to talk about today is
involving students in real casework, in
real fieldwork. And it's important
on a number of
different levels. I teach forensic science
courses and I know from
being a former crime scene investigator, students
absolutely, positively
will not get a job in forensic science if they
don't have an internship
or if they don't have some sort of real-world
practical experience.
And it's also been my
experience that there are
more students studying the forensic sciences than
there are internship
opportunities. So, you know, we have a
slew of students that are
waiting for a position - whether it be Baltimore
County Police Department,
Baltimore City Police Department, Anne Arundel
County Crime Lab - and
the wait - they'll all graduate before their
number even comes
up on the queue list. So I'll get emails
two-three years after
students have graduated - what can I do to get my
foot in the door? To get some sort
of experience? So what I want to
talk about today is an
opportunity that arose a number of years ago -
about four years ago, for
me to take students into the field to work a
real forensic case, get
real-world experience. And how that has blossomed
into something much larger
than I could have ever imagined or ever
anticipated.
So since this case that
I'll talk about in just a
few minutes - this being the case that got the ball
rolling, we've been out
on probably six cases and have had about four
come into our lab, our
forensic lab at Towson. So without further ado,
let me just talk about
this case a little bit. The victim in this case
was a young man named Mike
Hogan - Michael Hogan, but we call him Mike. And Mike's father, the
victim's father is kind
enough to join us right here and hear
this presentation.
So this all started about
four years ago when I
received a phone call on my cell phone from a
man, who's now my friend. And he was telling me how
his son had been missing
for four years and the body - part of the
body had recently been
recovered but the whole investigation
was essentially a CSI
nightmare, and was there anything that we
could do to help? We, me, students, anyone? Could we do anything? And so just to give you
a little bit of background
on the case, Mike suffered from OCD and he was 26
when he went missing? Twenty-five, 26 years
old when he went missing. He had severe OCD to the
point he couldn't function
in regular society. He just would get hung
up on tying his shoes or
looking in the snow to see if he had his someone
with his car - he couldn't
function and he had to be in a therapeutic
community.
And so the Hogan's, Mike
and his ex-wife Sandy,
they found a place called Spring White
Ranch in Vermont. A very fancy facility,
clearly a high dollar
facility, where Michael would go, and he
would live there. He would receive
treatment, but he also
would learn some skills. He would learn how to
tap trees and make syrup.
He would learn
carpentry skills. It was a therapeutic
environment. And so Mike had been
there for a year or so,
maybe a little bit longer. And by all accounts
enjoyed his time there.
He had made friends. He was doing well. He had plans to come home
to attend a graduation,
and one day he went missing. He was supposed to answer
the telephones after
lunch, and he never showed up.
He had been seen in the
morning working on the
woods crew, and he never showed up. Interestingly preceding
this was a fallout with
another member of the ranch that I won't go
into but probably factors
heavily into the story. Anyway Michael went
missing, and he was
missing for four years. Now you can see just
by looking at the images
here, it a heavily wooded area.
It's Vermont, you know. They're tapping
trees for sap. But the people that work
at this ranch, they go
out into the woods every single day to
harvest the sap. They also log.
The area is
actively hunted. So for him to go missing
for four years despite
numerous searches, despites the Hogan's
paying money to have lakes
drained and having private canine search
and rescue teams go out,
Michael was never found. Four years later, hunters
stumble across his skull
less than a half a mile from the ranch right
off of a path that was
actively traversed by ranch tenants
every single day. Michael was found in
a wooded area, basically
where I'm sitting in the path is where
the doors are.
So how people could not
smell him, how people
could not stumble across the body still, to this
day, remains a mystery. So when hunters from
the skull, the police were
dispatched - Vermont state police. They went out, and I'm not
saying anything that they
wouldn't tell you to your face. They didn't really
process the scene
like a crime scene.
They went out and moved
around some leaves, picked
up the bones that they saw and called it a day. They never called
crime lab out. They never did a concerted
search of the area for
personal effects or for evidence. So the Hogan's received
notification that Michael
had been recovered.
