Authors: Patricia Cornwell
The T-shirt and the waistband of Dr.
Jordan’s white boxer shorts
are completely saturated with blood that has soaked the sheet under him, spreading in a stain that extends to the edge of
the mattress and under the body of his wife, the entire fitted sheet bloody.
He was stabbed a total of nine times in his chest
and neck, and there is no indication he struggled or attempted to ward off the vicious attacks of a knife with an unusual
guard that left parallel contusions on his skin.
His wife is on her right side, her hands tucked under her chin, facing away
from her husband, toward the window that overlooks the street in front and the old cemetery on the other side of it, and I
certainly don’t believe she was in this position when she died.
Her body was rearranged, staged to look almost pious, as if
she is praying, yet her gown is hiked up to her waist and her breasts are exposed.
I pick up her flannel gown, long-sleeved, with buttons up to the neck and a lacy collar that seems to fit with the demure
serious-looking woman in the Christmas portrait taken not even a month before she was to be photographed again, this time
vulgarly positioned on her blood-soaked bed.
Flakes of old dark blood drift to the white paper covering the table as I look
at every perforation and cut left by a blade that stabbed her a total of twenty-seven times, her face, her head, her chest,
her back, her neck, her throat slashed for good measure.
The gown is stained front and back, so saturated with blood that
only areas of the sleeves and the bottom of the hem indicate the flannel is a pattern of floral blue.
I’m aware of Mandy O’Toole sitting in a chair she’s moved near a window to stay out of my way.
She’s watching me intently,
curiously, as I arrange the gown on top of the paper, putting it back the way I found it, dried blood making some areas of
the fabric as stiff as petticoat netting.
Mandy doesn’t say a word or interfere, and I
don’t offer my thoughts, which are getting darker and uglier by the minute.
I check Gloria Jordan’s case file again.
I study
body diagrams and review laboratory reports of blood samples taken from her gown, confirming the presence of her DNA, as one
would expect, but also her husband’s and their five-year-old daughter’s.
Why Brenda’s blood?
I notice from Colin’s measurements and descriptions that the wound to Gloria’s neck begins behind her left ear and travels
down in one clean incision, under the chin, below the right earlobe, consistent with her having her throat cut from behind.
If she didn’t see it coming and her carotid was severed, that would explain the lack of defensive injuries Colin mentioned,
but it raises more questions than it answers.
Next I notice another photograph of her on the bed, a close-up taken from the
foot of it.
Blood spatters are on the tops of her feet, and the soles of them are bloody, which doesn’t seem possible if she
was lying down when she was cut and stabbed.
But it’s hard to say.
There was so much blood everywhere, and I try to imagine
an assailant cutting Mrs.
Jordan’s throat from behind if she was lying down, sound asleep, drugged out on clonazepam.
I follow blood that is streaked, smeared, pooled, stepped in, and splashed on the stairs, and then the arterial pattern that
may have been from the slashing of the knife, perhaps to the neck, perhaps Gloria Jordan’s neck, the spatter arching in rhythm
to the beating of a heart that was about to quit.
But whose heart, and which direction was the person heading, up or down,
in or out?
Crime scene investigators, even good ones like Sammy Chang, can’t swab every blood drop or streak or mop up every
pool and puddle at a scene, and the labs couldn’t possibly analyze all of it.
Down the stairs to the landing at the bottom, and I pause in the area near the entryway and front door where Brenda collapsed
as I try to come up with an explanation for why her blood would have been transferred to the nightgown of her mother, who
supposedly died in bed.
I look for any evidence that efforts were made to clean up blood in the foyer, on the stairs, in the
hallway, or anywhere in the house, but I see nothing that hints of it, and there is nothing to suggest it in any of the reports
I’ve seen.
I continue going back to the area of the entryway, to Brenda’s body, a sight that must have horrified police when
they arrived at the house after the next-door neighbor discovered the broken glass in the kitchen door and called 911.
No normal person likes to look at dead children, and it’s a temptation not to look closely enough.
The flooring in the area
of the entryway is a chaotic pattern of drips and spatters cast off by a weapon, and smears and puddles, and bloody prints
left by footwear and also marks that appear to have been made by bare feet.
Toe prints and a heel that are too large for a
child’s, and I pick up the SpongeBob pajamas again.
They have footies.
The marks left by bare feet could not have been left
by Brenda when she was fleeing downstairs toward the front of the house and the door, and I find myself back to the same conundrum,
the cut, which is significant, on her mother’s left hand.
