(January 2010)

A day in the life of the real Horatio

Tom McCarthy speaks to forensic detective Bob O’Brien

Horatio makes it look so easy in CSI: Miami. He arrives at the crime scene, sums up the evidence with a cursory glance, and then kicks off the opening credits with a one-liner. Example – Colleague: “Her friend said she came down to drink some mojitos and catch some sun.”  Horatio: “Well it looks like … (pause to put on sunglasses) something (dramatic pause) … caught her.” Then the opening theme kicks off and Horatio solves the crime inside 45 minutes using a bizarre array of technology. He has a team but they often seem more like a hindrance to his prowess as a forensic detective than anything else. How close to reality do shows like CSI and Cold Case really operate however? I jumped at the chance to investigate this when Bob O’Brien came to UCC recently.

Real life forensic scientist Bob O’Brien operates out of Connecticut Forensic Science Lab. His recent workshop on campus with science teachers allowed me a chance to interrogate him on the daily workings of a real life crime scene detective and examine where fact and TV fiction diverge. Originally a chemist by trade, Mr. O’Brien has come a long way from working in pharmaceuticals and indeed Co. Clare where his ancestors hailed from. With originally a small but growing curiosity in the area of forensics in 1986 (at that stage in its infancy), he approached a local Connecticut lab to merely enquire about forensics and maybe get a tour of the building. The man on the other end of the phone insistently told him to come in the following day. Little did O’Brien know he was in fact talking to a world renowned forensic scientist, Dr. Henry Lee, who has worked on the high profile Jon Benet Ramsey, Elizabeth Smart and OJ Simpson cases, as well as the Washington DC sniper shootings and the forensic nightmare following the 9/11 attacks. Dr. Lee asked O’Brien there and then – “When can you start?” O’Brien was unsure, but Dr. Lee was adamant – “You love it, you work. You start next week.” This first foray into the often gritty world of forensics has resulted in a fascinating life and further training at some of the same facilities used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in training their agents.

O’Brien’s first big case occurred in Connecticut where under the tutorship of Dr. Lee, the two investigators took on the ‘Wood Chipper’ case. A husband killed his wife, froze her body and proceeded to use a chainsaw to severe her limbs. He then put the limbs through a wood chipper to hide the evidence. This was the first case in Connecticut where a conviction was obtained without a body, and is the case that propelled Dr. Lee and his colleagues to fame for the first time.

Getting a job so easily would be a difficult feat today, be it Ireland or the USA. However, Mr. O’Brien feels that Ireland is living up to international standards in terms of educating its own forensic scientists – “I think the Irish philosophy is working. You’re teaching forensic science along with chemistry and biology and you’re getting the best of all these worlds. In the States I try to tell people to make themselves more marketable – if there’s not a job in the forensic science field, there’s a lot of pharmaceuticals companies and biotechnology firms – you can kind of mould into one of those jobs in the meantime.”

Image courtesy of indigophotos@aol.com

O’Brien certainly leads a hectic lifestyle, with a varying mix each week of teaching (at 3 different colleges), consultancy work (often with the FBI) as well as frequent court visits as an expert witness. On top of this is full time employment with the Connecticut Crime Lab often involving attendance of crime scenes.

Depending on the nature of the offence, O’Brien and his team will end up doing anything from giving advice to suiting up in protective clothing to collect evidence for later analysis.

Income is certainly not the motivator for O’Brien, who had a greater wage in pharmaceuticals before he made the move to forensics. “I think forensic science in itself is a very self-motivating career … I go to bed at night and I watch the news and I’m watching cases which will be on my desk tomorrow. It keeps life very interesting.”

It does seem like his work is never quite finished. Shortly after the interview he flew back to the States in order to testify as an expert witness at a police-involved shooting, armed with a case brief from the attorney to examine en route home. He is present as a neutral expert, rather than taking the side of any one party. On other days, he is often at the lab from 7am onwards where his role revolves around supervising the identification section, made up of 19 scientists. His other specialities involve firearms (e.g. gunpowder residue) and fingerprints. Inevitably administrative work is part of the job also but high profile cases keep things interesting. The most recent O’Brien has worked on occurred at Yale University where a female pharmacology student mysteriously vanished on campus on the day before her wedding, a situation which further fuelled the media interest. She was seen entering the campus earlier that day but never leaving. Her body was eventually found stuffed inside the wall of a campus building – she had been the victim of strangulation. A campus employee was later arrested for the crime.

