Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist (27 page)

Spiro owed thousands of dollars to relatives, friends, and other creditors and millions to a bank that had loaned money to his wife for home repairs several years earlier. The spring before his death, he had taken out a $1.5 million life insurance policy on himself.

Friends from the children’s schools said the once tidy Brit had become unkempt and distracted in recent weeks. Always a doting dad who showed up for every class activity, Spiro had lately grown irritable and brusque with his kids.

Next, a local jeweler came forward to say that he had sold cyanide to Spiro, ostensibly for gold processing, two weeks before his death. Spiro’s attorney, James Street, added that he had loaned his client a .357 Smith & Wesson revolver because Spiro said he was getting threatening phone calls at all hours and feared for his family’s safety. Were the callers mysterious figures from the world of espionage or irate creditors? It was hard to say.

Though investigators were granted access to Spiro’s CIA files and confirmed that he had in fact done work for the agency a decade earlier, mounting evidence pointed to a tragic decision made by a man crushed under a mountain of financial pressure.

Then the month after Spiro’s body was found, a group of hikers in Anza-Borrego stumbled upon two battered green-and-gold-striped suitcases and a black briefcase, all filled with Spiro family documents, three miles from the spot where Ian Spiro’s body was found. Among the reams of papers was a cassette tape with a recording of Spiro rambling somewhat incoherently and referring to himself in the third person. “The house of cards,” he said, was “falling down.” The investors he had bilked in his failed businesses wanted his head. Gail was going to leave him. The tape seemed to bear out the notion that Spiro had contrived a deadly escape hatch from the debt threatening to engulf his family.

Relatives didn’t buy it. Ian Spiro was a devoted husband and father, they said, a gentle man who would never hurt anyone.

Police weren’t so sure. In their interview with Rojas, the maid had mentioned a red robe twice. That piqued their interest. They searched the house and found the garment. But when they examined it, they found no trace of blood spatter. After the FBI stepped in to investigate the Spiro murders, they, too, scrutinized the robe and found no blood on it—not even on the white cuffs.

So investigations stalled. The DA’s office couldn’t get involved because no arrests had been made. Still, pressure to solve the case remained intense. An entire family, a family living in a haven of privilege where violent crime was virtually nonexistent, had been executed. The public wanted closure.

Three years went by before my old pal Tim Carroll—a retired San Diego detective with whom I had worked undercover narcotics operations years earlier—agreed to reexamine the Spiro case as a favor
to the local sheriff. Tim called me in 1995 and asked whether I would be willing to take a look at the robe and some other clothes from the Spiro murders as well as the crime scene photos. He also wanted my help finding an unbiased, independent forensics lab to examine the physical evidence.

Tim hand-carried the items to me in Portland. First we took the robe to Dr. Raymond Grimsbo, whom I’d worked with on the Green Thread Mystery. We all examined it under high-intensity lights and a microscope but found nothing.

Then we sprayed it with Luminol and, to our amazement, blood popped up everywhere.

Bathed in the luminescent chemical compound, the robe revealed the high-velocity impact spatter typical of blowback from gunshot wounds all over the right sleeve. It dissipated in the direction of the shoulder. Blood also dotted the front of the robe, and a smaller amount speckled the left sleeve. Spatter was visible even on the white cuffs, though the flecks were too minute to see with a microscope.

Was Spiro right-handed? Yes.

Would the pattern revealed be consistent with contact wounds, meaning the killer held the gun close enough to literally touch his victims when he fired? Yes.

Was there enough spatter to have come from multiple victims? Yes, again.

Confirmatory lab tests bore out our suspicions that the substance embedded in the fibers of the terry-cloth robe was indeed blood. Now we needed to find out whether it belonged to the Spiro victims. Fortunately, samples of their blood had been saved from the postmortems. Dr. Grimsbo conducted DNA tests on the sections of the robe that reacted with the Luminol; experts at a crime lab in San Diego County followed with similar tests.

