Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist Read online

  But I had no answers. I remember shootings where I noticed blood specks on witnesses’ clothes. I had no idea that in the years to come, those patterns would prove enough to convict a suspect of murder. I would scrutinize the blood at suicide scenes and traffic accidents, but trying to interpret what it meant was like trying to read a foreign language.

  Once, I responded to a call where a woman was lying in a bathtub naked, slashing her wrists. The patterns created by the blood swirling in the hot water intrigued me, but as soon as I set foot in the bathroom she started doing her best to stab me with the butcher knife she was gripping, so I had precious little chance to analyze the watery red pools and ribbons winding over the tile floor.

  Another time, we responded to an anonymous call and found a dead teenage girl in a tub full of ice. She had clearly OD’d, and her drug addict friends had injected milk into her veins, then put her on ice before fleeing the scene. (I have never yet seen that trick work, but junkie culture held fast to the belief that cow’s milk would dilute the drug and ice would slow its progress to the brain.) Blood was everywhere, most likely because they had jabbed her repeatedly before they managed to get the milk into a vessel. It was the first time I had seen blood mixed with milk. I noticed from the bright red and white swirls that it interacted differently from the way blood did with water.

  Around that same time, we raided a heroin den in a heavily Mexican section of town. It was summer in Southern California, which meant the heat was relentless. It made the pavement soft under your shoes and filled the air with a hazy, vaporous shimmer.

  It was an oppressive, wiltingly hot afternoon when we pulled up in front of the dilapidated house we were targeting. The users were sprawled around the porch, trying to keep cool with as little clothing and movement as possible. When they saw police cars approaching, they flew into action as if an electric shock had jolted them. We chased them over the lawn and reached the porch just as a shirtless, barefoot man with long black hair slammed the door in our faces. From behind it came panicked yells, the crash of furniture falling over, pounding feet, and someone shouting in Spanish. We heard the distant flush of a toilet, which meant somebody was trying to get rid of contraband in a hurry.

  “Open the door! Police!”

  We rammed our shoulders into the heavy panels, but the man on the other side of the door was throwing all his weight against it to keep it shut. Finally, we kicked it in. The rip of splintering wood filled the stifling air along with a long and agonized wail from the dark-haired man behind it. He fell backward and began rolling on the ground, his face contorted, screaming and cursing in Spanish.

  I looked down and instantly realized why. He had been standing with both hands pressed against the door, one foot back to brace his weight and the other forward to keep his balance. When the door flew inward, the bottom of it caught the top of his foot, shearing off most of the skin and two of his toenails. Blood was spurting out of the open wounds in his foot with each beat of his heart, making long, spattery red lines on the grimy floor. I paused long enough to notice the linear patterns and to register that a heartbeat was causing them. It was the first time I had ever seen an arterial spurt.

  In the years that followed, when blood pattern interpretation classes began to crop up in the United States, I was always the first to enroll, despite overwhelming skepticism from my colleagues. I would become a charter member of the first American chapter of the International Association of Bloodstain Pattern Analysts, one of only twenty-five believers doggedly persevering on experiments that most law enforcement professionals ridiculed as a far-fetched waste of time but that would later prove invaluable to the field.

  I amassed my knowledge of blood through years spent turning over dead bodies, looking at their wounds, and examining the blood they left behind. Blood pattern analysis is part science, part art. True, you need a solid grasp of math and physics. You have to understand disciplines like trajectory and pathology. And you must be able to apply scientific methods to your work when you conduct experiments. But you also have to put in years of fieldwork to understand it thoroughly. You can’t learn what my colleagues and I do from sitting home reading books. You have to be able to read crime scenes. And that’s a skill you get only from going to crime scenes. Lots of them.

  When I walk into a blood-soaked room with a dead person sprawled in the center, it’s like opening a book and starting at the end. The crime scene is the last page. I read that. And then slowly, carefully, often painstakingly, I work my way backward through the chapters—who, what, when, where, and how—until at last I reach the first page and find out how the story began.

