Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist Read online

  BLOOD SECRETS

  BLOOD

  SECRETS

  Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist

  ROD ENGLERT

  with Kathy Passero

  Foreword by Ann Rule

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  BLOOD SECRETS. Copyright © 2010 by Rod Englert with Kathy Passero. Foreword copyright © 2010 by Ann Rule. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.stmartins.com

  Book design by Phil Mazzone

  Blood spatter illustrations in chapter 5 by Rosie Welch

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Englert, Rod.

  Blood secrets : chronicles of a crime scene reconstructionist / Rod Englert with Kathy Passero ; foreword by Ann Rule.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-312-56400-1

  1. Bloodstains. 2. Blood. 3. Forensic hematology. 4. Evidence, Expert.

  5. Criminal investigation. 6. Evidence, Criminal. I. Passero, Kathy. II. Title.

  HV8077.5.B56E54 2010

  363.25'62—dc22

  2009040294

  First Edition: April 2010

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Author’s Note: Where indicated with an asterisk (*), pseudonyms have been used.

  Editor’s Note: In the world of professional crime solving, the proper terminology is “bloodspatter.” However, for the purposes of readability in this book, the term has been broken into two separate words and appears throughout the text as “blood spatter.”

  For the victims

  Contents

  Foreword by Ann Rule

  1 Early Days

  2 From Rookie to Undercover Ace

  3 Blood, Drugs, and Murder in Multnomah County

  4 Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist

  5 Blood Basics

  6 Celebrity Cases

  7 Cold Blood

  8 A World of Crime

  9 Trials and Errors

  Afterword: A Glimpse of the Future

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Index

  Foreword

  SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I was invited to Aspen, Colorado, to present a seminar on serial killers to the Colorado Association of Sex Crimes Investigators. After driving from Denver, we arrived late in Aspen—too late to order room service or to find an open restaurant. I looked forward to a hearty breakfast, something you can usually count on at a law enforcement convention.

  The next morning arrived and I was hungrier than ever. As I walked into the large room where speakers would lecture, one whole side was taken up by tables covered with spotless white tablecloths, tables laden with heated silver serving dishes. The menu was replete with eggs, bacon, sausage, ham, hash browns, grits, pancakes, waffles, and fruit. One could not ask for a more appealing breakfast.

  Alas, my good friend Rod Englert was slated as the first speaker of the day. I knew what that meant. Rod had decorated the other three walls of the room with his unique style. Life-size photos of recently and not so recently departed suicide and murder victims were everywhere I looked. In between, there were white sheets of paper with red splotches, sprays, droplets, and streaks. I thought I saw some jars with red fluid in them, but I didn’t look closely enough to determine what it was.

  As the author of more than thirty books on actual murders and some fourteen hundred magazine articles, I have learned much from Rod about solving homicides with the “code” that is inherent in the life fluid of human beings. He has taught me and thousands of others about low-, medium-, and high-velocity blood spatter—enough so I can usually tell from photographs or viewing crime scenes whether a club or a bullet or a “transfer” left a particular pattern in scarlet.

  Even so, as much as I admire his brilliance, I cannot eat and look at Rod Englert’s photos and charts at the same time. Several dozen detectives from all over Colorado and adjoining states, and a sprinkling of FBI special agents, filled their plates to overflowing and chewed away undeterred, listening avidly to his explanation of how the victims on the walls died.

  Not me. My empty stomach could barely manage black coffee and ice water. Despite my queasiness, I learned a great deal at that “breakfast seminar.” After thirty years of researching often grisly crimes, I suppose I should be inured to the shock of what violence can do to the human body. But I’m not.

  Rod Englert is an uncommonly kind man, but he has transcended his own distress and sorrow at man’s (or woman’s) inhumanity to man to offer remarkable insights into what the dead can tell us, even after they can no longer speak.

  Blood Secrets is a fascinating book on many levels. It is autobiographical, showing the fulfillment of a small Texas boy’s dreams to be a police officer through his rookie years, his close calls, his mistakes—which he admits freely—to his years as a homicide detective and now to his career as one of the foremost experts in the world on the silent stories written in blood.

  Most of us involved in the circle of forensic science experts know one another, even though we come from many different regions. We are a motley crew, a fraternity who studies the blackest side of human nature and manages to find justice for victims of crime and the truth for their survivors. In our group are forensic anthropologists (identification by the derivation of bone structure), forensic odontologists (identification by teeth), medical examiners, psychological profilers, fingerprint experts, fiber and hair experts, DNA experts, tool mark experts, ballistic experts, forensic entomologists (bug experts), forensic geologists (soil and stone identification), forensic botanists, and all manner of skilled criminalists who now solve baffling crimes in ways no one ever imagined even a few de cades ago.

  I often think that anyone contemplating the commission of a crime would be frightened away if they knew how much evidence they leave behind them—all unaware.

