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Among rows of shelves stacked with ordinary brown cardboard boxes reaching the ceiling, Diane Spiller spends her workday.
Spiller is in charge of organizing, documenting and storing evidence and property collected by the Fort Wayne Police Department.
Within the ordinary-looking boxes are contents of critical importance to victims of crimes, detectives, prosecutors and defense attorneys.
Every piece of evidence collected at a crime scene – clothing items, shell casings, fingerprints – is stored in these boxes until it is needed.
Detectives build cases on the evidence. Prosecutors need the evidence to make their case to a jury. And defense attorneys try to refute the evidence of their client’s wrongdoing.
Spiller, 49, has worked in the department’s property and evidence management for nine years. She maintains the thousands of pieces of evidence collected from every crime investigated – as well as lost or stolen property gathered by officers on a daily basis – with the help of two other employees and one officer who maintains firearms.
“We are dealing with everyone’s worst day, whether it is a robbery, burglary, rape, child molesting,” Spiller said. “And we talk to the victims. We deal with victims of homicide. Try to deal with the families. There is a lot involved that people don’t think about.”
There is a lot of putting items in order, finding room to store them, checking and double-checking numbers on evidence to make sure it matches case numbers, entering information into a computer database and dealing with citizens’ questions about their property.
But Spiller believes she has found her calling and has created an efficient method for properly maintaining important pieces of evidence.
“It’s like I found where I belong,” she said. “With the organization and everything, I absolutely love my job.”
On her first day nine years ago, Spiller found the property and evidence room in disarray.
The two police officers in charge of maintaining it had retired and no one had been doing the job full time, she said.
Piles of evidence were stacked on the floor. There was no set method to storing evidence. The logs documenting evidence coming into the room were handwritten – “very badly,” she said.
For an orderly person like Spiller, it was a little overwhelming but also a challenge she was ready to take on.
Today, after years of going through old evidence piece by piece and case by case, getting rid of what was no longer needed and reorganizing what needed to be kept, Spiller said she has an efficient system.
She and another employee spent nights and weekends a few years ago rearranging all the evidence by year when they relocated to a new room, she said.
Capt. Paul Shrawder, a supervisor in the police department’s investigative and support division, said Spiller’s job is essential in investigations.
“The whole process of showing where that evidence has been, where it has been to a lab for testing, or just in our property room, is her responsibility,” he said. “The whole process is essential to most of our cases, or at least cases that have physical evidence involved with them.”
She’s also been a major player in implementing a bar-coding system to track evidence, helping create a purging policy to get rid of old evidence and consolidating DNA evidence in the department’s new refrigerator, Shrawder said.
“It has to be organized,” Spiller said. “You definitely don’t want to risk losing something from court cases because we didn’t do our job.”
She sorts every piece of evidence dating back to 1996. She also maintains evidence from homicide cases dating back to the 1970s, any unsolved crimes, and evidence from child molesting cases until the victim is 31 years old, she said.
In addition to all the old evidence, she has to record and store new items collected every day.
“Every day is different but still the same,” she said.
Every morning she checks a row of lockers where all property and evidence collected by police officers from the day before is stored.
Officers package and label the items they have collected from a case – documenting when they submitted the evidence and what investigation it belongs to.
After the evidence is put into the locker, it’s out of the hands of the officer and becomes the responsibility of Spiller and her fellow property and evidence management employees.
All evidence and property gets a bar code and all the information – from the type of item it is to the case the item is connected to – is entered into a computer system.
After it is documented and stored, evidence and property remains in the ordinary cardboard boxes stacked on shelves (DNA evidence is in a secure refrigerator) until it is needed for a court case or until its owner comes to claim it.
Days, weeks, months or even years can pass before a criminal investigation reaches court.
Attorneys on both sides know how important evidence is for their cases and depend upon it being properly handled while in police possession.
To ensure all evidence stored by the department is handled correctly, access to the property and evidence room is restricted, Spiller said.
She gets from 15 to 20 requests a day from detectives and the prosecutor’s office to pull certain evidence. And each time that evidence is touched, it is documented, she said.
“I take it very seriously,” she said. “I treat everything that comes through here as the piece of evidence that’s going to make or break that case.”
The stringent documentation is important to both prosecuting and defense attorneys when reviewing evidence.
Allen County Prosecutor Karen Richards said the storage of criminal evidence is critical to the cases her office prosecutes.
“There are all kinds of prerequisites for admitting evidence into court proceeding,” Richards said. “They look at the chain of custody, has it been properly stored, can you even find it? There are all those kind of issues. If your property isn’t managed appropriately, then you don’t get to admit those things into evidence.”
If the property room employees do not do their jobs well, it leaves room for defense attorneys to poke holes in the prosecution’s case, she said.
Local defense attorney Nikos Nakos said he has challenged how evidence was stored or whether the proper protocol was followed from police officers to the property room.
“I remember one particular case where there was DNA evidence stored in an unlocked refrigerator,” Nakos said. “Certainly we made some hay with that to the jury on the importance of the chain of custody.”
But both attorneys say the Fort Wayne Police Department property and evidence management has improved over the past few years and is doing a good job of making sure evidence isn’t compromised.
“They have improved, which might not be the best thing for defense attorneys, but I think it’s good for the community,” Nakos said.
And Spiller recognizes the value of doing that job well.
“It’s such an important department, and to be a part of that and a part of the Fort Wayne Police Department is something I’m very proud to do,” she said.
mhubartt@jg.net
