by Pat Brown
“Excuse me,” I said when a young couple arrived at the car, “would you mind terribly opening the trunk of your vehicle so I can look in it and see how big it is?”
They looked at me kind of funny, so I said, “I’m a criminal profiler, and I’m working on a case. I know it sounds a little odd, but I want to know if a body would fit in your trunk.”
They just laughed-wouldn’t you?-and said, “No problem.”
They opened it up, I checked out the size of the trunk, and then said, “Thank you very much.”
Since the victim I was dealing with was a bit on the overweight side, I had to make sure that this wasn’t a trunk for anorexics only. The lady would have fit in the trunk.
On occasion, if the police found a body in a certain position, I might wonder, “Could that body be in that position in the trunk?” In that situation, it’s not going to be good enough to look in the trunk. I’m going to say, “I’m about the same size as that woman. Guess who’s going in the trunk?”
Could an alleged perpetrator climb through a given window if, for example, the window seemed kind of small? I have to find somebody the same size and try to shove him through it. I can’t just guess.
The Virginia detective who nailed the cat burglar turned serial killer dealt with this issue in one of the murders he investigated. He said, “That was a pretty small window that guy had to use to get into the house. He had to be a certain weight to slither through that one.” A 210-pound man couldn’t get through it, but a 140-pound man might.
If a weight limit isn’t definitive, I have to analyze how the weight is distributed on the body. Maybe a guy with a big butt can’t get through, but a guy with big shoulders and a small butt could wiggle through. I play devil’s advocate and try different things to prove what is true and what is not true.
It can be rather amusing as well.
“Mom is stabbing me again!” my daughter once told her friend on the other end of the phone line as I circled her with a fake butcher knife.
A YOUNG AMERICAN enlisted man stationed in Japan was found hanging naked by a belt in his closet. He was on his knees; the police determined it was an autoerotic death. The family, however, went ballistic and blamed his death on the Yakuza-the Japanese mafia. “They murdered him!”
What dealings he might have had with the mob in Japan and why they would want to do him in was quite unclear, but motivated families are like detectives, and they explained how the Yakuza hung around military bases and could have tried corrupting their son. They came up with every imaginable story that might link their son to being murdered.
And when that failed to convince, they simply rejected accidental death, outright. His mother said, “First of all, he would not put that belt around his neck because it would be so uncomfortable.”
Just because we’re profilers doesn’t mean we’ve experienced everything in the world and can instantly determine whether something is true. In a case involving a sexual predator, I needed to find out if dripping hot wax on someone’s body was simply sadistic or if there was some pleasurable erotic component to it. I always found that warm wax, like you get when candles melt, was fun to play with, warm and squishy, like a fancy Play-Doh. So I got a candle and dripped a few drops from up high onto my leg. SON OF A BITCH! Okay, the man was a sadist.
Now, what about a belt around the neck? Was it uncomfortable? If you’re hanging yourself with a belt, and you’re trying to achieve autoerotic pleasure, that strategy prevents the blood from going back to your brain. In theory, at least, you put the belt around your neck, bend your knees, and then while you masturbate, your brain is deprived of oxygen. But as soon as you have an orgasm-because it is supposedly much better when you have less oxygen to your brain, which is why you’re doing the hanging thing-you must remember to push up on your knees, stand up straight, and the pressure of the ligature ends. The blood rushes back to the brain and the masturbator is okay.
The problem comes when the masturbator doesn’t! If the fantasy isn’t good enough, it takes too damn long. That means the blood isn’t returning to the brain soon enough, there is not enough oxygen, and the person passes out. That’s when autoerotica becomes accidental hanging, and that’s when the person dies. The masturbator needs really good fantasy material. Otherwise, he’ll be dead.
Maybe, I thought, whatever fantasy he was using didn’t work for the young soldier. Sometimes, if a person involves himself in autoerotic sex too often and too many times, he finds it harder and harder to get aroused quickly enough to stay safe.
His mother said, “My son cannot stand things around his neck choking him. He would not do this.”
I wanted to find out for myself what it would feel like so I called my daughter over.
“Honey, can you come into the bathroom? Mom has to hang herself.”
“Okay,” she said, knowing she’s seen me try worse.
When using myself as a prop, I always have someone “spot” me, stand next to me in case I get myself in trouble. Say, for instance, I am testing out the usefulness of a particular belt for hanging myself in a small closet space. I don’t want to accidentally reenact the whole scene successfully and then have another profiler analyze what happened to me.
“I’m going to put this belt around my neck and bend my knees and do what the soldier did, minus the fun part,” I told my daughter. “And just in case anything goes wrong, be here and grab my body and push it back up so I don’t pass out.”
I put the belt over the towel rod, wrapped it around my neck, and bent my knees. I took it to the point I could feel a constriction and a light-headed feeling start to occur. I didn’t stand with my knees bent until I was near to passing out; I only needed to test the feeling of the belt on my neck.
“That doesn’t feel bad at all,” I said.
My daughter rolled her eyes, eager for the experiment to be over.
