by Pat Brown
I do my job, and whether a case gets prosecuted or not, that’s not my call.
Does a profiler solve cases? No. A profiler profiles. That’s it. The police department officially is charged with solving cases; the prosecutor chooses which cases to prosecute.
AND THERE THE case of Missy Jones sits. Nothing more has been done.
Orville was never charged with his daughter’s rape and murder. If the system puts Orville back out there, he will likely go after someone else’s twelve-year-old daughter.
CHAPTER 10.JIMMY:WITH FRIENDS LIKE THIS
The Crime: Homicide
The Victim: Jimmy Conway
Location: Home of his friend, Southwestern United States
Original Theory: Shot in self-defense
People often wonder whether profilers go to the actual crime scene or if they don’t always bother and, in truth, I always go if I can. I can learn a lot by being there, standing on the spot where the victim and perpetrator once stood, absorbing the environment.
For example, you might think that some guy could toss a fellow off a particular bridge because the pictures you are looking at make that seem plausible. This happened to me on a case in Minneapolis. One of the theories was that the victim, who had been drinking at a local bar on Halloween night and been thrown out for being too inebriated, was walking over that bridge when he ran into another young man his age who tried to rob him. When he resisted, the guy pushed him over the railing. Well, that could make sense, except when I actually stood on the Hennepin Bridge at the point where it crossed the Mississippi River, I wondered how this shorter, smaller, less muscled attacker could have accomplished this. The railing was so high that the robber would have had to pick him up off the ground and heave him over it. If I hadn’t gone to the scene, I might have erroneously believed that action was possible. When you go to the location, you can see the neighborhood. You can see possible escape routes. You can analyze why someone would go that way and not this way.
Of course, sometimes crime scenes change, developers plow through them with a bulldozer, and then it’s gone, it doesn’t look anything like it did before, and then I do have to rely on the pictures.
But I learn a lot in person. I can interview people, and I can do a lot more because I can get the feel for everything. It’s not always economically reasonable to do so, in which case I have to rely on the photos and reports and hope that they will be good enough to do the case justice.
Working pro bono, as I always do (unless I am working for a defense attorney-and they don’t like me that much so it is a rare event), the family is not paying for my expenses or anything else.
In this case, the Conway family said, “We think that Jimmy was murdered. We don’t think it was self-defense, we think his friend shot him in cold blood.” They wanted me to look over the case and sent me the files, which they had because the case was closed. (If the case remains open, the family usually gets nothing.) I had access to all the photos of the crime scene and all the details in the police reports, so I could review the case quite thoroughly, even from a distance.
THE CONWAY FAMILY provided me with a solid amount of information, although the photos from the scene were lousy.
But one of the lousiest held the key.
It was one of those off-the-cuff pictures that people take. The police arrived, took a quick picture of the dead man at the scene, and it turned out to be the most valuable piece of evidence in the case file. It was a Polaroid photo that contained a blood spatter evidence pattern that convinced me that Jimmy’s “friend,” Earl White, was lying.
* * * *
THIS VALUABLE OPPORTUNITY early in my career taught me the importance of photography.
When a murder is fresh, the police sometimes make snap decisions at the scene as to what they think the case is about.
In another Minnesota case, in 1998, a young man was found hanging in his bedroom. Gregg Meissner’s death was ruled a suicide at the scene and the police took no fingerprints off objects in the room. They didn’t even seal off the scene because, as they told Gregg’s mother, “This isn’t television.” The detective on the case actually allowed Gregg’s distraught friends to enter the crime scene.
The family didn’t think it was suicide, I didn’t think it was suicide, but the tests were never run. The family fought like tigers to prove Gregg was murdered, and finally, a man named Shawn Padden, one of the friends allowed into the crime scene, was convicted of killing him. However, the lack of certain evidence allowed only a manslaughter charge and not Murder One. Gregg’s family was convinced the crime was premeditated, but because the evidence wasn’t protected, the state could only prove manslaughter, and Padden might get out to kill again.
I often find this is also true for alibis, that if you make an assumption somebody is not involved and you don’t ask for an alibi, you can’t go back four years later and say, “Oh, by the way, where were you on May third?” If you’re innocent, you can’t protect yourself, because there is no way in heck you or anyone else can remember where you were on May 3. An innocent person can’t provide himself a decent alibi. A guilty person, well, he’s got an excuse not to provide himself a decent alibi, because he will say, “How the heck would I know where I was four years ago on that day?” or “How do you expect anybody to remember where I was?”
The innocent person can’t defend himself, and the guilty person can laugh and say he’s got an excuse not to remember and not have an alibi.
Like getting alibis, photography is sometimes not methodically and carefully done. If the detective thinks he knows what happened on the scene, he may not be concerned about what those detectives will have to do two, four, or ten years from now.
