by Gil Reavill
Likewise, blood spatter pattern (BSP) evidence has inherent limitations. Only in rare cases can it lead to identification of the perpetrator. A known case involved a killer who, from the BSP at the scene, had used his right fist to beat the victim, and cut his own hand while doing so. Detectives located a suspect with a fractured right hand that sported a nasty cut, who eventually confessed to the crime.
Generally, though, BSP evidence points not so much to “who” as to “how.” After long study, a base of knowledge has grown up to characterize the behavior of blood droplets under various conditions. To solve for the angle (A) from which a blood droplet fell, for example, CSIs use a simple formula:
Blood spatter demonstrates a signature teardrop shape that indicates direction of travel: from the “fat,” rounded end toward the thin, pointed end. Generally, the smaller the droplet, the greater the speed of travel, from the mistlike spatter from gunshots to the round “crown” droplets from stationary sources. Drops thrown off from the bloody hair of a human in flight array themselves in bizarre, complex patterns.
Reading the blood spatter in Linda Twyman’s apartment did not reveal a pretty scenario. Twyman was first wounded in her kitchen, ran into the living room (where she bled over her family photos) and was caught again in the hallway. She stumbled into the bedroom off the hall, smearing the doorjamb in the process.
In the bedroom, the assailant delivered the blow that killed her as she knelt on the floor. The convergence of the pencil lines on the interior wall established that the blow came forty inches off the floor, which was consistent to the kneeling height of a woman Twyman’s size. A cast-off pattern—blood flicked from the blade as the killer drove it downward—indicated the force of blow. The massive bleed-out stain marked the place of her death.
Every contact leaves a trace. Locard’s exchange principle summons up a universe where every action imprints itself indelibly upon the world, which we could read if only we had an apparatus of observation sensitive enough to do so. We lift our hand and displace atoms of air, and those atoms could be read and tabulated. A sparrow falls, and that could be marked also.
BSP analysis traced Linda Twyman’s last moments in the world. But as she moved through her life she touched many people, her family and friends, in ways not examined in any forensic textbook. As I stood in Twyman’s apartment, all the multiple signs of a thoroughgoing forensic investigation appeared paltry to me. I could see clearly that the effort to understand her death failed utterly to illuminate her life. “We don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything,” said Edison.
Imagine we trail behind us shimmering life lines that trace our progress through the world. They mark our everyday trips to the grocery store, back and forth to our places of employment, far afield to our Maine vacations. Our residences, naturally, would be scribbled thick with such lines, drawn and redrawn repeatedly as we move back and forth to the kitchen, bathroom and bedroom.
Now mark the lines of a murderer. Mark the lines of a victim.
In the great majority of cases, because most victims know their killers, the life lines of murderer and victim demonstrate a veritable crosshatch of interrelatedness. The two paths intersect many, many times before that of the victim suddenly terminates. But in rare cases, the life lines of killer and killed pursue their meanderings quite independently, to cross once and only once, at the moment of murder.
These are the murders we fear most. Charlie Manson’s group of hippie killers got lost in the L.A. canyons, knocked on the wrong door, and wound up barging in on a pregnant movie star. The life lines of Sharon Tate and the Manson girls had never crossed before. These kinds of killings seem terrifyingly random. But fear of them is irrational. Statistics tell us we should be looking at our family, our relatives, our friends and neighbors. But statistics don’t lessen the terror.
In Linda Twyman’s case, the principle of “look closest first” yielded no suspects. Her boyfriend of four years was ensconced at a gated army base three hours to the north, with entry and exit closely monitored. Her ex-husband was across the country in Minneapolis with the couple’s daughter. The life lines that crossed and recrossed led nowhere. There was left the chilling possibility of a random, wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time murder.
The killing of Linda Twyman enjoyed only a very brief run in the local newspapers and on television stations. The death of a single mother was not particularly good copy. Evanston police, playing it very tight-lipped, were no help. Although it had help from the North Regional Major Crimes Task Force, an ad hoc expertise-sharing investigative body, the Evanston police department allowed the trail to grow cold. Linda Twyman’s murder appeared as a blip on the radar, glowed momentarily, and then winked out.
