Behind the Yellow Tape: On the Road With Some of America's Hardest Working Crime Scene Investigators (22 page)

On April 24, 2006, almost exactly one month to the day after the shootings on Capitol Hill, the Seattle bomb squad was called to examine a suspicious-looking package found behind an apartment complex. The landlord of the complex had recently noticed a lot of illegal dumping, so he had been digging around in the Dumpster when he came across a strange-looking object hidden in it. Though the suspicious package turned out to be nothing more than garbage, the landlord had also discovered something nearly as explosive—a suicide letter from Kyle.

Crumpled up in a fast-food bag was a handwritten note from Kyle addressed to his twin brother, Kane, regarding the events that would unfold on that now infamous day in March. Initially, most people thought the letter was a hoax, especially considering the random circumstances in which it was found. Some have theorized that Kane might have been in possession of the letter and wanted to distance himself. He was known to have passed by that Dumpster several times as he prepared to move out of the Seattle area forever. But how the letter got into the Dumpster remains a mystery. A cursory comparison of the letter to other samples of Kyle’s handwriting revealed similarities, but nothing conclusive, so the letter was eventually sent to the Washington State Crime Lab for analysis.

On June 7, the lab released its findings, stating that the letter was in “high probability” written by Kyle Huff. And the contents appeared to be the ravings of a paranoid and troubled young man. The letter was to his brother, ranting about a “revolution” against “a world of sex.” Kyle’s words wove a delusional tapestry about “killing this hippie shit”—a clear attack on the rave kids whom he ultimately killed in cold blood. Kyle ended the letter with the phrase “Now Kids Now,” then signed off by telling Kane that he loved him. Without question, the Capitol Hill Massacre was a tragedy of epic proportions, carried out by a lonely and misguided soul.

CSIs are real people. Every graduate we spent time with has a family. They are ordinary people, except they have an up-close and inside look at just how crappy the world can truly get. Detective Mark Hanf and his wife are no different. They live in a beautiful condo just outside Seattle. She works for Intel and travels across most of Asia, helping to keep the tech industry booming. They have two adult sons, one who recently came back from the war in Iraq. At dinner, which we ate at a local Mongolian grill, we talked about something other than dead bodies:
American Idol
. It doesn’t get much more everyday than that.

The next morning, after a Mongolian buffet hangover, we reconvened with the rest of the crime scene unit down in their office. It’s a little macabre, visiting all of these different cities and hoping for crimes to occur, thus giving us crime scenes to work. Yet up to this point, we hadn’t had even a sniff of death. But that morning, talk in the department was of a current missing-person case that had caught the attention of the local news media. Flyers had been posted everywhere, and relatives of the missing person had been on television complaining about the police and how little they were doing to find their loved one in the nearly two weeks he’d been missing.

The case was a little strange: On Cinco de Mayo, a father and son had apparently gone down to Pioneer Square to drink, snort cocaine, and, it seems, share a hooker back in their hotel room. (Not our idea of what the holiday’s meant for.) There was little information to go on. Supposedly the son had walked out of the bar they’d been drinking at, headed north, and never been heard from since. The father was not considered the most credible witness; he seemed to be sketchy when asked about the events that occurred on the night his son went missing. His timelines did not match the time frames on the bar security camera, and phone calls from the hotel room seemed to contradict his story. Dad said his son had gotten into a fight with the bouncer before he was kicked out of the bar, but the bouncer said something quite different, telling the cops that the father was never even at the bar and that the son had come and gone on his own. Though the father was turning out to look very suspicious, there was nothing warranting an arrest. However, the investigators wanted to talk to him and had scheduled him to be polygraphed the very next day.

The next morning on our way to the department, we stopped at one of our favorite places—Krispy Kreme—and brought in a dozen doughnuts for breakfast, keeping the stereotype alive. (We opted for traditional doughnuts, rather than another Seattle treat—a humbow. A humbow is simply a steamed or baked Asian pastry filled with a very sweet red meat. Think of it as a Krispy Kreme glazed doughnut filled with barbecued pork. Mark had introduced us to them during our first visit to Seattle three years earlier, and we realized that there was another reason for all of the coffee consumption in Seattle—to wake up its residents from humbow-induced comas.) Back in the office, we sat around for a while, doughnuts in hand, talking to Mark about how his NFA training had helped him with his work. “For me, [the most valuable part] was the forensic anthropology component,” Mark stated. Not many in his department, with the exception of some members of the Green River Task Force, had ever had any formal training in human remains recovery until then. Just as we were getting deep into the conversation, however, a call out to a crime scene came in.

A body had been discovered underneath the Magnolia Bridge, one of the myriad of bridges permeating the heart of Seattle. They didn’t know who it was, what condition the body was in, or even how long it had been there. As a matter of fact, they had no idea if a crime had even taken place. Armed with only this little tidbit of information, we piled into the backseat of an unmarked cruiser with the crime scene van following close behind. The exact location of the body was hard to determine from the initial call. We drove up, down, and all around the Port of Seattle pier trying to find where the body had been discovered. Initially, a security guard working the entrance to the pier barred us entry, even with the flash of a badge. Homeland security is alive and well in Seattle. Finally, after what seemed to be a dizzying quarter of an hour later, we found where we were supposed to go.

