"Enlisting a Posse of Scientists"

The Column One story in the Times today was intriguing, describing a small-town police officer who reached out to scientists via the Internet to try to solve a murder: “Enlisting a Posse of Scientists”

The case fell to Sgt. Paul Dostie, 52, a genial detective with 20 years on the force.

Aware that his years in Mammoth Lakes hadn’t prepared him for the job ahead, Dostie reached out for help with the best tool he had: the Internet. Through e-mail, he slowly assembled an A-team of investigators, each with a different talent.

None worked in law enforcement. Instead, they were academics — scientists who study how ancient peoples lived and died.

They were two anthropologists, a stable-isotope geochemist from Canada, two DNA analysts and a pioneer in American forensic skull reconstruction.

“That’s my claim to fame,” Dostie said dryly. “I know a lot of people smarter than I am.”

The case this small-town cop put together mined obscure scientific databases and analyses that have emerged only in the last decade with the mapping of the human genome and that still are the domain of a handful of anthropologists and geneticists. Some had never before been used in a U.S. criminal case, the researchers say.