Mitochondrial DNA analysis, even in 2008, is a highly specialized technique and one that is not easily or inexpensively obtained. There are only four regional mitochondrial DNA labs in the United States, and their backlog is roughly two years long—give or take. Private labs can do the analysis much faster, but the price is steep, running anywhere from two to five thousand dollars per test. And with police budgets tighter than they’ve ever been, that’s money most departments cannot afford. Lynchburg is one of those departments. Though the resourceful Pelletier has had some conversations about striking a deal to get more DNA analyzed, for now the mitochondrial analysis will have to wait.
After about eight hours of searching the hills and ravines for Lloyd, we finally called it a day. It was starting to drizzle, ahead of a massive cold front that had the meteorologists already talking about the possibility of snow later in the week. Lloyd Floyd Thomas would not be found on our search, and quite frankly, unless someone stumbles headfirst by accident into the rest of his remains, he probably never will. He could even still be alive; who knows? He would be eighty-one years old in 2009. We gathered our supplies, our divining rods, our green bones, and loaded everything back into the crime scene vans. Bobby locked the gate to Blackwater Creek Park behind us as we left Lloyd’s supposed final resting place. For us, it would be the last time setting foot in this park. But for the investigators, the search may never end. It is still an open investigation to this day, with Pelletier attempting to arrange for the mitochondrial analysis and Bobby chasing leads like those from the drunken guy who’d claimed he’d killed Thomas. They’ve even arranged to go back into the house and process the scene for cleaned-up or faint traces of blood. It’s a long shot at best. The sad thing is, the only potential suspect who was ever developed, George Morton, is now dead. They will probably never solve the crime, but hopefully one day they’ll get a break and find Lloyd Floyd Thomas.
Back at the partially condemned church, also known as the Lynchburg Police Department, we gathered in the basement at the mini-crime scene lab with Bobby. The lab is very compact, but it has a fuming chamber and a few other forensic accoutrements that make analysis of minor evidence relatively easy. “Now, how do those damn things work?” Bobby asked, referring to the divining rods in that wonderful Virginian accent. He hadn’t had the opportunity to witness Dr. Vass conducting this experiment in person. “Is he an alien?” Bobby asked us, joking.
“No, he’s from Jersey,” we told Bobby, laughing. We get that question all the time about Dr. Arpad Vass because of his wide-ranging intelligence on a myriad of topics—not to mention his stint at Roswell that he can’t talk about. Frankly, sometimes we also wonder if he might be from Mars, mainly because we’ve never met anyone here on Earth as smart as he is.
Bobby tried out our homemade divining rods on the bones we’d found. We had constructed our rods using a hanger from the dry cleaner’s, because dry-cleaning hangers like the ones that hold freshly pressed pants come with a round, hollow, cardboard tube on the hanging part of the hanger. All we did was simply cut the long portion of the hanger in half and remove the hollow cardboard tube (there now being two halves). The metal pieces were bent into the shape of an L and inserted into the straight cardboard pieces. The cardboard is the part of the rod that you hold, allowing the metal part to move about freely. We laid one of the bones in the middle of the floor and handed Bobby the rods. Back and forth he walked, slowly, holding his arms steady, walking right up to the bone, holding his outstretched arms over the bone. Nothing. He repeated it from the other direction. Again, nothing. “You sure Arpad’s damn things work?” Bobby asked.
“They’re not Arpad’s. We made ’em,” we told Bobby.
“I’ll be damned,” he yelled, faking anger as we laughed. “You drive all the way up here, and you two make the rods? You don’t even bring the real set?” Maybe we were looking for “divining intervention” here in your “police church,” we told him, tongue in cheek. “Whatever,” he responded, flinging our rods into the air and walking past us in that typical Bobby Moore way of telling us that we were done here. And we were.
