IAPE Evidence Blog

Cal­gary Sun, cnews.canoe.ca
BYLINE: Nadia Moharib, Cal­gary Sun
Link to Article

Cal­gary, AB, Canada

Cal­gary Police Ser­vice evi­dence stor­age facil­ity super­vi­sor R.G. Hem­low among items stored at the facil­ity in Cal­gary, Alberta, on Novem­ber 12, 2011. )(MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY

CALGARY — Found hot tubs, seized sex toys, the occa­sional body part and a pick­led corn snake have been kept here over the years.

Right now, there are about 121,000 exhibits lin­ing shelves and kept in fridges and freez­ers in the 85,000 sq-ft. facil­ity hous­ing every­thing from found bikes to crime-scene evidence.

While some are strange, oth­ers gross and sev­eral down­right stinky, many ulti­mately are key to solv­ing a crime, ide­ally see­ing court­room con­vic­tions, in cases from mur­ders to muggings.

Exhibits aren’t sim­ply stock­piled but metic­u­lously filed, each piece given a bar code, before being put in its place for safekeeping.

For the most part, that is pretty much where the item will stay, (some kept for­ever,) painstak­ingly pro­tected, until it goes to court, is destroyed or sent to auction.

The goal is to ensure the exhibit is not tam­pered with and proves a pris­tine piece of evi­dence, absolutely unal­tered from how it was found, should it go to court. 

“We are the gate­keep­ers,” says unit super­vi­sor, R.G. Hem­low, one of 18 cus­to­di­ans at the warehouse.

“We are the con­ti­nu­ity kings.”

Even police offi­cers require escorts here and it’s not uncom­mon for vet­eran vis­i­tors to slip hands safely into pock­ets to pre­vent a fin­ger­print from inad­ver­tently land­ing some­where suspicious.

Clean­ing staff undergo secu­rity checks and are fin­ger­printed, pho­tographed and undergo a polygraph.

“It smells in there,” Hem­low warns before offer­ing a tour and detail­ing what is kept inside.

“There is stuff in there from cig­a­rette butts to DNA and guns and there are screw dri­vers and bod­ily fluids.”

On a slow day staff take in about 150 new exhibits while a busy one can see up to 500.

The annual intake has gone from nearly 70,000 in 2007 to 107,865 in 2010.

But very few exhibits actu­ally have their day in court.

“Police offi­cers are thor­ough,” Staff Sgt. Gord Eiriks­son who over­sees the unit explains.

“If they have a file where they are not sure whether to take the sofa — they’ll take the sofa.

“Of all the exhibits, really only one per­cent will see a court room.”

There is no down­play­ing, how­ever, the poten­tial value of those which do.

“Peo­ple can end up going to jail for life because of what we have in here,” he says.

Every­thing is care­fully cat­e­go­rized before being filed in an elec­tronic data­base and each and every move­ment of any exhibit, even if sim­ply relo­cated from one shelf to anther, is documented.

There are pop cans fash­ioned into secret drug caches, weapons and a creepy musi­cal doll seized in a fraud inves­ti­ga­tion where a woman allegedly went door-to-door with a sob story sell­ing the items which were likely stolen.

“You name some­thing and we’ve had it,” Hem­low says.

“I’ve had com­plete fuel tanks, brand new fridges, a com­plete semi full of appli­ances and a hot tub,” he says still befud­dled at the lat­ter exhibit.

“I just can’t believe any­one has lost a hot tub — we could use a hot tub in here,” he jokes.

A cus­to­dian — more typ­i­cally tasked with find­ing right­ful own­ers of bikes, wal­lets and purses — shakes his head at the prospect of track­ing down the owner of a bent and bat­tered shovel recently turned in to police.

“Some cit­i­zen took the time to turn it in,” he shrugs.

“I’ll do my best.”

About 200 bikes come into the unit a month, kept for 30 days bikes before going up for auction.

About 300 in any given year are refur­bished by pris­on­ers at the Cal­gary Cor­rec­tional Cen­tre for the Cal­gary Kiwa­nis to give away.

“I have to keep these mov­ing,” the cus­to­dian says point­ing to neat rows of bicy­cles, and stress­ing his job would be eas­ier if peo­ple took time to report thefts to police.

“I have really, really high end bikes in here that no one has reported as stolen .. every­thing belongs to some­body, it’s our job to do our due dili­gence” to find them.

Boxes of licence plates, lost, never claimed or stolen, are cut into bits and des­tined for a shred­der before being melted down for recycling.

