Not until the start of the twenty-first century-after DNA testing methodology had undergone a decade of refinement-were state and national data banks established. In the infancy of this forensic breakthrough, evidence that had yielded enough DNA to create a unique human profile could only be compared to a specific donor-suspect or witness-who surfaced on the radar screen in an investigation.
But data banks offered a much broader capability for solving crimes. In every state, legislation mandated the creation of arrestee or convicted-offender DNA files, filled with profiles of growing numbers of miscreants, against which crime-scene evidence could be searched by computer. Matches were now being made daily all over the country-unsolved cases being connected to others in different jurisdictions by “linkage” data banks even as jailed felons and parolees were regularly being identified for crimes most law enforcement officials had assumed would go unpunished.
Homicides, in particular, were being reexamined by police and prosecutors with new forensic tools not available when the cases had occurred. Unlike violent felonies in most states, no statutes of limitation exist for murder cases, and detectives everywhere began digging through old files and forgotten pieces of evidence in unsolved cases in hopes of striking the ever-satisfying “cold hit”-the match to a DNA profile of a known subject in a constantly growing network of data banks.
We left Throgs Neck for a less gentrified section of the borough-1086 Simpson Street-home of the Bronx Homicide Task Force. Sunday night in the squadroom was as quiet as I had expected. The approaching days of summer in the city, when asphalt streets were more likely to come to a boil and the murder rate usually spiked, would bring more weekend action to this group of specialists. For now, Spiro Demakis and his partner, Denny Gibbons, seemed content to be catching up on the tedious paper-pushing that was a hallmark of good detective work.
“You don’t got enough to do in Manhattan?” Spiro asked, walking us down the hallway and turning on the lights in the small, empty office that housed the borough’s cold-case files. “I’m sitting on four unsolved shootings-all drug-related, without a single witness who could put his hand on a Bible and be believed. I got two domestics-one guy took out the girlfriend’s mother and three kids just for spite. And last week I picked up a drive-by with a dozen spectators on the sidewalk who saw zilch. It ain’t the bright lights of Broadway, but if you’re into making cases in the Bronx, I’ll take the help.”
“Coop may be looking for new digs if she blows her trial.”
“You got that rich boy that hired someone to off his wife, don’t you? Thin ice, Alex. Newspapers read like you’re on thin ice.”
“Stay tuned, Spiro. I’ve still got a few surprises left.”
“I don’t envy you going up against Lem Howell. He wiped the floor with one of the Bronx prosecutors a few weeks ago. Three-month trial and deliberations barely lasted through lunch.”
Spiro unlocked a file cabinet and tossed a couple of manila folders on one of the desks. “Whoever the squad boss was at the time must have dumped this one. Guy who had it wasn’t one of our sharpest. Retired about a year later. Doesn’t look like he did all that much detecting.”
Mike dragged a second chair over and sat beside me. “You know him?”
I started to skim the first few pages of documents.
“Only by reputation,” Spiro said from the doorway. “Looks like he had a confession and all. Perp skipped back to the Dominican Republic, so nobody went after him. Might keep it myself. Sounds like an easy collar. Help yourselves. The Xerox machine is over on our side.”
“Where’s the confession?” Mike asked, sliding the folder over as he picked through it.
“‘Rebecca Hassett. Female Caucasian. Sixteen,’” I said, reading aloud. “‘Found in a drainage ditch off the side of the fairway on the eighth hole of the golf course.’”
“There’s your girl,” Mike said. He studied two photographs that were in a small envelope stapled to the side of the folder, then passed them to me.
The first was from a school yearbook, probably taken just months before her death. Bex was unsmiling, with dark brown eyes and thick black hair-the color of Mike’s-framing her pale face in a layered cut. She looked older than her age, or perhaps it was the makeup she used to achieve that effect. She was rail thin, wearing a black turtleneck sweater with a plain crucifix on a chain around her neck.
“Pretty kid,” I said.
The second picture was one of the Polaroids taken by the detective at the crime scene.
He had obviously stood over the body, shooting down at Bex’s face and upper torso. I would never have recognized the solemn young woman who had earlier posed for the camera at school. Her head was turned to the side, against the ground-the once pale skin cyanotic and the swollen tongue protruding from her mouth. The sweater she was wearing was opened halfway down her chest, and abrasions lined the tip of her chin. Faint oval bruises were apparent on her neck, probably the fingertips of the killer.
“What’s this mark?” I asked Mike, pointing to a pattern within the discolored patch of skin.
He leaned over me and looked again. “I can’t tell. Your folder have the autopsy report?”
I turned several pages of DD5s until I came to the medical examiner’s findings.
“Manual strangulation,” I said, skimming the first page of the document. “The ME thinks those lines on the neck are caused by the zipper of her sweater, caught under the perp’s hands and pressed into the skin. There must be close-ups of the injury in the morgue archives.”
I looked at the Polaroid again. The thick metal zipper had left an imprint like miniature railroad ties as it was pressed against Bex’s throat.
“Sexual assault?” Mike asked.
My finger ran down the paragraphs as I looked for the doctor’s description of the vaginal vault. “No sign of it. Nothing completed, anyway.”
