If nothing else, you might get a funny story to tell in your dotage.
Or in your basement, which is where I am now. In July 1980, though, I was a rookie cops and courts beat reporter at the long since defunct Springfield News. The beloved Snooze.
I was just out of grad school and five months away from being a dad for the first time. I didn’t know anything about cops and courts except for a traffic ticket or two. So I set out to learn the beat. Whenever I met someone new on my beat, or learned of a different division within an organization, I would go visit in person to see who they were, what they did and how it connected to others in the world of crime and mayhem.
This approach resulted in lots of interesting if relatively soft features, but I learned how the criminal justice system worked and who did what.
One of my first such ventures forth was to the crime lab at the Oregon State Police patrol office on Springfield’s north edge, next to Interstate 5.
Criminalists, as they were oddly called then, were the science nerds of the cop world, and they were cool people. Deeply intelligent, serious and, as far as I could tell, trusted.
The crime lab captain was happy to invite me on a tour, and he gave me a big grin and a hearty handshake when I arrived. He and his crew were happy for the attention. He explained how they took fingerprints and analyzed blood spatters and so on. He was enthusiastic. I wish I remembered his name. He was a genial host.
An aside here, and this is a bonus rule tip for young journalists, who should do everything I say. Scientists are the most fun people to interview, because they are so into what they do and they want to share it with you. Of the scientists, entomologists are at the very top. Oh my gawd they are fun to talk to. Fascinating, I think.
So anyway, the beaming captain takes me around the crime lab, introducing me and showing me vials of this and packets of that. The vials and packets and chemical smears were collected at crime scenes and were at the lab to be tested and identified, so they could be used in court. The lab did forensics work for all the local departments — the cops in Eugene and Springfield, the county sheriff’s office, OSP’s own troopers and detectives, of course, and probably the small town departments, too. The criminalists routinely testified in criminal trials, so I got to see them over at the courthouse quite a bit.
The beaming captain tells me he wants to show me something, and takes me around to a refrigerator. He opens it, reaches in and pulls out a square patch of skin that’s pinned to a board like a butterfly. Written on the skin, in blue ink, is a license plate number.
It was a case out of West Eugene, I think. That was the part of Eugene where things got sketchy, in those days. I don’t know about now. Anyway, these guys pull into a gas station late at night. The attendant, a woman, apparently gets a bad feeling about them and writes their license plate on the palm of her left hand. The guys rob the place, shoot her dead and drive off.
But damn, look here. Good lord, this brave, intelligent woman nailed them. Here is the license number of the murderers’ car. Jeezus. Dead herself, but hammered them on her way out of this world. At the woman’s autopsy, the medical examiner cuts the patch of skin off her left palm and they keep it for evidence.
The cops quickly track down the guys, arrest them, and they are convicted and sent off to prison. This patch of skin here, from that woman’s left palm, the beaming captain tells me, that was good evidence. The guys were convicted and sent off, but the captain said they kept the palm patch at the crime lab in case there was an appeal or something.
He puts the pinned-down palm patch back in the refrigerator and closes the door.
Just then, just exactly then, the crime lab’s matronly receptionist comes around the corner. Glasses and flower print dress, as I recall.
She smiles big at me and the captain, opens the refrigerator door and takes out her sack lunch.
“Oh,” she says, grinning at the captain, “what did you boys put in here today?”
That scene never made it into my feature story, but I’ve laughed about it for 40 years. Get out of the office. Go see.