Homicide (14 page)

Of course, a detective knows that a street murder carries its own advantages, notably the possibility of witnesses, the second element of the investigative triad. For this reason, one alternative has long held a special place in the catalogue of urban violence, particularly in a rowhouse city such as Baltimore, where every block has a rear promenade. Kill someone in an alley and you minimize the risks of both physical evidence and witnesses. In Baltimore, the report of a body in an alley is bound to bring groans and other guttural noises from the throat of a responding homicide detective.

Only one scenario, in fact, offers less hope than a body in an alley. When a Baltimore homicide detective is called to the woods and brambles along the far western edge of the city, it can only mean that one of the city’s inhabitants has done a very bad thing and done it very, very well. For two generations, Leakin Park has been Baltimore’s favored dumping ground for those who depart this vale by bullet or blade. A sprawling, thickly wooded wilderness surrounding a small stream
known as the Gywnns Falls, the park has been the scene of so many unlicensed interments as to warrant consideration as a city cemetery. In New York, they use the Jersey marshes or the city’s rivers; in Miami, the Everglades; in New Orleans, the bayou. In Baltimore, the odd, inconvenient corpse is often planted along the winding shoulders of Franklintown Road. Police department legend includes one story, apocryphal perhaps, in which a class of trainees searching one quadrant of the park for a missing person was reminded by a Southwestern District shift commander, with tongue planted in cheek, that they were looking for one body in particular: “If you go grabbing at every one you find, we’ll be here all day.”

Veteran detectives declare that even the most unremarkable crime scenes offer some information about the crime. After all, even a body in an alley leaves a detective with questions: What was the dead man doing in that alley? Where did he come from? Who was he with? But a dump job, in Leakin Park or in an alley, in a vacant house or a car trunk, offers nothing. It stands mute to the relationship between the killer, the victim and the scene itself. By definition, a dump job strips a murder of any meaningful chronology and—with the exception of whatever items are abandoned with the body—of physical evidence.

Whatever and wherever the scene, its value as the baseline of a murder investigation depends entirely on the detective—his ability to keep out the rabble and maintain the scene itself; his capacity for observation, for contemplating the scene in its totality, in its parts, and from every conceivable angle; his willingness to perform every task that could possibly yield evidence from a particular scene; his common sense in avoiding those procedures that would be meaningless or futile.

The process is subjective. Even the best investigators will admit that no matter how much evidence is pulled from a scene, a detective will invariably return to the homicide office with the discomforting knowledge that something was missed. It is a truth that veterans impress upon new detectives, a truth that emphasizes the elusive quality of the crime scene itself.

Whatever happens before the scene is secured can’t be controlled and in the wake of a shooting or stabbing, no one objects to the behavior of uniformed officers, paramedics or bystanders who alter a scene in an effort to disarm the participants or administer aid to the victim. But apart from such necessary actions, the first uniform at the site of a murder is supposed to preserve the scene from being trampled, not only by the locals, but by his fellow officers as well. For the first officer and those who
arrive after him, good police work also means grabbing hold of any potential witnesses who happen to be standing around.

The first officer’s duties end upon the arrival of a downtown detective, who, if he knows his business, will start by slowing everything down to a crawl, making it much more difficult for anyone to express stupidity in any truly meaningful way. The more complex the scene, the slower the process, giving the detective some semblance of control over the uniforms, the civilian witnesses, the bystanders, the crime lab technicians, the ME’s attendants, the secondary detectives, the shift commanders and every other human being in the vicinity. With the exception of the civilians, most of this crowd will know the drill and can be trusted to do their jobs, but as in everything else, assumption is mother and midwife to the most egregious mistakes.

Before this year is out, a detective on Stanton’s shift will arrive at a scene to find that a novice team of paramedics has taken a dead person—a very dead person—for a last ride to a nearby emergency room. There they will be told that it is hospital policy to accept only those patients who are at least clinging to life. The flustered paramedics will mull this over and then decide to take the body back to the street. Upon their return to the death scene, this plan will be given tentative approval by the uniforms, who assume that the ambulance crew must know its business. No doubt the officers would then have done their best to place the cadaver in its original position had not the detective arrived to say thank you, but no thank you. Let’s just say the hell with it and take the poor guy down to the autopsy room.

