You've been involved in a lot of high profile cases, although one of the more interesting is the case of the wood chipper murder in Newtown, Connecticut.  Helle Crafts, a flight attendant, disappeared in 1986.  Her husband, Richard Crafts, claimed that they'd had an argument and she'd left and never came back.  He actually filed a missing persons report, and he might have gotten away with murder if it hadn't been for the fact that a snowplow driver had seen someone down by the river one night running a wood chipper.   The police investigated and found tiny fragments of bone, cloth, hair, a letter, and other remains.  Then they located evidence that Craft had rented a wood chipper from another town.  It was the first time in the state's history that a man was convicted of murder without the body being found.  I know you were part of that investigation, and that must have been pretty challenging, but what has been your most challenging case to date?

Famous Crimes Revisited

Some people say it must be O. J. Simpson, and I tell them that's the least challenging.  Other people say the wood chipper murder, and yes, that case looks pretty challenging because the victim vanished.  We went through snow inch by inch in the middle of the winter and we only found fifty-six little tiny bone chips because the victim's body went through a large commercial wood chipper.  It blew everything into the river.  But we were able to put it together.  Not every case is difficult.  If you handle it correctly, people can look at it later and say, "Ah, that was easy."  If you handle it incorrectly, an easy case later becomes difficult.

But with the wood chipper case, you were facing a precedent in that state of going to trial without a body.

Yes, but we have another case that was even better than that.  With the wood chipper case, at least we found some hair and bone chips.  The other case happened a couple of years ago in a massage parlor.  A young lady, 16 years old, went to perform a service and was supposed to return around 2:00 that afternoon.  By 4:00, she hadn't come back.  Finally the manager called the place where she was supposed to go and they said that she'd already left.  So the police were called to this location, where she was last seen.  They got a search warrant but didn't find anything.

I was in Washington giving a lecture and got this phone call, "Can you come back right away, Dr. Lee?"  So I came back in the middle of the night and went to the house.  It was a meticulous killing, very clean.  When I got to the basement, I said it was just too clean.  It had a wall-to-wall carpet that had recently been shampooed.  It was kind of wet.  The detective said, "Doc, we've been here almost ten hours and we didn't see anything."  I said, "Look, put your cheek against the carpet."  So all fourteen of them right away dropped their cheek to the carpet.  "You're right," they said, "it's damp."  We did some chemical tests with Ortho-tolidine and it turned blue: we found a trace amount of blood.  So we cut the carpet.  Guess what we found?  Underneath the padding there was a large pool of blood.  We estimated about 2000 cc.  In 1979, I'd written a paper about estimating volume of blood and that now became important in this case, because according to her body size, if she'd lost that much blood, she'd be dead.  No body was found before it went to trial, but we used the information about the blood to get the conviction.

Two years after this case, we found the body.  About sixty miles from this location, they found skeletal remains in a backyard.  We did a reverse paternity test.  We had used her parents' blood to compare with the blood found under the carpet to establish her identity, and with the remains, we used her parents' DNA to compare it with the DNA in the bone. 

How do you talk to a jury about scientific evidence?

You cannot use long words.  The jury is intelligent.  I approach them in a logical way to present scientific facts—only the facts.  I don't get into speculation.  Let the jury make its own decision.  I use simple life examples.  Instead of naming a chemical test, I just say "chemical test."  I don't try to impress them.  If a bullet wound was found in the upper body, I just say, "upper body," instead of superior or anterior. 

Isn't it frustrating to come into a case where others have been there before you, such as when you're asked to consult?  You go through a number of those cases in your book, Famous Cases Revisited.  It's clear that people have been over the ground before you and you now come in at something of a disadvantage, especially since mistakes have been made.  I like the way you list the problems with each case, such as how the defense was weak or prevented from a full evaluation of the crime scene, and evidence was collected badly or was lost.  In cases like the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Marilyn Sheppard murder, and the JonBenet Ramsey killing, it must be difficult to make the kind of evaluation you want to make.

Ninety-nine percent of the police investigators try to do a good job, but sometimes lack of resources, experience, or time causes mistakes.  Unintentional mistakes are excusable, and we hope they don't make it next time.  Unfortunately some make intentional mistakes: they plant evidence or change evidence.  That makes a case frustrating.  Cold cases are difficult, too, but that's why people come to me.  If it's easy, they don't want to come to me.  Yet if original documentation is gone, as with the John F. Kennedy case, you can't call me on the phone and ask for an interpretation.  You can't call me in my office in Connecticut and ask, "Dr. Lee, what does Florida look like?"  If you don't give me a picture of what it looks like, how can I tell you?  I went into that case, but it was a limited study.  It was a question of whether newer technology can improve the image of a photo or help with other tests.