Sergeant Trevor Evans has been in the police force for twenty-seven years, and a Crime Scene Examiner for the past seventeen of those. When he was nineteen-years-old, Evans decided he wanted a career that offered different experiences every day. He'd tried working as a clerk, and some part time study, but that wasn't for him. As a teenager, he'd met a couple of cops and their work sounded interesting. Evans applied to become a police officer, and was accepted to train at the Victoria Police Academy.
On 7 November 1977, Trevor Evans, with his packed suitcase and his regulation short-back-and-sides haircut, arrived at the imposing Police Academy in Glen Waverley. In those days, many of the classes were run by senior constables who fashioned themselves after army drill sergeants. On the very first day, Evans recalls one such chap standing in front of the raw recruits screaming so loudly that his face glowed red and spittle flew from his mouth as he yelled. He finished his baptism of fire with a directive - they all had to go home and get their hair cut even shorter. It would be the last chance they would get to leave the Academy during the week. Their twenty weeks was akin to being in prison with weekend leave.
That night at home, Evans's mum took one look at her son and knew that if she had have told him he didn't have to go back to the Academy, he wouldn't have. Luckily, she had the sense to keep her own counsel and her son returned the following day.
The old-style of training for police recruits was raw and regimented. There was a definite pecking order, and the junior ones did as they were told. Trevor Evans enjoyed his training but really didn't like the Academy, and each Sunday, after a weekend's respite, he drove up Waverley Road and saw the huge imposing Police Academy looming on top of the hill and shuddered inwardly.
Despite not enjoying being at the Academy, graduation happened soon enough and the recruits practised their drills and marches. When graduation day rolled around, so did the dark thunder clouds, and it literally rained on their parade. Evans and his squad ended up graduating in the Academy's beautiful chapel.
After graduation, in the real world of policing, Trevor Evans had a slow start at Ringwood police station. There was lots of patrolling in the van, and lots of foot patrols through the Eastland Shopping Centre. After his three-month probation period was over, Evans was sent to the Information Bureau of Records. In those days, information on criminals was stored on cards not unlike a library cataloguing system. When police officers rang through for information on someone, IBR personnel would locate the alphabetised drawer, pluck out the appropriate card and read out the information over the phone. It was a cumbersome, but necessary system. The fact that the secondment was only for twelve months, and that next door to the Information Bureau of Records was a cavernous room filled with rows of young female typists typing up the index cards, meant that Evans lasted out his time in fairly good humour. He also learnt the importance of writing as much information about people as you could for future reference - tattoos, distinguishing features, known associates - the information could prove vital for future investigations.
Next posting for the young recruit was at the Richmond police station. Here Trevor Evans really started his policing education. The good Catholic boy from the Eastern suburbs was about to learn that inner-city Richmond, with its clusters of monolithic housing commission towers, high unemployment and thirty-seven pubs for its hard-drinking locals to choose from, would certainly provide him with an interesting work environment. Nothing in Richmond was mundane.
Evans remembers domestic violence as being particularly prevalent in the Richmond housing commission flats. Neighbours would call and report screaming matches from nearby flats, and Evans, then aged just twenty, would find himself mediating between warring couples old enough to be his parents. Particularly frustrating was the wife's mantra that he heard too often: 'I love him. He only bashes me when he drinks...'
Trouble was, a lot of the husbands drank all the time.
Another thing, the young constable learnt early on in Richmond was that you never park a police car near the housing commission high-rises. When he'd been there a while, Evans was driving a fellow officer to a domestic dispute at one of the high-rises. His colleague had recently transferred to Richmond, and Evans told him about the parking rule. Another back-up police car from a nearby policing district had arrived ahead of them. Those cops had already raced into the building leaving their car parked too close to the towers. As Evans and his partner walked past the police car, pausing only to take in its smashed windscreen and driver's side window and the bottles pelted from upstairs windows strewn around, Evans said laconically, 'That's why you never park near the buildings.'
The high-rise flats also came with their own sets of rules. If cops were called to a disturbance, they would catch the lifts which always smelled pungently of urine, to a floor above or below the floor they'd been called to - just in case the call was a set up and people were waiting outside the lifts to jump the cops.
And some of the Richmond kids started their apprenticeships early - Evans remembers being called regularly to the local primary school to disarm a nine-year-old boy with a penchant for coming to school armed with a knife.
As a uniformed constable, Trevor Evans didn't really come across any of the hardened criminals although he was well aware of the presence of the notorious Pettingill family in the area. Mostly, the uniformed cops were kept busy enough patrolling the mean streets and dealing with the local drunks and street offences like assaults, offensive behaviour, and thefts. Richmond had a host of old drunks who were real characters. On a cold winter's night, they would parade into the Richmond police station and say, 'It's cold out tonight, sir.' Evans recalls this with a shrug. 'We'd give them a bed for the night. They were harmless. Mostly you'd lock them up for their own safety. If we didn't they'd be staggering around the street.'
