Anatomy of Injustice

by Raymond Bonner

  Conradi was sworn in, and Elliott asked her to review her autopsy findings. Conradi asked if she could illustrate with slides she had taken of the body. The court agreed. Conradi stepped down from the witness stand to a slide projector that had been set up. She clicked through sixteen slides and explained the injuries each showed, including abrasions on the vagina; cuts and bruises on the face; stab wounds on the right side of the back and neck, “probably produced by a knife”; and stab wounds behind the right ear. When she finished, she took her seat in the witness box again.

  Elliott turned to the question of whether the tongs or a penis had caused the injuries to Mrs. Edwards’s vagina. It wasn’t out of prurient interest. Solicitor Jones had portrayed Elmore as having raped Mrs. Edwards, or at least having stuck his penis inside her, which is when she was said to have ripped out his pubic hairs. He even had Gilliam testify that Elmore had told him he had washed afterward in order to eliminate any semen.

  “Were those injuries consistent with penetration by an erect penis?” Elliott asked.

  Conradi would only say that they “could have been caused by an erect penis, yes.”

  “Had the tongs been utilized, what might you have expected to see?” Elliott asked.

  Again, Conradi did not give the answer the state wanted. The tongs may have been used, she said. “I can’t rule them out completely, but if the tongs were used forcefully, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see linear lacerations in the vagina, and we did not see that.” Still, she repeated, she couldn’t “rule out the tongs completely.”

  Nor could she be certain about the time of death, and that was a far more serious problem for the state. If Mrs. Edwards had not been murdered on Saturday evening but on Sunday, as Dr. Arden testified, Elmore should walk out a free man, because on Sunday, he was at his mother’s, watching television and drinking beer; the state hadn’t disputed that.

  It was time for another seminar on rigor mortis. Dr. Conradi’s rule of thumb was that it begins at four hours after death in muscles of the fingers and jaw; at twenty-eight hours, it is starting to leave; and by forty-eight hours, it is ordinarily gone. In her autopsy, Dr. Conradi had found partial rigor of the left knee and hip, and full rigor of the left ankle. Given that she examined the body on Tuesday, this would mean that Mrs. Edwards had been murdered sometime on Sunday, which was what Dr. Arden concluded.

  Dr. Conradi could not explain the stiffness. “Her left ankle was stiff, and I can’t explain that,” she said in answer to a question from Elliott. “I don’t know if she had arthritis in that ankle or if the ankle just remained stiff over this period of time from the time of death.”

  Jensen and Holt looked at each other, contemplating the absurdity of Dr. Conradi’s claim that arthritis was the cause of the stiffness in Mrs. Edwards’s body, not rigor mortis. Judge Kinard smiled, bemused.

  Elliott pushed on. Again, she asked Conradi for her estimate of the time of death. Conradi stuck with what she had said at the three trials. “Probably the evening of the sixteenth. Based on everything.” That “everything” was the historical, as opposed to medical, information—the information the police had given her. Pathologists generally determine the time of death largely based on what the police tell them. In this case, however, the police, unbeknownst to Conradi, were relying on what Holloway had told them. He was the only one who told the police that Mrs. Edwards was planning to go out of town on Sunday. He was the one who said that the alarm clock was ringing when he walked in and he’d left it on, that the coffeepot was on and he had not turned it off. He was the only one who testified to seeing the Sunday and Monday editions of The Greenville News in the driveway on Monday morning. He said he picked them up and put them inside. No one else testified to seeing those newspapers, not in three trials.

  When Elliott finished her questioning of Dr. Conradi, Jensen stood. He stayed on the subject of rigor mortis. In her autopsy report, Dr. Conradi gave the time of death as sixty-five hours before the autopsy. “I’m having a little difficulty understanding this,” Jensen said. “If rigor begins to pass off at twenty-eight hours and is fully gone at forty-eight hours, then how could you have a body at eleven a.m. on the nineteenth that still had indications of full rigor in some joints and partial rigor in others and then say that the time of death was sixty-five hours earlier, which was well beyond the forty-eight-hour range that you indicated?”

