Written in Blood (26 page)

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Authors: Diane Fanning

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The next witness called by the defense was Faris Bandak, a Ph.D. specialist in biomechanics, the study of forces and motion on living things. He prepared a flashy video to enhance his testimony.
The video was too stylish by far—the animated model wore black nail polish, and black lipstick on an otherwise blank face. It also had problems in its content. The lift chair so prominent in all the photographs of the stairwell at Cedar Street was not present in the film. Its presence at the scene gave the initial impression to investigators that Kathleen was disabled.
The computer-generated woman was shown leaning forward and holding the railing before she fell backwards—in direct contradiction to the laws of physics. It did not demonstrate any movement that would cause Kathleen to get blood on the soles of her feet. The pratfall seen in the animation would have caused bruising on the buttocks of a real woman. Kathleen had no such marks. And if the impact on the doorjamb was the first, as shown, the blood evidence found there would not have existed.
On cross-examination, Freda Black gave her most
effective performance up to this point of the trial. “What experience do you have in scalp lacerations?”
“None.”
“Thyroid cartilage?”
“None.”
“No research that you've done personally?”
“Do I have to build a 707 to know how to fly one?” Bandak was cocky now, but in a few minutes, Black would have him stammering like a schoolboy.
“So how many autopsies have you attended before?” she asked.
Bandak gave a rambling answer that included his experience in live surgeries with animals and children.
“Sir, I didn't ask you about surgeries and I didn't ask you about animals. How many autopsies have you attended where the ultimate opinion of the pathologist was that an adult person died because of a beating death? Any?”
“None.”
“Not having that experience and not being a forensic pathologist yourself, you come to this courtroom and tell this jury that Dr. Deborah Radisch, who actually performed the autopsy, is just dead wrong about this?”
“Well …”
“That's what you told them, correct?” Black pushed.
Bandak stammered out his objections to being paraphrased and justified his interpretation of the biomechanical evidence. Black jerked him back to the question at hand: Did he disagree with Dr. Radisch's testimony that the lacerations were inconsistent with a fall?
Bandak stuttered his way through his responses as
Black lobbed one direct response after another at him. He tried to discredit Dr. Radisch's expertise, but left the impression that he didn't believe his own testimony.
He was still rambling on when Freda Black interrupted, “Do you remember my question?”
Then Rudolf interrupted her. “Objection. Argumentative.”
“Assuming it is not argumentative,” Judge Hudson said, “overruled.”
“Sir, my question was, would you agree that a person that's actually there, whether it's a doctor or pathologist or even someone in your position actually there visualizing a person's body, looking at their wounds, feeling their wounds, measuring their wounds, looking at all the different things on their body—Would you not agree a person with that vantage point could really have an advantage in making a decision in a case like this?”
“[ …] Not on the cause, not in the causation.”
Freda asked Bandak to get up from the stand and use the Kathleen doll and acrylic model of the staircase. He held the doll awkwardly, like a man caught playing Barbie and trying to deny it. She asked, “Can you show us another scenario of what might have happened? Such that she received those injuries in the stairwell?”
Bandak bumbled through a clumsy response. Black then switched to photographs of the crime scene. Bandak held the photos before the jury box as Black fired a rapid series of questions. Bandak did not fare well under the constant volley.
Black's attack then led to one big question: “How many lacerations do you contend she had to the back of her head?”
After a long pause, Bandak answered, “If you count it, you count it per, per hit she has, uh, uh, four lacerations. If you count it as individual slices, she has more. Individual—if each individual fork is counted, she has more. It's just a bookkeeping issue.”
“So the number of lacerations she has is a bookkeeping issue?” Outrage screeched like fingernails on a chalkboard on the edge of Black's voice.
“Objection. Argumentative,” Rudolf shouted.
“I think she's just asking a question,” Hudson responded. “Overruled.”
“What do you mean by that?” Black asked again.
Bandak gave a disjointed response about the different ways you could count the injuries.
“So the number of lacerations wasn't important to you?” Black asked.
After another aimless response from Bandak, Black asked, “So, what was the answer to my question, sir?”
Rudolf called out an objection.
“Three—three lacerations,” Bandak answered before Hudson overruled. “By my way of counting.”
After establishing that Bandak had billed $40,000 to Michael Peterson so far, Black let him go.
On Thursday, September 18, for the first time in weeks, coverage of the Michael Peterson trial was not on the front page of the local newspapers. The gale force winds of Hurricane Isabel had blown it to the back pages. That day, court was cancelled in advance and then a lack of electricity in the courthouse suspended the action on Friday as well.
On Sunday, Defense Attorney David Rudolf called District Attorney Jim Hardin. He informed him that he might call lead investigator Art Holland as a witness for the defense. Hardin knew Rudolf had an unwelcome surprise in the works, but he had no idea that legal steps were taken behind his back.
Earlier that day, David Rudolf requested an
ex parte
order from Judge Orlando Hudson. That type of order meant that no one—not the judge or the defense—would inform the state of its existence.
Judge Hudson granted permission to the defense to remove evidence found in the house at 1810 Cedar Street after a professional photographer had recorded it where it was found and its condition at the time of discovery. The order also required that if the defense
