Photo by Robert Burroughs

Daniel Vomhof studied engineering/physics and chemistry, then a master’s degree in analytical chemistry, and a doctorate in biochemistry and physiology, with a minor in genetics.

Vomhof calls it The Case of the Too Many Skids and says it went.like this: Kid was on his way to the beach. Drove his folks’ 1970 Mercury from his home in El Cajon to the Grand/Garnet exit in Pacific Beach. It was after eight on a warm July evening. Kid had a buddy with him. They turned left on Garnet and headed west toward the ocean. Neither saw the man. Too late, they heard the heavy thud and then up flashed something big coming at them, over the hood, and then the brakes shrieked. . . . They lurched to a halt.

The officers who arrived at the accident scene had dutifully measured all the relevant skid marks, but failed to analyze the significance of their fellow officer’s substantial skid.

David Diaz

Cops came and found the body on the pavement, a fifty-four-year-old man so smashed by the impact that he would die in Mission Bay Hospital within a few hours. At the scene, a witness said the kid was speeding. Worse, the cops measured more than 134 feet of skid marks. The cops’ computer didn't take long to spit back the conclusion: kid had to have been careening along at sixty-two miles per hour in a thirty-five zone. The cops figured that made it not just speeding, but also failing to exercise due care and caution for a pedestrian. And manslaughter.

The case of the celebrating sailors...

David Diaz

So the kid went to jail, got bailed out. got a lawyer. Case against the kid looked grim. But this lawyer . . . just . . . wondered . . . about a few things. Like the note in the police report mentioning that the hospital measured the victim’s blood alcohol level at .25 percent. (The law defines intoxication at .10 percent.) Also, the kid sounded sincere when he protested that it just didn’t seem possible he was going that fast. He had stopped for the light at Pendleton, the street just after where Garnet Avenue branches over to Grand. He hit the guy a block and a half later. How could the Mercury have accelerated like that? Good question, the lawyer thought. So he called Vomhof. Immediately.

The case of the tooth truth...

David Diaz

That’s how Vomhof got lucky. The quick call brought him to the scene the afternoon of just the third day after the accident. All the blood and police chalk and skid marks were clearly visible. When he checked the cops’ measurements, he came within one foot of theircount, except that in the daytime, you could see that there were not one, but three separate skid marks. They overlapped enough so that in the dark anyone would have made the same mistake. In the sunlight, Vomhof saw unmistakably that the kid’s tires matched only one eighty-nine-foot patch. Also, that patch was the sort created by bald, swerving tires, rather than locked, skidding ones. A mark like that meant the kid couldn’t have been going faster than nineteen miles per hour. Vomhof also noted that (according to the police report) the victim’s pocket contained a new book of matches from the Cabaret, the bar right in front of the accident scene. Furthermore, the dead man’s blood alcohol level at the time of the accident could have been as high as .31 percent — enough to make him close to comatose. Vomhof reported back to the lawyer. The lawyer argued to the cops: kid couldn’t have avoided the drunk on that dark stretch of pavement. The cops dropped the charges; kid went free.

The case off the bogus broom log...

David Diaz

That was case number 75-F-117 for Daniel W. Vomhof, Ph.D., forensic scientist, director of Expert Witness Services, whose business it is to reconstruct automobile accidents, analyze blood stains, verify handwriting, test individual alcohol tolerance levels, and more. Vomhof has been in this business for six years. His office is in a house next door to his home on University Avenue in La Mesa. He says forensic science “is an old, old field that goes back as far as the 1600s in France. That’s when people began to apply some science to criminal investigation. But at the same time it’s a new field. The major challenge in it isn’t competition. The real competition is ignorance on the part of the general public and attorneys as to the fact that there are people with a scientific and technical background who also have the knowledge of the legal requirements to present information to a jury or a judge.”

