Todd Fenton is perfectly comfortable in his laboratory on the fourth floor of Fee Hall, even though he’s surrounded by small fragments of prehistoric remains of teenagers and an intact human skeleton lying on the table next to him.
Fenton, a forensic anthropologist and anthropology professor at MSU, works daily to identify the cause of death in cases when it is unknown or when a crime victim’s identity remains a mystery.
“My favorites are the ones where you have to figure out the individual death story,” he says.
Fenton received his undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and earned his master’s degree at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
He has been working on campus since 1998.
“I love forensic anthropology because you can work a case one day and assess the trauma to a body, positively identify the remains and when you go home at night there’s a sense of accomplishment like no other field allows,” he said.
Fenton and the rest of the employees at MSU’s forensic anthropology lab have recently been receiving increased statewide and national attention for their hard work and positive results.
Last month, Fenton was the lead forensic anthropologist in the investigation of Lansing resident Michele Husband’s death. Her body was found in a wooded area in Lansing during the early morning of Nov. 11.
While Lansing Police Lt. Ray Hall said the need to call in outside forensic help is rare, the speed in solving the Husband case means MSU’s anthropologists will be called upon again.
“We were impressed not only by their knowledge but the professionalism in handling the case,” he said.
While high-profile cases are fun to work on, it’s the day-to-day work that makes up his career, Fenton said. He says it’s not rare to be called to a scene at 5 a.m., or to be available for work 24 hours a day.
“Every case and every day is different,” he said.
And it’s definitely different now.
Fenton himself has also recently been garnering national attention for his work on the 18-member team reinvestigating the Boston Strangler murders.
He was chosen by his colleague James Starrs, a professor of forensic science and law at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The two have worked together several times since 1989.
When the Boston Strangler case was brought to Starrs by the family of the strangler’s last victim, Mary Sullivan, Fenton was one of the first people to come to mind, Starrs said.
“He does magnificent work in every extent, he’s thorough and particular in every detail,” he said.
Sullivan’s sister and son asked Starrs to take the case and exhume the body when the Massachusetts Legislature refused to release details about the condition of Sullivan’s body at the time of her death.
On Oct. 14, the team exhumed her body - which had been buried for nearly 40 years - and spent all day and most of the next examining the remains for signs that Albert DeSalvo, considered to be the Boston Strangler, was not Sullivan’s true murderer.
Re-examining the case allowed officials to use technology that wasn’t available decades ago.
“It was a brutal murder and our goal was to find trace DNA evidence that we could use to identify the perpetrator of the murder,” Fenton said.
Fenton’s role in this case was to make sure the remains being analyzed were truly those of Sullivan - as she was buried in a family plot. He also searched for a small neck bone that almost always breaks in cases involving strangulation.
Some DNA evidence was found on the body, but the results of its analysis being done at the University of Florida are not yet complete.
Starrs is glad he chose Fenton for the job because the pair works well together - and that’s a necessity in a case like this, he says.
“He is the kind of person that will do the nitty-gritty and doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty,” he said.
