Baby Kate Trial: Testimony of Soil Scientist James Crum

[XLFD]

On April 24, 2012, Dr. James Crum, a professor of soil science at Michigan State University, was the first forensic scientist called to testify in the Sean Phillips Trial.  He was also the first to be contacted by Ludington Police Detective JB Wells about the shoes of Sean Phillips in late December of 2011, roughly six months after the disappearance of Baby Kate, and the seizing of those shoes. 

A good question to be asked is why the information on the shoes took such a long time to be looked at.  Effectively, by the time the material was scraped off the shoes and meaningfully analyzed by Dr. Crum and his associates  in December, there could be no meaningful search for Baby Kate due to the winter months and the snow cover inherent to this area.   The new growing season of 2012 would put out a whole new playing field for plant forensics, though it wouldn't affect too greatly the field of Dr. Crum. 

 

Hindsight is 20/20, but the investigation of this aspect should have begun at least in early July of 2011 when it was clear that Phillips was not going to talk, and the areas they had searched had turned up nada. 

 

But what did Dr. Crum's testimony amount to in the overall scheme of things?  He did tell us about there being wind blown sand on the shoe.  Sand does not necessarily mean beach sand, but refers to the particle size of 'dirt'.  And although in his testimony he talks of white and yellow sand, a look at the shoes indicates that the particles of 'sand' were darker shades of brown and red, indicating that either organic impurities (like tannic acid) or darker mineral impurities (like feldspar) were making up the sand particles.  One would think that the good professor would have been able to tell something about the chemical makeup of the soil through testing the limited amount of samples he had, but he gave no indication of doing so, or interpreting the actual color of the particles. 

 

The worth of Dr. Crum's testimony was summarized neatly by Defense Attorney Smedley in her cross-examination.  With a few yes/no questions she was able to neatly wrap up that his testimony amounted to saying the shoes were worn outside in a sandy area basically anywhere in Michigan.  No more.  He also contradicted an assertion by his colleague Dr. Frank Telewski about the chain of custody of what has turned out to be the prosecution's main evidence since the trial:  Sean Phillips' shoes. 

 

 According to geologists sand particles range in diameter from 0.0625 mm (or 1⁄16 mm) to 2 mm

According to Dr. Telewski, he never received the shoes (see his interview in 2013, and look at page p 95, line 19 of Telewski's testimony) contrary to Dr. Crum's assertion in line 10,11.

UP NEXT:  Dr. Frank Telewski believes the trail of Baby Kate is marked with the fragments of plant parts, and gives a hint of where law enforcement believed Kate to have been placed.