January 11, 2024 • 42 mins
Forensic research on human donors is not for the faint of heart, Mary Ellen O’Toole, director of the Forensic Science Program in George Mason University’s College of Science, admitted to Mason President Gregory Washington. But the university’s new outdoor research and training laboratory—or “body farm,” as O’Toole, a former FBI profiler, calls it—is a valuable addition to the study of human decomposition in various environmental conditions for the purpose of solving crimes. It also positions O’Toole’s program as a national leader in forensic science and forensic anthropology.
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Narrator (00:04):
Trailblazers in research, innovators in technology and those who simply have a
good story. All make up the fabricthat is George Mason University,
where taking on the grand challenges thatface our students, graduates and higher
education is our mission and our passion.Hosted by Mason President Gregory
Washington, this is theAccess to Excellence podcast.
Gregory Washington (00:26):
As one of the FBI's most accomplished profilers,
Mary Ellen O'Toole helped capture,
interview and understand someof the world's most infamous
people, including Gary Ridgway,the Green River Killer,
and Ted Kaczynski,
the Unabomber. Now as a professor anddirector of the Forensic Science Program
(00:50):
at George Mason University'sCollege of Science.
O'Toole is positioning her programas a national leader in forensic
anthropology and forensic science.
The program recently opened a fiveacre science and research training
laboratory on Mason's SciTechcampus in Manassas, Virginia,
one of only eight in the U.S. and theonly one on the east coast capable
(01:14):
of performing outdoorresearch in forensic science
using human donors. That'sright. A body farm. The lab,
which is expected to receive itsfirst human remains in the spring,
is dedicated to studying the processof human decomposition in various
environmental conditions forthe purposes of solving crimes.
(01:38):
Dr. O'Toole, I've been lookingforward to this one for quite some time.
Welcome to the show.
Mary Ellen O'Toole (01:43):
Oh, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here with you.
Gregory Washington (01:46):
So you've had an interesting kind of winding career pathway.
Can you help the audience understandhow you got to where you are?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (01:57):
Sure.
So I've spent about 30-some years in law
enforcement.
In 28 of those yearsI was an FBI agent FBI
profiler.
And I've always had an interestin what goes on in somebody's head
right at the time theycommit a violent crime.
So I found the FBI andprofiling to be a perfect match
(02:21):
for me so I could betterunderstand that. And in fact,
I think at age five I started havingthose thoughts about what's going on in
somebody's head whenthey're murdering someone.
And I'm sure that thatterrified my mother,
but it's been an interestthat I've had my entire life.
So when I finally became an FBI agent,
I heard of this program that wasdesigned to have special agents
(02:46):
who would work as profilers orpeople that study human behavior that
included behavior like serialmurder cases, sexual assault cases,
child abduction cases. AndI thought, that's for me,
I absolutely have to do that.
And I just found it absolutelyunbelievably interesting.
So I spent about 50% of my FBIcareer doing that and having the
(03:08):
opportunity to interviewsome people that, um,
were absolutely beyond the pale,
just in terms of their criminal behaviorand what they would do to other human
beings. And then onceI retired from the FBI,
it's really hard to move away from that.
So when the opportunity came up to bea part of the forensic science program,
(03:30):
I really didn't think I would getthe job. But remarkably I did.
And then I found my second home here.
Being able to work with otherpractitioners in the field and bringing
initiatives and opportunities to studentsso that they can go forward and have
remarkable careers, whether theywant to be a forensic DNA analyst,
(03:52):
a forensic chemist, an anthropologistor crime scene investigator.
And they have the same, kind ofthe same background that I did.
They grew up on these crime stories andthey are fascinated with human behavior
and they want to contribute to thefield and they want to do great things.
And they are ambitious andhardworking and amazing students
(04:14):
that love the profession.
So it's just worked out inreally quite a wonderful way.
Gregory Washington (04:20):
Well, outstanding. Outstanding.
So I know this is a somewhat serious topicthat we are gonna get into. You know,
I have to ask if youstill have the skeletons
greet visitors when theycome to your program offices?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (04:32):
We still have the skeletons. In fact,
they're standing by the reception areathat I just left a few minutes ago.
And the only thing my faculty won'tallow me to do is to turn on their voices
because they do speak,
but they are there and they are thefirst greeters that will meet you at the
front door when you walk intothe forensic science unit.
Gregory Washington (04:52):
Outstanding. So for those people who don't know,
and it may be new to the concept,
talk to us a little bitabout what is forensic
science?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (05:03):
Forensic science is a combination of the application
of the theories in naturalsciences combined with
the application of thattechnology to the criminal justice
system, especially interms of analyzing and
(05:24):
collecting evidence at a crimescene and then presenting that data
in a courtroom.
So it's the application of naturalsciences to the criminal justice system,
and it becomes broader eachday as they add more sciences
into forensic science.
The reason that it's so fascinatingis that it's not just theory,
(05:45):
it's the application of thescience in a courtroom setting.
Gregory Washington (05:49):
It's also been popularized by programs like CSI and others,
right? People see that and they'relike, okay, this is really, really cool,
and where can I go toschool to learn that?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (06:01):
They do see it on TV programs and a lot of my students grew up with Law and
Order and they grew up with CSI andBones and they are challenged by
the possibility of resolving or solving a
very complicated crime. And ifthey can do it using science,
that's what they want. So it could beDNA science, it could be chemistry,
(06:25):
it could be CSI,
but they're very curious studentsand they are motivated to be able to
apply their science in a way thatenables them to come up to a solution
for a complicated and ongoingor very challenging case.
Gregory Washington Okay. So talk to us about the lab,
what it is and what do youhope that it will be at its
(06:49):
zenith?
So we call it the Body Farm,
not because we wanted to callit the Body Farm Laboratory.
It's actually called the ForensicAnthropological Outdoor Research Facility.
But I knew deep down insidethat as soon as we started
and launched this initiative,
it was going to be called the Body Farmand there really wasn't anything that we
(07:10):
could do about it. So we didhave a much more formal name,
but it defaulted to Body Farm andthat's what the public knows it as.
That's what my students know it as. Andso that's why it's taken on this name.
The beauty of having this initiativehere at George Mason is because we
have such a thriving program andstudents really want to get involved
(07:31):
in research,
and whether it's a chemistry studentbiology student anthropology student,
it does not matter.
They want to get out there and understandhow their particular science can be
improved or used to solvecases. So for example,
the intent of the farm is to bring inhuman donors and to study decomposition,
(07:53):
but it's a lot more complex than that.
We actually want to be able to studydecomposition based on many different
scenarios. If a person is buried,if a person is on top of the ground,
if the person is in a vehicle,
if a person is hanging from a tree,
all of these are real life scenarios thatwe have encountered out in the field.
(08:14):
And they can be very perplexingproblems because decomp can cause a
body to manifest evidencethat's hard to interpret.
And that's the goal of this initiative,
is to be able to study reallife crimes and we will depict
them at the crime scene at the Body Farm
and in an effort to study whathappens, and I'll give you an example.
(08:38):
We are No. 8 in terms of thebody farms throughout the United States.
And there are several down in Texas.
And Texas did some research and foundthat there were very large birds that came
to their body farm and these birds werelanding on the donors and they were
causing the donors tobruise, postmortem bruising.
And prior to the release of this study,
(08:58):
when I would see postmortem bruising,
we would attribute that to the offender,
the person that committed the murder thatthey engaged in postmortem behavior.
And that was a completely incorrectconclusion based on the research that was
done at the body farm down in Texas.
So it was very valuable to be able tolearn what happens after someone is left
(09:20):
outside. And many of the crime scenesthat I worked as an FBI profiler,
the victim was left outside.
And so it became important tounderstand cause and manner of death.
Time of death,
what happened to the victim and whatcan we tell about through the victim,
what can we tell about the offender?
So that's our goal is to be ableto advance the science and to
(09:43):
incorporate in new sciences, for example,
our bee research and ourcadaver dog research,
all of those are gonna advance the sciencein ways that other body farms aren't
doing right now.
Gregory Washington (09:54):
No, that's really cool. So are there actual bodies on the ground yet?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (09:59):
Not yet.
We hope to get our first donor eitherby the end of this year or sometime in
early spring or next semester.
Now we have buried pigs out there andthey are there right now and we're
conducting research on pigs.
That is ongoing researchthat's being done right now.
Gregory Washington (10:18):
Oh, that is cool. You continue to use the term donors.
How do you get the bodies?Is it like a donor card,
like your donating a kidneyor some other body part?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (10:29):
Great question.
