The Henry C. Lee Institute at the University of New Haven is pledged to advance forensic science through training programs and seminars.  Can you tell us about that?

The Institute has been in existence almost ten years.  About thirty years ago I joined the state services, but before that I was a university professor in the forensic science program.  When we were training students, we noticed that it was very difficult for them to get practical experience, so I got the idea to set up an institute that would accept cases from people who could not pay a consultant fee.  We charged them only the cost and those cases allowed students to get working experience.  It also helps the community.

After I joined the crime laboratory of the Connecticut State Police, after 20 years of service, I decided to retire.  They asked me to stay on as the chief criminalist for the state, and then three years ago, the governor asked me to become the Commissioner of the State Police and the Department of Public Safety.  In reality, I've retired so many times, and so I retired again from that job and now my job title is Chief Emeritus for the State of Connecticut, which means, 'do a lot of work.'  But I enjoy the scientific work and now I don't have administrative duties.

What is your area of specialization?

Fingerprint examiners think I'm a fingerprint examiner.  Blood spatter experts think I'm a blood spatter expert.  DNA people think I'm a DNA expert.  Basically, I started my career as a police officer and investigator, and then I became a biochemist.  The major area for me is putting the case together, how to reconstruct a crime.  Laboratory tests are mostly mechanical; you follow the procedure, you get the result.  But how you interpret that result becomes crucial.  You have to fit it into the whole case scenario.  Sometimes you find DNA and it doesn't mean a thing.  We just had a case like that: The police collected a lot of cigarettes all over the place.  So we found a lot of DNA on the butts, but how do we know anything about the cigarette butts that people just threw there?  It's a shotgun approach.  You pick everything up and hope that one will match your suspect. 

I noticed that at the Institute, you teach several seminars. What do you mean by Advanced Crime Scene Reconstruction?

That's how you look at it.  I get to the scene.  I look at an ashtray—how they put out a cigarette butt.  Which one is still warm?  The way each of us puts out a cigarette butt shows certain habits.  Then we look for whether there's lipstick or grease on it.  You sort it out before you send it to the laboratory. If you do the work, you already know how many people sat in there and smoked, and whether or not there were females or auto mechanics.  Then if I go to a suspect's home, I look at the way he or she puts out a cigarette to see if there are similarities with what we found.  You make an interpretation of existing patterns.  That's advanced work, based on a lot of experience.  You don't need an odontologist to recognize a bite mark.  I can say it's a bite mark, but then you have to be able to make finer distinctions: is it an upper molar or lower molar, and does it have any special features?  That makes it more advanced, and you solve it in the context of all the other evidence.

Henry Lee's Crime Scene Handbook

A key issue that emerges from several of your books is that you want to improve the quality of crime scene investigation, because you've seen a lot of mistakes made which have been costly.  In your Crime Scene Handbook, you describe an approach that you call the logic tree analysis.  In other words, you urge investigators to take a logical and systematic approach to a crime, and then to diagram the reasoning process to provide a foundation for reconstruction.  It starts with the recognition of an item as evidence, and then identification of that item into a certain type of classification.  Can you say more about that?

It's like a living textbook.  When you look at the history of criminal justice, not only in this country but in foreign countries as well, the problem is that in many cases the crime scene was not handled properly.  We lost the window of opportunity and now the crime scene is gone.  The physical evidence was not collected or was collected but improperly.  It got contaminated, or deteriorated, or distorted.  All of those issues can be avoided.  How we can improve that is threefold: 

1. Through education.  Every year at the institute we run advanced crime scene symposiums.  Usually around one thousand detectives come from all over the country to attend that and we train them in the latest techniques.
2. Try to develop a good textbook.  To train detectives, we use the logic tree approach instead of the shotgun approach.  Many times, people investigate cases with a shotgun approach---hit and miss.  Hopefully we learn something.  The logic tree approach is the reverse.  We have to look at a crime scene first and try to determine what's the MO, what's the pattern evidence, and then try to determine what happened, where it happened, how it happened, and when it happened.  We have to determine the primary scene and secondary scene, and whether it's an active scene or passive scene, or an organized scene or disorganized scene.  Once you have all of those issues resolved, you develop a hypothesis. 
3. The problem with most police officers is that they think in real life, you develop theories, like Kojak or Columbo.  But nobody has a theory.  A theory is something that has to be proven to be correct.  We start with a hypothesis, which is based on our experience and training.  In other words, you come up with a logical explanation.  So we try to teach the students how to develop logical thinking from a hypothesis.  Then how you use witness statements and physical evidence to prove or disprove this hypothesis.  After it's been tested and proven, you have a viable theory.
4. Practical experience: A lot of courses we offer are smaller, limited to about fifteen to twenty students.  For example we have a gunshot reconstruction course.  We go shoot up a car and then let them study the bullet holes in the glass and in the car body, and teach them to use the bullets and casings to determine the shooter's position and the bullet trajectory.  We videotape them and then show them the original videotape that shows how we shot the car.  They then learn from that how they made mistakes.
5. We also have a blood spatter pattern workshop to teach them about low velocity, medium velocity and high velocity blood spatter.  We show them what a baseball bat hit looks like, what a gunshot pattern looks like, and then we give them actual practice.  This way the next time they do a crime scene, they can do it properly.

Does the fact that crime scenes are unique affect what you do?

Crime scenes are very individual.  However, it's like a human face: very individual, all different, but all humans have hands, arms, and legs.  So you can approach a crime scene with a general principle.  As long as you follow that principle, you will not make basic mistakes. Then you learn the specifics.  Each type of crime scene—a rape or homicide scene or contract killing---all those specifics mean we handle it as a special type of case.  You develop this through years of experience because the more you see, the more you learn; the more mistakes you make, the less mistakes you make in the future.  The best way to avoid mistakes is to learn how others made mistakes.  Then you don't make your own mistake.