by Gil Reavill
Forensic investigators, considering the variety of weapons involved in murders, have established broad rules of thumb that can help illuminate the nature of a killing. Blunt-weapon use, such as in the Lopez murders and the killing of Eric Grimes, can indicate a crime of impulse or passion. Caught up in the frenzy of the moment, the perpetrator seizes the nearest object. Blunt-object homicides are often, but not always, unpremeditated. Contrast the Lopez case, for example, with the Tarell Koss murders. Koss had to wait out a three-day cooling-off period before he could obtain his gun. In general, use of firearms indicates a greater probability of premeditation.
I never went out to the Lopez duplex. Instead I viewed Greg and Greg’s digital-camera documentation of the scene on the computer monitor in the Aftermath offices. Aftermath, Inc., maintained an enormous database of crime scene photos, clinical representations that served primarily documentary (rather than narrative) purposes.
The techs marked the files with short descriptive phrases: “Suicide in basement,” “Murder-suicide 30s couple,” “Hemorrhage,” “Murder stalking.” Other tags referenced geography: “Elmhurst,” “W. Walnut,” “Roger Road,” “S. Oak Park.” A few of the descriptions rise to the level of minioperas: “Suicide cross-dressed male, wife in Hawaii,” and “Unattended death, 9 days, male 50s, reading Playboy on crapper.”
A pair of storage boxes containing Aftermath’s pre-digital-era photo collection, thousands of depictions of jobs from the early days of the company, disappeared from its offices, the work, no doubt, of souvenir hunters. Crime scene photos have become popular on the Web, with no Luc Sante–style disclaimer about the “disrespect” inherent in looking at them. They have become just one more subgenre in a burgeoning media culture of crime. Because of the squeamishness of advertisers, Maxim had surprisingly stringent rules about crime scene photos, one of which outlawed blood flowing from body wounds. We could show blood, and we could show dead bodies, but the twain could never meet.
I sat in front of the computer in the Aftermath offices and scrolled through the images of the Lopez killings. Somehow, the trail of Ed Gein and Terry Caspersen had led there. The crime itself, with its brutalization of innocents, brought up memories of the deaths of Michael and Alex Smith in South Carolina.
The flat color images that appeared on the computer monitor rendered the blood trail through the Lopez house in precise but somehow unreal detail. The shot of Erik Lopez’s tiny handprint had an immediate, terrible impact, but the other shots blurred together. I found myself analyzing them in terms of blood-spatter patterns. The blow had to come from here, the skull positioned there. Order from disorder.
An often-repeated fact about television viewing is that by the time an average American child leaves grade school, he or she will have witnessed eight thousand murders. In present-day media culture, some of these statistics become unmoored from their sources and take on a life of their own (like the idea that to remain healthy one must drink eight glasses of water a day). But the “eight thousand murders” stat has impeccable credentials, first published in a 1992 report from the American Psychological Association, detailing a content analysis study conducted at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication by George Gerbner and his associates.
Gerbner was dean of the Annenberg School and a leading proponent of Cultivation Theory, including a subthesis he developed, the “mean/scary world” theory. The latter states that people who are exposed to a lot of violence (Gerbner was talking about television, but the same could be applied to Aftermath techs, police detectives, or forensic scientists) tend to view the world as more menacing than it really is. Asked what the chances were that they would be involved in violence in any given week, heavy television viewers estimated one chance in ten, when the statistical truth was less than one chance in a hundred. In other words, their worldview was skewed by violence on TV.
Before we were married, when we were headed into the ceremony, the Moral Compass gifted me with a tiny scroll, on which was written a quote from Gertrude Stein: “Considering how frightening everything is, it is comforting to know that not much is really dangerous.”*
Which comes first, the murder or the fear? Hamlet would have counted himself “a king of infinite space,” were it not for the fact that he, like Greg Banach, was troubled with bad dreams. Most of the time, I slept like a baby after jobs, untroubled by dreams lousy or otherwise. And I was usually fine during the job itself, too busy working to be anything except a little dyspeptic.
