by Gil Reavill
Taking the Black Museum as a starting point, and running up to the present-day saturation of prime-time television, we’ve had about a hundred years of forensics-as-theater. The cumulative effect of this onslaught has been to skew the public mind in some odd ways.
Prosecutors and defense lawyers label it the “CSI Effect,” and it has already become a recognized element in American jurisprudence. Schooled by a steady curriculum of crime shows, the public formed new assumptions about the validity of scientific evidence. The jury pool became muddied, or at least clouded.
Predictably, prosecutors and defense attorneys disagree on the impact of the CSI Effect. Prosecutors detect highly unrealistic expectations on the part of juries, who anticipate DNA tests, trace-evidence analysis, and all the whiz-bang scientific bells-and-whistles common on television but not always applicable to every case. Prosecutors have begun presenting “negative evidence witnesses,” summoning experts to testify that just because DNA results were not presented in court does not mean the prosecution’s case is weak. Such negative testimony in court attempts to reeducate juries in the realities of criminal investigation, counteracting the perceived harmful impact of the CSI Effect.
Likewise, defense attorneys have sought to neutralize an assumption they ascribe to too much TV crime viewing on the part of juries. On CSI, the evidence never lies and Gil Grissom is never wrong. As a result, juries have developed an unrealistic faith in scientific evidence, which they perceive as infallible, just like on TV.
“You never see a case [on TV] where the sample is degraded or the lab work is faulty or the test results don’t solve the crime,” Dan Krane, president and DNA specialist at Forensic Bioinformatics in Fairborn, Ohio, told USA Today. “These things happen all the time in the real world.”
The CSI Effect represents a subtle variation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which maintains that the act of observing changes that which is observed. The act of portraying crime—on television, in movies, in the pages of this book—changes its nature. To put it another way, art fucks with life, and life turns around and repays the favor by fucking with art.
A young teenager fishing off his family dock in Galveston Bay saw an object floating in the water and called to his father, who judged that it was the body of a dead pig. The floater turned out to be a headless and limbless human torso, and its discovery eventually led to murder charges against New York real estate heir Robert Durst. The same day, September 30, 2001, police examined garbage bags washed up with the tide nearby. The bags contained the torso’s arms and legs (but no head) as well as convenient clues to the identity of the dead man. He was Morris Black, Durst’s seventy-one-year-old neighbor and the erstwhile owner of what would become the most infamous missing head this side of Sleepy Hollow.
As the scion of a Manhattan real estate fortune worth billions, Durst could afford the best legal representation money could buy. (A pot-smoking, cross-dressing eccentric, Durst petitioned Judge Susan Criss to fire his attorneys, writing that he “had already paid $1.2 million in retainers” to his legal team, but it was now trying to “squeeze him for another $600,000.”) Among the things that $1.2M can buy are the services of famed jury selection consultant Robert Hirschhorn, taken by some to be the model for the Gene Hackman character in John Grisham’s The Runaway Jury.
Hirschhorn was very well aware of the CSI Effect and its implications for his clients. The Durst defense wanted to play up the fact that a missing piece of vital physical evidence—namely, Morris Black’s gone-astray head—might help exonerate the accused. On shows such as CSI, Hirschhorn knew, such a major gap in evidence was unheard of, and might lead jurors to judge the prosecution’s case weak. Durst’s legal team insisted the case was one of simple self-defense. Wounds to Morris Black’s head, they said, would prove out the theory, if only it could be found.
Hirschhorn made sure prospective jurors were surveyed as to their TV-viewing habits. He didn’t have to worry. Out of the five hundred citizens in the Galveston jury pool for the Durst trial, more than two thirds watched forensic crime programs such as CSI or Law & Order. In a finding that ranks with the “what were they thinking?” outcome of the O. J. Simpson trial, the jury acquitted Durst of killing Morris Black even though he had admitted doing so, and had confessed to chopping up the body with a butcher’s saw too.
But it’s not only prospective jury members who watch TV. Killers do too. Police and prosecutors have noticed a trend recently toward generally less physical evidence recovered from crime scenes. Sitting at the feet of Gil Grissom and Andy Sipowicz, felons have learned to cover their tracks better, scour for trace evidence more completely, and defeat Locard’s exchange principle as best they can.