Evans's father had worked closely with the St Vincent de Paul Society, and helping the helpless was a family trait.
After two years in Richmond, Evans, who was by now married with a baby, decided that a move to the country would be a refreshing change from excitement of inner-city policing. He applied for a position in Camperdown - a small town halfway between Colac and Warrnambool. Camperdown was farming country where it was said that it rained for nine months of the year and dripped off the trees for the other three months.
Richmond cops had patrolled two-up so there was always someone to back you up; in Camperdown, police officers often rode solo, so as a cop, you were on your own. Evans enjoyed this self-reliance. Country policing also meant that you were never really off duty. Evans remembers a time when he was driving home after visiting his wife in hospital. She had just given birth to their second child. On the way home, he saw a fellow police officer parked on the side of the road having trouble with a gang of youths. And so the new dad pulled over and helped his colleague arrest them and take them back to the police lock-up.
In the country, everyone knew everyone and to truly integrate into the community, Trevor Evans joined the local footy club, the local church, and a couple of the services clubs. He stayed in Camperdown for four years and loved the community, but with a wife and two young children, he decided to try for a position closer to home and the support of his extended family.
During his policing years in Camperdown, Evans had come into contact with a couple of crime scene examiners. Having observed the work they did, he started to think about applying for a position himself. He was a keen amateur photographer and after spending seven years in general policing, he decided that he'd like to specialise, perhaps starting with crime scene photography. One particular case sticks out in his mind as influencing the decision. In Camperdown, Evans was called out when a car was reported stolen from a car yard. When the car was finally located, Evans noticed a shoe impression on the rubber floor of the car. He carefully sketched the pattern of the shoe impression in his notebook. When a suspect came to light shortly after, Evans asked the suspect to take off his shoes. The soles had the same star patterns that Evans had sketched earlier. Being able to link evidence to an offender in this case was a defining moment in his decision to work crime scenes.
After a couple of applications to the sought-after positions at crime scene photographics, Evans was finally accepted in May 1988. The Victoria Police State Forensic Science Laboratory by then had moved to the large complex in Macleod, and training for the first three months involved buddying up with an experienced crime scene photographer and working alongside him or her. At the end of the three months, he was on his own.
One of the first valuable lessons Trevor Evans learned was that you should never answer the phone at the scene of a homicide. While he was training, he and his photographic buddy attended a case where a woman had been murdered and lay dead in her bed with a Wiltshire knife sticking out of her neck. The phone rang and, without thinking, Evans picked it up.
'Who are you?' demanded a female voice.
'Er...I'm from the police...' stammered Evans, '...and who are you?'
'I'm [the victim's] mother!' came the reply.
Not knowing even where to begin, Evans quickly handed the phone over to an experienced Homicide detective to gently explain to the hysterical woman that her daughter had been murdered.
In those days, a crime scene photographer photographed a diverse range of things: collisions, stolen property, suspicious deaths, bank robbery scenes, and of course murder scenes. Photographers also spent time at the old city morgue and took photos of post-mortem examinations. The old city morgue is remembered fondly by few - Trevor Evans thought it had all the atmosphere of a B-grade horror movie. Luckily he only had to work there a few times before the new state-of-the-art complex opened in Kavanagh Street in Southbank.
In his work in photography, Trevor Evans soon got used to bodies in various states of damage and decay. He says bodies that aren't found for a while are the worst. Once an old lady had died in her home and had not been found until weeks after her death. The partially decomposed corpse was covered in maggots and the stench was overwhelming. Sights like these become part of the rich tapestry of crime scene examination.
In those days, at every murder or suspicious death, Forensics sent two crime scene examiners, one crime scene photographer, and two video operators. More recently, they only send one of each.
In the year and a half that he worked as a police photographer, Trevor Evans worked closely with crime scene examiners. He was a keen assistant and followed their directives on what to photograph at the scenes he attended until it became intuitive. A crime scene examiner's role was to attend and make a search of the crime scene, then record the scene using notes, photographs, and sketches, and finally to collect and record evidence in such a way that it can be used in court to give a picture of what may or may not have happened. Crime scene examiners were the central figures in the work done to process a murder scene - which also put them in the front line of every major crime committed in Victoria. Evans knew that one day, he would like to be in that position.
In September 1989, a vacancy came up for a crime scene examiner and Evans applied for and was accepted to the position.
