James Gaskill can't help but grin when he recalls that cat hair was the best clue in one of the most famous cases solved by Weber State University criminal scientists.
Gaskill, director and founder of the Weber State crime lab, said a hair found at the scene of a rape about five years ago was traced to the cat of another rape victim. That linked the two incidents and provided evidence needed to obtain convictions in both cases.Those cases also helped to earn Gaskill a reputation as the "Sherlock Holmes of Northern Utah." He wears the same type of English derby made famous by the fictional Holmes.
Gaskill's similarities to Holmes aren't limited to his attire.
He also studies evidence with the same emotional fervor of his fictional 19th century counterpart.
"Life, liberty and the happiness of pursuit," reads a sign above Gaskill's desk at Weber State.
But you won't often see Gaskill with magnifying glass in hand.
With modern science at his fingertips, Gaskill analyzes evidence brought to him by northern Utah police by processing it through technical X-ray and chemical devices that can give increasingly greater accuracy than Holmes ever could have achieved.
"We were once able to narrow a blood sample down to 30 percent of the population," Gaskill said. "Now we can often get it down to less than 1 percent."
The thrill of being on the cutting edge of technology is what keeps Gaskill excited about his work. "There have been an awful lot of people arrested, convicted and rehabilitated because of new methods we have been able to employ in the lab," he said.
This thrust for new science helped Gaskill open the first crime lab to serve the entire state in 1971 shortly after he began teaching at Weber State. He said the lab was a natural undertaking because many of his students were police officers who were already bringing him evidence for analysis.
"Setting up the lab was not as difficult an undertaking as you might think," Gaskill said. "If you're careful and give police and juries the information they need, people begin to accept you."
The Weber State criminal justice program educates about 80 percent of the police serving northern Utah. Weber State was the first Utah school to offer a four-year criminal justice degree.
Also a first was the sponsorship of such a lab by a teaching institution. Gaskill said today the lab continues to be the only university facility in the United States to promote large-scale cooperation with professional law enforcement.
In 1980, a similar facility was opened in Salt Lake City, and Weber State began focusing on evidence collected from Davis County and communities to the north.
In Weber County, crime lab technicians collect all evidence from crime scenes within 13 municipalities as part of a new technical services partnership formed in July.
Gaskill's group also is called to the scene of major crimes for evidence gathering in Davis County.