by Gil Reavill
Dave came up from basement and motioned to Ryan. The two of them huddled briefly. Ryan turned back to speak to George.
“Okay, it looks like there’s quite a bit of contamination downstairs,” Ryan said. “We’re going to have to deal with that too.”
That was it for George Grimes. “You do what you got to do,” he said. Tears welling in his eyes, he backpedaled down the hall to the front door.
What Ryan had termed contamination in the basement turned out to be extensive. Fresh blood had drained from Grimes’s head wounds, into the heating vent next to where he lay, down through the ductwork, finally to drop onto the basement floor. Over the course of the few hours before George discovered Eric’s body, the steady drip of blood produced a perfect halo of splatter that was six feet in diameter and covered a chest freezer and a wheelchair stored in the basement.
“He rolls six inches the other way, away from the vent,” Ryan said, “this job would be half as big.”
Blood makes up less than ten percent of body volume. In the pool in the kitchen, I again noticed the separation that occurs when blood ages in open air. Fifty-five percent of blood is plasma, a saline solution that contains every protein produced by the body, more than five hundred of which have been identified so far. Plasma also contains several minerals and sugars, and is responsible for the “sweet” smell of blood so often mentioned by thriller writers. The pool that bled out from Eric Grimes had halfway dried and coagulated, and pink-tinged plasma had separated out on its perimeter.
I noticed something else about the scene. Even though it had been processed by homicide detectives, there was little residual fingerprint powder or other signs of the crime scene investigation. The scene was released with what appeared to be unseemly haste, a mere twelve hours after the discovery of the body.
“Think about it,” Dave said as he geared up. “It’s the South Side.”
The issue of race hung in the air, unspoken. I imagined that there could be a lot of reasons why the scene was processed quickly, or perfunctorily. Perhaps the detectives had already developed a theory of the crime, or held a suspect in custody who had confessed.
Dave ripped open a pack of white terry-cloth rags and set to work on the hula hoop–size bloodstain on the kitchen floor. Ryan and Dave had decided the contaminated ductwork would have to be taken out and disposed of. While Dave worked the kitchen, Ryan and I went downstairs. The blood spatter in the drip zone below the ductwork looked so fine it could have been made with a plant mister. A half-moon of red droplets spread over the pitted white metal of the freezer.
I edged around the mess toward the corner of the basement opposite the stairs. A door led to a sheltered space outside beneath a deck. The door had a rusted security gate, a padlock hanging open on its catch. The security gate opened inward, and had scratched a powdery white arc in the gray concrete floor of the basement.
“Look at this,” I said to Ryan. “I thought people had to lock their doors around this neighborhood.”
“If it was a break-in, whoever it was could have gotten in right through there,” Ryan said.
At nine o’clock on a dead winter night, the trespasser squeezed through the unlocked security gate, crossed the darkened basement, and surprised Eric Grimes in the kitchen at the top of the stairs. The murder weapon? One of opportunity, a hammer picked up from the clutter of the living room, perhaps, a metal cane, or the base of a lamp. Taken along when the murderer fled.
Ryan, who I’ve seen manhandle king-size mattresses into the back of the Aftermath truck all by himself, lifted the freezer up, rested it on his knee, and bent his head to look under it. He let it drop back to the floor with a bang.
“What the fuck is going on?” Dave shouted from upstairs in the kitchen.
“Nothing,” Ryan shouted back. “Hollywood just fainted.”
“I’m okay,” I yelled up.
Ryan retrieved a roll of duct tape from his tool bucket and taped the lid of the freezer shut. I could hear the contents thudding around inside. Without asking for my help he upended the two-hundred-pound appliance and dragged it away from the blood halo.
“I think we can get away with cleaning this thing off and saving it,” he said, and tossed me a package of cleanup rags.
Given a known set of circumstances—a cellar door left open, a blood-splattered kitchen—how do we tease out the details of what happened? Standing at point B—the crime scene—how do we journey back through time and arrive at point A—the crime?
