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A Maggot for the Prosecution

Discover, Nov, 1998 by Jessica Snyder Sachs

Insects can help solve murders but their testimony is being attacked in the courts. Pigs in stockings may help make the bugs respectable.

In the cow town of Stroud, Oklahoma, no one thinks twice about a junk pile alongside a neighbor's driveway. But people paid attention to the pile by Aureliano Cisneros's house, thanks to the thick swarm of shiny, fat flies and a ripening stench. On August 8, 1994, police discovered within that junk pile the decaying, maggot-packed body of Cisneros himself. Apparently, after being stabbed in the chest and neck, he had collapsed in front of his house; a short drag mark in the lawn suggested that someone then tried to move the 220-pound corpse before hiding it beneath the heap of dresser drawers, suitcases, and blankets.

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Suspicion quickly fell on Cisneros's wife, Linda Howell. The previous Thursday night, August 4, witnesses saw the couple storm out of a local bar, with Howell saying, "You son of a bitch, I'm gonna kill you!" When investigators came to Howell's door, though, she said she'd been wondering where Cisneros was. Yes, they'd argued Thursday night, she acknowledged, but they'd made up before morning. She hadn't seen her husband for two days, since the evening of Saturday, August 6, when he left home to join some buddies.

The police didn't buy her story and arrested her for the murder of her husband. Yet when Jackie Johnson, a deputy inspector at the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, looked over the forensic evidence, she wasn't very confident about the case. None of the reports gave her anything to refute Howell's claim that Cisneros was still alive two days after their public brawl.

Ironically, it was Howell's defense attorney, Frank Muret, who led Johnson to the evidence she needed. When she was handing over the forensic reports to Muret, he asked if they had looked at the maggots on the corpse. If they had, he was entitled to know what they'd found. As soon as Muret walked out the door, Johnson picked up her phone. Two calls later, she had located Neal Haskell, one of North America's most unusual private investigators. Haskell is a forensic entomologist--a scientist trained in gleaning criminal information from insects. He is, in fact, the world's only full-time forensic entomologist, though he counts as his colleagues a dozen or so other researchers who pursue forensics as a sideline. Haskell earned his Ph.D. from Purdue back in 1993. Now he crisscrosses the continent in a dusty white van with the Indiana license plate MAGGOT, consulting with the police in homicide cases and conducting research of his own.

Johnson asked Haskell if he could testify about Cisneros's time of death based on photographs, case reports, and a few vials of maggots--that is, fly larvae--collected from the body. "No problem," Haskell replied.

Haskell identified the larvae as belonging to two common flies: the black blowfly and the secondary screwworm. He then determined that these maggots were in their third developmental stage, or instar, the last before they would crawl away from the corpse to pupate and mature into adult flies. Since temperature influences the pace at which flies develop, he consulted the temperature records from the nearest weather stations, then calculated that the maggots had come from eggs laid on the body 72 to 96 hours before discovery. In other words, Cisneros could have died no later than the morning of August 5--a day earlier than Howell claimed she had last seen her husband alive.

Howell's lawyer did not exactly cave in when faced with the scientific evidence. Instead he tried to have it suppressed. During the pretrial hearings, Muret pointed out that much of the research on how blowflies develop has been conducted not on human cadavers but on dead pigs or cows' livers, and that, he argued, makes the findings inapplicable to homicides. Haskell replied that, as a matter of fact, he was preparing to publish some of his own research on human corpses, done in Tennessee. The results were consistent with nonhuman experiments.

Next Muret objected to Haskell's reliance on research done outside Oklahoma. He questioned whether developmental charts created in Tennessee are accurate enough for flies in, say, Oklahoma. This leap of faith--that blowflies in different regions grow at the same rate--is generally accepted by entomologists but remains unproved. "I've collected maggots at hundreds of workshops from one end of this country to the other," Haskell countered gruffly. "I've never seen significant variation in their growth rates outside of that determined by temperature."

Which led Muret to his next and final objection. Haskell had relied on weather readings that had been recorded miles away from Cisneros's house. Since temperature is a powerful influence on how quickly larvae grow, police should have recorded the temperature at the scene of the crime. Pulling out a field manual that Haskell himself had published, the defense attorney pounced on a passage detailing the proper procedure for determining temperature at the scene of a murder. "Did the police at the scene take ambient air temperature readings at one-foot and four-foot heights in close proximity to the body?" he asked, repeating Haskell's own instructions. "Did they take ground surface temperatures, body surface temperatures, and maggot-mass temperatures?"

A Maggot for the Prosecution

Discover, Nov, 1998 by Jessica Snyder Sachs

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