Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist (14 page)

We dug a little further and uncovered a bullet hole in the engine panel under the dashboard, where the windshield wipers are anchored. Using a metal cutter to rip out the firewall that separates the engine from the car’s interior, we located three copper fragments and a lead core lodged deep within the engine compartment. When we pieced them back together, they formed a nine-millimeter bullet. We returned to the garage of the house where Whitesides was staying when Humbert vanished, and sure enough, we found a nine-millimeter shell casing, which ballistics experts matched to the bullet fragments in the missing man’s car. On the garage floor, we also found bloodstains that
someone had obviously tried to wipe away, and there were blood droplets consistent with the high-velocity mist created by a gunshot wound spattered over a collection of wooden drumsticks stored in the garage.

Next we sent the mutilated bullet to Dr. Raymond Grimsbo of Intermountain Forensic Laboratories Inc. in Portland, asking him to analyze the blood on it. We told him nothing about our own findings, but when he called to say he was sending back his report, he told me, “You know, this bullet is very interesting. Did you notice that it had a green thread embedded in the lead core?”

And speaking of those green threads, here is a prime example of how mistakes can hinder evidence collection when people don’t understand it thoroughly: I was standing next to Floyd County assistant district attorney Susan Orth and a local evidence collector named Hank* as he removed a section of the plastic radiator housing under the car’s hood. In the center of it was a big round drop of blood with scalloped edges that extended out to the sides, suggesting the blood had hit the plastic hard.

We all leaned in to scrutinize the chunk of plastic and spied, perched atop the blackened blood, the first of many bright green threads we would discover.

“Let’s get that out of the way,” Hank said casually, plucking away the thread with his fingers and shaking them.

Susan gasped and stared at me wide-eyed. Instantly we both fell to our knees, groping over the ground in search of the discarded thread.

“What are you doing?” asked Hank, clearly baffled. “That’s meaningless. It’s garbage.”

“It might be the key to the whole case,” I told him, fighting to keep the irritation and incredulity out of my voice.

We never retrieved the thread. We sent the bloody plastic radiator cover to Dr. William Brady, a private forensic pathologist based in
Portland, who found brain tissue and minute bits of skull in the blood as well as pieces of carbonaceous material consistent with gunpowder. Brady’s conclusion? “No one could lose brain tissue like that and live.”

This gave Stan enough to make a case for murder. But whose?

He didn’t have Humbert’s body, so how could he prove that was Humbert’s blood all over the hatchback? The blood evidence from the engine was in such minute quantities that it would have been impossible at that time to do a classical DNA test. We could conduct one on the blood from the cargo space, but that would only substantiate Whitesides’s version of events—a bloody body stowed in the car and then dumped in the river.

So Stan enlisted DNA experts to try a new technique called HLA (human leukocyte antigen) DQ alpha testing, which allowed experts to glean genetic information from very small or degraded tissue and blood samples. Since we had no samples of Humbert’s DNA and nothing reliable to cull from his house when other people had been living there for months after his disappearance, Stan ultimately got Humbert’s mother and siblings not only to donate samples of their own DNA, but to give the okay to exhume Humbert’s father’s body and extract bone marrow from a femur to compare with the blood in the car. Experts concluded that the victim whose blood was spattered all over the engine was in fact an offspring of Mr. and Mrs. Humbert and a relative of Eric’s brothers and sisters.

The green threads pointed in one direction: Humbert was hunched over his car while the hood was up, wearing his cap in the cold garage and examining the running engine, when Whitesides shot him in the back of the head, sending blood, bone and brain fragments, and minuscule bits of hat into the engine, which sucked them in as it ran.

Using what we knew now, I focused on reconstructing the actual
crime scene. I was able to calculate Humbert and his killer’s positions relative to each other and to the car when the murder occurred, and to map out the trajectory of the bullet based on the blood spatter and the bullet hole in the engine firewall.

Remember the six bloody transfer streaks under the hatch door? We concluded that they were made by Humbert’s blood-soaked watch cap as Whitesides shoved the body into the back of the car; the ribbing would have created a distinct pattern of exactly the sort in the hatchback, with regularly spaced voids between the raised “ribs” of the cap.

