KEENESBURG — While digging a shallow grave for two murder victims, Catherine Gaither and Thomas Netwal compared notes and considered their next move.
“Think like a murderer who’s burying the evidence,” college professor Gaither told her shovel mate. “What would you do next?”
“Well first off,” said Netwal, a 30-year veteran of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. “I wouldn’t be doing this in broad daylight.”
True. But just about every other part of the murder scene that Gaither, Netwal and a handful of others from Metropolitan State College of Denver pieced together Monday morning seemed pretty close to form.
But the true test happens this fall, when Metro State students enrolled in forensic anthropology, chemistry and crime-scene investigation will descend on the same corner of the Buffalo Ridge Landfill — about 5 miles north of Keenesburg — to see if they can answer the question of what happened to the unfortunate couple.
Good luck to them. Because in about two hours Monday, under a baking sun, Gaither and her confederates had done their worst and produced a top-notch crime scene.
“Not too bad,” said Gaither, who teaches anthropology at Metro State.
“That’s one of the best crime scenes I’ve ever seen,” said Netwal, who teaches CSI classes at the college.
They had gathered shell casings and broken beer bottles and dressed their “victims” in torn clothing to illustrate a violent end to the couple’s lives. They were then tucked into the grave and covered up with dirt.
The bodies are laboratory bones mixed with actual skeletal casts of crime victims. They are also pockmarked with gunshot holes and other evidence of an especially nasty murder.
There are other clues strewn about the grave, which rests alongside makeshift mounds that used to hold other bodies dumped at the landfill by Gaither and her students.
It will be up to a new batch of students to determine which is the new grave and then slowly and painstakingly weigh, catalog and produce credible evidence that would be handed over to police, said Gaither.
“This is the type of class where we get to the basic uses of forensic anthropology,” Gaither said. “But it’s so hard to find anywhere where we can actually go out and dig and examine evidence. It just doesn’t work as well if you are in a lab.”
But, Gaither said, she is lucky that Waste Management of Colorado managers were willing to let her use a small portion of the 1,130-acre landfill.
“They were great, we couldn’t do this type of work without them,” Gaither said.
“It’s fun to see them work,” said Buffalo Ridge site manager Jack Epple. “It’s something a little different anyway.”
In a previous class, a Waste Management employee used a front-end loader to dig a mock mass grave for Gaither.
Besides examining the skeletons, students this fall will be asked to run DNA and fingerprint analysis of the crime scene as well as a chemical analysis of the other pieces of evidence.
Most of the students in Netwal’s class are juniors and seniors hoping to eventually get hired as police officers. But there also is a smattering of English majors, hoping one day to write the great American detective novel, said Netwal, who retired from CBI and began working at Metro State in 2005.
“This will be a great experience for them,” Netwal said. “We try and make this as real as possible, so we will ‘salt the scene’ with all kinds of different things for them to look at.”
April Hill, assistant professor of chemistry at Metro State, said her forensic chemistry students will be at the site, gaining valuable insights into an almost real-world scenario.
“This is so great,” Hill said. “There is just so much you can learn in a lab.”
Monte Whaley: 720-929-0907 or mwhaley@denverpost.com
