Part Two: The Bastards of Forensic Science exposes systemic failures, detailing how bite mark analysis and Dr. Michael West's fabricated evidence led to wrongful convictions like Mark Reed's. The hosts condemn Dr. Arpad Voss for teaching pseudoscientific dowsing with copper rods at the National Forensic Academy despite FBI studies proving its ineffectiveness, while also critiquing Richard Voer Bruges's unreliable clothing wrinkle analysis and Tracy Harpster's debunked 911 call guilt detection. Ultimately, these unvalidated methods exploit grieving families and undermine justice, highlighting a dangerous gap between law enforcement adoption and empirical scientific rigor. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Financial Literacy Month Kickoff00:01:58
This is an iHeart podcast.
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It's financial literacy month, and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they've failed.
Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
If you're watching the latest season of the Railhouse Wise of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down.
Portia accusing Kelly of sleeping with a married man.
They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew.
Pinky has financial issues.
On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Railhouse Wise franchise, the drama, the alliances, and the T. Everybody's talking about.
To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgeta Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
DNA Evidence and Family Wealth00:15:15
Cool Zone Media.
Oh, man.
Wow.
That is the funniest thing anyone has ever said on this show.
And we're going to have to, I mean, obviously, we've already edited it out because it's also definitely an actionable threat against what I can't believe, Kava, is that you even had their home address.
Wow.
What a bit.
You know, you learn these things when you're a doctor.
It's important to know as much about someone as you can.
Hopefully.
Anyway.
Welcome back to part two, everybody.
This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast where every week we get as close to getting our guest, Dr. Cavajoda, in trouble with the authorities as possible without actually doing it.
Thanks to Daniel.
It's going to happen one of these days.
Thank you for having me back.
Kava?
Yes.
Robert.
How do you feel so far talking about bite mark analysis?
I think it's really interesting.
I think forensic quote-unquote science is a fascinating topic because it's such an important part of our legal system.
And as we discussed in the first episode, if you haven't listened to it, you should go back and listen to it.
Like, why are you listening to this one?
And what are you doing?
That'd be amazing.
You're maniac, but I kind of dig it too.
So if that's your thing, then I'm down with it.
But long story short, I think it's really fascinating to like see how some of these things that aren't really based in the science as I would see it and as I'm used to, how it's grown and how it's used, unfortunately, in these really tragic cases.
I'm assuming you probably have more of people being sent to prison for crimes they did not commit.
And it's a really interesting time to do it too.
And I don't know if you're going to go into this.
You probably aren't, but you know, because O.J. Simpson died recently.
And he should.
And in his case, there was a lot of DNA evidence.
And I'm not like an O.J. Simpson official by any chance.
I don't know much about that case, but I know there was DNA evidence.
And it seems like it was around 94 when it was still pretty new to people.
And I don't think people really knew that much about DNA evidence at the time.
So I think it could have made a pretty big difference, his case, maybe if it was done now as opposed to then, for example.
And that's like part of forensic science as opposed to like bite marks, which and maybe fingerprinting, which seemed a little bit softer in that regard of science.
So I think it's really fascinating.
I'm not bummed out yet.
Although there are some great tragic assets.
There are some sad aspects of this.
A man just got sent to prison for 30 years who was innocent.
That's a little bit of a bummer.
Now I sound like a fucking monster.
Thank you very much.
Just parts of Jerve.
An innocent man.
An innocent man.
We're just innocent men, like that one from meme.
But I do think it's a really interesting topic, and I think it's a super important one.
So I'm glad you're doing it.
Yeah, actually, Kava, I have a different opinion about the O.J. Simpson case than a lot of people.
I half-watched that TV show about it a few years back, and I was kind of fucked up at the time, but I currently believe that Ross from Friends was the murderer.
That would make sense.
That would answer a lot of questions.
The way he kept saying juice just didn't sit right with me.
Quick aside, did you know that OJ Simpson had like a prank show?
Yes.
And like, it was this terrible, terrible prank show.
It made no sense.
It was so silly and stupid.
And like the catchline was, hey, you've been juiced.
Like when he come out, it's so funny.
Oh, man.
That's great.
Robert likes to bring up that Ross from Friends played Robert Kardashian and that OJ Simpson.
That's one of the funniest pieces of casting ever.
Because bring it up often.
It might be your Roman Empire if the Roman Empire wasn't your Roman Empire.
Well, the problem is that specifically Ross from Friends shouldn't be allowed to play other people because he's always just going to be raw.
I can't believe you was Robert Kardashians screaming juice at your friend.
I believe the guy who played OJ is OJ.
He was great, but you're just, you're always Ross from Friends now.
I'm sorry.
I'm not.
You're a millionaire.
It's fine.
Yeah, he's okay with it.
I'm sure he's okay with it.
Like Leonard Nimoy is okay or was okay being Spock, I think, at some point.
He got used to it.
Yeah, he made peace with it.
Judging by the titles of his biography.
You can't be anything else but one thing.
That's what you're doing to this person.
To Ross from Friends, yes.
That's what he is.
He's a remote.
Oh, he's a remote.
And he's a murderer, I think.
So we just finished our episode talking about people versus marks, which is kind of this court case that really helps to provide the popular grounding for bite mark analysis as a thing that's real.
Now, this case established the pract, at the time that this case was adjudicated, the established practice was that scientific evidence should not be accepted into a court case unless said evidence was generally accepted by the relevant scientific community.
This was known as the Fry test based on the court case that established the standard.
Again, we're all talking about like matters of precedent here.
Bite mark analysis, like the kind performed by Vail and Levine in this case, was not based on generally accepted odontological science because why would odontologists have done this, right?
Like it's not really relevant to most of like dentistry, even to like trying to do this thing, right?
It just, there wasn't an established kind of practice around how you should do this.
But an exception was made to the fry test based on the reasoning that bite mark matching was so simple, any lay juror could look at a cast of a bite and a cast of a perp's teeth and tell if they matched.
Because the eyeball test could tell if a bite mark matched a set of teeth, it should be admitted into court case, right?
And like you can see how like the stereotypical layman who's, you know, dumb might buy that, but also I feel like maybe this is just a matter of like it happened at a different time.
Because when I read that, I want to scream inside.
Like, no, they can't.
No, they can't.
Why would you think people could match a bite to a cast of teeth?
That doesn't make any sense at all.
Fuck you.
I think our faith in people has really just gone down in general is what I'm hearing here.
And I can't disagree with it.
But it does on the surface seem very reasonable.
It's like, okay, well, this is a very simple imprint.
If this person has a really weird, like shit mouth, you should line it up with these things.
It seems like it would make sense.
It's like to the general public, I could totally see that.
I understand how this whole disastrous train of events got moving, right?
How the momentum got built up behind it.
So, you know, the eyeball test, this is going to wind up being kind of like, it's sort of a disaster that this gets established as a way to verify whether or not a new forensic science should be trusted because it creates this very dangerous situation.
After Marx, a whole host of new kinds of experts start coming forward using different kinds of pattern matching, forensic techniques, like matching shoe prints or tire treads or bits of hair based on visual signs alone.
This bite mark analysis case, People versus Marx, it opens the floodgates on a lot of nonsense getting introduced as forensic science.
And the positive side of this is we get a shitload of TV shows based on forensic analysis, right?
This is where all of them come from.
This idea that there's all these, every crime scene, there's all these little clues and you can, you know, you could, any little thing can match the shoe prints.
You can do this.
And like, none of this stuff works.
It either doesn't work at all or it doesn't work as well, as the experts who make their living based on convincing you it works perfectly are going to claim.
And because they've now reset the standard from forensic science has to be generally accepted in the field to like, well, if it's an eyeball sort of thing, you can introduce it.
You know, it looks good enough.
Yeah, it's kind of like what we talked about too before, which is like.
I think, like in general in terms of law they, if something's been set once, then it lasts if there's precedent.
But like, on top of that, like judges are probably more willing to allow things than to keep things out of the trial if they don't understand it.
Because if, if someone could present a, you know, convincing enough argument that sounds like they know what they're talking about, I could see why a judge would be like, oh okay, this guy sounds smart enough we'll, we'll leave it in and the jury can do what they will with it.
Yeah I, it makes me think like re-watching Star Trek Next Generation, as I'm usually doing.
We're very lucky that all of those screenwriters went to Hollywood rather than decided to do this because they could have created some techno-babble bullshit that would have locked a lot of people away.
Yeah.
Yeah, right.
As a skill, yeah, whoever was writing Jordy's dialogue could have been very dangerous in another career.
This is the second show I've done with you where we get into the Star Trek.
I feel like we should just do a whole episode on Star Trek The Next Generation.
