Behind the Yellow Tape

by Jarrett Hallcox

  It’s certainly amazing how many bodies are discovered by smell, with neighbors invariably saying, “Well, I hadn’t seen him in a while and now that you mention it, I had been smelling something funny.” In this case, construction workers called in to do a renovation on a house had called the police after stumbling into the bad smell, and Union County CSIs were dispatched to the scene when police found the dead body. The police had concluded within minutes that the deceased had committed suicide, strangling himself with an electrical cord, but they hadn’t given the crime scene more than a cursory look.

  Sergeant Frankie Coon was the first CSI to the scene. Frankie is the brooding guy of the group. The police told him right away that it was a suicide, but, not convinced, he decided to take a look for himself. “Frankie called me within a few minutes,” Melissa began as we made our way out to the crime scene van. “He thought it was a possible homicide, so I went to the scene to help him out.” Once the New Jersey CSIs took over, the police on scene essentially stepped out.

  “When I got to the scene, it was obvious to me that it was a homicide,” Melissa said as we drove into the city of Elizabeth. “There were pools of old, dried blood, with fine spatter above the body,” she explained. “The victim’s pants pockets were turned inside out, and a large container of rat poison was placed at his head. There were also many footwear impressions left in blood, but the victim was barefoot. Even if the prints were from his shoes, someone had removed them—they were nowhere to be found.” She added, “If it was a suicide, it was unlike any suicide I’d ever heard of or seen.”

  At the autopsy of Juan Doe, a strange circumstance was unveiled. Not only was an electrical cord wrapped around his neck, but there was also a dress, and underneath the dress was a coat hanger. Three different objects had been used to strangle this poor guy to death. Yet the medical examiner corroborated the police’s determination and listed suicide as the manner of death.

  Frustrated, Melissa and Frankie continued on with what they could with regard to the case. Pieces from the man’s femur have been sent to the University of North Texas for DNA extraction in an effort to enter Juan into the missing person’s database. The blood was also swabbed and collected to see if it might have belonged to someone other than just Juan. The severity of its degradation has made this comparison difficult. Unfortunately, this may be the only way to ever establish the possibility of the case being a homicide. “What do you think happened?” we asked, walking down the street in Elizabeth, down near the shores of the Arthur Kell River, where they filmed the opening to The Sopranos, feeling sort of like the Beatles walking down Abbey Road. “It’s probably a gang murder or a gang initiation,” Melissa said. “Frankie thinks the rat poison and the turned-out pockets are references to the victim being a rat.” Regardless of who or why or even how, the main focus is just to identify the victim—which seems to be a long shot at best. Juan was probably an illegal alien, which makes the possibility of discovering who he was that much harder.

  The number of missing people is growing exponentially every year. The federal government’s best estimate of the number of missing and unidentified persons in the United States is roughly five thousand. But those in the know, the people who work in this arena every day, estimate that number to be roughly ten times that—a staggering fifty thousand missing and unidentified persons, many of whom will never be identified no matter what the advances in forensic science or how much evidence comes to light. Reasons for this vary, but the practice of most medical examiners’ offices, particularly ten to twenty years ago, was to simply get rid of unclaimed bodies through either cremation or burial in potter’s fields—with little to no identifiable markings. Hopefully, if DNA can be extracted from Juan’s femur, he may be identified and returned to his loved ones. But more than likely, Juan Doe will be added to that ever-growing list of “never to be knowns.”

  On our second night in Union County, Sheriff Froehlich invited us and the CSI Unit out for a nice dinner. Melissa made reservations at a wonderfully fancy Italian restaurant, Ristorante da Benito, which often boasts major players in New Jersey politics. On this night, ex-New Jersey governor James McGreevey was having dinner with other politicians from the area. The DeFilippo name carries significant weight in Union; Melissa’s mother-in-law is the Democratic chair for the county. And Melissa herself is obviously known among the political elite, as we saw when McGreevey came over to give her a kiss on the cheek.