In my journalism career I had repeatedly encountered the bafflingly opaque nature of the crime scene. I’d had enough experience to realize I wasn’t that good at plumbing its mysteries, not in the intuitive sense of a Columbo, say, or a Gil Grissom. I stood at point B and peered backward, but point A remained stubbornly lost in the fog.
“You want to call it?” says Catherine Willows to Grissom, inviting him to present his theory of the crime. But I never seemed to be able to call it. My deductive reasoning skills never measured up to the task. Variables and unknowns overwhelmed me. I was, without apology, a Monday-morning detective. I liked to read affidavits and court transcripts. That’s how I figured out what had gone down.
One of the first true-crime articles I ever worked on concerned a mass murder that happened in the countryside just outside my hometown in central Wisconsin. At 5:00 A.M. on the morning of July 5, 1987, a fifty-five-year-old named Kenny Kunz came home after sleeping off a drunk in his car to find his family massacred. His uncle, two aunts, and brother lay sprawled around their rat’s nest of a farmhouse, all of them shot, ballistics would determine, with a .22 rifle. Kenny’s mother, seventy-year-old Helen Kunz, was nowhere to be found.
Four dead, one missing. Kenny was the immediate suspect (look closest first). His alibi wobbled. During the night of July 4, when his family was murdered—the pop-pop-pop of the .22 lost amid the exploding firecrackers and cherry bombs of Independence Day—he had been asleep in his white Ford Grenada at his place of work. And, yes, because this was Wisconsin, his place of work was a cheese factory.
As the details of the investigation leaked out, the victims proved themselves to be as strange as the crime. Family patriarch Clarence Kunz lived with a small harem of sisters—Helen, Irene, and the mildly retarded Marie. Hints of incest hovered around the intensely secretive family: Kenny was Helen’s son by her brother, making Clarence both his uncle and his father. His brother, Randy, routinely slept in the same bed as his mother, Helen.
Investigators discovered over twenty thousand dollars in cash hidden in the incredible squalor of the Kunz household. There was a lot of porn too. The farmhouse didn’t have running water, but it was equipped with a VCR and multiple TVs. As sheriff’s deputies sifted through the scene the day after the killings, a UPS truck drove up to deliver a porn tape addressed to the recently deceased Randy.
Detectives could not quite take Kenny Kunz seriously as a viable suspect. He was too slow, too muddled. But he did point them to a young neighborhood hellion who was eventually charged with the crime. Christopher Jacobs III—his family called him Christy—had visited the Kunz farmhouse a couple years before, looking to buy some autos junked on the land.
Through painstaking detective work, police developed a case against Christy Jacobs. It was circumstantial, and built on what forensic experts term “impression evidence,” meaning imprints left by one object coming into contact with another. In this case, .22-caliber cartridge casings recovered in Christy’s bedroom matched those found at the Kunz farmhouse. Also, a quarter mile away from the farmhouse, the freshly tilled Kunz family garden plot showed tire tracks that matched those on Christy’s black 1974 Dodge Charger. Christy’s motive, detectives theorized, was robbery.
Almost nine months after the crime, detectives found Helen Kunz’s decayed body in a swamp along a rural road. She, too, had been shot twice in the head with the same .22 rifle. The road where she was found was known to investigators as one along which car-fanatic Christy Jacobs some
times discarded unwanted auto parts.
Four months later, Christy Jacobs was charged with the five murders of the Kunz family. Thirteen months after that, in October 1989, a jury acquitted him. Circumstantial impression evidence, in those pre-CSI days, wasn’t enough to sway the jury.
I followed the case from the beginning and as it threaded its way through the justice system. My father sent me clippings from the local newspaper. Like a lot of people around my hometown, I put on my deerstalker cap and tried to figure out what had happened. But I remained stuck at point B.
The facts about the crime scene were well-established. Four dead in a ramshackle farmhouse. Another family member killed by the same weapon, but discovered almost twenty miles away. Telltale cartridge casings. And a quarter mile down the road, in the soft dirt of a freshly Roto-tilled garden, tire imprints.
What had happened? I tried, but I couldn’t fathom it. The past remained impenetrable, opaque.
