Evidence of Blood

by Thomas H. Cook

  WARFIELD: Do you remember what she was wearing?

  DINKER: A green dress and a pair of black shoes.

  WARFIELD: What was the dress made of?

  DINKER: Cotton.

  WARFIELD: Was it dark green or light green?

  DINKER: Dark green. And it had a little white lacy collar that I made for her.

  WARFIELD: Mrs. Dinker, did you ever see your daughter again?

  DINKER: No, sir.

  WARFIELD: Mrs. Dinker, do you see this pair of shoes I have in my hand?

  DINKER: (whimpering) Yes, sir.

  WARFIELD: Whose shoes are these, Mrs. Dinker?

  DINKER: Those are Ellie’s shoes.

  WARFIELD: How do you know that?

  DINKER: By them shiny little buckles.

  WARFIELD: Mrs. Dinker, did you ever see Ellie’s green dress again?

  DINKER: (crying) No, sir.

  WARFIELD: Mrs. Dinker, do you see this dress I’m holding up to show the jury right now?

  Martha Dinker had, indeed, seen that dress, and she went on to identify it positively as having been the one her daughter had worn the day of her death.

  By eight that same Friday evening, Mrs. Dinker had begun to worry about Ellie, but since, as she put it, “kids is kids,” she had waited until ten before acting on her concerns. She’d had no phone, she told Warfield, and so she’d walked the mile or so from her home to the Sheriff’s Office. There she’d talked to Sheriff Maddox, who’d advised her to return home, after assuring her that he would alert all police patrols to be on the lookout for her daughter.

  Maddox followed Mrs. Dinker to the stand. All during the night following Ellie’s disappearance, he told the jury, the members of his department had kept an eye out for the missing girl. None of them had spotted Ellie by morning, however, and Maddox had begun to suspect that something very bad might have happened.

  WARFIELD: SO, in light of the fact that Ellie Dinker had not been located during the night, what did you do the next day, Sheriff Maddox?

  MADDOX: I went up to Mrs. Dinker’s house. I thought maybe the little girl had showed up. I figured since Mrs. Dinker didn’t have no phone, maybe she wouldn’t have been able to let me know if Ellie had come home.

  WARFIELD: And what did Mrs. Dinker tell you when you arrived at her house?

  MADDOX: She was real upset. She’d already walked all the way up the mountain to the Slater girl’s place, and the Slater girl had told her that Ellie never did come to her house.

  WARFIELD: So Ellie Dinker never made it up to Helen Slater’s house, is that right, Sheriff?

  MADDOX: No, she never did.

  WARFIELD: What did you do then?

  MADDOX: I got started on a roadblock, just to see if maybe somebody had seen the Dinker girl going up the mountain.

  WARFIELD: And someone had, isn’t that right?

  MADDOX: Mr. Coggins seen her.

  WARFIELD: All right, now, you also had occasion to search the woods north of the mountain road, isn’t that right?

  MADDOX: One of my deputies did. Deputy Ben Wade.

  WARFIELD: And what did he find?

  MADDOX: (pointing) That dress you got in that bag there.

  WARFIELD: The one Mrs. Dinker identified as Ellie’s.

  MADDOX: Yes, sir.

  WARFIELD: Now we’ll be hearing from Deputy Wade in a minute, but for the record, Sheriff, Wade brought that dress back down to your office, didn’t he?

  MADDOX: Yes, sir, he did. That’s procedure.

  WARFIELD: What did the dress look like?

  MADDOX: Just like when you held it up.

  WARFIELD: Bloody?

  MADDOX: Just like you showed it.

  WARFIELD: Were there any other signs of Ellie Dinker in those woods, Sheriff?

  MADDOX: No, sir. We looked everywhere, but we couldn’t find hide nor hair of her.

  WARFIELD: All right, Sheriff, now, if you could, just tell us what happened after you found the dress. How did your investigation proceed?

  It had proceeded just as Kinley thought it might, strictly by the book of rural law enforcement. A roadblock had been positioned along the mountain road to question any of the people going in or out of Sequoyah about what they might have seen the day before. As a police canvass, it had worked superbly. They’d found several people who’d seen things relevant to Ellie Dinker’s disappearance, and one by one, as Warfield called them to the stand, they told the jury what they’d seen.

  Luther Tyrone Coggins

  WARFIELD: Now, Mr. Coggins, when the police stopped you at that roadblock, they asked you about Ellie Dinker, didn’t they?

  COGGINS: They asked about a girl in a green dress.

  WARFIELD: Did they say her name?

  COGGINS: No, sir, but I told them who I reckoned it was.

  WARFIELD: And who was that?

  COGGINS: Ellie Dinker.

  WARFIELD: So you knew Ellie Dinker, did you?

  COGGINS: I knowed her mother. She’s on my peddling route. She always buys a few things from my truck.

  WARFIELD: So what did you tell the police officer you spoke to at the roadblock?

  COGGINS: I allowed as how I’d seen Ellie Dinker on the road. I told how she was wearing a green dress, and that she was standing next to a guy I knowed. They was by his old truck, and the hood was up on it.

