Inside the Mind of Israel's Chief Crime Scene Investigator
A senior Israeli police forensic expert reflects on decades of investigating gruesome crime scenes, the trauma of the October 7 massacres, and the relentless pursuit of truth.
The first sight that greeted forensic investigators when they arrived at the construction site in Kiryat Motzkin where the body of 17-year-old Lital Yael Melnik was found was the appearance of her hands protruding from the sand. At first glance, it was difficult to understand what was hidden beneath the earth. Only when they began to approach, document, and examine every grain of sand did the scale of the horror become clear. Chief Superintendent Uzi Nagar, currently head of the forensic identification unit in the Coastal District, was there. Years have passed, but that brutal crime scene has never left him. Even after nearly a thousand death scenes, he struggles to speak of that moment without returning to it as if it happened yesterday.
You see the hands in the shape of an X protruding from the sand, and you do not understand what is there, he recalls. And then you begin to trace all the evidence. There was a pipe that allowed her to breathe, and at first you do not understand why there is a plastic pipe, why there are digging tools, and what happened there. This is one of the most difficult incidents I have encountered. This is a case you carry with you for the rest of your life. At that same scene, even before suspect Edward Katchura gave his version of events, Supt. Nagar, the crime scene investigators, and the mobile lab had already begun constructing the scenario from the findings. They searched for shoe prints in the sand, collected objects scattered around the place, and tried to understand who touched what.
Years later, in September 2025, Katchura was convicted of causing the death of the late Lital Yael Melnik through negligence, exploitation of a dependency relationship, and violation of a restraining order, and was sentenced to only 7 years in prison. The court ruled that the state had not proven beyond a reasonable doubt an intention to kill. In response, the State Attorney's Office filed an appeal to the Supreme Court demanding a stiffer sentence, and the hearing was scheduled for March.
The Weight of Forensic Work
This is the world of Supt. Uzi Nagar. A world where an almost invisible stain, a partial fingerprint, a moved cartridge casing, or a single drop of blood can be the difference between a case that remains unsolved and a suspect who stands trial. Supt. Nagar has served in the police for about 30 years, nearly 20 of them in the field of forensic identification. He has been an investigator, team leader, and technical surveillance operative, went to officer training, and led identification teams in the Northern and Coastal districts. Today, he is the head of the forensic identification branch in the Coastal District, which extends from Hadera in the south to Rosh Hanikra in the north, and he is the one who enters the most difficult and complex scenes in the area.
We are the ones who have to determine whether it is a natural death, suicide, or murder, explains Supt. Nagar. There are not always security cameras, and no one tells you what happened. You have to understand what the suspect did at the scene, where he touched, and where the scene touched him.
In recent years, the work of forensic identification at murder scenes in the Arab society has become a particularly complex struggle. Supt. Nagar says that more than once his personnel arrive at scenes that have been deliberately tampered with: some of the exhibits were moved, some of the cartridge casings were taken, and some of the scenes were washed down, he says. There is no cooperation, and in most cases you also feel hostility in the field.
The Invisible Victims
In August 2023, Supt. Nagar was summoned to an apartment on HaHalutz Street in the Hadar neighborhood of Haifa. The apartment owner decided to renovate it after one of the tenants died. In the bedroom stood a bed on a concrete platform unknown to the owner. When the workers began breaking the surface, they discovered something that did not belong to construction materials.
I put two layers of gloves on my hands, Supt. Nagar recalls, I put my hand into the opening that had formed in the concrete and felt what seemed like a skull inside a mass. I told them: guys, we have a murder here.
In an affair that was mistakenly dubbed the body in the wall, the investigation raised suspicion that one of the two apartment partners murdered the other, concealed his body in concrete, and continued with his life. However, the suspect himself died a few days before the body was discovered, and the case ended without him being able to stand trial. More than the way the body was concealed, Supt. Nagar was horrified by the fact that no one reported the victim's disappearance. A person was murdered, buried in the bedroom, and erased from society without anyone searching for him. There are transparent people, he says. A person dies and no one looked for him. He simply evaporated from society and that is it.
Entering the Death Camp
For years, forensic investigators trained for the scenario of a casualty collection station. They studied mass disaster events around the world, examined lessons from the September 11 attacks, and practiced using dolls and simulations. On the morning of October 7, 2023, it became clear just how unfathomable the distance between an exercise and reality could be.
Supt. Nagar returned from Eilat shortly before October 7. On Saturday night, he already found himself deploying teams from the district who went to Shura camp. They worked around the clock, in three shifts, in what he describes as a casualty identification assembly line. The mission was clear — to give a name to every victim, to return an answer to the families, and to allow the murdered to be brought to burial. But no exercise prepared them for what they encountered there.
We saw presentations on events around the world, but when you get there, you arrive at a death camp, Supt. Nagar recalls. You lead teams and you are not allowed to break. You have to believe in the mission, send the people, and be with them there without batting an eyelash. As a commander, I dragged it with me so that none of the people would break.
Within the containers and closed rooms, hundreds of bodies waited. Some were burned, others charred or in a condition that made identification very difficult. The weather was still hot, and the smells, he says, clung to clothes, skin, and memory. The forensic investigators were required to undress the bodies, look for identifying marks, extract fingerprints and DNA samples, and carefully collect the personal items found on them.
The mental price is felt in the unit to this day. The training of a skilled crime scene investigator takes at least three years, and the knowledge accumulated over decades cannot be quickly replaced. To cope with the load, Nagar established during the war a volunteer system consisting of forensic retirees. Professionals who retired returned to uniform and labs, assisting in identifying the fallen.
