Justin Smith: Balix

M A N W E M E S S E D U P B A L I X . C O M

9 WORST INVENTIONS EVER![ pg. 369 ]

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MAN’s BEST FRIEND?

tripledogdareyou to eat

JELLIED VEAL LOAF

the weird sciencebehind scent dogs

Replacement

REFScut it out

I WILL PUTSOMETHING HERE!

IDK what it is YET

Look at meyou know you want to cause I am awesome

contentf e a t u r e s

O N T H E C O V E Rpg.20 What the Jellied is This?pg.39 9 Worst Inventionspg.65 Replacement Refs Cut It Outpg.78 Hope for Change to School Lunchpg.99 In Dogs We Trust

Elijah Wood PHOTGRAPHED EXLUSIVELY FOR BALIX BY Ni-gel Parry. SUIT, SHIRT, TIE, AND SHOES BY Giorgio Armani

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Arnold Gringrich (1903-1976) FOUNDING EDITOR David Granger EDITOR IN CHIEF Peter Griffin DEPUTY EDITOR Helene F. Rubinstein EDITORIAL DIRECTOR David Curcurito DESIGN DIRECTOR Lisa Hintelmann EDITORIAL PROJECTS DIRECTOR Mark Warren EXECUTIVE EDITOR Nick Sullivan FASHION DIRECTOR John Kenney MAN-AGING EDITOR Ryan D’Agostino, Ross McCammon, Tyler Cabot ARTICLES EDITORS Richard Dorment SENIOR EDITOR Peter Martin SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR Mark Mikin (mobile editiors) ASSISTANT EDITOR Matt Goulet ASSISTANT TO THE EDITOR IN CHIEF Jessie Kissinger, Anna Peele, Elizabeth Sile EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS ART Strovinski Pierre A R T DIRECTOR Michael Wilson DEPUTY ART DIRECTOR Geraldson Chua DESIGN ASSISTANT Steve Fusco DIGITAL IMAGING SPECIALIST P H O -T O G R A P H Y Michael Norseng PHOTO DIRECTOR Alison Unterreiner PHOTO EDITOR Deb Wenof PHOTO COORDINATOR

IN DOGS WE TRUSTTestimony from forensic experts can be the most persuasive evidence presented at trial, but often juries don’t realize that the analysis may not be so scientific. And as the story of deputy Keith Pikett, master of the dog-scent lineup, shows, investigations can sometimes lead to the greatest crime of all: putting inno-cent people behind bars. - Micheal Hall

ROMNEYCAREMy life is easier because I live in Massachu-

setts, where Mitt once was governor. He

introduced a universal-health0care plan for

which I am grateful and proud. So why is he so

ashamed of it? - Ron Popelli

OBAMA NUMBERSSifting through the noise, an unbiased look

at the data of the last four years — the

highs, lows, and obfuscations of the current

political landscape. - Bob Jones

TELLER’S QUESTThe loudest voice in magic is coming from its

quietest practitioner. Famed Magician Teller is

doing what few magicians have dared to do in

decades. - Jaun George

DETROIT BUILTFrom bauxite 20 feet underground in Suri-

name to the humming grace of a stamping

plant in Flint, Michigan: How a great Ameri-

can car is made. - Tim Taylor

BALIX STYLEAround the world in style — ten stops, nine

time zones, and 26,814 miles. The suits and

sportswear you need for travel, whether you’re

flying to India or Indianapolis. -Amanda Hugs


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pg 89 REPLACEMENT REFS CUT IT OUTGoodell stood inside an opening-night dressing room

and welcomed home his stars of the game, his personal

MVPs of the Dallas Cowboys’ victory over the New York

Giants, the men dressed up as NFL officials as if they

were ready for Halloween. - Ian O’Connor

pg 45 WHAT THE JELLIED IS THIS?Jellied beef loaf is a meat product made with shredded

beef which has been mixed with gelatin, poured into a

mold, and allowed to set. Typically it is served cold, for

example at a brunch with an assortment of other cold

prepared foods. - Betty Crocker

pg 57 HOPE FOR CHANGE TO OUR SCHOOL LUNCH

Children and parents across the country are fed up with

the restrictive new school meal regulations implemented

by the Department of Agriculture, which has long been

touted by first lady Michelle Obama. - Justin Smith

pg 78 9 WORST INVENTION EVER From the zany to the dangerous to the just plain dumb,

here is Balix’s list (in no particular order) of some of the

world’s bright ideas that don’t work. - Matt Brooksby

pg 88 MAN AT HIS BEST: CULTURE The legacy of Steve Jobs, the superiority of Mark Helprin,

and the shocking usability of Windows 8. - Nate Helen

pg 95 SEX Are your jeans too tight? Should you be doing this thing

called the karezza? - Justin Smith

pg 105 STYLE LIKE BONDHow to dress like Bond, the return of the Fair Isle sweater,

and a leather tote made like a baseball glove. Plus: the

designer who introduced sprezzatura. - Diego Pier

pg 135 A THOUSAND WORDSThere’s a new candidate in this year’s presidential

election: Money. And it seems to be winning. - Brian Nye

b u n g l e

b o i l

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Balix is on the IPad. Check out the magshopon itunes.

