Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist Read online

  By this time, our brawl had made enough of a racket to alert the crowd inside the bar. A straggle of onlookers had drifted out the back door and everyone was standing in a semicircle staring down at me, panting and bleeding as the surging adrenaline that had sent my heart into a furious gallop finally subsided. I dragged a shaking hand across my forehead to wipe away the sweat. That’s when I heard the sound of sirens in the distance. Relief coursed through me. Help was on the way. It’s hard to describe what that sound means to a cop in trouble. It’s like the cavalry storming in.

  I didn’t even realize I had dropped my .38 until a stranger in the crowd silently handed it back to me. It had been one hell of a fight. Blood was all over the parking lot, and I had been lucky—very lucky—to come out on top.

  My opponent, the mysterious Mike Tyson of the back alley, ended up in the hospital with twenty-five stitches. But the way I saw it, I was lucky to be alive and so was he. Things could have ended a lot worse. Nonetheless, I found myself in court over the incident. And of all the courtrooms I didn’t want to land in, this one topped the list. It belonged to Leon Emerson, a hard-nosed judge whose courtroom I had been in before and who seemed to dislike me intensely.

  I walked in, and there sat the psycho from the parking lot, ready for his arraignment, clad in a business suit but sporting a massive, turbanlike bandage on his head. As bad luck would have it, he turned out to be a VIP with North American Aviation.

  “I was completely out of it. Really drunk,” he testified. “I swear I thought I was back in Vietnam. I just went nuts.”

  Emerson didn’t buy a word of it. It didn’t matter that the man was trying to apologize, pleading mea culpa. He was a high-ranking executive, a big shot with a big corporation, and he had suffered what looked like some serious police brutality from the judge’s viewpoint. Emerson didn’t seem to care that the man had been drunk out of his mind and had attacked a public servant. He made his opinion clear with a slew of snide remarks aimed at me from the bench.

  I sat there, black and blue and boiling, biting my swollen lip, as he prattled on, Monday-morning quarterbacking in his robes. What did Emerson know about it? He wasn’t the one lying on his back in a parking lot in the middle of the night getting the crap kicked out of him and thinking he was about to die. I was out there trying to do my job. I didn’t have any other avenues. I could have been killed. The guy was insane. He was trying to get my gun.

  I kept my anger in check, but when I got back to the station, I wrote a memo to the chief of police defending myself and complaining about Emerson’s comments. The result wasn’t exactly what I had hoped for: The chief wrote his own complaint to the judge, saying that he supported my actions. But he still ordered the whole department to go to baton-training school. Worse, thanks to me and my boxing match behind Tahitian Village, we had to carry our batons in rings on our belts at all times from then on, which made walking, running, driving, and even sitting down at your desk awkward and cumbersome.

  “Thanks a lot, man,” my colleagues grumbled. They were as ticked at me as I was at Judge Emerson.

  A Nose for Narcotics

  Licking my wounds, I went back to work. I was getting good at what I did, discovering I had a sixth sense for the cars carrying drugs. Sometimes I could tell from subtle glitches in the driving. Sometimes furtive motions from the front seat gave the drivers or their passengers away. Sometimes a simple hunch would tip me off.

  Soon I led the department in narcotics arrests. I was assigned to AI (accident investigation), but I was still catching so many drug users that I landed myself right back in the crosshairs of Judge Emerson. I had been gracing the L.A. County District Court judges’ courtrooms so often to testify that he convinced himself I must be in league with the drug trade. “You’ve got a whole police department down there,” he told my boss. “How come one guy is making all these narcotics arrests?” He couldn’t believe the busts were legitimate. He figured I was planting dope, faking probable cause for pulling people over, or getting inside tips from an informant. Finally, he demanded a ride-along.

  I was still fuming about the man’s barbed comments, but I had no idea he was targeting me. I thought he just wanted to do a ride-along and I had been unlucky enough to get stuck with him.

