Behind the Yellow Tape: On the Road With Some of America's Hardest Working Crime Scene Investigators (20 page)

The cloudiness has also contributed to Seattle’s being called by some the “Suicide Capital of the World,” where dark days encourage depression, and the large number of bridges invite the depressed to jump off to their ultimate end. The city no longer even mentions suicides in the paper for fear of causing a copycat effect and tempting even more people to jump off bridges.

Lastly, Seattle is home to the ubiquitous Starbucks—the leading coffee retailer in the entire world. Within the city limits of Seattle are forty-four Starbucks stores, with dozens of other branches owned by the chain dotting various outlets throughout the city. No other city in America needs a pick-me-up like Seattle does, which helps explain why Starbucks and a host of other coffee vendors thrive side by side on virtually every street, serving java to the masses and hopefully helping to medicate those would-be serial killers and potential jumpers.

Unlike most other areas of the country, here in the Emerald City cops and crooks alike can agree on one thing: a good cup of joe. Invariably, crime scene photo after crime scene photo shows an easily identifiable white-and-green Starbucks cup—in
venti
size no less—somewhere in the background, lurking under tables, sitting on park benches, or in the hands of an investigator. So much coffee goes down the gullets of Seattleites that we began to think we should propose a forensic study titled
The Effects of Coffee on the Smell of Decomposing Flesh
, maybe even discovering a new chemical leeching from the body called javarine. But by our last day in Seattle, we found out that we no longer needed to conduct that study. Decomp still smells like decomp no matter how much coffee you drink.

We had arrived after our cross-country flight just in time to catch NFA graduate Detective Mark Hanf testifying on the stand about a 2006 case—a gang-related shooting. Kevin Monday, the defendant in the case, had gotten into an altercation that turned into a shooting in the middle of the street, where he fired wildly, hitting two people in a car and one on the street. The person shot on the street, Francisco Green, ultimately died of his wounds. Ten fired cartridge casings were among the evidence collected at the crime scene.

The case was a homicide, but since a fatal shooting had occurred inside the halls of the King County Courthouse in 1995, the entrances and exits of the public courtroom were highly regulated. No one could enter or leave until the judge granted a recess. After sitting outside the courtroom for several minutes, chatting with another NFA graduate, Detective Brian Stampfl, we finally entered the courtroom.

Crime scene photo from the shooting at Pioneer Square
in Seattle, Washington.
COPYRIGHT © BY SEATTLE POLICE DEPARTMENT

Trial court, real honest-to-goodness trial court, is, well, boring as hell. Atticus Finch, poignantly speaking to a jury and saving Tom Robinson from his demise, is nowhere in sight. We watched our pasty-skinned friend Mark, wearing his trademark fanny pack turned to the front, take sealed envelope after boring sealed envelope; cut it open, careful not to damage what was inside; and display the contents (in this case, fired cartridge casings) to the jury. Multiple cartridges had been collected at the scene, and according to good crime scene technique, each had been packaged in a separate container. After repeating this procedure numerous times, jurors and bailiffs alike were nodding off in their after-lunch coma. Starbucks should consider a kiosk in the courtroom.

Despite knowing that his life was hanging in the balance by what Mark was showing the jury, the defendant seemed even less interested in what was happening on the stand. (Of course, it might have had something to do with the fact that the entire chain of events had been caught on tape by a street musician who had left his camera on while he had been performing on the street.) The defendant appeared more focused on how he might flee the courtroom, gauging the guards, their guns, and the distance to the door. He sat next to his attorney, slowly turning his chair toward the door and nervously eyeing the guards. Then the anti-drama improved a bit when the prosecutor asked the court for permission to enter the judges’ chambers and retrieve another piece of evidence. What he came back with was the passenger door off a Mazda, riddled with bullet holes. As the twelve men and women craned their necks to see the car door, Mark came down from the witness stand and educated the court on bullet trajectory, discussing each bullet entrance in depth.

Finally, after all of the evidence had been entered into the trial, it was the defense’s turn to cross-examine Detective Hanf. “You don’t actually do all of the stuff they do on the television show
CSI
,” the defense attorney began asking Mark. On TV, he said, “They collect evidence, analyze it, and investigate the crime, so why do you call yourselves CSIs?” Mark smiled just a little because of our presence in the courtroom; we had had this very conversation about how invariably the defense’s first course of action nowadays is to cast doubt by referring to the television show
CSI
. “We call ourselves crime scene investigators because we investigate crime scenes,” the ever-introverted Mark answered, never making eye contact with the defense attorney. At that point, even the judge intervened, commenting tongue in cheek that the popular TV show likely stole the term
CSI
from police agencies. Everyone in the courtroom sort of chuckled, and the defense attorney’s futile attempt at using the CSI Effect to create reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors melted right before his eyes.

It had been three years since we had last visited Mark. On his return from Knoxville, Mark had organized a new mini-crime scene school, and we’d brought a bloodstain course to the Seattle Police Department as a kickoff. In 2003, Mark had come through the academy representing one of the largest cities in the United States that at the time did not have a dedicated crime scene unit. During his training at the academy, Mark realized that his department
needed
a dedicated crime scene unit to respond and bring consistency to the investigation of all violent crimes occurring within its jurisdiction. And then on TV one evening in 2006, we both caught a glimpse of a familiar stocky fellow in a white Tyvek suit working a crime scene being broadcast live on CNN. Mark and other NFA alumni, as well as future alumni, were all dressed up in their Michelin Man attire, working the largest and most horrific crime scene the city had seen in the last quarter century—dubbed the “Capitol Hill Massacre”—with their fully
dedicated
crime scene unit. What had once been an agency many years behind the curve was now benchmarking practices and sharing crime scene skills with agencies across the country. It goes to show that with the right person leading the charge, even in a bureaucracy, a lot can happen in just a few years.