Vomhof is forty-two years old, a tall man whose shaggy brown hair flows into a pointed beard. Around his office, he dresses casually, in cowboy boots, jeans, a print polyester shirt open at the neck to the shallow V of a white undershirt. He often wears horn rimmed glasses through which he peers sharply. “The term forensic science has a broad definition.” he continues expansively, almost professorial. “Forensics, broadly, is debate, and attorneys in a courtroom are debating. So any field that is involved with a legal proceeding is forensic something,” Vomhof says. Science usually slips into the courtroom when the physical evidence in a case is open to question, questions like: how did the car crash? whose handwriting is this? whose hair?

It’s an odd marriage of science and law, and Vomhof says today most forensic scientists enter the field through the back door. In his case, the path involved undergraduate studies in engineering/physics and chemistry, then a master’s degree in analytical chemistry, and a doctorate in biochemistry and physiology, with a minor in genetics. He began to cross the threshold into the legal world when he worked as director of the U.S. Customs laboratory in Chicago. “We’d get questions about wigs. First they’d want to know if they were synthetic or human, then if they were Caucasian or Oriental, then if they were Chinese or Japanese.” He begins to grin. “Then if they were Nationalist or Communist Chinese.”

Eight years ago Vomhof transferred to the San Diego customs office, where even more eccentric questions occasionally confronted him. There was the time, for example, when customs agents at the border searched an aged pickup truck and found a secret compartment full of marijuana. The truck’s owner swore that he knew nothing about the hidden cache; he claimed he had just bought the vehicle from a Tijuana man whose name he didn’t know. The customs agents were particularly suspicious of the square patches of paint on both doors, so Vomhof was asked to determine what was under it. He drew upon his chemistry background to find a solvent which would remove the top layer of paint without disturbing any bottom one. That revealed the name of a Tijuana businessman who had been the driver’s employer, clear evidence that a good part of the man's story was a lie.

Such scientific sleuthing only engaged Vomhof part-time until another local scientist asked him to join Expert Witness Services. Shortly thereafter, Vomhof bought the partner out, and since then, Vomhof figures he has testified in court more than 150 times. He accepts both civil and criminal cases, but civil work (in which one individual sues another) has become his specialty; usually lawyers or insurance companies hire him (rather than the litigant directly). Vomhof says Southern California contains a number of “experts” who regularly appear in court to evaluate evidence in one or another particular field, like automobile accident reconstruction or fire investigation. But he estimates that outfits like his, which tackle the whole broad range of scientific puzzles, probably don’t number more than a dozen or so in the country; no more than one other in Southern California. As a consequence, Vomhof gets calls from all over— like the one which plunged him into

The Case of the Four-Wheel Oversight

Another accident case, it began in Indio about 6:30 p.m. one temperate July. A number of witnesses saw the yellow ’64 Ford Ranchero stop in the intersection’s left-turn lane and then pull out into the path of an oncoming Jeep driven by an off-duty Indio policeman. The crash swept the Ranchero broadside across the two opposite lanes to rest at one corner of the intersection. Passers-by who rushed to the damaged yellow Ranchero saw a plump young girl of about thirteen behind the wheel, her back up against the door of the driver’s seat. On the floor underneath the glove compartment was her mother, a woman in her early thirties. Most witnesses hadn’t noticed who was driving, but two said it was the young girl. The question was a crucial one; California law says if a driver makes a left-hand turn too close to an oncoming car, then the turning driver is guilty. In this case, the investigating officers took one look at the underage, unlicensed, apparent driver of the Ranchero and cited both the girl and her mother.

The off-duty policeman driver of the Jeep also filed suit for damages, although the women were most severely injured, particularly the daughter, who suffered temporary brain damage. On top of everything else, the mother was uninsured. However, she steadfastly recounted another version of the accident. She said she, and not her daughter, had been driving. Further, the mother remembered seeing the Jeep far enough away so that there should have been plenty of time to complete the turn. So she hired an attorney, and the attorney retained Vomhof. In this case, by the time he reached the scene most of the physical evidence had long faded, so Vomhof had to rely on the police account.

