By Carlene Hempel

Robert J. Martin can't help laughing out loud. The scene, on TV, is of a dead kid in a high school bathroom. This, in itself, is not funny. What cracks up Martin, the senior forensic criminalist at the State Police Crime Laboratory in Sudbury, is watching the forensic crew work a case on CBS's smash drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

See, Martin's investigators don't tackle murder suspects or pack heat. They don't storm into the lab demanding DNA reports. Oh, and one more thing: He can't remember ever seeing one of his people prance around in leather pants and a halter top.

We're sitting in Martin's living room, watching CSI on his 32-inch television. Gil Grissom, the stocky, bug-loving chief investigator on the show, asks a suspect to take off his shirt so he can run a spot gunpowder-residue test. No prob, the suspect says. "This is a detective's job," Martin snickers. "We would never do that - absolutely not, because the defense attorney would rip you a new one." While his two young boys sing nursery rhymes upstairs, Martin sits in the family room of his Amesbury home talking about women's semen-stained underpants and the nauseating smell of death. He tells me it can take days to fingerprint a scene, months to process a single DNA sample. Most of that used to be insidery crime scene stuff - shop talk for cops and forensic scientists. Then CSI and a handful of bloodstained copycats took over prime time. Real-life investigators like Martin are watching this gross new world and bracing for each new boob-tube breakthrough.

They call it the "CSI effect," a phenomenon in which actual investigations are driven by the expectations of the millions of people who watch fake whodunits on TV. It has contributed to jurors' desire to see more forensic testimony from the stand. Academic programs are springing up to accommodate people who now want to be forensic scientists. And it has spurred a phenomenon that defense lawyers call "junk science," in which high-paid, underqualified consultants are hired to lend a little razzle-dazzle to a case. Because in prime time, we've learned that virtually anything left behind can solve the crime: sofa cushions, a dead insect, lint.

"Crossing Jordan or CSI makes people have this unrealistic expectation of tests that can be performed and the time frame in which they can be performed," says Michael Gorn, a criminalist in the Boston Police Department's Crime Laboratory Unit. "That can hurt us." It wastes time and money, he says, with prosecutors starting to demand sophisticated forensic tests that often have nothing to do with the case.

And who can blame them? Jurors watch TV shows in which investigators walk onto scenes soaked with forensic evidence. Then they want to know why there's no DNA on the suspect's shirt collar or blood on his hands. Why aren't the hairs at the scene a match for those found inside the accused's cap?

Last summer, when Agapito Lao was on trial in Boston for strangling his estranged wife, Alicia, the prosecution had two witnesses, including one who saw Lao at the scene a half-hour before the body was found. Still, the defense claimed that Lao couldn't have committed the crime, because there was no damning forensic evidence. The state won, but had to call in a chemist to explain to jurors why it didn't rely on forensics: Lao had been in and out of his wife's Chelsea apartment before the murder, so evidence such as fingerprints would mean nothing.

Even in the face of eyewitness testimony, "Juries are starting to say, 'If all that wasn't done in a case, maybe somebody else has done [the crime],' " Gorn says. It's reached the point that he can't even watch CSI. He gets too angry. He's one of the few.

More-gore TV is everywhere. There's CSI, set in Las Vegas, and its high-rated spinoff, CSI: Miami. On NBC's Crossing Jordan, fetching star Jill Hennessy plunges her soft hands into a decomposing corpse. Forensic shows are also de rigueur on CourtTV, A&E, and the Discovery and Learning channels. HBO's entry in the gross-out game, Autopsy, features detective of death Dr. Michael Baden dissecting bloated livers and scooping out the brains of real-life victims.

To be fair, our fascination with guts and gore existed long before Gil Grissom and his band of investigators hit The Strip. Jack Klugman's Quincy, M.E., which ran from 1976 to 1983, inspired a generation of forensic scientists. Patricia Cornwell has been pumping out bestsellers featuring medical examiner Kay Scarpetta since the late '80s. And we all had O.J.

"The psychological state of being intrigued with blood and guts is something I will never understand - of why someone could be so infatuated that they can't get enough," says Robert D. Keppel, founder of the Seattle-based Institute for Forensics and a former homicide detective who helped catch serial killer Ted Bundy.