Our donors will be processedthrough the office of the
chief medical examinerfor the state of Virginia.
They're located in Richmond and one oftheir units down there is called the
Virginia Anatomical Program,or Virginia Anatomical Board.
And they will process all the requestsof individuals who want to come
(10:50):
to our body farm.
So they'll be the first group ofpeople that will receive the requests
and process the requests to make surethat the donor meets the criteria
to come to the body farm. So for example,
one of the things that they do beforewe would ever see the donor is to make
sure that the person does nothave a contagious disease
because we don't want our studentsand researchers to contract a disease.
(11:14):
And we make sure that the donor has notbeen embalmed yet because the purpose is
to monitor the decomposition.
We will get our bodies through them andthey will actually transport the bodies
out to Manassas. And we alreadyhave a team ready to go.
If we get a call,
our team is gonna be out there to receivethe donor and we will bring the donor
(11:34):
in, meet them at the hearse, andthen bring them into the Body Farm.
We have the experiment alreadyset up and ready to go,
and we will begin theplacement out at the Body Farm.
Gregory Washington (11:44):
Hmm, that is so cool. Now,
you mentioned that there are anumber of these labs in Texas.
My understanding is ours is a one ofa kind relative to the East Coast.
Is that correct? Andwhy is that important?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (11:56):
That is correct. We are the only one in this geographical area.
And it's important because our geographyhere is different than Texas or
different than Florida. So we havedifferent weather, we have different soil,
we have different insects, wehave different animal predators.
All of those elementsimpact decomposition.
So it's important that we know herewhat goes on in the Mid-Atlantic area
(12:21):
that we could see in an actual case.Is it the combination of the insects
with the predators? What are theydoing? How do they impact the body?
What about the weather, what about thesoil? How's that impacting the donor?
So it becomes imperative for usto understand decomp in this area
because we cannot use the research fromother geographical areas to tell us
(12:43):
what to look for in our crime scenes here.
Gregory Washington (12:46):
So if you're a student in the program,
so right now you say you got pigcadavers out there, right?
And so what do students encounterwhen they're out in the field?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (12:55):
When the students go out in the field right now, and they do go out,
they've been working on a number ofthings. They will help us dig graves.
They will help us take the pigsa couple of weeks ago. And they,
they actually carried the pigs into thebody farm and actually buried the pigs
in their graves.
They will then monitor thepigs for decomposition and what's happening with the
(13:17):
pigs.
Our students also helped with plantingcertain plants out there that we needed
the flowers to enhance the bee research.
We had students come out from geographywithin the College of Science to help
with the analysis of thesoil and the geography.
So they're involved with doing thepreliminary research about the body farm
(13:39):
because once a human donor is there,the ground itself, the water itself,
the flowers, the plants,that's going to change.
So we had to get the baselineresearch collected and analyzed,
and then we would bring the donor in.
So we have done that through the useof our students. And I can tell you,
we asked for volunteers that will goout there and help with the research.
(14:02):
And the number of students whovolunteer to go out there is so
amazing because they want to beinvolved. They want to see it,
they wanna touch the ground,
they wanna be able to saythat they're a part of it.
Gregory Washington (14:15):
That's one of the things I'm learning about being here,
really about kind ofhuman nature in general.
People do want to belong to something.
I think there's afundamental human driver.
Which brings me to yourother pastime -- profiling.
Not often we get to talk to someonewho engaged a Green River Killer or the
(14:36):
Unabomber.
So how do you profile somebody anddid you find anything interesting with
these individuals?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (14:43):
When we profile somebody,
it means that we study their behaviorfrom a crime scene. So for example,
in the Green River Killer, he killed fora long time before he was identified.
He killed in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s,
1990s. And the early two thousands.That's a lot of murders.
That's a lot of murders. And it's a lotof time to fly under the radar screen.
(15:06):
So that task force was lookingfor him for all of those years.
And it became important to understandhow did he get away with it?
Because there are other cases wherethey get apprehended pretty quickly.
Recently,
there was a serial killer in L.A. whokilled three people over the course of a
couple days. He got arrested quitequickly. Green River, however, decades.
(15:26):
And one of the reason that he did isbecause he lived a normal lifestyle.
He was married, he had achild, he went to church,
he had a regular job for some 30 years.So people thought when he was arrested,
they were, it couldn't be this guy 'causehe's my neighbor and he's very normal.
But what we do, we looked at all of GaryRidgway, who's the Green River Killer,
(15:47):
we looked at all of his murdersand he left his victims outside at
outdoor crime scenes. And in fact,
some of the remains of the victimswere not found for decades.
Because he was very efficientat being able to hide the bodies
or dump the bodies in a way thatprevented them from being found.
And of course, over the sixties,seventies, eighties and nineties,
(16:08):
we simply did not have the technologyfrom a forensic perspective to be able to
do a lot with those crime scenes.
Now times have changed and we can doa lot more. But when I first met him,
I became part of the task force out inSeattle. When I first met Gary Ridgway,
I was really surprised byhow normal and engaging
(16:29):
that he was and to look at him
there's no way that you wouldknow what he did. I mean,
you'd sit next to him on Metro andyou would never know that he was
the most prolific serialsexual killer in U.S. history.
Gregory Washington (16:45):
But somehow you profiled him. So you knew. If you sat by him on that train,
would you know,
could you have said something to him orasked him a question that would say to
you, okay, I'm starting to getsome eerie feelings from this guy?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (17:00):
What I'm gonna tell you may not click for a lot of people,
but the one thing that ispresent in most of the serial
sexual killers, and I saythat specifically because a serial sexual killer,
that's their motivation formurder. It's for sexual purposes.
They meet the criteria of thepsychopathic personality disorder.
(17:21):
The old term is sociopath,the new term is psychopath.
And part of the psychopathic structureis that these individuals have
the ability to show youwhat we call snake eyes,
which means their eyes arevery normal a lot of the time.
But when you're interviewing them orthey're angry at you during an interview,
(17:42):
or they don't likesomething that you've said,
their eyes transform into what we callsnake eyes. Their eyes lose their color,
and they go at half mask.And when you see it,
it makes the hair on theback of your neck stand up.
And if I saw someone in public and Ihave a couple times that makes that
transformation to snakeeyes, then I know stay away.
And I saw that with Gary Ridgway a lot.
(18:03):
If I said something tohim that he didn't like,
he would lose the eye color from hiseyes and his eyes would become coal black
and they would be at half mask.
And I know those were the eyes that hisvictims saw right before they murdered
him. And we know it'sa neurological issue.
We don't have a lot of information on why.
We just know that it's presentin psychopathic individuals.
Gregory Washington (18:26):
Oh wow. That is interesting. Did you talk with Kaczynski?
I didn't talk with Ted.Ted is uh, quite a loner.
And so he was very comfortableout at Supermax in Colorado.
'cause he lived alone in Lincoln,Montana for all those years.
But what I did do is Iinterviewed all of his victims.
I interviewed all the people that receivedthe bombs and all the people whose
(18:51):
names were on the sender part ofthe package.
Because we needed to see if there wasa nexus between the sender and the
receiver.
Was there?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (18:59):
No, there wasn't.
Which was really surprisingbecause that's not that typical.
Usually there you'd find a nexus.And Unabomber started in 1970,
actually in Chicago at a university. Sowe thought we could see something there,
but we did not.
And the last professor I interviewedwas at Yale and he survived the attack.
But once I came back hereto the profiling unit,
(19:22):
all of a sudden we get amanifesto from the Unabomber.
We still don't know who hewas. And this was '95, '96,
we received his demandattached to his manifesto,
which was pages long singlespace. It was coherent,
but with ideas that you could tellright away as you're reading it,
they were very off.
He demanded that that manifesto be printedon the front page of The Washington
(19:45):
Post and The New York Times.
Gregory Washington (19:48):
That was his undoing, right?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (19:49):
It was his undoing.
So I flew up to New York with anotheragent and met with the head of The New
York Times and attempted to persuade them.
They had to print it in itsentirety, not just excerpts.
And it had to be on the frontpage of The New York Times.
And if you can imagine,
The New York Times is thinking I'mbeing held hostage by this serial
(20:12):
killer. And that's justnot how a newspaper works.
But they ultimately agreed to do it. Thesame reluctance by The Washington Post.
But they agreed to do it as well. AndI think that there was fear there,
certainly, because what wouldhappen if they had not done that?
Would they have receiveda bomb at their offices?