They go to Vermont right
after the body had been
shipped to Maryland to meet with the detectives,
and they learned
more about the story. They learned that
there was no forensic
anthropologist that was called in to look
at the remains. Mike's wife, Sandy, had
opened the casket to say
her goodbyes to Michael and was horrified when she
saw that there was hardly
anything in that casket. So there were tons
of remains that were
still out there.
Mr. Hogan had
asked for Michael's
personal effects. The detective reached into
a desk drawer and threw
them across the desk, not even in a bag. Nothing had been
processed for fingerprints
or for evidence.
He handed Mr. Hogan
Michael's shoes and bones
from his feet fell out in his lap. Michael had already been
buried at this point. Absolutely horrific,
horrific circumstances.
These are some of the
remains that were found. These are major elements,
bones of the leg. But you can see that
they look like sticks. They found the big
ones, but there's 206
bones in the human body.
They didn't find any
of the small ones. So when Mr. Hogan - that's
what they found - so when
Mr. Hogan contacted me he said is there anything
that we can do,
absolutely anything? And so his concerns - and
I'll read them quickly -
his concerns were Michael had a falling out with
another ranch member, and
it was never investigated.
The body location
was not processed
as a crime scene. The contents of
his wallet, which you just
saw in the previous slide, weren't processed
for fingerprints. There was no chain of
custody on anything
that was recovered. The family was told that
all of Michael had been
recovered and you could see from that
previous image, there
was hardly anything.
His shoes still
contained evidence,
the bones of his feet. The location of recovery
wasn't systematically
searched for evidence. His clothing was missing,
his lighter, his keys. All his personal effects
were still missing.
The area had been logged
and had been hunted and
Michael wasn't found. So and there was no
forensic anthropological
examination of the remains. There was one image that
was taken at the morgue. And it was taken
by a student that was
interested, and I quote, was interested
in forensics.
So the medical examiner
called her in to quote
unquote, get her feet wet. You know, that's not what
a family of a deceased
individual wants to hear that, you know, students
are getting their
feet wet on your son. And one of the things
that we do in forensic
anthropology - one of the very first things that
we do is we lay out the
skeleton in what we call standard anatomical
position,
which is like this. It doesn't include your
feet and your hips.
The radius and ulna are
up by the shoulder and
they're on the wrong. The ribs are upside
down and on the wrong
side, the vertebrae. So are we to trust that
the student who got her
feet wet was able to successfully look through
the remains and say that
there was no evidence of trauma? So when I met with Mike
Sr. I said I can't redo
the police investigation, and it's a very
slippery slope.
You know, if we go
up there, we're going up
there because they screwed up, essentially. And we were concerned that
if we did go to Vermont,
the police wouldn't even take us to the right
location for fear that
they would have egg on their faces. I knew we would
find remains. When I met with Mike
and Sandy, they said how
confident are you that you'll find something,
and I said 95 percent.
And I later found out that
you guys thought I was
full of it, but we found a lot. So I said what we need
to do is we need to get
permission from Vermont state police and their
invitation to come up and
just do a once over of the scene. You know, you've got to
keep your enemies close. And so that's
exactly what we did.
And we put a plan in
place, and we developed
what we called a forensic science student
organization which was a
means to funnel money and provide logistics and
provide us with the legal
coverage that we needed to take a group of
students out of state. But what I did was I found
a bus, Dylan's bus service
holds 38 people, so I said 38 people want
to go to Vermont? The first 38 - I don't
care what your major is as
long as you're willing to go outside and work. Let's do this. And so we did that.
We scheduled our trip
for May, right after
the semester ended. As a matter of fact,
several students missed
graduation to participate in this endeavor. We had graduate students,
undergraduate students,
mostly anthropology and criminal justice majors. There were forensic
chem majors.
