Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle

by Michael Benson

  The rules were that a certain number of similarities had to be present before two fingerprints could be called a match, but only one difference was necessary to distinguish them.

  During his work on this case, Dunker was provided a set of “known prints” for comparison purposes. He received a set of the victim’s prints made during the autopsy, but eight of the ten fingerprints were inadequate for identification purposes. The victim’s remains had been underground and wet. Her fingerprints were shriveled, but the palm prints were adequate for matching purposes.

  He was also provided with a set of the defendant’s prints taken after his arrest. All of these were of top-notch quality, perfect for identifying mystery prints.

  Dunker positively matched the defendant’s fingerprints with a left thumbprint found on a box of baby wipes discovered inside the Camaro. A fingerprint found on the cell phone battery pulled from King’s phone and found in the car matched the defendant’s left index finger.

  The key piece of evidence was a palm print found on the outside of the driver-side window that matched the victim’s right palm print.

  John Scotese cross-examined, picking at the chain and quality of evidence. William Dunker was not there when the crime scene prints were found and lifted. There were prints that could not be matched because they were smeared or prohibitively incomplete. These came from the front door and sliding glass door to Lee’s house, the passenger side of the Camaro, and King’s cell phone.

  On redirect, Dunker said that the mystery prints found at the Lee home could potentially be those of the defendant, and those found on and in the Camaro could potentially be those of the defendant.

  The state called Kevin Noppinger, the lab director at DNA Labs International. Questioned by Suzanne O’Donnell, Noppinger testified that his lab was internationally accredited and functioned under the guidelines of the FBI. It was audited every two years to make sure it remained under those guidelines.

  Noppinger defined DNA as the readable code of a person’s biological makeup, a code provided half by each parent. The DNA in cells from the bottom of a person’s foot is the same as that in his or her hair.

  Noppinger had a master’s degree in forensics and received DNA training from the FBI. Noppinger said that he was in on the ground floor of DNA technology, which had only been perfected and used to catch criminals since the 1990s.

  For this case, he was given organic material known to have come from the defendant and the victim to use for comparison purposes. He was also given a hair found in King’s Camaro and was able, using DNA, to identify positively that hair as belonging to Denise Lee. He also positively ID’d the blood found on the outside of the Camaro as that of the victim. The odds of another human having a DNA code that matched the victim’s were 1 in 1 trillion.

  “Was the bloodstain solely Ms. Lee’s, or did it involve a mixture?”

  “A mixture.” But the quantity of secondary blood was insufficient for testing.

  “Were the results of your testing such that Mr. King could be excluded as the secondary donor?”

  “No.”

  All in all, the witness testified, thirteen bloodstains were found on the Camaro. Of those, eight were pure and five were mixtures of the blood from two individuals. None of the blood could be matched positively to King, but—and it was a big but—jut one dissimilarity in DNA code would have been enough to exclude King as the secondary donor of blood, but no dissimilarities were found.

  “What are the odds that King wasn’t the secondary donor?”

  “About two hundred eighty to one.”

  “Let me now show you a blanket found on the floor of the King residence. Did DNA Labs International do DNA testing on this blanket?”

  “Yes.”

  “Multiple areas on the blanket were tested?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was there a bloodstain on the blanket?”

  “There was.”

  “Sole donor or mixture?”

  Noppinger said it was a mixture, and as had been the case with the stains on the car, this one predominantly came from the victim, but the defendant could not be excluded as the donor of the secondary blood. The odds were stronger that the blood was his, however, as the DNA code the lab was able to extract made it a 1 in 600,000 chance that the blood belonged to anyone else.

  Noppinger testified that there was also a semen stain on the blanket. The semen could be positively ID’d as King’s using DNA technology to the point of certainty. Chances the semen belonged to another man were 1 in 1 quadrillion, which was a 1 followed by fifteen 0s.

  The witness was shown the piece of carpet removed from the King residence. It, too, had a semen stain on it, and the odds were 1 in 1.1 quadrillion, an even larger number, that it wasn’t the defendant’s. A small quantity of blood was found on the blanket, a mixture. Odds were 1 in 19,000 that the victim was not a contributor, and 1 in 310 that the other blood didn’t come from King.

  A bloodstain on the piece of bra strap, to a strong degree of certainty, belonged to Lee. A stain found on the boxer shorts turned out to be a combination of “sperm cells and regular cells.” Using a chemical process, Noppinger was able to separate the cells and found that the sperm most likely belonged to King while the other cells were probably those of Denise Lee.

  John Scotese cross-examined: “When trying to match DNA samples, you use the same database as used by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you tell me what PCR stands for?”

  “It stands for polymerase chain reaction.”

  Kevin Noppinger acknowledged that PCR was a technique used by his lab to “amplify DNA in order to analyze it further.” The process caused the DNA to make copies of itself, so that there was more DNA to test.

  “I’ve heard the analogy that PCR is like a copying machine, a biological Xerox. Would that analogy be correct?”

  “Yes.” PCR could make a million copies very quickly, Noppinger added.

