Bad blood

by Linda Fairstein

  “Were you able to determine, Doctor, to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, what caused the death of Amanda Quillian?”

  “Yes, Ms. Cooper, I was.”

  “Would you please tell the jury about your conclusions?”

  “Mrs. Quillian died as a result of asphyxia, and in particular in this matter, by compression of the neck-or strangulation.”

  “What is asphyxia, Dr. Genco?”

  “It’s actually a broad term referring to conditions that result in the failure of cells to receive or to utilize oxygen, along with the inability to eliminate carbon dioxide. Body tissues simply cannot function without oxygen. Most especially the brain, since it uses twenty percent of the body’s total available oxygen.”

  “Is there more than one category of asphyxia?”

  “Yes, in general there are three. One would be chemical asphyxia-things like carbon monoxide or cyanide poisoning, which operate by excluding oxygen from the brain. A second would be suffocation or obstruction of the airways.”

  “Let me stop you here for a moment, Dr. Genco, at these first two categories. In the case of both chemical asphyxia and suffocation, is it correct to say that the resulting death might occur homicidally?”

  “Yes, Ms. Cooper. You’re right-in some circumstances. But in both instances death might also be accidental. And in the case of suffocation, it’s frequently self-inflicted.” Genco went on to give examples of each to the jury. “One may have a choking fatality because of the unintentional inhalation of an object-a wine cork or the cap of a pen that someone puts in his or her mouth temporarily, but then it gets sucked in and occludes the airway. Same thing happens with a piece of food.”

  Several jurors nodded their heads in understanding.

  “Now, Doctor, what is the third form of asphyxial death?”

  “Compression of the neck, Ms. Cooper-usually by strangulation.”

  “Are there different methods of strangulation?”

  “Yes, there are. Again, we usually break these down into three varieties. Those would be hanging, ligature strangulation, and manual strangulation.”

  “Can you distinguish between accidental, intentional, and homicidal deaths in the case of asphyxia by strangulation?”

  Genco spoke confidently to the jurors farthest from the stand. “Most of the time, of course. The overwhelming number of hangings are suicides-it’s not a method frequently used as a means of killing someone.”

  The jury was following his analysis. “With ligature strangulation, although you do get a few accidents, virtually all the cases are homicides-probably the most common form of homicidal asphyxia.”

  “And by ligature, tell us what you mean exactly.”

  “Certainly, Ms. Cooper. I’m referring to a bond of some kind-electrical cord, rope, wire, necktie-an object used to encircle the neck horizontally, occluding blood and oxygen from reaching the brain.”

  “That’s distinguished from manual strangulation, is it not?”

  “Quite easily, in fact. Manual strangulation-death caused by using one’s hands to compress the neck of another-can never be anything but homicide.”

  “Would you please tell the jury why, Dr. Genco?”

  He straightened his glasses and looked earnestly at the people in the box. “It’s not possible to use your own hands to strangle yourself. Pressure on the neck is a very intentional, deliberate action. The first thing such excessive pressure causes is a loss of consciousness. So that if you were holding your own throat until the point at which you passed out, you couldn’t possibly continue to keep the grip on. You’d regain consciousness as soon as your hands dropped away.”

  I wanted him to go through every second of Amanda Quillian’s final agony. I wanted them to understand that her last moments were spent face-to-face with her attacker, at less than arm’s length, while he purposefully squeezed the life out of her body.

  “Can you estimate for us, with a reasonable degree of medical certainty, how long it was that Mrs. Quillian remained conscious while her neck was being compressed?”

  Genco took his time with the answer, trying to explain the dynamic of this death mechanism without drawing an objection for any prejudicial statement. “Strangulation, you must understand, does not cause death as quickly, say, as a bullet to the brain or a stab wound to the heart. There is evidence here that despite her small stature and weight, the deceased put up a struggle-a fierce struggle-for her life.”

