Behind the Yellow Tape: On the Road With Some of America's Hardest Working Crime Scene Investigators (24 page)

After Mike was finished with his police stories, we talked a little bit about the week ahead. Sunday, the day we arrived, was the start of Melissa’s on-call shift, when she could be called out to any scene that happened—day or night. We had come prepared with warm clothes just in case that happened. The year 2006 had been pretty busy for Union County, which typically gets between forty and fifty homicides per year. Compared to Knoxville, Tennessee, which gets about ten to fifteen, and Duluth, Minnesota, which gets somewhere in the single-digit range, the number seems pretty significant. So, as we had in other cities, we were macabrely hoping to see a good crime scene. And indeed, after about our second piece of pizza, Melissa’s pager went off.
Bingo
, we thought as we scurried around for our gloves and hats. But we hadn’t been paying attention to Mike, who had grabbed the phone and gone into the other room to make a crank call. Good ol’ Mike. We left the DeFilippos’ with our bellies full of pizza, hoping beyond hope that the Jersey thugs would wait at least one more night so we could get some sleep.

With a peaceful night behind us, we started the next morning by sitting down with Sheriff Ralph Froehlich at his office. Sheriff Froehlich is a consummate professional, welcoming us with open arms and applauding us for our contributions to the world of law enforcement. He’s also a consummate politician, never failing to miss an opportunity for a news story or a photo opportunity, and he had us pose along with the other graduates of our program out in the front lobby. Well, it was an election year after all.

The authors with Union County Sheriff’s Office, New Jersey, personnel:
Frank Coon, Melissa DeFilippo, and Adrian Furman.
COURTESY OF THE UNION COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE, NEW JERSEY

The sheriff has certainly seen a lot during his long tenure in office. But for him, one of the best compliments that had ever been paid to him or to his department was when the Union County prosecutor’s office determined that because of the skills of his CSI Unit, they would be in charge of all homicides across the twenty-one municipalities—a true testament to their success. “Most chiefs come up and almost kiss me, grateful for the work we do,” Sheriff Froehlich told us from behind his large desk adorned with more than half a century’s worth of law enforcement accoutrements. “Hell, I shoulda been dead years ago,” he told us later, because of an illness that was supposed to be fatal. “Even an old dog can learn new tricks.” Admittedly, many departments with older chiefs or sheriffs are reluctant to try new things, being happy and content with the status quo—that is also to say, happy and somewhat lazy. Not every chief within the county wants to kiss the sheriff. After all, murders are a lot of work. A suicide, not so much. And when there is doubt, politics can come into play.

“Wanna see a mummy?” Melissa asked us as we were released back into her custody. Finding a mummy at a crime scene is a rarity and elicits excitement, being the Holy Grail of forensic evidence. “He’s a Juan Doe,” Melissa told us as she gathered up the crime scene photos,
Juan
referring to the unknown person being of Hispanic ethnicity. “How was the body found?” we asked, looking through the disgusting crime scene pictures. “Bad smell,” she replied, with an upturned nose.

It’s certainly amazing how many bodies are discovered by smell, with neighbors invariably saying, “Well, I hadn’t seen him in a while and now that you mention it, I had been smelling something funny.” In this case, construction workers called in to do a renovation on a house had called the police after stumbling into the bad smell, and Union County CSIs were dispatched to the scene when police found the dead body. The police had concluded within minutes that the deceased had committed suicide, strangling himself with an electrical cord, but they hadn’t given the crime scene more than a cursory look.

Sergeant Frankie Coon was the first CSI to the scene. Frankie is the brooding guy of the group. The police told him right away that it was a suicide, but, not convinced, he decided to take a look for himself. “Frankie called me within a few minutes,” Melissa began as we made our way out to the crime scene van. “He thought it was a possible homicide, so I went to the scene to help him out.” Once the New Jersey CSIs took over, the police on scene essentially stepped out.

