by Pat Brown
The police came on the scene and completed a routine crime scene process. Donnell was still doing CPR.
Donnell didn’t do CPR when it might have been useful—in the first few minutes after he found his mother. Instead, he waited until his aunt and the police arrived. Was Donnell’s CPR just a show?
The police focused in on the fact that Donnell was a violent felon who had a history of bad behaviors. He had just served seven years in prison for battery, and he told police he had just stolen forty pounds of marijuana from drug dealers.
Sometimes, you look at the last event that occurred in somebody’s life. “What’s the most recent thing that made somebody mad at Donnell Washington? What happened in the last few days?”
The police concluded that the double homicide was a retaliation hit in which they went after Washington’s mom to get back at Donnell, and they took out the boyfriend as collateral damage.
Not a bad theory.
Except that there were several curious things about the case. One was something that Donnell said. This happened to be an African American community, and he said, “In our community, nobody goes after somebody’s momma. If they want me, they are going to go after me. They know who I am. They’ll come after me. They won’t take out my mother.”
Culturally, that is correct in my experience. It is rare that in an African American community a bad guy would attack somebody’s mother in retaliation for something that her son did. But that was the angle the police pursued.
It was the Washington family that disputed this theory.
“I think the police have this wrong,” said Charmaine. “First of all, this was not her apartment. This was her boyfriend’s. I think somebody was going after him. Renee stayed at her boyfriend’s home often, but she could have been at her own place. But her boyfriend turned state’s evidence in a drug case. We think they were after the boyfriend and she was collateral damage.”
That was actually a pretty good theory, too.
Which theory does the investigator work on? Again, the problem with many theories is that people are fitting the available evidence to the theories they like best, ignoring any evidence that will blow their theory out of the water. The evidence should guide you to a theory; you should not be allowing the theory to guide the evidence upon which you focus.
Did anybody stop to look at the actual evidence to see what exactly happened in the home that day and then reconstruct all the available information to determine the culprit and nature of this particular crime?
We knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that somebody definitely stabbed that man and that woman to death. There was no question about that, and it was a very violent crime. Frank was stabbed numerous times, far more than was needed to kill him. Renee fought her attacker but ended up with her throat cut.
The police told the Washington family that Renee had human blood under her fingernails, having scratched her attacker. But if they knew whose blood it was, they never said.
We also knew that a knife was not found at the scene. We don’t know where the knife came from or where it went, so whoever did this took the knife away with him or her. We knew that.
We also know that the man—because of the blood spatter pattern and from the blood that was tested—was killed first, and the woman second. Therefore, the attack began in the living room with the man, and the second attack was on the female in the bedroom.
Of course, that doesn’t tell us who the target was; it just tells us that somebody came into the home and killed the man in the front room. Was he killed because the murderer was on his or her way to get to Renee and he had to get through Frank first, or was Frank killed and then somebody heard Renee in the bedroom and had to kill her, too? Therein lies the question.
I took a look back at exactly what happened over the preceding twenty-four hours.
The night before he died, Frank returned home by seven thirty p.m. from visiting a friend.
As for Renee, she was at her brother’s home until six thirty p.m. She left by herself and visited her mother until nine thirty p.m., knowing that if she was going to spend the night at Frank’s, she had to be there by ten or he wouldn’t let her in. Frank was stubborn about this. Her mother lived ten minutes away from Frank.
The time line itself was pretty intriguing. Donnell said that his son heard a thump in the living room, which upset Donnell. He told the police that he thought, If I had broken that door down earlier, perhaps I would have been able to stop this.
We could look at some physical evidence and find out whether Donnell was correct about that. Was there rigor mortis? Was there livor mortis? Rigor mortis is the stiffening of the body after death; livor mortis refers to the blood that settles in the body after death. If you’re facedown, it settles to your face and stomach; if you’re on your back, it settles to your back as gravity pulls it toward the earth. A smart investigator can identify this and sometimes tell how long a person might have been dead. It depends on how quickly the body is found, too. Then a forensic scientist, coroner, or medical examiner can tell the investigator the probable time of the person’s death.
There is also circumstantial evidence for when a person died, and what makes sense.
The Washington family said there were two interesting points that the police didn’t seem to consider. One is that the boyfriend, Frank, would never open his door to anybody if he did not know who it was. Whether his drug-dealing past had made him paranoid or he just didn’t like to open the door to people he didn’t know, he would not open his door to just anybody. And after ten p.m., he wouldn’t take a chance on anyone, not even his girlfriend—at least that is what the Washingtons claimed.
Frank was involved in some serious drug dealing; a year before the murder, he was caught in another city, in possession of marijuana valued at more than $150,000. A judge gave him probation and he was reported to have turned police snitch against his boss to avoid serious prison time.
Frank had taken the opposite path in life of his brother, Barry. Barry was the general foreman for the city, by all reports an upstanding citizen. Some speculated that the police didn’t solve the murder because it would shine a light on Barry’s brother’s unsavory activities.
