Liz Ziolkowski, MJ'87

By Karen Feldscher

At came down to tinsel, spider legs, and an orange carpet.

A man had been beaten, his head bashed in. His body, wrapped in a sheet, was found dumped in a parking lot.

Liz Ziolkowski, director of the trace evidence unit for the Boston Police Department crime lab, examined the body with colleagues. They found concrete dust, orange-colored fibers, spider legs, cobwebs, and tinsel. Wherever the man had been killed, those items had been present.

But it wasn’t until two years later that the forensics team got a chance to examine the suspected crime scene. It had taken that long for the police to get a warrant to search the apartment where a witness said the killing had taken place. After all that time, their hopes of finding evidence had dimmed.

“We looked for blood, for a weapon. We tested many little stains. But we found nothing,” recalls Ziolkowski. But she remembered a particular piece of evidence they’d collected from the body, “these orange fibers that were trilobed, shaped like a fat shamrock. Trilobed fibers are usually carpet fibers.”

No orange carpet in the apartment, though; just a tile floor. But around the perimeter of a room, the investigators found tacking strips with nails sticking out; they were covered with blue fibers, indicating there’d once been a blue carpet there. And around the base of a radiator, Ziolkowski found another clump of fibers—orange ones.

In the basement, where the victim had allegedly been thrown after being killed, the team took more samples. The concrete used to make the basement floor matched the concrete dust found on the victim. There were spider legs and cobwebs, too—though that didn’t necessarily prove anything: Most basements have spiders and cobwebs.

But there was tinsel. “There was a Christmas tree in the basement that still had tinsel on it,” Ziolkowski says.

Back at the crime lab, Ziolkowski found the orange fibers matched up. And the tinsel? “We had to ask, how different is one kind of tinsel from another? Is it all the same? We had to do a whole tinsel study,” she recalls. She even talked to an entomologist to find out how common the spider legs were.

In the end, all the evidence found at the murder scene—the orange fibers, the tinsel, the spider legs, the concrete dust—matched the evidence found on the body. At trial, the suspect was found guilty. “The trace evidence helped to tell the story,” says Ziolkowski.

It’s why Ziolkowski, who’s worked at the crime lab since 1994, likes her job so much. Trace evidence—paint, glass chips, hairs, fibers, fingerprints, footprints, gunshot residue, bloodstains—can be crucial in solving crimes.

“When someone commits a crime, something will be left behind, and something will be transferred,” she says. “The trick is recognizing it, collecting it, preserving it, then knowing what to do with it. We use the tools of science to make a difference to people in court, to people in the victims’ families.”

She adds, “If you love science, it’s a way to use it in a very applied manner.”


See other profiles:

Irene Wong, BHS'01
William Graziano, MJ'80
Robin Smith, MJ'84
Paul Zambella, MJ'81