Evans's very first homicide where he was the main crime scene examiner involved a murder in 1990. An Asian woman had found out her husband was having an affair with another Asian woman. She went around to her rival's house armed with acid and a knife. When the other woman had opened her front door, the wife had thrown the acid in her face and then proceeded to stab her. By the time Evans arrived, the wife was in custody, the mistress was dead, and the house was a bloodbath.
One of the worst cases in terms of what Evans describes as 'sheer nastiness' was when he was called to a double murder at a massage parlour in a lovely old Victorian house in Fitzroy. The massage parlour had a number of bedrooms and three were set up with massage tables; the fourth bedroom was rented to a male Chinese student. In the living room, a Filipino girl sat slumped on the couch. She had suffered so many stab wounds in her chest that it looked like a pin cushion. She had been handcuffed during the attack.
In the kitchen, the Chinese student lay face-down on the floor, dead. He too had been handcuffed and unable to defend himself. Investigators were shocked to find that he'd been stabbed many times in his back - all along his spinal column as if the killer had tried to sever his spinal chord in as many places as possible. When the body was rolled over, investigators saw that he had also been stabbed once in the abdomen. Unfortunately, the perpetrators for this double homicide were never caught.
While some homicides are open and shut, some are not. The aspect Evans most enjoys about his job is searching for clues and hopefully being able to link physical evidence to an offender. And when an offender is caught, the evidence he collects can successfully deny or corroborate their account. In his seventeen years examining crime scenes, Evans has worked on such high-profile cases as Jaidyn Leskie and Jane Thurgood-Dove.
In Moe, on the night of 14 June 1997, Greg Domaszewicz was minding the son of his girlfriend, Bilynda Murphy. Little Jaidyn Leskie was just thirteen-and-a-half months old.
In the early hours of the next morning, Jaidyn vanished, a severed pig's head had been thrown at Domaszewicz's house, and a mystery had begun that would get much of Australian postulating on the state of small-town poverty, unemployment, and whether or not single mothers had children to different fathers in order to 'rort the system'.
When Trevor Evans was called in to examine the crime scene, he, the photographer and two video operators met first at the Moe police station for a briefing. Domaszewicz had told police that he had gone to pick up Bilynda Murphy from a night out and left the sleeping baby home alone in the early hours of 15 June. When the two had returned to Domaszewicz's house, the infant was gone.
Evans examined the pig's head which was lying outside a broken window at Domaszewicz's house in Moe. The crime scene examiner could see that the pig's head had been thrown at least twice at the house. On the eave above the window, was evidence of blood and pig's hair, where the head had obviously struck at least once before it was thrown again, this time at the window. Although the pig's head had smashed the window, it had bounced back and landed on the ground outside the house.
Inside the house, there was no sign of the missing little boy. Evans did find some hair on the heater, and blood on tissues in the rubbish bin that would later be found to belong to Jaidyn. But that was about it.
When a child vanishes, it is always the collective hope of the community that perhaps some childless couple have taken him to bring him up as their own showering him with love and joy. To entertain any less-positive thoughts, is to invite the unspeakable. For months after his examination of the toddler's disappearance, Evans would sometimes wake in the middle of the night and wonder what did I miss? But he knew that he and his colleagues had got everything they could get out of the crime scene. But it just wasn't enough to indicate where the missing boy might be, and also who was definitely responsible for his disappearance.
Part of the mystery was solved on New Years Day 1998, when Jaidyn Leskie's little body was recovered from Blue Rock Dam, near Moe. Greg Domaszewicz was charged, tried, and found not guilty of Jaidyn's murder. The Homicide Squad has now closed the case.
Five months after Jaidyn Leskie went missing from Moe, another case would capture intense public interest. On 6 November 1997, Jane Thurgood-Dove, a 35-year-old mother of three young children, was gunned down in the driveway of her home in Muriel Street, Niddrie. While the case would grow to be front-page news for weeks, when crime scene examiners get called out to murder scenes, they never know how big a case will be. Although, they get pretty good at guessing.
When Trevor Evans stared down at the dead woman who had been shot three times in the head, he certainly knew that the case had the potential to attract a lot of public attention. Here was a mother who had picked up her kids from school one afternoon, driven them home, pulled into her driveway and then been chased around her car by a pot-bellied gunman before being shot dead in front of her children.
In Evans's experience, some of the homicides that happen in Victoria each year attract the media but most don't. Crime scene examiners never let that fact get in the way of their work. By the time Evans arrived at the Thurgood-Dove murder scene, the children of course had been taken away, but Jane Thurgood-Dove's body still lay where it had fallen. The immediate body-site had been screened off from the eyes of the neighbours, and Muriel Street had been cordoned off. Residents had to be escorted in and out on foot by uniformed police.
