“Um, Larry, do you always drive like this?” we asked, now really afraid for our lives.
“People in New York don’t respect cops,” Larry said indignantly. “Down south they still do, and even some out west, but not here. A cop here can look at a guy dealing in the street and the dealer will yell, ‘What the fuck you looking at?’ Used to be, you got something for being a cop. Now, there’s no perks, no respect, no nuthin’. All we got left is running a red light or two.”
After about fifteen minutes of “driving however you want,” accumulating enough traffic points to keep thirty people off the road forever, we arrived at our first New York City crime scene. We drove right up to the tape and rolled out like we owned the place. “Yo Larry, what’s up?” one of the guys yelled. As we found out, one of Detective Walsh’s nicknames is “Larry Love.” And everybody does love him.
“Whaddya got?” Larry asked, from the other side of the tape.
“Eh, a dead guy with his pants down around his ankles,” the CSI replied to Larry. We arrived just after the body had been zipped into the body bag and placed in the medical examiner’s van.
“These are friends from Tennessee,” Larry said, introducing us as if we were at his house for dinner and not at a murder scene. We talked at length with the guys and gals working the scene, but there wasn’t much to it. From the evidence they’d collected and the way the body had looked, it appeared to be a crime of passion between two lovers. In other words, “a fuck and dump,” as somebody was heard to exclaim. The shift working the scene was the night shift, just finishing up their work that had lasted into the next morning. They had responded to eight homicides in just over twenty-four hours. That’s as many homicides as most communities have in a year.
After a few minutes another call came in: Shots fired. We jumped into the car and sped to the next scene. When we got close, we turned down a street that looked more like a very wide alley, with businesses lined down each side. At the end of the street, we could see the crime scene tape that had been put up, right next to what appeared to be a car-detailing shop. Larry drove right under the crime scene tape toward where the detectives were standing. And they were a sight to behold. Four men all dressed to the nines, each with an ankle-length wool trench coat and slicked-back dark hair, and every one with a cell phone glued to his ear. It was like a quorum of Harvey Keitels huddled up in the street, and one of the few times it seems Hollywood got it right.
As we accompanied our brute of a tour guide up to the men in coats, each began flipping their cell phones down to give Larry some love. “Larry Love!” they hollered out to him as we approached the crime scene tape. With the pleasantries finished, Larry asked what was going on. “We got a hommy [homicide]; looks like a mob hit,” one of the Keitels said as we watched blood literally run down the sidewalk and into the street. The CSI unit was busy processing the scene, photographing bullet ricochets, and collecting shell casings: evidence not typically left behind in a mob hit. In fact, there usually isn’t any evidence left at a mob hit.
“Did anybody see anything?” we naively asked, looking at the dozens of people who lined the street watching the cops do their jobs.
“Nah, they’re all wiseguys,” Keitel number two snapped. Translation—they’re all connected to the mob, so naturally, nobody saw nuthin’. The detectives had already worked out some connections between a couple of mobsters, narrowing down who they’d probably be looking for. But then before anyone could do anything, the trench-coat-clad detectives received another call.
A baby had been brought in to the morgue early that morning; it was thought to be a SIDS death. Yet just a few minutes into her examination, the medical examiner realized that it was no SIDS death; it was a homicide. “Another hommy,” the lead Keitel said, flipping his cell phone shut. “The ME’s doing the cut as we speak.” In other words, the medical examiner was conducting the autopsy. With that, the four detectives jumped immediately into their cars, inviting us and Larry along to check it out.
The morgue was just around the corner from where the mob hit had occurred. It was essentially like any other morgue—old, dank, and overrun with sickeningly sweet smells. We found our way through the catacombs of rooms until we stumbled across the detectives and the ME, at work. The morgue is a terrible place no matter what city it is. No matter how anal retentive a medical examiner is with regard to cleaning, there are always bits of flesh in virtually every nook and cranny, remnants of death gone by. And it’s very, very wet from the washing of the bodies and the squeegeeing of the diluted blood-water mix as it goes down the drain. We entered into the morgue just as the tech was dragging a freshly Y-incisioned cadaver off the autopsy table and back onto the gurney. Unfortunately for us, the gurney was much lower than the table, and the tech was much smaller than the cadaver (meaning she had to struggle a bit), so the body came down with a flop and a splash, and our faces were spattered with a fine mist of diluted, bloody death sweat.
