Bloodsworth (11 page)

“Right, Mom.”

“Well, if you hadn't married that bitch,” Curtis started, “and we begged you not to . . .” And with that they began to fight. Kirk and his father started shouting at each other about Wanda. Kirk lost it, got mad, threw his napkin down, and left. It was the last meal he would ever have with his mother.

Needing a place to sleep he went to the pool hall and from there called his cousin, Cindy Bloodsworth. “Cindy,” he said, “I've gone and landed myself in a fine kettle of shit.” He then went on to tell her how he'd left Wanda and somehow become a suspect in a murder case. He was innocent, he assured her. “It's just that everything seems to be taken the wrong way.” He was sure he'd be cleared, but
he needed somewhere to stay and some time to get himself together. Cindy picked him up and took him over to her place.

Despite having been wasted for most of the day and night, Kirk had a hard time finding sleep. He lay on the couch at Cindy's for a long while regretting how he'd cursed at his father. He thought of how close he'd come to ruining his life. The doping, the drinking, Wanda—all were wrong turns. Now he was even a suspect in an insane murder. He thought of days past, days more innocent, when all he'd wanted was a fine morning in which to work the river. Knowing the tides and the pull of the moon, knowing the weather, being in synch. Working for himself. No compromises, no excuses. Enough was enough. He promised himself to make a change. And if he put a measure of weight on anything in this world, it was on his own word, on his own commitments, even if only to himself. His time with Wanda was over. Come the new day he planned to hunt down Bill Elliott. To start working the water again. And to save his money and get himself that workboat he'd dreamed of since being a boy. For the first time in an age, he fell asleep with a plan, with a sense of a future.

Soon after he dozed off, he heard from somewhere far away a pounding noise. It became louder. As he came awake, he realized the pounding was there in front of him, on his cousin Cindy's front door.

F
OR A LAW ENFORCEMENT
officer, the objective of any identification procedure should be to ensure a reliable and trustworthy result. Because cops sometimes get carried away, become, perhaps, too eager to make that collar, courts must occasionally wade in and remind them of this purpose. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, in a series of criminal cases raising issues of constitutional due process, the United States Supreme Court addressed the problems inherent in eyewitness identification. The Court ruled that identifications stemming from unnecessarily suggestive police identification procedures were fundamentally unfair and would be inadmissible as evidence. The Court recognized that eyewitness identification, particularly in the criminal context, is by its nature difficult and fraught with possible error. People with similar features can easily be confused one with another. For the typical identification witness, who first sees a perpetrator amid the stress of a criminal encounter, the risk of a mistake increases in any kind of suggestive setting. Showing a witness a single suspect at the scene or in a squad car is suggestive. Showing a witness just one photograph is suggestive. This is because such procedures suggest to the
witness that the police think the one person, or the person depicted in the single photograph, is the culprit. Some witnesses tend to want to please the police. Others are easily led or susceptible to being influenced. The victim or witness typically wants to identify the culprit, wants to be of help. Giving the witness only one choice stacks the deck. And once a witness's identification is tainted—that is, the product of an unduly suggestive procedure—all the subsequent identifications that witness makes may be unreliable, mere repetitions of the first.

The Supreme Court was careful to prohibit only
unnecessarily
suggestive identifications. It chose a term that could be interpreted flexibly by the lower courts in order to meet the endless exigencies of law enforcement and the varied factual situations that arise. Sometimes an on-the-scene arrest coupled with a prompt identification of the suspect by the victim is as reliable as an identification can be. Police remained free under the Court's guidelines to solicit identifications in myriad settings. Nonetheless, nonsuggestive identification procedures, as the Supreme Court ruled, were always to be preferred if available.

To be trustworthy and not suggestive, a good photographic spread should contain numerous pictures of individuals who have the same characteristics the perpetrator was known to have, characteristics consistent with the witness descriptions of the person sought. The people depicted in the photo array should be somewhat similar in appearance. If a suspect has already been apprehended and a photo spread isn't necessary, a nonsuggestive lineup should be conducted. The lineup also should include a number of people with characteristics consistent with the description of the perpetrator. Witnesses should never see the suspect in a suggestive situation before viewing the lineup. Child witnesses are particularly prone to error and suggestion. Working with child witnesses requires extraordinary care in the investigative setting.