O’Brien is keen to stress that unlike the hero/heroine scenario so often portrayed on TV, no one person solves a case - a team approach is everything. For the Yale case, O’Brien along with his colleagues was called in to help collect the physical evidence in cooperation with the state police. This is a far cry from the one man army inspired by Horatio and Co. – “We couldn’t survive with just one person. We need everybody’s expertise to come into play.” This is in part testament to just how far the profession has come. There are literally so many different specialities, from firearms to fingerprints to profiling, that one man’s work 30 years ago would be impossible today without a balanced team of professionals.

Much like we all yearn to ask doctors and nurses whether they watch House, I couldn’t resist asking O’Brien whether he watched any of the various incarnations of CSI. “It’s not the real world. A lot of the stuff is hi-tech Hollywood which makes my job tougher when I’m on the stand testifying.” He coins the phenomenon as the ‘CSI Effect’. “The jury now expects to have DNA. If they don’t have DNA then it’s ‘The guy didn’t do it’. The juries are more educated or at least think they are about the science of the whole process, when in fact the Hollywood version glamorises it into a ten minute segment.” In contrast, O’Brien might spend an entire day or more examining a single piece of trace evidence looking for a fibre or tear. “The real life is that you are looking at sometimes gory evidence. It’s physical evidence that someone was killed in, along with blood and biological fluids. You have to have a strong will and focus on the evidence rather than think ‘Someone was in this clothing’ or ‘Someone got stabbed by this knife.’ You have to detach yourself from the situation as best you can.” O’Brien maintains that this can sometimes be difficult however when crimes against the elderly or very young are carried out. 

Four Courts, Dublin

The Josef Fritzl case (an Austrian who kidnapped and systematically abused his own daughter over a 24 year period), alongside the case of predator and former nursery worker Vanessa George (who sexually abused countless children in a UK nursery before being detected) demonstrates that ever more heinous crimes are emerging. It often seems criminals are becoming ever more devious and intelligent. The technology is at least keeping pace however. O’Brien highlights that one of the biggest advances in recent years is that of national and international databases that allow the names of suspects and convicts to be cross-referenced. APHIS (dealing with fingerprints), CODIS (DNA profiles) and NIBIN (firearms and cartridge case database) are but three examples of the increasingly useful resource. For instance an individual who carried out a burglary five years previously and was added to the database at that time might go on to commit a rape. Hair fibres he leaves at the scene can then be used to successfully identify and prosecute him. The other major advance is DNA which has been successfully resulted in thousands of successful convictions against individuals with crimes ranging from major sexual offences to minor burglaries. “It has really captured the heart of the people and we expect a lot out of it. We can do a lot we couldn’t do 15 or 20 years ago.”

A growing minority in the USA and further afield make the argument again and again in favour of a nationwide capture of fingerprints and DNA profiles. On the surface it seems innocent enough. After all if you have nothing to hide, then why oppose such a move? From a scientist’s prospective, O’Brien agrees with this – “I would love to have everybody categorised on the database only because it would make our job easier.” Outside of this however, he feels civil liberties would be jeopardised and possibly subject to abuse by insurance companies or ‘Big Brother’ governments. Even UCC’s own Mardyke gym employs (optional) biometric scanning for entry onto the premises. As farfetched as it might sound, can anyone really be that comfortable with supplying such personal (in every sense of the word) information to a company? It certainly seems to be an issue American citizens are far more worried about then Irish citizens, which must surely stem from their constitution which so centrally and staunchly defends individual freedoms.

It is also challenging, particularly when attempting to present evidence to a jury that could consist of a PhD holder in one corner and a janitor in another, or dealing with the backlog of cases that is common to virtually every forensic lab worldwide. On a recent trip to the Dublin Crime Lab for instance he met with the staff and discovered he shared the same issues as they did in relation to funding and equipment despite living 2000 miles away. While the name of the Irish state pathologist Marie Cassidy seems to be mentioned in every crime where foul play is suspected in Ireland, Connecticut alone has 5 or 6 state pathologists at any one time to tackle the in excess of 300 homicides seen there each year, a figure that does not include assaults or rapes.

Why any one case can capture the attention of the media so easily while another fails to, lies beyond the scope of the discussion here. However O’Brien feels every case is high-profile from the perspective of the victim’s families and thus finds his role fulfilling. “If one of your family members dies, then it’s a high profile case to you.” 

With thanks to Dr. Declan Kennedy, Dept. of Education, University College Cork.