by Ann Rule
One memorable experience began a few years ago on my birthday, of all days. The phone rang and, assuming it was a well-wisher, I answered. Instead it was a defense attorney whose name I recognized instantly. He specialized in high-flying power players as clients. I had met him during previous celebrity cases, though we had never been on the same side.
“Rod,” he said, “I really need your input on this one. Will you write me a report?”
I was instantly on guard. “I would have to come down and look at the evidence first,” I said.
“Great. We’ll arrange it.”
“Are you really planning to use me on this?” I asked.
“Absolutely.”
“You’re not just trying to make sure I’m off-limits for the other side, are you?”
“Rod,” he said smoothly, a note of hurt indignation in his voice, “how could you even suggest that? My client and I would simply like you to analyze the evidence in his case and let us know what you think.”
A few days later, a check signed by the well-known personality in question arrived. I called the lawyer to say that I had received it and to firm up plans for me to examine the evidence. I was surprised when I didn’t hear back from him, so I called several more times and left additional messages. No response.
About a week went by before I received a call from the prosecutor in the same highly publicized case. “I think the blood evidence in this case is pretty strong,” he said. “Would you be willing to take a look at it and give me an opinion?”
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’ve already been retained by the defense.”
He seemed surprised, but he thanked me politely and hung up. It got me thinking about the case again, so I decided to do a little research online. A newspaper article popped up touting the fact that the celebrity and his attorney had recently met with their team of expert witnesses in preparation for the upcoming trial.
I should’ve known. The attorney did precisely what he’d vowed not to do. He knew he couldn’t pay me off, so he “hired” me simply to take me out of the game. He had no intention of showing me the evidence. He didn’t want my opinion on it in the first place. He just wanted to ensure that opposing counsel didn’t hear my opinions. And his client was rich enough to shell out fees simply to keep me out of the picture. In a way, it was flattering.
Of course, neither side has the monopoly on questionable tactics. I ran into one egregious example of unscrupulous behavior in a case that had nothing to do with murder. It occurred because a woman started hemorrhaging suddenly and called 911. She lost a lot of blood even before the ambulance arrived, and she nearly died en route to the emergency room, partly because she refused to let the EMTs take her to the nearest hospital. She was bent on going to a different one all the way across town. After her recovery, she sued the hospital and the emergency services company that transported her.
I was asked to consult on the case for the defense. The experience had obviously been harrowing for everyone involved, and the woman had been lucky to recover. Still, something about the photos of the blood-soaked mattress in her bedroom looked wrong.
“I can’t make a definitive assessment from these images,” I told my clients. “I need to examine the mattress itself.”
They requested it, but the plaintiff’s team was adamant. “Absolutely not,” was the answer. “It’s not available. And there will be no DNA testing, either.”
That was odd. Why should the woman’s lawyers oppose DNA testing?
My clients pressed and prodded and appealed to the judge to grant me access to the evidence. At last I was permitted to view the mattress in the woman’s home, though opposing counsel showed up literally shouting, screaming, and trying physically to bar us from the premises. The minute I saw the mattress I understood why. There was too much blood. No one could bleed like that and live. Someone had poured an enormous amount of additional blood or another reddish liquid onto the already stained sheets to make the effect more dramatic for jurors in the courtroom.
To test my conclusion, I removed plugs—sample cross sections of the sheets, blankets, and mattress—and showed them to Dr. Grimsbo in Portland, along with photographs of the bed. We conducted a number of experiments to find out how much liquid had gone into the mattress and bedding. We kept pouring and pouring, but we still weren’t matching the levels indicated in the plugs. We concluded that the amount of liquid in the mattress where the woman’s hemorrhaging began was well over the total amount of blood in the human body, which is about six quarts. In the end, my clients settled. No one ever determined how that amount of blood found its way into the mattress.
Far-Fetched Speculation
As shocked as I still am at what certain lawyers are capable of, I am equally astounded by some of the statements I have heard over the years from those sworn in as blood pattern interpretation specialists. It’s no wonder lawyers, judges, jurors, journalists, and even average citizens tend to be suspicious when “experts” take the witness stand.
I once heard an expert say with a straight face that he could not state beyond a reasonable doubt that high-velocity impact blood spatter was from a gunshot wound. “It could occur if someone dipped a toothbrush in wet blood and ran their finger across the bristles,” he explained. “That would create the same type of spray.”
Sure. But murderers don’t bother to dip toothbrushes in blood and decorate the walls. They’re too busy killing their victims.
In the state of Washington many years ago, there was a crime scene where a shooting had projected blood spatter onto the ground. I was asked to consult on the case and gave a report to the DA’s office stating that in my opinion, this was high-velocity blood spatter resulting from a gunshot wound. Another expert, who had been called in at the same time I was, told the DA’s office that my theory could be right, but that the blood patterns in question could also have come from repeatedly dropping a bloody pencil.
“When the point hits the ground,” he theorized, “it would create dots like the ones in these photos.”
