Murder.com (15 page)

A few hours later, the 911 dispatcher in Rowlett received a frantic call. ‘Somebody came in here,’ Darlie screamed down the phone. ‘They just stabbed me and my children!’

Having examined from a distance the larger, although incomplete, picture, we can now move in closer and start to
study several of its components. First, the fingerprints, which, according to the pro-Darlie camp and her legal team, are an integral part of proving her innocence. For among the few flys-pecking issues that her supporters have seized on is the fingerprint evidence – or, to be correct, the lack of fingerprint evidence – which they believe may prove her innocence.

Darlie had told the police dispatcher that a man wielding a knife had attacked her and her sons. She said the assailant had dropped the knife when he fled the house and that she picked it up. The dispatcher told her not to touch anything, to which Darlie responded with a calculated comment, totally out of sync with the rest of the call: ‘God… I bet if we could have gotten the prints maybe… maybe…’

This being the case, there would have been no fingerprints on the knife other than those of Darlie Routier, who obviously wanted it on record that she had picked up the murder weapon – thus any prints found on it she had ‘inadvertently’ placed there, conveniently erasing the alleged attacker’s at the same time.

Crime-scene technicians had discovered a hazy fingerprint on a coffee table in the recreation room. The table was very close to where Damon had been stabbed. At the trial, prosecution experts argued that it was a child’s print, while the defence team claimed it was an adult’s.

By a process of elimination, it was determined that the print apparently had not been left by Darlie, Darin or any of the investigators or emergency personnel who attended the scene of the murders. The police did not fingerprint the dead children at the time, and since the children were soon buried their prints could not be compared with the print on the coffee table.

Devon and Damon’s bodies were exhumed several years ago and a post-mortem photograph was taken of the print from Devon’s right thumb. Family members also found a set of Damon’s fingerprints which had been taken as part of a school safety programme.

Fingerprint consultant and former police detective Robert C Lohnes Sr said the coffee table print ruled out Darin, Darlie and Devon, leaving only Damon’s prints to be matched. On this matter, lead prosecutor Greg Davis says Darlie Routier ‘has since been unusually quiet’!

At the time of the case, Greg Davis believed the coffee table fingerprint could have been Damon’s. Other blood trace evidence supported this theory because, unlike Devon, who was stabbed through the heart and never moved, Damon was very close to the table and he had moved after the attack.

Greg Davis has more recently stated, ‘If there was a fingerprint discrepancy, the prints could have been matched up at the time [they found the school card]. The family could have seen whether the fingerprint matched Damon’s. They [Darlie Routier and her internet supporters] haven’t talked about that at all.’

The organisers of the internet’s Free Darlie Routier Campaign have also relied heavily on a latent fingerprint expert called Richard L Jantz, and in doing so they may have inadvertently shot themselves in the foot.

Rather than using more accepted fingerprinting investigation techniques, Jantz used methods more commonly employed by anthropologists in his efforts to size, age and determine the sex of the person who left the coffee table print. This technique, however, has brought some quite unwarranted criticism from the anti-Routier camp and the state’s attorney. Nevertheless,
although Jantz was quite sure that it was a child’s print, he clearly stated that, although the print
did not appear
to match prints from Darlie, ‘it does not rule out the Appellant [Darlie Routier] nor does it rule out any partner, adult male or adult female’.

In summary, the print on the coffee table could have originated from any adult male or female, or even young Damon. If it had been proven not to have been left by the dead boy, then no doubt Darlie Routier would be advertising the fact at every opportunity, but prosecutor Davis says she is not, so I will leave readers to form their own conclusions on this point.

Two other unidentifiable fingerprints were found on the utility room door through which Darlie Routier says the murderer fled. It is now claimed by her internet supporters that further examination of these two fingerprints is critical to her claim that an unknown man attacked her.

The first and most important print lifted from this door was a latent bloody fingerprint – whoever left it had blood on their finger. Nevertheless, it revealed insufficient detail to identify its source, although forensic fingerprint analyst Glenn Langenburg has currently excluded its having come from Darlie Routier, while other experts argue that it cannot exclude her.