Make sure to follow us on Facebook. facebook.com/balix


6 J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 3WHAT’S THE CALL?

T O U C H D O W N , F I E L D G O A L , o r S U C C E S S F U L T R YBoth arms extended above head.

F I R S T D O W NArm pointed towarddefensive team's goal.

B A L L I L L E G A L LYT O U C H E D , K I C K E D ,o r B AT T E DFingertips tap both shoulders.

M A N W E M E S S E D U P B A L I X . C O MWHAT’S THE CALL?

than those that settled the USA-USSR gold-medal basketball game in 1972.

That same year, Franco Harris made one of the most famous plays in league history, a catch forever

remembered as the Immaculate Reception. Forty years later, Russell Wilson’s winning heave to Golden Tate in Seattle qualifies as the Immaculate Deception.

Tate’s touchdown was actually M.D. Jennings’ pick in the end zone, and the whole world knows it. Tate set up his non-catch by pushing Green Bay’s Sam Shields in the back with both hands -- blasting him to the ground -- and the replays would let the whole world in on that, too.

But the official signaling for a touchdown would win out over the official signaling for a touchback, win out on an absurd interpretation of the simultaneous possession rule, and even amid the chaotic aftermath, this much was clear:

Goodell has been perpetrating a fraud on his customers. The commissioner had been advertising one product and selling another, promising something real and delivering something fake. Goodell set fire to his own brand by allowing games played and coached by the best of the best to be officiated by a propped-up group that included tailgating fans, fantasy league contestants and, of course, Lingerie League leftovers.

Bill Belichick suddenly became the ugly face of the farce by chasing one of these guys off the field Sunday night, but this has been Goodell’s game from start to finish. If he did his legacy a ton of favors by attacking the issues of player safety and concussions, he’s busy right now spraying graffiti all over that legacy.

“Awful,” Aaron Rodgers called the officiating that stole the Packers’ rightful victory.

b u n g l e

G OODELL stood inside an opening-night dressing room and welcomed home his stars of the game, his personal MVPs of the Dallas Cowboys’ victory over the New York Giants, the men dressed up as NFL officials as if they were ready to go door to door on Halloween.

The commissioner wore the look of a guy who had just escaped a head-to-toe IRS audit without a scratch. Goodell shook hands with the replacement refs, patted them hard on their backs in an atta-boy way, did everything but douse them with chilled bottles of champagne.

He had to have been afraid he would be humiliated on national TV, afraid the amateurs he hired in place of the locked-out officials would blow an endgame whistle that shouldn’t have been blown or throw an endgame flag that shouldn’t have been thrown, leaving the walls of America’s new sporting pastime to come crashing down around him.

Goodell survived that opening night, one marred more by the defending champs than the refs, and so he stood in the bowels of MetLife Stadium and acted like that trainer or ball boy you always see standing at the locker room door greeting the winning players with a series of high-fives.

But the bill finally came due Monday night, when Goodell and the owners were embarrassed and exposed in a staggering way. An overmatched circle of fools awarded the Seattle Seahawks a victory over the Green Bay Packers on a call no more legitimate

Bring back the zebras and send out the clowns.

by Ian O’Connorphoto by Otto Greule Jr.

Replacement

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S A F E T Y

Palms together above head.

8 J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 3

JELLIED BEEF LOAF3 T DICED CELERY2 T GELATINE1 C COLD WATER1 TSP. SALT1 BAY LEAF3 T LEMON JUICE2 C MEAT STOCK1 T WORCESTERSHIRE SAUCE1 T CHOPPED ONION2 C COOKED AND GROUND MEAT3 T CHOPPED GREEN PEPPER3 HARD BOILED EGGS

Soak gelatine in water, dissolve in hot meat stock, lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce. When mixture begins to thicken, add meat, onion, green pepper and eggs, cut in pieces. Put in a wet mold in which you have previously poured 1/4 inch hot gelatine. Garnish with slices of egg and green pepper.

SERVES 10-12.