Bot­tles and cans no longer needed to be kept are recy­cled with money going into city cof­fers while any cloth­ing, which has second-hand poten­tial, is given to charity.

Boxes of Lucky Beer, bloody cloth­ing, com­put­ers seized as part of child pornog­ra­phy inves­ti­ga­tions, hub caps, bike hel­mets, bro­ken glass, skate­boards, lunch boxes and even moldy items tightly wrapped in plas­tic are stored on shelves where a posted sign man­dates a 575-lb limit.

There are blood swabs in fridges, exhibits in freez­ers, rolls of cop­per wire, ski poles and news­pa­per boxes all taken in as part of crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tions in other parts of the warehouse.

Staff are on call should tem­per­a­ture in the walk-in refrig­er­a­tor dip too low, surge too high or in the case of a power surge — all poten­tially jeop­ar­diz­ing the integrity of exhibits rang­ing from DNA to urine and semen.

“It’s pretty dis­turb­ing,” Hem­low says, his breath vis­i­ble, as he points to shelf after shelf lined with sex kits.

“All that is sex assaults.

“I amazes me, it baf­fles my mind,” he says of the sheer vol­ume of exhibits.

“And it’s ongoing.”

Work isn’t sim­ply con­fined to the warehouse.

Cus­to­di­ans often work with police green teams, suit­ing up in haz­mat out­fits to tear down mar­i­juana grow ops.

They bag plants in the illicit oper­a­tions, seizures later audited before paper­work is sent off to Ottawa.

A ‘Please Keep Off The Grass,’ sign hangs on the wall above sev­eral black bags con­tain­ing a recent crop hauled in to the unit.

Soon it will all, lit­er­ally, go up in smoke.

Cus­to­di­ans, escorted by the TAC team, cart plants to undis­closed rural loca­tions where they are put in incinerators.

“We don’t leave until 30 min­utes later,” Hem­low says.

And it’s a pile of dust when they are done.

A strong stom­ach is optional, but cer­tainly a good asset for cus­to­di­ans to have.

And a thick skin doesn’t hurt either.

The first offers a defence to deal­ing with the actual “stinky stuff,” while the lat­ter might insu­late against tummy-turning, often heart­break­ing, details asso­ci­ated to exhibits.

Over the years many would eas­ily fit in the ‘gross’ or “utterly odd” cat­e­gory, includ­ing a fetus in a pizza box, a partially-dressed, head­less man­nequin staff dubbed ‘No-head Nor­man,’ and that pick­led corn snake picked up in a Hells Angels’ file.

“Three or four months ago, an offi­cer came in with a thumb in a jar and asked if we could dis­pose of it prop­erly,” vet­eran cus­to­dian Todd Neis says matter-of-factly.

“Stuff like that doesn’t bother me, the only thing that really does is just the smell of stuff, rot­ting stuff.”

A sec­tion where homi­cide exhibits are kept, includ­ing one dat­ing back to the 1970s, is an area where many find it tough to ignore real-life, often life-ending, sto­ries behind the exhibits.

“Some peo­ple say the hair on the back of their neck goes up, they just have an eerie feel­ing,” Hem­low says.

“You’ll see peo­ple in the news and you know what hap­pened to that per­son, how they were killed — you see some of their pic­tures and you con­nect with the vic­tims. It’s not just a name to us.”

It’s those type of exhibits, espe­cially, which are a reminder this mas­sive ware­house isn’t sim­ply a stor­age facil­ity — vic­tims hop­ing on a court­room coup often count on evi­dence kept here to make that happen.

“You would see the whole team crushed if we did some­thing wrong,” Hem­low says.

“We don’t want to make a mistake.”

Being a small part of the pur­suit of jus­tice is reward­ing, cus­to­di­ans keenly aware safe­guard­ing exhibits helps put crim­i­nals away.

Recently, a man was con­victed of rap­ing a woman in her own home 25 years ago based largely on DNA.

For many years, file num­ber 87019230 sat inside a walk-in freezer, filed beside more than 1,000 other so-called sex kits — ulti­mately lead­ing to the con­vic­tion of James Par­ent a quarter-century later.

On the job for more than a dozen years, Neis, says see­ing crim­i­nals held account­able never gets old — that con­vic­tion a prime example.

“We were hap­pier than hell when he was found guilty,” he says.

“Every­body let out a big cheer.”

“Some­times we get to see there’s a ‘guilty,’ that’s deserved and we get that smile,” Hem­low adds.

“It’s mean­ing­ful work.”

The weath­ered head­stone with the name John T. Mitchell engraved on it is among many mys­ter­ies at the prop­erty unit, staff try­ing to find out where it belongs.

