Behind the Yellow Tape: On the Road With Some of America's Hardest Working Crime Scene Investigators (27 page)

The tight budget affects more than just an officer’s salary. The perception most people have of a CSI unit is of some really high-tech place with stainless steel tables, microscopes, and all of the fancy whizgigs that money can buy. Unfortunately, that couldn’t be any further from the truth. What we saw looked more like Barney Miller’s office from thirty years ago—all Larry needed was a rotary phone and he’d be set. “We ain’t got nuthin’,” one of the guys said, after being introduced to us. They have computers, but they are not hooked up to the e-mail system, nor are they on a server that would allow them to share files. They have digital cameras, but they are not compatible with the computers they have, so they don’t use them. Seeing the NYPD reminded us of stories of how Rome just grew too big to keep up with itself, with the outlying parts of the Roman Empire dying off first. The crime scene unit at NYPD is on the outskirts of a dying empire.

We sat with Larry and some of the rest of the guys in his unit for a while, drinking coffee and chatting about the television version of crime scene investigation. “What do you think about the show
CSI: New York
?” we asked the three guys sitting around the table.

“I only watched that shit once,” Larry began, leaning over in his chair, pointing his behemoth finger in our direction. “And all I saw was them trying to find a rat who ate a fuckin’ bullet. Getthefuckouttahere! How youse gonna find one rat in New York City? We gots millions a rats!”

“Did anyone from the show come here and see what it is that you guys do?” we timidly asked, now afraid to talk anymore about the show.

“Yeah, they were here for one day,” one of the other guys answered. “One day, and they said, this ain’t gonna make good TV.”

“Do you guys like any of the CSI type of shows?” we asked.

“Yeah,
Dexter
,” was the overwhelming response. What a shocker. The favorite show of the boys in blue is about a serial killer who’s a forensic bloodstain analyst during the day, but who employs his own style of vigilante justice, limiting his killing to only bad guys. You gotta love New York.

Our plan for the day was to have Larry escort us around the city, visiting crime scenes being worked throughout the different boroughs. That is, if there were any. “Do you think they’ll be any callouts?” we asked Larry sarcastically, as we looked through hundreds of his grisly crime scene photos. Before he could even respond to our question, a call came in to the precinct that a body had been found.

“So let it be written, so let it be done,” Larry said, in that deep, Rocky-esque voice. Larry is fond of that biblical quote, though his version comes from the Metallica song “Creeping Death.” When we had asked Larry months earlier whether we could visit him and see what his life was like as a CSI in New York City, his answer had been the same—“So let it be written, so let it be done.” It’s sort of his metal mantra.

We hurried down the back entrance of the building to where Larry’s crime scene vehicle was parked. It was an old, beat-up Ford Explorer that made the run-down cars cabbies drive look like Cadillacs, in sharp contrast to the brand-new vehicle that the Union County folks were using just a few miles across the river. “This probably won’t be much of a scene,” Larry said, backing out of his spot wildly, as if he’d done this a thousand times before.

“How long have you been on the force?” we asked, scrambling to put on seat belts that turned out to not even work.

“Seventeen long years and six with the unit,” Larry replied, making an illegal left U-turn on red, from the far left lane, in a police car with no blue lights.

“Um, Larry, do you always drive like this?” we asked, now really afraid for our lives.

“People in New York don’t respect cops,” Larry said indignantly. “Down south they still do, and even some out west, but not here. A cop here can look at a guy dealing in the street and the dealer will yell, ‘What the fuck you looking at?’ Used to be, you got something for being a cop. Now, there’s no perks, no respect, no nuthin’. All we got left is running a red light or two.”

After about fifteen minutes of “driving however you want,” accumulating enough traffic points to keep thirty people off the road forever, we arrived at our first New York City crime scene. We drove right up to the tape and rolled out like we owned the place. “Yo Larry, what’s up?” one of the guys yelled. As we found out, one of Detective Walsh’s nicknames is “Larry Love.” And everybody does love him.

“Whaddya got?” Larry asked, from the other side of the tape.

“Eh, a dead guy with his pants down around his ankles,” the CSI replied to Larry. We arrived just after the body had been zipped into the body bag and placed in the medical examiner’s van.