Perpetrators spill a lot more bleach around crime scenes nowadays. Torching evidence is also more common. Rapists, attuned to the incriminating potential of DNA, have begun to use condoms much more often than previously. Thus was born a new category of trace evidence, whereby scientists analyzed and matched particulates, lubricants, or spermicides to particular brands of condoms. In a parody of an arms race, the light and dark sides of the Force competed to develop new ways to apply Locard’s law, and new ways to circumvent it.
On a Wednesday evening just before Christmas 2005, in Warren, a suburb of Youngstown, Ohio, Keyatta Hines, twenty, acted as a driver for a dark errand. With her were a forty-five-year-old sometime dope dealer named Rebecca Cliburn and a young ex-con named Jermaine McKinney. Already in his young life McKinney had been given the nickname “Maniac,” and he was going to earn it that night.
The plan: Hines would drop McKinney and Cliburn off at the house of Cliburn’s mother, Wanda Rollyson. Rollyson was off at church and the house was, McKinney would tell Cliburn, a perfect place for them to have sex. Hines would then speed off to pick up another partner in crime, Jazzmine “Jazz” McIver, twenty-one. The two girls would then come back to the Rollyson house to help McKinney rob Cliburn and her mother. As an added bonus, Wanda Rollyson was a diabetic, and always kept syringes around. In the world of Maniac McKinney, syringes were gold.
At 6:30 that evening, Hines dropped Maniac and Cliburn off at Rollyson’s home on the outskirts of Warren, close to the Ohio Turnpike. By the time Jazz and Hines returned at around 9:00 P.M., events had already transpired well beyond robbery. Hines later told police she entered the house to find the elderly Rollyson back from church and lying dead in “big puddle” of blood. Cliburn was dead too. McKinney had fatally beaten her with a crowbar after putting two bullets into Rollyson’s head.
Among his other leisure time occupations (marijuana, concealed weaponry), Jermaine McKinney was a devoted viewer of CSI. “I don’t want evidence found,” he told Hines repeatedly. He was concerned about hair, he said, and the sperm he had left in Cliburn’s body. He carefully collected his cigarette butts from the scene, knowing from CSI that they could yield DNA in his saliva. He washed his hands in bleach, confident that would eliminate traces of the crime. Covering his car seats with blankets to prevent blood droplets from being transferred, he gathered his bloody boots, the bed linens, and the murder weapon and brought them out to the car. Then he returned to the house.
In order to eliminate any trace evidence he might have left behind, Maniac decided Cliburn and her mother would have to be burned. He carried the battered bodies to the basement, painted them with flammable beige house-paint, and set them afire. In this step, at least, he was successful, since police later said they could identify the bodies only by the jewelry they wore.
His attempts to dispose of the crowbar and bloody clothing were not so successful. Driving through the night with Hines and Jazz back to his old ’hood in Youngstown, McKinney tossed the crowbar and other incriminating evidence off Jacobs Road into McKelvey Lake. Or rather, onto McKelvey Lake, since the weapon failed to break the ice and came to rest in full view, alongside his boots and Wanda Rollyson’s blood-soaked bed linens.
“Motherfucker!” McKinney screamed, standing there freezing on
Jacobs Road, looking down at his best-laid plans gone awry. A maniac, maybe, but not a smart one. Two days later, after police captured Maniac (true to form, he engaged them in a four-hour gun battle), investigators retrieved the murder weapon and the other discarded material.
“People are getting more sophisticated,” an investigator with the Trumbull County prosecutor’s office told the Youngstown Vindicator, “with making sure they’re not leaving trace evidence at crime scenes.”
A contrary opinion, from Larry Pozner, former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers: “Most people who commit crimes are not very bright and don’t take many precautions,” he said to the Associated Press, serving up commentary upon, but probably not directly referring to, Jermaine McKinney as he heard the crowbar clang down on lake ice. “CSI and all the other crime shows will make no difference.”
Christy Jacobs told the story of the Kunz killings to a girlfriend of his who, when she was nabbed on a bank robbery beef in Minnesota, told the story to police. After a little detour to the Supreme Court to sort out double-jeopardy issues, Jacobs was tried for the kidnapping of Helen Kunz and the full story came out in court.
