Body Parts (35 page)

Canty asked Freeman, who had told the jury he had a psychology degree, if looking at the floor was another symptom of Wayne’s depression.

“It can be,” Freeman said, adding that, as Canty suggested, it could also be an indication of shame.

One day when Mazurek was questioning one of the coroners on the stand, some schoolchildren on a field trip filed into the courtroom and sat in the back row.

During the morning recess, Wayne was sitting at the counsel table, and the judge came down from the bench to chat with the kids and answer some of their questions.

“What kind of trial is this?” one of them asked.

“It’s a murder case,” Smith replied.

Eventually, the children wanted to know where the murderer was sitting, but the judge was reticent to answer.

Wayne, who was wearing his sport coat and tie, turned toward the kids, raised his hand, smiled, and waved.

On March 29, Dianne Vertes, the pathologist who did the autopsy on Lanett White, testified that the toxicology test of the victim’s chest blood showed .09 percent ethanol, or alcohol, but noted that this level can increase after death. (California’s legal limit for driving under the influence is .08 percent.)

Vertes said the blood also showed a level of .23 micrograms per milliliter of methamphetamine, or speed, which would not change upon death, but she noted that neither substance, nor a combination of the two, would have caused her death.

Mazurek asked Vertes to describe what the jury was seeing in a particular photo of Lanett’s neck.

Vertes testified that the pattern of red marks above the very pale area was consistent with someone having pressed a chain against her skin with an object. Skin goes pale, she said, when blood has been drained from it.

Asked if the marks were consistent with someone strangling Lanett, with, say, a nylon braided rope, Vertes said yes.

On cross-examination, Mapes began what would be a series of questions aimed at raising the possibility that these women died as a result of their own drug habits, not by Wayne squeezing their necks to cut off blood to their brains.

Mapes asked if what Vertes saw in the autopsy could also be consistent with a carotid hold used during erotic asphyxia.

“Yes,” she said.

“And not the strangulation by ligature, as Mr. Mazurek refers to it?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

Mapes moved on to the toxicology results and asked if people who use methamphetamine can develop arrhythmias, which are abnormal changes to the heart rhythm.

“Absolutely,” Vertes said.

Because speed itself could cause such a change to the heart rhythm, Mapes asked if the chances of developing an arrhythmia were even greater for people engaged in erotic asphyxia while they were high on meth.

“There are so many factors involved in answering that question, that, I mean, it’s, like, anything is possible,” Vertes said. “I mean, I could give you another scenario, too, that’s just as likely.”

“Well, the fact is, we don’t know what happened?” Mapes asked.

“We don’t know what happened. And it’s possible.”

Mapes pointed out that the toxicology results showed no trace of amphetamine, which shows up in the blood after the body starts to metabolize the meth, so he concluded that Lanett was high when she died.

“So we only see the parent drug, which means it hadn’t started to wear off?” Mapes asked.

“Yes.”

Next, Mazurek called Mike Jones, the lead detective on Lanett’s case. Jones testified that after interviewing Lanett’s family and friends, he “basically ended up following some leads that turned out to go nowhere” until Wayne surrendered to authorities.

Mazurek passed out transcripts to the jury and played the tape of the two-and-a-half-hour interview by Jones and his partner, Joe Herrera, so the panel could hear Wayne’s own words for itself. He would do the same thing before calling detectives from each of the other counties, playing their respective interview tapes and questioning them about Wayne’s “amnesia” about the killings.

Under cross-examination by Canty, Jones acknowledged that he’d encountered cases involving sexual asphyxia and carotid holds during his time on sex detail.

Canty asked him to demonstrate the practice to the jury.

“It’s actually two pressure points, and it’s on the side of the neck at the carotid veins, which would be in this position about right here,” Jones said, placing his fingers against his own neck.

Jones explained that the idea was to apply enough pressure to cut off blood and/or oxygen to the brain, both of which ultimately translate into a lack of oxygen and result in a partial or full state of unconsciousness.