  She repeated that she had settled on Saturday night because that was when the police had determined Mrs. Edwards was murdered.

  “Just to clarify a few things,” she said. “The only joint that she had full rigor in was the left ankle joint. She may have had arthritis in that joint. I don’t know.”

  Jensen couldn’t believe it.

  “Dr. Conradi, are you telling me you can’t tell the difference between rigor and rheumatism in this woman?”

  “No, I really can’t.”

  Jensen might have said, “QED.”

  Something else about Conradi’s testimony upset Jensen and Holt. Those slides Dr. Conradi had just shown the court, where had they come from? A few weeks prior to the hearing, Holt and Jensen had gone to Charleston, to the medical school where Conradi taught, to interview her. They asked her for all the photographs and slides she had, whether taken by SLED agents or by herself during the autopsy. She did not give them anything.

  Now she had produced slides. What else did she have? Jensen wanted to know.

  What about the original photographs taken by the police and turned over to her? Did she have those? Jensen asked.

  “Yes, I have them with me.”

  “You do?” Jensen said, surprised.

  “I do have them with me,” she said nonchalantly.

  “May we see them?” he asked, nonplussed

  Conradi reached into a bag she had brought with her and pulled out several photographs.

  Holt and Jensen began looking at them.

  Conradi interrupted: “I’m sorry. Here are some additional photographs.” She pulled more out of her bag. Sergeant Owen had given them to her when he brought the body.

  Jensen, Holt, Elliott, and Zelenka were all baffled.

  “Would this be a good time for a break?” Judge Kinard asked.

  The court recessed at 3:45. Proceedings resumed at 4:00.

  Jensen could barely contain his anger. There were fifteen photographs neither he nor Diana had seen before. In one, SLED agent Parnell had worked himself into the closet and pointed his lens down at Mrs. Edwards’s body. The photo shows her torso and legs, bloody and bruised. Her robe is pulled up. Her knees are bent. A low-heeled dress boot is threaded between Mrs. Edwards’s legs.

  Holt stared. She had seen other pictures of the body, but they were not as clear as these. The boot had been blurred in the other photos. It seemed to her that the only way that boot could have gotten there was for the killer to have carefully placed it. The boot was a crucial piece of evidence, covered with blood, and presumably it had the fingerprints of the person who put it there.

  Were you ever given that shoe to examine? Jensen asked Conradi.

  No, sir, she answered.

  Nor was anyone else.

  BLOOD, BLUE JEANS, FOOTPRINTS, AND FINGERPRINTS

  ANOTHER PHOTOGRAPH puzzled Holt. It showed a large pool of blood on the carpet outside the closet door. But Holt noticed that there was no blood on the wood strip between the closet and the bedroom carpet. How was that possible? It takes about twenty-five minutes for a person who has been stabbed or shot to bleed out, which means the strip should have been soaked in blood.

  Hayward Starling, a former state investigator from North Carolina, cleared up the mystery when he was called as a witness for Elmore. He was seventy-two years old, his hair white, and he didn’t project the authority or confidence that Arden had. But he wasn’t a northerner and was likely to have some added credibility by virtue of having worked for North Carolina’s State Bureau of Investigation, the equivalent of SLED, for thirty-eight years.

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nbsp; Looking at those photographs, did Starling have an opinion as to how the victim ended up in the closet? Jensen asked after Starling was sworn in.

  “My opinion is that she was moved to that location. She was carried to that location.”

  In other words, Jensen went on, to be sure it was clear, “someone would have to have physically picked her up after she had lain on that carpet bleeding for a substantial period of time and dragged her or moved her into that closet, is that correct?”

  “In my opinion, that’s probably what happened, yes,” said Starling.

  The answers to Jensen’s next questions were self-evident, but the lawyer was being careful to build the record.

  “Now, do you have any opinion based on those observations of the crime scene, the pooling of blood on the carpet, and the blood on the wall and evidence that you have testified to about how the victim was moved, as to whether or not the person or persons who did this would have blood on their clothing?”

  “I do,” Starling said.

  “What is your opinion?”