So once the manifesto appeared in bothnewspapers,
(20:37):
Ted Kaczynski's brother readit and recognized the writing,
not the handwriting becauseit was newspaper print,
but he recognized the themes, the phrases,
the ideas that werepresented in the manifesto.
His brother had seen that over the years,
had recognized that that's how hisbrother wrote as his brother was in high
(20:59):
school and in college. They were thesame complaints and the same injustices.
So his brother hired an attorney andthey came forward that way and said,
it must have been so hardfor his brother. He said,
I believe that the Unabomberis my brother.
Gregory Washington (21:13):
Whoa. Did that message come to you? Did you see that message?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (21:16):
Eventually I did. Eventually I did.
Gregory Washington (21:18):
And And what did you, what did you think?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (21:20):
There was a big part of me that thought this whole thing's not gonna work.
It's gonna appear in the newspaperand it's going to produce nothing.
When I heard that a family memberbelieves that it was their brother,
actually I was surprised. I knewit was important that we do it.
I knew it was importantthat we put it out there,
but I just didn't think it wouldhave the results that it did have.
(21:43):
So, yeah, I was very,
very relieved because the problem wasthe Unabomber said, if you do this,
I'll stop bombing. Well,
you'd never trust a serialkiller because psychopaths,
one of the 20 traits of a psychopathis that they're habitual liars.
And so I didn't think he would stopwhether we placed it or didn't place it in
(22:03):
the newspaper, he would continue tobomb. Why? Because he enjoyed it.
He enjoyed building the bombs,
and he enjoyed making surethat they exploded and people were killed or injured.
So knowing that this producedresults was a huge release,
because it was going to continue,I felt until he was apprehended,
and I'm not sure that we would've foundhim in that small cabin in Lincoln,
(22:26):
Montana without this happening this way.
Gregory Washington (22:29):
Do you think he would have committed more crimes even though the manifesto was
published?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (22:34):
I do. I absolutely do. I've had other cases where the offender tells you,
look, if you do this, I won't do itanymore. I promise, Boy Scouts honor
I promise. You cannot trust thatat all. You cannot trust that,
that they will enter into anagreement like that. So I was,
and I think my colleagues in the FBIand in the Unabomber task force all agree
(22:59):
that he's just saying that he'sgonna continue until we capture him.
He will continue.
Gregory Washington (23:04):
So do you help train students now to profile?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (23:10):
Actually, I do.
And we're starting some prettyneat new initiatives that
will allow us to do even more of that.
Because I do have a group ofstudents that want to go take their
expertise more into the behavioralarea and they see the value of it.
So I have a class right now wherestudents are learning how to study crime
(23:33):
scenes from a behavioral perspectiveand then analyze the behavior.
And then from that behavior, what theydo is they explain who's the offender,
what kind of an offender would'vecommitted a crime like this. And in fact,
in the small semester this time,
I gave them three cases to analyze.
And one of them was D.B. Cooper, never saw,
(23:53):
jumped out of an airplane with$200,000. We never found him.
Gregory Washington (23:57):
They're still looking for him. Right?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (23:59):
They're still looking for him, never found him.
So some of the students getthat case. Another group,
they get the Marilyn Monroe case.
Marilyn Monroe was determined tohave died as a result of suicide.
Not so sure about that.
And then the third case that my studentswork on just for their midterms is the
Black Dahlia case.
And Black Dahlia is a unsolved caseout of Los Angeles where this beautiful
(24:23):
young woman that had movedto L.A. to become a movie star.
And she ended up meeting up with the wrongperson who kidnapped her and kept her
for a number of days and then placed herdismembered body in a neighborhood in
Los Angeles. And she's referredto as the Black Dahlia.
So my students study those casesfor the first half of the year,
and they look at the behavior andfrom the behavior they draw behavioral
(24:47):
traits of the offender andwhat the offender is like,
what kind of a job the offender has,
what kind of relationship theoffenders have with other people.
So they learn how to take the behaviorand extrapolate that into who the
offender is.
Gregory Washington (25:01):
What type of student goes into forensic science?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (25:04):
I think there is a type, and I've thought about this for a long time.
Students who are verycurious, very empathic,
very motivated, students that have a lot of
internal fortitude because they knowthey're gonna go out there, for example,
at least a lot of them to the body farm.
(25:24):
And they're gonna see some thingsthat are pretty upsetting with the
decomposition of a human donor.
So these are students that havereally thought this through very well,
and students that are critical thinkers.
That's the course I teach here is criticalthinking. You're not born with it.
It's not a gift. You need to develop it.
(25:46):
I am amazed by how quicklystudents learn to be
very adept
critical thinkers in a way that allowsthem to cut through complex cases,
tear them apart, and look at sections,put the sections back together,
and then make analysisabout who the offender is.
(26:07):
So I see that in so many of my studentsand they don't jump to conclusions.
And they understand that opinionsare just that. They're just opinions.
They're not the resultof critical thinking.
So I'm impressed by how well mystudents bring those traits together and
apply it into these cases.
Gregory Washington (26:25):
That is really, really cool.
Do you miss in any way the days whenyou would stare into the eyes of these
folk and see their eyes change overand deal with people in that context?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (26:37):
I do. I do. I still work cold cases,
but the interviews, especiallywith a serial killer, are my love.
And I tell people I'd rather talk to a,
a serial killer than geta pony at Christmas time.
The reason that I say that is there'snothing more fascinating than to get
inside an interview room. And all I do,
(27:01):
all I do is I sit there and I say,
I wanna learn from you and I'm gonnasit here for three hours, 10 hours,
12 hours,
and I'm just gonna listen to you tellme about who you are and how you were so
successful at what you were able to doand why you did the kinds of things that
you did at the crimescene and to the victim.
And I could sit there for three or fourdays and just listen. So I do love that.
(27:24):
I'll always love that. And ifthe opportunity presents itself,
I'll continue to do that.
Gregory Washington (27:29):
Wow, that is fantastic. So what does
F-A-R-O mean and why is it significant?
My understanding is Mason has partneredwith a company to become the first
forensic F-A-R-O university laboratory.Can you talk a little bit about that?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (27:47):
Sure. F-A-R-O is FARO, and it's the name of a company.
And this company has developedinstrumentation that is
3D measurement instrumentation.So in the olden days,
crime scene investigatorswould go to a crime scene,
whether it was outdoor or indoor.
One of the things that they wouldhave to do would be to draw a
(28:10):
map of the crime scene.And if it was a homicide,
they would have to draw where thebody is, where the weapon was found,
where the blood spatter was,where the gun was found.
That's really a part of the CSIwork. And the maps are drawn by hand.
And so with that kind of technology,
the amount of error is quite large.It could be in terms of inches.
(28:32):
And when you take the case to courtand you testify as an expert witness,
an expert CSI,
you're gonna be asked what's theerror ratio on where that gun was
in relationship to where the body wasfound? And you have to testify, well,
probably a number of inches. Well,that's not very close, is it? Well, no,
(28:52):
your Honor, it's not that close.But that's our technology.
But with FARO now, their accuracyis within centimeters.
Can you even imagine that? And so it.
Gregory Washington (29:02):
And it's a, it's a digital 3D technology?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (29:04):
Yes. And so you can go into a room and within,
within minutes and canmeasure the entire room.
And the beauty of that is youcan't hold a crime scene forever.
Although there are some instances wherethat they have held a crime scene for
years.
You can take that back to the office andif you discover a week later, oh darn,
I wished I would've gotten a pictureof this or measurement of that,
(29:26):
FARO allows you to do it.
But the accuracy of theFARO allows you to identify
where all of the things were within thecrime scene with incredible accuracy.
And within a far shorter amount of time.
When we heard about FARO,we were absolutely gung-ho,
and committed to the fact that weneeded to include that equipment in our
(29:50):
program. And when wecontacted the company,
they decided that theywanted to work with us.
Gregory Washington (29:56):
Of course.
'cause they just ensured thatthey're gonna be able to sell systems
for the foreseeable future to all ofour graduates, is a huge deal for them.
Mary Ellen O'Toole (30:05):
It's
a huge deal.
And what they did was they decidedto make us the only university in the
United States with a FARO lab.
And they donated hundreds of thousandsof dollars worth of equipment to us
to help with students.
So our students are learningon state-of-the-art equipment.
We take this equipment out to the bodyfarm and we can measure the body farm
(30:29):
with this equipment.
And we've actually got two CSIpeople and now two other people,
a total of four people within theforensic program who have been specially
trained so that they canprovide courses to students.
And once the semester is finished,
students who take the FAROcourse are now certified.
