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  I was still a minority, but no longer a minority of one. I believe, though, that the case is still carried as an unsolved murder.

  Knowing what to ask for. Knowing how to interpret what you get. That was important to the investigator's role in the autopsy when Gross was writing his first criminology text, and that's what's important today—not that the investigator know how the tests work, but that the investigator know what to ask for.

  And what can, and what cannot, be done.

  That's important for the writer, too.

  TABLE 8__

  The Person Who Finds the Body

  Some writers, such as P.D. James and Dorothy Sayers, like to spend a good bit of time examining the reactions of the first person -usually uninvolved and innocent—who finds the body. What will such a person notice? Think about ways you can use these facts to create red herrings.

  • If there is blood and gashing, an unexpecting (and unsuspecting) discoverer of the body will rarely see past those injuries. S/he will not, later, be able to describe clothing, hair, eyes and so forth.

  • If the victim was strangled, the discoverer will notice if the body is hanging but may not otherwise notice anything around the neck, as his/her attention will be focused on the protruding tongue, bulging eyes, swollen and suffused face, and froth (often bloody) around the mouth. If a male strangulation victim is naked, the discoverer may notice the erect or semi-erect penis. Again, clothing, coloring, and so forth almost certainly will go unnoticed.

  • Even in natural death, there may be a deceptive appearance of violence which will be very distressing to the finder. In some cases, the victim of a heart attack may bite his tongue, bleed from the mouth and nose, and dash about knocking things over, presenting the exact appearance of a violent struggle. In other cases, the heart attack victim will die instantly; I have seen such victims found hours after death still sitting on the toilet or leaning over the fence of a dog kennel.

  • If the victim has been dead several days, the first thing noticeable is the odor. I have heard it described as sickly sweetish, but it doesn't seem sweetish to me. I find it horrible and indescribable. It is like nothing else including animal carrion, and it cannot be mistaken for anything else even by a person who has never smelled it before. Even a fresh corpse, dead of violence, has a smell that seems to be comprised of stale raw meat, stale blood, and combined feces and urine, as the sphincters normally relax in death and release feces and urine.

  • The corpse dead several days, unless it has been kept extremely

  cold, will have begun to rot. The entire body will be swollen with the bruise-like colors of decay. A bluish film may cover the open eyes, making even dark eyes appear blue. By this time, body fluids have soaked clothing, making it harder to observe so that even a normally good observer may not be able to distinguish color of anything but the victim's hair.

  • A body that has spent some time in cold, but not freezing, flowing water may be mistaken for a fresh body, but the epidermis—the top layer of skin, with all its hairs, suntan, calluses, scars and other marks—will have sloughed off, leaving behind the dermis, which will appear like the skin of a delicate and very young person never exposed to sun or work. The nails, slipping off with the epidermis, will leave behind delicate glistening pinkish nail beds, which may look like short but well-tended nails. Thus the body of a French peasant woman in her twenties was once, several hundred years ago, mistaken for the body of a noblewoman of fifteen. Before the error was discovered, a frantic search had taken place for the source of the found body and the body of the missing woman, and two men were near execution for a nonexistent murder.

  • In real life, the discoverer of the body may well be the murderer, drawn back by his/her own nervousness about the situation, or s/he may be a perfectly innocent intruder on the crime scene. The nervous murderer at this point may appear as distraught as if s/he were totally innocent.

  • Discovering a body, like being a crime victim, is extremely stressful and may lead to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. As a result of this nervous condition, the finder's memories of the scene may become extremely vague, disorganized and unreliable. Apparent falsehoods told by the finder are at least as likely to be the result of shock as the result of deliberate attempts to mislead.

  I've discussed what the investigator may find at the crime scene and how s/he should package the things found there. But what happens to those items once they reach the lab? And more important, what can the lab discover that can help the detective?

  Let's look now not at how the lab does the work, which would need a whole library of books the size of this one, but rather at what the lab can determine from working with those bits of evidence.

  Bombings

  If you followed the story of the airplane that exploded over Locher-bie, Scotland, you are undoubtedly aware that one of the most significant bits of evidence was a fragment, no larger than a fingernail, of a detonating device. Crime laboratories often are able to make significant findings from fragments of evidence that small. The task is not easy, however, and if the crime-scene investigator doesn't

  know what to collect, or how to package it, or what to tell and ask the lab, these findings may be impossible.

  Dynamite

  Dynamite does not usually contain any kind of tracer that would allow it, after it is detonated, to be tracked to its source.

  Dry dynamite is reasonably safe. It is not likely to be detonated accidentally; it needs some sort of "cap" or detonating device. You've seen on television people detonating dynamite by firing a gun at it. It's possible, but not easy enough to be practical.

  Wet dynamite is another matter, especially if it's been wet very long. It begins to separate into its component parts, until by the time it has developed a greasy yellowish or off-white look, it becomes as unstable as pure nitroglycerine—which means that a knock can set it off.

