The Mammoth Book of New Csi (25 page)

Other police began searching the house for clues. On the landing, a yapping white Pomeranian nipped Patrolman Mark Wyman’s trouser leg. Karen Neal called the dog off.

“It’s Karen, Domain, Karen! Now leave the policemen alone and get in your corner!” she said. She explained to the policemen that the dog did not like strangers. This immediately begged the question, what was the dog doing when the intruder broke in?

A veteran of twenty years on the force, Lieutenant Jack said he had never seen such a slaughter. Later, when he saw Damon in the morgue, he turned away in tears. For months after that, when he went into the bedroom of his own sleeping five-year-old to check on him, the image of Damon in the morgue and Devon on the living-room floor flashed before his eyes.

“I just couldn’t shake the vision,” he said.

It was not just the physical horror of the scene that got to him. Both Jack and Patterson felt that there was something very wrong here.

As the crime scene investigation got into full swing, the Routier home was filled by CSI men and women taking photographs, dusting for fingerprints and making notes. Sergeant Nabors’s job was to examine the patterns of blood. In the kitchen, he noticed that the sink was spotless but the edge of the countertop around it was smudged with blood. It seemed as if someone had tried to clean the sink of blood.

He sprayed the area with Luminol. When the lights were turned off, the entire sink and surrounding counter glowed in the dark. There had, indeed, been blood in the sink that someone had tried to wash away.

On the leatherette sofa, he found a small child’s handprint near the edge where Damon had been stabbed. Like the blood in the sink, someone had wiped it away. Why?

Crime scene consultant James Cron began checking out Darlie Routier’s testimony. She said that the killer had entered and left through the garage. True, the screen on the side window had been slashed. But it showed no sign of having been pushed in or out by someone passing through the netting. Indeed, the frame of the screen was easily removable if someone had wanted to get through. Even the stupidest criminal would have simply taken it down. Besides, there were no footprints in the ground outside the window, which was soft and damp. It had not been disturbed. Cron figured that Darlie Routier must have been wrong. The intruder must have entered and left by another route. He went around the house looking for signs of a forcible entry or exit, but found none.

Curiously, the trail of blood led to the garage window. But the dust on the window sill had not been disturbed. And there were no handprints around the window. This was doubly odd as someone would have had to hang on to the wall to maintain their balance while forcing their way through the screen.

He then checked for traces of blood outside the house. Presumably, the fleeing attacker would have been dripping with gore – he had left enough of it in the trail up to the garage window. But outside there were no further traces. There was none on the undisturbed earth below the window, none on the manicured lawn, none on the six-foot fence that surrounded the yard, none in the alley outside. All the blood was in the house.

Darlie Routier said that she had fought off the attacker in the living room. But there was little sign of a struggle. A lampshade was askew and an expensive flower arrangement had been overturned. But the stems of the flowers were unbroken. It was as if the arrangement had not been knocked over, but had been placed there.

In the kitchen, only the bloody footprints of Darlie were visible – no one else’s. Pieces of a shattered wineglass lay among the prints and the vacuum cleaner had been knocked over. But the blood underneath them indicated that they had been deposited afterwards.

She also said that she had run barefoot through the kitchen pursuing the intruder, but there were no cuts to her feet from the broken glass.

At the Baylor Medical Center, the staff were puzzled by Darlie Routier’s behaviour. While she seemed outwardly agitated and repeated over and over, “Who could have done this to my boys?”, they found her manner to be artificial and insincere.

According to the testimony of trauma nurse Jody Fitts, “Darlie was wheeled by Trauma Room 1, where her dead child was. She glanced over there, and I was very concerned she would get more upset. His physical condition alone was disconcerting. He was nude and covered head to toe in blood. Tubes were still held in place with tape, and brown bags had been placed around his little-bitty hands to preserve any possible evidence. It was a very stressful and horrible sight . . . I’ll never forget it. She saw him. She had absolutely no response, just turned her head back and stared straight ahead – cold as ice.”

While Darlie was covered with blood, her wounds were superficial. Even the ugly gash in her throat was not life-threatening. The platysma, the muscle fibres protecting the jugular vein, was intact. Nevertheless, the doctors decided to keep her in the hospital for observation.

Lieutenant Jack put Patterson and his partner, Chris Frosch, in charge of the investigation. The day after the murders, they went to the hospital to interview Mrs Routier. Again, she told them of her attack, but this time the details were slightly different.

