Behind the Yellow Tape

by Jarrett Hallcox

  Pulling off the sweatshirt revealed an approximately eighty-to one-hundred-pound mass of maggots that, once daylight hit them, vanished within seconds, down into the thoracic cavity of the victim. Amazingly, from the bottom of his neck to the top of his head, the victim was completely gnawed down to the bone, while the rest of his body looked essentially whole and not decomposed. The spine had been severed from the trauma of the fall, and the only thing that was holding the victim’s head in place was the sweatshirt hood. Flies lay eggs only in moist places, which typically, not counting wounds, are the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and genitals. But a fully clothed man, with a hood on, lying facedown, doesn’t provide much access for the flies. However, the fall had clearly broken the man’s neck violently, thus leaving a wet and warm wound for the flies to infiltrate and begin their habitation of the victim’s corpse. The medical examiner had never seen anything like it. Nor had we.

  The maggot mass had taken on a life of its own, and even later in the cooler at the morgue, they continued to eat away at the victim—from the inside out. The ME, with help from the CSIs, removed the body from under the bridge, placed it on a board, and loaded it into the truck. The scene had been worked, and the case had essentially been solved. A drunk guy had fallen off a bridge. After the body was removed, we left to go back to the processing area to wash the decomp off our shoes and get ready to visit with another of our favorite NFA graduates in Seattle.

  Seattle Police Department, Washington, personnel: Mark Hanf,

  Brian Stampfl, Lisa Haakenstad, and Don Ledbetter.

  HALLCOX & WELCH, LLC

  Detective Tim Devore (a graduate of Session X) was the second person from Seattle to ever grace our doorstep in Knoxville. Tim is the Dean Martin of CSIs; if it had been election year in Knoxville during his session, he would easily have been elected mayor. Tim simply has the type of personality that everyone gravitates toward. He had been an alternate with the CSI unit when he came through the program, and ultimately chose to work full time in the homicide unit. We met him and his partner for dinner. Tim had picked a great restaurant right on the water, Maggie Bluff’s—which, as luck would have it, turned out to be about a hundred feet from where we had spent all day collecting the remains of the fellow who’d fallen from the bridge.

  “How’s homicide?” we asked Tim. “I’m the fifth wheel,” he replied, flicking his sport coat open. Tim is one of the few cops in the Seattle Police Department who still dresses like the stereotypical detective, minus the tie, regardless of the relaxed dress code. His fellow detective, Jeff Mudd, who happens to be related to the doctor who patched up John Wilkes Booth after he had assassinated President Lincoln, looked as if he were dressed for fly fishing. Being the fifth wheel in the homicide unit essentially means you’re the paper pusher, taking overflow from the others who are already established and working felony assaults. Tim’s current assignment also includes being on a task force that is going through some of the 296 cases that had been overturned on a technicality by the courts back in 2004. Of particular interest to Tim, as well as the rest of his department, was the possibility of an overturned conviction of a man who had murdered one of their comrades, Detective Antonio Terry.

  “I’ve interviewed over sixty convicted thugs across the state,” Detective Devore said, regarding the Terry case. “It took me a while to understand the prison lingo. I’d start off each interview with, ‘How long have you been here?’ and I’d get an answer like, ‘A minute.’ I finally found out that ‘a minute’ was any time less than six months.” Tim talked about how he had interviewed members of the Black Gangster Disciples, trying to develop leads on whether the person convicted for killing Detective Terry had ever talked about killing a cop. Most just clammed up when asked if they knew anything, but one finally talked. They would use him to try to keep the cop killer in prison for good.