There's nothing I'd love more, but I feel like there's also a million of those shows.
Look, listeners, find a rich crazy person who will pay for me to do a show on Star Trek The Next Generation, and I'll do it.
But I feel like there's a lot of that.
Anyway, so after Marx, the burden of proof when you're introducing science into a lot of these cases has shifted drastically.
No longer do experts have to show their processes in line with an established scientific field.
The burden of proof is on the defense attorney to create doubt against the claims of an expert.
The success of dentists like Levine and Vale opened the floodgates to a whole host of men who were even less qualified, pushing to convict people based on analysis that is even less scientific.
And the reality of bite mark analysis is that it was always questionable.
Harward, the Navy man that Levine got convicted after arguing that only he could have bit Teresa Perrone, was ultimately proven innocent and released after losing 30 years of his life to the criminal justice system.
And a lot more people lose precious time as a result of this bullshit, sometimes all the time that they had, thanks to the fountain of forensic conmen enabled by People v. Marx.
Fabricant cites this infuriating story in his book, Junk Science.
Quote, The Connecticut Supreme Court adopted the eyeball test in State v. Mark Reed, a rape conviction involving the use of hair microscopy, a technique that matches two hairs together through visual observation of the interior characteristics of human hair.
Hair matching evidence was admissible, not because it had been scientifically validated, but because jurors were free to make their own determinations as to the weight they would accord the experts' testimony in light of the photograph and their own powers of observation and comparison.
Ten years later, DNA proved that the jurors' powers of observation had led to Mark Reed's wrongful conviction.
He was innocent.
The Negroid hair, a racist anachronism still used in forensics today, matched to Reed, was in fact the pubic hair of his accuser, the white woman who had identified Reed, a black man, as her rapist.
Oh my God.
That's disgusting.
Oh my gosh.
That's just real bad.
That's just real.
Just give me a moment.
Just give me a moment.
Let's all sit with that for a second.
God damn it.
That's so rough on so many levels.
Yeah, it's, I mean, part of why, and again, the primary reason this is bad is because a lot of innocent people are getting convicted.
The other reason it's bad is because outside of these quacks doing hair matching, there are people who are really trying hard and using scientific methods to try and catch murderers and rapists, which is important.
And this also, it makes it impossible to trust them, you know, the way that we should be able to.
That's part of why this is so comprehensively vile.
What's happened with this industry of grifters that have subsumed forensic sciences?
Can I ask a question?
And this is probably not something you're privy to, but do they ever, in your reading or research for this, did you ever come across a case of a expert in one of these like soft sciences here, forensic sciences, that was then later like asked about a case that had been overturned because of DNA?
And did they ever like, did they still try to fight it or were they like, yeah, it was a mistake.
We made a mistake.
Was there any response from them?
Usually, usually no response.
I can't find a single case of a guy being like, oh, yeah, you know what?
I horribly fucked up and my entire life has been a lie.
Well, I guess.
When you say it like that, I guess it makes sense why they don't do it.
But like, yeah, yeah, you know, I don't know, because it's tough because, like, again, there are real, you have to, if somebody's out there committing rapes and murders, they should be identified and stopped.
And there are going to be different scientific techniques that are developed over time that will allow to make those kinds of identifications.
And just because the people doing it are human, they will fuck up sometimes without it being them being irresponsible, just because people are imperfect, right?
The same way that doctors will fail to save patients who could have been saved because like you know, that's just that's the reality of the world.
But at the same time, when I read about cases like this with people doing this bullshit, like you think you hear hair matching, you think like, oh, well, they're probably getting DNA from the hair and matching it.
No, they're looking at two hairs and saying, well, this is clearly a negroid hair.
That guy should do as much prison time as the guy who got wrongfully convicted.
You know, if COVID taught us nothing else, it's that you have to, the people you should trust the most in terms of the expert opinions are the ones that admit when there is limitations, when there's some doubt.
When anyone tells you this is the exact answer to a novel or new issue, you have to take that with a grain of salt because nobody wants to bring on like that person onto their show.
Like no CNN, Fox.
They don't want to bring someone onto the show that says, well, you know, there's a lot we don't know yet.
We're still trying to figure it out.
They bring on the person that's like, oh, the answer to this is don't rub your eyeballs.
And that's 100% the way that's going to keep you from getting sick with COVID, et cetera.
It's the same thing that happened.
We just had this case where Israel struck an Iranian embassy in Syria and Iran responded by firing missiles and drones into Israel.
And online, when all this started, the number of people who are like, this is World War III, right?
Is like, you can wait.
You can wait to know.
Like, not that it's not important to care about this, but you sitting at home in fucking St. Louis, Missouri, you don't need to have an opinion about what the fallout for this is going to be the night that it happens.
Just give it a day or two until we know some more about what's actually happening, right?
You know, that's, that's, I, I, people, Sophie has a look on her face.
The Bite Mark Analyst Scandal00:15:52
I think I know what she's going to add here.
Oh, I'm waiting to see if you'll do it.
Listen, I'm not going to correct the way he says Iran.
I, you know what?
I petition that we now refer to Iran as Iran and Iranian because I love Robert that much.
Okay, you hear that out there?
So people out there.
Please stop messaging.
Please, please, please stop messaging me to correct the way Robert says Iran.
I love the way he says it.
I've given up.
Thank you.
In response to that, I'm going to make a grand gesture that I think might be able to heal some of the damage in this world.
Austin, Texas, now a suburb of Tehran.
Oh, fair enough.
I think it's a good idea.
I think the tacos that are going to come out of this will be incredible.
Oh my God.
The food that will come out of this alone.
Listen, you can't take the food from us.
You can say a lot about us, but you can't take our food from us.
And you put us in Austin.
I bet you we'll make some magic happen.
I know.
The kinds of barbecue science that will come out of this.
It's amazing.
Outstanding.
Yes.
Anyway, back to bite mark analysis.
So in those early publications of bite mark analysis, that before they actually got this sort of up and running as a quote-unquote science, Levine and his cohorts had acknowledged that there are issues.
You can't really analyze bites in soft tissue the way that you can analyze bites in cartilage, which is why they were so excited about the Marx case, right?
Because it was a good, what's called a three-dimensional bite that they could actually cast.
But as soon as bite mark analysis is accepted as forensic science, they drop this whole, well, soft tissue bite marks aren't really, you can't really, you know, analyze them reliably and just started going hog wild with identifications.
Vail, the dentist from the Marx case, testified two years later, this time as a certified member of the AAFS forensic odontology branch about a bite mark in a young murder victim's thigh.
This was exactly the kind of bite that earlier had been acknowledged as a bad fit for analysis.
But now the court praised the superior trustworthiness over scientific bite mark analysis rather than less reliable kinds of forensic science.
The reality is that there was very little science of any kind around bite marks.
Once the nucleus of forensic dentists had earned a place for themselves in the AAFS, they set up a forensic board and locked the field into a system where newbies apprenticed themselves to established physicians.
And the practice of bite mark analysis became a thing of wisdom handed down rather than a thing of empirical study.
And part of the problem here, part of what makes this it impossible for science to develop out of this, right?
It is possible in certain cases to match teeth to a bite mark.
I'm not going to say that's a thing that you could never do, but the number of cases in which you could actually do that responsibly is a tiny, tiny fraction of the number of cases that involve a bite.
There's no incentive financially, to be honest about that, to say this is not a good candidate for bite mark analysis.
If your job is selling bite mark analysis, your financial interest is in saying every case, oh yeah, I can tell you some good stuff about that bite mark.
Right.
It's not like these people, I imagine, you know, like there are expert witnesses in different fields of science, and there are people who come from other places and they get paid for it.
And you could argue about that, but they're coming from places where they already have like jobs doing other things.
They work at a university where they're like a professor and they do research and then, or they're a doctor in a case and then they have their own practice and then they're asked to do this.
If your field exists solely to be an expert witness, essentially, then that seems strange to me.
That does seem like a bit problematic.
I mean, I assume defense lawyers will use that argument, but I could see that being questionable.
A lot of times they don't know to, or they don't feel like they can because, you know, again, in their heads, like, I'm just some lawyer.
This is a doctor, you know?
It causes problems.
And again, we should note that like in any of these cases, forensic evidence is not the only evidence.
There's other stuff going into it.
But a lot of times, forensic evidence is what cinches these bad convictions.
And this is like acknowledged at the time by like the prosecutors and shit that like, yeah, it was that bite mark analysis that got us this conviction.
Yeah.
So again, what you have with this kind of growing field is you've got this board at the AFS that are able to certify people as like, these are the real bite mark analysts.
And this becomes like once you're in that, the only way to become a bite mark analyst is to get approval from these people who are already very biased in such a way as to like make this be a profitable industry.
