Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist Read online

  He looked at me impassively. “Hmm,” he said. “Why?”

  Out poured the countless night terrors: I’m kneeling on the highway in the dark, realizing the cop is dead, only to have the corpse’s bloodied hands reach up suddenly and close viselike on my arms. I’m racing in slow motion to a body trapped under a fence, bending close and seeing . . . not the real victim’s face, but the faces of cops I know, friends in the department, my brother Mickey, my cousin Ralph, sometimes my own face.

  I felt embarrassed telling Reynolds all this. Frankly, it was antithetical to the strong, unflappable macho persona we all strove for, the stoicism we vehemently believed was a prerequisite for being a great cop. But it was cathartic. Sitting in that chair venting all the anguish, guilt, and fear I had pent up was necessary in some way.

  Reynolds didn’t say anything. He didn’t pat me on the back or reassure me or tell me brusquely to snap out of it. He listened. When I walked out of the evaluation, I knew I would be okay. I wouldn’t forget it, but I would be able to file that case away mentally with the many others I was accumulating and go on with my work.

  Still, of all the bloodshed I’ve seen in the years since, that bloody Christmas Eve wreck on I-5 still ranks as one of the most disturbing scenes in my memory.

  Not long ago, I was asked by decorated former LAPD detective and District Attorney investigator Buck Henry, now among the top crime scene reconstructionists in the business, to examine blood evidence for a case that brought back all those memories.

  It was Friday afternoon in Oceanside, California, when Tony Zeppetella, a twenty-seven-year-old police officer, pulled a car over for a routine traffic stop in the crowded parking lot of the Navy Federal Credit Union at Avenida de la Playa and College Boulevard. Behind the wheel of the car he stopped was Adrian Camacho, a criminal alien who had been deported from the United States for his lengthy record of drug and weapons convictions. Camacho had already spent much of his adult life in prison, and rather than risk going back, he opened fire on Zeppetella in front of more than a dozen witnesses and then fled in the officer’s police cruiser.

  It was my job to re-create precisely what happened at the Navy Federal Credit Union that afternoon based on the blood spatter. Camacho fired the first shot with a loaded semiautomatic lying beside him on the seat as Zeppetella stood at the driver’s-side window. When the impact knocked Zeppetella to the ground, Camacho leapt out and kept shooting until he ran out of bullets. He then pistol-whipped Zeppetella. Next he grabbed the wounded officer’s gun and emptied it into the dying man’s back as he struggled in vain to crawl to shelter—thirteen shots in all. The entire incident unfolded in less than two minutes.

  The blood evidence bore out what the witnesses saw: This was a vicious, senseless murder, committed without a fragment of mercy or human compassion. It earned Camacho—whose blood test revealed that he was hopped up on a blend of heroin, methamphetamine, and Paxil when the shooting occurred—a spot on death row.

  As a consultant, I cannot get emotionally involved in my cases. Detached impartiality is crucial for accurate assessment and analysis. But I will confess that when I examined Officer Zeppetella’s blood-soaked notebook and found a photograph of his wife and baby son tucked inside it, I felt as if I were once again standing on the Santa Ana Freeway in the damp and chilly night air, in the first hours of that Christmas morning forty years ago.

  This could have been me on countless occasions. This could have been my blood spattered all over a parking lot, all over my notebook, all over a photograph of my children, then left for someone else to analyze. It could have been the blood of any of the cops I’ve known over the years—men simply trying to do their jobs, trying to keep the streets safe from murderers and drug dealers, and pulling over the wrong car on the wrong Friday afternoon.

  The $8.00 Incident

  The I-5 accident was one of two memorable events in my life that took place on a California freeway. The second would provide the catalyst for the worst moments of my entire career, a potentially ruinous crisis that snuck up and blindsided me. And it all started with an incident that seemed downright trivial.

  I was on patrol late one night with a ride-along—a young radio operator with dreams of becoming a cop, just as I’d had in my own days riding with Ralph back in San Angelo—when a call came in: “Possible drunk driver southbound on Paramount Boulevard.”

  “I’m on it,” I told the dispatcher.