That was enough. Vomhof found that the officers who arrived at the accident scene had dutifully measured all the relevant skid marks, but failed to analyze the significance of their fellow officer’s substantial skid. When Vomhof took into account the friction of that particular pavement surface, he computed that the Jeep had to have been doing more than forty-five miles per hour in that thirty-five-mile-per-hour zone. Furthermore, in his report, Vomhof demonstrated how the laws of physics accounted for the daughter being lobbed from the passenger seat to the other side of the truck’s cab, just as her mother slid over and forward, down to the floor. After Vomhof reported those calculations to the woman’s attorney, the police dropped the criminal charges. And the women sued the off-duty policeman for their huge medical bills, a suit which his insurance company eventually settled.

In that case, the mother’s lawyer raised the question of whether the investigating officers had deliberately turned a blind eye to some of the evidence because it would have damaged a fellow cop. That question went unanswered, but Vomhof generalizes that law enforcement officers usually make mistakes about traffic accidents. He asserts, “In seventy-five percent of the automobile cases that I get involved with, where a law enforcement type has made a determination in his report as to who was the party at fault, he’s stuck it to the wrong person. It turns out that the physical evidence contradicts the investigating officers’ conclusion as to what went on. And the cases I get into aren’t fender benders. Normally, they’re cases where there’s been a significant amount of property damage to the vehicles, and injuries or deaths.”

Vomhof thinks a partial explanation is that law enforcement officers have a lot to do at any crash scene. “The primary responsibility of the first officer on the scene is to protect the scene from the standpoint of keeping other cars from plowing into the wreckage. While he’s doing that, he’s also supposed to provide whatever aid he can to the victims until such time as the medical people arrive. His first responsibility is not to take careful measurements.” Vomhof also says most law enforcement officers lack training in even the very basics of accident reconstruction. “They get a little bit in the academy, but that’s when they’re rookies and they don’t have any idea what the hell’s going on anyway. It may be two years until they have to handle an accident on their own. By then they forget. . . .It’s just plain scary.” He says the independent investigator must make sure the most basic evidence hasn’t been overlooked, the way it was in

The Case off the Pointed Pontiac

On this particular New Year’s Day, what the California Highway Patrolman found was two cars on the northbound side of Interstate 5 near La Jolla. One, a white Datsun with a crumpled rear end, had plunged down an embankment and still contained its young woman driver. Once conscious, she testified that she had been driving home from a New Year’s Eve party when she saw lights coming up behind her, fast. That’s all she remembered. The other car, a green Pontiac, stood vacant about a hundred feet down the road. A check of its registration showed that it had recently been sold to someone who was likely a Mexican illegal alien. But despite the second car’s proximity, the CHP officer disbelieved the young woman’s hazy account of the crash. Instead he concluded that her partying had caused her to fall asleep and drift off the road. His judgment was bad news for the woman, whose insurance company refused to pay for an accident that was her fault.

When she hired a lawyer, who brought in Vomhof, the forensic scientist quickly found that physical evidence supported the woman’s story. Simple measurement of both cars showed that the dent in the Datsun’s trunk exactly corresponded to the (minted nose of the Pontiac. Moreover, Vomhof found white paint on the green car, and vice versa. Given those facts, the woman’s insurance company readily paid.

