Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist (30 page)

Just about that time, Penny and I emerged into the arrivals area. Finding no sign of Dayle and discovering that my cell phone wouldn’t work, we wandered around the desolate airport and then eventually ventured out the front door to see if Dayle was waiting at the curb.

An unofficial-looking cabdriver approached us. “You want a ride?” he asked.

“No,
gracias
,” I said confidently. “We’ve got one.”

He shot me a skeptical glance, then wandered off in search of another fare.

“Let’s just wait here,” I told Penny, pushing our massive pile of luggage up against a pillar. “I’m sure she’ll turn up soon.”

The minutes ticked by, and the airport grew quieter. A few slow-moving stragglers trickled out to their cars and cabs, then silence descended as the clock edged its way toward midnight. Maybe my edginess stemmed from all the dire warnings I had been given about Colombia, but a palpable sense of menace seemed to be enveloping the empty building. I knew Bogotá was a city where foreigners are not supposed to walk around by themselves in the daytime. Now here my wife and I were, stranded in the dead of night.

“Maybe I should try to reach her on a pay phone,” I began. Penny’s eyes widened in horror at the prospect of being left alone on the curb. I glanced ruefully at the heap of heavy trunks and suitcases. It would be ridiculous to lug them all the way to a pay phone and back again. Why hadn’t I brought slides instead?

As if we weren’t uneasy enough, a female cabdriver spotted us, jumped out of her car, and hurried over. She shook her head vehemently and held up her hands.

“Señor, this is very bad for you to be out here,” she said in English.

“We’re waiting for somebody,” I told her. “We don’t need a taxi. . . .”

“You should get back inside the building right now,” she warned. “It’s not safe here.”

Penny and I decided to heed her warning and were starting to drag the trunks back through the doors when a man strolled past and did a double take. “Whoa,” he said in an American accent. “You’re in dangerous territory. What are you doing?”

“I’m supposed to have a ride, but I can’t reach the people I’m meeting,” I told him.

“Well, I can’t leave you here,” he said. “I’m with the American embassy, doing some construction work. I’ll give you a lift to your hotel.”

“I don’t know where my hotel is,” I admitted sheepishly. “My colleague has that information.”

“Any guesses?”

“Well, it might be the same place we stayed last year.”

“Why don’t you call and find out?” he said, handing me his cell phone. I did and, to my relief, the desk attendant told me we were registered there.

Our helpful new friend got his pickup, helped me load my equipment, and, though it was a forty-five-minute drive, dropped us off at the hotel I recognized from my previous training session. It was one
A.M.
when we heaved the trunks through the front doors, bedraggled and drained from the tension and the long trip.

“I’m sorry, but you’re not registered here,” said the clerk at the desk.

“What?!”

The clerk shook his head. “There’s no record for you.”

By this point, I was desperate. Should we go back to the airport and catch the next flight home? I glanced at Penny, surrounded by mounds of luggage.

“Have you got any vacancies?” I asked.

He checked his computer. “We have one room available.”

“We’ll take it.”

It turned out to be a luxury suite that had been readied for a no-show VIP. Baskets of fruit, flowers, and other luxury amenities covered every table. Ignoring them, Penny collapsed and I got on the room phone and started making calls. At last I reached Dayle, who was still wide awake and trying to locate us. I could hear the worry in her voice. She and our official room reservation were all the way across town.

Some detective. I couldn’t even track down my own hotel. After coordinating with Dayle to meet the next morning and transfer our luggage, I gave in to my exhaustion, resolving never to travel internationally again without writing down my reservation information and getting a cell phone guaranteed to work abroad.

We soon realized why people were so stunned to find two lost-looking Americans milling around the airport after dark. Just how seriously Colombians took security became apparent once the conference began and we were all given bodyguards. We spent the rest of the week being escorted everywhere we went in a bulletproof Suburban with two-inch-thick glass in the windows and a professional driver from the American embassy. Our driver never stopped for a red light if he could help it. If a motorcycle he deemed suspicious pulled up behind us, he simply veered over the median and sped off in the opposite direction. Every day when we arrived at the police academy, a thirty-minute drive from our hotel, officers on duty used mirrors to scan the underside of our vehicle, despite the fact that we were invited guests. Armed guards were posted at our hotel at all times.

