Abandoned Prayers (28 page)

Near where the body had lain, however, a rusty shotgun shell was recovered from under a rock that had been resting next to the victim’s head. Weaver studied the shell. “It’s too old to be related.”

“Collect it anyway,” Wiggins said.

The investigators searched a quarter-mile radius and found nothing. Wiggins, Weaver, and Liesman scoured the length of the culvert. Nothing.

Measurements of the dump site’s key features and its location were recorded. It was four feet ten inches from the level of the road to the body’s location in the ditch. Wiggins noted that the body had been lying face up on an east-west axis, the head against the culvert, facing east. So fragile was the body that a good downpour could easily have washed the bones through the culvert and scattered the remains.

He wrote: “The odor was putrid, I recognized it as decaying flesh and body fluids.”

Weaver, Wiggins, and the foul-smelling corpse, now in a body bag, rode in Jim Hall’s county van to introduce Dr. Bayardo to his latest patient.

The Travis County Morgue is in the basement of Brackenridge Hospital, on the outskirts of downtown Austin’s business district, only a few blocks from the beautiful, rosy-colored sandstone capitol building. Brackenridge is a rundown, borderline-condemned building with a leaky roof. It’s an institution with an image problem, a reputation as the hospital for the poor and illiterate of Texas’s capital city.

Medical Examiner Roberto Bayardo, 51, had been raised in Mexico, where he earned a medical degree at the Universidad de Guadalajara. The superior schools in the States
and a fascination with forensics brought him across the border in 1967. Dr. Bayardo had been the county’s chief medical examiner since June 1978, after coming to Austin by way of Harris County, Texas, where he had held the medical examiner’s job. He had all of the right credentials: a medical degree, four years of training in pathology, and the stomach to handle what at times was an unsettling job.

Even his detractors conceded that the doctor never pointed fingers when someone made an innocent mistake. Dr. Bayardo had done thousands of autopsies, and he knew that the unexpected sometimes happened on the table.

The John Doe from out by Pilot Knob arrived around one in the afternoon and was numbered ME-85-466.

Autopsies are not a pretty sight, and, in spite of the medical jargon and protocol surrounding them, the doctor and his assistant are still hacking at a human body with saws and scalpels. None of that is lost on the investigators who observe such proceedings. In fact, Travis County sheriff’s deputies and detectives call the assistant “Bayardo’s ghoul.” The ghoul’s job is to saw open the head, do some of the meat-cutter’s work for the doctor, and sew the body back up. One ghoul used a Swiss Army knife, which he kept in his pocket, to make the incisions. Most use a scalpel.

“That ghoul didn’t last too long,” Wiggins remembered. “He liked his job too much.”

The easiest part of the autopsy is the first procedure, the external exam. Weaver, who assisted Bayardo with this part of the exam, took two series of photographs of the body. One, of course, would seem sufficient. But, in the game that must be played with defense attorneys, the second of the series was taken without the medical examiner’s ID tag in each shot. This is done so that a defense lawyer can’t say: “Is this exactly as the body was found? Was that little tag on the body when it was found?”

Every once in a while Weaver would respond to one of the doctor’s motions to take another photograph.

Wiggins and Weaver listened carefully as Bayardo went through his routine—a routine so exact they figured he
could do it in his sleep. Some, who had worked with the doctor many times, wondered if
they
could do it in
their
sleep. Wiggins’s cigar smoke battled the odor from the dead man’s body. The cigar didn’t have a chance in the small and, in his opinion, poorly ventilated room.

Trace evidence—such as the carpet fibers that helped nail the Atlanta Child Killer, Wayne Williams—had emerged as a major advancement in forensics. Answers could be found under the lens of a microscope. Many medical examiners in the major cities now used special “clean suits” for the doctor and the assistant examiners. No particles or fibers could fall from these, as in the case of the old surgical scrubs. Bayardo, however, wore a disposable, white plastic apron over street clothes—things were not so progressive in Travis County. This office did things the old-fashioned way and looked only for the obvious.

Wiggins and Weaver knew they would be out of there before two. Dr. Bayardo’s exams never lasted more than an hour.

