Scene of the Crime

by Anne Wingate

  And Kolata to a large degree is right. In a copyrighted article originally published in the Washington Post, Boyce Rensberger pointed out some of the problems with DNA fingerprinting. In general if a complete DNA fingerprint is taken, all people except identical siblings can be distinguished from one another. But the problem is that DNA fingerprinting does not look at the entire DNA sequence; rather, it looks at certain parts of sequences that are normally different in all people. Given this short sequence comparison, it is indeed true that any person is totally different from any person not closely related. But the chances that two siblings will be identical in this short-sequence comparison may be as low as 1 in 128.

  Furthermore, Rensberger quoted geneticists Richard Lewon-tin of Harvard University and Daniel Hartl of Washington University as saying it is possible that the odds for and against a wrong match must be calculated differently for each race and ethnic group and subgroup, because some ethnic groups are more interbred than others.

  This can be as important in writing fiction as in real life; I'm already thinking of ways of using it, and I'm sure you can think of many more.

  One more thing ... don't have a DNA test performed in the morning and the results announced that afternoon. DNA test results require an absolute minimum of ten days, but two weeks is more likely.

  What is the future of identification?

  Genetic fingerprinting—when the entire genetic sequence, rather than only a part of it, is used —is probably as good as it gets, though the techniques of genetic fingerprinting and of interpreting the tests will certainly be improved in the future. At present, the tests involve several complicated chemical steps, and the resultant printout resembles a bar-code of the type used in grocery stores to scan prices, except that it is far more complicated and far more colorful.

  Scientists in several parts of the world are involved in a project called gene-mapping. They hope that by the time the project is completed, around the turn of the century, they will know what every gene on every chromosome controls. Frequently the papers announce new discoveries related to this mapping; within the time I have been working on this book I've read about the discovery of the location of genes that relate to several different kinds of cancer and of genes that may control the onset of Alzheimer's disease, and of course it was the gene-mapping project that located the Marfan's syndrome gene. Once this project is complete, DNA fingerprinting will be able not only to identify a person, but also perhaps to determine what illnesses that person is likely to have in his/her lifetime and maybe even what his probable appearance, intelligence and talents are.

  I've already mentioned that the U.S. military services are now storing a small amount of genetic material of each recruit, so that in the future there will be no more unknown soldiers. What else? The sky's the limit; I would certainly expect that in the near future, DNA codes will be stored on all known sex criminals, and it may well be that within the next hundred years, DNA codes will be automatically stored at the time of birth of every individual. Try to get away with changing your identity—or disguising the corpse of your victim —then!

  At present, the Tokyo Police Department leads the world in applying new scientific techniques to criminal investigation; the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Scotland Yard, the New York Police Department and the Los Angeles Police Department all run very close seconds. Beyond them, as close thirds, are many city, state and national police departments, as new discoveries are written up in journals and quickly shared with other departments. This chapter views the autopsy from the point of view of the investigator. For the pathologist's point of view, see Keith Wilson's Cause of Death (Writer's Digest Books, 1992).

  The Importance of the Autopsy

  Gross emphasized the importance of a good working relationship between criminal investigators and medical examiners, and that situation has not changed in the slightest. A good medical examiner can help to guide the investigation in the right direction; a bad one can throw it off track completely. But even a good one, if s/he is uncomfortable working with the police, can cause problems.

  During the time I was policing in Albany, Georgia, we had— for a while—two medical examiners working simultaneously. One, though an extremely competent board-certified pathologist, felt very uncomfortable working with police; the other, though not yet board-certified, enjoyed his relation with us. Guess which one we preferred to work with?

  If you remember the television show "Quincy," which was about a Los Angeles medical examiner, you undoubtedly were amused by the opening sequence of every episode, which showed a group of police officers trying to watch an autopsy and, one by one, falling over backward. I never did that, though I will admit that I spent my first autopsy sitting on the floor because I was afraid that if I stood up, I would fall over. It's not the sight that tends to bother most people, but the smell, which can best be described as a mixture of too-raw flesh, human mortality (which you may not realize has an odor until you work around it), and body odors including urine, feces and blood.

  Why would police need to view an autopsy anyway? (A Fort Worth pathologist told me he prefers "postmortem examination" because, he insists, autopsy literally means surgery on oneself. The dictionaries do not agree, and the word autopsy seems to be the most common one.) There are several reasons for police to see autopsies. For one thing, if evidence must be collected during the autopsy, having the police officer on hand to receive the evidence directly shortens the chain of custody and reduces the amount of time a busy pathologist has to spend in court. (Busy police officers' time is considered less important.) Second, if the police officer is on hand, police will have access to information much sooner than if they have to wait for the official autopsy report, which may take several days to several weeks. But most important, if the officer is present to ask questions, information may come out which would not find its way into a formal autopsy report, and which might be extremely important. (I must point out that, during that disastrous first autopsy, I did stay in the room, albeit on the floor—a twenty-year veteran police officer who had entered with me stayed only five minutes before going out the door with his hands over his mouth.)