  Several jurors began to wriggle in their seats as they followed his testimony. Genco paused, asking permission of Judge Gertz to step to the easel and refer to an enlargement of one of the autopsy photographs I had introduced through him half an hour earlier. I handed him a pointer and he got back to work.

  “These marks on the neck of the deceased represent the force used by her assailant to subdue her, and then to cause her death.” He tapped at several large bruises on her throat as he spoke. “Repeated applications of force, actually, suggesting that she was struggling against him while he tried to fasten his grip more tightly. All of that fighting prolonged the process of the strangulation.”

  The finger marks of the killer looked enormous to me, causing not only the external bruising but the hemorrhaging deep into the musculature that Genco’s dissection of the throat had revealed. I had studied the images for months, thinking constantly of someone with hands big enough, strong enough, to cause that damage. Someone with hands much larger than Brendan Quillian’s, which detectives had examined at the time of his arrest.

  “Is there any other physical evidence to suggest that unconsciousness did not occur immediately after Mrs. Quillian was attacked?”

  “Yes, Ms. Cooper. All the medical hallmarks of manual strangulation are present.”

  “Would you identify those to the jury?”

  Genco pointed to the small, crescent-shaped marks that bordered the larger discolorations. “Can you see these small semicircles?” he asked the jurors, most of whom were nodding. “These abrasions weren’t made by the killer. They were left there by the fingernails of the deceased herself.”

  Brendan Quillian had assumed a posture of faux anguish. His shoulders were slumped and he held his head in one hand, shaking it from time to time as though incredulous that someone could have done these things to his wife.

  A few jurors seemed surprised, until Genco went on with his explanation. “Mrs. Quillian was struggling against her attacker to breathe, fighting for her very life. Like every victim of strangulation whose arms aren’t bound, she tried to free her airway of the hands that were restricting it. She didn’t mean to scratch herself, but each time her assailant increased the pressure on her neck, she fought to claw his hands off her-unsuccessfully despite a number of attempts.

  “This is a very slow and deliberate way to kill someone,” Genco said. His glasses were cockeyed on his nose and he adjusted them again. He looked up. “Strangulation is an especially painful way to die.”

  Howell knew better than to object. The damage had been done with the forensic pathologist’s assertion, and the defense position was simply to distance Brendan Quillian from the murderous act of whatever lone thug had committed the crime. Howell leaned over to stroke his client’s back, to suggest that he needed to be comforted during this graphic description of Amanda’s death.

  I took Genco through each set of fingernail scratches, hoping jurors could imagine the fourth, fifth, and sixth times that Amanda Quillian scratched at the massive pair of hands to gasp for air. I looked for their reactions out of the corner of my eye as the doctor explained the abrasion on the tip of the young woman’s chin, which he said had been injured when she lowered it in the vain effort to protect her fragile neck.

  “Back to the question I asked, Doctor, about whether you can estimate the length of time you believe Mrs. Quillian fought before losing consciousness?”

  “Yes, Ms. Cooper, I can. Were there constant compression of the carotid arteries, for example, one might become unconscious in fifteen
or twenty seconds. But that isn’t the case here.”

  Genco repeated the rest of the autopsy findings: the congestion of Amanda’s face, which had become cyanotic-tinged with a blue cast-above the site of the compression; the pinpoint hemorrhaging in the whites of her eyes and densely spread throughout the eyelids themselves; and the fracture of the hyoid bone, a horseshoe-shaped structure at the base of the tongue, crushed by the deadly reapplications of force.

  “I would say that the nature and number of injuries to Mrs. Quillian’s neck and face, as well as those she sustained internally, suggest that the struggle may have lasted for as long as two or three minutes. Perhaps even four,” Genco said, looking up at the clock above the doors at the rear of the courtroom.

  In my closing argument, I would repeat the medical findings and stand silently in the well of the courtroom while the second hand swept slowly around the dial four times, reminding the jurors how very long that time took to elapse. The death throes of Amanda Quillian had been excruciating, and I would make that point at every possible opportunity.

