Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist Read online

  At other times, I wasn’t so lucky. We never solved the murder of elderly Eunice Karr. In 1984, she was found dead, bound and strangled, in her tiny cottage home in a neighborhood known as Parkrose. Her body had been posed on the bed with various objects placed around it, including a paper cross positioned upside down in one of her hands. We suspected the killer or killers were after the numerous antiques that filled her home but were trying to throw us off the trail by staging a bizarre murder scene.

  In the months that followed Karr’s death, whoever masterminded it started sending notes to us through the personals ads in the local papers with messages like “You’re on the wrong track” and “I don’t want to work with Detective Pritchard.”

  We answered them: “Pritchard no longer involved. You are crafty and clever, but time is on our side. Signed, Peterson and Englert.”

  Karr’s niece called me every year on the anniversary of her aunt’s death until I retired from the sheriff’s office. I always had to tell her the same thing: “I’m sorry, but I haven’t found your aunt’s killer yet.” Advancing technology is at last bringing new hope to unsolved cases like Eunice Karr’s. The cords, the paper cross, even the victim’s clothing might well be covered in minute traces of her killer’s DNA. But when Eunice Karr was murdered, we lacked the science to analyze the evidence we found. Now, as part of Multnomah County sheriff Robert Skipper’s special cold case team, we are reexamining unsolved crimes like the murder of Eunice Karr. We can enlist area labs to comb preserved evidence for fragments of DNA and cross-check any samples they extract for matches with criminal profiles in state and national databases.

  Case Study: The Pizza Boy’s Missing Body

  Some of the most compelling cases I ran across while working homicide were those where the body was missing and the only evidence we had to go on was blood. A perfect example was the case of a young man named Daniel W. Pierce in Troutdale. When Pierce failed to show up for his shift at a local Pizza Hut in March 1986, one of his coworkers called his girlfriend. Puzzled, she headed to his apartment, where she found no sign of Pierce, but was alarmed to discover what she thought might be blood in his bedroom. She called the sheriff’s office, so my partner, Joe Woods, and I went to the apartment to investigate.

  When we searched Pierce’s bedroom, the first thing we noticed were wrinkled, uneven bedcovers. The bed had obviously been hastily made. On a hunch, we pulled them back. Underneath the top layers was a large, telltale dark stain. Somebody had bled all over the mattress. I crouched down and took a closer look at the wall. There were a number of brownish red spots up and down it. Smeared sections suggested someone had tried hurriedly to wipe them away.

  We collected blood samples, took photographs, and admitted some of the missing man’s belongings into evidence.

  We also interviewed Daniel Pierce’s roommate, a twentysomething by the name of Dan Brown, who claimed he knew nothing of Pierce’s whereabouts.

  “He probably crashed with some friends,” Brown said casually. “He’ll turn up.” His attitude seemed a little too blasé to be genuine.

  Actually, there wasn’t much of anything genuine about Brown, as it turned out. First, we ran a DMV check on the car he was driving and found out that it was a stolen vehicle from Seattle. Next, we learned he was using an alias. His real name was Socrates E. Ladner.

  We booked Ladner on suspicion of murder and took him down to process him. We searched the apartment thoroughly but found no weapons. Nor did anything suspicious turn up among Ladner’s belongings, though we impounded the stolen car he had been driving and towed it to the police lot.

  One of the lab technicians concluded that the droplets we had found in Pierce’s room were the result of a gunshot to the head. But applying what I had learned from my own experiments and studying blood pattern analysis, I disagreed. The spatter didn’t look fine enough to be high-velocity mist. To me, this looked more like the medium-velocity spatter that comes from a beating.

  The guys in the crime lab smirked at my theory. “You’re way off,” they said. “That analysis stuff’s nonsense.” These were, incidentally, some of the same experts who were scoffing at the relevance of the rapidly emerging field of DNA analysis to forensics. Eventually, we removed a section of the bedroom’s blood-spattered east wall to present in court as evidence.

  Under questioning at the sheriff’s office, Ladner continued to insist that he knew nothing about his roommate’s disappearance. He had been hanging out with friends, he said, and come home to find Pierce gone. He hadn’t thought much of it—even when the guy failed to turn up the next night—because they led very separate lives.

  With no other leads and no evidence to hold Ladner, we were coming to an impasse when we suddenly remembered the impounded car. We hurried out to the lot behind the station, popped open the trunk, and saw an ominous-looking black plastic bag with something lumpy inside. The foul odor emanating from it left little doubt about the contents. Joe and I looked at each other. Neither of us was clamoring to open it.

  He shrugged. “You’re closest,” he said. “You do the honors.”

  I grasped the edges gingerly and pulled them back so we could peer inside.

  “Holy cow!”

  I shook my head and looked in the bag again, pulling its edges farther back to let more light fall on the gory contents. I knew I was staring at the severed hands and head of Daniel Pierce, but the face looked just like that of my oldest son, Gary. I closed my eyes, shook my head, and looked again, working hard to steady my breathing and waiting for the features of the decapitation victim to swim into focus. Finally, I managed to convince myself that I was staring into the lifeless face of Daniel Pierce and not my own son.