The detective is at the scene, seeing everything and talking to everybody. If he thinks he has solved the case, he doesn’t feel compelled to pursue any more information. But then something goes wrong. The case doesn’t get prosecuted, or it is closed as an accident or suicide, but later on, if somebody questions the veracity of that conclusion and a new sheriff reopens the investigation, where is the evidence? Now a profiler is brought in and I am looking at a report file so thin I know no interviewing was done and few tests were run. I may have an autopsy on one page that doesn’t actually say more than that the victim is dead (known as a “tailgate autopsy” because all the coroner does is drive up in his truck, drop the tailgate, put one foot up on it, light his cigar, and say, “Yep, she’s a dead one”).
If the photos are so limited that I can’t see if anything is odd in the next room of the house or if there was blood dripping off the porch or not, I will not be able to analyze the case accurately.
I’ve actually had a good laugh at some cases. Sometimes they bring me seventy boxes of notes, and I think, “Good job, guys, you’ve got typewritten interviews.” In others, I am handed a small box with a few sheets of paper and a napkin from the local eatery, on which are scribbled some unreadable words. “Oh goody, I’ve got diner notes!”
In talking with police detectives today, I tell them what I know is true of case notes: just because you think you know what your note means now, believe me, in four years, you won’t have a clue what you once meant, and neither will the next detective reading your notes. If a cold case squad or a profiler comes on board ten years from now, they won’t have notes that clearly state what happened and explain whatever you were thinking-and if you don’t have quality crime scene photographs, they will have nothing useful with which to work.
BACK TO JIMMY Conway.
If it weren’t for that one picture in the Conway case file, I might not have come to the conclusion I did.
I received police reports, the autopsy report, autopsy photos, and the crime scene photos from the family. The crime scene photos were of poor quality and did not clearly show the scene, nor were proper close-ups taken. Autopsy photos were limited and no photos of the full body of Jimmy Conway were included. Only two photos of Earl White exist that were taken that same day. No
photos of Earl’s girlfriend, Heidi Mills, were taken at any time in spite of the fact that she claimed to have been severely assaulted by the deceased. There was limited processing of the scene, no gunshot residue tests were done, and no fingerprints were processed on the baseball bat or shotgun, the weapons used in the crime. The dimensions of the crime scene were never drawn.
Interviews were limited to one-time statements by Earl, Heidi, and Earl’s son, Joey. No statements were taken from Earl’s brother, whose house Earl went to right after the shooting. None of the neighbors were ever contacted either. No further interrogation was done and there was no polygraph testing.
There is a question as to when the actual homicide occurred, though it was between eight thirty and nine thirty p.m. There was not a big problem with this vague time frame, as those involved may not have paid attention to the exact time.
All agreed Jimmy arrived before Earl’s teenage son, Joey, and entered through the back door in the kitchen. Earl and Jimmy talked in the kitchen. Joey entered the house and went past Earl and Jimmy and got his clothes from his bedroom. Then he went to see Heidi in the bedroom she shared with Earl and asked her to care for his animals, as he was going away. Earl was not in their bedroom during this time because he had no knowledge of Joey asking Heidi to do this. Jimmy and Earl apparently remained in the kitchen the entire time Joey was in the house.
The investigators made one of those critical mistakes where they take a picture of something-a bloody footprint on the floor-but the crime scene investigators didn’t document where the footprint was. Which room was it in? Which way was it going? Was it headed east, west, north, south? I had no clue.
I took all of the photos in this case and looked at the bottom of each, trying to identify in some cases where the pattern was on the floor and what the green object might be in the corner. Was it the corner of a refrigerator? I took it like a jigsaw puzzle and rebuilt the house so I could determine where those bloody footprints were.
I did this by reconnecting the photos, discerning the floor patterns, and identifying the bottoms of the furniture. Once I accomplished that, I approximated where the footprints would have been and which direction the owner of the bloody feet was heading. This helped me put together part of the scenario of what happened.
But there was one more photo, an otherwise crappy Polaroid picture. I have to say CRAPPY in big capital letters. It was crappy. It was blurry. It was junk, but somebody took it and tossed it in the file. My first impression was “Boy, what a shabby picture.” But later on I returned to it and realized it was key to the entire crime. The photo said to me that these people who claimed innocence were lying. One picture made the difference.
When detectives work their cases, I urge them to take the best pictures they can, take way too many pictures, shoot a video of the scene, take close-ups of everything, draw diagrams, document as much as possible, collect all their interviews, record all the alibis, write all their notes and explanations legibly, because they never know when one piece of stray information will make all the difference. They might not catch it, and their partner might not catch it, but somebody might eventually notice. It could be the secretary in the department who one day picks up that photo and goes, “Hey, guys, look at this…” Because they had that picture, a person was able to identify something crucial.
JIMMY CONWAY WAS forty years old.
His paycheck was usually $4,000. But one payday, somebody at the company inadvertently added a zero to Jimmy’s check, giving him $40,000, and he was like, “Cool, I’ve got a $40,000 check here!”
You and I know that what he should have done was go to the company and say, “You made a mistake.”