To our right, the four horsemen huddled around the autopsy table where the baby lay, talking with the medical examiner, who looked suspiciously like Brigitte Nielsen. The ME invited us right into the midst of the conversation, which centered on the three-month-old infant’s skull. “See, look here,” she said, peeling back the flesh of the skull. She allowed us to move forward to see what she was talking about. “Hundreds and hundreds of tiny fractures,” the ME continued. “Not a SIDS death.” The tiny infant’s body lay there, revealing a savage beating at someone’s hands.
“Fuckin’ shame,” Keitel number three chimed in.
It was a shame. It has been our experience that most adult murders happen at night and are usually reported at night. Babies, on the other hand, almost always turn up dead first thing in the morning. All too often, angry husbands or pissed-off boyfriends, annoyed by a baby’s crying, lose their tempers and react violently. Then the mothers bring in the baby the next morning, telling everyone who will listen that they “found the baby not moving when I got up,” hoping that the hospital will think it’s SIDS. Most don’t realize that babies, just like adults, get a complete autopsy when the cause of death is unknown.
“Doc, take a picture of her just like that,” the lead detective told the ME, regarding the infant. “I want them to see what they did.” The detectives were already preparing for their investigation and interrogation of the parents, wanting to show them the picture of the autopsied infant to show them what they had done to her.
“We got the parents at the PD now,” one of the Keitels said. “We’ll see what they say.” The photograph was snapped, and the ME readjusted the baby’s head. Amazingly, she looked perfect. No bruising, no swelling, no nothing. She looked like a toy baby doll sitting on a stainless steel table. Without an autopsy, no one would ever have been the wiser about what the baby had endured. “Pleasure to meet youse guys; enjoy New York.” And with that, the four trench-coated detectives vanished from our lives forever.
Noon approached as we left the morgue. Lunchtime. We have no idea what it is, but something primal happens in the body when it’s around death for long periods of time. Unbelievable hunger almost always occurs in morgues. Our experience has been that the urge is even worse around decomposing bodies. It must have something to do with the body saying, “Hey, yoohoo, hello, you’re not dead; eat something!” So we grabbed a sandwich at one of Larry’s favorite haunts down in Brooklyn.
“What have you been up to?” we asked Larry, with our sandwiches in hand.
“Oh, I just worked a fire death,” he responded. “A guy down in the city had been set on fire repeatedly, and then put out, and then set on fire again, just to torture him. Eventually, they sat the guy in a chair, duct taped his arms so they couldn’t move and his head completely so he couldn’t breathe, and set him on fire by lighting a bag of Kingsford charcoal.” He paused. “It was all over drugs.”
As we drove back to the department, we mentioned that we’d seen Larry in People magazine. “Oh yeah, the bouncer; you saw that
?” Detective Walsh had made a little splash in People magazine when he worked the homicide scene of female victim Imette St. Guillen. Darryl Littlejohn is the bouncer of the club she was last seen at, and has been accused of murdering the graduate student from John Jay College. “That guy knew what he was doing,” Larry said, driving crazily back to Queens. “He was a scumbag.”
The case began when an anonymous 911 call came in to the NYPD that a body had been spotted lying on the side of the road near Spring Creek Park in Brooklyn, New York. There, police found the nude and almost unidentifiable body of Imette St. Guillen wrapped in a bedspread, her hands and feet tightly bound. A sock had been placed into her mouth and taped in place with clear shipping tape. She had claw marks, gouges, and other lacerations indicative of a sexual homicide. Her assailant had meant not only to kill but to torture her.