And obviously, mentorship is a necessary part of any medical field, any scientific discipline, really, right?
And that's not a bad thing.
It's not bad that, you know, most doctors have mentors when they're younger doctors with more experienced doctors.
But what you get with these forensic boards is more akin to a medieval guild than anything we would associate with modern science.
There is no kind of opened peer review structure built into the field.
And the only people watching out to see if people are practicing utter bunk are other people who have a vested financial interest in maintaining the reputation of their field.
This becomes a problem when conmen find their way into practicing bite mark analysis.
And that brings me to the hideous story of Michael West.
A dentist from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, West decided to become a bite mark specialist when he realized there was a potential fortune to be made in becoming the Amazon.com of bite forensics.
Oh, my God.
At the height.
Oh, that's such a terrible phrase.
What a terrible phrase.
Oh, my God.
Kava, do you know much about conducting an autopsy and how much time that takes and stuff?
I've worked on cadavers, but I've never actually been on a true full autopsy.
I assume it's a very long time.
It's a long process.
There's a lot to do.
It is pretty involved.
And so it should have seemed weird to people that at the height of his career in the early 90s, West was conducting between 1,200 and 1,800 autopsies a year.
An amount most experts will agree is a lot for a dentist.
That's for a dentist.
For a dentist.
That is quite a few autopsies for a dentist.
Wow.
It sounded like a lot.
And then I remember also dentist.
He's a dentist.
Yeah, this is not a guy who is like an expert autopsier.
Not like a dentist in the Doc Holiday old West where that meant he could be like a surgeon as well, like a modern day.
Yeah.
Wow.
Now, I know what you're saying here, Kava.
Are there even that many murder cases where somebody gets bitten?
And the answer is no.
But West developed an ingenious method for turning any run-of-the-mill death into a homicide with bite marks that he could match to whatever victim he was hired to look over.
And I'm going to quote from journalist Radley Balco, writing for Reason.com, describing West's methods.
Kava, you are about to have a conniption fit here.
Quote, a fluorescent black light flicks on.
West is now employing a much-ridiculed technique he invented for identifying bite marks, which he modestly calls the West phenomenon.
He claims that by using a black light and yellow goggles, he can find bite marks, knife serrations, and other tears and abrasions to the skin that no other expert can see.
Okay, can we start by the fact that he calls it the West phenomenon?
What a douchebag.
Holy shit.
Oh, my God.
That should get you flung into the sea.
Oh, my God.
Like, naming it after yourself with this ridiculous, like, he has me yellow goggles, like he's, like, studied UV lighting or some shit like that.
What a terrible.
I don't know.
I don't need to know any more about him.
I don't like him.
Oh, you're about to hear a lot more.
So once he's found these bite marks, West can have a judge compel whoever's been accused in the case and get a castmate of their teeth, right?
Then he simply takes the cast and he uses it to put bite marks on the dead body, thus creating the evidence that he was hired to find.
There are videotapes of him doing this.
During an autopsy, West conducted on a 23-month-old baby named Haley Olivo.
Quote, West's hand then enters the frame, holding a plaster dental mold taken earlier that day from Jimmy Duncan, who was accused of killing this kid.
Using the replica of Duncan's teeth as a weapon, West repeatedly presses and jams the front bite plate directly into Olivo's cheek.
Over two minutes, he does this 17 times.
At 6.57, he starts dragging Duncan's mold across Olivo's face, beginning near her lips, then scraping the plaster teeth down her face to her jaw.
He does this for another minute.
West next moves to Olivo's elbow and uses the cast to impress Duncan's dentition into an old bruise hospital record show she suffered weeks before her death.
With the lights out, West continues to jam the plaster cast into the girl's cheek, elbow, and arm.
Over the course of the 24-minute video, West pushes the cast of Duncan's teeth into the girl's body at least 50 times.
I know I don't usually ask you to like skip ahead for me, but can you blink twice if it ends badly for this motherfucker?
It definitely doesn't sell.
God damn it.
I mean, it doesn't end well for him, but it doesn't end the way it should.
It should.
Is him getting flung into the sea?
It should.
I was hoping for some from Flops and some.
No, it should aim.
It should.
This is the story should end with him tripping and falling into a bubbling cauldron of herpes.
A cauldron would be great.
Yeah, a cauldron of herpes feels valid here.
That's kind of the end I was hoping for.
Okay, let's hear more because I'm deeply disturbed.
Real quick, though, I'm sorry.
Someone was recording him doing this, like those hidden.
No, yeah, this is an autopsy.
They are all recorded.
Yeah.
And this is so this is like gets reviewed, and like this is part of what starts this guy kind of being unwound as an expert.
But in this specific case, the footage that shows him creating bite marks in the corpse was not entered into evidence.
So it had no role in the initial trial of the man accused of murdering Haley.
His charge was raised to capital murder, and the bite marks were cited as one of the reasons why.
But in the time between his exam, between the exam West conducted and the actual trial over this death, West was discredited due to reporting around his deeply questionable methods, including this video.
So the prosecution just shopped around for another dentist.
They tried Lowell Levine, but he was familiar enough with West's shady-ass behavior to turn them down.
He's like, no, man, I'm not that dumb.
Like, absolutely not.
Yeah, maybe shady, but not that shady.
Yeah.
Eventually, they found a dental examiner who looked over photos West had taken of the fraudulent exam he'd carried out and confirmed that the defendant had left the bite marks.
Balco writes, despite West's disintegrating reputation and the fact that the bite mark evidence was derived from his work, Louisiana Fourth Judicial District Judge Charles Joyner ruled in 1995 that the video contained no exculpatory evidence favorable to the defendant, a finding hotly disputed by all the forensic specialists consulted for this article, and that therefore prosecutors didn't need to hand it over.
The state maintained at first that the defense is somehow hoping to drag Dr. West into this case in order to create ancillary issues for the jury.
But by 1996, prosecutors relented and gave defense attorneys the video.
But Duncan's attorneys never showed the video to their own dental examiner.
This point would have become crucial since the bite marks were the only physical evidence used to elevate Duncan from a negligent guardian to a lethal child rapist.
I don't understand, though.
Okay, I have so many questions.
One, did this West guy not?
I mean, why would he do that knowing he was filming it?
Did he think no one's going to see it?
I think he thought he was explaining as he's doing it basically, like I'm testing, you know, this is where I see the bite marks or whatever.
Like.
But he's making the bite marks.
Right.
Yeah.
I think he thought nobody was going to really care to check.
And they didn't for a while.
People that are like that level of bold feel untouchable.
And I think he thought he could just get away with doing this.
And it sounds like he did.
Yeah.
Wes and the other dental examiner.
There's another guy in the room with him there during that autopsy.
I like that guy, too.
Yeah.
They fall out of favor because journalists like Balco start writing about their methods.
But Wes continued to testify as an expert until 2001.
What stops him being cited as brought in as an expert in court cases is that in 2001, a defense lawyer decided to test him by sending him a cast of an active defendant's teeth and photos of bite marks from a closed-solved homicide case.
West confirmed that the dental mold matched the photos of the bite marks.
So, you know, basically, there's an active case going on.
The defense lawyer sends him a cast of the defendant in that case, Keith, teeth, and then photos of bite marks from a completely different homicide that has already been solved.
And West is like, oh, yeah, this guy made those bite marks.
And like, how dumb is he to not realize that?
Yeah.
I mean, do it.
Why would you believe the defense lawyer is trying to make you look dumb and you just help them?
This person seems insane to me that this person was able to do this when they also seem really incompetent.
What's really insane is how little the fact that he's obviously a fraud helps the people that he had helped to get convicted.
In 2003, the Mississippi Supreme Court held that, quote, just because Dr. West has been wrong a lot does not mean without something more that he was wrong here in a trial for another man he'd helped to convict.
Broken clock.
It's right twice today.
So is Dr. West.
Yeah.
And Jimmy Duncan, the guy convicted in the case where he's fucking dragging a bite, a tooth cast across a dead baby, still on death row as of 2023.
And it's one of those things where like, again, there's other evidence a lot of the time, but in Duncan's case, the only physical evidence was from West, right?
Like, it's.
So how has that not been how?
I mean, maybe this is ongoing, but like, they don't, how come the Innocence Project isn't working with him on that?
They are.
They are.
It's just like this, the fact that like something seems clearly fucked up, number one, doesn't mean that you're going to get court rulings that revisit, you know, those cases.
Like it's, it's just not, it's a pain.
It takes a lot of a lot of these, a lot of people who are exonerated as a result of the Innocent Project's work.
It can take years or decades, you know?
Right.
And he might have done the case.
