Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist Read online

  James brought his boot down onto the man’s neck, and I braced myself for the crunch of breaking bones. Instead, he spoke in a low, menacing voice.

  “You will never come back to this town again. Ever. Understand me?”

  I stood rooted to my patch of dirt, transfixed, until I felt a sudden yank on my arm.

  “We’re outta here,” Ralph whispered.

  He wheeled me around and marched me forcibly away from the cluster of men, with me twisting my head over my shoulder the whole time to see what would happen next. He shoved me into the passenger’s seat and slammed the door, then stalked around to the driver’s side and revved the engine.

  He didn’t speak until we were several blocks away from the bloody scene. When he did, he was every bit as furious and every bit as menacing as James, but for a very different reason.

  “Rod, what you just saw back there is wrong,” he told me. “That’s not how all cops act. It’s not how any cop should act. You should never treat another human being that way, no matter what he’s done or what you think he might have done.”

  I never forgot what James did or what Ralph told me. I promised myself that when I became a cop, I would never do that and never let it happen on my watch. And I never did. I’ve made it a point to treat people with decency, always.

  I’d been on the force in Los Angeles for a few years when I heard through the grapevine that Melvin James had finally gotten his just deserts, though there were people in San Angelo who would have argued that he deserved even worse.

  One night, he took a seventeen-year-old African-American kid he had arrested behind the San Angelo Police Department, beat him senseless, then shot him three times. Remarkably, the teenager survived. James claimed it was self-defense; the kid claimed it was attempted murder. Whatever the truth, the incident made the Feds suspicious enough to investigate James. After taking a closer look at his policing methods—which more than one source claimed included using electric cattle prods on suspects to extract confessions—the authorities charged him with assault with intent to commit murder.

  Until Melvin James’s downfall, cops had to watch their backs and bite their tongues in San Angelo. Everyone knew the chief was mean and he was dirty and he had an iron grip on the careers of his officers. The man could make your future or he could destroy it.

  During the trial, some of them spoke out at last. One of James’s own officers testified that he’d watched the chief pistol-whip the black kid and kick him in the head. James copped a plea deal and received a $1,000 fine, which San Angelo residents who were still devoted to their chief raised funds to cover. He also assured the city commission that he would never seek office again—a promise he promptly forgot. Just two years later, James ran as a write-in candidate for what would have been his sixth term as police chief. Fortunately, he lost.

  Cracking the Code of Bloodshed

  Those early experiences were instrumental in my decision to become a cop and eventually a crime scene reconstructionist and blood pattern analyst. In the years since I left Texas, I have investigated thousands of murders, testified in almost four hundred court cases, and given nearly six hundred lectures about the telltale evidence to be found in blood smeared on walls, pooled on floors, soaked into sheets, and spattered on clothing. To me, blood is a road map—a route that leads to the truth after a murder has been committed. It reveals what really happened before investigators reached the scene and began the painstaking process of piecing a broken puzzle back together. It tells what the victim can’t and the killer won’t.

  Of course, I don’t get it right every time. In nearly five decades of police work, I have investigated plenty of homicides that I couldn’t solve. Many of them are still classified as open cases. I recently became part of a team assembled by forward-thinking Multnomah County sheriff Robert Skipper to reexamine such cold cases in Oregon in the hopes that new technology may shed light on these long-dormant mysteries.

  Lately it seems that nearly every time I turn on my television I see a CSI spin-off or a report on the latest DNA evidence details from yet another high-profile criminal trial. America has developed a pop culture obsession with crime, where everyone is an armchair sleuth. To those of us who do this work professionally, the inaccuracies on TV crime dramas are sometimes so ludicrous that they make us chuckle. At other times they make us groan or genuinely worry. But with so many Americans curious about crime scenes, it’s time someone who has actually been there—countless times—took them behind the yellow tape for the uncensored inside story. I’ve sifted through thousands of pages of case notes that fill my lab in Oregon and handpicked the most compelling, curious, and chilling crimes to share with you. As you’ll see, they’re filled with just as many gripping twists, turns, and red herrings as a prime-time crime drama. What sets them apart? They’re all true-life stories. Every one. All the close calls and the clever crooks you’ll read about in these pages, all the ones we got and the ones who got away with it, sprang not from a screenwriter’s overactive imagination, but from life. They were—and in some cases still are—out there.

  2

  From Rookie to Undercover Ace

  BY THE TIME WE graduated from high school in 1960, many of my childhood friends were getting ready to take over their families’ farms, stepping into their fathers’ long-familiar roles. Dad hoped I would do the same, but my heart was elsewhere. I was determined to become a cop. I was also eager to go to college. When my uncle Wes and aunt Louise Chamless offered to let me live with them rent-free in Los Angeles if I attended school there, I seized the chance.

  In the fall of 1961, I packed up my Chevy and drove straight to Southern California, stopping just long enough to refuel. As soon as I had settled in there, I headed down to the police station—a wide-eyed, eager nineteen-year-old—and asked for an application. “Sorry, kid,” the desk sergeant told me. Nineteen, I learned, was two years too young to become a cop.