  I soon found the car in question and tailed him as he turned east onto Imperial Highway. Then I switched on my lights and pulled the driver over.

  “Could you step out of the car, please, sir?” I asked him.

  These were the days before Breathalyzers, so I did a sobriety test by making him stand with his feet together, then apart, walk in a straight line, and so on. It was obvious the guy was not quite drunk. He wasn’t belligerent, either. He just stood there calmly watching while I searched his car. I found a pinch of marijuana—enough to dump out, but not enough to justify arresting him.

  I had no choice but to fill out a field interrogation report (a three-by-five paper we called an “FI card” that showed I had stopped someone but hadn’t found cause to bring him in) and to send him on his way.

  I watched him drive off and didn’t give him another thought.

  Six months later, we had just finished a big drug raid on La Reina Avenue and booked forty people when my lieutenant, Jim Shade, pulled me aside.

  “There’s been a complaint against you,” he said, handing me a piece of paper. He seemed almost casual about it, but as I scanned the page, I shook my head in disbelief.

  It was signed by a man named Green, who said he was writing on behalf of his friend Robert Thornton to complain that I had pulled Thornton over six months earlier on Imperial Highway and stolen $8.00 from his pocket while I was patting him down.

  The next day, I found myself summoned to Chief Ivan Robinson’s office. He threw me a rueful glance as I walked in.

  “Officer Englert,” he said, “have a seat.”

  As I sat down, he swiveled his chair around so that his back was toward me. From the wall behind his desk, he carefully removed a plaque that bore the Law Enforcement Code of Ethics. He began to read aloud from it.

  “As a Law Enforcement Officer, my fundamental duty is to serve mankind; to safeguard lives and property; to protect the innocent against deception, the weak against oppression or intimidation . . .”

  I was scared to death. How could this be happening? I had been on the department only two years. I had wrestled with some serious demons after I-5, but I had conquered them and I had been scrupulously ethical every day on this job, my dream job.

  “Honest in thought and deed in both my personal and official life, I will be exemplary in obeying the laws of the land and the regulations of my department . . .,” he went on, reading the words slowly.

  He finished and swiveled around to face me across his desk, eyebrows raised quizzically.

  “I didn’t do it,” I told him. “Why would I steal eight dollars?”

  “Yeah, Jim Shade said the same thing,” Robinson told me. “He’s sure you’re innocent. He offered you up for a polygraph. So I guess we’ll find out. Won’t we?”

  My heart sank. I had always had great respect for Chief Robinson. During my first few weeks on the force he had sat all his newly minted officers, including my five pals from the police academy and myself, down as a group to share some simple words of wisdom with us.

  “Gentlemen,” he told us, “never lower yourself to the level of the people you are dealing with.”

  Now that was exactly what Robinson thought I had done. The chief of police, my commanding officer, was convinced that I had betrayed the public trust and disgraced my department by lowering myself to the level of a thief, a pickpocket. If he doubted me, I wasn’t sure how much it mattered that I was innocent.

  The next morning, as Deputy Chief L. D. Morgan drove me to the sheriff’s office in downtown L.A., I wa
s still petrified and baffled about why anyone would make up such a bizarre story about me. When we arrived Morgan introduced me to Bob Murphy,* the officer who would administer my polygraph.

  Murphy shot me a skeptical, appraising glance, then ordered me to sit. He soon made it clear he didn’t feel any kinship with me as a fellow officer. Nor did he subscribe to the old notion of being innocent until proven guilty in cases like mine.

  “You know what a field mouse is?” he barked at me. “Are you gonna be a man or a field mouse and not tell the truth?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I told him honestly, just as I had told Chief Robinson back at the station. “I’ve never done anything like that. Why would I jeopardize my entire career for a lousy eight dollars?”

  But he was bent on hearing a confession. As the minutes dragged by, he grew more aggressive and frustrated with me for refusing to crumble.

  At last he leaned back in his chair and growled, “All right, you’re done.” He ordered me to stay put while he talked with Morgan, who, unbeknownst to me, had watched the whole conversation through a two-way mirror.

  “Well, Englert,” Morgan said, “you didn’t do so well.”

