CSI's Not Fiction for Oakdale Resident

Oakdale resident David Peterson is a longtime criminal investigator who now manages the crime scene program as well as latent print analysis, firearms and documents for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. He spent 16 years as a criminal investigator for the U.S. Air Force, and then worked analyzing fingerprints for the Wichita, KS, police department before he began working for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension 14 years ago. He was involved in the high-profile investigation of the 1999 murder of Cally Jo Larson in Waseca. The 12-year-old girl was killed in her home when she walked in on a man burglarizing it. Peterson recently spoke to the Oakdale Business and Professional Association about his work, and he’s answered questions at the Science Museum of Minnesota in the past in conjunction with a crime scene investigation exhibit. Oakdale Patch sat down with Peterson to learn more about his work.

Oakdale Patch: How did you adjust to working at death scenes that most people would find disgusting and disturbing?

 David Peterson: What you have to learn to do if you’re going to do this for a living—and let me make another point here, all of our scientists who are on the crime scene team, they’re made up of all the different disciplines in the lab and that’s not their primary job. This is an extra duty. We have a team that’s on call all the time. The pager goes off, they go. Nobody’s required to be on that team. They’re given training, but if they find out they can’t handle it—they go to a scene once, they say, “hey it had some kids in it and I don’t know if can do this anymore,”—That’s fine. … We had somebody else once that said, “That body looked a lot like my dad, I can’t do this anymore.” OK, fine. This job is not for everybody, there’s no doubt about that, but for those of us who do this routinely, you do have to separate yourself. You can’t dwell necessarily on what you’re seeing, on the death of a person. It’s very sad that this happened, we understand that, but there’s no life there, that soul is gone in my opinion, the spirit’s out of there, and you just get used to the fact that there’s nothing creepy about it. They’re not moving and you have to work around it. … One that was really hard to process was actually in Oakdale a few years ago. It was the baby that was stabbed to death. ... So, it does affect us emotionally, we just have to deal with that and then move on and do our business. You will probably hear stories of people maybe taking some things lighthearted when they’re at a scene or joking around. If we didn’t do that we would go nuts. We’re very sensitive and we’re very careful. If there’s any family around, we don’t do that. We’ve even got clothing that we wear, mostly off-duty, it says when your days end our day begins. It’s kind of an informal motto, but it’s exactly what we do. We do that just to deflect from the awful nonsense that we see.

Oakdale Patch: What is a typical day like for you?

Peterson: The bulk of my work now is approving reports by examiners in latent prints, firearms and documents. When our crime scene team goes out, the leader of that team has to submit a field report to document where they were, what they did, what they saw, what they collected, and basically the circumstances of that scene, and I read and approve those as well. I don’t do any fingerprint examinations anymore. I will occasionally go out to the field with the crime scene guys just to observe.

Oakdale Patch: Do you ever wish you were back on the field?

Peterson: Oh yeah. You ask any supervisor, anybody in management. After a period of time they’ll wish they were back on the bench just doing regular casework because there’re so many things that go with management. I don’t care where you work, you’re going to have that.

Oakdale Patch: What has kept you interested in doing this kind of work for so long?

Peterson: Job satisfaction. When I started doing this—even back in my Air Force days—when you were able to conduct an investigation and you were able to prove who did something by collecting all the facts and putting all the pieces together, there’s a lot of satisfaction in that.

Oakdale Patch: Is it frustrating that there isn’t a database that just has everybody’s fingerprints in it nationwide? (Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota all share the same fingerprint database.)

Peterson: Yes, but in the United States it would be extremely big. We do have the option of—the FBI runs a database. As an aside—this happened in the Cally Jo Larson case—they knew (the suspect) wasn’t using a real name, and when they ran his fingerprint card through the FBI, they didn’t recognize it, and that’s because the state that had arrested him multiple times, Texas, didn’t send the stuff for them. So your database is only as good as what the agencies send in, but we do have the option. We can’t search it directly, but we e-mail the fingerprint to the FBI, they search their database and give us the results, and we have gotten hits out of that. Canada does—their entire country is on one system.

Oakdale Patch: What are some of the common misconceptions that people have about forensics and criminal investigation that they get from television?

Peterson: Time is obviously the first thing. When I was in investigative school in the Air Force, there was a phrase I’ll never forget. Time is on the side of the investigator; be patient. It doesn’t mean you don’t stop what you’re doing, but most crimes—unless you’re dealing with a serial killer or someone of that caliber who really knows what they’re doing and knows how to cover their tracks and doesn’t talk—most other people will talk, so eventually the word gets out. And obviously for television or a movie, they’re just flipping right along. CSI is the same thing … Our (fingerprint) machine doesn’t twirl them around, it doesn’t pop up the name right away, but it is good enough to search a million and a half fingerprints in 30 seconds. But then it says, here’s the ones we think, and it’s the examiner’s job to figure it out. Then there’s certain other things like a DNA analysis that just take time and there’s certain parts of that analysis that just have to sit and do their thing. You can’t hurry that along. It just takes time. … For the most part they get the equipment end of it right, and the technology is OK, it’s just how they use it, they’ll deviate. They’re going to make it look cooler because of Hollywood.

Oakdale Patch: Have you been affected by government budget cuts or has the BCA been pretty insulated?

Peterson: Not yet. That was just brought up again this morning. We’ve been pretty fortunate in the last couple of rounds to be left alone. We’re very thankful.

Oakdale Patch: Why are you willing to get out in the community and talk to people about your work?

Peterson: I think it’s important for people to realize what we actually do and how we do it. There’s nothing to hide. The science museum actually came to us when they had their exhibit because it was based on the CSI show and they had three different scenarios—crime scenes—set up in there and people were supposed to walk through them and see if they could solve them. Because it was so popular and people watch the show so much, it was a great draw. It was there for three months. Once a month we actually brought a team of our staff, our crime scene investigators right there, so we were at the exit as people came out. If they had any questions about how we really do stuff, we could answer them. It’s just good to interact with the public and say, “Hey we’re real people, and here’s how we do the job, and yes, it does affect us emotionally. We don’t just—we’re not these callous people that just don’t care what happens.”