Bloodsworth

by Tim Junkin

  They sat in the visiting room of the penitentiary surrounded by inmates. A March snow fell outside the barred window. Next to them a couple kissed while a guard pretended to look away. In the corner, another inmate, watching the couple kissing, played with himself.

  Kirk was quiet, but unyielding. “And it’s more than that. Living with what they’ve done to me I’d rather go for broke. It’s my call now. You told me that. And I want it tested.”

  Bob Morin, despite three years of effort, knew he had run out of options. Although he believed the attempt would prove futile, he agreed to revisit a DNA analysis for Kirk. Initially, he wasn’t even sure where to begin. The road turned out to be as twisted as the bizarre facts surrounding Kirk Bloodsworth’s convictions.

  THREE

  ACCORDING TO THE FBI, the physical evidence collected at the murder scene in 1984 had yielded no useful information. In an effort to look for a possible blood type back then, cotton swabs had been used to capture fluid specimens from the victim’s vagina and rectum at autopsy. Residue from these swabs was then smeared on glass slides and stained with a preservative. While the state medical examiner, using a microscope, had noted some spermatozoa on the slides, the FBI had analyzed the cotton swabs and determined that no semen was present. The FBI also reported that no semen traces and no foreign blood had been found on the victim’s clothing.

  Morin had first to determine whether this crime scene evidence still existed, and if so, where it was stored. If he could locate the evidence, he’d have to then persuade both the prosecutors and the court to permit him access to the evidence to send it off for testing. He’d have to further research testing facilities—find the labora-tory with the most advanced techniques in DNA analysis, one that would be willing to take on the challenge. If all this could be accomplished, and even in the unlikely event that traces of sperm were found, he didn’t know whether DNA could be retrieved and analyzed from such traces, particularly after the passage of so much time.

  When Bob Morin first agreed to represent Bloodsworth, he’d obtained a court order requiring the state to preserve all of the existing evidence. He learned that the cotton swabs were still available at the FBI. Through persistent calls and interviews, he discovered that the state medical examiner’s office had kept the glass slides preserved in a freezer. By personally rummaging through the court clerk’s office, Morin also found the victim’s clothing, the murder weapon, and the other physical evidence taken from the crime scene in a cardboard box. This was a start.

  Morin understood that most efforts to lift preserved specimens of DNA off glass slides still were unsuccessful. The stain used to preserve the specimens on slides back in 1984, before genetic fingerprinting was even heard of, tended to degrade the DNA, and the most widely used technique for analyzing DNA—the one employed by Cellmark and most other labs—usually consumed the sample, leaving nothing left to test. Morin discovered, though, that a laboratory in Richmond, California, was employing an advanced technology that was capable of extracting and analyzing DNA from a very small amount of biological material. Forensic Science Associates was run by Dr. Edward T. Blake, a leading scientist in the developing field of forensic use of DNA for criminal identification purposes. Blake’s lab, employing this new technique for amplifying DNA, known as PCR—polymerase chain reaction—was capable, under some circumstances, of identifying and reproducing tiny amounts of genetic material so that it then could be successfully analyzed. Given the FBI’s findings, and believing that the slides and swabs were probably of no help, Morin asked if Blake’s lab could examine and test all of the crime scene evidence, including the girl’s clothing, the scrapings underneath her fingernails, the murder weapon as well. If he was going to take a last shot, he figured he’d at least put everything in the hopper. If any semen could be found or blood that was not the victim’s, and DNA retrieved, it could be compared with a DNA sample from Kirk Bloodsworth. Dr. Blake’s lab was willing to test it all, provided it got paid. The cost, the lab estimated, could run between $10,000 and $12,000.