  I eventually grew to find autopsies very interesting, especially when "little Santos" was doing the job. Dr. Santos seemed a born teacher; he really enjoyed not only explaining to me what he had found, but also insisting that I look more closely until I could see the same thing. On one occasion, he pulled out the entire digestive tract of the cadaver and laid it out on the table to explain to me how digestion works. I could have understood that a little better if the victim had died of poisoning—in fact, she had been the victim of a simple bashing—but nonetheless, it was extremely informative.

  I remember two other autopsies particularly vividly. In one, we had a strangulation murder. We suspected strangulation with some sort of ligature, as there were no hand-shaped bruises on the neck, and there were many creases in the skin, any one of which could have hidden the marks of a ligature. But when Dr. Santos laid open the skin of the neck, he was able to show me, on layers of flesh inside the skin, very deep bluish-purple hand marks. The victim had been manually strangled by someone whose hands were quite large, and the creases on the neck were all just creases.

  The other was one of the most horrible cases I ever saw. It actually happened outside our normal jurisdiction, but our evidence collection facilities were far better than those of the jurisdiction where the crime took place, and Butch and I were called out on it. Doc was unavailable; I think he was on leave.

  The victim, a young housewife, had been sexually assaulted and stabbed more than a hundred times. The first attack apparently took place in the kitchen; most of the stabbing was in the laundry room; and then, the best we could determine, the murderer had stood and watched while the mortally wounded victim crawled down the hall toward her bedroom, trying to reach a telephone to call for help.

  After Butch, some local officers, and I worked the crime scene the rest of the day the bo
dy was found, Butch and I went to the autopsy. Butch had never seen one before. All three of us—Dr. Santos, Butch and I—were never able to figure out exactly how many stab wounds there were, as there were places where the knife had repeatedly entered the same wound. Dr. Santos found at least four wounds that would have been fatal within minutes. And he found one thing that helped, later, to pin the crime on the right person: He found that the knife blade was short and either slightly serrated or very dull. (It turned out to be the latter.)

  Here's what Butch and I were proudest of about that case: The day after we finished the crime scene, the head of the state crime lab flew down to do everything we had missed. He went out to the

  scene, viewed it, and then said there was nothing left for him to do. Butch and I had done it all. And he got in his plane and flew back to Atlanta.

  What are some of the things that can be determined from an autopsy? What are some of the things that cannot be determined from an autopsy?

  A Heavy Case of Typhoid!

  Henri Girard of Paris committed the perfect crime—almost.

  The way J. H. H. Gaute and Robin Odell tell it in The Murderers' Who's Who, after blowing a family inheritance, Girard set out to locate another fortune. Charming Louis Pernotte into giving him power of attorney, Girard then insured Pernotte's life for 300,000 francs. Shortly thereafter, M. and Mme. Pernotte and their two children all came down with typhoid—a problem that couldn't, of course, have been related to the typhoid bacilli Girard had recently bought. Mme. Pernotte and the children survived; Pernotte died. Girard was heartbroken by his friend's death—but not too heartbroken to tell Mme. Pernotte that M. Pernotte owed him 200,000 francs!

  Expanding his technique, Girard then tried poisonous mushrooms on his next two intended victims. They survived, but the one after that, a widow, succumbed a little too soon after her insurance purchase. The insurance companies investigated, La Surete became involved, and Girard sadly explained that he was unhappy and misunderstood despite his warm heart.

  Perhaps wisely, he then swallowed one of his own doses before he could reach trial.

  Other people have tried Girard's technique since then. Some have not succeeded. If any did, we don't know about them.

  Secretors

  First, because of genetic fingerprinting, it is possible to determine far more now than when I was in police work. Then, we could— about 60 percent of the time —determine blood type of the assailant from semen, spittle or other body fluids left on the victim's body.

  That's because about 60 percent of the population are secretors, and about 40 percent are not.

  A secretor is a person whose blood type can be determined from body fluids other than blood. A nonsecretor's blood type cannot be determined from any body fluid other than blood. The difference is probably genetically determined, but nobody knows why or how. After the gene-mapping project is complete, maybe we will know. Police wish all sex criminals were secretors. Now, with DNA fingerprinting, if the assailant has left any of his/her own body fluids behind, we may have enough to identify the assailant with almost certainty.

  The Cause of Death

  The pathologist can usually determine the cause of death, bearing in mind that almost always there is a chain of causes rather than a single cause. If you have ever seen a death certificate, you saw on it several lines that look like this:

  Legal Cause of Death

  Under English common law, and under statute law in many states, death must occur within a year and a day following the injury to be considered murder. The reason for this originally was the medical uncertainty about cause of lingering death. It may well be medically true that the injury is still the cause of death, but in many jurisdictions it is no longer legally true. According to Black's—a very important legal reference source — the rule is obsolete, but the common-law presumption hasn't been overturned by statute in most jurisdictions.

