Endless Thread - Bonus: Glitter's Connection To Forensic Science

Episode Date: November 14, 2019

Get ready for some extra sparkle on the heels of last week’s deep dive into “The Great Glitter Mystery.” Retired Forensic Scientist Ed Jones has one of the world’s largest glitter collections. And his side hobby has served him well over the years – glitter helped him solve a murder case back in 2001.

Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR Boston. If you missed last week's episode about the Great Glitter Mystery, stop right now. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Go listen to that right now. And then come back for this sweet, sweet bonus content. But if you did listen to the Great Glitter Mystery, you are in for some extra to sparkle right now, my friends. As you heard in the episode, we went down a lot of rabbit holes, and we talked to a lot of

people while we were trying to figure out the largest mystery customer of the New Jersey glitter manufacturer named Glitter X. During our quest, it became clear that some of the people we talked to, the rabbit holes we dove down, could be episodes in and of themselves, which is how we get today's snack time, about someone who told us without any clues that he thought GlitterX's largest customer was connected to the paint industry. That would be my guess. Whose guess? Ed Jones's guess.

Well, I hope I could give a good guess. Ed better hope he could give a good guess because he's got credentials. You want us to present those credentials? Ed's got what is thought to be the largest glitter collection in the world. more than a thousand unique samples. How do you store all of this, Ed? I'm picturing like just shelves and shelves and shelves of little glass jars.

Small thousand in a three-ring binder. Wow, so just very small samples, huh? If you can see your plastic sheet with three holes punched on it, with 20 slots. Coin collectors use them to put their coins in. Well, what I use is those same sheets. Ed's interest. obsession with glitter started with an obsession with microscopes.

I'm kind of addicted to the microscope. I belong to microscope clubs, and I make things for the microscope and under the microscope. Glitter is so fun to look at under the microscope because it's man-made, and you can make it in all these visually exciting forms, which you really don't see with the naked eye, but under the microscope, they become apparent. And I've collected it for many, many years and used it in my artwork. Oh, what kind of art do you make? Microscopes slides that usually spell something out in 12. I'd spell out like 2001 and the year, and I would put that all on a microscope slide, which would just be normal size print. Whoa. Whoa. So it looks, when you look at it not under a microscope, it just looks like

regular writing, and then you put it under the microscope. Then you go, ooh. Ed has a lot of experience with microscopes because, well... I'm a retired scientist from the Ventra Sharf's Crime Lab, and I'm a forensic scientist. A forensic scientist with a love for glitter and a specialty in trace evidence. Well, the funny way to... Okay. In reality, trace evidence is pretty much anything which can't...

can be compared and or analyzed, even though trace implies it's small. Sometimes we deal with very large things. The common thinking of trace evidence is glitter falls into the same category as all. Anytime there is a contact, there is a transfer. A transfer as in, oh, hey, were you around glitter earlier today? How did I know? Oh, because it's all over you. And in all cases involving trace evidence, there's always the trance.

there's always the triangle between the victim. One of the reasons why glitter is so good is because it's so small and it's so hard to clean up. And because it's so hard to clean up, glitter actually helped solve a murder case that Ed worked on back in 2001. The victim, Megan Barroso, had red glitter in her hair, a remnant of the Fourth of July party she was on her way home from at the time. And the suspect, Vincent Sanchez, hadn't cleaned out his truck well enough afterwards. I actually found glitter on her. The scalp actually peels all in that form of degradation.

I was looking through the scalp under the microscope and articles out of her hair on his truck. The trace evidence triangle. Victim, suspect, crime scene was complete. Although Ed has retired from forensic science, his glitter collection could still serve as a useful crime-solving tool. In fact, part of it came from a former colleague of his. at the Ventura Crime Lab. Manufacture, he got like 150 different samples from the issue of criminals, and then he distributed those samples.

Well, Ed couldn't ultimately help us solve our own glitter mystery. He still gets to be listed on the Wikipedia page for glitter for that beast of a three-ring binder glitter collection. And he can share in our frustration over the general secrecy in the industry. And buying them, whenever I buy them, it doesn't really say who manufactures. it. It just says who distributes it. Oh, wow. Which is really kind of difficult for any kind of serious tracking or tracing.

A little suspicious, if you ask me. A little bit, though, given everything we have learned about the glitter industry at this point, not shocking. All that glitters is none of your damn business. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music.

Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast.

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We actually don't know, but we're on the case. We will report back next week.