Behind the Yellow Tape: On the Road With Some of America's Hardest Working Crime Scene Investigators (25 page)

The home of Nicole Giovanni—Roselle Park, New Jersey.
COURTESY OF THE UNION COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE, NEW JERSEY

In the end, the mother stuck to her story and was able to plead down to aggravated manslaughter—a sentence of thirty years, of which she must serve twenty-five and a half. Lynn had been sent to a psychiatric hospital, forgoing bail, and had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder during her medical incarceration, a condition probably made worse by her recent divorce. This was significant in allowing her to be able to plead down her crime to manslaughter. New Jersey law stipulates that before a person can be charged with a murder, the state must prove two things beyond a reasonable doubt: First, the person must have caused the victim’s death or serious bodily injury that then results in death—of which Lynn clearly was guilty. Then, if the first criterion is met, the state must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did so purposely or knowingly. New Jersey prosecutors, knowing that Lynn had been diagnosed as being bipolar, didn’t believe that they could prove that she “knowingly” killed Nicole. Thus, they allowed the plea of aggravated manslaughter to be entered. Lynne’s ex-husband, Nicole’s father, sat in the courtroom as the verdict came down, and he was quoted as saying to Lynn, “I hope you and your soul rot and burn in hell for eternity.” He had hoped for her to receive a much stronger sentence, vying for the death penalty.

Nicole was the second teen from the Roselle area to have been brutally killed within the previous few months. The other young girl, Judy Cajuste, age fourteen, had been found in a Newark Dumpster after being reported missing. Judy is believed to have been a victim of cyberstalking. To date, no arrests have been made in her case. Public outcry over these two murders compelled New Jersey assemblyman Neil Cohen to introduce a bill dubbed “Judy and Nikki’s Law” that would provide a mandatory life sentence without parole for anyone who murders a young person under age sixteen. The bill unanimously passed the assembly in 2006, and in 2007 the Senate received it. To date, it is still awaiting review by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“We actually had another domestic in an even more upscale area almost exactly one year later,” Melissa said. “I was on call on New Year’s Day in 2006 when the call came in from Cranford, New Jersey. I had bronchitis really bad, and I was thinking, ‘What’s going on in Cranford? There’s no crime.’”

Indeed, Cranford has remarkably little violent crime, years passing without a single homicide. But 2006 was ushered in with a tragic turn of events, the first murder since 2001. “It was a nice house that still had its Christmas wreath on the door,” Melissa recalls, of Mary Ellen Touris’s house on Retford Avenue in Cranford. Inside the house was a different story. “There were Christmas bulbs smashed, a footstool through the wall, and the owner of the home was found at the bottom of the basement stairs. And the boyfriend was nowhere to be found.”

Mary Ellen had been savagely beaten, with huge bruises all over her body. A large one on her neck was in the pattern of a shoe—the same shoe print that was found in dust in the dining room. “I could tell that she had run all over the house, trying to avoid whoever had eventually killed her,” Melissa said, of the crime scene. “There was a clump of hair found on the second floor, and blood swipes leading down the stairs. And the soles of her feet were as black as coal where she had continued to run around in the basement.”

The home of Mary Ellen Touris—Cranford, New Jersey.
COURTESY OF THE UNION COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE, NEW JERSEY

Detectives searched the entire county for the boyfriend, Christopher Pessolano, who had ironically been stopped earlier that day for driving erratically, but let go. He was finally tracked down in a hotel room, with a pile of bloody clothes stashed in the corner. They found his car also, with blood smeared in it. Though Pessolano immediately claimed that the blood was not Mary Ellen’s, the lab determined that it was. “Were there any other pieces of evidence that tied Pessolano to the crime?” we asked, as we exited the car back at the department. “No, he lived there, so his shoe prints, DNA, and fingerprints would be there,” Melissa responded. “It was the blood evidence found elsewhere that tied him back to the crime.” Pessolano ultimately pleaded guilty and was charged with first-degree murder and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.