  I failed? How could I have failed a lie detector test when I told the truth?

  We rode back to Downey in silence. When we got there, Morgan said, “You go home and think about this to night. We’ll talk to the chief tomorrow.”

  It was the most miserable night of my life.

  “It’s over. My whole career is over,” I told my wife. “All that education went down the tubes.”

  “It’ll be okay,” she said, though she didn’t have much luck convincing me. “You told the truth. That’s what matters.”

  “Not if you fail the polygraph,” I replied.

  The next day, Chief Robinson asked if I had anything to tell him.

  “Just what I told you before. I didn’t do it.”

  Later that day, I found myself being chauffeured by Morgan to yet another polygraph. I was bracing for more hostility, but instead we went to an apartment in Glendale. The man who opened the door greeted Morgan like an old friend. It turned out that’s just what he was: a retired former colleague who ran a polygraph operation out of his home.

  Like the setting, the approach contrasted starkly with my first ordeal. This time no one badgered me—Morgan’s pal just took me into a separate room, where he asked me questions about Thornton and the infamous $8.00.

  When he finished he said, “Only you know whether you’re telling the truth or not.”

  “That’s not exactly giving me a clean bill of health,” I replied.

  He smiled and shrugged.

  He spoke to Morgan in private, then we said good-bye and got back in the car. By this time it was almost midnight, but instead of returning to the station, Morgan drove straight to Chief Robinson’s house and told me to wait in the car. My heart pounding, I watched from the passenger seat as Morgan knocked on the front door and stood waiting. At last, Robinson answered. He leaned in the door frame, wearing pajamas and a bleary-eyed look. Our arrival had obviously woken him up. I could see Morgan talking—and Robinson nodding occasionally—but I couldn’t hear a word of the conversation I knew would determine my fate.

  At last, Robinson closed the door and Morgan climbed back in the car. “Well,” he said simply, “it’s over.”

  What was over? The investigation? My career? I glanced at him apprehensively.

  He left me in suspense for a few more minutes before telling me that I had passed polygraph number two and that Robinson had decided to drop the issue. After that night, they both acted as if it had never happened. Case closed.

  More than a year passed before I got an unexpected call to testify in superior court about a field interrogation report card I had filled out on one Robert Thornton. I soon learned that Thornton was on trial for raping six women in Los Angeles County and for using the unique and horrible MO of shoving rocks into their vaginas after his attacks.

  I stepped into the courtroom and there he sat—the man who had almost demolished my career. I barely recognized him behind the pair of Coke-bottle glasses he was wearing.

  As soon as I took the witness stand, pieces of the story started to click into place: I had pulled Thornton over when he was fleeing one of his crime scenes. He had been remarkably composed for a man who had just committed a brutal rape. But why would a guy with such a sinister secret to hide write to the chief of police? Why call attention to himself?

  I soon found out.

  “Officer Englert, when you’re on duty, it’s not unusual for you to stop three or four people a night. Is that correct?” the prosecutor asked.

  “Yes, sir,” I answered.

  “Mr. Thornton did nothing significant. You didn’t even arrest him. Why would you remember him so well from an event that occurred more than two years ago?”

  The tension on Thornton’s face was evident. It turned out that his entire case hinged on one of the little boxes I had checked on the FI card.

  Thornton fit the description all the victims gave of their attacker, except for one crucial point: The man who had raped them hadn’t worn glasses. The defense attorney claimed his client was innocent because he was almost legally blind without corrective lenses.

  On my FI card, I had noted “no glasses.”

  “Mr. Thornton has stated under oath that his poor vision requires him to wear glasses at all times,” the DA continued.

  “Well,” I replied, and I looked directly at the jury as I spoke, “I know that when I stopped him he wasn’t wearing glasses. And he was driving at the time.”

  Thornton was convicted on all counts. Case closed.

  So that’s why I had been put through hell. Thornton wanted to discredit me—to get me out of the way so I wouldn’t be able to testify and blow his disguise if he ever got caught. I had just been in the wrong place, wrong time.

  Chief Robinson never apologized when he learned the truth. He just shrugged. “It made you a stronger person,” he said.

