Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist (10 page)

I watched dozens of people pull themselves out of poverty and despair and fight their way to happier lives, but the most inspiring was Michelle Thompson.* A longtime dealer, user, and prostitute, Michelle came from a line of drug addicts. Her dad had died of an overdose when she was a kid, and—judging from the apathy she seemed to show the two dirty, disheveled preschoolers I often saw straggling along at her heels—she was bent on continuing the family tradition.

My instinct would have been to write Michelle off as a lost cause.
She was a chronic thorn in our sides—defiant, antagonistic, and back to hustling the moment she got out of jail. But my deputies wouldn’t give up on her. They paid her regular visits, always treating her politely despite her foulmouthed belligerence toward them. At last the façade began to crack, and Michelle timidly confessed a desire to change her life. We enlisted some women from my church to revamp her wardrobe and teach her how to handle a job interview. Then we got her part-time filing work at the sheriff’s office, checking weekly to make sure her arms were free of track marks.

Life was looking up for Michelle as Christmastime drew near. She was off drugs, getting to the office on time, and—she confided in us—hoping to scrape together enough cash to buy a tricycle for her kids.

But ultimately, funds were too short. Christmas morning arrived, and glancing around the bleak apartment, seeing the crestfallen looks on her kids’ faces, was too much. Who was she kidding? None of them would ever get out of this life, she told herself bitterly. Might as well score some dope and escape it for a few hours. She grabbed her coat and told her kids she would be back soon. She was heading to the door when someone on the other side knocked. Figuring it was one of her old junkie customers, she flung it open irritably, ready to tell him to get lost. Instead, she found two deputies in uniform grinning at her.

“What do you want?” she snapped.

“Merry Christmas to you, too, Michelle,” said one, still smiling amiably. “Mind if we talk to you for a minute?”

Michelle eyed them cynically. She knew both of them well by now. They had helped her land the filing job. But she was in no mood to be civil.

“It’s not a good time,” she said brusquely. “You’ll have to come back.”

“I really think it would be in your best interest to come outside,” one persisted.

“And bring your kids,” the other added.

She sighed resignedly and motioned the kids to follow her.

When they stepped outside onto the porch, Michelle’s children gasped in delight. Hidden behind the deputies was a shiny green tri-cycle with a bow and a deputy’s star painted below the handlebars.

“Merry Christmas!” they told her as the kids rushed eagerly to the bike, running their hands over the polished metal and vying for space on the seat.

Michelle, fighting back tears, learned that one of the deputies was a diver, and while searching for a body in the river that fall, he had discovered a tricycle—rusted, forlorn, and missing a wheel—stuck in mud in a riverbed. He’d wrestled it out of the muck, hauled it home, and spent weeks repairing it, painting and polishing each piece, getting it ready for Michelle’s family, knowing how much her kids wanted a tricycle.

Michelle is now employed full-time with a utilities company and attending college. Nobody knocks on her door in the dead of night looking to score, and her kids know their mom isn’t going to wander off in search of heroin on Christmas morning.

She became such a believer in community policing that she volunteered to speak at several seminars I ran on our program.

We always had her come in as her old self—leather, tattoos, and stilettos, oozing attitude. I would introduce her, give the “backstory” on her, and ask the audience how they would handle someone like her. We were in Florida when a gruff, middle-aged sergeant slouched in the front row muttered a disparaging remark.

Michelle caught it and, thoroughly in character, spat back, “Fuck you!” loudly enough for the whole audience to hear.

The sergeant sneered, shrugged, and glanced at me.

“What a bitch,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I’d put her in jail and throw away the keys. Forget her.”

Michelle left, and we spent the next two days in breakout groups discussing community policing. On the third day, she reappeared, this time clad in work clothes, acting polite and professional. Not one person recognized her.

“I’m here to tell you about my relationship with cops,” she began. “I’ll give you an idea of how to treat people differently, how we can treat you differently, and how we can all help each other.”

As she spoke, she strolled over to a blanket that had been draped over an object on a folding table, unnoticed during the entire program.