  Fortunately for Bloodsworth, his conviction and imprisonment had remained controversial. Questions occasionally still surfaced in the press about the quality of the evidence against him—that most of it was circumstantial, that no scientific proof tied him to the crime scene, and that the two key identification witnesses against him had been a seven-year-old and a ten-year-old. The prosecutors who tried and convicted him were cocksure that Bloodsworth was the murderer, but they were rankled by the lingering doubts. While skeptical that a DNA test would shed any light on the crime, they were certain that if it did, it would resolve any question about Bloodsworth’s guilt. Consequently, they cut a deal with Morin. Provided Morin was willing to pay for the test, they’d agree to release the crime scene evidence to Morin to be sent to the laboratory. If any DNA could be retrieved and identified, it would be matched against Bloodsworth’s. The results would then be made public, whatever they showed. The prosecutors told Morin that they looked forward to scientific confirmation that Bloodsworth was the murderer.

  Morin talked it over with his partners, Gerry Fisher and David Kagan-Kans. The three were seated at a card table they sometimes used for conferences in their office. Morin told them that the test would probably yield no new information. The lab expense was steep, and there was little likelihood they’d be reimbursed. Still, he needed to be able to tell Kirk Bloodsworth that he had done everything in his power to help him.

  “I’ll just have to find another couple of fee cases,” Gerry Fisher said, leaning back. “Beat the bushes a bit.”

  “Yeah,” David Kagan-Kans said. “Me too.”

  In August 1992, after months of negotiations and wrangling over arrangements with the prosecutors, Morin obtained the evidence and sent it, along with a sample of Kirk’s blood, to the California lab. Three months passed with no word. He was not surprised. He had no expectations.

  The day before Thanksgiving, Morin received the strangest and most unexpected of phone calls. A lab technician working for Dr. Blake called late in the evening. She said they’d found a stain of semen on the girl’s underpants. Morin was astonished. Back in 1984 the FBI lab had reported that there wasn’t any identifiable semen on the panties.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “I’m looking through the microscope at the little sperm heads right now,” she answered.

  She wanted to know if Morin wanted the semen found on the girl’s panties lifted and tested. She cautioned him. Utilizing the PCR technology, a DNA test could only exclude about 90 percent of the population. Morin’s client could be grouped in that other 10 percent, she advised. There was a significant risk that DNA from the sperm might be compatible with Kirk Bloodsworth’s, even if he weren’t the actual donor. And Morin remained concerned that the test might compromise the sample, that there might not be the opportunity to test the semen again. Did he want to take the risk?

  MORIN DROVE TO Baltimore and met with Kirk on Thanksgiving Day. Kirk had just finished a plate of turkey and watered-down mashed potatoes. Morin told him the good news and the bad. He explained that if the DNA from the sperm stain was found to be consistent with Kirk’s DNA, while not probative of anything, Kirk’s effort to free himself would be over.

  Kirk, when he heard they’d found a trace of semen on the girl’s panties, started crying. It took him several minutes to compose himself. He listened carefully to Morin’s cautionary warnings, nodding the entire time. “Test it,” he said, as tears streamed down his large, flushed faced. “Test it. It’s there for a reason. It’s my ticket out of here. Test it . . .”

  But by April 1993 the results were long overdue. It had been eight months since the lab had first received the evidence and five long months since the semen had been discovered. Kirk was scared and anxious. He called Morin almost daily. Morin tried to calm him, to reassure him. With each passing week, though, Morin had grown more worried himself. What test could possibly take so long to complete? Had the semen s
tain even yielded a testable DNA sample? Would the results ever come? And what might they show?

  It was the telephone number of Dr. Edward Blake that Morin dialed late on the afternoon of April 27, 1993. He’d run out of excuses to give Kirk, run out of his own wick of patience. The phone rang just once. Morin was taken aback when Dr. Blake answered it personally. Morin introduced himself. He asked about the Kirk Bloodsworth test results.

  “Bloodsworth?” he heard Dr. Blake say. “Bloodsworth? Yes, Bloodsworth . . . Yes, yes, I have him right here.” Morin could hear Blake rustling through papers on the other end of the line. The DNA scientist seemed to take forever. Morin closed his eyes, held his breath, and waited.