But in a mental process familiar to anyone who has studied post-traumatic stress, my experiences on the job came back to haunt me. Every once in a while, at random times day or night, my mind would seize up like a rusty chainsaw, fixating on an image from my murder biography that busted unbidden into my thoughts—blood in a basement room filled with fish tanks, say, a cold southern lake, a nine-year-old child’s bloody handprint, or a girl on a riverbank in a gingham dress.
“Look there, brother baby,” ran the riff in Robert Johnson’s “Sweet Home Chicago,” “and you’ll see what I have seen.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Cold
CSI graffiti
Come lovely and soothing death, undulate round the world.
—Walt Whitman
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me.
—Bob Dylan
Aftermath threw its Christmas party at the Foundry, a sports-bar restaurant on the perimeter of the Westfield Fox Valley Mall in Naperville. It was a somewhat dispirited affair, with a steam-table buffet and the Seahawks-Eagles Monday Night Football game on three big-screen TVs that braced the party space. Because of the ebb and flow of Aftermath business, which saw a dip every year in the dim winter months, some of the techs hadn’t been working for a while.
Everyone was on their best behavior. The spouses who came with their husbands sat primly beside them. Since the techs usually spent so much time in the field, apart from the office personnel, the groupings at the party became quickly Balkanized. Techs sat with techs, office workers with office workers. Chris handed out cigars and Nancy Doggett, the office supervisor, dispensed the envelopes containing the staff’s Christmas bonuses. Given the paucity of jobs during that period, holiday cheer balanced with a surly mood of economic desperation, and Greg and Greg didn’t bother to show up.
I left the table and headed for the smoking area around the pool tables. Away from the ears of Chris and Tim, the techs bitched about the lack of work and the tough nature of their jobs. They reminded me of the old joke, two alter kockers complaining about their Catskills resort: “The food here is terrible!” “Yeah, and there’s not much of it!”
Out of earshot of the techs, Tim bitched, too, mostly about the pressures that the exigencies of the marketplace put on them.
“It’s like a vicious circle,” Tim said. “We pay a premium on workman’s comp insurance. When we can find an insurance company who will write us, they keep jacking up the rates. Then we have to pass those charges along to the people who pay for the jobs. And guess who they are? Insurance companies. We don’t make money. We recycle it.”
Chris came by with a cigar, sunny and smiling. He looked like the only happy one at the whole party. Then Ryan introduced his girlfriend, a property manager who worked with his mom. Dave’s girlfriend, a hairstylist, couldn’t make it, but the affair took on an all-in-the-family atmosphere.
I gravitated to Joe and Kyle, the third crew. Joe’s wife, Holly, was visibly pregnant with their second child. Ryan congratulated him. “That’s additional proof of your manhood,” he said, laughing.
Joe held up his Long Island Iced Tea and toasted absent friends. Where were Banach and Sundberg?
“Greg Banach is the best remediation tech in the company,” I said rashly. “Which means he’s probably the best remediation tech in the world.”
I could tell no one agreed with me, but I blundered on. “If his head doesn’t explode, he’ll stay the best.”
We talked ab
out movies.
“Hollywood, you are one sick, sick puppy,” Joe assured me. A movie that I had a screenplay credit on, called Dirty, had just come out, and DVD copies made the rounds of the company. “That movie was one twisted motherfucker.”
You know you have done your job when your stuff grosses out an Aftermath tech.
I had flown in simply to go to the holiday party, since in the course of working alongside the techs I numbered so many of them as my friends. That evening the whole Aftermath enterprise struck me as impossibly fragile. One insurance rate hike, the techs quitting to take other, saner jobs—I didn’t know what I thought might happen, but I imagined the company under assault. Catastrophic thinking was the Christmas bonus that Aftermath had given me. In the garish light of the sports bar, faces shone with a green, sulfhemoglobin tint. Or maybe that was just the result of Chris’s cigars.