“How does it read, Coop? Like they looked?”
I knew what Mike meant. A sixteen-year-old kid who’d been living recklessly the last few weeks of her life might have been presumed by investigators as well as acquaintances to have contributed to her own death. Perhaps the case had not been worked as aggressively as the murder of a teenage girl on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Perhaps there had been so many homicides the same week that this one was relegated to the back burner by a detective with less interest in his victims than Mike Chapman had.
“Covers the bases,” I said. “Detailed examinations of the external and internal genitalia. Vaginal swabs taken and prepared on slides. Both negative. The UV lamp showed nothing either.”
The presence of seminal fluid or sperm inside the body or on the thighs would have been suggestive of penetration. Since semen fluoresces under ultraviolet light, it was routine to scan the body for matter not visible to the naked eye.
“They did a pubic-hair combing, too,” I said. “Nothing loose, nothing foreign.”
“Bite marks?” Mike asked, referring to one of the classic injuries that often presents in a frenzied homicide in which the motive was sexual assault.
“No. Doesn’t look like there were abrasions anywhere else on Bex’s body.”
“Finger marks on the thighs? I mean, does it specifically say there were none?”
I shook my head. An attempt at a rape often resulted in minor bruising as the assailant tried to pry apart the victim’s legs.
“No, but look at the chart,” I said, referring to the outline of a human body that was part of the autopsy report. “The only notation of any focal point of injury anywhere on Bex Hassett is on her neck.”
I could see Mike’s expression changing as he evaluated the detective’s reports while he listened to me. Bex Hassett was becoming one of his victims. He was Monday-morning quarterbacking the guy who had dumped the case-even after getting a suspect to confess-as Mike liked to do with every unsolved homicide he came across.
Mike was flipping the pages of the second folder. “How about fingernail scrapings
?”
I thought of Amanda Keating and her frantic effort to get her killer’s hands off her neck so that she could continue breathing.
“No.”
“No, they didn’t take any?” he asked impatiently.
“The doc scraped the nails. Negative findings.”
He reached across and tried to take the folder from me. “There must be some signs of a struggle. It sounds like the girl didn’t even fight. Why did Trish Quillian think she’d been sexually assaulted?”
“There’s your answer,” I said, passing the papers to him. “Third paragraph from the end. Bex’s blood alcohol level was over.23. That’s why she couldn’t fight.”
Mike answered with a whistle. “Jeez, the poor kid must have been dead drunk. What a target for any scumbag who happened to be hanging around.”
The most commonly abused drug in America is alcohol. The pack that Bex Hassett was running with in the park, if Trish Quillian had been right, had encouraged her to get in over her head once she began to be alienated from her family and friends. If she had voluntarily intoxicated herself-and the ME’s report had no findings of any other illegal substances in the toxicological studies performed-then she could have been either in a stupor or entirely unconscious when her life had been taken.
Mike had grabbed the autopsy report from me so that he could study it himself from top to bottom. I picked up the folder he had placed back on the desk to read through the detective’s follow-up reports to see how his suspect had been developed.
The description of the crime scene included a canvass of the area within the park that surrounded Bex Hassett’s body. An empty bottle of Courvoisier and several cans of beer were found a few feet away. DNA profiles had been developed from saliva left on the glass-including on the lip of the brandy bottle-and matched the genetic fingerprint of the deceased teenager. Results had also been compared to some of the street kids who had been picked up in the neighborhood for questioning, but none of them had been a hit.
“You can copy all this,” I said to Mike, rubbing my eyes. “Maybe I’m just tired-and my heart breaks for this lost child-but can we save this for another day?”
Mike started turning pages more quickly. “Make sense of this for me.”
“What?”
“The detective’s notes from the confession. Nineteen-year-old kid-one of the park regulars named Reuben DeSoto.” Mike stood up straight, obviously jarred by something he had seen in the case file. “Two of the other hoodlums fingered him as the last of the group to be seen drinking with the girl that night.”
“DeSoto admitted killing Bex Hassett?”
“Don’t get ahead of me, Coop.” Mike squinted at the words as though he were trying to decipher them. “Says he knew her from the park. She’d been hanging out with his homeboys for a couple of weeks. Not involved with any of them. But that night Reuben came on to her-tried to have sex with her. She’d been drinking. But beer, he says-only beer.”
“No mention of brandy? Wasn’t her DNA on the Courvoisier bottle?”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t sound like that beverage was within Reuben’s budget. Says he tried to hook up with her but she refused. Not drunk at all-just a few pops of brew. Says he actually got on top of her and tried to penetrate.” Mike looked up at me as he asked, “Wouldn’t that have left some kind of physical evidence?”
“It should have. Unless she was so intoxicated that she wasn’t able to offer any resistance. Her muscles would have been so relaxed you’d have no internal injury either. But you’d expect to find some of his pubic hair on her body or clothing, even if he didn’t complete the act. There really should have been some kind of trace evidence if what he admitted is true.”
“Yeah, well, either Reuben was hallucinating or the ME needs a refresher course.”
“What’s wrong?”
