Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist (7 page)

People often raise a skeptical eyebrow when I swear that in all the years I bought drugs I never sampled them, but it’s true. I am a master at faking it, though. When a dealer cocks a gun against your temple and threatens to kill you unless you do a line of coke to prove you’re not a narc, you get a strong incentive to learn the art of simulated snorting.

“Hey, man,” I used to say, “I’m just in it for the money. You can’t be gettin’ rich if you’re gettin’ high all the time.”

The argument made sense to dealers, so they bought it.

Besides, that stuff was like gold down at the station: You had to account for every bit of it. When you signed out for $50 to buy weed or coke, you had better turn in $50 worth of weed or coke as evidence. Not $45. Not even $49.

I started out simple. My supervisor, Al Soule, and senior narcotics/vice officer Jerry Gilbert taught me a lot. They gave me a primer on what to say and what to steer clear of to avoid entrapment or tipping my hand (“Where’s the action?” is okay; “Can I buy some drugs from you?” is not), then they pointed me in the right direction and offered advice whenever I needed it. At first I just showed up at the bars, streets, and parks where drug trade was heavy. I would hang out for a while, make a buy here, an acquaintance there, but mostly keep a low profile. Gradually, I dug my way deeper into the scene, forging more pivotal contacts and progressing toward the power players—big-money dealers and drug lords.

Soon my hair was long and shaggy, and I had grown a scraggly beard. I looked nothing like the clean-cut young officer in uniform of a few months earlier. Stained T-shirts and grungy ripped jeans had replaced my starched shirts and crisply pleated navy blue pants. By now, my wife and I had three small children, and I looked bizarrely misplaced with them, like a drifter who had wandered inadvertently into a happy family scene. People did a double take when
they saw us at the grocery together. What’s that shady-looking guy doing with those nice folks? they wondered. I could read it in their expressions.

But disdain from strangers didn’t bother me. I loved working undercover. I became another person. I played the part, looked the part of a doper. I’ve always been gregarious and affable, and that helped me win the trust of the people I needed to convince.

Many of my undercover days in Downey were spent chasing a tall, lanky teenager named John Sutherland.
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The kid was a pain in the butt, always in trouble. Ostensibly a heroin dealer, he shot up more than he sold. I arrested him repeatedly, but he always made bail and turned up again causing problems. I kept following him, hoping to get him off the streets once and for all. As it turned out, he did that without any help from me.

I was at work one day when I overheard a call on the police radio about a dead body at a familiar address in a run-down neighborhood nearby. John Sutherland’s address. I recognized it at once and hurried over.

When I walked in, John was lying in a corner of the living room dead, with a needle sticking out of his arm. There was blood all around him.

A lieutenant I knew well was there with some wet-behind-the-ears rookie patrolman I had never met. In I came, with my long hair and scruffy beard, and pushed right past them toward the body.

“How ya doin’?” I called.

“Hey,” the rookie cried indignantly. “What do you think you’re doing? This is my crime scene. You’re not supposed to be in here.”

“He’s right, Rod,” said the lieutenant, grinning. “You’d better back off.”

Chagrined, I apologized and asked if it was okay if I hung around. The rookie grudgingly agreed.

I retreated to an out-of-the-way corner and studied the scene from there. Why was John so bloody? Dark stains had soaked into the carpet and spotted the shabby furniture all around his body.

I had seen enough drug use by that point to draw some preliminary conclusions about the crime scene. It wasn’t uncommon to find a user dead with a needle jutting out of some part of his body. Addicts OD’d on hot doses—undiluted ones that they either didn’t realize were lethally strong or were too desperate to take time to cut with quinine—all the time. But I had found those bodies before. At most, I had seen a trickle of congealing blood that had run down their arms in their final minutes.