  “I’d just said bye to Antonio,” Tim continued somberly. He began to quietly tell us about Antonio, how good he was as an undercover at buying dope and how he’d put on liquid glove (a chemical skin protectant) to protect his hands from the ass-ridden dope he would buy. (On the street many dealers hide their goods in their rectum, so if they are searched it won’t be easily found.) He talked about how Antonio had joked with him and the other guys about his wife’s reaction to the smell of his hands, and how he’d said good-bye to them as he headed for the South Precinct. Devore talked about how great a guy Detective Terry was, and how he had stopped on his way to help two thugs whose car had broken down, but when he’d pulled over to help, one had yelled, “He’s a cop!” and a gun battle had ensued. Tim told us that Antonio had shot one of the suspects and had been shot himself, yet had still managed to drive back to the precinct, staggering in and yelling “I’m shot!” Tim continued on, getting quieter, telling us how the bullet had ratcheted through the artery in Antonio’s hip, how they pumped blood into him for two hours and how it flowed out, and how he had heart attack after heart attack after heart attack, and finally died from a massive coronary. “We all heard he’d been shot in the stomach and were relieved,” Tim said, having hardly touched his food. “Your chances are good with those types of gunshots.” But it was not to be, and Detective Antonio Terry was senselessly killed, leaving behind a wife and a young child. Tim has made it his mission to see that the perp who murdered his friend doesn’t get out of prison on an overturned technicality.

  We talked for hours about crime scenes, the training, and how we all had come to know one another. As we got up from the table to leave, Detective Devore, in typical chamber of commerce fashion, decided to take us to the top of one of the hills surrounding Seattle, the perfect spot to see the wonderful skyline at night. We commemorated our last night in Seattle with a picture of the view. Exhausted and with the smell of decomp still stuck in our nostrils, we went back to our rooms to get some sleep for our long journey home.

  The next morning, as we prepared to leave Seattle, we received a call from CSI Detective Mark Hanf. “We’ve got a homicide,” he said excitedly. Go figure. It’s impossible to predict when crime is going to occur. Crime analysts are employed by virtually every police department in the country to provide statistical analysis on crimes and crime trends. But those are still only trends and best guesstimates. No one ever knows when the drunk guy will get mad enough to stab another drunk over a game of pool, or when an angry wife will shoot her husband as he comes in from work.

  The authors with Mark Hanf and Detective Tim Devore in Seattle.

  HALLCOX & WELCH, LLC

  Violence has no true identity and no true probability, which is a scary proposition for those in charge of figuring out who done it. But with CSIs like Mark around, we feel confident that he and his team will figure out who did it, all with an over-caffeinated grin and a venti cup tossed somewhere in the background.

  7

  Jersey Devil

  UNION COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE, NEW JERSEY

  Union County, New Jersey, was founded in 1857 and is considered part of the greater New York metropolitan area. Elizabeth, the county seat, is the fourth-largest city in New Jersey, helping to make Union County one of the densest counties in the nation. Elizabeth was the first capital of New Jersey, but it is usually overshadowed by its bigger sister Newark to the north. The sheriff’s office employs 215 people. Thirty-seven murders occurred in the county in 2006.

  New Jersey is famous for a lot of things. Thomas Edison, the Atlantic City Boardwalk, The Sopranos; even the first baseball game ever played was in New Jersey. But something that is less known about New Jersey is that it’s full of ghosts. That’s right, ghosts. Ghosts, ghouls, goblins, and creatures of every kind. Some say that New Jersey is the most haunted state in the union, and many famous apparitions call it home, including the ghosts of Captain Kidd’s pirate crew, Joseph Bonaparte (Napoleon’s younger brother), and the celebrated Jersey Devil, a wicked winged and hoofed creature that sprung straight from its mother’s womb. It still wreaks havoc today in the fields, farms
, and streams along the Jersey shore.

  We came face-to-face with a Jersey Devil in Knoxville, Tennessee, on a warm Sunday evening in early May 2005. This devil was a female, dressed in all black, with long jet-black hair and nails, accompanied by her giant of a husband, who had very short buzzed, brownish-blond hair and a walk reminiscent of Karl from Sling Blade. All that was missing was some goat’s blood and for someone to ask for “biscuits and mustard, hmm.” Just as we began the introductions to begin Session XII, the devil’s phone went off, blaring the theme music from The Godfather. With that auspicious beginning, we knew we were in for quite an experience. She scared us a little, and we think we scared her too. Her name is Melissa DeFilippo.

