Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist Read online

  Case Study: Horse Hooves and Hammer Blows

  One of the first people ever to officially seek my help as a blood spatter consultant was Dr. Bob Keppel, a brilliant criminal investigator who had worked on the Ted Bundy case as a young homicide detective and to whom the infamous serial killer had confessed a number of his murders. Bob was working with distinguished prosecutor Greg Canova, recently appointed senior assistant state attorney general, to head up a newly formed unit of the Washington State Attorney General’s Office that was charged with launching independent inquiries into criminal cases at the requests of local prosecutors. The case Bob brought to me in 1981 was one of the most intriguing I had ever encountered.

  Donna Howard—a former rodeo trick rider, longtime horse lover, and married mother of two—was found dead on the floor of a stable on her farm in Yakima County, Washington, in January 1975. Donna’s husband, Russell Howard, discovered her body and told police that he thought she had been kicked in the temple by one of her horses, judging from the copious amount of blood pooled around her head. The coroner agreed that Donna’s head wounds were consistent with blows from a horse’s hoof.

  But Donna’s family was skeptical. Donna’s marriage to Russ Howard had long been on the rocks, and Russ, who struggled with a drinking problem and took few pains to hide his affairs with a string of local barmaids, had recently hit Donna so hard in the head during one of their many arguments that she had lost consciousness. When Russ invited his latest paramour, who went by the nickname of Pepper,* to move in and “babysit” his two daughters just weeks after their mother’s death, the family saw it as a confirmation of their worst fears.

  The death was ruled an accident, but in the years that followed, Donna’s sister never stopped hounding prosecutors, begging them to reopen the case. It wasn’t until Pepper got fed up with Russ, stormed out, and showed up at the sheriff’s office with an unusual “hypothetical” question that anyone began to take Donna’s sister’s doubts seriously.

  “What if,” Pepper asked, “I knew about a murder but didn’t say anything? If the killer got found out, would I be in trouble for keeping quiet?”

  When pressed, she dropped some interesting—and incriminating—tidbits. Toward the end of 1974, Pepper was tired of fooling around with Russ Howard and lowered the boom. “Marry me or we’re through,” she warned. A smitten Howard eagerly agreed, then hatched a plot to murder his wife with a claw hammer to get her out of the way. He laid it all out for Pepper in hushed tones: He would coax Donna out to the barn, hammer in hand, claiming he needed to talk about some repair work with her. Then, when she wasn’t looking, he would hit her with the broad side of the hammer. The death would look like an accident, he assured Pepper. Everyone would think Donna’s skull had been crushed by a panicked horse. He even called Pepper the morning Donna died to assure her that he had gone through with the plan.

  Pepper’s tale was enough to reopen the case, with Keppel and Canova helming the investigation. The problem was, nearly all the crucial physical evidence had long since been burned, buried, tossed out, or painted over. All that was left were some grainy black-and-white photographs. So Keppel and Canova had Donna’s body exhumed and sent her skull to a number of forensic pathologists—first in Washington, then at the Smithsonian Institutions, and finally to consultant Dr. Clyde Snow, one of the country’s leading forensic anthropologists. All concurred that the damage inflicted—particularly a curious little oval fracture at the temple—looked a whole lot more consistent with hammer blows than horse hooves.

  It was damning evidence, but Keppel and Canova needed more to build a shatterproof case against Russ Howard. They needed someone to explain the only other remaining piece of evidence—two dark swaths smeared along the wood on the wall of the stable.

  Around that same time in 1982, Keppel attended a one-day class I was teaching on blood patterns. He hovered at the back of the room, then walked up to the lectern after I had completed my presentation.

  “I’ve got a case I’d like to talk to you about,” he said, and launched into the details of the Donna Howard death. Intrigued, I agreed to help, and we met a few days later, using a photographer’s loupe to scrutinize blowups of every image he could provide of the stained wall and of Donna’s body.

