WEST VALLEY CITY -- For nearly 100 years, police trying to reconstruct crime scenes have relied on wooden dowels and yards of string to trace the path of spent bullets.
Not any more, though. At least not in West Valley City, where police have added a touch of Hollywood high-tech with disco smoke and laser beams.In the past four months, the police department has used lasers to trace ballistics in more than 20 shootings, said Lt. Charles Illsley, spokesman for the department and president of the International Association for Identification.
"It's quicker, it's more convenient. It has a little more sex appeal," said Barry Fisher, director of the Scientific Services Bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, a 5,000-member professional organization. "What you're using is a high-tech way of dealing with a low-tech problem."
The lasers and expertise have come courtesy of Calvin Ostler, a former investigator in the Utah Medical Examiner's Office with a background in forensics and chemistry. He also is now president of LumaChem, a subsidiary of Ostler Scientific International.
With advice from West Valley police, Ostler has developed the Scene Sweeper, a self-contained forensic laser kit specially designed for police work.
Bullets have been tracked with lasers for about five years, said Fisher, but the practice has been limited by a lack of adequate yet affordable laser power.
Ostler's kit can track bullets up to 1,000 yards. Add a fog machine and bullet trajectories can be photographed and shown to a jury.
The bottom line for investigators, said Illsley, is more accurate crime scene reconstructions. "The old technique lacks scientific integrity," he said.
Ostler volunteers his services to police departments statewide for a simple reason: "I hate criminals. I really do. I've seen the (stuff) they do and I hate it."
He spent three years in the medical examiner's office investigating some of the state's grisliest crimes -- the Ogden HiFi Shop murders, Arthur Gary Bishop's multiple murders of young boys and the Lafferty brothers' slayings in American Fork.
"The ones that go after kids, I want to put them in jail," said Ostler. "That's the passion that drives me."
The most recent and highest-profile use of the laser tracers in Utah to date was in the Nov. 7 drive-by shooting that claimed the life of 16-year-old Bethany Hyde.
A week after Hyde's death, police propped up six of Ostler's high-powered argon lasers at the intersection where the shooting occurred, each beam tracing the path of a single bullet. The results were eerie.
The beams painted four dots on the car. One beam passed through the back window and out the other side and pointed police to an impact mark made by a bullet on a curb 100 yards away, Ostler said.
The last beam went through the back door and touched the far passenger door -- the path of the bullet doctors removed from the teenager.
On the heels of the publicity generated by the Hyde case, other agencies have contacted Ostler. Next week he will set up nine beams in Green River to reconstruct the scene where Emery County worker Charles Watterson was killed by a sniper while grading a road.
Watterson's assailant is believed to have fired as many as 25 shots from a .22 caliber rifle from about 80 feet away. Nine struck Ostler. Emery County Sheriff LaMar Guymon said the goal is to pinpoint bullet trajectories and the location of the shooter.
"We pretty much have those things," said Guymon, "but this just helps build our case -- to prove we know what we think we do."
Illsley said that with multiple bullets the point where the beams converge can pinpoint where a shooter was standing. Different entry angles and paths can indicate if either the shooter or the victim was moving. That in turn can help police determine provocation or even motive.
Illsley said Ostler has spent up to 40 hours a week doing crime reconstruction with West Valley police.
Ostler Scientific International, the company that pays his bills, develops lasers for a variety of medical uses and does some development for laser shows.
"It's all getting the technology out there and seeing if we can help get some of these guys put behind bars where they need to be," said Clark Cannon, a member of the board of directors and part owner of OSI.
Laser technology at crime scenes is not new. It was first used to illuminate fingerprints in 1976. Since then forensic scientists have found that different wavelengths can make fingerprints, bone and tooth chips and body fluids literally glow in the dark.
Blood and bruises below the skin will absorb the color and appear dark under the light. Pointing a laser across a flat surface causes even minor indentations, such as writing on a note pad, filed-down serial numbers and footprints in dust, to cast a visible shadow.
Lasers have been used to search out Nazi refugees and help apprehend serial killer Richard Ramirez, the so-called Night Stalker.
It was that kind of detective work that Illsley -- using Ostler's lasers -- was performing inside the truck of James Pinder, a Duchesne rancher charged with the murders of a couple on his ranch.
"It's totally amazing," said Duchesne County Sheriff Ralph Stansfield. "If it does what we think it's done for us . . . then it's done us a heck of a job."
Stansfield said investigators believe Ostler's lasers located some fibers and fingerprints that could be relevant to the case, but the findings must be verified.
Ostler said the FBI and other law enforcement agencies are interested in buying his $10,000 forensic lasers. The kit is stronger than laser pointers used by some agencies, and the Scene Sweeper is also strong enough to detect prints, fluids and fibers.
The idea for adding ballistics capability to the Scene Sweeper came to Ostler one night as he and his wife were watching a television documentary on the shooting of a man during a backyard barbecue.
The investigators in that case used 300 yards of string to roughly pin down where the shot had been fired. A laser like the one Ostler was developing at the time could have reconstructed the scene in minutes and much more accurately, he said.
The next step for Ostler is to open a garage where any police agency can bring cars used in crimes so they can be swept for evidence.
"You cannot commit a crime without leaving evidence, and with this," Ostler said, "we're going to find it."