  Melissa is the sergeant of the crime scene unit for the sheriff’s office in Union County, New Jersey. Union County is composed of twenty-one different municipalities, including the city of Elizabeth (home to none other than The Sopranos). As a matter of fact, you can take a Sopranos tour, similar to Kramer’s “The Real J. Peterman Tour” from Seinfeld, visiting such world-renowned landmarks as the spot where Big Pussy talked to the FBI. The heavy Italian influence on the area is self-evident, and in fact Melissa, Frankie Coon, and Adrian Furman (all graduates of the program and all Union County CSIs) all have thick jet-black hair and look like they could be the bastard children of Tony Soprano himself. (Though our most recent graduate from Union County, Lauren Guenther, is a redhead, so go figure.)

  Union County is a very blue county, with the longest-standing sheriff, Sheriff Ralph Froehlich, in the entire United States. His fifty-plus years dedicated to law enforcement is an incredible achievement. And he is living proof that progressiveness and youth are not necessarily correlated. Melissa contacted our office and was able to come through the program on a scholarship reserved for the first person to represent a state. “We’ll never send anybody else because of cost,” Melissa told us early on during her session. But now Union County has had a total of six graduates of the program, and all but Melissa paid the full tuition. And the sheriff can take full credit for having the vision to make his department better. His department’s successes have put his CSIs in charge of all murders and officer-involved shootings for all of the municipalities that reside within the county of Union. This decree was put out by the prosecutor’s office, which saw firsthand the knowledge gained by graduates processing crime scenes in New Jersey.

  Melissa had it tough in the beginning of the program, and we certainly didn’t do her any favors. Each student gets randomly teamed up with another tablemate for ten weeks, to work together and support each other. Her tablemate was Mark Turner, the detective from Sevier County, Tennessee. Imagine for a moment what Larry the Cable Guy might sound like trying to talk with his nose stuffed full of cotton and his mouth filled with molasses. That’s Mark. Then imagine this cotton-and-molasses-filled Larry trying to communicate with a gal whose Jersey accent is as thick as the cream in a cannoli. It was like a screwed-up United Nations meeting without a translator. Shoulder shrugs and turned-down mouths were the only modes of communication for the first several days. In Melissa’s defense, even we Knoxvillians had trouble understanding Mark’s incredible southern drawl.

  Melissa admitted that on day one, she was in tears calling home, telling her husband, Mike, who had gone back to New Jersey, that she already wanted to come home. But by day three, she was in the bathroom on the phone to her boss, saying, “Hey, I get it, we learn by tawking”—though to this day, she still has problems with many southern colloquialisms, particularly the phrase, “jam up and jelly tight.” But by week five, she had become the unofficial mother hen of the group, making Italian dishes for the whole class at night and cooking a traditional New Jersey breakfast dish, lovingly referred to as a “Jersey Breakfast,” for all of us one morning. Melissa fried up slices of Taylor ham and coupled them with eggs, cheese, salt, pepper, and ketchup to create a wonderful breakfast sandwich. She actually flew home just to get the ham and brought it back in her carry-on luggage. Sergeant DeFilippo made such an impression on everyone that in the end, she won the coveted Dr. Bass Excellence in Forensic Science Award, proving that bad girls can be good.

  We visited Melissa and Mike at their home in New Jersey on a cold day in early December 2006. Christmas lights had sprung up around the neighborhood, shaking off the cobwebs of northeastern basements and attics everywhere. Christmas seems to begin earlier up north because of the cold temperatures, which tempers crime just a bit. Melissa ran to the door, greeting us with her usual hugs and kisses, and Mike, with his typical Archie Bunker/Jerry Lewis voice and his pet parrot on his shoulder, gave us both a kiss on each cheek, something we came to love about New Jersey. Mike is quite the jokester and a hell of a storyteller. After ordering a typical New Jersey- Italian meal of pizza, Mike jumped right into some of his war stories.