  At around seven P.M. we were sitting next to each other parked on Imperial Highway, working radar and trying to make polite conversation despite the ill will almost palpable in the car, when a black 1959 Ford Fairlane sped past us. I clocked the Ford at twenty miles over the limit. At fifteen over, I would have let him go. But that speed on this road was dangerous. I turned on the overhead lights and tailed the car, spying the familiar hunched pose—the telltale hurried scramble of a user fumbling to stuff his stash under the seat.

  When the car finally pulled over, I approached the driver and motioned for him to roll down the window. He cracked it a mere two inches. A pair of bloodshot eyes with pupils so dilated that I could barely make out a rim of iris around them blinked up at me. I glanced back at Emerson and waved him out of the car.

  “Could you come over here for a minute, Judge?” I asked him. He walked up to me. “Can you smell that, Your Honor?” Pungent fumes of pot smoke were wafting out of the cracked window. Emerson nodded.

  “You’re gonna have to step out of the car, sir,” I told the driver while Judge Emerson peered over my shoulder. Reluctantly, he swung open the door and stepped out. As he did, I caught sight of something black and shiny peeking out from under the passenger’s seat. I ordered the driver to face the car, handcuffed him, and read him his rights.

  “Take a closer look in there, Your Honor,” I told Emerson, indicating the car’s interior. Emerson strolled over to the passenger’s side and opened it. Across the top of the Ford, I watched his eyes widen as he spied the half-hidden handgun on the floor.

  “Anything else under the seat?” I asked, keeping my voice casual. Emerson bent down for a closer look. Sure enough, there was “jar” after “jar”—a thousand pills each—of colorful “reds” and “yellows” (barbiturates and Nembutal), all neatly divided into plastic bags for sale. We had just nabbed a dealer en route to a delivery, enjoying a joint along the way.

  I arrested him for possession with intent to sell, then packed him in the back of the car and we headed to the station. In we walked, with the judge carrying all this dope, a big grin across his face. I booked the dealer, filled out the evidence cards, and typed up my report. Emerson waited until I finished, then left.

  “Nice work,” he said on his way out.

  I had won over the judge at last . . . at least until he got subpoenaed in the case and was accused by the dope dealer’s defense attorney of breaching the separation of the judicial and executive branches of government. The case was dismissed because of it, which understandably infuriated Emerson. It frustrated me, too, to think of the dealer back out on the street, but there was nothing either of us could do about it.

  A few days later, Jim Shade told me Emerson’s true motive for the ride-along: The judge had set me up, sure that I was crooked. Lieutenant Shade had defended me, just as he had in the $8.00 incident, when rapist Robert Thornton tried to get me fired. “Englert’s not dirty,” he assured Judge Emerson. “He’s just got a nose for narcotics and a sixth sense for suspicious cars.”

  But here’s what neither Emerson nor Shade knew: I wasn’t a dope cop myself, but I was doing an exemplary job for them—turning loads of drugs over to them and filing flawless reports—because what I wanted more than anything was to join their ranks.

  I was at my desk one day, filing yet another report on a drug bust I had made, when the phone rang.

  “Englert?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Leon Emerson.”

  What now? I thought.

  “Listen,” he said. “I owe you an apology.”

  That was all it took. In the years that followed, Judge Emerson became one of my closest friends. The better I got to know him, the more I ad
mired his dedication. He had taken time out of his own schedule to check up on me, not to be a jerk but because he cared about justice and honesty in the courtroom.

  But if you had predicted back on Imperial Highway in 1964 that the stern-faced judge in the passenger seat would become one of my best buddies, bucking hay with me under the glaring sun on my Oregon farm during weekend visits in the years to come, I would have said you were as high as that driver in the 1959 Ford Fairlane.

  Going Undercover

  I kept busting drug users with Emerson’s blessing and eventually made a good enough impression to get assigned to narcotics. In 1966, to my delight, I became an undercover agent in Downey.