  I would also have the chance, then, to suggest to them our theory that as Brendan Quillian had ordered, the enormous sapphire ring was wrenched off Amanda’s finger, and the area around the still-warm body was ransacked to create the illusion of a botched burglary. The killer had the great good fortune to be out the door and away from the town house with barely two minutes to spare before the first cops came within half a block of the scene of the crime.

  I was almost at the end of Jerry Genco’s direct exam, with just a few points to clean up. The jurors and indeed the spectators seemed sobered by his testimony, following the morning’s unexpected entertainment from Kate Meade. “Did you have an opportunity to meet Brendan Quillian?”

  Genco lifted the damaged eyeglass frame and focused his attention on the defendant, who sat upright and returned the stare. “Yes, I did. He came to my office the following day, October fourth.”

  I didn’t bother with questions about his demeanor. I would argue that it had been part of his plan to play the grieving widower. “Did he tell you where he had been on October third?”

  “Yes, he mentioned that he was in Boston. That he took the shuttle back to New York late in the evening, after Detective Chapman had notified him of the death of his wife.”

  “Did you examine any part of the defendant’s face or body?”

  “Yes, actually I did.”

  “What were you looking for?”

  Quillian’s hands were folded in front of him, resting on the counsel’s table. His fingers were long and slender, unlikely weapons in this matter, which we’d known from the outset.

  “Detective Chapman and I were convinced the killer would have been injured in this struggle as well. I expected if we found him early enough, there would be lacerations-probably numerous cuts and scratches-caused by the victim’s frenzied fight for her life, on his face and hands,” Genco said, looking squarely at the defendant. “Mr. Quillian had no such injuries.”

  I was about ready to relinquish my witness to Lem Howell, running my eyes down the checklist of facts that I had planned to cover on direct before I asked the judge to issue the grim photographs to the jury.

  The silence occasioned by Genco’s recounting of Amanda’s last minutes alive was broken by loud voices coming from the rear of the courtroom. As with all high-profile trials in Manhattan, every seat in the house was filled, and a line of onlookers queued in the hallway to fill the place of any departing spectator.

  The lone court officer in charge of the flow was pushing and shoving a tall, pale-faced man in a blue seersucker suit who was trying to break past him.

  I glanced over my shoulder again as Judge Gertz banged his gavel to restore order.

  Preston Meade, the cuckolded husband of Kate, was shouting my name as he charged toward the railing that separated the benches from where I stood.

  6

  “He only wanted to publicly humiliate you, kid. Like you did to him this morning.”

  “Me? I didn’t do anything to him except-”

  “Except completely misjudge the character of your first witness,” Mike said. “Mr. Meade was probably hoping that if he made a big enough stir inside the courthouse, it would trump the news story of his wife’s infidelity.”

  Judge Gertz had quelled the commotion and allowed Lem Howell to end the session-keeping the jury later than planned-with his cross-examination of Dr. Genco. It was after six when Mike and I returned to my office to make the phone calls confirming the appearances of the next day’s witnesses.

  “You changing the batting order?”

  I was scratching out names and shifting some of the civilian witnesses to the next week. “You bet. I’m sticking with forensics at the moment. Cold, clinical facts.”

  I dialed the beepers and home numbers of the crime-scene analysts who had scoured the Quillian town house unsuccessfully for fingerprints, photographed the entryway and the parlor, and tried to give the lab techs something to work with, as well as the forensic biologist who had spent painstaking hours vainly trying to find nanograms of DNA on items that had been on or around the victim’s body. By seven fifteen, I had restructured my case presentation and was ready to quit for the night.

  “Let’s check the tube and see how they play the day,” Mike said, starting out for the public relations office on the main corridor of the eighth-floor hallway. The press secretary, Brenda Whitney, had the responsibility of monitoring media accounts-on television and in print-of all the office cases that attracted attention for daily reports to Paul Battaglia, the longtime district attorney of New York County.