  Our first task was to confirm that the blackish smears were in fact blood and not oil or mud or some other innocuous substance. The second would be to determine what they proved about the manner of Donna’s death.

  Part one was relatively easy to prove based on written reports compiled by those who had been on the scene. Numerous sources noted that they had found two large bloodstains on the wall, though the original autopsy report surmised that Donna had been thrown into a railroad tie and cut her head on its sharp edge. We blew up photographs of the tie itself, taken on the day Donna died. Not only was it free of blood, but it was covered with cobwebs.

  Part two was trickier. Studying the images, I decided that, like the skull, the blood evidence belied Russ’s story and the coroner’s original conclusion. All the signs here pointed to homicide. There was no way those smears had been created by Donna’s body slamming against the wall from the force of a horse’s kick. A kick would have hurled her against the wall in a second or two; there simply wouldn’t have been time for that much blood to pool in her hair that quickly. Also, we would have seen a hair impact pattern. Instead, the bloodstains revealed dozens of streaky lines—a classic blood transfer or swipe pattern. (To picture it, think of the marks a paintbrush leaves if you shake off most of the paint, then drag it along a wall; when you look closely, you can discern hundreds of individual thin lines left by the bristles. They can be wavy or straight, depending on how you move the brush—or, in the case of a murder, the bloodied object.) And photos of Donna’s body showed that her hair was saturated in blood. If a killer had hit her in the head, then inadvertently allowed her blood-soaked hair to graze the wall as he lowered her body to the stable floor, it would have left precisely the type of pattern visible in the photos.

  I did experiments at home in my barn to see if my theories were on track or not. Since I was beginning to give blood pattern analysis lectures several times a year, I also got Bob’s permission to take crime scene photos from the Howard case along to my lectures, gradually collecting feedback from detectives who had investigated horse kick–related injuries and deaths, keeping Bob apprised of my findings. I had my students conduct experiments, too, trying their own tactics to see if they could replicate the patterns on the Howards’ stable wall. They reached the same conclusion I had: Lowering a bloody body to the ground would produce the type of pattern in the photo; flinging a body against a wall—particularly immediately after a blow to the head, before blood has had time to pool in the hair—would generate different patterns.

  We continued this process over the next three years, slowly amassing solid data to back up our theory about how Donna had really died and eventually giving Bob enough to go on to get a warrant for Russ Howard’s arrest.

  When the case finally went to trial in 1986, I was invited to join a formidable team of forensic experts presenting their findings in court. Together, our expertise helped to convince the jury that Russell Howard had indeed killed his wife, Donna, with a hammer. He was found guilty of murder in the first degree and sentenced to life in prison. He died in 2002, shortly after being paroled.

  Case Study: The Second Shot

  A few years later, a consulting case came my way that bore chilling resemblances to the Donna Howard murder. Just after six A.M. on the morning of March 29, 2000, insurance agent David Duyst called 911 to report that his wife, Sandra Anne, had killed herself in their home in Grand Rapids, Michigan. When police reached the scene, they found Sandra sprawled across her bed, dead, with a nine-millimeter handgun lying next to her. Fighting back tears, David Duyst said that he had risen early and gone to another room to avoid waking up his wife when gunshots suddenly shattered the peaceful stillness of the house. He rushed in to find
his wife bleeding from the head and gently removed the gun from her hand, laying it beside her on the bed. “I’ve been afraid something terrible like this would happen,” he added, explaining that Sandra had been depressed ever since one of the quarter horses she raised at their nearby ranch kicked her in the head two years earlier.

  Like Donna Howard, forty-year-old Sandra Anne Duyst was a mother with young children (two sons and a daughter), an award-winning equestrian, and—investigators soon learned—a woman with a troubled marriage that she did her best to hide from the outside world.

  Police doubted David Duyst’s grieving-widower act for several reasons. First, forensic experts found two bullet holes in Sandra’s skull just behind her right ear. Could a suicide really shoot herself twice in the head? Unlikely. Second, Duyst—who they soon discovered was suffering financial woes and having an affair with his office assistant—had recently taken out a $500,000 life insurance policy on his wife.