He went to the Kunz farmhouse that night not for burglary but for murder. After an argument with his father he felt angry and demeaned. The Kunz family seemed the perfect targets for his ire—a group of outsiders living in an isolated location. An opaque element of the crime scene, at least to me, was always the car parked a distance away in the garden plot. That turned out to have a very simple explanation, very obvious in hindsight: Jacobs wanted to sneak up on the house. The broken arm that Randy Kunz suffered before he was shot stemmed from a struggle with Jacobs at the door of the farmhouse.
Still sexually inexperienced at age twenty-one, Christy Jacobs kidnapped the seventy-year-old Helen Kunz in order to rape her and thus finally unload the burden of his virginity. He drove with the terrified woman through the dark Wisconsin countryside. When it came time to do the deed, Jacobs pulled over to the side of the road. But he couldn’t do it. He opened the car door of his Charger and vomited onto the asphalt. Then he took his passenger from the car, sat her up against a tree and, using the same Remington Nylon 66 .22 rifle he had employed to kill her brother, son, and sisters, shot Helen Kunz twice in the head.
Yes, of course. That’s exactly what must have happened. For over a decade I had stared at the opaque screen hiding the facts about the Kunz farm massacre. Then the veil lifted, and a sense of clarity flooded the crime with light. Why hadn’t I been able to parse it out before? But that was the nature of the beast, and the attraction of forensic science. Humans are the puzzle-solving animal, and crime scene investigators solve high-stakes puzzle after high-stakes puzzle professionally, in the course of their ordinary workdays.
But my crime-parsing skills were progressing. Two weeks after the murder in Calumet City, detectives arrested an ex-con junkie named Chessie Martin, who confessed to killing Eric Grimes. He had targeted the same neighborhood in a series of break-ins, always accessing unoccupied houses through their back alleyway entrances. Grimes surprised Chessie Martin in the darkened kitchen before he ever got a chance to rifle through the house for valuables.
“He fought hard,” Martin told detectives. “I thought he was going to kill me, so I had to kill him.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Left Hand of God
The Freak show in Plainfield, Wisconsin
Reporters love a murder.
—Calvin Trilling
I’m a killer-diller with nothing on my mind.
—Fats Waller
Notes toward a murder biography, or, Homicides I Have Known and Loved:
Ed Gein enjoyed considerable notoriety around the central Wisconsin of my youth as a hometown boy who had made bad. He lived in a ramshackle farmhouse outside of tiny Plainfield, Wisconsin. (Later on, it wasn’t lost on me that Aftermath’s headquarters was located in Plainfield, Illinois.) Locals employed Gein as a handyman and occasional baby-sitter.
Baby-sitter? Evidently so. There may be people still alive who as children were dandled on Ed Gein’s knee. Even before he twisted off, Ed was odd. What could their parents have been thinking?
When his mother, Augusta, died in 1940, the thirty-nine-year-old Gein became gradually but thoroughly unhinged. He had always been something of an authority on anthropological studies that showed odd or bizarre human behavior. Now he began to collect anatomy books, medical encyclopedias, reference works on the Nazi experiments at Auschwitz. His gender dysphoria led him into strange confusions, and he investigated sex-reassignment surgery but then held back. He decided instead on a do-it-yourself approach. With his semiretarded grave-digger sidekick, Gus (last name lost to history), he made body-robbing sojourns to local cemeteries.
Gein’s prey were always adult females. He dug up Augusta herself. Using the meat-dressing skills he had learned during deer-hunting season to flay and cure human skin, Gein fashioned the corpses into macabre trophies. When police finally showed up at the farmhouse in November 1957, they found a shoe box full of nine salted vulvas (one, presumably that of his mother, painted silver), a belt embedded with nipples, four noses in a cup in the kitchen, and a pair of lampshades made of human skin.
The discovery happened a month after my fourth birthday. With only two confirmed kills, Ed did not technically qualify as a serial killer (the traditional minimum requirement was three), but that didn’t deny him immediate entry into the pantheon of folk mythology. Ed Gein jokes were a constant of my childhood (Q: What does Ed Gein eat for dessert? A: Ladyfingers). Wisconsinites became known as “Geiners,” which was, I suppose, a better tag than “cheeseheads.”
