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CSI: MTSU
MTSU’S signature, reputational forensic science program solves crimes across Tennessee—and the world
Article by Skip Anderson, Allison Gorman, and Drew Ruble
His research goes by titles such as “Common Household Rope and an Outdoor Hanging,” “Cervical Vertebrae Entrapment in the Noose,” and “Evidence of Prehistoric Violent Trauma from a Cave in Middle Tennessee.”
Such scholarly, albeit gruesome, work in the field of trauma has earned MTSU Professor Hugh Berryman a reputation as one of the nation’s foremost forensic anthropologists; in fact, he’s one of only 120 board-certified forensic anthropologists in the world.
Venerable institutions like the Smithsonian Institution regularly tap Berryman’s expertise on bones and bone trauma. In 2005, the Smithsonian invited him to join an elite scientific research team examining the 9,300-year-old skeleton dubbed “Kennewick Man.”
For the past 24 years he also has served as a consultant to the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command Central Identification Laboratory (now the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency) in Hawaii, one of the world’s most technologically advanced forensic labs.
In 2012, Berryman received the T. Dale Stewart Award—the highest honor bestowed upon a forensic anthropologist in the United States.
Certainly the glamorization of forensics on television and in fiction has inflamed student interest across the U.S. At MTSU, Berryman has turned that fascination with forensics into a flagship program for the University.
Forensic Institute for Research and Education
FY17–21
• $387,130 external funding
• 6 proposals
THE HOUSE THAT BERRYMAN BUILT
He did so in large part by founding MTSU’s Forensic Institute for Research and Education (FIRE), which advances forensic science through education, research, and community service in collaboration with faculty, students, and community partners.
FIRE accomplishes these goals in part by offering crucial training to medicolegal death investigators, local law enforcement, and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. Suffice it to say that when skeletal remains are found anywhere in Tennessee, there’s a strong likelihood that Berryman will be on the road and behind the yellow crime tape. The institute itself is no doubt on speed dial for many middle Tennessee counties.
Research and grant work also is substantial at FIRE, bringing money into the University through a wide range of efforts—perhaps the most significant involving identification attempts and the return of soldiers who died in the Mexican-American War (1846). Berryman called upon over 30 scientists and historians to assist in this endeavor.
Last, the institute boasts a highly specialized student experiential learning team that gains access to active crime scenes across the state (in cooperation with local and state law enforcement) to prepare its team for future careers. The Forensic
Anthropology Search and Recovery (FASR) Team, founded in 2006 and composed of a maximum of 15 students annually, assists law enforcement in the recovery and documentation of skeletal remains from crime scenes and assists medical examiners in identifying unknown skeletal remains and assessing trauma.
“Students are our most important work at MTSU. I have always been very proud of my FASR Team students,” Berryman said.
Consider these recent former FASR Team members, each of whom graduated in the past three years:
Devin Adcox, who worked as an autopsy technician for the Davidson County Medical Examiner’s Office, is currently attending graduate school at California State University–Chico.
Sunny Lusins was hired as a medicolegal death investigator with the Davidson County Medical Examiner’s Office to assist forensic pathologists in their autopsies by investigating all unnatural deaths in the greater Nashville area.
Kendall Denney was hired by the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department as a crime scene investigator.
Tiffany Saul, another MTSU graduate and an early FASR Team member, has established key FIRE programs, including a forensic isotope laboratory— one of the few in the nation—through a National Institute of Justice grant and an international study abroad program in forensic aviation archaeology to recover airmen missing in action from WWII.
The list goes on and on.
Berryman agrees that students these days are attracted to the profession for obvious pop culture reasons. “Shows like the CSIs and Bones have helped generate interest in the forensic sciences as a career option, that’s for sure,” he said.
But the institute isn’t resting its future hopes on such continued fascination with television programming. To cultivate new student prospects and to advance its mission, it also launched a four-day summer camp (“CSI: MTSU”) that annually accommodates 35 high school students, divides them into teams, and has them compete to solve a crime.
Scenarios are based on actual forensic cases and give students a chance to work with law enforcement agencies.
“CSI: MTSU starts with a 911 call, and that’s their only clue,” Berryman said. “We would have a crime scene set up where they could investigate and record evidence, and they could interview the various characters involved. Some would tell the truth, and some would be lying—just like the real world.”
Breakout sessions provide training in various areas of forensics, including DNA, fingerprints, blood pattern analysis, tire and shoe impressions, and ballistics.
“On the last day, each team would use PowerPoint presentations to present their theories to a panel of judges, who could ask questions,” Berryman said. “Parents and grandparents would be invited and encouraged to ask their own questions.”
