Episode 29: Raychelle Burks on the Chemistry of Murder

0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone and welcome to The Mindscape podcast, I'm your host Sean Carroll. Now, let's face it, we've all contemplated how we would go about committing the perfect murder. Or if any of you are truly innocents out there, perhaps you've contemplated, what it would be like to be the victim of a perfect murder. One way or the other perfect murders are the kinds of things that dwell in our minds. We wanna know what it would be like. One of the things that we think is true, anyone who has watched TV or movies knows it is harder these days to commit the perfect murder, than it might have been in the past, the ability of the police and their friends to investigate crimes is better than it ever has been before, in large part because of science, because of our ability to do chemistry and forensic science that teaches us something from the crime scene about what actually went down. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. Ray Burks is an analytical chemist who moved from actually working in a crime lab to becoming a professor at St. Edward's University in Texas, where she continues to work in forensics. Her lab constructs detectors that look for explosives, drugs and other substances of questionable repute to help the cops catch the bad guys.

0:01:14 SC: We're gonna talk about different types of poison, if that's the way you wanna roll. How to dispose of a body, this is a big problem for would-be murderers out there. And also, the major differences between what you watch on CSI and the real world of a Forensic Investigator. As far as I can tell the major difference involves paperwork. So hopefully, this is gonna be an amusing listen, usually, in podcasts my goal is that something educational happens but I'm not quite sure I really want this one to be very educational. Let's stick with amusing, shall we? Hopefully this will not turn out to be useful in your own future planning. I really don't want Mindscape podcast to be investigated by the FBI. Despite our best efforts, though, it's very possible you're gonna learn something as well as have a few thought-provoking ideas go into your mind. All right, let's go.

[music]

0:02:03 SC: Ray Burks, welcome to the Mindscape podcast.

0:02:23 Ray Burks: Thank you.

0:02:24 SC: So very excited, we're gonna talk about chemistry and murder.

0:02:27 RB: Murder.

0:02:29 SC: Which came first for you? The chemistry or the murder?

0:02:31 RB: Murder.

0:02:31 SC: Murder came first?

0:02:32 RB: Murder.

0:02:32 SC: That got you into the chemistry?

0:02:34 RB: Murder got me into chemistry.

0:02:35 SC: How did that happen?

0:02:36 RB: So I wanted to be a lawyer and I was a real dorky kid. I used to go to the library on Saturday carrying a briefcase, that my parents got me because they supported my dorkiness. And I used to go and I used to read law books and learn about collateral estoppel. And so, again, really fun.

0:02:56 SC: Sexy stuff yeah.

0:02:57 RB: I know very fun kid. And then in junior high, I got an opportunity to go to a junior high trip and we went to Washington, DC which of course, if you wanna be a lawyer and you're a kid, that's like, "Woooahh!"

0:03:10 SC: That's like Mecca. Yeah, right?

0:03:12 RB: But then we had an opportunity to visit FBI field office and at the time they were... Kind of had a tour of a little bit of forensic science, talking about crime, and how science could be used for that. And I'd never ever before in my life, thought science was remotely interesting or useful?

0:03:33 SC: Okay.

0:03:33 RB: But this really did it for me because I was just like, "What? You can use [chuckle].. You can use science to do stuff?" And I don't know why it never really hit me before, some people, of course, my age, in this shuttle era would have been big into space, or dinosaurs, or... And that never really got me but the forensic science, that really resonated. And then from there, I just went down the nerd rabbit hole.

0:04:06 SC: Because this was high school.

0:04:07 RB: Junior high.

0:04:09 SC: Junior high. Okay. But then, that's when you actually actively became interested in chemistry for its own sake.

0:04:14 RB: Yes, because a lot of the tests, the idea that you didn't know what something was, and you could do some tests and figure out what it was that really got me.

0:04:24 SC: Right.

0:04:24 RB: The solving mysteries. And I think that it's kind of what in a weird way, being a bit of a law nerd when I was little and watching Murder, She Wrote with my grandmother and Matlock, and there was always some lawyer running around solving or some ex-high school teacher, who wrote mystery novels just up to no good.

[chuckle]

0:04:47 RB: And so, seeing as science could solve these mysteries was really the hook that got me interested and then that's when I realized, I'm like, "Oh, so science is kind of a big deal."

0:05:00 SC: Yeah, and that's probably common but you stuck with the whole murder aspect.

0:05:05 RB: Yes.

0:05:06 SC: I don't know exactly your trajectory, I'll figure it out before I post the episode. But you served, you worked in some kind of law enforcement capacity investigator.

0:05:16 RB: Yeah, I was in a crime lab.

0:05:18 SC: Crime lab. Okay.

0:05:19 RB: So chemistry and then went to graduate school and then left graduate school and worked in a crime lab for a while. And so yeah, that's what I thought I would do for the rest of my life was be in that line of work.

0:05:34 SC: So this is literally the CSI stuff, you're doing the, I don't know what it you were doing. You were analyzing compounds trying to figure out what it is...

0:05:42 RB: I worked at a small crime lab, with just five people. And you're doing a lot of a little bit of everything. Sometimes you get called out to a crime scene, but a lot of times you just you're pulling case work that you get assigned, you go down to evidence property you pick up the stuff.

0:06:01 SC: Yeah.

0:06:02 RB: And you bring it back, and you might be doing all kinds of things. I actually did a lot of forensic video and image analysis.

0:06:12 SC: Oh, okay.

0:06:12 RB: In addition to chemical processing and physical processing of prints. Again, it was a very kind of small... And so you kind of had to cross-train and do certain things. And then we also, when we were called out to do crime scene work that was something that you had to be requested to go out so that... And then it was usually some type of major incident, so it could have been a homicide, it could have been say a robbery which you know, a threat of violence or something of that nature, that you would get called out and have to do kind of all this crime scene work.

0:06:47 SC: Any particularly memorable incidents from that period of your life?

0:06:50 RB: Tons of memorable incidents. Very few I could talk about. [chuckle]

0:06:54 SC: Very few you could talk about. That is your law training. You know a little bit about what the rules are.

0:07:00 RB: Yes, yes, yes. [chuckle]

0:07:00 SC: Yes. That's right.

0:07:00 RB: So I wouldn't say... No for CSI, I think... And I knew this just from really being involved in going through education and everything is that first of all in CSI none of us are that good looking, none of us have wardrobes that are that hip or cool. I've never had sunglasses that neat and I always used to watch those shows, especially when I was in that job and they never show them doing paperwork, and I know I spent at least half my time documenting and writing reports.

0:07:33 SC: You think the show would be improved if there was more paperwork?

0:07:35 RB: I think the show would be improved if... Yes CSI paperwork. [laughter]

0:07:39 SC: Yeah CSI paperwork.

0:07:41 RB: But I think that was the fun part is, it's like "Okay, so take all of that, cut the episode by 20 minutes and put in just writing reports".

0:07:51 SC: More paperwork.

0:07:51 RB: More paperwork.

0:07:51 SC: That yeah.

0:07:52 SC: I have no idea why you're not a showrunner for a major...

0:07:56 RB: I don't know either.

0:07:57 SC: There are some days when you might have, yes. So then what in the world gave you the idea that what you really wanted to do was be a professor?

0:08:05 RB: That's why I think it's funny because I planned this whole thing where I was gonna work in the crime lab for a long time, and definitely when I was in graduate school you kind of sometimes are surrounded by folks that want to be in academic and a little bit different in chemistry 'cause chemistry is also very in industry.

0:08:23 SC: It's useful for things other than being a professor.

0:08:25 RB: Oh sure.

0:08:26 SC: Not like theoretical physics.

[chuckle]

0:08:28 RB: I didn't. That was not me.

0:08:30 SC: That was me.

0:08:31 RB: But I think chemistry with it's history and applications, the common thing is that a third are in academia, a third are kind of in government labs, a third 's in industry, so lots of applications in that way. And so actually most of the people that I went to graduate school with were not gonna be academics, it's just chemistry.

0:08:53 SC: Right.

0:08:54 RB: And it's a little bit different for other fields.

0:08:55 SC: So this was your PhD program. You had a PhD before the crime lab, yeah.