-MRS. H. C. BRADFIELD

b o i l

ELLIED beef loaf is a meat product made with shredded beef which has been mixed with gelatin, poured into a mold, and allowed to set. Typically it is served cold, for example at a brunch with an assortment of other cold prepared foods. For serving, the jellied beef loaf is unmolded, making it easy for people to slice wedges off and top them with assorted condiments. This specialty food item is sometimes available at delicatessens, and it can also be made at home.

This dish is one among a large family of dishes made by mixing various ingredients with gelatin or aspic and allowing them to set. These dishes were immensely popular during the 1950’s, as many period cookbooks can attest, although their popularity has since waned in favor of less elaborate preparations of food. Despite being less well known than it once was, jellied beef loaf occasionally crops up at parties and dinners in various regions of the world, along with an assortment of other molded and chilled dishes.

To make beef loaf, you need cooked and shredded beef. You may be able to obtain this from a local deli, or you can make it at home; a slow cooked beef roast is often ideal for this purpose. If you wish to add vegetables, cook and shred or finely chop them, and mix them with the beef and any desired spices. Meanwhile, dissolve some gelatin in cold water and then whisk it into a pot of beef stock, allowing the mixture to cook until it starts to firm. Mix the stock with the beef, and pour the mixture into a loaf mold of choice to set and chill before serving. Keep jellied beef loaf cool up until the point you plan to serve it, and refrigerate it promptly after serving to reduce the risk of food borne illness.

As a general rule, for every two cups of meat and vegetables, you will need two cups of stock and one and one half tablespoons of gelatin. You can also pour the mixture into small molds, if you wish to make individually molded jellied beef loaves in a variety of sizes and shapes.

What theJelliedis This?

Michelle’s health eating isn’t working out so well when see tries a healthy jellied loaf. Stu-dents aren’t so happy about their school lunch either. Find out more on the next page!

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1 0 J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 3

Cb o i l

HILDREN and parents across the country are fed up with the restrictive new school meal regulations implemented by the Department of Agriculture under the “Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010,” which has long been touted by first lady Michelle Obama.

The standards — which cap meal calories at 650 for students in kindergarten through fifth grade, at 700 calories for middle school students and 850 for high school students — also dictate the number of breads, proteins, vegetables and fruits children are allowed per meal.

A spokeswoman for Kansas Republican Rep. Tim Huelskamp, who earlier this month introduced legislation to roll back the new standards, told The Daily Caller that Huelskamp’s office has heard more complaints about the issue during the past few weeks than any other.

“This year, we’ll be hungry by 2:00,” one student, Zach Eck, told KAKETV in Kansas. “We would eat our pencils at school if they had nutritional value.”

Iowa mom Robin Wissink told TheDC that she now provides her autistic daughter Molly, a junior in high school, with a bag lunch because her school’s new menu is so unappealing. Students at St. Mark’s in Colwich, Kan. have also been “brown bagging” their meals.

And some student-athletes in Wisconsin are arguing that the calorie caps hit them especially hard, given their intense workouts and scrimmages.

“A lot of us are starting to get hungry even before the practice begins,” Mukwonago High senior Nick Blohm told

the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Our metabolisms are all sped up.”

The new lunch standards have led to the removal of some old food favorites, including a particularly popular item at one school in upstate New York: chicken nuggets.

“Now they’re kind of forcing all the students to get the vegetables and fruit with their lunch, and they took out chicken nuggets this year, which I’m not too happy about,” Chris Cimino, a senior at Mohonasen High School in upstate New York, told the Associated Press, which gave the rules a “mixed grade.”

Students in the Plum Borough School District in Pennsylvania are protesting the new federal restrictions on Twitter.

“everyone.. if you agree school lunches are expensive and small, RT this. we can fight the school! tweet #BrownBagginIt,” @TornadoBoyTubbs tweeted, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Administrators have scrambled to find creative ways to make the new menus appealing. A school district in Lake County, Fla., for example, is planning to conduct a survey to determine how to make vegetables more appealing to children, who often throw them out.

“[The regulations do] limit the food that you can put on the plate,” Alden Caldwell, the director of food services at a Brookline, Mass. school, told Wicked Local. “In theory, it’s a good idea, but in practice we’re finding that there are issues with it.”

Despite the outrage, some parents believe the ongoing obesity epidemic justifies the tight calorie standards.

“I think it’s smart to be pre-emptive and proactive at getting more nutrition fed into the kids,” Amos Johnson, a parent with students in the Lee Summit, Missouri school system, told the Lee’s Summit Journal. “I see that more as a multi-beneficial supporter for health and academic performance. I think that’s the thing I would look at.

