RALPH
F. TURNER
"Teaching museum" aim of retiring
The crime lab on the top floor of Olds Hall was done up on a recent
May morning as though a New Year’s Eve celebration was occurring. Streamers
and balloons were everywhere. "Uncle Ralphie" was surprised by his students
at 7:30am, as he arrived early, as usual, for the last of the 8 to 11 a.m.
classes in criminalistics which he has taught every Tuesday and Thursday
in spring term since 1948.
Other than the class schedule, nothing else has remained the same in the intervening years for Ralph F. Turner, whose new years begin with a consultancy and then retirement. Turner is a familiar figure on campus, looking rather like a local representative of Scotland Yard as he pads between buildings, wearing (in season) a British trenchcoat and carrying (when needed) a wood-handled black umbrella. The deerstalker hat is missing; on his white thatch of hair is a cap of regimental tan. With hands usually behind his back and smoking one of his chain cigars, he often appears to be looking for clues.
Part of his year of consultancy will be devoted to fixing and cataloging
items for a "teaching museum" he hopes to create in the Olds Hall lab.
The lab itself, he will continue to defend against change, except as it
improves forensic science.
Too much fluorescent
"There’s too much fluorescent lighting and asphalt tile around here,"
says Turner. For years he has defended against renovating the men’s room
and it’s early plumbing fixtures. He has managed to keep intact the lab’s
squeaky wooden floor, the exposed wall bricks and the 1917 light fixtures
- although he lost the skylight.
"I’ve wanted my students to know how things have been, how buildings used to be made," he says. The R.E. Olds Hall, built with funding from the Lansing auto magnate to house engineering studies and administration, was completed in 1917, the year Turner was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The memorabilia which he plans to get into working condition are one-of-a-kind items invented by the late J.K. Mathews, who had been chairman of the chemistry department at the University of Wisconsin, and who willed them to his protégé Turner. They include a gadget "rifling meter," the first "comparison camera" and the first "commercial comparison microscope" designed and constructed for Mathews for use in forensic science.
It was Mathews who led Turner down the forensic science path. In his
years since 1938, Turner has testified in criminal and civil court cases
relating to firearms, evidence from scenes of crimes, and alcohol use and
abuse. He was also a selected panelist in 1975 to review the firearms evidence
for the Los Angeles County Court in the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
Deer poaching case
Turner’s first testimony in firearms identification was a deer poaching
case in northern Wisconsin, with a jury of "locals". Not only did the jury
find their neighbor not guilty, Turner reports, but one of the jury members
(seated on a long bench next to a potbelly stove) fell asleep and fell
off the bench during Turner’s testimony.
His next recollection was another "rural justice" case in Arkansas, in 1941, in which a county treasurer was found guilty of embezzlement be cashing county pay checks to school teachers and other employees. The defendant (who should have gone directly to jail), the sheriff and about 30 relatives and friends of the defendant, surrounded Turner, a colleague and the prosecutor in a nearby restaurant. A fight began. There was a lot of punching and pushing, Turner recalled, but the prosecutor was bigger and stronger than the defendant. Right prevailed. Turner and his colleague left for Fayetteville during the night, at the suggestion of the prosecutor who said he was a native and could take care of himself.
Between the early days and now, Turner says many changes have occurred in forensic science, in criminal justice systems and education. He would like to see more efficiency and less overlapping of duties and responsibilities of federal, state, county and local police units in the United States. He cites the British amalgamated system as more efficient and less costly to taxpayers.
Technological developments have greatly advanced forensic science in blood identification and analysis, he says, while electronic equipment has helped in many other areas, allowing improvement in qualitative examinations.
One field in which progress remains slow or non-existent, Turner says,
is that of "proof beyond a reasonable doubt," with interpretations continuing
to be subjective in firearms problems, handwriting and document examination.
Prime examples, Turner cites, are the Dreyfus case in France in the 1890s
and the "Mormon" will of Howard Hughes.
Lab supervisor
Prior to coming to MSU in 1948, Turner was laboratory supervisor for
the Kansas City police force, doing scientific criminal investigations.
There he began the substantial work he has done on alcohol use and abuse.
At MSU in 1949, he became involved in a year-long scientific study of drinking "under field conditions". The MSU Board of Trustees at the time was very doubtful about his request for the purchase of $3000 worth of one-batch 90-proof Kentucky bourbon, but President Hannah cleared the item which was funded by the National Traffic Safety Council. Turner’s "field conditions" involved creating a social setting and getting four to six volunteers every Friday night for more than a year to play cards, talk and drink when they wanted.
They had agreed to keep track of their consumption and to submit to breath, blood and urine testing at set intervals. Campus psychologists also checked for coordination and other responses and attitudes of the volunteers who had come from all walks of life. Turner allows he was glad to come to the end of the sessions which tended to go on until 3 or 4 in the morning - all in a scientific cause.
This summer, Turner will return to London where he has conducted MSU courses in comparative criminal justice at undergraduate and graduate levels in a biannual basis since 1970. John Hudzik, also with the School of Criminal Justice, will be in charge, but Turner will share the visits to Scotland Yard and his other haunts. In other years he has taught in Taiwan, Guam and Saudi Arabia.
He plans to continue to keep in touch with his student alumni, who are scattered around the world. One of the students at the recent festivities in the crime lab is the daughter or a prior student who is now in a prestigious post in Michigan. Other students have included Stuart Knight, a 1953 graduate who now heads the U.S. Secret Service; Kenneth Balge, 1948, special assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury; and Rod Puffer, 1959, security chief for NASA at the Houston Space Center.
(Written by Fran Murray for the MSU News-Bulletin June 19, 1980)
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