Bugs and bodies

Assistant professor Bethany Marshall is a small, intense woman with hair like fine copper springs. Her office is a museum of oddities, with maps, a skull, framed moth specimens, vials of soil, and a half-eaten bag of Mission tortilla chips stuffed under the desk. Her bookshelves are filled with a standard selection of biology texts spiced with titles like Maggots, Murder, and Men and Death's Acre. Near her computer, she has taped up a bumper sticker that says,"Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies."

Bethany Marshall, assistant professor of entomology. Photo by Robert Hubner

Marshall came here four years ago to teach entomology. She describes her professional journey to WSU as a "twisty path" that included teaching junior high in Chicago and earning a Ph.D. in entomology at Michigan State University. While she was working on her doctorate, she stayed connected with the Chicago school and created science outreach programs for the students. She also found herself consulting with officers about bugs and the role they play in decomposition, a field still fairly new to crime solving.

Not long into her work at WSU, she found a group of students who shared her interest in insects and crimes. They are young adults who like science, but who are not necessarily looking at vet or medical school, she says. "Through their needs, I started the forensics club."

Crime scene investigation, Pullman: Under the careful scrutiny of entomologist Beth Marshall, students in the WSU Forensics Club unearth a black bear that was dumped on campus last summer. They collect insects at the scene for clues to how long the bear has been dead and where it may have come from. Crime scene experts are using insects more and more as evidence in their real-life investigations. Photos by Tom Williams

Over the past few years she has arranged for field trips with real homicide investigators and hard-core training in "man-tracking," which once took her students on a backwoods manhunt near Priest Lake, Idaho. She also put them through her own forensic entomology experience, using real pigs as victims. "I have this relationship with the [WSU] swine center," Marshall explains. She collects stillborn piglets and larger pigs that had to be put down. She deposits or buries many of the carcasses at Smoot Hill, a research preserve north of Pullman, where they can attract a "carrion community" of insects, mostly maggots, beetles, and flies. Other pigs get placed at special sites in northeast Washington and Idaho to be used in training professional investigators.

While forensic entomology is a relatively new field in the United States, the first recorded example of someone using insects to solve a crime dates back to 13th-century China. In 1235 A.D. Sung Tz'u, a Chinese death investigator, wrote a book in which he described the story of a victim in a small village who was slashed to death with a sickle. After interviews failed to turn up a suspect, the local investigator asked the townspeople to bring their sickles to a meeting and lay them out. Just one drew flies, probably because there were traces of blood on it. The evidence pointed to the sickle's owner as a prime suspect and prompted a confession.

At WSU, the history of forensic entomology goes back to the late Professor Paul Catts. In the 1980s and early 1990s, he and a few colleagues around the country pioneered the use of bugs in American criminal investigations. "They called themselves the 'Dirty Dozen'," says his wife, Dana Catts.

Part of their mission was to encourage the use of insect evidence and to teach investigators the proper way to handle the bugs at a crime scene. Often evidence like maggots and flies were ignored or even washed off the body. Catts and his colleagues wanted officers and medical examiners to realize that insects could help pinpoint things like time of death, location of the crime, and location of wounds. Catts set out to formalize forensic entomology, putting together guidelines and criteria for training experts in the field. Then he wrote the book on the subject. With Neal Haskell at Purdue University, Catts assembled Entomology and Death: A Procedural Guide, a small spiral-bound booklet to help scientists and officers use insects in their forensic investigations. Illustrated with Catts's own whimsical drawings, the book details everything from how to get insects from a crime scene-"collect only those stages of insects which can be seen readily on the body"-to how to testify at a trial-"be objective, nonpartisan and scientifically honest."

As a professor, Catts was an internationally recognized expert in parasitology and medical entomology. His expertise included insects that survive on living flesh. He worked to make the study of insects palatable to his students. He is perhaps most famous in Pullman for the "insect luaus" he threw for his students, where the menu often included honey bee pupae fried in garlic, tempura cockroaches, and cricket tacos. Catts held the buggy smorgasbord to get the students over their big anxieties about insects.

From his fly and live flesh work, it was a natural progression to dead flesh, says Richard Zack, a WSU colleague. "If you're doing research on maggots in a body, you can see where you would get into forensic entomology."

At the time, the use of insects in forensic investigations was viewed as a novelty and seemed the sole domain of insect experts who had day jobs at universities. "It was a hobby for a lot of these people," says Zack.

Even so, Catts was trusted and respected by both colleagues and law officials. He consulted with investigators on a number of high-profile Northwest cases, including the Green River killer. His untimely death in 1996 left a hole not only in Pullman, but in the forensic entomology community nationwide.

Now Marshall has inherited Catts's legacy. Like the well-known professor, she eagerly drops to the ground to dig through soil and pick through bugs. She is constantly seeking opportunities to help local officers use insects in their investigations.

She makes time for extracurricular work, including several cold cases from King County and a recent murder near Anatone. In the latter, she played a role in helping officers identify a suspect.

Marshall has also taught officers around the state the art of recognizing and collecting insects at crime scenes. King County detective sergeant Mark Toner says his basic training provided some insect instruction, but nothing compared to what he's learned from Marshall. "It's hands on digging pigs and picking bugs," he says.

And if there's something he's stuck on during a real investigation, "I'll call her and say, 'This is what I've got, what can you do for me?' She tells me how to pick them up. I send them to her. She will then give me all the information I need." "There are plenty of scientists who have her knowledge," says Toner, "but they don't have her interest level or energy for this work." It's gory, smelly, and tedious, and you should never go bug hunting in a stylish outfit like the detectives do on TV, says Marshall. "But I've been given the stomach and passion to do this."