Schools around the US say NO to Michelle’s Lunch

by Justin Smithphoto by Jaun Marks

Hope for Changeto School Lunch

When the legislation was signed into law in 2010, it received bipartisan support, including a big endorsement from Michelle Obama. “As parents, we try to prepare

decent meals, limit how much junk food our kids eat, and ensure they have a reasonably balanced diet,” the first lady said in a statement at the unveiling of the new

standards in January. “And when we’re putting in all that effort the last thing we want is for our hard work to be undone each day in the school cafeteria. When we send

our kids to school, we expect that they won’t be eating the kind of fatty, salty, sugary foods that we trying to avoid.

1 0 J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 3


1 2 J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 3

9 Worstinventions ever

C R O C S S H O E SIt doesn’t matter how popular they are, they’re pretty ugly. Crocs, introduced in 2002, mostly take the form of rubber clogs but have been transformed into high heels and loafers.

Nintendo Virtual BoyThe system consisted of bulky, bright red head-gear that completely obscured a gamer’s vision as he tried to play games rendered in rudimen-tary 3-D graphics.

Baby CageIn the 1930s, London nannies lacking space for their young ones resorted to the baby cage. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a creepy wire contraption, patented in the U.S. in 1922, that lets you claim that space outside your city window for your infant.B

Auto-TuneIt’s a technology that can make bad singers sound good and really bad singers (like T-Pain, pictured here) sound like robots.

SegwayThe Segway never brought about its promised rev-olution in transportation.

Venetian-Blind Glasses

A trend in the ‘80s, these slatted sunglasses were dead and buried until West sported them in his 2007 music video for “Stronger.”

Spam EmailOne of the most substantial stigmas attached to virtual mailboxes is spam email. One folder of utter clutter of unsolicited messages.

Hydrogenated OilsTrans fats were invented for a practical purpose. In the late 1800s, people began adding hydrogen to oils like vegetable oil to increase the shelf life of foods.

TamagotchisWhen a child asks a parent for his or her first pet, the defense platform is a given: Are you going to feed it but not with a Tamagotchis!

b o t c h

WE GOT THE TOP NINE HERE FOR YOU!GO TO BALIX.COM/50WORSTTO SEE WHAT ELSE MADE THE LIST.

BY DAN FLETCHER


SONOS

It captivated millions of people around the world for eight days in the summer of 1969. It brought glory to the embattled U.S. space program and inspired beliefs that anything was possible. It’s arguably the greatest technological feat of the 20th century. And to some, it was all a lie.

There are many different inconsistencies that have people believing that the 5 lunar landing were not real but done on a stage. We scowered the internet for what people believe to be the top inconsistency of the lunar landing and present them to you to figure out.

MOON LANDING

a HOAX?

6% 25%WHY?

US citizens believe that the lunar landing was fake.

UK citizens believe that the lunar landing was fake.

Because the astronaut was in the shadows but you could still see him clearly.Some people believe that this is because the moon surface is so reflective that the suns light was reflected onto the astronaut.

I’m really on the moon.

Really!

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The astronaut’s shoe would not leave an inprint. Something like this could only be accomplished by wet sand. Although those who believe the landing was really state that this is because of how dense the dirt is on the moon and it hold itself together.

Those that believe that the mission to the moon is true states that you can shoot a laser at the moon and you see the laser bounce back because the astronats left reflectors there.

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This graph shows the amount spent (per $100 billion) by the United States on piloted spaceflight from 1959 to 2015. It shows the impor-tance of the Apollo program and of the Space Shuttle. At right, the Space Station program and the Exploration program. In all, the US spent $500 billion over 57 years, an average of $8.3 billion a year.

* CHART INDICATES THAT 1= $100 BILLION DOLLARS. ALL FIGURES ARE IN 2010 DOLLARS.

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SATURN VDIAGRAM

1 6 J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 3


IN DOGSWE TRUSTIs mans best friend out to get him?

UINCY, the amazing bloodhound, sniffed the air around the body of Sally Blackwell, who lay half-naked in a field just outside Victoria. Blackwell, a supervisor for Child Protective Services, had been missing for a day when a county-road crew found her in a brushy field on March 15, 2006. She had been strangled with a rope, which was still on her body. Quincy’s handler, Deputy Keith Pikett, held the leash and surveyed the scene, which was teeming with officers from the Victoria Police Department, the Victoria County Sheriff’s Office, the Department of Public Safety, and the Texas Rangers. It was almost seven o’clock and would be getting dark soon.