I have no other knowledge, but like, you know, with what evidence, you know, if that's the only evidence, then it's highly suspect.
And certainly there are a lot of cases where he matches a bite to a perp who did do the murder, but that also does, like, he could still be lying.
There's just other evidence, right?
Like, you know, the cops got the right guy and they brought him in and he just agreed with, you know, what the cops already thought.
And in that case, he was right because that guy happened to do it.
But yeah, it gives you an idea, just like how fucking sketchy a lot of this is.
Now, one thing we should all know at this point about scientific disinformation is that if left unchecked, it spreads inevitably.
How Disinformation Spreads Unchecked00:03:48
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Like in cancer.
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It's financial literacy month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
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If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for a pitch, it's just like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything.
But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
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Hi, I'm Bob Pippman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia.
And I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
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When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
Here at the Nick Dick and Pole show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
What Kugler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
Who do you think he is?
I don't know.
You meet the like the president?
You think he goes to president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
Lozla proves that.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It's a good one.
I like that saying.
It's an actual Polish saying, it is an actual Polish saying.
Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
Listen to the Nick Dick and Pole Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
So the fact that scientific disinformation spreads if left unchecked is why you have to fight vigorously against people who want to deny basic facts of reality for their own profit.
If you ignore, say, an anti-vax doctor claiming vaccines cause autism to make a fortune for himself, in a few years, you might have presidential candidates screaming about vaccine chips or viovermectin in schools full of kids with whooping cough.
Mechanical Corpse Sniffing Dogs00:15:17
The field of forensic science has the same issue.
I would even go even further than that and say you don't even, it could be something even more subtle, like some doctor who says, or I'm sorry, not doctor, but some, you know, famous actress says putting a jade egg in your hoo-ha helps with such and such.
There is now, I feel there's a direct line to that, that anti-vax president, you know?
Now, I used to not care that much.
Now I do.
Any bit of this misinformation can lead eventually to this cascade.
Eventually you get RFK Jr. like killing Samoan babies.
You know, this is how it happens.
Yeah, the derangement, like, yeah, it's a kind of cancer.
It acts that way, at least.
And for an example of just how bad it can get, I want to turn now to the story of Dr. Arpad Voss.
Now, on paper, Kava, Arpad Voss is as legit as it gets.
This guy's got a PhD in forensic anthropology.
He works with the University of Tennessee's world-famous body farm.
He even has a TED Talk.
And most of that TED Talk sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Notably, not a scientist.
But it sounds good.
It's a lucid look at how human decomposition is impacted by various factors and how cadaver dogs, often labradors, work by smelling different chemicals that are a product of said decomposition.
And then, about 70% of the way through his TED Talk, we get this.
Our next step is to develop our own Labrador.
An electronic version.
Well, you may not be good at a lot of things, but we can nail those acronyms.
Okay?
This instrument was designed specifically for two purposes.
One to track the chemical plume, and the second to give the operator an idea of which area has the highest concentration.
Because where the body is is where the concentration will be the highest, and as the plume migrates, it moves away.
So.
What he is selling here, and the reason he brings up an acronym is that his device that is basically a mechanical corpse-sniffing dog is called the Labrador.
And the Labrador in this case is an acronym for Lightweight Analyzer for Buried Remains and Decomposition Odor Recognition.
And to be honest, that's a pretty good acronym.
Like, he did a solid job.
They had to work through it.
They had to work through it.
They have a lot to work with, and they came up with something.
Yeah.
They made it happen.
The device looks like a bulky metal detector.
It looks like a metal detector with extra shit glued on it, right?
If you were, again, say you were doing a Star Trek episode and you needed a future metal detector, you'd get a metal detector and you'd throw some shit on it, you know?
That's how this thing looks.
It's, yeah.
Anyway, his device is...
This is bullshit, right?
But it makes sense that something like this might work, right?
If a dog can sniff out a buried cadaver, and dogs can definitely do that, we should be able to someday design a device that can fulfill the same role electronically.
You know, that makes sense.
And perhaps someday we will.
But Dr. Voss's gizmo does not use anything that we would call regular science.
Instead, it functions on the principle of a divining rod.
Do you know anything about divining rods or dowsing, Kava?
We're talking about the old, old school, like dust bowl stuff where someone walks around.
Sure fucking are.
Yeah.
That's great.
That's fucking great.
If you haven't been pilled on this particular bit of esoterica, dowsing or divining rods go back a long time, at least about 500 years, and variations of the practice probably predate that.
The basic idea is that you get either a Y-shaped piece of wood or two curved copper rods, or there's a couple other variants of this, and you walk around looking for water or whatever underground.
And when the two rods cross or the Y-shaped stick gets pulled down, that means that it's right below you, right?
When the rod or rods move or whatever, that's a sign that you're standing above whatever you're looking for.
And dowsers have claimed over the years they can find everything from underwater, underground water to buried treasure to corpses.
And this is done in a couple of different ways.
I'm not going to labor on all of the different ways.
It is generally considered officially to be a pseudoscience because repeated studies have not been able to show that dowsing is any more accurate than random chance.
Seems like it'd be easy to prove that, yeah.
Yes.
The explanation for why the sticks cross or get pulled or whatever is something called the idiomotor effect.
And this is when suggestions, beliefs, or expectations cause unconscious muscular movements.
Most people are probably broadly familiar with the concept.
What's happening here is not wildly different from what happens with cops and drug-sniffing dogs, right?
While dowsing has its origins primarily in finding water, which is why it's also often called water witching, Dr. Voss is one of a number of people who think it can and should be used to find human remains.
He always frames this as focused on both giving the families closure, in the case of hikers who died somewhere off trail and their bodies were never found, and of course aiding in murder investigations.
And before we get into this grift, and it is a grift, I want to cite one paragraph from an article on Dr. Voss in Mother Jones.
In June 2021, scientists from the FBI laboratory, George Mason University, and the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command conducted a controlled blind test to evaluate the ability of dowsing rods to detect buried bones.
A control group of participants was asked to look at nine holes and to identify which ones they thought contained bones.
A different group did the same thing using dowsing rods, which they didn't have experience using for this purpose, according to the study.
The scientists determined that neither method worked.
In an email exchange with Mother Jones, Dr. Voss called that study useless.
And in his opinion, wrong though it is, matters because he gets to train a lot of cops and forensic investigators.
He wrote back in his email that he teaches his students proper dowsing and the 17 scientific principles that, quote, make the rods work, which took me years to find out.
Oh my God.
First of all, if your whole grift is based on doing what a dog does, but not as well, like what a lame grift.
Like we already have dogs for that.
Like, what's the point of 17 of them?
What are those scientific principles?
Yeah.
In the fact that he has a TED Talk, and it probably goes into that.
I mean, it just goes to show that like, you know, not everyone who gets a TED Talk is fucking really an expert on anything.
I guess you gotta, I mean, that's a little disappointing, actually.
I kind of assume they'd have some level of like, you know, criteria that has to be met to give a TED Talk.
You have to assume the TED Talk booker person or whatever isn't a forensic scientist.
It would be weird if they were.
And this guy is a forensic scientist with impressive credentials who works, who trains FBI agents.
So what is he saying?
His again, it looks like a metal detector to dowse for corpses.
He has them walk around with copper rods where there are bodies buried so that they can find them.
I mean, okay, I bite.
What is the, like, I want to know, like, what is it about the dead body?
What pheromone?
Because you know what is true?
Like, for example, like, there are researchers off the coast, the Farallon Islands here in San Francisco, who study orcas when they attack sharks.
And when a shark's body dies, it releases, they think, a certain pheromone that acts as a warning sign to other sharks to keep them away.
So there is pheromones that have been theorized to be released after death.
Is that what he's saying?
Is that the bodies releasing certain odors or hormones that this device is picking up?
Bodies do release certain like odors that you couldn't, again, that's what like a cadaver dog is smelling, right?
Even if you can't like physically smell, obviously you can smell a dead body that's right in front of you.
If it's like buried or something, cadaver dogs can find them sometimes, right?
Right.
What he's doing is he's out on the body farm where they take dead bodies and they put them in various situations to see how decomposition works and also to train like investigators and stuff.
And so he's walking around places where he and others know bodies are buried and they are dowsing and eventually finding them.
And what's really probably happening is a mix of they know there's a body somewhere.
There's obvious signs that a body was buried and the idiomotor effect takes care of the rest, right?
That's what I think is actually happening here.
But what he is telling people is that you can dowse for corpses and you can't.
You just can't.
It's not real science.
Yeah.
And again, if it was real science, he wouldn't say, I spent years figuring it out.
He would say, here is all of my peer-reviewed research showing why this works.
Right.
