Behind the Yellow Tape: On the Road With Some of America's Hardest Working Crime Scene Investigators (23 page)

“I’ve interviewed over sixty convicted thugs across the state,” Detective Devore said, regarding the Terry case. “It took me a while to understand the prison lingo. I’d start off each interview with, ‘How long have you been here?’ and I’d get an answer like, ‘A minute.’ I finally found out that ‘a minute’ was any time less than six months.” Tim talked about how he had interviewed members of the Black Gangster Disciples, trying to develop leads on whether the person convicted for killing Detective Terry had ever talked about killing a cop. Most just clammed up when asked if they knew anything, but one finally talked. They would use him to try to keep the cop killer in prison for good.

“I’d just said bye to Antonio,” Tim continued somberly. He began to quietly tell us about Antonio, how good he was as an undercover at buying dope and how he’d put on liquid glove (a chemical skin protectant) to protect his hands from the ass-ridden dope he would buy. (On the street many dealers hide their goods in their rectum, so if they are searched it won’t be easily found.) He talked about how Antonio had joked with him and the other guys about his wife’s reaction to the smell of his hands, and how he’d said good-bye to them as he headed for the South Precinct. Devore talked about how great a guy Detective Terry was, and how he had stopped on his way to help two thugs whose car had broken down, but when he’d pulled over to help, one had yelled, “He’s a cop!” and a gun battle had ensued. Tim told us that Antonio had shot one of the suspects and had been shot himself, yet had still managed to drive back to the precinct, staggering in and yelling “I’m shot!” Tim continued on, getting quieter, telling us how the bullet had ratcheted through the artery in Antonio’s hip, how they pumped blood into him for two hours and how it flowed out, and how he had heart attack after heart attack after heart attack, and finally died from a massive coronary. “We all heard he’d been shot in the stomach and were relieved,” Tim said, having hardly touched his food. “Your chances are good with those types of gunshots.” But it was not to be, and Detective Antonio Terry was senselessly killed, leaving behind a wife and a young child. Tim has made it his mission to see that the perp who murdered his friend doesn’t get out of prison on an overturned technicality.

We talked for hours about crime scenes, the training, and how we all had come to know one another. As we got up from the table to leave, Detective Devore, in typical chamber of commerce fashion, decided to take us to the top of one of the hills surrounding Seattle, the perfect spot to see the wonderful skyline at night. We commemorated our last night in Seattle with a picture of the view. Exhausted and with the smell of decomp still stuck in our nostrils, we went back to our rooms to get some sleep for our long journey home.

The next morning, as we prepared to leave Seattle, we received a call from CSI Detective Mark Hanf. “We’ve got a homicide,” he said excitedly. Go figure. It’s impossible to predict when crime is going to occur. Crime analysts are employed by virtually every police department in the country to provide statistical analysis on crimes and crime trends. But those are still only trends and best guesstimates. No one ever knows when the drunk guy will get mad enough to stab another drunk over a game of pool, or when an angry wife will shoot her husband as he comes in from work.

The authors with Mark Hanf and Detective Tim Devore in Seattle.
HALLCOX & WELCH, LLC

Violence has no true identity and no true probability, which is a scary proposition for those in charge of figuring out who done it. But with CSIs like Mark around, we feel confident that he and his team will figure out who did it, all with an over-caffeinated grin and a
venti
cup tossed somewhere in the background.

UNION COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE, NEW JERSEY

Union County, New Jersey, was founded in 1857 and is considered part of the greater New York metropolitan area. Elizabeth, the county seat, is the fourth-largest city in New Jersey, helping to make Union County one of the densest counties in the nation. Elizabeth was the first capital of New Jersey, but it is usually overshadowed by its bigger sister Newark to the north. The sheriff’s office employs 215 people. Thirty-seven murders occurred in the county in 2006.

New Jersey is famous for a lot of things. Thomas Edison, the Atlantic City Boardwalk,
The Sopranos
; even the first baseball game ever played was in New Jersey. But something that is less known about New Jersey is that it’s full of ghosts. That’s right, ghosts. Ghosts, ghouls, goblins, and creatures of every kind. Some say that New Jersey is the most haunted state in the union, and many famous apparitions call it home, including the ghosts of Captain Kidd’s pirate crew, Joseph Bonaparte (Napoleon’s younger brother), and the celebrated Jersey Devil, a wicked winged and hoofed creature that sprung straight from its mother’s womb. It still wreaks havoc today in the fields, farms, and streams along the Jersey shore.

We came face-to-face with a Jersey Devil in Knoxville, Tennessee, on a warm Sunday evening in early May 2005. This devil was a female, dressed in all black, with long jet-black hair and nails, accompanied by her giant of a husband, who had very short buzzed, brownish-blond hair and a walk reminiscent of Karl from
Sling Blade.
All that was missing was some goat’s blood and for someone to ask for “biscuits and mustard, hmm.” Just as we began the introductions to begin Session XII, the devil’s phone went off, blaring the theme music from
The Godfather
. With that auspicious beginning, we knew we were in for quite an experience. She scared us a little, and we think we scared her too. Her name is Melissa DeFilippo.

