Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist (19 page)

We calculated the angle of impact based on Opperman’s wound and the blood spatter as well as on the position his body was found in, then we compared this with the dimensions of the tiny bedroom. There simply wasn’t enough room for his wife to have shot him. She would have had to sit on the floor with her feet under the bed between her husband and the TV stand, and he would have had to allow her to place the end of the rifle in his mouth. Suspicious circumstances notwithstanding, murder would have been physically impossible in the Opperman case.

Casey Opperman soon moved out of state and married for a third time. Did Tyler mimic her first husband’s method of suicide in an attempt to incriminate her as some people have suggested? Did Casey play an active role in her husband’s death as others suspected? I have certainly handled cases where one person literally talked another into killing himself. Then again, I have investigated crimes where someone took drastic, tragic actions for the sole purpose of ruining someone else’s life. But the blood evidence in the Opperman case told me nothing about the dynamics of their relationship, and I never speculate. Conjecture has no place in crime scene reconstruction.

It’s not uncommon for people who stumble upon dead bodies to try to find out if the victims might still be alive. They check for a pulse, turn a victim over, shake him, try to resuscitate him, or come in contact with wet blood through any number of other innocent, well-intentioned actions. In most cases they panic, particularly if they know the victim. They might not even realize that they’ve transferred blood to their own clothing until a police officer points it out. Unfortunately, murderers know this. And, like Hartmann and Greineder, they have an annoying
habit of trying to explain away the bloodstains on their clothes by claiming they were the proverbial innocent bystander “trying to help” the victim.

One of the most accurate ways to find out whether such transfers are inadvertent or incriminating is to do a microscopic examination of the fabric. Blood coating only the top layer suggests that the person brushed against wet blood accidentally. However, minuscule droplets of blood spatter embedded more deeply in the fabric’s fibers suggest the person wearing the clothing was either the assailant or stood nearby while an attack causing medium-or high-velocity spatter occurred.

Taking this one step further, crime scene reconstructionists would use the position of the blood spatter on the clothing to determine whether it suggests guilt or innocence. The Sandra Anne Duyst murder is a prime example: Not only did an examination of her husband’s clothing reveal high-velocity blood spatter, but it showed spatter concentrated behind the right sleeve—precisely where blowback would hit a shooter extending his arm as he pulled the trigger.

Firearms are responsible for close to three-quarters of the murders in the United States. They accounted for 68 percent of them in 2006, the most recent year for which the National Institute of Justice has data. They are also the weapon of choice in more than half of the suicides—just over 52 percent, based on 2005 data from the National Center for Health Statistics. So it’s not surprising that high-velocity blood spatter interpretation plays a central role in crime scene reconstruction in America today. But it’s only one piece of the puzzle.

Understanding
trajectory
(the flight path a moving object takes
through space) is equally important. Crime scene reconstructionists work backward from the blood spatter through the victim’s wounds and the position of his body to determine the course the bullet or bullets took through the air. Mapping out the bullet’s path tells you the shooter’s position and distance from the victim, approximate height, right-or left-handedness, whether he or she was stationary or moving when the shots were fired, and more.

Ballistics experts can also piece together what make of gun and type of bullet were used based on shell casings, spent bullets, and bullet fragments. Was more than one gun used? Was the gun a type that leaves residue on a shooter’s skin or clothes? If so, detectives will swab any suspects they bring in and lab test their clothing for traces of it. A fired bullet is almost like a license plate—it reveals the distinctive grooves, lands (flat, high points), and other unique markings of the gun that fired it. No two guns create the same markings.

When there is a gun in evidence, experts can use chemicals to reconstruct a serial number that has been ground or filed off. This can then be entered into a state or national database to find out whom it’s registered to and whether it has been used in other recent crimes.

In 1989, I got a chance to put my knowledge of trajectory to use to help unlock lingering mysteries in a crime that took place almost 150 years ago.