Together with a video operator and a photographer, Evans and his colleagues examined the scene. Ballistics was also called in because Thurgood-Dove had been shot. This was one of those crime scenes where there wasn't much to go on and there was little in the way of evidence to link this shooting to an offender. The shooter and an accomplice had driven a stolen Holden Commodore which was found burnt out in nearby Farrell Street. They would have swapped the Commodore for a second getaway car, and torched the car in case it contained any evidence.
Evans spent many hours working on the burnt-out Holden Commodore. When the car had burnt, the plastic mouldings on the dash had melted and collapsed onto the floor in the front of the car. One of Evans's tasks was to extract anything that had been in the front of the car that could have melted into the plastic. Incongruously, there was a large piece of floral fabric in the burnt wreck that Evans spent a lot of time extracting from the plastic. But despite the investigative hours, the fabric - like much of the evidence - could never be connected to anything and the case remained unsolved. Some have recently named two men as the culprits, but because both men have died since 1997, they can never be brought to justice. Rumour has it that the Thurgood-Dove killing was a case of mistaken identity.
Trevor Evans cites one of the cases he worked on in September 1997 when he gives lectures to crime scene students. In some ways, the case was open and shut, but good crime scene work gives investigators the evidence to make charges stick in court. Evans's involvement began when he got paged at 2am on 16 September. He rang D-24 to get the details, and D-24 told him that they had a job in St Albans and they'd just got a second job in Footscray. He could choose which job to attend. Evans chose the one in St Albans, in Melbourne's western suburbs. A body had been found in an empty house in Main Road West. Before he left home, Evans organised a second on-call crew to attend the Footscray crime scene.
Around 3.50am, wearing blue over-alls and carrying only a torch, Trevor Evans walked up the front path of the triple-fronted cream brick veneer suburban house. The garden looked neglected and overgrown, and the letterbox was crammed with unclaimed junk mail. The crime scene examiner met the investigating officers out the front and they briefed him on all the details they had to date. During the briefing, Evans was told that an anonymous call had come through to the Keilor Downs police station at 12.01am. The caller had said, 'Now listen to this; I'm only going to tell you this once. There's a body in the front room of a house in Main Road West in St Albans.' The police station at Keilor Downs had recently received some threatening phone calls and the station had installed a call-tracing device. The police officer who took the anonymous call, left the line open after the caller had disconnected. The call was quickly traced to a woman's mobile phone.
Shortly after the tip-off, police had gone to the address given by the anonymous caller and found what they thought to be a man's body in an empty lounge room lying in front of a heater. The first police on the scene were uniform officers. They made sure that the body was actually deceased and then left the scene so as not to contaminate any possible evidence. They called the local Criminal Investigation Unit detectives who went to the house in Main Road West. Once the detectives confirmed the case looked like murder, they in turn notified the Divisional Detective Inspector who had then called in the Homicide Squad. Once the Homicide Squad were called, D-24 sent pages to all on-call crime scene members who were required - in this case, a video operator, a crime scene photographer, and Trevor Evans as the crime scene examiner.
Meanwhile, other police had gone straight to the home of the woman who was listed as owning the mobile phone used for the anonymous call. She told the police that she had lent the phone to her brother, Theo. The police took down Theo's address and went and paid him a visit. Shocked to find the cops on his doorstep so soon after his anonymous tip-off, he quickly began to 'assist police with their inquiries'.
At the house in Main Road West, the first police on the scene had also notified the SEC and instructed them to reconnect the power to the empty house. A technician arrived and reconnected power from the main pole. Having the lights on in the house made it easier for the investigators to see what they were dealing with.
Trevor Evans took charge of the crime scene. The uniformed sergeant indicated where the body was and told Evans where he had walked when he'd entered the house. It was vital that Evans knew who had been inside the house so that he could tell what evidence came with the homicide and what evidence might have come from the police themselves. It was crucial that the least amount of people possible enter a crime scene for fear of contamination. The sergeant went back outside and left Evans to do his job. He began with a visual examination.
In the lounge room at the front of the house, he could see the body lying in front of a gas heater set into a fireplace with a tiled hearth. The body lay parallel to the hearth. Contrary to what Evans had been told about the body being male, he could see, on closer examination, that it was a woman's body. She had suffered massive head injuries and the dried blood on her face almost made her look like a burns victim. Evans could see that the woman's throat had been cut and she had been stabbed a number of times in the throat and chest. A pool of blood next to her head, indicated to Evans that the woman had received the head injuries while she had been lying on her side. After the head injuries had been inflicted, she had been rolled onto her back leaving a pool of congealed blood adjacent to where her head was now positioned.
