Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist (8 page)

My first home improvement project was to build a barn. Over the years it held horses, cats, dogs, and a pet sheep named Sammy who would make a break for the house every time he saw the door open and butt poor Ron in the stomach. Mainly, though, it held cattle, which I hoped would prove a lucrative enough sideline to help me cover the costs of raising three children.

I went to a few auctions and bought a handful of skinny three-hundred-pound feeder calves, planning to fatten them up to a robust eight hundred pounds each. It was easy for me to fall back into the familiar routines of farm life still ingrained from my childhood—getting up in the wee hours to feed the cows, mucking out the stalls every night. My kids weren’t so easy to convince, though. I was adamant that the cattle were to be a family affair—everybody pitched in, everybody got their hands dirty, and, ultimately, everybody would benefit. From the time they were about nine, the three of them took turns—one week on, two weeks off—handling cow duty. That meant dragging themselves out of a warm bed, puffy-eyed and shivering, at five
A.M.
to don sweatshirts, knee-high boots, hats, and heavy gloves, then trudging
down the hill to the barn to feed the cows, stifling yawns and resentment. The work had to get done even in the rain, sleet, and snow. Sometimes a steer would break out of the barn in the middle of the night and we’d roust the kids at three
A.M.
to grab flashlights, help us find the runaway, and chase him back home, slipping on the mud and ice. It was tough work for children, but it gave all three of them a sense of discipline and responsibility they’ve never lost.

By the end of our first year of farming, we had acquired six head of cattle, slaved over them during countless hours at the drafty barn . . . and made a grand total of $19. My plan was hardly shaping up to be the moneymaker I had hoped for.

The problem was the exorbitant cost of feed. I racked my brain for an answer. Should I give up? Try something else? Not yet, I decided. If police work teaches you anything, it’s tenacity. Then I remembered a strategy Phil Weston,* a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff I had known back in Downey, used with his livestock: scrap tortillas. I grabbed the Yellow Pages and started calling every tortilla factory listed within driving distance.

“I’ve got a question for you,” I began. “What do you do with broken tortillas?”

After I had convinced them I wasn’t a prank caller, I struck a deal with Reser’s Fine Foods: They would give me all their misshapen tortillas and leftover dough from the ton they cranked out daily if my kids and I would pick it up every weekend and haul it all away. In exchange, we promised to keep the factory owners stocked with as much steak and hamburger as they wanted. It worked perfectly. We supplemented the tortillas with alfalfa for roughage, and we made
sure the factory owners’ freezers never went empty. The kids used to joke that our cows mooed in Spanish from eating all those tortillas, but the cattle couldn’t have found more nutritious feed—almost pure corn—and it was restaurant quality. Sometimes I would catch my kids surreptitiously snaking a hand into the barrels and sneaking a tortilla to munch.

As time went on, I expanded my cattle operation to seventy-five head and three hundred regular customers. My children and I spent weekends delivering meat, getting the cattle vaccinated, and scooping manure out of the barn with a front-end loader on a tractor to spread across the pastures as fertilizer. It was backbreaking work, but the proceeds helped to put them through college.

Why am I telling you so much about my cattle business? Because, as farmwork often does, the operation generated a lot of blood—blood that ultimately proved invaluable to my developing career in crime scene analysis.

When the bulls arrived, we castrated them to help them gain weight and to keep them from bothering the heifers. Then we forced them into a squeeze chute, where we cut off their horns with a tool resembling a pipe cutter. That kept them from gouging one another while they vied for space at the feeding trough. The cuts usually created an arterial spurt, and the steer would swing their heads around wildly when their horns came off. Sometimes the blood sprayed over the walls before you could manage to get medicated coagulant on the wound. At other times the steer rubbed their wounds along the sides of the chute, leaving long horizontal red smears and streaks on the walls.

