Who You Gonna Call? Unique Forensics Experts By Katherine Ramsland

I write crime fiction and nonfiction. Inevitably, they run together. My three novels in the Nut Cracker Investigations series feature a female forensic psychologist, Annie Hunter, who runs a PI agency from her home on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. She travels, so I Scream Man is set in Savannah and South Carolina’s Low Country, with a follow-up novel, In the Damage Path, set in western South Carolina and Tennessee. The third installment, Dead-Handed, takes her to Concord, MA (Hawthorne country). I form my plots from actual cases I’ve worked or researched and include unique forensic disciplines that can introduce readers (and other writers) to something new.

 

Let me tell you about a few.

 

Annie herself is a suicidologist. As a clinical psychologist, she can do standard assessments and consult on the psychological angles of death investigations. Her unique training in suicide gives her an advantage for interpreting behavior at death scenes. She can spot when a supposed suicide is staged, for example, or see more in a suicide note than what cops are trained to see. She can perform psychological autopsies and handle city councils faced with a cluster suicide (or is it?). In the Damage Path features a narrative based on the case of the girl who persuaded her boyfriend to commit suicide. But is there more to the story? Annie thinks so.

 

A key member of Annie’s team is Natra Gawoni, a cadaver dog handler and data miner. She keeps the records straight, finds obscure info, and simplifies complex data. Her dog, Mika, can locate clandestine graves and participate in search and rescue operations. This expands the team’s investigative abilities.

 

I’ve worked on death investigation teams. It’s amazing how many different types of experts come into play. A forensic geologist for an exhumation, for example, or an anthropologist trained at a body farm. A radiologist, a medical photographer, a criminalist, a pathologist, a graphologist. When I set out to write my series, I realized that, like me, Annie can connect with a network of specialists. She has a core team, but she can reach out to a discipline that might be needed for a specific kind of case.

 

Ayden Scott is Annie’s main PI, and he’s also a forensic artist. Few readers know much about this expertise. Sometimes, Annie needs him to draw a face from unidentified remains, perhaps a skull or a decomposing face. This is a rare skill, with exacting mathematical calculations. His artist’s eye catches small details, like something in a prisoner’s tattoos, which can break a case. Ayden also coordinates with Annie’s part-time digital analyst, Joe Lochren, to tinker with tech. (I use an actual cyber tech advisor who’s offered some very cool devices and plot twists. My favorite, in Dead-Handed, is his dark web honeypot.)

 

One of the most unusual disciplines I’ve included is a forensic meteorologist. JoLynn Wilde is introduced in In the Damage Path when she provides a unique sensor mounted on a drone to calculate from trees where decomposed remains might be buried. She also discovers a possible murder during a weather event, which brings her back in Dead-Handed to investigate more such cases. The Weather Channel once aired a series, Storm Stories, which featured these experts. Since I love to use weather in my fiction, it’s useful to include an expert like JoLynn.

 

She’s also a taphonomist. She studies the many factors that affect outdoor decomposition. I’ve taken courses at body farms in Tennessee and Texas, learning how to study what happens to human remains in various condition. I’ve learned (like Ayden) to draw from decomposed faces and identify remains among the ashes in burnt buildings.

 

A controversial method I’ve used is remote viewing. Some readers think this makes my fiction paranormal, but not at all. As Annie explains, the US military used it during the 1970s-1990s as “psi research” for spying. This began at the Stanford Research Institute, a California-based think tank. SRI researchers sought real-time sight at a distance. Science writer Jim Schnable documented these experiments in Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies, and journalist Annie Jacobsen offers even more in Phenomenon: The Secret History of the U.S. Government’s Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. I use this to justify the Nut Cracker team’s experiments. Annie cites the case of a remote viewer locating Ted Bundy’s last victim. That’s in the prosecutor’s book! (And he confirmed it to me.) Thus, I coined “remote profiling” as a crossover method for last-ditch forensic investigations.

 

My most recent novel, Dead-Handed, involves toxicology, meteorology, geology, suicidology, dark web analysis, behavioral profiling, taphonomy, anthropology, end-of-life science, and a bit of literary history. As I say in the blurb: “What do Nathanial Hawthorne, William James, Scottish lore, and a purloined corpse have in common?” My own experience on death investigation teams is that multiple disciplines are often involved, so I use the opportunity to show readers what they can do.

 

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Dr. Katherine Ramsland teaches forensic psychology and behavioral criminology in the graduate program
at DeSales University. She has appeared as an expert on more than 250 crime documentaries and was an executive producer on Murder House Flip and A&E’s Confession of a Serial killer: BTK. The author of more than 1,800 articles and 73 books, including Confession of a Serial Killer and The Serial Killer’s Apprentice, she pens a regular blog for Psychology Today. Her fiction series features a female forensic psychologist who consults on death investigations. Dead-Handed is her most recent book.