by John Bloom
Deffibaugh huddled with Chief Abbott and with two other sheriff’s investigators who had been dispatched to the scene. That meant the entire investigative unit of Collin County was present, but from the bare outline of what Abbott told him, Deffibaugh could tell that that wouldn’t be enough. He decided to begin shooting pictures in the utility room—the nearer to the time of death they were taken, the more valid they would be as evidence—but in the meantime he asked Chief Abbott to call Dr. Irving Stone. Like a pleader to the Supreme Court, Deffibaugh had asked for the criminal investigator of last resort.
Dr. Stone worked for no police agency and had no particular passions beyond the arcane investigations of the Dallas Institute of Forensic Sciences. The “doctor” before his name referred not to medicine but to his Ph.D. in chemistry, which was the principal reason he was hired in 1972 to be chief of physical evidence at the institute. Stone was short and swarthy, with a perpetual half-grin that gave him a deceptively disarming first impression. At the Dallas County Courthouse he was sometimes called “the Jewish Columbo,” a designation rendered half in jest and half in respect for his microscopically inventive analyses of crime scenes. Since the institute was funded as an adjunct to Parkland Hospital, the public hospital of Dallas County, most of Stone’s work was for the local district attorney’s office or the Dallas Police Department. But one case in four took him to parts unknown, generally to small towns that had neither the funds nor the personnel to handle a particularly messy murder case, and whose officials knew that the difference between a conviction and an unsolved crime could hang on the flicker of an image magnified a thousand times by Stone’s microscope.
One thing that could test Stone’s habitual good humor was a call at 2:30 in the morning. In this case, he stopped the caller after the word “homicide” and said, “Okay, just give me the address.” Then he went to wake up his son Ken. Ken was a first-year law student at Southern Methodist University, but when he wasn’t in class he liked to help his father on investigations. Dr. Stone liked having him along, too, since he could often use the extra pair of hands, and police officers weren’t always the best people to have handling evidence.
Stone had to look up Wylie on the map, since he had never been there before. It was a long drive, but not long enough for him to feel totally awake even after he got there. That soon changed. Confusion still reigned supreme, inside and outside the Gore home. Stone was distressed by the number of people, but the biggest surprise was yet to come.
After the introductions, Abbott said simply, “The woman is in the utility room. She’s dead. Her husband is out of town. The garage door was left open.”
“Who’s going to process the crime scene?” asked Stone.
“You.”
This Stone hadn’t expected. He was usually employed as an adviser to policemen, who did the actual lifting of prints and preservation of evidence. But he was prepared anyway. He went to his car and got out the portable crime scene laboratory that he always carried in his trunk. While he was getting ready, Deffibaugh cleared everyone else out of the house.
Dr. Stone was a methodical worker, slow and orderly, who knew that it might be necessary to collect a thousand bits of evidence in order to find the one that solved the crime. He knew he had a long night ahead, since the evidence was scattered all over the house. He was glad that Abbott hadn’t told him anything more about the crime, because he preferred to start with a clear head, free of predispositions. He walked slowly through the house, mentally noting which of the rooms seemed to be involved in the actual commission of the crime, trying to formulate a time sequence. He quickly ruled out all the back bedrooms, the living room-den area, and the kitchen, and deduced that the victim and the perpetrator had confined their activities to the utility room, the front bathroom, the front entry hall, the front porch, and perhaps the garage. He decided to start at the point where he thought the crime ended—the bathroom.
With his son helping, Dr. Stone dusted every surface in the bathroom, floors, walls, and fixtures, since porcelain and tile are a fingerprint expert’s dream: smooth, even surfaces that hold latent prints like a sponge holds water. He cut blood-stained strands out of the green throw-rug beside the bathtub and scratched dried blood off the tile. From the drain in the tub he retrieved a fairly large clump of hair, which he placed in a bag for later lab analysis. Then he and Ken moved their operation to the utility room itself, where Deffibaugh had already pointed out one of the most promising pieces of evidence. On the door of the freezer, a white surface smeared with blood from top to bottom, there was a clean red thumbprint. It was about midway up the door, the print from a left hand pointing toward the right, as though someone had leaned against the door for support. Unfortunately, it also constituted a very thorny problem for Stone. Television cop shows notwithstanding, fingerprints in blood are the rarest sort of evidence, and, once dried, they are all but impossible to lift without exotic chemicals. Stone had nothing of the sort with him, so he instructed Deffibaugh simply to photograph the print, which is the next best way to preserve it. Deffibaugh did, but since he was low on film, he took only one photo. Then Stone tried to lift it with powder. As he had predicted, he failed, ruining the print in the process.