I made that same mistake myself. Every week I paid the woman who cleans my house $40 via an electronic payment. But one time I left the decimal out. I put $4,000 in for $40. I hit the button, and the woman received $4,000 for her services. The woman’s husband called me up and said, “We think you made an error.” I thought, Oh, my God, I’ve hired an honest person. I was both relieved (really, really relieved) and impressed that this person was so honest.
As for Jimmy? Not so much.
When his employer added the zero onto his check and his $4,000 turned into $40,000, he said, “It’s my lucky day!” He intended to keep that extra $36,000.
Jimmy didn’t have a bank account, according to his sister, because he didn’t have a valid driver’s license. He told a lawyer friend what happened and said, “What should I do about this? Do I have to return it, or is it mine?”
The lawyer said that he could put it in the bank and if it stayed there for a month and he hadn’t heard from the company, then it was his. I guess Jimmy didn’t have too many ethical friends.
In addition to not having a bank account, Jimmy had a few other problems, which is why he didn’t hold a valid driver’s license. He went to his buddy Earl White, who he’d known for years, and who was related to the Conway family by marriage, for help. Earl opened a bank account and Jimmy signed the check over to Earl, who deposited it.
Before the thirty days passed, Jimmy heard back from the company:
“We want our money back.”
Jimmy went over to Earl’s house on February 4, 1999, and he said, “I need my money back. I have to return it.”
And that’s where the story gets interesting. According to Jimmy’s family, Earl told him, “That’s a problem, Jimmy, I spent more than half of it.”
Earl used $20,000 of the money Jimmy received by accident to fix up his home. When Jimmy heard this and realized he was in deep shit, he and Earl got into an angry fight.
When Jimmy showed up at Earl’s house, Joey was heading out, leaving Jimmy there with Earl and his live-in girlfriend.
A shot rang out. Joey later told Jimmy’s sister, “Your brother must have been dead by the time [I] reached the stop sign.”
Did Joey hear a shot after he left the house?
THE POLICE WERE called to investigate the incident.
They did not shoot a video, which would have been valuable because it would have shown from many angles what the place looked like. Video evidence gives the viewer a spatial feeling for the house-how long the hallway is, where things are positioned in the room-and it relieves the investigator from going click, click, click on a thousand little pictures. The video will capture all kinds of objects and things that might later be important to an investigator. Video is becoming much more routine these days, but some departments still don’t use it in every homicide investigation.
Actually, along with the video, the investigator should click, click, click as many photos as does the crime scene justice.
Video and photos taken care of, the next item needed is a diagram of the room where everything should be mapped out with proper measurements to scale so the detective knows later where the evidence was relative to the body. This was not done. Somebody took a set of crappy pictures with a camera, and there weren’t even many of those.
Based on those pictures, I had no idea where anything was and had to guess which rooms were which.
And then there was one snap with a Polaroid.
Some people wonder why Polaroids are even used anymore. In the old days, before we had electronic cameras, we printed everything out. The Polaroid was used just in case something went wrong with the standard camera and the investigator ended up with no pictures whatsoever.
Nowadays, with digital cameras, we can see right away that things are going well, and we can download them immediately to a computer for distribution and storage. The digital advantage is that we can take huge amounts of pictures, so I tell the police, “Snap away. You won’t have to print those suckers out and it won’t cost you a lot of money, because you will put them on a CD. You may not even necessarily need to waste your time looking at all of those pictures, but at least they’re there just in case.”
Of course, amateur shutterbugs can still take useless, blurry close-ups.
The police interviewed Earl and hi
s girlfriend, asked them what happened, and that was that. Earl said it was self-defense. He said that Jimmy was enraged and planned to shoot him. Jimmy attacked, pummeling Earl and his girlfriend. They feared for their lives, so Earl pulled his sawed-off shotgun out from under the bed and shot Jimmy to end the rampage.
That was his story.
The detective said, “Sounds plausible to me.” And that was it. Case closed.
Why did they accept the story so easily? Was it because Earl’s family was well known in town, and the police didn’t want to challenge them? Was it because Jimmy was considered a crook? Admittedly, it’s hard to care about certain people, so maybe they didn’t want to waste their time.
If Earl did shoot him, and it wasn’t self-defense, who cares? Let’s just close it down.
Maybe they were inexperienced cops. But they didn’t do an investigation of any reasonable sort. They took statements from Earl, his girlfriend, and his son. They did the bare basics but no follow-up or analysis. If they had, they would surely have recognized the multiple inconsistencies in their witness statements.
The first inconsistency that struck me was the claim that Jimmy was beating the couple and that he smashed Earl’s girlfriend into a window. Earl stated that Jimmy attacked him and Heidi in the bedroom, and he described a violent assault.
“Jimmy was hitting Heidi,” he told the police. “I could hear her screaming… I heard glass breaking. I saw Jimmy push Heidi into the bedroom window.”
But there was no evidence of a broken window. And there wasn’t a single picture of the supposedly brutalized Heidi. Despite the “beating” she says she sustained, Heidi did not go to the hospital. Unless the police were incredibly sloppy, she probably did not seem injured.