by Colin Evans
A slow drip of information gradually seeped into the public domain. Sources close to the investigation revealed that the killer had most likely been armed with a knife, as some of the victim’s clothes had been slashed (although Helen herself had not been cut). Then came news that Shaler had found a non-Caucasian hair on the gag. The police immediately downplayed this discovery, stressing that there was no evidence to show that it definitely belonged to the killer.
But much the most significant development came in August, almost two weeks after the murder. James Devlin, an AC engineer at the Met, suddenly recalled hearing “a sigh, a moan or a groan [between] 9:30 and 9:45 [P.M.]…definitely a woman,” coming from the bottom floor of the building in the northwest corner. “It meant nothing to me at the time,” he said. He had looked around the floor and checked elevator 11, but saw no one. Much later, under cross-examination, Devlin admitted that in the first round of interviews he had originally told detectives, “I didn’t see or hear anything of a suspicious nature,” but only remembered the sound “a number of days after I was interviewed.”
On August 12, after a ten-day hiatus, the Met reopened amid heightened security, although the management stressed how impossible it was to police every inch of its labyrinthine corridors.
In the midst of all these developments, what neither the press nor the public knew was that from the very day that Helen’s body had been discovered the police had been in possession of a critical piece of evidence—a partial palm print found on a pipe that ran across the roof, close to where the shoes had been discovered.
For most of the twentieth century, fingerprints have been regarded as the gold standard of forensic evidence. Find a print, match it to a suspect, and, bingo, case closed! In recent years, however, all that has changed. For the first time in almost a century, serious doubts have begun to be cast on the sanctity of the fingerprint as an ironclad guarantee of identification. Courts in more than one U.S. state, and also in Britain, have thrown out cases because of faulty fingerprint evidence. Perhaps the most egregious example of misidentification came in the aftermath of the Madrid terrorist bombings on March 11, 2004, in which 191 died and 2,000 were injured. An Oregon lawyer, Brandon Mayfield, found himself hauled into custody as a “material witness” after no fewer than three FBI experts matched his prints to a partial print found on a bag that contained explosives at a Madrid train station. According to the experts, they had found fifteen points of similarity. Despite the Spanish police having grave doubts about the identification, the FBI dug in its heels and kept Mayfield locked up for two weeks, before finally admitting that they had goofed: the print was actually shown to belong to an Algerian national thought to be living in Spain, named Ouhnane Daoud.* Such a blunder, once unthinkable, is becoming more common, and the possibility for mistakes is only likely to increase as fingerprint databases grow ever larger. With this expansion comes a heightened chance of two people having similar prints. The key word here is similar, because all the problems thus far have arisen over misidentification. No two people, not even identical twins, have ever been shown to have the same fingerprint.
For those detectives investigating the murder of Helen Hagnes, the partial palm print found on the roof was never more than a guideline, even if it did point squarely in the direction of one particular Met employee, twenty-one-year-old stagehand Craig Crimmins.
Although Crimmins denied any involvement in the murder, he freely admitted being on the roof both before and after the murder. The print, he said, could have been left on any of these occasions. This was a valid observation—after all, dozens of Met employees used the roof for work and relaxation on a daily basis—but what the print did do was to concentrate attention on Crimmins. First, there was his physical appearance, at five feet eight inches and weighing 160 pounds, he resembled the man in the elevator whom Laura Cutler had seen; second, his movements on the night of the killing were unsubstantiated and to some extent contradicted by some of the other stagehands; third, he had a history of drink problems, combined with arrests for disorderly conduct and assault.
Crimmins had been born in New York City and had quit Manhattan Vocational High School after two years to start work at the Met. He lived at Scott Towers, a well-kept cooperative at 3419 Paul Avenue, in the Bradford Park section of the Bronx, where he shared a nineteenth-floor apartment with his father and sister.