The second print taken from the door was a latent print located below the patent bloody fingerprint. On behalf of ABC News, latent print consultant Robert Lohnes analysed this print in June 2003 and pro-Routier supporters conclude that it matched Darin Routier’s second finger joint on the middle finger of the left hand. At least this is what Darlie’s legal team claimed in their ‘Renewed Motion for Testing of Physical and Biological Evidence and Request for an Evidentiary Hearing’, which was granted by the Honourable Robert Francis.

The documents are posted on the website dedicated to Routier’s release and on closer scrutiny I suggest that the court papers have been released primarily to blow smoke in a critic’s eyes.

I can support this cutting observation because fingerprint consultant Robert Lohnes said nothing of the kind. In his Affidavit, sworn on 29 January 2003, Lohnes mentions nothing about Darin Routier’s fingerprints. Quite the contrary, in fact, because he simply says that, after comparing a photograph of the bloodied print with the fingerprint card of Darlie Routier, he was able to confirm that the prints did not come from her.

Glenn Langenburg also analysed the second latent print from the door. From the prints available to him for comparison – which included the fingerprints, finger joints and upper palm areas for Darlie and Darin Routier – Langenburg was unable to match the latent fingerprint to either person. Significantly, he was unable to say that Darlie Routier had not left this print.

However, if Darin had left this second print, the significance is worthless, for he lived in the house and his dabs would be everywhere.

Quite obviously, the value of the unidentifiable latent fingerprints found at the crime scene will be of little value in Darlie Routier’s struggle to have her sentence quashed. If, however, any of the three prints had been clear enough, possibly they could have been added to a fingerprint database which would automatically have scanned its registers for a match – perhaps flagging up a known offender with a previous criminal record. If this had been successful, Routier might have solid grounds for an appeal because it would have been proved that an intruder had been in the home that fateful night.

Shedding of blood is the dramatic accompaniment to murder committed by violent means. Blood accounts for about 9 per cent of a healthy person’s body weight and, as many murderers have discovered to their cost, when it is spilled, a little goes a long way.

While crime-scene technicians methodically worked their way through the Routiers’ home, in the utility room/kitchenette Sergeant Nabors noted that, while the sink was spotless and white, the top and edges of the surfaces around and above it were blood-smudged. It was as if someone had taken the effort to clean the sink of blood and wipe the worktops.

Initially, Darlie denied ever being at the sink, although when later pressed she changed her story. Of more significance, however, is the fact that she made no mention of her washing her hands, or the intruder stopping to wash his hands in the sink as he fled the premises – an action that in any event would have been unlikely.

With this in mind, Nabors conducted a Luminol test to detect the presence of human blood that cannot be seen with the naked eye. If the white crystalline compound in the Luminol detected the copper component found in human blood, the area sprayed would become luminescent. The sergeant sprayed the sink and the surrounding counter. When the lights were switched off, the entire sink basin and the surrounding surface glowed a brilliant bluish light in the dark. He concluded that the bloodstains discovered in the sink would be consistent with someone washing blood off his or her hands. And there was also an indication that some of the blood around the sink had been wiped up with a towel. Hardly the actions of a crazed killer intent on escaping as fast as he could!

Although Darlie Routier vehemently denied visiting the sink to wash her wounds, the only scenario one can infer from the blood traces in the sink and on the worktop was that she had cut her own throat at the sink and then tried to wipe up the blood afterwards. But there is significantly more to this than meets the eye.

If she did wash her hands in the sink, when did she do it, and why clean the sink and wipe the worktop? These actions could have only taken place
after
murdering her sons, stabbing herself and cutting her own throat, and
before
picking up the phone to dial 911, because she stayed on the phone until assistance arrived, and by then the sink had already been cleaned.

This being the only conclusion that can be reached, it would also be reasonable to ask, what else did she do during the period between the murders and calling for help?