  Still, contrary to most laymen’s belief, there is such a thing as a perfect murder, thousands of them. And an eyewitness is not necessarily the best way for a prosecutor to win a case. A jury benefits most by being able to see, feel, smell, and examine physical evidence. And it takes skilled forensic experts like Rod Englert to winnow out the truth.

  When I first met Rod in the 1970s, he had recently become a homicide detective with the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office in Portland, Oregon. About a dozen and a half detectives and a CSI team were crowded into an upper floor of a rather dingy building, their desks just far enough apart so they could move the chairs back and get up from time to time.

  Along with his partner, Joe Woods, Rod Englert was solving a number of bizarre and difficult murder cases. At the time, I was a “stringer” covering the Northwest for True Detective magazine and her six sister fact-detective magazines.

  I made $200 an article and $12.50 for every photograph I sent in to accompany the text. I was raising four children on my own after their father died at forty-three, and the Multnomah County detectives were as nice to me as Seattle investigators were and agreed to let me interview them about cases that had been adjudicated—either in a trial or through a confession. They knew that my career, somewhat rare for a female, was supporting my family. Rod, Joe, Blackie Yazzolino, Stu Wells, Bob Walliker, Bobby Graham, Neil McCarthy, John Kerslake, and Lieutenant Jim Purcell had an enviable record of convictions.

  In Blood Secrets, Rod Englert recalls many of the cases
he participated in closing successfully in the greater Portland area. I recognize a lot of them, and they are as fascinating as they were back in the seventies when we first met. The sheriff’s homicide unit in Multnomah County was one of my regular stops. While I was researching murder cases, I was learning. And while Rod was solving those cases, he was learning about the mysteries that could be solved with the blood of victims. And, sometimes, by the blood of killers.

  In my first three published books, there were aspects that Rod Englert had handled. It was chance, probably, but he had his investigational fingers in multiple pies—or, more accurately, any number of homicidal mysteries. Sometimes I teased him, saying he would probably appear in every book I ever wrote. In the end, of course, I began to write about cases all over America, and Rod’s expertise in blood spatter identification made him in demand thousands of miles away from my killers’ stalking areas.

  Now, when we run into each other, it is at one training seminar or another. In Aspen, the hotel where he and I spoke on our particular subjects was in the shadow of the Wildwood Inn, where one of Ted Bundy’s victims—Caryn Campbell—had vanished two de cades before. I can’t recall how many conferences there have been, but there have been many, and I look forward to seeing Rod and his wife, Penny, to catch up.

  Usually, we get an honorarium and travel expenses, and on occasion, Rod and I meet up to speak for nothing at all to high school students who aspire to become members of law enforcement. Rod has always had time to work with youth groups.

  Gradually, Rod Englert’s name began to appear at the top of the list of blood spatter experts in America. At first, it was surprising to watch television news shows and see Rod testifying at high-profile trials. Within a few years, it became commonplace. Until I read the galleys of Blood Secrets, I really didn’t know how many celebrity trials Rod was part of. He gives the reader an insider’s peek at what went on behind the scenes of a number of these investigations and trials.

  I always encouraged Rod to write a book. He worked with author Kathy Passero, whose seamless style meshes perfectly with the subject, and the team has produced a worthy book, unique and captivating.

  One would think that after spending more than half my life writing about homicide cases, I wouldn’t enjoy reading a book on bodies, murder, and blood. But I did. This book is instructional for both detectives and crime aficionados. I thought I was well versed in the meaning of blood trails and marks, but I learned at least three things in this book about blood that I didn’t know before.

  Blood Secrets is much more than a textbook for homicide investigators; it is an absorbing story of the journey of a barefoot boy who picked cotton in Texas to his discovery of a forensic science that is partly art, partly science, and partly gut instinct.

  I highly recommend this book!

  —ANN RULE

  Ann Rule is a former Seattle police officer and the author of thirty New York Times Bestsellers on true crime cases—from The Stranger Beside Me to her newest, But I Trusted You.

  BLOOD SECRETS

  1

  Early Days

  THE FOG WAS ALREADY getting thick before I reached the station for roll call at eleven-thirty P.M. It meant the roads would be dangerous, so I drove slowly and kept an eye peeled for the inevitable drunks behind the wheel at that hour. I was coming down with the flu, and the dampness hanging in the air didn’t help. It blanketed everything with a clammy mist more typical of Seattle than Southern California.

  I’d been a uniformed officer on patrol for almost two years in Downey, a bedroom community of Los Angeles, and though I was hardly a seasoned veteran, I no longer considered myself a pup. That night would prove how wrong I was. It would also change the course of my future.

  No sooner had I arrived than I got pulled out of roll call to respond to a suspicious circumstances complaint: A woman suspected there might be a dead body at an apartment building in south Downey, the seedy side of the town’s main street and unofficial dividing line. The guys who were going off duty at midnight could have responded themselves—technically the call came in on their shift—but a dead body takes hours of work to process, so they’d left this one for me.