Next Stone attended to the body itself. He slipped small plastic bags over Betty Gore’s hands in the hope that either he or the coroner could find “trace evidence”—skin or hair samples that belonged to the perpetrator. He examined the ax and encased its handle in plastic, but he held out little hope of recovering anything from it, since wood is the worst surface for fingerprints. He placed plastic bags over all the doorknobs in the utility room and bathroom, and ordered them removed. Then he found a pair of sunglasses that had been smashed up and kicked under one of the appliances. While he was doing this, he instructed his son to lift all squares of linoleum that appeared to have full or partial footprints on them. There was so much blood on the floor that it was sometimes hard to say where a footprint left off and a mere smudge began, but Stone told him that, if there was any doubt, he should take it anyway.
While Stone, his son, and Deffibaugh were going about their tedious business, the cops on the outside were still working under the assumption that the killer was nearby. At about 2 A.M., after everyone within blocks of the house had learned of the killing, a man called police reporting that a young girl had just looked out her window and seen a whistling fat man standing under a lamp-post a block from the Gore home. The girl didn’t say why the whistling fat man was suspicious, but four officers investigated, including two from Sachse. They searched for half an hour but couldn’t find the man. Throughout the night people called the Wylie police, either asking for information or offering it, stirring up confusion that was a foretaste of the investigative chaos that would follow in the next few days.
But the more important investigation was going on inside, where Stone and Deffibaugh moved from the utility room into the living room-den area, still looking for blood, hair, or any other substance that might be traced to the killer. At one point Jim Grindele, the young officer who had followed Johnney Lee Bridgefarmer to the scene, walked up to Stone and Deffibaugh and said, “Look what I found.”
He held in his hand a sunglasses lens, obviously missing from the pair of smashed sunglasses Stone had found in the utility room. Deffibaugh had a flash of anger—the naive cop had obviously moved a piece of evidence before Stone could see it—but he suppressed his rage for the moment.
“Where did you find it?” Stone said.
Grindele led them back into the garage, turned to his right, and pointed to a small closet. For the first time Stone and Deffibaugh entertained the notion that the crime might have occurred in the garage as well, so Stone remained for a while, looking for more evidence. He finally decided that it made no sense, since he could find no blood, no hair, nothing else to indicate that anything went on in the garage. Deffibaugh took a few pictures anyway.
The men worked until dawn, going through the carpet inch by in
ch, scraping up blood samples wherever they thought the blood might belong to someone other than Betty Gore. One of Abbott’s officers, meanwhile, shuffled through some belongings on the top of Betty’s bedroom dresser, where a $20 bill had been found. (Deffibaugh duly photographed the dresser, if only to rule out robbery as a motive.) But then the officer found a curious document, a letter of some sort, in a man’s oversized handwriting, apparently written to the dead woman quite recently. It was on the final page of a spiral notebook full of similar letters. The officer showed it to Abbott and then, with the chief’s permission, ripped it out for later study.
The letter read:
Our marriage has changed a lot since our weekend. Before the weekend I did an awful lot of thinking and worrying about what I was getting out of our marriage and whether or not you were doing things for me. The weekend showed me that what I needed to do was focus on you and us instead of me. I have really tried to do that. I have found that it is even fun to help you (without complaining). We talk more when I do. I have also found that I can place you, us and our family ahead of my job and other activities and still be successful in them. It’s the dialogue that does it. Because when we don’t, I feel myself slipping back to thinking about me instead of you and us. We have got to get back to a regular (every day) dialogue schedule. I Love You, Allan.
It was almost 6 A.M. when yet another young Wylie officer, Mike Stanley, approached Stone with the evening’s second surprise. In his hand Stanley held a bloody fingernail.
“I found this on the rug in the living room,” he announced.
“Lemme look,” said Stone, taking it from him with some exasperation. “Looks like it could be the victim’s. Hold on to it.”
Stone had noticed earlier that the body was missing part of one fingernail, and he assumed the nail found by Stanley belonged to Betty Gore. Officer Stanley took the fingernail and laid it on the kitchen cabinet, next to a microwave oven. Then, after a while, Stanley left. He had not been called to the scene. He had just been on duty at the station, heard there was a homicide on Dogwood, and wandered over to see what was going on.
At eight o’clock in the morning, a full five and a half hours since he had begun collecting evidence, Stone took full inventory of what he had: numerous blood samples, a clump of hair from the bathtub, one photograph of a bloody thumbprint, several bloody footprints, a corpse that might yield more evidence later, and a three-foot ax. Until now, he hadn’t said much to Deffibaugh or Abbott about what he was thinking, but before leaving, he made two observations.
“It was not premeditated,” he told Abbott. “The weapon is too strange, there are signs of a terrible struggle everywhere. It was a crime of circumstance. Second, those footprints in the utility room don’t belong to a man; they’re too small. I think a woman did this. A woman or a kid.”
Stone had already given instructions to the ambulance attendants, and now he made one last phone call—to his friend and colleague, Vincent DiMaio. Dr. DiMaio was the senior medical examiner in Dallas County, having performed about 3,500 autopsies in his eight years on the staff, and he was at the morgue bright and early. It was his turn to do Saturday duty, which meant he would be by himself all day.