0:09:00 RB: And so a lot of people... Actually no I left... This is what not to do, kids. I left graduate school to take this super awesome job because there's not that many jobs, and I said, "You know what, I will totally write my dissertation while I'm working in a new full-time job".

0:09:14 SC: Oh famous last mistake.

0:09:17 RB: So funny. I mean I did, but let's just say it took a little bit longer than I had deluded myself and my advisor into thinking. [chuckle] But yeah, so I think most of the people and definitely in my PhD program in the lab that I was in, a lot went into working at say GlaxoSmithKline or Merck or... There's a colleague that works at NIST. So a big mix academia is not the big deal.

0:09:54 SC: Yeah.

0:09:55 RB: And so that was not uncommon. And you planned for that. In your programs a lot of people are going into industry and chemistry or they're gonna be full-time researchers, but not professors not academics. And so that was really interesting to me because that certainly wasn't what I went to graduate school for, but I learned a lot and I definitely when you start doing a job, then I realized, "Hey, I couldn't actually miss doing the research and development," because when you're active case work you just have no time.

0:10:32 SC: Certainly not doing research, no.

0:10:34 RB: No. I mean and...

0:10:35 SC: A lot of paper work to care about.

0:10:36 RB: There's a lot of paper work to be getting done. But your case backlog in some places can be several months, if not years. And so even though you might be best positioned to develop some new method, you have no time or no resources in order to do that. So I missed that and I did miss teaching. Even though when you go to graduate school you don't really get a PhD in teaching.

0:11:02 SC: No.

0:11:02 RB: Or education.

0:11:03 SC: No.

0:11:04 RB: [chuckle] So...

0:11:05 SC: The more successful you are, the less you teach.

0:11:06 RB: Right. So it was kind of funny to me and then going back into academia I realized that, "Wow, I did miss these things," and it kind of in a way snuck up on me 'cause it was not quite what I planned for, but I like the training aspect too of undergraduate research 'cause I'm at a principally undergraduate institution, so the idea of training folks to do field work or lab work and really giving them the opportunity to develop new skills is, in an informative way is really fun. I find that... It's very hard. Some days you're like I hope I am not messing this up.

0:11:48 SC: Yup a lot of responsibility, But.

[chuckle]

0:11:52 RB: But it's also a lot of fun to see people really grow into their scholarship and into their profession.

0:12:00 SC: So, I do physics for a living. Some people have the mis-impression that this is somehow close to chemistry.

[laughter]

0:12:06 SC: In fact, I know nothing about chemistry. I've never even taken a chemistry class at the university level, I took high school chemistry. So if you, if you had in mind that what you were interested in was sort of the forensic side of chemistry, what kind of chemist would you become? I know there's physical, and organic and inorganic and so forth.

0:12:25 RB: Yeah. I would say analytical.

0:12:26 SC: So what does that mean?

0:12:27 RB: So I like to call analytical chemists the detectives of chemistry. So we tend not to make chemicals, we find them.

0:12:35 SC: Okay.

0:12:36 RB: And we tend to find them in a sea of other ones. So I always joke when people say, "Oh it's really hard to find a needle in a haystack." That should actually be pretty easy because a needle and a haystack are very different.

0:12:48 SC: Very different.

0:12:49 RB: But analytical chemist it's about finding a needle, particular needle in a stack of needles.

0:12:56 SC: Yup.

0:12:57 RB: And so while we don't often build or we don't do a lot of synthesis, we may build molecules or engineer instruments that will then be used as detective tools. And so I think that analysis and then also being able to look at the data and treat it in a certain way, whether statistically, or modeling the data to then stand back and look at it. What the hell does it mean? [chuckle] And really, it is sometimes that way, where you just like... You project it and you have this thing and then you have to step back and look at it, and it might be one of those things where I know for sure this has happened to me, where you're looking at the data, you know it means something and you bolt upright at 2:00 AM and it has come to you. [chuckle] Where you've seen this pattern before, what the pattern indicates and then you run to write it down.

0:13:57 SC: Well this is fascinating, because I think that people who are not chemists or scientists for a living, might have a different idea of what it means to do chemistry. The process you're describing, it sounds much more creative and artistic than a lot of people might think. But so when you say the pattern, you've recognized the pattern, a pattern in what, what are you looking at?

0:14:15 RB: So there are sometimes... So I build sensing devices and sometimes they're chemical sensors, so one chemical will interact with another and give off some signal. And a lot of times it's a color, it changes color.

0:14:30 SC: Okay.

0:14:31 RB: Or it fluoresces, there might be bioluminescence or some kind of luminescent event. And so you might do something like trying to not only, you might have several of those sensors, and then not just do you look at "How does it change?" You're looking, "How if one change is in relationship to another, is there some type of pattern in how certain sensors behave?" And then what does that tell you about what they're interacting with? 'cause oftentimes you're trying to design something to find, at least for me being forensic, I'm trying to find bad stuff.

0:15:09 SC: Yeah.

0:15:10 RB: Weapons, chemical biological explosives scheduled stuff. So, how then does the sensor respond? Because it's not enough to build it and have it be reliable and be like, "Yep, it always does. It always turns red when it's in whatever." You also, "Why does it do that, why does it turn red here but green here?" And so sometimes you look at the data and you can use various tools, and sometimes you use chemo-metrics which is like fancy chemistry statistics. [chuckle] As a way to, again, you're looking at changes of changes sometimes and you map the data and sometimes you'll look at a plot. And I think even economic data, there's lots of people who have all kinds of data and you might plot it in a lot of different ways, bar chart, pie chart. Venn diagram, like you're just plotting a plot. And then you know that there's something there, and you just, sometimes you just don't recognize the pattern or how one thing influences another, you just need to step back from it for a moment. And literally, it could be literally, I have literally projected things and literally just stepped and just gazed on it.

0:16:16 SC: Yeah.

0:16:16 RB: And I do feel like maybe that is a bit of the creative thing where sometimes I've gone to museums, and pieces of art, and you're not sure that you're seeing what either quote, you should, or what maybe either the artist thought, or maybe you're seeing something that is not intended, but you need to get a better look at it. And sometimes you step forward, but sometimes, there's been a few pieces, and I remember the first time I went to the Uffizi Gallery and saw say, the Allegory of Spring or the Birth of Venus, I had no idea they were that large.

0:16:51 SC: Ah, 'cause you see photographs and they're all the same size.

0:16:53 RB: 'Cause you see little, small... Or something... Or the Mona Lisa is that small.

0:16:58 SC: Mona Lisa, I was just gonna say that.

0:17:00 RB: And you just have to step... Sometimes, with the ones that you're like, "That thing is the entire side of the room." And you are almost out in the hallway, trying to really see the full picture of all the data and what it means in relationship to other data. And that's what oftentimes we do in science, is that... Because you might have a very simple dataset, "Okay, this thing turns red." But then, the more sensors you add, then you have 17 of those things, and then, you're trying to detect 100 different chemicals... So all of a sudden, you have a very complicated pattern, and you need to kinda step back and say, "Well, what does it all mean in relationship to each other?" And so, that part, there is a creative aspect in how you visualize it, and I think sometimes I look at, "Why did that person paint that way, with that shadow?" Or, "Why is that so abstract?" Or, "Why did they sculpt it in that way?" And this... And then maybe we'll never know.

0:18:00 RB: I do think that sometimes artists take stuff, literally, to their grave. [chuckle] And they don't communicate the intention or anything. And sometimes, the point is, you take from it what you find important. But you do sometimes from every angle have to step kind of back and see, "Okay, can I interpret it in different ways?" And I feel the same thing with scientific data.

0:18:23 SC: Absolutely, right. Yeah.

0:18:25 RB: Different treatments. And it's not as if you're making it up, but you are doing different... Again, "I'm gonna make it a bar chart versus a line graph first." And then, what does that visualization reveal about the underlying process?

0:18:42 SC: And the thing about chemistry and crime-fighting or whatever, is that there's so many different ways that the chemicals are involved in the investigation, right?

0:18:51 RB: Yes.

0:18:51 SC: Let's say you are called out. But you still get called out, even now that you're a professor now, not a crime lab technician, Do you visit crime scenes?

