In the bathroom, a half-dozen treasure hunter magazines lay next to the toilet. I was at the FBI Academy for an in-service class and had just arrived at the dormitory suite I would be sharing with a student attending a different class. I wondered what kind of suitemate I was going to have for the next couple of weeks.
That evening, I met him. Richard Graham was a senior FBI agent and a top metal detector expert. Richard was tall, straight, soft-spoken, and every bit a gentleman. His obsessive interest in metal detection came not from some fantasy of striking it rich, but in picking up tips that would make him better at his job.
Richard was a strong proponent of Garrett metal detectors. Over the next couple of weeks (I was at FBI Academy 5 weeks that summer), Richard taught me how to calibrate a detector, sweep the ground for maximum effectiveness, determine what type of metal I had detected, and estimate how deeply it was buried.
Subsequently, I bought my own top-of-the-line Garrett. I used it at a number of major crime scenes, most notably homicide scenes. In one, the killing of an undercover narcotics officer in a city park, I was able to locate all of the fired bullets beneath the thick grass.
In another alleged shooting of a police officer (see my post of July 24, 2023), I found the bullets a cop had fired to stage his own shooting.
I used the metal detector to find lost jewelry that citizens reported. One time, a valuable gold bracelet had fallen off a woman’s wrist while she was gardening. There was a 60-foot strip of newly turned soil around two sides of her back yard. In a matter of only a minute or two, I recovered her bracelet.
In one case at a remote picnic spot in a box canyon in rural Arizona, a high school boy had been shot through the head with a .357 revolver by a classmate. I calibrated the instrument for a copper jacketed 158 grain bullet like those that were in the revolver and searched a hundred yards of sandy creek bottom without success. I ignored hundreds of targets that were outside the calibrated parameters for the bullet. But the bullet eluded me.
After I had spent six hours combing every inch of that sandy dry wash multiple times, a deputy came to see how I was doing. He casually mentioned he had received a call from the ME. The copper jacket from the bullet had been recovered from the victim’s brain cavity. No wonder I couldn’t find the bullet – the response of the lead core of the bullet would be drastically different from the bullet with the copper jacket still in place. I had probably passed over the lead core several times and ignored it. Since the recovered copper jacket contained the stria from the firearm, I called it quits on the search for the rest of the bullet.
A good metal detector is invaluable in the search for small metal items of evidence at outdoor scenes. Training in the intricacies and subtleties of responses of different metal items is crucial. Regular practice to maintain proficiency is important. The price of a good metal detector and suitable training is insignificant considering the importance of recovering evidence at a major outdoor crime scene.