There was even an
English major who somehow
heard about it and came. And the plan was, if we
found remains, we would,
by law, have to turn them over to the Vermont state
medical examiner's office. But ultimately, those
remains would make their
way back into my custody, and we would take
them to the Smithsonian
Institution and have them formally evaluated by my
colleague, Doug Owsley. He and I would do the
skeletal examination.
In the meantime, we
would file an order of
exhumation and have what was previously buried
of Michael exhumed. And so - just
a minute - here's
shots from the field. Before we embarked on
this endeavor, students
underwent rigorous training. We talked about the
use of compasses.
We talked about
laying in transects. My husband's an
archaeologist. He teaches here. He flew up the week before
they were out there,
laid in survey grids, five meter grids that
we would work in.
Students were trained
in their mapping, their
excavation, their recovery skills. Going with the forensic
chemistry students that
accompanied us was a crimes scene investigator
with Prince George's
county police department. And PG County let her
unload her crime scene van
in the bottom of the bus. So we took all of our
evidence and digging tools
and gloves and bags and tags.
Everything of that nature
was provided to us. We were not shy about
asking for assistance. We went to Lowe's. They provided us - free
of charge - with buckets
and tarps and gloves.
Grocery stores provided us
with water and bug spray. So it was amazing how
many people and how
many businesses in the community came together
and provided us with lots
of tools that we would need. But so students had
rigorous training
in the field. How are we to
operate in the field? How do you work
within a transect? How do you
do the controlled
service collected? So we trained for about
three days doing that.
Students also we trained
in the identification of
human and animal bone. I didn't care if they
found human bone. I didn't care if they
found animal bone. I just wanted
them to find bone.
And then I can come up
behind them and determine
was it human or animal? This turned out to be
a very important exercise
in a sense that there are coyotes in Vermont. I didn't know that, and
the coyotes were getting
all the fawn, so there was animal bone all
over the place. But sure enough,
students were finding
bone left and right. We also had a
training seminar.
We knew what had been
recovered with Michael,
meaning we knew what had not been recovered. So you have a training
center where I had
relocated skeletons and students were able
to familiarize themselves
with the elements that we were looking for, elements
that we're missing. We also knew what Michael
was wearing at the time he
was missing, so they have their eyes out
for clothing and
personal effects. This is a bird's eye view
of the map that we made.
This is the trail. Keep in mind, this is
all heavily wooded. This is where the
hunters found the skull. So you can see, it's right
off the trail and then
these were the five meter transects.
So students were assigned
- three students were
assigned to each transect and they literally, from
the trail's edge, got on
their hands and knees and just started searching. And within the first five
minutes on the scene,
we found our first bone. This is just to give you
an idea of how thickly
wooded this area was. This is also important
in terms of the timing of
the search, which was May.
We wanted to go out before
the ground cover really
started to take hold and would obscure anything
that was on the,
I don't know, ground. And Mike and Sandy
were out there with us. This is one of
the detectives. Again we were suspicious
of him in the beginning.
We didn't know if he was
going to take us to the
right location, but he certainly did. This woman here
is kind of funny. I'd just like to point
her out for a second. I - her pants probably
should've given
me the first clue.
She was just some random
woman that showed up,
and I'm not sure she was associated with the
police department. And she was convinced that
Michael was trampled by
a moose, which turned out not to be the case. We later found out that
she's on the psych side
of the ranch and got out somehow and joined
our search team. So I don't know if
you can see this, but this
was found within the first couple minutes of
being on the scene.
You remember, Mike,
when we found this. The detectives had walked
me back with the Hogans
and said this is where he was found. You're not going to
find anything, look how
thick and spongy it is. And I said look there's
his rib right there.
So that was the very
first bone that we found. And this was exciting,
too, for the students
because at this point they knew, they absolutely
knew, that we were
going to find stuff. So it was
invigorating to them. Some of the animal bone
that I talked about, poor
Bambi, lots of animal bone out there.
But like I said, it
wasn't important if it
was human or animal. As long as the students
could find it, I would
later tease out what it was and determine if
it was human or faunal. One of the areas - I
credit this entirely
to the students. Let me go back to
the map for a second.