  The sheriff sat at the head of the table, talking about the “olden days” as we dipped crunchy Italian breads into olive oil seasoned with herbs. “In my day,” the sheriff began, leaning back a bit in his chair, “the CSI was the mayor’s detective, [someone who] was appointed by him. And he probably was a nephew or a cousin or whatever,” the sheriff theorized. “He carried a box camera, a magnifying glass, a little dusting brush, and would just dust every damn thing he would come up to, never finding anything.”

  “But,” he conceded, “that was crime scene work back then.”

  Sheriff Froehlich carries himself in a dignified and confident manner, yet is somehow still grandfatherly. The sheriff has lived a long time and has spent more than a half a century dealing with every facet of law enforcement. “In all my years, a lot of changes have taken place and they have taken a long time, but in five years you guys have done more in one subject, in one area, than I have seen in my fifty years in all of law enforcement,” he said. “Look at where you guys are today; holy smoke!” And with that superb speech and ringing endorsement, dinner was served.

  The next morning, we began our quest again in search of crime. After all, New Jersey is certainly well known for its crime. Camden is one of the most dangerous cities in the United States; Jimmy Hoffa is probably buried under concrete somewhere in the Garden State if he wasn’t ground up and made into hot dogs. Whereas most people kill people with simple things like guns, knives, bare hands, or broken bottles, New Jerseyans have been known to raise the bar. Like using a bike, for instance. Melissa had a recent homicide case where the victim had been killed with a bicycle. He wasn’t beaten to death with the handlebars or strangled to death with the chain or even bludgeoned with the kickstand. No, the guy was beaten to death with the whole friggin’ bike. Now that’s dedication, when you can kill someone with a Schwinn.

  “What’s the worst crime scene you’ve been a part of?” we asked Melissa as we drove around some of the more affluent areas in Union County with her partner, a Beastie Boys wannabe who kept saying, “Here come the po-po.”

  “We had a domestic on Super Bowl Sunday in 2005,” Melissa began, slapping her partner to shut him up. It’s an urban legend that up to 40 percent more domestic violence cases occur on Super Bowl Sunday in the United States compared to any other day because of the disproportionate amount of sore-losing bettors. But Melissa’s case, though it was a domestic, had nothing to do with football, and everything to do with a sick and very troubled mother.

  New Jersey State Troopers discovered Lynn Giovanni crashed into a guardrail along Route 78 in Roselle, New Jersey. “Roselle’s a pretty nice area,” Melissa said as we continued driving. Simply put, “nice areas,” whether in New Jersey or Arkansas, are less likely to have homicides. It’s just a fact. And almost invariably, when CSIs are dispatched to cases in these areas, it’s for crimes of familiarity, not ones of random violence.

  Lynn was taken to the hospital and treated for minor wounds. She then dropped a bomb on the unsuspecting troopers, telling them rather nonchalantly that she had murdered her daughter, Nicole, and had been trying to kill herself by crashing her car (though some disbelieve her tale about the attempted suicide, considering how minor the actual crash was). Troopers were dispatched to Lynn’s house and had to bust down the door to get in. That’s where they found the unthinkable.

  “She was a very popular, all-American girl,” Melissa said of Nicole Giovanni, the fourteen-year-old girl who had been brutally beaten by her mother while she slept. Lynn Giovanni had beaten he
r daughter from behind with a hammer, many times. But as Lynn would admit later in court, “she kept breathing.” Lynn then turned to a shovel, but “it was too hard to swing,” and again, “she kept breathing.” So Lynn returned to using the hammer to finally kill Nicole.

  “Adrian, she was the first CSI to the scene,” Melissa said. Officer Adrian Furman is the pretty, straight-talking, artistic one of the group. Adrian has a knack for working on some of the more gruesome cases. She worked the macabre and eerie scene, jumping each time the radiator in the bedroom clicked on and off, as Nicole lay there motionless and covered in blood. “We’re just not used to normal-looking people at scenes,” Melissa admitted. Most crimes, the ones that don’t end up as national news, are committed by people who are “high risk,” like drug dealers, prostitutes, and meth heads. Cases like those of Natalee Holloway and JonBenét Ramsey, though well known and highly publicized, are not the norm. They are aberrations in the crime statistics. “Nicole’s room looked like my room when I was a teenager, except all of her posters and teddy bears were spattered with blood. Sad,” Melissa said.