Colin speculates Mrs.
Jordan sliced open her thumb while pruning in her garden, and I follow the thread of this theory through
photographs, returning to the sunporch and the garden in back.
I revisit the round drops of dried blood, approximately eighteen
inches apart on terra-cotta tile and flagstone and foliage, Mrs.
Jordan’s
blood, believed to be unrelated to the case and excluded from evidence at the trial.
If what Colin suggests is correct, and
I don’t think it is, she must have injured herself almost immediately after she began pruning.
But there’s no tool anywhere
in any of the pictures I review, not a cut branch or side shoot or sucker in sight, the garden bleak and in need of a winter
cleanup it never got.
When Marino questioned Lenny Casper, the former next-door neighbor who happened to notice Mrs.
Jordan in her garden the Saturday
afternoon of January 5, Casper made no mention of her appearing to have hurt herself.
Maybe he didn’t notice, but most people
taking their dog out or looking through a window might be aware of someone hurrying back into the house, dripping blood.
A
casual observation by a neighbor and drops of Gloria Jordan’s blood that didn’t make sense in the context of such gory homicides
led to the conclusion that she cut her thumb earlier in the day.
She returned to the house, forgot to clean up the sunporch
and the hallway near the guest bath, and didn’t bandage her injury or let her physician husband tend to it when he arrived
home from the men’s shelter.
I just don’t believe it.
According to her toxicology report, when Mrs.
Jordan died she had alcohol and clonazepam on board, higher blood levels than
her husband’s, and she was taking the antidepressant sertaline.
After the murders, these prescription drugs were collected
from the master bathroom, from what appears to be her side of the sink, and I look at them again in their evidence bag, noticing
a detail that eluded me earlier.
“You want to help me with something?”
I ask Mandy, who is observing everything I do with her cobalt blue stare.
“You bet.”
She’s already out of her chair.
“The Barrie Lou Rivers case file?
I believe it’s electronic, not printed, because her death occurred after the office became
paperless.”
“Want me to print it?”
she asks.
“Not necessary.
But I’m interested in a document, if you can find it in her file.”
“Can you wait one minute so I can get my laptop?”
“I’ll stand in the hallway.”
I step outside the conference room.
M
andy O’Toole returns from the histology lab with a laptop and begins a search of Barrie Lou Rivers’s records while I search
Lola Daggette’s clothing for anything that might have been missed.
I examine the Windbreaker, the blue turtleneck and tan corduroys that she was washing in her shower, an incriminating act
that was the sole basis for her being charged with multiple counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death.
Much of
the blood was washed away, only traces of a pattern left, areas of dark discoloration on the thighs of the pants, and drips
and smears on the cuffs and on the front of the Windbreaker and its sleeves.
Lola would have had blood on her shoes, and my
thoughts keep going back to that.
“Got her file.
Tox and other lab reports, autopsy records,” Mandy
says, sitting in the chair by the window, the computer in her lap.
“What are you looking for, exactly?”
“Something you might not have but Jaime Berger did.
A one-page document included with the autopsy protocol and tox reports,”
I reply.
“A chain-of-custody form from the GPFW relating to the execution drugs.
The prescription was filled but never used
because Barrie Lou Rivers died before they could execute her.
Just a strange piece of paper that doesn’t belong with the autopsy
record but somehow ended up in there.”
“My favorite thing,” she says.
“Details that aren’t supposed to be included.
But they are.”
As I continue looking at Lola Daggette’s clothing, I think about what the victims had on when they died and how much blood
there was.
The crazed trail of footwear prints on the black-and-white checkered kitchen tile and the fir wood floor indicate
that the killer was tracking blood throughout the house or someone was or more than one person was.
Not all of the tread patterns
look the same.
Contamination by people disrupting the crime scene after the police got there, or did Dawn Kincaid have a partner
in her hideous crimes?
It wasn’t Lola.
Had she been walking around the Jordans’ house that early morning, her shoes would have been bloody.
Yet she
wasn’t washing shoes in the shower when the volunteer healthcare worker walked in.
She wasn’t washing her underwear or socks.
She was never examined for injuries, such as scratches, and it wasn’t her DNA or fingerprints recovered from the victims’
bodies or the scene, and it’s tragic no one paid attention to these facts.