The next day we met Bobby at his other office, upstairs in the investigations side of the police department. The office was simply a large, open room with wooden floors and wooden desks arranged to get as many workspaces in there as possible. The brass of the unit had actual walls surrounding their sparse office space. Bobby is not only a crime scene investigator; he is a detective as well. The initials CSI are misleading, because individuals who work crime scenes don’t typically investigate anything. They simply process the scene, draw no conclusions, and turn over the investigation to a detective. It’s just another misnomer that is portrayed on television. However, though Bobby can process a scene, he spends most of his time investigating crime. On days when he is not dusting a fingerprint or stringing a bloodstain, he is shaking down leads.
“We’re gonna knock on some doors today,” Bobby growled as he grabbed his clipboard from his desk. A few days before we arrived in Lynchburg, some boys had broken a plate glass window in a local auto store. A security camera poorly captured the event, making identifying suspects a tough proposition. But as luck would have it, one of the kids was identified; and Bobby, based on a conversation with the suspect, was going to try to corral more of the players involved.
We left the police department in Bobby’s Taurus and headed just up the hill to a residence not more than a mile from the station. Bobby pulled up right in front of the residence and parked on the street. “This ought to be interesting,” he crooned as we exited the car. Within just a few steps up the paved sidewalk that led to the front door, we could hear the pounding of many sets of feet on hardwood floors, scrambling about the house in all directions. With all of the commotion going on, Bobby continued up the walkway, right up to the door, as we followed directly behind. On reaching the door, Bobby knocked three times, very hard, and took a step to the side of the door. We came to a halt like two rubes, directly in front of the door. “Yeah, that’s where I’d stand if I wanted to get shot,” Bobby said sarcastically. We immediately shuffled to the left, where Bobby stood, never having thought of “getting shot” as a possibility.
After more knocking, several “just a minutes” yelled from the other side of the door, and an endless stream of onlookers peeking from behind the curtains, someone finally opened the door. The person answering the door was an adult female, presumably the mother of the child in question, though apparently none of the ten to twelve boys roaming the house, peeking from behind doors, and looking down on us from the top of a staircase were hers. Bobby explained the situation as the woman yawned and stared off into space, uninterested in anything Bobby was saying. Ten minutes later, we were gone. “Do you ever worry about getting shot?” we asked as we nervously walked back to the car with our backs to the house. “No,” Bobby said stoutly, “and once you do, you can no longer be an effective cop.”
Bobby continued chasing down leads, with the same scenario playing out over and over: the running, the knocking, the waiting, the conversation with an unconcerned female, the mean looks, and all the rest. None of the boys were home on this day, and by noon, Bobby had exhausted all of his leads. “Do you ever get frustrated?” we asked as we headed back to the car the last time. “They’ll turn up,” Bobby said confidently. Then, all of a sudden, he frantically checked his cell phone for the time. “Oh hell, its lunchtime,” he exclaimed. “Let’s eat.”
We and Bobby headed to an old sandwich shop called the Yellow Sub, where he’d been eating his whole life, just minutes from the house he grew up in. The hole-in-the-wall sandwich shop was very busy, but the savantlike owner knew everyone by name and exactly what he or she wanted to eat. We were the only ones in the place who had to place an order. Of course, everyone knew Bobby, from softball or from church or from the police department or just from being Bobby. “You’re famous,” we teased as we waited on our subs. In fact, we had been kidding him about that for y
ears, ever since he’d been interviewed by Popular Science magazine right after graduating from our program. “Yeah, yeah, more like infamous,” he replied, turning around to shake hands with someone from his church. Everyone knew Bobby Moore; it was like eating lunch with the Lynchburg Elvis.
Just before Bobby had attended the academy, he’d worked a case in which the victim, Loretta Napier, had been shot at close range and was found sitting upright on the floor. But what Bobby and the other investigators saw at the crime scene didn’t seem to add up, and Bobby never really felt he had a good handle on how the murder had occurred—that is, until he came through the academy. When Bobby got back home, he went to the prosecutors, who were considering going after Napier’s boyfriend, and was able to use his newfound knowledge to explain to them how everything had happened. “I could see the whole thing play out in front of me,” he told the Popular Science reporter. With Bobby’s new analysis as evidence, the boyfriend pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. “I guess I learned the most about bloodstain at the academy,” Bobby said, chewing through his usual sub. “I guess I use that the most.” That’s probably true with most of the graduates of our program. Bloodstain pattern analysis is the Holy Grail of crime scene investigation training.
