By Jessie-Lynne Kerr
Morris News Service
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Her e-mail address is savethemaggots@cox.net, and she finds fascinating the things that make most people turn away in disgust.
Sue Gruner, a forensic entomology doctoral student at the University of Florida, has spent the last several years studying how maggots consume corpses. It is all in the interest of advancing science to help investigators determine when, and possibly where, a person died.
For the past year Gruner, 51, has been volunteering her time to train crime-scene technicians with the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office in the basics of collecting bug evidence.
Her research, which at one point involved scores of dead pigs, is aimed at documenting the life cycles of flies at various temperatures so that investigators can backtrack to determine when the corpse they were found on died.
Even in a clean environment, she said, flies of the Calliphoridae family are attracted to a body by the odor of decomposition. Gruner is compiling what is called rearing data on the flies.
"We want to know at different temperatures how long it takes for the fly eggs to hatch, to go through the larval stages, pupate and become adult flies," she said.
From the data, investigators will be able to get a range of time when a person died or when the body was put outside, moved or even came from another state, Gruner said.
"I've watched Sue work, and I wouldn't do it," said Kenneth W. Brooke, a sergeant in the crime-scene unit who supervises one of the teams. "It's pretty nasty. ... She calls maggots her little babies. She thinks they are cute."
In the last year, Gruner has been involved in 15 death cases in Jacksonville, going to the actual scenes in 10 of them. In the others she examined specimens collected by evidence technicians.
"Recently she helped us on the Youmans case," Brooke said, referring to the death of 12-year-old Tony Youmans, who was sought as a missing person until his body was found July 31 in a wooded area near his home.
"I called her about noon, and she was up here from Gainesville within two hours," Brooke said.
On another recent case, Gruner found a hair and follicle entangled in an adult fly. The hair was sent for DNA tests at a Florida Department of Law Enforcement lab and may prove a break in the case.
Gruner has been training crime-scene unit technicians in recognizing what to collect, how to collect it and how to preserve it, Brooke said. The samples are then given to Gruner for testing and determination in Gainesville, a lot more convenient for law enforcement than a trip across the country to a specialty lab.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement does not have any forensic entomologists at its labs in the state, according to department spokeswoman Sharon Gogerty.
Forensic entomology has been a factor in the criminal justice field for at least 700 years, according to the American Board of Forensic Entomology's Web site. But just 11 entomologists are actively engaged in death-scene investigations, expert witness testimony and forensic entomology research in the nation.
And while TV viewers have become familiar with the character Gil Grissom on the series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Gruner said she does not watch the show "because I don't want to damage my television set." She finds fault with much of the so-called science portrayed in the series.
Maggots aggregate in masses and the masses, once they reach the size of a tennis ball, can regulate their own heat independent of the ambient temperature, even as high as 130 degrees, Gruner said. In warm weather, they can consume 60 percent of a corpse in less than a week.
Recently, for her master's degree, Gruner conducted what is described by UF as the largest forensic entomological decomposition study using pigs as models. Pigs had to be used because human cadavers are almost impossible to get. Over three years Gruner carried 60-pound pigs she purchased from a livestock company out to a forested 40-acre site behind a butterfly farm in Earleton.
"It was the perfect place to do this research," she said, "because it was the kind of place down a dirt road where you'd dump a body you were trying to hide."
To keep vultures away from the dead pigs, her husband, wildlife photographer Mike Turco, built cages to put over them.
She visited the corpses regularly, sometimes in 100-degree heat, to document the rate of decomposition and gather samples of the maggots. She had to count, measure and take the temperature of every single maggot and boil some of them. Some of the pigs were reduced to bones in less than a week, she said.
All the time she was studying the maggots on the pigs, Gruner said she was calling law enforcement agencies across Northeast Florida "begging them to let me come to their crime scene."
She read with dismay news reports when the charred body of Lynda Wilkes was found off U.S. 301 near Waldo, less than 2 miles from her work site with the dead pigs. Wilkes was the Jacksonville woman killed with her infant son by the baby's father, John Mosley Jr., in April 2004.
"But they never called me," Gruner said.
Finally in June 2006, Don Silcott, an evidence technician from the Sheriff's Office crime-scene unit, called UF and wanted someone to come to Jacksonville to teach them about insects they find on bodies. She has been working with and training Silcott and the other evidence technicians off and on since then.