The entire notion flew in the face of logic. A murder had taken place in the room shown in the photographs. There was a dead body to prove it. The victim’s injuries indicated that he had been shot to death. And there were no bloody pencils lying around the crime scene. Pencils don’t come into play in murder scenes, unless a killer is jabbing somebody with one. In that instance, the jury agreed. The defendant was convicted.
Was the sole purpose of the pencil expert’s statement to throw doubt on the prosecution’s case? Did he sincerely believe a pencil was a plausible, possible cause of the blood spatter he was examining? Was he simply playing devil’s advocate and pointing out every conceivable hypothetical scenario for the sake of argument? If so, is that an ethical approach in a murder trial? Examples can be used to distort facts as well as to illuminate them. Ultimately, jurors have to sift through what they hear and decide for themselves. More than one panel has voted to acquit a defendant even when the blood evidence proved he was guilty just because an expert testified that blood-spattered clothing could have gotten that way from pencils, toothbrushes, and other innocuous sources.
I have been on scenes where people shot themselves. I have also been on scenes where people got shot and were breathing when I walked in, then stopped after I arrived. And I have been on scenes where I have been personally involved in shootings, though fortunately I have never had to kill anyone. Yet in all my decades of seeing dead and dying people and studying the bloodshed that violent crime generates, I have never, ever seen random house hold items inadvertently replicate medium-or high-velocity blood spatter around a victim.
I have tremendous respect for the scientific, academic side of forensics, but veteran cops and analysts with years of field experience balk at purely theoretical propositions. Crime is rooted in the real world. It doesn’t happen under lab conditions.
Experts who testify in court can be prone to another disturbing characteristic. As America lea
rned from watching the O. J. Simpson spectacle, witnesses in celebrity trials can become famous names in their own right. More than one forensics pro has let the limelight eclipse the work. I caught sight of a remarkable example of this not long ago while my colleagues and I were doing some work on a crime scene. We were flabbergasted to find another analyst literally signing autographs inside the house where a young man had recently met with a violent death. When the family of the deceased asked to pose for a picture with the man, I thought they were joking. Then the cameras came out and I realized they weren’t. In the world of crime, abnormal behavior is rampant—and not just among the criminals.
Case Study: A Teen Crush Turns Deadly
One of the stranger things I have done in court is to model a woman’s pink bathrobe for a jury. Here is the story behind it.
Sixteen-year-old Sarah Johnson lived with her mom and dad in a well-kept house in the town of Bellevue in Blaine County, Idaho, which counts itself among the nation’s wealthiest communities. On the morning of September 2, 2003, Sarah said she awoke around six-fifteen A.M. to the sound of running water and knew that one of her parents was up taking a shower. She was still lying in bed a few minutes later when gunshots suddenly echoed through the house. She raced across the hall to her parents’ closed bedroom door and called to her mother. When she got no answer, she tore out of the house and started banging on neighbors’ front doors, screaming that her parents had been murdered.
Local law enforcement officers hurried to the scene and found Sarah’s mother, Diane Johnson, in bed under the covers, dead from a gunshot wound to the head. Sarah’s father, Alan Johnson, lay facedown and naked on the floor nearby, dead from a gunshot to the chest.
Blaine County sheriff Walt Femling had the presence of mind to stop a garbage truck grinding along the Johnsons’ street as it made its morning pickups. Then he secured the entire block as part of the crime scene. After getting a search warrant, deputies began to go over the area inch by inch for clues. One of them opened a garbage can near the curb at the Johnsons’ house.
What lay inside would unlock the truth about events in the Johnson house that fall morning. But if the trash collectors had been a few minutes faster in their rounds, it would have been whisked away forever. On top of the trash sat a woman’s pink terry-cloth bathrobe. Police picked it up, and out fell a left-handed leather glove and a right-handed latex glove.
It was Ian Spiro all over again. Speckling the robe were the familiar traces of high-velocity impact blood spatter. Lab tests also revealed bone fragments and human tissue, deeply embedded in the fibers of the garment. DNA tests showed the blood spatter belonged to both Diane and Alan Johnson. Traces of Sarah’s DNA were also present on the robe and both gloves. When questioned, Sarah admitted that the robe belonged to her but said she had no idea how it had ended up in the trash. She vehemently denied having killed her parents. Instead, she accused a house keeper who had recently been fired by the family for theft.
Police traced the murder weapon, a .264 Winchester Magnum rifle found lying near the bodies, to a man named Mel Speegle, who was renting a garage apartment on the Johnsons’ property. But Speegle had an airtight alibi: He had been in another city when the shots were fired, and he had witnesses to confirm his whereabouts. They also followed up on Sarah’s accusation of the maid, but she, too, had a legitimate alibi.
Then the sheriff’s office found out about Bruno Santos. Santos was a nineteen-year-old illegal Mexican immigrant with a history of drug use and gang ties. He had briefly attended the local high school where Sarah was a student. He was also Sarah’s secret fiancé, if the teenager’s friends were to be believed.
Sarah’s parents had made no secret of their aversion to her taste in sweethearts. In fact, relatives said that when Alan Johnson discovered his daughter had lied to him and spent the night at the Santos family’s apartment in a Bellevue housing project three nights before the murders, he had threatened to file statutory rape charges.