My students were a sharp and dedicated collection of about twenty-one local pathologists, psychiatrists, intelligence agents, police investigators, and dentists with expertise in bite-mark identification,
all handpicked by the Colombian government. In addition to lecturing while students wore earphones for simultaneous translation, I made use of the trunks I had brought by setting up a series of elaborate re-creations of crime scenes with mannequins, stage blood, and other props, all inspired by real homicide cases I had worked. One mannequin was propped up in a bathroom with its head literally shot off using a shotgun. Another setup simulated a hanging, with only the faintest traces of blood as clues.

It took Penny, Dayle, and me long, painstaking hours to set it all up, and whenever we made the smallest mistake, we had to clean up the damaged scene and start all over. We finally finished staging the vignettes at four
A.M.
Class started at eight
A.M.
When the students arrived, I divided them into teams, then invited them to rotate from scene to scene, with forty-five minutes allotted to examine each “crime.” At the end, the teams gave opinions about the crimes and compared notes, and I explained how the cases had actually unfolded.

We also conducted a number of blood spatter experiments, and as always, I learned something new through teaching. One afternoon, a cluster of my students came hurrying over excitedly. The translator explained that they wanted to show me the work they had done. They dragged me to a gutter and pointed down at a trail of blood they had dropped into the sand-strewn cement channel.

“Which direction does the trail lead?” they asked.

I grimaced. My experience with sand was severely limited. I leaned over to examine it. The blood had soaked into the porous surface, and directionality was almost imperceptible. They watched me expectantly. If I made the wrong deduction, my credibility would be shot.

I crouched down for a closer look. The droplets were round, but I thought I discerned minuscule specks that had broken out of them on
one side, creating what’s called a “leading edge.” I took a deep breath. “This way,” I said, and pointed in the direction of the subtle tails.

They erupted into applause.

“Phew. That was a close one,” I mumbled.

“What?” asked the translator.

“Never mind,” I told him.

On the day before we left, Dayle and Penny decided to squeeze in a bit of shopping. That gave us yet another window into the harrowing aspects of daily life in Bogotá. They were assigned a bodyguard and chauffeured in an armored car to the area’s most upscale mall. Before they got out, the driver and bodyguard had them remove all their jewelry, and the driver stashed it in his trunk. Then the bodyguard briefed them on proper mall behavior: “Never separate. Never walk by yourself. Always stay next to each other,” he cautioned, slinging an AK-47 over his shoulder in addition to his sidearm. “I will be ten feet behind you at all times.” It was more like heading into an undercover narcotics operation than into a department store.

My work in Colombia made me proud of the system we have in America. It’s not perfect here, but it’s very, very good. I also developed tremendous respect for the men and women who fight crime in Bogotá. Their work is demanding and unending in the face of such high homicide rates. Yet they are passionate about and proud of what they do, and they remain optimistic in spite of the odds. By the time our farewell reception rolled around, we had developed some lasting friendships.

“Weren’t you afraid to be here?” asked a female forensic patholo-gist who had joined with another doctor to serve as my bodyguard team for a portion of the week.

“No. I felt protected by you,” I told her.

“Well, we were afraid
for
you,” she said.

“Aren’t you afraid for yourself?”

“Yes,” was the answer, “but what can I do? This is my life.”

Although I thoroughly enjoy the journeys my work entails, some of the most compelling crimes happen in my own backyard of the Pacific Northwest. One memorable example came early in my consulting career. Let’s call it the Case of the Vanished Mariner.

At a glance, Ruth and Rolf Neslund looked like any other retired couple living out their golden years on picturesque Lopez Island, one of the San Juan Islands in the northwestern corner of Washington State. Norwegian-born Rolf had enjoyed a long and largely illustrious career captaining ships for the Puget Sound Pilots Association and was a popular local figure. So when the gregarious octogenarian failed to turn up in any of his usual haunts in the late summer and fall of 1980, his friends at the pilots association got worried and called the San Juan County Sheriff’s Department. Deputies paid a visit to his wife, sixty-year-old Ruth Neslund, to see if she could enlighten them on his whereabouts. Ruth said she had no idea where her wayward husband had gone. “Probably ran off with
her
,” she said, a bitter edge in her voice. When police asked Ruth to clarify, she explained that Rolf had never broken things off with his mistress of many years earlier.

