
DATE: Monday, November 3, 1997              TAG: 9711030053

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY MIKE MATHER, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH                    LENGTH:  257 lines

A CAREER OF TRACKING CASES

Charlotte Lowe stopped on the worn path meandering through the shady woods. She clutched the bagpipe to her.

She had parked where the killers parked. Walked the path the killers walked. Stopped where the killers stopped.

Her breath bloated the instrument's Gore-Tex bag and, as she squeezed the air from it, the African blackwood and ivory pipes bayed through the forest.

A year earlier, she stood in the same spot in the sprawling expanse of Newport News City Park. The remains of a young woman were at her feet, stripped of clothes and flesh. A murder mystery was unfolding then.

As supervisor of Virginia Beach's Forensic Services Unit - the state's busiest, with more than 5,000 crime-scene searches yearly - it was Lowe's job to help solve the mystery, as she had done countless times in more than two decades of scientific sleuthing.

Her bagpipe had become part of her. In the 10 years since her first lesson, she had played the instrument at more police funerals and memorials than she could remember.

But on this day - June 19, 1996, the anniversary of Jennifer Evans' death - Lowe played her pipes for the living.

``I played for Mrs. Evans,'' Lowe said. ``It was a gift for Jennifer's mother. In no way will I ever know what it feels like to lose a child, because I never had children. . . . But I wanted to give her a part of me. It was not the best in the world, but it was the best I had to give.''

Lowe had met Jennifer's mother during the prosecution of the woman's killers, both Navy SEAL trainees. It was Lowe whose matter-of-fact testimony about what happened to Jennifer moved the mother to tears.

After leaving the witness stand, Lowe searched for Mrs. Evans.

``I need to talk to you,'' she told the mother. ``But I have no idea what to say.''

For 15 minutes on the somber anniversary, the notes of ``Catherine's Lament'' coursed through Lowe's Great Highland Bagpipe. Then Lowe walked out of the woods and drove to Williamsburg for her weekly music lesson.

Some cases, like the Jennifer Evans murder, stay with Charlotte Lowe. Some fade into a jumble of memories.

``Some things become a part of you, like patches in a quilt,'' she said.

Lowe's quilt spans nearly a quarter-century of police work, from secretarial typing to witness-stand testimony that's convicted savage killers.

``It's the best job in the world,'' Lowe said. ``No one has a better job than me. I can't envision any other life.''

Lowe's job is among the most important in a police investigation. It is her duty to collect the bodies, blood, bullets, fibers, fingerprints, footprints. It is her duty to find the truth. To find out what happened. To convict the guilty, to exonerate the innocent.

More often than not, the evidence she finds either supports or refutes an already-established theory. But sometimes what she finds - maybe the faint friction ridges of a fingerprint in the wake of her dusting brush - can resuscitate a dead investigation.

``That's always a surprise, like a Christmas present,'' Lowe said. ``It's like magic, a wonderment, a wonderful science.''

And when a computer matches that fingerprint to its owner, ``I got you,'' she thinks.

It's a wonderment because fingerprints are fickle. Last year, Lowe and her 15 evidence technicians - or ``techs'' as they call themselves - searched more than 5,000 crime scenes. They found and recovered more than 2,000 fingerprints. Of those prints, 344 were traced to criminals.

In the world of forensics, 344 is a huge number. In 1996, no other state jurisdiction matched that success. In fact, no jurisdiction in Virginia has bested Lowe's staff in the past decade, according to the city's annual police report.

Charlotte Jean Lowe, or ``Charbs'' to her sisters, needs to be the center of attention.

She's happiest at the front of a classroom, regaling police recruits or officers with tales of murder and mayhem in the city where she's lived since elementary school. And she's thrilled when she connects with a jury that suddenly grasps the relevance of a fingerprint, a blood spatter, a microscopic mark on a mushroomed bullet.

``I love to prepare for a case and testify,'' Lowe said. ``I get to be the show-and-tell.''

Lowe is 41, married, and childless by choice. When she wears her uniform and gold police badge, she braids her long, red hair and pins it neatly in back. In civilian clothes, she usually lets her locks fall around her shoulders.