There would be a body of this would, who, people would dedicate their lives if you could walk around with copper rods and they would somehow point out dead bodies underground.
Yeah.
Someone would dedicate their life to figuring out why.
That would be interesting.
Yes.
People would be doing it all the time, by the way, because people go on beaches looking for like loose change.
Imagine how much loose change.
People do go dowsing a lot.
So again, there's not data to prove that this works, but it doesn't matter because Voss is an instructor at the National Forensic Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Here's how that Mother Jones reporter attended his class where he's teaching police officers.
And here's how he described it.
There are no official dowsing rods at hand, but that doesn't matter.
You can use the flags, Voss offers.
Bend them like you would coat hangers.
Fred Ponce, a private detective from Miami with a dark mustache and beard, gets right to it.
He tears the red plastic rectangles off two stakes and spaces his hands to measure about 12 inches of straight steel, then bends the remaining metal into handles.
Holding the stakes like six shooters, he walks over one of the suspected grave sites.
The stakes cross.
He does it again.
They cross and again they cross.
I'm not kidding, Ponce says, marveling that his DIY grave finder seems to be working.
And again, reasonable people would go, like, well, you're at a body farm.
You know, they buried bodies around here.
Most people who bury corpses probably aren't good at like hiding all of the evidence.
And the fact that the fact that you're trying to convince me this is real science, and you could say, literally any metal you bend works for this.
What else works that way?
I don't expect.
I don't okay.
I don't expect that much, but like we're expecting like an 18th century technology to help us.
Yeah.
Yeah, whatever.
To help us find these corpses, I feel like we've gone wrong.
I feel like we've done, we've, we like law enforcement's gone astray.
Yeah.
It might be fair to say that at this point.
Reasonable people, and only reasonable people listen to this podcast, might say, that sounds like nonsense.
But Dr. Voss's class is among the most loved portions of the 10-week training course at the National Forensic Academy.
It costs students, mostly crime scene investigators from agencies in 49 U.S. states, $12,000 of your tax dollars.
So that's cool.
The Academy itself is widely respected.
The Washington Post called it the Harvard of Hellish Violence.
Voss's techniques are used all over the country by real law enforcement officers, in spite of the fact that a lot of this is just obviously bullshit.
And for evidence of that, I'd like to turn back to the Labrador, which we opened this portion of the episode discussing.
That July 5th, 2012 TED Talk is not one of the more popular TED Talks.
It's got like 14,000 views at present.
But the fact that Voss got a TED Talk might suggest to some people that his Labrador was a real product.
As far as I can tell, it is not.
The device never launched commercially.
When asked about this, Dr. Voss always claims he has a patent on the device, as if that matters.
Mother Jones cites Diane France, director of the Colorado Human Identification Laboratory.
She notes, you can patent anything.
It doesn't mean that it works.
It just means the design has to be different from other products.
Diane noted that she's never seen the Labrador, let alone been able to test it.
Mother Jones could only find one expert who claimed to have used the device, and that expert was Michael Hadzel, president of the non-profit Peace River Canine Search and Rescue Association from Inglewood, Florida.
He claims to be field testing the device and that it has a 60% success rate, but did not provide any data on this whatsoever.
And I will note that a guy testing a device without backup and saying it works 60% of the time is remarkably close to saying it works about as well as the flip of a coin.
Super, super bullshit.
No error rate study.
Again, getting back to that thing we talked about in the first episode, error rate study.
This is like, this is exactly the flip of a coin.
And no one will ever do a study on this because it's nonsense and there's only a device that doesn't exist, obviously.
As I've noted repeatedly, there's a lot of problems with the way that police use dogs forensically, but we know that dogs can smell this stuff.
And part of how we know it is we have studied their noses extensively.
Like we have, there's data on how sensitive a dog's nose is because it's science.
Because people noticed dogs seemed supernaturally good at something.
And rather than just saying, well, that's good enough for me, they figured out the underpinning reasons why, because that's how real science is done.
Yeah.
The patent application itself lists the device.
Actually, this is the application, I think, for a successor device to the Labrador.
That's the improvement on it.
Lists this corpse-sniffing gadget as having two L-shaped antenna that allow it to channel electromagnetic waves.
In other words, he basically built a divining rod in the form factor of a metal detector.
I've updated it.
I've now called it Theranos.
You're going to love this device.
I found an analysis.
One of the best write-ups of this guy as a con man comes from the website pctmissing.org.
The PCT is the Pacific Crest Trail, right?
This is, it's the same.
The Appalachian Trail is kind of the other one in the U.S. You've got these two massive long continent-wide trails that, like, for a lot of people, it's their whole life ambition to do the PCT or to do the Appalachian or to do both of them, right?
And because absolute sickos.
I don't know.
Parts of it seem appealing to me.
And then I think of how tired I'd get.
Oh, my God.
God bless them.
I'm so glad somebody wants to do that.
It's very impressive.
Obviously, it can be dangerous, right?
People die doing this with some regularity.
Obviously, not most people who do it, but it's not uncommon for people to go missing.
And so there's this website, pctmissing.org, that both covers these missing report persons' cases.
And what they're doing here is kind of as journalists trying to advocate to families that are being preyed upon by Dr. Voss.
Quote, the full patent makes more references to divining rods.
And during the Casey Anthony trial in 2011, Dr. Voss admitted to dowsing for graves as a hobby.
The Casey Anthony Trial Debate00:07:38
Now, when I read that, I said, what the fuck?
And I clicked the hyperlink on the words Casey Anthony trial.
And that hyperlink took me to a Casey Anthony trial fan cam YouTube account that includes cut-up videos of Dr. Voss's testimony during the Casey Anthony trial, where he was employed by the prosecution as an expert witness when they were trying to prove that that toddler's dead body had at one point been in the trunk of Anthony's car.
So the prosecutors want Voss to show that because he could find chemical evidence of like the chemicals released by a decomposing body, that the dead kid had been in Anthony's trunk, right?
That's why they have him on, right?
Here's how Mother Jones describes Voss's performance in the Casey Anthony trial.
Voss claimed that an air sample from the trunk revealed high levels of compounds consistent with human decomposition based on his research.
An analytical chemist from Florida International University testified that Voss's testimony wasn't backed up by scientific evidence and that many of the compounds Voss identified could have been emitted by food wrappers and other trash recovered from Anthony's trunk.
Anthony was acquitted in part because of doubts about the air sample from the car, legal experts said at the time.
Now, that's all fucked up.
And by the way, before you get into it, I don't know anything about the Casey Anthony trial.
If you have a strong opinion about that, I'm not making an opinion on the verdict of that trial.
What I am having an opinion on is Dr. Voss's testimony during that trial.
Even being a part of it, why is this guy a part of it?
No matter who should not be in a fucking courtroom unless he's being charged as a con man.
No matter how dumb you think things are, it's just like they get dumber.
Like, are there children running the courts?
Why is this happening?
Why is he even a part of it?
He's got, again, he has really good paper qualifications, but when he actually gets on the stand, it's so fucking funny.
And I'm actually going to play you a bit from this video collage of his testimony during the trial.
Advas, A-R-P-A-D, V-A-S-S.
I think I can make an logical, not logical, but I can make a conclusion.
You know, it's just another corroboration of what my nose tells me is correct.
Did you do any other instrumental examinations of the carpet piece?
Significant ones?
I don't think I would call any.
We don't know where the source is.
It could have been from decomposition or it could have been from gasoline.
Is there a specific established chemical odor signature for human decomposition?
A clear and specific one to human decomposition only?
I do not think so.
You are not a chemist.
Correct.
You are not an analytical chemist.
Correct.
You're not a biochemist.
Correct.
And therefore, you really can't testify as to the chemistry and the makeup of things of which you have no experience, correct?
Well, if I've never looked at something, yeah, I suppose that's true to a certain extent.
But you do not list what you got your PhD in.
Could you tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury what you got your PhD in?
Anthropology.
Now that was unify hearings.
Now look, anthropology.
It's so funny.
I lie that that's such a good cross-examination.
Because like, look, there are actually a lot of anthropologists in forensic science, right?
There's a lot of things about anthropology as a discipline that are relevant, you know, especially when you're talking about like digging up people who were murdered years ago and buried and like all that.
So obviously forensic scientists are useful.
What they are not is chemists.
And if you are as an anthropologist claiming to have developed this like novel technique of measuring chemicals that are specific to human decomposition, I'm going to need to see that somebody who knows chemistry professionally has been involved in that process.
Back this up.
Oh my God.
It's so disheartening.
And you know, the thing about it that's kind of a bummer is that like, you know, I get it if he would come across on the stand as being like really knowledgeable, authoritative, but it doesn't even seem like that.
He can't even like fake it that well.