  “Hey, youse guys ever hear of the bunny test?” Mike asked. Neither of us had. The bunny test is an apocryphal story made famous in New York, though everyone denies ever having heard of it. Plausible deniability is every policeman’s motto. The bunny test begins simply enough when an investigator starts interrogating a suspect. If the investigator gets nowhere, he gets up and leaves the room, without ever saying a word. Fifteen minutes pass, which is enough time to make the suspect begin to wonder what’s going on. And that’s when it happens. The door bursts open, and in comes a guy dressed head to toe in a pink bunny suit, with an orange billy club made to look like a giant carrot. He continues with the interrogation, but unlike the investigator, with the first sign of resistance, he proceeds to beat the shit out of the guy with the carrot until he tells the bunny what he wants to hear. Then he gets up, flops his ears back, and leaves. Another fifteen minutes pass, and the original investigator comes back, acting oblivious as to what the suspect is claiming to have happened. In court, when the suspect tells the story of being beaten by a pink rabbit, the judge disregards it as the rantings of a madman. That is, until many suspects begin to complain about the “wascawy wabbit.” Needless to say, the bunny test is now frowned on. Too bad.

  There are many similar stories around the country about how police officers get confessions in strange, but less violent ways. For instance, many an investigator has gotten a confession from none other than a copy machine. They just tell the suspect that the machine can tell if he or she is lying or telling the truth. Then, after the investigator’s question, and depending on the desired answer, he or she puts a piece of paper into the machine, which copies the word yes or no, spitting it out into the tray in front of the suspect, confirming the answer and proving him or her to be a liar. Some even go a step further and hook a suspect to the department’s AED (automated external defibrillator), telling the poor ignorant soul that it is a lie detector. Thank God for dumb criminals.

  After Mike was finished with his police stories, we talked a little bit about the week ahead. Sunday, the day we arrived, was the start of Melissa’s on-call shift, when she could be called out to any scene that happened—day or night. We had come prepared with warm clothes just in case that happened. The year 2006 had been pretty busy for Union County, which typically gets between forty and fifty homicides per year. Compared to Knoxville, Tennessee, which gets about ten to fifteen, and Duluth, Minnesota, which gets somewhere in the single-digit range, the number seems pretty significant. So, as we had in other cities, we were macabrely hoping to see a good crime scene. And indeed, after about our second piece of pizza, Melissa’s pager went off. Bingo, we thought as we scurried around for our gloves and hats. But we hadn’t been paying attention to Mike, who had grabbed the phone and gone into the other room to make a crank call. Good ol’ Mike. We left the DeFilippos’ with our bellies full of pizza, hoping beyond hope that the Jersey thugs would wait at least one more night so we could get some sleep.

  With a peaceful night behind us, we started the next morning by sitting down with Sheriff Ralph Froehlich at his office. Sheriff Froehlich is a consummate professional, welcoming us with open
arms and applauding us for our contributions to the world of law enforcement. He’s also a consummate politician, never failing to miss an opportunity for a news story or a photo opportunity, and he had us pose along with the other graduates of our program out in the front lobby. Well, it was an election year after all.

  The authors with Union County Sheriff’s Office, New Jersey, personnel:

  Frank Coon, Melissa DeFilippo, and Adrian Furman.

  COURTESY OF THE UNION COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE, NEW JERSEY

  The sheriff has certainly seen a lot during his long tenure in office. But for him, one of the best compliments that had ever been paid to him or to his department was when the Union County prosecutor’s office determined that because of the skills of his CSI Unit, they would be in charge of all homicides across the twenty-one municipalities—a true testament to their success. “Most chiefs come up and almost kiss me, grateful for the work we do,” Sheriff Froehlich told us from behind his large desk adorned with more than half a century’s worth of law enforcement accoutrements. “Hell, I shoulda been dead years ago,” he told us later, because of an illness that was supposed to be fatal. “Even an old dog can learn new tricks.” Admittedly, many departments with older chiefs or sheriffs are reluctant to try new things, being happy and content with the status quo—that is also to say, happy and somewhat lazy. Not every chief within the county wants to kiss the sheriff. After all, murders are a lot of work. A suicide, not so much. And when there is doubt, politics can come into play.

  “Wanna see a mummy?” Melissa asked us as we were released back into her custody. Finding a mummy at a crime scene is a rarity and elicits excitement, being the Holy Grail of forensic evidence. “He’s a Juan Doe,” Melissa told us as she gathered up the crime scene photos, Juan referring to the unknown person being of Hispanic ethnicity. “How was the body found?” we asked, looking through the disgusting crime scene pictures. “Bad smell,” she replied, with an upturned nose.