THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 30, 1995 TAG: 9504280591
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY PEGGY DEANS EARLE
LENGTH: Short : 46 lines
HARD EVIDENCE
How Detectives Inside the FBI's Sci-Crime Lab Have Helped Solve America's Toughest Cases
DAVID FISHER
Simon & Schuster. 317 pp. $23.
You can be sure that the scientists in the Explosives Unit of the FBI's Criminal Laboratory have been working overtime since a two-ton car bomb wreaked havoc April 19 in Oklahoma City. The ``bombers,'' as these scientists call themselves, have used their expert powers of observation, plus state-of-the-art equipment, to solve other horrifying, high-profile explosions, such as the one that downed Pan Am Flight 103 and the one that almost destroyed New York's World Trade Center.
Author David Fisher spent two years interviewing the FBI's forensic science specialists, and in Hard Evidence, describes a complex world of crime detection in which an investigator gets ``the case of a lifetime every week.'' Fisher introduces the other arms of the lab by reference to headline-making cases: the Chemistry/Toxicology Unit (Tylenol-cyanide affair); the Hair and Fiber Unit (arrest and conviction of Ted Bundy, Jeffrey MacDonald and Wayne Williams); the Latent Fingerprint Section and DNA Unit (Polly Klaas kidnapping/murder case); the Document Section (Howard Hughes' bogus will) and the Firearms and Toolmarks Unit (ballistics analysis in John F. Kennedy's assassination).
While the fascinating subject matter alone should carry Hard Evidence, there are some segments that get bogged down in technical minutiae and others that may be too brutally clinical for the average reader. In addition, a glaring need for copy editing is often apparent. Despite these drawbacks, this unusually close scrutiny of the top of the line in crime detection elicits both awe and admiration. MEMO: Peggy Deans Earle is a staff librarian. by CNB