Murder.com (16 page)

This is not
Star Trek
. The intruder was not beamed into the house, where he searched for a bread knife, then beamed back outside to cut the screen, to climb through, replace the bread knife, kill the boys, attack the mother and flee. No! Only someone already inside the house, someone who knew where a suitable knife was – one of the parents – could have cut the screen and placed the knife back in the drawer.

The police considered every single other option, but still the window screen seemed an unlikely escape route even though Darlie was insistent that this was the way the killer left the house.

If an intruder had entered and escaped through this slash in the screen, he would have left some trace of his doing so – perhaps a human hair, a fibre from his clothing or a blood trace – but nothing was found. The dust on the sill was undisturbed, there were no handprints, bloody or otherwise around the window; odd, since the killer, in forcing his way through the window, would
have had to hang on to the walls for balance, and yet not a boot- or shoeprint was found in the soft mulch outside!

All of this led the police to conclude that the trail of blood leading to the window screen was a red herring. Someone was trying to deceive them into believing that the killer was an intruder when no intruder had ever existed. But who would try to deceive them? If the intruder did not exist, and there is not a shred of evidence – apart from Darlie Routier’s statement – that there was one, Darlie Routier was lying. By ‘arranging’ the crime scene and scattering red herrings around, she was trying to divert suspicion away from herself.

In the entertainment room where, according to Darlie, she struggled with her attacker, James Cron found little evidence of a melee having taken place. The lampshade was askew and an expensive flower arrangement lay beside the coffee table. There was nothing more out of place. He found, in fact, the fragile stems of the flowers unbroken – as if the arrangement hadn’t fallen but been placed there. Once again, someone was trying to deceive the eye. But there was even more.

Atop the utility room work surface, close to the sink, sat Darlie’s purse, which appeared in order and undisturbed. Several pieces of jewellery – rings, a bracelet and a watch – were laid out neatly and untouched. If the alleged intruder’s motive had been robbery, he would have seen the jewellery when he washed his hands and stolen it. Therefore, it was obvious that, before cutting her own throat and injuring herself, Darlie had removed her jewellery to protect it from blood contamination or possible damage. It was a repeat of the staged scene in the murder room: items had been carefully placed to avoid damaging them, and even a bloodstain on the couch had been wiped away.

Darlie Routier had inflicted her own injuries at the sink!

Everything the crime-scene experts saw at the crime scene disturbed them. The lack of a blood trail away from the home, coupled with virtually no signs of a struggle, bothered them most. The entire picture before them had been carefully set. Everything had been designed, like one of Escher’s drawings, to fool the eye into seeing something that did not exist.

Of great significance is that Darlie must have injured herself, arranged the crime scene and set the red herrings
after
the murders had been committed and
before
the 911 call was made. The actions of a very cold and calculated killer indeed!

After his thorough and all-day examination of the crime scene, James Cron summarised his findings for Lieutenant Jack and Sergeant Walling: ‘We all know the crime scene tells the story. Problem is, that story’s not the same one the mother’s telling. Somebody inside this house did this thing. Gentlemen, there was no intruder.’

Cron was positive that the crime scene had been staged. An article in the FBI’s
Law Enforcement Bulletin
refers to ‘staging’:

But nobody asked: ‘Why hadn’t the Routiers’ dog barked in the night?’

As Sherlock Holmes would be quick to deduce, the dog knew the killer/s and that could have only been Darlie Routier, Darin Routier or both.

With the physical evidential facts already established, all of which prove beyond any doubt that no intruder had entered the Routiers’ home on the night of the murders and that the crime scene had been ‘carefully staged’ by someone living in the house, we can now focus more closely on the crimes in an effort to prove that only Darlie Routier, acting alone, could have committed the murders.

Darlie Routier most certainly had the opportunity for committing the crime and she had the opportunity to prepare for the crime, clean the place up and scatter red herrings around to divert suspicion away from herself.

The scientific forensic testimony had proven, beyond any doubt, that an intruder did not leave the blood trail. The fibre found on the bread knife taken from the drawer and replaced in the drawer matched in every respect fibres from the mesh window screen, and this evidence convinced the jury that a guilty verdict was safe.

The police were convinced that the killer had tampered with and fabricated evidence at the crime scene in an effort to lead them in the wrong direction – to point an accusatory finger elsewhere. This being so, it was an act by the killer indicative of guilty consciousness or intent. And Darlie Routier certainly gave a number of unsatisfactory explanations as to the events that night.

At first, she told one officer she had struggled with her assailant on the couch. She added that her only view of the man came as he was walking away from the couch. She said she just couldn’t remember any distinct details about the attack or the killer, except that he was wearing dark clothes and a baseball cap.

To support this claim, she also told a friend, who visited her in hospital, that she remembered lying on the couch as the man was running the knife over her face. When she returned home from hospital, an annoyed Darlie told a shocked friend that the place was a mess and would take some cleaning up.

However, when questioned about the blood in the sink, and over the work surfaces, she told another officer a different story: that the struggle took place at the sink.

The investigators’ suspicions grew even more when the doctors and nurses who treated Darlie told them that her wounds could have been self-inflicted. Then, a few days after leaving the hospital, she showed the police bruises that covered her arms from wrist to elbow. These, she said, had been caused by her attacker. Yet the doctors who examined her said the bruises were too fresh to have been inflicted on the night of the murders. More likely, they said, Darlie hit her arms with a blunt instrument after she left the hospital – or got someone else to do it – to convince the police that she had been attacked.

The police asked themselves: why did the alleged intruder only slice Darlie’s throat and stab her in the shoulder and forearm, instead of plunging his knife deep into her body, the way he plunged it into the bodies of her boys? Why did he not make sure that Darlie was dead so that she would be unable to identify him or raise the alarm?