  3

  Blood, Drugs, and Murder

  in Multnomah County

  BY 1969, I WAS spending far more time immersed in L.A.’s gritty, treacherous drug culture than I was with my family. I loved under-cover work. In fact, I wanted to work all the time. And that was easy to do in a place like Los Angeles, where barbiturates, cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens, marijuana, and hashish changed hands faster than traders swap shares on the stock exchange floor.

  But my constant absence was putting a strain on my family. Finally, we decided to move to Oregon, where I hoped to strike a better balance between career and home and where my kids could grow up in a more wholesome, rural environment. I was also eager for them to get a taste of the farm life that had shaped my childhood.

  I contacted the sheriff’s office in Multnomah County, which covers Portland, and they offered me a job. I left the station in Downey at five P.M. on a Friday afternoon, loaded my family and all our belongings into a moving van, and reported for duty at nine A.M. Monday, where I discovered that I had been assigned once again to narcotics. It wasn’t the most auspicious start for someone who had vowed to work less, but we soon felt at home in Oregon and the move proved to be a wise one for all of us.

  We settled on five acres of rambling, hilly farmland close enough to Portland that I could travel between work and home easily, but far enough away that Gary, Cherie, and Ron could go to school in a small farm community, enjoy plenty of room to roam and play outdoors, and, in the summer, swim and water-ski at nearby Willamette River.

  My first home improvement project was to build a barn. Over the years it held horses, cats, dogs, and a pet sheep named Sammy who would make a break for the house every time he saw the door open and butt poor Ron in the stomach. Mainly, though, it held cattle, which I hoped would prove a lucrative enough sideline to help me cover the costs of raising three children.

  I went to a few auctions and bought a handful of skinny three-hundred-pound feeder calves, planning to fatten them up to a robust eight hundred pounds each. It was easy for me to fall back into the familiar routines of farm life still ingrained from my childhood—getting up in the wee hours to feed the cows, mucking out the stalls every night. My kids weren’t so easy to convince, though. I was adamant that the cattle were to be a family affair—everybody pitched in, everybody got their hands dirty, and, ultimately, everybody would benefit. From the time they were about nine, the three of them took turns—one week on, two weeks off—handling cow duty. That meant dragging themselves out of a warm bed, puffy-eyed and shivering, at five A.M. to don sweatshirts, knee-high boots, hats, and heavy gloves, then trudging down the hill to the barn to feed the cows, stifling yawns and resentment. The work had to get done even in the rain, sleet, and snow. Sometimes a steer would break out of the barn in the middle of the night and we’d roust the kids at three A.M. to grab flashlights, help us find the runaway, and chase him back home, slipping on the mud and ice. It was tough work for children, but it gave all three of them a sense of discipline and responsibility they’ve never lost.

  The Tortilla Solution

  By the end of our first year of farming, we had acquired six head of cattle, slaved over them during countless hours at the drafty barn . . . and made a grand total of $19. My plan was hardly shaping up to be the moneymaker I had hoped for.

  The problem was the e
xorbitant cost of feed. I racked my brain for an answer. Should I give up? Try something else? Not yet, I decided. If police work teaches you anything, it’s tenacity. Then I remembered a strategy Phil Weston,* a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff I had known back in Downey, used with his livestock: scrap tortillas. I grabbed the Yellow Pages and started calling every tortilla factory listed within driving distance.

  “I’ve got a question for you,” I began. “What do you do with broken tortillas?”

  After I had convinced them I wasn’t a prank caller, I struck a deal with Reser’s Fine Foods: They would give me all their misshapen tortillas and leftover dough from the ton they cranked out daily if my kids and I would pick it up every weekend and haul it all away. In exchange, we promised to keep the factory owners stocked with as much steak and hamburger as they wanted. It worked perfectly. We supplemented the tortillas with alfalfa for roughage, and we made sure the factory owners’ freezers never went empty. The kids used to joke that our cows mooed in Spanish from eating all those tortillas, but the cattle couldn’t have found more nutritious feed—almost pure corn—and it was restaurant quality. Sometimes I would catch my kids surreptitiously snaking a hand into the barrels and sneaking a tortilla to munch.