  Laboratory Findings in Bombings

  • It is usually possible to determine what type of explosive was used. Because many explosive manufacturers deliberately include a chemical signature — certain inert but easily identifiable chemicals that vary slightly from batch to batch—it is often possible to determine the source in detail, by finding out first what manufacturer made that batch of explosives and when that batch was made, and then tracing that batch to its purchaser. All too often, however, the trail hits a dead end; either somebody has lost track of the materiel (frequently, this means it was sold to somebody nobody wants to admit selling explosives to) or it has been stolen.

  • It is frequently possible to determine precisely where the explosion took place. In a building, that may mean little, but in an airplane, for example, it may be possible to find out in whose baggage the bomb was placed. That would be a major lead as to who might be responsible for the bombing.

  • It is often possible to determine what the triggering device was, and to trace the device back to its manufacturer and then forward to its purchaser. In the Mark Hofmann bombings in Utah, much of the equipment and supplies used to manufac-

  ture the triggering device had been purchased quite openly from Radio Shack, which of course intended it for quite different uses.

  The Mermon Forgery Bomber

  Who was Mark Hofmann?

  In October 1985, a bomb disguised as a just-delivered package exploded in a downtown Salt Lake City office building, killing a businessman. Later the same day, a second bomb which had been left near the patio of another businessman detonated when the intended victim's wife picked up the package. For several days, associates of the two men were rushed into hiding by authorities fearing for their safety and absolutely baffled as to motive; although the two men had been involved in a financial scheme that had gone belly-up, it seemed unlikely that anybody would want to use bombs as a means of revenge. Then, on a hill outside LDS (Mormon) Church-owned Deseret Gym, a third bomb exploded when Mark Hofmann was getting into his car. Unlike the other two victims, Hofmann - who had been involved with
the businessmen in other ways, but not in the financial scheme—survived.

  At first, Hofmann was thought to be another innocent victim, and authorities began to look elsewhere than the ill-fated financial scheme for motives, but within days after the third bombing, the trail led back to Hofmann himself. A workshop inside his house proved to be the location where the bombs were built, and sales people in a nearby Radio Shack store remembered selling him some of the items that later became parts of the bombs. Speculation was rife as to where Hofmann had been returning from when his car exploded, and whether the third bomb had been intended for another person or an attempt at suicide. Although Hofmann eventually confessed and in January 1987 pled guilty, many of these questions were never resolved.

  However, investigation unraveled an incredibly tangled web of forgery, fraud, swindling and murder. Over many years beginning while he was still in college, Hofmann - among other things, a rare-document dealer-had "discovered" many rare and valuable documents from American history and specifically from LDS (Mormon) history. After the bombings, many of the documents

  were revealed as forgeries, and many others—possibly legitimate—remained highly suspect. But Hofmann had finally overreached himself by "finding" a collection that seemingly did not exist, and then selling the collection—sight unseen—to one person while mortgaging it to another. Attempting to cover up the fraud, he began methodically murdering his victims. Nobody was ever able to determine who the third bomb was intended for, and Hofmann refused to tell.

  Several books have been published on the case; unfortunately, most of them are more or less hostile to the LDS (Mormon) Church, which more reasonably should be considered another victim of Hofmann's fraud.

  A joke circulating in Utah at the time went like this:

  Joker: Hey, have you heard, Mark Hofmann was pardoned?

  Victim: You're kidding! How in the world—

  Joker (grinning): Yeah, the pardon was signed by Brigham Young.

  Laboratory Determination From Small Evidence

  Let's go on, now, to look at what the lab can determine from other things. A good place to start is with bloodstains. One of the major pieces of evidence in the Sam Sheppard case, discussed earlier, was the pillowcase Marilyn Sheppard's head had been lying on. Among the many bloodstains on it, there was a distorted but somewhat symmetrical one which could, given sufficient exercise of the imagination, appear to be the place where a tool was laid, the pillow folded over it, and the tool later removed. The prosecution maintained that the mark was that of some never-named surgical instrument, which Sheppard used to bludgeon Marilyn; the defense contended—uselessly, in the original trial, though it was an important element in later appeals—that the mark was actually made when the bloody pillowcase was crumpled over on itself.

  Bloodstain Evidence

  Blood can reveal many things. It can reveal species: Is this blood on the suspect's clothing human blood or—as he claims —dog

  blood from when he took his injured pet to the veterinarian? Blood type—can this be the blood of the victim or the suspect, or is it that of someone else? It is important to remember that in all cases, the older the blood is, the less information will be obtainable from it. In blood more than a year old, it may not be possible to obtain much more than the species and the ABO type; the DNA fingerprint may persist for years, but the older the blood, the less likely that any test results will be reliable.

  Of course, the investigator and the laboratory will at times be looking for different information from blood found at the scene of the crime and from blood found later on the person, clothing, vehicle, or other possessions of the suspect.