0:18:58 RB: No. [chuckle]

0:18:58 SC: You're very sad about this?

0:19:01 RB: In a way I'm not, because it's a very stressful job, and academia is stressful in different ways. But also, there's the cost-benefit, I get to do other things now.

0:19:12 SC: Yeah, okay. Alright, let's pretend that that's not true.

[laughter]

0:19:14 SC: Let's pretend you get called out all the time.

0:19:15 RB: Okay.

0:19:16 SC: What is on your mind when you're called out to a crime scene? What are you gonna be looking for as a chemist? What good is the chemist out there at the murder investigation scene?

0:19:25 RB: Well, I think it obviously depends on what kind of background... So typically, when you would get there, you would get briefed by whoever's in charge of the scene, which is not you.

[laughter]

0:19:35 SC: They remind you of that?

[laughter]

0:19:38 RB: And so... No, but when you watch on the TV, you're like, "What are the police for?"

[laughter]

0:19:43 RB: 'Cause the CSI people are always running around. But the background is important, of what should we be looking for, what shouldn't we be looking for, what's missing is just as important as what maybe should be there. And so...

0:19:57 SC: So what does that mean, what's missing?

0:19:58 RB: Well, let's say that you had somebody that had a severe shellfish allergy, and they had... And you hear that from family, but yet you're not seeing anything... You don't see an EpiPen, you don't see...

0:20:15 SC: None of the drugs they might have.

0:20:17 RB: You don't even see a medic alert bracelet, which is really odd.

0:20:20 SC: The dog that didn't bark yeah.

0:20:22 RB: Also, what's not there. Or if the person was... You hear from the ME that someone was shot, or somebody was stabbed or they were strangled, but there's literally no weapon around. So what's not there can be just as important as what is there. And so... And the same thing goes with any kind of analytical data. And I'm sure in physics and astronomy, at least from friends that I have in those fields, it's not only looking for what's present, but what is not there can tell you a lot too.

0:20:52 SC: So if someone is poisoned or something like that, I could absolutely understand the usefulness of a chemist. If someone's shot or knifed, is there still things for the chemist to do at the crime scene?

0:21:01 RB: There might be. And chemical tests, though whether it would be a chemist there or not, but sometimes you might do a gunshot residue. And so, presumptive tests for that, or they would actually collect swab hands, very similar to what some... You get screened for testing at the airport and they might swab your hands. And then, they might actually take that swab and secure it and transport it. And then, you maybe do some X-ray spectroscopy or some type of atomic emission or absorption spectroscopy to see, "Okay, are the metal components that you would typically find in gunshot residue, are they present, and maybe at what amount?" So that would be some level of analytical chemistry... But also let's say that there is, you're trying to say, "Okay is this red brown stain, is it blood or not?"

0:21:54 SC: Right. Okay. That's what you would use it for.

0:21:55 RB: Then you would do some type of chemical presumptive test or even, "Okay, so it is blood but is it human?" and then you might do an immunoassay that would illuminate that.

0:22:07 SC: So what does that mean exactly? How do you do... How do you figure out whether blood is human or not?

0:22:11 RB: Certain antibodies for different types of animals would be present, or not present, and you can do kind of like the same type of technology as a pregnancy test.

0:22:22 SC: Okay.

0:22:23 RB: To kind of do... It's really a dipstick, it does look a lot, reminds you a lot of a pregnancy test and you can kind of get an idea and say, "Oh it's," which doesn't, that might lead you to another thing of, "Why is there dog blood here then?" You know what I mean?

0:22:39 SC: Yeah, there's no dog dead but...

0:22:40 RB: Right? What's that?

0:22:41 SC: Dog blood everywhere.

0:22:42 RB: So I think that's another thing, is that there are lots of tests that folks do. And so a lot of the, even the presumptive and by presumptive test I mean that it's just a quick screening test, usually they change color really visual, really fast to do. And so sometimes there's real popular ones for scheduled drugs. That will, if you road side they're very popular, like highway patrol or if you're screening something and then you put a little sample in little baggie and break a couple of ampoules and boom. Purple.

0:23:18 SC: Okay.

0:23:19 RB: Right, and then...

0:23:19 SC: So you don't even... That's not even a professional chemist. That's like the cop on the street, can do a little...

0:23:23 RB: Sure, and...

0:23:25 SC: Amateur chemistry.

0:23:25 RB: And lot of those have been developed. Right? And then there's a lot of development behind that to get it down to it being that quote simple to do. And so, those types of tests are very popular. And then can, again they're just providing quick information to maybe make some type of a command decision. And so that's chemistry, chemical development of fingerprints. So say on paper, you can use Ninhydrin which interacts with amino acids, turns purplish pink color.

0:24:01 SC: Okay.

0:24:01 RB: Works like a charm on non-porous materials.

0:24:04 SC: So you can get fingerprints off of paper that way?

0:24:07 RB: Yeah visualize. So it'll stay on the material but you can visualize this print matter. And that actually came about when folks were trying to do staining, and chromatography of proteins and amino-acids and then they were like, "Hey, this might be useful for this other thing."

0:24:26 SC: You can solve murders with this. Yes.

0:24:28 RB: And there's many things... Even CA Cyanoacrylate or superglue fuming that you see a lot on TV. That was a total, oops!

[chuckle]

0:24:39 RB: We say that, but it's very useful kind of technique. And so that's a very interesting chemical process that people are still talking about in literature about how exactly it works, what's the mechanism?

0:24:52 SC: So we know it works but the chemistry, the sort of individual chemistry is not completely understood?

0:24:57 RB: We think we're pretty good.

0:24:58 SC: Pretty good, okay.

0:25:00 RB: But I feel like that's a lot of... We have really good mechanisms worked out or we think we've got very strong evidence that this, is this the action?

0:25:09 SC: Right.

0:25:10 RB: Until we don't.

0:25:11 SC: Yep.

0:25:12 RB: [chuckle] And so...

0:25:13 SC: We do till a better idea comes along. Yeah.

0:25:14 RB: There's lots of, and the fun, when I think about, say, slime which might seem unrelated. The kids and adults let's face it, love making with the glue and the borax love making slime. And just this year in chemical and engineering news people, it was still in literature, in real chemist they're still debating about how that actually works. And everyone thought that that was a for sure lock. And you realize that, no, it's not actually that, it's actually this instead.

0:25:42 SC: I think that you are more familiar with this process of slime making than I am, How do you make slime?

0:25:46 RB: I think... Okay, so...

0:25:47 SC: I don't make slime intentionally...

0:25:49 RB: Well, any of your listeners that probably have kids have made it or... So that's the... You just basically get Elmer's glue, and you add in a little borax, like a soap, borax soap, the powdered soap, old school, I don't know, maybe in college in the labs they had the borax soap. And then you basically mix it together and it becomes this non-Newtonian fluid. You would love this. I want...

0:26:13 SC: I would. I wanna go home and get some Elmer's glue.

0:26:16 RB: Yes it's super... It's super fun. And of course you can make it with different types of polymers, clear glue, white glue, people put glitter in it and food coloring and like bespoke slime. But part of it too is, even though that process was like, "We know how it works, it's a polymer, it cross-polymerizes, blah blah blah, we're out the door." Then in the last couple of years, people were like, "Actually, it's not this discrete repeating cross-polymerization we thought it was and actually it's a... " And so I find that really fun, because even though the best evidence at the time, people were very confident, it's explained a lot, but then you get better techniques too, right? And we've seen that, definitely, in forensic science, where the trajectory of the field has changed, the instruments get better, you're able to literally see either smaller amounts or levels of detail that change. Even small amounts can revolutionize an entire thought process.

0:27:19 SC: Would you say that chemical forensics is becoming more important over time in crime investigation, or less?

0:27:25 RB: I definitely think more. I think that the use of science in both criminal and civil matters has really dramatically increased in the last, I would definitely say, in the last 200 years, and definitely in the last 30, and I think... It's kind of funny, 'cause one of my shows as I grew up was Murder, She Wrote kinda demonstrates that over... You know, that show was on, I think, for 12 years, but when it was on you straddled the era of pre-DNA and post, and you see that in the show. The things that they talk about in early episodes and "Oh, we can get fingerprints and ABO typing," and you're just like...

