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Throughout Dana Kollmann's life, she's stayed close to Towson. She earned her undergraduate degree in anthropology here in 1990, and now she teaches forensic science and criminal justice classes.
And when she became a crime scene investigator for Baltimore County twelve years ago, her first crime scene was on Towson's campus.
Kollmann was in training when a student committed suicide in the Residence Tower. When the call came in, she asked to tag along, but didn't know if she could handle seeing a dead body.
"I was petrified. I was scared to death," she says now.
But she handled it well, and she spent the next decade as a forensic services technician, a fancy name for the people who collect evidence at a crime scene.
She recently published a book about her experiences, "Never Suck a Dead Man's Hand: Curious Adventures of a CSI."
She started writing it immediately after she left the police department.
"Every time I would be around my friends that were non-crime lab people, they would say 'tell us a story, tell us a story,'" she said. "They would ask, is it really like how it is on TV? And I would say, it could not be more different."
She says the real world is nothing like the popular CBS television show "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation."
Ask her what's inaccurate about TV depictions of forensic science, and she's happy to explain: "They think you get all gussied up and go to work in your designer clothes and high heels, and you spend your time doing fancy experiments on the individuality of nose hairs. In reality, you're covered in fingerprint powder, you wear uniforms that are anything but flattering, you spend the majority of your time handling property crimes, and you literally run from one call to the next."
She sums it up this way: "You never see 'em handling the weed whacker that got stolen out of the shed!"
Kollmann said she couldn't count all the burglaries she has investigated. Arriving at a crime scene, she would determine the point of entry, process it for fingerprints, and look for other evidence.
"Was the door pried open? Then process it for tool impressions. Find the tool that pried it. Collect part of the door or cast those impressions," she said. "If the door was kicked open, we can develop the footwear imps using powder or photograph it."
Inside a crime scene, she would look for areas that were disturbed by a suspect.
"For crime lab, we want to know the things they didn't take," she says. Criminals do strange things - "they drink stuff in your fridge, they help themselves to candy" - so she would look for small hints of evidence.
While most of the crimes she handled were ordinary, she still came across hundreds of dead bodies.
"If you kill them, I will come," she jokes.
She says she would rely on gallows humor to remove herself from the grisly reality of the crimes.
Kollmann now shares those stories with aspiring CSIs. She teaches in the same Linthicum Hall classroom she used to take tests. Previously an adjunct, she became a full-time lecturer this semester, teaching forensic anthropology, introduction to forensic science and introduction to criminal justice. Next semester, she'll add advanced forensic criminal investigations.
She shares an office with associate professor Victor Fisher, who was her undergraduate advisor almost two decades ago.
With her book now in print, Kollmann is getting plenty of attention for her CSI stories. As she writes in her epilogue, when people now ask her about her most interesting crime scene experiences, "I can just hand them a copy of 'Never Suck A Dead Man's Hand' and go on my merry way.'
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The Anthropological Society at Towson University is hosting a book signing for Kollmann at the Starbucks in Cook Library at 5 p.m. on March 28.
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