Likewise, Robert McAllister, a seasoned detective and a veteran of several hundred crime scenes, will soon find himself standing in a Pimlico kitchen above the blood-soaked body of an eighty-one-year-old man, stabbed forty or fifty times in a brutal housebreaking. On a dresser in a back bedroom is the bent-blade murder weapon, caked with dried blood. So preposterous is it that anyone would disturb such a glaring evidentiary item that McAllister will think it unnecessary to warn against doing so. This crime of omission ensures that a young officer, fresh to the street, will wander into the bedroom, pick up the knife by its hilt and carry it into the kitchen.

“I found this in the bedroom,” she will say. “Is it important?”

Assuming that such calamities are avoided and the scene preserved, what remains for the detective is to find and extract the available evidence. This is not done by vacuuming every room, fingerprinting every
flat surface, and taking every beer can, ashtray, shred of paper and photo album down to evidence control. Discretion and common sense are valued as much as diligence, and a detective unable to discern the differences among probabilities, possibilities and the weakest kind of long shots soon finds that he risks overloading the evidence recovery process.

Remember, for instance, that the overworked examiners in the ballistics lab are weeks behind on projectile comparisons. Do you want them to compare your .32 slug with other .32-caliber shootings this year, or should they go back another year? Likewise for the fingerprint examiners, who in addition to the open murders are handling latents from burglaries, robberies and half a dozen other types of crime. Do you tell the lab techs to dust surfaces in rooms that seem to be undisturbed and apart from the scene, or do you have them concentrate on objects that appear to be moved and that are close to the death scene? When an elderly woman is strangled in bed, do you vacuum every room in the house, knowing how long it will take the trace lab to go through one room’s worth of dirt and lint, hair and fiber? Or, knowing that there wasn’t any far-flung, room-by-room struggle, do you instead have the ME’s people carefully wrap the body in the sheets, preserving any hairs or fibers that came loose during the action near the bed?

With only a few available on each shift to process evidence, the lab techs themselves are a limited resource. The tech working your scene may have been pulled off a commercial robbery to work this homicide or may be needed a half hour later to work another shooting on the opposite side of town. And your own time is equally precious. On a jumping midnight shift, the hours you could spend at one scene might be divided between two homicides and a police shooting. And even with a single murder, hours spent at a scene have to be measured against time that could be spent interviewing witnesses who are waiting downtown.

Every scene is different, and the same detective who requires twenty minutes at a street shooting may spend twelve hours to process a double stabbing inside a two-story rowhouse. A sense of balance is required at both scenes, an understanding of what has to be done and what can reasonably be done to produce evidence. Also required is the persistence to oversee the essentials, to make sure that what’s being done is done correctly. On every shift, there are those lab techs who arrive at complex crime scenes and provoke sighs of relief from detectives, just as there are others who can’t lift a usable print if a suspect’s hand is attached to it. And if you want the photos to show the location of critical pieces of
evidence, you better say as much, or the five-by-eight glossies will come back with every angle but the one you need.

These are the basic requirements. But there is something else about crime scenes, an intangible on the continuum between honed experience and pure instinct. An ordinary person, even an observant person, looks at a scene, takes in many of the details and manages a general assessment. A good detective looks at the same scene and comprehends the pieces as part of a greater whole. He somehow manages to isolate the important details, to see those items that conform to the scene, those that conflict, and those that are inexplicably absent. He who speaks of Zen and the Art of Death Investigation to a Baltimore homicide detective is handed a Miller Lite and told to stop talking communist hippie bullshit. But some of what happens at a crime scene, if not exactly antirational, is decidedly intuitive.

