RUTH VIVIAN
She was reluctant to tell the police everything at first because she had a young fellow that was coming up before court and she didnt want him down the pen with anybody that was going to hurt him.
Since the murder, she’s tried to move. Ruth has been asking to move now for twenty-five years. She talked to them eight or nine times. She got a doctor’s note to help her cause. She talked to a psychiatrist right on LeMarchant Road. She’s no good for names.
She had a run-in with Sheldon Troke. He came to the back door one morning and asked her son Tom to stay away from Donna. That was after Tom fixed a flat for her. Just tell him to stay away from Donna is what he said. Ruth never said nothing she just minded her own business, closed the door and came on. She told her son when he came home and that was a long while ago.
SHELDON TROKE
Ruth Vivian is after saying a lot in this courtroom. She’s afraid of this and afraid of that. From what Sheldon hears in this courtroom, if Mrs Vivian seen this or Mrs Vivian heard this, Mrs Vivian wouldnt be able to keep it to herself. She runs out and tells a police officer Sheldon phoned her. The next day she runs out and tells another one, and what’s on the go? These people are not paying no attention to her. Theyre just taking some notes. So the next day she runs to a third one. In two days she’s after running to three different police officers and in each one of them she’s after saying three different things. If Ruth Vivian seen Sheldon Thursday night or she seen him Friday night she would not be able to keep it to herself. She’s a liar and she knows it. Power of suggestion. That’s what it boils down to.
SHARON WHALEN
She heard a big bang and thought it was the coffee table knocked over. It might be Mom sleep-walking or maybe she rolled off the chesterfield. Sharon heard another voice. She thought she was dreaming it though. The voice whispered be quiet, Donna, be quiet. It sounded like a man’s voice. Her mom was saying, No, no, Sheldon! Leave me alone, leave me alone! Sharon went back to sleep. Her bedroom is not far to where the coffee table is. Then Cory woke her up, he was shouting out, Mommy! Mommy! Sharon looked at her clock and it was 8:39 a.m. and she thought it was weird because Mom normally gets up and unlocks Cory’s door. Sharon went out to see where Mommy was and the coffee table was tipped over near the kitchen and there was broken glass by the coffee table. Mommy was lying on her stomach and Sharon just thought she was asleep. She went in and opened her brother’s door and his room was all a mess. She said okay we got to clean this up for Mom. So that’s what she started to do and then she went out and her mother was lying on the floor. There was blood on her shoulder and some blood near her chest dripping down. She took the blanket off and saw some scratches on her legs. Sharon knew that she was dead. She pulled down her mother’s nightdress and put the blanket over her so that Cory wouldnt see and then she dialed 911.
I found my mom lying on the floor dead.
What are you saying?
I found my mom lying on the floor and she’s dead.
We will send the ambulance.
Ambulance, ambulance. Cory stay away.
We’ll send somebody along.
Okay, then.
Then she dialed her nan.
That blanket was kept in her mom’s room. If her mom was going to watch TV late at night she had a TV in her room. She didnt sleep out on the couch, but she was sleeping on the couch that night because her new bed wasnt set up in the room. That black blanket was her mom’s favourite.
After the phone calls Sharon unlocked two of the doors. First the latch one and then the one downstairs. You pick out the latch part that’s right across. There’s a push-in lock on the knob. She doesnt remember if that was closed or not. She doesnt even remember going to the back door.
She waited by the front door for the ambulance. Sharon thought her mom had killed herself. She used a knife. She was under a lot of stress. She never had no luck with boyfriends and she always had a lot to do. On the floor near her mom were the cushions on the chesterfield and the coffee table was broken.
THE
INVESTIGATION
JIM PIKE
They were about to have coffee when their dispatcher got the call. We’ve got a hysterical little girl on the phone and she claims her mother is dead. They got into the ambulance and left. Jim Pike and his partner Harold Parsons. Harold was driving. They had their ambulance emergency sirens on. Around four minutes later they arrived just outside the door, walked down over a little embankment and approached the house. They were the first emergency vehicle there. Two kids standing in the doorcasing, a girl and a little boy, dressed in their nightclothes. In the next door there was a man standing in the doorway. An average built person. Just standing there, leaning against the door. He didnt look to be providing any comfort to these two children. The man questioned as to what they were doing and he and Harold ignored him.
The girl said she’s up this way. So Jim and Harold followed the two children up the steps. The girl was holding the little boy’s hand. She said she woke up and heard her mother call her name but then thought she dreamt it and went back to sleep. The television was on. Whatever channel it was on had finished broadcasting, it was just a snowy screen. There may have been some noise coming from it, but it wasnt enough to bother you. Then the girl pointed, She’s over there. The first thing Jim saw was the legs. He could see the blood. The coffee table was tipped over. He approached the head of the patient and at that time he realized the blood was dry.
