OSU Saturday Academy

Suicide? Murder? A horrible accident?

Nineteen Saturday Academy students, armed with a morning's worth of information on fingerprinting, ballistics tests and blood splatter patterns, are on the case.

Instructor Emma Dutton divides the students into teams, gives them patterns to match and watches them go to work. It isn't long before suspicions start to grow: Fibers from a shirt bear blood stains from two people. Fingerprints are found that don't belong to the victim. The evidence isn't conclusive, but it certainly looks like Mr. X met an untimely end.

"There were a lot of different possibilities," said Crescent Valley High student Madison Lynch, 14. "She told us you don't always get the right answer."

The Mid-Willamette Valley Saturday Academy is a nonprofit, extracurricular education program that places students with professionals to learn about careers. Oregon State University hosts the program, which particularly emphasizes math, technology and the sciences. Different classes are held throughout the year.

On April 13 at the "Crime Scene Investigation: What it takes to be a Forensic Scientist" class at Western Oregon University, students included middle-schoolers, high-schoolers and home-schoolers. They traveled from Albany, Corvallis, Dallas, Jefferson, Scio, Toledo and Lincoln City to learn how law enforcement officers investigate a crime scene.

Dutton, who has a doctorate in neuroscience, has worked for a year with the Oregon State Police in quality control. It's her job to oversee all the laboratories used by the investigators, to make sure the scientists are trained and following procedures, and to ensure that everything that's done is defensible in court.

She and her husband Bryan Dutton, a botanist, have taught many Saturday Academy classes. Their most recent: "From Botany to Brains."

Many of the forensic science participants said "CSI" and other crime investigation TV shows inspired them to sign up for this particular class. Prior to setting up the crime scene, Dutton took them through several stations to demonstrate the techniques those investigators use.

They practiced brushing soft gray or white powder over coffee cups and Pepsi cans, then carefully covering the powder with a strip of tape to lift fingerprints. They stepped into a bucket of mud to check shoe impressions. They stuck thin eyedroppers into tubs of raw liver and dripped the bloody liquid onto paper plates to note smear and spray patterns.

"You can't make a very good smiley face," observed J.T. Cray, 15, of Albany as he daubed blood on his plate.

"Make a snowman," urged Matt Dickey, 16, of Toledo.

At a nearby table, Amy Ebarb, 17, of Albany and Katie Pilcher, 13, of Jefferson used cotton swabs and a bottle of phenophthalein to test brownish smears on a swatch of carpet for a reaction. Only the stain marked "blood" turned the swab pink. Coffee, chocolate and mud had no reactions.

"I thought chocolate would at least do something," Pilcher said, surprised.

Dutton had plenty of other lessons for her young investigators: Identical twins have different fingerprints. Gunpowder can be flake-style, ball or cylindrical. Shoe prints vary by manufacturer, and databases exist to help investigators compare.

Cray said it was interesting to learn that evidence of drug use shows up in a person's hair.

"I can just see some people finding that out and shaving their heads the next day," he said.

Josh Murane, 15, of Albany said crime investigations are different than the TV shows had led him to believe.

"It's not necessarily as fun or as nice as the shows make it seem. They solve the whole mystery in three days," he said. "The real DNA takes a long time to analyze."

Whitney Davis, 16, of Corvallis said she takes Saturday Academy classes as often as she can.

"I'm going to pursue science, because I'm going to be pre-med," she said. "This is a great way to get to know what I want to specialize in."

Lynch, however, already knows she wants to study forensic science.

"This is exactly what I want to do when I grow up, so it's really exciting," she said.