  I never forgot it. Even when every instinct tells me a suspect is guilty, I reserve judgment until all doubt is removed, because I know how it feels to have everyone in the room be convinced you committed a crime when you’re innocent. And though I’ve submitted plenty of defendants to polygraph tests because I know that a skilled operator can coax a confession out of a guilty man by convincing him that the machine has already revealed the truth, I never rely solely on the results of a lie detector test.

  Nine Ninety-Nine!

  It didn’t take me long to discover that for a cop, the unexpected was inevitable. It was always waiting just around the corner, behind the door, or at the end of the blind alley. And it always seemed to happen in the dead of night.

  At around three A.M. on one particular night, I was patrolling a notoriously rough part of Downey known as the Boot. The neighborhood, which lay just inside the city limits, was infamous for drugs, prostitutes, and worse. And the hub of the action was a sprawling complex with a hotel, nightclub, and restaurant known collectively as Tahitian Village. Word at the time was that organized crime ran the operation.

  I get hunches about trouble, and that night mine led me into the narrow alley that emptied out in back of the nightclub. I drove through it, past the trash bins and into a nearly empty parking lot hidden behind the bar. Sure enough, I spied a car parked at a peculiar angle, straddling two spaces. Something about it didn’t look right. I got out and edged closer.

  A man sat slumped over the steering wheel, eyes closed, mouth agape. Asleep? Maybe. Dead? Possibly. Drunk or on drugs? Probably.

  I knocked on the window.

  At once, he jerked upright, looked around wildly, and spied me. His eyes narrowed and his face lit up with a sort of murderous intensity. I had only a second to register his bizarre expression before he flung open the door and launched himself at me. He was enormous, a head taller than me, and out of his mind with rage. Like a kick-box
er in overdrive, he flew at me, punching, kicking, biting, throttling, and grabbing for my gun in the holster.

  Before I knew it, I was in a fight for my life, swinging and ducking as fast as I could to keep this lunatic from knocking me senseless and then killing me with my own bullets.

  As yet another sharp right flew out of nowhere and caught me below the eye, I thought ruefully of my baton, lying uselessly on the front seat of my patrol car. I ducked a blow and landed one on his jaw. But this guy wasn’t going down. He just kept coming back for more, as if the only thing that would satisfy him was to murder me.

  We didn’t carry radios in those days, so all I could do was keep fighting and try to steer the brawl back toward my car in the hope that I could get close enough to grab the radio and call for backup.

  The stranger caught me around the neck and started to drag me across the parking lot, choking me until stars popped in front of my eyes. I twisted loose and dove for the car. Luckily, I had left the door open.

  My hands slipping frantically over the radio, I pressed the button and shouted, “Car seven. Nine ninety-nine. Repeat, nine ninety-nine!”

  When an officer called a nine ninety-nine, all hell broke loose. It was the police version of SOS or 911. Mayday. No matter what else you were doing on duty, you abandoned it and raced to the officer’s aid. (The verbal shorthand for “Emergency! Officer needs assistance!” varies by city and state. Some departments have scrapped codes altogether in favor of plain English to simplify things. However, the most common police call for help is “code zero,” which we used in Oregon.)

  I barely got the words out before a pair of massive bleeding knuckles reached in and yanked me upward, hoisting me out of the car. The stranger flung himself on me, trying to force me down to the pavement, his hands still scrabbling at my holster. I hit him as hard as I could, sending him reeling backward, then grabbed my gun.

  I had done everything I could think of not to kill this guy, but I was in trouble. I was exhausted, and he was not only bigger than me, but full of the hyperenergetic, superwired kinetic strength people get when their systems are loaded with drugs. What the hell was wrong with him? Why was he bent on killing a complete stranger and a cop, no less? All I did was tap on the window to see if he was okay. I wasn’t going to shoot him, but I had to end it. Soon. So I pulled out the .38 Smith & Wesson with the six-inch barrel that I had bought myself when I became a cop and cracked him hard across the head with its hefty barrel several times. (Cops had to buy their own guns in Downey in those days.) He let go of me instantly and crumpled to the pavement with a thump. I jumped on him and got him handcuffed.