Dr. Bayardo estimated that the victim had been in his early twenties. His ghoul weighed and measured the body. The victim was sixty-eight inches tall and weighed about 140 pounds. His hair was brown. The cutoff jeans were Bill Blass, with a waist size of 33. Wiggins studied the cutoffs for the marks or tag that might be left by a cleaner, but there were none.

Dr. Bayardo removed the cutoffs and placed them in an evidence bag. He noted that the victim’s uncircumsised penis had not been mutilated.

The female greenfly doesn’t wait long to deposit her eggs on a human corpse. As soon as the body is cool—after about twenty-four hours—females will light on a corpse and begin laying their eggs. Within seven days the larvae will grow to about a quarter of an inch in length. Though the maggots obscured much of the body, they were also of critical importance. Dr. Bayardo measured them—the largest were five-eighths of an inch long. To Dr. Bayardo, all of the evidence taken together indicated that the
victim had been dead for about four weeks, maybe as long as six.

In some decomposition cases the fingertips are plumped up with a fluid injection. David Weaver would not use that technique on ME-85-466. Both hands and feet had slipped off like gloves and shoes. Weaver was forced to lay the loose skin from the victim’s hand over his own to make the prints for identification purposes. The resulting prints were good, better than Weaver had hoped. Some fingers were intact and he was able to roll them on the FBI standard white card.

Every detail was documented on a form that Bayardo would have his secretary type on Monday morning.

A Y-shaped incision was made running from shoulder to shoulder then down the midline to the genitals. The precision of the doctor’s scalpel was evident, but in the end observers would say the body had been cut open like a gutted bass. With the exception of the appendix, which Bayardo determined had been surgically removed, everything was autolyzed, but intact. The heart was normal, as were the liver and lungs.

Since no blood was in the body, a blood typing was not going to be a part of the examination. Given the mummified condition of the body, this was not unusual. Blood breaks down and separates shortly after death.

Weaver had to consider each of the doctor’s words carefully. After the hundreds of autopsies he had seen Bayardo administer, he was fairly good at understanding Bayardo’s heavily-accented English.

The head was saved for last. Saw cuts were made that revealed the gunshot wound—the victim had been shot through the left eye.

As was his procedure in his examination of bodies decomposed as badly as this one, Bayardo removed the jaws to have X rays and dental charts made.

Beneath the scalp, Bayardo hit possible crime-solving pay dirt and retrieved a distorted, mushroom-shaped .22-caliber lead projectile. Though it was badly damaged from
its collision with the skull, the slug was a piece of evidence that could lead to some answers. In addition, Bayardo determined the path of the bullet: into the left eye and then the skull. The path was upward from the toes and into the head at about a thirty-five-degree angle, and from the right toward the left at about a thirty-degree angle.

Wiggins got up from the little built-in desk where he spent most of his time during the autopsy and looked at the wound. He figured that the victim had been shot by someone shorter than he was, or that he may have been shot while lying on his back.

Dr. Bayardo rinsed the bullet carefully, to avoid marring any of the delicate grooves that might later identify the murder weapon. No one really held much hope that the distorted, mushroom-shaped bullet would be very helpful, it was so badly damaged. But it was all they had. The medical examiner put it into a small manila envelope, which was labeled and notarized for evidentiary purposes. He handed it to Weaver. The chain of evidence was documented. It was 1:55
P.M
.

They still didn’t have a name for ME-85-466.

On May 13, 1985, the
Austin American-Statesman
buried an article on page B-5, headlined “Body Found Near FM 1624.” Few beyond the victim’s killer probably paid much attention to the article—such dumpings were common.

It was the middle of May, and the students in
Marilyn Martinez’s
second-grade class could feel the heat of approaching summer the day Eli Stutzman showed up with paperwork from the school office to take Danny out early. Danny didn’t know that he was leaving the school for good, but seemed glad to go with his dad. All of the kids wished him well and said good-bye.

Martinez wondered what the rush was and why the boy’s father didn’t wait two more weeks and let the boy finish the school year.

Stutzman said they were moving, though later she couldn’t recall if he had said where.

“Danny was one of those little children you’d like to have more of in your class,” she later said.