Mark finally finished testifying for the day. The jurors were removed from the courtroom first, returning to their room in single file while the rest of us stood waiting for the judge to release us. Then, with the jurors safely tucked away behind closed doors, sheriff’s deputies handcuffed the defendant and took him back to his cell. The jury never saw him brought in or taken out in handcuffs. Mark came down from the witness stand to greet us two tired and very weary travelers, and so with two sleepy out-of-towners on his hands, he was forced to take us to Starbucks for a pick-me-up. (Mark is an anomaly in this city—he doesn’t drink coffee, never having acquired a taste for the stuff.) After a good Starbucks drink and a short drive back to our hotel, we crashed for the night, resting up for our first full day with the Seattle crime scene unit.

The next morning, or as we prefer to call it, the jet-lag-from-hell morning, we found our way down to the CSI Unit and the Police Support Facility of the Seattle Police Department. Seattle’s new CSI Unit is centrally and wisely placed among the department’s other forensic units (Latent Print Unit, Photo Lab, and Video Unit) as well as the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory. As championed by the city’s highly regarded police chief, Chief Kerlikowske, the City of Seattle renovated—what else?—an old Starbucks packaging facility and turned it into one of the best forensic areas we had ever seen. This new building is well equipped, extraordinarily organized, and multifunctional, providing every opportunity to work virtually any type of case.

One of the most unique aspects of this complex is the vehicle processing bay—the envy of the Pacific Northwest. On average, one car per day arrives into this facility to be processed by either Seattle crime scene investigators or latent print examiners. It has room for dozens of cars, trucks, motor homes, boats, and just about anything that can be driven, floated, or flown. It even has a lift to transport many of these vehicles upstairs for long-term storage on more important cases. Touring the upstairs was similar to visiting one of those weird car museums, like the ones in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, or Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, that display cars with their own names and reputations, or cars that Elvis owned or that Hank Williams, Sr., died in. Except here, Mark walked with us down each row, telling us the often terrible stories behind each car, including the one with the missing passenger side door, which was still propped up in the downtown Seattle courtroom as a reminder to the jurors (who eventually found Monday guilty of homicide and sentenced him to sixty-four years).

Some of the vehicles had been there for years, trace evidence already faded or covered up by a thin dust layer of sediment that had begun to collect on the exteriors. There were old cars, new cars, foreign cars, domestic cars, hoopties, and classics—each with a unique yet tragic story to tell. In one corner of the garage we even came upon a pleasure boat sitting cocked to the side, looking strangely out of place. Mark told us the story behind the boat: It had been involved in an accident with another boat in which several people were hurt and one person was violently killed. As we walked around the side of the boat, we could still see the blood smeared across the bow—another eerie reminder of how quickly and unexpectedly a life can be taken.

Seattle investigator Mark Hanf examining the car driven by
one of the victims from the Pioneer Square shooting.
HALLCOX & WELCH, LLC

One of the CSIs who, by default, has become a sort of curator for the crime-car museum is Detective Kevin O’Keefe. Detective O’Keefe is one of those old, stereotypical homicide investigators found in every department. The guy has seen and done it all, lives on caffeine, and acts as if he hates just about everybody. That’s Kevin. Only he acts as if he hates us just a little bit. Kevin spent nearly five years working on the Green River Task Force trying to catch Gary Ridgway back before DNA technology was all the rage. For months, after Ridgway’s eventual capture, members of the task force, including Kevin, searched the Green River area weekend after weekend, along with other wooded clusters in and around Seattle, for the remains of Ridgway’s victims. It took years to recover the pieces of the missing prostitutes that the Green River Killer had considered “throwaways.” He would bury them in groups so he could drive by and relive the moment, but unfortunately he wasn’t that bright (or maybe he was) and claimed to have forgotten where a lot of them were buried. A shackled Ridgway was brought out to an area where Kevin and others had cleared acres of brush looking for bits and pieces of these murdered girls. Many times, the guys, including Kevin, got ribbed, hearing, “Hey Kevin, come over; I’ve got some brush in my backyard you can clear.” But over time, they were rewarded by finding at least some of the remains, though ultimately no one believes that they have all been accounted for.

As we continued touring the amazing facility, Mark took us to the unit’s staging area. It was immaculately conceived and organized to the hilt—everything had a use and a place. And just like every other place we visited, ingenuity prevailed. Bureaucracies are wrought with a quagmire of impediments, written down in a compendium and usually guarded by a forked-tail person with big, red, pointy horns. Many of these “rules” stem from incidents that no one remembers and probably weren’t big deals anyway. But there they are, on the books, harder to remove than an indigo tattoo. So the CSIs in Seattle improvised on many things, creatively acquiring and paying for items out of their own pockets to make their jobs easier and their performance better. Otherwise, they might still be working out of a scarcely supplied silver van.