  FOUR

  AT ALMOST THE SAME MOMENT, about fifty miles away, Kirk Bloodsworth entered a room in the Maryland Penitentiary designated as the prison library. He’d been lifting weights with Stanley Norris, known as Bozo because he had hair like the clown’s, and Big Tony, who had once been a Hell’s Angel and could bench press 500 pounds. Kirk, himself, had pressed 380 that day. He was burly, overweight from the prison food, wore a bandanna around his head and his dark sunglasses. His faded purple T-shirt was damp with sweat from his workout. On his way to the library, he’d been listening to his Walkman radio through the earphones. The disc jockey had been playing hard rock and heavy metal hits from the past. Kirk had listened to one of his favorites, Guns N’ Roses playing “Welcome to the Jungle.” Music that touched on his world, that sought to reflect or capture his mean existence, had become an important source of both solace and escape in the prison. A few years before, when inmates had rioted and taken over Dormitory C, near where his cell was located, and he’d heard the incessant screams of an inmate who was beaten and raped sixteen successive times, he’d played a Guns N’ Roses tape over and over to drown out the terrible sound.

  The DJ that afternoon followed up with a song by Ozzy Osbourne, known as the grandfather of heavy metal. The song was called “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” Hearing it, Kirk had stopped in his tracks and leaned against the tier wall. Kirk considered himself a religious man, but in a waterman’s way—drinking, smoking pot, womanizing—these were just part of his life as a Chesapeake Bay crabber. Along with his faith in God, he also believed in portents, dreams, and mysticism. He’d been born on Halloween and was convinced that spirits inhabited an invisible world connected to this one. In prison he’d converted from Protestant to Catholic. He liked the ritual, the symbolism, the mystical side of the Catholic Church. Hearing Ozzy Osbourne that afternoon sing “Mama, I’m Coming Home” gave him a jolt. He had always liked and admired Osbourne’s music. He’d only heard this song a few times, but its refrain was the wish and hope of his life. Kirk felt it might be a sign. Hearing the song made him both hopeful and afraid.

  Once in the library, Kirk sat at a steel table in the center of a small windowless room around which a couple of hundred books were stacked on institutional shelving crumbling with rust. The books were all secondhand, old law books mostly, some dime store mysteries, some true crime accounts; a few were hardbacks with their covers still intact but most looked ragged and dog-eared. Kirk had spent thousands of hours in this room. He believed that he had read nearly every book on the shelves. For a waterman’s son, he thought to himself humorlessly, he’d become damn well read.

  He had entered the library to begin drafting yet another of the hundreds of letters he still wrote and sent out regularly protesting his innocence in the crime of raping and murdering Dawn Venice Hamilton. He signed each and every one “Kirk Bloodsworth—A.I.M.—An Innocent Man.” He set a sheet of paper on the table and started writing a letter, this one to Lou Ferrigno, the Incredible Hulk. Kirk tried to write to everyone he admired. He began each letter with a description of who he was and where he’d come from. Halfway through this letter he stopped and set the pen down. Writing about his past made him think of his mother, Jeanette. Kirk had lost her to a massive heart attack three months earlier, the day of President Clinton’s first inauguration. Kirk had been taken—in handcuffs, a waist chain, and leg irons—to view her body for five minutes alone in a closed room, though he had been refused permission to attend her funeral. He’d convinced himself that she’d died of a broken heart over what had happened to her son, over what he’d gotten himself into. He thought of her as his angel and knew if spirits ever helped people, she would help him. Since her death, he’d thought of her constantly, missing her with a physical ache. He could see her there, in their home in the small town of Cambridge, Maryland, where he grew up. He shut his eyes to picture her more clearly. And then without meaning to, he drifted off.