The same evening they'd interviewed Kirk Bloodsworth, August 8, 1984, Detectives Ramsey and Capel drove back from Cambridge to the police station in Towson and prepared a photo array of six pictures. Included in it was the photograph of Kirk Bloodsworth. Of the five pictures Ramsey and Capel put with Bloodsworth's, one showed a man who was clean-shaven with no mustache and one showed a man with a full beard. Only three photographs depicted men who were similar to the descriptions given by Chris Shipley and Jackie Poling. Later, the detectives testified that several of the photographs in the array were of other potential suspects in the case.

At eight o'clock that evening, Capel and Ramsey showed the array of photographs to seven-year-old Jackie Poling at his home. Jackie sat at his kitchen table. His mother was out, but a babysitter was there with him. Jackie looked at the pictures one by one. He then told the detectives that he did not see a picture of the man who'd been at Bethke's Pond with Dawn Hamilton. None of them was the one. Capel later testified that he thought Jackie was distracted, preoccupied, more interested in getting back to the television than in looking at the photos.

At 9:45
P.M
., Ramsey and Capel showed the pictures to ten-year-old Chris Shipley in his home. His mother also was present. Shipley studied the prints, then pointed to photograph number four. “That looks just like him,” Chris told them. Then he added something. He told them that the man's hair was a slightly different color. “The man at the pond didn't have as much red in his hair. It seemed lighter,” he told them. Still, he was pretty sure the man in picture number four was the guy at the pond. Picture number four was the photograph of Kirk Bloodsworth.

Back at the station, Capel and Ramsey discussed the results of the photo ID procedure. Jackie Poling had never been certain of anything. He was maybe just too young. Chris Shipley, on the other
hand, seemed to know what he'd seen. He impressed them as a trustworthy witness. While there, they learned of the statements Kirk Bloodsworth had been making in Cambridge, statements that were obviously incriminating. They marveled again at how closely he fit the psychological profile. It all seemed to fit. The difference in hair color mentioned by Shipley when he selected the photo was somehow overlooked. The fact that Jackie Poling had described the man at the pond as skinny and Chris Shipley had described his build as slim to medium was also forgotten. The height discrepancies were rationalized away. Capel and Ramsey were convinced they had their man.

The detectives prepared an affidavit and obtained a warrant for Kirk Bloodsworth's arrest. They drove back to Cambridge, arriving sometime around midnight. Working with Detective Cottom and others, it took a few hours to trace Kirk's movements to his cousin's house. But they found him.

When Kirk Bloodsworth answered the pounding on Cindy Bloodsworth's door, a dozen police officers stood outside. A spotlight shone in his eyes. Disoriented, he looked over his shoulder behind him, wondering who or what they wanted. He heard one of the cops yelling, then, that he, Kirk Bloodsworth, was under arrest for the rape and first-degree murder of Dawn Hamilton. Police were suddenly everywhere. “You have a right to remain silent,” he heard a man shout. “Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law . . .”

Kirk's first reaction was to lose his temper. He began cursing the lot of them. Someone knocked him hard in the small of his back, sending him against the wall where he was pinned and told to shut up. He did. Kirk realized this wasn't just some lurid game. He was up to his ears in it, and he had no idea what to do.

All Kirk was wearing was a pair of blue shorts. They handcuffed him roughly, led him outside barefoot, without a shirt, and pushed
his head down and into the back of a police car. The night was hot and he could hear the bullfrogs from the ditches, and the cicadas from the hedgerows. He grew more afraid. Police cars were all over the street with their red and blue lights rotating through the trees and against the row of houses. He stared at the windshield feeling helpless and sick. His life was over, he kept thinking. Over. He could see what looked like movie credits in red lettering scrolling down the car's windshield:
The End,
they read.