  As time went on, I expanded my cattle operation to seventy-five head and three hundred regular customers. My children and I spent weekends delivering meat, getting the cattle vaccinated, and scooping manure out of the barn with a front-end loader on a tractor to spread across the pastures as fertilizer. It was backbreaking work, but the proceeds helped to put them through college.

  Blood at the Barn

  Why am I telling you so much about my cattle business? Because, as farmwork often does, the operation generated a lot of blood—blood that ultimately proved invaluable to my developing career in crime scene analysis.

  When the bulls arrived, we castrated them to help them gain weight and to keep them from bothering the heifers. Then we forced them into a squeeze chute, where we cut off their horns with a tool resembling a pipe cutter. That kept them from gouging one another while they vied for space at the feeding trough. The cuts usually created an arterial spurt, and the steer would swing their heads around wildly when their horns came off. Sometimes the blood sprayed over the walls before you could manage to get medicated coagulant on the wound. At other times the steer rubbed their wounds along the sides of the chute, leaving long horizontal red smears and streaks on the walls.

  I soon discovered that the patterns bore a striking resemblance to the blood patterns I saw at crime scenes. Since cattle blood has the same properties as human blood, I started studying them more closely, noting the differences between what happened when a steer stood still, shook his head, dragged it along the wall, and so on. Castrations gave me ample opportunity to examine blood-into-blood patterns because cutting through multiple tissue layers as we did meant the steer dripped blood continuously as we worked. That taught me a lot about coagulation, too. Blood starts to get gooey and jellylike as it dries, and the plasma begins to separate, forming a yellow-tinged rim at the edges of the red part. Understanding this process—and knowing how long it takes to occur at different temperatures and in different weather conditions—gave me an effective way to estimate time of death at murder scenes.

  But that wasn’t what generated the most useful blood.

  Every month, the mobile slaughter van would arrive to kill four or five fattened steer. The man who ran the operation shot them in the head before butchering them, a sight that would have turned some folks into vegetarians on the spot. But having grown up on a farm, I had long ago grasped the link between slaughter and supper. I had conquered any squeamish urges as a little kid watching Ernest Braden, a neighboring farmer who did his own butchering back in Wall, slide a coffee cup under the slit he had cut in a steer’s throat to catch the blood—and then drink it. Besides, all that cattle blood provided ideal research material for a homicide detective.

  Before mopping up the barn, I would study the blood patterns made by the gunshots and the bodies, then I would refrigerate bottles of blood to help me re-create details from cases I was working. Conducting my own experiments using cattle blood often helped me to more effectively unravel puzzling clues in murders I was investigating than I could have done on a crime scene where other people are always tromping around trying to do their jobs, where time can be limited, and where evidence is already cold.

  Whenever I had spare time, I would gather up a notebook, a camera, a bottle of cows’ blood, and anticoagulant from the barn to further my study of blood patterns. I dribbled blood from my fingertips, from the points of knives, and from holes in plastic garbage bags dragged across the barn floor. I tried the same tests on cement, gravel, dirt, sand, grass, wood, and carpet to find out how the trails of blood differed. Then I did the experiments on ice and snow and watched what happened when it began to melt. I made notes about how the droplets got absorbed or distorted depending on how porous or soft a surface they hit.

  In those days, just over half of all the homicides in Oregon were committed with guns, so I spent a lot of time shooting into blood with .22s, .38s, shotguns, and automatic weapons, and studying the fine red mist the impact created. I found out that the more powerful the gun was, the finer the bloody mist it generated. It’s common knowledge among blood experts now, but back then it wasn’t.