Santos looked like the logical killer until DNA tests cleared him. That’s when police began to look at suspects closer to home. Sarah had been every bit as enraged as Santos at her parents’ efforts to thwart their romance. After dragging his daughter home from her boyfriend’s place, Alan Johnson had grounded her, taken away her house keys, and relegated her to the garage apartment while Speegle was out of town. Had she found Speegle’s rifle while brooding alone in the guest house and hatched a plan to murder the people threatening to separate her from her lover?
On October 31, 2003, Sarah Johnson was arrested and charged with her parents’ murders. Because the case had already received such widespread publicity, her trial was moved to Boise. Blaine County prosecuting attorney Jim Thomas and Scott Birch, chief investigator for the Idaho State Attorney General’s Office, asked me to examine the blood evidence and help them reconstruct the murders.
That was tricky. The pink robe had clearly been in the room when both shots were fired. But the spatter was in all the wrong spots. Sarah was right-handed, yet the majority of the blood droplets were on the back of the robe and the left sleeve. Did it mean she had assisted someone else in the killings? Local police and I went over various scenarios, but time after time we turned up nothing that made sense.
I pored over the photos and went to the crime scene to inspect the room where the homicides occurred, struggling to piece it all together. The pictures showed a trail of bloody water and footprints leading from the bathroom to the bedside, suggesting that Alan Johnson had been shot in the chest while he was in the shower and had then stumbled out toward his wife before collapsing. His body was naked and wet, and the showerhead was still running when the police arrived, splashing bloody water all over the walls in a scene straight out of Alfred Hitch-cock’s classic Psycho. Diane had been asleep, burrowed under the covers, when she was shot in the head by someone standing no more than three feet away from the bed.
Sarah kept changing her story about how she realized her mom and dad were dead. First she said her parents’ door was open a crack when she stood in front of it. Then she said it wasn’t. At one point, she said her own door was closed. Then she changed her mind. But airborne blood, bone, and tissue fragments from Diane’s head had landed on the outside of Alan and Diane’s bedroom door, the hall, and a wall inside Sarah’s bedroom. That meant both doors must have been open during the murders, despite what Sarah claimed.
The “open sesame” that finally melted away the cave door and revealed the truth hidden behind it did not come from Jim, Scott, me, or any of the many other investigative specialists working obsessively on the Johnson case. It happened when Sarah’s defense attorney, Bob Pangburn, made a guest appearance on Nancy Grace’s nightly current affairs program on CNN. While all of us insiders were still grappling with how such atypical blood patterning had gotten onto the bathrobe and Pangburn was maintaining that it exonerated Sarah, Grace started pondering possible explanations. In the midst of one spontaneous “what if,” she mimed putting on an article of clothing backward.
Jim, Scott, and some of their colleagues were burning the midnight oil together in their office and, as luck would have it, took a break to watch Grace’s show. It was the eureka! moment in the prosecution’s case. Scott grabbed the phone and called me. “Rod, think out of the box,” he said. “She wore it backward!” Suddenly it all clicked into place. And once again, the crucial insight came from an unexpected source.
Say you put your clothes on back to front. If you normally shoot right-handed, your right becomes your left and your left becomes your right. What if Sarah had slipped the robe on backward to protect her clothing before firing the rifle that killed both her parents?
Not surprisingly, the Johnson trial was lengthy and emotional. Bruno Santos’s links to the drama brought him to the attention of immigration authorities, who first deported him and then brought him back to appear in court. The young man for whose love Sarah, by then eighteen, had apparently sacrificed so much took the stand and test
ified against her through a Spanish-language translator.
To help prepare his case, the ever-thorough Jim Thomas spoke with a number of experts on parricide. What makes a teenage girl with no prior criminal record and no history of mental illness, sexual abuse, or any other trauma in her life decide single-handedly—with no partner in crime, no accomplice egging her on—to murder both of her parents at point-blank range with a high-powered rifle? It doesn’t happen often. In fact, he learned that Sarah Johnson’s was the first documented case of its kind since Lizzie Borden’s more than a century earlier. There were a few other parallels to the famous ax murders, too. Borden stuffed her dress in the stove and burned it after her parents died. Johnson stuffed her robe in the trash. But, of course, she wasn’t quick enough to dispose of it effectively, and that made all the difference in the trial.
The most important task for me was to reconstruct the crime scene according to what I was now certain had happened. I described how events had unfolded step by step, slipping on the pink bathrobe over my own suit with the opening to the back. Then I grasped the rifle to show the jury exactly how the murder had unfolded based on the story told by the blood spatter.
After deliberating for three days, jurors found Sarah Johnson guilty of first-degree murder on March 16, 2005. She received two consecutive life sentences plus fifteen years with no possibility of parole. She appealed the verdict, but she lost.
What Money Won’t Buy
Throughout the Johnson trial, reporters converged on anyone who would talk. But they were still no match for the media frenzy the O. J. Simpson case sparked. Before my particular expertise plunged me into the double-murder investigation, I knew there were upstanding journalists and underhanded ones just as there are good and bad members of all professions. But what I saw was still an eye-opener.