  Obviously if the blood at the scene is that of the assailant and, as usual, the crime is discovered promptly, with reasonable luck the blood type and the DNA fingerprint of the assailant can be obtained. But even if the blood belongs to the victim, there are many things it can reveal about the suspect and about the manner in which the crime occurred. Quite a lot of research has centered on this matter, and a terrific recent book is Interpretation of Bloodstain Evidence at Crime Scenes, by William G. Eckert and Stuart James. It is part of the Elsevier Series in Practical Aspects of Criminal and Forensic Investigations; although it's the only one of the series I've needed to consult, the entire series (listed inside the front endpapers of the book) looks splendid for a crime writer's personal library as well as for an evidence technician's library. Of course, they should all be available through interlibrary loan.

  Although all aspects of bloodstains are important, Dr. Paul Kirk, who wrote a pioneering book on blood at the crime scene, contends that "No other type of investigation of blood will yield so much useful information as an analysis of the blood distribution patterns" (Eckert and James 11-12). Kirk, who was involved with the Sheppard appeals, testified in 1955 that he

  was able to establish the relative position of the attacker and victim at the time of the ... beating. He was able to determine that the attacker administered blows with a left hand, which was significant in that Dr. Sheppard was right-handed.

  (Eckert and James 12)

  As a result of his testimony, interest in bloodstain evidence — which had been substantial throughout the history of criminal investigation—grew considerably, and forensic scientists as well as investigating officers realized even more the need for careful studies of the characteristics of blood in various situations. Up to that time, each individual investigator, working on his or her own, would decide what the bloodstains appeared to indicate, sometimes on the basis of experiments with beef or chicken blood (which does not have exactly the same characteristics as human blood) and sometimes on the basis of sheer guesswork. Working under a government grant, H.L. MacDonnell did several painstaking studies, which were published in 1971 and 1973. By 1983, the International Association of Bloodstain Pattern Analysts had been organized, and the study continues. Eckert and James suggest that careful study of bloodstains can provide the following types of information:

  • Source of the blood—human or animal? Which human or animal?

  • Relative positions of persons and objects in the area at the time of the attack.

  • Distances the blood flew, and speed.

  • Whether impact was from sharp or blunt object.

  • Number of impacts.

  • Elapsed time between impact and study.

  • Movements of persons and objects after the attack.

  By providing this information, the study can help to determine which possible witnesses are telling the truth; can provide additional means of judging time of death; and can help to sort out findings from other investigative and laboratory work.

  For a more precise discussion of bloodstains, see the entire Eckert and James book, particularly the section beginning on page thirteen.

  But in order for any of these desirable results to occur, the investigator at the scene has the primary responsibility for—what? For seeing to it that s/he fulfills the duties that are always the primary responsibility of the investigator on the scene: making careful notes; making careful photographs (preferably color, preferably with a measuring device included in every photograph); and taking careful, triangulated measurements. The investigator must always remember that no color film is fully dependable for showing subtle gradations in color, so notes are critical; furthermore, photographs

  not done very carefully may distort the truth. (We've all seen photos in which someone's feet, placed in the foreground, appear ten times their real size.)

  Cameras and Film

  At the time that I entered police work, the Albany Police Department was still using a Speed Graphic. That's the camera you see reporters and police photographers using in old movies—the one that's so tough that reporters could knock somebody in the head with it and then go on taking pictures. When Chief Summerford first instructed me to learn to use it, I was intimidated by the very sight of that camera.

  Once you learn how to use it, however, there's pract
ically nothing you can do to mess up pictures on it; it's far less fussy than many cameras. The huge (four-by-five-inch) negative allows enlargements for courtroom use with practically no grain, whereas a 35mm negative enlarged to eleven-by-sixteen is almost always going to look somewhat grainy. Its film packs and sheet films also prevent waste: If I use only four shots on a roll of film and need the pictures this afternoon, the other shots are wasted; if I use only four shots on a film pack, I can pull those four out and develop them and still have the other twelve shots left. And in a small darkroom, sheet film is far easier to work with blind than roll film.

  But for all practical purposes, the day of the Speed Graphic is gone. Even black-and-white film for it now costs a small fortune, and I doubt color film is even available except through incredibly expensive special orders. Most police photography now is done almost entirely in color with 35mm cameras and film.

  What kind of color film? A good photographer—or a writer intending to play tricks with photography in fiction—will take the time to read all available information on all films and determine which is the best to use now. Nobody can possibly say which is going to be best forever, because manufacturers are constantly improving film and processes.

  In general, most crime-scene photographers use whatever camera the department supplies, and keep a personal camera and more departmental film in their car so that if they get a call in

  the middle of the night, they can go straight to the scene without having to detour by the police station.

  It is important to remember that photography, when produced incompetently or with intent to mislead, particularly in a blood-spatter situation, can cause serious problems.

  In general, police photography does not use filters of any kind. It is important to be able to swear, in court, that what the photograph shows is as nearly as possible exactly what the photographer saw. But most photographers know a few tricks. One is that if you shoot black-and-white panchromatic film through a filter the same color as your subject, that color seems considerably lighter in the picture; if you shoot through a complementary color filter, the color in the scene seems considerably darker. Thus, by using a red filter, you could effectively do away with a lot of the blood in the scene; by using a green filter, you could darken the blood.