“We’ve had a cou­ple of urns full of ashes,” Neis says.

“A fish­er­man reeled one in on the end of his fish­ing rod, a wooden urn which had a guy’s first name on it.”

While some exhibits lit­er­ally embody the smell of death, oth­ers brim with life.

“We actu­ally had a bird in lost and found and held it until some­one picked it up,” Neis says.

Sev­eral years ago, a rat crawled out of a back­pack, he says, and “we had a corn snake in a pick­led jar which kind of freaked peo­ple out.

“I’m not sure about the story with that.”

Racks and racks of evi­dence in the Cal­gary Police Ser­vice evi­dence stor­age facil­ity in Cal­gary, Alberta, on Novem­ber 12, 2011. (MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Cal­gary Police Ser­vice evi­dence stor­age facil­ity super­vi­sor R.G. Hem­low among items stored at the facil­ity in Cal­gary, Alberta, on Novem­ber 12, 2011. (MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY)
 
 
 

Recov­ered bikes in the Cal­gary Police Ser­vice evi­dence stor­age facil­ity in Cal­gary, Alberta, on Novem­ber 12, 2011. (MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY)
 
 
 
 

Assault evi­dence in the Cal­gary Police Ser­vice evi­dence stor­age facil­ity in Cal­gary, Alberta, on Novem­ber 12, 2011. (MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Cal­gary Police Ser­vice evi­dence stor­age facil­ity super­vi­sor R.G. Hem­low with some of the odd items stored at the facil­ity in Cal­gary, Alberta, on Novem­ber 12, 2011. (MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY)
 
 

Metal, includ­ing weapons, chopped up to go to recy­cling in the Cal­gary Police Ser­vice evi­dence stor­age facil­ity in Cal­gary, Alberta, on Novem­ber 12, 2011. (MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Racks and racks of evi­dence in the Cal­gary Police Ser­vice evi­dence stor­age facil­ity in Cal­gary, Alberta, on Novem­ber 12, 2011. (MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY)
 
 
 
 

Bags of pot wait­ing to be destroyed in the Cal­gary Police Ser­vice evi­dence stor­age facil­ity in Cal­gary, Alberta, on Novem­ber 12, 2011. (MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY)
 
 
 

Homi­cide sec­tion among the racks and racks of evi­dence in the Cal­gary Police Ser­vice evi­dence stor­age facil­ity in Cal­gary, Alberta, on Novem­ber 12, 2011. (MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY)
 
 
 

Cal­gary Police Ser­vice evi­dence stor­age facil­ity super­vi­sor R.G. Hem­low among items stored at the facil­ity in Cal­gary, Alberta, on Novem­ber 12, 2011. These items are all from a sin­gle seizure of stolen goods. (MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY)
 
 
 

Metal chopped up to go to recy­cling in the Cal­gary Police Ser­vice evi­dence stor­age facil­ity in Cal­gary, Alberta, on Novem­ber 12, 2011. (MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY)
 
 

- — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — -
Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org

News Her­ald, newsherald.com
BYLINE: CHRIS SEGAL / News Her­ald Writer
Link to Article

Bay County, FL

Bay County Sheriff’s Office Crime Scene Inves­ti­ga­tor Chris Reynolds takes fin­ger­prints from a piece of paper in Lynn Haven Wednes­day. TERRY BARNER / The News Herald

PANAMA CITY — There’s a secret base­ment down­town full of drugs and mur­der weapons. It’s down a flight of stairs, past an old, out-of-place paint­ing of a land­scape and through a door with two locks that no one per­son holds both keys to.

The fridge in the back of the room keeps the DNA fresh. Dozens of pis­tols and rifles, a bow, some arrows and at least one samu­rai sword are there.

It’s the clerk of court’s evi­dence vault, and it’s the last stop before destruc­tion for the evi­dence used to con­vict crim­i­nals in Bay County.

“There’s more paper­work than any­thing else,” Donna Fowler said. “Really it’s just a base­ment with a bunch of junk.”

Fowler is the crim­i­nal depart­ment man­ager at the clerk’s office. She doesn’t go into the base­ment. It’s kind of scary and the drugs lan­guish­ing there con­tribute to a funky odor.

In Lynn Haven, the evi­dence locker at the Bay County Sheriff’s Office is arranged by crimes. Evi­dence over here per­tains to vio­lent crimes. Those stereos and video games are bur­glar­ies or robberies.