Not understanding hasn't stopped Keppel from teaching a course at the University of Washington extension school called Serial Murder. It has 750 people enrolled each quarter and a 4,000-person waiting list. He also wrote a book, Signature Killers, that explains in gruesome detail how repeat murderers sometimes mutilate their victims. It was intended as a trade publication for colleagues; that's not who buys it. "I can go anywhere, and somebody has read my book or somebody's grandma has," Keppel says. "And I just go, 'Why? I wrote this for policemen.' It is the absolute worst of the gore. Why anyone would like to read that, I don't know."

Hetty Orringer knows why. She's a 49-year-old switchboard operator for Genzyme Corp. in Framingham and one of the 24 million Americans who watch CSI every week on Thursday. "When they show a scene with the bullet going in and severing this and that, and they actually show it on the body, I like that," she says. Orringer is also a good test case for what investigators and criminalists claim: that the public can't tell the difference between Gil's gadgets and the real deal. "Oh, I never think they're making it up," she tells me. "It's not science fiction. No, it seems very possible to me. I don't know who does the forensics around here, but I'm sure they have the same thing - a big lab with the computers and everything else."

Not quite.

In a recent Friday afternoon, chemist Kerrie Donovan is processing one of the 1,200 rape kits that come in each year and include all the evidence collected during a sexual assault investigation. We're at the State Police Crime Lab in Sudbury, where evidence from every major crime in the state, except those in Boston, is sent. She starts by going into a massive refrigeration room where crime-scene material is stored until the chemists can get to it. In this case, a prosecutor has called to say the case is going to trial within a year.

Donovan selects a brown cardboard box wrapped in red shiny tape and takes it to her cramped lab. She puts on protective goggles, a lab coat, and purple rubber gloves. She spreads a piece of white, waxy paper onto a waist-high table that has been cleaned with bleach to kill any contaminants. Then she takes each piece from the box and combs it for evidence. There is a swab containing excretions from the victim's vagina, anus, and mouth. Her underpants are there, as are samples of her head and pubic hair and scrapings from under her fingernails. There is also a large sheet on which she was asked to undress. Any debris that fell off her body is considered evidence.

It's tedious work. Sometimes the evidence smells. Sometimes it's messy. This is not a glamorous job. Donovan will search first for hairs and fibers on the silky blue and white briefs. Then she will look for semen. If she thinks she finds it, she will cut out a 1-square-centimeter piece and dye it so the sperm heads turn purple. She will then wrap the sample in glassine paper, put it into a small vial, and take it over to the DNA lab, where it will be stored inside a freezer set at 112 degrees below zero. She will return to the other evidence and continue to look for blood, any condom residue, and traces of urine. If the police report says the victim was assaulted anally, she will look for feces. When she's done - all the evidence processed and the vials on ice - she will take what's left, load it back into the box, wrap it this time with yellow tape, and send it back to whatever police station it came from. The evidence in the DNA freezer will sit there until the prosecutor in the case calls for it, which could be months, or years, or never.

Donovan and her 15 colleagues at the State Police Crime Lab also visit a total of nearly 260 crime scenes each year, about 125 of which are homicides. A single murder can require days' worth of evidence collecting, and then weeks or even months of forensic testing. There is also evidence to process from lesser crimes, such as breaking and entering. And don't forget all the cold cases that police departments across the Commonwealth are digging out of dusty file cabinets. Plus, crime lab employees have to testify in court.

For all that time and work they put in, Donovan and her labmates are just identifying the evidence. Someone else, in a locked-down lab across the hall, has to test for DNA - which is what the prosecutors really want. "We have 6.3 million people in Massachusetts, which is almost the equivalent of New York City," says the state crime lab's Martin. "New York City has 80 DNA analysts" for 8 million people; "we have four. We're getting four more, so now we'll have eight for 6.3 million people," not including Boston, which has three analysts of its own.

Bottom line: It can take months to get the report Gil Grissom expects on his CSI desk by the end of the day.

OK, but try telling that to the family and the neighbors of recent crime victims, including those of Christa Worthington. It's been more than a year since the fashion writer was found dead on the floor of her Truro cottage with a knife wound in her chest and her little girl, 2 1/2-year-old Ava, clinging to her body.

It took several days just to collect the evidence at the scene, says Truro's police chief, John Thomas. About six local police officers arrived at the home in the late afternoon. Within a half-hour, 10 detectives from the State Police barracks in Barnstable had showed up. Separately, and before anything was touched, a team of three State Police photographers came to photograph and videotape the scene. That took a few hours. Then the medical examiner showed up, along with an assistant who drove the van in which Worthington's body would be taken away.