  “Such a technique would be highly sensitive to contamination, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes.” If a contaminant was present, the process would make copies of it as well as of the DNA that the lab was attempting to identify. Noppinger acknowledged that. Though it was highly unlikely that a sample would be contaminated once it arrived at his lab, he had no control over how a sample was handled up until that point.

  “In your lab, you use a DNA analysis system known as Identifiler, correct?”

  “That’s one of the DNA profiling kits we use, yes.” That system, the witness said, was better because it recognized two more DNA markers than other analysis kits.

  Noppinger acknowledged that others had helped with the lab work on the blood and semen samples he’d testified to. Others, for example, had extracted and amplified the DNA samples.

  “Isn’t it true that your job today is to testify to results found by other people?”

  “No, it is not.”

  “Could you explain what a reference sample is?”

  “A reference sample is also sometimes known as a ‘known sample’—such as a cheek swab or blood sample taken from a known individual for comparison purposes.”

  No, Noppinger’s lab had nothing to do with the collection of the reference samples in this case, and he could not testify to their purity. He also had nothing to do with the DNA analysis of the reference samples, the results of which were e-mailed to him by FDLE and then printed out on a piece of paper. If there were mistakes in those results, he would have no way of knowing it, Noppinger admitted.

  “Let’s talk about that bra strap for a moment. If I understand your testimony, you tested that bra strap and found a partial DNA profile, correct?”

  “Yes. You cannot exclude Ms. Lee as a contributor to that profile.”

  “So you would agree that in that case, there wasn’t necessarily a match, right?”

  And on and on, the cross-examination went. Yes, there was a chance that the DNA did no
t match the victim and the defendant with all of the tests he’d done. But, also in every case, it was a very, very slim chance.

  Scotese, making the most of what he had to work with, hoped that the slim chance that the DNA testing was wrong might constitute reasonable doubt in the minds of a juror or two.

  “Are you a director of DLI?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have an ownership interest?”

  “Personally, I do not. My wife owns the company.”

  “Do you know how much it costs to amplify DNA?”

  “I do not. I am on the science side, not the business side.”

  He was knowledgeable enough to make an educated guess, saying he figured it cost about $600 or $700 per sample. The witness then acknowledged that in April of 2008, three months after Denise Lee’s murder, he offered Detective Christopher Morales a deal, saying he was willing to do a DNA analysis for free on the shell casing found near the burial site.

  And further, didn’t Noppinger tell Morales that it would be worth it to the lab if word got around that they’d done the testing that cinched a guilty verdict for such a notorious case?

  Noppinger said he didn’t remember; at which point, Scotese produced an e-mail Noppinger had written. After reading the e-mail, Noppinger admitted that he had made the offer to Morales to test the shell casing for DNA for free.

  “Did you offer to type Mr. King’s and Ms. Lee’s profile for free?”

  “No.”

  “Why not, because it wasn’t good for business?”

  “I would strongly disagree with that.”

  Scotese quizzed Noppinger about how long various aspects of the lab work took, painting a picture for the jury of long and tedious work. From beginning to end, the process would last three days if scientists worked a twenty-four-hour day. Wasn’t it a grueling effort that could be easily lightened by cutting corners?

  The witness, again, strongly disagreed.

  Scotese brought up some items from this case that Noppinger tested, but about which the prosecution had not asked. These items included the blue jeans, black boxer shorts, and black sneakers that King was wearing at the time of his arrest. Of these, blood was found only on the shorts—blood that most likely came from the defendant. Nothing connecting the defendant to the victim was found on those items.

  On redirect, Suzanne O’Donnell asked Kevin Noppinger what type of testing he did on the shell casing found near the burial site. The witness replied that the search for DNA on the shell was done with a DNA profile kit known as MiniFiler, which was a relatively new kit—“cutting-edge,” Noppinger called it—designed specifically for degraded samples.

  “Were you able to obtain any DNA profile from the shell casing?”

  “No, I was not.”

  In addition to receiving reference samples for the victim and defendant, DLI also received samples from Carlos Saenz, Harold Muxlow, Robert Salvador, and Nate Lee.

  “Did you find any matches on any of the items you analyzed with any of these other reference samples?”

  “No.”

  Lewis “Skip” Wood took the witness stand and testified that he was an SCSO employee who currently reported to the supervisor of the Forensic Services Unit. He reported to crime scenes and submitted written reports regarding his findings. He’d worked for the sheriff’s office since 1992 and had worked in the Patrol/Bomb Unit and on the dive team before being assigned to forensics. He attended classes at the graduate level at the University of Maryland and was a professional archaeologist.

  “What is an archaeologist?”

  “I’m a dirt detective. In non–police work, I evaluate soils and cultural remains to determine what types of people lived in an area in the past and what their culture was like.”

  In January of 2008, he assisted the NPPD with the recovery of Denise Lee’s body. The process had to be done very carefully, since the body needed to be unearthed and eventually removed from the site without destroying any potential evidence.