[laughter]

0:28:10 SC: Why would anyone do that, yeah.

0:28:12 RB: Right. And then later, it's a very... It's a big...

0:28:16 SC: They had DNA, yeah.

0:28:16 RB: Big revolution. And then even watching shows, Columbo, where they'll have a handgun, they'll take a handkerchief [laughter] from their pocket and think that they're somehow protecting the prints, so they'll take a pen and literally either, the pen, and stick it down the barrel of the gun to pick it up.

0:28:34 SC: Even I know that's a bad idea.

0:28:35 RB: Right. Like all this...

0:28:36 SC: Yeah, destroying all the rifling and...

0:28:38 RB: Yeah. But I think even that visualization, you can see how even the perception and how shows are run now. And now it's not uncommon to see whole shows where they show folks in Tyveks, and they're changing out their booties and they've got gloves that they keep changing every... So you've seen the evolution of a field be mirrored in television and movies, and sometimes right and sometimes there's artistic license taken, but definitely the field is, that reflects the big changes in the field which continue. They march with the technology.

0:29:18 SC: Sure. And do the chemists get very involved with poisoning and things like that, or is that mostly medical people?

0:29:25 RB: So yeah, a medical examiner really depends on the state. There's the difference between, if you're doing testing of, say, tissues and biological fluids, that's typically under the control of the medical examiner. And then that person would send tests out or request samples be processed by toxicology folks and maybe histology and pathology, they're looking at different, depending on which... Like if is it tissue or is it, say, urine or is it... That kind of thing. So different types of materials and different types of tests. But if you say you found some mysterious white powder, that actually might go to trace, and...

0:30:05 SC: I see. Right. So once it's in their body, then maybe it's the medical examiner's job.

0:30:10 RB: Oh yeah, that's... Yeah, that a different deal.

0:30:11 SC: But when you find all sorts of chemicals around, then the chemists get involved for sure.

0:30:14 RB: Yeah, yeah. And there was a big workplace poisoning case in Germany this year where a worker allegedly... Allegedly is dozens of their co-workers, and the last one that kind of kicked off them finding the... First of all, nobody had known this workplace poisoning was going on that spanned maybe... You know, he'd worked the company for 40 years.

0:30:42 SC: He was just killing people, poisoning people?

0:30:44 RB: Potentially, because this one worker brought their lunch. You know, in the break room, you put it in the fridge. Your biggest concern is you hope Susan doesn't eat your wontons, right?

0:30:53 SC: Right. Exactly.

0:30:54 RB: And so they opened up their thing and they see this white powder that they didn't...

0:31:01 SC: They didn't...

[laughter]

0:31:01 RB: Why is that on the sandwich, right?

0:31:03 SC: Right, yeah.

0:31:04 RB: And so they took their supervisor who at first was like, "Oh, it's some kind of a prank or whatever," and of course me being a chemist, I'm like, "That's not a prank."

[laughter]

0:31:14 RB: That's not a prank.

0:31:15 SC: Mysterious white powder, let's assume the worst.

0:31:18 RB: And so they do some testing, and in the meantime they also installed CCTV. And it seems as if they did not maybe inform people that they had installed cameras, and so it turns out they got this person on video opening lunches.

0:31:36 SC: Just for kicks.

0:31:37 RB: And I think that's the thing that the investigation is gonna look into, of what was going on there. And they do testing and they realized that it was lead acetate, which is very sweet-tasting but incredibly dangerous. But then they go back and they realize he had so many different types of poisons. Poisons, too, that could have potentially mimicked, you know... Especially, these would be like a chronic poisoning, not an acute, so it might look like co-workers were ill. And at the time the person was arrested, there was one co-worker in a coma and one on dialysis.

0:32:15 SC: So this poisoner was an aficionado. He didn't have just the bucket of bad stuff, but he had a retinue of different possible ways.

0:32:25 RB: There's a lot there to unpack, right?

[laughter]

0:32:28 RB: And then they started going back and looking at how many co-workers of this person had died in the last 20 years. And there's a lot... I mean, there's gonna be a lot of work to do.

0:32:39 SC: Wow. Alright, so chemists are gonna be fully employed by this job, yeah.

0:32:44 RB: Yes, I think toxicology and then medical... There's tons of stuff. But I also think my chemistry background too, working in analytical, image analysis and video, which seems a bit odd, but then, how photography works, how digital data works and how things are stored. And images in some ways an image is an image. So if you have a camera that's hooked up to a microscope versus a security camera, how do those work, what does the data mean, how do you retrieve the data? And so, I think just like in a lot of other fields, where you can translate the skills you learned to this maybe new application or looked a bit tangent, you can do the same thing, definitely.

0:33:32 SC: And it's not just figuring out how a murder was done or who did it. There's presumably a lot of chemistry involved in things like finding the body or analyzing old cases and old scenes...

0:33:46 RB: Oh yeah. One thing I do wanna say is that I don't... It was never my job to solve anything. That's definitely a big thing. That's the police's job.

0:33:55 SC: Yeah, okay. [laughter]

0:33:56 RB: But you might say, "Okay, is this possible?" And the thing would be like, "Yeah," or provide some data. But I think with... Yeah, I think some of the most interesting stuff that comes out is trying to find clandestine graves, and how do you find when people have been moved or if people had been there. And so, try to develop chemical tests. And of course, geologists do this a lot, as far as types of imaging and trying to look at... And even different life scientists of how different plant growths, and then entomologists, what kind of bugs are there? Trying to locate those things and trying to map those. You would think... Even I sometimes am like, "Is that a big problem, that we have a lot of clandestine graves?" It turns out yes.

0:34:46 SC: Yeah, really?

0:34:47 RB: Or trying to find...

0:34:48 SC: So a clandestine grave, this is not supposed to be a grave, but it's a grave.

0:34:51 RB: Not supposed to be a grave, but yeah.

0:34:51 SC: So there's a dead body in your yard and you didn't tell when you bought it.

0:34:55 RB: Yeah. And actually, in LA... So we're in LA now, and there's just a case that happened where someone discovered a decaying skull in their backyard.

0:35:04 SC: As one does.

0:35:04 RB: And then, packed it up and brought it to a police station. And the police at first... This was just reported by LA Times, I think it was yesterday, and the police were like, "We thought it was a prank at first, 'cause, what?" My thing is, so if you find that, don't move it.

0:35:19 SC: Don't move it, right.

0:35:20 RB: And the police will come to your house. [laughter] And take care...

0:35:25 SC: It's possible you don't want the police to come to your house.

[laughter]

0:35:28 RB: Right, right. And so, I think that's the thing is, sometimes, there's those types of endeavors, or when you have missing people or... And it could be historical. I think there's also kind of historical forensics, where you might be trying to investigate a certain event and trying to really get... Now that, again, technology advances, and maybe we can start finding certain mass graves or certain sites that... Things that people thought would occur. Or sometimes, there is a case that I wrote about for my column that was like Renaissance era poisoning. Potentially, that was the rumor.

0:36:08 SC: That's a long time ago.

0:36:09 RB: Oh, yeah. And the rumor was, this was the Medici's court in Florence, which was just a hotbed.

[laughter]

0:36:17 SC: There was a lot of poisoning, yeah.

0:36:17 RB: Scandal and activity. And art and intrigue and all this stuff. And there was this rumor that these folks, philosophers and poets, had been poisoned. And in an odd way or a good way, I feel weird saying that, but there are certain poisons that just, they stay with you. They stay, they're literally in the bone, or in certain amounts, they get preserved. And so, it was really interesting work that they did, because they had baselines, say arsenic levels, that just... 'Cause that's everywhere, that's a naturally-occurring element.

0:36:58 SC: Arsenic, yeah.

0:37:00 RB: And it can be in drinking water, it can just be around. So there is that really small, baseline quantity. And so, it had that kind of environmental background of what was kind of just present at the time...

0:37:10 SC: Because arsenic is not some complicated molecule, it's an...

0:37:12 RB: No, it's an element.

0:37:13 SC: Element. One atom.