  “Did Brenda leave you the key?” She had a bank of television sets that ran all day so that her staff could follow national news stories-Battaglia’s creative white-collar investigations that frequently shook up the financial industry-and feeds from the local networks that replayed around the clock.

  Mike dangled the key over his shoulder as he walked out my door. “Follow me. One cycle of breaking news and then you can feed me. Mercer will meet us for dinner in an hour.”

  “I’ve told you I can’t eat,” I said, picking up some folders to take home and turning out the lights.

  “We need to keep your strength up for the rest of the battle. I think Lem’s been chewing steak knives to sharpen his teeth for the kill.”

  We let ourselves into the pressroom and Mike flipped on one of the TVs. The local all-news channel repeated its headlines three times an hour, and it took only minutes until they reran the end-of-the-day broadcast from the courthouse steps.

  Mercer had done his job well. He had spirited Kate Meade out the back door so the press had no photo ops, no footage with which to tell her story. Instead, they got shots of Preston Meade being led away from the building by three uniformed officers who had surrounded him when Judge Gertz ejected him from the proceedings.

  The telegenic Lem Howell smoothed his hair back and smiled for the cameras. He’d never met a microphone he didn’t like. “I think you’ll see that the state rushed to judgment in this tragic matter,” he said to the reporter, who was eager to get a quote from a principal in the case.

  “You have any idea who the killer actually was?”

  “No more so than the prosecutor does, I’d have to say.”

  “Give those glib jaws a rest,” Mike called out to the image on the screen as he switched channels. “You didn’t come off too badly in all that.”

  “Only because Preston Meade hasn’t found a path to Battaglia yet to complain.”

  “C’mon, blondie. The way your luck is blowing, I got a shot at Jeopardy! tonight and then we’re off, okay?”

  For as long as I’d known Mike Chapman, it had been his habit to watch the last five minutes of the perennially popular quiz show in order to bet against whoever was in his company on the final Jeopardy! question. Mercer and I were the usual combatants, wagering twenty dollars or more, depending on whose favorite subject was the topic of the ev
ening. Squad commanders, prosecutors, morgue attendants, and dead bodies had all been kept waiting while Mike tested his wits against the on-screen players.

  Alex Trebek was smiling at us as the commercial break ended. “Tonight’s category is Greek Mythology. Let’s see what the answer is, folks.”

  “Double or nothing,” Mike said. He had majored in history at Fordham College before joining the NYPD and had encyclopedic knowledge of military figures and events, both American and worldwide. If the subject was an ancient Greek warrior, he would beat me cold. “You can always hope for Leda and her swans.”

  “Do I have any choice?” I asked, removing the bills from my wallet.

  Trebek revealed the answer on the giant blue game board as he spoke it aloud. “Iconic desert figure whose original Greek name means ‘the strangler,’” Trebek said, repeating the word I had hoped not to hear again tonight. “The strangler.”

  “Brendan Quillian isn’t Greek, is he?” Mike said. “I’m totally stumped. Where’s there a desert in Greece?”

  “Out of my league,” I said, waving the bills at him. “We’ll use this for drinks.”

  “I’m sorry that none of you guessed it correctly,” Trebek said to his three dejected contestants. “The Sphinx. The Great Sphinx at Giza, which for many people symbolizes the country of Egypt, is named from the Greek word for a fantastic creature with the head of a woman, the body of a lion, and the wings of a bird. Legend has it that she strangled travelers who couldn’t solve her riddle.”

  Mike zapped Trebek off with the clicker. “I’ll give you a hundred bucks if you work that image into your summation. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the defendant testified in this courtroom, no longer silent like the Sphinx, the great ancient strangler of the desert-’”

  “‘Half-man, half-beast.’ You’re on. And it’s all providing I survive Lem’s motion to dismiss at the end of the People’s case. Where are you meeting Mercer?”