  “It’s my opinion that the person would have blood on his clothing.”

  At Elmore’s trial, the SLED serologist testified that he had found only five tiny spots of blood on the blue jeans that had been taken from Elmore’s mother’s house.

  “Would you expect to see a larger quantity of blood than what was evident on Mr. Elmore’s jeans?” Jensen asked Starling.

  “I would expect to see more blood, yes, sir.”

  Holt glanced at Zelenka. He was shaking his head, seemingly in disbelief, as he studied the photographs himself and listened to Starling. This changed the nature of the case. Dorothy Edwards had bled to death on her bedroom floor. Her body had then been picked up, and while she was being lowered to the floor in the closet, her blood-soaked hair left streaks down the bureau. The perpetrator had then carefully placed a boot between her knees. Finished, he had closed the closet door. That’s not the way enraged homicidal maniacs normally treat their victims. They are more likely to leave the body and flee.

  Zelenka couldn’t challenge the fact that there was so little blood on the jeans. So he devised a novel theory to explain why. He raised it during his cross-examination of Starling. “And if he did not have his pants on,” Zelenka began a lengthy question, wouldn’t that explain why there was so little blood on the jeans?

  Starling didn’t grasp what the state’s lawyer was suggesting. He gave the same answer as before—there should have been more blood on Elmore’s clothes if he was the perpetrator, if he had moved her body into the closet.

  Zelenka stuck with his naked perpetrator theory.

  “But that assumes that he would have had the clothes on at that particular time, is that correct?”

  “That’s correct,” Starling said. “If he’d had them either on or his trousers pulled down, yes.”

  Starling wasn’t the only one who seemed to find it hard to believe that Zelenka was suggesting that Elmore had taken off his jeans before sexually assaulting Mrs. Edwards. Someone in the courtroom surreptitiously slipped Zelenka a brief handwritten note offering what he thought was a more plausible explanation for the lack of blood. “She was found upside down in closet—probably was picked up by the ankles—avoiding a great deal of blood on clothes.” Even Zelenka found that hypothesis too fanciful, and he didn’t advance it to Judge Kinard. The note was not signed. (Many years later, Geddes Anderson admitted he’d written the note. He realized that it might raise questions about the quality of his representation of Elmore if he was giving the state a theory that would help keep his former client on death row. Quickly after admitting authorship, he insisted, as he had before, that he had vigorously defended Elmore. He added, again, that he thought he was guilty.)

  Other questions about the blood on the blue jeans were wanting for answers. For starters, whose blood was it? At trial, the SLED serologist had testified that the blood on the jeans was type A and that Mrs. Edwards had type A and Elmore type B.

  On the third day of the PCR, Jensen called Elmore’s brother Charles to the stand. Anderson and Beasley hadn’t bothered to interview Charles, and he had never been called to testify at any of his brother’s trials. Jensen examined most of the witnesses, but Holt handled Charles, just as she had Gilliam. They were comfortable with her. She wasn’t just another white lawyer; she was one of them.

  “Please state your name for the record,” she began.

  Charles Elmore.

  “Are you any relation to Mr. Eddie Elmore?”

  “Yes, ma’am. That is my brother.” He was thirty-two years old now, four years younger than Edward.

  “Did you share clothes with your brother?” Holt asked, gently.

  “Yes, ma’am, I did.”

  Those jeans that the police had collected from Abbeville, whose were those?

  “They was mine.”

  How about those shoes taken off Eddie’s feet when he was arrested, had Charles worn those? Holt asked.

  “Yes, ma’am, I had. I had them. I had since I got them.”

  Did Eddie and Charles often wear each other’s clothes, switch off every couple of days?

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Did Charles have a washing machine?

  “No, ma’am, at the time, no.”

  How long had it been since the jeans had been washed? she asked.

  About a week, maybe, was the response.

  She asked what kind of work Charles did. Did he handle razor blades in his work? Might he have bled on those blue jeans?

