Whodunit?

By Drew Lindsay

The Connecticut State Police headquarters straddles a low hill just outside the city limits of Meriden, about 25 miles south of Hartford. The site used to be a boys' reform school, and most of its dozen or so buildings are old, stone war horses that wheeze with age. But at one end of the compound stands a low-slung structure, its spanking new brick capped with a shiny green metal roof. Here, in quiet, cool rooms often lit only by the glow of computer monitors, roughly 30 scientists, technicians, ex-cops, and other forensic experts assigned to the state's crime lab pore over evidence from murders, sexual assaults, fraud, robberies, and the like. Many of these sleuths hold advanced degrees--even Ph.D.s--in forensics or more pedestrian sciences like chemistry. They read magazines like Microscopy Today , and their shoptalk is laced with jargon and acronyms--ESDA, VSC-1, and FTIR--that make even the most grisly murder seem routine, another day at the office.

Framed and hanging on a wall just past the building's reception area and a card-key entry are clippings that tell the story of the "Woodchipper Murder," a case from the late 1980s in which a husband killed his wife and stuffed her body through a woodchipper. It was the first time in Connecticut that prosecutors put someone on trial for murder without a body to back up their charge, but Henry Lee, the lab's director, found the proof needed to convict, matching nail polish from a severed finger to a brand found in the dead woman's bedroom. Since then, Lee has free-lanced his services in a number of high-profile cases--most recently, the investigation of White House aide Vincent Foster's suicide. In the process, he's become one of the country's best-known crime busters. Fans of the Court TV network will probably remember that he took the stand as a star witness for the O.J. Simpson defense team last year and smacked his hand repeatedly in red paint in a dramatic demonstration of how blood splatters.

It is Lee and his crack team that school officials in Fairfield, Connecticut, have turned to for help in solving a mystery of their own. It all began last winter when district officials noticed a suspiciously high number of erasures on students' standardized tests. By spring, the publisher of the test had concluded that someone--or more than one person--had tampered with the answer sheets turned in by Stratfield School, one of Fairfield's nine elementary schools. By summer, the school board of this 7,000-student district had assembled a team to investigate the tampering that included Lee's crime lab, a retired judge, a nationally known testing expert, and a firm of private investigators headed...