  WARFIELD: And what time would this have been, Mr. Coggins?

  COGGINS: That would have been around twelve-forty, something like that.

  WARFIELD: SO you told the police that you’d seen Ellie Dinker with a man you recognized.

  COGGINS: I sure did.

  WARFIELD: Do you see that man in the courtroom here today, Mr. Coggins?

  COGGINS: Yes, sir, I do.

  WARFIELD: Could you point him out for the jury?

  COGGINS: That’s him, right there, sitting with Mr. Talbott.

  WARFIELD: The man in the blue shirt?

  COGGINS: Yes, sir.

  WARFIELD: Your Honor, I ask that the record show that Mr. Coggins identified Charles Herman Overton, the defendant, being the man he saw with Ellie Dinker on the afternoon of Friday, July 2, 1954.

  COURT: So ordered.

  Even without turning to the next volume of transcript, Kinley knew who the next witness would be. Warfield was handling things just as prosecutors had always been taught, lining up his witnesses in such a way that each added bit of testimony moved the jury’s mind just a little further in the direction of the defendant.

  Officer Ben Wade

  WARFIELD: And you heard Luther Coggins’s testimony just a few minutes ago, didn’t you?

  WADE: I did.

  WARFIELD: And was that a true and accurate report of what transpired between you and Mr. Coggins?

  WADE: Yes, sir, it was.

  WARFIELD: All right, sir. Now, could you tell the jury in your own words what action you took after hearing from Mr. Coggins?

  WADE: I kept on with the roadblock for a while, then I went down and told Sheriff Maddox about what Mr. Coggins had said.

  WARFIELD: And what did Sheriff Maddox do?

  WADE: He said we’d look into it directly.

  WARFIELD: And did you look into it soon after that?

  WADE: We did early the next morning.

  WARFIELD: But before that, you conducted a search of the woods north of the mountain road, isn’t that right?

  WADE: Yes, sir.

  WARFIELD: Where was that search exactly, Deputy Wade?

  WADE: In the woods up from Mile Marker 27.

  WARFIELD: And that is a location directly north of where Mr. Coggins told you he saw Charles Overton and Ellie Dinker, isn’t that true?

  WADE: Yes, sir, it is.

  WARFIELD: And what did you find in those woods, Deputy?

  WADE: I found a green dress sort of hanging over a limb.

  WARFIELD: Which you brought down to Sheriff Maddox, isn’t that right?

  WADE: Yes, sir.

  WARFIELD: And what happened the n
ext day, Deputy Wade?

  WADE: That was Independence Day, and Sheriff Maddox and I went to check on what Mr. Coggins had said. You know, to ask Mr. Overton about it. But nobody was home. They’d all walked down to the courthouse for the celebration.

  WARFIELD: You say, they’d walked. How do you know that, Deputy Wade?

  WADE: Because Overton’s truck was in the driveway.

  WARFIELD: And did you have occasion to look in that truck, Deputy Wade?

  WADE: Yes, I did.

  WARFIELD: And did you find anything in that truck that you thought might have a bearing on the whereabouts of Ellie Dinker?

  WADE: Yes, sir. I found a tire iron wrapped up in cloth, and it looked to me like it had blood and hair on it.

  WARFIELD: Anything else, Deputy?

  WADE: A pair of black shoes.

  WARFIELD: And pursuant to your duties as a County Deputy, did you take these items?

  WADE: Yes, sir. I took them right down to the Sheriff’s Office and handed them over to Sheriff Maddox.

  Predictably, Warfield called Sheriff Maddox to the stand a second time, then a series of court and law enforcement officials to establish that the chain of evidence had never been broken, that once the shoes and tire iron had been collected, none but authorized officials had gained access to them.

  He then moved on to the arrest of Charlie Overton, something Maddox and two deputies, Wade and Riley Hendricks, had carried out themselves.

  Sheriff Maddox

  WARFIELD: Where did you find Mr. Overton?

  MADDOX: At his house on the mountain. We was waiting for him when him and his wife come up the hill.

  WARFIELD: What happened then?

  MADDOX: Well, me and the boys sort of fanned out, you know, in case he tried to run off. They got on either side of him, and I just stood right there in front of him, and I said, “Charlie, you know a little girl name of Ellie Dinker?” And he didn’t say nothing. He just sort of went pale in his face, you know.

  TALBOTT: Objection, Your Honor.

  COURT: Sustained.

  WARFIELD: Did you then arrest Mr. Overton?

  MADDOX: They was a few more words between us, and then I arrested him. He didn’t put up no fight about it. He just come on with us. His wife, she was crying and such as that, but Overton, he didn’t offer no resistance.

  Kinley stopped, noting, as he always did, those phrases which seemed to denote an emotional state that might otherwise have gone unrecorded.

  No resistance.

  He tried to arrive at an image of such passivity in his mind. He could see the men fan out around Overton, the Sheriff approach him, accuse him before his pregnant wife’s astonished face, of murdering a young girl, and in the midst of all that, to offer no resistance.