  We went back inside and confronted Ladner about the gruesome discovery we had just made.

  “Want to tell us about what’s in the trunk of your car?”

  At last, he confessed. Yes, he said, he had killed his roommate. He was having money troubles, and Pierce was hoarding enough cash to cover all his debts. Unfortunately, the guy didn’t want to part with it.

  Ladner went on to explain that he snuck into Pierce’s room and beat him to death while he was sleeping, proving my theory about the medium-velocity spatter. Next he decapitated his victim and removed his hands, which explained the large amount of blood soaked into the mattress. Finally, he told us we would find the rest of Pierce’s body if we searched a secluded spot on Mount Hood, a favorite local dumping ground for murder victims. He even mapped out where we needed to dig. We followed his directions and soon unearthed the headless body of the missing teenager.

  As this and other cases taught me, blood at a crime scene presents an invaluable window into what happened—and what didn’t. Even now when I walk into a scene, I focus immediately on the blood. What does it suggest about the victim? What does it say about the killer? About the manner of death? About the motive?

  Like footprints, bloodshed leads in a certain direction—toward specific conclusions and away from others. And like fingerprints, it illuminates who did what. It can explain how the attacker struck, reveal what the victim did in his final moments of life, and detail the actions the killer took after the murder. Often the clues to be found in blood yield more vital information than those found on the body itself. Whenever I walk into a crime scene, I glance repeatedly at the blood while I examine other elements of the scene to gauge how each relates to the spatter or pooling patterns I’m seeing. Eventually, the blood almost always reveals its secrets.

  4

  Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist

  IN THE EARLY 1970S, the field of blood pattern analysis was still developing—and still widely derided—but conferences cropped up here and there. Whenever I heard about them, I signed up. I paid my own way and went on my own time, since most of the men in my department would have scoffed at the subject matter. I disagreed. But I did find myself getting frustrated as I sat in a lecture hall at the Southern Police Institute in Louisville, Kentuc
ky, in 1976, ostensibly expanding my knowledge of how to interpret bloodshed at crime scenes.

  For the past twenty minutes, I had been filling my notebook with more unanswered questions than useful information. In the margins I had scrawled a slew of “What about . . .” queries and “Remember to double-check . . .” notes reminding myself to examine photos from my files, refer to my old case notes, and conduct further experiments to find out exactly how the information from this lecture might apply to a real crime scene. I glanced around surreptitiously at some of the cops filling the seats nearby to see whether their faces registered any of the dissatisfaction I felt. Some seemed to be listening intently, but others were gazing off into space or carrying on their own conversations.

  What was going on here? At last, I realized what the problem was: The professor lecturing had never actually been on a crime scene. He had never stood over a corpse lying in a puddle of congealing blood, trying to figure out what the plasma collecting at the edges revealed about the time of death. He had never scrutinized blood matted with hair, bone, and tissue fragments on a wall, trying to discern what it told about the murder weapon used. Sure, the speaker knew the science of blood. But his lecture was frustratingly far removed from the gritty, real-world contexts in which cops see it. What I really needed—what we all needed—was someone who could combine an academic’s knowledge with a veteran detective’s field experience.

  Yes, blood droplets leave a different shape when they hit carpet than when they hit linoleum. True, they make a teardrop with a pointed tail when they land at an angle. But how does that information help a homicide detective catch a killer? We needed someone who could teach us to read the types of blood patterns you find at murder scenes and how to use that information to solve a crime. We needed someone to show us examples of real blood spatter from real homicides and tell us what they revealed about the weapons used, the motive for the murder, the relationship between the killer and the victim, and so on—and to explain the role those clues played in catching offenders.

  After the lecture, I edged my way through the crowd of about 160 attendees to find Raymond Dahl, the ex–chief of police who had organized the conference. He was a gruff, intimidating bear of a man—not the kind of guy anyone strolls up to easily to spout out suggestions that might be misconstrued as criticisms.

  “Listen, I’ve been thinking . . .,” I started tentatively. Then I launched headlong into an unrehearsed explanation of the lecture I wanted to hear at the next conference.

  “Why don’t you do it?” he asked.

  “What? No . . .,” I stammered. “That’s not what I was suggesting—”

  “Why not?” he said, cutting me off. “You’ve got field experience. You’ve been to hundreds of crime scenes. You do crime scene reconstruction, don’t you? You could give a talk like that.”

  A few minutes later, I had gotten myself drafted into giving the seminar I wanted to attend. Dahl thought it was a brilliant idea, and he wasn’t taking no for an answer. My name was officially added to the roster for the next conference he was organizing.

  By the time my plane landed back in Portland, I was regretting ever having approached Dahl. Why had I shot my mouth off like that? I had promised to stand up in front of dozens of my peers—guys who probably knew just as much as or more than I did—and tell them how to do their jobs better.

  At the Podium

  Determined not to make a fool of myself, I pored over the notebooks from old cases that filled box after box in my house, culling every point I found related to blood evidence. I combed bookstores and libraries and read every book I could find from medical texts—though there were precious few textbooks on the topic—to true crime paperbacks that mentioned blood patterns.