He was driven to the Cambridge Police Station, where Ramsey and Capel took him into the same interview room as the day before. Configured the same way, the room was bare except for the table and two chairs in its center. There, the detectives interrogated him for several hours. Ramsey, this time, took the lead. “How come you're telling people the rock had blood on it?” Ramsey demanded to know. “How would you know about a bloody rock?”

“What the hell you talking about?” Kirk answered, denying at first that he'd said anything about a bloody rock.

“We got the witnesses,” Ramsey told him. “You've been talking about a bloody rock all over town!”

Kirk backtracked. He told him he never said it had blood on it, but that they'd made him think it was the murder weapon when they put it in front of him.

“Why'd you think the rock was the weapon,” Ramsey said. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

Kirk told him again he'd assumed it was the weapon when they put it on the table. They'd tricked him into thinking something he wasn't supposed to know, he said.

Ramsey scoffed at this. “Oh, so you're the detective, now, are you?” He threw Dawn's picture down in front of Kirk. “You kill that little girl?” he asked. “Why'd you kill that little girl?”

“I didn't kill no little girl, sir. No, I did not.”

“Why'd you do her, Kirk? Why did you do that to her?”

He asked it over and over.

Each time Kirk denied it.

Ramsey wouldn't quit. He kept coming back to the same question. Then he demanded to know where Kirk was the morning of July 25.

Kirk couldn't think straight, was too afraid. He told them he wasn't sure. He thought he was home. He thought he'd met a friend named Wayne Palmer who sold pot.

“Tell us about the little boys at the pond,” Ramsey said. “Before you took Dawn into the woods.”

Kirk shut his eyes and shook his head.

Ramsey threw the child's shorts and panties that Kirk had seen the day before on the table. “Look at them,” he ordered. “Look at them!”

He pressed Kirk again about killing Dawn Hamilton. “You killed that little girl, didn't you,” he said. “You're going to the gas chamber, if you don't tell us.” Ramsey repeated the words slowly, enunciating each one, “
The gas chamber . . .
”

Gas chamber
. This sunk in.
Christ . . .

All the while, Capel sat in the corner and never spoke.

Ramsey pointed his finger at Kirk and started in again.

Finally, Kirk went off. He grabbed the girl's panties from off the table, shook them in the face of William Ramsey, and screamed back, “I didn't kill that little girl and I don't know who did neither . . . But it wasn't me! You hear me? You listening?” Kirk threw the panties at the detective. “I wouldn't do a thing like that and if you think I would then you're crazier'n hell!” Kirk started crying. He asked to see a lawyer.

Ramsey rose from the table and walked out of the room in disgust. Capel just shrugged and recuffed him.

When they put him in the police car for the drive to Baltimore County, the tip of the sun was just rising over Leggett's Store.
Through the dawn haze it flashed like a roadside flare, stippling the river's far edge with garish flecks. Riding across the old Fishing Pier Bridge, Kirk wondered whether he'd ever see the old bridge again, ever see the river again. He shut his eyes on the highway. He wished it might all be a bad dream. Minutes later he heard the officer in the front passenger seat say, “How can he sleep? How can someone who's done what he has done ever sleep?” Kirk wanted to answer him but he didn't know how.

T
HEY TOOK HIM
to a holding cell at the police station in Towson. It was the first time he'd ever been in a cage. It smelled of stale urine. Other detectives questioned him again about his whereabouts the morning of July 25. They acted friendly and said it would help him if he could remember. One detective handed him a calendar through the bars and encouraged him to work backward with the dates in order to figure out his whereabouts. Kirk tried and told him that he was home, that July 25 was his day off. Kirk asked the detective to talk to his housemates. He was sure they'd confirm this. He repeated that he was nowhere near where that girl was killed.

But Kirk felt he wasn't explaining himself. His words seemed to fall flat. He didn't know what words would serve to make them understand. He was running out of words. He was running out of strength. It was overwhelming. It seemed like some cosmic nightmare. Some surreal hoax. He tried to explain again to another detective that he was home on the 25th but couldn't find the language to sound convincing, even to himself. At one point he just lost it. “I'm an innocent man!” he screamed through the iron bars. “I'm not guilty! Don't you understand? What are you doing to me? Why are you doing this to me?”