  In many ways, undercover work was the antithesis of what I had done as a patrolman. You don’t go into an office every morning. You don’t wear a uniform. You don’t worry about keeping your hair short or staying clean-shaven. Your job is to convince criminals that you’re one of them.

  I still remember what I wore on my first day undercover: a grubby baseball cap, a goatee, a rumpled short-sleeved golf shirt, and—taking a page from old Robert Thornton’s book—glasses with big, black frames. The lenses were just clear glass, but they were so thick and heavy that they fooled the bad guys, who figured there was no way I could be a cop. Not with eyesight that pathetic. When a guy I had never met asked if I was on the level, my contacts would dismiss his doubts casually. “That dude?” they would ask incredulously. “The guy’s practically blind.” For many years I kept those glasses hanging in my lab to remind me of all the frightening places and white-knuckle predicaments they helped me scrape through.

  People often raise a skeptical eyebrow when I swear that in all the years I bought drugs I never sampled them, but it’s true. I am a master at faking it, though. When a dealer cocks a gun against your temple and threatens to kill you unless you do a line of coke to prove you’re not a narc, you get a strong incentive to learn the art of simulated snorting.

  “Hey, man,” I used to say, “I’m just in it for the money. You can’t be gettin’ rich if you’re gettin’ high all the time.”

  The argument made sense to dealers, so they bought it.

  Besides, that stuff was like gold down at the station: You had to account for every bit of it. When you signed out for $50 to buy weed or coke, you had better turn in $50 worth of weed or coke as evidence. Not $45. Not even $49.

  I started out simple. My supervisor, Al Soule, and senior narcotics/vice officer Jerry Gilbert taught me a lot. They gave me a primer on what to say and what to steer clear of to avoid entrapment or tipping my hand (“Where’s the action?” is okay; “Can I buy some drugs from you?” is not), then they pointed me in the right direction and offered advice whenever I needed it. At first I just showed up at the bars, streets, and parks where drug trade was heavy. I would hang out for a while, make a buy here, an acquaintance there, but mostly keep a low profile. Gradually, I dug my way deeper into the scene, forging more pivotal contacts and progressing toward the power players—big-money dealers and drug lords.

  Soon my hair was long and shaggy, and I had grown a scraggly beard. I looked nothing like the clean-cut young officer in uniform of a few months earlier. Stained T-shirts and grungy ripped jeans had replaced my starched shirts and crisply pleated navy blue pants. By now, my wife and I had three small children, and I looked bizarrely misplaced with them, like a drifter who had wandered inadvertently into a happy family scene. People did a double take when they saw us at the grocery together. What’s that shady-looking guy doing with those nice folks? they wondered. I could read it in their expressions.

  But disdain from strangers didn’t bother me. I loved working undercover. I became another person. I played the part, looked the part of a doper. I’ve always been gregarious and affable, and that helped me win the trust of the people I needed to convince.

  Case Study: The Overdose

  Many of my undercover days in Downey were spent chasing a tall, lanky teenager named John Sutherland.* The kid was a pain in the butt, always in trouble. Ostensibly a heroin dealer, he shot up more than he sold. I arrested him repeatedly, but he always made bail and turned up again causing problems. I kept following him, hoping to get him off the streets once and for all. As it turned out, he did that without any help from me.

  I was at work one day when I overheard a call on the police radio about a dead body at a familiar address in a run-down neighborhood nearby. John Sutherland’s address. I recognized it at once and hurried over.

  When I walked in, John was lying in a corner of the living room dead, with a needle sticking out of his arm. There was blood all around him.

  A lieutenant I knew well was there with some wet-behind-the-ears rookie patrolman I had never met. In I came, with my long hair and scruffy beard, and pushed right past them toward the body.

  “How ya doin’?” I called.

  “Hey,” the rookie cried indignantly. “What do you think you’re doing? This is my crime scene. You’re not supposed to be in here.”