Perhaps of even more significance was the fact that only Darlie’s bloodied footprints were visible on the floor. Surely, if the killer had stopped to wash his hands, with blood dripping on to the floor, his own shoeprints would have been found, but they were not.

Fragments of a shattered wine glass lay on and around Darlie’s bloody footprints. A vacuum cleaner lay on its side. Blood found
underneath
these items indicated to crime-scene consultant James Cron that they were dropped after – not before or during – the violence and the spilling of blood.

Sergeant Nabors repeated the Luminol process on the leatherette couch close to where the boys had been stabbed. Here he found a small child’s handprint glowing iridescent blue on the edge of the couch. Like the blood in the kitchen sink, someone had wiped the blood away. The police had
not wiped the couch clean, so who had? Surely not the alleged intruder?

The only two people who could have wiped it were Darlie and her husband, and they denied doing so.

In summary, the sink had been cleaned, the blood-smeared worktop wiped over, a bloodstain on the couch had been wiped too, and all before the police arrived at the premises. Despite all this, the Routiers denied cleaning anything.

To evaluate the veracity of Darlie’s statements to the police, a forensics expert tried to replicate the intruder’s series of moves that fateful night, based on Darlie’s recollection.

He began by dropping a bloody knife from waist height on to the floor of the utility room while making his way towards the garage door. The blood that spattered across the floor during the test produced a pattern entirely different from the little pools found in the utility room on the night of the murders. The test conducted by the forensics expert showed a random pattern of drops and directional splashes, while the crime photos showed ‘carefully dropped drips of blood’.

When another blood expert found tiny drops of the boys’ blood on the back of the nightshirt that Darlie had worn that evening, he remarked that a likely way the blood could have got there was when it dripped off the butcher knife and on to Darlie’s back, and this would be consistent with her raising her arm above her while stabbing the boys.

After the murders, Darlie gave two conflicting accounts of exactly what the intruder had done to her. One officer said that she told him that she had struggled with her assailant on the couch, while another officer said she told him the struggle was at the work surface of the utility room.

To retrace the alleged attacker’s movements as observed by Darlie Routier, James Cron then followed the trail of blood. It indeed led from the room where the children had been slain, through to a utility room, past the sink, then on to the concrete floor of the garage, where it trailed off below a window screen. Cron then went out into the yard and began looking for blood traces that might have been left behind by the alleged slayer in flight after he exited the garage window. Surely his savagery would have produced vast amounts of blood and his clothing would have been dripping with it – yet there was no blood on the window, its frame or sill, or on the outer wall.

There was no blood in the dewy, wet mulch below the window… or on the yard’s manicured lawn… or along or on top of the six-foot-high fence that surrounded the garden, or on the gate, or in the nearby alley.

The blood was contained within the house, and nowhere else!

Darlie Routier had told the police that she had seen the killer leave the premises by passing through the utility room and into the garage before disappearing. The blood trail led to the window screen and not to the garage doors, which, as Darin claimed in court, were in any case locked.

The screen had been slashed with a knife, but on examination it showed no signs of having been forcibly pushed in or out to facilitate an adult’s ingress or egress. Even more telling was the fact that the screen’s frame was easily removable. Perhaps, the investigators figured, the woman, in her panicked condition, may have been wrong – perhaps the intruder had found another means of entry and exit. So they examined every entry point to the entire home for other indications of breaking and entering.
They looked for other blood trails and found nothing. Why, the police asked themselves, didn’t the intruder just pull off the screen, as burglars normally do?

Then Charles Linch, Dallas County’s premier trace-evidence analyst, dropped a bombshell: he found a bread knife in the kitchen drawer. On the serrated blade he discovered a nearly invisible fibre, 60 microns long, made of fibreglass coated with rubber. Using a microscope, Linch determined that the fibre found on the bread knife matched in every respect the composition of the fibreglass in the mesh screen cut by the so-called intruder. If this was the knife used to cut the screen, and there is no doubt that it was, common sense tells us that the screen was cut from inside the house, not by the intruder from the outside.