If there had been an intruder, what was his motive? It most
certainly was not robbery. But Darlie Routier’s motive for committing the crime has not been found.

Or has it?

One of the first police officers at the scene was perplexed because Darlie didn’t tend to her sons, even when he asked her to. Instead, she held a towel to her own neck. A slash of the butcher knife had missed her carotid artery by two millimetres, or was it a carefully judged act of self-mutilation? As no intruder had attacked her, only Darlie could have injured herself. We can rule out her husband because his wife’s injuries spilled a large amount of blood and there was not a drop of blood on him when the police arrived – unless he had changed his clothes.

Nurses at the hospital to which Darlie was taken said that when she was told that her sons were dead she exhibited a ‘flat affect’ and did not dissolve into hysteria, as mothers often do on learning they have lost a child.

When Darlie took the stand at her trial, she changed her story, explaining that she went to the sink to wet towels and place them on her children’s wounds. Paramedics found no towels near the children when they arrived, but Darlie was holding a towel to her own neck.

She also claimed that the scene with the Silly String at Devon’s grave was her heartfelt way of wishing a happy birthday to her son, who, she hoped, was watching from heaven. But Darlie was not a persuasive witness. She cried at unlikely times and became far too defensive under the cross-examination of Toby Shook, the veteran Dallas County prosecutor, who kept slamming her for what he called her ‘selective amnesia’.

The facts proved that there had been no murderous intruder in the Routiers’ home, so Darlie had been lying. She had even
laid false clues and tampered with evidence. This, combined with giving unsatisfactory explanations and changing her account of what took place, tied in with her detached post-crime behaviour, and earned her a place on Death Row.

But there was just one problem.

On the night of the murders, one of Darin’s socks was found down a back alley some 75 yards away from the house. It contained two small spots of blood from Damon and Devon, but none of Darlie’s blood.

What was it doing there?

The police initially speculated that Darlie had carried the sock three houses away to make it look as if the intruder had dropped it during his escape. But they couldn’t find any of Darlie’s blood – or anyone else’s blood – outside the house. There was no blood on the back patio, on the back fence or in the back alley. If Darlie had planted the sock, how did she avoid leaving a blood trail of her own for, once her throat was cut, she lost significant amounts of blood.

The detectives and the prosecutors came up with an interesting theory: Darlie stabbed her boys to death, took the sock down the alley – perhaps to give the impression that the intruder had used it to keep his prints off the knife – then cut herself at the kitchen sink.

Either before she stabbed the boys, or before she stabbed herself, she cut the mesh screen with the bread knife, laid the red herrings, arranged the crime scene and, once all that was done, called 911, then screamed out for Darin.

However, Darlie’s well-meaning internet supporters argue, if she had wanted the police to find the sock, wouldn’t she have thrown it closer to the house, perhaps at the end of the driveway,
instead of leaving it so far away, next to a garbage can, where the police might have overlooked it? And wouldn’t she have doused that sock in blood so that the police would know what they had found? And even then, would Darlie have had time to do everything before the police arrived?

In fact, had there been an intruder who used the sock to avoid leaving his fingerprints, he would have left his dabs at the point of entry – but none was there. The stabbings were brutal and blood would have sprayed all over the sock, and on exiting the premises the blood-soaked sock would have smeared the window and its frame, as well as any door frame it may have touched. But there were only a few spots of blood on the sock. To suggest that an intruder slipped it on his hand before he killed the boys is ludicrous.

There was no intruder, so the only people who could have dropped the sock were Darlie and Darin. But there is no evidence to implicate Darin in the murders or any attempt to cover them up, so we must focus on Darlie. We have seen that she certainly spent some time arranging things and cleaning up before the police turned up, so I suggest that this is another of Darlie’s red herrings in her efforts to divert suspicion from herself. However, when the red herrings fail, the opposite occurs and she puts her head firmly in the noose.

The pro-Routier camp have been thorough, in one respect, by highlighting the police records which indicate that Darlie was on the phone with the 911 dispatcher for five minutes and 44 seconds. Just as that call was ending, a police officer came into the house and he was there for at least a minute before the paramedics arrived. They found Damon still breathing; he died shortly thereafter. Why is that important? Darlie’s supporters ask.

According to a doctor who studied the severity and location of Damon’s stab wounds, the boy could not have lived longer than nine minutes once he was first stabbed and probably lived no more than six minutes after that.

‘Let’s assume he lived nine minutes,’ claim Darlie Routier and her friends. ‘If you subtract from that nine minutes her five-minute-and-44-second phone call to 911, then subtract the additional minute and ten seconds that she was in the presence of a police officer, Darlie had only two minutes and six seconds to stab her sons, head for the garage, step through the slit in the window screen, jump a back fence or go through a back gate, run barefoot for 75 yards down an alley, drop a bloody sock, run 75 yards back, stab herself, clean up the blood around the sink, and stage whatever crime scene there was left to be staged.’

The prosecutors certainly did not have a good answer to the timeline conundrum, except to say that the doctor was simply guessing about the nine minutes it took Damon to die and that even then Darlie could have had enough time to commit the murders and stage the crime scene.

Leaping on the prosecutor’s uncertainty, the pro-Routier camp asks, ‘But, if she was smart enough to plant fake evidence, wouldn’t she have been ready with a more believable story about what the intruder looked like, and how the killings occurred?’

But it is the sock we are interested in, and not the what-ifs.

The sock did belong to Damon. Forensic experts did find spots of both of the dead boys’ blood on it, and that blood could have only got there after the murders had been committed, therefore, before the mother injured herself.