The Devil's Dozen (29 page)

The result of Grinder’s examination.
Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories Inc.

Farwell administering his brain scan test to suspected killer James Grinder.
Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories Inc.

Two years after this incident, a deer hunter walking down a remote, dead-end road came across skeletal remains near Brock Cemetery, thirty miles north of Russellville, Arkansas. He also found shreds of clothing and jewelry. The police called in a forensic anthropologist who said the bones appeared to belong to young adolescents. The likely candidates were Teresa Williams, Crystal Parton, and Cynthia Mabry, who had disappeared on December 2, 1976, a decade earlier, and were never heard from or found. Two were thirteen and one was fourteen.

The anthropological examination indicated with about 80 percent certainty that some of the bones matched Teresa and Crystal. There appeared to be only two sets of remains in this area. A thorough search around the cemetery and in the woods yielded nothing more, leaving Cynthia’s mother desperate to know what had happened to her daughter. She’d held out hope that the girl would one day come back.

At the time of the girls’ disappearance, the police had a key suspect. Teresa’s fourteen-year-old cousin told police he’d seen James B. Grinder, a local woodcutter, with Teresa that day. Grinder admitted he’d seen the girls hitchhiking and picked them up, but he’d dropped them off at the interstate exit for Pottsville. He gave them twenty dollars but claimed that was the last he saw of them. He returned home to his girlfriend. Since there was no evidence against him, he appeared to have an alibi, and since the girls were still missing, he was not charged. In fact, no one was charged, since two of the bodies were not found for over a decade and the third girl was still considered missing. Investigators had surmised that they were runaways.

More years passed and Grinder was arrested with two other men for burglary. The police questioned him about Julie Helton, offering him a deal for life in prison, so he confessed. He said he had planned the murder for about two months, watching and waiting. One night, he spotted her car parked at a business and punctured the radiator. Later that night, he saw her with her disabled car, the hood up, standing on an overpass—just what he’d been waiting for. He stopped to “assist,” and then two other men stopped as well—the men involved with him in the burglary. He said that Julie agreed to get into one man’s car, but they all ended up at a mobile home, three men and Julie. They used cocaine and then the men all raped her. Finally, they had to kill her to keep her from talking, so they took her to the railroad track, where Grinder stabbed her in the neck and in the mouth.

One of the problems with this confession was the testimony of the other two men, who claimed they had nothing to do with the rape or murder of Julie Helton. In fact, the physical evidence from the scene indicated that only one man had been with her when she died. Grinder then changed his story somewhat, adding the participation of a local police chief, and then recanted his confession altogether, saying that while he was present at the crime scene, he had not participated in either the rape or the murder. In addition, Grinder’s nephew confessed to the rape and, in exchange for immunity, corroborated one of Grinder’s statements.

The police chief, too, denied involvement, but he was subsequently suspended. The other two men remained in prison to await trial, although everyone knew that all the police had was Grinder’s confession, which was a mess. It would be a tough case to win, but they had to do something to get justice for the victim and her family.

When the Russellville police learned that James Grinder had confessed to a Missouri homicide, they decided to try to get more out of him about their missing-person case. Lieutenant Ray Caldwell and State Trooper Dwayne Lueter traveled to Macon County in 1998 to inform Grinder that two of the girls’ remains had been found. Grinder admitted to killing all three, providing details about physical evidence that had never been publicized, and clearing up the mystery.

He had picked up the three girls on December 2, 1976, he said, outside Russellville. They went with him to Morrilton, where he purchased alcohol. He then drove them to Brock Cemetery and raped Teresa and Crystal. Afterward, he strangled them and stabbed them in the neck. He hid their bodies under some brush. Cynthia was still alive, and he took her to another location in the woods and raped her. She, too, had to die, so he used a soda bottle to hit her over the head. When this failed to work, he picked up a tire iron and bludgeoned her several times. The place was so forlorn that he figured he did not have to hide her body, so he just left it there. A week later, he returned to the cemetery to pile more brush on the other two, still undiscovered.

Grinder’s former live-in girlfriend also admitted that he’d come in around midnight on that December 2 and told her that if anyone asked, she was to say he’d been with her all evening. He told her about the missing girls and gave her $200 to cover for him.

In 1998, David Gibbons, the Pope County prosecutor, filed one charge of capital murder against Grinder, which signified the premeditated killing of two or more people. However, the whereabouts of the remains of Cynthia Mabry plagued both the girl’s family and the investigators who had long been on the case. Even after twenty-three years, they wanted to find whatever they could and give the girl a proper burial. They hoped to bring Grinder to Arkansas so he could point out the exact location, but before they could do so, his situation in Missouri took some interesting new turns.

In early June 1999, Missouri attorney general Jay Nixon asked that first-degree murder charges be dropped against two of the men implicated in Grinder’s confession. Although it was initially believed that the semen samples removed from Julie had been used up in earlier testing, some turned up in a Colorado lab. DNA testing cleared the men and indicated that Grinder had lied when he described their involvement. Since Grinder had manipulated the evidence, Nixon stated that he would revoke the deal and reconsider the death penalty. Days later, after more testing, charges were also dropped against the police chief.