That means they can go into court whenthey're working for Arlington Police
(30:51):
Department or the FBI or Fairfax CountyPolice Department and be qualified as an
expert witness. And when crossexamined about what is your expertise,
I'm certified on FARO, which is thestate of the art. Mason does that.
Gregory Washington (31:05):
That's really cool. And they have it upon graduation?
I hope all of you out there who arelistening to this podcast catch that one.
Let me ask you, let me ask you this.We're an education institution,
but one thing that I know happensis that our faculty and our
programs extend beyondthe traditional college
(31:26):
age students.
We have individuals in their seventieshere and individuals in their eighties.
So talk a little bit about individualsin the FBI or law enforcement
or any of those organizations.
Do you have those individualscome to Mason to get trained
in the science of forensics?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (31:45):
What we have is a faculty that is made up of retired
FBI agents and FBI scientistsand people that have worked
in law enforcement and then broughttheir expertise here to work as college
professors. So we know forensicscience is an applied science.
And so we hire people that have thathands-on experience because they worked in
(32:07):
the field.
And then we are collaboratingwith departments like the FBI,
especially in areas that are veryunique to the FBI like the Body Farm
and canines, the BodyFarm and cadaver dogs.
And we're collaborating withother police departments.
So that what our research does isdemonstrate that we have based it
(32:29):
on real life crime scenes. So it's morefrom a collaborative point of view.
But recently I had a group of FBIprofilers come out to the Body Farm in a
couple weeks we'll have FBI laboratoryfolks come out to the Body Farm and
we will provide them a day of training.We'll have the military come out,
we'll provide them withtraining. So we're trying to be,
(32:50):
and we've been pretty successful at beingas collaborative as we can because we
are as strong as ourability to collaborate.
We are as strong as our ability tobring in all this outside expertise to
further the mission of the program, tofurther the education of our students.
And just to improve the whole concept ofcollaboration is where it's at when it
(33:11):
comes to forensics.
Gregory Washington (33:12):
Doing work with animals, dogs,
any other animals that can bedomesticated and used in forensic
science?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (33:20):
Right now it's just with the cadaver dogs.
And that's almost a full-timeendeavor. Here's why I say that.
We know that dogs can find human remains.
We know that dogs can find peoplethat are missing but not deceased.
The problem is we really don'tknow what the dog is smelling.
So we know that they have theability to smell something that a
(33:43):
human nose can't even comeclose to. We know that,
but we don't know whatthe animal is picking up on.
What is it that enables themto distinguish between, say,
the smell of human decomp from pig decomp?
That's important becauseoftentimes we find bodies because
(34:04):
the cadaver dog finds them for us.
And then the dog handler hasto go to court and testify
that their dog found it. Andthey're always asked, well,
what's the dog smelling? Andthe science is not there yet.
So we are working onthat. That's critical.
So if I gave you a rose and I gave youa lily, and I said smell, both of them,
(34:28):
you would say they both smell likeflowers, but they both smell differently.
Gregory Washington (34:32):
Right.
Mary Ellen O'Toole (34:33):
But you wouldn't be able to tell me why one smells like a rose and one smells
like a lily. So we knowthat the science behind the,
the use of cadaver dogs is awesome.
We just need to explain itfrom a scientific perspective.
Gregory Washington (34:47):
So we like to say at Mason that one of our pillars is audacity.
That is,
we are on the relentless quest forknowledge that can change the world.
And I think this program, yourprogram fits this mode perfectly.
So in that context,
what are students who go through thisprogram who participate in the research,
(35:08):
in the training lab, what canthey expect relative to a career?
We obviously know they canbe in a forensic scientist,
but what else can they look forward to?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (35:19):
They certainly can look forward to careers that present challenges in terms
of a high bar for creativity, ahigh bar for critical thinking,
a high bar for tenacity,
a high bar for compassionand empathy for other people.
Because when you workin the forensic field,
you realize that you have to bringthose personality traits to the job.
(35:43):
You have to have that ability tobe creative and to be very curious.
And then at the same time,
you have to be compassionate becauseyou may be dealing with the victim's
family, you may bedealing with the offender,
who knows they're going to spendthe rest of their life in prison.
So it's really an eclecticcombination of traits that
(36:03):
students really develop knowing thatall of that is gonna be necessary
if they want to be reallywell-rounded in the job.
And I love the term audacity,
because being audacious is notthe same as being arrogant.
Being audacious is to stand up and say,
we've got thousands of unidentifiedremains in medical examiner's offices
(36:27):
throughout the United States.
What can we do to reunite thoseindividuals with their family members?
We know that we've got unsolvedcases out there of marginalized
victims throughout the United States.
Audacious means what can wedo to solve those crimes?
And so if my students can beas audacious as is humanly
(36:50):
possible, they're gonna bemagnificent forensic scientists.
Gregory Washington (36:54):
Wow, that's really cool.
I hear there are different kind ofresearch going on in the lab with bees.
Can you talk a little bit aboutwhat's going on with bees?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (37:02):
So bees, the honeybees are our little winged crime fighters.
That's what I call them. They'relittle winged crime fighters.
We have bees already outthere at the body farm.
They've already been placed outthere by our university entomologist.
And we've already had our universitybotanists plant flowers out there
that would attract honeybees.
(37:23):
And the theory behind it isbased on the fact that honeybees,
when used in other research,
were able to deposittheir pollen in a way that
researchers could detectthe presence of pesticides.
So we're using that same scienceto basically say, okay, honeybees,
we're gonna have a human donors outthere. You will fly to the plant,
(37:45):
the volatile compounds will bein the plants from the decomp,
they will be in the plants.
You will go to the plant and then flyback to your beehive and take the pollen
and deposit it in yourbeehive. And from that,
we're hoping that we can detect thepresence of human decomposition.
And the reason that that's important isthat oftentimes when you're looking for
(38:09):
a body, somebody that's beenmurdered, you may be facing, you know,
10 miles of an areathat you have to search.
That's nearly impossibleto do that effectively.
So if we can narrow the area bylooking at the bee activity in the
area and there and there are beefarmers all over the United States,
if we could test their beehivesand see if there's any evidence of
(38:31):
human decomp in their beehives,
we would be able to say there islikely a human body within two to
five miles of this beehive.
Gregory Washington (38:40):
That is pretty interesting. And that includes underground as well?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (38:45):
We don't know the answer to the underground,
and that's what we areattempting to determine.
'cause our first science experimentwill be with a buried human donor.
Gregory Washington (38:54):
So last question. In all the time you spent as a profiler,
what did you learnabout the criminal mind?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (39:01):
I love that question.
I think the one takeaway that Ilearned over and over and over again
is that the people that I workedon, the cases that I worked on,
serial sexual murders and kidnappingsand robberies and burglaries,
very violent crimes,
people did not snap and justgo from one day being law
(39:23):
abiding, compassionate,and kind to a criminal.
I learned that violencestarts in the brain.
And what I mean by that ispeople start thinking about it,
people start planning for it.
People start to develop ideasand outlooks on life that
enable it, enable them tocommit a violent crime.
And I see this as being reallycritical. When we have a mass shooting.
(39:45):
We oftentimes hear people weighingin on these mass shootings,
not unlike the one we just had the otherday at the University of Las Vegas,
where people say mentalillness or he just snapped.
My experience has been that'snot the case at all.
Gregory Washington (39:59):
That that that people don't just snap.
They've been moving in thatdirection for some time.
So that means that it'sprobably preventable.
Mary Ellen O'Toole (40:06):
That means a lot of this is preventable. Some behavior,
like with psychopathy, weknow has a genetic dose to it,
we know that the sciencetells us that. Nonetheless,
there's a pattern of behaviorthat develops over time.
And that period of time wherethere's the possibility to really
(40:26):
influence and change for the better aperson's life is before they reach their
mid twenties. Because after that,
your brain is hardwired andyour personality is hardwired.
And to expect change after thatis really actually pretty naive.
So if there's opportunity to reallyinfluence someone that's manifesting
indicators of problems thatcould get worse and worse,
(40:49):
intervention has to be at an earlyage.
Gregory Washington (41:02):
Well, we'll have to end it there. Thank you. Mary Ellen O'Toole,
director of the Forensic Science Programin George Mason University's College
of Science, for a most interestingand fascinating discussion.
Mary Ellen O'Toole (41:16):
Thank you for having me.
Gregory Washington (41:17):
I am Mason President Gregory Washington saying, until next time, stay safe,
Mason Nation.