I had a lot of time to think about it. It would not be until almost twelve years after the crime, in June 1998, that the facts about what went down on the secluded Kunz farm that Independence Day night would finally become clear.
You want to call it?
The murder of Eric Grimes in Calumet City got me closer to a fresh unsolved homicide scene than I had ever been before. Ryan, Dave, and I entered the house hard on the heels of the crime scene investigators. If it had been Las Vegas, the odor of Gil Grissom’s cologne would still have been lingering in the air.
Most people learn what they know about crime scenes from watching television, and thus much of what they know is mistaken, only half true, or downright wrong. The difference between the reel world and the real world is marked.
But it isn’t for lack of information. Counting network and cable, at least one hour of crime-forensics programming airs in prime time on six of the seven nights in the week. Three prime-time iterations of producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s CSI franchise are among the top-rated television shows in the U.S., and CSI is also seen on several channels in Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia.
CSI is just the tip of a very large iceberg.* “Crime,” one television critic dryly noted, “is the new black.”
Hollywood created the mythical character of the crime scene investigator, hybridizing the roles of homicide detective, evidence analyst, and forensic scientist into one sexy beast. Gil Grissom, Catherine Willows, and their counterparts in Miami and New York, Horatio Caine and Mac Taylor, act as real jacks-and-jills-of-all-trades. They collect evidence at the scene, interrogate witnesses, badger suspects, head back to the lab to crunch chromatographs. They solve crimes.
Members of a real crime scene investigation team—in the UK they are called “scenes of crime” officers—have very distinct roles. The white smock behind the microscope never conducts witness interviews. The crime scene analyst passes off his material to the lab and might never see it again, under a microscope or otherwise. The evidence tech operates apart from the microscopist. Several different detectives might work different aspects of the same case. The all-in-one model makes for good drama, but it bears little resemblance to what actually happens in the field.
Forensics. From the Latin for “in the forum,” meaning in public discourse. Due to its wide exposure in TV and movies, the term has become synonymous with crime investigation, but that’s not really accurate. The word can just as well apply to the practices of formal debating teams, the traditional geek refuge in secondary schools. Forensic science, then, refers to science designed for debate in the public forum—in other words, in court.
But because of CSI’s popularity, forensic science courses, not debate teams, proliferated in high school and college curricula. The trend spills beyond education. A bar opened up on the Bowery in New York City that calls itself Crime Scene. It has come to this: In a series aimed at middle school readers called Extreme Careers, there was a book called Forensic Scientists: Life Investigating Sudden Death. Some of the glamour filtered all the way down to bioremediation. Also available in the same series: Biohazard Technicians: Life on a Trauma Scene Cleanup Crew. Light reading for young teenagers.
Forensic science is indeed an engrossing discipline, maybe not as compelling as the drama-inflated narratives of crime writers, but one with its own attractions. Taken to an extreme, the world-vision of forensic science can represent a Zen approach to reality. It’s a world where our every move radiates consequence, where our physical actions can be exposed and tracked as if by an all-seeing God.
Did the killer of Eric Grimes enter through the unlocked downstairs door, walk through his basement, and attack him in his kitchen? Theoretically, forensic science could trace the killer’s every step. Do we consider our secrets safe when we operate alone and unseen? Forensic science sees. Forensic science presents our passage through the world as one that leaves behind a boatlike wake of evidence, swirling microscopic clues, a phosphorescent path that could conceivably lead back to our first steps as a toddler.
That’s theory. In reality, there are severe limits on the omniscience of forensics. Our collection and retrieval devices are too inefficient, and our analytical engines too ham-handed, to be able to determine more than a small percentage of the clues that are theoretically available. Processing remains arduous and time-consuming. And that old bugaboo, human error, constantly threatens to corrupt the purity of the results.
Still, the idea lingers. There are no secrets, just unexplored routes of discovery. Theoretically, every step that O. J. Simpson took on the night of June 12, 1994, left behind microscopic traces. A team of forensic scientists with infinite computing power, finely calibrated machines sensitive to the atomic level, and an endless amount of time could proceed from point B back into the past and arrive at point A.