Like, you know, you're going to be a grifter.
You got to, he's not even good at it.
It's got to be both that like a lot of cops are just not all that bright.
And also, I assume one-to-one, he's charming enough that like he makes you feel like he knows what he's talking about, but he does not look good up on that stand.
No, he does not look.
It's a bad grift.
I don't know how it's worked at all for him.
I mean, you got to pet that.
That's remarkable.
Yeah, he sure did.
A consummate professional.
Dr. Voss doesn't just make his money teaching CSI guys and consulting badly on court cases.
He also reaches out to families who have lost loved ones.
Some of these people do speak highly of him.
Delana Hall Bodmer's sister, Gina, went missing in June of 1980 with a man named Stephen Epperly.
Her body has never been found, but Gina is sure Dr. Voss located it because his device signaled a frequency he matched to her specific corpse in eight locations, which he claims means she was dismembered and buried in eight different areas.
Now, Epperly had already been convicted in a rare no-body homicide.
I think it was actually one of the first no-body homicides convictions in Florida.
But, you know, what they're looking for is like, where was she buried, right?
And he says, like, well, I found evidence she was cut up and buried in these parts.
And they find some bone fragments near where he picks out.
And I haven't found any confirmation that they were human.
The last article I read said they were like still being analyzed, but it seems like if they were, he would be trumpeting that.
So maybe, again, if you spend a lot of time in the woods, you'll run into a lot of bones.
Sure, right?
And I've definitely seen bones where I'm like, well, yeah, that could belong to.
It's just a little shard of bone.
I can't identify what it is.
I assume a doctor, a scientist of some sort could, but.
Is he reaching out to these people directly or are they coming to him for it's a mix, but a lot of times I do think he does reach out, especially if it's like a big case.
He's also, you know, famous enough that some people who are desperate to find their lost loved ones, you know, go to him.
This is still happening.
He's still doing this.
This is something that is still going.
That's why that Pacific Crest Trail website is covering him because he's been sort of preying on people who have lost loved ones on the trail.
Wow.
And again, we just brought up this case, this woman, Lana, whose sister was murdered in 1980.
She's clearly someone who is mourning a lost loved one and desperately hopes to get some kind of closure using what she thinks is science, right?
She also is looking to, again, this is very sad.
Part of why she's working with Dr. Voss is that he's kind of convinced her that they, by figuring out how to use this device and using her sister's case as a case study, they could also use this thing to find abducted children, right?
And this presents an opportunity to Lana where she thinks like, maybe I can make something good come out of my sister's death.
And I understand that impulse, right?
But this is not science.
And it's not, Dr. Voss isn't going to help anybody.
Like she has been taken for a ride by him.
And I think that's pretty gross of him.
There's more realistic science behind the Ghostbusters Proton packs than there is this device that he has.
And they also look cooler.
And like, this is, and he's able to sort of use this.
Exploiting Grief for Profit00:03:42
It's just, it's, I mean, I just, it's amazing how much money you can make in this country, in this world with a grift.
It's amazing.
And what's even more amazing is Dr. Voss's patented find your dead loved ones service, the primary sponsor of this episode of Behind the Bastards.
And Kava, when Dr. Voss came to me and said, I want to sponsor a podcast episode on forensic science lies, I said, it seems kind of weird because we're definitely going to tear you a new one.
But he paid us $170,000.
So here's a bad.
He's a swell guy.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
It's financial literacy month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum-Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything.
But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
Here at the Nick Dick and Pole show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
What Koogler did that I think was so unique?
He's the writer director.
Who do you think he is?
I don't know.
You meet the president?
You think he goes to president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
Leslo proves that.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It was a good one.
I like that saying.
It's an actual Polish saying.
It is an actual Polish.
It's a better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
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Sketchy Forensic Clothing Analysis00:14:25
Anyway, we're back.
So again, I can't blame Gina for like wanting to get something positive out of her sister's murder, but I can blame Dr. Voss for, in my opinion, taking advantage of her and a lot of other grieving people.
Case in point, a shitload of folks who've lost loved ones on the PCT.
People like the family of David O'Sullivan, a 25-year-old from Ireland who went missing in the spring of 2017.
Voss scanned for his body from a helicopter with his Labrador and gave GPS coordinates to where rescuers would find the body.
A mountaineer went to the coordinates and found nothing.
O'Sullivan is still missing three years later.
He was still missing three years later.
Again, if people out there listening trying to figure out what this Labrador thing is, it's just like a dumb-looking box of nothing.
It's a box of nothing.
It's nothing.
Like, how would that, how would you, working from like an inch away, I don't think it would work, much less from a helicopter.
Yeah, yeah.
And yeah, I'm going to quote again from Mother Jones here.
And this is them talking to the family of David O'Sullivan.
Voss cost us a lot of money and gave us false hope, which was much worse.
The lost hiker's mother, Carmel O'Sullivan, wrote in an email, adding that she now doubts Voss ever found a missing person.
Families are at their most vulnerable at this time and will try desperate measures.
Voss is such a fixture in the I Lost a Loved One on the PCT community that the first article, again, this website has done a write-up of him because they feel the need to warn people in the community about him because he's a fucking predator.
It's what some people might argue.
He cites a patent file, or the guy who wrote that article in PCTMissing.org cites a patent filing for this successor device to the Labrador, which is called the Inquisitor.
And I'm not really curious about what the acronym stands for, but I do want to read this quote from that PCT Missing article.
I've reviewed 27 cases Voss worked, and I can't find a single one where the Inquisitor detected an actual missing person or their remains.
I know of one missing hiker case in which Voss and his device walked within feet of the remains and totally missed it.
We know this because the missing person was found by accident many months later, well outside the area detected by Voss and his Inquisitor.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, the thing is that he does it once.
You know, shame on him.
He makes a living off of it.
Shame on us.
Right.
There's a broader problem.
This is a systemic issue now.
That article of that PCT missing article, which again, I was, I would not surprise that this is a community, right?
That like there's enough missing people and that it's enough of a thing that folks who are particularly really into the trail do.
But I was impressed at like the degree of rigor in the article that this guy put together on Dr. Voss.
It's really quite good.
The author of that talked to Dr. Monty Miller, director of forensic DNA experts, to provide an analysis of the patent for the Inquisitor device.
Dr. Miller has a PhD in biochemistry, not anthropology, which makes him somewhat more qualified to draw conclusions on biochemistry.
Quote, in a six-page report, he thoroughly debunked the Inquisitor's ability to locate dead family members using your fingernail clippings.
That's what Voss was advertising.
You give me your fingernails and I will find your loved one using my magical gadget.
Wow.
That's so rad.
For an example of how ridiculous this is, it's hard to get DNA from fingernail clippings.
Right.
Like, it's not, you could do it, but it's not easy, right?
Like, it's one of the more difficult things in DNA-related science.
You certainly cannot put your fingernail clippings in a box that then finds your son's body.
That's just not real.
Yeah, I don't like this guy.
I mean, whenever you tell me about these grifters that are able to pull off these scams, allegedly, I don't know if he listens or if he's litiginous, but like, I have, it almost is a part of me that's just like, that's pretty, I wish I had that confidence.
I wish I had this level of like confidence in my skills to be like, to try and sell something like this.
Like, it's kind of inspiring in a weird way.
I hate to admit that.
It is.
It's awesome in like the literal sense of that word and that you have awe at the audacity of this motherfucker.
Yeah.
And it's working.
He's like, he's like, he wouldn't keep doing it.
It may not be working as well now.
That's a little unclear to me.
Sources at the UT Forensic Anthropology Center say Voss is no longer associated with their department.
The author of that article I cited talked to a PhD who specializes in LIDAR.
This person described Voss as predatory.
To date, there are no scientific studies backing up Voss's claims.
Person who wrote that article claims he charges $300 an hour plus expenses and a retainer for his services, which is deeply, again, if your fucking kid is missing, you'll do anything.
Right.
If you can be convinced, obviously.
For his part, Voss told Mother Jones he's not out to take advantage of anybody.
A statement made almost exclusively by people out to take advantage of other people.
He states that his fee is minimal and that he's worked pro bono in the past.
A statement wonderfully vague enough that it means almost nothing.
He does note that he also operates with more recognized tools like cadaver dogs and chemical tests.
Curious then that he makes such a point about his patented body stiffing machine that no one can seem to prove has been studied in any kind of objective repeatable way.
Eric Bartelink, an anthropology professor who was former president of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology, says Voss's services are not scientifically valid.
Helen Gilking, director of the Forensic Anthropology Lab at the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification, adds, part of the problem has to do that Voss doesn't belong to any of the usual organizations or societies.
He's operating in a society of consumers who have been conditioned by all sorts of forensic scientific fantasy in the popular media.