The woman was wearing a blue tracksuit and a white T-shirt. A pair of white socks lay on the blood-splattered hearth. At her feet were a jacket, a pair of boots, and a toilet roll. Her feet were bare, and the boots and jacket probably belonged to her. Evans noted that the boots were Blundstones. In the event he discovered any shoe impressions, he would know which ones were hers.
It was with interest that Evans studied the blood splash patterns on the wall and on the tiled hearth adjacent to the body. He knew from experience that splash patterns only occur with repeated injuries - it made sense that this woman would have been hit several times to bleed enough for the weapon to then splash up the blood on subsequent contacts to make the pattern he could see on the wall. To the untrained eye, splash patterns don't mean much, but the expert knows that the tail patterns of the splash droplets always point away from the point of the blows. To Evans, the tails indicated that she was hit in the vicinity of where she lay.
On the dusty polished boards of the dining room floor of the empty house, were a number of distinct shoe impressions. Lucky for this job, Trevor Evans was in charge of the shoe file database at Forensics and he had a very good knowledge of shoe impressions. There were Doc Marten shoe impressions in blood on the hearth which meant that the Doc Marten wearer was involved or very close by when the woman was bludgeoned to death. Not only that, but there were a full set of right/left, right/left bloodied shoe impressions showing the exact path the Doc Marten wearer had walked away from the room where the body lay.
After his visual examination of the surroundings where the body had been found, Trevor Evans went outside and told the investigators that the victim was in fact a female, and that she had sustained severe trauma to the head. He told them that her throat had been cut and she had been stabbed in the throat and chest. The police photographer and the video operator recorded the scene as it was found. Evans was able to tell the investigators that three people had recently walked in the vicinity of where the body lay. One was wearing Blundstones - probably the victim since the Blundstones were found near her body. The other shoe impressions belonged to someone wearing a pair of Doc Marten boots, and someone wearing Converse Skate Star runners.
Evans retrieved his crime scene kit from his car and began the formal examination. The crime scene kit contained a myriad of tools that could be needed on a job: swab sticks, casting materials, plastic bags, labels, tweezers, scalpels, Hemastix for presumptive blood tests, a torch, gloves, rulers, scales, distilled water, a tool kit, magnifying glass, scissors, and writing materials. Evans wrote his notes and sketched his diagrams on a foolscap pad fixed onto a clipboard.
On the floor near the dead woman's head, was a small piece of mortar which looked out of place. Evans instructed the photographer to take a picture of it, and then he collected it as evidence. There were also a number of cigarette butts in the house, and Evans had these photographed and then collected them for evidence. Because a smoker leaves saliva residue on a cigarette butt, these would later be examined for DNA which could be matched to an offender.
By the time Evans began his examination of the wider scene, both inside and outside the house, the sun was coming up, turning the sky a pale shade of pink. Around the back of the house, Evans saw a table underneath a rear window. There were a number of shoe impressions on the table and a partial one on the window sill.
Using powder to dust the shoe impressions, it was obvious to the trained examiner that one set of shoe impressions had been made when the shoes were wet because of indications of moisture and residue in the impression, while another set were made when the shoes were dry. The difference between the two different types of impressions is quite marked. The print made on the dusty table with a dry shoe simply picks up the dust and leaves a negative impression. A shoe that has moisture on it, leaves the moisture residue behind and leaves a positive impression. When dusted, the shoe impressions with moisture show up much darker than the ones left by a dry shoe.
As well as the shoe impression evidence, Trevor Evans found something else that could prove important. At the side of the house, on a concrete path, there was a row of square concrete bricks. One of the bricks was missing and had recently been removed from where it had lain, leaving the concrete underneath looking cleaner and less discoloured. Considering the piece of mortar that Evans had found next to the body inside the house, he thought there was a reasonable possibility that the missing concrete brick could have been the weapon used to smash repeatedly into the victim's head.
Trevor Evans sketched the lined pattern of the Doc Martens shoe impression and gave the sketch to local detectives. Other uniformed police had been utilised to make a search of the local area, and they were all give copies of the sketch. During the course of the day, Evans left the crime scene examination at the house in Main Road West, when he was called to a park in St Albans. An astute police officer involved in the foot search of the local area, had noticed Doc Marten shoe impressions leading into and out of the park.
A shallow concrete drain which marked the end of Jones Creek ran through the park and disappeared under a nearby road. Police searchers had located a burnt back-pack type handbag on the muddy bottom of the drain. They fished it out and left it on the bank. It was Evans's job to examine the find to see if it was connected to the case at hand. While he examined the handbag where it lay on the ground, he noticed a concrete brick in the creek. It looked similar to the others that he had seen at the house. It was too much of a coincidence for the seasoned crime scene examiner. He had the brick photographed and then retrieved it from the creek. Amazingly, a biologist would later find blood, hair, and material fibres on the brick matching the victim.