“Boy,” said Stone, when DiMaio came on the line, “have I got something for you. It’s an ax murder. A lot of blood. Found some very small footprints in the blood so it might be a woman killer. The ax is in the lab. And Vince—it’s a white woman. Good luck.”
Vincent DiMaio told his two lab technicians to put the body on one of the blue plastic carts and wheel it into the examination room. The first thing he looked at himself, though, was the ax. Of all the unusual death weapons he had examined in his career, the ax was one of the rarest. Only once before had he seen it used on a victim, but that case didn’t really count, since the person had been strangled first and then dismembered after death. The only thing rarer, DiMaio thought, was that time when a man had been killed with a plain, rounded-end table knife. The killer had tried to stab his victim with the knife repeatedly, but when that failed to penetrate the skin, he’d taken the serrated edge of the blade and literally sawed the fellow’s throat open, then jammed the knife down into the chest cavity. DiMaio had had to go fishing for the knife, eventually retrieving it from the man’s right lung.
Dr. DiMaio was thirty-nine years old at the time the body of Betty Gore was left at his doorstep, and he could tell stories like the one about the table-knife killer without even a trace of revulsion, often while smiling in a bemused sort of way, as though the homicidal follies of men had long since ceased to surprise him. Perhaps that’s because he was a second-generation coroner, the son of the former chief medical examiner of New York City, and he had become a student of grisly untimely deaths in Manhattan even before he reached his twentieth birthday. A small man, prematurely grey, who fancied oversized wire-rim glasses and affected an avuncular familiarity, DiMaio’s interest was less with the bodies he examined—after all, nothing could be done for them—than with the people who dispatched them to him so gruesomely. Like all good forensic pathologists, he prided himself on his ability to tell a great deal about the perpetrator just by looking at a corpse. But then there was always the one case in a hundred that didn’t follow any of the usual patterns. He liked those best of all.
He knew this was such a case as soon as the lab assistants pulled back the sheet. The horrible disfigurement of Betty Gore didn’t shock DiMaio, but it intrigued him. For one thing, the victim appeared to be white, middle class, and female, which was a combination he rarely saw. Only one in five murder victims were women, and, of the ones in the Dallas area, most were either black or Mexican-American. Virtually all of them were victims of battering or sexual assault. Obviously, there was more going on here than assault. But the main thing DiMaio noticed about Betty Gore’s body was more foreboding. He could tell almost immediately that, even though the body was covered with perhaps three dozen wounds, there appeared to be little postmortem disfigurement. She had been alive while these blows were being struck.
“Put on some coffee,” DiMaio told his assistants. “It’s going to be a long day.”
For the first hour or so, DiMaio did nothing except look at the body, pacing around the cart, his hands clasped behind his back so he wouldn’t be tempted to touch anything. Because of the extreme mutilation it was difficult to take everything in at once, so he began with the hands, hoping to find traces of hair or blood that Betty Gore might have grabbed during a struggle. He did find strands of hair in her hands, as well as some on the soles of her feet; he would have to wait for lab analysis to know whether it was her own hair or someone else’s. He inspected all her clothing carefully, had the technicians trim all the fingernails in the hope that she had scratched skin off her assailant, and formed a theory. It must have been a sexual crime. Otherwise, why so much overkill, so much mutilation? So DiMaio had the corpse undressed and ordered the technicians to take anal, oral, and vaginal swabs, looking for semen. All the swabs turned up negative, though. “We are dealing with something strange,” he said.
After photographing each wound and completing his visual examination, DiMaio began the formal autopsy. Ordinarily he would start from the head and work downward, but he could tell the fatal wounds were in the head area, so he saved them for last. He began instead with the arms, clearing away foreign substances as he went, so that he could see the depth and extent of each wound. On the right arm he found five cuts, none of them very deep, randomly arrayed, as though the woman had been defending herself. On the left arm he found another five wounds, much more serious ones, two of which ran horizontally, as though the ax had been swung side to side. He proceeded on up the body, describing abrasions and chop wounds on the hands, shoulder, and left leg. The only things that puzzled him about this part of the examination were three wounds on the thighs. Those cuts were much lower than all the others, as though struck after the victim was down. But that didn’t make sense, when obviously the rage of the assailant was
directed at the head and face.
DiMaio moved on to the head. The first thing he noticed was not a cut at all but a small bruise on the left side of the forehead. Why a bruise in the midst of all those chop wounds? He dismissed the question for a moment and took a long look at what used to be the right side of Betty Gore’s face.
Half her face was nothing but a mass of tissue and blood. The eye socket and the cheekbone had been pummeled to bits. The bones had been so completely fractured that the eyeball had sunk out of sight, falling back into the sinus. Gingerly, DiMaio cleaned the blood from the wound and began the painstaking work of reconstructing the bones. After getting them all realigned, he could see clearly at last: the damage was caused by six vertical blows, parallel and very deep, and of such similarity that it was obvious to him they had been struck after Betty Gore was down and her head had ceased to move. They could even have been rendered after she was dead. So, despite their apparent force, he temporarily ruled out those blows as the fatal ones.