Dawn Kincaid’s DNA but her fingerprints aren’t
a match, and I remember what Kathleen
Lawler said about giving her
children
away.
As if she had more than one.
“Paydirt,” Mandy says, and I think of
Payback.
A monster most assume Lola made up.
“Yes, exactly what I’m looking for,” I reply, as I read the form on the screen, a lethal prescription filled by a pharmacist
named Roberta Price, the drugs delivered to the GFPW and signed for by Tara Grimm at noon on the day of Barrie Lou Rivers’s
execution, two years ago, March first.
Boxes checked on the form and blanks filled in indicate the sodium thiopental and pancuronium bromide were stored in the warden’s
office, then moved into the execution room at five p.m.
but never used.
“Mean something?
You’re looking like you’re thinking something,” Mandy can’t resist asking, as I hand the computer notebook
back to her.
“As far as you know, these are the only items of clothing belonging to Lola Daggette?”
I answer her question with one of my
own, as I pick up the evidence bag of prescription drugs, checking labels on the orange plastic bottles.
“In other words,
no shoes.”
“If this is what Colin’s got, what the GBI still has stored, then that’s all there was, I feel sure,” she says.
“As bloody as the killer would have been, impossible to think the shoes weren’t bloody, too,” I comment.
“Why wash your clothes
in the shower but not your bloody shoes?”
“One time Colin scraped gum off the bottom of a high-heeled shoe that came in with the body and recovered a hair, then the
DNA of the killer.
We had T-shirts made.
Colin Dengate the Gum Shoe.”
“Would you mind finding him?
Tell him I’ll meet him outside.
I’d like to take a ride.
Do a retrospective visit, if possible.”
Lola Daggette didn’t wash her shoes in the shower, because a pair of shoes wasn’t included with the bloody clothes planted
in her room.
She didn’t murder anyone, and she wasn’t inside the Jordans’ antebellum mansion the early morning of the murders
or on any occasion.
I suspect the troubled teenager would have had no reason to meet the distinguished and wealthy Clarence
and Gloria Jordan or their beautiful blond twins and probably didn’t have a clue who they were until she was interrogated
about their murders and charged with them.
I strongly suspect Lola also didn’t have a clue who to blame, a person or persons motivated by more than drugs or petty cash
or the thrill of killing, a monster or a pair of them with a grand plan that a mentally impaired teenager in a halfway house
wouldn’t have had any reason to know about.
Or if she did, she’d probably be dead, too, just as Kathleen Lawler and Jaime
are.
I suspect there was an orchestrated scheme that included framing Lola, just as someone is trying to frame me now, and
I don’t believe these manipulations are the sole handiwork of Dawn Kincaid.
I dig my phone out of my shoulder bag and enter Benton’s number as I emerge from the lab building, finding a spot near bottle-brush
bushes with brilliant red blossoms where I’m eye to eye with a hummingbird, and the blazing sun is a relief.
I’m chilled,
even my bones are cold from being inside the air-conditioned conference room surrounded by evidence so obvious it seems to
shout its grotesque secrets, and I’m not sure who’s going to respond.
I can count on Colin, and, of course, Marino and Lucy will pay
attention, and I’ve sent both of them text messages asking if the name Roberta Price means anything, and asking what else
can we find out about Gloria Jordan?
There’s very little about Mrs.
Jordan in news stories I’ve read, few personal details
and nothing to suggest there were problems, but I’m sure there were, and the timing couldn’t be worse.
If Benton weren’t my husband, I have no doubt he wouldn’t listen to what will sound like a tale of horror, a sensational yarn,
something made up.
What I strongly suspect happened nine years ago isn’t going to be of interest to the FBI or Homeland Security
right now, and I understand why, but someone needs to hear me out and do something about it anyway.
“Sounds like your friends from Atlanta arrived,” I say to Benton, when he answers his cell phone, and voices in the background
are loud, a lot of people with him.
I’m about to try his patience.
I can feel it coming.
“Just getting started.
What’s up?”
Distracted and tense, he is moving around a noisy room as he talks.
“Maybe you and your colleagues could look into something.”
“What’s that?”
“Adoption records, and I need you to pay attention,” I reply.
“I know the Jordan case isn’t a priority at the moment, but
I think it should be.”
“I always pay attention, Kay.”
He doesn’t sound annoyed, but I know he is.
“Whatever pertains to Kathleen Lawler, to Dawn Kincaid, although that wasn’t her name when she was born and I have no idea
the name of the first family who adopted her.