0:37:14 RB: And so, they have that baseline, and you can get that in a lot of ways. We have a lot of artifacts from that period. The stuff is just literally everywhere. But then, they did some interesting work where they found that definitely for one of the two courtiers, the amounts that they've then found were way beyond what they found in kind of separate remains that would've just been more like, "Yeah, this is pretty standard." And it's, again, maybe then the leap of saying, "This was a malicious poisoning," that's a legal, law enforcement thing, but when you look at the levels and you go, "Wow."

0:37:55 SC: And they were the Medici orbit. Yeah.

0:38:00 RB: Now, does that mean that it's a criminal? Again, we're also talking about an era where you could... And even much after that, you could go to a pharmacy/chemist and pick up stuff that nowadays you're like, "I'm sorry, you could do what?"

[laughter]

0:38:14 RB: You could just go to the pharmacist and pick up...

0:38:16 SC: The rules were looser back then.

0:38:17 RB: Strychnine and cyanide. And so, it's hard to say but the levels are interesting, to be like, "Yeah, so that's... Someone needs to explain." It's more about, what's the reasonable explanation? That's not just casual...

0:38:31 SC: Well, we tell stories about the Medicis and it's kind of fun, palace intrigue stuff. But are we exaggerating or was there really that much poisoning going on?

0:38:39 RB: I feel... When you look back on those things, people always say now like, "Oh, kids these days, or nowadays... " And I'm like, "Uh-huh."

[laughter]

0:38:49 RB: There was some stuff going on between the Borgias and the Medicis and the stories that you hear. But then, has that become almost integrated into historical lore? And that's why sometimes the folks that go back, and if you look at the Egyptian houses in Upper and Lower Egypt, that... What is that, with great power comes great responsibility?

0:39:09 SC: Comes great responsibility.

0:39:11 RB: I think with great power also comes great shenanigans.

[laughter]

0:39:15 RB: And there's just a lot of potentially things that have gone on. And part of it is, "Wow, really?" I remember the first time I heard about the Borgias I was like, "Oh, scandal." And again, we think that that's very modern, some of these things.

0:39:32 SC: No, it goes back.

0:39:33 RB: Oh yeah, and I think that kind of the nicknames that things get, like arsenic, inheritance powder.

[laughter]

0:39:39 RB: That's how common it was. And you think...

0:39:41 SC: Could speed up your inheritance process a little bit.

0:39:44 RB: When you think about those things, or hemlock and belladonna and strychnine, and you think about all these things and how easy they were to get and how so-and-so's uncle or whatever had a gastro distress, and then it took a long time. And this is also an Agatha Christie device of sometimes it is artistic, and sometimes art is just mirroring that yeah, so-and-so aunt whatever did have an eight-month-long illness and then died and then so-and-so inherited the house or some small bequeath. But yeah, but then a lot of times you look back at the old newspapers and you realize that that is the whole...

0:40:33 SC: A little suspicious?

0:40:34 RB: The Law and Order... I always loved the old-school Law and Order, where it says... Or even in SVU now, it says that little previsal of, "This is not... It may be similar, because it's ripped from the headlines and actually."... And you realize we've been doing that for a long time. And some of these cases, you're like, "That hits a little too close to home." [laughter]

0:40:56 SC: Well, this is good. Let's switch gears from being the investigators to being the perpetrators. Let's put ourselves in the mindsets of the perpetrators. So we can... Maybe working our way historically works here. So if you were back in ancient times, what were the good ways to off your nemesis?

0:41:15 RB: Besides just bludgeoning? [laughter]

0:41:17 SC: Yeah, let's say we were a little more subtle, maybe we didn't wanna be caught.

0:41:20 RB: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:41:21 SC: That's the great thing about poison is, at least presumably, back in 2000 years ago, if you bludgeoned someone, it's pretty noticeable, but maybe you could poison someone and no one would know?

0:41:32 RB: Yeah, and I think that that's the... When you have some of the classic, quote, old-school poisonings, they've been around for a long time, your hemlock, your belladonna.

0:41:43 SC: So would you want... Presumably, the trick is you want something that the person imbibing it wouldn't know about.

0:41:50 RB: Wouldn't know about it.

0:41:51 SC: So not too strong a taste. But of course, how do you know it doesn't have too strong a taste? You don't wanna taste it.

0:41:55 RB: Well, that's where the kind of folklore and legend... And people... That's the other really interesting thing, is when it comes to poisons, there's certain things, again, that people thing are kind of, quote, modern inventions: Poisons, abortifactants, birth control attempts. This has all been well documented in texts. As soon as people could be writing down things, they were either writing down how to kill, how to not get pregnant, how to terminate a pregnancy or, "Oh, wait, we need to write down some laws." [laughter] These types of... And bills of sale, I think were... I think the historical folks would be like, "No, no, no. Bills of sales came first," those kind of tracking things. But all of that, when you look back at some of our earliest great scientific texts, and again, at the time, it was the best they could do. 'Cause you read some of the things now and you're like, "That would never have worked." But there was a lot of information.

0:42:54 RB: And sometimes, again, it was observed that so-and-so ate this plant that was growing by the river and... And so... [chuckle] Unfortunately. And so, that's why that kind of information. But poisons, certain types of poisons have been known for a very long time. And people have been killing each other with poisons, in one way or another, whether literally chemical or biological also, and being intentional and trying to infect people. People were flinging rotting corpses over walls and leaving dead rats in water wells and trying to do different things, and also just kind of bulk poisoning for a long, long time.

0:43:36 SC: And one of the things you hear about is carrying poison, not just through ingestion but through a garment or a weapon or something like that.

0:43:44 RB: Oh, yeah.

0:43:44 SC: How plausible are those devices?

0:43:46 RB: Pretty plausible. Most folks know about curare and darts and arrows and things like that. And also, lots of Greek mythology and ancient plays will talk about a poisoned dress. The poisoned dress trope is really popular, of kind of saturating fabric and having it somehow... And also a metaphor of having it be beautiful and then having it kill you. And that you covet it.

0:44:13 SC: The person who wore the dress would be the victim of this.

0:44:16 RB: Yeah, and sometimes... Or any garment, could be a dress, could be a fancy garment, could be... Kinda reminds me... Even the crowns, so even Game of Thrones a bit, and there wasn't really a poison, it was hot, molten gold. But you lust for something and you covet it so much...

0:44:33 SC: There's a symbolic...

0:44:33 RB: There's a symbolic element there.

0:44:35 SC: Aspect, yeah.

0:44:36 RB: But when you read some of these plays, like Medea, and you go, "Oh." And that, again, didn't come from nowhere.

0:44:42 SC: And what happened in Medea?

0:44:44 RB: So again, the poisoned dress trope.

0:44:46 SC: Oh, yeah.

0:44:47 RB: Where it kind of actually reads a bit like... Like a napalm. And then when you think about open flames, and how... And even flammable fabrics have always historically been a problem for ladies as far as the types of material dresses are made out of, and the fact that they were so much fabric for certain folks and that lighting devices, were literally open flames.

0:45:12 SC: Right. Yeah, everything was open flame.

0:45:14 RB: So this kind of danger of that and the visualization of that whole thing.

0:45:20 SC: It looks good when your dress catches on fire.

0:45:23 RB: But even in a more artistic way to make a statement like Hunger Game, like that whole visualization. But when you think about there's lots of routes of exposure, there's ingestion, there's gas, there's like through the skin and so there's a lot of methods and that also is interesting and historically it goes way back. Could have been something that you would touch, could again, like clothes, and you saw that the danger too, like World War I, which is called the chemist war. Some of the...

0:45:54 SC: It's not really called that by anyone who is not a chemist.

0:45:56 RB: Right.

0:45:56 SC: [chuckle] Sorry.

0:45:57 RB: Unless a historian. Unless that you're a historian maybe you call it the chemist war. But also some of the challenges with some of the earliest nerve agents, and today is that they persist in the environment, and on your clothes. Well, if you're in a theater of war, you can't really start running around taking all your clothes off. Even in a lab environment, like lab safe. Anyone's been through lab training knows that if you spill something on yourself, you gotta to go use shower. But you're actually supposed to take off this garment because it is keeping it against yourself. And so, that's definitely based in history, of fact. Again with some flair, the ancient Greeks really did love their flair when it came to their tragedies.