According to identification found in the back-pack handbag, the victim was a 20-year-old woman called Corie. It turned out that she was a local drug addict, and was known to police. She stole to support her drug habit and stayed wherever she could find a bed for the night.
By this time, the anonymous caller, Theo, had told the police that he had gone to the local pub for a drink when he'd met up with a man called Joseph DeFalco, aged 30, and his 18-year-old girlfriend, Pamela. According to Theo, over several beers, the conversation went something like this:
DeFalco: Hey you know Corie, the druggie?
Theo: Yeah.
DeFalco: Well we killed her.
Theo: Bullshit!
DeFalco: Come on, we'll show you.
Theo: Orright.
And that's how Theo - who had the sense to not go alone, and picked up his brother, Con on the way, came to be at the house in Main Road West. When they got there, DeFalco had jumped up onto the table at the back of the house in order to climb through the window. Once he was inside, he had unlocked the door for his girlfriend and Con and Theo to enter. Theo told the investigators that he and Con hadn't wanted to get too close to the body and that DeFalco had gone right up to it and illuminated her face with his cigarette lighter while they had stayed as far back as they could.
And the motive: apparently DeFalco thought that Corie had broken into his parents' house a year before the murder. A ring of great sentimental value was stolen in the burglary. DeFalco had given Corie's name to the police as a suspect and the police had interviewed her, but Corie denied stealing the ring. Joseph DeFalco didn't believe her.
On the night of the murder, DeFalco and his girlfriend Pamela had met Corie at the St Albans railway station and they had again argued about the ring. Then, DeFalco told Corie about an abandoned house that he sometimes used and invited her over. Corie was perhaps persuaded by having somewhere warm to spend the night. At the house on Main Road West, the three unlikely companions drank a cask of wine, and Corie soon fell asleep on the floor in front of the hearth.
It was then that Joseph DeFalco told Pamela that he was going to kill Corie. He got a brick from outside and dropped it onto her head a number of times, crushing her skull. When he was done, he could hear her making gurgling sounds, so he rolled her over and slashed her throat with a knife. Mistaking the sound of air escaping through her severed trachea, DeFalco thought she must still be alive, so he stabbed her in the chest and neck.
All the evidence that Trevor Evans found at the crime scene corroborated the stories of those involved. The brick taken from the scene, found in the creek with blood, hair and fibres matching the body, the shoe impressions which were later matched with Joseph DeFalco's Doc Martens boots, and some of the cigarette butts found in the house had DeFalco's DNA on them. Blood from the victim was also found in the ridges of the soles of his boots. Pamela's Converse Skate Star runners matched the other shoe impressions found at the house.
DeFalco was charged with murder and got seventeen years with a fourteen-year minimum. Pamela was charged with being an accessory after the fact and served fifteen months in remand and was eventually released with time already served. She gave evidence against DeFalco.
An increasingly important aspect of crime scene examination is Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) training. Wherever there are two or more bodies whose identities might be difficult to ascertain - like in an air crash, bombing, or widespread disaster like the Asian tsunami, DVI trained officers are called in to manage the situation. It is a vital legal requirement that bodies are identified, and it is a vital emotional requirement that relatives are able to bury their loved ones. In a disaster like the World Trade Centre terrorist attack in New York on 11 September 2001, many of the victims were never found and their remains were lost when the north and south towers collapsed after they were struck by hijacked planes. In cases like this, sometimes families do not get a body to bury.
DVI training involves police officers being put in simulated scenarios that might befall a modern society: gas attacks, terrorist situations, large-scale collisions, and bombings. DVI units are comprised of crime scene investigators, photographers, missing persons experts, fingerprint experts, medical and dental experts, victim support groups, and sometimes other personnel like the SES, Red Cross, or Salvation Army. These DVI teams work together arriving at a disaster scene with the bodies, where possible, having been left in situ so that they can be photographed, tagged, and recorded before being transported to the mortuary. Any property located at the scene is also labelled and the location where it was found recorded.
At the mortuary, bodies are logged and placed in cold storage before being examined. Fingerprints and photographs are taken. Dental records are recorded, post-mortem examinations are performed, and any personal effects on the bodies like clothing and jewellery are photographed and logged. While this phase of the DVI process is happening, relatives ring hotlines which are quickly set up and they give details of their loved ones in the form of missing persons reports. Relatives are asked to provide information about identifying details such as tattoos, jewellery, clothing and dental records, medical histories, x-rays, photographs, and DNA samples which can be obtained from hair from a hairbrush that the deceased has used, or from relatives. This is known as the ante-mortem phase.