  Fortunately, the barn was massive—ninety feet long, thirty feet high, and forty feet wide—large enough to convert to a horseback-riding arena (which is what the people who later bought it from us did). That meant there was plenty of room to experiment without endangering the animals. If I was doing a test that might make bullets ricochet, I stacked phone books or set up plywood around my work area as a protective backdrop. Living in the country—where deer, duck, and pheasant hunting was common—helped, too, because nobody panicked at the sound of a gunshot. I could fire all day long without raising an eyebrow.

  Gunshots were just one part of my research. I also hit puddles of blood with bats, hammers, boards, and other blunt objects at different angles, rates of speed, and degrees of force. They generate a coarser mist with larger droplets than guns do—a pattern now classified as “medium-velocity spatter.” I also scrutinized the cast-off that various weapons made on wood, metal, fabric, glass, and other surfaces. “Cast-off” is the term crime scene reconstructionists use to describe the blood that flies off a weapon as it’s wielded repeatedly.

  During the tests, I wore different types of clothes to find out how much blood soaks into certain fabrics and where it concentrates based on the type of attack—swinging a baseball bat, raising one for an overhead blow, and so on. One surprising observation I made was that during a beating, very little blood travels backward onto the attacker—the impact projects most of it forward onto walls, furnishings, and whatever else is in front of both attacker and victim. It’s vitally important for homicide detectives, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and jurors to understand this concept, but plenty of them have a hard time believing it.

  I filled page after page in notebook after notebook with my findings, documenting the visual effects with photos. Sometimes the experiments were purely theoretical; at other times they sprang from cases I was working and evidence that was puzzling me.

  Case Study: The Twenty-Nine Slashes

  Take the case of John Lee Hipsher, for example. Hipsher was a long-time transient, well-known in the homeless community that populated some of the parks in Portland. He was found dead one morning in early September 1983 at the end of a secluded hiking trail in Lewis & Clark State Park, lying next to a triangular pool of his own blood. His throat had been slashed twenty-nine times. The lower halves of his arms were covered in the blood-into-blood patterns and satellite spatter that occurs when blood drips repeatedly onto an area.

  When I interviewed the other drifters who had been in the park the night Hipsher died, one told me he and Hipsher had been hanging out on a bench when a man and a woman walked by. “Hey!�
�� Hipsher exclaimed. “There’s the dude that stole my backpack. I’m gonna go get my stuff back.” Hipsher then lumbered off in pursuit of the pair, according to his pal, and that was the last he had seen of any of them.

  A few yards down from the spot where Hipsher’s body was discovered lay a campsite with a fire pit. I searched it and found a partially eaten pear that someone had tossed away. I overnighted it to forensic odontologist Dr. William Alexander in Eugene, Oregon, to examine before it could decompose, taking vital clues with it. Today, we could most likely have retrieved DNA from the pear. But in the early 1980s, forensic technology was much more limited. Still, Dr. Alexander managed to extract some intriguing information from the fruit.

  “Whoever ate this pear was missing a front tooth,” he concluded. “The person was probably also wearing a Pendleton shirt, judging from the multicolored threads in the flesh of the pear.”

  Unfortunately, extensive searching turned up nobody fitting the suspect’s description. It would be almost two years before we caught a break in the case—when narcotics agents in our office arrested a woman named Patricia Marcus* for drug possession.

  “What if I tell you about a murder you never solved?” she offered, hoping to barter for reduced charges. “I know who did it. I saw it.”

  As soon as she started talking, I realized she was describing the Hipsher case—and she knew enough details to convince me that she was telling the truth. Marcus claimed she was partying in the park with her ex-boyfriend, Richard Salmon, when a bum approached them. Neither she nor Salmon knew the guy, but a heated argument soon erupted. According to Marcus, Salmon beat up the drifter, then dragged him off into the woods and cut his throat. They were all wasted at the time, she explained, but Salmon was violent even when sober, and she had been too scared of him to come forward until now.