But before her body was removed, five or six criminalists from the State Police Crime Laboratory processed the corpse for clues. Once that was done, they went through the rest of the scene, looking for hairs, fibers, bodily fluids, fingerprints, and shoe and tire imprints, among other things. That took several more days.

Yet, despite the boxes of forensic evidence, including semen, no suspect has been identified. And everyone wants to know why.

The police chief has come up with a standard response to the question. He doesn't have an Emmy Award-winning budget, Thomas says, and tests are expensive. "And to submit a sample to the state lab, you have to go through the district attorney's office," he says. "And because of the workload in the state, each DA's office is only able to submit [a few cases] a month. So, it's like when you watch TV and you see somebody on a computer and things just pop up, that can't be done in real life, and everybody believes it can."

In CSI, the team works in an office virtually without walls, where quirky lab technicians and a saucy former stripper trade barbs and breakthroughs. The equipment is top-of-the-line, the lab spacious and fully staffed.

Elizabeth Devine, a co-producer who has written several episodes, swears that the science and the gizmos are realistic. In fact, she says it hurts when she hears the show criticized. Not as much as having the skin peeled off your skull, a forensic technique used on a corpse in this season's premiere, but enough to get her to raise her voice. "I've lived this job, and I know what's real. If we're just making this up, then why watch it?" Well, I ask, what about complaints from people in the field that the show exaggerates everything?

"We leave things out, but we don't make things up," says Devine, who worked for 15 years as a criminalist in Los Angeles County's Department of the Coroner. "The problem with a lot of these professionals who can't say anything nice is they can't wrap their head around the fact that in order to tell a story, we have to do it in 44 minutes." But the public is starting to believe that tests like DNA can be done in a flash, I point out.

"No, you can't do DNA in five minutes. There's not a person who works on either show who doesn't know that," she snaps. "But in order to tell the story, we can't do what real crime labs do, which is wait nine months to get the results back. We'd arrest the guy in season five. I don't want to sound defensive, but I just get so tired of it."

Devine's right. In a way, we're as much to blame for the reality gap as the neatly wrapped TV plots. We don't understand even the basics of investigative work. Take the fundamental misconception about crime scenes. In Sam Spade's day, a matchbook cover could lead to the villain.

Today, on TV, the DNA dicks can make the bust after finding a pair of broken eyeglasses. The reality is far different. A killer can leave enough blood behind to fill a Coke can. "But you need a suspect," says David Meier, chief of the homicide unit for the Suffolk County district attorney's office. "You need a known person to find a match."

Meier's office recently started using new forensic technology on another high-profile but now-old murder case: Susan Taraskiewicz, the 27-year-old Northwest Airlines employee who was found dead 10 years ago in the trunk of her car. But he wouldn't go into details. "The crime scene may yield infinite potential matches," he says, "but until you get a known sample that matches, it could be anyone in the world."

Which is not to say that there aren't breakthroughs. Real cases are cracked by forensic scientists. Last winter, for example, police cleared Keyshawn Wallace, an 18-year-old Dorchester man, of a high-profile rape near the Ashmont MBTA station. His DNA didn't match that found on the victim.

But along with legitimate forensic contributions, there are plenty of what criminal defense lawyer James L. Sultan calls the "junk scientists." This is a breed of witnesses, no doubt glorified by these TV shows, he says, who pitch themselves as forensic experts but lack the necessary education and experience. Because of the demand, though, they've starting swarming courthouses like cockroaches to an open refrigerator.

"Once they can talk their way into one courtroom, they can say to the next judge, 'Well, I was recognized as an expert in Nevada, so you should recognize me in Utah,' and eventually the person shows up in Massachusetts," says Sultan, a partner in the Boston firm Rankin & Sultan. "And they have the pretense of legitimacy, but in many cases, they are not even scientists."

He would not indict anyone or cite specific cases, but Sultan says he's starting to see junk scientists in courtrooms every week in Massachusetts. "There are people out there doing bloodstain pattern analysis, for example, who do not have scientific degrees or training or education in areas like fluid dynamics, physics, and the other basic scientific fields that would be required to intelligently opine in that area. They may have gone to some workshop or camp or taken some short-term course given by some law enforcement agency, but that doesn't turn them into a scientist."

And there are plenty more "experts" coming.

