FEATURE STORY — March/April 2010

 

The Dust Detective

Skip Palenik’s work behind the microscope has helped solve such hideous crimes as Seattle’s Green River murders

By Sandra A. Swanson

Skip Palenik, founder and president of Elgin-based Microtrace. Photo by Lloyd DeGrane

The crime wave terrified the Mary­land residents of Montgomery County. Women were afraid to walk alone. They were scared to drive. The attacker broke into cars and hid in back or lurked in parking lots and surprised the women from behind. Then he raped them. He grew more aggressive and bolder. He began breaking into homes and waiting for his victims. He hid in a closet and raped a 13-year-old girl.

The man left few clues. He covered his victims’ faces with shirts so they couldn’t identify him. The police had nothing to go on except for two athletic shirts the rapist had left behind. Ron Collins, a sergeant in the Montgomery County Dept. of Police and a member of an eight-person task force, grew desperate. Finally, he put in a call to Skip Palenik ’72 las, founder and president of Elgin-based Microtrace.

Palenik is a forensic detective. He looks at very tiny specks of evidence—much tinier than a grain of sand—and identifies their source. He helped catch Seattle’s notorious Green River killer, who confessed to murdering 48 Seattle-area women, by tracing particles on the victims’ clothing to the killer’s workplace. He was summoned to help solve the murder of JonBenet Ramsey and wrote a 40-page report based on tiny packets of dust collected from her clothing.

Microtrace is “the place to go when you can’t think of anything else to do with your evidence,” says Wayne Moorehead, senior forensic scientist at the Orange County Crime Lab in California and a man who’s known Palenik for more than 20 years. “Skip knows micro-techniques and books that people have long since forgotten about. His wealth of knowledge is just incredible.”

It was that unique knowledge that Palenik brought to bear on the Maryland rapist. He vacuumed the dust off the shirts and studied it under one of his powerful microscopes. He noticed minute bits of paint and used a tungsten needle to separate the paint from the dead skin cells, fiber and other particles. The paint particles were all uniform spheres, which suggested the pattern left by spray paint, and he pinpointed their source as coming from large-scale commercial projects. Palenik detected calcium carbonate gypsum on the shirts—a lot of it, and finely ground. He guessed it came from sanding drywall. He told Collins that the rapist’s occupation was a dry wall installer for large-scale commercial projects.

Several months later, the police received a tip about a suspicious vehicle. What convinced Collins that the owner might fit Palenik’s profile were clothes in the car’s backseat that were covered with white dust. Palenik’s hypothesis gave him an edge during interrogation, and the suspect, a drywall installer for large-scale commercial projects, confessed to all of the crimes.

“When you think about it,” says Collins, “it’s pretty remarkable that [he got that] from a couple of athletic shirts.”

FIFTEEN-HUNDRED SAMPLES OF ANIMAL HAIRS
It’s not so remarkable when you visit Palenik’s office and step into his laboratory. Here are the tools of his trade—a dozen devices that make even a high-powered microscope look like a toddler’s toy. Among the more pronounceable are the x-ray diffractometer, which can detect elements at parts-per-million, and the mass spectrometer, which can separate ions by mass and identify unknown compounds. The latter was useful when Chicago Bulls fans accused police of attacking them with pepper spray; Palenik used it to confirm the spray on swatches of fans’ clothing.

Even more impressive than these visible tools are what’s unseen: the dozens and dozens of drawers and jars that contain his “collections.” Microtrace has 1,500 samples of animal hair, including yak and mink. A section of one wall looks like a giant spice rack—except that the 1,200 jars contain soils and sands from around the world. There are 4,000 bits of fiber, with carpet and clothing traceable back to the manufacturer. “The only place that has a bigger fiber collection,” says Palenik, “is the German federal police.”

Palenik even has an “occupational collection” of dust gathered from the clothing of people in more than 100 professions. Anyone is fair game for the dust detective. One day, Palenik noticed a welder working outside the Microtrace office. “I went out and paid the guy some money to borrow his shirt for awhile,” says Palenik, who vacuumed the shirt and put the particles into a tiny container. “That’s how you learn stuff.”

Palenik has been vacuuming dust for 50 years. As a child, he spent hours emptying the family vacuum cleaner and analyzing its contents. He used a microscope to trace the origins of the debris: Did it come from the kitchen or bathroom? Did it belong to his mother or father? He didn’t know it then, but he was following a theory called Locard’s Exchange Principle. It’s the primary tenet known to every scientist in the forensic field: any contact leaves a trace. Or, as Palenik explains it: “Whenever two objects come into contact, there is always a transfer of material.”

Locard’s Exchange Principle and the analysis of tiny debris has been a lifelong obsession for Palenik. Kids growing up in the 1950s idolized Mickey Mantle and Roy Rogers. Palenik’s boyhood hero was a less familiar name: Edward Oscar Heinrich.

Heinrich was, among other things, a chemist, physicist and former police chief. In the early 1900s, he became the go-to guy whenever a criminal case stumped the authorities. One of Palenik’s favorite examples occurred in 1923, when four railroad employees were killed during an attempted train robbery. By analyzing a pair of overalls left at the scene, Heinrich determined that one of the criminals was a left-handed lumberjack who had worked in Pacific Northwest logging camps. The clues gleaned from those overalls ultimately helped police nab the culprits.