He moved back the coffee table to get a better look at her face. Her hair was down over her face and there was something there—a black purse. He realized something was wrong. This person was dead—he’s seen enough dead people to know—and had been dead for a while. He checked the radial pulse of her arm. There was no pulse and he could feel the temperature of her hand was cold and her fingers were curled and rigid. Harold Parsons was standing there and Jim said turn on a light, Harold. He flicked on a switch which turned on the ceiling fan and so right there and then, Jim just wanted to levitate and get out of there so as not to disturb it any more than what they already done. He checked the legs for rigidity and it was cool to the touch. Jim said to Harold dont touch anything. The blood was dry, so Harold called on his portable radio for the police to come down. All he said was, ASAP.
Jim went out to the ambulance and used their channel 2 frequency which is scrambled—they’ve got a specialized crystal in the radios. We’ve got a murder case, he told them, so hurry things up. He went back in and it seemed a long time, but it was probably ten minutes later that the police arrived. The police took their names, got their story, and then Jim and Harold left.
The coffee table was over on the side. It was more or less parallel with the chesterfield. The body was between the coffee table and the chesterfield and the end that was towards the head, Jim moved it back three or four inches to get a better look.
The fire department was coming behind them. They had their lights on, but they werent using the sirens. Jim saw that through the sheers on the living room window. He ran down to the bottom of the stairs to meet them. Two uniformed officers and then another one came after and he was the staff sergeant, Ches Hedderson. Jim was telling them the story as they walked up the stairs, he was giving them basically what they found. He said, This is it. And then Ches Hedderson got on his portable. He said, We need to get Major Crimes at this address.
Hedderson said to one of the police officers to stand at the bottom of the stairs and not let anybody else into the house, not even a policeman.
So there would have been seven people standing around the coffee table three or four feet away from the body.
The fire lieutenant took the two children and brought them across the street and put them in the Rescue to babysit them until the police arrived.
During training there is a lawyer and a police officer come in. They talk about continuity of evidence. Most of it is on-the-job training, you get involved in one situation, and figure out what you should
or shouldnt do and just through daily experience and run-ins with the police they tell you what they would like you to do. It is a building of education that way.
The best thing to do is to leave everything, dont touch it and let the police look after it from there. A police car pulled up and Harold and Jim went up with them. They had a police dog. They told the police about the light switch and then asked them would they take over the scene.
In the residence were a couple of street patrol officers and they were noting who was entering and leaving the scene. Dr Philip Abery, he is a forensic pathologist, and Gary Bemister and Charles Stamp, they are identification officers, they were at the scene as well.
CHARLES STAMP
Charles did a walk-through of the house and it was quite neat. A drinking glass on the countertop and a plate, spoon and knife and a fork and a mug and a Pepsi bottle in the sink.
Charles was careful not to walk on anything that might have value and once that’s finished you see if there’s anything the investigator may need right away. Charles photographs that first then calls in Philip Abery so that he can get the core temperature of the body which has an effect on the investigation.
The house was very clean and Charles didnt see any broom closet that if you went into someone’s house and you opened up a closet door you probably see their brooms and mops. He didnt see any place to put her articles so seeing a mop and bucket didnt strike him as being out of the way. The only thing that did strike him were the gloves on the floor. The gloves were examined for fingerprints but he found no friction ridges. What you do is you put your exhibits into a fuming tank, you put cyanoacrylate in a little dish over a light bulb and you also take some hot water and seal the tank off and the krazy glue—that’s what they use for cyanoacrylate—the glue will condense into the air and attach itself to the exhibits where there’s ridges of a fingerprint. In a fuming tank the friction ridges are white and anywhere else youre using black powder or grey powder or red powder, the ridges appear that colour.
Charles found three fingerprints on the drinking glass in the sink. Two of those fingerprints were identified to Sheldon Troke. The left index and his left thumb.
The water in the bucket is no good for forensic because it’s too diluted with cleaning chemicals.
The atmosphere conditions in the room has a big effect on the fingerprint. They will dissipate over a few weeks. If it’s nice and warm and the humidity is low, prints can last a long time. There are types of chemicals now that can react to fingerprints that have been there for twenty years. Charles’s done three homicide scenes of this nature—you get about six or seven good fingerprints. If he went into his own residence and fingerprinted it he wouldnt get anything. Handle drawers in your kitchen, the doorknobs, anything that’s used a lot, medicine cabinets, what youre getting is superimposed fingerprints, one over the other, partial palmprints, the inside ridges of the fingers, and he’s after dusting hundreds of doorknobs and it’s impossible to get a fingerprint that you can actually take to court and do a chart on because it’s very difficult to understand how you can call it a fingerprint when you’ve got four or five ridges going through the fingerprint from another fingerprint.
You can tell a female’s fingerprints. If a female is a housewife their ridges on their fingers are wore from washing dishes and using cleaning chemicals on their hands and the ridges arent out as far. A masonry person, you can usually tell what kind of job they have because of the surface of their fingerprints.
PHILIP ABERY
Dr Abery inserted a thermometer into the abdomen and into the liver. He measured the ambient temperature of the room. Then he took a walk around the entire thing just to get a general picture as to what may have transpired. He viewed the knives in the drawer in the kitchen but did not examine them for fear of interfering with evidence. He cannot say that any of these knives were the knife.