“When I got to the scene, it was obvious to me that it was a homicide,” Melissa said as we drove into the city of Elizabeth. “There were pools of old, dried blood, with fine spatter above the body,” she explained. “The victim’s pants pockets were turned inside out, and a large container of rat poison was placed at his head. There were also many footwear impressions left in blood, but the victim was barefoot. Even if the prints were from his shoes, someone had removed them—they were nowhere to be found.” She added, “If it was a suicide, it was unlike any suicide I’d ever heard of or seen.”

At the autopsy of Juan Doe, a strange circumstance was unveiled. Not only was an electrical cord wrapped around his neck, but there was also a dress, and underneath the dress was a coat hanger. Three different objects had been used to strangle this poor guy to death. Yet the medical examiner corroborated the police’s determination and listed suicide as the manner of death.

Frustrated, Melissa and Frankie continued on with what they could with regard to the case. Pieces from the man’s femur have been sent to the University of North Texas for DNA extraction in an effort to enter Juan into the missing person’s database. The blood was also swabbed and collected to see if it might have belonged to someone other than just Juan. The severity of its degradation has made this comparison difficult. Unfortunately, this may be the only way to ever establish the possibility of the case being a homicide. “What do you think happened?” we asked, walking down the street in Elizabeth, down near the shores of the Arthur Kell River, where they filmed the opening to
The Sopranos
, feeling sort of like the Beatles walking down Abbey Road. “It’s probably a gang murder or a gang initiation,” Melissa said. “Frankie thinks the rat poison and the turned-out pockets are references to the victim being a rat.” Regardless of who or why or even how, the main focus is just to identify the victim—which seems to be a long shot at best. Juan was probably an illegal alien, which makes the possibility of discovering who he was that much harder.

The number of missing people is growing exponentially every year. The federal government’s best estimate of the number of missing and unidentified persons in the United States is roughly five thousand. But those in the know, the people who work in this arena every day, estimate that number to be roughly ten times that—a staggering fifty thousand missing and unidentified persons, many of whom will never be identified no matter what the advances in forensic science or how much evidence comes to light. Reasons for this vary, but the practice of most medical examiners’ offices, particularly ten to twenty years ago, was to simply get rid of unclaimed bodies through either cremation or burial in potter’s fields—with little to no identifiable markings. Hopefully, if DNA can be extracted from Juan’s femur, he may be identified and returned to his loved ones. But more than likely, Juan Doe will be added to that ever-growing list of “never to be knowns.”

On our second night in Union County, Sheriff Froehlich invited us and the CSI Unit out for a nice dinner. Melissa made reservations at a wonderfully fancy Italian restaurant, Ristorante da Benito, which often boasts major players in New Jersey politics. On this night, ex-New Jersey governor James McGreevey was having dinner with other politicians from the area. The DeFilippo name carries significant weight in Union; Melissa’s mother-in-law is the Democratic chair for the county. And Melissa herself is obviously known among the political elite, as we saw when McGreevey came over to give her a kiss on the cheek.

The sheriff sat at the head of the table, talking about the “olden days” as we dipped crunchy Italian breads into olive oil seasoned with herbs. “In my day,” the sheriff began, leaning back a bit in his chair, “the CSI was the mayor’s detective, [someone who] was appointed by him. And he probably was a nephew or a cousin or whatever,” the sheriff theorized. “He carried a box camera, a magnifying glass, a little dusting brush, and would just dust every damn thing he would come up to, never finding anything.”

“But,” he conceded, “that was crime scene work back then.”

Sheriff Froehlich carries himself in a dignified and confident manner, yet is somehow still grandfatherly. The sheriff has lived a long time and has spent more than a half a century dealing with every facet of law enforcement. “In all my years, a lot of changes have taken place and they have taken a long time, but in five years you guys have done more in one subject, in one area, than I have seen in my fifty years in all of law enforcement,” he said. “Look at where you guys are today; holy smoke!” And with that superb speech and ringing endorsement, dinner was served.

