Behind the Yellow Tape: On the Road With Some of America's Hardest Working Crime Scene Investigators (10 page)

The outside of Fitger’s Brewery.
HALLCOX & WELCH, LLC

We had been summoned to this bounty by the few brave hotel staff who remained stranded with us. And as the smells of maple syrup and thawing meat wafted into the air, we could hear the hotel staff talking among themselves. “Ya, dey say dere’s thunder wid da snow,” one of the staff explained to the other in a thick Minnesotan accent. “Ah, ya don’ say,” the other replied, neither remarkably moved by the unbelievable weather unfolding.

That’s how it is in Duluth. It’s snowy; it’s cold; and, maybe because of the weather, people just don’t seem to get that excited about anything—it’s as if their blood is frozen. Most cope with the harsh climate by spending hours on end in their saunas (pronounced “sa-oo-nas”), in keeping with their Scandinavian heritage, or eating a “hotdish” full of meat, vegetables, and a binding ingredient such as canned soup. A hotdish is essentially a casserole popular in Minnesota. Pop the concoction into the oven and bake for thirty minutes—simple and Scandinavian. We later ate an authentic hotdish in the house of an authentic Scandinavian family. And, although we realize that everyone everywhere has had a hotdish of one kind or another, when a hotdish is served in Minnesota by Scandinavians, it just tastes better.

The climate of Duluth can be inhospitable and is essentially smack-dab in wilderness country. Nearly 80 percent of the land in the county is uninhabited, with forests and lakes making up most of the area. Because of this lack of population and the light pollution found in most big cities, Duluth is able to partake in one of nature’s greatest events—the aurora borealis.

However, all of this undisturbed nature has contributed to Duluth’s newfound popularity. In 2006, it was voted one of the top fifty places to live in America. Nevertheless, just like everywhere else, Duluth is not without its criminal element. Thieves, killers, and crooks, like most other animals, adapt to their environments, regardless of how cold it gets. Crime doesn’t stop on account of the weather, no matter how bad it gets or how unappetizing the continental breakfast becomes. And harsh winter conditions wreak havoc on crime scenes, as well as on crime scene investigators.

Two of the most useful pieces of evidence left at a crime scene are usually footwear impressions left in the ground and fingerprints left on objects. The cold, snowy climate can impact both tremendously. For example, after a snowfall of more than about one-quarter of an inch, it becomes virtually impossible to get a good footwear impression. This is because with each step, the shoe carries more snow to the next impression, making the subtle characteristics of the tread impossible to discern. Furthermore, the deeper the snow gets, the more likely that prints left in the snow will cave in on themselves. Not to mention the fact that, when it’s snowing or the wind is high (and it usually is), shoe prints can be covered up by the blowing snow and hidden forever.

A crime scene investigator will also have more trouble finding and developing fingerprints in cold weather. One obvious reason is that everybody wears gloves during the winter, so by default fewer fingerprints will be left at a scene. Couple that with the fact that cold climates are usually drier, and therefore a perp’s hands will be less oily or sweaty than usual—and in order to leave good fingerprints, hands need to be moist.

The weather also affects how a crime scene is processed. In subzero temperatures, camera batteries wear out after taking just two or three shots, and the ink in a ballpoint pen will freeze within seconds. Bullets fired into the snow burn right through, making it nearly impossible to locate the evidence. In some cases, the Duluth CSIs had to call in the fire department to hose down an entire hillside, washing away the snow, in an effort to find spent bullets.

And don’t forget about the toll the weather can take on an investigator. The blinding snow, the all-night crime scenes in freezing temperatures, and the lessons they have all learned about not using their mouths to hold anything. Many Duluthian CSIs have jumped out of their vehicles on a cold, icy night and put their keys into their mouths in order to free up both hands. Unfortunately, this usually results in a reenactment of the classic scene in
A Christmas Story
, except it’s a tongue stuck to a set of keys instead of to a flagpole.

This wild winter weather calls for good planning, regardless of which side of the criminal justice system a person is on. Sometimes it even calls for a little old-fashioned ingenuity. This far north, the ground may be frozen solid until May, and people who die during the winter sometimes lie in state in a mausoleum until the spring thaw, when they can finally be buried in the ground. That certainly makes it difficult to bury someone you’ve just killed. The frozen tundra forces some killers to pick their season or, at the very least, buy a wood chipper (like the scene in
Fargo
). Or, if they are really clever, they time it just right and catch an ice-fishing hole just ripe for a burial spot.

“For God’s sakes,” Sergeant Eric Rish had said to us when we arrived on the eve of the worst blizzard anyone could remember, trudging through the remnants of the previous week’s snow. He was commenting on our “big coats,” similar to the one George sported on an infamous episode of
Seinfeld
. “It’s not that bad,” he scoffed. We met Rish in 2004 during Session VIII, a winter session at the academy. Winters in Tennessee can occasionally be cold and snowy, such as the blizzard of ’93, as the natives refer to it, when Knoxville had its worst snow ever—piling on nearly thirty inches in and around the city, crippling it for weeks. But since that time it has rarely snowed, proving that at least in Al Gore’s home state, global warming is for real. At least, that is, until Eric showed up, bringing with him both snow and the very first snow-covered exhumation practical exercise.

