Badin High School alumnus Leslie McCauley returned to the scene of the crime Wednesday, so to speak, with crime scene photos.

McCauley, class of 1995, is as a crime scene investigator for the Sheriff’s Department in Montgomery County, Texas. She returned to her alma mater to talk to science classes about career opportunities in the field — and to clear up common misconceptions.

“The real purpose of why I like to come and talk to high school and college students is to let you know that it’s not nearly as glamorous as they make it out to be on television,” she said, showing them a promotional photo of a stylish television crime scene team side-by-side with a group shot of herself with her colleagues wearing polo shirts. “We’re just normal people doing a job.

After graduating from Badin, McCauley received a degree in biology from Morehead State University in Kentucky, got married and moved to Texas, about 45 minutes north of Houston, where she decided that she wanted to become a crime scene investigator.

She attended the police academy and worked patrol for a few years before finding her “dream job,” which she’s now been working for nine years.

“The last thing I want to do is for someone to want to do this because of what they see on TV, but then get to a real crime scene and realize they don’t have the stomach for it,” she said. “What you don’t see on TV is the destruction that is caused to the body over time.”

Probably the biggest difference between the popular television series and real-life CSI, she said, is the time frame. On TV, it may seem like they got results from the lab in a matter of hours, when it really takes months or even a year to get some tests done.

McCauley told students that reality-based shows, like “Forensic Files,” where they actually talk to real investigators paint a more accurate picture than the network drama series.

Using real crime scene and lab photos from cases she has worked on through the years, McCauley shared with students the different techniques she has used for collecting, examining and interpreting evidence.

“Sometimes we don’t know until we got there what might be important to that scene,” she said. The cases she normally deals with involve injuries, trauma and death.

McCauley shared how she used herself in an experiment to see if the fanning out of a victim’s hair on the ground was consistent with suicide, how to determine how many times a person may have been hit with a baseball bat and how her team once used fabric softener to help them extract a usable fingerprint from a body that was in advanced stages of “dry” decomposition.