There is little else to explain Terry McLarney staring at the seminude body of an elderly woman, rigored in her bed with no apparent trauma, and deciding correctly—on the basis of an open window and a single stray pubic hair on the sheet—that he is working a rape-murder.

Or Donald Worden, walking down an empty East Baltimore street minutes after a fatal shooting, putting his hand on the hood of one parked car out of twenty and feeling the heat of an engine—a sure sign that the car was recently occupied by persons who fled rather than be identified as witnesses. “There was some condensation on the back window,” he says later, shrugging. “And it was a little ways from the curb, like the driver parked it in a hurry.”

Or Donald Steinhice, a veteran from Stanton’s shift, who is entirely convinced that the woman hanging from the ceiling of her bedroom has taken her own life, but somehow can’t leave the room until one last detail is settled in his mind. He sits there in the shadow of the dead woman for half an hour, staring at a pair of bedroom slippers on the floor below the body. The left slipper is below the right foot, the right below the left. Was she wearing the slippers on the wrong feet? Or did someone else, someone who staged the scene, place the slippers there?

“It was the only thing about that scene that really bothered me, and it bothered me for a good long while,” he later recalls, “until I thought about how a person takes off their bedroom slippers.”

Steinhice finally imagines the woman crossing her legs so as to wrap the toe of one slipper around the heel of the other, prying the slipper off
from the back—a common maneuver that would leave the slippers on opposite sides.

“After that,” he says, “I could leave.”

F
RIDAY
, F
EBRUARY 5

In the clear sunlight of a winter morning, the academy trainees feel no sense of foreboding in the alley behind the rowhouses on Newington Avenue. As they crawl through its recesses and kick through its clutter, they find it to be an alley like any other.

Dressed in the khaki uniforms of the Education and Training Division, the class of thirty-two trainees begins the second day of the Latonya Wallace investigation by moving slowly through the alley and the back yards of every house in the block bounded by Newington and Whitelock, Park and Callow. They search inches at a time, stepping only where they have already searched, picking up each piece of trash with great care, then setting it down with the same deliberation.

“Go slowly. Check every inch of your yard,” Dave Brown tells the class. “If you find something—anything—don’t move it. Just go and grab a detective.”

“And don’t be afraid to ask questions,” adds Rich Garvey. “There’s no such thing as a stupid question. Or at least for right now, we’re going to pretend that there isn’t.”

Earlier, watching the trainees bound off a police department bus and count off for their instructor, Garvey expressed misgivings. Allowing a herd of new recruits to graze through a crime scene had all the makings of what detectives and military men like to call a clusterfuck. Visions of self-satisfied cadets trampling over blood trails and kicking tiny bits of evidence into sewer drains danced in Garvey’s head. On the other hand, he reasoned, a lot of ground can be covered with thirty-two interested persons, and at this point, the Latonya Wallace probe needs all the help it can get.

Once loosed upon the alley, the trainees are, to no one’s surprise, genuinely interested. Most of them attack the chore with zeal, picking through piles of garbage and dead leaves with all the fervor and devotion of the newly converted. It’s quite a sight, prompting Garvey to wonder what primal force of nature could inspire thirty patrol veterans to get down on their hands and knees in a Reservoir Hill alley.

The detectives divide the recruits into pairs and assign each to a rear yard behind the 700 block of Newington Avenue as well as the yards on
Park and Callow avenues, which form the east and west boundaries of the block in which the child was found. There are no yards or open areas behind the block’s northern boundary, Whitelock Street; there, a red brick warehouse backs right up to the alley. The search takes more than an hour, with the trainees recovering three steak knives, one butter knife and one kitchen carving utensil—all marred by more rust than could accumulate on a murder weapon overnight. Also harvested are a variety of hypodermic syringes, an item commonly discarded by the local citizenry and of no particular interest to the detectives, as well as combs, hair braids, assorted pieces of clothing and a child’s dress shoe—none of it related to the crime. One enterprising recruit produces, from the rear yard of 704 Newington, a clear plastic bag half filled with a dull yellow liquid.