Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist (11 page)

Months of investigation proved that James Turel’s instincts were on the mark. We dug up a load of dirt on the seemingly clean-cut and mild-mannered Addicks, including allegations of securities fraud and arson in several states. When incriminating evidence surfaced linking Turel’s former seasonal tax preparer, Si Cross, to the arson ring, Cross offered to help with the homicide investigation in exchange for immunity. He told us that Addicks had tried on multiple occasions to hire him and several other men he knew, including his cousin, to kill Turel. Cross agreed initially—for a fee of $5,000—but ultimately
couldn’t go through with the murder. When he backed out, Addicks and a man named Dennis Lee Cartwright—a hunting buddy and childhood friend of Addicks’s who was already on parole for assault and battery in Washington—committed the murder themselves. Addicks even bragged about it, Cross said.

After Addicks and Dennis Lee Cartwright were arrested, Cartwright confessed to his part in the murder. His version of events matched Cross’s. Cartwright went to prison for murder, though he was paroled after serving thirteen years. Addicks was found guilty of arson, securities fraud, and murder and sentenced to life in prison. While there, he launched a multitude of lawsuits, from a $2 million suit against
Official Detective Stories
magazine for libel to a $5 million suit against the victim’s son Stan Turel—who Addicks claimed was secretly a police agent—for allegedly violating his Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights. (The costs of lawsuits launched by prisoners are underwritten by taxpayers.) Though the suits were largely unsuccessful, Addicks was paroled by the states of Oregon and Washington in 1989.

As I investigated more homicides, I learned that most people commit murder for one of three reasons: money, sex, or revenge. If you are astute and you know what to look for at a murder scene, you can often spot clues that reveal which motive inspired the crime—a broken window, a busted lock, or ransacked drawers suggest a break-in; semen on or around the victim indicates that intercourse has recently taken place; and so on. In other cases, delving into the victim’s background unearths the motive: Was she a woman with a broken romance and a violent-tempered ex-lover? Was he in a heated struggle with a business partner for control of a company they shared? Were
they double-crossing associates in a drug deal? In James Turel’s case, Addicks stood to lose a huge amount of money if Turel exposed his shady business dealings and ousted him from the firm.

Sometimes you know instinctively that a killer’s actions arose from one of the three common motivations, but you can’t prove it. Such was the case in the death of little Larisa L. Wahnita, a six-year-old girl we found stabbed to death in her bedroom in 1977. Her mother’s boyfriend, Phyll Mendacino, admitted to killing her, but his story about how it happened would have been laughable if it hadn’t been so tragic. Mendacino claimed Larisa was jumping up and down on the bed and he warned her to stop. She didn’t. So he tried to stop her while holding his knife, and she jumped into it—more than eighty times.

Child murders have always been the hardest for me to handle emotionally, so it was horrible seeing Larisa’s body covered in stab wounds, lying on the floor next to her bed. My gut told me Mendacino had made some kind of sexual advance on Larisa and then flown into a rage at her reaction. I had seen it often enough before to recognize the signs. But there was no way to prove it. Ultimately, he was convicted of murder, and bringing out lurid details about Whatever his motive may have been wouldn’t have changed anything in the sentence.

Like every other homicide detective, I’ve made my share of misinterpretations and missed key evidence more than once. I had already been working homicide for eight years when the phone rang at four
A.M.
one chilly November morning in 1983. My family and I had tickets to the Oregon–Oregon State football game, but instead I got dragged out of bed to respond to a homicide in one of Portland’s wealthy, old-money neighborhoods. The scene was a bloodbath. Unbeknownst to his family, Robert Galloway, owner of the successful J&J Construction Company, was on the verge of bankruptcy. Rather than face the humiliation of losing it all, he decided to end it and take his entire family out with him—even the dog. As we soon learned, he told his two older
sons he was worried about burglars and needed them to sleep in sleeping bags in the J&J offices. Then he showed up in the wee hours and shot them both. Afterward he drove to Elmer’s Pancake House and ate breakfast, before heading home and shooting his wife and his youngest son. His teenage daughter heard the gunfire and called 911. I still have the tape of her screaming, “Dad, Dad, don’t!” and the sound of shell casings hitting the floor with a metallic ping like a handful of dimes dropping on hardwood as he jettisoned them. You can hear Galloway reload, then a bang and a yelp as the dog is shot. There is one final shot as he points the gun at himself and fires.

