Online Killers
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The documents are posted on the website dedicated to Routier’s release, and on closer scrutiny we suggest that the court papers have been released primarily to blow smoke in a critic’s eyes.
We can support this cutting observation because fingerprint consultant Robert Lohnes said nothing of the kind. In his affidavit, sworn on January 29, 2003, Lohnes mentions nothing about Darin Routier’s fingerprints. Quite the contrary, in fact, he simply says that, after comparing a photograph of the bloodied print with the fingerprint card of Darlie Routier, so he was able to confirm that the prints did not come from her.
Glenn Langenburg also analyzed the second latent print from the door. From the prints available to him for comparison—which included the fingerprints, finger joints and upper palm areas for Darlie and Darin Routier—Langenburg was unable to match the latent fingerprint to either person. Significantly, he was unable to say that Darlie Routier had not left this print.
However, if Darin had left this second print, the significance is worthless, for he lived in the house and his fingerprints would be everywhere.
Quite obviously, the value of the unidentifiable latent fingerprints found at the crime scene will be of little value in Darlie Routier′s struggle to have her sentence quashed. If, however, any of the three prints had been clear enough, possibly they could have been added to a fingerprint database which would automatically have scanned its registers for a match—perhaps flagging up a known offender with a previous criminal record. If this had been successful, Routier might have solid grounds for an appeal because it would have been proved that an intruder had been in the home that fateful night.
Shedding of blood is the dramatic accompaniment to murder committed by violent means. Blood accounts for about 9 percent of a healthy person’s body weight and, as many murderers have discovered to their cost, when it is spilled, a little goes a long way.
While crime-scene technicians methodically worked their way through the Routiers’ home, in the utility room/kitchenette Sergeant Nabors noted that, although the sink was spotless and white, the top and edges of the surfaces around and above it were blood-smudged. It was as if someone had taken the effort to clean the sink of blood and wipe the worktops.
Initially, Darlie denied ever being at the sink, although when later pressed she changed her story. Of more significance, however, is the fact that she made no mention of her washing her hands of the intruder stopping to wash his hands in the sink as he fled the premises—an action that in any event would have been unlikely.
With this in mind, Nabors conducted a Luminol test to detect the presence of human blood that cannot be seen with the naked eye. If the white crystalline compound in the Luminol detected the copper component found in human blood, the area sprayed would become luminescent. The sergeant sprayed the sink and the surrounding counter. When the lights were switched off, the entire sink basin and the surrounding surface glowed a brilliant bluish light in the dark. He concluded that the bloodstains discovered in the sink would be consistent with someone washing blood off his or her hands. And there was also an indication that some of the blood around the sink had been wiped up with a towel. Hardly the actions of a crazed killer intent on escaping as fast as he could!
Although Darlie Routier vehemently denied visiting the sink to wash her wounds, the only scenario one can infer from the blood traces in the sink and on the worktop was that she had cut her own throat at the sink and then tried to wipe up the blood afterward. But there is significantly more to this than meets the eye.
If she did wash her hands in the sink, when did she do it, and why clean the sink and wipe the worktop? These actions could have only taken place after murdering her sons, stabbing herself and cutting her own throat, and before picking up the phone to dial 911, because she stayed on the phone until assistance arrived, and by then the sink had already been cleaned.
This being the only conclusion that can be reached, it would also be reasonable to ask, what else did she do during the period between the murders and calling for help?
Perhaps of even more significance was the fact that only Darlie’s bloodied footprints were visible on the floor. Surely, if the killer had stopped to wash his hands, with blood dripping on to the floor, his own shoeprints would have been found, but they were not.
Fragments of a shattered wine glass lay on and around Darlie’s bloody footprints. A vacuum cleaner lay on its side. Blood found underneath these items indicated to crime-scene consultant James Cron that they were dropped after—not before or during—the violence and the spilling of blood.
Sergeant Nabors repeated the Luminol process on the leatherette couch close to where the boys had been stabbed. Here he found a small child’s handprint glowing iridescent blue on the edge of the couch. Like the blood in the kitchen sink, someone had wiped the blood away. The police had not wiped the couch clean, so who had? Surely not the alleged intruder?
The only two people who could have wiped it were Darlie and her husband, and they denied doing so.
In summary, the sink had been cleaned, the blood-smeared worktop wiped over, a bloodstain on the couch had been wiped too, and all before the police arrived at the premises. Despite all this, the Routiers denied cleaning anything.
To evaluate the veracity of Darlie’s statements to the police, a forensics expert tried to replicate the intruder′s series of moves that fateful night, based on Darlie’s recollection.
He began by dropping a bloody knife from waist height on to the floor of the utility room while making his way toward the garage door. The blood that spattered across the floor during the test produced a pattern entirely different from the little pools found in the utility room on the night of the murders. The test conducted by the forensics expert showed a random pattern of drops and directional splashes, while the crime photos showed “carefully dropped drips of blood.”
