Creepiest crime fighters

By Joe Brown

Wednesday, May 28, 2008 | 2 a.m.

His business card reads “Know Maggots, Will Travel.”

Bugs are his game, solving crimes is his aim.

Like the main character in “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” he’s a forensic entomologist.

Lee Goff, one of only a dozen certified insect investigators in the country, is the curator of a traveling exhibit called “CSI: Crime Scene Insects” at the Las Vegas Museum of Natural History. Using actual case studies, it shows how insects are used to solve crimes.

It’s fascinating and creepy stuff, and the squeamish may want to stick to the museum’s animated dinosaurs or live sharks and stingrays. A museum administrator says the Las Vegas Museum of Natural History compared notes with educators at other museums that had hosted the exhibit, and gave the display the green light for young visitors.

“There are obviously things that you could throw up there (in the exhibit) if you wanted to — and risk alienating everybody who walks in — but there’s no point to that,” Goff says, seemingly unaware that he said “throw up.” He adds that he is not often asked to be a dinner speaker.

Goff is a consultant on “CSI,” and several of his cases have turned up as plot elements in the show, which is set in Las Vegas. (On the show, Dr. Gilbert Arthur “Gil” Grissom, played by William Petersen, is the night-shift team supervisor for the Las Vegas CSI unit.) The soft-spoken scientist, who is chairman of the Forensic Sciences Program at the Chaminade University of Honolulu, looks like a surfin’ Santa, his deep tan contrasting with his snowy white hair and beard.

Hatched in about 1986, forensic entomology is a relatively young discipline in the spectrum of forensics, which includes scene investigation, blood spatter analysis, DNA analysis, and specialties in engineering, chemistry, toxicology, psychiatry and other professions.

Goff defines forensic entomology as “any time insects come in contact with the legal system.” There are three different branches of the field. The first involves products: “That’s when you find a bug in your breakfast cereal and you want your money back, and the grocery chain doesn’t want to pay for it,” Goff says. “The entomologist has to figure out who didn’t do what they were supposed to, and most importantly who should be paying for it.”

The second involves structural damage, as in termite damage, which is a major industry and a basis for litigation. Goff doesn’t like these kinds of cases. “It always turns out to be greed vs. greed,” he says. “A guy wants $3 million because he saw some insects at 6 a.m.”

He prefers to work in the third area, “where you have a criminal event, usually a homicide, and somewhere along the line insects have become part of the question. About 98 percent of what we do is estimating the period of time since death, and what we actually estimate is the period of insect activity on the remains. What we look at is the size of the insect, its stage of development.”

Although many of us have an instinctive shudder reaction to seeing insects, the point of the exhibit is that bugs aren’t always the bad guys. In CSI cases, they serve as expert witnesses or minidetectives, providing vital clues concerning the time and circumstance of a death, whether or not a body was moved, the timing of infliction of wounds, and whether or not drugs or toxins contributed to the victim’s demise.

Once a body stops, insects get busy pretty fast. Within 10 minutes in some locations. It ain’t pretty.

Goff admits to suffering some queasiness on arriving at a crime scene, and says an early mentor tested him to see first whether he would throw up or pass out, and second, whether his results were any good.

“You have to learn to divorce yourself from what’s going on and view the scene as an object,” Goff says. “It’s going to be a scientific investigation.”

Meet the beetles: Aversion to bugs seems to be acquired with age, and many kids will probably be intrigued by much of this exhibit, which includes large-scale models of bugs (including a fly’s head, which looks like it belongs to a futuristic dinosaur), plus display cases populated by living flies, maggots and beetles.

Visitors should brace themselves for the sight of two morgue refrigerator units housing molded replicas of corpses in different stages of decomposition (one’s greenish, the other’s grayish, and Goff says the coloring is pretty accurate). Embedded in the chest of one of them is a video screen that displays what Goff calls a “squirming maggot mass during the active decay stage.”

I catch him glancing at me to see whether I flinch.

I do. Full-body shudder. He grins.

The exhibit’s centerpiece is a square vitrine housing a stroboscopic animation of the life cycle of a housefly, from squirming, creeping maggot larva to pupa to baby fly to adult insect and back again.

It’s revolting but mesmerizing.

An amusing side note: The 13-week Las Vegas stay of the bug exhibit is sponsored in part by Western Exterminator Co., which, in addition to killing vermin in Nevada, Arizona and California, takes a keen corporate interest in informing the public about bugs. The company has an in-house entomology department and will have a representative on hand at the museum on weekends to answer questions and show off his own collection of live insects.

Goff keeps a lifetime scientist’s poker face as he guides his guest through the exhibit, but he can’t resist the itch to share a bit of bug humor. He specialized in mites and chiggers before veering toward the relatively more lucrative forensics field, and would often lecture on the tiny pests.

“I’d start off, and just give a little scratch of my shoulder, then my neck, then my back. And within five minutes I would have an entire lecture hall of people sitting their squirming and scratching,” he chuckles. “It was beautiful.”

What Goff hopes visitors will take away is an appreciation of just how diverse and complex and practical insects really are.

“People tend to look at an insect on the floor and say” — squish — “there it is.

“An entomologist looks at it and says, ‘Oh, Periplaneta americana, a wonderful cockroach, look at those antennae, beautiful wings ...’ ”

Squish.