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By Colin Grey
When it comes to major crime investigations,
the smallest things can make a huge difference -- like the upholstery on
a cheap sofa.
When police needed to shore up their evidence for a case against
the murderer of a three year old girl in Toronto in 1992, they called on
Skip Palenik, a giant of a man who has spent the better part of his life
staring into a microscope.
Mr. Palenik confirmed the analysis of a Canadian forensics expert
and added further proof that the small, golden fibers found on the
victim's clothes matched the chesterfield in the apartment of a
33-year-old man who lived in the same building.
"He rented a room in one of the apartments nearby, and it
turned out in his apartment, there was a sofa which shed little gold
fibers. It was not a high quality sofa. They were glued in at one end,
little gold fibers that came off whenever someone sat on it," said
Mr. Palenik of Elgin, Illinois.
"So when the fibers were transferred, you knew it, which you
often don't, that they came from this particular source. So that was one
of the principal pieces of evidence that tied her to the suspect's
environment," he continued.
Mr. Palenik, widely considered one of the world's best forensic
microscopists, is in Ottawa this week, teaching a course in optical
microscopy at Carleton University. Forensic microscopy is the analysis
of materials found at crime scenes, such as clothing fibers or grease,
as opposed to the genetic examinations done for DNA analysis.
He is one of those people who has always known what he wanted to
do. As he tells it, the story behind his career is almost Capra-esque,
starting when he got a Gilbert-brand microscope when he was eight years
old.
The manual that came with the instrument, called The Vacuum
Cleaner Detective, caught his imagination in a vise grip and never let
go.
"The microscope wasn't much good. The book was much
better," Mr. Palenik said. "You could go through the dust in
your mother's vacuum cleaner and pull it apart and you could tell which
part of the house the dust came from...And, sure enough, I was able to
pick apart my mom's hair from my dad's hair and things like that, even
with a substandard microscope. Things just took off from there."
From dust bunnies, Mr. Palenik's work has moved to inquiries that
have proved notorious.
He has confirmed the authenticity of the
paper used in the identification card for "Ivan the Terrible,"
a Nazi death camp guard. He has analyzed fibers found on the truck
driven by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
In another case in Canada, he helped track down the origin of
explosives used in the twin bombings of an Air India flight over Ireland
and of the Tokyo Airport on the same day in 1985. In that case, RCMP
suspected Sikh terrorists were behind the bombings, but the force hadn't
tracked down the manufacturer of the explosive. They were stymied by one
botanical substance.
It didn't take Mr. Palenik long to discover it was cocoa shell
dust. "That was the final clue that allowed them to identify the
manufacturer and from there the paper trial."
Mr. Palenik once assisted his mentor, Dr. Walter McCrone, in his
analysis of the Shroud of Turin, which purported to show the shroud was
a clever forgery. His analysis of a tuft of hair revealed that a body
buried in Boliva was not, as had been suspected, that of Wild West
outlaw the Sundance Kid. He also disproved the theory that two gunmen
shot Martin Luther King Jr.
Perhaps his most famous case had nothing to do with a crime but
rather an episode of the Oprah Winfrey show on women's sexual
stimulants. He was asked to analyze a cream on sale over the internet.
"It was just an oil and water emulsion, like salad dressing, and
then there's the oil of wintergreen mixed in with it. So it gave kind of
a tingling sensation," he said. His findings were such a hit, he
was taped describing it.
"The most exciting projects are not these high-profile
cases. They're the ones where science is brought to bear on
things," he said.
Sometimes that science can be miraculous, such as one case in
which thieves broke into a cargo train and stole cans of silver flakes,
left from film processing, and replacing the valuable metal with sand.
Investigators called in Mr. Palenik.
Where did the switch take place? He identified traces of pollen
on the sand as having come from sagebrush. Then, he found the sand was a
special form of the mineral zircon. Only a month before, a researcher in
his laboratory had brough him back a matching sample of zircon from
Colorado.
"They sent in an investigation, and eventually that's where
everything was found to have occurred," he said. "It's a
matter of establishing fact. Rarely do we solve crime, we establish
facts." |