“My story is under this blanket,” she said, and she told them about the holiday gift that changed her life. “That was me. I was at the bottom of the river. I couldn’t sink any lower,” she said. “But the police put air in my tires. They were there for me. And I surfaced.”

By the time she finished, everyone was crying. The irascible old sergeant got up, hugged her, and apologized all over himself, vowing to help implement a program like Columbia Villa’s when he got home.

But while Michelle was defying the odds to get her life back on track, some of my brightest colleagues let theirs fall into irreparable shambles. When my phone used to ring in the middle of the night, I knew that if it wasn’t a troubled teenager from the church’s youth group, it would be my old buddy Phil Weston* from the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department—the resourceful, no-nonsense cop who gave me the inspiration for the scrap tortillas that saved my cattle business. He had always had an active life outside the force and logged as many punishing hours on his farm as I did on mine, but when he retired he couldn’t move on. Police work had given him an anchor. Now he was adrift.

During Phil’s years in L.A., he and I had worked closely with
another great undercover cop named Vic Calzeretta. Vic was a former Chicago Police Department officer who joined the Clark County Sheriff’s Office in Vancouver, Washington, where he headed up narcotics investigations virtually single-handedly when he arrived. In the early 1970s, the three of us conducted a series of successful multi-state drug stings together, often with help from other departments. It was risky, high-adrenaline work—the type of adventure you remember fondly once it’s over and you know you survived. But now Phil was keeping me on the phone for hours, rehashing old cases, his voice growing more and more slurred, his thoughts more disjointed. He did the same to Vic, who had left police work to become a lawyer. Finally the two of us reluctantly checked Phil into rehab, guilt-ridden but assuring ourselves that it was for the best.

Two weeks later I got a call from Phil’s treatment center.

“Rod, ya gotta get me outta here,” Phil said. “I’m losing my mind.”

“Can’t do it, Phil,” I told him.

“Our friendship is over if you don’t.”

Foolishly, I drove back to the treatment center—a top-of-the-line retreat where celebrities often went to kick the habit—only to catch Phil mixing cough syrup and gin before noon the next day. A few years later he killed himself.

Doug Vanderson’s* story was just as tragic. Doug was the fair-haired boy of the Downey police force when I met him—smart, funny, charming, and a shoo-in to become the next chief of police. He had a happy marriage and three adorable daughters, but then he fell for another cop’s ex-wife. Rumors started flitting around the office like gnats that Doug was sneaking off to meet her every night while he was supposed to be commander in charge of the shift.

Furious, the deputy chief staged a stakeout. Sure enough, he saw Doug stroll out the woman’s front door in his uniform pants and a
T-shirt to pick up the newspaper—all while he was supposed to be on duty. When Doug got back to the station at three
A.M.
, the deputy chief told him, “I’ve got two pieces of paper. One is your resignation. The other is your termination. Choose.”

Doug refused to sign either form. He called me in Oregon, begging for help, so I testified on his behalf at a city council arbitration hearing. I told them we had worked together closely and Doug was a good cop, honest and hardworking. His brother Stan* was a heroin dealer, and I knew Doug was determined to carve out a different path.

But Doug got fired anyway. Out of loyalty and concern for his wife and daughters, I got him a job with the Beaverton Police Department in 1979. His family moved in with ours for three months and then finally bought a little farm six miles from mine. We got together often, just as we had done in Downey.

One weekend while Doug and I were barbecuing as our kids played in the yard, he told me he had landed part-time security work for a diamond dealer. Working overtime to support his wife and kids sounded like a good move to me. But several months later, I was getting ready to go elk hunting with friends early one morning when an article in the newspaper caught my eye:

“A spokesperson for the Seattle police department says that shortly before 5 p.m. yesterday a diamond dealer was approached by three men while exiting a Seattle jewelry store. They robbed him of a briefcase containing a large dollar value of diamonds and cash. The suspects, who escaped on foot, are described as three Caucasian males in their late thirties. . . .”

I read on, more and more convinced that the perpetrators were Doug, Stan, and an ex-con pal of Stan’s named Robbie,
^*
whom I had met once back in Downey. Before I left the house, I called the FBI.