“These are friends from Tennessee,” Larry said, introducing us as if we were at his house for dinner and not at a murder scene. We talked at length with the guys and gals working the scene, but there wasn’t much to it. From the evidence they’d collected and the way the body had looked, it appeared to be a crime of passion between two lovers. In other words, “a fuck and dump,” as somebody was heard to exclaim. The shift working the scene was the night shift, just finishing up their work that had lasted into the next morning. They had responded to eight homicides in just over twenty-four hours. That’s as many homicides as most communities have in a year.

After a few minutes another call came in: Shots fired. We jumped into the car and sped to the next scene. When we got close, we turned down a street that looked more like a very wide alley, with businesses lined down each side. At the end of the street, we could see the crime scene tape that had been put up, right next to what appeared to be a car-detailing shop. Larry drove right under the crime scene tape toward where the detectives were standing. And they were a sight to behold. Four men all dressed to the nines, each with an ankle-length wool trench coat and slicked-back dark hair, and every one with a cell phone glued to his ear. It was like a quorum of Harvey Keitels huddled up in the street, and one of the few times it seems Hollywood got it right.

As we accompanied our brute of a tour guide up to the men in coats, each began flipping their cell phones down to give Larry some love. “Larry Love!” they hollered out to him as we approached the crime scene tape. With the pleasantries finished, Larry asked what was going on. “We got a hommy [homicide]; looks like a mob hit,” one of the Keitels said as we watched blood literally run down the sidewalk and into the street. The CSI unit was busy processing the scene, photographing bullet ricochets, and collecting shell casings: evidence not typically left behind in a mob hit. In fact, there usually isn’t any evidence left at a mob hit.

“Did anybody see anything?” we naively asked, looking at the dozens of people who lined the street watching the cops do their jobs.

“Nah, they’re all wiseguys,” Keitel number two snapped. Translation—they’re all connected to the mob, so naturally, nobody saw nuthin’. The detectives had already worked out some connections between a couple of mobsters, narrowing down who they’d probably be looking for. But then before anyone could do anything, the trench-coat-clad detectives received another call.

A baby had been brought in to the morgue early that morning; it was thought to be a SIDS death. Yet just a few minutes into her examination, the medical examiner realized that it was no SIDS death; it was a homicide. “Another hommy,” the lead Keitel said, flipping his cell phone shut. “The ME’s doing the cut as we speak.” In other words, the medical examiner was conducting the autopsy. With that, the four detectives jumped immediately into their cars, inviting us and Larry along to check it out.

The morgue was just around the corner from where the mob hit had occurred. It was essentially like any other morgue—old, dank, and overrun with sickeningly sweet smells. We found our way through the catacombs of rooms until we stumbled across the detectives and the ME, at work. The morgue is a terrible place no matter what city it is. No matter how anal retentive a medical examiner is with regard to cleaning, there are always bits of flesh in virtually every nook and cranny, remnants of death gone by. And it’s very, very wet from the washing of the bodies and the squeegeeing of the diluted blood-water mix as it goes down the drain. We entered into the morgue just as the tech was dragging a freshly Y-incisioned cadaver off the autopsy table and back onto the gurney. Unfortunately for us, the gurney was much lower than the table, and the tech was much smaller than the cadaver (meaning she had to struggle a bit), so the body came down with a flop and a splash, and our faces were spattered with a fine mist of diluted, bloody death sweat.

To our right, the four horsemen huddled around the autopsy table where the baby lay, talking with the medical examiner, who looked suspiciously like Brigitte Nielsen. The ME invited us right into the midst of the conversation, which centered on the three-month-old infant’s skull. “See, look here,” she said, peeling back the flesh of the skull. She allowed us to move forward to see what she was talking about. “Hundreds and hundreds of tiny fractures,” the ME continued. “Not a SIDS death.” The tiny infant’s body lay there, revealing a savage beating at someone’s hands.

“Fuckin’ shame,” Keitel number three chimed in.