In Heinrich, Palenik saw the kind of problem-solving prowess he wanted to emulate. “I think you need heroes,” he says, “and I don’t think they necessarily need to be sports heroes. Intellectual heroes are probably good ones to have as well for young people.”

>Microtrace has worked on such high-profile crimes as the Green River murders (above) and the JonBenet Ramsey murder. Palenik helped authorities catch Green River killer Gary Ridgway by tracing particles on the victims’ clothing to his workplace; for the Ramsey case, he prepared a 40-page report based on tiny packets of dust found on her clothing. Elaine Thompson-Pool/Getty Images

TOP-SECRET GOVERNMENT PROJECTS
At any given time, the Microtrace staff usually handles about three dozen cases. The criminal cases make headlines, but Palenik spends much of his efforts in civil actions. When a dead mouse pops up in cereal or a chip of metal in chewing gum, Palenik analyzes the particles to determine whether the manufacturer is responsible or whether the contaminant was added after the food left the factory. Pharmaceutical companies are regular clients. So are antiquities dealers.

In one recent case, a dealer had purchased a stone carving of a sheep from an auction house, paying nearly $200,000 for the item, which was supposed to date back thousands of years. When Palenik checked the carving for authenticity, he found a miniscule rayon fiber—suggesting that the item was, at best, about 50 years old. “By the time the guy at the auction house got through the second page of our report,” says Palenik, “he told the dealer, ‘You can have your money back.’”

Then there is the work that Palenik can’t talk about—the highly classified work that occupies much of his time. “It’s related to the war on terrorism—that’s about as much as I can say about it.”

Surprisingly, Palenik does not have a Ph.D., which is unusual for someone of his standing in forensic science. But curiosity and dedication have more than made up for the formal degree. Growing up, he and his brother, Mark ’71 las, spent their formative years in a lab in their parent’s basement. One summer, Palenik taught himself organic chemistry. He was a constant visitor to the Field Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry. It was there that he first en­countered Dr. Walter McCrone, the forensic legend who proved the Shroud of Turin was a medieval painting, 10 years before carbon dating confirmed the shroud was a fake.

“I was just amazed that there was somebody who did what I wanted to do,” says Palenik. He had so many questions for this microscope expert, but wasn’t ready to ask them yet. “I was about 10 or 11 … I was just too frightened to talk to a grownup like that at the time.”

Palenik, along with Mark, studied chemistry at UIC, but dropped out and enlisted in the U.S. Army. (“I wanted to become a soldier-scholar.”) He spent two years in Germany as a military intelligence officer, then returned to Chicago to get married and complete his chemistry degree at UIC. Shortly before graduation, he wrote a letter to McCrone—the man who had inspired and intimidated him 14 years earlier—and expressed his interest in microscopy. Palenik joined McCrone Associates when he was 24, and stayed for more than 20 years.

“I’d been studying microscopy and microchemistry since I was eight years old,” Palenik says. “The first year I worked with Walter McCrone, I figure I doubled everything that I knew. And it just snowballed.”

Palenik’s wealth of experience and unique analytical talents have secured him an elite reputation in his field. This past February, he was awarded the prestigious Paul L. Kirk award, the highest honor given by the American Academy of Forensic Scientists in the area of criminalistics (which focuses on physical evidence). 

ONE CASE THAT COULDN’T BE SOLVED
Palenik had planned to spend his entire career at McCrone Associates but left in 1992 because McCrone “sold the company to a businessman, and it just quit being fun.” As a result, he was forced to become a businessman himself, and started Microtrace in his basement. He moved the company to a small professional building in 1994.

The lab is where he nails down evidence—but his favorite room in the Micro­trace office is the library. It’s here, near the fireplace, while sitting in one of the leather chairs, that Palenik likes to contemplate his forensic cases. To refresh his memory, or merely to take a break, he has hundreds of journals and books with titles such as Chemistry and Technology of Explosives, Principles of Sedimentology, The Story of Silk and All About Weeds.

Palenik also maintains a collection of microscopes. One even played a role in family planning. During the 1970s, while Palenik was working at McCrone Associates, he decided to purchase a polarizing microscope. It cost $2,000. “We put off having our first baby so I could buy it,” he says. Palenik and his wife Peggy now have two sons—the oldest is named Chris. When Chris was two years old, Peggy brought him into her husband’s lab at home, and pointed to the microscope. Palenik laughs when he recalls what happened next: “She said, ‘Chris, I want you to meet your older brother, Mike.’”

Chris apparently didn’t resent “Mike,” considering he’s also chosen a career in forensic science. He joined Microtrace in 2005.

There is one case, sadly, that Palenik was never able to solve—and it proved a devastating loss. In 2007, the day after Thanksgiving, an arson fire in the Microtrace building destroyed a significant portion of his treasured books and journals. Police never caught the perpetrators, though evidence suggested it was a random act. Other tenants—lawyers and chiropractors—were back in business a week after the fire, but it was small comfort to Palenik. He spent $100,000 restoring what he could, and moved the office to a new location. “A lot of things are irreplaceable,” says Palenik. “I was suicidal for probably two weeks.”

Thankfully, the original owner’s manual from his boyhood microscope—a prized possession—was at home amid his collection of rare books. And at least two of the books were easy enough to replace: they were volumes containing two of his  favorite stories by Edgar Allen Poe: “Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter.” Palenik makes the stories required reading for any new employee at Microtrace. “[Those stories] are examples of how you take facts, sift through things, and from that, you use your imagination.”

It’s a formula that has served Palenik for half a century.