Narrator (41:25):
If you like what you heard on this podcast, go to podcast.gmu.edu
for more of Gregory Washington'sconversations with the thought leaders,
experts, and educators who take on thegrand challenges facing our students,
graduates, and higher education.That's podcast.gmu.edu.
Trailblazers in research, innovators in technology and those who simply have a
good story. All make up the fabricthat is George Mason University,
where taking on the grand challenges thatface our students, graduates and higher
education is our mission and our passion.Hosted by Mason President Gregory
Washington, this is theAccess to Excellence podcast.
Gregory Washington (00:26):
As one of the FBI's most accomplished profilers,
Mary Ellen O'Toole helped capture,
interview and understand someof the world's most infamous
people, including Gary Ridgway,the Green River Killer,
and Ted Kaczynski,
the Unabomber. Now as a professor anddirector of the Forensic Science Program
(00:50):
at George Mason University'sCollege of Science.
O'Toole is positioning her programas a national leader in forensic
anthropology and forensic science.
The program recently opened a fiveacre science and research training
laboratory on Mason's SciTechcampus in Manassas, Virginia,
one of only eight in the U.S. and theonly one on the east coast capable
(01:14):
of performing outdoorresearch in forensic science
using human donors. That'sright. A body farm. The lab,
which is expected to receive itsfirst human remains in the spring,
is dedicated to studying the processof human decomposition in various
environmental conditions forthe purposes of solving crimes.
(01:38):
Dr. O'Toole, I've been lookingforward to this one for quite some time.
Welcome to the show.
Mary Ellen O'Toole (01:43):
Oh, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here with you.
Gregory Washington (01:46):
So you've had an interesting kind of winding career pathway.
Can you help the audience understandhow you got to where you are?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (01:57):
Sure.
So I've spent about 30-some years in law
enforcement.
In 28 of those yearsI was an FBI agent FBI
profiler.
And I've always had an interestin what goes on in somebody's head
right at the time theycommit a violent crime.
So I found the FBI andprofiling to be a perfect match
(02:21):
for me so I could betterunderstand that. And in fact,
I think at age five I started havingthose thoughts about what's going on in
somebody's head whenthey're murdering someone.
And I'm sure that thatterrified my mother,
but it's been an interestthat I've had my entire life.
So when I finally became an FBI agent,
I heard of this program that wasdesigned to have special agents
(02:46):
who would work as profilers orpeople that study human behavior that
included behavior like serialmurder cases, sexual assault cases,
child abduction cases. AndI thought, that's for me,
I absolutely have to do that.
And I just found it absolutelyunbelievably interesting.
So I spent about 50% of my FBIcareer doing that and having the
(03:08):
opportunity to interviewsome people that, um,
were absolutely beyond the pale,
just in terms of their criminal behaviorand what they would do to other human
beings. And then onceI retired from the FBI,
it's really hard to move away from that.
So when the opportunity came up to bea part of the forensic science program,
(03:30):
I really didn't think I would getthe job. But remarkably I did.
And then I found my second home here.
Being able to work with otherpractitioners in the field and bringing
initiatives and opportunities to studentsso that they can go forward and have
remarkable careers, whether theywant to be a forensic DNA analyst,
(03:52):
a forensic chemist, an anthropologistor crime scene investigator.
And they have the same, kind ofthe same background that I did.
They grew up on these crime stories andthey are fascinated with human behavior
and they want to contribute to thefield and they want to do great things.
And they are ambitious andhardworking and amazing students
(04:14):
that love the profession.
So it's just worked out inreally quite a wonderful way.
Gregory Washington (04:20):
Well, outstanding. Outstanding.
So I know this is a somewhat serious topicthat we are gonna get into. You know,
I have to ask if youstill have the skeletons
greet visitors when theycome to your program offices?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (04:32):
We still have the skeletons. In fact,
they're standing by the reception areathat I just left a few minutes ago.
And the only thing my faculty won'tallow me to do is to turn on their voices
because they do speak,
but they are there and they are thefirst greeters that will meet you at the
front door when you walk intothe forensic science unit.
Gregory Washington (04:52):
Outstanding. So for those people who don't know,
and it may be new to the concept,
talk to us a little bitabout what is forensic
science?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (05:03):
Forensic science is a combination of the application
of the theories in naturalsciences combined with
the application of thattechnology to the criminal justice
system, especially interms of analyzing and
(05:24):
collecting evidence at a crimescene and then presenting that data
in a courtroom.
So it's the application of naturalsciences to the criminal justice system,
and it becomes broader eachday as they add more sciences
into forensic science.
The reason that it's so fascinatingis that it's not just theory,
(05:45):
it's the application of thescience in a courtroom setting.
Gregory Washington (05:49):
It's also been popularized by programs like CSI and others,
right? People see that and they'relike, okay, this is really, really cool,
and where can I go toschool to learn that?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (06:01):
They do see it on TV programs and a lot of my students grew up with Law and
Order and they grew up with CSI andBones and they are challenged by
the possibility of resolving or solving a
very complicated crime. And ifthey can do it using science,
that's what they want. So it could beDNA science, it could be chemistry,
(06:25):
it could be CSI,
but they're very curious studentsand they are motivated to be able to
apply their science in a way thatenables them to come up to a solution
for a complicated and ongoingor very challenging case.
Gregory Washington Okay. So talk to us about the lab,
what it is and what do youhope that it will be at its
(06:49):
zenith?
So we call it the Body Farm,
not because we wanted to callit the Body Farm Laboratory.
It's actually called the ForensicAnthropological Outdoor Research Facility.
But I knew deep down insidethat as soon as we started
and launched this initiative,
it was going to be called the Body Farmand there really wasn't anything that we
(07:10):
could do about it. So we didhave a much more formal name,
but it defaulted to Body Farm andthat's what the public knows it as.
That's what my students know it as. Andso that's why it's taken on this name.
The beauty of having this initiativehere at George Mason is because we
have such a thriving program andstudents really want to get involved
(07:31):
in research,
and whether it's a chemistry studentbiology student anthropology student,
it does not matter.
They want to get out there and understandhow their particular science can be
improved or used to solvecases. So for example,
the intent of the farm is to bring inhuman donors and to study decomposition,
(07:53):
but it's a lot more complex than that.
We actually want to be able to studydecomposition based on many different
scenarios. If a person is buried,if a person is on top of the ground,
if the person is in a vehicle,
if a person is hanging from a tree,
all of these are real life scenarios thatwe have encountered out in the field.
(08:14):
And they can be very perplexingproblems because decomp can cause a
body to manifest evidencethat's hard to interpret.
And that's the goal of this initiative,
is to be able to study reallife crimes and we will depict
them at the crime scene at the Body Farm
and in an effort to study whathappens, and I'll give you an example.
(08:38):
We are No. 8 in terms of thebody farms throughout the United States.
And there are several down in Texas.
And Texas did some research and foundthat there were very large birds that came
to their body farm and these birds werelanding on the donors and they were
causing the donors tobruise, postmortem bruising.
And prior to the release of this study,
(08:58):
when I would see postmortem bruising,
we would attribute that to the offender,
the person that committed the murder thatthey engaged in postmortem behavior.
And that was a completely incorrectconclusion based on the research that was
done at the body farm down in Texas.
So it was very valuable to be able tolearn what happens after someone is left
(09:20):
outside. And many of the crime scenesthat I worked as an FBI profiler,
the victim was left outside.
And so it became important tounderstand cause and manner of death.
Time of death,
what happened to the victim and whatcan we tell about through the victim,
what can we tell about the offender?
So that's our goal is to be ableto advance the science and to
(09:43):
incorporate in new sciences, for example,
our bee research and ourcadaver dog research,
all of those are gonna advance the sciencein ways that other body farms aren't
doing right now.
Gregory Washington (09:54):
No, that's really cool. So are there actual bodies on the ground yet?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (09:59):
Not yet.
We hope to get our first donor eitherby the end of this year or sometime in
early spring or next semester.
Now we have buried pigs out there andthey are there right now and we're
conducting research on pigs.
That is ongoing researchthat's being done right now.
Gregory Washington (10:18):
Oh, that is cool. You continue to use the term donors.
How do you get the bodies?Is it like a donor card,
like your donating a kidneyor some other body part?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (10:29):
Great question.
Our donors will be processedthrough the office of the
chief medical examinerfor the state of Virginia.
They're located in Richmond and one oftheir units down there is called the
Virginia Anatomical Program,or Virginia Anatomical Board.
And they will process all the requestsof individuals who want to come
(10:50):
to our body farm.