The next phase in the process is known as 'reconciliation' where the post-mortem details are matched with the ante-mortem information provided by the relatives. Problems with positive identification arise when, like in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, whole families and their homes were wiped out. There were often no loved ones left to report people missing, and no homes in which to find medical records or even photographs.
On 12 October 2002, an explosives-packed van detonated outside the Sari nightclub at the Balinese beachside resort of Kuta killing 202 people including 88 Australians. Within days, a joint Indonesian Australian taskforce had been established and Australian personnel were sent in to assist in the investigation and body identification.
Trevor Evans volunteered to be a part of the DVI team and was keen to use his training to assist on such a large-scale disaster. He describes the experience as 'the most surreal ten days of my life'.
When Evans and a team of DVI experts travelled by bus into the bomb site, suddenly the images that he had seen on the TV became real - the damage, the devastation, the wreaths, and public appeals for missing loved ones - were all there in front of him. At the hospital, the scene was the same. Makeshift coffins, grief-stricken relatives, and armed guards made the situation very real indeed.
As a crime scene examiner, Evans along with other Australian experts had the responsibility of body identification. Each bombing victim was examined, and their friends and relatives were asked to provide details of anything that might assist in identification. Experts then examined the remains, and their findings were matched with information from relatives. The two lots of evidence were then compared and matches invariably found. Evans worked in this reconciliation stage. He was part of the team that matched victims with information and then presented the information to a coroner. This was done at chaired hearings when the experts presented evidence to give the anonymous remains a name.
What made the time more stressful was that the crime scene examiners worked under constant armed guard; they had been told that a further attack on Westerners was a strong possibility. While the crews were working to identify the remains of the 202 people killed during the Bali bombings, they didn't have time to rest and reflect on what they were seeing and experiencing. One moment stands out in Evans's mind. He was standing among a sea of bodies, laid out and covered in plastic. A wall of plywood had been erected to shield the scene from the public. On the wall, someone had drawn a rough outline of a map of Australia. Inside the map, they had written, 'There's no place like home'. Seeing the map, made Evans stop in his tracks. Home for him was a place of safety and refuge away from the madness that had ensued from the moment the bomb had detonated.
By the time Evans finished his ten-day tour of duty, the count of bodies that had been positively identified by the DVI team working in conjunction with the Indonesians had risen from 36 when he arrived to 88 when he left. Fifty-two more families had received loved ones back to bury.
When Evans arrived home in Australia, he got off the plane in Melbourne, and caught a taxi to Victorian Forensic Science Centre to collect his car. At work, he checked the roster. At the time, his division was short on crime scene examiners, and he was rostered on for the following day. Having worked twelve days straight before he left for Bali, and the ten days there, Evans calculated that he'd worked twenty-two days straight. He was beyond exhausted and told his colleagues he wouldn't be in the next day.
Since the beginning of 2004, Sergeant Trevor Evans and Acting Sergeant Shaune Ward have been responsible for the curriculum at the four-week training program at Project Clarendon at the Victoria Police Academy. Evans and Ward train recruits in an innovative new program which sets up divisions called Crime Desks at major police stations around Victoria. The program aims to send trained crime scene officers to every house break-in and car theft in the state. During the four-week course, Evans teaches the trainees crime scene techniques including how to take crime scene photographs, how to search a crime scene, and how to take comprehensive notes. Shaune Ward, who is a fingerprint expert, instructs students on fingerprinting techniques including the theories of fingerprints, and how to identify and lift them from crime scenes.
The impetus for the need for this new service comes from changing patterns in crime deterrence. Where once, armed robberies on banks were common, the advent of security measures like surveillance cameras and pop-up screens sealing the robbers on the wrong side of the counters, means that robbers are now choosing softer targets like convenience stores. When the convenience stores upped their security with timed safes and cameras, homes became the next target of choice. Governments have recognised this change in burglary patterns and legislation has changed to accommodate this. The term 'aggravated burglary' use to be used to describe violent attacks on people in their homes perpetrated by burglars, but now, if an occupant is merely at home during the course of a burglary, it is now classified as an aggravated burglary. Victoria Police has followed suit in the setting up of Project Clarendon and Evans and Ward believe in the success of training uniformed police officers to become proficient in lifting fingerprints and collecting evidence. Before Crime Desks were implemented, the Fingerprint Branch were called to attend only 23% of burglaries, now, Crime Scene officers attend all such crimes and any prints lifted are sent for examination to the Fingerprint Branch.