Then something impossible happened. A job came in, one that would eventually help crystallize the whole Aftermath experience for me. Tim took me aside and told me about a homicide cleanup in Evanston the next morning. Greg and Greg were going to handle it, but since they had skipped the party, Tim decided to give it to the second crew, Dave and Ryan.
“My flight’s not until afternoon,” I said. “I could go to the job, then shoot out to Midway.” I felt elated, then immediately felt guilty for feeling elated over someone else’s tragedy, then felt elated some more because I had so clearly and so thoroughly entered into the topsy-turvy reality of Aftermath.
“A single mother,” Tim said. “They don’t know who did it.”
On a frosty December morning I followed Dave and Ryan’s Aftermath truck as it nosed through a dense residential neighborhood off Dodge Avenue in Evanston. We had difficulty with our approach to Ashland Avenue, a two-block-long street that seemed locked within a maze of one-way thoroughfares. We spotted the building because of a small shrine set up out front, flowers and guttered candles. “Linda we love and miss you,” read one message.
The shrine occupied the concrete front stoop of 1144 Ashland, a tan-colored two-story brick apartment house crowded uneasily among single-family residences. Linda Twyman, a forty-three-year-old travel agent and divorced single mother, had occupied the back apartment on the right-hand, northern side of the building. We geared up and entered a living space that clearly had been heavily forensically investigated, with signs of police presence everywhere. Beneath the dusting of several different types of fingerprint powder, though, blood spatter showed up clearly.
The apartment’s front entrance led into the living room. Straight ahead, a hallway gave access to two bedroom doors and linen closet before it ended at the bathroom. Through the living room was the kitchen, where the back door led to a side yard.
Fingerprint dust, leuco crystal violet, covered door frames, light switches, doorknobs, doors, window frames, and walls, with some overspray on the carpets. Detectives had removed and taken with them the doorknobs from the linen closet and the first bedroom. Some black ninhydrin dust showed up against the mottled purple of the leuco crystal. Blood stained the gray carpet in the hall and both bedrooms, with some splatter in the living room also. Blood droplets spilled over a clutch of family photos on a low table under windows on the north side of the living room.
Investigators had also sawed out and taken along a section of doorway molding between the kitchen and living room. They lifted linoleum floor tiles from the kitchen itself, which was heavily dusted. In the first bedroom, evidence of the coup de grace. A platter-size black-red bloodstain dried on the floor. On the interior wall, detectives marked penciled lines through the blood splatter, each line lettered A through F and tracing the trajectory of an individual droplet of blood splatter. The vector lines converged at a point about forty inches off the ground.
Evanston police detectives, who got help from the North Regional Major Crimes Task Force, left behind small one-by-two-inch stickers everywhere. Some were evidence markers, lettered or numbered peel-and-stick decals with calibrations along two sides, utilized to mark areas for crime scene photography. Others gave warnings to those who would come after them. “Biohazard,” read one Day-Glo orange sticker. “Possibly Biologically Contaminated. Handle with Gloves.” Others, similarly brightly colored, marked off chemically treated areas, or blared out, “Warning Warning Warning BIOHAZARD Blood Blood Blood.”
“At least they marked out the places where there are chemicals,” Ryan said. “They don’t usually do that.”
Blood soaked the mattress in the bedroom, and we wondered how we would maneuver it out of the apartment. I followed Ryan through the kitchen and out the back door into the yard. Here, more signs of the police investigation. The police had carefully raked the backyard, clearing away a scrim of leaves and snow.
“Looking for the weapon,” Ryan said. He decided to take the mattress out on the opposite side of the building, through the window off the hall, and into the side walkway to the street.
When we returned to the kitchen, Ryan plinked his finger against the bowl of a solitary goldfish. “Saw the whole thing,” he said.
“What do you think?” I asked him.
“Oh, this was a hit,” he said with utter certainty. “They knew who they wanted, and they came looking for her.”