On the morning of July 3, 1863, twenty-year-old Gettysburg resident Mary Virginia Wade rose early and started kneading dough for bread and biscuits she planned to hand out to hungry Union soldiers, as she and her mother had done the previous day. The family had taken shelter at the house of Wade’s sister Georgia, who gave birth an
hour before Confederate troops rode into town on the first day of what would become the Civil War’s most famous battle. Jennie Wade (or Ginnie Wade, according to some sources) and her family hoped the little brick house would provide a safer haven than their own, which was several blocks away. Instead they found themselves caught in a no-man’s-land between Northern and Southern sharpshooters.

More than 150 shots hit the façade of the Baltimore Street house before one fatal bullet penetrated the exterior side door. It pierced the interior kitchen door next and then struck Wade in the back under her left shoulder blade. She died instantly, earning the dubious distinction as the only civilian killed in the epic Battle of Gettysburg. Her fiancé, a Union soldier, was wounded, taken prisoner, and died in a hospital less than two weeks later. He never learned of Wade’s fate.

The bullet-riddled house where Jennie Wade was shot to death is now a museum and a popular tourist attraction. According to one local legend, it is still haunted by the ghost of the young woman who died trying to serve the cause of patriotism by feeding starving troops. Nearby at Evergreen Cemetery, an American flag flies over Wade’s grave around the clock. Betsy Ross is the only other American woman given that honor.

For more than a hundred years, history held that the shooter fired from a building on Baltimore Street just north of the house, where Confederate troops were positioned. When I was attending the FBI National Academy for three months in 1989, my roommate, a captain in a California sheriff’s office, was an American history buff, and on weekends I tagged along with him to visit every battlefield within driving distance in that history-rich region. I found Jennie Wade’s house especially fascinating and took Penny to see it when she came to visit. There were the famous little round holes in the doors that had left the wood splintered and exposed, the same bullet holes that have drawn countless visitors to the spot over the years. There was the large battered
wooden dough tray where Wade was working when she died. I followed an imaginary bullet’s trajectory in my mind’s eye, as I have done at many crime scenes, from the first through the second hole and on to an imaginary woman standing in the kitchen, trying to calculate the point of origin. Then I read the historical information displayed. Something didn’t sit quite right. But it was hard to focus in a room where other visitors were examining the artifacts and intermittently blocking my view. I spoke to the people in charge, explained what I did for a living, and asked if I might be able to come back to examine the bullet holes more closely. They agreed.

It would be several years after I graduated from the FBI Academy, where I was privileged to serve as president and spokesperson of the 159th session and give the commencement speech for my class, but I managed to return with measuring equipment in 2003. I ran a string from one bullet hole to the next and then on to the dough tray. My measurements showed that the hole in the kitchen door was roughly three and a half inches higher than the one in the exterior wall. That meant the bullet was on an upward course when it struck Wade. It also cast doubt on the theory that the sniper who fired it was in a building. He would have been positioned low and firing upward. I stepped outside and scrutinized the area. Based on historical accounts of who was stationed where when Wade died, the bullet most likely came from much farther away than originally believed—probably from a field where Confederate sharpshooters had taken up posts north of the cluster of buildings that included the Wade house. I filmed a short reenactment using an actress dressed in period costume to illustrate how the shooting would have happened based on the trajectory the bullet holes suggested.

In the spring of 2009, Penny and I had the honor of returning to examine evidence at the Jennie Wade House once again with a superb group of investigative pros that included forensic serology consultant
Dr. Ted Yeshion of ClueFinders Inc. as well as former Oregon police officers Amy Dier and Olivia Leon, who now run their own private investigative firm called Blue Line Investigations. Ken Rohrbaugh, who oversees operations at the Jennie Wade House, and house manager Sharon Marcus generously allowed us a full day and evening to conduct tests with phenolphthalein and Luminol for the presence of blood on the dough tray, the wooden floorboards of one of the bedrooms in the house, and a bullet that was donated to the museum recently with the claim that it was the actual bullet that killed Wade. Luminol tests revealed a glowing bright green constellation of what looked like blood spatter patterns on the bottom of the dough tray’s center and sides as well as some intriguing reactions with the flooring in the bedroom. We took core samples of the wood and sent them to Dr. Grimsbo for DNA tests to find out whether it was human blood and, if so, whether it belonged to a man or a woman. We were still awaiting results as this book went to press.