  Kirk would remember later that he dreamed that day of himself as a boy, free on the marsh, running his skiff on a silver river, a dream that was both momentarily peaceful yet troubling. In the dream he was at first small, just five or so, wearing the snowsuit his mother had sewn for him and helping his father tong for oysters on the broad Choptank River. The near shore was pocked with ice and foam, the gray green waves chased by the wind, and his father smiling as the boy culled the oysters, his father strong and the white workboat safe and sturdy. Then he was maybe ten and was in cutoff waders, sloughing through the gum thickets off Blackwater Marsh, setting his muskrat traps in the predawn quiet, the air expectant, the horizon glowing lilac in the flat oval of his water-bound world, the waves lapping the marsh grass, the first sound of the birds. And then he was nearly full size, the year he first started crabbing. He saw his silhouette in the mist, rowing a boat on water that was flat and smoky. His mother was there standing on a dock. She waved to him, then beckoned. His dream was interrupted by a tug on his arm. A prison guard, Sergeant Cooley Hall, stood over him.

  Sergeant Hall, a dark Trinidadian with a wide grin and a penchant for whistling, had always been friendly to Kirk. Hall had a message for him written on a piece of scrap paper. He waited for Kirk to wake fully and adjust himself and then he handed it to him. It was from Kirk’s lawyer, and it was marked urgent. Kirk focused more closely. He read the word urgent again and read that Bob Morin wanted him to call immediately. Kirk’s eyes opened wide and he sat up straight. He looked at Hall, then back at the message. Then he placed a hand over his face to hide his emotion, to keep himself from shaking.

  Kirk Bloodsworth was thirty-two years old and would ever after remember the date and the time he got that message. The offspring of generations of Chesapeake Bay watermen, he’d grown up crabbing and fishing the rivers and creeks on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and trapping the Dorchester marshes, as befit the descendant of an independent, free, and proud breed. His ancestors had emigrated to Maryland from Great Britain and Ireland in the 1600s and an island in the Chesapeake Bay just below Cambridge, Maryland—Bloodsworth Island—had been named for his forbearers. A high school graduate, he’d been a marine and a champion discus thrower. But for the past nine years he had lived a nightmare that he could not understand, account for, or articulate.

  For nine years of his life he’d been locked up in prison, most of it in the hellhole known as the South Wing of the Maryland Penitentiary—nine years of eating inedible food, shivering in a dim cold cell in the winter or sweltering in what became an unventilated sweatbox in the summer; nine years of being cursed as a child rapist and killer, of being threatened daily by other inmates, of having to lift weights with the Pagans and the Hell’s Angels in order to stay fit and able to fight for survival in the shower, of having to fend off shanks and clubs made of batteries crammed into socks, of hearing at night toothbrushes being sharpened into knives on the prison floor; worst of all, nine years of being despised by the outside world, of being mistrusted by his family, of being embarrassed about what he’d become and the way he had to live. Nine years of this before the afternoon Sergeant Hall tapped him on the shoulder and gave him the message.

  The first time Kirk had met Sergeant Cooley Hall, back in 1985, he’d told him that he was being held hostage, that Hall was holding an innocent man. When Hall heard thi
s he laughed aloud. He had a deep bass laugh that he seemed to exhale like a shout. He was one of the few people who Kirk ever heard laugh inside the prison. “Everyone in the pen is innocent, mon, don’t you know?” Hall had told him. “You just one more innocent lamb, Mister Bloodmon. One more innocent lamb . . .” And he had continued to laugh as he walked away. But Kirk had reminded Hall nearly every day of the fact that he was innocent and that he was being held hostage. “You know you got an innocent man, here?” Kirk would say when Hall would walk with him to the commissary. “You holding an innocent man hostage, now. I just want you to know it.” Sometimes Hall, in that accent of his, would say quickly, “No, no, no! I don’t hold you nowhere! Da’ government got you, not me.” Kirk had repeated his claim of innocence, though, so often and so regularly through the years, that Hall had stopped laughing about it and stopped denying it. And then Kirk had stopped repeating it. It had become an unspoken token between them. Hall was just one of many in the prison who thought Kirk might be speaking the truth.

  While Hall had been standing there, the blood had drained from Kirk’s face as he’d reread the piece of scrap paper, then stared at it as if mesmerized. Kirk’s hand trembled as he asked Hall if he could use the phone. Hall smiled. His grin was gleaming white against his dark face. “Sure, mon,” he said. “Maybe your crab boat done finally come in this time, Mister Bloodmon.”