A few hours earlier, Sam Eyre, a sergeant with the Victoria police, had called Pikett, who lived in Houston and worked out of the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office, about two hours away. Pikett (pronounced “Pie-ket”) was something of a star in law enforcement circles. For years he and his dogs—Quincy, James Bond, and Clue—had helped find missing children and escaped convicts, and they had investigated murders all over the state, including one in Victoria in 2003. They had worked with the FBI, the ATF, the Texas Rangers, and the state attorney general’s office, and they had helped solve hundreds of crimes with Pikett’s version of a technique called a scent lineup, in which his dogs matched an odor found at a crime scene to the person who left it. His dogs were so good at sniffing out the bad guys, he said, that they had made only five mistakes in fifteen years.

Standing in the field, Pikett, a lean man of 59, took out a couple of gauze pads. He knelt down and wiped one on Blackwell’s body; the other he wiped on the rope. Then he held the first up to Quincy’s nose. “Seek,” the deputy said.

Testimony from forensic experts can be the most persuasive evidence presented at trial, but often juries don’t realize that the analysis may not be so scientific. And as the story of deputy Keith Pikett, master of the dog-scent lineup, shows, investigations can sometimes lead to the greatest crime of all: putting innocent people behind bars.

by Micheal Hallphotos by Jack Gregerson

1 8 J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 3

The air scent dog works off lead, ranging back and forth in an area to pick up the human scent left by the subject. Ranging often takes the dog out of sight for several minutes at a time, so the handler must trust his dog and listen for an alert. Once the dog gets the subject's scent, he moves in to its source. The dog must then "alert" by either barking while staying with the subject or by returning to the handler and "indicating" her in some way that the handler should follow. The dog then "refinds" the subject and leads the handler to the subject.

To train an air scent dog to issue a bark alert, we start training the dog to bark on command as young and as soon as possible. The bark alert is usually the hardest area of the search sequence to get the dog to do reliably, so we start early on this behavior.

P H A S E ITeam members start with

runaway searches for the new dog. A person the dog is familiar with holds the dog while the handler excites the dog and then runs away and hides. All this is done in full view of the dog with the reward, preferably a toy, in the runaway subject's hand. The handler then gives a command such as "search" or "go find."

P H A S E I IFor those dogs that we

want to give a bark alert, we now add the requirement that the dog barks when he reaches the subject. Usually the subject has to give the "speak" command. Once the dog barks the handler comes in and helps reward the dog with play and praise.

H

Quincy took off, with Pikett on the other end of the leash. An excited cry went up from the other investigators, who jumped in their vehicles. Eyre ran alongside Pikett, while Pikett’s wife, Karen, followed in an SUV with James Bond. They cruised down Hanselman Road, a two-lane blacktop, for about half a mile, then took a hard left at Loop 463. Quincy loped along, her head bobbing between the air and the pavement. She crossed under U.S. 59 and led the officers up a wide overpass that went over Business 59. Pikett stopped, put Quincy in the vehicle to rest, and took out James Bond. He pulled the scent pad out of a Ziploc bag and held it to James Bond’s nose. Again they were off.

By this point they were inside the Victoria city limits. James Bond, younger and faster than Quincy, took a left at Airline Road into a suburban neighborhood called Cimarron. The twenty-month-old bloodhound jogged through the quiet streets, finally stopping on Laguna Drive at Blackwell’s house. A truck from a local TV station was parked across the street. It had been a five-and-a-half-mile journey from the victim’s body to her home, but the dogs weren’t finished. There was a killer to catch. So Pikett held one of the scent pads to Quincy’s nose, and she took off again, turning onto the first street, Navajo Drive. At this point, Sheriff T. Michael O’Connor told Eyre that a “person of interest” in the case, Michael Buchanek, lived on the street. Buchanek had gone out on a couple of dates with Blackwell, and he had been questioned that morning. Now Quincy led Pikett and Eyre down Navajo, around a long bend, up a driveway, and to the front door of a brown brick home. It belonged to Buchanek.

ERBERT was not your typical suspect. The divorced father of two had been an officer with the sheriff’s department for 24 years. He’d run the SWAT team, taught firearms classes, and had some experience with police dogs, rising to the rank of captain before retiring, in 2004, and

taking a job with a contractor training police officers in Iraq. He had asked O’Connor to care for his children if anything happened to him while he was overseas and even left his friend a signed document granting him power of attorney. Buchanek had returned in late 2005, but only after being injured when a suicide bomber attacked his hotel.

The law enforcement officers all reconvened at ten o’clock at Cimarron Express, a nearby convenience store, buzzing with excitement about the break in the case. What was next, they asked the deputy? To be certain of the connection and to have probable cause for a search warrant, Pikett suggested a scent lineup. All he needed was a scent sample from Buchanek. O’Connor told Pikett about the document Buchanek had signed two years earlier; it was still sitting in an envelope in O’Connor’s desk drawer. Pikett said that that would do, so O’Connor retrieved it. Pikett wiped a pad across the signature and put the gauze in a bag.

