Solutions to These Murder Mysteries Found in ‘Plots’

ALPINE, Calif. — The youngest student investigator found the unmarked grave first, his curiosity piqued by tree limbs piled too neatly atop a rectangle of suspiciously soft soil.

But only after four hours of meticulous digging did he and his fellow students unearth the first signs of human remains: foot bones spread next to a neon blue flip-flop.

Were these the bones of the unloved wife who never returned from a trip to Japan? The grandmother assaulted and raped before she was killed? Or the pregnant socialite who disappeared after hosting a dinner party?

In the end, students traced the flip-flops to the grandmother, who also had a fondness for costume jewelry and acrylic fingernails.

Such were the riddles solved during training by an elite team from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.

In an elaborate game of “Clue,” the students -- investigators from police agencies throughout Southern California -- learned how to search for “graves” cunningly disguised by their trainers, excavate plastic skeletons, sift soil for evidence and solve crimes. The trainers hid as many as 100 objects -- some important, some not -- in each grave, and the diggers were to locate all of them and theorize how the crimes occurred.

The 16 students spent five days at the San Diego County Sheriff’s Descanso Detention Center, located on 14 acres of hilly, wooded terrain east of Alpine. There, they learned the fine points of exhuming human remains from members of the coroner’s Special Operations Response Team, or SORT, a unique unit that handles high-profile cases and those involving five or more deaths.

Formed in 1996, the unit assisted with the 2003 Santa Monica Farmers’ Market crash, the Fairfax district airplane crash that same year and the 1999 Alaska Airlines jet crash off Ventura. It also excavated and analyzed numerous graves, many of them in Angeles National Forest.

Some students at Descanso said they rarely had to dig up bodies in their real jobs, but that they welcomed the training.

“Buried bodies are not the cases that come along every day,” said Lt. Erik D. Arbuthnot, a lead SORT investigator. “But it’s often those types of cases that don’t come every day that people need the training in.”

Staffers from the coroner’s office visited in January to create four unmarked graves and plant the clues.

Winter rains and blowing leaves had erased any signs of digging by the time the students arrived three months later. The group worked together to dig up one skeleton and then split into three teams that searched through the underbrush to find the other three graves. Their orders: to dig up remains and locate as many clues as possible so they could determine which skeleton belonged to which victim.

The youngest investigator, Brian Kim, 20, a UC Irvine student, spotted one grave because of its neat wood pile and the maggot-like insects swarming on the soil. Closer inspection showed the insects were actually egg-toting ants. Digging yielded foot bones, an arm bone and, finally, a skull still wearing glasses. Possible clues included acrylic nail tips, a fake pearl necklace, condoms and condom packages.

A second team removed soil from a grave containing a large suitcase. A third dug up a purse and a child’s stuffed animal. All three graves contained soda or beer cans, presumably left by the killers.

Students spent nearly two days digging and sorting in the hot sun. Once, they were interrupted by a swarm of bees that sent even hardened criminal investigators racing to their cars. Then, at Descanso, they convened for an exam of sorts. Senior criminalist Michelle Sandberg asked each team to report on the contents of each grave, matching the clues with what the trainers originally placed in the graves.

Some results were surprising. A cotton Niagara Falls T-shirt had been planted in the grave with the suitcase and the bones belonging to the Japan-bound wife -- who, it turned out, was killed by her husband. The T-shirt had disintegrated, showing how quickly clues can vanish in three months.

Diggers found duct tape at the pregnant woman’s grave, suggesting she had been bound or gagged. But trainers reported they had never placed duct tape there, demonstrating how suspicious-looking objects are sometimes mere accidents of time and placement.

Kim said he was fascinated by how clues shifted position, deteriorated or vanished entirely. Even as the seminar disbanded, he was mentally sorting through the evidence: Whatever happened to the brochure that was buried with the grandmother?

Unlike a murder-mystery novel, this work leaves a few loose ends.