  He thought of Dora, the level look of her eyes as she’d related the events surrounding her father’s trial the night before. Whatever Charles Herman Overton might have been, he was certainly a good deal different from his daughter, a man of no resistance whose daughter had not relented yet. He thought of Dr. Stark, of how he’d spoken of the wounded heart Ray had inherited from his father, and then of himself, wondering what secret defects he’d inherited as well, and which all his grandmother’s solitary nurturing could do nothing to correct, and then of Dora, once again. For a moment he wondered what Ray must have thought of her after their first hours together. Knowing him as he did, Kinley knew that he must have thought of Lois and Serena, both of them sleeping comfortably in the valley, assured of his old-fashioned faithfulness, while he could feel that same solidity slipping away as he looked at Dora, listened to her tale, slipping away like earth moving helplessly downward, gathering mass and momentum as it hurled down the mountainside.

  ELEVEN

  It was nearly noon by the time Kinley finished the first few volumes of the transcript. By then he’d followed Warfield’s witnesses through the early stages of the investigation, Overton’s arrest, and the relatively small amount of forensic material which could be gathered in the absence of Ellie Dinker’s body. Here, the testimony had come from Dr. Stark, and as Kinley sat in the small restaurant a few blocks from the courthouse, he reviewed the notes he’d taken as he’d read it.

  According to Dr. Stark, Ellie Dinker had been a patient of his from the time he’d delivered her in his clinic on June 24, 1938. Although the Dinkers were a poor family, Dr. Stark said, they’d paid his fees either in small payments in cash, or more often, with vegetables grown in their backyard. It was a form of remuneration which Stark said he’d accepted since the Depression, but a practice, he’d added to the jury’s amusement, that he did not wish to encourage in “these more prosperous times.”

  Still, he had continued to see Ellie Dinker through the years, the last time only a month before her death, and in the process, he’d gathered a basic amount of data about her. For the purposes of the trial, the most crucial element within that data had been her blood type. It was B positive, Stark had told the jury, a relatively rare type that was shared by approximately eight percent of the general population. At that point in the testimony, Warfield had anticipated the defense cross-examination and had asked its most important questions himself. No, Stark had admitted in response, he could not say for sure that the blood on Ellie Dinker’s dress was her own. He could only surmise that it could not be that of ninety-two percent of the remaining population. The exchange had been so suggestive of courtroom tactics in the mid-1950’s that Kinley had written it down verbatim.

  WARFIELD: So, scientifically speaking, you cannot positively identify the blood on Ellie Dinker’s dress as being Ellie Dinker’s blood, can you, Dr. Stark?

  STARK: No, sir, I can’t.

  WARFIELD: But if you took a hundred people out of this courtroom here and gave them a blood test, the chances are no more than eight of them would have B positive, is that right?

  STARK: Yes, that’s right.

  WARFIELD: And looking out over the courtroom, how many of these eight people are also wearing a green dress, Doctor?

  STARK: I haven’t counted the green dresses in the gallery, Mr. Warfield.

  WARFIELD: Now, I know you’re a scientist and a medical man, Dr. Stark. But would you also say that you have what we call around here regular walking-about sense?

  STARK: Yes, sir, I think so.

  WARFIELD: Well, let me ask you this, Dr. Stark. If I show you an animal that looks like a skunk and acts like a skunk and smells like a skunk, Doctor, using your regular walking-about sense, what would you say that animal is?

  STARK: I’d say it was a skunk, Mr. Warfield.

  WARFIELD: And if I show you a little girl in a green dress who had B positive blood, and later I show you that dress all ragged and bloody, and I tell you that the blood on that dress was ? positive, Doctor, whose blood would you say was on that dress?

  At that point Horace Talbott, Overton’s attorney, had predictably objected, and the court had sustained the objection. By then it had hardly mattered, of course, since the jury had heard the question and guessed Stark’s answer to be what they themselves had already surmised, that the blood on Ellie Dinker’s dress had come from her body.

  But where was the body? That was the question that now moved restlessly about in Kinley’s mind. Why would Overton have hung the green dress in the tree for all to see, then taken elaborate pains necessary to conceal the body so effectively no one had ever been able to locate it?

  As he finished his hamburger and fries, Kinley well knew that he could not have been the first person to ask such a question. The initial stage of Overton’s defense would have had to confront the missing body, not only as the incontestable physical evidence for the fact of Ellie Dinker’s murder, but also as the central illogical piece in the prosecution’s puzzle. Why would Overton have bothered to hide a body and leave a dress flapping openly, like a bloody pennant, in the trees above Sheriff Maddox’s head?

  “You must have thought about it,” Kinley said urgently.

  Horace T
albott nodded his great, bald head. Though over eighty years old, Kinley could tell that he was completely lucid. He sat in an enormous woven tapestry chair, surrounded by plants, in the bright light of the solarium. Over his left shoulder, a mynah bird squawked from time to time, as if complaining of the heat, but Talbott seemed never to hear it, his dark brown eyes very steady as they stared toward Kinley.

  “Did it bother you?” Kinley asked.

  “Things that don’t make sense always bother me, Mr. Kinley,” Talbott said. “But as you told me, when you asked to see me, you are doing this for Miss Overton.”