0:46:37 SC: They did. They were good at it. They invented drama and tragedy. Right.

0:46:39 RB: So yeah, that's definitely rooted in.

0:46:42 SC: Do you think that it was an impetus from early chemistry that desired to kill people in more creative and interesting ways?

0:46:49 RB: I think finding out, I think it's funny because when you think about maybe the history of chemistry, but in specific analytical chemistry was to test currency. You're talking about a time where currency or things that you could trade, you had to prove they were the chemical composition they were. Is it gold? Is it silver? And for a long time salt was considered a currency. And you could trade and barter 'cause it was so damn expensive. And we don't think of it nowadays cause it's like laughably cheap. You can buy a bucket of it for like a dollar. But is it what it actually is? This thing that you've attached huge value to and that's one big thing. And then of course, the other one is we gotta find out why people keep, why people keep dying.

0:47:42 SC: Yeah. That's an important question.

0:47:43 RB: And so I feel like in analytical there's definitely this kind of you're trying to, again, solve mysteries of either, "Is this thing what we say it is?" Because either it's gonna be the foundation of an entire economy which can cause an entire thing to collapse if the gold isn't gold.

0:48:04 SC: Right.

0:48:05 RB: Or we have such a problem with proving goods are what they are. Which again is a foundation of economy, or again, like the poisoning, thing. And Deborah Blum did a great job in her book, The Poisoner's Handbook of tracking why that was such a thing. Because again, in the foundation of the science society, the poisonings are, were not that common and it was literally... But it's the confidence and it's the security of society, which is very tenuous.

0:48:35 SC: Yeah.

0:48:36 RB: And doesn't take a lot of criminal behavior to do that.

0:48:40 SC: No I had great podcast with Neha Narula, talking about digital money, and first we had to agree that it's money, right?

0:48:47 RB: Right.

0:48:47 SC: And digital currencies are struggling with that right now.

0:48:49 RB: So the perception of safety and security, whether it's in the economy or your person, that a lot of the earliest chemical tests were based solely on that...

0:49:03 SC: Interesting...

0:49:03 RB: On a level of the protection, and community and security of what does that mean? Because we've had to all agree in trust.

0:49:09 SC: Right.

0:49:10 RB: And yet trust can be violated.

0:49:12 SC: Yeah, and so once we get to the renaissance, if you're Lucrezia Borgia and you have an annoying cousin. What do you do? How do I go shopping for poison? Or do I need to make it myself?

0:49:27 RB: Well, or you'd have your right-hand person. But also your apothecaries and your thing. And I think there's always been, there's always been challenges. What is that old proverb? "The only way to keep... The only way three people can keep a secret is of two of them are dead." The more co-conspirators that you have.

0:49:46 SC: Yeah. It's a problem.

0:49:48 RB: And so, sure, if you can do it yourself, and keep your own counsel. To also... But I think it's actually a biblical phrase, "Keep your own counsel." Then that would be better in that.

0:50:00 SC: Right.

0:50:00 RB: And so some of these folks were actually quite good, but also the important thing to remember is at the same time that these things are lethal and poisonous a lot of the same things were in cosmetics. In smaller quantities they were considered medicinal. It would not be uncommon, especially in an affluent household when we think of, "I'm gonna open my medicine cabinet and I've got a acetaminophen, and aspirin, and antacids and nine types of band-aids of various sizes, and I have got ointments". You have this whole spread, especially in a big household.

0:50:32 SC: Right.

0:50:32 RB: Well, that was, again...

0:50:33 SC: So the equivalent of that back then...

0:50:34 RB: Equivalent of that would have have been...

0:50:37 SC: A whole lot of poisons...

0:50:37 RB: It would not have been uncommon to have some of these things. And then also think about pest control, which was also kind of a big deal, and also that the beginning of understanding the pest role in disease and all of that, but it wasn't also uncommon to get rid of vermin just because they ate your food, and even if the disease link came later you knew they were eating your food, they were eating through your clothes, they were just pests. And so how do you get rid of the them?

0:51:04 SC: Okay.

0:51:04 RB: So it was totally not uncommon for people to have buckets of the craziest stuff in their house or to also be using it in some much smaller quantity in a medicinal way. Again, whether it worked or not.

0:51:18 SC: This sounds like a very 1800s kind of thing to me. Was that the high point for ingesting crazy substances as potential miracle cures?

0:51:25 RB: Can go much earlier.

0:51:27 SC: Really? Okay.

0:51:27 RB: And it's kind of fun to go to museums and you'll see these chests of things and you realize that... Especially again the more affluent the house or whatever the equivalent would be of middle class and up, and even more precarious socio-economic positions there were kind of the community medicinal chest.

0:51:52 SC: Right.

0:51:52 RB: Or things people had access to.

0:51:54 SC: So what kinds of things?

0:51:56 RB: So you just had to say so different herbs and some of the things that we would think now are like, "Oh, so basil". Like flavoring agents or things like that.

0:52:05 SC: Yeah.

0:52:05 RB: Or peppermint. Different mints that were soothing on the stomach or let me do a combination of a little bit of mint with Pennyroyal and add in these kind of concoctions that you'd inherited from grandma, whoever, and it just seemed to work. And again that the fun thing is from a natural products thing, there's a lot of things that you carried forward and you are like that actually did work. And so, we're gonna now make it and manufacture it and it's aspirin. So some of these things and people go back to. There's a whole area of scholarship where people go back into historical tests and try to figure out what was this thing? And then test it.

0:52:46 SC: Right.

0:52:47 RB: Against modern or historic diseases and see that, "Hey, it really did". Even on a weird way, honey and mud mummification, anti-bacterial properties, and honey, it wasn't just... It wasn't a weird thing or because it was sticky it actually it served...

0:53:04 SC: Sorry, I didn't know that honey played a huge role in mummification. Is that true?

0:53:07 RB: Yeah, a little bit. There's lots of different types of mummification protocols, but some protocols actually a thin layer of honey, and it did, it did help keep down some of the little bacteria friends from getting a bit out of control.

0:53:24 SC: That's crazy to me because it seems like it's sweet and nutritious, and it would attract all sorts of crazy things.

0:53:28 RB: But it's jam-packed, full. It's another chemical it's just... The things like honey and coffee we just don't think about of what they contain.

0:53:37 SC: Okay.

0:53:38 RB: And it's thousand chemicals and it's got all kinds of stuff in there. It's an animal product honey. You've got all kinds of cool stuff in there that could be serving some really interesting purpose.

0:53:51 SC: Right.

0:53:52 RB: What are the animals doing with it? I'm not sure that they're making it so that I can have it on my toast. Right? So there's some really interesting... And again, it's an active area of scholarship. And some of the plants that people grow, "Oh it's ornamental, might be poisonous, or it's ornamental, and it seems like if I place it here, it keeps down these types of pests and insects." Well, it's releasing this volatile organic chemical and there's really something in that people have known about, and gardeners, it's not an accident that these very elaborate gardens that were planned out, plants were where they were, and it wasn't just because they looked cool. When you talk to or you read these old historical documents you realize, "Oh, that's why they're trying to keep down pests or trying to attract certain things," or certain gardens place certain things there because if you weren't well you would want your medicinal garden close to the house, you weren't gonna have to...

0:54:48 SC: That makes sense.

0:54:49 RB: Hike out to...

[laughter]

0:54:50 SC: Right.

0:54:51 RB: And so some of that knowledge. Now, we just again, we have better tools so we can kind of find or dismiss certain things. And I think that's kind of the fun part is that you can look back and say, "Okay, well, that explains it," or you're like, "I have no idea why everyone was putting, sprinkling arsenic here." Why, why were you people doing that? [laughter]

0:55:16 SC: Well, nowadays we presumably know a lot more. Would we be able to commit the perfect crime with our chemistry knowledge? Hypothetically of course. We're not advocating anything here.

