Coroner's Journal (19 page)

The crime scene was on Randall Street, which runs off of Plank Road. The beginning of Randall was blocked by the crime-scene van. The scene was cordoned off down Randall until the street intersected with another. That end was blocked by a marked police unit, so we had control of the street for a whole block. As we waited to be cleared by crime-scene officers to enter the area, we chatted among ourselves—mostly about the possibility that this prostitute could be part of a string of murders that many felt was the work of a serial killer.

We were cleared to approach the body.

We found a blue purse several feet away from the body. It was open and its contents spilled out over the driveway. Condoms and several twenty-dollar bills were scattered about. The presence of the twenties suggested that the crime scene had not been tampered with to any extent. Nobody in this neighborhood is going to walk past a twenty-dollar bill, let alone six of them.

There was also a six-inch kitchen knife in view. It did not appear to have any blood on it.
Murder weapon? Victim's weapon?

Tasha (not the victim's real name) was lying face down in the first driveway on the left. The ants had found the body almost immediately. The blow flies were still napping and there was no other insect activity on the corpse. The victim was dressed in blue slacks that appeared so tight as to make the gold-colored belt superfluous. She had on a pink striped blouse and blue shoes. Her hair was shoulder length, but it looked like a wig.

As it happened, my initial speculation was that this was the work of the serial killer. “Wonder if it's him . . .” I mumbled to myself. I mumbled a little too loudly.

Upon which my wife blurted out, “Nope, it's not him.” She said this in a very authoritative manner, and of course everyone heard her say it.

Now, I like to think I can put professional pride aside and be open to input from any source. But I must admit this irked me just a little. “Now, how in the hell do you now that, De? How do you know this is not the serial killer's work? We haven't even examined this woman yet!”

“Because I know this ‘woman' is a male. I don't even have to see the face. Look at the hands—too big. Look at the feet—too big. Plus the butt is too angular. The body fat isn't in the right place, and besides . . . that outfit is atrocious.”

I couldn't let it go. “We'll see.” De helped me turn Tasha over. Examination revealed Tasha had on a black sports bra. Each cup was stuffed with a rolled-up stocking. A key was in the right cup and a driver's license in the left one. Tasha was a man I'll call Alton. Alton also had on thong underwear that allowed him to fold his penis back toward his buttocks. De was right. Alton, alias Tasha, was definitely a male.

Still, I couldn't capitulate without a final stand. “So maybe the serial killer made the same mistake—I mean assumption.”

De: “He hasn't shot anyone to date, has he?”

Smart-ass.
I'd kept that part to myself.

Examination revealed that Tasha had sustained a gunshot wound to his right upper back. The bullet nicked a major pulmonary vessel and caused him to bleed to death. He also sustained a gunshot wound to his left hand. He was able to run from his corner of business to the driveway before he lost too much blood to continue.

I asked De to interpret the blood trail. “Well, he was running from the corner of Plank Road. You can see from how the drops splattered that he was moving fast at first; then you can see where he slowed down. Looks like he may have just stood here for a moment before he collapsed because the drops here are almost at ninety degrees.”

One of the crime-scene officers felt the need to share that he was impressed with her interpretation. I had to agree. I was proud of her.

The empty casings were .380 caliber. Some were under the PD's crime-scene van—they had parked right on top of them.

Of course, as the case unfolded, the prime suspect became the victim's lover. That's always the first suspect, assuming he had a lover. There are several lessons here. Even though I know better, I found myself giving in to that seductress known as speculation, who tempts you to look for ways to make the facts fit your preconceived assumptions. That's an investigative pitfall, and one—as Tasha and DeAnn reminded me—I'm not immune to. We all need reality checks now and then. I was jumping to a conclusion. Indeed, on our way to the scene, I had been replaying the other similar victims in my mind. Maybe I had allowed myself to be biased by the initial call. But, I was on the wrong page. The biology was wrong here. The victim was a male, albeit a female impersonator, and one who fooled me at first glance. But he was still a male, and not our serial killer's type. The cause of death, a gunshot wound, didn't fit either. The “non-serial killer” likes close contact, and strangulation is close and personal, so the psychology was just wrong. “Our boy” would never have just shot someone and run off. There was no positioning of the corpse to display his work, and like I said, bullets just aren't as intimate as choking a person to death with your hands.

The other lesson here is that men and women tend to see things differently. I strongly believe that some subtleties, especially in female homicides, are best detected by a female. A female investigator is a valuable resource to have on your team. Actually, this was only a preview of how that value would express itself later in other cases. Ironically, I would be criticized by my more vocal detractors for allowing my wife to volunteer her services. There were wrong about lots of other things too.

By the way, just as an addendum, Frank's is a local restaurant where lots of us judicial types meet up. We did go to Frank's for breakfast that morning. Our waitress recognized us, and when De ordered crow for me, both she and the waitress laughed. Personally, I failed to see the humor in that. Where's my damn biscuits and alligator sausage?

There is a “switch” that most emergency responders have developed. I've seen it in EMS paramedics, police officers, healthcare providers, and even in myself. This objectivity switch is flipped on immediately when we get a call-out. We try to put our emotions aside in order to be able to render care, or do an investigation or an autopsy, free of subjectivity. We are applying scientific methods to the task at hand.

But just because a person is not reacting emotionally to the events he or she is dealing with does not mean the emotions are not coming—because they are. We repress them at the scene. That's a good thing. We need to be able to compartmentalize situations. That ability allows us to function optimally in a crisis situation. But if we do not deal with those emotions after the acute crisis is over, then they will surely deal with us later. Those repressed emotions bubble up to the surface as alcoholism, prescription drug addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, divorce, and even suicide. We all know comrades who have burned out.