  “I didn’t respond to the initial call; I was sent there to do the blood reconstruction in case the mother decided to change her story later,” Melissa continued. “Nicole was gone, but all of the blood evidence was still there.” At the time of Lynn’s confession and subsequent arrest, no one was sure that she would stick to her story. The Union County CSIs wanted to make sure that the evidence in the room corroborated the mother’s original confession. Melissa’s job was to string the blood scene and calculate the area of origin for Nicole’s head when she had been struck. She performed the calculations at the scene and mathematically reconstructed the events, placing the area of origin about eight inches above the bed—precisely where Nicole’s head would have been on her pillow. “It was amazing, seeing that stuff work,” Melissa enthused about bloodstain pattern analysis.

  The home of Nicole Giovanni—Roselle Park, New Jersey.

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

  In the end, the mother stuck to her story and was able to plead down to aggravated manslaughter—a sentence of thirty years, of which she must serve twenty-five and a half. Lynn had been sent to a psychiatric hospital, forgoing bail, and had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder during her medical incarceration, a condition probably made worse by her recent divorce. This was significant in allowing her to be able to plead down her crime to manslaughter. New Jersey law stipulates that before a person can be charged with a murder, the state must prove two things beyond a reasonable doubt: First, the person must have caused the victim’s death or serious bodily injury that then results in death—of which Lynn clearly was guilty. Then, if the first criterion is met, the state must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did so purposely or knowingly. New Jersey prosecutors, knowing that Lynn had been diagnosed as being bipolar, didn’t believe that they could prove that she “knowingly” killed Nicole. Thus, they allowed the plea of aggravated manslaughter to be entered. Lynne’s ex-husband, Nicole’s father, sat in the courtroom as the verdict came down, and he was quoted as saying to Lynn, “I hope you and your soul rot and burn in hell for eternity.” He had hoped for her to receive a much stronger sentence, vying for the death penalty.

  Nicole was the second teen from the Roselle area to have been brutally killed within the previous few months. The other young girl, Judy Cajuste, age fourteen, had been found in a Newark Dumpster after being reported missing. Judy is believed to have been a victim of cyberstalking. To date, no arrests have been made in her case. Public outcry over these two murders compelled New Jersey assemblyman Neil Cohen to introduce a bill dubbed “Judy and Nikki’s Law” that would provide a mandatory life sentence without parole for anyone who murders a young person under age sixteen. The bill unanimously passed the assembly in 2006, and in 2007 the Senate received it. To date, it is still awaiting review by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

  “We actually had another domestic in an even more upscale area almost exactly one year later,” Melissa said. “I was on call on New Year’s Day in 2006 when the call came in from Cranford, New Jersey. I had bronchitis really bad, and I was thinking, ‘What’s going on in Cranford? There’s no crime.’”

  Indeed, Cranford has remarkably little violent crime, years passing without a single homicide. But 2006 was ushered in with a tragic turn of events, the first murder since 2001. “It was a nice house that still had its Christmas wreath on the door,” Melissa recalls, of Mary Ellen Touris’s house on Retford Avenue in Cranford. Inside the house was a different story. “There were Christmas bulbs smashed, a footstool through the wall, and the owner of the home was found at the bottom of the basement stairs. And the boyfriend was nowhere to be found.”

  Mary Ellen had been savagely beaten, with huge bruises all over her body. A large one on her neck was in the pattern of a shoe—the same shoe print that was found in dust in the dining room. “I could tell that she had run all over the house, trying to avoid whoever had eventually killed her,” Melissa said, of the crime scene. “There was a clump of hair found on the second floor, and blood swipes leading down the stairs. And the soles of her feet were as black as coal where she had continued to run around in the basement.”

  The home of Mary Ellen Touris—Cranford, New Jersey.