So they'll be the first group ofpeople that will receive the requests
and process the requests to make surethat the donor meets the criteria
to come to the body farm. So for example,
one of the things that they do beforewe would ever see the donor is to make
sure that the person does nothave a contagious disease
because we don't want our studentsand researchers to contract a disease.
(11:14):
And we make sure that the donor has notbeen embalmed yet because the purpose is
to monitor the decomposition.
We will get our bodies through them andthey will actually transport the bodies
out to Manassas. And we alreadyhave a team ready to go.
If we get a call,
our team is gonna be out there to receivethe donor and we will bring the donor
(11:34):
in, meet them at the hearse, andthen bring them into the Body Farm.
We have the experiment alreadyset up and ready to go,
and we will begin theplacement out at the Body Farm.
Gregory Washington (11:44):
Hmm, that is so cool. Now,
you mentioned that there are anumber of these labs in Texas.
My understanding is ours is a one ofa kind relative to the East Coast.
Is that correct? Andwhy is that important?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (11:56):
That is correct. We are the only one in this geographical area.
And it's important because our geographyhere is different than Texas or
different than Florida. So we havedifferent weather, we have different soil,
we have different insects, wehave different animal predators.
All of those elementsimpact decomposition.
So it's important that we know herewhat goes on in the Mid-Atlantic area
(12:21):
that we could see in an actual case.Is it the combination of the insects
with the predators? What are theydoing? How do they impact the body?
What about the weather, what about thesoil? How's that impacting the donor?
So it becomes imperative for usto understand decomp in this area
because we cannot use the research fromother geographical areas to tell us
(12:43):
what to look for in our crime scenes here.
Gregory Washington (12:46):
So if you're a student in the program,
so right now you say you got pigcadavers out there, right?
And so what do students encounterwhen they're out in the field?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (12:55):
When the students go out in the field right now, and they do go out,
they've been working on a number ofthings. They will help us dig graves.
They will help us take the pigsa couple of weeks ago. And they,
they actually carried the pigs into thebody farm and actually buried the pigs
in their graves.
They will then monitor thepigs for decomposition and what's happening with the
(13:17):
pigs.
Our students also helped with plantingcertain plants out there that we needed
the flowers to enhance the bee research.
We had students come out from geographywithin the College of Science to help
with the analysis of thesoil and the geography.
So they're involved with doing thepreliminary research about the body farm
(13:39):
because once a human donor is there,the ground itself, the water itself,
the flowers, the plants,that's going to change.
So we had to get the baselineresearch collected and analyzed,
and then we would bring the donor in.
So we have done that through the useof our students. And I can tell you,
we asked for volunteers that will goout there and help with the research.
(14:02):
And the number of students whovolunteer to go out there is so
amazing because they want to beinvolved. They want to see it,
they wanna touch the ground,
they wanna be able to saythat they're a part of it.
Gregory Washington (14:15):
That's one of the things I'm learning about being here,
really about kind ofhuman nature in general.
People do want to belong to something.
I think there's afundamental human driver.
Which brings me to yourother pastime -- profiling.
Not often we get to talk to someonewho engaged a Green River Killer or the
(14:36):
Unabomber.
So how do you profile somebody anddid you find anything interesting with
these individuals?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (14:43):
When we profile somebody,
it means that we study their behaviorfrom a crime scene. So for example,
in the Green River Killer, he killed fora long time before he was identified.
He killed in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s,
1990s. And the early two thousands.That's a lot of murders.
That's a lot of murders. And it's a lotof time to fly under the radar screen.
(15:06):
So that task force was lookingfor him for all of those years.
And it became important to understandhow did he get away with it?
Because there are other cases wherethey get apprehended pretty quickly.
Recently,
there was a serial killer in L.A. whokilled three people over the course of a
couple days. He got arrested quitequickly. Green River, however, decades.
(15:26):
And one of the reason that he did isbecause he lived a normal lifestyle.
He was married, he had achild, he went to church,
he had a regular job for some 30 years.So people thought when he was arrested,
they were, it couldn't be this guy 'causehe's my neighbor and he's very normal.
But what we do, we looked at all of GaryRidgway, who's the Green River Killer,
(15:47):
we looked at all of his murdersand he left his victims outside at
outdoor crime scenes. And in fact,
some of the remains of the victimswere not found for decades.
Because he was very efficientat being able to hide the bodies
or dump the bodies in a way thatprevented them from being found.
And of course, over the sixties,seventies, eighties and nineties,
(16:08):
we simply did not have the technologyfrom a forensic perspective to be able to
do a lot with those crime scenes.
Now times have changed and we can doa lot more. But when I first met him,
I became part of the task force out inSeattle. When I first met Gary Ridgway,
I was really surprised byhow normal and engaging
(16:29):
that he was and to look at him
there's no way that you wouldknow what he did. I mean,
you'd sit next to him on Metro andyou would never know that he was
the most prolific serialsexual killer in U.S. history.
Gregory Washington (16:45):
But somehow you profiled him. So you knew. If you sat by him on that train,
would you know,
could you have said something to him orasked him a question that would say to
you, okay, I'm starting to getsome eerie feelings from this guy?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (17:00):
What I'm gonna tell you may not click for a lot of people,
but the one thing that ispresent in most of the serial
sexual killers, and I saythat specifically because a serial sexual killer,
that's their motivation formurder. It's for sexual purposes.
They meet the criteria of thepsychopathic personality disorder.
(17:21):
The old term is sociopath,the new term is psychopath.
And part of the psychopathic structureis that these individuals have
the ability to show youwhat we call snake eyes,
which means their eyes arevery normal a lot of the time.
But when you're interviewing them orthey're angry at you during an interview,
(17:42):
or they don't likesomething that you've said,
their eyes transform into what we callsnake eyes. Their eyes lose their color,
and they go at half mask.And when you see it,
it makes the hair on theback of your neck stand up.
And if I saw someone in public and Ihave a couple times that makes that
transformation to snakeeyes, then I know stay away.
And I saw that with Gary Ridgway a lot.
(18:03):
If I said something tohim that he didn't like,
he would lose the eye color from hiseyes and his eyes would become coal black
and they would be at half mask.
And I know those were the eyes that hisvictims saw right before they murdered
him. And we know it'sa neurological issue.
We don't have a lot of information on why.
We just know that it's presentin psychopathic individuals.
Gregory Washington (18:26):
Oh wow. That is interesting. Did you talk with Kaczynski?
I didn't talk with Ted.Ted is uh, quite a loner.
And so he was very comfortableout at Supermax in Colorado.
'cause he lived alone in Lincoln,Montana for all those years.
But what I did do is Iinterviewed all of his victims.
I interviewed all the people that receivedthe bombs and all the people whose
(18:51):
names were on the sender part ofthe package.
Because we needed to see if there wasa nexus between the sender and the
receiver.
Was there?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (18:59):
No, there wasn't.
Which was really surprisingbecause that's not that typical.
Usually there you'd find a nexus.And Unabomber started in 1970,
actually in Chicago at a university. Sowe thought we could see something there,
but we did not.
And the last professor I interviewedwas at Yale and he survived the attack.
But once I came back hereto the profiling unit,
(19:22):
all of a sudden we get amanifesto from the Unabomber.
We still don't know who hewas. And this was '95, '96,
we received his demandattached to his manifesto,
which was pages long singlespace. It was coherent,
but with ideas that you could tellright away as you're reading it,
they were very off.
He demanded that that manifesto be printedon the front page of The Washington
(19:45):
Post and The New York Times.
Gregory Washington (19:48):
That was his undoing, right?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (19:49):
It was his undoing.
So I flew up to New York with anotheragent and met with the head of The New
York Times and attempted to persuade them.
They had to print it in itsentirety, not just excerpts.
And it had to be on the frontpage of The New York Times.
And if you can imagine,
The New York Times is thinking I'mbeing held hostage by this serial
(20:12):
killer. And that's justnot how a newspaper works.
But they ultimately agreed to do it. Thesame reluctance by The Washington Post.
But they agreed to do it as well. AndI think that there was fear there,
certainly, because what wouldhappen if they had not done that?
Would they have receiveda bomb at their offices?
So once the manifesto appeared in bothnewspapers,
(20:37):
Ted Kaczynski's brother readit and recognized the writing,
not the handwriting becauseit was newspaper print,
but he recognized the themes, the phrases,
the ideas that werepresented in the manifesto.
His brother had seen that over the years,
had recognized that that's how hisbrother wrote as his brother was in high
(20:59):
school and in college. They were thesame complaints and the same injustices.
