6/21/07

Retired SLED photographer visits Harvin Clarendon County Library
By Philip Gibbons

PHILIP GIBBONS/Manning Times

Manning resident Alice Hyman purchases a book from Lt. Rita Shuler, following her presentation last Thursday at the Harvin Clarendon County Library.

For years, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) has worked hard to uphold the law and keep the bad guys off the streets. For Rita Shuler, her job always went one step further: giving something back to the families of victims.

Shuler is a retired forensic photographer for SLED. She worked there for 24 years, mainly in the photography department, but also provided assistance on other special assignments, such as security and crowd control.

“I was a jack-of-all-trades whenever female agents were needed,” Shuler said.

Shuler’s inspiration to become a forensic photographer began early in life, when she and her family started following the story of a brutal murder in South Carolina.

“When I was eight years old, I was exposed to a horrible case over in Pamplico, South Carolina, about seventy-five miles from our home in Santee. I was just curious. It was a double-murder. My family and I followed it in the newspapers. After the perpetrator was captured, we went over to the crime scene where this horrible thing happened.”

“I started doing photography when I was around 12 years old, as a hobby. When I finished high school I went into X-ray technology and did that for two years. Whenever law-enforcement needed an X-ray technician to find bullets in homicide victims, I would go down to the autopsy room to do that. That’s when my fascination was really sparked.”

The final thing that put her on the path to her career was a radiology convention out in California. One of the courses offered over the weekend was in forensic pathology.

“That’s when I knew when I got back to South Carolina that I had to be part of that science. SLED was in dire need of a photographer.”

Aside from her police work, Shuler has written two books. Murder in the Midlands tells the story of two victims who were murdered in 1985, and Case Files of a Forensic Photographer chronicles other assorted cases that Shuler was a part of, including the notorious Ronald Conyers case in Clarendon County. She plans to write a third book, depending on the availability of research material, concerning a cold case that happened in 1978.

On June 14, Rita Shuler held a program at the Harvin Clarendon County Library. It lasted for approximately 30 minutes, a considerable departure from the normal length of Shuler’s presentations (usually three hours). It was organized with young teenagers in mind, but most of the audience members who showed up were adults. Shuler was easily and quickly able to retool her lecture for an older group.

“You can go home and tell your teenagers about this,” she said to the parents in the audience.

The presentation was comprised of several crime-related categories. Shuler lectured on the effects of illegal narcotics, talked about the various tools and technology law enforcement uses to solve cases, and related stories regarding her involvement in criminal investigations.

Even though her job consisted of photographing evidence, she made it clear that she rarely visited the crime scenes themselves. The evidence was brought back to the lab before she did any work on it.

“We had a crime scene team at SLED that went out to the crime scenes. They were trained in photography to take pictures there. All the evidence that they gathered at the scene to try and make the case, they brought back to me in the photography department at SLED to photograph and document, even before they did a lot of their analysis and examinations.”

Although she is retired, Shuler is occasionally consulted to help in investigations.“I consult a little bit, and if a case comes up, a cold case, they will call me to do some possible photography or a little more investigation.”

For Shuler, her career has always been about more than earning a living, or the thrill of the chase. It’s about helping those who can no longer help themselves.

“Everything I touched at SLED during the investigations, I felt like I was doing something to help the victims and their families,” she said, “We shouldn’t remember these cases by the bad guy, but by the victims who are not here with us anymore.”