Some time before midnight, at Pikett’s direction, detectives set up six paint cans twenty feet apart in the parking lot of the police station. Five of the cans contained scent samples from five other white males as foils; in the sixth was the scent pad that had been wiped along Buchanek’s signature. Pikett then held the scent pad from the rope to the nose of James Bond and walked him along the cans. According to Pikett, James Bond “alerted” on the one that held Buchanek’s scent. Pikett did the same with Quincy, using the scent pad from Blackwell’s body, and Quincy also matched Buchanek’s scent to the victim. Though Buchanek had denied having anything to do with Blackwell’s murder, he officially became a suspect, and officers obtained a warrant to search his home and car. He was barred from his home, and his car was seized.

Six days later Pikett and Eyre conducted another lineup, this time with a scent taken directly from Buchanek’s arm, in a grassy area of the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office. The three dogs did fourteen lineups using various scents from the crime scene.

P R O P E R A I R S C E N T D O G T R A I N I N G


P H A S E I I INow the dog is ready for

"blind searches" where the subject hides without the dog watching. It is essential to work into the wind so that the dog has the best chance to catch the human scent. As the dog becomes more ac-complished at this, we make the searches longer and vary the terrain. If the dog fails to bark or do a refind.

P H A S E I VNext we use subjects

unfamiliar to the dog and add variables such as length (distance and time) and new terrain. We also begin starting the search in another place than where the subject started from.

P H A S E VAgain, as with the final

phase for the Tracking Dog, Phase V is for the search team (handler and dog) that is ready for the wilderness certification test. The team needs to be ready to search for long periods with short rest breaks, covering a wide variety of terrain in all kinds of weather. Ifollow each successful exercise.

In every one, according to Pikett, the dogs picked Buchanek’s scent. Once again, Pikett’s dogs had nailed their man.

They did it again a year later, when in the summer of 2007 Pikett helped Houston police nab Ronald Curtis for a string of cell phone store burglaries. It wasn’t long before Houston investigators called again, asking for help in solving a brutal triple slaying; Pikett and his hounds matched two men to the crime, Cedric Johnson and Curvis Bickham, both of whom were charged with capital murder. In March 2009 an officer with the Yoakum Police Department took a scent pad to Pikett after two women, on two separate Sunday mornings, had been attacked—one was raped and the other robbed. The pad had come from the hand of Calvin Miller, a mechanic who, an informant told police, had been buying a lot of cocaine lately. Pikett ran a series of scent lineups using all three dogs. Each one picked Miller.

Buchanek, Curtis, Johnson, Bickham, Miller: five men from three cities incriminated by one forensic technique. But they had one other thing in common: All five were innocent. In August 2006 the son of Blackwell’s boyfriend confessed to her murder. The Houston burglaries continued while Curtis was in jail, and eventually the actual perpetrator was caught. In April 2009 another man confessed to the Houston murders. That same month Miller was exonerated by a DNA test. Between them, Curtis, Johnson, Bickham, and Miller spent nearly three years in jail, their lives shattered. Buchanek was more fortunate. He was never charged, but he had to deal with five months of stares and whispers. “My friends turned their backs on me,” he says. “People from my church didn’t want anything to do with me. I was locked in my house, crying and praying, trying to figure out why my world fell apart. I spent my adult life defending the Constitution. As far as I’m concerned, Pikett and the others walked all over it.”

The unscientific methodWhat could be more terrifying than

to be accused of a crime you didn’t

commit? How about to be accused by a forensic expert? This doesn’t happen on popular television dramas like CSI, CSI: New York, and CSI: Miami. On those shows investigators and lab technicians confidently use often-fantastical techniques to solve violent crimes, like the time an examiner poured a special paste into a knife wound and extracted a replica of the murder weapon.

If Keith Pikett, Quincy, Clue, and James Bond were to appear on CSI, he would be quirky, they would be lovable, and the suspects would be 100 percent guilty. But can dogs—which are reliably used to track criminals and sniff out drugs and bombs—actually match scents in paint cans in a parking lot? We don’t know. Various states have used scent lineups, but there’s little science to back them up. Quincy, Clue, and James Bond had never had any standard training, and they had never been certified. Pikett (who declined to be interviewed for this story) had no specialized forensic training either, and his protocols and methodologies, which he developed himself, were primitive at best. “A gypsy reading tea leaves and chicken bones is probably as reliable as a dog doing a scent lineup,” Steve Tyler, the current district attorney of Victoria County, told me. Yet Pikett worked on more than two thousand cases, helped indict more than one thousand suspects, and testified in forty cases as an expert witness before retiring this past February.