So his brother hired an attorney andthey came forward that way and said,
it must have been so hardfor his brother. He said,
I believe that the Unabomberis my brother.
Gregory Washington (21:13):
Whoa. Did that message come to you? Did you see that message?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (21:16):
Eventually I did. Eventually I did.
Gregory Washington (21:18):
And And what did you, what did you think?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (21:20):
There was a big part of me that thought this whole thing's not gonna work.
It's gonna appear in the newspaperand it's going to produce nothing.
When I heard that a family memberbelieves that it was their brother,
actually I was surprised. I knewit was important that we do it.
I knew it was importantthat we put it out there,
but I just didn't think it wouldhave the results that it did have.
(21:43):
So, yeah, I was very,
very relieved because the problem wasthe Unabomber said, if you do this,
I'll stop bombing. Well,
you'd never trust a serialkiller because psychopaths,
one of the 20 traits of a psychopathis that they're habitual liars.
And so I didn't think he would stopwhether we placed it or didn't place it in
(22:03):
the newspaper, he would continue tobomb. Why? Because he enjoyed it.
He enjoyed building the bombs,
and he enjoyed making surethat they exploded and people were killed or injured.
So knowing that this producedresults was a huge release,
because it was going to continue,I felt until he was apprehended,
and I'm not sure that we would've foundhim in that small cabin in Lincoln,
(22:26):
Montana without this happening this way.
Gregory Washington (22:29):
Do you think he would have committed more crimes even though the manifesto was
published?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (22:34):
I do. I absolutely do. I've had other cases where the offender tells you,
look, if you do this, I won't do itanymore. I promise, Boy Scouts honor
I promise. You cannot trust thatat all. You cannot trust that,
that they will enter into anagreement like that. So I was,
and I think my colleagues in the FBIand in the Unabomber task force all agree
(22:59):
that he's just saying that he'sgonna continue until we capture him.
He will continue.
Gregory Washington (23:04):
So do you help train students now to profile?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (23:10):
Actually, I do.
And we're starting some prettyneat new initiatives that
will allow us to do even more of that.
Because I do have a group ofstudents that want to go take their
expertise more into the behavioralarea and they see the value of it.
So I have a class right now wherestudents are learning how to study crime
(23:33):
scenes from a behavioral perspectiveand then analyze the behavior.
And then from that behavior, what theydo is they explain who's the offender,
what kind of an offender would'vecommitted a crime like this. And in fact,
in the small semester this time,
I gave them three cases to analyze.
And one of them was D.B. Cooper, never saw,
(23:53):
jumped out of an airplane with$200,000. We never found him.
Gregory Washington (23:57):
They're still looking for him. Right?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (23:59):
They're still looking for him, never found him.
So some of the students getthat case. Another group,
they get the Marilyn Monroe case.
Marilyn Monroe was determined tohave died as a result of suicide.
Not so sure about that.
And then the third case that my studentswork on just for their midterms is the
Black Dahlia case.
And Black Dahlia is a unsolved caseout of Los Angeles where this beautiful
(24:23):
young woman that had movedto L.A. to become a movie star.
And she ended up meeting up with the wrongperson who kidnapped her and kept her
for a number of days and then placed herdismembered body in a neighborhood in
Los Angeles. And she's referredto as the Black Dahlia.
So my students study those casesfor the first half of the year,
and they look at the behavior andfrom the behavior they draw behavioral
(24:47):
traits of the offender andwhat the offender is like,
what kind of a job the offender has,
what kind of relationship theoffenders have with other people.
So they learn how to take the behaviorand extrapolate that into who the
offender is.
Gregory Washington (25:01):
What type of student goes into forensic science?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (25:04):
I think there is a type, and I've thought about this for a long time.
Students who are verycurious, very empathic,
very motivated, students that have a lot of
internal fortitude because they knowthey're gonna go out there, for example,
at least a lot of them to the body farm.
(25:24):
And they're gonna see some thingsthat are pretty upsetting with the
decomposition of a human donor.
So these are students that havereally thought this through very well,
and students that are critical thinkers.
That's the course I teach here is criticalthinking. You're not born with it.
It's not a gift. You need to develop it.
(25:46):
I am amazed by how quicklystudents learn to be
very adept
critical thinkers in a way that allowsthem to cut through complex cases,
tear them apart, and look at sections,put the sections back together,
and then make analysisabout who the offender is.
(26:07):
So I see that in so many of my studentsand they don't jump to conclusions.
And they understand that opinionsare just that. They're just opinions.
They're not the resultof critical thinking.
So I'm impressed by how well mystudents bring those traits together and
apply it into these cases.
Gregory Washington (26:25):
That is really, really cool.
Do you miss in any way the days whenyou would stare into the eyes of these
folk and see their eyes change overand deal with people in that context?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (26:37):
I do. I do. I still work cold cases,
but the interviews, especiallywith a serial killer, are my love.
And I tell people I'd rather talk to a,
a serial killer than geta pony at Christmas time.
The reason that I say that is there'snothing more fascinating than to get
inside an interview room. And all I do,
(27:01):
all I do is I sit there and I say,
I wanna learn from you and I'm gonnasit here for three hours, 10 hours,
12 hours,
and I'm just gonna listen to you tellme about who you are and how you were so
successful at what you were able to doand why you did the kinds of things that
you did at the crimescene and to the victim.
And I could sit there for three or fourdays and just listen. So I do love that.
(27:24):
I'll always love that. And ifthe opportunity presents itself,
I'll continue to do that.
Gregory Washington (27:29):
Wow, that is fantastic. So what does
F-A-R-O mean and why is it significant?
My understanding is Mason has partneredwith a company to become the first
forensic F-A-R-O university laboratory.Can you talk a little bit about that?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (27:47):
Sure. F-A-R-O is FARO, and it's the name of a company.
And this company has developedinstrumentation that is
3D measurement instrumentation.So in the olden days,
crime scene investigatorswould go to a crime scene,
whether it was outdoor or indoor.
One of the things that they wouldhave to do would be to draw a
(28:10):
map of the crime scene.And if it was a homicide,
they would have to draw where thebody is, where the weapon was found,
where the blood spatter was,where the gun was found.
That's really a part of the CSIwork. And the maps are drawn by hand.
And so with that kind of technology,
the amount of error is quite large.It could be in terms of inches.
(28:32):
And when you take the case to courtand you testify as an expert witness,
an expert CSI,
you're gonna be asked what's theerror ratio on where that gun was
in relationship to where the body wasfound? And you have to testify, well,
probably a number of inches. Well,that's not very close, is it? Well, no,
(28:52):
your Honor, it's not that close.But that's our technology.
But with FARO now, their accuracyis within centimeters.
Can you even imagine that? And so it.
Gregory Washington (29:02):
And it's a, it's a digital 3D technology?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (29:04):
Yes. And so you can go into a room and within,
within minutes and canmeasure the entire room.
And the beauty of that is youcan't hold a crime scene forever.
Although there are some instances wherethat they have held a crime scene for
years.
You can take that back to the office andif you discover a week later, oh darn,
I wished I would've gotten a pictureof this or measurement of that,
(29:26):
FARO allows you to do it.
But the accuracy of theFARO allows you to identify
where all of the things were within thecrime scene with incredible accuracy.
And within a far shorter amount of time.
When we heard about FARO,we were absolutely gung-ho,
and committed to the fact that weneeded to include that equipment in our
(29:50):
program. And when wecontacted the company,
they decided that theywanted to work with us.
Gregory Washington (29:56):
Of course.
'cause they just ensured thatthey're gonna be able to sell systems
for the foreseeable future to all ofour graduates, is a huge deal for them.
Mary Ellen O'Toole (30:05):
It's
a huge deal.
And what they did was they decidedto make us the only university in the
United States with a FARO lab.
And they donated hundreds of thousandsof dollars worth of equipment to us
to help with students.
So our students are learningon state-of-the-art equipment.
We take this equipment out to the bodyfarm and we can measure the body farm
(30:29):
with this equipment.
And we've actually got two CSIpeople and now two other people,
a total of four people within theforensic program who have been specially
trained so that they canprovide courses to students.
And once the semester is finished,
students who take the FAROcourse are now certified.
That means they can go into court whenthey're working for Arlington Police
(30:51):
Department or the FBI or Fairfax CountyPolice Department and be qualified as an
expert witness. And when crossexamined about what is your expertise,
I'm certified on FARO, which is thestate of the art. Mason does that.