The source of this omniscient view of forensic science resides in the work of a pioneer French criminologist named Edmond Locard. A thick-bodied graybeard who in 1910 founded the world’s first crime laboratory in Lyons, France, Locard is much-beloved by the world’s crime writers. His name has become a shibboleth and a plot device, often introduced in the same way.
“Do you know who Edmond Locard was?” She shook her head.
—Jeffery Deaver, The Bone Collector
“Have either of you ever heard of a man named Edmond Locard?” I said no.
—Stephen White, Cold Case
“I don’t know how much you know about forensics,” he murmured. “Not much,” she admitted. “The French investigator Edmond Locard is often credited with being the father of forensics,” Tidwell told her.
—Laura Childs, Chamomile Mourning
Locard’s name endures because a guiding precept of forensic science has been ascribed to him. Now confidently cited as “Locard’s theory,” “Locard’s law,” or “Locard’s exchange principle,” its actual wording turns mushy upon close examination. Locard’s rule of thumb has been variously stated as “Every contact leaves a trace,” or “With contact between two items, there will be an exchange,” or “The criminal always leaves behind something at the scene of the crime and carries away something from the scene that was not on him or her before.”
The confusion arose from the fact that Locard never exactly formulated the idea as a “principle.” The closest he came was with a sentence in his 1923 treatise, Manuel de Technique Policière: “Il est impossible au malfaiteur d’agir avec l’intensité que suppose l’action criminelle sans laisser des traces de son passage,” which can be translated, “It is impossible for a criminal to act, given the intensity of a crime, without leaving traces of his presence.”
From such slim basis (there are other, similar declarations in Locard’s writings), the concept of Locard’s exchange principle took on a life of its own, until an obscure nineteenth-century French criminologist found himself routinely referred to in procedural thrillers and on prime-time television.
How did that happen? Human beings want to believe in our impact upon the world, we want to believe that we le
ave an imprint, a trace, the indelible evidence of our existence. Locard’s exchange principle enshrines this wish in science. It is not just the criminal, acting in the “intensity” of the crime, who leaves a snail trail of evidence behind. We all do. Comforting to think so, anyway.
The historical Locard trained in medicine and law and became a police prefect in Lyons. He proved himself an obsessive, dogged forensic scientist long before the field was formally recognized. He embarked upon a decade-long microscopic study of various kinds of dust. He and Gil Grissom would have gotten along well. After solving a string of spectacular cases, Locard became known as the French Sherlock Holmes, and his forensics laboratory the goal of pilgrimages by police all over the world.
Within his lab, on the fourth floor of the Palais de Justice in Lyons, Locard created what he called the Black Museum, a showcase of sorts, featuring murder weapons, evidence from famous homicides, and a photographic rogue’s gallery of killers. The exhibits of the Black Museum represented a precursor, the very first pre-TV, pre–Jerry Bruckheimer protoepisodes of CSI.
The Black Museum had a distinguished visitor in 1921, when British author Arthur Conan Doyle stopped in Lyons on his way back to England from a sojourn in Australia. A strange funhouse-mirror moment must have occurred, when art met science, and the creator of Sherlock Holmes encountered the reputed real-life French personification of his creation. Locard conducted Doyle on a tour of the Black Museum.
Doyle stopped short in front of a portrait in the rogue’s gallery. “Why, what is my chauffeur doing here?” Doyle asked.
“You’re mistaken, Sir Arthur—that’s Jules Bonnot, the famous motor-bandit.”
But the villain in the rogue’s gallery and the chauffeur were one and the same. Arthur Conan Doyle’s driver in the years before World War I later became infamous as the murderer, carjacker, and “illegalist” Jules “le Bourgeois” Bonnot, credited with the first use of the getaway car in crime. Bonnot had worked not only for Doyle, but for some of the top forensic scientists of the day, a criminal-in-the-making gleaning pointers from leading experts in the field. He then fell in with a group of French anarchists to create la bande à Bonnot, the Bonnot gang, and was killed in a spectacular shootout with the gendarmes.