There are other extremes, Vomhof says, where investigation seems to only confirm a client’s guilt or liability. But he says in such cases he faces no legal or ethical conflicts. “In civil cases, you report back to the client and you tell them what the facts indicate. If the facts are against them and they want to go ahead anyway, that’s their problem. ... In criminal cases, we report our findings to the attorney, who is an officer of the court. Remember, the defense attorney’s obligation is to make sure that his client has the benefit of all the legal analysis that’s involved. And if it all points to guilt, then it’s up to him to decide on the best strategy. The forensic scientist does not have a legal or ethical obligation to run down to the district attorney’s office and say, ‘Hey, we’ve looked at this and, boy, you’re on to something.’” In contrast, Vomhof says the forensic scientist does have a duty to maintain an open mind, even when investigating the bleakest situation, one like

The Case off the Celebrating Sailors

There were two of them, a twenty-three-year-old and his buddy, who had just turned twenty-one. To mark the birthday, they headed to a North County bar in the younger man’s nine-year-old Dodge Charger. About 11:30 p.m. they finished their beers, got into the car, and turned south on Pomerado Road to head back toward Miramar. Only a hundred or so feet later the Charger plowed into the right-hand side of a bridge built over a gully. The car pivoted and blocked the road; the birthday celebrant’s head smashed into the steering wheel. He wasn’t badly hurt, but at the point of impact the passenger door flew open and the force flung his twenty-three-year-old buddy down the embankment. He died very quickly.

Vomhof’s files contain a copy of the report of the CHP officer who reached the scene first. The driver’s eyes looked red and glassy and his speech was extremely thick and slurred, the officer noted. A few times the sailor seemed to drop off to sleep even as his bleeding friend was being carried away. Inside the car, the officer sniffed beery breath. He transported the man downtown, where a blood-alcohol test showed him to be at. 11 percent — over the legal limit. For the law enforcement officer, that clinched it. He charged the sailor with felony drunk driving and vehicle manslaughter (causing a death resulting from an automobile).

This time the defendant’s lawyer couldn’t even suggest any leads for Vomhof. “He just said, ‘You look at the evidence and tell me if there’s anything that might be a mitigating circumstance,”’ the forensic scientist remembers. First, Vomhof read the damning police report. Then he drove up to the accident scene. He measured the distances against the reported figures, then something caught his eye.

Vomhof noticed that the pavement surface of the road was about two and a half inches higher than the adjoining shoulder. He got in his car and turned left out of the bar parking lot just as the young sailor had done. Sure enough, Vomhof’s right front tire jerked off the roadway and down to the shoulder, before climbing back up to the pavement that led to the bridge. In fact, by Vomhof’s calculations, any normal-size car making a similar left turn from the parking lot would bounce through the same path; a multitude of tire tracks in the dirt shoulder confirmed that. Then Vomhof headed for the tow yard where the damaged Charger had been deposited.

Sure enough, he found what he was looking for: one of the ball joints attaching the tie rod to the right front wheel was loose. Vomhof could envision what had happened. As the old clunker (it had 220,000 miles on it) had jounced off the pavement, the shock had popped the tie rod, depriving the driver of any steering ability. “So any driver in the same car, drunk or sober, would have gone into that bridge,” Vomhof concluded. Furthermore, he advised the attorney that there was strong reason to doubt that the sailor had even been drunk. The bartender had stated that the sailors walked out immediately after each downing one beer. When the car hit the bridge, most of the alcohol would have been in the birthday lad’s stomach, not his bloodstream. By subtracting the amount of alcohol which would have entered the sailor's bloodstream in the time between the accident and the blood test, Vomhof concluded that the young man would not have met the legal definition of intoxication. The trauma of his own injuries and his friend’s death could just as readily account for the sailor’s slurred speech, apparent sleepiness, and glassy eyes. Vomhof suggested. “This is a case where, had the police department done a better job of investigating the accident, the charges shouldn’t have been brought,” Vomhof declares emphatically. “But in California, more than any other state, if there’s an accident and the officer smells alcohol, the investigation stops.”

