Retired officer now teaches aspiring investigators

Barksdale, who retired from the Lincoln Police Department this year after more than four decades, now teaches aspiring investigators, scientists and law enforcers how to catch criminals.

He’s the only faculty member of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Forensic Science Program, which is part of the Entomology Department, who worked his way from street cop to top investigator.

Lincoln Public Safety Director Tom Casady called Barksdale the “Leonardo da Vinci of criminal investigations in Lincoln.”

He worked on every major criminal investigation in Lincoln for the past 20 years, Casady said.

“Larry is the quintessential detective. He approaches the criminal investigation with the mind and eye of a scientist. His fingerprints are all over the Lincoln Police Department, the way it operates, its philosophy.”

Before his appointment as an adjunct professor at UNL, Barksdale also taught forensic science students at Nebraska Wesleyan University.

As a professor, he illustrates with personal stories, launching into tales of chasing criminals down Cornhusker Highway, figuring out the difference between bug guts and blood on car hoods, and diffusing bombs.

“I love working with Larry,” said Erin Steward, who with his guidance is researching how to place time of death based on hair roots.

Many students don’t relish the idea of putting on police uniforms, she said, but Barksdale’s stories defuse some anxiety and open a window into the daily life of law enforcement.

“It doesn’t seem like it would be that bad to be a cop for a few years, get that experience, and use what they learn in college later on,” Steward said.

While techniques may be the same, investigating a crime scene in the middle of a ghetto or cornfield is a world away from making molds of footprints in a college laboratory, said Marina Amaral, a visiting scholar from Sao Paulo, Brazil.

“When you are in the crime scene, you are under pressure. You have a lot of people trying to get inside. You have danger. Sometimes the criminal is around. So you have to focus,” Amaral said. “I think Sgt. Larry is an excellent crime scene investigator. He can cope with all these kinds of emotions. He has the experience.”

Amaral worked as a crime scene investigator in Brazil for seven years before coming to UNL, where Barksdale often tutors her on techniques for tasks like finding fingerprints after it rains.

A native of Dodge City, Kan., Barksdale after high school had no desire to go into police work. In fall 1966, he looked forward to college life at Wichita State University and a degree in applied mathematics.

But President Lyndon B. Johnson reaffirmed America’s commitment to end Communist aggression in South Vietnam.

Mid-semester, Barksdale got his draft notice.

“Then, they didn’t allow you to not go into the Army if you were in school. It was like, too bad,” Barksdale said.

He got the letter in October, took the physical, rode a train to Kansas City, and, on Nov. 2, 1966, was boots on the ground, assigned to the 1st Infantry Division at Fort Riley.

During boot camp, a soldier was looking for volunteers to be bomb squad technicians.

“I figured, well . bomb squad technician sounds better than being in the infantry. So I went over and signed up,” Barksdale said.

While he attended explosive ordnance disposal and nuclear weapons cleanup training, political and race riots raged in metropolitan American. The Army, which provided bomb disposal to local law enforcement, needed men who could blend in with protesters.

At 19, Barksdale fit the bill. He spent most of the next couple of years providing crowd control, bomb expertise and protection for politicians in Chicago.

He was there for the riots following the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

“Since we were young . we looked like the rioters.” Barksdale said. “They would send us out to do things because we knew about bombs and explosives, but we also fit in with the environment. . It’s hard to run the streets of Chicago if you’re 45 or 35.”

Barksdale’s stint in the Army ended in November 1968, and he went back home planning to study English at Fort Hays State University. But in 1970, he fell in love.

“She wanted to go to nursing school (in Lincoln), so it looked like a good idea for me to move here and get a job. It sounded like the best offer I had at the time.”

He got a job working with fiberglass, but soon heard the police department had eight openings. He applied, passed the tests and once again put on a uniform.

In 1971, the Lincoln Police Department paid $498 a month. By patrolling at night and attending the University of Nebraska at Omaha during the day, Barksdale finished his bachelor’s degree, this time in criminal justice, and earned a master’s degree in political science from UNL.

