Broken Doll (16 page)

“Let me turn now to the scientific evidence,” said Scott. “The prosecution intends to offer a number of items of scientific evidence and testimony from a number of experts on blood typing, DNA testing, and carpet fiber comparison. Let me respond briefly to what he said.

“DNA testing is still a relatively new procedure, which requires a great deal of scientific control and care in preparation of the test and reporting the results. The defense will challenge the DNA evidence,” asserted Scott, “on a number of grounds that I'll briefly outline for you.”

The defense sharply criticized the interpretations of DNA test results, stating, “When there is a mixture of DNA, it' s difficult or impossible to identify which DNA is which.” If the control feature for a particular test has failed, and where there are multiple results when there should be only one, “in that situation,” he said, “that test should be disregarded as unreliable.”

Scott also advised the jury that the results of carpet fiber comparisons and blood group testing had problems as well. “If the samples of blood are correctly taken, preserved, and grouped, the conclusions are nonetheless based on calculations of the frequency of the blood group in a particular population. That means that all you can say is that this person is of one among a number of persons in a population group that has that blood characteristic. They can
not
tell you,” he insisted, “that the person in question did in fact contribute that blood. As for the carpet fiber and comparisons,” he said, “the same statement applies to both of those items.

“I believe the evidence will show that two fibers were recovered from Roxanne Doll's body and compared with carpet fibers from Richard's van. Let me tell you how that happened,” he said, “and why they are reported to have similar characteristics.

“The evidence will show,” said Scott, “that the comparisons do not specifically identify the fiber found on Roxanne Doll as having come from the carpet in the van. In fact, the comparison is done by taking ten or twelve fibers from one of these carpets samples and determining whether any one of them match the evidence sample. In many situations, one or two of those fibers will match, and on ten or twelve of them, the rest of them won't.

“So,” Scott clarified, “from the same carpet sample you can have fibers which match the suspect sample, or suspect evidence and some that do not. And what is reported to you is those that match. And therefore we have no way of knowing whether the carpet that is the sample is in fact the contributor of the carpet fibers that were found on her body, or they could have come from some other place. The similarity of the hair, which is done in a much similar way, and the carpet fibers is of limited value because it can not be the base of claiming a match between the known and unknown samples.

“In conclusion,” Scott said, “let me ask you to keep an open mind on all the evidence and not to expect a distinct and separate defense. It is our position that the abduction of Roxanne Doll could only have occurred after midnight, after Gail Doll saw two heads in the bed, those of Roxanne and Kristena, that we can prove to a near certainty where Richard Clark was between midnight and six-thirty in the morning. Thank you.”

Errol Scott took his seat next to his conservatively dressed client, and Judge Thorpe asked the prosecution to call their first witness.

“We screamed and we ran home on our bikes,” said one of the two young girls who saw Roxanne's body on a brushy north Everett hillside. In her soft voice, the nervous child told of their innocent fun coming to a tragic halt upon the grisly and nightmarish discovery. Wesley Coulter, the man who actually summoned police to the scene, also testified.

Kristena Doll, Roxanne's sister, wearing a purple flower-print dress, sat poised within the framework of perceptible unease. “Does Roxanne live with you anymore?” asked deputy prosecutor Ron Doersch. “Yeah,” responded Kristena seriously, “but she is up in heaven.”

“Much of the first day was spent setting the scene, more or less, for Roxanne's disappearance and the discovery and recovery of her body,” recalled Herndon. “There were detailed maps of the Iffrig home, the bedroom that she was taken from, and the site where the two young girls found her body.”

The jury was also shown the Barbie pullover Roxanne last slept in and the dolls she kept in her room. “Several photographs of the body recovery site were shown to them,” Herndon said, “and that included some where you could see Roxanne Doll's partially buried foot.”

Tim Iffrig and Gail Doll gave detailed accountings of the hours from the early afternoon the of March 31 through April 1, 1995. “Richard Clark's attorneys,” recalled Herndon, “really questioned Gail about the statements she gave to us in which she indicated that she saw Roxanne and her sister asleep in bed at about five past midnight, April first. They wanted her to have actually seen Roxanne in bed when she came home, but she didn't. As she testified, she expected to see two heads in the bed, and that's what she thought she saw.”

The parents, pals, relatives, officers, pathologists, investigators, scientists, and significant passersby, by virtue of their overlapping testimonies, were as brick and mortar in an interlocking and fiercely impenetrable fortress of facts.

Dr. Eric Kiesel described in lurid detail the tragic injuries that violated young Roxanne, and those that caused her death. “If you are looking at the vagina with a person laying on their back,” he said, “and set up a clock, this tear, the gape, the gaping laceration, would extend from about the four to eight o'clock position, through the six o'clock.