I think that to really understand what all this does to a person and how it expresses itself, you have to stand in the shoes of a responder. I hope this journal entry clarifies some of it.

One warm, mosquito-infested Saturday night in May of 2001, we were out among the usual responders at the death scene of a teenager. I say “we” because DeAnn was with me. It was just before midnight, and the humid “air” clung to us. He was not a big kid—the eighteen-year-old Broadmoor High student looked about fifteen. He had sustained a single gunshot wound to his neck and had bled to death, alone, there on a main thoroughfare in Baton Rouge.

He had tried to run from his assailants. I could tell this by the blood path he left and the way the droplets of his blood patterned on the pavement. He seemed to be running in the direction of his home. He had a lacerated jugular vein. If he had known to put pressure on it he might have lived. I thought of how scared he must have been and how his death was pointless.
Death doesn't play fair! Death doesn't “play” at all!

So there he was, crumpled up on the side of the road. His name was Demetrius White. He was walking home from a nearby apartment complex where he was visiting friends. The police were already on the trail of the killers. Minutes before midnight, three men in a four-door maroon Oldsmobile approached White and tried to rob him. White struggled and was shot in the back of the neck. The criminals went on to carjack three other men in just hours.

This was not a whodunit. Our job was to make sure we collected all of the evidence and did everything just right so we could get a conviction, and hopefully some modicum of justice for Demetrius. I realize our legal system is not necessarily compatible with justice at times. I try not to confuse the two.

We were waiting for a detective to arrive before we moved the body. Evidently it was a busy night for them. Having gone as far as we could, we were sort of huddled up around the body. A cloud of gloom hung over us and no one was talking much. We were in a kind of numb holding pattern.

There are four lanes of traffic on this street and the lanes are separated by about twenty feet of grass-covered ditch. As DeAnn looked across the road she spied an armadillo, a creature common to Louisiana. She was concerned that the creature might find its way over to us. Several of us assured her that it would probably be roadkill shortly, as it was wandering out into traffic.

What the armadillo did was serve as a sort of reprieve or temporary diversion from the depressing task at hand. One of the crime-scene officers expressed concern about the health of the creature. Another joined in to assure everyone that it would be okay. Another was sure it would be dead within ten minutes and offered to start a betting pool on the time of death.

When the armadillo did meet its abrupt demise, several of the group were truly upset and showed it.

We have a murdered child at our feet and we are upset about a damn armadillo.
Are we so callused that we feel more for an armadillo than for a child? Have we lost all perspective?
The answer is a resounding no, though sometimes it may seem that way on the surface or to someone looking in from the outside.

This is a vivid example of the dichotomy that many responders live with. It is a classic example of displaced emotions. We had seen far too much death that night. We had a professional obligation to Demetrius to do the best job possible and that meant staying objective. These were not two totally separate responses. This was a projection of our anger, outrage, and sadness that we felt for Demetrius. These were the emotions we could not talk about or express at the scene lest they shade our professionalism and our abilities to do right by him. The bottom line is that we just couldn't stand to see death win again.

As Elvis sang,

 

 

Two years later, on March 26, 2003, a jury convicted a twenty-three-year-old man in the shooting of Demetrius White, committed during a month-long spree of robberies and thefts. Travis Grevious was found guilty of second-degree murder, which carries a mandatory life sentence. The jury also found him guilty of conspiracy, armed robbery, and theft of a firearm. After Grevious robbed a convenience store with help, he stole a man's car from the Nicholson Apartments on the LSU campus. The car was a maroon 1991 Oldsmobile, the same car used in the killing of Demetrius White. Police found Grevious's fingerprints on the car, and the murder weapon in his grandmother's yard. One of the accomplices received ten years for conspiracy to commit armed robbery, and the other man received eight for the same count.

Lonnie Poydras, who admitted being involved in the attempted robbery, testified in court that they had picked the teenager randomly. He quoted Grievious as saying, “There goes a victim.”

As I drove down the street toward the crime scene, I admired the arbors that shaded the street and sidewalks. It was spring in Baton Rouge and the vegetation was lush and brilliantly green. It is a time of rebirth. This was an established neighborhood. It looked like something out of
Leave It to Beaver.
The only thing that betrayed the serenity that quiet breezy day of April 4, 2000, was the crime-scene tape stretched about the yard.

Any feelings of tranquillity were shattered by the revelation of the secrets that the house held within. The first thing I noticed as I entered the scene was a male dead on the floor of the carport. I was informed that we had a total of four dead. The other three were in the house. The detective offered to give me a walk-through. His voice was flat, which meant something really nasty lay inside. He escorted me unceremoniously through the front door.

The usual chit-chat was not going on. The place was really quiet—I mean, no one was talking. The objective and speculative comments were at a minimum. Nobody wanted to hear the bullshit about “How when I was in Vietnam I saw holes blown through slopes like that” or “Damn, bet that hurt” or all the rest of the crap that can go on. People tend to project and when a kid is killed, you see your own kid there. No side conversations about last week's fishing trip or agency politics. Flip comments were not appreciated and drew dark looks.

There were toys in the living room. Something that always gives me that chill up my spine is entering a homicide house and seeing kid's toys lying about. The immediate foreboding is that a child has been murdered. Regrettably, the feeling was accurate this time. A young woman's body was in the hallway. I paused and did an initial cursory examination. She had been shot to death. We then entered a bedroom. Another young woman was dead in the bed. Her injuries were compatible with a close-range shot from a high-powered rifle. Empty cartridge cases scattered about indicated the killer was shooting either an SKS or an AK-47 assault rifle.