Coroner's Journal (23 page)

From a subjective standpoint, I've walked through Gina's house and reworked that scene in my mind more times than I care to count. I guess I'm trying to reconstruct events in order to try to understand how someone is capable of such a crime.
What was he thinking? How can you so dehumanize someone? Did he stalk her? What caused him to choose her as the victim? How could this have been prevented? Was there something there that heralded a subsequent murder?
Even though we know who her killer is now, there were still so many unanswered questions then. I don't know if those questions will ever be answered. Until then, I'll continue to replay that tape in my mind—frame by frame.

Autopsy confirmed that she died from asphyxiation due to strangulation. Evidence showed that she had also been raped. DNA later linked her to Derrick Todd Lee. He's been confronted with immutable evidence, linked by DNA to seven female murders, and already convicted of two of those murders. Yet ruthless, uncaring, unremorseful sociopath that he is, he refuses to fess up to his other actions and give those surviving family members any relief or closure. Like Stan says, “What do you expect, Lou? He's a sociopath.”

It happened on January 14, 2002, in Addis, Louisiana. That's in West Baton Rouge Parish, so it was out of my jurisdiction and not my case. I wish it had been. Things might have been different. Geralyn DeSoto, an attractive twenty-one-year-old white female, was beaten and stabbed to death in her home. Her throat was slashed. She was a graduate student who had registered at LSU on the day of her murder. Her cell phone was missing. Her murder was not tied to Gina Green's. I can't be sure what was initially done or not done at autopsy. It was not my case. I did, however, talk to a family member later who insisted that Geralyn was the victim of the Baton Rouge Serial Killer and that none of the various law-enforcement officials she spoke to gave her a serious hearing. Some questions arose about the handling of evidence and about whether a rape kit had been used, but nothing came of it. There is also a gaping question about the rape kit. Was one even done? Again, Geralyn's death did not come under the jurisdiction of my office and subsequently we had no involvement in that autopsy.

Months later, her fingernails, samples of which were taken during autopsy, would prove her family right. The killer's DNA was found there. He had not gotten away unscathed, and the details of her final moments of life would be reconstructed and presented in graphic detail during trial.

The rains in Louisiana can get pretty heavy at times. They can wreck homes, ruin crops in the fields, flood roads, and occasionally help find a body.

One of the greatest unsolved mysteries in my career brought me to a levee of the Mississippi River on a rainy Father's Day in 2002. Earlier that Sunday, two retired gentlemen from the area had their hearts set on fishing in a bar pit behind the levee that keeps the Mississippi from flooding East Baton Rouge Parish and all points north and south.

A bar pit is created by the dirt taken from the river side to build the levee. The pit fills with water and is restocked with fish every time the river rises out of its natural banks. The original term, “borrow pit,” over time became “bar pit.” But today, due to rainy weather that made “gumbo mud,” the two fishermen predicted the bar pit would not yield the best catch.

As I understand it, they looked around and spied a pond on the far side of the levee. Even better, they saw the remnants of an old dirt road that would allow them to drive up to the pond. This road was essentially two ruts that ran by the side of Ebenezer Baptist Church, and they followed the two ruts until they reached their destination.

They set up on the litter-strewn banks of the pond, fished for a while, then concluded this was just not a good Sunday to be fishing. A joint decision was made to abandon fishing and seek other endeavors. So they loaded up the buckets and poles and the ice chest and set out to retrace their way back to River Road. The rough road required them to move very slowly, almost at a crawl. One of the luckless fishermen was practically hanging out of the window when he spotted something strange in the road. When he got out and kicked it out of the way, he suddenly realized it was a human skull.

I was with my wife, DeAnn, at home when I got the call that a skull had been found on River Road. As we drove south along the curvy blacktopped road, DeAnn and I talked about the case. As a psychiatric nurse and a registered medicolegal death investigator, she has the training and experience to investigate deaths and collect evidence for a coroner or medical examiner. Her unique combination of skills has afforded us valuable insight into many homicides, particularly those involving women.

When we pulled up to the picturesque little wooden church, the rain continued, and any resemblance to a Norman Rockwell scene was abruptly dashed by the detectives from the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office who greeted us. We knew each other from previous homicides and enjoyed a good working relationship—not always the case between agencies. Their crime-scene officer was a seasoned veteran in death investigation. De and I were motioned over to a canvas shelter that had been erected over the skull. The skull was about twenty feet or so from the edge of River Road—the crime-scene officer of course had taken more exact measurements.

Initially I examined the skull in place. Once I was assured that all the necessary photos had been taken, I picked it up for a closer look. At fifty-four years of age, I'd already taken part in innumerable autopsies and handled innumerable specimens, but the eerie sensation of holding the skull of a human evades description.

It was as though this person was looking back at me through those hollowed eye sockets and trying to tell me what happened. My job is to respectfully examine and analyze every possible facet of information available. It is here that my duties as victim's advocate, conservator of the peace, and physician all merge. It is here that I must call upon all my expertise and resources to “listen” to what the victim has to tell me. It's a heavy responsibility, and this ain't no TV moment. This is for real. I continued my examination.

There was still some tissue inside the cranium. Several teeth were missing, as was the mandible, or lower jawbone. The bone structure was comparatively delicate and the size of the skull was such that I surmised these were the remains of a female. There were enough teeth in place for dental comparison and we could surely make a DNA match if we had some DNA to compare it to.

I instructed one of my investigators to move out and search for other bones. DeAnn and I did the same. A light rain was still falling, and the world seemed to have become a hazy gray—a very depressing gray. It is amazing what people do not see when they are not looking for anything in particular. Scattered about the churchyard were the skeletonized remains of a young female. Scattered skeletal remains that showed evidence of extensive animal activity. We soon learned that a stray dog had taken up residence there in the past several weeks.

