Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist (15 page)

Of course, none of this proved that Morris herself—or even Shanna Hall—killed Jenkins as I suspected one of them did. But it did help to convince the jury that there was reasonable doubt Alan Gell pulled the trigger. Gell was finally cleared of the murder of Allen Ray Jenkins in early 2004 and released from prison after spending more than nine years on death row. He was a troubled young man in many ways—guilty of car theft and drug dealing—but he was innocent of killing Allen Jenkins. No one else has ever been charged in the killing.

Gell went on to get a college education and to become an outspoken anti-death-penalty activist, though he later went back to prison for having sex with yet another fifteen-year-old girlfriend, sentenced ironically by the same judge who presided over the earlier trial that ended in his acquittal.

These are just four of the unique cases I’ve been privileged to take part in through my consulting efforts. I consider myself fortunate to be in this profession. I enjoy my work immensely. It’s fascinating. It’s educational. And it helps to ensure that justice is done. I meet some of the most brilliant and dedicated people handling both prosecution and defense around the United States and often outside it, not to mention
coming up against a good number of brilliant minds on the criminal side. I learn more about crime scene reconstruction and blood pattern analysis with every new case. Bloodstains can be divided into a few basic categories, and bloodshed itself follows the simple laws of physics. But there is no such thing as routine when it comes to murder, as you will see in the following chapter.

I
STARED AT THE
reddish brown swirls of blood winding over the wall. In thirty-plus years of police work and crime scene reconstruction, I had never seen anything like them. The case itself was straightforward. Double homicide. The murder victims, a middle-aged man and woman. The weapon, a rifle. The location, the outskirts of Las Vegas. She had been killed first, and he had made the mistake of coming downstairs to see what was going on. The local criminalist, who asked me to consult on the blood evidence, had filled me in on their history, and we were all convinced that the killing was Mob related.

But these bloody spirals were a mystery. They weren’t from a
victim’s hand clutching at the wall for support. They weren’t from a murderer’s sleeve brushing the wall as he hurried out. They weren’t a secret message written cryptically in a dead man’s blood. I had seen all of those before, and this was different.

“So, what do you think?” asked one of the local officers.

“No idea,” I was tempted to say. But instead, I squinted more closely at the grotesque swirls, trying to force myself to concentrate, to stretch my tired mind beyond the usual causes and conclusions I would determine in more ordinary crime scenes. Nothing.

I scanned the pictures of the crime scene for what seemed like the hundredth time, desperate to catch sight of some sort of clue—some crucial, hidden piece of the puzzle I had overlooked. Then I saw it in the corner of one photo. Lying at the base of the bloody stairs was a large round object partially obscured by a blanket. The pattern looked vaguely familiar to me.

Suddenly the marks made perfect sense. I couldn’t help grinning a little.

“Did you figure it out?” asked the cop, watching me closely.

“I did,” I told him. “You’ll never believe what caused those blood patterns. This couple has a dog, don’t they.”

“Yeah,” he said, surprised. “They do.”

“Must be a big dog, judging from the size of that bed,” I said, pointing to the edge of the photo, where part of a large, round dog bed was visible. There was a blanket draped over it just like one my in-laws had for a dog at their house back in Oregon.

“As a matter of fact, it is.”

“I’m guessing the dog is just about the same height as those blood patterns,” I said. The blotches swam into focus as clearly as if a microscope lens had been adjusted. I could see now that they were imprints of a dog’s muzzle pressed repeatedly against the wall.
Once you knew what you were looking at, you could even discern the outline of a canine nose in the middle of each. The swirls were tongue marks where the dog had licked its owners’ blood off the walls.

The fact that a family pet’s innocent actions could manage to baffle every crime expert scrutinizing the bloody scene just described is less surprising than you might think. It takes years of going to crime scenes to develop skill in interpreting blood patterns, years of encountering bizarre examples like the Las Vegas dog case to build a library of knowledge. My own mistakes have been my best teacher. By now, I’ve spent decades learning from them. Though academic research has brought invaluable advances to the field, no academic could walk into a room where a murder occurred and reconstruct the crime or use the blood clues to tell whether an eyewitness is lying about what he saw. To do that, you need savvy, street sense, and a lot of experience with witnesses, suspects, and dead bodies.