I soon discovered that the patterns bore a striking resemblance to the blood patterns I saw at crime scenes. Since cattle blood has the same properties as human blood, I started studying them more closely, noting the differences between what happened when a steer stood still, shook his head, dragged it along the wall, and so on. Castrations gave me ample opportunity to examine blood-into-blood patterns because cutting through multiple tissue layers as we did meant the steer dripped blood continuously as we worked. That taught me a lot about coagulation, too. Blood starts to get gooey and jellylike as it dries, and the plasma begins to separate, forming a yellow-tinged rim at the edges of the red part. Understanding this process—and knowing how long it takes to occur at different temperatures and in different weather conditions—gave me an effective way to estimate time of death at murder scenes.

But that wasn’t what generated the most useful blood.

Every month, the mobile slaughter van would arrive to kill four or five fattened steer. The man who ran the operation shot them in the head before butchering them, a sight that would have turned some folks into vegetarians on the spot. But having grown up on a farm, I had long ago grasped the link between slaughter and supper. I had conquered any squeamish urges as a little kid watching Ernest Braden, a neighboring farmer who did his own butchering back in Wall, slide a coffee cup under the slit he had cut in a steer’s throat to catch the blood—and then drink it. Besides, all that cattle blood provided ideal research material for a homicide detective.

Before mopping up the barn, I would study the blood patterns made by the gunshots and the bodies, then I would refrigerate bottles of blood to help me re-create details from cases I was working. Conducting my own experiments using cattle blood often helped me to more effectively unravel puzzling clues in murders I was investigating
than I could have done on a crime scene where other people are always tromping around trying to do their jobs, where time can be limited, and where evidence is already cold.

Whenever I had spare time, I would gather up a notebook, a camera, a bottle of cows’ blood, and anticoagulant from the barn to further my study of blood patterns. I dribbled blood from my fingertips, from the points of knives, and from holes in plastic garbage bags dragged across the barn floor. I tried the same tests on cement, gravel, dirt, sand, grass, wood, and carpet to find out how the trails of blood differed. Then I did the experiments on ice and snow and watched what happened when it began to melt. I made notes about how the droplets got absorbed or distorted depending on how porous or soft a surface they hit.

In those days, just over half of all the homicides in Oregon were committed with guns, so I spent a lot of time shooting into blood with .22s, .38s, shotguns, and automatic weapons, and studying the fine red mist the impact created. I found out that the more powerful the gun was, the finer the bloody mist it generated. It’s common knowledge among blood experts now, but back then it wasn’t.

Fortunately, the barn was massive—ninety feet long, thirty feet high, and forty feet wide—large enough to convert to a horseback-riding arena (which is what the people who later bought it from us did). That meant there was plenty of room to experiment without endangering the animals. If I was doing a test that might make bullets ricochet, I stacked phone books or set up plywood around my work area as a protective backdrop. Living in the country—where deer, duck, and pheasant hunting was common—helped, too, because nobody panicked at the sound of a gunshot. I could fire all day long without raising an eyebrow.

Gunshots were just one part of my research. I also hit puddles of blood with bats, hammers, boards, and other blunt objects at different
angles, rates of speed, and degrees of force. They generate a coarser mist with larger droplets than guns do—a pattern now classified as “medium-velocity spatter.” I also scrutinized the cast-off that various weapons made on wood, metal, fabric, glass, and other surfaces. “Cast-off” is the term crime scene reconstructionists use to describe the blood that flies off a weapon as it’s wielded repeatedly.

During the tests, I wore different types of clothes to find out how much blood soaks into certain fabrics and where it concentrates based on the type of attack—swinging a baseball bat, raising one for an overhead blow, and so on. One surprising observation I made was that during a beating, very little blood travels backward onto the attacker—the impact projects most of it forward onto walls, furnishings, and whatever else is in front of both attacker and victim. It’s vitally important for homicide detectives, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and jurors to understand this concept, but plenty of them have a hard time believing it.

I filled page after page in notebook after notebook with my findings, documenting the visual effects with photos. Sometimes the experiments were purely theoretical; at other times they sprang from cases I was working and evidence that was puzzling me.