The back of the room smells con­sid­er­ably fresher than the clerk’s vault. This must be evi­dence from drug cases – yep, there’s a pound of dope right there. Sev­eral pounds maybe. That sack could def­i­nitely hold sev­eral pounds. There’s a whole mar­i­juana plant actually.

In many Bay County crim­i­nal cases, this is the first stop for the evi­dence that will be used in pros­e­cu­tions. Roughly 13,000 pieces of evi­dence in more than 35,000 crim­i­nal cases pass through this room each year, said Inves­ti­ga­tor Shan­non Mitchell, one of four crime scene inves­ti­ga­tors and tech­ni­cians who work back here.

When deputies col­lect evi­dence, they bring it here, where it is logged into the sys­tem, pack­aged, sealed and labeled. There are rows and rows of rifles, dozens of pis­tols hang­ing from the walls. Some of this stuff, like the muzzle-loader rifle there, looks like it’s been here since the civil war.

BSCO’s locker has a fridge that con­tains mag­gots from a death case. There’s a new machine that allows the CSIs to use super­glue to recover fin­ger­prints. It’s actu­ally just like those detec­tive shows, but slower, Mitchell said. There’s a machine for bloody clothes, which need to dry before they can be pack­aged and sealed.

Evi­dence of a crime must be saved for years. A case doesn’t end just because someone’s been con­victed of a crime. The evi­dence can’t just be tossed out when someone’s locked up. The appeals process can last for years, espe­cially in mur­der cases. A con­vic­tion over­turned may call for a new trial, so there’s always the off-chance that evi­dence will be needed again.

“These guys are really awe­some at what they do,” Sher­iff Frank McK­ei­then said dur­ing a brief visit to the lab. “Get­ting it is just a part of it. It’s what they do with it that counts.”

- — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — -
Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org

Car­roll County Times, carrollcountytimes.com
BYLINE: Car­rie Ann Knauer, Times Staff Writer
Link to Article

West­min­ster, MD

A strange sur­prise: About 20 stolen lawn orna­ments were placed in Rebecca Hale’s West­min­ster yard overnight Sat­ur­day. SUBMITTED PHOTO

Rebecca Hale wants her neigh­bors to know she didn’t steal their lawn orna­ments, even if they did end up in her yard Sun­day morning.

Hale, who lives in the 200 block of Jan­ice Way in West­min­ster, said she and her boyfriend Jonathan Chell left the house at 10 p.m. Sat­ur­day to go to a friend’s house and play cards. When they returned home at 5 a.m. Sun­day, she almost couldn’t believe that she had pulled up to the right house.

“My dri­ve­way was lined with about 20 stolen lawn orna­ments,” the 36-year-old said. “I thought to myself ‘It looks like some­body is about to have a yard sale.’”

There was a black wooden dog on a bench on her front porch, and a metal swan block­ing the door. At the bot­tom of her steps were a fam­ily of bun­nies to the right, she said, and to the left some angels and gar­den gnomes. One of the more sig­nif­i­cant pieces was a small cow statue that she esti­mated weighed more than 100 pounds.

“It was crazy,” she said. “I had a mil­lion thoughts going through my mind.”

Think­ing it was pos­si­ble that the lawn dis­play could have been a prank by a friend, she waited for some­one to speak up and take credit for it. When no one came for­ward, she called the West­min­ster police at 3 p.m. to report the dis­play, which she assumed was of stolen goods.

A police offi­cer came to check it out Sun­day, she said, and on Mon­day, they sent a city dump truck to col­lect the goods and take them to the police department.

West­min­ster police Lt. Dou­glas John­ston said it appears most of the lawn dec­o­ra­tions were stolen from the sur­round­ing neigh­bor­hood. Eight of the objects have already been reclaimed by the own­ers, who had reported them as stolen, he said.

John­ston said the items are all intact, and have been placed in the department’s prop­erty room. Some peo­ple may not have noticed that they were stolen yet, he said, or may have noticed and not thought about report­ing the theft.

Any­one in West­min­ster who had a lawn dec­o­ra­tion stolen this week­end should con­tact the West­min­ster police at 410 – 848-4646 and ask for the prop­erty clerk, he said.

“We don’t get this occur­ring that often,” John­ston said. “More than likely, it was juveniles.”

Hale said she took lots of pho­tos of the lawn dis­play with her cell­phone, and said she won’t soon for­get the episode.

“It would be cool if every­one got their stuff back,” she said.

Reach staff writer Car­rie Ann Knauer at 410 – 857-7874 or carrie.knauer@carrollcountytimes.com.

- — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — -
Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org