  Disappointed but with no other choice, I channeled my energy into studying instead. I spent the next two years at East Los Angeles Junior College, where I earned my associate degree in 1964. Then, with the help of a Johnson administration grant, I enrolled at Cal State at Los Angeles, majoring in police science and administration. Veteran cops from police departments in the area would show up regularly to guest lecture and serve as adjunct professors, and I would listen spellbound to their tales of thwarted robberies and special investigations, hoping one day to be working cases like those myself.

  As soon as I turned twenty-one, I applied at the LAPD’s Parker Center—named after the force’s chief at the time, William H. Parker, a no-nonsense former war hero beloved in those days for his integrity and for purging the force of corruption. After completing the paperwork, I had to take a medical exam at a local hospital. I had worn contacts for years, so I wasn’t surprised to find myself struggling to read the minuscule letters lining the bottom of the eye chart. I was stunned, however, when three months later an official rejection letter arrived because of it. Twenty-twenty vision, it turned out, was a prerequisite for joining the LAPD.

  After years of anticipation, my dream was about to fall apart. Resolved not to let that happen, I started applying at all the other police stations within driving distance. A few months later—in early 1963—a letter showed up from the Downey Police Department, just south of L.A., congratulating me on my acceptance to the force and telling me where to report to begin training. I was elated, but still smarting over my rejection from what I deemed the big leagues of the LAPD itself. At least I would get to attend the Los Angeles Police Academy for training, I told myself. I’d get to become a cop.

  Looking back, I realize Downey turned out to be the best career move I could have made. L.A.’s department was so huge and sprawling that I would have spent years edging my way up the ranks. Downey was small—small enough for an eager, energetic young cop to work every assignment. I volunteered for all of them, even offbeat ones like presentations at PTA meetings in the evenings, wh
ere I taught parents how to recognize narcotics and how to know when their kids were revealing signs of drug use. That public-speaking experience would prove invaluable training ground when I started lecturing on blood pattern analysis decades later.

  Basic Training

  The next three months of my life involved little more than abject misery and crushing exhaustion. Toiling through the sweltering rows of cotton plants under the Texas sun was grueling, but the Los Angeles Police Academy had it beat for sheer physical punishment.

  I knew I was in trouble when the muscle-bound ex-marine standing next to me collapsed during training. His knees buckled, and down for the count he went. The academy training officers spat on us, humiliated us, called us every foul name in the book. The Los Angeles Police Academy is in Elysian Park, right by Dodger Stadium, and we ran around the field so many times, I lost count. I might have found the experience awe-inspiring in those deep summer days of my childhood, when I was back in Texas idling away hours dreaming of becoming a professional baseball player. But the reality was starkly devoid of romance. There were no cheering throngs urging us on as we barreled through the heat until our legs trembled and our calves balled up into stabbing cramps. The officers running the program did everything they could to break us psychologically and physically. Along the way, they pounded us into shape—just the intense physical and mental conditioning we needed to prepare for what we would soon face on the streets of Southern California.

  I started at the academy with five other new Downey recruits—Frank Riesenhuber, Mike Hadley, Bart Kirk, Bob Bradfield, and Larry Olson. We all stuck it out, went through orientation together, and forged the kind of lasting, loyal camaraderie that comes only through sharing one of life’s defining experiences.

  We never knew when the officers in charge would march solemnly into the police academy classroom at Elysian Park and turn to face a hundred of us new recruits standing at attention, silent and terrified. One of them would belt out a recruit’s last name, followed by the words we all dreaded.

  “Johnson,” they would yell, “get your books!”

  That would be the last you would see of the guy. Head hanging, he would fall out of the ranks, gather his belongings, and slink away, publicly disgraced, weeded out for reasons usually unknown. Sometimes they just perceived a character flaw that convinced them the man in question wouldn’t cut it on the force.

  The classroom work was just as brutal as the physical training—they drilled us on search and seizure, arrest procedure, investigation technique, use of deadly force, radio communication, and every other angle of law enforcement. Then came firearms training, weapons care, marksmanship, defensive driving, pursuit driving, and safe vehicle handling. On and on it went.

  I slogged through and eventually got both my wishes: I became a cop, and I got my bachelor’s degree in fall 1968. L.A.’s own Chief Parker, in full dress uniform, shook my hand and congratulated me at the commencement ceremony as my own new chief, Ivan Robinson of Downey, handed me my badge.

  By this time, I had also married my first wife, Carolyn, whom I met at a wedding I attended with my aunt and uncle. I was twenty-one when we married; she was twenty-five. It sounds young now, but it seemed ordinary then. I was proud to be married, proud to be a full-fledged adult. But nothing made me prouder than being a police officer. I kept my navy blue uniform with its vivid orange patches pressed and my black shoes polished to a glow (a much easier task now that I’d left the academy and nobody was spitting on them). Even my keys hung flat and precise on my gun belt, with one slipped between the three layers of leather to hold them in place, the others dangling below in easy reach.

  Graveyard Shift

  I started out working the graveyard shift—the postmidnight hours that the guys with more pull and experience are eager to avoid. For the first few weeks, an older officer rode along with me so that if anything he deemed me too green to handle came up, he could jump in.

