Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist (28 page)

Melton and Truby asked the family about their mishap on CR 6480. Robert explained that he had spent the night drinking with his friend Les Engh, then taken a drive along CR 6480, stopping to relieve himself en route. Gloria Fry chimed in with highlights of the towing fiasco that followed.

The detectives made a note to interview Engh as soon as they could track him down. That, as it turned out, couldn’t have been easier. The man was already in custody for forgery because an official had caught him falsifying signatures for court-ordered community service, the punishment for a prior offense.

Engh told Melton an innocent tale about partying with Fry, ducking into a convenience store for cigarettes, and walking out to find his pal chatting up a tearful Native American woman. Engh said Fry simply took her number and left. Melton asked Engh what Fry normally kept in his Ford. Among the items Engh ticked off was a sledgehammer. Melton thanked him and left.

Then Truby returned with more questions. In minutes, Engh cottoned on to the fact that the cops had found Betty Lee’s corpse. He came clean and started spilling every detail of the gruesome killing.

On June 11, police showed up at the Fry house with a warrant for Robert’s arrest. He was charged with the murder, kidnapping, and attempted rape of Betty Lee as well as tampering with evidence. Engh, too, was arrested. Bloodstained items retrieved from his home were submitted into evidence, as was Fry’s Ford Aspire, which contained a
bloody floor mat and one of Lee’s earrings. Lab tests showed the blood on both men’s clothing and Fry’s car belonged to the murdered woman.

When word of the arrest made the newspapers, those who knew him were hardly surprised. Robert Fry was infamous for a vicious, violent temper that darkened when he drank. And he drank a lot. He was menacing, moody, and prone to picking fights. But he was also a relentless braggart, spinning wild tales about brawls and military adventures. (In reality, he had been dishonorably discharged from the navy after breaking another sailor’s nose.)

One of those who read the headlines was his sometime drinking pal Larry Hudson. Fry had long boasted to him about “killing an Indian.” Until then, Hudson had dismissed the guy as a blowhard, but now he wondered. Fry had described hitting his victim over the head with a hammer. According to the papers, he had killed this woman exactly the same way. Were Fry’s gory, booze-fueled yarns true after all? Hudson figured he had better let police decide. He told members of the sheriff’s office everything he could remember of Fry’s alleged Indian murder.

When Hudson started talking, detectives realized Fry’s stories were no tall tales. Although he didn’t realize it, Hudson was relating key details of the still unsolved murder of forty-year-old Donald Tsosie of Ganado, Arizona. Tsosie, a Navajo parent of five just like Betty Lee, had been found beaten to death in the spring of 1998, nearly a month after his murder. The police had deliberately kept certain points out of the newspapers. Only the killer would know them. Now here was Hudson rattling off inside information like the fact that the victim was found barefoot, his cowboy boots tossed over the edge of a cliff on top of his bloodied body.

“Ask Les Engh,” Larry Hudson said. “He was with Fry. He’ll know more.”

Realizing his own fate was on the line when police showed up to grill him about Tsosie, Engh told them everything they wanted to know. He described the murder of a Native American stranger, to whom Fry offered a ride outside a bar one night simply because he was keyed up and wanted to “roll an Indian.” Engh remembered Fry chuckling when the stick he was beating Tsosie with kept breaking. He said Fry used the jagged bits to stab his victim in the eyes and genitals.

But by the time the Betty Lee case went to trial, Fry and his lawyer had come up with their own version of events. Engh, they claimed, was the ringleader of the Lee killing and Fry the unwilling tagalong. In their take, he reluctantly followed orders to harm a helpless woman because he was too terrified to defy his psychopathic friend.

The prosecution asked me to examine the evidence and tell them whose story the blood reinforced. Engh said Fry wielded the sledgehammer that murdered Betty Lee. Fry said Engh did it. Somebody was lying.

Analyzing the blood patterns on their clothes, I found it relatively easy to distinguish fact from fiction. Robert Fry’s boots were dotted with medium-velocity impact spatter in Lee’s blood in no fewer than twenty places. These spatter stains and the stains on the sledgehammer itself were consistent with an attacker who had leaned over his victim and bludgeoned her repeatedly with a blunt instrument like a sledgehammer as she lay on the ground in front of him.