She's a regular at a Suffolk auction house, with reserved seats in the front row ``so I can see the stuff better.'' She's addicted to books on tape.

The middle of three girls, Lowe grew up in a middle-class neighborhood near Bow Creek Golf Course. Her father was a plumber and her mother stayed home.

Their house was filled with music and entertainment. Lowe's mother came from a long line of vaudevillians and her father was a talented tenor. In high school, Lowe studied piano and played the flute.

But each girl grew up knowing that, while the emotional support would last forever, the financial support wouldn't. Their father wouldn't pay for college or weddings, and he expected rent once they had graduated from high school. Those were the rules.

In 1974, with a diploma from Kellam High School, Lowe followed her older sister into the Virginia Beach Police Department. Lowe was hired as a precinct clerk. Her main duty was docket typing.

She wanted to be a dispatcher like her sister, Liz, but supervisors in the radio room didn't want siblings working together. Lowe settled into her secretarial job, where she planned to stay forever.

``I learned more in those first 18 months than I had in my entire life,'' she said. ``I think that's because I just didn't know anything.''

Then something simple and profound happened.

A lieutenant named Buddy Lee Rodgers told her she couldn't be a clerk the rest of her life. Lowe was stunned, because that was exactly her plan.

Why not? The pay was fine and the job was interesting. She could afford car insurance and the rent she paid her parents. For a wide-eyed woman barely 20, that was enough.

``That was a novel concept,'' she said. ``I hadn't thought of that. I had never thought there was anything beyond the next shift.''

There was: a job opening in the Identification Section, the ancestor of today's Forensic Services Unit. The lieutenant urged her to apply.

``I went for the interview and I was hired,'' she said. ``I'm not sure how that happened.''

She worked hard to learn the new skills. She didn't want to disappoint the lieutenant. But she had early doubts. The requirements of her new assignment were overwhelming. And then there was the gory stuff.

``Your first death investigation stays with you forever,'' Lowe said. ``And my first death investigation was extremely spectacular.''

She was still an apprentice when she was sent to her first dead body. A man with a shotgun had killed himself in a parking lot. The blast of lead pellets showered bits of skull, flesh and blood onto the pavement.

Lowe was assigned to shoo away hungry seagulls.

``I didn't know if this was going to be what I wanted to do,'' she said.

The investigators promised she would never see anything worse. Either they were right, or she grew tolerant.

``I used to say nothing could ever shock me anymore,'' she said. ``Beaten babies, burned bodies. I've seen unbelievable kindness and unbelievable cruelty. But somebody, somewhere always comes up with something else that shocks me.''

The crimes she's traipsed through include scandalous murders and the private traumas of ordinary people.

Some faces stay with her, like the man who killed his neighbors, a mother and daughter. She remembers him waving at her while she took aerial photos from the police helicopter. She waved back.

Some faces are only blurs in her memory, a mix of confusion and terror. Once, Lowe crawled under a kitchen table to huddle with a rape victim too scared to come out. Another time, she rocked for hours with a mother and the corpse of an infant who had died in his sleep. She can't remember the name or the face, ``But I remember her pain,'' Lowe said. ``Those are the ones that really stay with you.''

And the unsolved cases never go away.

``They're with you every day,'' she said. ``You always think, `What didn't we do? What could we have done?' ''

The phone on her wooden desk emits an electronic yammer. She snatches it up on the first ring.

Her office on the first floor of police headquarters is small. Gray daylight from a single south-facing window blends with the fluorescent glow radiating from two overhead strip lights. The carpet is brown; the walls, eggshell.

One corner of the office harbors electronic relics - outdated VCRs, a television, a camcorder. The neighboring corner holds a stash of memos and paperwork that have been there since she moved into the supervisor's office two years ago.

Across the room is a bookshelf sheltering binders with titles like ``Basic Leadership'' and ``Exposure Control Plan.'' Above the binders are manila folders bearing the names of active homicide cases.

She greets the caller with a lilting voice: ``Forensic Services, Mrs. Lowe.''

The caller wants a job.

``We require a degree in criminal justice and, or, one of the sciences,'' she says. ``And we require a background check.''

She pauses to listen.

``We're civilians,'' she says. ``We don't have arrest powers. But right now, we don't have any openings.''