As a result, there is no shortage of potential victims.
I don't fully agree with her because, again, he is associated with some reputable thing, like organizations.
He's like been teaching cops at the fucking body farm.
It's not weird that people think he's got qualifications.
Part of the issue is that this is not just a Voss thing.
Like the whole field of forensic science, all the different fields of forensic science are riddled with like issues in adequately determining whether or not different techniques are valid in repeatable science.
This is a problem again and again.
We're not even going to get into it in these episodes because there's so much else, but like one of the big findings of the last couple of decades has been that a huge amount of what used to be called like arson analysis, like burn analysis, was just wrong.
People were convicted all the fucking time based on an understanding of what sort of patterns in a fire indicated arson that were not necessarily indicators of arson that could happen in totally accidental fires and fires that are started electrically that they were like, this only happens when you pour fuel, right?
Was completely bunked.
People went to fucking prison for this shit.
It happened.
It's all over the goddamn place.
And it's because once people have the idea to start doing this as a method of forensic analysis, they just start doing it in court for money rather than building up a body of science around it first.
You know, again, it's like it comes out of like the legal system and law enforcement as opposed to coming out of like the traditional sciences where they come out of.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Fundamental flaws.
Yeah.
So, and while Voss is a particularly noteworthy example of the problematic aspects of having little in the way of objective standards for any kind of practitioners of forensic science, he's not nearly alone.
This brings me to Dr. Richard Voer Bruges, who has used his unparalleled skill in denim identification to ID a bank robber, Wilbur McCreath, who was sentenced to prison for 92 years.
What identification?
He's matching like pants and shirts on camera, like the pattern of creases and folds in them to prove that it's the same shirt, not just like an identical, because obviously a lot of people buy the same versions of the same shirt.
You have to prove that like this is the, this shirt on camera is the shirt this guy owns, right?
And he's doing that by like doing wrinkle analysis.
Wow.
Wow.
That's awesome.
It's one thing if there's a guy like Rob, say, say a guy holds up a liquor store and you see he's wearing a certain shirt with a specific pattern and there's three cigarette burns in the shoulder and you find this a shirt with the same pattern and cigarette burns in the same way.
That's some evidence, right?
That would definitely be reasonable to introduce, right?
Yeah.
What he's doing is much sketchier than this, right?
Look at this.
There's a photographic comparison for this bank robbery case where you can see how kind of unclear the actual clips from the bank camera are.
And you can compare that with like the pictures they have of the suspect and his shirt.
And it's just a bunch of like arrows pointing at nothing.
Like I can't even see what they're claiming is like the unique wrinkle patterns that prove these are the same.
So for listeners, what we have on the screen right now is a bunch of pictures, black and white, taken from surveillance photos of like a plaid shirt.
You can't really tell the color.
And there is like, just like he, like Robert mentioned, a bunch of arrows literally pointing to, it could be anything.
It just looks random.
Just random arrows sort of pointing here and there.
No discernible like arrangement.
And the concept I'm guessing here is like, for example, my shirt right now, there's like these folds and wrinkles around my like armpit, for example.
Like they would check that, put an arrow there and be like, this fold here is very specific, which is like, which seems pretty unreproducible to me.
This like, it seems like absolute garbage.
Every guy in Pittsburgh has this shirt.
It's one thing to say.
You know, I've done open source analysis that has been cited in courts and stuff, right?
And like when you do it, it's stuff like, okay, well, this person is wearing a mask, but they have an article of clothing.
And there's another picture of a person who is wearing the same mask, who has the same article of clothing, and then a picture of them without the mask wearing that clothing.
And you can also see evidence of like there's this part of a tattoo in the picture of the person without the mask that is present in the picture of the person with the mask.
And like, you know, these other, you know, there's a ring or something that you can see in all these other pictures.
And like, we can sort of suggest that this is the same person in all these pictures because these things are really consistent, right?
And there's enough of them that it would be really weird if like that it's very unlikely that it's like not the same person, right?
Whereas Bruges is just saying, he literally says, based on the photos I just showed you, there is a one in 650 billion chance that these are different shirts.
Oh my God, that's where does he get that number from?
Holy hell.
What a bold statement, man.
I'm going to need to see your fucking math.
I don't even know math, but I'm going to need to see you prove that to me.
It's a pre-make of that number, bro.
ProPublica notes, quote, there is no body of work, at least not outside of the FBI, on clothing pattern matching.
There's no data available detailing the number of identical shirts created during manufacturing runs or how many variations an examiner should expect to find in a lot of manufactured clothes, nor is there any specific training required to turn an FBI examiner into an expert on clothing features.
From what's been obtained by ProPublica, the only requirement seems to be a functioning pair of eyes.
Do they even say the brand of this shirt they're using as an example?
Oh, I'm sure.
Yeah, I'm sure they do somewhere.
It looks like you can't.
It's like 2004, the gap.
Everybody had that shirt.
It's not a specialty shirt.
It's like a red plaid shirt, right?
It's a plaid shirt.
It's a plaid-colored shirt.
This is not some specialty item.
Jesus Christ.
My God, we're so desperate.
We're so desperate.
This is how bad it is, how bad we are at solving crimes as we are turning to stuff like this.
Yeah, it's amazing stuff.
The FBI has claimed in court filings that patterns of wrinkles in jeans and shirts are as unique as fingerprints, which really gives up some of the game here.
Fingerprints are accepted as a flawless method of scientific identification, though, as we started these episodes by saying, they are not.
So if you want to make your much sketchier tactic look acceptable, you have to tell the jury it's just as reliable as fingerprinting.
ProPublica continues: like anything else, this science is prone to confirmation bias, but in these cases, it's much worse.
FBI image examiners aren't given control images or items to guard against this.
They're only given images and the items investigators believe are evidence.
So it guides examiners to inevitable conclusions.
Their research tends to be little more than finding ways images and items match, working backwards from the assumption that the item being examined is evidence of a criminal act.
The entire body of this quote-unquote wrinkle matching science rests on a 20-plus-year-old case involving a pair of blue jeans.
Let me show you the photographic evidence.
Can you even see the fucking wrinkles in these pictures?
Okay, so we are looking at two side-by-side photos, very old, grainy black and white photos.
Are they supposed to be the same pants?
Yes.
Okay, one is a straight-leg jean that's like a stovepipe style.
The other one is like almost a wide leg or a boot cut jean.
What?
And there are clearly different colors.
I can even tell they're different colors in black and white.
And the denim print is completely different.
The stitching is different.
And this is all bullshit.
Sorry.
I mean, like, I would.
Okay, here's the thing.
If there was some computer analysis that like really honed in on like a section of like the fiber and they said, oh, you could see there, there's a problem here with the stitch.
Like the stitch here is a unique mess up.
Like this is like a one in a whatever thousand chance of having a mess up like this, then that sort of makes sense.
Guilty Pleas on 911 Calls00:12:00
But literally, this seems to be a science where it's like, look, the genes are wrinkled here and here and here.
And these genes over here are also wrinkled in a similar sort of way.
They must be the same person.
Like, you know how pissed I would be if I got sentenced erroneously to jail because of this.
Like, it would be even worse than going to jail without doing the crime.
It would be because of this.
I went to jail.
I'd be so furious.
These are completely different genes.
The styles are not the same.
You got straight stovepipe and you got wide leg boot cut.
What the fuck are we even talking about here?
This is bullshit.
Sorry.
So frustrating.
I shot for a lot of genes.
I know what I'm talking about.
I will say the good thing is that the field of wrinkle analysis is not as respected as it once was.
Oh, really?
Oh, really?
Because it's based off of this?
Okay, sorry.
Because the Innocence Projects folks got a lot of people's convictions overturned based on like really shoddy, this specifically being very shoddy science.
And it's forced the Justice Department to change their requirements around this.
DOJ standards now mandate that their scientists and experts not unequivocally claim that fingerprints or bullets or hair analysis can determine which bullet fired a gun or which hand left a print or which head grew a hair, quote, to the exclusion of all others.
This is the kind of claims that we're making about stuff like bullet analysis, wrinkle matching, that like, because of my expertise as like an FBI trained fucking wrinkle, I can, these are the same pants to the exclusion of all other possibilities.
They cannot say that anymore, right?
The DOJ guys, right?
People who are actually working for the Department of Justice, you know, doing forensic analysis can't be.
Great success.
I'm so glad we got that very basic thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So at least, at least that's good.
So yeah, you know, there's a lot that's angry, frustrating about this today.
There's more here I wanted to go into.
We're already running so long, but I do feel like I would be remiss if I didn't at least let you know about the latest bullshit forensic science that I came across, which is the exciting field of 911 call analysis.