I did not feel like I was choking. It did make me slightly giddy. But now I knew, firsthand, that when any parent said to me, “They wouldn’t do it because they would be choking,” I could say with authority, “No, it doesn’t feel that way. You do not feel like you’re choking. Actually, it makes you kind of happy; that’s why they do it.”
I proved the police correct on that aspect of the case.
On the wall in front of this young Japanese man was a little bit of shaving cream. The Japanese police claimed he was using shaving cream to masturbate. Was this true?
His mother claimed this, too, was a lie.
In the autopsy photos, on one hand, the young man had a tiny bit of white material. It was not semen, but it was some bit of dried white stuff, in the webbed area of his right hand between his thumb and first finger. It was not seen anywhere else. If he really used shaving cream, why would it be only in that one little spot? Wouldn’t we see a white film on more of his hand?
The family thought so. “That’s right. Somebody just dabbed a bit of foam on his hand to make it look like he was doing that. He would have had it all over his hand if he were really using it.”
I used a black light, two fingers of my left hand (as the young man’s penis), and my other hand to reenact the situation. When I finished and turned on the black light, the only place that I found shaving cream was in the web of my hand. I proved that he must have been masturbating, and hearing what I did makes the cops I tell crack up laughing. I didn’t have anything else to work with. I’m sorry! What can I say?
THE BRIAN LEWIS case taught me a lot.
Brian’s mother was adamant that her son had been murdered, but the police ruled it a suicide.
He was found sitting in the front seat of his car, an old 1977 Cadillac, with a shotgun up under his chin. It was a sad, sad case with horrifying crime scene photos. The damage caused to the head and face by a shotgun with its barrel pressed against the chin or placed in the mouth is horrific and grotesque.
This poor family had to see their beautiful son not looking anything like they remembered him because there were
huge gashes distorting what remained of Brian’s face. It was a brutal thing for anyone to witness.
Brian worked nights at a grocery store and had appeared to be in a good mood to those who saw him that last night. After work, he bought some beer. Then the next morning, the family got the phone call that changed their lives. Brian’s car had been found in a remote mountain area with his body in it. He was dead of a self-inflicted shotgun wound.
The police closed the case pretty quickly. They looked at the crime scene and felt no need to do much in the way of evidence analysis or investigation. “It’s a suicide,” they reported. Brian was in an isolated location, alone in the car with a shotgun in his lap, and nothing indicated that anyone else had been with him at the scene or any crime happened. It looked like a suicide, so it was a suicide.
The family felt that the police rushed to judgment and failed to perform a proper investigation. They didn’t even test for fingerprints on the gun or the beer bottle between his legs. The family thought somebody staged that. They wanted the beer bottle and gun tested for fingerprints and they wanted people interviewed, but none of this was done. The family fought long and hard to prove that Brian would not have attempted suicide. They insisted he wasn’t depressed or upset or having any problems in life.
They came to me and said, “Can you look into this case and bring us some peace?”
One thing I learned right off was that “experts” often disagree with each other. At the beginning of my career, I wasn’t all that familiar with what happens when you shoot yourself with a shotgun, what happens to your head, what happens with the blood, in what direction the pieces go, and what happens to the wadding in the shotgun. I wasn’t a ballistics expert, so I sought out people who were. The original person I approached gave me information that turned out to be incorrect, and I had based a good portion of my initial profile on that.
In the beginning, I agreed with the family. I thought the blood looked like it was going in the wrong direction. But that was an error on my part, because I believed what the first expert told me.
I eventually sought out a different expert, but something still seemed wrong with the picture.
A third ballistics expert brought yet another conflicting opinion but one that came with a much better explanation. That’s how I learned that I shouldn’t blindly believe an expert; I need to find out why they believe what they do. We often see a courtroom expert who will give an opinion, but nobody bothers asking him exactly how he came to that opinion. Just because an expert says “In my professional opinion…” doesn’t mean you should automatically believe he is correct. The courts are a great example of this. How is it that the prosecution expert and the defense expert almost always give opposing opinions? They can’t both be right.
A profiler should always have a thorough explanation of each point in his profile so that anybody, whether a police detective or a victim’s mother, can understand exactly why we believe what we write. Any forensic expert should have a thorough explanation as well. I learned in this case to require any expert who analyzes any portion of a case I am working on to do the same.
The Lewis family believed that Brian did not pull the trigger on the gun that killed him. Someone else must have been responsible.
If you shoot yourself and the trajectory is going in a certain direction, it will continue in that direction. The family and private investigators they brought in looked at the blood spatter. Brian was shot sitting in the driver’s seat, and the shotgun muzzle was up against the right side of his neck, just under the jawline. They expected that the blood would go backward toward the backseat or maybe the back part of the driver’s window. But the blood in this case was mostly over the front half of the driver’s side window and on the roof of the car toward the front. It looked like the shotgun blast went up under his chin toward the back left door but then the blood U-turned and came out through the front of his face. The family and its expert thought the back of Brian’s head should have been blown off, but not his face. Wait a minute, I thought. Geez, that is pretty weird.