We finished our sandwiches and got a tour of the historical part of Lynchburg, culminating with a drive through the Old City Cemetery, hugely popular among Civil War buffs. It’s two hundred years old and houses twenty thousand of Lynchburg’s famous, infamous, and simply strange dead. We were especially intrigued by the history of the “appalling, terrific, bizarre, and unusual deaths” that dot the old cemetery. Of particular interest was the death of poor Parham Addams, who came to his unfortunate demise when his soda water machine exploded and left an imprint of his face in marble. We will certainly pay more attention to the “contents under pressure” warning on all those soft drink bottles.
With our history lesson complete, it was time to say good-bye to Bobby. We had a long drive ahead of us and a looming cold front coming from behind. Bobby gave us his typical bear hug, wishing us well on our journey. Detective Bobby Moore is the definition of “a character,” and he has become a true living legend among all of the graduates who have graced our program. Every two years or so, graduates from all across the country gather back in Knoxville, Tennessee, to participate in the Biennial Alumni Retrainer, to learn new and cutting-edge techniques that are being taught, and to get as drunk as skunks. That’s where Bobby has really become infamous. At the last event we had back in 2006, Bobby tried to steal our Hummer, and when that failed, he and seven other alumni crammed themselves into a Ford Taurus and spent the night at one of Knoxville’s best haunts—a country-western bar called Cotton-Eyed Joe’s. Unfortunately for the proprietors of the establishment, it was quarter beer night. They didn’t turn much of a profit on that night. But come first thing the next morning, there was Bobby, looking fresh as a daisy. “I’m getting too old for this shit,” he said as he scooped up some runny eggs from the breakfast buffet. He probably is getting too old for that stuff, but we hope he never changes.
5
Mamas, Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys
TEXAS RANGERS
San Antonio is the second-largest city in Texas and one of the ten largest cities in the United States. It is the county seat of Bexar County; the city was founded in 1718, though Spanish explorers had been living there as early as 1691. San Antonio was the site of the infamous Battle of the Alamo, where Texans fought against the Mexican army for their independence; in 1968, it hosted the World’s Fair, of which the Tower of the Americas is the only remnant still standing. The San Antonio River flows one story beneath the city, making the River Walk one of the city’s most popular tourist areas. In 2006, the Texas Rangers were involved in some capacity with 886 murder cases throughout the state.
Very few things are left in the world that transcend time. Elephants and alligators are good examples, windows to a past that no longer exists. But even these living dinosaurs are dying out, and when they are gone, generations will simply wonder in awe about a time when they roamed Earth.
Human history has very few examples like these left. Most of us now walk upright, and less and less of us still wear powdered wigs. Yet scattered across the wild Texas terrain, hundreds of miles from nowhere, still roam 116 of the gun-toting endangered species called Texas Rangers.
The Texas Rangers can trace their ancestry back to 1823, when Stephen F. Austin commissioned ten men he referred to in his journals as “Rangers” to protect the Anglo settlements from the giant Karankawa Indians. Since that time, the Rangers have survived abolishment, Bonnie and Clyde, and even Texas governor Ann Richards.
When it comes to the Rangers and their unique brand of law enforcement, not much has changed since the saloon days of the Wild West. They are still the quintessential cowboys, with the boots, the hats, the ultradecorative handmade leather gun belts, the guns of their own choosing (ornate in every sense of the word), and, last but not least, the badges, which are made from a 1947 or 1948 Mexican cinco peso—a holdover from a time when Rangers had to make their own badges so they could be identified by the town marshal.
In the early days, Rangers were essentially provided nothing by the state (or the republic, as it was called back then). They were organized as a militia-type outfit, with each Ranger bringing with him his own horse, gun, and other necessary supplies as part of the deal. In modern Ranger times, the state does provide them with a few necessities, including a gun—though they are not required to use it. In keeping with their heritage, the Rangers can carry whatever gun they want, so long as it falls within a few parameters. They are the only outfit in the entire Texas Department of Public Safety not required to use the standard department-issue Sig Sauer.