  “He’s right, Rod,” said the lieutenant, grinning. “You’d better back off.”

  Chagrined, I apologized and asked if it was okay if I hung around. The rookie grudgingly agreed.

  I retreated to an out-of-the-way corner and studied the scene from there. Why was John so bloody? Dark stains had soaked into the carpet and spotted the shabby furniture all around his body.

  I had seen enough drug use by that point to draw some preliminary conclusions about the crime scene. It wasn’t uncommon to find a user dead with a needle jutting out of some part of his body. Addicts OD’d on hot doses—undiluted ones that they either didn’t realize were lethally strong or were too desperate to take time to cut with quinine—all the time. But I had found those bodies before. At most, I had seen a trickle of congealing blood that had run down their arms in their final minutes.

  I also knew that the more habitually you shot up, the harder you had to work to find an uncollapsed vein. Smack users were prone to hit an artery now and then in their urgent quest to find an inroad for the drug, and when they did, blood could spurt anywhere. Sometimes you found long, arching lines of it streaked across a mirror over a bathroom sink, and you knew an addict had been gazing in it while searching his neck for a vein to tap. He had pierced an artery by mistake and sent his blood spurting onto the glass. At other times, you spotted a dark red blob beside the body—the telltale sign that a user had found a workable vein, then carelessly squirted his blood onto the floor in order to empty the syringe before refilling it with a liquid he considered more precious to put in his body.

  But none of that explained this blood.

  Still baffled, I watched them carry out John’s body. Later, I read the medical examiner’s report and it all fell into place. The ME discovered a large gash on the back of John’s head. In the first moments after fixing, as the heroin was flooding his system and doing its irreparable damage, John tried to take a few steps, but he fell down and lacerated his head on the sharp edge of a table. He lost consciousness, but his heart continued beating for several minutes—pumping blood out of the wound in the back of his scalp and onto the floor all around him, leaving him lying in a sticky red pool. The death was ruled an accident. Odds were John didn’t feel a thing. He slipped blissfully into a coma, never realizing he was simultaneously overdosing and bleeding to death.

  Blood Puzzles

  Why am I telling you about this particular case, about this long-dead and forgotten junkie? Because when I recall that day, I am struck by how much police work has changed.

  Blood pattern analysis was in its infancy in the United States in the mid-1960s. Looking back, John could have been bumped off by a rival dealer, a reckless junkie who coveted his stash, a thief who knew where he hid his drug money—anyone. The guy had his share of enemies. Frankly, we would never have known if a clever killer had whacked him on the back of the head, shot him up with enough pure heroin to make sure he never woke up again, and vanished, taking the murde
r weapon with him.

  Nowadays, dozens of crime photos would be taken of a scene like that. You would get every angle of the body and the blood on camera. You’d collect samples. You’d photograph the trail of droplets. You’d measure each one and study its shape. You’d do a bloodstain map. In this particular case, you would focus intense attention around the victim’s head as the source of the blood. You would conduct a microscopic examination of the table where he hit his head. You would examine John’s clothing for touch DNA—places where someone might have grabbed, twisted, or yanked on his clothes and inadvertently stripped off some of their own DNA.

  But back then, there wasn’t one cop looking for those clues. Everyone just tromped through the blood evidence at crime scenes. Blood was something to be cleaned up. There were no schools studying blood pattern analysis in this country, no textbooks defining terms like “spatter” and “blowback.” Even though practitioners in Poland had begun, in 1895, doing research by beating rabbits and studying the bloodstains the blows created, the field wouldn’t emerge in the United States for decades.

  Blood fascinated me, although I didn’t know the first thing about it. As a patrolman, I ran into the stuff almost daily. Fights. Beatings. Dead bodies. They all came with blood. Whenever I was called to a bloody scene, my instincts told me, There’s got to be something to this. How did this blood get here? What does it mean?