I also knew that the more habitually you shot up, the harder you had to work to find an uncollapsed vein. Smack users were prone to hit an artery now and then in their urgent quest to find an inroad for the drug, and when they did, blood could spurt anywhere. Sometimes you found long, arching lines of it streaked across a mirror over a bathroom sink, and you knew an addict had been gazing in it while searching his neck for a vein to tap. He had pierced an artery by mistake and sent his blood spurting onto the glass. At other times, you spotted a dark red blob beside the body—the telltale sign that a user had found a workable vein, then carelessly squirted his blood onto the floor in order to empty the syringe before refilling it with a liquid he considered more precious to put in his body.

But none of that explained this blood.

Still baffled, I watched them carry out John’s body. Later, I read the medical examiner’s report and it all fell into place. The ME discovered a large gash on the back of John’s head. In the first moments
after fixing, as the heroin was flooding his system and doing its irreparable damage, John tried to take a few steps, but he fell down and lacerated his head on the sharp edge of a table. He lost consciousness, but his heart continued beating for several minutes—pumping blood out of the wound in the back of his scalp and onto the floor all around him, leaving him lying in a sticky red pool. The death was ruled an accident. Odds were John didn’t feel a thing. He slipped blissfully into a coma, never realizing he was simultaneously overdosing and bleeding to death.

Why am I telling you about this particular case, about this long-dead and forgotten junkie? Because when I recall that day, I am struck by how much police work has changed.

Blood pattern analysis was in its infancy in the United States in the mid-1960s. Looking back, John could have been bumped off by a rival dealer, a reckless junkie who coveted his stash, a thief who knew where he hid his drug money—anyone. The guy had his share of enemies. Frankly, we would never have known if a clever killer had whacked him on the back of the head, shot him up with enough pure heroin to make sure he never woke up again, and vanished, taking the murder weapon with him.

Nowadays, dozens of crime photos would be taken of a scene like that. You would get every angle of the body and the blood on camera. You’d collect samples. You’d photograph the trail of droplets. You’d measure each one and study its shape. You’d do a bloodstain map. In this particular case, you would focus intense attention around the victim’s head as the source of the blood. You would conduct a microscopic examination of the table where he hit his head. You would
examine John’s clothing for touch DNA—places where someone might have grabbed, twisted, or yanked on his clothes and inadvertently stripped off some of their own DNA.

But back then, there wasn’t one cop looking for those clues. Everyone just tromped through the blood evidence at crime scenes. Blood was something to be cleaned up. There were no schools studying blood pattern analysis in this country, no textbooks defining terms like “spatter” and “blowback.” Even though practitioners in Poland had begun, in 1895, doing research by beating rabbits and studying the bloodstains the blows created, the field wouldn’t emerge in the United States for decades.

Blood fascinated me, although I didn’t know the first thing about it. As a patrolman, I ran into the stuff almost daily. Fights. Beatings. Dead bodies. They all came with blood. Whenever I was called to a bloody scene, my instincts told me, There’s got to be something to this. How did this blood get here? What does it mean?

But I had no answers. I remember shootings where I noticed blood specks on witnesses’ clothes. I had no idea that in the years to come, those patterns would prove enough to convict a suspect of murder. I would scrutinize the blood at suicide scenes and traffic accidents, but trying to interpret what it meant was like trying to read a foreign language.

Once, I responded to a call where a woman was lying in a bathtub naked, slashing her wrists. The patterns created by the blood swirling in the hot water intrigued me, but as soon as I set foot in the bathroom she started doing her best to stab me with the butcher knife she was gripping, so I had precious little chance to analyze the watery red pools and ribbons winding over the tile floor.

Another time, we responded to an anonymous call and found a dead teenage girl in a tub full of ice. She had clearly OD’d, and her drug addict friends had injected milk into her veins, then put her on
ice before fleeing the scene. (I have never yet seen that trick work, but junkie culture held fast to the belief that cow’s milk would dilute the drug and ice would slow its progress to the brain.) Blood was everywhere, most likely because they had jabbed her repeatedly before they managed to get the milk into a vessel. It was the first time I had seen blood mixed with milk. I noticed from the bright red and white swirls that it interacted differently from the way blood did with water.