Some places in America clamor for gun control, even to the point of pushing for legislation to stop police officers from carrying weapons. But not in Texas and certainly not with the Rangers. Their jurisdiction is the state, and their means are by whatever means necessary.
“They should have ironed him out right there,” Ranger John Martin told us, with a sheepish grin as wide as the Rio Grande Valley. To “iron someone out” is the euphemism many Rangers use in reference to shooting a bad guy. Martin was telling us a story about how he had persuaded a renegade truck driver to stop his rampage through the town. “He was running over troopers, and we weren’t gonna have that,” Martin said coyly, crossing his full quill ostrich boots up on top of his desk. These boots have seen many a crime scene and have been put through many a perp’s door. “What did you do?” we asked, already assuming the answer. “I shot him,” Martin said, as matter-of-factly as if he’d offered the driver a piece of candy.
That’s the Texas Rangers in a nutshell. Try that anywhere else and a cop might get fired, or at least time off without pay and a lot of paperwork. But Ranger Martin was never even questioned. Texas Rangers have been empowered like no other law enforcement agency in the country.
We first met Ranger John Martin at Session VIII of the academy in 2004. During our customary meeting the Sunday night before the class begins, Martin was easily identifiable as the first person we’d ever had wear a cowboy hat to the event. He even kept his hat on during a burial exhumation, while working and digging in heavy, wet snow—the same snow our Minnesota investigator experienced. Since Martin’s graduation from the program, we’ve had four other Rangers follow in his footsteps and have added two others as instructors.
We had come to San Antonio to visit Martin and his unique Ranger unit, UCIT (Unsolved Crimes Investigation Team). UCIT was formed in 2002 after much politicking by a local influential family whose invalid patriarch had been erroneously accused of killing his wife. The case was a tragic example of shoddy police work, not to mention just plain stupidity.
The case was doomed from the initial call, considering that dispatch was informed that they should call “the meat-wagon” (a nickname for the coroner) because they had a “na
tural causes” death, even though the woman was naked from the waist down and had had her throat slit from earlobe to earlobe.
Eventually, the sheriff’s department showed up and determined that it was a homicide. Yet after working the crime scene for less than two hours, they collected the body and packaged four cigarette butts as the only evidence in the case. They quickly decided that the husband was the perpetrator, even though he was bedridden when they arrived. “Hell, he had three days’ worth of shit in his diaper,” Martin explained to us. Despite the husband’s having no blood on him and the lack of blood trails to where he lay, the sheriff’s department’s whole case was attributed to the invalid husband “acting” sicker than he really was. Eventually, they filed a case against him with the district attorney and considered the case closed.
The case remained unsolved for six years until the son, who had been working relentlessly to get somebody to listen to him about the case, finally got the attention of a victim advocate who got him a meeting with the Texas Rangers. The son told his story to Al Cuellar, the Texas Ranger who’d drawn the short straw, who read the case notes and looked at the crime scene photos. At the end of the conversation, Ranger Cuellar told the son something he had never heard from anyone but had wanted to hear for six years—his father did not kill his mother. Cuellar knew that the case was FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recognition), and that finding out who did kill his mother would be very tough if not virtually impossible. So he promised the son that he would devote one entire week to the case, dropping everything else. If nothing came out of that one week, then there was nothing more that he or the Texas Rangers could do.
Within a couple of days, Cuellar discovered that although a rape kit had been collected on the victim six years ago, it had never been processed. Every day rape kits are collected from victims, many of which are never sent to the lab for profiles. Even in today’s modern forensic world, some people in law enforcement still look at the technology as if it’s witchcraft. Without a profile, DNA cannot be run through the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) for a possible match to another crime, but the backlog in laboratories and the huge caseload of investigators unfortunately puts the rape kit at a very low priority. However, once the kit was finally processed, although the DNA could not confirm who had committed the murder, it was able to exclude who didn’t. The husband was exonerated and removed from the suspect list, though the case still remained unsolved.
Behind the Yellow Tape Page 11
