By Ralph Brave Near the beginning of a recent episode of a popular prime-time television suspense drama, the detective heroine arrives upon a murder scene and is given a description of the grisly state of the victim's body. Asked whether she would like to view the corpse, she declines, reasoning that she "could learn more from the bugs than the body." There can't be many viewers who actually understood the reference to "bugs." But UC Davis professor Robert Kimsey and the students from his forensic entomology seminar would have understood, and perhaps even begun surmising what story the bugs would tell. That's because the TV detective's comment is not about telephone taps or similar electronic "bugs" but refers to Kimsey's particular area of study and expertise: the insects that decompose animal and human corpses, and the tales those insects can tell about the circumstances of death. Kimsey is a member of a small group of experts--one of perhaps two or three dozen around the country--who specialize in applying their knowledge of insects to cases that wind up in court--forensic entomology. Most of those cases involve situations that many of us would unhappily recognize--bug infestations of a building, an insect found in or around food products, a skin bite. These are the civil cases that often turn on an entomologist's expert testimony, since the heart of the matter is the presence and precise activity of particular species of bugs. But the cases that are gripping for the mind and the soul, in that ghoulish Edgar Allan Poe kind of way where science and mortality meet, involve human corpses. What Kimsey has brought as an expert witness to murder cases, some of them infamous, and what he teaches his students is an understanding of the precise patterns by which insects consume a corpse and what those patterns can reveal as evidence in a legal proceeding. "Forensic pathologists are good at estimating the time of death a few days or so after a person dies," Kimsey explains. "But a forensic entomologist can carry that out almost to two weeks, based on the evidence of the arthropods [primarily insects]. The way we do that is by knowing the succession of the different kinds of arthropods that appear at different points in decomposition and also by knowing the rate at which these different arthropods develop through their different life histories." Though few are familiar with forensic entomology, it's not an entirely recent development in detective work. How old is the field? "More than a thousand years," says Kimsey. "There are some extraordinary cases in the ancient Chinese literature, dating from about 900 B.C." The best known ancient case involves a murder committed in a little village in China. A man was hacked to death with a rice-harvesting sickle. Because this was a rice-growing village where everyone had a sickle, there were many suspects. Kimsey admiringly explains how the murderer was caught. "The local magistrate very cleverly lined up every one of the farmers with their sickles out in the field. He walked up and down the line and pointed to the man who had done the murder. The evidence he used to identify this man as a murderer--he later confessed, by the way--was the fact that green bottle flies were attracted to this man's sickle. And nobody else, of course, had green bottle flies on their sickle because the flies would be attracted only to a surface that had blood on it. No matter how rigorously you cleaned your sickle, you would still have remnants that these flies would be able to detect." Modern forensic entomology, though, dates from the 1880s, says Kimsey. But back then forensic entomology was used only in spectacular cases. "These days many more cases of death are due to unknown causes. Forensic pathologists have become amazingly sophisticated at getting evidence from dead stuff. But they are now beginning to recognize that the living animals [insects] in the vicinity of the corpse can oftentimes offer a tremendous amount of evidence." Kimsey himself might never have been aware of insect evidence except for his family's move from a coastal area to a landlocked one. His father was a fisheries biologist whose job took him from Sacramento, where Kimsey was born and lived for a time, to Uganda and then Galveston, Texas. "I always had a passionate interest in one form of life or another," Kimsey says. While he lived in coastal Galveston, he figured he'd follow in his dad's footsteps and specialize in fish. "But we moved inland, to Bethesda, Md., near Washington, D.C., where there were no fish to study. But there are insects everywhere. I discovered that insects are incredibly diverse and became fascinated with them from that time on. I'm a biologist in general," he says, "but I really, really enjoy insects." So much so that he married a fellow entomologist, Lynn, whose specialty is classifying the estimated 6 million to 8 million different insect species and who is director of the campus's Bohart Museum of Entomology. After he received a bachelor's degree (1976) and a Ph.D. (1984) from UC Davis, did some postdoctoral work here, and taught and researched at the Harvard School of Public Health, the two of them found jobs back at UC Davis nine years ago. A couple of years after returning, Kimsey was called in on his first murder case--the Dorothea Puente case. Puente was found guilty of murdering the tenants of her home for the aged in order to receive their retirement payments without the expense of caring for them. She buried the bodies in her midtown Sacramento backyard. Kimsey was hired as a consultant for the defense, providing a report on his finding that one of the bodies had been above ground for at least a half-day before it was buried. The defense used the finding to support its contention that the murder had not been premeditated. Since that case Kimsey has worked with the Sacramento County coroner's office on many other cases of suspicious death. But it was just last spring that Kimsey first offered a graduate-level seminar in forensic entomology. The course is best known, among those who have heard of it, for the dead pig final exam. Kimsey sets dead pigs in a field. After a few days, the pigs are collected, and Kimsey guides the students in the identification of the different insects on the pig corpses, their stage of development and the extent that they have invaded and decomposed the bodies. "But I also set out an additional dead pig secretly, and as part of the final exam, the students collect [the insects] off that dead pig and determine the time of death. "We use pigs because pigs and humans have a lot of characteristics in common," Kimsey says. "They're about our size; they have similar skin--a lot of things like that." (He obtains the pigs from the campus herd; they are among the animals that have already been slaughtered for sale.)

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