Paul Zambella, MJ'81

By Karen Feldscher

Though Paul Zambella has spent twenty-eight years working for the Massachusetts State Police crime lab, he says he never gets bored. Based in the Danvers satellite lab, Zambella spends about a third of his time at crime scenes, another third in the lab, and the rest testifying in court.

“Even now,” says the forensic chemist, “I look forward to going to work every day.”

Not that Zambella doesn’t occasionally get frustrated. In fact, one case still eats at him. In 1994, David Clark was charged with killing state trooper Mark Charbonnier on Route 3 in Kingston after Charbonnier pulled Clark over for a routine traffic check.

Zambella collected evidence at the crime scene. A gun found there proved, after markings on a bullet removed from Charbonnier’s body were analyzed, to be the murder weapon. The bullet had entered the trooper’s body just below his bulletproof vest. The vest itself had a hole made by a second bullet, which investigators were unable to find.

On the muzzle of the gun, Zambella found a small teal-colored cotton fiber. It matched fiber from Clark’s briefs. In court, Clark’s girlfriend testified he routinely carried a gun tucked inside his pants.

The evidence helped convict Clark of first-degree murder, but not without some courtroom drama. During their investigation, Zambella and his colleagues had checked and rechecked Charbonnier’s bulletproof vest, to see if the missing bullet had somehow gotten wedged inside. They found nothing.

The defense attorney and her expert also examined the vest for several days, unsupervised. One day in court, as she showed the garment to a witness, the defense attorney suddenly said, “I’m feeling something in this vest!” It was a bullet fired from the murder weapon, which, Zambella says, the attorney had also had in her possession for a time.

The implication was that Zambella and his colleagues had somehow missed the bullet, that their whole investigation had been shoddy. It “tested my credibility as a scientist,” Zambella says. “To this day, I would say that bullet was not in that vest when I examined it.

“Where this bullet was ultimately discovered was obvious,” he says. “There was no way anybody could have missed it. Just by looking at it you could see a bulge.”

During the trial, when the prosecutor suggested that perhaps the defense attorney had planted the bullet, she “came flying out of her chair like a rocket, and objected strenuously to the [claim] that she had tampered with this vest in any way,” Zambella says.

Though Zambella was pleased to see Clark convicted, he still cringes when he recalls the case. “It was upsetting to see newspaper stories calling into question the crime-lab staff, the ballistician, the investigators,” he says. “You’re just chomping at the bit, wanting to say something in response.”

For “a nice diversion” from the stresses and strains, Zambella goes to schools to talk to children about his job. “The kids always seem to be fascinated,” he says. Sometimes he spends all day in a classroom, first describing what he does, then setting up mock crime scenes so the kids can do their own investigation.

Zambella’s sons, ages thirteen and ten, are captivated by dad’s work, too. Some weekends, in fact—when he’s on call and his wife’s at work—he has to bring them to crime scenes. He makes sure the kids hang out in a police van so they won’t see anything grisly. But once they saw a victim’s body being wheeled out of a house, “and they couldn’t wait to go home and tell their mother about it,” Zambella says.
“The next time I had to take them to a crime scene,” he says, laughing, “my wife was so concerned she actually had her mother come to the scene to pick up the boys.”


See other profiles:

Liz Ziolkowski, MJ'87
Irene Wong, BHS'01
William Graziano, MJ'80
Robin Smith, MJ'84