We had arrived at Rish’s house for dinner that night and what we hoped would be our first encounter with a traditional hotdish. Eric and his wife, Kris, are an interesting pair. They both work in law enforcement, and they both work in investigations. Yet their jobs are completely different. Eric is with the Duluth Police Department who investigates crime and puts criminals in prison. Kris is an investigator with the Minnesota State Department of Corrections who investigates prison crimes committed by the people whom her husband helped put in there. Crime, major crime, doesn’t end at the prison gates. It continues within the confines of a prison and continues to affect law-abiding citizens on the outside. It’s amazing what some criminals are still able to do, from sending threats to their estranged lovers during their phone call time to full orchestration of gang activities. Essentially, it’s the effed-up circle of criminal life. Eric investigates criminals and puts them behind bars, and Kris keeps on investigating them until they are put to death or released back into society, where Eric begins his work all over again.

The Duluth blizzard, February 2007.
HALLCOX & WELCH, LLC

Kris told us about her side of the law enforcement world over our hotdish and frosted mugs filled with Fitger’s Brewery root beer. We hadn’t planned on researching prisons and prisoners, but when the opportunity came to spend the day with Kris touring prisons, including one of Minnesota’s oldest and meanest institutions, we said what the hell.

The Stillwater prison is located about thirty-five minutes south of Duluth. Its population is roughly three thousand inmates. It smells like a cross between a school cafeteria, a locker room, a morgue, and a rhino’s ass. Stillwater is a maximum-security prison, housing the worst of the worst. At various “free” times, murderers, rapists, and even serial killers roam about the facility at will.

Entering any prison is a very disheartening and disturbing experience. Entering a prison like Stillwater is even worse. We had to give our driver’s licenses to the guards (so that in case something happened to us while we were on the inside, they could identify us), get our hands stamped as if we were going to a club, and pass through several very thick steel gates before arriving at the main part of the facility. And when the last gate opened up, we entered, for the first time, the place where we help put the bad guys away. It was akin to waking up in hell.

The prison cells flanked both sides of the main portal, five stories tall, stacked on top of one another like cubes. Ten-by-ten single-dwelling cubes—if they were lucky. Those not so lucky had to share their ten-by-ten space with a roommate. We walked slowly down one of the corridors, with the cells to our left and an old brick wall with a bank of pay phones on our right. We were looking at the prisoners as if they were animals in a zoo. And they were looking at us as if we were food. Some were reading, some were watching television, and all of them were staring. Right away, our guide, Tee—one of the investigators at Stillwater—told us not to get too close to the cells, but also not to stand too far away from them either. This was because being either too close or too far out increased the chance of having bodily fluids being hurled at you, similar to Clarice Starling’s ejaculate experience in
The Silence of the Lambs
. Except any experience of ours would be real.

At one point we were cornered in the chow line, with about five hundred of the worst of the worst walking by, many of whom were doing life without the possibility of parole. One of the convicts was reportedly the infamous Harvey Carrigan, serial killer extraordinaire, who leered at us all as if we were some sort of human dessert. And then came the catcalls, from which
none
of us were excluded, male or female. A vile, palpable, nauseating sense of wickedness permeated the place, the likes of which neither of us had ever experienced. As evening approached, we were offered the opportunity to have dinner before we left, cooked and served by some of Stillwater’s finest, something with Alfredo sauce, no less. We passed on the opportunity.

Prisons are like cities unto themselves. When a prisoner arrives in Stillwater, he is first placed into a multiperson cell. With time and good behavior, he can apply for a job and possibly upgrade his digs, eventually earning a cell to himself. Prisoners apply for jobs, get jobs, get paid, get fired, earn free time, and buy groceries, television sets, coffee pots, candy bars, sodas, and so on. Prisons are essentially mini-metropolises for the seedy underworld. The old adage that crime doesn’t pay is false. It pays roughly twenty-five cents per hour to start in Minnesota. And with cigarettes going for about three dollars apiece and jailhouse tats going for about forty bucks, many hours have to be put in to afford such luxuries. Not that those luxuries are legal. Sometimes, instead of purchasing their brand of vice, they just make it themselves—in the toilet. Homemade alcohol or hooch is easily made from a little water, a little ketchup, and a little bread. Presto, a ketchup wine that Emeril himself wouldn’t even taste. Around the Super Bowl, extra guards have to be brought in to simply do bed checks for all of the hooch contraband made for the event. Gotta love football.

The guards at Stillwater do not carry guns. On average, there are seven or eight major incidents a day, including violent fights with some unbelievable homemade weapons. We saw every type of item imaginable sharpened into deadly weaponry—toothbrushes, plastic forks, shower curtain rings. The one amazing thing about prisoners and prison life is the ingenuity that it breeds. If necessity is the mother of invention, then these mothers really have it. With nothing but time to think, these guys can come up with just about anything. For example, an entrepreneur has contracted with Moose Lake Prison, the prison where Kris Rish works, to have the inmates remove all identifying markings from returned merchandise from Wal-Mart, Target, and the like, which arrives by the truckload, which he then sells in town by the pallet. Moose Lake Prison is also known as the tattoo capital of Minnesota, and enterprising inmates who work in this returns department from time to time break open a VCR, a DVD player, or the video controller to a video game system, and in a split second pull out the little motor to make a tattoo gun. It also helps that Moose Lake Prison has one of the best print shops in all of Minnesota, giving the prisoners access to all of the colors of the rainbow. You just have to admire someone who will take the vibrating motor out of a wireless Xbox 360 controller, shove it up his ass, jerry-rig an electrical plug to it, steal a needle and some ink, and start his own tattoo business at forty dollars a pop. Capitalism, even in prison, is alive and well.