The next morning, we began our quest again in search of crime. After all, New Jersey is certainly well known for its crime. Camden is one of the most dangerous cities in the United States; Jimmy Hoffa is probably buried under concrete somewhere in the Garden State if he wasn’t ground up and made into hot dogs. Whereas most people kill people with simple things like guns, knives, bare hands, or broken bottles, New Jerseyans have been known to raise the bar. Like using a bike, for instance. Melissa had a recent homicide case where the victim had been killed with a bicycle. He wasn’t beaten to death with the handlebars or strangled to death with the chain or even bludgeoned with the kickstand. No, the guy was beaten to death with the whole friggin’ bike. Now that’s dedication, when you can kill someone with a Schwinn.

“What’s the worst crime scene you’ve been a part of?” we asked Melissa as we drove around some of the more affluent areas in Union County with her partner, a Beastie Boys wannabe who kept saying, “Here come the po-po.”

“We had a domestic on Super Bowl Sunday in 2005,” Melissa began, slapping her partner to shut him up. It’s an urban legend that up to 40 percent more domestic violence cases occur on Super Bowl Sunday in the United States compared to any other day because of the disproportionate amount of sore-losing bettors. But Melissa’s case, though it was a domestic, had nothing to do with football, and everything to do with a sick and very troubled mother.

New Jersey State Troopers discovered Lynn Giovanni crashed into a guardrail along Route 78 in Roselle, New Jersey. “Roselle’s a pretty nice area,” Melissa said as we continued driving. Simply put, “nice areas,” whether in New Jersey or Arkansas, are less likely to have homicides. It’s just a fact. And almost invariably, when CSIs are dispatched to cases in these areas, it’s for crimes of familiarity, not ones of random violence.

Lynn was taken to the hospital and treated for minor wounds. She then dropped a bomb on the unsuspecting troopers, telling them rather nonchalantly that she had murdered her daughter, Nicole, and had been trying to kill herself by crashing her car (though some disbelieve her tale about the attempted suicide, considering how minor the actual crash was). Troopers were dispatched to Lynn’s house and had to bust down the door to get in. That’s where they found the unthinkable.

“She was a very popular, all-American girl,” Melissa said of Nicole Giovanni, the fourteen-year-old girl who had been brutally beaten by her mother while she slept. Lynn Giovanni had beaten her daughter from behind with a hammer, many times. But as Lynn would admit later in court, “she kept breathing.” Lynn then turned to a shovel, but “it was too hard to swing,” and again, “she kept breathing.” So Lynn returned to using the hammer to finally kill Nicole.

“Adrian, she was the first CSI to the scene,” Melissa said. Officer Adrian Furman is the pretty, straight-talking, artistic one of the group. Adrian has a knack for working on some of the more gruesome cases. She worked the macabre and eerie scene, jumping each time the radiator in the bedroom clicked on and off, as Nicole lay there motionless and covered in blood. “We’re just not used to normal-looking people at scenes,” Melissa admitted. Most crimes, the ones that don’t end up as national news, are committed by people who are “high risk,” like drug dealers, prostitutes, and meth heads. Cases like those of Natalee Holloway and JonBenét Ramsey, though well known and highly publicized, are not the norm. They are aberrations in the crime statistics. “Nicole’s room looked like my room when I was a teenager, except all of her posters and teddy bears were spattered with blood. Sad,” Melissa said.

“I didn’t respond to the initial call; I was sent there to do the blood reconstruction in case the mother decided to change her story later,” Melissa continued. “Nicole was gone, but all of the blood evidence was still there.” At the time of Lynn’s confession and subsequent arrest, no one was sure that she would stick to her story. The Union County CSIs wanted to make sure that the evidence in the room corroborated the mother’s original confession. Melissa’s job was to string the blood scene and calculate the area of origin for Nicole’s head when she had been struck. She performed the calculations at the scene and mathematically reconstructed the events, placing the area of origin about eight inches above the bed—precisely where Nicole’s head would have been on her pillow. “It was amazing, seeing that stuff work,” Melissa enthused about bloodstain pattern analysis.