This is the result of a deputy police chief, Tracy Harpster from Dayton, Ohio, who had no particular experience solving murders prior to attending a course at the FBI Academy in 2004.
He met a teacher there that he thought was fucking great, and he decides to go get his master's degree at the U of Cincinnati.
And his thesis involves he listens to 100 recordings of 911 calls.
Half are from innocent people and half are from people who were guilty of the crimes they were reporting.
He then analyzed the calls for clues on the cues guilty people gave off.
Now, this study is peer-reviewed, but it is a peer-reviewed, it's labeled in the, where it was published as exploratory research.
So it's not, it's not, when I say it's a peer-reviewed study, that doesn't mean that a bunch of scientists agreed this is a great way to determine whether or not people making a 911 call committed a crime.
They agreed that like, this is interesting and more research should be done, right?
And in fact, one of the people who helped him with this has like gone on to be like, I think what he is doing is not acceptable now because what he now does is teach cops all around the country for huge amounts of money how to tell if people are guilty based on things in 911 calls.
What kinds of things?
Well, if you use the word please, you're probably guilty in a 911 call.
If you say, huh, in response to a dispatcher's question, that's an indicator of guilt.
If you say something like, please help me, that could mean that you're guilty.
Please, huh, and please help me are like three of my favorite things to say.
Yeah, it's cool.
I want to quote from a ProPublica analysis that's just fucking infuriating.
This is of a Colorado sheriff's deputy who asks Harpster to analyze the 911 call of a widow suspected of murdering her husband.
Quote, the widow said the word blood, for example, and that's a guilty indicator.
Bleeding, however, is not.
She said somebody at different points, which shows a lack of commitment.
Witnesses to a crime scene should be able to report their observations clearly.
Harpster and Adams wrote, She was inappropriately polite because she said, I'm sorry, and thank you.
She interrupted herself, which wastes valuable time and may add confusion.
She tried to divert attention by saying, God, who would do this?
Harpster and Adams commented, This is a curious and unexpected question.
This is fucking insane.
Yeah, this is like 1984 level of like this guy, this widow gets convicted.
Yeah, maybe she did it.
There was other evidence, you know, but this is some of the evidence they convict her on, and that makes me very uneasy because this shit is bull crap, right?
The whole idea that like witnesses to a crime scene should be able to report their observations clearly.
Have you met a crime scene witness?
Have you watched?
Have you talked to someone who just saw a violent act committed?
Right?
They're bad at doing that.
They're terrible.
I mean, understandably so.
That's like what they've just experienced.
I mean, it would be like there's a part of me.
I get why all these things work because they're all fun.
Like, it's all fun.
Like, this is like, wouldn't it be fun to be able to detect if someone's lying based on like some subtle cues like that?
You know, but cops love being able to take like a five-day course and say, no, I can tell when a 911 call is a lie by a murderer.
You know, it seems like it'd be a lot of fun.
I get why people like it, but like we have to take, we have to learn as a country to take a step back.
Just take a step back every now and then and look at what we're doing.
This might not.
He has taught police and continues to teach police officers, I think, 26 states at this point.
20 researchers from seven federal government agencies, universities, and advocacy groups have tested his methods against other samples of 911 calls to see if the guilty indicators that he points out do correlate with guilt.
And these studies have consistently found no relationship for most of the indicators.
Oh, wow.
In two separate studies, FBI behavioral analysis unit experts warned law enforcement officers that their results contradicted Harpsters and police probably shouldn't be using this shit.
Despite that, the FBI repeatedly suggests his, like, like recommends him as an expert in cases.
So it's good.
It's amazing.
It's amazing.
Again, no matter how dumb it seems to be, it just is new levels of dumb that I discover.
Yeah.
I love it.
I'm sure we'll be learning more about this guy.
ProPublica seems to be has been reporting quite a bit on him lately.
So that's good.
Anyway, don't call 911.
Absolutely.
I'm not sure I can back that one.
I'm going to be normally when we do an episode and it's, I can shut it off in my brain right away because we do so much of what we do.
I'm going to be mad about the gene thing for a really long time.
It's good stuff.
Look, folks, if there's a lesson here, again, never call 911.
Always take justice into your own hands.
That's the safe way to do this, you know?
Yeah.
No, I didn't say that.
I didn't say that.
The doctor didn't say that.
The doctor on the podcast couldn't say that.
The Reverend, the one true Reverend Doctor on this podcast did not say that.
Well, I don't know.
What I will say is, if you call 911, don't use the word blood.
Yeah.
I don't say please.
Don't say please.
Be mean.
Don't hesitate.
Start yelling at them.
I guess that's the only way to do it.
Yeah yeah, atonal shrieking.
Yeah, there you go, a shriek atonally and give them your address.
That's it.
Cool stuff.
I am fantastic.
I'm mad.
Well, that's my job done.
That was fun, all right everybody, that was fun.
Dr Hoda, anywhere people can find you, please listen to my podcast.
I I like it when people listen.
I enjoy that very much.
It's called THE House OF POD.
It is a uh fun medical podcast and I know you're thinking you probably wouldn't like a medical podcast, but you will, you will and you will listen.
You will like it.
I think there's a good chance you might enjoy it.
Um, thank you so much for having me on.
I really appreciate.
This is always so much fun for me.
And look folks out there, if you're a lawyer uh prosecutor da, or whatever, I have started advertising my services as a uniquely skilled guilt science expert, which basically means you pay me fifteen hundred dollars and i'll look at a guy and go, oh yeah, that motherfucker did it, and i'll do that in a courtroom.
You know no, when this episode ends, can we just do a quick round of two truths and a lie and see if we can guess who's lying and who's there, we go.
We could even do it on air too, but I really want to see if I can guess when you guys are lying.
Okay okay, let's do it.
Let's do it Kave, that seems like a fun way to end our episode.
Okay, but come, come a little closer to the screen.
I want to see if the facial micro expressions are expressions.
Sure, let me okay, move my window over, so i'm looking directly at it.
Okay, perfect now um Robert, please tell me if you, if you would, i'm gonna ask you a couple of questions, and I want two of them to be true and one of them to be a lie.
Oh, my god, okay.
Um, what was the name of the street you grew up on?
Seeger, that's true.
No, it's not.
Damn, it's absolutely a lie.
All right, I don't even remember this name.
I mean, it actually might be true, because I have no idea what street I grew up on.
Like, it depends on what do you even mean by that?
Like, i've lived in so many places as a kid.
Um, I remember like a couple of the streets.
Well, you know, I guess it's not an exact science.
Um, what we're learning is that very few things are.
Asked me a question, okay Sophie, how many times have you seen the movie Titanic?
You gotta look at me when you answer this, though you can't look down like you're doing.
That looks suspicious and I think you're lying already.
Yeah yeah, I think we should arrest her.
I'm counting, and now are we talking ever, or whoa?
My goodness, in the last year, I guess, I don't know yeah, twice.
That's obviously a lie.
No one's watched the Titanic.
I watched it twice.
That was the truth.
I would never lie to you.
I would never lie to you.
I thought it was a lie because I assumed you'd watched it a lot more.
No no, I saw it once in theaters and once at home.
Once at theaters on the anniversary and once at home.
I would never lie to you.
You are my friend okay, you're right, this is the difficulty.
Whereas Robert Robert would lie to you to prove his friendship.
Oh, just for fun, just as a bit sometimes.
Yeah, I mean, and and uh, i'm really good at detecting when people lie is what everyone thinks, and nobody is yeah, nobody is.
Nobody's very good at it nobody.
That part's okay, because none of human civilization would work if we were all good at telling when we were being lied to.
So so much of peace and tranquility in in civilization relies upon us not catching every little lie somebody tells us.
Oh my god, if you could read people's minds, it would be absolute chaos.
Things would be terrible.
And to end this out, I would like to plug that we have a new show launching momentarily on CoolZone Media hosted by Jamie Loftus.
Mind Reading Chaos and Lies00:03:03
It's a weekly podcast called 16th Minute of Fame.
Look for that.
Yeah, speaking of failures in the criminal justice system, Jamie still has not been brought to justice for those murders.
And she's innocent.
I even forgot the name of the city.
I lied about it.
Grand Rapids.
Grand Rapids.
Oh, I thought it was Gary Indiana for some reason.
Gary, Indiana.
Maybe she did in Gary, Indiana.
So next week, we're our investigation into Jamie's crimes and Gary will have pursued.
We're going to be looking into Labrador dousing for the bodies.
Yeah, get Dr. Voss on the case.
I don't know.
I need to see all of Jamie's genes.
We got to do a gene analysis, Jamie.
Make sure the creases don't match too much.
My goodness.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
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