Melissa is the sergeant of the crime scene unit for the sheriff’s office in Union County, New Jersey. Union County is composed of twenty-one different municipalities, including the city of Elizabeth (home to none other than
The Sopranos
). As a matter of fact, you can take a
Sopranos
tour, similar to Kramer’s “The Real J. Peterman Tour” from
Seinfeld
, visiting such world-renowned landmarks as the spot where Big Pussy talked to the FBI. The heavy Italian influence on the area is self-evident, and in fact Melissa, Frankie Coon, and Adrian Furman (all graduates of the program and all Union County CSIs) all have thick jet-black hair and look like they could be the bastard children of Tony Soprano himself. (Though our most recent graduate from Union County, Lauren Guenther, is a redhead, so go figure.)

Union County is a very
blue
county, with the longest-standing sheriff, Sheriff Ralph Froehlich, in the entire United States. His fifty-plus years dedicated to law enforcement is an incredible achievement. And he is living proof that progressiveness and youth are not necessarily correlated. Melissa contacted our office and was able to come through the program on a scholarship reserved for the first person to represent a state. “We’ll never send anybody else because of cost,” Melissa told us early on during her session. But now Union County has had a total of six graduates of the program, and all but Melissa paid the full tuition. And the sheriff can take full credit for having the vision to make his department better. His department’s successes have put his CSIs in charge of all murders and officer-involved shootings for all of the municipalities that reside within the county of Union. This decree was put out by the prosecutor’s office, which saw firsthand the knowledge gained by graduates processing crime scenes in New Jersey.

Melissa had it tough in the beginning of the program, and we certainly didn’t do her any favors. Each student gets randomly teamed up with another tablemate for ten weeks, to work together and support each other. Her tablemate was Mark Turner, the detective from Sevier County, Tennessee. Imagine for a moment what Larry the Cable Guy might sound like trying to talk with his nose stuffed full of cotton and his mouth filled with molasses. That’s Mark. Then imagine this cotton-and-molasses-filled Larry trying to communicate with a gal whose Jersey accent is as thick as the cream in a cannoli. It was like a screwed-up United Nations meeting without a translator. Shoulder shrugs and turned-down mouths were the only modes of communication for the first several days. In Melissa’s defense, even we Knoxvillians had trouble understanding Mark’s incredible southern drawl.

Melissa admitted that on day one, she was in tears calling home, telling her husband, Mike, who had gone back to New Jersey, that she already wanted to come home. But by day three, she was in the bathroom on the phone to her boss, saying, “Hey, I get it, we learn by tawking”—though to this day, she still has problems with many southern colloquialisms, particularly the phrase, “jam up and jelly tight.” But by week five, she had become the unofficial mother hen of the group, making Italian dishes for the whole class at night and cooking a traditional New Jersey breakfast dish, lovingly referred to as a “Jersey Breakfast,” for all of us one morning. Melissa fried up slices of Taylor ham and coupled them with eggs, cheese, salt, pepper, and ketchup to create a wonderful breakfast sandwich. She actually flew home just to get the ham and brought it back in her carry-on luggage. Sergeant DeFilippo made such an impression on everyone that in the end, she won the coveted Dr. Bass Excellence in Forensic Science Award, proving that bad girls can be good.

We visited Melissa and Mike at their home in New Jersey on a cold day in early December 2006. Christmas lights had sprung up around the neighborhood, shaking off the cobwebs of northeastern basements and attics everywhere. Christmas seems to begin earlier up north because of the cold temperatures, which tempers crime just a bit. Melissa ran to the door, greeting us with her usual hugs and kisses, and Mike, with his typical Archie Bunker/Jerry Lewis voice and his pet parrot on his shoulder, gave us both a kiss on each cheek, something we came to love about New Jersey. Mike is quite the jokester and a hell of a storyteller. After ordering a typical New Jersey-Italian meal of pizza, Mike jumped right into some of his war stories.

“Hey, youse guys ever hear of the bunny test?” Mike asked. Neither of us had. The bunny test is an apocryphal story made famous in New York, though everyone denies ever having heard of it. Plausible deniability is every policeman’s motto. The bunny test begins simply enough when an investigator starts interrogating a suspect. If the investigator gets nowhere, he gets up and leaves the room, without ever saying a word. Fifteen minutes pass, which is enough time to make the suspect begin to wonder what’s going on. And that’s when it happens. The door bursts open, and in comes a guy dressed head to toe in a pink bunny suit, with an orange billy club made to look like a giant carrot. He continues with the interrogation, but unlike the investigator, with the first sign of resistance, he proceeds to beat the shit out of the guy with the carrot until he tells the bunny what he wants to hear. Then he gets up, flops his ears back, and leaves. Another fifteen minutes pass, and the original investigator comes back, acting oblivious as to what the suspect is claiming to have happened. In court, when the suspect tells the story of being beaten by a pink rabbit, the judge disregards it as the rantings of a madman. That is, until many suspects begin to complain about the “wascawy wabbit.” Needless to say, the bunny test is now frowned on. Too bad.

There are many similar stories around the country about how police officers get confessions in strange, but less violent ways. For instance, many an investigator has gotten a confession from none other than a copy machine. They just tell the suspect that the machine can tell if he or she is lying or telling the truth. Then, after the investigator’s question, and depending on the desired answer, he or she puts a piece of paper into the machine, which copies the word
yes
or
no
, spitting it out into the tray in front of the suspect, confirming the answer and proving him or her to be a liar. Some even go a step further and hook a suspect to the department’s AED (automated external defibrillator), telling the poor ignorant soul that it is a lie detector. Thank God for dumb criminals.