Simultaneously, a search of Whitesides’s truck turned up a nine-millimeter semiautomatic handgun with bloody blowback on the barrel. The amounts were too small for DNA tests to confirm it as Humbert’s, even through DQ alpha testing, though pathologists did confirm that the blood came from a higher primate. As Stan put it, “Jonathan Whitesides either went to the zoo and shot a chimp or a gorilla, or he shot a human being with that gun.”

Stan presented the findings in court, with testimony provided by Dr. Grimsbo, Dr. Brady, myself, and other forensic experts, and it took the jury just thirty-five minutes to find Jonathan Whitesides guilty of the murder of his best friend, Eric Humbert. He was sentenced to forty years in prison. He was released with ten years of supervised probation in the spring of 2008.

As word about my consulting business spread, I began to get calls from other states, from representatives of district attorneys’ offices and law firms doing defense work, and from a number of police departments. Sometimes my opinions would help to convict a murderer.
At other times they would help to free an innocent person. That’s what happened in what I always refer to as the Bug Case.

One afternoon in 2000, I got a call from an attorney in North Carolina named James Cooney. I had met Jim during a case I consulted on involving Dr. Edward Friedland, who was charged with his wife’s murder and then sued members of the Charlotte police force—unsuccessfully—for having arrested him after prosecutors dropped the charges against him. In working with Jim on that case, I developed great respect for his dedication and honesty, so when he asked me to give an opinion on the blood evidence for a new case he was handling, I readily agreed.

Twenty-five-year-old Alan Gell had been on death row for the murder of fifty-six-year-old Allen Ray Jenkins since 1998. The case had bounced through a series of inept or uninterested lawyers and languished while Gell’s execution date ticked closer. Then it landed on the desks of Cooney and a Raleigh lawyer named Mary Pollard, both of whom the state of North Carolina tasked with reexamining the facts.

As I read through the file and scrutinized the crime scene photos, I shook my head. The evidence against Jim’s client seemed convincing. Though there was no physical evidence like fingerprints or DNA tying Gell to the crime, an eyewitness—fifteen-year-old Crystal Morris, the best friend of Gell’s fifteen-year-old girlfriend, Shanna Hall—testified that she had watched Gell, a small-time drug dealer who had just been released from jail, step out from behind the bedroom door and kill Jenkins with one of the double-barreled shotguns Jenkins kept loaded in his house.

Morris and Hall were on close terms not only with the alleged killer, but with the victim, who was perhaps not the most stellar of citizens. Allen Ray Jenkins was notorious among the neighbors for loud parties, where he liked to greet guests wearing only a dish towel
pinned around his waist, and for his fondness for teenage girls, whom he frequently plied with wine coolers and drugs. When he died, he had already pleaded guilty to two counts of indecent liberties with a minor—a fourteen-year-old girl who was a frequent visitor to a mobile home he owned—and served six months in jail.

Morris, who was a regular guest at Jenkins’s house, claimed she had stopped by briefly to repair a VCR for Jenkins when she witnessed his murder, though several empty wine cooler bottles suggested her visit had been more social in nature and, during exhaustive questioning by investigators, she gave six conflicting versions of the events from the night Jenkins died. By the time Gell’s case reached Jim Cooney, both Morris and Hall had pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and were serving ten-year sentences for allegedly having helped Gell to rob and murder Jenkins.

I didn’t think I could help Jim, so I called and apologized. But a few months later, I was lecturing in France when he phoned me again, asking me to reconsider. Gell’s conviction, Jim explained, had hinged largely on when Jenkins died. And Jim had unearthed new evidence suggesting the prosecution had been mistaken about the date.

When the authorities found Jenkins on April 14, 1995, sprawled on the floor of the tidy white house that had once belonged to his mother, his corpse was bloated to four times its size, brown and mottled, with a brittle, paper-thin outer layer of skin already beginning to flake away. The body was also teeming with maggots. How long had Jenkins been lying there to decompose to such a degree?