Around that same time, we raided a heroin den in a heavily Mexican section of town. It was summer in Southern California, which meant the heat was relentless. It made the pavement soft under your shoes and filled the air with a hazy, vaporous shimmer.

It was an oppressive, wiltingly hot afternoon when we pulled up in front of the dilapidated house we were targeting. The users were sprawled around the porch, trying to keep cool with as little clothing and movement as possible. When they saw police cars approaching, they flew into action as if an electric shock had jolted them. We chased them over the lawn and reached the porch just as a shirtless, barefoot man with long black hair slammed the door in our faces. From behind it came panicked yells, the crash of furniture falling over, pounding feet, and someone shouting in Spanish. We heard the distant flush of a toilet, which meant somebody was trying to get rid of contraband in a hurry.

“Open the door! Police!”

We rammed our shoulders into the heavy panels, but the man on the other side of the door was throwing all his weight against it to keep it shut. Finally, we kicked it in. The rip of splintering wood filled the stifling air along with a long and agonized wail from the dark-haired man behind it. He fell backward and began rolling on the ground, his face contorted, screaming and cursing in Spanish.

I looked down and instantly realized why. He had been standing with both hands pressed against the door, one foot back to brace his
weight and the other forward to keep his balance. When the door flew inward, the bottom of it caught the top of his foot, shearing off most of the skin and two of his toenails. Blood was spurting out of the open wounds in his foot with each beat of his heart, making long, spattery red lines on the grimy floor. I paused long enough to notice the linear patterns and to register that a heartbeat was causing them. It was the first time I had ever seen an arterial spurt.

In the years that followed, when blood pattern interpretation classes began to crop up in the United States, I was always the first to enroll, despite overwhelming skepticism from my colleagues. I would become a charter member of the first American chapter of the International Association of Bloodstain Pattern Analysts, one of only twenty-five believers doggedly persevering on experiments that most law enforcement professionals ridiculed as a far-fetched waste of time but that would later prove invaluable to the field.

I amassed my knowledge of blood through years spent turning over dead bodies, looking at their wounds, and examining the blood they left behind. Blood pattern analysis is part science, part art. True, you need a solid grasp of math and physics. You have to understand disciplines like trajectory and pathology. And you must be able to apply scientific methods to your work when you conduct experiments. But you also have to put in years of fieldwork to understand it thoroughly. You can’t learn what my colleagues and I do from sitting home reading books. You have to be able to read crime scenes. And that’s a skill you get only from going to crime scenes. Lots of them.

When I walk into a blood-soaked room with a dead person sprawled in the center, it’s like opening a book and starting at the end. The crime scene is the last page. I read that. And then slowly, carefully, often painstakingly, I work my way backward through the chapters—who, what, when, where, and how—until at last I reach the first page and find out how the story began.

B
Y 1969, I WAS
spending far more time immersed in L.A.’s gritty, treacherous drug culture than I was with my family. I loved under-cover work. In fact, I wanted to work all the time. And that was easy to do in a place like Los Angeles, where barbiturates, cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens, marijuana, and hashish changed hands faster than traders swap shares on the stock exchange floor.

But my constant absence was putting a strain on my family. Finally, we decided to move to Oregon, where I hoped to strike a better balance between career and home and where my kids could grow up in a more wholesome, rural environment. I was also eager for them to get a taste of the farm life that had shaped my childhood.

I contacted the sheriff’s office in Multnomah County, which covers Portland, and they offered me a job. I left the station in Downey at five
P.M.
on a Friday afternoon, loaded my family and all our belongings into a moving van, and reported for duty at nine
A.M.
Monday, where I discovered that I had been assigned once again to narcotics. It wasn’t the most auspicious start for someone who had vowed to work less, but we soon felt at home in Oregon and the move proved to be a wise one for all of us.

We settled on five acres of rambling, hilly farmland close enough to Portland that I could travel between work and home easily, but far enough away that Gary, Cherie, and Ron could go to school in a small farm community, enjoy plenty of room to roam and play outdoors, and, in the summer, swim and water-ski at nearby Willamette River.