Kevin Neal, Convicted of Murder by Forensic Entomology

In Ohio, the state Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, a division of the Attorney General's Office, is available to assist police departments that do not have criminalists on staff to process crime scenes.  BCI also functions as a central crime laboratory for examining all types of evidence, from fingerprints to DNA samples, or tire marks to computer hard drives.

BCI Special Agent Eva Hall was on duty September 6, 1997, when she received a call to assist the Champaign County Sheriff's Office with a crime scene at the Nettle Creek Cemetery. She had already been involved in processing other evidence related to the children's disappearance, visiting the Neal homestead back in July, shortly after India and Cody vanished, to collect trace evidence as suspicion fell on Kevin Neal. Now she had the sad task of ensuring that the recovery of the children's bodies was performed according to crime scene protocols.

When she arrived at the cemetery around 5 p.m. that evening, the area had already been cordoned off by yellow crime scene tape. She noted that the area where the bodies were found was "a heavily wooded area. On first glance you couldn't really see anything in there."