  If that wasn’t enough to raise their suspicions, they got a call from Sandra’s sister, who said Sandra had told her she had hidden a note under a drawer in the china cabinet in her dining room. “If anything sinister happens,” Sandra instructed her sister, “go find the note when David’s not around.” Police checked and, sure enough, there was a piece of paper in Sandra’s handwriting that read as follows:

  “On November 19th, my accident was no accident. David beat me with a hammer/ax. He came from behind while I was in Dexter’s stall. He hit me repeatedly.

  “If anything has happened to me look first to David Duyst, Sr.,” she continued. “He could be my killer. I would never commit suicide. He may have killed me.”

  Indeed, Sandra’s family told police they remembered being a little puzzled about why David’s clothes were bloody when they met him in the emergency room after Sandra’s “accident” in the horse stall.

  Duyst was arrested and arraigned in Michigan’s Kent County District Court and charged with first-degree murder in the death of his wife. Prosecutor Greg Boer sought my help to interpret the blood spatter and to find out whether Duyst’s version of events was possible. He flew out to Oregon with the evidence, including the bloody sheets and pillowcase and the clothes David Duyst was wearing when he claimed to have found Sandra.

  First we examined David’s T-shirt under high-intensity lights, using magnifying glasses. (Authorities from the Michigan State Police had issued a report stating that the shirt contained no blood, though Greg later learned that the officers examining the shirt had only eyeballed it—hardly enough to draw a definitive conclusion.) Sure enough, after several minutes of careful scrutiny we found tiny droplets of blood and tissue consistent with the high-velocity mist created by blowback from a gunshot wound not only on Duyst’s pants and the front of his shirt, but, most significant, on the back of his right sleeve. Was Duyst right-handed? Yes. There was only one logical way those blood patterns would end up embedded in the fibers of the shirt in that unusual spot: Duyst held the gun in his right hand, extending his arm as he pointed the trigger at Sandra’s head. When he fired, the bullet sent minuscule fragments of blood, bone, and brain matter into the air in a fine mist. Some landed on Sandra’s body, some on the bedsheets, and some on the underside of his sleeve, toward the back—the part of his clothing closest to and facing the wound he had created.

  Next we took the sheet from Sandra’s bed outside. We strung it up on a line in the bright sunlight to inspect the patterns, examining it inch by inch. If you looked carefully, you could discern a long, vertical void in the blood spatter—a line that showed where the shooter had stretched out his arm toward his victim as he shot.

  Finally, we rented a motel room and re-created the crime scene using measurements and other data from the autopsy. We knew from the fracture pattern in Sandra’s skull where each bullet had entered her brain and which had gone in first. Sandra would have had to shoot herself, then reposition the handgun, raising it an inch or so, and fire again. The act would have been physically impossible because the first shot would have incapacitated her. As renowned Texas-based forensic expert Dr. Vincent Di Maio put it in his testimony, the first shot to Sandra’s head would have been akin to going into your garage and yanking the electrical panel off the wall. The lights would have gone out, so to speak.

  Some suicide victims do manage to shoot themselves more than once if the first bullet barely grazes the skin or misses vital organs. However, you often end up with what cops call a “stove pipe”—a shell casing that gets jammed into the barrel when a shooter’s grip on the gun is feeble and his or her wrist and hands are too weak to grip the trigger properly—a phenomenon we did not see in the Duyst case.