This is a subject that stirs him to mount the soapbox. Over the years he has developed a maverick opinion on the perils of drinking and driving. He readily agrees that “anybody, if they drink enough alcohol, will be impaired in their ability to drive.” But he charges that legal intoxication has become a scapegoat, that far too many law enforcement officers seize it as an easy explanation for any driving accident. And he claims that public overreaction to and distortion of the accident statistics make the law enforcers’ attitude understandable. For example, Vomhof cites claims by the National Safety Council that fifty to seventy-five percent of all fatal accidents involve drinking drivers. “Well, that’s just not true,” he scoffs, pulling out a book of California Highway Patrol statistics for 1978. Fatal accidents in which alcohol or a combination of alcohol and drugs were considered to be the major cause comprised twenty-nine percent of the total, and that number drops to eleven percent for injury accidents.

“I don’t want to come across as some advocate of drinking and driving,” Vomhof says. But he claims that the legal "presumption” of intoxication in any person whose blood alcohol level is .10 or more is a virtual arbitrary tyranny. Some drivers become far more careful after drinking, he asserts. “You can have broad guidelines. But when you have a specific case, you have to look at that specific individual. And just because someone smells of alcohol does not mean that whatever happened, happened because he was drinking.

Vomhof jumps up from a chair and strides across the wood floors of his Spartan office. One comer contains a video-tape machine. Snowy images fill the TV screen until he corrects the picture. It shows a young woman in her twenties, to whom Vomhof is administering a field sobriety test. Stone sober, she follows Vomhof’s instructions: With some hesitation, her sandal-clad feet follow a straight line; her wavering increases as she tries to touch her nose with her index finger while her eyes are closed; when she tries to balance on one foot, she totters repeatedly. “She was a real klutz,” the scientist mutters in an aside.

Then the film cuts to a point where she’s consumed enough beer to raise her blood level to .10 percent. Remarkably, she performs the same field sobriety tests with much more confidence. Most startling is the footage taken when her blood-alcohol level is .20 percent. Upon command, she raises her right leg up and then holds the position, steady as a mannequin. “I think we could have taken her up to a .24 or more before she would have shown it,” Vomhof says, shaking his head incredulously. “At .20, I would have felt perfectly comfortable about driving with her!”

Vomhof has seen four or five cases in which the lawyer used a tolerance test to win acquittal for a driver whose blood alcohol was over the legal limit. He remembers one case in particular in which the defendant, a student, was driving along and sipping beer from a plastic cup when a policeman stopped him for driving with his lights out. The subsequent blood test gave a .16 reading. Yet the tolerance test showed him to be unaffected by that amount of liquor. Vomhof explains, “The law says if you have a blood-alcohol level of .10, it’s presumed that you’re under the influence — hut it’s a rebuttable presumption. Most people don’t know that. That is, if you were not impaired for the purposes of driving, you were not under the influence.’’The student’s lawyer convincingly argued that his client hadn’t been impaired; he had forgotten to turn on his lights merely because the street he was driving on was so bright, a fact Vomhof documented with a light meter.

As if to demonstrate the' wide variety of the effects of alcohol, Vomhof runs another tape, this one starring a young man who performs competently while sober. In his case, a .10 percent blood-alcohol level obviously handicaps him. At .16, he staggers up the line and sways discemibly while standing. “Right after we stopped filming this he got sick,” Vomhof says. Nonetheless, Vomhof says this tape helped this particular subject, who had fallen victim to a breathalyzer test; it was

The Case of the Tooth Truth

That same young man had been stopped right after pulling onto the ramp connecting Balboa Avenue with Highway 163; the policeman thought he detected some fish-tailing. The officer had administered the field sobriety test, with borderline results. However, the young man’s breath test at the police station looked conclusive; a .17 percent blood-alcohol level. The citation for driving while under the influence stunned the young man. He had only consumed one sixteen-ounce beer and he sure didn’t feel intoxicated. He knew that he didn’t have much tolerance for alcohol, and he also felt sure he hadn’t exceeded his limit.