But two years ago, there were plenty.

Lowe is a demanding boss whose promotion to supervisor was greeted with three resignations.

``I would like to think those people went on to jobs with better pay and better chances for advancement, that's what I'd like to think,'' Lowe said. ``People are resistant to change. I don't think it was me.''

Rachel Cannon was one of the three who left.

``She used to be very nurturing and motherly to me,'' said Cannon, who now works for the Chesapeake Police Department. ``I think she is a wonderful I.D. tech and a great teacher. I'm certainly better off because she is the one who trained me, but she is a very controlling person, and that extended into my personal life. You make some decisions in your personal life she doesn't agree with, and then she doesn't like you anymore. She holds a grudge.''

Amy Meador, who also left for the Chesapeake Police Department, said it was Lowe's motherly attentions that drove a wedge between them.

``Chesapeake has never seen a tech like her, or a supervisor like her,'' Meador said. ``She is tremendous at what she does. But she became very involved in my personal life. She thought I married the wrong person.''

Lowe admits she's dominating. She wants things done her way. And no one questions that her way has been stunningly successful.

Her assertive personality contributed to the breakup of her first marriage, to an arson investigator in 1978.

``He was a very controlling person, and I'm not one to be controlled,'' she said. ``He was, and is, a very nice man. We just had different expectations of what a marriage should be.''

She lived by herself four years. When she dated, she didn't tell potential suitors about her job for fear of grossing them out or frightening them away. She said only that she was a photographer.

But one afternoon in a tobacco barn in the city's rural southern end, she met a handsome man over a decomposing body.

She and a homicide detective named Ken Lowe had been sent to the barn because the death looked suspicious. The man was found in a pool of blood. She and the detective hit it off. She snapped a picture of him that day. She still has it in her desk.

In the photo, drying tobacco leaves hang above the smiling detective.

Days later, the detective learned the man died of tuberculosis. That meant lengthy medical treatments and tests, which the tech and the detective endured together. That's how the relationship bloomed. Then they married.

Now, a dozen years later, the detective is a lieutenant. The black hair in the photograph is gone, ``but he still has that tie,'' she said.

When Lowe turned 30, she went to a music store. She bought a bagpipe starter set and an instructional book.

She remembered the pipes' magic from a concert 20 years earlier. When she was about 10, her father took her to see Blackwatch, a British army bagpipe band. The instrument's mystique had lingered since.

Musicians say bagpipes are among the most difficult instruments to master. It took her four years to sound remotely human. But, unlike the rest of her life, her goals for the instrument were low.

``I decided I only have to be OK at this,'' she said. ``My goal was to be merely adequate.''

Through the years, she practiced, and attended bagpipe schools. Once, someone suggested she play ``Amazing Grace'' at a police funeral. She did, and her participation at police memorials was added into the department's General Orders.

Since that first funeral, her bagpipe has crooned ``Amazing Grace'' countless times throughout Hampton Roads. She even played at the funeral of a Norfolk police dog.

She frequently practices outside, in parks and cemeteries, because the pipes need room to sing.

``The Great Highland Bagpipe is an instrument of war,'' Lowe said. ``It is meant to be played outdoors.''

Once, after a long hike in the Blue Ridge Mountains, she paused to pipe. Other hikers flocked to the sound. So did a herd of cows.

Now, Lowe spends more time as a teacher than a technician. Her days are filled with budgets instead of bullets. She goes to more meetings than murders.

In six years, she'll have been with the department three decades. She'll retire then. Maybe she'll pursue a second career in a funeral home, or maybe she'll continue her teaching.

She'll spend more time playing her bagpipe, and hunting for antiques.

``It won't be fair for me to stay any longer,'' she said. ``There are others who deserve this chance.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photos]

TOP INVESTIGATOR

BETH BERGMAN NAKAMURA/The Virginian-Pilot

Charlotte Lowe is supervisor of Virginia Beach's Forensic Services

Unit, the state's busiest, with some 5,000 crime-scene searches a

year. It is her job to help solve the mystery with scientific

sleuthing.

File photo

At a crime scene, Lowe's job is among the most important. Here

taking notes, her duty is to collect the evidence - to find out what

happened.