  He told the jury about protecting the site with sandbags overnight, and how he and archaeologist Maxine Miller began the actual digging on the morning of January 19. Photos were taken after each small layer of earth was removed. Eventually scallop marks could be seen indicating that someone had dug a hole at this spot with a round-nosed shovel. No, the archaeologists could not have made these marks as they only used much smaller hand tools. The victim’s shoulder became visible first; then, slowly and carefully, the rest of her.

  That ended the direct examination of the archaeologist. There was no cross-examination. The witness was excused, and Judge Economou called the lunch recess.

  That afternoon, Maxine Miller testified that she was a crime scene analyst and nine-year veteran of the SCSO. Like Lewis Wood, Miller was an archaeologist who helped with the excavation of the victim’s remains. Just like Temperance Brennan, the protagonist in the Bones TV show, Miller was an anthropological archaeologist who also used her considerable skills to help solve crimes.

  It had been her job to search the grave site for fingerprints. She had also been the photographer who memorialized the hole at each stage of the dig, after each layer, or stratum, of earth was removed.

  When emptying out the already-loosened earth with the grave site, they were careful not to excavate new earth for fear that they would inadvertently alter the position of the body. They wanted to be sure that they found the body just as the killer had left it. Wearing her booties, cap, and jumpsuit at the scene, Miller continued to work after the body was removed.

  The witness was shown the photographs taken during the excavation process. She said those were the photos she took. The images were on a screen and Miller used a laser pointer to demonstrate her points: the darker soil and the scallop marks of the round-nosed shovel.

  “What type of tools did you use as you dug?”

  “We used a variety of small shovels. When the body became visible, we switched to brushes.”

  “What were the shovels made of?”

  “Plastic. I should add that, like any good archaeologist, we did a lot of digging with our hands as well.”

  She described for the jury the removal of the body from the grave, and the official transfer of the remains to the medical examiner, who took them to the morgue for autopsy.

  No further questions, no cross, witness excused.

  Following the natural order of the prosecution’s case, the next witness was forensic pathologist Dr. Daniel Schultz. He was also the medical director at LifeLink, a nonprofit organization that helped facilitate organ and bone marrow transplants. He was not the medical examiner, but rather his backup, a role he served now and at the time of the murder. When the call came in that remains were found, it was he who came to the scene and supervised the removal of the body from the shallow grave.

  For the jury’s sake, he felt it was okay to refer to him as the medical examiner. He was qualified, and that was the role he served in this case. Enunciating upon those qualifications, he told the jury about his bachelor’s degree in chemistry, his medical degree from the University of Michigan, and the pathology residency he’d completed.

  “What was your first task after you took possession of the remains?” asked Lon Arend.

  “To determine the cause and manner of death.”

  “You performed the autopsy. Is that correct?”

  “Yes. It began at eight-thirty A.M., January twentieth.”

  “You had performed autopsies before, Dr. Schultz?”

  “Oh, yes, somewhere between four and five thousand autopsies.”

  “Had you ever before done one involving a gunshot wound?”

  “Yes. Hundreds.”

  “Ever dealt with cases that involved vaginal and anal damage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any cases that involved blunt-force trauma?”

  Dr. Schultz said he had, and defined what “blunt-force” meant for those who might not know. Any blow to a body that didn’t involve a pointy stabbing ob
ject was considered blunt-force trauma. The most common injury that resulted from blunt-force trauma was bruising or contusions, in which blood vessels broke, creating a purple area. People were familiar with bruises. They turned a variety of colors as they healed. Abrasions, on the other hand, were usually caused by contact with rough surfaces, and involved tearing of the skin.

  Arend asked the witness to take the jury through the process of determining the cause and manner of death in an apparent homicide.

  The witness replied that evidence came in different ways. There was what he could observe during the postmortem operation, the results of evidence collected during the autopsy and sent to the crime lab, and photographs and eyewitness statements regarding the conditions in which the body was found. All of those things together hopefully made the medical examiner’s conclusion an easy one—which was true in this case.

  He’d arrived at the grave site as the body was slowly uncovered. The body was found thirty-nine inches from the surface, naked, on its left side, in the fetal position. He described how he and another man had wrapped a plastic sheet around the body before it was lifted from the makeshift grave.

  “Did the depth of the hole have an effect on any of your analyses?”

  “The victim had been buried in moist sand, and that was a factor.” This was because it could speed up the cooling of the body and affect his ability to determine the time of death. The moisture of the earth was such that the hands were pruney, like hands belonging to drowning victims.

  There was a pause in the questioning as Judge Economou read aloud for the jury a stipulation that the body found in the shallow grave was indeed that of Denise Amber Lee.

  Dr. Schultz described the autopsy. They began by removing her jewelry, which consisted of a gray-metal necklace with a heart-shaped pendant, one earring—the other was found near the grave site—and a wedding ring. Arend showed the pathologist photos of these items and he identified them as those removed at the autopsy. Arend asked if the items were the same as when he saw them, and Dr. Schultz replied that the wedding ring had been cleaned before the photograph was taken.