The alcohol tolerance test certainly confirmed the youth's inability to hold much liquor. But Vomhof’s testing went one step further when he learned that the young man wore ill-fitting dentures. Vomhof says sometimes the adhesive of such dentures can actually absorb and hold liquor. So he had the young man take alcohol into his mouth, hold it there, then spit it out. The procedure confirmed that the denture adhesive was retaining enough of the liquor for a breathalyzer test to stigmatize the (sober) young man with a blood-alcohol reading of .10 as long as twenty-five minutes after spitting out the alcohol.

The case went to court, where the arresting officer testified that he checked the young man’s teeth — and had found a normal, healthy set. So when Vomhof relayed his test results a few minutes later, and the defendant subsequently popped out the dentures, “the prosecutor just threw up his arms in defeat,” Vomhof remembers. Indeed, the case was dismissed.

“I don’t usually enjoy going to court,” Vomhof says. Much of his role necessarily involves a tedious recitation of his credentials. Vomhof says he’s called upon to testify in only about ten percent of all the cases he undertakes, and only the rarest of those culminates in Perry Mason-style drama. Far more commonly, he doesn’t ever learn the final legal resolution, which can be particularly frustrating when Vomhof grapples with a truly offbeat problem. One time, for example, the challenge was to quantify “Quiet.”

The Case off the Soundproof Chicanery

It was three in the morning. The cops banged on the door of the first-floor apartment off Seventieth Street in La Mesa. At long last a muffled voice sounded through the door. The cops bellowed that they had a search warrant. The occupant responded that he would open the door. But nothing happened.

So the police kicked the door open and cornered the occupant in his bedroom, where they found a goodly store of cocaine, marijuana, and drug paraphernalia. Later they explained why they had burst in: Through the door, they heard their suspect making a break for it. The man’s attorney simply couldn’t believe that explanation. His client’s apartment had concrete floors, covered by padding, which in turn was covered by carpeting. And his client was barefoot. How could the arresting officers possibly have heard an attempted escape? Enter Vomhof.

To complicate the question, by the time the lawyer posed it to Vomhof, the client had moved out of the apartment and an elderly lady had moved in. Nonetheless, she graciously allowed Vomhof to do some testing. He rented a sound frequency analyzer, which measured not only the loudness but also the frequency of various sounds. Then, with the defendant, he visited the apartment one afternoon. Vomhof measured assiduously as the defendant ran barefoot, ran with shoes on, bumped into furniture. Vomhof had to return at three in the morning to measure the quietness of the hallway in the wee hours. He found that while there were almost no sounds of traffic from the side street, noise from the nearby freeway (Interstate 8) clearly penetrated the apartment complex. Even louder was the thrumming of air conditioning. “I was able to conclude that no one outside could have heard the occupant running away from the door, because the ambient noise outside was louder than most of the noises you could produce inside. ” He testified in court to his findings, but the judge admitted the drug evidence on other grounds. Vomhof never heard how the case turned out.

That assignment required the use of a special instrument, but Vomhof’s La Mesa office for the most part seems devoid of fancy gadgetry. One graying wall of the office living room is filled with certificates of the scientist’s professional achievements. Books like The Psychology of Homicide and the Standard Handbook of Fastening and Joining line one entire wall. A jumble of odds and ends gives the back rooms a Holmesian flavor: on the fireplace mantle a plastic human brain rests on a copy of The Micro-Chemistry of Poisons. Next to that a grinning skull clenches a bullet in its teeth. Vomhof further states that sometimes the key to a case merely involves going in with a sharp eye, as it was in

The Case off the Curious Carpeting

It was an El Cajon business, with a central, three-level “island.” A woman customer had tripped while descending from one level to another and the misstep had shattered her ankle. Afterward, the store managers argued that anyone who climbed the tiers had to know they were there and should have been careful walking down them. The woman disagreed and sued.