The crime scene unit sergeant was already there, awaiting our arrival. And the moment we got out of the car downwind from the body, we could already smell that all-too-familiar smell of human decomposition. As we moved a little closer, we could see the hump of a body lying facedown in the weeds, just a few feet on the other side of a chain-link fence that had been partially torn down.

The body of a dead man lies beneath the sheet, having fallen
to his death from the bridge above.
HALLCOX & WELCH, LLC

After gathering what information was available from the initial responding officer, the team began to work the scene. As if they had performed this dance a hundred times before, they each worked on a different task, never having to speak but each knowing what the other was doing. Don Ledbetter (a graduate of Session XIII at the NFA) went to the top of the bridge to take pictures of the victim, who lay down below. We assisted Don, directing traffic to keep him from getting run over. Then Don and Brian Stampfl began mapping the entire crime scene area with a
total station
, a measuring instrument used in surveying as well as in crime scene work and traffic collision reconstruction. It is used to electronically measure and map outdoor crime scenes accurately. Lisa Haakenstad (also an NFA alumnus) took notes while Mark assisted wherever necessary. Meanwhile, it had been determined that in all probability, the victim found under the bridge was the same young man who had gone missing twelve days earlier on Cinco de Mayo. Several investigators from both homicide and missing persons were also on the scene trying to confirm that was the case, discovering that a call had come in to 911 on May 5 about a drunken man who’d been seen walking in traffic. The CSIs continued to map, photograph, and work the scene until they reached the body, while the sergeant went to procure the most important tool a Seattle crime scene investigator needs—coffee. Then it was time to call the ME’s office.

As the team drank their Starbucks coffee while waiting for the medical examiner to arrive, stress-related black humor began to emerge. Someone started whistling
Ode to Billie Joe
, particularly emphasizing the line that goes “today Billie Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.” Another began referring to May 5 as “Stinko de Mayo.” You’ve got to love the morbid humor of a CSI.

The ME arrived on the scene to a swarm of flies, which had begun hatching right before our eyes. Up until this particular day, the spring weather had been cool and cloudy, with virtually no sun. But on this day the weather was spectacular—too hot for Seattleites—and the warmth had allowed the flies to begin popping from their wiggly cocoons. The victim had been wearing a hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled up when he’d apparently plunged to his death from the Magnolia Bridge, landing facedown and thus obscuring his face. From all outward appearances, the victim looked “fresh,” with no visible signs of decomposition. But when the ME worked his way around to the head area of the victim’s body and pulled down the sweatshirt hood, we were privy to the most unnerving sight we had ever experienced.

Pulling off the sweatshirt revealed an approximately eighty-to one-hundred-pound mass of maggots that, once daylight hit them, vanished within seconds, down into the thoracic cavity of the victim. Amazingly, from the bottom of his neck to the top of his head, the victim was completely gnawed down to the bone, while the rest of his body looked essentially whole and not decomposed. The spine had been severed from the trauma of the fall, and the only thing that was holding the victim’s head in place was the sweatshirt hood. Flies lay eggs only in moist places, which typically, not counting wounds, are the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and genitals. But a fully clothed man, with a hood on, lying facedown, doesn’t provide much access for the flies. However, the fall had clearly broken the man’s neck violently, thus leaving a wet and warm wound for the flies to infiltrate and begin their habitation of the victim’s corpse. The medical examiner had never seen anything like it. Nor had we.

The maggot mass had taken on a life of its own, and even later in the cooler at the morgue, they continued to eat away at the victim—from the inside out. The ME, with help from the CSIs, removed the body from under the bridge, placed it on a board, and loaded it into the truck. The scene had been worked, and the case had essentially been solved. A drunk guy had fallen off a bridge. After the body was removed, we left to go back to the processing area to wash the decomp off our shoes and get ready to visit with another of our favorite NFA graduates in Seattle.

Seattle Police Department, Washington, personnel: Mark Hanf,
Brian Stampfl, Lisa Haakenstad, and Don Ledbetter.
HALLCOX & WELCH, LLC

Detective Tim Devore (a graduate of Session X) was the second person from Seattle to ever grace our doorstep in Knoxville. Tim is the Dean Martin of CSIs; if it had been election year in Knoxville during his session, he would easily have been elected mayor. Tim simply has the type of personality that everyone gravitates toward. He had been an alternate with the CSI unit when he came through the program, and ultimately chose to work full time in the homicide unit. We met him and his partner for dinner. Tim had picked a great restaurant right on the water, Maggie Bluff’s—which, as luck would have it, turned out to be about a hundred feet from where we had spent all day collecting the remains of the fellow who’d fallen from the bridge.

“How’s homicide?” we asked Tim. “I’m the fifth wheel,” he replied, flicking his sport coat open. Tim is one of the few cops in the Seattle Police Department who still dresses like the stereotypical detective, minus the tie, regardless of the relaxed dress code. His fellow detective, Jeff Mudd, who happens to be related to the doctor who patched up John Wilkes Booth after he had assassinated President Lincoln, looked as if he were dressed for fly fishing. Being the fifth wheel in the homicide unit essentially means you’re the paper pusher, taking overflow from the others who are already established and working felony assaults. Tim’s current assignment also includes being on a task force that is going through some of the 296 cases that had been overturned on a technicality by the courts back in 2004. Of particular interest to Tim, as well as the rest of his department, was the possibility of an overturned conviction of a man who had murdered one of their comrades, Detective Antonio Terry.