“The reason again that you learned of this in your training . . . is that [it] in some manner increases the pleasures associated with the orgasmic event?” Canty asked, trying to make the practice seem less malevolent.

Jones acknowledged that it was called autoerotic asphyxia when a person attempted to do it to himself, and that some couples also engaged in the practice.

“Is it part of your training and experience that sometimes people engaging in this behavior can make a mistake and hold the pressure too long, deprive the other person of oxygen . . . thereby causing significant injury or death?” Canty asked.

Jones said yes. He’d never seen that in couples, but he said, “I’m sure it’s possible.”

On redirect by Mazurek, Jones said Wayne did not seem overly tired during the interview, nor did he seem to have problems understanding any questions or say he was too tired and ask to stop.

“People engage in erotic asphyxia sometimes for the pleasure of the person that’s being restrained, is that correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“And sometimes it is for the pleasure of the person that’s doing the restraining?”

“That is correct also.”

Mazurek reiterated Canty’s question about somebody making a mistake while engaging in this practice.

“Probably not likely that somebody would make four mistakes?” Mazurek asked.

“Probably not.”

On Monday, April 10, Mazurek called Donna Brown, the pathologist who did the autopsy on Tina Gibbs, referring to whatever photos the judge had allowed after Canty’s objections to virtually all of those Mazurek wanted to show.

As Brown described the bruises in Tina’s neck, Mazurek asked her to demonstrate how someone would cause such injuries. She did so, and Judge Smith translated for the court reporter.

“For the record, you’re indicating a hand around either the chin or throat area, where you’re separating your thumb from the other fingers, the thumb being on one side of the neck and the rest of the fingers on the other side of the neck?”

“Yes,” she said.

She then described the broken bones, saying the injuries were consistent with “manual strangulation with the hands. . . . Tina died because of asphyxia. She couldn’t breathe because she was strangled.”

Anticipating Mapes’s question on cross that arrhythmias had caused Tina’s death, Mazurek asked Brown if she’d explored any possible causes for a natural death.

“Yes,” Brown said. “And she was pretty healthy.”

On cross-examination, Mapes questioned Brown about the amounts of cocaine and alcohol found in Tina’s blood, which were 3,070 nanograms per milliliter, and .12 percent, respectively. (Depending on the state, 50 to 300 nanograms per milliliter of cocaine is considered a positive test result.)

Brown noted that decomposition could have contributed to the alcohol level, despite her body being found in cold water.

As expected, Mapes did bring up the possibility of arrhythmia caused by the cocaine, complicated by the sexual asphyxiation, as Tina struggled for air. Pointing to an autopsy photo, Mapes then tried to get Brown to say that the marks on Tina’s neck and face could have been caused by someone doing CPR.

“It’s conceivable that that’s possible?”

But Brown wouldn’t go there. “I don’t think it’s very possible. You’d have to use two hands, one to hold the nose and the other to stabilize the jaw.”

On redirect, Mazurek brought that point home, saying the bruising “to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, [was] not done while somebody was rendering CPR to her, correct?” Or for that matter, he added, the ligature marks around her neck.

“Correct,” she said.

Asked how much pressure it would take to fracture someone’s thyroid cartilage, she said, “It would be a large amount. Someone would have to do it, more likely, in the heat of anger or something like that, where their force would be applied more than” ordinary CPR.

With erotic asphyxiation, she said, people “pass out to the point where they just block main vessels. They don’t break larynx and thyroid cartilages and hyoid bones.”

Before the next witness, Canty and Mapes renewed their objection to the upcoming testimony of “Sonoma County Doe,” aka Rachel Holt, in light of the testimony by the three previous pathologists about injuries to the victims that were completely different from Rachel’s.

“There hasn’t been any evidence on any of the victims about premortem tying up,” burns to the vagina, or bruising to the breast, Mapes said.

Canty noted that there were a number of other dissimilarities between the crimes, alleging that Jane Doe died at Clam Beach after Wayne drove her there in a private vehicle, and Tina Gibbs died in a motel in Las Vegas, not in Wayne’s truck.