The purpose is to try and give the time interval between death and discovery. They measure alcohol both in the blood and in the vitreous fluid. The vitreous fluid comes from the eye. Both the blood ethanol and the vitreous ethanol were negative.
The body of any suspicious death is secured in the morgue. The body was in a body bag liner inside a locked box. The clothing was one blue nightdress. It was bloodstained on the front and it had slit defects over the left aspect of the front panel. There was a pair of white socks which had blood smearing on the upper aspect but was free of blood on the soles. A pair of white underwear tied in a knot around the individual’s neck. He cut at a point distant from the knot to preserve the knot. There are forensic experts who can determine by examining a knot whether the individual was left- or right-handed. He cut the underwear and they came apart. It wasnt a knot at all, but simply firmly twisted into place.
The body was transported by a police van.
There were three sets of earrings in each earlobe, all of which are yellow metal. There were four yellow metal chains around her neck and four yellow metal pendants on the chains and two blue hair buckles.
As the blood settles, if you push on it, you push the fluid out of the way and the skin turns white. With time, the blood clots and it stains the surrounding tissue. At that point, we say lividity is fixed because when you push on it, you cannot push the clot and the staining away. There’s no blanching, which occurs within a certain range of hours after death.
The hair was normal, shoulder-length black hair. The scalp was unremarkable with no evidence of any scratches, bruises or lacerations. The ears were unremarkable. Her eyes were brown and partially open. A condition called tache noir, which is French for black line, was noted in the conjunctiva. If an individual dies with their eyes open, the corneas dry and you get this line. There was no evidence of any pinpoint hemorrhages that occur in the eye in cases of strangulation.
There was no evidence of forcible sexual assault.
There were no injuries to the face.
On the right side of the neck there was an area of patent abrasion. If a chain had been pressed hard into the neck. They peeled back the scalp flap and examined the scalp from the inside. There was no evidence of bruising to the scalp. The skull was intact.
They removed the brain and all the organs from the body and performed a neck dissection. This allows blood to drain from the body. If you dont do it in that sequence you may cause artificial hemorrhaging to the neck. There was no evidence of injury to the neck.
One cannot date wounds with accuracy. On a recent abrasion, healing starts to occur and you see peaked-up edges. That occurs after several days.
In terms of the panties being used as a ligature, it’s fairly soft material and you may see a ligature mark, but you may not. So the panties themselves may not leave any injury. However, the underwear would push on the chain.
They put the wound edges back together with scotch tape and measured them. There are elastic fibres that run in the skin. If you cut a wound parallel to those fibres, it stays like a slit. If you cut across the fibres, the wound gapes open. A wound in its natural state may not be the correct size because of the cutting of these elastic fibres.
The heart has been cut. The pulmonary vein and the vena cava have been cut. The lungs tend to collapse. In order for the lungs to stay inflated, we have a negative pressure in the chest. It’s like a vacuum in our chest. Once a stab wound occurs, there are two potential sources of air to enter the chest cavity—one from the lung itself because, as you breathe in, the air will escape from the lung into the pleural cavity. And then there’s the wound to the outside. A sucking chest wound forms a flap that allows air to get in, but doesnt allow air out, so pressure can build up in the chest cavity and this can compromise an individual’s ability to breathe and vocalize.
There are reports of people who have had fairly extensive injuries, their hearts blown completely out and have still been able to run twenty or forty feet. So it’s impossible to say that it would absolutely prevent her from being able to move around.
Any of the wounds
to the lung could cause death, although death may not be very rapid. The wound that cuts the pulmonary artery on its own would be capable of causing death. The wound that penetrates the left ventricle of the heart. The wound to the vena cava.
If youre going to be stabbed in the chest, there are several things youre going to do. One of them is defend with your arms or legs to try and knock the knife away. If you know the knife is coming towards the heart, there may be a tendency to move the body to protect it. You end up with wounds on the lateral side of the chest.
Defensive wounds are attempts to ward off blows or thrusts of a weapon with your hands. Dr Abery sees injuries to the backs of the hands where you might put your arm up. In the case of an edged weapon, the individual will grab at the knife to remove it from the assailant and when the assailant draws the knife back, you can’t hold the blade so it cuts into the hand. It’s the location of the wounds rather than their configuration which suggests these are defensive wounds.
The majority of knives are single-edged weapons. The back of the knife is flat and the face of the knife has a cutting edge. When that is inserted, you get one edge to the wound that’s sharp and the other edge is slightly blunted.
They examine the organs for injury as they are in the body. Then they remove the organs and look underneath, so the continuity of the track of the wound is not maintained. You can’t measure accurately the depth of a wound track. A four-inch knife could cause a six-inch wound if, on penetration, there is indentation of the wall. When a knife is thrust fully into the body and with sufficient force to indent a chest cavity, the hilt of the knife impacts against the skin, and you have a hilt injury to the wound. When you look at the stab wound, instead of nice sharp margins, you see bruising. That would indicate that the hilt of the knife has caused a bruise at the time of stabbing. Here, all of the wounds have clean margins and no evidence of hilt injury.
The Death of Donna Whalen Page 13
