Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist (3 page)

Still, I managed to find time to get bored and cause trouble as a teenager. Our whole community was German-Catholic, which meant beer drinking was part of everyday life for us. Even my grandparents drank it. Nobody looked askance at a seventeen-year-old with a glass of beer. But getting caught sneaking cigarettes—which I did—got you a tongue-lashing and worse.

One dry and dusty summer day after my junior year, I hit upon a memorable way to liven things up in town for my friends and me. I convinced them it would be a bright idea to toss a cherry bomb into a little bar at the edge of town, a place notorious as a watering hole for the local drunks. I rounded up some friends—three girls and two guys—to pile into my pal Nelson Word’s 1952 Mercury. The plan
was for Nelson to pull up near the bar’s front entrance and keep the Mercury running while I hopped out, yanked open the door, and chucked the firecracker inside.

The bar was housed in a narrow building about ten feet wide—long and low and dark—and when the cherry bomb exploded, it let off an eardrum-shattering
bang!
It literally shook the rafters.

As the sounds of panicked shouts and screams rose from inside the bar, we doubled over laughing uproariously—failing to notice that the bar’s owner was standing nearby openmouthed, staring at us and still clutching the bulging trash bags he’d been emptying into bins in the parking lot. Nelson, our getaway driver, hit the gas and off we sped as the enraged owner raced to his pickup truck.

No sooner had we rounded the corner on our getaway than the engine gave a raspy mechanical cough and died. Nelson was trying desperately to restart it when the pickup roared past us and screeched to a halt inches from our fender, penning us in. The owner of the bar jumped out, slammed his door, and stalked over. By the look on his face, he hadn’t found the cherry bomb nearly as hilarious as we had.

He marched us back to the street in front of the bar, where things were still in an uproar thanks to the cluster of staggering, slurring patrons who had stumbled out, all convinced someone had fired a gun and all hotly debating exactly what had gone down.

“I’m tellin’ ya, Mary shot John!”

“Naw, you’re way off. It was John who shot Mary!”

Ignoring them, the owner ordered us to wait while he called the cops.

The next thing we knew, we were en route to the local police station. As we pulled to a stop in front of the civic auditorium, which housed police headquarters in its basement, I thought wistfully back to the last time I’d been here. That afternoon I’d been elbowing my way to the front of a crowd of mesmerized San Angelo residents
standing on the sidewalk, gaping at a young Elvis Presley as he stepped out of a gleaming pink Cadillac. He flashed his trademark whiplash grin, then headed inside to warm up for a concert he was giving that night, leaving the air filled with lively chatter.

Today the place was a stark contrast—silent and somber. You could hear a pin drop as we marched down the steps, past the dispatcher and the drunk tank, all of us trembling silently at the thought of what our parents would do when they found out we’d been hauled in by the cops. I was calculating just how mad my dad was likely to be and how badly I’d be punished when the scene in front of me snatched those worries completely out of my head.

I was standing in the middle of one of the most fascinating places I’d ever seen. Every wall was lined with posters and pictures, many bearing faces of menacing-looking criminals glaring defiantly at the camera over descriptions of their crimes. I squinted to read the details. Rumpled drunks peered curiously out at us from between the bars of their holding cells. All around us, officers were busy at work on important-looking jobs, hunched over their desks, filing reports, jotting down notes as they listened to callers. A sign indicated that the detectives’ bureau lay just down the hall, out of sight. While my friends hung their heads and waited morosely, I stared around wide-eyed, taking everything in. So what if I was on the wrong side of it all? This place was amazing.

On the way home, as my dad reprimanded me for my stupidity, I nodded silently, only half hearing, still mesmerized by the police station.

Another incident from a different summer would also shape my future, though I didn’t know it at the time. It began with football.

We were all football crazy when I was a teenager, and knowing I would want to go out for the team in San Angelo, I set out to find a job that would help me bulk up the summer we moved. Thanks to a friend of my dad’s, I got work at the Acme Iron & Metal Company junkyard. It was an enormous, rambling place with acres and acres of smashed cars in towering stacks and mounds of scrap metal as tall as buildings. The work was hot, filthy, and backbreaking. Day after day I lugged huge chunks of greasy, broken-down chassis, rolled heavy barrels, and cleaned insulation off copper. By the time I headed home, my arms were always black and coated in flecks of broken glass.