In the aftermath, storytellers began to recast Gein into some of the most infamous horror characters of the movies. Norman Bates in Psycho, Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb in The Silence of the Lambs, Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre—all were incarnations of Ed Gein. He became that flip side of the folk hero, the folk villain.
Plainfield was forty miles south of my hometown. My father often drove there on business. A carny named Bunny Gibbons bought “Ed Gein’s ghoul car” and toured area carnivals with the 1949 Ford as a twenty-five-cent novelty draw (“Look! See the car that hauled the dead from their graves!”). I paid my two bits with my friends at the Wisconsin Valley Fair.
Gein’s gravestone in the Plainfield Cemetery led a peripatetic existence. After years of being chipped away at by souvenir hunters, it finally disappeared entirely in 2000. A year later it turned up across the country, outside Seattle. It now rests in a museum in Wisconsin. The Gein farm had a similar twisted history. The farmhouse itself burned to the ground on March 20, 1958, the work, police said, of arsonists.* In 2006, the Gein land briefly came up for sale on eBay. (“Ed Gein’s Farm…The REAL deal!”) The ad got a lowball bid before being pulled by the auction site’s administrators, who had banned the sale of so-called murderabilia in 2001.
The jokes, the movies, the continued fascination were no doubt expressions of communal nervousness. How could anyone stroll off the deep end in quite that weird a way? Salted vulvas?
I eventually came to see Ed as the inevitable product of the normalcy of my home state. What could be more banal, mundane, and average than the Midwest? But there’s a price to be paid for all that dullness. Every so often an excrescence of the macabre had to come along to balance things out. Ed Gein and then, thirty years later, Jeffrey Dahmer. The state should be due for another monster along about 2020.
Because of its shape on the map, Gein called Wisconsin the “left hand of God.”
Ed’s weirdness placed him beyond the pale. He was risible rather than hair-raising, and the proper response when his name was invoked was a nervous chuckle. Layered underneath the laughter and anxiety, I thought I could detect a sympathy, almost an affection.
Some of this was just gallows humor. Whistling past the graveyard. Students at my alma mater, the University of Colorado, named the caf
eteria in the student union the “Alferd E. Packer Grill,” in honor of Alferd Packer, a Colorado gold prospector who in 1883 became the country’s only convicted cannibal.
Better to store a monster safely away in jokes and mythology than have him roaming around the streets. In folklore, Gein assumed the aura of the holy whack-job. His craziness had the soothing effect of making everyone else appear sane. He was a poet of carnival madness. Wearing a “mammary vest” stitched out of breasts and leggings made of human skin beneath his dead mother Augusta’s dress, he danced outdoors at night.
“Graze the skin with my fingertips,” he recalled of these Dionysian rites, “a pleasant fragrance in the light of the moon.”
What can you say about a man like that? For all of Ed’s notoriety during my childhood, he might have been too bizarre to be truly frightening.
No, the first murder that came truly, violently home to me occurred at around noon on Monday, May 11, 1964, when I was ten years old. A former mental patient repeatedly stabbed an eighteen-year-old high school senior named Eleanor Kaatz as she crossed a railroad bridge over the Wisconsin River in my hometown. The island where it happened was one of my early playgrounds, officially called Barker-Stewart, which we always referred to as Dog Island. A deserted, ruderal-strewn place, bisected by railroad tracks, perfect for childhood play, or for murder.
I had crossed the “murder bridge” (as it instantly became known) many times. My childhood friend Brian and I once built a makeshift fort a few yards from where searchers discovered Eleanor Kaatz after the attack. Volunteers in a fire department rescue boat rounded the northern end of the island and saw her, sitting slumped on the riverbank, dazed and in shock, covered in mud. Her feet trailed in the water and her gingham dress was bloodied, with more than fifty jackknife stab wounds in her face, neck, back, and abdomen. The stubby blade had punctured her liver a half-dozen times. She bled surprisingly little externally, but had massive interior hemorrhaging. To the astonishment of her doctors, Kaatz held on for nearly two days before succumbing.