When he died, Frank was trying a do-over in his own life, attending barber school in an attempt to learn a legal trade.
Donnell came over at one a.m. the night before to borrow his mother’s car because he did not have one; he was going to come back and pick up his mother for the funeral in the morning. He called the house that night and he said nobody answered, so he went over in person and knocked on the door. At least this time, Frank answered the door. And despite the late hour, he obviously did let Donnell in. Donnell borrowed the car and went on his way. Donnell was the last one to see them alive.
I looked at what was going on in the home in the hours before the double homicide. There was no breakfast on the table, no plates set out, no dirty dishes in the kitchen. Dinner was gone—if it had ever been prepared and eaten in the apartment—and it didn’t look like anybody had had breakfast yet.
Frank was on the sofa. He was dressed. He had on a pair of jeans and an undershirt, a long-johns type of shirt, and some soft slippers. He didn’t look like he was going out at that moment. It looked like he was hanging around the house.
Renee was dressed in panties and a silk nightshirt, and her sister, Donnell’s aunt, said, “My sister always laid out her clothes for the morning. That’s one of the things she always did. She laid out the clothes, what she was going to wear, everything ironed and ready to go. She was going to a funeral in the morning. If she had gone to bed, she would have definitely laid those clothes out.”
The most pressing question was no longer who did it but when did the murders actually happen? Did it happen in the morning after they had all gotten up, or did it happen before they went to bed?
Donnell was there sometime in the middle of the night. …
I considered the possibility that the crime occurred w
hen Donnell’s son said he heard a thump in the living room. But it is unlikely to be the time it happened. Still, even if it had, some rigor mortis would have set in. The fact remained that neither Frank nor Renee seemed like they had been to bed yet. This is circumstantial evidence, but I needed to think about its implications.
The next thing I wanted to do was check out everyone’s stories; where did they agree, where did they conflict? How accurate were their individual reports?
Donnell said when he returned to Frank’s home later in the morning, he busted in the door. This is one of the reasons I go to the scene of the crime whenever possible and see what I can still see. So I went to the boyfriend’s basement apartment.
To reach it, you had to go through a locked outside screen door and then walk downstairs and gain access through a sturdy locked door.
The apartment door itself had not been changed since the crime, and I could see absolutely no evidence that it was ever kicked in. I had pictures of the door from the scene, and I saw no evidence in those that the door was any different. What door did Donnell kick when he “broke the door down”? Where were the signs of damage?
Nobody paid attention to the fact that Donnell said he broke the door down, and yet the door was just fine and dandy. That lit a bulb in my head.
Next I wanted to see the interviews Donnell did with the police. One concerning issue was the CPR. He told the police that when he did CPR on his mother, he knew he shouldn’t have done that because he disturbed the scene.
“I knew I shouldn’t have done it, but I couldn’t help myself,” he said.
I thought, What a strange comment. Most people would think doing CPR was the right thing to do. If you thought there was a chance in hell of saving someone’s life, not much would get in your way. It would not have been wrong to move your mother’s body under those circumstances. And you probably wouldn’t say the words, “but I couldn’t help myself.” What an odd statement. I kept that statement in the back of my mind, because I thought it peculiar.
There was another very damning set of statements about the CPR issue. Donnell said as soon as he found his mother lying facedown on the floor, he picked her up, turned her over, and put her on the bed. Then he proceeded to give CPR. But Lamont said when he arrived Donnell had run outside to tell him his mother and Frank were dead and when he followed Donnell back into the apartment, he saw his aunt “facedown on the floor.”
Seems to me Donnell didn’t exactly rush to give CPR to his mother. He waited until his aunt and the police showed up!
* * * *
PEOPLE TEND TO have problems coming up with stories that sound truthful when they have to explain what happened (and they can’t be entirely forthcoming). One method often used is to take an episode that really happened and move it to another point in time. This way the storyteller runs through the events as he saw them and need not continually fabricate details. The result is a fairly honest-sounding tale, which it is, except that events didn’t happen when the storyteller claims they did. The emotions one felt at the time can also be described and come off as sounding truthful because they were truthful at that earlier time.
Donnell made a number of statements that could have related to different actions that occurred at an earlier time than when he found his mother dead in the morning.
The first interesting statement was the one about Donnell doing CPR on his mother: “I knew I shouldn’t have done it, but I couldn’t help myself,” he said.
What if that statement wasn’t about CPR, but about murder? What if he murdered his mother? If you roll that statement back to an earlier time, say, to the time Donnell might have murdered his own mother, the weird statement makes a lot more sense. I know I shouldn’t have done that, but I couldn’t help myself. He shouldn’t have done that. He shouldn’t have killed her, but he couldn’t help himself. Why couldn’t he help himself? Because something got so out of hand that he had to do it?
Donnell made another statement that bothered me: “I don’t mind that my mother’s dead,” he said. “I just don’t like the way it went down.”