“I was going to work a couple years, then move on. Here it is 41 years later, and I finally quit,” Barksdale said.

He started doing foot patrol downtown, then upgraded to cruising Cornhusker Highway, known at the time as “Lincoln’s Hell Hole.” In 1972, he had a chance to put his military ordnance training to use and defused a bomb sent to Lincoln-based neo-Nazi Gerhard Lauck.

Twenty years later, fingerprints found on that bomb helped secure the guilty pleas from those responsible, he said.

Barksdale counts himself lucky to have started his new career at a time when LPD took a progressive stance toward law enforcement.

“There was a lot of encouragement to be problem solvers,” he said. “You don’t always have to grab somebody, arrest them, throw them on the ground and stick them in jail. There are other ways we can keep the community safe and resolve issues. So I was kind of fortunate falling into that as a young person.”

Promoted to sergeant in 1977, Barksdale has investigated everything from bicycle thefts to murder, including the unsolved killings of Patricia Webb in 1974 and Tina McMenamin in 1995.

But he made a name for himself helping break up organized auto theft rings and studying blood spatter in his garage.

In the early 1980s, he helped uncover a scheme involving the owner of a local used car dealership with connections to organized crime in Cleveland. Nebraska didn’t have a salvage title law at the time, meaning the title for a totaled car was the same as one for a good car.

“We were the dumping ground for the rest of the United States for people that launder titles,” Barksdale said.

Criminals in Ohio figured out they could buy totaled cars at auction and sell the titles to the Lincoln dealership, which would get them transferred to Nebraska. The guys in Ohio would then use the clean titles to sell stolen cars of the same make and model.

Barksdale went on to investigate organized theft of recreational vehicles and motorcycles, as well as a dealership selling illegal high-end “gray cars” — Porsches and Ferraris manufactured in Europe that didn’t meet U.S. standards and had been smuggled into the country through Houston.

In 1995, then-Police Chief Casady tasked Barksdale with creating and leading a crime scene technical unit, which became the first in Nebraska to be certified by the International Association of Identification.

About the same time, the department began looking for volunteers to get trained in blood-spatter analysis. Barksdale and one other person, Erin Sims, stepped up.

One of the first times he used the training — during the investigation of the summer 1997 murder of Harold Fowler and Duane Johnson — Barksdale saw blood stains on the ceiling, walls and a mirror that didn’t fit with textbook examples of multiple gunshot wounds to the head at close range.

The men were killed during a botched drug deal inside Fowler’s apartment at 801 S. Ninth St. and found days later by the landlord.

The bodies had attracted a lot of flies, and Barksdale decided to test a theory that the flies had lapped up blood and then vomited it back up, creating the stains. He was right.

In that case and others, he used his own blood — drawn from his arm by his wife, a registered nurse — to recreate patterns he found at crime scenes. He flung blood onto butcher paper. Put it on his gun and a baseball bat then waved them around. Put it in his mouth, pretended to be dying and spit it out.

Then he’d leave blood and meat out for flies to feast on.

“I know it sounds gross, but that is just the way it is,” Barksdale said. “The only material in the world that is like blood is blood.”

He and collaborators wrote up the research and published articles in forensic journals. The papers caught the eye of Mark Benecke, a professor of forensic entomology with the University of Cologne in Germany.

“He and I worked together. He with his students at the University of Cologne and me at Lincoln, Nebraska, in my garage,” Barksdale said.

They co-authored a piece on bloodstains caused by flies that was published in a 2003 edition of the Forensic Science International.

Barksdale has no plans to retire to Florida, although he does enjoy having more time to catch the occasional Olivia Newton-John concert. He’d rather spend his retirement as he spent his career, pioneering, answering questions, advancing the forensic science field and influencing young minds.

Barksdale hasn’t completely given up police work. He does the occasional consulting (requests have come in from across the country), but he doesn’t charge. He sees the consulting as a public service.

“I’m not looking to go out and make a lot of money being a consultant and expert witness. But this is a university, and I have done this for years,” Barksdale said.

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Information from: Lincoln Journal Star, http://www.journalstar.com