If you look right here
- this boundary here,
it's a wetland area. It's a marshy area. And at its greatest
depth, the water would
be up to one's knees. The detectives didn't want
to search in the marsh,
because it's wet and it's nasty and they get
their suits messed up.
But the students
could care less. They were out
there to work, and,
boy, did they work. Moose woman - the woman
that was convinced that
Mike was killed by moose, thought that perhaps the
coyotes had dragged - and
I hate to be graphic, but it is what it is - parts
of Michael into the marsh. 'Cause that - she said
that they tend to feed in
areas like that because they're protected.
They can concentrate
on their food source and
not on other scavengers. So she was convinced
that we should
look in the marsh. And so students were first
to jump in there and,
again, very thick ground cover. I'm looking for a
particular slide, like
I said, this isn't the PowerPoint that
I intended.
This is Tiffany, the crime
scene investigator from
Prince George's County. And she was working with
students on mapping. While I have this slide
up, let me just go off on
a little bit of a tangent here and I'll come back
to this at the end. Things that we do in the
classroom, such as mapping
and photography and crime scene documentation,
you know, things that are
exciting the first night, but, you know, six
weeks into the semester,
students are complaining about - they don't want
to map anymore, they don't
want to take measurements.
On a real case, it takes
on so much more meaning. Students were up until
the wee hours of the night
trying to figure out how to calibrate their
compasses, how to work
within these transects. It's no longer a
multiple-choice question. It's something
that they're doing
because it matters.
They're doing it, and
it's going to go into
a homicide case file. So things like this
take on a tremendous
new meaning. So a student here, Amanda,
who's mapping - she hemmed
and hawed for months when I would make her map. And look at her, she just
looks like, you know, best
thing since sliced bread.
So this is the slide
that I was looking for. These two students -
Siobhan, who's now a
PG county crime scene investigator, and Maria,
who works in a forensic
toxicology lab, they're in the swamp. And you can't really
see, it's cut off. But Siobhan is up to
her knees in mud, and
she's trying to move.
She's trying to show Maria
what she's just found. The problem is,
she's moving, but her
boots are not moving. She - in the subsequent
slide, she falls down
on her back, completely underwater in the swamp. But she holds on to what
she had found in her hand.
And so, we get her
up and look at it,
and it's a tooth. She found Michael's tooth
in that swamp water, just
reaching around blindly. And so Mr. Hogan was out
there and I walked up to
him and I said did Michael have a cap on his tooth? And he fell on his
knees and said yeah.
When he was riding his
bike for the first time
he had his training wheels taken off, he fell
and broke his tooth. So we knew, at this
point, not only do we
have remains, we've got personal effects. And I believe this
is in his missing persons
poster, isn't it, that his tooth was capped? I think I saw
- it doesn't matter - I
think I saw it in there. So some of the remains
that students were finding
are pretty obvious.
You know, it's a humorous,
it's a bone in the
upper arm, but otherwise, they're not that obvious. And again we were out
there for three days, and
students were literally on their hands and knees
the entire three
days or in the swamp. And in addition, we
found Michael's clothing,
found his lighter. We found his keys.
All of this, his water
bottle, more clothing. We found his hair. This is one of the
transects, what it looked
like before we started, and one of the transects
when we were finished. So this is the way
an investigation should be
done - just some images of packaging up evidence.
So then phase two - and
students were involved
in every step of this investigation. The remains that we
recovered and the personal
effects were taken to Vermont state police. The remains were taken to
the Vermont state medical
examiner's office and just as planned, when the
medical examiner released
the remains, he drove them right here to Towson. And we curated them in
the forensic science lab.
In the meantime, Mike and
Sandy filed an order of
exhumation to have what was previously buried
of Michael exhumed. And that took a
couple months. We got out of the field
in May and the order
was signed in August. And so Mike and Sandy and
me and students went to
Bel Air Memorial Gardens and Michael is
disinterred, taken to
a funeral home, and the remains were subsequently
transported to the
Smithsonian, just like we had in our plan.