He didn’t care that she was dead. That showed a person with a lack of empathy, which is a sure sign of a psychopathic human being. Also, given his criminal history, it was not unlikely that he might have been a psychopath. He had no empathy for the victim, even if she was his mother. He didn’t care that she was dead; he just didn’t like the way it went down.
If he was involved in it, I guess he wouldn’t like the way it went down, because he ended up killing his mother, and chances are he kind of liked having her around. She was useful, and maybe he didn’t mean to kill her. Maybe he had to kill his mother.
What was really going on? Did Donnell Washington tell the truth?
LET’S STEP BACK a bit.
The family said Frank Bishop, the boyfriend, was the target of this crime. It wasn’t the mother. Could they be right? Why would Frank Bishop be the target?
First of all, the attack occurred at Frank’s residence. That makes sense in supporting the boyfriend as the target theory. Usually, if a person wants to kill somebody, they go to where the person lives. Renee Washington, Donnell’s mother, stayed there sometimes, but she didn’t always, so if they wanted to kill Renee, why not go to her own house and kill her there and leave Frank out of it?
Donnell picked up the car after midnight and brought it back at seven a.m., so unless the killer was actually watching the residence, he would not know Renee was even there that night, because her car wasn’t there.
No one was permitted in the house unless they called first; Frank didn’t open the door to strangers. If some crazy person from a gambling joint, or a drug gang, were after Renee, Frank wouldn’t know them and would not have opened the door.
Renee was not dressed at the time she was killed. Frank was. She was in the back room in her nightgown, and he was killed first. So whoever came to Frank’s home was let in by Frank and attacked him. He also received the more violent attack, even though he fought back less than Renee did. He had almost no defensive wounds on him, despite a shockingly violent assault. He was stabbed and stabbed. She was stabbed just enough to kill her. Usually when you see major anger released on a victim, that’s the person the killer was after.
I found evidence that there was a show of anger before Frank was attacked.
The table in the living room was tossed, and it seemed like Frank wasn’t expecting things to turn volatile. He was just sitting docilely on the couch, the table was thrown, and then the attacker went after him.
It all brings us back to the common knowledge that Frank wouldn’t open his door to someone he didn’t know. The murder scene suggests that Frank was having a conversation with somebody he knew, that somebody got mad, picked up a table, and heaved it out of his way. It hit the Christmas tree and knocked ornaments off it.
The killer was angry. If we were talking about a hit man, he wouldn’t do any of this; he would be an unemotional professional who could come in quickly and cleanly nail everybody. And it wasn’t a gang of thugs because there wasn’t enough turmoil in the apartment.
The perpetrator here was somebody who was obviously pissed off. He went after Frank like crazy and stabbed him without mercy. After that, the person went into the room where Renee was. There was a cell phone lying there. If she was in the back room and she heard this assault occurring in the front room, she most likely would have called 911.
Why did she get stabbed to death? I believe it’s because she was about to call 911, and she was going to rat on who did this. That’s when Renee became collateral damage.
The target of the crime was Frank. Renee was just in the way at the time and about to make that phone call.
Donnell said, “I didn’t mind that she died, I just didn’t like the way it went down.” He also said, “I knew I shouldn’t do it, but I couldn’t help myself.” But what if he wasn’t referring to CPR but to murder? As in, I knew I shouldn’t have killed her, but…I thought she was g
oing for the telephone. She was going to call the police. Couldn’t have that happen.
THERE WAS OTHER information that corroborated when the crime probably occurred:
A neighbor reported hearing loud “fussin’” between one and three in the morning. She didn’t hear anything break, just arguing.
There was light food in Renee’s stomach that should have been gone by morning had this attack happened at seven a.m.
Someone attacked Frank sometime after midnight. Who was there early in the morning? The only person I know of was Donnell Washington. Donnell admitted he was at Frank’s home. Donnell was someone Frank would have let in. And he was the last one known to see his mother, Renee, and Frank alive.
At seven a.m., when he returned to Frank’s home and knocked on the door, Donnell pulled some shenanigans—like a fast-talking con artist. He called relatives and told them, “I can’t get in!” But what if that was all a con?
It took him more than two hours to come back and finally kick the door in—if he actually did that, he must have had the gentlest touch in America—at ten a.m. Then he attempted to give Renee CPR.
This is one of those cases where, if you look at the physical evidence, it tells you a sure thing. And the statements of the people who were interviewed, when I paid attention to the right key points, gave us information that matched the physical evidence.
It’s one of those cases where the family could have shut up and not said so much, but by saying more and more, it seemed to me they implicated Donnell in the crime.
Donnell was extremely concerned about establishing the time of death. He wanted the police to believe it was seven in the morning. That was important to him. Why? Because we know where Donnell was at seven in the morning and he had his son as his witness. He was knocking on the door—but didn’t enter then. He even thought the killer might have been there at that time, because he saw a gray Cherokee parked outside, and somebody sped away. He implicated other people in the crime.