In February 1964 a twenty-three-year-old Bob Dylan journeyed in a new Ford station wagon he had just bought, through the South to New Orleans, where he was enthralled by the spectacle of a jazz funeral procession. A frequent aspect of such pageants was a solitary mourner, carrying a tambourine, walking ahead of the hearse. Dylan subsequently wrote “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a song I listened to for much of my life without realizing the lyrics were an invitation to death.
Whitman, too, in his epic elegy for Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” wrote “a chant of fullest welcome” to death. This clashes so sharply with the usual human stance of abhorrence and avoidance that we must leave it to the poets to accomplish it. But in spite of the famous directive from another Dylan—“Do not go gentle into that good night”—some level of reconciliation with death could be said to be the goal of most religious and philosophical thought.
Their experience at the helm of Aftermath has left Chris and Tim with diametrically opposed ideas on what Chris calls the “big questions.” He and Kelli described themselves to me as “definite Christians” who attend church every week and are committed to being part of the community of believers.
“I believe this life is a test,” Chris said. “How well you act on earth, how well you behave—do you walk with the Lord?—those are all questions that are going to be decided in the here and now. But I also think the here and now is just like the blink of an eye. You are here and then you’re gone.”
Chris responds to the constant exposure to tragedy with something of a “seize the day” philosophy. “A lot of times the deceased wasn’t doing anything wrong, anything that would put them in harm’s way,” Chris said. “All of a sudden, someone comes upon them and stabs them, or they get stuffed through a machine at work. It doesn’t make any kind of sense that you can understand. So you’ve got to be ready to go at any moment.”
Tim Reifsteck went the other way. He, too, discerns a lack of understandable pattern in the stories of death and dying he encounters on the job. “I was asking myself a lot of questions back when we started Aftermath, and even before,” he said. “I put a lot of thought into it. At a funeral, the pastor says, when you lose a loved one, ‘Well, God needed him.’ And I think, what a selfish thing to say to me! That someone needed this loved one more than their family or their kids? I cannot believe that. I cannot rationalize that.”
Tim’s wife, Sara, attends a small, nondenominational Christian church, and is raising their two sons as Christians. “It’s been like baby steps,” she said. “I call myself a baby Christian. I feel like God’s watching me more since I had kids.”
She became a churchgoer after watching one of her friends suffer from uterine cancer at a young age. “The disease turned her inside out,” Sara said. “She looked like a skeleton by the time she died.”
The same experience would have spun her husband off in a totally different direction. “So there’s some higher being that looks down on this earth and says, ‘You know what, I am going to take a mixture of myself and put it in people and see how they grow up’? I can’t accept that at all. If it were true, why would he allow children to be raped and murdered, women to be raped and murdered? Because that’s happening every second of every day.”
/> Linda Twyman wasn’t raped, but her murder challenged notions of the good death—a death that comes naturally in the course of a long and rewarding life. Chris and Tim respond to that challenge in different ways, Chris by becoming more deeply religious, Tim by rejecting transcendent meaning as a guiding principle of life. But from their experiences at Aftermath, both of them understand the brutally random nature of death.
“I was in downtown Chicago, and I’m looking at this guy standing at the curb,” Tim recalled. “Actually, he was standing with his feet hanging over the curb. And I thought, ‘Buddy, if you only knew how close you were to dying.’ Because maybe a little old lady takes a corner too sharp—oops!—and that’s it.”
In the Aftermath universe, random deaths qualify as bad ways to go, along with deaths by violence, unattended deaths, and those marked by dementia. When I asked Chris and Tim to describe the way they imagined their own deaths, they both answered the same way. They wanted to be surrounded by people they love.