“We’re in charge of fingerprinting and fingerprints,” Melissa said to us the next morning, our last day in Union County. We walked outside and under the jail to where the fingerprinting is conducted. Sheriff’s offices across the United States are traditionally in charge of fingerprinting people who have been arrested and booking prisoners into incarceration. In Union County, the crime scene unit is in charge of fingerprinting everybody who was committed to jail the night before. They are also, unfortunately, in charge of taking the DNA swabs. “Who gets swabbed?” we asked Sergeant DeFilippo as Frankie struggled to roll one arrestee’s fingerprints properly. “Everybody convicted of an indictable offense,” she answered, eyeing Frankie’s growing frustration. Little known to all those wannabe CSIs are some of the more menial tasks involved, such as trying to get a good set of prints while wrestling drunks and others not too happy with the po-pos. But even worse than that is the swabbing. People with bleeding gums or those who haven’t bathed since God knows when aren’t too helpful about having the inside of their mouths swabbed with a giant cotton swab. Some lick it, some bite it, and some even swallow it. Other glamorous duties of the CSI include pubic hair combing; fingernail and toenail scraping; penile, vaginal, and anal swabs; and collecting vomit and fecal matter. Ah yes, the real life of a crime scene investigator that television never shows.

After watching the printing and the swabbing, we walked back to the department to process some evidence. Since graduating from the program, Union County CSIs have become locally known gurus in crime scene processing. Surrounding jurisdictions sometimes get Melissa and her guys to process evidence from their cases. Many things have changed in the unit since Melissa returned from her training, from large things like replacing 35-mm film cameras with digital cameras to small things like the way they dress, moving to the more appropriate BDU (battle dress uniform). The BDU is the typical uniform worn by crime scene investigators as well as other law enforcement officers. This rugged uniform gets its name from the standard-issue uniform that the U.S. military wore in combat.

They also commandeered a supply closet and turned it into a processing lab, just big enough for a couple of superglue-fuming hoods. An officer had given them a piece of a plastic bag from the scene of a robbery. “We’ll try it,” DeFilippo said. It takes about twelve to fifteen minutes for quick superglue-fuming to find fingerprints on an item; alas, after fifteen minutes, no prints appeared. “It’s like that sometimes,” she said, with resignation.

Melissa DeFilippo and her partner looking at the results
of superglue-fuming on a piece of evidence.
HALLCOX & WELCH, LLC

We then moved over to Adrian, who was preparing to appear in court and making a very large representation of an arrested suspect’s fingerprints. One side of the posterboard had an enlarged version of the actual print, and the other side showed the comparison print from the scene, with minutiae highlighted to show the identifying characteristics that made the fingerprint unique. “Adrian, have you used any technique from the training at a scene recently?” we asked her as she stared intently at her fingerprint posters. “Yeah, I had this one case where I used Bluestar in a bathroom and the sink lit up like a Christmas tree,” she responded gleefully. Bluestar is one of the chemical products that we were first introduced to by one of our students at the academy. Bluestar is essentially luminol on steroids. Both products are latent blood reagents that react to the trace proteins found in blood. They are both particularly useful when trying to detect trace amounts of blood left behind after cleanup with a cleaning agent such as bleach. Both sparkle like fireworks in reaction with bleach, but the places that continue to stay lit, so to speak, is where the blood evidence is. Unlike luminol, which must be used in complete darkness, Bluestar can be used where there is a fair amount of light. Not only that, but Bluestar simply reacts stronger and longer to trace amounts of blood evidence. Bluestar is fast becoming the new standard in blood detection.

Melissa, Adrian, Frankie, and the other CSIs had been introduced to Bluestar at the academy, but the case Adrian mentioned had been her first opportunity to use it on a real case. The suspect in the case was trying to cover up everything. It turned out to be a sexual homicide, but there was very little blood evidence. The suspect said that as he was “doing her,” the victim’s breathing got slower and slower, and he claimed that she’d basically perished while in the throes of passion. He also said there wasn’t much blood, but he had certainly cleaned up his mess, washing his hands, towels, and other objects in and around the bathroom. That’s where Adrian used the Bluestar to prove that the suspect had been calculated in his actions and in fact had cleaned up a lot of blood, a hell of a lot of blood. “He even changed her shirt after she died,” Adrian noted. Ironically, and no one knows if it was on purpose, the shirt he put on his victim had the sentence “God has treated me well” printed across the front of it in large purple letters. “There wasn’t a whole lot of blood at the scene, but the bathroom sink really lit up. People are stupid; they can’t ever clean up enough.”

Adrian Furman working on her fingerprint chart for court.
HALLCOX & WELCH, LLC

We then moved back into the video room with Melissa to ask her a few last questions before we broke for the night, so we could finish the evening with a home cooked meal at the DeFilippos’ house before we departed to head back to Tennessee.

“Is there a case that eats at you?” we asked Sergeant DeFilippo, as we had every other CSI we visited with on our road adventure.