“There is another laceration. And this is on the left wall of the vagina,” said Kiesel, pointing to large, illustrative photographs. “You can just see a hint of it. You clearly can see the full length of it. This one was from where the laceration began to the apex, or the top, of the laceration, which is in what's called the left fourchette; that's the space in the vagina adjacent to the cervix. That laceration also gapes to about two centimeters, as I measured it. And that's at the widest point. There is considerable amount of hemorrhage in the deep, soft tissues.”

Asked by the prosecution to explain what that meant, he replied, “Well, by definition the laceration is a blunt-force injury. She tore and bled. I was not able to tell if there had been penetration to the anal area. The anus is dilated. But that can occur as postmortem artifact. So whether or not the anus is dilated enough from insertion of something or due to this postmortem artifact, you can't tell in part.”

The way to tell if it is associated with sexual assault, he explained “is if spermatozoa or semen could be found in there, but considering the condition, the location she was on the hill, drainage would be from the vagina. She is on her back, and if the anus is dilated, there could be some cross contamination if spermatozoa is found in the anus or rectum. So basically I can't tell, but there is no trauma to the anus or rectum. So spermatozoa found on the anal swab could have drained from the vagina itself.

“There is really no way to tell how much force caused the injuries to her vagina, but sufficient force to tear the skin and from a stretching force, enough force to create disruption of blood vessels. But there is also going to be disruption of those blood vessels as the tissues stretch. So, there is no scientific way that I'm aware of to truly be able to measure that in this individual. You can do experiments, measuring how much force does it take to tear, but there is enough individual variability that I don't think we would be significant here.”

Prosecutor Doersch turned attention away from Roxanne Doll's torn and stretched vagina, and focused on the fatal stab wounds. “First of all,” Doersch asked Dr. Kiesel, “how much stab wounds to the neck in total?”

“Well, [there] were a minimum number of seven,” Kiesel said. “The reason that there is a minimum number is because some of these wounds are multicomponent, and it's not possible for me to tell whether that's two wounds or if the second wound was created by the motion used to create the first.”

On the right side of Roxanne's head, by the right ear, were more wounds. “There is a large irregular wound, which is the one furthest over to the side, and then there are two other wounds toward the center, or toward the middle part of the neck,” Kiesel testified. “This upper wound, the small wound at the top of the series of three wounds, is a stab wound. It's three-eighths by one-quarter inch. It's a multicomponent stab wound. It's not a pure stab wound—it is not a wound from a knife going in and coming out. [It] has multiple cutting components to it, so that it suggests that either there are two wounds to the same area or it's a wound where there is movement on the part of the deceased, or there is movement on the part of the person creating the wound.

“Twisting of the blade could do this,” he explained. “A shaky hand could do this; hesitation could do this. This wound is through the skin and it's relatively superficial, it's into the subcutaneous tissues. Subcutaneous tissues are those tissues immediately beneath the skin. It doesn't go into the muscles of the right neck, it's just into the skin. It goes slightly under the skin and has an estimated depth of half an inch; so measured from the skin surface to the apex or the end of the wound track, it was approximately one-half inch. The wound traveled from front to back, it went upward, and it went from left to right. So, this wound is heading from the . . . the injury to the skin itself, upward and essentially toward the back of the head. This wound is located, if you will, if you measure from the top of the head, this one is nine inches below the head. Just below it is a three-quarter-inch wound. These wounds also are gaping. Part of this is due to the elasticity of the skin, part of this is due to the decomposition changes. This lower wound is three-quarters of an inch long. It's almost transverse, or horizontal. The body is standing in an upright position—that would be the horizontal position. It's three-quarters inches right at the midline. And if you measure from the top of the head, it's nine and a half inches below the top of the head. This wound track is deeper; it's one and a quarter inches deep. It goes through the skin and through the strap muscles of the neck.”

The neck has numerous muscles beneath the skin that attach to the neck organs. The neck organs being the larynx, or voice box, the trachea, or the cartilages there, the hyoid bone, which is a movable bone up at the top of the neck where the tongue attaches, and they also attach to the jawline. These strap muscles give control of the neck organs.

“If you turn your head and stretch your neck,” explained Dr. Kiesel, “there is a large muscle that goes from the midportion of your collarbone, and it actually goes up to what's called the mastoid process. There is this bony lump behind your ear, and it's a pretty good size muscle. This wound is just center, toward the center of that, so it's in front of that muscle and to the side, the inside of that muscle. It doesn't really hit that muscle, but it goes through all these smaller muscles there. The significance of this is, if you feel your voice box, that big muscle, in the groove between the two is where your major inner-vascular bundle is, the major nerves coming from the brain down to the body, but your carotid arteries, major arteries that supply the brain, run here, and also the large vessels, the jugular veins, are also in this area. So this stabbing goes through the skin, into those strap muscles, but it does not hit the nerve vascular bundle.