  Months later, dressed for my first homicide investigation lecture, I surveyed myself doubtfully in the mirror. I adjusted my shirt cuffs and tugged nervously at my navy blue suit and vest to smooth out any wrinkles. Maybe this would be like a football game, where the butterflies disappear as soon as you get hit. Maybe my anxiety would vanish when I stepped onstage. I reminded myself of the advice L. D. Morgan, the deputy chief back in Downey, gave me before my first PTA narcotics talk years earlier: “You know more about your subject than they do.” Then I forced my feet numbly toward the lectern at the front of a room packed with cops from around the country. I braced myself to hear snores, snickers, or scoffing, unsure which would make me feel worst.

  My cousin Ralph, by then detective lieutenant of the San Angelo Police Department; my brother, Mickey, a homicide detective in San Angelo; my friend Fred Dietz, another San Angelo homicide detective, whom we knew and liked so well that he was an honorary member of our family; and some of their fellow officers had enrolled and filled the front rows to give me moral support. They grinned encouragement as I fumbled through the notes and slides I had prepared so painstakingly, doing my best to put all the scientific facts I had culled into the context of actual crime scenes I had handled. I tried to be candid and specific about how blood clues had led and misled me, how they revealed when a body had been moved or manipulated to mislead the police, and when an accomplice or a witness had been on the scene and lied about his actions. I told them about the times blood had helped me catch murderers and the times it might have done so if only I had known how to read it more accurately.

  Finally, I stepped gratefully away from the microphone. I gathered up my notes hurriedly, eager to clear out before the criticism started. When I looked up, I was surprised to see Dahl give a thumbs-up from the back of the room. People were forming a line to talk with me.

  “I’ve got this case I’ve been working on. I wonder if I could get your opinion on it. . . .”

  “Would you be willing to take a look at some photos from one of our crime scenes?”

  So it went with cop after cop.

  “I’m not sure I’ll be able to help,” I kept telling them.

  “Just take a look. See what you think,” they said.

  Any good cop knows that when you get more minds working on a case, you tend to get more effective results. You bring different perspectives to the puzzle and you increase the accumulated experience exponentially, particularly when you put veteran detectives in the mix. My talk convinced a number of my peers that my particular knowledge might help shed light on the cases where blood evidence was stumping them. So began the most fascinating stage of my career and what has grown into my life’s work.

  My supervisors in Multnomah County gave me the go-ahead, and soon I found myself lecturing a few times a year as well as consulting informally on weekends, handling what amounted to about four or five cases annually. The sheriff viewed my emerging sideline as good publicity for the work we were doing in the county. As far as he was concerned, it proved how strong our expertise was and how far our reputation reached. We were a midsize department, but we were well recognized for thorough, effective police work. Our achievements stemmed in part from the fact that we were among the first police departments in the United States to require all our officers to hold a bachelor’s degree—a strict policy in the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office ever since 1966.

  Unfortunately, some of my colleagues were less encouraging, and my sideline inspired a certain amount of jealousy. I got used to sniping, snide comments, and speculations about how much I was gone despite the fact that whenever I lectured, I did it on my days off or used vacation time to cover the absences, often taking my family along and making the speaking engagement double as a family vacation. They used to joke, “Boys, we’ve got an Englert sighting!” whenever I walked into the office.

  One particular colleague made so many disparaging remarks that I finally confronted him. “I hear what you’re saying,” I told him. “But let me ask you a question: Would you seize an opportunity like this if it was offered to you?”

  He thought for a moment. Then he shrugged. “Yeah,” he answered. “I would.” If he kept criticizing me after that, at least he did it behind my back.
r />   I formed Englert Forensic Consulting in the mid-1980s, though it would be years before I could actually retire from the sheriff’s office and devote myself full-time to blood pattern analysis and crime scene reconstruction.

  From the start, I made it clear that I didn’t have all the answers. I was not—and am not—the definitive authority on blood spatter. There is no definitive authority. I stress that point to every client. Even after handling thousands of homicide investigations, I’m still learning. I still run across unfamiliar patterns and mysteries that baffle me. The pattern on the cover of this book is an example.

  I knew that if I was going to offer official opinions on cases that had bewildered experienced homicide detectives, I would have to know more than I had learned in my own years on the job plus six months of compulsive research. So I intensified my background reading and my experiments. And I solicited input on my cases from seasoned cops and forensic experts whose opinions I respected. When I lectured, I took along crime scene photos from cases I was working on and, with my clients’ permission, tacked them up on the walls, inviting attendees to scrutinize them during breaks. I still do this. I usually combine images from cases I’ve solved with photos from open homicides. The first group gives attendees a chance to test their skills by analyzing the pictures and drawing conclusions, then finding out if they were right or wrong. The second gives me a wealth of useful insights and tends to spark enlightening discussion. You never know when you’ll stumble across someone who managed to crack a case just like the one that’s currently puzzling the hell out of you and who can tell you exactly what unorthodox weapon inflicted a series of peculiar wounds or generated a bizarre blood pattern.