Scene of the Crime (32 page)

• Each semen-stained item must be packaged separately, and only after it is
thoroughly
air dried.

Throughout this book, I've been writing as if your fictional detective will be a police officer. Of course I realize that may not be true; s/he may be a private investigator, or a brilliant amateur. Nevertheless, most of this information remains useful. What can and cannot be determined by examining evidence, as well as how a crime scene and its evidence should be handled, remain the same.

But the unofficial investigator faces many problems that the police officer does not. To start with, simply gaining access to the evidence may be impossible. If the evidence has already been seized by the police, a court order—called a
motion for discovery,
obtainable by the defense attorney but not by the P.I. personally—may be required for the P.I. even to find out what evidence has been collected. The police, if they have not already been told by the prosecuting attorney not to, may decide to allow the P.I. to see the evidence, or they may not. (My usual practice, if I had no instructions from the D.A., was to allow the defense attorney to see the evidence only if it was so conclusive I felt my showing it would lead to a guilty plea.)

The P.I. certainly will not be allowed to take custody of the evidence, and lengthy court maneuvering might be required before the defense can get access to the evidence for an independent expert to examine it. If the court rules otherwise, the defense will never get access. Period.

The P.I. cannot, by law, get a search warrant, but if s/he enters illegally s/he may be charged with unlawful entry, burglary, or interfering with a police officer in the lawful discharge of his or her duty.

At the very best, even if the police and the witnesses all decide to cooperate with the P.I., the fact remains that the scene has been thoroughly worked over before the P.I. gets access to it. The P.I. will almost never have the advantage of seeing an undisturbed scene; therefore, s/he must almost always work with, through, or around someone else's interpretation of the scene.

And that "very best" situation rarely occurs. Usually the police will not cooperate, and the likelihood of a defense attorney's being hired and getting a court order requiring the P.I. to have access before the police are through working the scene is virtually nil—no matter how wealthy and well connected the suspect's family may be.

For an idea of the difficulty involved, consider the Sam Sheppard murder case: It took years, well after the defendant's conviction, for the defense to gain access to most of the evidence.

In addition to unavailable evidence and an already-worked-over scene, the P.I. may have another problem. Although police cannot actually compel possible witnesses to talk with them, they still carry some official clout, which the P.I does not have. If the P.I. is working for the defense, the prosecuting attorney may order possible witnesses not to talk; even without an order, a hostile witness who might feel compelled to talk with police — even if s/he is lying—may easily refuse to talk with any other investigators.

In real life, P.I.'s are rarely involved in murders; more often they are working with domestic matters or with corporate crime, where legal clout may be replaced with other types of clout. But in fiction, almost always the P.I. is working with murder or with something that may turn into murder.

One way to handle these problems is the way Rex Stout's detectives (other than Nero Wolfe, who almost never left his house) worked it. Think about how many times Archie or Stout's other detectives somehow managed to be first on the scene of the murder.

But even the most handy device can be used to excess. For an idea of what would happen in real life, let's look again at the murder of Brigette Garbo from the previous chapter. Let's suppose that Brigette's agent, Sam Snoop, who was hopelessly in love with her, has the idea that it was Brigette's husband-before-last, Peter Prowler, who killed her, and framed poor Ralph for the crime. So he calls you in—P.I. Anny Boddy. What are you going to do?

You're going to tread carefully, because, buddy, that California license doesn't mean Jack in Utah. You have no authority at all, legal or otherwise.

The first thing you want is access to the scene, and that's your first hurdle, when you find out that Brigette was still married to Peter Prowler when she bought the condo, and it was joint property. So now Peter owns it, and is he going to let you inside?

Scratch that.

So you go down to the Ski City Police Department and ask to speak to the investigating officer, Molly Murphy. Molly is in charge of the sex-crimes unit, and she has no time to talk to you, and anyway, she disapproves of Sam Snoop for very good reasons of her own which she sees no reason to discuss with you. What does that mean?

It means you aren't going to get a look at any of the crime-scene photographs or any of the evidence.

But wait a minute. If Snoop wants to convict somebody else, that means he's sort of on Ralph's side, because he doesn't want Ralph to get convicted, so you go and talk to Ralph's lawyer.

Who is Ralph's lawyer?

He's a public defender, of course, because since when could a maintenance man afford an attorney?

He's a public defender, which means he probably graduated from law school last year, and although he knows quite well what a motion for discovery is, he's never filed one in real life, and the idea makes his stomach hurt. He can get the format from a book, but he's not very happy about trying to follow the format, and he's not 100 percent sure it will work.

Well, that's okay; Sam Snoop can afford to hire a more expensive lawyer. You get a motion for discovery.

That means the district attorney has to tell you what evidence there is against Ralph. It does not mean Molly has to talk to you. It does not mean the State Crime Laboratory or the State Medical Examiner's Office, both located in Salt Lake City, have to give you any information. It does not mean you can get an independent expert to look at the evidence.

