Technology

To purchase a ticket for this special event, click here. If you’d like to be contacted when another crime lab tour and lecture are scheduled, subscribe to LAVA’s occasional Crime Lab Newsletter.

Join us in the Cal State Los Angeles teaching crime lab for an afternoon’s inquiry into the development of new breakthroughs in forensic science coming out of the Criminalistics Department.

We are delighted to announce the debut crime lab appearance of Prof. David Raymond, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at CSULA. Prof. Raymond will provide an overview of Forensic Engineering with a focus on his specialty, Forensic Injury Biomechanics. The presentation will introduce attendees to the field of forensic engineering and subspecialties; including injury biomechanics. Dr. Raymond will provide some historical background on the genesis of this field along with modern applications of injury biomechanics in engineering design and in forensic applications. Finally Dr. Raymond will demonstrate the utility of biomechanics in forensic science through the presentation of real-world cases.

For the second presentation, LAVA crime lab host Prof. Donald Johnson will provide an overview of Blood Stain Patterning through his long working relationship with Dr. Raymond.

The first topic covered will be the development of an Automated Imaging System for Blood Stain Patterning, demonstrating their work in producing more sophisticated mathematical models—recognizing that trajectories are arcs, not straight lines, for example — leading up to a means by which wound origin and trajectories can be quickly processed by forensic investigators at crime scenes. Numerous real-life case examples will be used to illustrate this discussion.

Next Prof. Johnson will discuss their work on micro RNA, which is leading to determination of wound of origin for blood stains. Using the 1990s-era British murder case against Sion Jenkins as a jumping off point, Prof. Johnson will explain the methodology and instruments by which his graduate students are learning how to pinpoint proteins in RNA specific to respective organs and account for them in blood stain patterns.

By proving the wound of origin for blood evidence, forensic scientists can discount the claims of suspects who insist a victim’s blood at a crime scene got there by innocent means (nose bleed, minor accidental injury, etc.). Using the new analytical methods developed in Prof. Johnson’s lab, a scientist can prove that the blood stain in question originated with bleeding from the lungs, and not from the mucus membrane in the victim’s nasal passage.

To purchase a ticket for this special event, click here. If you’d like to be contacted when another crime lab tour and lecture are scheduled, subscribe to LAVA’s occasional Crime Lab Newsletter.

Join us in the Cal State Los Angeles teaching crime lab for an afternoon’s inquiry into the development of the science of forensic investigation in the L.A. area.

We are delighted to announce the debut crime lab appearance of crime reporter Frank Girardot, author of Name Dropper: Investigating the Clark Rockefeller Mystery.

Join Frank in the Cal State Los Angeles teaching crime lab, as he presents in depth on the fascinating Clark Rockefeller mystery, and offers a selection of memorable incidents from his crime reporter’s notebook.

Presentation One:

Frank’s first presentation will be on Clark Rockefeller, which is the tale of a teenaged German immigrant who remade himself into a welcome and respected member of Boston’s wealthiest neighborhood. The story might have followed that oft-told American tale of opportunity for all, but like all good Hollywood scripts, the tale of Clark Rockefeller had a dark twist. Namely murder.

In April 2013, Rockefeller, whose real name is Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, was convicted in the 1985 slaying of John Sohus. Gerhartsreiter didn’t only kill Sohus, he buried the trisected body in the backyard of a home in San Marino — one of L.A. wealthiest neighborhoods. And then he vanished along with Sohus’ new wife Linda, a 6-foot, 200-pound, red-headed Amazon with a flair for dark science fiction and strange fantasy.

He may have left San Marino, but Gerhartsreiter’s quest to become a member of wealthy and privileged American society continued. During the height of the Reagan Administration he worked under the assumed name of Christopher Crowe as a broker for some of Wall Street’s toniest firms. When the cops came looking for him, Crowe became Rockefeller and embarked upon one of the greatest cons ever pulled on high society. As Rockefeller, the onetime immigrant had a pad down the street from the United Nations. He hobnobbed with celebrities, collected art and bragged about his dogs.

Rockefeller eventually married Sandy Boss, a respected financial analyst with a seven-figure annual income. But when the couple got divorced and Clark kidnapped their daughter, the past came knocking.

The murder case relied heavily on circumstantial evidence that singularly might not have amounted to a conviction. Taken together the evidence, which included blood, fingerprints, old ID cards and a stolen car, was solid. What resulted in the conviction? Probably a simple light shone on a plastic bag sold in a university bookstore for a very limited period of time. The man once known as Rockefeller is now simply Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, 52, a resident of a medium security prison in the San Joaquin Valley serving out a 25-to-life sentence for killing John Sohus.

As for Linda? She has never resurfaced.

For Frank’s second lecture, he will lower his guard, roll up his sleeves, and look back on three decades in the newspaper business reporting on criminal investigations and the law enforcement agencies which conduct them, distilling for us the best and the worst, like how a murderous tagger might as well have signed his name at the crime scene, or the paramedics who left brain matter on a dead man’s driveway for his family to clean up, or a con-man who used Craigslist to bilk dozens of needy would-be renters, and what still keeps him up at night: an unsolved double murder in Monrovia that occurred during a ride-along in the 1990s.

ABOUT FRANK GIRARDOT: Frank Girardot is the editor of the Pasadena Star-News. Born in Detroit, Michigan, raised in the Silicon Valley, he got start as a copy boy in the late 1980s. Working as a newspaper reporter and editor in Los Angeles since 1989, he has covered floods, fires, explosions, strikes, plane crashes, rapes, suicides, amnesia victims, political conventions, and the murder trial of OJ Simpson. Favorite pastime is following a good murder, as is evidenced in his new book, Name Dropper: Investigating the Clark Rockefeller Mystery.