As soon as I got back from my hunting trip, I confronted Doug. “I
read about that robbery,” I told him as we sat parked in his Volkswagen. “I know you’re involved.” When he opened his mouth to protest, I cut him off. “I don’t wanna know. I’m not gonna testify, but you should know I called the FBI.”

His silence told me more than a confession. When an undercover FBI agent managed to buy some of the lost diamonds from Stan a few days later, my fears were confirmed.

All three men were arrested and charged, but Doug, with his irrepressible charm, won over the jury and beat the rap. Unfortunately, during the two days he spent in jail before making bail, his cellmate slipped him a phone number for his sister. “You gotta meet Trish*,” the guy said.

For reasons I’ll never fathom, Doug did. He left his long-suffering wife and moved in with the woman, who was a con and a dealer just like her brother. After that, we all gave up on Doug.

In 1980, less than a year after what was supposed to be Doug’s new start, I got a call at three
A.M.
from Larry Stephens, a friend of mine with Oregon’s Salem Police Department. “Rod, I’ve got some bad news,” he said. “We had a shooting to night. We’ve got two people in custody, and Doug Vanderson’s the victim.”

I sat on the edge of my bed, speechless, remembering the under-cover operations Larry, Doug, and I had worked before Doug’s life came apart—before he traded his wife and daughters for a dope-dealing girlfriend. Apparently, Doug was at Trish’s house when several of her “clients” showed up with loaded guns, knowing she kept drugs and cash lying around. Doug heard them crash through the front door and slipped out the back. He started smashing windows to draw their attention and give Trish a chance to escape, but one of them followed him and opened fire to stop the racket. He shot Doug eight times with a rifle.

I broke the news to his estranged wife and daughters, drove the
eldest child to the funeral home, and gave Doug’s eulogy, sharing memories of my old friend from earlier, happier times.

Though it’s no excuse for what happened to Phil or to Doug, juggling police work with family life can admittedly be tough. Nearly everyone I knew on the force went through his or her share of personal struggles. Carolyn and I separated in 1980 and divorced five years later.

Not long after Doug Vanderson’s death, I was fortunate enough to give a lecture on blood patterns at a forensics conference. After I had finished speaking, I was putting my notes away when a beautiful woman named Penny approached me and said she had a few questions about my lecture. Penny and I married in 1986, and she has been a great support in both my life and my career. She does plenty of her own fascinating work as well. As a dental hygienist with an interest in forensic odontology, she was part of a National Disaster Medical System (NDMS) Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT) that assisted local medical examiners’ offices in identifying bodies through their dental records after the World Trade Center and Hurricane Katrina disasters. She also spent several years designing and perfecting every aspect of my lab, which took me from the drafty, cavernous barn and makeshift garage space of my early consulting days to a state-of-the-art facility where everything is user-friendly and at my fingertips, whether it’s case files, slides, high-intensity lighting equipment, or bottles of the luminescent chemicals I use to reveal hidden traces of blood spatter.

By the time I met Penny, I had been investigating murders for a number of years—since 1975, when I became a homicide detective for the
Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office. I still remember my first case vividly.

Successful forty-nine-year-old businessman James Turel, a polio survivor, was found strangled and beaten to death with his own crutches in the offices of his company, the Columbia Bookkeeping Service, on August 29, 1974. My partner, Joe Woods, and I inherited his murder investigation from renowned detective Blackie Yazzolino when he retired, and our first step was to review the crime scene photos and the original detectives’ notes. Though money was missing from the victim’s wallet and the vault was open, the scene looked too neat for a robbery. There was no sign of forced entry, and none of the desks or file cabinets had been disturbed. In fact, all signs suggested Turel had been murdered by someone he knew.

Rod Addicks, a tax accountant and partial owner of Turel’s company, drew our attention right away. First, Addicks had refused to take a polygraph test when questioned along with other firm employees after Turel’s death. Second, shortly before his death, Turel had confided in his son Stan that he had grown uneasy about Addicks because a house belonging to Addicks had burned down just sixty days after it was purchased. Addicks, he said, seemed downright glib about the fire. Turel suspected arson and told Stan he was checking into the man’s background.