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

  Detectives searched the entire county for the boyfriend, Christopher Pessolano, who had ironically been stopped earlier that day for driving erratically, but let go. He was finally tracked down in a hotel room, with a pile of bloody clothes stashed in the corner. They found his car also, with blood smeared in it. Though Pessolano immediately claimed that the blood was not Mary Ellen’s, the lab determined that it was. “Were there any other pieces of evidence that tied Pessolano to the crime?” we asked, as we exited the car back at the department. “No, he lived there, so his shoe prints, DNA, and fingerprints would be there,” Melissa responded. “It was the blood evidence found elsewhere that tied him back to the crime.” Pessolano ultimately pleaded guilty and was charged with first-degree murder and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.

  “We’re in charge of fingerprinting and fingerprints,” Melissa said to us the next morning, our last day in Union County. We walked outside and under the jail to where the fingerprinting is conducted. Sheriff’s offices across the United States are traditionally in charge of fingerprinting people who have been arrested and booking prisoners into incarceration. In Union County, the crime scene unit is in charge of fingerprinting everybody who was committed to jail the night before. They are also, unfortunately, in charge of taking the DNA swabs. “Who gets swabbed?” we asked Sergeant DeFilippo as Frankie struggled to roll one arrestee’s fingerprints properly. “Everybody convicted of an indictable offense,” she answered, eyeing Frankie’s growing frustration. Little known to all those wannabe CSIs are some of the more menial tasks involved, such as trying to get a good set of prints while wrestling drunks and others not too happy with the po-pos. But even worse than that is the swabbing. People with bleeding gums or those who haven’t bathed since God knows when aren’t too helpful about having the inside of their mouths swabbed with a giant cotton swab. Some lick it, some bite it, and some even swallow it. Other glamorous duties of the CSI include pubic hair combing; fingernail and toenail scraping; penile, vaginal, and anal swabs; and collecting vomit and fecal matter. Ah yes, the real life of a crime scene investigator that television never shows.

  After watching the printing and the swabbing, we walked back to the department to process some evidence. Since graduating from the program, Union County CSIs have become locally known gurus in crime scene processing. Surrounding jurisdictions sometimes get Melissa and her guys to process evidence from their cases. Many things have changed in the unit since Melissa returned from her training, from large things like replacing 35-mm film cameras with digital cameras to small things like the way they
dress, moving to the more appropriate BDU (battle dress uniform). The BDU is the typical uniform worn by crime scene investigators as well as other law enforcement officers. This rugged uniform gets its name from the standard-issue uniform that the U.S. military wore in combat.

  They also commandeered a supply closet and turned it into a processing lab, just big enough for a couple of superglue-fuming hoods. An officer had given them a piece of a plastic bag from the scene of a robbery. “We’ll try it,” DeFilippo said. It takes about twelve to fifteen minutes for quick superglue-fuming to find fingerprints on an item; alas, after fifteen minutes, no prints appeared. “It’s like that sometimes,” she said, with resignation.

  Melissa DeFilippo and her partner looking at the results

  of superglue-fuming on a piece of evidence.

  HALLCOX & WELCH, LLC

  We then moved over to Adrian, who was preparing to appear in court and making a very large representation of an arrested suspect’s fingerprints. One side of the posterboard had an enlarged version of the actual print, and the other side showed the comparison print from the scene, with minutiae highlighted to show the identifying characteristics that made the fingerprint unique. “Adrian, have you used any technique from the training at a scene recently?” we asked her as she stared intently at her fingerprint posters. “Yeah, I had this one case where I used Bluestar in a bathroom and the sink lit up like a Christmas tree,” she responded gleefully. Bluestar is one of the chemical products that we were first introduced to by one of our students at the academy. Bluestar is essentially luminol on steroids. Both products are latent blood reagents that react to the trace proteins found in blood. They are both particularly useful when trying to detect trace amounts of blood left behind after cleanup with a cleaning agent such as bleach. Both sparkle like fireworks in reaction with bleach, but the places that continue to stay lit, so to speak, is where the blood evidence is. Unlike luminol, which must be used in complete darkness, Bluestar can be used where there is a fair amount of light. Not only that, but Bluestar simply reacts stronger and longer to trace amounts of blood evidence. Bluestar is fast becoming the new standard in blood detection.