Four universities are racing to start graduate-level forensic programs to meet the demand bolstered in part by these shows, says James P. Hurley, spokesman for the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. High school science teachers are revamping chemistry programs to run like semester-long murder cases. It's the best way to keep the kids' attention. CourtTV has even developed a free forensics curriculum on its Web site. Instructors are shown how to teach about gunshot residue, footprint castings, and fingerprint matchings.

What Hurley doesn't mention is that the odds of landing a job in a legitimate state or private lab are about as good as getting a cameo on CSI. "There are a lot of universities that have been coming up with these forensic science programs. They're diploma mills," says Gorn at the Boston crime lab. "They're happy to take your money, but we're still a small community. And we still rely on government funding. There aren't a lot of jobs, and there are certainly not enough to fill the enormous interest."

Robert Martin is an unassuming sort of guy with sparkly eyes and a nice smile. He's got a buzz cut, a bit of a gut, a thick Boston accent, and a sense of humor. It's obvious that his colleagues and his bosses like him. Major Mark Delaney, the veteran homicide detective-turned-administrator who runs the crime lab, was eager for me to meet him. He knew Martin's enthusiasm for the place would rub off. But a sunny personality can't make the lab better than it is, with the best equipment and more staff. Even if Martin had movie-star looks, that still wouldn't make his lab like the ones on TV. His wish list for new stuff is as long as the credits on an episode of CSI.

He wants a crime scope, which is an alternative light source used to make fluids such as semen, saliva, and urine fluoresce. Price tag: $20,000. The lab has two, but both are a decade old, and the wand keeps breaking on one, which takes months to fix.

He'd also like GRIM 3, a machine that helps determine the source of different types of glass - windshield glass, for example, or the specific prescription of eyeglasses - found at a crime scene. Price tag: $65,000.

He'd really love to be able to do pyrolysis gas chromatography, which is great for identifying types of fibers. It can also take something solid, like a paint chip, vaporize it, and tell investigators which pigments are there, such as the shade of red Ford used on its pickup trucks between 1970 and 1975. Price tag: $110,000.

Then there's the scanning electron microscope. Martin's eyes roll back in his head when he talks about that one. He asks for it every year, and every year he's told it's not in the budget. A new one costs about $300,000. "When I worked for Osram Sylvania [a lighting company], we needed one and it was bought in a month, because you needed this product to make money. In private industry, if you don't have the tools, you don't make the money. Well, the state, as you know, doesn't produce a product."

The list goes on, which is in part why the Sudbury lab was reviewed by a needs-assessment commission in 2001 to determine why the backlog there was so severe and why the lab needed more funding to keep up. But it is getting better. Last month, Martin and Delaney launched a six-month pilot program designed to improve efficiency and decrease the backlog. Before, whoever was around from the lab would go to a crime scene, and then evidence would be passed from person to person without much continuity. Now a chief crime scene investigator is assigned to one of three regions in the state and will team up with the lead police detective on any major crimes in those areas. This real-life CSI will then follow that case through with the help of four or five crime scene assistants from the lab.

"We will take the walk-through with each other, that person dealing with the investigative side, me dealing with the scientific side of the investigation," says Martin. "From there, we will process the crime scene and be able to feed investigators information. That doesn't help an investigator if you just take everything and run into a laboratory and never give him an answer for months and months and months down the road."

Back on the family-room couch, Robert Martin is laughing again, this time at the moody bluish hues that characterize the TV set lab. He grew up watching Quincy, M.E. - in fact, that's why he got into this business - so he doesn't mind the idea of crime shows on television. It's just that sometimes the shows do more harm than good.

Maybe they help with public relations, he allows. Maybe legislators are watching them, too, which could mean a boon come budget time. In fact, why shouldn't forensic labs exploit the "CSI effect" for their own benefit, he's been thinking. Because the way it stands now, real-life investigators can't keep up.

"Understand, on the TV show, the same five people do everything," he says. "I've shown you 30, 40 different people who have to do all these different jobs." Even cops have started to blur how it really works.

"I had a detective the other day say, 'I saw on CSI someone grab someone's shirt, and they got DNA off it. So, we need to do DNA on this part of [a suspect's] shirt, because the victim was grabbed here.' And I had to say, 'You know, you're limited in your samples' " - because of the money and time it takes. "I'd have to go up to the DNA analyst and say, 'Someone grabbed him here,' and they're going to say, 'We already have the semen. Isn't that enough for you?' "

This is what TV has done to criminalists like Martin. "It educates the jury, and they grow to expect the same from us. That's dangerous. Hollywood has to stretch it to keep you interested. In real life, we can't."

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company. .