Lucky for me we had the tape to tell us what happened. But I still managed to miss vital blood evidence that I should have noticed on the scene—namely, blood transfers covering the light switch in the daughter’s room, which would have proved Galloway’s hands were covered in his family’s blood before he touched it, had there been any doubt as to who was behind the rest of the Galloway family members’ murders.

At other times, I wasn’t so lucky. We never solved the murder of elderly Eunice Karr. In 1984, she was found dead, bound and strangled, in her tiny cottage home in a neighborhood known as Parkrose. Her body had been posed on the bed with various objects placed around it, including a paper cross positioned upside down in one of her hands. We suspected the killer or killers were after the numerous antiques that filled her home but were trying to throw us off the trail by staging a bizarre murder scene.

In the months that followed Karr’s death, whoever masterminded it started sending notes to us through the personals ads in the local papers with messages like “You’re on the wrong track” and “I don’t want to work with Detective Pritchard.”

We answered them: “Pritchard no longer involved. You are crafty and clever, but time is on our side. Signed, Peterson and Englert.”

Karr’s niece called me every year on the anniversary of her aunt’s death until I retired from the sheriff’s office. I always had to tell her the same thing: “I’m sorry, but I haven’t found your aunt’s killer yet.” Advancing technology is at last bringing new hope to unsolved cases like Eunice Karr’s. The cords, the paper cross, even the victim’s clothing might well be covered in minute traces of her killer’s DNA. But when Eunice Karr was murdered, we lacked the science to analyze the evidence we found. Now, as part of Multnomah County sheriff Robert Skipper’s special cold case team, we are reexamining unsolved crimes like the murder of Eunice Karr. We can enlist area labs to comb preserved evidence for fragments of DNA and cross-check any samples they extract for matches with criminal profiles in state and national databases.

Some of the most compelling cases I ran across while working homicide were those where the body was missing and the only evidence we had to go on was blood. A perfect example was the case of a young man named Daniel W. Pierce in Troutdale. When Pierce failed to show up for his shift at a local Pizza Hut in March 1986, one of his coworkers called his girlfriend. Puzzled, she headed to his apartment, where she found no sign of Pierce, but was alarmed to discover what she thought might be blood in his bedroom. She called the sheriff’s office, so my partner, Joe Woods, and I went to the apartment to investigate.

When we searched Pierce’s bedroom, the first thing we noticed were wrinkled, uneven bedcovers. The bed had obviously been hastily made. On a hunch, we pulled them back. Underneath the top layers was a large, telltale dark stain. Somebody had bled all over the
mattress. I crouched down and took a closer look at the wall. There were a number of brownish red spots up and down it. Smeared sections suggested someone had tried hurriedly to wipe them away.

We collected blood samples, took photographs, and admitted some of the missing man’s belongings into evidence.

We also interviewed Daniel Pierce’s roommate, a twentysomething by the name of Dan Brown, who claimed he knew nothing of Pierce’s whereabouts.

“He probably crashed with some friends,” Brown said casually. “He’ll turn up.” His attitude seemed a little too blasé to be genuine.

Actually, there wasn’t much of anything genuine about Brown, as it turned out. First, we ran a DMV check on the car he was driving and found out that it was a stolen vehicle from Seattle. Next, we learned he was using an alias. His real name was Socrates E. Ladner.

We booked Ladner on suspicion of murder and took him down to process him. We searched the apartment thoroughly but found no weapons. Nor did anything suspicious turn up among Ladner’s belongings, though we impounded the stolen car he had been driving and towed it to the police lot.

One of the lab technicians concluded that the droplets we had found in Pierce’s room were the result of a gunshot to the head. But applying what I had learned from my own experiments and studying blood pattern analysis, I disagreed. The spatter didn’t look fine enough to be high-velocity mist. To me, this looked more like the medium-velocity spatter that comes from a beating.