When another blood expert found tiny drops of the boys’ blood on the back of the nightshirt that Darlie had worn that evening, he remarked that a likely way the blood could have got there was when it dripped off the bread knife and onto Darlie’s back, and this would be consistent with her raising her arm above her while stabbing the boys.
After the murders, Darlie gave two conflicting accounts of exactly what the intruder had done to her. One officer said that she told him that she had struggled with her assailant on the couch, while another officer said she told him the struggle was at the work surface of the utility room.
To retrace the alleged attacker′s movements as observed by Darlie Routier, James Cron then followed the trail of blood. It indeed led from the room where the children had been slain, through to a utility room, past the sink, then onto the concrete floor of the garage, where it trailed off below a window screen. Cron then went out into the yard and began looking for blood traces that might have been left behind by the alleged slayer in flight after he exited the garage window. Surely his savagery would have produced vast amounts of blood and his clothing would have been dripping with it—yet there was no blood on the window, its frame or sill, or on the outer wall.
There was no blood in the dewy, wet mulch below the window… or on the yard’s manicured lawn… or along or on top of the six-foot-high fence that surrounded the garden, or on the gate, or in the nearby alley.
The blood was contained within the house, and nowhere else!
Darlie Routier had told the police that she had seen the killer leave the premises by passing through the utility room and into the garage before disappearing. The blood trail led to the window screen and not to the garage doors, which, as Darin claimed in court, were in any case locked.
The screen had been slashed with a knife, but on examination it showed no signs of having been forcibly pushed in or out to facilitate an adult’s ingress or egress. Even more telling was the fact that the screen’s frame was easily removable. Perhaps, the investigators figured, the woman, in her panicked condition, may have been wrong—perhaps the intruder had found another means of entr
y and exit. So they examined every entry point to the entire home for other indications of breaking and entering.
They looked for other blood trails and found nothing. Why, the police asked themselves, didn’t the intruder just pull off the screen, as burglars normally do?
Then Charles Linch, Dallas County’s premier trace-evidence analyst, dropped a bombshell: he found a bread knife in the kitchen drawer. On the serrated blade he discovered a nearly invisible fiber, 60 microns long, made of fiberglass coated with rubber. Using a microscope, Linch determined that the fiber found on the bread knife matched in every respect the composition of the fiberglass in the mesh screen cut by the so-called intruder. If this was the knife used to cut the screen, and there is no doubt that it was, common sense tells us that the screen was cut from inside the house, not by the intruder from the outside.
This is not Star Trek. The intruder was not beamed into the house, where he searched for a bread knife, then beamed back outside to cut the screen, to climb through, replace the bread knife, kill the boys, attack the mother and flee. No! Only someone already inside the house, someone who knew where a suitable knife was—one of the parents—could have cut the screen and placed the knife back in the drawer.
The police considered every single other option, but still the window screen seemed an unlikely escape route even though Darlie was insistent that this was the way the killer left the house.
If an intruder had entered and escaped through this slash in the screen, he would have left some trace of his doing so—perhaps a human hair, a fiber from his clothing or a blood trace—but nothing was found. The dust on the sill was undisturbed, there were no handprints, bloody or otherwise, around the window—odd, since the killer, in forcing his way through the window, would have had to hang on to the walls for balance, and yet not a boot- or shoeprint was found in the soft mulch outside!
All of this led the police to conclude that the trail of blood leading to the window screen was a red herring. Someone was trying to deceive them into believing that the killer was an intruder when no intruder had ever existed. But who would try to deceive them? If the intruder did not exist, and there is not a shred of evidence—apart from Darlie Routier’s statement—that there was one, Darlie Routier was lying. By “arranging” the crime scene and scattering red herrings around, she was trying to divert suspicion away from herself.
In the entertainment room where, according to Darlie, she struggled with her attacker, James Cron found little evidence of a melee having taken place. The lampshade was askew and an expensive flower arrangement lay beside the coffee table. There was nothing more out of place. He found, in fact, the fragile stems of the flowers unbroken, as if the arrangement hadn’t fallen but been placed there. Once again, someone was trying to deceive the eye. But there was even more.
Atop the utility room work surface, close to the sink, sat Darlie’s purse, which appeared in order and undisturbed. Several pieces of jewelry—rings, a bracelet and a watch—were laid out neatly and untouched. If the alleged intruder′s motive had been robbery, he would have seen the jewelry when he washed his hands and stolen it. Therefore, it was obvious that, before cutting her own throat and injuring herself, Darlie had removed her jewelry to protect it from blood contamination or possible damage. It was a repeat of the staged scene in the murder room: items had been carefully placed to avoid damaging them, and even a bloodstain on the couch had been wiped away.
Darlie Routier had inflicted her own injuries at the sink!
Everything the crime-scene experts saw at the crime scene disturbed them. The lack of a blood trail away from the home, coupled with virtually no signs of a struggle, bothered them most. The entire picture before them had been carefully set. Everything had been designed, like one of Escher’s drawings, to fool the eye into seeing something that did not exist.
Of great significance is that Darlie must have injured herself, arranged the crime scene and set the red herrings after the murders had been committed and before the 911 call was made. The actions of a very cold and calculated killer indeed!