When Ruth Davis closed out her report on Danny Stutzman for 1985, it was with some disappointment regarding Danny’s progress. She wrote on May 29, 1985: “No progress observed. Danny needs to . . . continue working . . . his monitoring skills have slipped during spontaneous speech.”

What caused Danny Stutzman to “slip”?

Homicide investigator Gary Cutler was the flip side of partner Jerry Wiggins. Young, and as hip as a Texas cop can be, Cutler was the opposite of the grizzled, chain-smoking, Levis-are-all-right Wiggins. If Wiggins was detective as scientist, Cutler was action and show. For Cutler, being a cop was an ego boost.

Murder was their only link.

Over the years they had worked a number of intriguing cases, most notably the murders attributed to Henry Lee Lucas. Lucas had allegedly killed three in Austin, whose bodies were recovered just off the interstate. The murders had occurred in October 1979. Wiggins and Cutler had worked the case in 1983, when Lucas had started pointing out dump sites throughout Texas. The total number of murders ran up like a Las Vegas jackpot.

It was a great case, full of twists, innuendo, and even cannibalism. The national press covered the case. Cutler had thought it might be made into a movie, but it wasn’t. Joseph Wambaugh, Wiggins’s hero, talked about doing a book on it, but dropped out, reportedly because the story was too “difficult.”

On Monday morning, Wiggins filled Cutler in on the body found out by Pilot Knob. Wiggins gave the details quietly
and matter-of-factly. By the time Wiggins had painted the picture of the body and the autopsy, Cutler was glad he had been off on Sunday. Since the sheriff’s office divided caseloads between north and south, the north being Wiggins’s territory and the south belonging to his partner, the case would have been assigned directly to Cutler as lead investigator.

Wiggins had been the first to work the case, so he had entered his name in the case file.

Cutler took over and began the process of trying to find out who the victim was and, he hoped, to get some answers on how the victim happened to end up out in the middle of nowhere with a slug through his head. The victim had been dead for more than a month, and the trail was as cold as Bayardo’s table-side manner.

The
Austin American-Statesman
, which the investigators liked to call the “American Misstatement,” published a small article in that morning’s edition. The text was only four inches, but it was enough to bring in a few calls from relatives and friends of missing persons, each caller sure that this might be his or her loved one.

Wiggins took a call from a Mrs. Dodson from Granger, Texas. She was sure the body was that of her son, Mike, who she said had a drug and alcohol problem. She had kicked him out of the house, and her heart still ached.

“What else could I do? I didn’t know what to do,” she kept saying. Wiggins listened and calmly took down the description. Mike had brown hair and a beard. His height was close to that of the victim.

He had not had an appendectomy, however.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry. The body we recovered had his appendix out,” Wiggins said, trying to let the mother down easy.

“Well, he could have had it taken out in the last two months. Couldn’t he?”

“It’s possible.”

Wiggins had learned that you don’t argue with a killer or a mother. Both are always right.

Across the street at the medical examiner’s office, Dr. Bayardo took down information from a caller who wished to remain anonymous. The caller believed the body to be that of a Michael Gordon. Bayardo gave the name to Cutler and Wiggins for follow-up.

Other calls came in. Notes were left on Wiggins’s and Cutler’s desks. Lots of people thought they knew who that body might belong to. A cousin. A brother. Always someone who was missing from somewhere.

Cutler had the victim’s physical description entered in the Austin Police Department’s missing persons computer. Nothing likely came up. Another option was to enter the details into a national computer, but because of the tremendous number of missing persons nationwide it was not done.

By afternoon it had become clear that identifying the body was not going to be easy. DPS notified Wiggins that it was unable to match the prints with any recorded in its Henry Fingerprint System, one of two standard national systems for comparing prints. Weaver had the little white cards with the dead man’s prints forwarded to the FBI identification section in Washington. From there it would be a long wait.

And a long shot.

Weaver knew that only 20 percent of the population of the United States has been printed. If the John Doe had a criminal record or had been in the military, the FBI might get a hit. Otherwise, investigators would have to rely on phone calls and missing persons reports, and those were not promising.