0:55:28 RB: Whenever, and I do, I've done some panels where, how to commit the perfect murder and things like that, and it's funny because I never think it comes with planning, in that way, and the perfect murder weapon, because sometimes even chemicals like succinylcholine, which is a really scary agent. It's a medical purpose, if it's used, it's probably because you're gonna be intubated, and it works on a certain type of muscle where completely it's gonna paralyze it. Unfortunately, the type of muscles are also the ones that help you breathe, however, if you need intubation, they need to get that tube down your throat, and you're gonna... It's all very well coordinated.

0:56:10 SC: Right.

0:56:12 RB: But if you use it for nefarious purposes, it goes very bad. And for a long time, it was such an odd poison to use as a poison. Again, we have the ones that we've developed a lot of tests for, that we know what they look like, these are the symptoms. Our tests... We've got very simple tests, they're gonna be the first run, like arsenic, say carbon monoxide, your skin turns like a cherry red. There's other types of drugs that would cause cyanosis, your skin would turn blue. But something like succinylcholine is such a... It's a very specific application, it's not one of the heavy hitter poisons, the historical poisons, that it literally wasn't found, now it's been the jig is up because it just was not commonly used.

0:57:07 SC: So I guess that...

0:57:08 RB: So you could at one time... That really went under the radar, and you could get away with some stuff because nobody was looking for it.

0:57:15 SC: [laughter] So if you're poisoning somebody, you might want a chemical that disappears from the body?

0:57:22 RB: Rapid metabolism, which succinylcholine... That can be an issue. Another one would be some of your... Say your drug-facilitated crime molecules like scopolamine, which I wrote about recently where, again, not only is it an issue because the metabolism can be fast, but one of its effects is memory loss. [chuckle]

0:57:46 SC: Ah, perfect.

0:57:47 RB: And it affects your... So by the time you might even realize, or even if you do that maybe I should seek medical attention three days later and whether a metabolite could be found or which metabolites, I mean that... So the drug's action itself limits its ability to be found, and that's a big, but that's...

0:58:07 SC: That's great.

0:58:07 RB: There's a whole area of scholarship going with that one and really seeking out.

0:58:09 SC: I like this one, yeah.

0:58:13 RB: So every new drug or new poison requires another set of people like myself, who develop a method like it's a race, it's a race against time, somebody comes up with something, and you've gotta find a test for it.

0:58:28 SC: So, today's perfect murder is tomorrow's easily solved crime, but you gotta keep ahead of the curve.

0:58:30 RB: Yes. Same thing with inheritance pattern. Sure it got that nickname, but for a lot of times, people were able to get away with some really outrageous stuff and then we developed the tests.

0:58:41 SC: So a lot of these, even if they disappear from the body, because they metabolized, they have some other effect on, like you turn red, like you said.

0:58:47 RB: There could be other effect, but even if they're metabolized as long as we... Other important area of scholarship is really understanding that metabolism, because even if you can't find the parent compound anymore, you can find all of it's little metabolites in certain ratios, and then it's like, it's indirect, but it's very good evidence. And there's tons of those. And so, again, that's a good... So the application of building a technique does depend on that good, old, not even old fashion, that clinical metabolism really getting the mechanism and the why, so you can build a better test. To me, it all comes together full circle of... I'm an applied scientist, but the reason I can build better tests is I have to understand the basic research in the clinical applications and the roots in order to get to the point where the little test that everyone takes for granted, that it's so simple.

0:59:44 SC: It comes back to the science.

0:59:45 RB: It always comes back to that.

0:59:47 SC: You wrote this wonderful little snippet in one of your columns that is relevant here. "With its red color bubbles and sweetness, Cherry Lambrini is a popular tipple. It is also the disguise for the sweet killer ethylene glycol."

1:00:00 RB: Oh, one of my favorites. Ethylene glycol was another one that for a long time went under the radar, an antifreeze.

1:00:08 SC: That's an antifreeze, or it is...

1:00:10 RB: It is antifreeze.

1:00:11 SC: Oh okay.

1:00:12 RB: And so, of course...

1:00:13 SC: Again, easily obtained...

1:00:13 RB: Easily obtained. You can buy literally gallons of it. Now, the reason why, too, it's not actually that weird green color...

1:00:22 SC: They color it?

1:00:24 RB: They color it because they're like, "Hey, don't drink this. It's antifreeze," 'cause it's incredibly dangerous. And of course the danger like that is that it's very sweet, like lead acetate. It's a very sweet thing. And so, how you disguise it, if you're trying to poison someone much like say, a lot of also plant-based poisons are alkaloids, and they can taste very bitter. And so where do you hide it? And so that's why, of course, even in cinema, you see a lot of these poisons in red wine.

1:00:57 SC: Or elaborate cocktails.

1:00:58 RB: Or elaborate... Yeah...

1:01:00 SC: Sweetened vinegar, yeah.

1:01:01 RB: The Campari or some kind of thing where it's like you're gonna...

1:01:04 SC: Antifreeze Negroni.

1:01:06 RB: You're going to... But antifreeze would be so sweet that that kind of cocktail... There was a big case where it was hidden in a Propel or like a Gatorade, 'cause Gatorade is also... Can be sweet.

1:01:19 SC: Would you want to hide it in something else that was sweet or do you wanna balance it? Maybe I'm thinking more as a mixologist rather than a killer. [chuckle]

1:01:28 RB: Right. And I think that that is your first mistake. No, but you want alike...

1:01:30 SC: I'd be a terrible murderer. I see.

1:01:31 RB: You want alike, right? If you're expecting sweet. Like this husband and wife. Like my wedding toast...

1:01:39 SC: Yeah, 'cause this is a real case.

1:01:40 RB: This is a real case. And my go-to to wedding toast is, "May your marriage never be described as perfect by Dateline," because then you know.

1:01:48 SC: Until... [chuckle]

1:01:50 RB: Until... But in this case, such a sweet beverage that adding a little bit...

1:01:56 SC: A little bit of antifreeze.

1:01:57 RB: Is gonna disguise it. You wouldn't wanna add something like strychnine...

1:02:05 SC: Right. It's too weird.

1:02:05 RB: Somebody would drink it, first of all, there's the white powder, you'd really have to work to get it dissolved. But also that bitterness would seem odd. So if a friend was a Negroni drinker, I'm not gonna put antifreeze in it, because the minute it hits the palate...

1:02:23 SC: So sweet.

1:02:23 RB: It's off. They would like, "Well, who made this?" And they'd dump it. And so part of it is you want to do like dissolves like... And of course, you have the really dangerous ones that are colorless, odorless, tasteless, which of course is dangerous for the person. And maybe just what the doctor ordered for the villain.

1:02:46 SC: So there's a known list of those things. Colorless, odorless, tasteless...

1:02:48 RB: Oh, yeah. There's actually a nice little review article about the seven most... About seven common homicide poisonings.

1:02:56 SC: Oh, okay.

1:02:57 RB: And it's weird or it's not weird, but just like everything else, things are in vogue. Things are not in vogue?

1:03:03 SC: Yeah, there's fashion.

1:03:07 RB: And again, it also becomes of how easy it is to get. Again...

1:03:11 SC: Sure, 'cause you don't want to arouse suspicion.

1:03:13 RB: That's part of a good old fashion gumshoe intelligence police work. Just amass the information. And there was a really old case that involved strychnine, where a person went to... You can just go to a store and buy it, because again, for pests, getting rid of rats, it's still utilized in these kind of poisoned weed, sprinkled around. And so the shop owner was like, "Yeah, you did come in and you did buy that, and you bought it one... " And that was almost 200 years ago. And then of course there was 150 years. Yeah, that was 150 years ago, and then there was a test. There was, again, these preliminary tests of looking at these things, then there was that and they discovered that, but again, the tests were done later. The tests are always later than... You just went and, you went to every place that sold it, you looked on the farm, and, "Yeah, yeah, she was here last Wednesday." That's the good old fashion kind of gumshoe stuff. And even I think that's the thing, is that even when you have the tests, people are still gonna want to, "But where did they get it?"

1:04:33 SC: Yeah, we live in a world where there's a lot of records that are left by everything we do. So it's becoming harder and harder to commit a good murder.

1:04:41 RB: Yeah, and I think the records... Some people ask me about committing a perfect crime and some really elaborate scheme. I think the better thing to do is that when people have...