ROOTS AND BRANCHES
Berryman’s understanding of juvenile fascination with forensics is authentic. He traces his own interest in forensic anthropology to his childhood growing up on his family’s farm in west Tennessee.
A meteorite ended its 4.5 billion-year journey on the Berryman farm in 1908. Berryman’s maternal grandfather, John Fagan, at the age of 13 found a 22-pound chunk of rock in the tobacco field that hadn’t been there the day before—the renowned Palmersville Meteorite. For the remainder of the century, the meteorite would serve as a doorstop, a nutcracker, a boot scraper, and a conversation piece. “Today, this rusty rock serves as our only family heirloom,” Berryman jokes.
If that meteorite sparked Berryman’s imagination, rocks of a different sort discovered on the farm fueled a bonfire. Anthropologists call them “projectile points,” and laypersons call them “arrowheads.” And the Berryman farm would occasionally yield one.
“When you’re holding an artifact like that in your hands, you’re holding the thoughts of their creator from hundreds or thousands of years ago,” Berryman said. “If you look at an artifact such as a ceramic vessel, it’s more than what you’re seeing. Whoever made that had a mental image of what they wanted it to look like; their fingers fashioned what their mind saw, and you’re holding in your hands their thoughts some 800 or so years later.”
Not only did these artifacts stir his imagination, but they also awoke his long-dormant interests in academic pursuits.
“I was one of the worst students Palmersville High School ever turned out,” he said. “My school counselor told me that I was not college material.”
It was under the tutelage of William M. Bass at the University of Tennessee that Berryman would take his first strides toward forensic anthropology. Bass established the world’s first “body farm,” as novelist Patricia Cornwell dubbed the otherwise unassuming plot of land planted with human bodies in various conditions and stages of decomposition for scientific research that aids in forensic recovery and identification.
“There are 206 bones in the human body,” Berryman said. “And it doesn’t take long to learn what a human femur looks like. But a fragment of a bone is a whole different thing.”
Hugh Berryman, FIRE founder
Once a week, Bass would give his students a quiz with 20 fragments.
“The final exam included the dreaded black box,” Berryman said. “We had 3.5 minutes to place our hands inside and identify, by name and side, 10 bone pieces by feel alone.”
Bass, who’s now retired, "taught me ways to estimate skeletal age, sex, ancestry, stature, diseases they may have had, and traumas that may have resulted in their death. The human skeleton records its own history,” Berryman said, “and if you know how to read that history, it’s almost as though you’re conducting an interview with the decedent.”
Decades later, Berryman would establish another important pillar of FIRE’s mission—the William M. Bass Lectureship Series. Twice per year, the series brings top people from the field to campus.
“These are leaders in the field who even laypeople might know,” Berryman said. “To name a few, we’ve had Michael Boden, who was a witness in the O.J. Simpson [murder] trial; Kathy Reichs, who developed the TV series Bones; and Doug Owsley, who was part of the team investigating the aftermath of the siege of the Branch Dividian cult in Waco, Texas. He also identified one of the victims of the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.
“Through this lectureship, our students have access to some of the world’s leading experts in the forensic sciences.”
PASSING THE BATON
At press time, Berryman was in the process of retiring from MTSU. But he is confident that the institute will be in capable hands with Tom Holland as director.
Holland—also among the mere 120 forensic anthropologists certified by the
American Board of Forensic Anthropology—has an international reputation not unlike Berryman’s. Formerly the scientific director of the Department of Defense’s Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, Holland has led forensic recoveries around the world, from the barren deserts of Iraq to the steamy jungles of Vietnam to the snow-covered mountains of North Korea.
In his DOD position, Holland held the awesome responsibility for approving the identifications of all U.S. military personnel from past military conflicts—including the Vietnam Unknown Soldier from Arlington National Cemetery.
A longtime consultant to the New York State Police, Holland routinely briefs high-ranking military and government officials including the U.S. secretaries of state and defense.
“Hugh Berryman took an ambitious dream for a forensic institute at MTSU and made it a reality. His will be very hard shoes to fill, but we have found just the person in Tom Holland,” MTSU Provost Mark Byrnes said.
Holland will inherit a tremendous asset at MTSU in Saul, a research assistant professor with FIRE who earned her B.S. in Anthropology and M.S. in Biology from MTSU and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from UT. She has developed collaborative national and international partnerships through the forensic isotope laboratory and has partnered with the aforementioned Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency to launch the aviation archaeological missions for MTSU students in France.
Every university wants all its programs to be as good as they can be. But some, by nature of the quality of the faculty and the uniqueness of the program, rise to a higher level nationally. The forensic program at MTSU—and the institute it supports—is precisely one of those signature, reputational programs impacting all of Tennessee.