“The good death,” a phrase that has been around since Chaucer’s time, embodies this concept in the West, but the idea itself is ancient as language. It has, at various times, been interpreted in different ways. In warrior cultures, the good death was the heroic death on the battlefield, with the Valkyries ushering the dead hero to immortality in the halls of Valhalla. In Chaucer’s day the Ars Moriendi (“art of dying”) movement held sway in Europe, arguing that the way to live was to prepare for death every single day you were alive.
Ars Moriendi had a fetishistic aspect called memento mori. The phrase is Roman in origin, and means “remember death,” but it was the Middle Ages that really took the concept to heart. The idea of keeping the thought of death always in mind yielded up some of the strangest art known to man. “Cadaver tombs” featured sculpted renderings of decomposing corpses: a representation on the outside of the tomb of what was going on inside. Monks went goth, keeping skulls around to contemplate. Paintings of skeletons, petal-shedding flowers, or snuffed candles embodied the memento mori theme in art.
Today we are in the grips of obliviscere mori, “forget death.” Death is carefully walled off from our day-to-day existences, behind words like morbid and gloomy. A cheerfulness prevails that can appear a shade desperate. Up with people, down with death. We hire firms such as Aftermath to deal with it. If we think about it at all, the good death is pretty universally regarded as a painless one, or passing away in sleep with loved ones at the bedside. For some people, the good death represents an oxymoron. No death is good.
Linda Twyman could not be said to have died the good death. She died alone, killed by strangers with knives who stabbed her repeatedly about the head and neck, with the coup de grace coming from a cut that severed her jugular. Medical examiners classify deaths in different ways. They distinguish among the manner, cause, and mechanism of death (some MEs throw in mode of death too). In Twyman’s case, the manner of death was ruled homicide, while the cause was an incise wound and the mechanism exsanguination.
Medical examiners sometimes call an autopsy a “narrative,” because the procedure teases out the story of a particular death. My own narrative of Linda Twyman’s murder—a cheerful and life-affirming forty-three-year-old woman living in a run-down neighborhood of an otherwise wealthy municipality, attacked by person or persons unknown, her killing left unsolved by police and forgotten by all but those who knew her—affected me more deeply than any other death I encountered at Aftermath.
There is the physical crime scene, the number two pencils inserted in bulletholes and the walls smeared with aluminum fingerprint dust. But there is an emotional crime scene, too, of affected friends, relatives, neighbors, bystanders. That scene could not be cleaned up quite so tidily. The emotional crime scene is much more long-lasting. What the Aftermath techs did might have an impact on it, in the sense that the physical always affects the emotional. But Ryan or Dave could never clean it up entirely. Only time would do that.
Death of a loved one invests the survivors with a fierce claim to privacy. The egotism of loss is absolute. Society assumes grief to be an intensely personal, privileged activity. Our sexual lives are no longer secret, but our mourning periods remain sacrosanct. No trespassing allowed.
Well, I trespassed. I violated. I hoped I did it in the manner of Gunther von Hagens, say, rather than H. H. Holmes, for positive reasons rather than selfish ones.
When a Topeka, Kansas, hate group led by Reverend Fred Phelps started showing up at military funerals, to protest loudly with signs and slogans that war deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan were God’s punishment for the country’s wicked, decadent ways, state legislatures quickly pushed through laws to protect the sanctity of the rites.
Death be not fucked with. I once went to a ceremony in a New Jersey cemetery, where the four grandsons of the deceased beat up a cabbie and put him in the hospital, because he had honked his horn while their grandfather’s casket was lowered. My father, an unreconstructed gay-hater, physically attacked his homosexual cousin at his mother’s funeral, punching him in the face and throwing him to the ground. The cousin’s trespass? Bringing his boyfriend to the service.
One could argue that these physical attacks, not a honking horn or a gay boyfriend, were the real violation of the atmosphere of dignity and decorum that ought to be maintained. Grief grants a sense of self-righteousness that can bring out the worst in people, setting them firmly on their high horses.