The guy in charge of the junkyard was called Red, and the men he hired were a rough crowd. When someone didn’t show up for work, odds were pretty good that he had landed in jail. Their talk was as colorful as it was cuss-laden, and listening to their stories made me feel as if I had landed in the middle of a crew of pirates. I was the only kid working there, but they all treated me fairly and decently. One of my favorite co-workers was a big, rowdy African-American guy named George.* He was jovial, loudmouthed, foulmouthed, and tough as nails.

One day I showed up to work to find several members of the San Angelo Police Department surrounding an old beater of a pickup parked on the truck scales near the junkyard’s entrance. I walked over to Joe,* one of my co-workers, who was ripping usable parts out of a rusted sedan, acting as if he hadn’t even noticed the cluster of cops nearby.

“What happened over there?” I asked him.

Joe glanced in the direction I was pointing and wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. “George and the guy drivin’ that pickup got in a fight,” he told me. “George shot him.” He said it
so casually, you would have thought things like that happened at work every day.

“
Shot
him?” I gasped. “Is he dead?”

“I reckon he is. He got shot in the head, close up.” Joe said the authorities had carted off both George and the dead man less than an hour ago. When I had pestered him with all the questions I thought he could tolerate without losing his temper, I forced myself to get down to work. The slam of doors and the sound of an engine starting a short while later told me the police were leaving.

I tried to concentrate on the copper I was cleaning, but I couldn’t resist glancing over at that abandoned pickup every few minutes. Back in those days, nobody put yellow tape around the crime scene—at least not for a crime like this one. No lab coat–clad team of forensic technicians was prepping to comb the vehicle with an armload of fancy equipment. No gaping onlookers or nightly news crews were buzzing around. No tow truck showed up to haul it away. It just sat there like the rest of the battered, rusted cars and trucks that littered the Acme junkyard.

I kept thinking about the pickup, wondering what it looked like inside. Finally, I dropped what I was doing and went to get a closer look. I walked cautiously over and edged up close enough to see into the empty driver’s seat with its open windows. Blood, blackish red and dried by that time, was smeared all over the seat back on the driver’s side.

A strange feeling came over me as I stood there gawking at it, unable to move away. Somebody had been shot in there. Somebody had died sitting right in that spot, less than a foot away from where I was standing. I felt horrified. But at the same time, I was utterly mesmerized. Dozens of questions started bubbling up in my mind. Who was the murdered man? Where did he come from? What was his story?
Did he and George know each other? What did he say to George to provoke him? Did the argument start over the price of scrap metal? What kind of gun did George use? How close was he when he pulled the trigger? I wanted to know everything about the murder.

I thought about that blood for a long time. Even today, I get the same feeling in my bones when I’m working a challenging case. I’m still just as fascinated, just as relentlessly intent on finding out every how and why of the crime.

One spring a few years later, my father and I were back in Wall helping my uncle Alois tend his garden when Dad asked, “So, have you heard from Ralph lately?”

My uncle took a break from his digging. “He’s out of the air force now,” he told us. “He just became an officer in the San Angelo Police Department.”

Ralph, my role model, was a cop?
While my dad and my uncle discussed Ralph’s new job, scenes from my brief brush with the law rolled through my mind—posters of escaped felons, drunks in holding tanks, ringing phones, important-looking people hurrying around doing important-looking work.

Forget baseball. Forget the military. I went home that evening, my head filled with images of myself in uniform catching bad guys and keeping the streets safe for ordinary citizens. A new career goal was fast taking shape in my mind. I wanted to be a cop.

Ralph soon discovered my fascination with his job and offered me a ride-along. After that, I became a frequent passenger while he was on duty.

One summer night when I was about eigh teen, I was riding through
town with Ralph in his patrol car when a call came in that two suspects had been apprehended outside a local beer ware house. He turned the car around and we headed to the address immediately.