Both labs concluded that the blood on Ian Spiro’s robe came from
his wife and three children. The blood on the left sleeve belonged to Spiro’s youngest child, Dina, who appeared to have been the only family member to wake up and resist. We already knew this from the crime scene photos. Hers was the only bedroom wall spattered with blood. Hers were the only covers turned back. It appeared that Spiro had started with his wife, then moved systematically to his older daughter and then his son, holding the gun against their heads and firing. Dina heard the noises and came out to see what was causing them. Her father forced her back to her room and held her down on her bed with his left hand while he placed the gun barrel against her forehead and fired with his right, resulting in a concentration of her blood on his right sleeve and a smaller amount on his left.

The solution to a mystery that had captured the imagination of several continents was there all along. It had been sitting on the shelf of an evidence room year after year without anybody noticing.

Tim Carroll filed a report on the homicide-suicide evidence, and police called a press conference to announce the long-awaited answer to the Spiro whodunit in the presence of the family’s surviving relatives.

Though the murder weapon was never found, there was strong evidence to suggest that Spiro used the gun his attorney, James Street, loaned him. Gail Spiro’s head bore bruise marks with the imprint of a gun barrel with an unusual sight line—a sight line that matched just one particular heavy, thick-barreled model of Smith & Wesson .357—the model Street loaned to Spiro a few weeks before the murders occurred.

There are conspiracy theorists out there who still argue that Ian Spiro was no midlevel conduit with connections in the Lebanese business world, but a full-fledged ace of spies who became inconvenient and got taken out with his family as collateral damage. But blood evidence doesn’t lie. Much as crime buffs would prefer a cold
war thriller, the blood-spattered red bathrobe told a sadder, less sensational story.

If the killing of Nan Toder was unsettling for its ice-veined premeditation and random choice of victims, the murder of Betty Lee was equally horrifying for its vicious, spur-of-the-moment fury and targeting of a specific woman because of her race and her vulnerability.

Lee was a thirty-six-year-old single Navajo mother of five living in Shiprock, New Mexico. She had grown up in the town, part of the Navajo reservation, and most of her family still lived there. Lee was taking business courses at a local Navajo tribe–run college, hoping they would help her land a better-paying job to support herself and her kids.

On the evening of June 8, 2000, she joined two female acquaintances making the thirty-mile drive into Farmington for a few drinks. The evening began well, but as the night wore on, her friends started flirting with a pair of Navajo men, and Lee felt like a fifth wheel. The five left a bar together, but the others made it clear they wanted Lee out of the picture and had no intention of driving all the way to Shiprock to drop her off.

It was after two
A.M.
when, to Betty Lee’s dismay, her friends left her at a group of pay phones outside a convenience store and drove away. She was crying openly when a burly stranger approached her and asked what was wrong. Sobbing, she explained that she was stranded in Farmington and was trying to reach someone she knew to give her a lift.

“Well, I hate to see a woman cry,” he said kindly. He offered to drive her to a small town halfway to Shiprock.

Another man walked out of the store clutching a pack of cigarettes and joined them. Lee realized he was a friend of the man offering her a ride. The apparent Good Samaritan was twenty-seven-year-old Robert “Bobby” Fry. His pal was twenty-four-year-old Leslie “Les” Engh.

Betty Lee was reluctant to accept a ride from two strange men, but what else could she do? No one was answering the phone, and she was thirty miles from home across barren desert countryside.

The three piled into Fry’s Ford Aspire and Fry headed north, while Lee told Engh how her friends had abandoned her. They had driven only a few miles out of town onto County Road 6480 when Fry veered unexpectedly into an unpaved turnoff and stopped the car in a deserted stretch that locals called Twin Peaks. Already apprehensive, Lee jumped out and started to hurry away.

“Where are you going?” Fry called. “I just have to pee.”

She ignored him, so he leapt back into the car and pulled up alongside her. Somehow he managed to calm her down, convince her he was genuinely sorry for scaring her, and coax her back into the passenger seat.

At first he seemed to be heading back toward the highway, but then suddenly he cut the car’s ignition a second time. He leapt out, darted around to Lee’s side, and yanked open her door. Then he grabbed a fistful of her hair and started to drag her out of the passenger’s seat.