The truth is, police and prosecutors have been using questionable forensic techniques for years, things involving bite marks, blood-spatter patterns, and even ear and lip prints. They use them because they help solve crimes. But over the past decade we’ve begun to understand just

P R O P E R A I R S C E N T D O G T R A I N I N G

“My friends turned their backs on me, people from my church didn’t want anything to do with me. I was locked in my house, crying and praying, trying to figure out why my world fell apart. I spent my adult life defending the Constitution. As far as I’m concerned, Pikett and the others walked all over it.”

2 0 J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 3

how unscientific forensic science can be. In the lab and at the crime scene, unsound techniques have incriminated the wrong person time and again. The most visible evidence of this is the 252 DNA exonerations nationwide since 1989—many of which, according to the Innocence Project, involved some form of improper or faulty forensic science. And these exonerees were the ones whose stories had happy endings, saved by DNA taken from old crime-scene samples that had not been discarded; no one knows how many unlucky people convicted on faulty science still languish in prison.

Texas has had forty DNA exonerations, more than any other state, including several high-profile cases that involved forensic science. In 1986 David Pope, of Dallas, was convicted of aggravated sexual assault and sentenced to 45 years in prison based in part on the “voice-print identification” technology of a sound spectrograph that two analysts had used to compare his voice with one left on the victim’s answering machine. Pope was exonerated by DNA in 2001. In 1994 hair-comparison analysis was used to wrongly send Michael Blair to death row for the murder of Ashley Estell, a seven-year-old Plano girl; he was also exonerated by a series of DNA tests. Some terrible forensic science mistakes have been discovered without the magic of DNA. Arson science was used in Fort Stockton in 1987 to convict Ernest Willis of murder and send him to death row. It took seventeen years to convince authorities that there was no actual science to the arson evidence, and in 2004 he was released. It turns out that even fingerprint analysis—the gold standard for most of the past century—can lead to mistakes. In 2004 three FBI fingerprint examiners and one independent one investigating the Madrid train bombing that killed 191 people made four unbelievable errors, matching a print found on a bag of detonators near the scene to the finger of Brandon Mayfield, a Muslim attorney from Oregon. He was sent to jail for two weeks, where he spent seven days in solitary confinement. It was a very public humiliation for the greatest crime-solving lab of all time—made worse when Mayfield sued the government and was awarded $2 million.

Today, law enforcement organizations and the legal system are facing a crucial moment in the history of forensic science. The Mayfield fiasco, coming on the heels of mistakes at state crime labs all over the country (most notoriously in Texas, where the Houston Police Department crime lab was closed in 2002 because of a series of problems), helped spur the federal government into action. In 2007 Congress authorized the National Academy of Sciences to investigate forensic science, and seventeen scientists,

medical examiners, professors, and judges spent two years interviewing crime-lab personnel, police officers, lawyers, and scholars. Their report, released in February 2009, was a detailed summary of the “serious problems” of the forensic science system. Most disciplines had no standardized protocols, oversight was inconsistent or nonexistent, and education and training requirements varied across jurisdictions. There was too much room for human error. The report slammed techniques like bite-mark and hair comparisons, but it also went after fingerprint analysis, which the NAS said was essentially subjective. In fact, except for biological disciplines, like DNA (which has a standardized methodology in which scientists examine a person’s genetic profile by comparing thirteen specific locations on the chromosome), the report found that “forensic science professionals have yet to establish either the validity of their approach or the accuracy of their conclusions.” And the courts—the gatekeepers of the whole process—“have been utterly ineffective in addressing this problem.”

Invalid science, ineffective courts, and the ultimate punishment: A few months after the NAS report was released, the country got an idea of just how disastrous a forensic science mistake could be when the New Yorker published a long story about the Cameron Todd Willingham case. Willingham had been convicted of murdering his three children by setting fire to his family’s Corsicana home in 1991, and he had been executed in 2004. The guilty verdict came primarily because of the testimony of two longtime arson

Texas has had forty DNA exoner-ations, more than any other state, including several high-profile cases that involved forensic science.

Today, law enforcement organiza-tions and the legal system are facing a crucial moment in the history of forensic science.