“I woke up hearing my son Damon saying, ‘Mommy, Mommy,’ as he tugged on my nightshirt,” she said. “I opened my eyes and felt a man get off me. I got up to chase after him. As I flipped the light in the kitchen on, I saw him open his hand and let the knife drop to the floor. Then he ran out through the garage. I went over and picked up the knife. I shouldn’t have picked it up. I probably covered up the fingerprints. I shouldn’t have picked it up. I looked over and saw my two babies with blood all over them. I didn’t realize my own throat had been cut until I saw myself in a mirror. I screamed out to my husband.”

During the interview, Patterson mentioned that her dog, Domain, had tried to bite a patrolman.

“Oh, he always goes off like that when someone he doesn’t know walks in the door,” she said.

Patterson made a note of the remark and later repeated it to Lieutenant Jack.

Nurse Christopher Wielgosz was present during the interview. He noted that Darlie repeatedly admonished herself, then and on other occasions, for picking up the knife and erasing the intruder’s fingerprints. She seemed to be deliberately driving home the point.

Others noted how cold she was. Nurse Jody Cotner said: “Her mother, Darlie Kee, and her little sister, God bless their hearts . . . they were hysterical. I probably held her sister I don’t know how long. They were all sobbing. All except Darlie.”

Cotner had worked with trauma patients for more than a decade and concedes that people who lose their children go through a wide range of emotions.

“Mothers are always inconsolable, but in my entire nursing experience I have never seen a reaction like Darlie’s.”

Another nurse, Paige Campbell, concurs: “People react differently, but there is a commonality when someone . . . sees someone they love die. But I had never seen a reaction like Darlie’s before. There were tissues by the bed, but she never took one.”

Denise Faulk, who looked after Darlie on her first night and washed the blood off her feet, expected her to break down. Instead, she displayed complete indifference. Faulk was so struck by this that, when she went off duty, she sat down and recorded her observations.

On 8 June, Dr Santos discharged Darlie. She and her husband Darin were taken to the police station by Patterson and Frosch to make written statements. In this version she said that Damon was still standing on his feet when he said, “Mommy, Mommy”; before, she said that he had been on the floor.

That evening, Darlie and Darin went to the Rest Haven Funeral Home. In the chapel, the boys were laid out in tiny tuxedos in separate walnut caskets, surrounded by white and red roses. Darlie knelt at their sides and Detective Frosch said he overheard her whisper to them, “I’m sorry.” Then she wailed, “Who could have done this to my children?”

After Darin calmed her down, Helina Czaban, who sometimes performed general housekeeping duties for the Routiers, stepped forward to express her condolences, adding, “. . . and now this expensive funeral to add to your problems”.

“I’m not worried,” Darlie replied. “I’ll get five thousand dollars each for both of the boys.”

The following day there was an hour-long funeral service. Darlie did not cry or wipe her eyes. Instead, she comforted others and made a note of who had sent flowers, saying that she would send them thank-you notes. It was the proper thing to do. The family put down Darlie’s lack of emotion to the Xanax pills the doctor had prescribed.

With no crime scene leads to the intruder, the investigator focused on Darlie herself. She had been born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on 4 January 1970, the first child of Darlie and Larry Peck. When she was seven, her parents divorced. The following year, her mother married a man named Dennis Stahl and, with her two sisters and two step sisters, she moved to Lubbock, Texas. However, the new marriage was soon on the rocks with the couple occasionally involved in violent fights.

A shy child, Darlie blossomed into a showy teenager. She was blonde and hazel-eyed, and attracted the boys, including one named Darin Routier. He worked as a busboy in a Western Sizzler restaurant alongside Darlie’s mother. He was bright and ambitious, a good catch for her eldest daughter, so she introduced them. Apparently, it was love at first sight. They dated at high school and continued writing to each other when Darin went to technical college in Dallas.

There was a strange incident at Darin’s going-away party. According to a friend, Darlie found she was not getting enough attention, so she left the party and returned in a frantic state, claiming that someone had tried to rape her. It did the trick.

After graduating from high school, Darlie joined Darin in Dallas where he now worked as a technician at a computer-chip company. Darlie landed a job with the same firm. The couple lived together and, in August 1988, they married.

The computer-chip industry was booming. Within the year, they moved to a small house in Rowlett. Then Darin started his own company, Testnec, that tested circuit boards for computers. He ran it out of their home.