“Grab her legs!” he told Engh, who obliged as Fry yanked off the struggling woman’s shirt and bra. Enraged at her resistance, Fry pulled out an eight-inch bowie knife he had been carrying and plunged the blade into Lee’s bare chest as Engh was pulling off her pants. The knife penetrated the breastbone and nearly pierced her heart. Remarkably, she wrenched herself away from her attackers, pulled out the blade, and flung it toward a nearby ravine. Then she ran toward the highway, bleeding profusely, her sandals flopping in the sand.

“Find the knife!” Fry yelled to Engh. Then he reached into the
backseat, pulled out a ten-pound sledgehammer, and headed after Lee. He caught up with her easily, stuck out his foot, and tripped her.

Engh would later tell police that he was still searching in vain for the bloody knife with a flashlight when he heard Lee scream. He looked up and saw Fry swinging the sledgehammer over his head repeatedly until the screaming stopped.

Fry returned, panting but visibly exhilarated. He ordered Engh to help him drag Lee, now motionless and bloody, more than a hundred feet to a clump of sagebrush, where they hid her body. Then they kicked her clothing into a shallow ditch nearby where no one driving along the road would spot it.

Eager to flee the scene, Fry gunned the engine, but the Aspire got stuck in the sand only a mile from the murder scene. Despite the fact that it was four in the morning, he pulled out his cell phone and called his parents, with whom he still lived, demanding they come get him.

Gloria and James Fry staggered out of bed, climbed into their red pickup truck, and hurried off to help their son. They dropped Engh at his own house and stopped by theirs so Robert could change his clothes. Then Robert and James headed back to the desert in the pickup, with Gloria following in a second car. By the time she caught up with them, both the Aspire and the pickup were hopelessly mired in the loose sand.

The Frys called a towing service, but as the truck driver spun his wheels in the dried riverbed, his truck became as immovable as the other two vehicles. Humiliated, he called a second tow truck provider—Bloomfield Towing—and driver Charley Bergin headed to the scene with a bigger rig. Bergin got all three vehicles out of the sand but got so irritated with his cell phone’s lousy reception that he hurled it out the window before heading back into town.

A few hours passed before a public service worker checking power lines on 6480 spotted a wide swath of fresh blood on the rutted dirt roadway. Thinking someone had hit an animal, he followed the trail
with his eyes. With a jolt of fear, he saw what looked like a woman’s bare foot jutting out of a bush. He called 911 and waited.

Members of the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office, including Detectives Bob Melton and Tyler Truby, followed the trail of blood and found the nude body of Betty Lee. Blood covered her chest, and her skull had been pummeled so hard with blows from a blunt object that portions of her brain were visible. A search soon turned up both murder weapons—a bloody bowie knife and a sledgehammer.

A bloody swath cut through the sand next to several sets of men’s footprints, showing that Lee had been dragged to her current position by two assailants. Tracing the drag marks from their termination back to their point of origin, they found more marks in the sand. Footprints suggested that a car had stopped, a woman had walked a short distance, and the same car had pulled up alongside her. Police widened their search of the ground and found a confusion of tire marks from multiple vehicles crisscrossing one another less than a mile away.

While they were still searching the area, Melton and Truby were surprised to see that a probation officer named Gloria Fry had pulled up and was talking with the sheriff. Meanwhile Deputy Matt Wilcox, one of several officers examining the tire tracks, spotted a cell phone lying on the ground. A quick check led back to Charley Bergin at Bloomfield Towing.

Chagrined, Bergin explained to the police that he had flung his phone away while helping to pull James Fry’s pickup, his son Robert’s sedan, and another tow truck out of the sand in the early morning hours.

Detectives Melton and Truby, who had been following up a series of frustrating false leads, headed to the Fry house as soon as they heard Bergin’s story. The Frys, though visibly apprehensive to find detectives converging on their home, agreed to let them search the
premises without a warrant. The officers rummaged through piles of dirty laundry covering the floor of Robert’s room and found a black T-shirt with a skull-like white face and the logo of the horror punk band the Misfits. The shirt had what appeared to be bloodstains on the front and the back of the right shoulder. They also found a pair of boots with suspicious stains.