Man hunt

ORISSA police finally nabbed Dara Singh, the killer of Graham Staines and his sons, last week. Until then a man who had done something truly barbaric remained at large, indulging in killing more individuals from the minorities. Meanwhile in Delhi, a year after journalist Shivani Bhatnagar was murdered, the case remains unsolved.

We are surrounded by enough crime for forensic science to be of direct interest to the average TV viewer. What does it take to ferret out clues even though the trail has gone cold? How much training, ingenuity and scientific skill is called for to unravel mysteries posed by murder, death and disease? For an answer, watch "Medical Detectives" on Discovery Channel, daily, throughout February. Its range of real life cases and painstaking reconstruction make it a fascinating whodunit series.

A shed burns to cinders, and from within it a completely burned human body is discovered. Thirty-five pounds of charcoal-like material without any recognisable skin or hair follicles to recover. Enough to work with? If you live in an affluent and technologically advanced country like the United States,a the answer is yes. The internal organs show that the person died before being burned. The age and sex of victim are determined thereafter. Bits of metal in the body point to a 22 calibre weapon having been used. A homicide case.

Who went missing around that time? When all the evidence is pieced together, police zero in on a cocktail waitress as the victim. She was a drug user. Tracking her movements on her final day alive leads them to a suspect. There is other evidence: traces of blood are found in his car boot. But when the victim was charred beyond recognition, how do you link her conclusively to the blood in the car?

Much of the suspense in this series, and much of the ingenuity called for, arises out of finding evidence that will stand up in court. In the case above the forensic team did something unprecedented: they extracted DNA from the tooth pulp in the victim's teeth to link her to the blood in the car.

Another episode involving a serial killer, who was finally caught, built up to an even more unusual means of nailing the final evidence. When the several-days-old body of a woman is found in the California mountains it has maggots crawling in it. What do the police do? They recover them, and send a hundred maggots off to a forensic entomologist. There they are preserved for several months, waiting to provide a clue when the time comes.

In the meantime the case turns out to be one of several sexual assaults which fit into the same pattern. When the serial rapist is finally nabbed, the law of limitations has run out in the case of some of his earlier victims and he can no longer be convicted for those crimes. The woman found in the mountains however is a borderline case: if the exact day of her death can be established the killer can be charged with her rape and death.

That is where the maggots come in. First the entomologist establishes to which species of fly they belong. Does it lay eggs in good weather or bad weather? Day or night? Then you determine how many hours or days old the pupae were, going by the size of the maggots recovered. Then you finally establish on which day and which probable part of the day the woman died. All of this of course takes months of investigation, and piecing together of different kinds of evidence. Only an affluent society can afford the kind of processes "Medical Detectives" unfolds.

The programmes are based on interviews and reconstructions, presumably using actors. The amazing thing is the degree of resemblance people in the reconstructed episodes have to the actual killers and victims. This is no slip-shod series. An enormous amount of research and resources has gone into it.

Every weekday afternoon, back to back, Discovery Channel runs two episodes of "Medical Detectives" between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m.. On Fridays you can also see it at 9.30 p.m..

Murder is not its only territory. One episode last week was on the mystery of cancer clusters that occurred in two parts of the U.S.. A catholic elementary school has 49 cases of childhood leukemia over a few years. It triggers a long, laborious investigation by several government agencies, a series of public hearings, an enormous amount of research into the behaviour of electromagnetic radiation, possible toxins and much else. Given American sensitivity to individual rights, nobody can afford to give up the search for an answer.

Then, the medical evidence shows that cancer rates have dropped as inexplicably as they rose. After 10 years and $2 million spent on investigation, the effort is given up as unsolved. The other community that this episode tracks managed to link the cancers in its residents to an electric substation nearby, but not conclusively.

At the end of the episode you are told that the Centre for Disease Control in the U.S., the only facility of its kind in the world, has investigated 108 cases so far of cancer clusters. It has never been able to find the cause of a single cancer cluster. The quest in itself though, makes gripping viewing. "Medical Detectives" beats fictional detective serials hands down.

Australian Open Finals: Why, a reader wants to know, did DD's Sports Channel keep its telecast of the above matches such a secret that many tennis lovers missed the live telecasts last weekend of the mens and womens singles? Because, says Doordarshan, it sealed the rights only on Friday at 6 p.m.. Trans World International was asking for too much. When they finally came down on their asking price and telecast became possible there was only time left for some last-minute publicity on the Metro Channel. And it was too late to book advertising. n

SEVANTI NINAN

E-mail the writer at sevantininan@vsnl.com

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