Forensic science students investigate mannequin murder mysteries in St. Paul

At a house in St. Paul, kidnappings, shootings, poisonings, stabbings, suicides and suffocations have all gone ignored by police. In fact, the only people investigating these crimes are college students.

That’s because the house, across the street from Hamline University’s Pat Paterson Field, is used to stage crime scenes for Hamline’s forensic science students.

“You can’t teach a crime scene in a classroom,” said Jamie Spaulding, a forensic science assistant professor at Hamline.

Spaulding arrived at Hamline in 2020 and was tasked with building a forensic science program, which now includes more than 100 students. A faculty member lived in the house for a while and vacated it around the time Spaulding was looking for some university property where he could stage crime scenes. In fall 2023, he began staging crimes there.

Scene preparation can take a few hours, and that usually comes after about a week of planning and scene writing. The story is important to reconstructing any incident, and Spaulding said they even replicated a scene from “Pulp Fiction” for one class.

“Jamie suggests ways, if you ever commit a crime, to hide it,” said Hannah Caine, one of Spaulding’s teaching assistants. “In a joking way, of course.”

Spaulding said he contacts all of the forensic laboratories in the metro area to make sure the students are learning what they need to be prepared for jobs and internships there. The labs at the murder house give students a chance to see what being a crime scene investigator is really like.

“It’s nice to find out if you like it before it’s your job and you hate your life,” said Hamline junior Haylie Magoon, who plans to work in a crime lab after graduation.

Investigating what appeared to be a staged suicide, Magoon and her group of student investigators crowded into the top floor of the Hamline murder house to analyze handwriting, calculate bullet trajectory and field test biologicals (i.e. human DNA stuff). Through the analysis of a suicide note’s handwriting and the bullet trajectory, Magoon and her team determined there was foul play involved in the death. The bodies are all mannequins, by the way.

And, yes, they use real blood.

“I can’t fake test results for our students,” Spaulding said. “If we have them testing for blood on scene, it has to be human.”

Because of this, students on the scene must wear Tyvek suits, shoe coverings and sometimes even face masks if a scene is “particularly biological focused.”

Sometimes, to make the scene more realistic and interesting, Spaulding will have a witness — often played by a teaching assistant — pretend to be a loved one of the mannequin victim and run onto the scene to hold their deceased loved one.

When Cassie Boyd, another of Spaulding’s teaching assistants, took the Crime Scene and Death Investigation course, she and her team had to tackle and remove their witness from the scene. And in a previous semester of the course, Caine was the distressed witness who had to be tackled by the student investigators.

“I made it to the body and touched it,” said Caine of her contaminating the fake crime scene.

Students in this course also have to participate in an all-night crime scene investigation, emulating what it would be like to be called out to a crime scene in the middle of the night at a professional forensic lab.

The all-night lab can be anywhere on campus, and the call can come at any time of night. Students aren’t allowed to begin investigating until all members of their team have arrived on the scene.

In previous semesters, some students outside of the course called campus safety after seeing one of the dead mannequins staged on campus, and Spaulding has even had to chase campus safety officers away from his scenes in the winter so they don’t obscure the footprints leading to the body.

But, in a real crime scene, it can be those footprints that solve a case.

“It gets you to think of the little things,” Caine said.