Allegedly, Darryl Littlejohn, a bouncer at a local nightclub, had had a disagreement with St. Guillen earlier that night. And some at the club say they saw the two of them together, arguing later in the evening. That’s part and parcel of why he was developed as a suspect. After his arrest, he consented to a DNA swab, and laboratory tests confirmed that it matched DNA found on St. Guillen’s body. Though it’s a wonder there was any to match at all. “He cleaned the girls up that he raped,” Larry said, clearly agitated by the thought. Purportedly, Littlejohn had raped before—afterward showering his victims, using soap, brushing their teeth, changing their clothes, and washing their mouths out with mouthwash before turning them back out into the street. Or he would dump their dead bodies along the side of the road, as he did with St. Guillen.
“Did you work the scene?” we asked, meaning when St. Guillen had been found.
“No,” Larry said, “I went back after the initial crime scene had been worked to collect more evidence regarding the other rapes.” Along with the DNA, other evidence helped provide the key links between Littlejohn and St. Guillen. The tape that covered her mouth had trace fibers consistent with fibers from Littlejohn’s home. In addition, unusual fibers from jackets found in Littlejohn’s home were also found on the tape across St. Guillen’s mouth. Eyewitnesses reported seeing Littlejohn’s van turning around in the neighborhood where her body was later found. All of the evidence added up to a three-count indictment against Darryl Littlejohn. The case is still awaiting trial.
“Why do you stay and work here, Larry?” we asked him as we sat around the lunch table. We had heard very few reasons to want to be employed as a crime scene investigator in New York City. They get very little support, the pay is terrible, and there’s a lot of violent crime.
“I grew up here; I’ve lived here all my life,” Larry replied with feeling to our question. That’s the way it is with a lot of the cops with the NYPD. It’s a feeling; a belief in something bigger. It’s certainly not the money or the fame. Most guys on the force have to take side jobs just to make ends meet. And Larry’s no different. He’s the bodyguard for the lead singer of Skid Row—one Sebastian Bach. “I even sat next to the copycat Zodiac killer in high school,” Larry said. “That crazy guy painted his fingernails black back then; I knew he was a weirdo.” Where else in the world can you go to high school with an infamous copycat serial killer and grow up to be a bodyguard for a 1990s metal band? Only in New York, kids, only in New York.
“We certainly don’t work for the brass,” Larry said indignantly, flexing his giant muscled arms. Larry has ruffled more than a few feathers during his seventeen years with the department—but not among the people he works with directly. Each and every person we bumped into—whether another CSI or a detective from a different precinct—all said the same thing: “If something happened to me or my family, I’d want Larry to work the scene.” That speaks volumes about Larry and what he knows. “One supervisor said I was a diamond in the rough,” Walsh told us as we were sitting in the break room of the unit. “I have a photographic memory,” Larry Love said, rubbing his stubble. And he’s telling the truth. He remembers vivid details about every training and every situation he has ever been in. That kind of recall makes him a perfect CSI. It also makes him the perfect target.
“It’s hard to soar like an eagle when you fly with turkeys,” Larry said. Larry’s abilities, coupled with his uninhibited way of speaking his mind, have not made him a favorite son with some of his bosses. The department is so big that by default there’s often a huge disconnect between the administrators and the worker bees. This problem is exacerbated in the CSI unit, where the disconnect involves more than just knowledge of what is going on in the department. It involves knowledge of forensic science.
“They don’t know what the fuck we do,” one of the CSIs said, coming by to get a cup of coffee in the break room. “They think we do magic.” Indeed, the CSI Effect doesn’t happen only in courtrooms. There is a CSI Effect among administrators in many police departments across the country. We heard stories of guys not in the unit asking the CSIs to do ridiculous things, like taking a swab from a suspect and touching it to a cell phone to get his identity. We also heard stories of brass visiting scenes and becoming overwhelmed when some of the simplest pieces of equipment were used, such as a laser measuring device. Many of the older guys who have been promoted up through the ranks over the years are simply afraid of the science of crime scene investigation. It’s an attitude of “I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.” And fear breeds antagonism in certain people.