A physical crime scene, an emotional crime scene, and perhaps a spiritual crime scene too. Some biblical scholars contend “Thou shalt not kill” is actually a mistranslation. What the Decalogue really says is “Thou shalt not murder,” thus letting off the hook warriors, government executioners, and law enforcement officers who kill in the line of duty. Whatever way the meaning is shaded, homicide violates a universal, fundamental, and age-old law, with biblical if not spiritual consequences.
When they were married in the 1980s, Linda Twyman changed her then-husband James Twyman’s life by giving him a book, Autobiography of a Yogi. The account by author Paramahansa Yogananda became something of a viral phenomenon after its publication in 1946, spreading Vedic philosophy and the practice of yoga through Yogananda’s adopted home in the West. The New Age movement claimed Autobiography as one of its seminal texts, and the book has influenced luminaries as diverse as Mahatma Gandhi (who was portrayed in its pages), Elvis Presley, and Jack “Chicken Soup for the Soul” Canfield.
It did a number on James F. Twyman. He embarked upon a twenty-year spiritual quest that led him to found the Beloved Community and the Emissary of Light, groups that express a hopeful, peace-through-love New Age philosophy. Under the banner of the “Peace Troubadour,” Twyman began traveling to the world’s war zones to put on concerts and prayer vigils. Armed only with a guitar, he showed up in Croatia, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, and the West Bank, hosting gatherings that over the years numbered in the hundred of thousands.
Linda and he divorced but remained close. James became one of the leading lights of the New Age scene, authoring such books as The Art of Spiritual Peacemaking, The Secret of the Beloved Disciple, Portrait of the Master, and Emissary of Love.
“While I traveled to some of the most dangerous places in the world, Linda was murdered at home, in her own apartment,” Twyman wrote in an e-mail.
Twyman devotes all his time and energy to plumbing Chris Wilson’s “big questions.” He has evolved a death-is-not-death philosophy and shares a lot of ground with his friend and spiritual ally, Neale Donald Walsch, author of the best-selling Conversations with God series.
“Linda’s death has taught us so much about life, and about the unreality of death itself,” Twyman wrote. “We now have another angel at our side creating peace in this world.”
I didn’t sense any angels in Twyman’s apartment when Ryan and Dave addressed the mess the police left behind a week after she died. But I hadn’t devoted my life to spirituality, so perhaps I was just blind to them. The equanimity
and grace demonstrated by James Twyman in the face of his ex-wife’s death indicated a path, arduous and long, toward Whitman’s “chant of fullest welcome.”
“You’re not going to turn all softheaded on me, are you?” the Moral Compass asked during a late-night phone call. In my Extended Stay purgatory, I had come to depend more and more on talking to my family to keep the black dog of depression firmly on its leash.
“I thought you loved Walt Whitman,” I said.
“Of course I do,” the Moral Compass said. “But that doesn’t mean he can’t be softheaded sometimes.”
“You can hardly blame me for thinking about this stuff,” I said. “I’m just trying to figure out how it fits into the grand scheme of things.”
“There is no grand scheme of things,” my wife said. “Unfortunately.”
Hurricane Katrina had kicked the stuffing out of the South just three months previous, and we talked about the devastation and dead bodies that were still turning up down there. Aftermath had made a corporate decision not to get involved in the relief effort, judging that the field was already overcrowded. Chris and Tim sent equipment donations instead. I quoted my wife a line from a raucously mournful blues song of ZZ Top: “Jesus just left Chicago and he’s bound for New Orleans.”
The Moral Compass sighed. “You don’t need to go to New Orleans,” she said. “Just come home safely.”
For me, the presence of all the fingerprint dusting, police stickers, and other investigatory leftovers in Linda Twyman’s apartment served a contradictory purpose. Instead of grounding what had happened in the just-the-facts-ma’am world of forensics, the police effort made me want to locate Twyman as a human being. She was not just “bio,” as the son-in-law of another dead man put it. And her apartment was not just a scene to be processed by all the advanced techniques forensic science had to offer. It had been her home.