  In taking out an arrest warrant following a murder, the officer must be absolutely exact in what s/he says. In the past, courts have

  ruled arrests invalid and even overturned convictions because the warrant and the indictment based on the warrant did not state that the subject shot the victim with a gun (it could have been with a crossbow); drowned the victim in water (it could have been in a butt of Malmsey); or burned the victim with fire (it could have been with acid). This means that the findings of the examining pathologist are critical in making a case for murder. Consider these gray areas: If a person dies of a heart attack after the assailant sticks a gun in his face and threatens to shoot him, is that murder? (In most states, probably not.)

  English common law, on which the statute law in all of the United States except Louisiana is based (Louisiana's law is based on the French Napoleonic Code), holds that any criminal is guilty of any result that a reasonable person would expect to follow the action the criminal took. That is, if the criminal takes a pistol and holds up a store and the pistol accidentally goes off and kills someone, then the criminal is guilty of murder, because any reasonable person would assume that a person who uses a loaded weapon in the commission of a felony intended murder. However, statute law varies from state to state, so before basing a story on this common law, you must check with your local district attorney, a lawyer, a law library, or the state attorney general's office. In Utah recently, a man who had shot and killed a pregnant woman, in front of her other children, was convicted of a lesser offense than capital murder because he insisted, and was able to convince a jury, that the loaded pistol he was holding to her head while robbing a video store "accidentally" went off.

  Death by gun, knife, fire, bludgeoning—these are pretty obvious, and the autopsy is often little more than a legal formality. The serial killer who gets away with it for years not because nobody can find him but because nobody knows murder is happening is usually setting up apparent illnesses (typhoid fever), good accidents ("The Brides in the Bath"), doing careful strangulation ("The Death Angel"), or using poison. (How many do you want me to name?)

  The brides in the bath: George J. Smith just couldn't seem to keep a wife.

  He abandoned Beatrice Thornhill, his first wife and the only legal one. She didn't know until much later how lucky she was.

  He was using the name Henry Williams when he "married"

  Bessie Mundy. Poor Bessie died in her bathtub at Heme Bay, leaving a small fortune to her spouse.

  The grieving widower next married Alice Burnham, who was possessed of small fortune. Ever provident, George saw to it she got life insurance. Poor Alice died in her bathtub in Blackpool. Her spouse, of course, collected.

  His next wife, Margaret Elizabeth Lofty, also well insured, died in her bathtub in Highgate. This time more newspapers picked up the story, and when Mr. Burnham, Smith's previous father-in-law, heard the story, he was curious—very, very curious.

  The police soon shared his curiosity.

  Brilliant forensic pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury thought perhaps the murderer had "simultaneously lift[ed] the knees and press[ed] on the head, so that the body slid along the bath, taking the head under water" (Gaute and Odell 214). Because there was no sign of struggle whatever, and no marks except a slight bruise on the heel of one victim, police were not fully satisfied with that theory but were unable to come up with a better one. They decided to try an experiment. They enlisted the aid of a young woman who was an expert swimmer. Clad in a swimsuit, she sat down in a full bathtub, and a policeman standing at the end of the tub nearest her feet seized her by the heel and yanked. Instantly her feet flew up and the rest of her body slid down into the water. The woman, though alert, healthy and expecting the attack, nearly drowned. After she was revived, half an hour later, she said water was forced into her mouth and lungs so quickly she hadn't time to do anything, even hold her breath. (In early experiments, when police tried following Spilsbury's suggestion, she had plenty of time to resist.)

  See Figure 8-1, which shows the sequence of the experiment.

 
The death angel: Poor Jeanne was so sweet. Even after her own children died one right after the other, she was still so happy to look after her nieces and nephews, and the children of her neighbors. In fact, she would beg for the opportunity; being around children made her feel closer to her dead darlings. When the babies died, as the poor things so often did, nobody was louder in grief at the funeral, in sympathy for the mother, than Jeanne. Nobody thought a thing—

  Until a neighbor arrived home unexpectedly early and entered her baby's room, to catch Jeanne in the act of strangling the child.

  Incredibly, Jeanne Weber was repeatedly caught in the act be-

  fore doctors or police would pay any attention; police tended to ignore complaints from slums, and doctors kept insisting the babies had died of fits or convulsions or cramps. Even more incredibly, her neighbors and relatives allowed her to go on babysitting. She was tried once and acquitted; after that, she was hired to work in a children's home by a philanthropist who wanted to show how sorry society was about her being falsely accused! The children's home discharged her after several children were severely injured, but did not report her.

  It was only after she had killed two more children that she was rearrested, this time winding up in a mental hospital rather than a prison. Two years later, she did the theoretically impossible: She succeeded in strangling herself to death.

  Even after she died in 1910, some of the officials who had continued to insist on her innocence swore she had committed only one murder, the last one, in which the tiny victim was severely mutilated as well as manually strangled. Their explanation? She had been so often accused of murder that eventually her mind snapped and she did what she had been accused of!