But none of this had come out at trial.

“Well, that’s not what we have in evidence,” Mazurek said.

Mazurek said the testimony would establish similarities in intent and motive, and underscore the crucial commonality that most, if not all, of Wayne’s victims were strangled after getting into his truck and having sex in the sleeper.

“She can talk about his intent was clearly not to satisfy her sexually, but to satisfy himself sexually through the use of strangulation, ligatures around her neck, being rendered unconscious, being revived, being rendered unconscious, several times,” he said. “How he engaged in . . . what I’m going to term sadistic acts. . . . [She] can testify this is what he clearly engaged in, were conscious choices, not accidents.”

Judge Smith ruled that the pattern of injuries and sexual activity was consistent overall, making the testimony of “Sonoma County Doe” “highly relevant,” certainly enough to outweigh any potential prejudicial impact.

Next up was Dr. Steven Trenkle, who conducted the autopsy on Patricia Tamez. Mazurek planned to use his testimony to paint Wayne as a monster who tortured and inflicted pain on his victims while they were still alive.

Trenkle testified that Patricia may not have been conscious when her back was broken, but she was still breathing.

“Her heart was beating and blood was circulating,” he said, adding that it was the type of injury you might see in an automobile accident, or when someone fell and landed on their back when it was acutely hyperextended or stretched backward, or when someone was struck with a hard blow, kicked with a boot, or kneed in the back. But, he said, it could not have been caused by someone doing CPR on a mattress in the back of a truck.

Referring to the step or ledge beneath the truck’s passenger-side door, Mazurek asked, “What if they fell on that as they were pulled out of the cab?”

“Oh, that might do it, yes.”

Trenkle explained that if a person’s carotid and vertebral arteries were cut off at the neck, he would be unconscious within ten seconds.

“How long would you have to restrict blood flow to the brain for it to be fatal?”

“It would be generally in the area of five minutes. . . . Some people might be dead after three minutes, and others, after six or seven minutes, they might recover.”

“But at three to five minutes, you’ve got to be choking somebody out for that period of time consistently to restrict the blood flow and cause death?”

“Yes.”

Trenkle said he determined the cause of Patricia’s death to be manual strangulation, meaning not by a rope or tie.

On cross-examination by Mapes, Trenkle said he determined that she was dead by the time her body was placed in the water.

Again, Mapes tried to raise the possibility that Patricia died as a result of erotic asphyxia, but this line of questioning did not go so well for the defense.

“I think the injuries to the neck could occur in a sexual asphyxia scenario, sure,” Trenkle said. But, he added, “What I know of sexual asphyxia doesn’t include breaking someone’s back.”

Although no drugs were found in Patricia’s blood, Mapes still tried to link her death to her past abuse. He noted that minuscule amounts would not have been detected by the toxicology tests and that a meth user can develop an enlarged heart, as Patricia had.

Trying to undo the damage caused by the image of Wayne squeezing these women’s necks for five minutes straight, Mapes went down the same road of arrhythmia with Trenkle as he had with the other pathologists, suggesting that such heart problems could have contributed to the deaths during the erotic asphyxia.

But Mazurek cut through the potential distraction for the jury on redirect.

“There’s no physical evidence of a heart arrhythmia?” he asked.

“No,” Trenkle replied.

“Even assuming Miss Tamez had an arrhythmia under the defense’s scenarios, it wouldn’t have happened if she . . . wasn’t being strangled, correct?”

“That’s the way I interpreted his scenario.”

“And, of course, Miss Tamez wouldn’t have died at this time had she not been strangled, correct?”

“Correct, yes.”

On Tuesday, April 11, Rachel Holt was sworn in as “Sonoma County Doe.” Because she was the only living victim who would testify about her experience in Wayne’s big black truck, her testimony was pivotal for the prosecution.

As allowed under the law for rape victims, she brought an unidentified person to sit with her at the witness stand.

Acknowledging that she was nervous, she testified that she was living in San Francisco and had continued to work as a prostitute since the incident with Wayne.