‘Maggotologist’ Helps Work the Bugs Out of Criminal Investigations

He’s a sleuth, but Dr. Zakaria Erzinclioglu doesn’t presume to compare himself to Sherlock Holmes. The 49-year-old forensic entomologist prefers another title: “maggotologist.”

He has spent more than 25 years helping solve some of Britain’s most puzzling crimes using his expert knowledge of bugs to reveal when, where and, sometimes, how a victim died.

“I like the concept of evidence, physical evidence. How do we know what we know?” said Erzinclioglu, whose book, “Maggots, Murder and Men: Memories and Reflections of a Forensic Entomologist,” was published in December.

It helps that he isn’t squeamish about death and that he even finds “a great deal of beauty” in blowflies, the family of flies that develop from maggots, those worm-like creatures that thrive on decaying bodies.

For “Dr. Zak,” as he is affectionately known to dozens of police detectives, insects can reveal many secrets that would otherwise lie buried with a corpse.

His work has helped Welsh police identify the skeletal remains of a teenage girl, using insect material found near the body to establish that she had been dead at least five years, significantly narrowing the search through missing person reports.

Erzinclioglu’s estimate of the day of death of another young Briton--arrived at by studying the developmental stage of the maggots found in her body--focused the investigation on a friend who was seen with her that day. The suspect later confessed to stabbing the woman 57 times.

“His ability to examine a body and conclusively determine the day of death was such-and-such has saved police a tremendous amount of time,” said Clive Jones, a retired detective chief superintendent for the Dyfed-Powys police in Wales. “How on earth can you conduct an investigation, interview suspects and eliminate people on alibi if you don’t know when the victim died?”

Erzinclioglu credits Sherlock Holmes, his favorite fictional detective, with paving the way for his type of criminal expertise, which until the second half of the 19th century wasn’t taken seriously by most investigators.

“The notion of looking at physical evidence was not the way people thought,” said Erzinclioglu, who was previously director of the Forensic Science Research Center at Durham University and a senior research associate at Cambridge University. “Police went for things like eyewitnesses and probabilities. We tend to ignore and underestimate things that are familiar.”

But Sir Arthur Conan Doyle “took a very different approach” with Holmes, Erzinclioglu said. Holmes understood what “the scenery of a crime” could reveal to a trained observer.

“There are many paths to the truth,” said Erzinclioglu, who embarked by chance on a career combining the study of insects with criminal investigations.

“I started out as an entomologist, interested in how [insects] transmitted diseases,” the soft-spoken Hungarian-born scientist said. “Then I got a call from the police in the early 1970s. They needed somebody who knew about maggots. They came back again and again. Soon I thought, well, this is an interesting area.”

Unlike Holmes, Erzinclioglu doesn’t directly identify the guilty.

“People often ask, ‘Has your evidence ever incriminated anyone?’ ” Erzinclioglu said. “Well, you don’t know. One cannot know in that sense.”

But, he adds, “there are cases in which the evidence is clearly central and compelling.”

He focuses on flies, which swarm to dead bodies.

“When a body begins to decompose it releases volatile compounds with particular chemical compositions. These are the odors that attract a fly to a corpse,” Erzinclioglu explains in his book.

Once those odors disappear, usually within a few weeks of death, “whether the body is buried or not,” flies ignore the corpse, he wrote. So by calculating the age of the flies and the fly larvae found on the body, a forensic entomologist can determine with a high degree of confidence how long ago the person died.

Similarly, the sheer number and variety of insects--there are some 5,000 fly species in Britain--helps investigators trace a body’s movements. For example, if an insect found only indoors or in one region shows up on a body discovered in another area, forensic entomologists can conclude “the body had been lying somewhere else, buried and exhumed,” Erzinclioglu said.

A forensic entomologist can sometimes reveal even more than the time and place of death. Flies that colonize a body tend to lay their eggs in orifices such as the eyes or mouth. If there is a wound, the flies will naturally be attracted to that.

“Even if the wound has been eaten away and there is nothing to see when the body is found,” the evidence of maggots can hint at a possible cause of death, Erzinclioglu said.

Maggots are also not susceptible to many kinds of poisons that can be used to kill a human. These poisons accumulate in the maggot’s body in a particular way. Erzinclioglu said it is easier to conduct a test on tissue from a living maggot than on a corpse to determine the presence of poison.

“His evidence can be graphic,” said Jones, who invited Erzinclioglu to explain his findings to a group of skeptical officers. “But after his lecture, we all understood exactly why he was saying what he was saying.”

Jones said that by studying the maggots in the body of one victim, Erzinclioglu was able to narrow the time of death from a period of six days to a specific date--allowing police to eliminate hundreds of potential suspects.

Welsh police were so impressed that they helped lobby the government to continue some financing for Erzinclioglu’s work, Jones said.

Erzinclioglu acknowledges his profession might not suit everyone --he describes a typical day as “put on protective clothing . . . and approach the body. It is infested with maggots, and flies are buzzing about in the room.”

But, he said, however unpleasant, “the last aspects of your life have to be dealt with as well.”

Besides, Erzinclioglu rather enjoys the unusual title that he has acquired over nearly three decades of forensic work.

“The maggotologist,” Erzinclioglu mused in his book. “As far as I know, I am the world’s only holder of this august title.”