But I can teach you the basics of beginning blood pattern analysis to help you develop a foundation—one you could never build by watching
CSI
or other crime dramas. If you were a homicide detective, a medical examiner, or another crime-solving professional sitting in on one of my workshops to sharpen your skills of detection, here are some of the bloodstain fundamentals we would cover, along with the basics on bullet trajectories and wound patterns.

As you know from the chapters you’ve already read, the stains that result when blood spatters are divided into three main categories. These categories are determined by how much force went into the source providing the blood (usually a human body, but in my experiments a puddle of cows’ blood) and the size, shape, and number of blood droplets that resulted from the impact. The three basic types of stains you find at murder scenes are low-velocity spatter, medium-velocity spatter, and high-velocity spatter. Being able to distinguish one group from another by the telltale lines, voids, and other calling cards they leave can tell you what kind of weapon was used, how the murder unfolded, and sometimes even the killer’s identity.

A crime scene’s combination of blood spatter types
.

Low-velocity blood patterns
occur when a minimal amount of force is used to spatter blood or when gravity alone causes blood to drip. They are characterized by large drops, much bigger than the ones
you see in medium-or high-velocity blood spatter. A trail of blood droplets that dribbled from a murderer’s hands, clothing, or weapon as he left the crime scene would qualify as a low-velocity blood pattern. So would blood that dripped or flowed from a victim’s wounds as he struggled to get away or reach for a phone to call for help.

Another common low-velocity pattern is
blood-into-blood
—where blood drips repeatedly into an existing pool or puddle of blood, as in the John Lee Hipsher throat-cutting case or the castrations we used to do on the bulls at our farm. One of its hallmarks is
satellite spatter
—smaller droplets that bounce out to the sides of a larger central pool when they hit it. Being able to read blood-into-blood patterns helps you gauge the duration of an attack and the position of both attacker and victim. In the Hipsher case, it told us the victim bled for quite some time before he died and provided a vital clue in distinguishing murder from self-defense.

Blood transfers
occur when an object that has wet blood on it comes in contact with another object. Let’s say a killer hoping to hide the evidence of his crime drags his victim’s body to his car, leaving a bloody swath behind him in the grass. Then he sets the hammer he used in the murder down momentarily while he hoists the body into the trunk, creating a bloody imprint of part of his weapon on the pavement next to the car. Both marks would be classified as blood transfers.

Blood-into-blood

The sorts of transfers cops find most often at crime scenes are hair transfers, fabric transfers, hand transfers, and weapon transfers. Each generates a distinctive pattern. The blood left on the barn wall in the Donna Howard “horse kick” case, as you’ll recall, left a classic hair transfer pattern on the wood—long, thin symmetrical lines that looked almost as if a paintbrush had been dragged over the surface. Blood is often heaviest at the point of contact, with the lines tapering off in the direction the blood source moved. Had Howard’s husband’s version of events been true, we would have seen a hair impact pattern instead—a much more chaotic, random cluster of thick and thin overlapping lines with some satellite spatter. Blood has to have time to pool in the hair in order to create an impact pattern—something that didn’t happen in the Howard murder.

Hair impact

The blood smeared inside Eric Humbert’s Chevy hatchback in the Green Thread Mystery left a unique fabric transfer pattern that eventually clued us in to the fact that a body wearing a ribbed winter hat had been shoved into the storage space, the bloodied cap brushing the car’s upholstery as it entered. Obviously, different types of hair (straight, curly, short, long) create slightly different patterns, as do different types of fabrics.

Any item soaked or spattered with wet blood can leave a transfer pattern at a crime scene. Say the hypothetical hammer killer was having trouble moving his victim’s body, so he wrapped it in a blanket or plastic drop cloth to make it easier to drag. If his victim’s blood soaked through the blanket or leaked through a hole in the plastic, investigators would spot a transfer pattern showing that something bloody had been dragged through the grass, assuming the blood was still wet when he moved the body. If he stepped in his victim’s blood when he was wrapping up the body, the bloody footprints his shoes made would be classified as a transfer pattern, too.

A
swipe
refers to blood that gets smeared as you move a bloody source across an unsoiled surface. Maybe in his hurry the killer just described slammed his trunk, failing to notice that his fingertips brushed the exterior of his car and left blood on it. If so, he would leave a classic blood swipe on the car. When a swipe is feathered on one side, it usually suggests that Whatever or whoever made the mark moved in the direction of the feathering.