1:04:55 SC: Keep it simple, stupid.

1:04:56 RB: Yeah "gotten away with something" it's really a kind of sometimes a perfect storm of incompetence, sometimes if a just low response time, certain things weren't collected that should have been. Maybe the investigative officers made mistakes, or there were accidents, or again, there could have been some level of professional incompetence. The prosecuting attorney declines, there's almost like a perfect storm of things, that can occur where you couldn't plan for that though, unless you literally did the investigation like, "It needs to be on the corner of Sepulveda and at this time at night, between a shift change and then... " That would almost... How did you find out, do you know that they're pulling your Google search records. That kind of stuff. And so, it can be, the more you plan, the plan reveals your maleficence.

1:06:00 SC: That's true, that's a good point. Yeah. [laughter] But some other... Sometimes I get mail from prisoners, who want me to give them a free copy of my book, or something like that, cause they can't get it in prison.

1:06:11 RB: Yeah. Yeah.

1:06:11 SC: And part of me wants to help them out, of course, 'cause they're in prison and they wanna improve themselves. But when you get mail from prisoners, it always includes their prisoner number. And you can go and look up what they did. And so far...

1:06:25 RB: Okay. You get way more exciting mail than I do.

1:06:26 SC: Yeah. So far the one's I've gotten, it's not like mail fraud, there's really bad things that this people did. There's one guy, pretty clear that he killed his grandmother and they never found her body, she disappeared, and from staying with him and things like that, but he got imprisoned for a related thing, but they never found her body. How do you get rid of the body? That's the other thing. Once I've committed the perfect crime.

1:06:53 RB: Well you got a lot of options, but there's also weaknesses. Body transport can be where you get caught. There's key cases where moving people and or bodies is when you got pulled over for that broken taillight. And so, there's those...

1:07:10 SC: How often do taillights get broken anyway?

1:07:12 RB: You'd be surprised, or some, or speeding or a parking fine or...

1:07:16 SC: Because you're nervous.

1:07:17 RB: Or something like that, and so, but then, okay, you move it then you've upped the number of people that see you and especially now with CCTV.

1:07:26 SC: Right.

1:07:26 RB: In parking garages and just the street and stop lights. And one of the first things that folks will do is they'll pull cameras from as many locations as they can and someone's gonna have to sit through it all. So all of the... Literally just the transport can be hard. And also, I would advise 'cause this is actually a real case. Don't Google, "Best disposal sites in the Los Angeles County."

[laughter]

1:07:52 SC: Can't you go to the dark web and do this without leaving a track?

[laughter]

1:07:56 RB: Just saying... But also again, it's... Are you gonna bury it in your house? Are you gonna transport? That time, leaves you open and vulnerable. There was a different case where someone bought disposal type things and they paid cash, but they went to a store with cameras. And then for some reason they wanted to use their club card so they could get a discount. [chuckle] You cannot make these things up. Human behavior.

1:08:21 SC: There's a selection effect that this are the ones we've caught. Right?

1:08:24 RB: Right. But on the other hand... But I think there's chemical disposal methods acid or base, there's fire to try obliterate it that way, there is I'm gonna...

1:08:38 SC: It would seem very difficult to incinerate a body, if you didn't have the right equipment.

1:08:42 RB: Oh no, you can do it.

1:08:43 SC: Okay.

1:08:44 RB: I think that...

1:08:45 SC: Dry it out first?

1:08:46 RB: I think time and where you're at and how hot you can, get things that might shorten the time.

1:08:54 SC: So, if you're out, if you're in a cabin in the woods, this might be the way to go.

1:08:58 RB: Maybe, but then why is there a huge smoke thing coming from that person's cabin?

1:09:02 SC: That's true.

1:09:02 RB: And I think there's always, that you can't... What you can't plan for, is someone that decided to do them and their friend hike past your remote cabin and see you carrying that thing rolled up in a carpet out to the bonfire. Right? [laughter]

1:09:19 SC: This is... [laughter]

1:09:21 RB: And even the cases where... And in recent years you've heard, it used to be the cliche was, "No body, no crime." It was at one time harder to prosecute those things, but almost with the advent of as much data and how everything is kind of logged, and you have to kind of access certain records, unless this person has totally ghosted everyone, and then gone completely off the grid, which is really, really hard to do. They're dead. [chuckle] And that's not a... And then you look at the person's behavior and how they would kind of carry on their life. They're not accessing their bank or card. They didn't do a major withdrawal. Their credit cards aren't being used. Their car is still there. All of these things, then it's reasonable to conclude something has occurred. And so, again, with the ramp up of technology, and sometimes there are concerns about privacy and things like that, are legitimate, but at the same time, it's like maybe a couple hundred years ago, maybe even 50 or 60 years ago, people would have been like, "No body no crime."

1:10:39 SC: Way easier to get away with the crime.

1:10:40 RB: But now, it's like no digital signature means that aunt Glenda is not... It's just so hard to do that.

1:10:52 SC: But the saving grace is that the crime labs are backed up by months or years. Doesn't that make it easier?

1:10:58 RB: I think that that's the other challenge. Again, that's a practical administration problem and we've seen, unfortunately, we've seen that manifest itself, especially with sexual assault test kits and with statue of limitations where you're talking warehouses full of kits. And there was a great bunch of work where they...

1:11:19 SC: With kits that have just not been analyzed.

1:11:20 RB: Analyzed. Because again, the backlog, the cost, the combination of those factors. But when they have gotten the funds and actually gone through and there was, I believe it was in Michigan, they did all of this work and analysis 'cause they got this funding, and they were able to process all these backlog kits, and they found a number of serial predators. And when you look at the data, again, you come back to the data and you look at these numbers, and you look at the... Again, I'm not over-saying it when I'm saying warehouses full of stuff that it's just, again, you get away with it not, because you didn't leave evidence behind, but because of limitations in staff, instruments, budgets, and it's shocking and somehow so ordinary to say that, but that absolutely influences like every other type of analysis, it absolutely influences what you can do.

1:12:24 SC: Sure. I always like to end on a more or less optimistic note and that was not it.

1:12:29 RB: I'm sorry, I'm sorry. [laughter]

1:12:31 SC: As we wrap things up, I do wanna say I hope that most of your students go into lives of fighting crime rather than committing it.

1:12:40 RB: Me too.

1:12:41 SC: They seem prepared for either one, but presumably the ones who are best prepared would be good at either one, but is it an exciting frontier for chemistry now in catching bad guys in better and better ways?

1:12:54 RB: I like to think of it maybe as keeping us safe and there's, again, not just catching bad guys, but I think also the things that we think about or just kind of workplace contaminants or environmental accidents or as someone who lives in Austin, Texas, we just had this boil water notice.

1:13:12 SC: What was that?

1:13:13 RB: Boil water notice. There was a...

1:13:15 SC: Boil the water?

1:13:15 RB: You had to boil all the water because the processing plants weren't able to function at the way they could. And when, again, like a storm or, again, a hurricane... It doesn't have to be malfeasant. And so when I think about my students and even the work I do, which would still be forensic even if it's not duplicitous, is that it's in the business of keeping us safe and being able to have confidence in the things that we take for granted, our food, and our drink, and our air. And I think that being able to have the skill set to keep yourself safe or at least be able to look at the data and make good choices. I feel like you're giving, you're empowering folks. And so that's kind of how I look at what I do rather than the opposite of catching bad guys.

1:14:10 SC: Good. Most people don't wanna kill people, or even catch bad people, they just wanna live their lives safely and happily. And this is helping them.

1:14:14 RB: Yeah, they wanna drink their water, and eat their kale smoothies and... And their bacon. [chuckle] And so that's how I look at it. Even though the CSI and the forensic stuff is sexy and people find it interesting, for the most part, what we do is this mundane stuff that you just wanna be able to, your milk is gonna be good, your water is safe to drink, and you've got a safe train station to walk through with no contaminants. That's really... So in some small way, I think a lot of scientists, in general I think a lot of scientists are, "I just wanna help people," whatever small way that is.

1:15:00 SC: And we're thankful for it. Ray Burks, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

1:15:02 RB: Thank you.

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