“Sometimes they come down to the scene when there’s media,” Larry said, cleaning up his lunch. “And they ask stupid questions or make stupid requests. Any question they ask me, like how do I know something, I just tell them I put it to the Moulage test. They don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, but they can’t question it or they’ll look stupid. So they just nod their heads and go away.”
With lunch all but digested, Larry took us on a tour of the NYPD crime laboratory. Most states have a crime lab for the entire state, and some bigger states have more than one. But the NYPD has its own lab in the same building as the CSI unit, just one floor up. Most CSIs would give anything for that proximity. Day in and day out, investigators all over the country have to liaison with lab personnel, many not in the same city, regarding evidence that they have collected and sent to the lab for analysis. Yet in New York City, until the day we visited Larry, he had never been up to the lab—never. He knew no one; no one knew him. The two entities might as well have been a thousand miles apart. Once he submits the evidence that he has collected, he moves on to the next case—more proof that being a bigger department does not necessarily mean being better.
Though Larry had not arranged for us to take a tour, the police brotherhood provided us with the opportunity to visit the lab, which was as state-of-the-art as crime labs get. Nearly every process and application imaginable could be performed in the city’s laboratory, including microscopy, toxicology, and ballistics. The other unique thing about the NYPD lab was the amount of space dedicated solely to housing drug evidence. More space was dedicated to drugs than most labs have in total space. They had also recently confiscated a large amount of marijuana—a couple of pallets’ worth to be exact, which is a common occurrence in New York City. We each developed a contact buzz before we finished our tour.
Lining the interior of the drug evidence area was shelf after shelf of every conceivable type of drug that had been collected as evidence at the scene of a crime: Ecstasy, heroin, LSD, Vicodin, OxyContin, ketamine. Whatever your poison, it’s probably there. They had even confiscated tons of trial-size prescription drugs such as diazepam. The amount of drug evidence processed by the city was simply amazing.
As we rounded the corner from the drug evidence area, we came to the ballistics part of the lab. These areas in crime labs are always interesting, with hundreds of guns skewered on pegboard for display and easy retrieval for testing. Guns that are confiscated as part of a crime are kept on file as examples for future cases. The most interesting guns are always found in here. Homemade guns of
every kind, and any kind of foreign gun imaginable, hang in the locker. Outside the evidence room was a glass case, a museum of sorts, displaying the weirdest and most famous guns that had been obtained over the years. Included in this gruesome collection of weapons was the .38-caliber pistol that Mark David Chapman used to kill John Lennon, as well as the .44-caliber handgun that David Berkowitz, a.k.a. “Son of Sam,” used in his rash of serial killings in the late 1970s.
With the tour of the forensic lab over, we went back downstairs to Larry’s cubicle to see some of the crime scene photos he’d taken while working on the tragic Staten Island Ferry crash that occurred in 2003. It was the worst tragedy in the hundred-plus years the ferry had been in operation. Larry worked the entire scene, documenting what had happened after the ferry violently slammed into the Staten Island Pier. “It’s just another scene,” Larry said of his work. Eleven people were killed, many dismembered or otherwise torn to pieces as the captain of the ferry slept at the wheel. The pictures were too gruesome to look at; most of the victims were unrecognizable as human beings, looking more like horrible Halloween costumes. Most CSIs that we have worked with over the years are able to separate themselves from their jobs. Otherwise, they would not be able to cope with all of the horror and human tragedy they are exposed to. Larry, though, and many others from NYPD, seem to have reached an even higher level of separation, which stems directly from the tragedy of September 11.
At about the same time we were looking at the pictures and going over the ferry case, a large crowd had gathered outside and was wrapping around the entire precinct. With the windows open, chants of “Kill the pigs who killed our kids” could be heard echoing off the outside façade of the building. The protesters were blocking the streets, the entranceways, and the exits. We were essentially trapped inside the building by an angry mob.
Behind the Yellow Tape Page 19