It would not have surprised Willingham, Buchanek, Curtis, or any of the other victims of bad forensic science.


investigators—an assistant fire chief and a deputy fire marshal—neither of whom had much education in the actual science of fire. The two men sleuthed their way through the burned-out structure, and though they found no indisputable physical evidence of arson in the house—no gas can, no kerosene, no matches—they did find, on the floor of the children’s bedroom, strange marks that they identified as “pour patterns,” which indicated that an accelerant had been used. They also found “crazed glass,” pieces of broken window suffused with spiderweb cracks, which suggested that an accelerant had been used, causing the fire to burn superfast and superhot. And they found charring under a threshold plate; common sense indicated that an accelerant had been poured there too. By the time their tour was complete, they believed the fire had been intentionally set.

Willingham protested his innocence until his execution. Afterward, others

began protesting too, including seven contemporary arson scientists and investigators, some of whom had done actual science experiments and analytical chemistry on fires and all of whom were stunned at the lack of hard science used to determine that the fire was arson. Each of the seven reached the conclusion that every indicator of arson the two original investigators had found was invalid. “The investigators had poor understandings of fire science and failed to acknowledge or apply the contemporaneous understanding of the limitations of fire indicators,” wrote Craig Beyler, a nationally recognized fire scientist, in an August 2009 report to the state’s new Forensic Science Commission, a panel founded by the Legislature to investigate faulty or negligent forensic science. “Their methodologies did not comport with the scientific method or the process of elimination. A finding of arson could not be sustained.”

The Willingham case got national attention this October when, two days before Beyler was to testify publicly before the commission, Governor Rick Perry replaced three members, including attorney Sam Bassett, its chairman. The new chairman, Williamson County DA John Bradley, promptly canceled the meeting. Everyone from texas monthly to CNN called the move an attempt to cover up the truth: Since there was no evidence of arson, there was no crime, and hence Texas could have executed an innocent man. When Bradley finally scheduled his first meeting as the new chair, in January, he moved it to Harlingen (the previous twelve meetings had been held in Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio). But instead of discussing the Willingham case, he spent the whole meeting talking about policies and procedures.

“every contact leaves its trace”It would not have surprised Willingham,

Buchanek, Curtis, or any of the other victims of bad forensic science that the father of crime-scene investigation was a fictional character. Sherlock Holmes, the subject of four novels and 56 short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle between 1887 and 1927, was one of the most popular characters in fiction in a new era of science, a man who used his superior sleuthing skills to solve baffling crimes. He was the first to analyze handwriting, typewriter-key impressions, and footprints, connecting evidence at the scene with the person who left it. He had superb observational and deductive-reasoning skills that allowed him to make superhuman leaps of logic, as when he once deduced that Watson had a “careless servant girl” because of the six parallel marks on the inside of his shoe, which the detective saw in the flickering light of a fireplace. He was always right, as are his modern-day TV counterparts.

What was the original inspiration for Wilfred?

I was at [co-creator] Adam Zwar’s place and he told me about going on a date with this girl where he went back to her place and there was a dog sitting on the couch. The dog was looking at him as if to say ‘what are you planning on doing with my missus?

I just started acting as this dog. We didn’t even realize we were improvising anything, but then we went ‘that’s hilarious’. So we wrote it all down and a week later we shot it.Is there much difference making a show in America to making one in Australia?

The real difference is in the development process. There are no real guidelines or maps in Australia as to how to write a show, whereas in Hollywood it’s where the TV industry is created and there’s a lot of work that goes into development.

Also in LA there’s such a respect for this industry. Hollywood is a pillar of Western culture and so it’s respected. In Australia, although we have an industry, it’s not respected as much - not unless you’ve made it overseas. Of course in Hollywood it’s more competitive but that’s where I want to be - I want to be competitive and make the best TV in the world.Tell us about your Australian accent in the US version of Wilfred.

The story goes that when they asked about the dog’s accent someone said ‘didn’t you know all dogs have an Australian accent?’ They laughed and that was the last time it was brought up.

It was crazy and I was surprised they’d want to go with that, but I’m pleased to see how people have responded and how they feel the Australian accent on Wilfred strengthens the comedy. That’s a great relief for me.Would you have changed the accent if they’d asked you to?

I wouldn’t have played an American Wilfred, no. I can’t imagine me doing that. With the gift of hindsight, though, maybe it would have been a good idea to do that because Wilfred has had a good response in the States and it’s opened a lot of doors for me - and maybe more would be open to me as an American-sounding person.

But the thing is that with accents and comedy it’s different to drama. British comedy - which has been a big inspiration to me for many years - is very different to Australian comedy and different again to American comedy. So it’s not just a matter of putting on an accent and being able to carry a comedy TV show or film.

INTERVIEW WITHJason Gann

by Fred Jones

Documents

Justin Smith: Balix