Police checked out the possibility but soon dismissed it. Rolf’s “affair” had long since cooled into a platonic friendship, it seemed. In fact, the woman who had given birth to two sons with Rolf before Ruth had entered the picture and gone from mistress to wife herself was newly married at the time of Rolf’s disappearance. When police brought Ruth up-to-date on all this, she shrugged. Well then, she suggested, maybe Rolf left because he was still despondent over a notorious 1978 accident in which he had crashed the
Chavez
—the forty-ton, 550-foot freighter he was piloting—into the east end of the West Seattle Bridge over the Duwamish West Waterway. Fortunately no one was
hurt, and Neslund retired two weeks later. But in the process, the old sea captain single-handedly forced the city of Seattle to replace the bridge, a notorious bottleneck, with a new larger, higher $60 million six-lane West Seattle Bridge and freeway that would take seven years to complete. Everyone knew Rolf’s name because of the incident. Some had even quipped that the new bridge should be named in his honor. Maybe he just needed to get away for a while.

But the more police delved, the less likely any of Ruth’s theories seemed. Rolf was diabetic, yet he had failed to refill his prescriptions for months. On one of their visits with Ruth, detectives noticed Rolf’s medicine was still sitting in his home on Lopez Island. Nor had he withdrawn any money from the bank since the previous summer. Even more peculiar, Rolf’s glasses were still sitting on the dresser.

Everyone knew the couple was prone to drinking binges that sometimes escalated into violent fistfights. The police had been called to the Neslund residence to sort things out more than once. They noticed it was generally Rolf—not Ruth—who bore the scratches and cuts. Had she finally snapped during one of her benders and done her spouse in, as she had threatened to do so many times after tossing back a few too many?

Circumstances grew even more suspicious when police learned that shortly before his disappearance, Rolf had realized Ruth was secretly transferring money out of his accounts into her own and hiding information about their finances from him. One friend came forward to say that the retired ship’s pilot had discussed changing his will and writing his wife out in favor of his two grown sons. People who were close to the tightfisted Ruth knew how she would feel about that: She would sooner see Rolf dead than let him give his boys a penny. She had said so herself.

That was just the beginning. Though Ruth’s relatives seemed downright terrified of the pudgy, nondescript middle-aged woman,
two of her nieces met privately with investigators to say that Ruth had called them and confessed to shooting Rolf in the head with one of the many guns she kept in the house. She had even told Donna Smith and Joy Stroup that she was burning her husband’s body in a barrel in the yard. But she was drunk when she said it, so neither woman took her seriously at the time. Could she have been telling the truth?

In the spring of 1981, police got a search warrant and combed the Neslund home but turned up nothing incriminating. It would take another year and another member of Ruth’s own family disclosing even more lurid details about precisely where in the house and how the murder had occurred before a second police search uncovered the blood that had lain hidden in plain sight all along. Ruth’s brother Paul Myers claimed he had overheard Ruth describing the killing in sickening detail. Ruth explained how another of her brothers, Robert Myers, had held Rolf still so that she could shoot him in the head. Then Robert dismembered Rolf in the bathtub so his body would be easier for her to burn.

Based on Paul Myers’s information about where to look, deputies inspected the living room once more. This time, they noticed that several new sections of carpet appeared to have been pieced together with older ones. When they pulled these back, they found large, dark stains that looked like blood on the concrete. They used a jackhammer to remove them for testing and submission into evidence. There was also what looked like high-velocity impact spatter on the ceiling. They even discerned tiny brownish dots on the edges of the shower doors in the master bathroom—the bathroom where Paul Myers claimed his brother had chopped up Rolf’s body for Ruth with an ax and a knife. A .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver with what appeared to be a few flecks of blood still clinging to it was also retrieved from one of Ruth’s dresser drawers. Though sophisticated DNA testing that could link blood to a specific individual would not appear for more than a decade,
the samples were tested and determined to be human blood of type A, the same as both Rolf’s and Ruth’s.