Their first child Devon was born on 14 June 1989, followed by Damon on 19 February 1991. Meanwhile, Darin’s company grew so fast that it moved into an upscale office building. Earning a small fortune, Darin had a house built for his growing family in Dalrock Heights Addition, an affluent new suburb of Rowlett. The two-storey Georgian-style mansion cost $130,000. Darin also bought a Jaguar that sat waxed and gleaming in the circular driveway.

Darlie was happy. She was a doting mother, who went overboard with decorations at Christmas and Halloween, and threw extravagant parties for Thanksgiving and the boys’ birthdays. But neighbours noticed that she often left Devon and Damon, who were little more than toddlers, unsupervised. When she did look after them, she appeared short-tempered.

She was attracted by all that was gaudy and showy. When she treated herself to breast implants, she opted for EE, the size favoured by soft-porn models. To show them off, she bought skimpy, attention-grabbing outfits. Her clothing bills soared. But for the Routiers it was spend, spend, spend. They even bought a $24,000, 27 ft (8.2 m) cabin cruiser and a mooring space at the exclusive Lake Ray Hubbard Marina nearby.

This outward display papered over marital problems. There were rumours that both partners were seeing other people and there was a violent row at a Christmas party when Darin decided that Darlie had danced too many times with another man.

Nevertheless, Darlie fell pregnant again in early 1995. Friends hoped that the new child would bring the couple together. But, after Drake was born on 18 October 1995, Darlie suffered from post-natal depression. She also found it difficult to shed the weight she had put on during her pregnancy. It was a sore point that Darin used against her when they argued.

While Testnec was making good profits, Darin was not earning enough to fund their extravagant lifestyle. Ends did not meet. Cost-cutting measures failed. Suddenly, Testnec was losing money and Darin was unable to pay himself the salary he needed. Nor could he pay Darlie for doing the books, which increased her depression. Creditors hounded them and, five days before the murders, their bank denied them a much-needed loan.

Darlie became suicidal and recorded her state of mind in a diary. On 3 May 1996, she wrote: “Devon, Damon and Drake, I hope you will forgive me for what I am about to do. My life has been such a hard fight for a long time, and I just can’t find the strength to keep fighting anymore. I love you three more than anything else in this world and I want all three of you to be healthy and happy and I don’t want you to see a miserable person every time you look at me . . .”

Darin walked in while she was writing and noticed the tears welling in her eyes. She broke down and confessed that she was contemplating suicide. He held her and they talked long into the afternoon. By the end of the conversation, she had calmed. For one afternoon, they loved each other again. This moment of happiness was followed by tragedy.

After the boys’ funeral, Darlie, Darin and Drake did not return home. Instead, they went to stay at her mother’s house 10 miles (16 km) away in Plano. A few days later, she needed some clothes and got her friend Mercedes Adams to drive her to Eagle Drive.

Mercedes expected Darlie to break down when she returned home. Instead, confronted with the scene of the murder, she cried: “Look at this mess! It’ll cost us a fortune to fix this shit!”

Standing on the spot where the two boys had been killed, Mercedes put her hands on Darlie’s shoulders and voiced what others were already thinking. She said: “Darlie, look me in the eye and tell me you didn’t kill the boys.”

According to Mercedes, Darlie did look her in the eye and said: “I’m gonna get new carpet, new drapes, and fix this room all up.”

“I couldn’t believe it,” Mercedes said later.

At Rowlett Police Department, they took a more analytical approach. There were a number of things about the crime scene that simply did not add up. What was the motive for the murders? If it was a robbery, why had Darlie’s purse and jewellery been left untouched? Why had an intruder killed two children before killing the adults, who posed a more serious threat? The killer had no scruples when it came to killing two small boys, so why had he backed off when Darlie awoke, leaving a witness alive to identify him? Why would he drop the knife on the floor, giving his pursuer a weapon she could use against him while leaving himself defenceless? Why would he have used the Routiers’ butcher’s knife in the first place? If he had broken into the house intent on robbery or worse, why had he not come already armed? Even the cut in the screen appeared to have been made by the Routier’s bread knife, which carried microscopic particles from the screen. If that was the way he came in, how had he got the bread knife in the first place? But most telling of all: why were there no physical traces of an intruder – no footprints, handprints, fingerprints, no drops of blood outside the house after he had made his escape? In fact, the only sign that the intruder had been there at all were two dead boys and the gash to Darlie’s throat.