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- [S106] The Mountain Press, 11 Sep 2012.
On the Case: Bohanan brings wealth of knowledge, experience to SPD
by JEFF FARRELL
SEVIERVILLE — Law enforcement officers often complain that real life doesn’t mirror crime shows — they don’t have a team of well-trained scientists who descend on a crime scene to analyze every piece of data and name a suspect before the first commercial break.
But with Arthur Bohanan joining the Sevierville Police Department as a reserve officer in the Criminal Investigations Division, they are much closer to having that as a reality.
Bohanan is retired from the crime lab in the Knoxville Police Department, but the highlights of his career read like the background of the hero of a crime show. He has helped develop a number of techniques after working with Dr. William Bass at the famous Body Farm in Knoxville as well as with some of the top scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
In fact, he patented a technique that’s commonly seen on some of those popular crime shows, where they lift fingerprints from human remains. “If you watch NCIS or CSI shows, and they get prints off a body, that’s my technique,” he said.
He learned that in part by working with Bass at his famous forensic research facility. The two have enough mutual respect that Bass used him as one of the few real-life characters in the books he has co-authored with Jon Jefferson, and Patricia Cornwall based a character in “The Body Farm” on him.
“Bass is just a great guy, and the Body Farm is a place of honor to learn,” he said.
Bohanan also was responsible for the discovery that the fingerprints of prepubescent children are chemically different from adult prints. That was the start of his relationship with ORNL.
He was working on evidence he knew should have latent prints from a child — the type left behind by oils on the skin, that can be discovered by applying certain substances to the surface of the material. He wasn’t having any luck, and he was starting to get an idea of why but he didn’t know how he was going to solve it if he was right.
Fate stepped in when a civilian tour group happened to be coming through the lab, and a man stepped out of the group and said he’d noticed Bohanan looked puzzled. When Bohanan explained his dilemma, the man asked him if he could come by his office at 10 and handed him his card. He was the director of the lab.
The next morning Bohanan sat down with a group of researchers who helped him confirm that the chemicals children leave behind with their fingerprints contain more volatile chemicals than adults — they don’t last as long and they don’t react as well with the chemicals normally used to search for fingerprints.
It’s that intellectual curiosity that drives Bohanan, and he’s always applied it to criminal investigation.
“I’ve always been curious,” he said. “I’ve known since I was 14 what I wanted to do in life.”
Even when he was in school, here in Sevier county, he was working with the sheriff’s office taking fingerprints. When he graduated high school, he got a job with the FBI and later joined the military police before returning to East Tennessee.
Discovering new evidence or finding new methods to collect it make him feel he’s making a contribution to a case.
“Think about the manpower, the time you save if you get a fingerprint match,” he said.
So it should be clear why Sevierville Police Chief Donnie Myer is proud have him working with his department. “We’re excited to have him,” Myers said. “I’ve learned two things I didn’t know about fingerprinting just sitting and talking with him.”
It actually wasn’t the first time he applied to join the Sevierville Police. He tried in 1968, fresh out of the Army, but they didn’t hire him at that time. He can be philosophical about it now, though. If that hadn’t happened, he never would have gone to the Knoxville Police Department and likely never would have met Bass or the scientists who helped him develop techniques that are now being used worldwide.
“It was one of those things that was meant to be.”
Now at the end of his career, he wants to pass that knowledge on to others. He will be working with Sevierville investigators on some cases, and will be available to help other local law enforcement, but he also hopes to pass on knowledge on how to obtain latent fingerprints and to get the department set up on the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), so that they can compare fingerprints from crime scenes or suspects to those in the federal database without sending them off to another agency.
He will also be helping them with developing composite images of suspects and other techniques.
With his connections, if he can’t help get an answer to a question, he’s confident he knows someone who can.
“I don’t have all the answers, he said. ‘I have a lot, but I still don’t have them all.”
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1944 - (80 years)
, d. 21 Mar 1967 (Age 68 years)