Forensic experts, lawyers, and jurors debated the question fiercely for one reason: Alan Gell had an airtight alibi for every day after April 3. He had spent some of the days in jail for stealing a truck and the rest with a friend out of state, where he had also run afoul of police when he ducked out of a restaurant without paying the tab.

Prosecutors were adamant that Jenkins died no later than April 3—so
adamant, Jim concluded, that they either downplayed or intentionally suppressed the statements of at least seventeen people who claimed they had seen Jenkins around town as late as April 10. One even swore he had sold him a dozen herring on that date. They also overlooked a taped conversation in which Crystal Morris told her boyfriend that she needed to come up with a story to explain what had happened at Jenkins’s house. But witnesses’ memories fade, and by the time Jim stepped in to examine Gell’s case, five years had elapsed since neighbors gave their initial statements to police. Several witnesses were elderly. Three died before Jim could reinterview them. And Crystal Morris wasn’t talking.

Out of respect for Jim, I agreed to take a closer look at the evidence. I flew to Charlotte, North Carolina, to see the house where the murder took place and the creek that ran behind it, where the killer tossed the gun and where the police later retrieved it. Next, we went to the state attorney general’s office library, where I examined what was left of the evidence. I laid out each piece on a table on fresh butcher paper under high-intensity lights, photographed it from every angle, then methodically inspected every inch of it with a magnifying glass. First we looked at the gun, then the pellets, and finally, what seemed like the least significant of all, the blue-and-white-striped dish towel Jenkins was wearing as a makeshift loincloth when he was killed. The blood was so old, it looked waxy and smooth, and the deteriorating fabric beneath it was falling to shreds. But hidden in that long-dried blood was one of the linchpins of Gell’s case.

There, embedded in the aging blood stuck to the towel, were the bodies of dozens of maggots, one of which had managed to form a nearly finished cocoon before it died. I combed the towel several more times, searching for broken casings of maggots that had hatched out as flies, but there were none.

I could feel my pulse quickening: Here was some of the most
subtle yet definitive data I had ever seen in blood. Based on the wealth of existing research on the blowfly life cycle and what we knew about conditions in Jenkins’s house, scientists would almost surely be able to answer the pivotal question in the case: When did Jenkins die?

Crime scene experts had taken temperature readings when they discovered Jenkins’s body, so we already knew his house was a veritable hotbox—around ninety degrees—thanks to a gas heater in the living room. Entomologists would know how long it would take blow-flies to lay eggs on the body (almost immediately after death) and how many days it would take their larvae to hatch into maggots and start forming cocoons.

“Jim, I think if you get an entomologist to look at this, you’ll find out exactly when the murder occurred,” I told him.

Jim sought input from famed forensic anthropologist Murray Marks of the University of Tennessee’s illustrious Body Farm, which studies human decomposition under a multitude of circumstances and conditions. Marks told Jim that the fly evidence suggested Jenkins had been dead for three to five days—not the eleven days the original prosecutors claimed—before being discovered. The time frame matched up perfectly with neighbors’ memories about the last dates they had seen the victim alive. It was just the scientific evidence Jim needed to corroborate evidence from the witnesses who had seen Jenkins alive after April 3 and to make an airtight case.

Jim also asked for my help in interpreting the blood spatter that had drenched the door frame on the side facing Jenkins’s bedroom, starting at a height of around five feet and then running down all over the lower part of the wall. Based on the positions of the blood, the body, and the shotgun pellets on the floor and in the ceiling, where was the shooter standing when he or she pulled the trigger? Where was the victim standing? Jim wanted to know whether, in my professional
opinion, Morris’s account of what she had seen was possible, given the laws of physics.

It wasn’t. I studied the photos closely, then went back to the crime scene and strung lines between the blood spatter and the pellet marks to calculate trajectories and angles. There was spatter from blowback and arterial spray in the hallway. If you believed Morris’s tale, Jenkins’s blood would have had to travel backward around the corner of the door frame. Years of crime scene reconstruction left no doubt in my mind that whoever pulled the shotgun trigger that night stood in the hall just outside the bedroom door and fired through the doorway.