“They?”
“The upstairs neighbor heard screams, looked out her back window, and saw two guys in hoodies running away.”
I wasn’t convinced. “She was a single mother, gainfully employed at a travel agency,” I said. “Who would want to kill her?”
“You never know what people are into. Only the goldfish knows.” He brought his face close to the bowl. “And you’re not talking, are you?”
Maybe it was the timing of the killing, during the holiday period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, or perhaps it was jet lag, but the contrast distressed me: the heavy forensic treatment of the detectives overlaying the tenuous, gentle existence of Linda Twyman on display in the apartment. Cold rationalism versus the complex warmth of day-to-day life.
In the living room a stack of meditation (Ocean of Love) and stress reduction CDs had toppled over onto the floor. The DVD for Pay It Forward, Haley Joel Osment’s paean to goodwill, lodged in the player. Twyman had decorated the wall above her couch with a simple inspirational poster: “The poor long for riches, the rich long for heaven, but the wise long for tranquility.”
“The evidence speaks to me,” says Gil Grissom. But there was nothing that fingerprint dust could say to the reality of Linda Twyman’s freezer, for example, jammed full of a dizzying array of ice cream treats from Klondike whole fruit bars to Edy’s Gourmet butter brickle. The cops investigate the crime. They miss the person.
And yet, at the same time, the clinical procedures of forensic detectives can be oddly comforting. In the face of an event about which nothing can be done, they represent something we can do. They present an objective view of the scene, and refrain from getting caught up in the clutter of subjective judgments, such as what it meant that a single woman found it necessary to reward herself with frozen confections. Overpowered by the emotional weight of Linda Twyman’s existence, I took refuge in crime scene science.
Gil Grissom uses a fluorescent fingerprint dust of his own custom mix, which he calls “Red Creeper.” Ninhydrin, or Triketohy-drindane hydrate, used by detectives in the Twyman case, reacts with amino acids left behind in fingerprints. Investigators can mix it with either acetone or another solvent, such as methanol, propanol, or petroleum ether. It is a toxic, headache-inducing substance, which is why CSIs thoughtfully left stickers behind announcing its use.
The presence of leuco crystal violet (LCV) implied murder, or at least violence, since it was used to raise fingerprints made in blood. In the language of forensics, blood was the “transfer medium” of the prints in question, and it catalyzed the LCV crystals in reaction to hydrogen peroxide. A coloring reagent used in photography and printing, LCV turns bright violet in sunlight and was used generously by CSI
s processing the Twyman apartment. The hallway looked as though Prince had been through, painting the walls purple.
Forensic investigators also used more traditional fingerprint powders, made from either charcoal or aluminum dust, which Aftermath techs hated, since they were fiendishly difficult to remove from surfaces. The worst method, as far as the techs were concerned, was Super Glue fuming, the use of cyanoacrylate ester treated with sodium hydroxide and mixed with fluorescent dye. Special Super Glue wands took the process out of the laboratory fuming cabinets into the field. A treated surface is sticky and blackened, resembling the marks left behind by peeled-off price stickers.
“I don’t even try with that shit,” Banach told me. “No way you can clean it off. If it’s on a door frame, I just strip the whole piece of molding right off the wall.”
Scientists enjoy using five-dollar words for fingerprint technology, such as dactyloscopy and ridgeology, but it all works off an evolutionary quirk that humans inherited from their tree-clinging ancestors: friction ridges on the volar surfaces of the hands and feet. Primates have fingerprints for the same reason tires have treads.
In the Twyman case, the fingerprint dusting yielded dozens of prints. Detectives would have to eliminate “knowns” or “residents” prints from the occupants of the apartment. Then they would have to match the remaining, nonresident prints against national computer databases such as the FBI’s IAFIS. (The two major federal government databases, IAFIS and USVisit, generate an average of seventy thousand positive ID hits every day.) Having identified suspects on the basis of a match, police would still face the task of locating them, questioning them, building a case against them.