When Vomhof visited the scene, he had to concur with the store owners that from the front door, the building's structure was obvious. But then he retraced the woman’s path. She had first gone around the island to pay a bill in the office at the rear of the first level. Then a store employee had led her up the island — the straightest path to the front door. Orange carpeting covered the top level, and Vomhof noted how easy it was to see the step down to the second, gold-carpeted tier. Then Vomhof meandered over to the spot where the woman had fallen. There he saw that only the slightest difference in shades distinguished the two levels. “Maybe she would have seen the step if she were looking down, but a furniture store is designed to be distracting, to get you to be looking all around you. ’' Vomhof's report used that argument and included a color photograph to illustrate how the similar carpeting created an optical illusion of one surface. In this case, Vomhof was informed of the woman’s eventual good news: the furniture store awarded her $80,000.

Vomhof says he’s handled maybe seventy-five slip-and-fall cases over the years. He’s been called to quantify floor slipperiness, to evaluate the engineering of women’s shoes. One slip-and-fall case drew upon his skills as a documents examiner.

The Case off the Bogus Broom Log

Vomhof got involved as a result of a call from a Riverside County lawyer whose client had tripped in the produce department of a Mayfair market. The injured woman insisted that a piece of lettuce caused her downfall. Impossible, the grocers replied. They said that in the first place, they conscientiously used nonskid floor wax. And furthermore, they not only made their employees sweep the floor with zealous frequency, they required all the sweepings to be logged and initialed on a special form. Confronted with the lawsuit, the assistant manager readily produced that record of the sweepers’ diligence.

The woman’s lawyer thought the sweep schedule looked suspicious, but when Vomhof first saw the completed sheet, he warned the lawyer not to get his hopes up. The chart was a baffling hodgepodge of numerals and initials; some of the initials were signed in blue ink; others were red, black, and green. Worse, the lawyer had only been able to obtain one unrelated sample of the handwriting of one of the people who claimed to have initialed the sweep schedule, the assistant manager.

Vomhof nonetheless sat down with a magnifying glass and found to his delight that the document was “one of those things where the more you looked at it, the more you began to see.” All the capital B’s looked alike. As a matter of fact, so did all the sevens. And the nines. And the double zeroes. In his final report, Vomhof was able to identify nine separate elements distinctive enough so that only one person was likely to have made them. More importantly, he found that those unique elements were present in more than one set of initials. In fact, the study forced him to conclude that the assistant manager had filled in the whole thing. “It raised serious questions about how frequently they did sweep the place,” Vomhof says. The store’s insurance carrier settled.

The forensic scientist points out that documents examination is a separate discipline from graphology. The latter uses handwriting to gain insight into psychological traits. In contrast, a documents examiner is an expert at comparing documents with the end of determining whether the same source produced them. However, many documents examiners get their “training” by first studying graphology and becoming familiar with the stroke-by-stroke analysis of writing. Vomhof got his start that way. He’s acquired other areas of expertise in somewhat serendipitous fashion. He learned to do paternity testing in an undergraduate class which related to the study of blood. He learned to investigate fire origins in seminars and courses conducted locally. One of his most absorbing experiences with the latter was

The Case off the Spurious Sparks

The defendant was the owner of an apartment complex on Bonair Street in La Jolla. A fire had devastated one of the units, and when the embers cooled, the firemen looked for the site of the heaviest damage, often the likeliest origin of any blaze. In this instance it was one comer of the bedroom. There, the flames had burned away some of the wood paneling along the bedroom wall. About six inches from this corner, the investigators could clearly see where two electrical wires had fused together. The chain of events seemed obvious. The wires had short-circuited and the resulting sparks had ignited everything else, the firemen decided. Given that verdict, the tenant sued the landlord for the damage to her belongings.

But the landlord contended that the wires had been well insulated. And he pointed out that the tenant smoked cigarettes constantly — and, he suspected, carelessly. So this time the landlord’s insurance company adjustor telephoned Vomhof and requested that the forensic scientist independently appraise the scene of the devastation.

