wow. This guy was good and drunk!” she says. “Once, we had a BAC as high as 0.34% (four times the legal limit). The laboratory phoned me to make sure it was right. They said he should have been dead.”

Dickson, who turns 66 next month and hasn’t even thought about retiring, processes 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.

Each morning, she checks to see what came 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, she 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 is about 5-feet-5, reaches up for the butt of a pistol protruding from a shelf. The .44-caliber magnum she pulls out dwarfs her small hand.

She knows how to shoot. Her husband Sam, who died in 1979, was a reserve police officer in San Fernando, and 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 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. Four years later, 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.

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

“We’re not all business here,” said Chief Dominick Rivetti. “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.”