Gregory Washington (31:05):
That's really cool. And they have it upon graduation?
I hope all of you out there who arelistening to this podcast catch that one.
Let me ask you, let me ask you this.We're an education institution,
but one thing that I know happensis that our faculty and our
programs extend beyondthe traditional college
(31:26):
age students.
We have individuals in their seventieshere and individuals in their eighties.
So talk a little bit about individualsin the FBI or law enforcement
or any of those organizations.
Do you have those individualscome to Mason to get trained
in the science of forensics?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (31:45):
What we have is a faculty that is made up of retired
FBI agents and FBI scientistsand people that have worked
in law enforcement and then broughttheir expertise here to work as college
professors. So we know forensicscience is an applied science.
And so we hire people that have thathands-on experience because they worked in
(32:07):
the field.
And then we are collaboratingwith departments like the FBI,
especially in areas that are veryunique to the FBI like the Body Farm
and canines, the BodyFarm and cadaver dogs.
And we're collaborating withother police departments.
So that what our research does isdemonstrate that we have based it
(32:29):
on real life crime scenes. So it's morefrom a collaborative point of view.
But recently I had a group of FBIprofilers come out to the Body Farm in a
couple weeks we'll have FBI laboratoryfolks come out to the Body Farm and
we will provide them a day of training.We'll have the military come out,
we'll provide them withtraining. So we're trying to be,
(32:50):
and we've been pretty successful at beingas collaborative as we can because we
are as strong as ourability to collaborate.
We are as strong as our ability tobring in all this outside expertise to
further the mission of the program, tofurther the education of our students.
And just to improve the whole concept ofcollaboration is where it's at when it
(33:11):
comes to forensics.
Gregory Washington (33:12):
Doing work with animals, dogs,
any other animals that can bedomesticated and used in forensic
science?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (33:20):
Right now it's just with the cadaver dogs.
And that's almost a full-timeendeavor. Here's why I say that.
We know that dogs can find human remains.
We know that dogs can find peoplethat are missing but not deceased.
The problem is we really don'tknow what the dog is smelling.
So we know that they have theability to smell something that a
(33:43):
human nose can't even comeclose to. We know that,
but we don't know whatthe animal is picking up on.
What is it that enables themto distinguish between, say,
the smell of human decomp from pig decomp?
That's important becauseoftentimes we find bodies because
(34:04):
the cadaver dog finds them for us.
And then the dog handler hasto go to court and testify
that their dog found it. Andthey're always asked, well,
what's the dog smelling? Andthe science is not there yet.
So we are working onthat. That's critical.
So if I gave you a rose and I gave youa lily, and I said smell, both of them,
(34:28):
you would say they both smell likeflowers, but they both smell differently.
Gregory Washington (34:32):
Right.
Mary Ellen O'Toole (34:33):
But you wouldn't be able to tell me why one smells like a rose and one smells
like a lily. So we knowthat the science behind the,
the use of cadaver dogs is awesome.
We just need to explain itfrom a scientific perspective.
Gregory Washington (34:47):
So we like to say at Mason that one of our pillars is audacity.
That is,
we are on the relentless quest forknowledge that can change the world.
And I think this program, yourprogram fits this mode perfectly.
So in that context,
what are students who go through thisprogram who participate in the research,
(35:08):
in the training lab, what canthey expect relative to a career?
We obviously know they canbe in a forensic scientist,
but what else can they look forward to?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (35:19):
They certainly can look forward to careers that present challenges in terms
of a high bar for creativity, ahigh bar for critical thinking,
a high bar for tenacity,
a high bar for compassionand empathy for other people.
Because when you workin the forensic field,
you realize that you have to bringthose personality traits to the job.
(35:43):
You have to have that ability tobe creative and to be very curious.
And then at the same time,
you have to be compassionate becauseyou may be dealing with the victim's
family, you may bedealing with the offender,
who knows they're going to spendthe rest of their life in prison.
So it's really an eclecticcombination of traits that
(36:03):
students really develop knowing thatall of that is gonna be necessary
if they want to be reallywell-rounded in the job.
And I love the term audacity,
because being audacious is notthe same as being arrogant.
Being audacious is to stand up and say,
we've got thousands of unidentifiedremains in medical examiner's offices
(36:27):
throughout the United States.
What can we do to reunite thoseindividuals with their family members?
We know that we've got unsolvedcases out there of marginalized
victims throughout the United States.
Audacious means what can wedo to solve those crimes?
And so if my students can beas audacious as is humanly
(36:50):
possible, they're gonna bemagnificent forensic scientists.
Gregory Washington (36:54):
Wow, that's really cool.
I hear there are different kind ofresearch going on in the lab with bees.
Can you talk a little bit aboutwhat's going on with bees?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (37:02):
So bees, the honeybees are our little winged crime fighters.
That's what I call them. They'relittle winged crime fighters.
We have bees already outthere at the body farm.
They've already been placed outthere by our university entomologist.
And we've already had our universitybotanists plant flowers out there
that would attract honeybees.
(37:23):
And the theory behind it isbased on the fact that honeybees,
when used in other research,
were able to deposittheir pollen in a way that
researchers could detectthe presence of pesticides.
So we're using that same scienceto basically say, okay, honeybees,
we're gonna have a human donors outthere. You will fly to the plant,
(37:45):
the volatile compounds will bein the plants from the decomp,
they will be in the plants.
You will go to the plant and then flyback to your beehive and take the pollen
and deposit it in yourbeehive. And from that,
we're hoping that we can detect thepresence of human decomposition.
And the reason that that's important isthat oftentimes when you're looking for
(38:09):
a body, somebody that's beenmurdered, you may be facing, you know,
10 miles of an areathat you have to search.
That's nearly impossibleto do that effectively.
So if we can narrow the area bylooking at the bee activity in the
area and there and there are beefarmers all over the United States,
if we could test their beehivesand see if there's any evidence of
(38:31):
human decomp in their beehives,
we would be able to say there islikely a human body within two to
five miles of this beehive.
Gregory Washington (38:40):
That is pretty interesting. And that includes underground as well?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (38:45):
We don't know the answer to the underground,
and that's what we areattempting to determine.
'cause our first science experimentwill be with a buried human donor.
Gregory Washington (38:54):
So last question. In all the time you spent as a profiler,
what did you learnabout the criminal mind?
Mary Ellen O'Toole (39:01):
I love that question.
I think the one takeaway that Ilearned over and over and over again
is that the people that I workedon, the cases that I worked on,
serial sexual murders and kidnappingsand robberies and burglaries,
very violent crimes,
people did not snap and justgo from one day being law
(39:23):
abiding, compassionate,and kind to a criminal.
I learned that violencestarts in the brain.
And what I mean by that ispeople start thinking about it,
people start planning for it.
People start to develop ideasand outlooks on life that
enable it, enable them tocommit a violent crime.
And I see this as being reallycritical. When we have a mass shooting.
(39:45):
We oftentimes hear people weighingin on these mass shootings,
not unlike the one we just had the otherday at the University of Las Vegas,
where people say mentalillness or he just snapped.
My experience has been that'snot the case at all.
Gregory Washington (39:59):
That that that people don't just snap.
They've been moving in thatdirection for some time.
So that means that it'sprobably preventable.
Mary Ellen O'Toole (40:06):
That means a lot of this is preventable. Some behavior,
like with psychopathy, weknow has a genetic dose to it,
we know that the sciencetells us that. Nonetheless,
there's a pattern of behaviorthat develops over time.
And that period of time wherethere's the possibility to really
(40:26):
influence and change for the better aperson's life is before they reach their
mid twenties. Because after that,
your brain is hardwired andyour personality is hardwired.
And to expect change after thatis really actually pretty naive.
So if there's opportunity to reallyinfluence someone that's manifesting
indicators of problems thatcould get worse and worse,
(40:49):
intervention has to be at an earlyage.
Gregory Washington (41:02):
Well, we'll have to end it there. Thank you. Mary Ellen O'Toole,
director of the Forensic Science Programin George Mason University's College
of Science, for a most interestingand fascinating discussion.
Mary Ellen O'Toole (41:16):
Thank you for having me.
Gregory Washington (41:17):
I am Mason President Gregory Washington saying, until next time, stay safe,
Mason Nation.
Narrator (41:25):
If you like what you heard on this podcast, go to podcast.gmu.edu
for more of Gregory Washington'sconversations with the thought leaders,
experts, and educators who take on thegrand challenges facing our students,
graduates, and higher education.That's podcast.gmu.edu.
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