After his thorough and all-day examination of the crime scene, James Cron summarized his findings for Lieutenant Jack and Sergeant Walling: “We all know the crime scene tells the story. Problem is, that story’s not the same one the mother’s telling. Somebody inside this house did this thing. Gentlemen, there was no intruder.”
Cron was positive that the crime scene had been staged. An article in the FBI′s Law Enforcement Bulletin refers to “staging”:Offenders who stage crime scenes usually make mistakes because they arrange the scene to resemble what they believe it should look like. In so doing, offenders experience a great deal of stress and do not have the time to fit all the pieces together logically. As a result, inconsistencies in forensic findings and in the overall “big picture” of the crime scene will begin to appear. These inconsistencies can serve as the “red flags” of staging, which serve to prevent investigations from becoming misguided.
But nobody asked, “Why hadn’t the Routiers’ dog barked in the night?”
As Sherlock Holmes would be quick to deduce, the dog knew the killer(s), and that could have only been Darlie Routier, Darin Routier or both.
With the physical evidential facts already established, all of which prove beyond any doubt that no intruder had entered the Routiers’ home on the night of the murders and that the crime scene had been “carefully staged” by someone living in the house, we can now focus more closely on the crimes in an effort to prove that only Darlie Routier, acting alone, could have committed the murders.
Darlie Routier most certainly had the opportunity for committing the crime, and she had the opportunity to prepare for the crime, clean the place up and scatter red herrings around to divert suspicion away from herself.
The scientific forensic testimony had proven, beyond any doubt, that an intruder did not leave the blood trail. The fiber found on the bread knife taken from the drawer and replaced in the drawer matched in every respect fibers from the mesh window screen, and this evidence convinced the jury that a guilty verdict was safe.
The police were convinced that the killer had tampered with and fabricated evidence at the crime scene in an effort to lead them in the wrong direction—to point an accusatory finger elsewhere. This being so, it was an act by the killer indicative of guilty consciousness or intent. And Darlie Routier certainly gave a number of unsatisfactory explanations as to the events that night.
At first, she told one officer she had struggled with her assailant on the couch. She added that her only view of the man came as he was walking away from the couch. She said she just couldn’t remember any distinct details about the attack or the killer, except that he was wearing dark clothes and a baseball cap.
To support this claim, she also told a friend who visited her in the hospital that she remembered lying on the couch as the man was running the knife over her face. When she returned home from the hospital, an annoyed Darlie told a shocked friend that the place was a mess and would take some cleaning up.
However, when questioned about the blood in the sink and over the work surfaces, she told another officer a different story: that the struggle took place at the sink.
The investigators’ suspicions grew even more when the doctors and nurses who treated Darlie told them that her wounds could have been self-inflicted. Then, a few days after leaving the hospital, she showed the police bruises that covered her arms from wrist to elbow. These, she said, had been caused by her attacker. Yet the doctors who examined her said the bruises were too fresh to have been inflicted on the night of the murders. More likely, they said, Darlie hit her arms with a blunt instrument after she left the hospital—or got someone else to do it—to convince the police that she had been attacked.
The police asked themselves, why did the alleged intruder only slice Darlie’s throat and stab her in the shoulder and forearm, instead of plunging his knife deep into her body the way he plunged it into the bodies of her boys
? Why did he not make sure that Darlie was dead so that she would be unable to identify him or raise the alarm?
If there had been an intruder, what was his motive? It most certainly was not robbery. But Darlie Routier′s motive for committing the crime has not been found.
Or has it?
One of the first police officers at the scene was perplexed because Darlie didn’t tend to her sons, even when he asked her to. Instead, she held a towel to her own neck. A slash of the bread knife had missed her carotid artery by two millimeters, or was it a carefully judged act of self-mutilation? As no intruder had attacked her, only Darlie could have injured herself. We can rule out her husband because his wife’s injuries spilled a large amount of blood and there was not a drop of blood on him when the police arrived, unless he had changed his clothes.
Nurses at the hospital to which Darlie was taken said that when she was told that her sons were dead she exhibited a “flat affect” and did not dissolve into hysteria, as mothers often do on learning they have lost a child.
When Darlie took the stand at her trial, she changed her story, explaining that she went to the sink to wet towels and place them on her children’s wounds. Paramedics found no towels near the children when they arrived, but Darlie was holding a towel to her own neck.
She also claimed that the scene with the Silly String at Devon’s grave was her heartfelt way of wishing a happy birthday to her son, who, she hoped, was watching from heaven. But Darlie was not a persuasive witness. She cried at unlikely times and became far too defensive under the cross-examination of Toby Shook, the veteran Dallas County prosecutor, who kept slamming her for what he called her “selective amnesia.”
The facts proved that there had been no murderous intruder in the Routiers’ home, so Darlie had been lying. She had even laid false clues and tampered with evidence. This, combined with giving unsatisfactory explanations and changing her account of what took place, tied in with her detached post-crime behavior, and earned her a place on death row.