And so this is where
things get interesting. I think it's interesting
the whole way around, but
- so we get the remains to the lab. One of the things that I
could see in the one image
that was taken in the morgue was this little
crack right here. And I thought, possibly,
it was a nasal fracture.
As it turned out,
it's just a suture. We all have a suture that
runs down our nasal bone,
but for the majority of us, ours is midline. Michael's was off a little
bit, which means his
nose was just a little bit crooked. So that turned out
not to be anything.
But what we did find
that was significant
were fractures to his vertebrae. And, again,
students involved in this
investigation - more as an observer at
this point than an
active participant. But before I get to what
we found with Michael, one
of the things that we had to carefully and
thoroughly document was
postmortem damage to the skeleton. In other words, when we
present what we found that
was wrong with him, we need to be able to justify
that this is perimortem
trauma - this happened at or about the time he death
- at or about the time of
death, and distinguish it and tease it away from
postmortem trauma.
So what are some
of the postmortem
things that we see? On this side image on
the left, you can see all
of those puncture marks. Those are from
coyote teeth. We also have gnawing,
rodent gnawing. And we also have
degradation of elements
that were in the swamp - the PH of the swamp
water completely ate
up some of these bones.
I might have a slide
of a - no I don't. In another presentation,
I actually have the - both
humeri, both radii, both ulnae - which are bones of
the arm, side-by-side, one
of which was in the swamp, one wasn't. And even the diameter for
the bones is, you know,
it's like night and day. So we have lots of
postmortem of trauma,
primarily through the swamp water and through
animal predation.
But of significant
to us, what we found was
that Michael had several fractured vertebrae. And this is something
that was not found at the
Smithsonian, it wasn't found by the
student observer. And we also know
- even, we have the blue
vertebrae, we don't have the ones with
the brown arrow. However, based upon the
location of the fractures
on this one and this one, we know that this
one would've been
fractured too.
So at the end of the day,
we have several bones
that have been broken. And just to give you
some examples, this is a
perimortum fracture of the centrum, or the body of
one of the vertebrae. And this one, you're
looking at it from the
side and the top has frayed down,
that's perimortum. When you think of bone
fracturing, green bone
or wet bone breaks like a stick, you got to
fray it, you got to
twist it and bend it.
Dry bone is like a dry
stick on the forest floor,
you just break it and it snaps. For that fray actions to
happen - for that piece of
bone to still be adhering, we know that bone was
wet when it was fractured
or it was a perimortum injury. These are facets that
should extend out to here. These are the
locking mechanisms
of your vertebrae.
Micheal's are sheared
off in a forward way -
completely sheared off. Another perimortum
fracture - this is a
compression fracture where a vertebrae has
collapsed upon itself. So at the end of the day,
I think we raised more
questions than perhaps we answered. The case is still being
investigated by the
Vermont State Police and they've - they're taking
another look at it.
What we hope as students
though is that - or what
my students had hoped, or my goal is that the
Vermont State Police will
rethink how they handle and how they investigate
cases of missing persons. Michael was not considered
to be a vulnerable adult
despite the fact that he was seeking psychiatric
treatment for severe OCD,
as I've already mentioned. Had he been treated as
a missing and vulnerable
adult by Vermont State Police's own admission,
the scene would have
been processed entirely different in and
the missing persons' case
would be handled entirely different. So, back to the
students, what did
they get out of this? Well, it was a humbling,
absolutely emotional and
humbling expreience for all of them.
In the classroom we talk
about, you know, working
with the media - what to say to the media, what
not to say to the media. We talk about mapping,
we talk about interacting
with victim's families, which is a huge component. And it just does not do it
justice to talk about this
in a sterile environment of a classroom. I've had students who
participated in this case
that have since contacted me and e-mailed me and
said it was one of the
most moving experiences they had absolutely
ever had.