Dawn was passed
around to a number of different foster homes or families, and eventually ended up in California with a couple that died.
Supposedly.
Anything you can find that the FBI hasn’t already found, specifically relating to Dawn’s contacting someone.
She had to have
contacted someone, possibly an agency down here in 2001 or 2002, when she decided to learn the identities of her biological
parents.
She had to have gone through the same process anybody else would.”
“You don’t know that what Kathleen Lawler told you is true, and it would be best to discuss this later.”
“We know Dawn paid a visit to Savannah in early 2002, and we need to discuss it now,” I reply, as I envision Kathleen Lawler
in the contact interview room, talking about being locked up in the
big house
when she went into labor, and I keep thinking of her comments.
Something about being locked up like an animal and having to
give your children away
and what was she supposed to do, give
them
to a twelve-year-old boy, to Jack Fielding?
“That really hasn’t been proven, either,” Benton says, and when he’s in a hurry and doesn’t want to have a discussion, he
gets contrary.
“Retested DNA places her in the Jordans’ house in 2002,” I say to him.
“But you’re going to have to request different testing,
and I’ll get to that.
Did she come all the way from California to meet her biological mother, or was there another purpose?”
“I know this is important to you,” Benton says, and what he means is Dawn Kincaid’s alleged visit to Savannah in 2002 isn’t
important to him.
The Bureau and the United States government, perhaps even the president, are preoccupied with potential
terrorism.
“What I’m suggesting is the possibility of someone else she
wanted to meet in addition to her mother.”
I go on anyway.
“Maybe there are records no one has thought to check into.
This
is important.
I promise.”
He’s moving around, and a voice in the background says something about coffee, and Benton says thanks and then to me, “What
are you contemplating?”
“How it’s possible to leave bloody fingerprints on a knife handle and a bottle of lavender soap at a crime scene if you had
nothing to do with the crimes.”
“What about the DNA of those bloody prints?”
“The victims’ DNA and also an unknown donor, a profile that we now know is Dawn Kincaid.
But the prints aren’t hers,” I answer.
“The Jordans’ DNA and Dawn’s, supposedly.
But some other person’s prints.”
“Supposedly?”
“Bloody transfers by whoever had bloody hands and touched the kitchen knife, the soap bottle, but the fingerprints aren’t
Dawn Kincaid’s.
They’ve never been identified, supposedly from contamination, from a lot of people being on the scene, including
journalists, maybe walking through blood and picking up evidence, touching it, or even cops, crime scene techs.
Apparently
the scene wasn’t well contained.
That’s the explanation I’ve been given.”
“It’s possible.
If people didn’t have their prints on file for exclusionary purposes and they handled things.
I’m going to
have to go, Kay.”
“Yes, it’s possible, especially when everyone involved is eager to accept such an explanation because they’ve got Lola Daggette
and aren’t looking for anyone else.
That seems to be the problem across
the board, overlooking, not questioning, not digging deep enough because the case is solved, the murders committed by someone
who was caught washing bloody clothes and told all sorts of lies that bordered on nonsense.”
“Tell her I’ll call back in a few minutes,” Benton says to someone else.
I watch Colin walk out of the building.
When he sees I’m on the phone, he gestures that he’ll wait for me in the Land Rover.
“See what you and your agent colleagues can find out about Roberta Price,” I say to Benton, who isn’t saying anything.
“The
pharmacist who filled Gloria Jordan’s prescriptions nine years ago.
Who is she, and is she connected to Dawn Kincaid?”
“I remind you that if someone is a head pharmacist, their name is on every prescription bottle, even if they didn’t fill it.”
“Probably not if it’s a script called in by a prison doc or one who’s an executioner,” I reply.
“If you’re the head pharmacist
and didn’t fill the prescription for sodium thiopental and pancuronium bromide, you might not want your name on it.
You might
not want your name even remotely associated with anything having to do with an execution.”
“I have no idea what you’re getting at.”
“Two years ago a pharmacist named Roberta Price, presumably the same person who filled Mrs.
Jordan’s prescriptions, also filled
the prescription for the sodium thiopental and pancuronium bromide that would have been used in Barrie Lou Rivers’s lethal
injection, had she not mysteriously died first.
The drugs were delivered to the GPFW, and Tara Grimm signed for them.
It’s
hard to imagine she and Roberta Price aren’t acquainted.”