  “Well, you know I could have, ma’am, to be honest with you now. I remember, you know, I was going to—I used to hang up the bathroom, you know, wallpaper the bathroom, you know, and probably about some of the best things I can use was a razor blade, and if I ain’t too mistaken, I believe I cut a little old, you know, line on my finger, if I ain’t too mistaken.”

  Zelenka then had a few questions. Did Charles know his blood type?

  He was nervous, and at first, he said, no, he didn’t. Then, “I take that back. If I ain’t too mistaken, you know, I believe it’s A.” So, the blood could have been Charles’s just as easily as it could have been Mrs. Edwards’s.

  The blood spots had been tested by SLED serologist John Barron. He had testified at Elmore’s trials, and now at the PCR he was called as a witness for the State. Zelenka asked him about the blood tests he had performed. Jensen had less routine matters to probe.

  Were the jeans in a bag or container when they arrived in your lab? Jensen asked Barron.

  Barron said he couldn’t remember.

  Were they sealed with evidence tape? Jensen asked.

  Barron said he couldn’t recall that either.

  Did SLED have any policy to seal exhibits with evidence tape so they couldn’t be removed from the package? Jensen asked.

  No.

  Did Barron seal the package after he received it?

  There was no record that he had, answered Barron.

  “So we have no way of knowing how many times that garment was taken out of the bag and put back into the bag?” Jensen asked.

  “No.”

  Jensen was improvising, reacting to answers to ask more questions, trying to build a narrative. It was a bit like writing a novel in which the author isn’t sure where the plot and characters will take the story. But this was not fiction, and disbelief was being stacked on top of incredulity—evidence not sealed, no record of how often it was in and out of the bag. There was also the question of where the blue jeans had been after they arrived at SLED.

  While Jensen was questioning witnesses, Holt would often be looking through filing boxes they had brought to court, which contained a mishmash of documents, including those that the state had turned over to them prior to the PCR, as it was required to do. When Barron was on the stand, Holt came upon a document they hadn’t noticed before—four pages long and handwritten. It was a list of the state’s exhibits, ninety-eight items altogether. To the right of each item wa
s a series of initials of the police officer or SLED agent who’d had possession of the item. This was the “chain of custody” prepared by Solicitor Jones, who knew that he would have to be able to account for where every item of evidence had been from the time it was taken by the police until it was introduced at trial. The state must do this to rebut any suggestion that the evidence has been planted or tampered with—innocently, negligently, or intentionally. A judge may exclude evidence if he is not satisfied with the chain of custody.

  Item 86 on the list was Elmore’s coat; item 87, his pants. To the right of each item were names and initials: Van, Earl, J.B., Tom, JTC, Dickenson, Earl, J.B.

  Translation: Detective Vanlerberghe, who had taken the jeans from Elmore’s mother’s house on the day he was arrested, had delivered them to Earl Wells, head of the forensics department at SLED, who had given them to John Barron for testing. From Barron they had gone to SLED agent Tom Henderson, who had given them to Greenwood police captain James Coursey, who had given them to Greenwood police detective Perry Dickenson, who had given them back to Earl Wells, who had returned them to Barron.

  What the hell is this? Holt said to herself. Why had the jeans passed through so many hands, and who had done what with them? One name in that chain leaped out: Tom Henderson. He was the SLED agent who had volunteered to work on the case, who had concluded within a day or two of the murder that Elmore was guilty, who had claimed that Elmore had said to him, “If I did it, I don’t remember.” Henderson, as much as any single individual, had sent Elmore to death row.

  SLED records showed that Henderson had taken the shoes, blue jeans, and coat out of the lab on February 3, and there is no record of how long he had them, or of why he gave them to Coursey instead of back to the SLED lab, or of why he had them in the first place. When Henderson took the jeans from the lab, he was no longer involved in the case, had no role in any of the forensic analysis. Of the ninety-eight items on the list, Henderson had taken only Elmore’s blue jeans, coat, and shoes.

  When Holt realized what she had found, she whispered excitedly to Chris. By this time, Judge Kinard was used to Holt whispering to Jensen, though he didn’t know that she was usually telling him what question to ask next. The judge waited patiently while the two lawyers conferred.