wished to enter this item into evidence, they must first inform the state of its existence.
Monday did not get off to a good start. One of the jurors overslept. Connecticut State Police Officer Palmbach was scheduled for a return visit to the witness stand. His previous appearance was cut short by his need to return home. Now, his flight was delayed.
Court was finally in session an hour and a half later than usual. Palmbach took the stand to face cross-examination by Jim Hardin. “With respect to those three hundred crime scenes you have worked, how many of those, in your opinion, have been perfectly maintained from the instant the crime had been committed?”
“And by perfectly, the assumption is exactly that—one hundred percent? None, none of them are done entirely correctly.” Palmbach admitted that the majority of them are prosecuted nonetheless. Hardin asked him how many times he had processed a crime scene where the residence was 10,000 square feet, and Palmbach granted that that was a large area to maintain.
Palmbach persisted in his allegation that luminol was sprayed at the bottom of the stairs, even though more than one witness had sworn it had not been done. He corroborated that he and Dr. Lee did not do any independent testing of the crime scene or evidence.
“What I'm saying is that we don't
per se
go through the same level of experimentation and documentation, because that's not our function,” Palmbach said. “That's the function of the primary investigator at the scene.”
“But you rendered opinions of what they did or didn't
do. And those opinions, in some respects, are one hundred and eighty degrees divergent from Deborah Radisch's, who said this death was due to blunt force trauma and not consistent with an accident. And one hundred and eighty degrees from what Duane Deaver opined to this jury, which was that these bloodstain patterns were consistent with a beating and not an accidental fall. You're aware of that?” Hardin asked.
“Yes.”
“And you hold opinions that are one hundred and eighty degrees apart from Deborah Radisch's and Duane Deaver's in particular, right?”
“Pretty much, yes.”
“And they are the people that did all of the work?”
“Or didn't do all the work,” Palmbach said. “But, yes, were charged to do it.”
“In your opinion?”
“Correct.”
“Okay. Your Honor, I have no further questions of the witness.”
Next, the defense called Clyde Andrson, a young man who had worked inside and outside of the Peterson home since 1999. He said he had never seen a blowpoke in the house and that the pool furniture was always by the pool—both statements contradicting testimony by Candace Zamperini.
But he also said that in 2001, he and Todd bought and put up the Christmas tree right after Kathleen died. In fact, the crime-scene videotape shows the tree already
standing on the 10th. Kathleen and Michael brought it home on the Friday before her death.
On Tuesday morning, the defense leaked to the media that they would witness a
Perry Mason
moment. Excited whispers and grins rippled through the spectator section behind the defense table.
Rudolf called Art Holland to the stand. Waving the blowpoke the state had introduced into evidence, Rudolf asked, “This is a pretty light item, isn't it?”
“It's fairly light, yes, sir,” Holland answered.
“Hollow?”
“Hollow.”
“It bends?”
“Flexible,” Art Holland said, nodding his head.
“Have you given any thought to what would happen to an item like this if somebody hit someone over the head—three, four, five times—hard enough to cause the lacerations on the scalp?”
“Probably mangled up,” Holland answered. As the blowpoke questions continued, he sensed what was about to happen. He had expected it much earlier in the trial. He and the prosecution team had discussed it many times. Unless he was mistaken, the defense was about to produce its own blowpoke.
And Rudolf did not disappoint. With a flourish, he pulled out a plastic tube containing a blowpoke and some dead bugs. It was dirty, discolored and covered with cobwebs. Rudolf had ignored Judge Hudson's instructions to inform the state of this evidence prior to its introduction in court.
“See that?” Rudolf asked Holland.
“Yes, sir.”
[ …] “That's a blowpoke, isn't it? Do you know where it has been for the last twenty months?”
“No, I don't.”
“This doesn't appear to you to be mangled, does it?”
“It's not mangled.”
“It's not even dented, is it? Not even a tiny indentation?”
“It doesn't appear to have any dents,” Holland admitted.
After identification by Investigator Holland, Rudolf requested permission to enter it into evidence. Hudson paused, expecting to hear an objection from the prosecution. Hearing none, he said, “It is allowed.”
It was great theater, even though it violated the judge's order. And it surely excited everyone in the media. But the jury was not impressed. Many of them had already eliminated the much-ballyhooed blowpoke as a possible weapon.
Professional photographer John Rosenthal followed Art Holland on the stand. He testified that he arrived at the Cedar Street home on Sunday, September 21, around 2:30 in the afternoon, and shot photographs of the blowpoke in the two-car garage.
Freda Black attacked the defense's inference that the blowpoke had just been discovered after resting in that same place since before December 9, 2001. “Do you have any earthly idea of how long it takes for dust to accumulate on an object in a garage?”
“No,” said Rosenthal.
“Do you have any earthly idea how long it takes cobwebs to form?”
“No.”
“You don't have any earthly idea on how long it takes a bug to die in someone's garage?”
“No.”
With that witness, the defense rested. No testimony was presented about the where, when or who of the discovery of the missing blowpoke. The defense omitted a lot of other witnesses, too.
In his opening, Rudolf promised the jury that he would call witnesses who would tell them about the Camelot-like relationship between Kathleen and Michael. He said he would call a doctor to testify about Kathleen's headaches and ocular migraine. He promised that Marines would testify about Michael's valor and leadership during battle. But not one of them made it to the witness stand.

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