  To test my theory about how Sandra Duyst died, I turned to my friend Lonnie Ryan, a gun expert with the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon. Lonnie suggested we stage an experiment. He asked his wife, Sheila, to come to the gun range and fire the actual nine-millimeter found next to Sandra Duyst’s body. Greg Boer and I would be on hand to watch what happened. Sheila knew nothing about the case and had no experience with guns. Lonnie’s only instructions to her were to hold the gun in a way that felt natural. We set up a wide ruler to measure the weapon’s recoil and a videocamera to film it. When Sheila fired the gun, it recoiled upward by a full four inches. And it stove-piped—in other words, the shell casing got jammed in the chamber instead of ejecting, as it should have. What did that tell us? First, to compensate for the recoil, Sandra Duyst would have needed enough strength and wherewithal to bring the gun back down a considerable distance after her first suicidal shot and reposition it against her head. Given Dr. Di Maio’s “lights out” analysis, this seemed impossible. Second, if Sandra had held the nine-millimeter lightly—as most people unfamiliar with automatic handguns do—the gun would almost certainly have stove-piped as it did when Sheila fired it, and that would have prevented the second round from ever loading into the barrel.

  I flew to Grand Rapids to present my findings in court, and thanks to Greg’s convincing arguments along with solid physical evidence, David Duyst was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. He requested a new trial five years later but was denied.

  Case Study: The Green Thread Mystery

  Sometimes the most significant information comes not from the blood itself, but from what’s hidden in it. Such was the case in what I call the Green Thread Mystery. Like a number of intriguing cases I had handled as a homicide detective, this one involved a body that was nowhere to be found. In its place was some of the most unusual blood evidence I have ever examined.

  Here’s what happened: On January 15, 1992, Eric Humbert’s wife called local police to report that her husband hadn’t returned to their New Albany, Indiana, home in several days and she was starting to get worried. The police filed a missing persons report on Humbert, but with few leads the case stagnated.

  Then three months later, they caught a remarkable break: Humbert’s Chevy hatchback had turned up in a Housing Authority parking lot just across the Ohio River in Louisville, Kentucky. Police there ran a check on the license plate and realized the car’s owner was a missing person. What’s more, a police detective had found what he believed was blood all over the back of the interior.

  The vehicle was towed back to New Albany for closer examination. Forensic experts determined the substance smeared across the upholstery was indeed a massive amount of blood. And before long, police zeroed in on Humbert’s best friend, Jonathan Whitesides, as their prime suspect. Whitesides came under scrutiny for two reasons: First, he turned out to be living with the missing man’s wife, as police discovered when they showed up to inform her that her husband’s car had been found. Second, he was the last person to see Humbert alive, and he had a rather incredible tale to tell about it.

  Whitesides told the police that he and Humbert had been driving home in Humbert’s car on a frigid winter afternoon after playing basketball at a local gym. Humbert was planning to drop off White-sides at an address
in the countryside where Whitesides was house-sitting, but he was having car trouble, so instead he pulled into the garage attached to the house to check his engine. According to Whitesides, a heated argument erupted when Humbert started hurling accusations at his friend as he peered under the hood.

  “You’ve been screwing my wife! I know it,” he said, glaring at Whitesides.

  “I haven’t touched your wife!” Whitesides shouted back.

  Suddenly, Humbert pulled a knife and launched himself at White-sides. As the two men struggled, the knife slipped and lodged itself in its owner’s neck. Humbert collapsed, and when Whitesides couldn’t revive him, he panicked. Thinking his friend was dead and he would get blamed, he shoved the body into the hatchback, drove to the Ohio River, and rolled it in. He ditched the Chevy in the closest parking lot he could find and went home to clean up the blood.

  Whitesides insisted that he had acted in self-defense and was guilty of no more than obstruction of justice for having disposed of Humbert’s body and his car. His version of events sounded like the farfetched cover story of a guilty man, but aside from the blood smeared over the car’s cargo space, evidence was scant and there was no victim to be found. Murder one would be hard to prove. The task of making a case against Whitesides fell to Floyd County, Indiana, prosecutor Stan Faith. Stan had attended a seminar I gave on blood spatter in San Diego about a year earlier, so he asked me if I would be willing to examine the scientific evidence and give an opinion on the case.

  I flew to New Albany and we conducted a thorough reexamination of Humbert’s car to see if any details might have been missed in the initial investigation. It was a good thing we did, for the hatchback yielded a plethora of blood spatter evidence.