The public's fascination with television programs like CSI means that the public also has a higher expectation of police who attend their own house break-ins. 'People expect to see examiners arriving with crime scene kits,' says Ward. 'They get that from TV.' And the reality is that when the crime scene officer in his or her examiner's uniform arrives at the door with a kit filled with powder and brushes and an impressively large digital camera, victims know their burglary is being taken seriously. On a practical level, because the response is usually same-day, they are then able to get their doors or windows fixed and clean up the mess - rather than waiting days for fingerprint experts or detectives to arrive. This minimises victim impact and maximises customer service.
To give their trainees realistic experience, Trevor Evans and Shaune Ward set up practice sessions in the Operational Safety Training & Tactics village - or the OSTT village for short. It cost over eight million dollars to build the mock suburban street complete with pub, petrol station, bank, and a number of houses of various sizes. Trainees from different courses run at the Academy can use the OSTT village to simulate raids, sieges, and almost any policing situation. Evans uses the village to show his students how to make the most of light when taking photographs at dusk, and Ward uses the mock pub to set up the simulated aftermath of a pub brawl. He uses pig's blood from a vial to drip onto the floor, and pours out pieces of broken beer bottle from a brown paper bag. As the trainees come into his 'crime scene' he explains that in a situation like this, they are collecting evidence merely of an assault at the pub, but, he explains, if the victim dies, their evidence could be presented at the Supreme Court at a murder trial. It's a sobering thought.
These days, the question most frequently asked of a crime scene examiner is: 'is it like CSI on TV?' and the answer is a definite and resounding no. Indeed, crime scene examiners tend to avoid watching TV shows that deal with their line of work because the errors are too annoying. Flashy good-looking crime scene photographers snap pictures of crime scenes without ever placing a scale or ruler next to items like shoe impressions - which would in fact render the picture useless in court. They never take notes to indicate which picture was taken where - again, a big no-no.
On TV, crime scene examiners like Gil Grissom on CSI run the investigation and catch the bad guys. In reality, crime scene examiners gather the evidence and present it to the investigating detectives who catch the bad guys.
Another favourite of crime scene shows is the chemical, luminol which is a spray that can indicate the presence of blood. A room must be completely dark to detect the bluish glow that results when the luminol mixes with the iron in haemoglobin. TV crime scene examiners regularly spray luminol in dimly-lit rooms or even in daylight. In reality, luminol, which has the potential to contaminate or destroy existing evidence, is only used after other tests have been completed, and only in complete darkness.
Time of death cannot accurately be predicted to the minute; the margin of error can range from hours to days. Factors include body temperature prior to death, ambient temperature of the surroundings where the body was found, levels of alcohol in the bloodstream, and obesity. On TV, medical examiners are usually very specific and pinpoint times of death to within very narrow margins.
Forensics does not have a computer that superimposes suspect shoe impressions over known patterns and then matches them. It is also very difficult to give an accurate assessment of a shoe size. Computers also do not read a fingerprint and spit out a match. When an expert feeds a print into a fingerprint database, the computer will return up to a hundred matches and then the fingerprint expert examines the first matches manually until he finds eight points of similarity between his print and the ones the computer has matched. Two other experts must then agree to his findings before a fingerprint is deemed to be a correct match. On television, the computer usually matches a print in seconds, and then, helpfully, it usually provides a name, address, and photo of the suspect/victim.
On CSI, they can turn blurred and pixilated images into sharp clear images by zeroing in on a part of the picture. The more a TV image is blown up, the clearer it becomes. In reality, the more you zero in on an image, the more pixilated it looks.
DNA evidence on TV is the doyen of the investigators' tools. In reality, DNA evidence can take months to process rather than minutes and can only be matched to a suspect if their DNA is on file or available for comparison.
And finally, TV murders are solved in hour-long programs because crime scene examiners and detectives use state-of-the-art - often fictional - tools to catch their killers. The reality is that some cases can take years to solve and others can remain on file with the Cold Case Squad indefinitely.
Trevor Evans has come full-circle from the young recruit who disliked the imposing Victoria Police Academy in 1977. Now, he enjoys his role as crime scene instructor at the Academy, and has branched out to lecture at Swinburne and LaTrobe University and he does the occasional lecture for budding crime writers at the Council for Adult Education. Whether his future lies in the classroom, or back doing active crime scene examination, remains to be seen. Either way, Evans knows that the future of crime scene examination continues to look promising. The more technology advances, the easier it will become to link offenders with their crimes.
An old saying among crime scene examiners is that forensic evidence is the 'silent witness'. As long as Trevor Evans and his colleagues maintain their commitment to its gathering and analysis, they will continue to make the silent witness speak.