As you know if you’ve watched shows like
CSI
and
Forensic Files
, killers often leave samples of their DNA behind at crime scenes—minute amounts of blood if they cut themselves during the attack, broken fingernails, strands of hair, bodily fluids like semen, and bits of skin that slough off when their hands touch their victims’ clothes.

Criminalistics has made phenomenal progress from its first simple forensic applications. In the early 1900s, precipitin tests emerged. They involved extracting the red and white cells from a sample of the blood of a specific kind of animal (deer, rabbit, human, and so on) and then dropping the clear serum that remains into an unidentified sample of blood to see whether it reacted by producing a cloudy “precipitate.”
The cloudiness indicated that the two samples came from the same species. If nothing happened to the serum, the tester could safely conclude that the unknown bloodstain came from a different species. Investigators used the results of precipitin tests to tell whether a murder suspect was lying or telling the truth when he claimed that the blood smears all over his clothes came from a successful deer hunt and not a human victim. In the mid-1980s, DNA fingerprinting emerged along with PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests, which allowed for analysis and identification using minuscule DNA samples as well as degraded ones that had been gathering dust in evidence rooms or buried with corpses for decades. Perhaps the best-known early example was the 1985 exhumation of Brazilian rancher Wolfgang Gerhard, whose remains were identified (through PCR DNA testing) by an international panel of forensic pathologists as those of escaped Nazi Angel of Death Josef Mengele.

I’ve investigated quite a number of cases that hinged on DNA technology. But the one that made the most powerful impression on me is the murder of Helena Greenwood.

Helena Greenwood, a British scientist-turned-marketer for a California biotech firm on the cutting edge of DNA diagnostics, was at home in her cottage in Atherton, a suburb of San Francisco, on the night of April 7, 1984. She spent the evening catching up on work, then went to bed early since her husband, Roger, was away on business. She wasn’t worried about staying alone. Atherton was wealthy and sedate, and crime was virtually nonexistent.

So it was with great horror and shock that she woke up in the darkness to see a tall, athletically built stranger with a gun coming toward
her bed through the darkened room. Keeping his hood pulled tight around his face so that all Greenwood could see were his eyes, the stranger ordered her to take off her clothes, then marched her through the house to her purse. After finding little money in it, he forced her back to her bedroom and demanded she perform fellatio on him. Terrified, she complied. A short time later, he pushed her away and fled. Shaking and fighting tears, Greenwood ran to the neighbors’ house and asked them to call the police.

Detectives combed the cottage and retrieved a semen-stained pillowcase, several hairs, and a white teapot that had somehow ended up on the deck when the stranger slipped in through the kitchen window. A forensics lab discovered a stranger’s fingerprint on it, but it didn’t match any in the FBI’s criminal database. That gave detectives little to go on, and the case stagnated until women in an apartment complex in the nearby community of Belmont started reporting similar assaults.

By the time a thirteen-year-old girl in the French Village apartments called police in February 1985 to report a man masturbating outside her window, Helena Greenwood had been offered a job with the biotech firm Gen-Probe in San Diego and had gratefully moved south with Roger after assuring the prosecutor that she would return to testify. Police hurried to French Village and apprehended someone named David Paul Frediani on the grounds. Frediani claimed he was in the market for a new apartment and had been looking for the manager of the complex when he was suddenly seized with an urgent need to urinate. Without a bathroom close by, he relieved himself in the bushes and the girl caught sight of him.