Scene of the Crime (28 page)

"He probably lived about half an hour."

"Could he have been conscious and capable of volitional action at any time during that half an hour?"

"He might have been conscious and able to move around for about five to seven minutes."

My opinion of the case changed abruptly. Here was my new scenario: Mike had stopped his car up on the roadside, wrestling with his suicide decision, and then shot himself. His foot slipped off the brake onto the gas, and the car plunged down the embankment. Dazed, Mike staggered out of the car, leaning heavily against the door, and then reached in to get the snake gun, perhaps to use it as a crutch. He dropped it, took a few more steps, staggered, and fell full length. That would account for everything.

Mine was a minority view —a minority of one.

Until a few days later, when Mike's girlfriend—we must assume she was less than the world's greatest housekeeper—showed up at the detective bureau, bringing Johnny Patton a note from Mike she had just found - six weeks late—on the mantel. It was a nobody-loves-me / everybody-hates-me / I'm-going-out-in-the-garden-to-eat-some-worms kind of note. It could have been interpreted as a suicide note; it could have been interpreted as something else. But added to what we already had—

I was still a minority, but no longer a minority of one. I believe, though, that the case is still carried as an unsolved murder.

Knowing what to ask for. Knowing how to interpret what you get. That was important to the investigator's role in the autopsy when Gross was writing his first criminology text, and that's what's important today—not that the investigator know how the tests work, but that the investigator know what to ask for.

And what can, and what cannot, be done.

That's important for the writer, too.

TABLE 8
__

The Person Who Finds the Body

Some writers, such as P.D. James and Dorothy Sayers, like to spend a good bit of time examining the reactions of the first person -usually uninvolved and innocent—who finds the body. What will such a person notice? Think about ways you can use these facts to create red herrings.

• If there is blood and gashing, an unexpecting (and unsuspecting) discoverer of the body will rarely see past those injuries. S/he will not, later, be able to describe clothing, hair, eyes and so forth.

• If the victim was strangled, the discoverer will notice if the body is hanging but may not otherwise notice anything around the neck, as his/her attention will be focused on the protruding tongue, bulging eyes, swollen and suffused face, and froth (often bloody) around the mouth. If a male strangulation victim is naked, the discoverer may notice the erect or semi-erect penis. Again, clothing, coloring, and so forth almost certainly will go unnoticed.

• Even in natural death, there may be a deceptive appearance of violence which will be very distressing to the finder. In some cases, the victim of a heart attack may bite his tongue, bleed from the mouth and nose, and dash about knocking things over, presenting the exact appearance of a violent struggle. In other cases, the heart attack victim will die instantly; I have seen such victims found hours after death still sitting on the toilet or leaning over the fence of a dog kennel.

• If the victim has been dead several days, the first thing noticeable is the odor. I have heard it described as sickly sweetish, but it doesn't seem sweetish to me. I find it horrible and indescribable. It is like nothing else including animal carrion, and it cannot be mistaken for anything else even by a person who has never smelled it before. Even a fresh corpse, dead of violence, has a smell that seems to be comprised of stale raw meat, stale blood, and combined feces and urine, as the sphincters normally relax in death and release feces and urine.

• The corpse dead several days, unless it has been kept extremely

cold, will have begun to rot. The entire body will be swollen with the bruise-like colors of decay. A bluish film may cover the open eyes, making even dark eyes appear blue. By this time, body fluids have soaked clothing, making it harder to observe so that even a normally good observer may not be able to distinguish color of anything but the victim's hair.

• A body that has spent some time in cold, but not freezing, flowing water may be mistaken for a fresh body, but the epidermis—the top layer of skin, with all its hairs, suntan, calluses, scars and other marks—will have sloughed off, leaving behind the dermis, which will appear like the skin of a delicate and very young person never exposed to sun or work. The nails, slipping off with the epidermis, will leave behind delicate glistening pinkish nail beds, which may look like short but well-tended nails. Thus the body of a French peasant woman in her twenties was once, several hundred years ago, mistaken for the body of a noblewoman of fifteen. Before the error was discovered, a frantic search had taken place for the source of the found body and the body of the missing woman, and two men were near execution for a nonexistent murder.

• In real life, the discoverer of the body may well be the murderer, drawn back by his/her own nervousness about the situation, or s/he may be a perfectly innocent intruder on the crime scene. The nervous murderer at this point may appear as distraught as if s/he were totally innocent.

• Discovering a body, like being a crime victim, is extremely stressful and may lead to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. As a result of this nervous condition, the finder's memories of the scene may become extremely vague, disorganized and unreliable. Apparent falsehoods told by the finder are at least as likely to be the result of shock as the result of deliberate attempts to mislead.

I've discussed what the investigator may find at the crime scene and how s/he should package the things found there. But what happens to those items once they reach the lab? And more important, what can the lab discover that can help the detective?

Let's look now not at how the lab does the work, which would need a whole library of books the size of this one, but rather at what the lab can determine from working with those bits of evidence.