  Finally, my first night working solo as a uniformed patrolman arrived. Christmas Eve. I checked all my gear, checked my shotgun, then reported officially that I was on duty. We termed it “clearing for calls” or “ten-eight.”

  This is gonna be great, I thought as I pulled out of the station parking lot. I’m finally a cop.

  Two hours passed uneventfully. Then just after two A.M., a call came crackling across the radio.

  “We’ve got a multiple-car accident on I-Five, the Santa Ana Freeway, near Florence Avenue.”

  I responded and reached the scene on the darkened highway minutes after the crash. As my headlights cut through the darkness, what I saw made me feel numb and short of breath, as if all the oxygen had suddenly been sucked out of the car. Sprawled out along the still and deserted road was the bloodiest mess I had ever seen.

  Cars were overturned, and random scraps of metal were scattered as if a bomb had exploded. Beyond the cars, I could make out the shape of a motorcycle lying on its side. There were bodies in every direction. My mind and my heart started sprinting at what felt like a hundred miles an hour, as if they were trying to outstrip each other. I called for backup, working hard to keep my voice steady. Then I leapt out of the car.

  What to do first? Save lives. I ran to the nearest body. A man I guessed to be in his late twenties was sprawled flat on his back on the concrete, white and still, eyes fixed on nothing. One look and a quick pulse check told me he was dead.

  I hurried on. More limp and crumpled bodies lay motionless at strange angles. No one was breathing. Hadn’t anybody survived this thing? I glanced around frantically, looking for someone to save, and caught sight of a pair of boots a lane and a half away. Something about them looked familiar, and I felt my stomach lurch. The motor-cyclist had skidded across nearly two lanes of pavement and ended up wedged under a chain-link fence that served as the divider in the center of the freeway. As I drew closer, I saw that the man’s body was on my side of the fence, but his head and neck were on the other side. Standing over him confirmed my fear. I was looking down at a California Highway Patrol cop in uniform. Over my shoulder I heard a car stop, and a concerned passerby appeared out of the darkness, rushing up to offer assistance.

  “Can I do anything to help, Officer?”

  The man’s question shook me out of my paralysis. I told him to grab the fence and yank it upward as hard as he could to lift it off the cop’s neck. Meanwhile, I crouched down and gently eased the injured man toward me, trying not to look at the blood everywhere, not to think about what it meant: There was too much of it. We were too late. As I leaned over the fallen officer, a strong, sharp aroma of alcohol pierced my nostrils. It didn’t take brilliant detective work to deduce what had happened here.

  The officer had been out partying, celebrating Christmas Eve, probably at the end of his shift. He had knocked back one too many eggnogs, maybe with friends from work, and headed home on his bike. In his hurry, he had tried to slip between two cars, passing them on the white stripe.

  But I didn’t care that this man had had too much to drink. I didn’t care that he had used questionable judgment. As a cop—even a new recruit—when you see someone in uniform wounded, you feel an instant bond. You think, That could be me. That could be one of my friends on the force. That could be a member of my family. By the looks of it, the guy wasn’t much older than me. What if this officer had a new wife at home waiting for him, too? What if he had little kids? It was Christmas Eve, for God’s sake. What kind of Christmas would his family have now?

  I knelt beside him and slipped my hand behind his head to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Where his skull should have felt solid, it felt as soft as an overripe melon. It seemed to settle between my fingers like a floppy, half-full water balloon. I wrestled down a rising tide of nausea and a nagging internal whisper that this was a losing battle. Instead I focused only on the CPR motions. Five compressions to the chest . . . one rescue breath . . . five compressions . . . one breath. Every time I pushed on his chest, I was pushing on his namepl
ate. It read, “DeWitt.”

  I’m going to save him, I told myself fiercely. I was so intent on it that I didn’t realize backup had arrived until a sergeant reached around to my gunbelt and took my keys. “Don’t worry about your car,” he said. “We’ve got it. Just get in the ambulance with him.”

  All the way to Lynnwood Community Hospital, I sat next to this colleague I had never met, staring at him, willing him to revive, trying not to remember the horrible softness of his head, trying not to look at his blood covering my hands, caked around my fingernails. Officer DeWitt was pronounced DOA, like the rest of the victims of that accident, and I went home for Christmas Day with my family.

  I got an official commendation for my efforts. I clipped the article about the accident out of the local newspaper and tucked it in a drawer. I had done all I could, I assured myself. Still, I couldn’t stop that gruesome reel from replaying in my mind. Every time I closed my eyes, the bloodstains and the rag-doll bodies on the freeway reappeared. I had nightmares and woke up in cold sweats. To a casual outsider, I looked as if I were holding it together. I was still doing my job. But I was losing it. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for police work after all. Doubt, remorse, and thoughts of turning in the badge that had meant everything to me at graduation were creeping up and threatening to overwhelm me every day.

  All of that came spilling out during my review when Vance Reynolds, the sergeant evaluating my performance, asked a simple question.

  “So, how’ve things been going?”

  “Pretty well,” I began heartily.

  Reynolds didn’t answer.

  I hesitated. Then I started again. “Actually, not so well. I’ve been thinking about quitting.”