Equally damning was the evidence on the back of Fry’s Misfits T-shirt. On the right shoulder was a series of medium-velocity blood spatter dots consistent with cast-off from a bloody weapon being swung overhead in a multiple-blow attack. (The medical examiner concluded that the killer struck Lee in the head between three and five times.) There was also a bloody, sandy impression of the rectangular head of a sledgehammer on the right shoulder, suggesting that whoever wore the
shirt slung the weapon over his shoulder and carried it in that position while the blood was still wet. When we placed the murder weapon on top of the indentation, the size and shape were a match.

Close examination of the projected blood spatter revealed that it was mixed with minute granules of sand. I had samples of sand from the section of CR 6480 where the victim’s body was found shipped to me in Portland so that I could conduct a series of experiments to help me understand precisely how it interacted with blood. It became apparent that the blood from Lee’s injuries created a wet blood-into-blood pattern in the loose, dry sand. As the sledgehammer made contact with it, some of the droplets became airborne on impact and the sand granules projected onto Fry’s clothing adhered to the fabric, as did the blood that carried them.

Engh’s shirt and black tennis shoes were bloody, too, but there was no impact spatter, no projected patterning, nothing consistent with him having hit anyone over the head with a blunt object. Instead his clothing revealed low-velocity transfer stains in Lee’s blood, bearing out his statement that he had dragged the dead woman’s body a significant distance immediately after her murder. The front of Fry’s T-shirt had similar transfer stains in Lee’s blood, reinforcing Engh’s explanation of how the two worked together to drag the victim’s body to its hiding place.

The prosecutor asked me to stage a reenactment of the murder to help the jury understand how the blood spatter had landed on Robert Fry’s boots and shirt and what that meant. So I set up a female mannequin and the actual sledgehammer used in the murder, then demonstrated the blows in slow motion.

I don’t take sides in court. I just do my best to educate the jurors on the blood evidence they need to understand. Still, it is impossible to ignore the family members sitting there, watching me re-create the terrifying, final moments of their loved one’s life. In the Fry trial, the
rows on the right held a smattering of the defendant’s kin, while those on the left behind the prosecutor’s table were filled with nearly fifty of Betty Lee’s relatives. Seeing the pain in their eyes was heart-wrenching.

I very seldom meet with relatives of the victim before my testimony, but I make a point to talk with them after my presentations whenever they are willing. I explain that I am genuinely sorry for forcing them to relive nightmares. I also remind them that my reenactments are done to help ensure justice for the person they have lost, to help give the victim a voice. Usually families understand.

The jury in the Fry case deliberated for seven hours before finding him guilty on all counts. He was sentenced to die by lethal injection. He appealed, arguing that the court violated his right to a fair trial by excusing seven prospective jurors who said their religion made them opposed to the death penalty, but the New Mexico Supreme Court upheld the murder conviction and death sentence. Engh, who testified against Fry, pleaded guilty and got a life sentence for his role in the killing.

After his conviction for Lee’s murder, Fry was also tried and convicted for killing Tsosie and sentenced to life in prison. When yet another former friend came forward to give evidence, Fry was tried and convicted of two earlier killings that had long gone unsolved and received two more life sentences for the brutal 1996 slayings of eighteen-year-old Matthew Trecker and twenty-four-year-old Joe Fleming, whose throats were sliced from ear to ear late one night in a Farmington store. At the time, Fry was a frequent customer and ostensibly a friend of both victims, one of whom he attempted to decapitate.

In March 2009, New Mexico became the fifteenth state to abolish the death penalty, though the legislation does not apply to the two men currently on death row, one of whom is Robert Fry. At press time, Fry’s case was still in the appeals process. If his appeals prove unsuccessful, his sentence of execution by lethal injection will stand.