The guys in the crime lab smirked at my theory. “You’re way off,” they said. “That analysis stuff’s nonsense.” These were, incidentally, some of the same experts who were scoffing at the relevance of the rapidly emerging field of DNA analysis to forensics. Eventually, we removed a section of the bedroom’s blood-spattered east wall to present in court as evidence.

Under questioning at the sheriff’s office, Ladner continued to insist that he knew nothing about his roommate’s disappearance. He had been hanging out with friends, he said, and come home to find Pierce gone. He hadn’t thought much of it—even when the guy failed to turn up the next night—because they led very separate lives.

With no other leads and no evidence to hold Ladner, we were coming to an impasse when we suddenly remembered the impounded car. We hurried out to the lot behind the station, popped open the trunk, and saw an ominous-looking black plastic bag with something lumpy inside. The foul odor emanating from it left little doubt about the contents. Joe and I looked at each other. Neither of us was clamoring to open it.

He shrugged. “You’re closest,” he said. “You do the honors.”

I grasped the edges gingerly and pulled them back so we could peer inside.

“Holy cow!”

I shook my head and looked in the bag again, pulling its edges farther back to let more light fall on the gory contents. I knew I was staring at the severed hands and head of Daniel Pierce, but the face looked just like that of my oldest son, Gary. I closed my eyes, shook my head, and looked again, working hard to steady my breathing and waiting for the features of the decapitation victim to swim into focus. Finally, I managed to convince myself that I was staring into the lifeless face of Daniel Pierce and not my own son.

We went back inside and confronted Ladner about the gruesome discovery we had just made.

“Want to tell us about what’s in the trunk of your car?”

At last, he confessed. Yes, he said, he had killed his roommate. He was having money troubles, and Pierce was hoarding enough cash to cover all his debts. Unfortunately, the guy didn’t want to part with it.

Ladner went on to explain that he snuck into Pierce’s room and
beat him to death while he was sleeping, proving my theory about the medium-velocity spatter. Next he decapitated his victim and removed his hands, which explained the large amount of blood soaked into the mattress. Finally, he told us we would find the rest of Pierce’s body if we searched a secluded spot on Mount Hood, a favorite local dumping ground for murder victims. He even mapped out where we needed to dig. We followed his directions and soon unearthed the headless body of the missing teenager.

As this and other cases taught me, blood at a crime scene presents an invaluable window into what happened—and what didn’t. Even now when I walk into a scene, I focus immediately on the blood. What does it suggest about the victim? What does it say about the killer? About the manner of death? About the motive?

Like footprints, bloodshed leads in a certain direction—toward specific conclusions and away from others. And like fingerprints, it illuminates who did what. It can explain how the attacker struck, reveal what the victim did in his final moments of life, and detail the actions the killer took after the murder. Often the clues to be found in blood yield more vital information than those found on the body itself. Whenever I walk into a crime scene, I glance repeatedly at the blood while I examine other elements of the scene to gauge how each relates to the spatter or pooling patterns I’m seeing. Eventually, the blood almost always reveals its secrets.

I
N THE EARLY 1970S
, the field of blood pattern analysis was still developing—and still widely derided—but conferences cropped up here and there. Whenever I heard about them, I signed up. I paid my own way and went on my own time, since most of the men in my department would have scoffed at the subject matter. I disagreed. But I did find myself getting frustrated as I sat in a lecture hall at the Southern Police Institute in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1976, ostensibly expanding my knowledge of how to interpret bloodshed at crime scenes.

For the past twenty minutes, I had been filling my notebook with more unanswered questions than useful information. In the margins I had scrawled a slew of “What about . . .” queries and “Remember to
double-check . . .” notes reminding myself to examine photos from my files, refer to my old case notes, and conduct further experiments to find out exactly how the information from this lecture might apply to a real crime scene. I glanced around surreptitiously at some of the cops filling the seats nearby to see whether their faces registered any of the dissatisfaction I felt. Some seemed to be listening intently, but others were gazing off into space or carrying on their own conversations.