If I took a wire starting at the butt of the gun and threaded it down the barrel, wouldn’t it blow off the back of the victim’s head? Why did the front of his face get blown out?
If you don’t understand how a shotgun works, you might misinterpret the blood spatter evidence. Most of us are much more familiar with how a handgun works. Usually, when you shoot a handgun, the bullet sails out in a straight line.
Brian, however, used a Remington 870 Express Magnum twelve-gauge shotgun. He used a shell that contained dove and quail shot, lots of little pellets with a bunch of powder propelling them. Basically, instead of a bullet tearing through the head in a straight line, a bomb is launched into the brain. Once that is accomplished, it explodes, and blood gases come into play. They expand, just like a bomb, and the gases move more easily against the places of least resistance. The skull is pretty strong, but the nose and eye sockets are permeable cavities, so Brian’s face exploded but his skull remained intact.
This ballistics issue was one of the things that confused everybody. The family didn’t understand this, and I didn’t understand this, not having a great familiarity with shotguns and shotgun blasts early on in my career as a profiler. Oddly, the first shotgun expert I approached didn’t appear to understand the physics of shotgun ammunition, either. Fortunately, I found a much wiser, more experienced ballistics expert, and he thoroughly explained it.
Now I was contending with determining from where Brian could have been shot. Could he have shot himself in that position? The family believed the shooter might have been in the backseat. That, they believed, was how blood traveled toward the front. The police never addressed the issue.
I purchased the exact same shotgun from Walmart. The next day, I was planning to take a trip, and I was in a luggage shop trying to buy a new bag, and they wouldn’t accept my credit card.
I called the credit card company while I was in the store, and they said, “There were some unusual purchases with your card. Did you go to Victoria ’s Secret?”
“Yes.”
“And did you purchase a shotgun yesterday at Walmart?”
They must have thought Bonnie and Clyde were on the run again.
I HAD TO find a car with the same dimensions and seat heights as Brian’s. Luckily, I had a big old car in my yard that did fine as a stand-in.
You have to reach really far to pull the trigger on a shotgun. Sometimes people use their toes to push the trigger when they kill themselves; some people use a stick. Brian would have had to pull the trigger with his own hands. Could it be done while he sat behind the steering wheel with the gun on the seat?
I’m five foot seven. Brian was four inches taller than me, five foot eleven.
I was able to reach the trigger on the gun I bought at Walmart and was able to push it with my thumb. That proved to me right away that Brian could have, but it didn’t prove that he did. It also showed me that when I went to push the trigger on the gun-because of the way I had to reach-my head was in exactly the right place for the blood spatter pattern shown in the crime scene photos. Another very important clue had to do with where the wadding inside the shotgun shell ends up. While pellets may disperse, the shotgun wadding will continue on its trajectory, in a straight line. The shotgun wadding was in the left parietal lobe, in the posterior region of Brian’s brain. In order to push that trigger, I had to turn my head to the left and lift my chin in order to get in a position where I could stretch my body and arm enough for my thumb to contact the trigger. And sure enough, if you put a rod along the barrel of the gun that ended under my chin and you pushed that rod straight through my head, the rod would pierce the parietal region of the brain exactly where the wadding ended up on Brian. More fascinating, my face shifted up and a little bit toward the driver’s side window, which was exactly where the exploding blood gases caused all the blood coming out the front of Brian’s face to land.
It sure looked-if he was
sitting in that seat-like he could have pulled the trigger, and the wadding in Brian’s head and the blood spatter proved it.
But I wanted to make really, really sure that there still couldn’t be another angle at which the gun could be held, by someone else, that could explain the blood and wadding evidence.
I wanted to hold the shotgun up to somebody’s head in that car and see with what angles the shooter worked, so I said to my son, “David, do you mind coming outside and getting your head blown off?”
And he said, “Okay, Mom.”
(Of course, the gun was definitely not loaded.)
We looked around and hoped nobody was watching. I had a boarder at the time and naturally, he returned home at exactly the time I was in the car holding the shotgun to my son’s head.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “nothing’s going on here. I’m calm. I’m just blowing my son’s brains out.”
I climbed in the backseat and aimed the gun in different directions, trying to get his head in the right place. I immediately had trouble getting the gun over the top of the backseat to put it in the correct line. I tried getting him to look back at me like he was saying, “Hey, guys, what’s up back there?”
I tried all kinds of methodologies, moving my son’s head in different directions, and found that there was no realistic way from the backseat that I could get that shotgun to line up properly with the evidence.
I went around to the front seat and sat in the passenger side, which was the only other possibility. I tried from that side, and found it was possible to do it from the front. Brian would have had to have been asleep, passed out or so drunk that his head was just lolling against the headrest and he wasn’t paying a bit of attention, and the person with him in the front seat would have had to hold the shotgun in a funny fashion, the passenger door open and his right elbow sticking out in front of him. But he could do it. It was possible, but only if Brian’s head was waaaay back and he didn’t have time to push the gun away.
I made a mental checkmark that maybe it could have happened that way. But did it happen?