And it was outside Scott Towers at 6:30 P.M. on August 29 that detectives approached Crimmins and asked him to accompany them to the 13th Precinct station house at 230 East Twenty-first Street, arriving at shortly before 7:00 P.M. It had been a low-key kind of apprehension, with no force used and no handcuffs. Whether Crimmins was actually under arrest at this point was a fine legal point that would later become crucial, but what is certain is that at some time during that night he was charged with murder and remanded to Rikers Island without bail.
With a suspect under lock and key, the police finally began to open up to the media. They revealed that during his first interview on August 6, Crimmins had aroused no suspicion, but when reinterviewed eight days later his story had changed. This time around he claimed to have been in the basement on the night in question, sleeping off a daylong bender, instead of being on duty. The night’s events were a blank to him. Another lengthy bout with the detectives followed on August 17, parts of which were videotaped. Crimmins expanded on life backstage at the Met. He explained how a kind of buddy system existed among stagehands; if one of them showed up for work either feeling rough or else hungover, coworkers would cover for him. Catnapping during performances was commonplace, as stagehands with nothing to do until the next scenery change snoozed in secluded corners.
Crimmins had worked at the Met for four years. He’d obtained the job through the intervention of his father, a Met electrician with twenty years’ service. (Crimmins’s stepfather had also been employed at the Met for a similar period of time.) Since his hiring, Crimmins had held a variety of positions, most recently as a “grip,” a stagehand who moves sets, lights, and other equipment backstage. It was a job that demanded several tools of the trade, among which were a knife and plenty of rope, the same kind of rope used to bind Helen Hagnes. Detectives also learned that when lashing scenery together, the grips all used a clove hitch, the same knot as that used to bind Helen Hagnes.
On September 5 Crimmins was indicted on two counts of second-degree murder and one count of attempted rape.
Friends and coworkers of Crimmins’s were askance, unable to believe he could be the killer. Everyone knew him as a quiet, even gentle, person, very popular. They scoffed at suggestions that he might have carried Helen up the stairs, as police theorized, because he had recently hurt his right shoulder and suffered a hernia in a motorcycle accident sometime before the slaying. And they dismissed out of hand any suggestion that Crimmins might have lured Helen up to the roof with hints of sexual intrigue. As one stagehand put it: “The musicians don’t associate with us.” State prosecutors were untroubled by these supportive gestures from Crimmins’s fellow workers; so far as they were concerned the case was in the bag. They had the most valuable piece of evidence possible—a confession.
On the night he was taken into custody, Crimmins had given a second videotaped interview, during which he appeared to admit to killing Helen. The interview in this brief tape took the form of a police officer reading out a series of set questions and Crimmins giving his replies. Defense lawyer Lawrence Hochheiser, claiming that the police “were under tremendous pressure to make an arrest in a highly publicized case,” argued that his client had been coached and coerced into making the false confession. Also, at the time Crimmins was arrested—6:30 P.M. on August 29, by the defense’s calculations—the police did not have probable cause to arrest, and therefore any alleged confession made after that time should be suppressed as it violated Crimmins’s Fourth Amendment rights and should not be admissible in court. The police, adamant that Crimmins had not been arrested until 1:00 A.M. on August 30, insi
sted that all the legal proprieties had been observed. Family members of the prisoner disagreed. They complained that during both interviews police officers had willfully obstructed their efforts to obtain legal representation for Crimmins.
While the lawyers wrangled, the state reviewed its hand. Apart from the taped confession, they weren’t holding any royal flush, even if the OCME had given them one vital lead, concerning that cigarette butt found on the stairway close to where Helen’s pen lay. Since 1925 it had been known that some 80 percent of the population secrete their specific blood group information in various bodily fluids, such as saliva. These people are called “secretors.” Craig Crimmins fell into this category. When Shaler tested the Marlboro cigarette butt found close to the hair clip and pen, the saliva stains were matched to someone with Crimmins’s blood group. Again, like the palm print on the roof, it could be argued that Crimmins might have dropped this butt at any time, but the number of damning coincidences was beginning to mount.