By the time we arrived, several other officers were already on the scene, surrounding a pair of men who were lying facedown on the ground in cuffs near a converted Quonset hut. One was shirtless and had been locked in thumbcuffs, a contraption I’d never seen before.

I felt like a spellbound kid watching an action flick. Here were two real, live bad guys—burglars who had broken into the cavernous metal dome and were obviously planning to steal the cases and kegs inside it. Their empty pickup truck was parked nearby, ready to be loaded up with beer. Fortunately, the good guys had arrived in the nick of time to nab them, just as in any cops-and-robbers drama.

Ralph was starting to ask what had happened when the rumble of tires on gravel interrupted him. We turned and spied the unmistakable Studebaker Lark of local police chief Melvin James pulling up.

The door swung open and out stepped James, clad as always in his trademark western hat and string tie.

Without waiting for his officers to fill him in on the details, he strode up to the shirtless man on the ground and looked down at him disdainfully. Then he drew back his heel and kicked the man in the face.

No one said a word.

James kicked him again. Then again. He kept kicking him until blood was pouring out of the man’s nose and mouth onto the ground around him. Finally, he wedged his boot under one bloodied shoulder and flipped the man onto his back. The suspect lay there, helpless, blinking up through the blood.

James brought his boot down onto the man’s neck, and I braced myself for the crunch of breaking bones. Instead, he spoke in a low, menacing voice.

“You will never come back to this town again.
Ever
. Understand me?”

I stood rooted to my patch of dirt, transfixed, until I felt a sudden yank on my arm.

“We’re outta here,” Ralph whispered.

He wheeled me around and marched me forcibly away from the cluster of men, with me twisting my head over my shoulder the whole time to see what would happen next. He shoved me into the passenger’s seat and slammed the door, then stalked around to the driver’s side and revved the engine.

He didn’t speak until we were several blocks away from the bloody scene. When he did, he was every bit as furious and every bit as menacing as James, but for a very different reason.

“Rod, what you just saw back there is wrong,” he told me. “That’s not how all cops act. It’s not how any cop should act. You should never treat another human being that way, no matter what he’s done or what you think he might have done.”

I never forgot what James did or what Ralph told me. I promised myself that when I became a cop, I would never do that and never let it happen on my watch. And I never did. I’ve made it a point to treat people with decency, always.

I’d been on the force in Los Angeles for a few years when I heard through the grapevine that Melvin James had finally gotten his just deserts, though there were people in San Angelo who would have argued that he deserved even worse.

One night, he took a seventeen-year-old African-American kid he had arrested behind the San Angelo Police Department, beat him senseless, then shot him three times. Remarkably, the teenager survived. James claimed it was self-defense; the kid claimed it was attempted murder. Whatever the truth, the incident made the Feds suspicious enough to investigate James. After taking a closer look at his policing
methods—which more than one source claimed included using electric cattle prods on suspects to extract confessions—the authorities charged him with assault with intent to commit murder.

Until Melvin James’s downfall, cops had to watch their backs and bite their tongues in San Angelo. Everyone knew the chief was mean and he was dirty and he had an iron grip on the careers of his officers. The man could make your future or he could destroy it.

During the trial, some of them spoke out at last. One of James’s own officers testified that he’d watched the chief pistol-whip the black kid and kick him in the head. James copped a plea deal and received a $1,000 fine, which San Angelo residents who were still devoted to their chief raised funds to cover. He also assured the city commission that he would never seek office again—a promise he promptly forgot. Just two years later, James ran as a write-in candidate for what would have been his sixth term as police chief. Fortunately, he lost.

Those early experiences were instrumental in my decision to become a cop and eventually a crime scene reconstructionist and blood pattern analyst. In the years since I left Texas, I have investigated thousands of murders, testified in almost four hundred court cases, and given nearly six hundred lectures about the telltale evidence to be found in blood smeared on walls, pooled on floors, soaked into sheets, and spattered on clothing. To me, blood is a road map—a route that leads to the truth after a murder has been committed. It reveals what really happened before investigators reached the scene and began the painstaking process of piecing a broken puzzle back together. It tells what the victim can’t and the killer won’t.