While the lawyers have been playing their legal games, you haven't been sitting still. No, you've been out to the condo, where you find there's been a sudden meeting of the condo owners association and guess what? It's embarrassing enough that Brigette was murdered there and Ralph has been arrested. Do you think anybody is going to talk to you?

If you do, think again.

At this point, you have exhausted all of the usual places for beginning an investigation, and for all practical purposes you haven't begun your investigation at all.

Does this mean P.I.'s—in real life or fiction—can't function?

No. It does mean that P.I.'s have to be smart. In real life, smart is enough. In fiction, the P.I. had better be very, veiy smart.

Of course, there are ways around many of these problems. Many fictional P.I.'s have close friends on the police department who will leak them information, or close friends who are crime reporters and will let them in on the little secrets that the police asked them not to print.

Many other fictional P.I.'s work almost entirely on the basis of the psychological elements of the crime and the talking-to-people area of investigation, and avoid crime scenes most of the time.

And in fiction, unlike real life, the P.I. sometimes is the first person on the scene of the murder.

You know what s/he
should
do then—back off, call the police, and stay out of the way. But if you read enough fiction to have any business thinking about writing it, you also know what s/he
will
do— surreptitiously search the victim's pockets if that seems called for; collect part of the evidence if possible (surely the police don't need
all
of this cup of probably poisoned coffee); examine the evidence if collecting it would be too damning (don't mess with the brass ejected by the automatic, but if you look at it long enough to find out the caliber and make, well, the police won't know the difference); sketch the scene; maybe take a photo or two; and then call the police.

In real life, this would certainly lose you your license; it might also lead to an arrest for murder or for accessory after the fact. But in fiction it works well.

This is the state of crime-scene investigation today. It has been said that writing is one part inspiration and nine parts perspiration. Crime-scene work is the same. The nine parts perspiration are critical; if the evidence isn't treated right, it can't tell anybody anything. But that one part inspiration is equally critical. It's the matter of knowing what to ask the evidence.

I Know Who Did It But I Can't Prove It

Sometimes it's maddening—situations in which police know who did it and know there is no way they can possibly prove it to the jury. I remember one case, a burglary, that I went to with Doc, after I'd been on the department about eighteen months. On the way back into the police station, I said, "Doc, that didn't look right."

"What didn't look right?" he asked.

"The whole thing," I said. "It didn't look like a burglary. It looked like the stage setting for act two, scene one, the crime is discovered."

Doc chuckled. "And now," he said, "you can call yourself a crime-scene officer."

Why Is an Innocent Person on Trial?

And sometimes, if you're an expert, you know that somebody who is commonly believed guilty is innocent. Several years after I left police work, I read about a case like that. An industrialist had been accused of setting up the murder-for-hire of a judge. The proposed assassin had reported to police, and police and the judge had worked together. The assassin told his employer the job was done, and the police moved in. The employer was charged not with murder, because the judge was perfectly healthy, but with conspiracy.

The newspapers were carrying blow-by-blow accounts of the trial, and I was interested. Several times people who knew my background asked me what I thought, and each time I replied, "I didn't work the case." At that point, neither the prosecution nor the defense had made a case, as far as I was concerned.

And then along came a crucial bit of testimony. The "murderer" had taken a Polaroid picture of the judge, supposedly dead, in the trunk of a car. (The judge had cooperated by climbing into the trunk and posing for the picture.) Police then coated the picture with thief detection powder, and the "murderer" supposedly showed the picture to his employer, who handled it, examined it closely, and returned it-inside a white Cadillac. When the employer was arrested within the next two hours, there was no trace of thief detection powder on his clothing, his person, or his car upholstery. And that was the point at which I said, "This man is innocent."

Why?

Because I've worked with thief detection powder. It is almost invisible when it's dry; in fact, when it's dry and spread thin you need ultraviolet light to see it. But it clings—oh, how it clings! You cannot brush it off — any attempt to do so merely spreads it. You cannot wash it off. The more you wash, the more purple your hands and clothing become.

The day somebody spilled some thief detection powder and I accidentally sat in it, I wound up having to completely discard the clothing I was wearing; ten washings with strong detergents and bleach did not wash the stuff out, and despite washing with every kind of soap I could think of, my hands did not get clean. It took about a week for the stuff to wear off.

And the prosecution team was trying to make a jury believe that this man handled a photograph liberally coated with this powder, but had no trace of it left two hours later? That's not even a good joke.

The jury agreed.

The work continues. As I took a break from this chapter long enough to watch the television news, I saw clips of a blood-spatter expert from California entering a West Valley, Utah, house, where two weeks ago, a woman and three children were knifed to death. Police think they know who did it, but they can't prove it. They hope the blood-spatter expert will help them prove it.

Right now I don't have an opinion. I didn't work the case. But I'll be interested in watching it develop.

This has been an overview of the state of crime-scene investigation today. I strongly recommend that you locate and read as many as possible of the books in my bibliography and other books like them, and that you keep constantly informed on changes. This is one of the fields, like physics and astronomy, in which what is true today and what is true tomorrow may not be the same thing. It was exciting to work in; it is exciting to read about and to write about.