“This wound is going again, from front to back. It's going just slightly left to right. In other words, it's almost straight on, but it's just slightly left to right, and it is upward, so it's going from bottom to top as it goes back.

“What's not shown well in any of these photographs,” he told the jury, “is that there is a very significant wound just above the voice box. It's a multicomponent wound. There is more than one cut associated with it. It's horizontally oriented or transversely oriented. On the right side is a sharp edge. This—and because the wound margins are also smooth, this is telling us that we are dealing with a single-edged weapon creating that, most likely a single-edged knife. It's centered just a quarter of an inch of midline. Actually, in state's exhibit seventeen this wound is just barely showing upright at the edge of the ruler. This wound has two components and actually has two wound tracks. So it indicates there are two stab wounds essentially in the same hole; or the knife is in, comes partially out, and goes back in. One wound track goes through the skin in the muscles of the neck. It incises the left lateral or the side of the thyroid cartilage on the left or actually hits the bones of the cervical neck or cervical spine. There are seven vertebral bodies and this actually nicks number four.”

Realizing that the stab wound pierced little Roxanne so deeply that the blade actually nicked her spine added additional disgust and revulsion toward whoever perpetrated such a horrid deed.

“The thyroid cartilage is, when you look at the voice box, the voice box is the larynx. In it, the very bottom edge of that, is another band of cartilage called the thyroid cartilage and immediately below that is the beginning of the trachea, which is the windpipe. So, this is a small piece of cartilage there at the bottom. This wound track, the first wound track, is nearly straight in, doesn't go up or down, doesn't go side to side; it's pretty much straight in.”

With elaborate photographs detailing the wounds that took young Roxanne Doll's life, Dr. Kiesel testified to the autopsy's details, the determination of knife size, and the length of time her body was exposed to the elements.

Each subsequent witness, from the plethora of forensic scientists to the Dog House bartender who fixed Clark's final appearance at that popular watering hole at prior to midnight on March 31, appeared in sequence. Each participant, from Neila D'alexander recalling who consumed what while awaiting Tim and Gail's return home on Friday afternoon, to Elza Clark and his parents' discussion of deer remnants, easily eradicated any reasonable doubts concerning the culpability of Richard Clark in the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Roxanne Doll.

Concerning deer blood in the van and on Richard's shirt, Toni Clark testified that there was a deer poached by Elza and his friends a few weeks prior to March 31.

“Oh, gee, at least two weeks before March thirty-first,” said Toni Clark. “It was only a hindquarter. I think Elza might have brought it over, because him and his two friends are the ones who poached it. It was just the bone, the fur, and a hoof. It was starting to stink, and we asked Richard to go put it in the van or just get it out of here. And so he picked it up—it was in a white bucket—he walked out of the patio with it, got to—I never seen him put it in his van. But he came back in and he got mad and started screaming and saying it got spilled, the blood got spilled. Well, there wasn't that much, just what little bit had dripped off the bone, because it was just the hindquarter. And so my husband says, ‘Oh, just forget it, Richard,' and he doubled bagged it and he threw it in our garbage and the garbageman took it. It was just no big deal, you know, there was just no big deal.”

Although Richard Clark was asked to take away a small portion of deer remnants, the event was the Sunday prior to Friday, March 31. There was no deer blood on Clark's shirt—it was the blood of Roxanne Doll.

Dr. Grimsbo detailed the DNA linkage of Clark to the crime, including the recovery of Roxanne's DNA from the bloodstained shirt given detectives by Carol Clark. That shirt became the focal point of an emotional firestorm when Carol Clark took the witness stand for the prosecution and completely contradicted her taped statements to detectives.

Prior to Carol Clark taking the stand, Detective John Burgess testified that a tearful Carol Clark gave him the gray-and-white pullover on April 18, ten days after Roxanne's body was found and after Richard Clark already had been arrested and charged with the killing.

Carol Clark was weeping uncontrollably when she first came into the courtroom, and testimony was delayed while deputy prosecutor Ron Doersch and others helped her calm down. Once on the stand, the tearful and emotionally distraught Ms. Clark gave testimony that completely contradicted her taped statement to police.

Carol Clark originally told detectives, “I asked him how he got that on his shirt and he said, ‘Well, I've been out poaching a deer.'”

On the stand, however, Carol said, “I noticed the stain on his shirt, and I stood at the sink washing some dishes and he told me at that time that Elza and his two friends had poached a deer, and at that time I thought the stain was from a deer.”

“Is it your testimony,” asked a surprised Ron Doersch, “that you didn't ask him where the stain came from?”

“No. That's what he told me. That's what he said. I didn't say anything.”

“Why did you tell the cops on April eighteenth that [you] had a conversation with Richard, if it wasn't so?”

“I don't know.”

“Is it because you did have that conversation?”