Sheriff Robert Dawson now faced a difficult situation. He had no physical evidence against Grinder, so the confession had been crucial. In 1993, court-ordered blood samples were taken, but the results were insufficient to support an indictment, especially for murder. Grinder had now changed his story so many times, even contradicting himself, that no one would have been surprised if he recanted altogether, which would have left Dawson with nothing. Given Grinder’s unreliability, they might have nothing even if he didn’t recant. After over ten thousand man-hours spent investigating the case and hoping for its resolution, the possibility that it could collapse alarmed everyone involved.

Dawson recalled recent news coverage of a neurological assessment technique called brain fingerprinting, a discovery of Dr. Lawrence Farwell, a neuropsychiatrist. With degrees from Harvard University and the University of Illinois, Farwell had been president and chief scientist of the Human Brain Research Laboratory since 1991. Along with brain fingerprinting, he had invented the Farwell Brain Communicator, a device that allowed a subject’s brain to communicate directly to a computer and speech synthesizer.

Farwell claimed that brain fingerprinting was 99.9 percent accurate. What Dawson had learned from the media coverage was that since the brain is central to all human activities, it records all experiences. This finding had many applications, including use in the criminal justice system. The act of committing a crime, as well as details from a crime scene, would be stored in the offender’s brain, which meant that the memory would have a measurable pattern.

Brain fingerprinting records distinct patterns, called event-related potentials, which are measures of the brain’s electrical activity as it corresponds to events in the environment. By averaging the distinct patterns of electrical activity, a singular waveform arises that can be dissected into components related to cognitive functions. Those related to brain fingerprinting are the P300 and the MERMER. The P300 is a positive charge that peaks between 300 and 800 milliseconds in response to meaningful or noteworthy stimuli. Dr. Farwell found that the P300 was one aspect of a larger brain-wave response that peaks at 800 to 1,200 milliseconds after a response, which he called a MERMER (memory and encoding related multifaceted electroencephalographic response). If a suspect like Grinder was involved in a murder, for example, his brain activity when shown crime-relevant stimuli would produce a distinct spike on a graph. “Your brain says, ‘Aha! I recognize this,’ ” Farwell explained. Innocent people, he claimed, or people who had never been to the specific crime scene, would display no such neurological response.

Farwell utilizes three types of stimuli for testing a subject: target, probe, and irrelevant. Target stimuli are made “noteworthy” by exposing the subject to a list of words and phrases before any testing is done. When flashed on the screen, they should all elicit a recordable MERMER. Probes also contain noteworthy information, and this set is derived from details that investigators know about the crime and crime scene. This information is meaningful only to the actual perpetrator, and includes things done to the victim, where she was taken, how she was killed, items removed from her, and items left at the scene. The subject does not see this list until the test itself is performed. Irrelevant stimuli, to which no MERMER should occur, might include a different type of weapon, landscape, MO, or acts that were probably not done during the commission of the crime.

To strengthen the results, Farwell might test another angle. If the suspect offers an alibi for the time of the crime, a scenario can be devised from it and tested with the scanning device to see if the brain has a record of it. Thus the technology is useful in more ways than one. Like a fingerprint at a scene, it does not necessarily prove murder, but it adds an indicator of guilt. If a suspect had no good reason to be present at the scene, the MERMER becomes strongly suggestive evidence.

Other researchers have studied violence and the brain, testing reactions, impulsivity, and areas of neural processing, but Farwell had developed a patented headband equipped with EEG sensors to detect the brain’s response and chart it on a graph. Brain fingerprinting is an improvement over the polygraph machine, Farwell claims, in that it relies on neurological processes over which no one has control. Some people have managed to manipulate a polygraph, but they cannot fool his machine.

Farwell uses a specific protocol. First, details about the crime must be gathered by someone familiar with brain fingerprinting, just as fingerprints can only be properly lifted by a trained investigator. Then the subject responds to the material and the sets of responses are analyzed and compared; this is followed by what is called a statistical confidence reading, an evaluation of the reliability of the responses.

Dawson contacted Farwell to request that Grinder undergo the test, and the suspect agreed to participate. Farwell was happy to be involved. This would be a first for him. While he’d conducted field tests and lab experiments, including accurately distinguishing between a group of FBI agents and nonagents, he had not yet participated in an active criminal case. It was a good chance to prove his methods and device. Many who had heard of it assumed it was little more than a glorified lie-detector test, which would make the results potentially inadmissible in court. However, in the court of last resort, investigators on the Helton case were willing to try it.

Farwell brought his equipment to the Macon County Sheriff’s Office and prepared to test Grinder’s memory in the matter of the fifteen-year-old murder. Sheriff Dawson, Chief Deputy Charles Muldoon, and Randy King from the Missouri Highway Patrol, all of whom were involved in the investigation, provided the needed details for developing a case-specific test. Former FBI Supervisory Special Agent Drew Richardson assisted. He had been involved in earlier brain-fingerprinting experiments and had left the FBI to become a vice president of Farwell’s company. From all this information, Farwell created a series of phrases and images to be flashed at Grinder at timed intervals on a computer screen.