Mary Manhein’s forensic tools
Thursday, October 25, 2007
This fall marks forensic anthropologist Mary Manhein’s 20th year as director of the FACES laboratory, an institution the state named in 2006 as keepers of a database of nearly 400 unidentified bodies from cold cases across Louisiana. Manhein’s team has ID’d about 100 so far.
“There’s no database like this in the country,” Manhein says. “Nobody else is going out and picking the brains of detectives like we are.” Recently she worked with state legislators to do away with an old law that required administrators of X-rays to stand 12 feet from the machine. Now she uses her latest toy, the Nomad, a hand-held X-ray device that looks like Marvin the Martian’s raygun, to capture digital dental images. The change could have a major effect on dentistry in the state. No more standing up in that giant X-ray machine. Manhein loves her Nomad. Here are some of her other favorite tools.
Identification of Pathological Conditions in Human Skeletal Remains by Donald Ortner
$2,000 sliding and spreading metric measuring calipers
Head-to-toe X-ray machine
DEXUS software package for digital imaging
Two-body cooler
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