Several of them have
also pinpointed this as
being a career starter. When they've gone in for
interviews, they've been
able to say, yeah, I was on a real case and
we found a real body. And yes I've worked, you
know, in the morgue and
I've been on exhumations. As I said at the
beginning, this also has
jumpstarted what seems to be a trend in our
department right now.
In the sense that we've
gone out on several cases. In Tennessee last summer,
I took 38 students - 38
seems to be the magical number 'cause that's
what the bus holds - to
Tennessee to work on a Holly Bobo case
and a Rachael Conger
missing person case. The Baltimore County
Police Department has
called us out on two cases, both missing
persons cases. One, students
found a decomposed body,
essentially, in Overlea.
And on another case
we did the search
for human remains. The skull had been
found on the property
of a high school. Students went out
and they found the
rest of the body. Last night I got a call
from a Baltimore County
homicide, and I have to meet them right after
this because a skull was
just recently found in someone's basement so I'm
going with some students
to investigate that.
But also, in terms of
diversity of learners, I -
you know, you always have the students that sign
up for these things, and
you're thinking, uh oh, like, geeze. Do I really want
to take them out
to a scene with me? And I'll tell you, some of
the students that I have
been the most concerned about in the classroom
have absolutely
excelled in the fields. You know, you just put the
information in a different
context, in a different venue and they excel. When I went to Tennessee,
I had one student who
was our media contact.
So any time the media had
questions, she was the one
that was put up front to answer the questions. In Tennessee, also,
we worked very closely
with one of the victim's families. And I'd had another
student who was a
psychology student, and she was the point
of contact for them. So, you know, to go back
to what we were talking
about this morning with the keynote speaker, which
was diverse opportunities,
these opportunities to learn the same information
in a different context.
That's what this
is all about. In terms of applying it to
your classrooms, this is
a little different in the sense that you're called
upon when there's an
exigent circumstance, but when I was listening to
this oil spill or chemical
spill - I'm sorry - in West Virginia, I thought,
you know, in a different
venue, it would be absolutely a perfect
opportunity if that were
to be in Maryland to have a group of, say, geology
students or geography
students that were trained in hazmat. Motivate - get them up,
get them out the door and
have them put their skills to work. So I'm not saying that,
you know, in all of your
classes you can go look for dead bodies, but it's
good to have a group of
students that's trained in the skill.
Biology, you know,
wing washers when
there's an oil spill. Have students go down
to Florida and take
care of wild life. There's ways to train
students and keep them
motivated and give back to the community. Thank you.
(APPLAUSE) >> Are
there any questions
for Dr. Kollman? >> I'll shout. Was there a credible
conjecture about Michael's
death based on the new evidence? I'm sure there were
many conjectures. Students were probably
very much involved in it.
>>Dr. Kollman: Yeah, well, what
we know he died from is
blunt force trauma to the spine. The trauma to the
spine itself probably
did not kill him. It wasn't high enough
on the cervical spine.
But it would've rendered
him incapable of walking. The person of interest,
Brian, has a long record. He's a big guy. What we think it could be
is possibly some sort of
martial arts movement, but we just don't know.
One of the things that was
suggested was that maybe
he climbed a tree and fell out. But the injury is over the
- too much of the spine
for that to be the case. And if you think back to
that very first rip that
we found, it was encased in that spongy stuff. That forest floor
is like a mattress.
You could jump off of a
tree and bounce back on
to the top of the tree. That would not
have done it. There's also some
conjecture that maybe a
log had broken off and caused his
(unintelligible). That was the first time
I had ever heard of that.
You know, these big
sticks fall off and
that could've hit him. But it's the
same argument. It's spread over too much
of the spine and it's
a force, it's a shearing force. It's not the
spinous process has been
fractured, it's the actual blocking mechanism.
Like, I hate to
jerk myself around. But it's an
action like that. So, again, I think we
opened as many, you know
- raised as many questions as we could. Anything else? .
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