Mike slapped the folder closed and picked up the second one that I had left on the desk. “Reuben-the guy who’s been the suspect for more than ten years while this case was sitting on a shelf collecting dust? He claims he killed Bex Hassett all right. Reuben says he choked her to death with a ribbon that he pulled out of her hair when she started to scream.”
“But the pictures of her neck-?”
“You can tell from that lousy Polaroid what those marks are on her throat? There’s no mention of any ribbon in the crime scene report and the autopsy doesn’t say a thing about any kind of ligature.”
I was trying to get us on our way. “So?”
“So you shouldn’t have stopped reading the file halfway through. Listen to this. Reuben had himself an abogado because of a burglary case he had pending. He skips back to the DR and the lawyer writes a letter to the commish, claiming the kid’s confession was coerced. That’s why the dick probably stopped investigating.”
“Why?”
“The lawyer also made a complaint to the CCRB. It was probably easier for the detective to just let it go rather than cloud his pension hearing with litigation over the fact that maybe he beat the crap out of Reuben and wound up with a phony confession,” Mike said, pacing the short room back and forth, worked up by the prospect of bad policing in the still-unsolved murder case.
The Civilian Complaint Review Board could have put intense pressure on the department if there was evidence that an officer had used physical force to get an admission.
“So you don’t like Reuben as the killer?”
“You’ve got the day off from court tomorrow,” Mike said. “I’ll be at the cemetery with Brendan Quillian. Call the morgue and have them pull everything on the Hassett autopsy. Get your hands on the physical evidence, if they can find it. This report says there was a speck of blood on the top of the zipper of Bex’s sweater.”
“Could be hers, don’t you think?”
“She didn’t bleed, according to the autopsy. The report says Bex had abrasions, not lacerations.”
“But they did DNA,” I said.
“Not on that bit of blood. There wasn’t enough of it for analysis at the time. Back then, a bloodstain had to be the size of a quarter for the lab to work it up. Maybe the perp nicked his finger on a rough edge of the metal.”
Bex Hassett’s death had occurred when the methodology of DNA had been more primitive, requiring far larger samples of fluid. In the last several years, the shift in technique to STRs-short tandem repeats-meant that the smallest droplets of blood could now be amplified, copying the unique genetic profile until there was enough of it to be mapped and identified.
“I promise you when the trial is over, I’ll jump-start this one for you,” I said. “Save some of your energy for the witness stand.”
I opened the door and turned the light switch off and on to get Mike’s attention.
“It doesn’t interest you that the Quillians make a guest appearance in the case file after all?” he asked. “I knew I could get those eyebrows of yours up a few inches.”
“What’d I miss? Trish told us the cops came to the house. She and Bex were great friends.”
“Yeah, but the fact is, the reason the police knocked on the door is that they were looking for Brendan.”
Mike spread out some papers on the desk and started tapping his fingers as he examined them.
“Why? What have you got?”
“Phone records. Over here are three months of them from Bex Hassett’s house, right through the time she was killed. Every now and then, looks like someone was placing calls to Brendan Quillian’s cell phone. Long conversations-four or five minutes each.”
I walked over to stand beside Mike. I could see that certain numbers had been circled in red ink.
He read to me from the detective’s report. “Says Mrs. Hassett and her sons deny making any calls. Outgoing volume seems to be heaviest in the month before Bex began spending her nights in the park. No way to track her comings and goings, which days she’d actually been in and out of the house.”
“Is there an interview with Brendan?” I asked with renewed interest in the o
ld case.
“Where’s your sense of romance, Coop? Wouldn’t you figure Brendan was on a honeymoon somewhere? Bex was murdered a week after he got married,” he said, pursing his lips. “Forgot about that myself. That’s why the cops went to the house, hoping to talk to him because of the phone activity. I was beginning to lick my chops.”
“How about Duke? Didn’t they question him?”
Mike brushed his hair off his forehead and read on. “Mrs. Quillian was interviewed. Talked to two of her other sons at the house and spoke with Trish, too. Brendan was out of the country and his mother didn’t know where he was or how to reach him. Double-check that honeymoon story with Amanda’s family, will you, blondie? And Duke Quillian was a patient at Sloan-Kettering. He was being treated for cancer. The detective checked that out. Has a phone number at the hospital, too.”
“Hey, it was a long shot anyway,” I said.
“Maybe not as long as you think. You got a date tonight? You didn’t even look at this set of phone records.” Mike was leaning against the desktop, shoving another page of numbers under my nose. “The detective was obviously interested in Brendan-interested enough to subpoena his cell phone information.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“The last phone call made from Brendan Quillian’s cell phone the day before his wedding. It’s to the Hassetts’ phone number. Mrs. Hassett told the detective Brendan had called there looking for her daughter, Bex.”
24
“I know it’s an old case. I wouldn’t be begging you for help if I could walk into the morgue and chat up the guy who did the autopsy,” I said at eight fifteen on Monday morning to Jerry Genco, the forensic pathologist who had testified for me last week. I had called him from my desk. “Your Bronx office handled it.”
“The doc who performed the postmortem is dead,” he said. “Natural causes. He was an old-timer back then. No way you can talk to him, Alex.”
Bad blood Page 19