Once there, Vomhof was immediately troubled by one thing. Although the fused wires were about eighteen inches off the ground, the fire had charred the paneling below the wiring all the way to the floor in a V pattern. “Fire burns up,” Vomhof says. “If the wires had started it, the burn pattern shouldn’t have looked like that.” The landlord had already removed all the mined flooring, but Vomhof asked him to retrieve it. When the landlord did, he and Vomhof discovered that the carpeting at the very bottom of the V had been consumed by some intense, concentrated heat source. Even the tack board (the thin strip of wood to which the carpet was fastened) in that particular spot revealed a fire-sculpted hole. That evidence, which Vomhof easily documented with photographs, threw the firemen’s explanation into serious doubt. Vomhof’s report argued that the far more likely explanation for that bum pattern was a cigarette which had fallen down, smouldered in the carpet, and finally ignited the paneling. Only when the flames licked their way up did the fire melt the wire insulation — and only then did the wires fuse.

Vomhof thinks that the firemen who came up with the other verdict almost certainly delivered it in a sincere effort to get at the truth. But facts don’t just stand alone. The interpretation of those facts can make a crucial difference — and sometimes a fact can simply be overlooked. Vomhof says the whole point of bringing in an expert witness is to make sure that all the interpretations get considered — that all the facts get found. He recounts one final example.

The Case off the Telltale Windshield

Certainly this case seemed open-and-shut if ever any did. The scene of the crime was in Anaheim. It happened just about a year ago, about 7:20 on a Saturday evening. A 1979 Toyota Corona was stopped at a light when an ivory-colored pickup truck smashed into the rear of the car, backed up, and roared away. Although the automobile driver was badly shaken, he and witnesses saw the culprit, a blond man in early middle age. They also gave the police a clear description of the pickup, so good a description that within twenty minutes an officer had spotted the offending vehicle, smashed windshield and all, in front of a nearby apartment building. From the license number, the police soon found the name of the owner, a name which corresponded with one of the mailboxes. When they rang the bell of that unit, a thirty-year-old plumber staggered to the door. He admitted that of course he was drunk; he had been drinking beer all afternoon. But he claimed he hadn’t left his apartment. He argued that had he been sober enough to drive home from the crash site, he would have been sober enough to conceal the vehicle. The policemen nodded wearily. The plumber’s car unquestionably had caused the damage. On top of that, the victim positively identified the plumber as the culprit. That was enough to convince the police to charge the plumber with two felonies, one for drunk driving and one for hit and run.

This time Vomhof once again entered the case quickly. His attention first focused on the plumber’s physical appearance. Right after the arrest, the police had noted in their report that the plumber had a bump and a minor abrasion on his forehead. The plumber contradicted them; he said his head was fine. When Vomhof viewed the arrest photo and the police video tape of the field sobriety test and didn’t see any such sign of head injuries, he sent the man straightaway to a doctor, who confirmed that he couldn’t find any bumps, dried blood, or glass fragments.

But in the car, Vomhof discovered a substance on the steering wheel which a lab test later verified was blood. And he found one blond hair still stuck in the smashed windshield.

That hair decided the case. When Vomhof looked at it under a microscope, he found that a cross-section of it was rounded and slightly oval. The blond color extended all the way to the roots. In contrast, a cross-section of the defendant’s hair revealed a completely different shape. The microscope further showed that the hair was actually reddish brown, but the ends had been bleached blond by the sun. The case against the plumber was dismissed.

For all Vomhof’s cases, he says his field still seems like it’s just out of its infancy. Now, like a youngster, the discipline of forensic science is growing with astonishing speed. “The American Academy of Forensic Science only was founded in 1956. And it’s only been in the last three to five years that you’ve really seen technically trained people getting interested in the field and working at it in its own right. Only in the last three years have you seen business-card ads of different technically trained people in Trial magazine [the trial lawyers association’s official publication]. . . . Attorneys are waking up to the fact that you don’t convince juries as frequently by the attorney standing up there and BS-ing. I think you’ll be seeing more and more expert testimony in court and better court cases because of that.”