It was a shame. It has been our experience that most adult murders happen at night and are usually reported at night. Babies, on the other hand, almost always turn up dead first thing in the morning. All too often, angry husbands or pissed-off boyfriends, annoyed by a baby’s crying, lose their tempers and react violently. Then the mothers bring in the baby the next morning, telling everyone who will listen that they “found the baby not moving when I got up,” hoping that the hospital will think it’s SIDS. Most don’t realize that babies, just like adults, get a complete autopsy when the cause of death is unknown.

“Doc, take a picture of her just like that,” the lead detective told the ME, regarding the infant. “I want them to see what they did.” The detectives were already preparing for their investigation and interrogation of the parents, wanting to show them the picture of the autopsied infant to show them what they had done to her.

“We got the parents at the PD now,” one of the Keitels said. “We’ll see what they say.” The photograph was snapped, and the ME readjusted the baby’s head. Amazingly, she looked perfect. No bruising, no swelling, no nothing. She looked like a toy baby doll sitting on a stainless steel table. Without an autopsy, no one would ever have been the wiser about what the baby had endured. “Pleasure to meet youse guys; enjoy New York.” And with that, the four trench-coated detectives vanished from our lives forever.

Noon approached as we left the morgue. Lunchtime. We have no idea what it is, but something primal happens in the body when it’s around death for long periods of time. Unbelievable hunger almost always occurs in morgues. Our experience has been that the urge is even worse around decomposing bodies. It must have something to do with the body saying, “Hey, yoohoo, hello, you’re not dead; eat something!” So we grabbed a sandwich at one of Larry’s favorite haunts down in Brooklyn.

“What have you been up to?” we asked Larry, with our sandwiches in hand.

“Oh, I just worked a fire death,” he responded. “A guy down in the city had been set on fire repeatedly, and then put out, and then set on fire again, just to torture him. Eventually, they sat the guy in a chair, duct taped his arms so they couldn’t move and his head completely so he couldn’t breathe, and set him on fire by lighting a bag of Kingsford charcoal.” He paused. “It was all over drugs.”

As we drove back to the department, we mentioned that we’d seen Larry in
People
magazine. “Oh yeah, the bouncer; you saw that?” Detective Walsh had made a little splash in
People
magazine when he worked the homicide scene of female victim Imette St. Guillen. Darryl Littlejohn is the bouncer of the club she was last seen at, and has been accused of murdering the graduate student from John Jay College. “That guy knew what he was doing,” Larry said, driving crazily back to Queens. “He was a scumbag.”

The case began when an anonymous 911 call came in to the NYPD that a body had been spotted lying on the side of the road near Spring Creek Park in Brooklyn, New York. There, police found the nude and almost unidentifiable body of Imette St. Guillen wrapped in a bedspread, her hands and feet tightly bound. A sock had been placed into her mouth and taped in place with clear shipping tape. She had claw marks, gouges, and other lacerations indicative of a sexual homicide. Her assailant had meant not only to kill but to torture her.

Allegedly, Darryl Littlejohn, a bouncer at a local nightclub, had had a disagreement with St. Guillen earlier that night. And some at the club say they saw the two of them together, arguing later in the evening. That’s part and parcel of why he was developed as a suspect. After his arrest, he consented to a DNA swab, and laboratory tests confirmed that it matched DNA found on St. Guillen’s body. Though it’s a wonder there was any to match at all. “He cleaned the girls up that he raped,” Larry said, clearly agitated by the thought. Purportedly, Littlejohn had raped before—afterward showering his victims, using soap, brushing their teeth, changing their clothes, and washing their mouths out with mouthwash before turning them back out into the street. Or he would dump their dead bodies along the side of the road, as he did with St. Guillen.

“Did you work the scene?” we asked, meaning when St. Guillen had been found.

“No,” Larry said, “I went back after the initial crime scene had been worked to collect more evidence regarding the other rapes.” Along with the DNA, other evidence helped provide the key links between Littlejohn and St. Guillen. The tape that covered her mouth had trace fibers consistent with fibers from Littlejohn’s home. In addition, unusual fibers from jackets found in Littlejohn’s home were also found on the tape across St. Guillen’s mouth. Eyewitnesses reported seeing Littlejohn’s van turning around in the neighborhood where her body was later found. All of the evidence added up to a three-count indictment against Darryl Littlejohn. The case is still awaiting trial.