There was also the circumstantial case against Crimmins: he knew the building well; he carried a knife and rope of the type used in the attack; he regularly used the clove hitch knot when securing scenery; and he went missing at the time of Helen’s disappearance.
Offsetting all this, however, was a potentially devastating problem. When Crimmins was placed on an ID lineup, Laura Cutler failed to pick him out as the man she had seen in the elevator with Helen. Nor, it could be argued, did the face in the sketch, which showed a dark, swarthy person with short hair, a lined forehead and a stubby growth of beard, bear much resemblance to the fairer complected Crimmins.
So everything hinged on the videotaped confession. Was it admissible or not?
In such a high-profile case, the defense was always going to struggle to win this argument. And so it proved. To no one’s surprise, on April 8, 1981, the courts ruled that the tapes were admissible, and the case proceeded to trial.
Dr. Elliott Gross was the first of the expert witnesses. He told how he had found Helen lying on her back, with blood covering her nostrils and ears. Death, he said, had been caused by “multiple fractures of the skull and ribs that occurred as the result of a fall.” He confirmed that she had been alive when she fell. There were signs of a struggle, most evident in strands of Helen’s blond hair found snagged on a hinged door nearby. The CME finished by saying that an ultraviolet light examination showed no damage to Helen’s genitals, and there was no visible evidence of rape.
The testimony of Crimmins’s supervisor, Frederick G. Collay, was crucial to the prosecution’s case. He had last seen the defendant when the stagehands were changing scenery after The Firebird. This would have been around 9:15 P.M. Thereafter Crimmins was absent for every scenery change and he never saw him again that night. The next day when Collay bawled him out for going missing, Crimmins sheepishly explained that he had fallen asleep on one of the movable stages at the rear of the theater. The supervisor agreed that it was common practice for stagehands to take naps in this area, though they usually told someone, in order to be woken up.
At about 9:20 P.M., Robert Rowlands, an electrician, saw Crimmins entering the men’s lounge beneath the stage. “He looked like he had been drinking.” Although Rowlands couldn’t swear to the exact time because he didn’t wear a watch, he recalled receiving a telephone call from Collay between 9:45 and 10:00 P.M., asking if he had seen Crimmins recently. He had answered in the negative.
As the prosecution had feared, Laura Cutler was predictably vague on the stand and added little to the case against the defendant.
An illuminating and not terribly complimentary insight into life backstage at the Met was provided by one of the carpenters. Thomas Gravina told how on the afternoon of the tragedy he and Crimmins, together with a couple of other stagehands, had adjourned to a bar in Teaneck, New Jersey, where they proceeded to get blasted. By the carpenter’s admittedly hazy reckoning, Crimmins sank about ten beers, sniffed diet capsules, and smoked some dope. They returned to the Met in time for the 8:00 P.M. performance. In Gravina’s view, Crimmins, although obviously feeling the effects of his afternoon exertions, did not seem impaired in going about his tasks. Later that night, in between performances, Gravina also noticed that Crimmins had gone missing and the next day asked him what had happened. Crimmins said he had passed out behind the main stage.
But easily the most telling part of Gravina’s testimony centered on a conversation he’d had with Crimmins on August 16. According to Gravina, Crimmins said, “If anybody asks that you had seen me sleeping in the back, say that you did.” Two days earlier Gravina had told the police that no one was missing from the stage crew on the night of the slaying. “So you lied?” defense counsel Hoch asked, desperate to undermine the witness’s credibility. “I lied,” Gravina admitted. Urged to expand on Crimmins’s reeling condition on the night in question, Gravina said that he appeared “a lot closer to being ready to pass out than just high.”
Another witness told how cocaine and marijuana use was commonplace backstage at the Met, both before and during performances, and that after returning to the opera house that evening Crimmins had continued drinking, with one estimate of his intake reaching approximately twenty-six beers.