I
LOGGED ROUGHLY ONE
hundred thousand air miles in 2008, much of it devoted to visiting crime scenes and police departments where I was consulting on blood spatter patterns in homicides. Luckily, I like to travel, and the work I do takes me to fascinating places. I have had the good fortune to lecture in Argentina, Canada, Colombia, France, Russia, and England’s illustrious New Scotland Yard, where I got to see some truly pioneering fingerprinting techniques in action. Even when I am supposedly the teacher, every new group I train teaches me something new about crime solving in return. My travels also remind me, continually, that murder finds its way into every kind of community in every corner of the world.

One unusual case occurred in the tiny fishing village of Togiak in southwestern Alaska. Even now, the population there barely tops eight hundred. In the winter, temperatures plunge to forty below zero. Togiak is one of dozens of Yupik Eskimo villages strung like beads through barren tundra more reminiscent of Siberia than the United States. According to census data, 86 percent of residents are Native Americans. The village perches on the edge of a bay inside a national wildlife refuge that shares its name, and the only way to reach it is to brave nearly impassable roads of ice or mud, depending on the season, or to hire a bush pilot willing to fly anywhere if the price is right.

The homicide in question was an unsettling one involving allegations not only of murder, but of necrophilia. On November 15, 1988, as the bitter Alaska winter set in, the Andrew family hosted a raucous party, where the booze flowed and the revelry lasted until after eight
A.M.
Most of the celebrants were still recovering from the previous night’s bash when two of the host family’s younger siblings wandered into the bedroom where twenty-two-year-old Moses Andrew was sleeping during the afternoon. There was Moses, unconscious, lying on top of his girlfriend, Roberta Blue. Something red had stained the pillow under her head. Moses’s little brothers took a few steps closer and saw that there was blood all over the bed.

They hurried out to get their aunt, who took one glance into the bedroom and then called the police. By the time a village public safety officer arrived, Moses Andrew appeared to be slowly regaining consciousness. When the officer walked in, according to his later testimony, he found the suspect partially nude and attempting to have sex with Blue’s corpse. He pulled Moses off the dead woman, ordered him
to get dressed, and arrested him. He also ascertained that Blue had been shot in the head multiple times.

I was asked by the prosecutor in the case to analyze the crime scene photos and give an interpretation of exactly what had happened, since everyone in the house had apparently been too inebriated to remember clearly. The last time anyone recalled seeing Blue alive was sometime around ten
A.M.
Moses Andrew’s defense attorney contended that another resident of the house had pulled the trigger and then set up the unconscious man as the fall guy by dumping him on top of the victim.

The blood in the case told me a story as remarkable as it was disturbing. Blue had been shot in the head three times with a .22 rifle, which was found lying on the floor beside the bed. She had a most unusual blood pattern of thin, crisscrossing red lines—a sort of tic-tac-toe board of blood—across her face. The bed also showed three distinct pools of blood, with thinner trails of blood connecting them all. These components together suggested to me that Blue’s body had been moved twice after she was killed. Each time her body was rolled into a different position, more blood leaked out of her wounds and ran down her face from a new angle, creating a pattern of intersecting lines. Blue’s body remained in its various positions a relatively long time, long enough for her head to continue bleeding heavily from the gunshot wounds and creating a new pool of blood wherever she lay. The photographs showed the position in which her body was found, with her legs apart and her head hanging over the edge of the bed. Blood had run down the sheets and puddled on the floor. It was gruesome, but an excellent study in flow patterns.

I was asked to testify in the trial. These were the 1980s, when my area of expertise was still a novelty, and the defense attorney requested that the judge bar my testimony on the grounds that blood pattern
interpretation had no merit and no basis in science. In this instance, the judge disagreed. Taking part meant that I would need to fly to Anchorage and then board a puddle jumper for the four-hundred-mile journey to Bethel, a remote town forty miles from the Bering Sea, where the trial would be held.

Proceedings were about to get under way and I had my travel plans set when, to my astonishment, my client called to tell me things had ground to a screeching halt because fishing season was starting. At first I thought he was kidding. But many Bethel residents, like their smaller-town neighbors, made their livelihood hunting and fishing in the salmon-rich waters around their homes. The jurors had to earn while they could. So did the alternates. And the salmon didn’t stop running, even for a murder trial.