Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist (12 page)

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.

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.

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.

One of the first people ever to officially seek my help as a blood spatter consultant was Dr. Bob Keppel, a brilliant criminal investigator who had worked on the Ted Bundy case as a young homicide detective and to whom the infamous serial killer had confessed a number of his murders. Bob was working with distinguished prosecutor Greg Canova, recently appointed senior assistant state attorney general, to head up a newly formed unit of the Washington State Attorney General’s Office that was charged with launching independent inquiries into criminal cases at the requests of local prosecutors. The case Bob brought to me in 1981 was one of the most intriguing I had ever encountered.

Donna Howard—a former rodeo trick rider, longtime horse lover, and married mother of two—was found dead on the floor of a stable on her farm in Yakima County, Washington, in January 1975. Donna’s husband, Russell Howard, discovered her body and told police that he thought she had been kicked in the temple by one of her horses, judging from the copious amount of blood pooled around her head. The coroner agreed that Donna’s head wounds were consistent with blows from a horse’s hoof.

But Donna’s family was skeptical. Donna’s marriage to Russ Howard had long been on the rocks, and Russ, who struggled with a drinking problem and took few pains to hide his affairs with a string of local barmaids, had recently hit Donna so hard in the head during one of their many arguments that she had lost consciousness. When Russ invited his latest paramour, who went by the nickname of Pepper,* to move in and “babysit” his two daughters just weeks after their mother’s death, the family saw it as a confirmation of their worst fears.

The death was ruled an accident, but in the years that followed, Donna’s sister never stopped hounding prosecutors, begging them to reopen the case. It wasn’t until Pepper got fed up with Russ, stormed out, and showed up at the sheriff’s office with an unusual “hypothetical” question that anyone began to take Donna’s sister’s doubts seriously.

“What if,” Pepper asked, “I knew about a murder but didn’t say anything? If the killer got found out, would I be in trouble for keeping quiet?”

When pressed, she dropped some interesting—and incriminating—tidbits. Toward the end of 1974, Pepper was tired of fooling around with Russ Howard and lowered the boom. “Marry me or we’re through,” she warned. A smitten Howard eagerly agreed, then hatched a plot to murder his wife with a claw hammer to get her out of the way. He laid it all out for Pepper in hushed tones: He would coax Donna out to the barn, hammer in hand, claiming he needed to talk about some repair work with her. Then, when she wasn’t looking, he would hit her with the broad side of the hammer. The death would look like an accident, he assured Pepper. Everyone would think Donna’s skull had been crushed by a panicked horse. He even called Pepper the morning Donna died to assure her that he had gone through with the plan.

Pepper’s tale was enough to reopen the case, with Keppel and Canova helming the investigation. The problem was, nearly all the crucial physical evidence had long since been burned, buried, tossed out, or painted over. All that was left were some grainy black-and-white photographs. So Keppel and Canova had Donna’s body exhumed and sent her skull to a number of forensic pathologists—first in Washington, then at the Smithsonian Institutions, and finally to consultant Dr. Clyde Snow, one of the country’s leading forensic anthropologists. All concurred that the damage inflicted—particularly a curious little oval fracture at the temple—looked a whole lot more consistent with hammer blows than horse hooves.

It was damning evidence, but Keppel and Canova needed more to build a shatterproof case against Russ Howard. They needed someone to explain the only other remaining piece of evidence—two dark swaths smeared along the wood on the wall of the stable.

Around that same time in 1982, Keppel attended a one-day class I was teaching on blood patterns. He hovered at the back of the room, then walked up to the lectern after I had completed my presentation.

“I’ve got a case I’d like to talk to you about,” he said, and launched into the details of the Donna Howard death. Intrigued, I agreed to help, and we met a few days later, using a photographer’s loupe to scrutinize blowups of every image he could provide of the stained wall and of Donna’s body.

Our first task was to confirm that the blackish smears were in fact blood and not oil or mud or some other innocuous substance. The second would be to determine what they proved about the manner of Donna’s death.

Part one was relatively easy to prove based on written reports compiled by those who had been on the scene. Numerous sources noted that they had found two large bloodstains on the wall, though
the original autopsy report surmised that Donna had been thrown into a railroad tie and cut her head on its sharp edge. We blew up photographs of the tie itself, taken on the day Donna died. Not only was it free of blood, but it was covered with cobwebs.