Crime Scene Facts from RS Writing Services

He has 20 years of police service including patrol, K9, criminal investigations, narcotics, crime scene processing, and emergency management. Glenn gives manuscripts the reality they need from his own experience. He's an expert in pinpointing the flaws in law enforcement scenes, including dialogue and lingo. And because he's an author, he understands how fiction works and has the skills to offer other authors helpful solutions to problem areas.


Candice Speare is an author, as well as a freelance content reviewer for Barbour Heartsong Presents: Mysteries! While Candice must defer to her partner's expertise in law enforcement, she is familiar enough with the topic to identify problem areas. She spent two years volunteering at her local sheriff’s office training academy, participating in recruit training scenarios and other aspects of recruit education.

We’re honored to be visiting Novel Journey today. We are co-owners of RS Writing Services, a law enforcement consulting service for mystery and suspense writers. In a nutshell, our business is to help writers obtain the law enforcement information they need in an easy, convenient way.

Not many writers have law enforcement backgrounds, and often they’ll get in the middle of a manuscript and realize they’re missing an essential law enforcement fact. Or, as they plot their books, they’ll wonder, is this realistic? Would this really happen? Very often, writers end up spending a lot of time and effort trying to develop contacts with overworked cops, and then they’re limited by how much time those men and women can give because answering questions does take time.

That’s why we started RS Writing Services. To provide writers easy access to the information they need at very reasonable fees.

Today Glenn is going to talk a bit about crime scene investigation.

One of the interesting things with crime scenes is that no matter what the crime, the way they are investigated is generally the same (or should be). A formula, so to speak. While each crime is unique, the way they are investigated is not.

We’ll look at a couple of scenes from Candice’s books and what may be unique to them or what obstacles they may present.

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From Murder in the Milk Case, Heartsong Presents: Mysteries!

Scene: A grocery store

Then I hurried on to the milk case. There I opened the glass door, grabbed three gallons, and turned to leave, but the hand behind the milk had already caught my eye. It just took a minute to move along my optic nerves to my brain. . . Sure enough. The hand was attached to an arm. . .No way, I told myself as I peered back into the dairy case. There couldn’t possibly be a hand behind the 2 percent milk. Surely this was a hallucination.

There was no blood on the hand, which there would have been had it been separated from its arm. At least if it were fresh. I guess. I squinted to see into the cold room behind the dairy case. In my peripheral vision, I thought I saw a flash of red, but the realization that the arm was attached to a man’s body distracted me. He was sprawled over a sixwheeled cart, positioned in a way that would be terribly uncomfortable for someone alive. A familiar bald head dangled, facing away from me, and a large knife protruded from his white-shirt-clad stomach. I had run into Jim Bob, all right. But I doubted I’d ever run into him again.

From Band Room Bash, Heartsong Presents: Mysteries!

Scene: Band Room in a high school

We’d found Georgia . She was lying in the space behind the door next to the chair and a fallen music stand. The weight of her prone body must have been what held the door shut. I swallowed hard then shook the strap of my purse off my shoulder and dropped it to the floor. “Tommy, call 911.”

“Mom, you gotta be careful. Dad said to watch out for you and—”

“Thank you, but please, just call.” I knelt clumsily next to Georgia, ignoring the murmurs of Tommy’s voice. Blood oozed through her thick, black, shoulder length hair, gathering in a puddle on the floor, which was drying around the edges. She had been sick—I saw remnants of that, too. Her eyes were open and sightless. I was raised on a farm. I’d seen the eyes of enough dead animals to recognize no life when I saw it.

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With any crime scene, the first and foremost priority is to protect it. The first officer at the scene has to protect the scene from intrusion by witnesses, by-standers, do-gooders, and believe it or not, OTHER cops.

Cops are the worst crime scene protocol violators out there. Especially on a slow night when nothing else is going on, because everyone wants to come see what happened. Cops show up, trample over everything, drop cigarette ashes and spill their coffee, and make everyone else’s jobs impossible.

Remember the whole 1995 OJ Simpson crime scene? It was horribly handled and that was what partially led to his not guilty plea. Prosecutors and District Attorneys are so paranoid about trying cases that aren’t gift-wrapped with a confession that any compromise in a crime scene will instantly set the case back right at the beginning of a trial. This is applicable from the big cities to the one man sheriff departments.

Once the crime scene is protected, which includes the always-present yellow crime scene tape, it also may involve protecting specific items from the weather. Blood, fingerprints, and DNA don’t get along well with rain, so a first on scene officer may have to go a little further and actually cover things up. Documentation is every cop’s friend. In the world of trials and police reports, if you didn’t document it…it didn’t happen. No matter what you say you did, if you don’t document it, it can’t be used.

Two problems that our first crime scene (from Murder in the Milk Case) presents is the body is in the cooler, which will prevent a time of death determination, and the actual moving of the body with the knife intact. The knife wouldn’t be removed unless the medical examiner determined to do so.

Oh, and just so everyone knows…. NO ONE touches the body until the Medical Examiner gets there. Well at least no one who doesn’t want to be screamed at and humiliated in front of everyone at the crime scene.

Once the Medical Examiner arrives, which could be hours away, the ME goes through and moves the body, checks it for ID, and looks at the preliminary wounds. Up until that point the crime scene investigators can mark objects, take measurements, and photographs.

In our first crime scene, the store would instantly be closed, employees segregated and interviewed separately. Any store surveillance tapes would be taken also.

Everything is of evidentiary value!! In our second crime scene, even the victim “getting sick” would be important. It could lead to what she had for lunch, which may tell who she was with and that could be the killer. Anything can be evidence.

If you don’t take it, you can never go back for it, or at least not without a warrant. Dusting for fingerprints will take place at both the scene and back at the police station on any evidence that may yield fingerprints. This can be done by traditional “dusting” or by the cynoacrolate method aka “super glue” treatment. The evidence is sealed in a tank with some super glue, the fumes then stick to any fingerprints and make them much easier to dust and lift for examination.

The prints go to the AFIS system (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) and are compared with millions already on file.

Speaking of warrants, in BOTH our crime scenes, there are only two options. Getting the owner of the store or the superintendent or principal of the school to sign a “Consent to Search” form, or obtaining a Search Warrant. Just because there is a dead body somewhere doesn’t mean the police can go traipsing around looking for whatever they want. They CAN secure the scene and prevent anyone else from going in; they just can’t search for anything or take any evidence.

Both of our victims would be the participants of an autopsy to determine time and cause of death. This procedure is quite in-depth and would take a lot of time to explain. Instead, we'd like to open up to questions from our readers. If you have a question regarding police procedure at a crime scene, please post that question in the comments section for Glenn and Candy.

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Please visit Glenn and Candy at http://www.rswritingservices.com/. And you can also visit our author Websites: http://www.glennrambo.com/ and http://www.candicemillerspeare.com/.