Bombings

If you followed the story of the airplane that exploded over Locher-bie, Scotland, you are undoubtedly aware that one of the most significant bits of evidence was a fragment, no larger than a fingernail, of a detonating device. Crime laboratories often are able to make significant findings from fragments of evidence that small. The task is not easy, however, and if the crime-scene investigator doesn't

know what to collect, or how to package it, or what to tell and ask the lab, these findings may be impossible.

Dynamite

Dynamite does not usually contain any kind of tracer that would allow it, after it is detonated, to be tracked to its source.

Dry dynamite is reasonably safe. It is not likely to be detonated accidentally; it needs some sort of "cap" or detonating device. You've seen on television people detonating dynamite by firing a gun at it. It's possible, but not easy enough to be practical.

Wet dynamite is another matter, especially if it's been wet very long. It begins to separate into its component parts, until by the time it has developed a greasy yellowish or off-white look, it becomes as unstable as pure nitroglycerine—which means that a knock can set it off.

Laboratory Findings in Bombings

• It is usually possible to determine what type of explosive was used. Because many explosive manufacturers deliberately include a
chemical signature —
certain inert but easily identifiable chemicals that vary slightly from batch to batch—it is often possible to determine the source in detail, by finding out first what manufacturer made that batch of explosives and when that batch was made, and then tracing that batch to its purchaser. All too often, however, the trail hits a dead end; either somebody has lost track of the materiel (frequently, this means it was sold to somebody nobody wants to admit selling explosives to) or it has been stolen.

• It is frequently possible to determine precisely where the explosion took place. In a building, that may mean little, but in an airplane, for example, it may be possible to find out in whose baggage the bomb was placed. That would be a major lead as to who might be responsible for the bombing.

• It is often possible to determine what the triggering device was, and to trace the device back to its manufacturer and then forward to its purchaser. In the Mark Hofmann bombings in Utah, much of the equipment and supplies used to manufac-

ture the triggering device had been purchased quite openly from Radio Shack, which of course intended it for quite different uses.

The Mermon Forgery Bomber

Who was Mark Hofmann?

In October 1985, a bomb disguised as a just-delivered package exploded in a downtown Salt Lake City office building, killing a businessman. Later the same day, a second bomb which had been left near the patio of another businessman detonated when the intended victim's wife picked up the package. For several days, associates of the two men were rushed into hiding by authorities fearing for their safety and absolutely baffled as to motive; although the two men had been involved in a financial scheme that had gone belly-up, it seemed unlikely that anybody would want to use bombs as a means of revenge. Then, on a hill outside LDS (Mormon) Church-owned Deseret Gym, a third bomb exploded when Mark Hofmann was getting into his car. Unlike the other two victims, Hofmann - who had been involved with the businessmen in other ways, but not in the financial scheme—survived.

At first, Hofmann was thought to be another innocent victim, and authorities began to look elsewhere than the ill-fated financial scheme for motives, but within days after the third bombing, the trail led back to Hofmann himself. A workshop inside his house proved to be the location where the bombs were built, and sales people in a nearby Radio Shack store remembered selling him some of the items that later became parts of the bombs. Speculation was rife as to where Hofmann had been returning from when his car exploded, and whether the third bomb had been intended for another person or an attempt at suicide. Although Hofmann eventually confessed and in January 1987 pled guilty, many of these questions were never resolved.

However, investigation unraveled an incredibly tangled web of forgery, fraud, swindling and murder. Over many years beginning while he was still in college, Hofmann - among other things, a rare-document dealer-had "discovered" many rare and valuable documents from American history and specifically from LDS (Mormon) history. After the bombings, many of the documents

were revealed as forgeries, and many others—possibly legitimate—remained highly suspect. But Hofmann had finally overreached himself by "finding" a collection that seemingly did not exist, and then selling the collection—sight unseen—to one person while mortgaging it to another. Attempting to cover up the fraud, he began methodically murdering his victims. Nobody was ever able to determine who the third bomb was intended for, and Hofmann refused to tell.

Several books have been published on the case; unfortunately, most of them are more or less hostile to the LDS (Mormon) Church, which more reasonably should be considered another victim of Hofmann's fraud.

A joke circulating in Utah at the time went like this:

Joker: Hey, have you heard, Mark Hofmann was pardoned?

Victim: You're kidding! How in the world—

Joker (grinning): Yeah, the pardon was signed by Brigham Young.

Laboratory Determination From Small Evidence

Let's go on, now, to look at what the lab can determine from other things. A good place to start is with bloodstains. One of the major pieces of evidence in the Sam Sheppard case, discussed earlier, was the pillowcase Marilyn Sheppard's head had been lying on. Among the many bloodstains on it, there was a distorted but somewhat symmetrical one which could, given sufficient exercise of the imagination, appear to be the place where a tool was laid, the pillow folded over it, and the tool later removed. The prosecution maintained that the mark was that of some never-named surgical instrument, which Sheppard used to bludgeon Marilyn; the defense contended—uselessly, in the original trial, though it was an important element in later appeals—that the mark was actually made when the bloody pillowcase was crumpled over on itself.

Bloodstain Evidence

Blood can reveal many things. It can reveal species: Is this blood on the suspect's clothing human blood or—as he claims —dog