Most of the ends of the long bones were chewed off. The dog had been bringing this woman's bones from her murder site up into the yard and eating them! Members of the church had been parking in the grass yard on top of them. They had done so as recently as this morning. No one ever noticed. It is times like this that make me think the whole world is insane, or blind, or both. The preacher later told detectives that he had actually thrown some bones he found in the yard into a nearby ditch.

We began a systematic search of the area. We found ribs in one area and vertebral bones from her back in another. There were parts of her pelvis scattered about with the bones from her arms, legs, and hands. The bones were strewn over an area that would easily accommodate twenty to thirty parked cars. And, to complicate matters even more, there were also animal bones—mostly chicken and turtle bones—in various places around the church. Poor Phideaux (or so we had dubbed him) was taken into custody by animal control. I doubt there was a happy outcome for him.

If I ever had a need for a forensic anthropologist, it was now. I called Mary Manheim and laid it out. As usual, she responded to the situation right away. She would grid it all out and process the remains in her lab.

By now, we all had a high index of suspicion that we were dealing with the remains of Christine Moore. At least, it was more probable than not.

I had read about Christine Moore in the newspaper. She had gone missing some three weeks earlier, on May 23, 2002. Her car had been found ten miles away from this area, at Farr Park. A five-foot, one-inch twenty-three-year-old black female, she was in graduate school at LSU, studying to be a social worker. Her weight was reported as 115 to 130 pounds. She was a jogger. She was the oldest of seven children and the valedictorian of her class at Xavier Preparatory School. Her father called her a trailblazer.

How can a young girl's bones be strewn about a churchyard and nobody notices it? Is it just me? Am I the crazy one?
Actually, I found it a bit reassuring that DeAnn was experiencing the same level of disbelief. Of course, there is the phenomenon of shared paranoid disorder, but . . .
Enough! Back to business.

We needed to find the primary site where the body had been dumped and where it had subsequently decomposed. Unfortunately, our best witness was the dog. We tried to search the area but came up with only a decomposing deer in the field behind the church and a dead dog in a ditch up the road. We decided to call in a dog of our own—a “cadaver dog,” one specially trained to seek out human remains.

Christine's body had been out here for about a month. Decomposition is a relatively rapid process in Louisiana. Between insects, carnivores, and the temperate climate, skeletonization can be accomplished within that time frame. Somebody must have smelled the decomposing remains, but they must never have considered the possibility that it was a human that was decomposing. Actually, given the fact that we had come upon the two aforementioned animal carcasses, it was possible that the odor could be mistaken for just another animal. Still, it still seemed illogical that no one would investigate it, especially in lieu of the publicity about the missing girl. Did no one around here keep track of current events?

The specialized cadaver dog had arrived. The dog, a German shepherd, lived up to its reputation and soon led his handler to the decomposition site. It was there that another horror scene awaited us.

We followed along a rudimentary path that ran from the rutted road to a small clearing about six feet in diameter, and when we got close, the odor was unmistakable. And the physical evidence further supported the fact that this was where Christine had lain for the past four weeks. Specifically, her hair had fallen off her head here during decomposition, and the ground was discolored from the leakage of body fluids as she decayed and the dog feasted on internal organs.

The rain was letting up now but the humidity was still high and we were all drenched with rain and perspiration. Our hair was matted down. Our clothes were wet and frumpy, and we looked like we had just crawled out of the swamps. I noticed that we had inadvertently formed a sort of odd circle around the spot. No one talked for what seemed like an eternity. The horror of it all was still sinking in. We may have looked like defeated swamp rats but the atrocity before us only made us more determined to get justice for the victim. We systematically began to investigate this part of the crime scene.

Her jogging shoes were to the south. Her hair was to the west. It was black, the color we would expect to find if this was Christine. Several other of her bones were recovered. In the end, we would find about seventy-five percent of her skeleton. Some of her clothing was also recovered.

We trudged back to the churchyard. Thirty or so little yellow marker flags were rippling in the breeze. They fanned out over the green grass and past the picnic tables, reminding me of some sort of field game that children who were members of the church might play on family day. But these flags were not festive in nature; these were morbid in that each marked a bone or bone fragment—evidence to be collected.

The autopsy confirmed what we had suspected: the dead body was Christine Moore's, a positive ID having been made based on dental records. A skull fracture indicated that severe head trauma was the probable cause of death.

I could envision her being preoccupied with whatever she was doing.
Maybe she was just getting out of her car when he surprised her. Maybe she was preparing to clear her mind with a long jog on that river road. In that split second before she became unconscious, she would have known that she was in trouble— indeed, from that moment on he was in total control and she was doomed.

Christine's hair was sent to the crime lab for trace evidence analysis. Her father had requested a lock of hair, but we could not comply with his wishes at the time because it was evidence. He understood. I first met Tony Moore, Christine's father, in the morgue, about a week after the autopsy. He came with the funeral home people to retrieve her bones. A local priest was there to bless her remains prior to her journey home. We placed her bones in a pink coffin. I remember thinking that I wished there were more remains that I could give him, and instantly realizing what a strange thought that was.

I wondered just how much pain one man could stand. First he endured the fear and uncertainty of having a missing daughter. Then, on Father's Day, of all days, he hears that the body we had found could be that of his daughter. Then it is confirmed that she had been murdered and her bones scattered and eaten by a dog. He obviously is a man of strong faith.

He was quoted in an interview as saying, “If Christine is alive, she will walk toward me. If she's coming from the other path, someone else will bring her to me.” It was with great sorrow that I brought her back to him, in a small body bag.