All the World's a Scene*
From Hans Gross to the Gilgo Beach Investigation, the question remains: What's a crime scene?
Update: The New York Times wrote a summary of the affidavit used in the arrest of Heuermann; you can find it here.
Beyond the body
In 1883 an Examining Magistrate named Hans Gross (1847-1915) published a textbook, Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter als System der Kriminalistik (Handbook for Examining Magistrates as a System of Criminalistics).
Gross wrote his practical manual (although the first edition ran to over 900 pages) in clear language that anyone with a basic education could understand. The book included psychology, social behaviors, criminal profiling, chemistry, physics, botany, ciphers, and microscopic examination of “dust,” what would now be called trace evidence. In it, he also coined the word kriminalistik (criminalistics) to describe the sciences* as applied to criminal investigations, as opposed to criminology, the study of criminal behavior in society. The book was immensely popular: When he died in 1915, the book had been published in seven editions and had been translated into a number of foreign languages.
As remarkable a historical landmark as Gross’ handbook is, a key aspect of its importance is often overlooked. Gross recognized that it was the crime scene and not the body that was of paramount importance in a criminal investigation. His book designated the crime scene “as a distinct analytical space, bounded conceptually and operationally by explicit rules of practice, and recognized as such by forensic investigators and the broader public alike.” Prior to Gross, few if any systematic manuals on criminal investigation for police practitioners had been published. The medico-legal mindset of the body as “the scene” predominated for a time even after the Handbook was published. As late as 1910, medical jurists maintained little to no interest in scene investigation as a part of their professional expertise. Medical examiners could not be concerned with matters such as the area around the body or clothing; those were for the police to worry about. The postmortem examination of the body and the interpretation of it were the primary concerns of forensic expertise, meaning medical expertise. Gross’s perspective depended on a non-medical but medically-aware expert. “The scene of a crime could be nearly anywhere; the trace could involve nearly anything…science needed to embrace not simply the body, but the whole of the physical world. It involved using any and all possible sciences--and even creating new ones--in order to better interpret circumstantial evidence.”
In this way Gross moved the scope of the forensic interest from the body at meso-scale both to the scene as macro-scale and the trace evidence as micro-scale. The body is now just one more item of evidence in a complex environment of the leftovers of mundane and criminal interactions. Forensic chemistry applications had advanced beyond the average medical jurist and toxicology was the apotheosis of that path. Gross, by shifting the focus and applying a wide range of sciences, intended to do the same for crime scene investigations and initiated the idea of a separate laboratory space for the examination of minute material evidence. Evidence does not have value, it can only be valued.
By making the crime scene a separate analytical space and by identifying trace evidence as a primary source of evidentiary significance, Gross set the stage for further development of forensic applications.
The Gilgo Beach Investigation
The police investigation into Rex Heuermann as a suspect in the Gilgo Beach murders started with the identification by a witness of a Chevrolet Avalanche that was driven by one of the victim’s killer; Heuermann owns a Chevrolet Avalanche. That led to an extensive investigation that uncovered
The tracking of the burner phones and Heuermann’s own phone proved to be crucial to the investigation. Analysis of cellular billing records and credit card activity “showed numerous instances where Heuermann was located in the same general locations as the burner cellphones used to contact victims…investigators could find no instance where Heuermann was in a separate location from these other cellphones” when the taunting and other calls were made.
Heuermann is an architect in midtown Manhattan and lives on Long Island. The number of phones and locations spanned one of the most populous areas on the planet.
The victims tied to Heuermann during this phase of the investigation were all found in roughly the same area of Long Island. Other remains have been found in the vicinity and it remains to be seen if they are connected to this investigation.
What is a “crime scene”?
We can spend a lot of time talking and quibbling over that question as posed here. “Where each of the bodies was found is a crime scene…duh. It’s a location.” But that misses the point that Gross worked so hard to make, even if he couldn’t conceive of an investigation like the Gilgo Beach murders. Yes, each body is a scene but it is a scene within a larger scene. The victim didn’t just appear where it was found; there was movement in, movement out, activities surrounding the placement. Prior to that, the activities the resulted in the interaction between the murderer and the victim, in whatever locations (plural on purpose), licit or illicit, all could have left a pattern, a network of proxy data (evidence) indicative of where they came from and what happened there.
To be naive about “a scene” is to miss the conceptual genius of Gross. As quoted above, the scene is a distinct analytical space, bounded conceptually and operationally by explicit rules of practice and that the scene of a crime could be nearly anywhere; the [evidence] could involve nearly anything. Cellphone records, credit card receipts from buying burner phones (that correlates with store CCTV video of the suspect being in the store), cell tower locations…a crime scene is not only a physical location, it is an analytical space (or spaces) defined by the rules of practice to extract information that aids an investigation. It is defined by the remit of the methods used to exploit it. In the Gilgo Beach investigation, police obtained a pizza box discarded in a public trash can and developed a DNA profile that is useful to the investigation—a crime scene.
We need to broaden our thinking about core ideas like this, especially in a digital age where evidence can be nano-scale. Technology is wonderful (I’m using a computer and the Internet to write this as I stream music in an air conditioned office powered by solar panels) but we all too often grab the handle without thinking about the tool or its purpose. “Free your mind…”. Follow?
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* With apologies to W. Shakespeare: “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.” —As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7