  The woman who’d made the call was waiting for me when I pulled into the parking lot. This was 1964, and in those days in Downey we worked solo, so I was by myself.

  “He’s up there,” she said tersely, pointing to a dingy stairway and then retreating. It was obvious she wanted to stay as far away as possible.

  As I made my way up to the second floor, the entire place seemed eerily quiet. Aside from the shabby stairs creaking under my footsteps, I heard nothing—no voices, no movements, no blaring TV sets sounded from behind the closed doors lining the hallway. Soon I found the room number the woman had given me and cautiously pushed the door open.

  The apartment beyond was pitch-black and stuffy. Without stepping inside, I switched on my flashlight to get a better sense of the surroundings and saw a single room furnished with little more than a bed and dresser. As I moved the beam over the walls, the procedure I’d learned in the police academy ran through my mind: Disturb as little as possible of the crime scene, don’t turn on lights because touching a switch might destroy potential evidence or blow you sky-high if there’s a gas leak. And that’s when I saw it.

  Blood was everywhere—spattered over the walls, pooled on the floor, soaking into the sheets of the bed, smeared on the dresser and a small vacuum cleaner standing next to it. Lying in the middle of all this, half on the bed and half off, was the body of an emaciated, balding middle-aged man clad only in boxer shorts. Like everything around him, he was covered in blood.

  My mind cast frantically through a cata log of possible scenarios. What could cause a body to lose all that blood? A hatchet? A machete? An ax? The man must have been murdered—and put up quite a fight, judging from the bloody handprints all over the walls.

  I switched off my flashlight, closed the door, and hurried back down to my patrol car to alert the detectives. “Murder victim,” I announced confidently over my radio. “Looks like he’s been assaulted with an ax.”

  I waited until the detectives and medical examiner arrived, then left the scene. The rest of my shift passed uneventfully, and I headed home from work in the morning still fighting off the flu, but congratulating myself on a solid night’s police work.

  It wasn’t until a few days later that I noticed the telltale grins breaking across the faces of my fellow officers whenever I walked into the room.

  “What’s so funny?” I demanded.

  “Your murder victim,” one of the detectives said, barely able to stifle his laughter. “Turns out the guy didn’t have a scratch on him.”

  “What?”

  “Nobody touched him.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. How could that be possible? The man was soaked in blood. The whole room looked like the set from a second-rate slasher film.

  “But, how . . .,” I began, baffled.

  “Ulcers,” he said.

  I shook my head, still confused.

  “Bleeding ulcers. One of them must have ruptured, and he was throwing up all over the room,” the detective said. “It made quite a mess, as you saw.”

  Snorts of laughter erupted around me.

  “So much for your ax-wielding madman,” the detective said, chuckling.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid move, I chastised myself. Why had I been so quick to announce my theory about an ax murder over the air?

  Even after I learned that it had taken the detectives themselves some time to realize my “murder victim” had bled to death all by himself—most likely as a result of alcoholism—I cringed when I thought about the jokes floating around the police station with me as the punch line. The incident became infamously known among my colleagues as the Vomit Case.

  Never again, I told myself. I resolved then and there to learn all I could about blood patterns in crime scenes and to make that the last time I drew such a misguided conclusion.
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  A Life in Blood

  I’ve devoted much of my life and career since that night in south Downey to studying blood patterns. After the Vomit Case, I read what few textbooks there were, though the field was in its infancy then and—as I would eventually discover through investigating thousands of crime scenes—much of what you could find in print was erroneous. Early sources, for example, claimed the higher the height from which you drop blood, the bigger the spatter produced. I remember reading and memorizing that point. In truth, blood spatter reaches terminal velocity at a height of about fifteen feet. That means the droplets look different when blood hits the ground from, say, a height of one inch as opposed to a height of four feet. But there’s virtually no difference between the spatter you’d see if you dropped blood from thirty feet or a thousand feet. You’d get the same-size drops. What creates varying patterns is the texture and porosity of the material the blood hits, the angle at which it hits, and the surface it’s dropped from. I’ll show you how these factors work in the chapters to come.

  Crime scene reconstruction has become my passion—particularly when it comes to interpreting telltale clues left in the bloodshed that often accompanies a homicide—and I’ve developed an amount of expertise in it. I’ve been called in to consult on hundreds of crime scenes, including high-profile cases like Robert Blake’s, O. J. Simpson’s, and Bob Crane’s. I’ve taught courses to help cops catch criminals using blood pattern analysis everywhere from rural Indiana to Scotland Yard to Bogotá. No matter how much knowledge I accumulate, I still learn something new from every case.

  I’ve been doing this work for decades—since long before series like CSI made the average American an armchair forensics pro. One of the questions I get asked a lot these days is, “Do the TV shows get it right?” Sometimes. More often, they get it wrong. But then at times so do the experts . . . at least initially. This isn’t Sherlock Holmes, where cracking the case is elementary if you do the deductive reasoning. It’s real life, which means it’s often messy and usually muddled, but invariably fascinating.