Take the case of John Lee Hipsher, for example. Hipsher was a long-time transient, well-known in the homeless community that populated some of the parks in Portland. He was found dead one morning in early September 1983 at the end of a secluded hiking trail in Lewis & Clark State Park, lying next to a triangular pool of his own blood. His throat had been slashed twenty-nine times. The lower halves of his arms were covered in the blood-into-blood patterns and satellite spatter that occurs when blood drips repeatedly onto an area.

When I interviewed the other drifters who had been in the park the night Hipsher died, one told me he and Hipsher had been hanging out on a bench when a man and a woman walked by. “Hey!” Hipsher exclaimed. “There’s the dude that stole my backpack. I’m gonna go get my stuff back.” Hipsher then lumbered off in pursuit of the pair, according to his pal, and that was the last he had seen of any of them.

A few yards down from the spot where Hipsher’s body was discovered lay a campsite with a fire pit. I searched it and found a partially eaten pear that someone had tossed away. I overnighted it to forensic odontologist Dr. William Alexander in Eugene, Oregon, to examine before it could decompose, taking vital clues with it. Today, we could most likely have retrieved DNA from the pear. But in the early 1980s, forensic technology was much more limited. Still, Dr. Alexander managed to extract some intriguing information from the fruit.

“Whoever ate this pear was missing a front tooth,” he concluded. “The person was probably also wearing a Pendleton shirt, judging from the multicolored threads in the flesh of the pear.”

Unfortunately, extensive searching turned up nobody fitting the suspect’s description. It would be almost two years before we caught a break in the case—when narcotics agents in our office arrested a woman named Patricia Marcus* for drug possession.

“What if I tell you about a murder you never solved?” she offered, hoping to barter for reduced charges. “I know who did it. I saw it.”

As soon as she started talking, I realized she was describing the Hipsher case—and she knew enough details to convince me that she was telling the truth. Marcus claimed she was partying in the park with her ex-boyfriend, Richard Salmon, when a bum approached them. Neither she nor Salmon knew the guy, but a heated argument soon erupted. According to Marcus, Salmon beat up the drifter, then dragged him off into the woods and cut his throat. They were all wasted at the
time, she explained, but Salmon was violent even when sober, and she had been too scared of him to come forward until now.

I tracked Salmon down a few days later. Not only was he missing a front tooth, but he actually admitted to killing Hipsher. He insisted, however, that he had done it in self-defense. Hipsher had attacked him, shouting some cockamamie tale about stolen stuff, and he had had no choice but to protect himself. Yes, he was carrying a knife. Yes, he cut Hipsher’s throat. But it was pure accident. He swung the blade wildly, trying to fend off the crazed derelict, and inadvertently caught Hipsher across the jugular. Terrified by the sight of all that blood pouring out, he and Patty bolted.

I didn’t buy it. Not with twenty-nine slashes. Not with those peculiar blood patterns. I was sure the blood was the key to learning what really went on in that wooded corner of the park that night. My colleagues agreed. But when we dug the crime scene photos out of the files and reviewed them, the bloody triangle in the grass still mystified all of us. Nobody in homicide had seen one like it before.

In the following weeks, as soon as I finished work at the barn I conducted more experiments to re-create the Hipsher murder. I tried angle after angle to determine what would cause the patterns in the crime photos I had tacked up on the wall. No standing position I could think of produced a shape remotely resembling this one. Nor did any seated or prone position. Even if Hipsher had fallen on his side, arms bent toward his head to form a triangle, it didn’t make sense. The blood was too evenly distributed between his right and left arms. Besides, Hipsher was found lying on his back, which meant he had bled into that triangle and then rolled or fallen over when he finally died.

At last, I hit on a possibility: What if Hipsher had been on his knees and elbows, with his forearms on the ground, hands clasped
together, while his throat was being cut? Blood would have run into blood on the lower half of his arms as multiple wounds were inflicted, while more blood flowed onto the ground between his forearms, creating a gruesome triangle in the grass and dirt.

There was just one hitch: Hipsher’s stance was hardly an attack pose. If my theory was right—and I was sure it was—Salmon’s tale of self-defense was nonsense. He had forced the transient onto his hands and knees and held him there while he murdered him.