When Shaler took the stand, he described the test procedures he had conducted to determine if semen was present either in or about the body. All had proved negative. He pointed out that this didn’t necessarily preclude the possibility of a seminal discharge. Semen could have been present at the time of death, but exposure to heat and moisture for more than four to six hours could destroy it. (As had already been made clear to the jury, the air shaft where Helen’s body was found was dripping with condensation and wickedly hot.)
What Shaler had to say next drove yet another stake into the Met’s already badly tarnished image. A drapery and three paper towels found backstage all tested positive for seminal fluid, and since two blood groups were identified, he said, the semen came from at least two men. He estimated the samples were between “one and two months” old but “could also be much older.” Reporters scribbled gleefully. Shaler’s testimony only added extra spice to already overblown tabloid depictions of the Met as a false-fronted meeting place, where high art in the auditorium concealed a debauched backstage world riddled with casual sex and drug use.
The final link in the prosecution’s medico-legal case was made by Detective Joseph Ferraro, who said that when he dusted for prints on the sixth floor roof of the opera house July 24, a day after Helen died, he found a partial palm print on a pipe. He thought the print had been there “about a day or so at the most. It was very lucid and very clear. The clarity was very good.”
That opinion was supported by another police fingerprint expert, William Plifka. He, too, had no doubt that the palm print had been made by Crimmins, and when asked how long the print had been there, hazarded a guess at “three days or less.” He based this opinion on the fact that sunlight, wind, dust, and rain “adversely affect the clarity of a print.”
The prosecution was now wading in dangerous waters. Trying to determine the age of a latent fingerprint is an area fraught with difficulties, as Vincent J. Scalice, a former NYPD homicide detective and now an independent forensic consultant hired by the defense, made clear. There was, he said, “absolutely no way” to determine scientifically the age of a latent print. There were just too many variables. Any estimate was a guess at best and might be off by days, weeks, even months or years.
The expert witnesses had given their testimony. Now everything hinged on the two videotapes.
In the first, made on August 17, Crimmins was questioned about his movements that night. “Well, I did miss some cues,” he said, owing to the fact that he had passed out behind the main stage. When Detective Gennaro Giorgio said that other stagehands had checked the area where Crimmins claimed to have slept and found it empty, Crimmins became pensive. After a few moments he asked to speak to Giorgio alone. When the two men were on their own, Crimmins began to ta
lk. “I’m afraid that I’m the man the cops are looking for on the elevator. I was on the elevator with that lady.” He claimed that he only spoke to Helen briefly and that she exited at the second floor, after which he went to his locker, drank another six-pack and fell into a stupor. When he awoke at 11:00 P.M., he sneaked out of the building unseen, stopped off to grab a bite at a nearby fast-food restaurant, then went home.
But it was the second tape that doomed Crimmins. In it, he could be seen waiving his rights to have a lawyer present and being read the Miranda warning. The interview itself took the form of a series of confirmatory questions based on statements purportedly made by Crimmins earlier to investigators. This time he admitted sexually propositioning Helen in the elevator. Her response had been to hit him. On the second floor he stopped the elevator and pushed her into a stairwell. By this stage she was plainly terrified. When he demanded sex, she panicked and “started freaking out on me.” The two fought on the stairs. “She tried to hit me. I grabbed her hand. That’s when I took out the hammer. I just held it and told her to walk up the stairs.” Terrified into submission by the raised hammer, Helen did as Crimmins ordered and began to undress. Crimmins, though, was incapable of intercourse, and after a few minutes of slack fumbling he told her to put her clothes back on and frog-marched her up to the roof. Once outside, he tied her with rope, intending to leave her and later notify someone where she was. However, she broke free. After a brief chase, he ran her down and retied her, this time reinforcing his rope with rags snatched from a nearby crate. When she was securely tied, he laid her on her stomach and hacked off her black skirt, black blouse, and underclothes. “I figured if she got loose, she wouldn’t run because she would be embarrassed.” Then, so he said, he lurched drunkenly toward the door. Behind him, Helen let out an involuntary whimper. Something inside Craig Crimmins snapped. “And that’s when it happened…[I] went back and kicked her off.”
