Murder in the Courthouse

by Nancy Grace

  This one was neither young nor old and clearly this was not his first crime scene. He walked up, sized up the whole scene carefully without a word, and then, without acknowledging the rest of them, he turned directly to Trimble.

  Keeping a steady gaze on the dead body, he directed his question toward the cop. “So, what do we know, Trimble?” His tone was cool but not cold, businesslike but not impersonal.

  “Well, Lieutenant, open and shut. Looks like the poor schmuck caught himself under his own garage door. It ain’t an easy way to go, but it’s pretty obvious.”

  The lieutenant looked between Trimble and the body and then, at Hailey and Fincher.

  Instinctively, Hailey held out her right hand. “Hi. I’m Hailey Dean, formerly of the Fulton District Attorney’s Special Prosecutors Division, inner-city Atlanta.”

  After a beat a little too long, he held out his own and gave Hailey’s hand a warm, firm grasp. “Lieutenant Chase Billings. Good to meet you. I’ve heard of you, Hailey. What brings you here?”

  “I’m here on the Todd Adams trial . . .”

  “I’m here for the trial too, but as a witness. I arrested Adams in Atlanta and transported him to Savannah,” Fincher chimed in.

  “Well, you deserve a medal for the collar on Adams. He did it all right. Julie Love was a sweetheart. Hope they don’t blow it at trial.” Billings smiled. “But what I meant was, how did you two end up here, on Randolph Drive?”

  “To tell you the truth, we heard the 63 and I knew the address. We thought we might be able to help.” Fincher looked back at the guy lying there on his garage floor.

  “I’m surprised. Lots of off-duty lawmen . . . and ladies,” he smiled at Hailey, “would run the other way.”

  Now Hailey’s concern she was intruding began to evaporate. The four of them stepped closer to Alton, lying there, and looked down on his face. It still bore a look of shock, almost surprise, Hailey thought.

  Billings’s brow furrowed. “Let me understand your theory. So Alton Turner accidentally kills himself on the way to work this morning with a garage door. That’s funny . . . he was a very particular kind of guy, if you know what I mean. He kept a desk job . . . sharpened his pencils, crossed his t’s and dotted his i’s. Very particular, methodical. Probably read the owner’s manual over and over. Wonder how this happened.”

  Not to be outdone, Trimble jumped in. “Just what I said! Yep. That’s the way Turner always was, all right. Very particular-like. Must’ve just got caught under it or something. Just an accident, you know? Probably wasn’t paying attention. Had his mind on his coffee cup, I guess.”

  Lieutenant Billings didn’t respond, but instead pulled a spiral notebook out of his jacket and started writing with a yellow number-two pencil that had been stuck down in the spirals. He was intent on his own notes when Trimble piped up again.

  “Guess you won’t be needing homicide backup. Or the medical examiner’s people. It’s pretty cut-and-dried. Somehow, Turner screwed up.” Trimble took out his radio and held it to his lips to call off further backup. “Trimble to dispatch, Trimble to dispatch . . .”

  Hailey couldn’t hold back another moment. This was all a colossal mistake. Hailey interrupted Trimble before he could say another word. “Don’t call off the ME. It’s not an accident. Alton Turner didn’t screw up.”

  Shoulder radio to his chin mid-sentence, Trimble seemed to freeze with his mouth still half-open. Billings stopped scribbling in his spiral notebook, and all three scrutinized her as if she just sprouted three heads.

  “What’d she say? Not an accident? I just don’t see, Lieutenant Billings, how Cailee Dean . . .”

  “It’s Hailey. My name’s Hailey Dean.” Hailey kept her cool.

  “OK. If you say so . . . Hailey Dean. How can somebody who knows absolutely nothing about this case or this neighborhood or Savannah in general, march onto an active death scene and just announce to me, a seasoned police veteran, that this is not an accident?” Little flecks of spittle flying off his lips when he spoke, Trimble was indignant at the suggestion his accident theory could be wrong.

  Hailey ignored Trimble’s outburst. Looking toward the body, her voice was steady. “This was no malfunction. Accident’s all wrong.” Hailey stepped around to the other side of the body when she saw it.

  “It” being blood. Not the thick, dark red pool, coagulating, surrounding Turner’s mutilated body. “It” confirmed what her gut had already told her.

  “Look. Look at this.” Several feet away from Alton Turner’s head, his eyes seemingly staring at the ceiling, Hailey bent down, squatting at the side of Alton’s car. Whipping out the silver pen that hung on a cord around her neck, stuck down her bra for safekeeping, she gestured toward the car, pointing but not touching.

  “This blood. On the tire of his car. Check out the hubcap. See it?” Hailey pointed toward the hubcap, keeping a few inches away so as not to compromise the evidence.

  “So what? So there’s blood on the tire. It spattered or something . . .” Trimble’s voice trailed off as he struggled to comprehend her point.

  “It’s not spatter. There’s no spatter pattern here or on the garage floor around him. If it had been spatter from the impact of the garage door severing his torso, we’d see spatter elsewhere as well . . . not just on the car’s tire. And look at it. It’s not a spatter mark. It’s a smear. Big difference.”

  She was met with blank stares.

  “My point is, gentlemen, he didn’t just ‘get caught’ under a garage door. That’s not what happened. You, yourself, Lieutenant Billings, said he’s a very particular guy, probably read the manual over and over. That’s what you said, right?”

  “Right. I did say that.”

  “No accident happened here.” Hailey stated matter-of-factly and looked Billings in the eyes. “Whatever did happen started right here, near the tire . . . not under that garage door.” She gestured toward the two halves of Alton Turner.

  “Look at the blood pattern close to the car . . . here . . . away from the garage door. That pool of blood wasn’t the first mortal wound. That’s just a bleed out. The first serious wound was here. He ended up under the garage door. You have the blood on the tire and a concentration of blood on the cement here. Something happened to Alton Turner, something awful. And it started here.”

  The three came over and stood behind her, looking down at the tire.

  “Please, Lieutenant. You know it, I know it . . . blood evidence never lies. Call in the ME before we lose more evidence. It’s hot out here. The body forensics are being destroyed with every tick of the clock.” Hailey looked up from the tire where she was still kneeling.

  “She’s right. Trimble, radio the ME. Pronto.” Billings directed Trimble over his shoulder.

  “Will do.” Trimble looked miffed, but he did as he was told. Stepping away a few feet, he turned to the side and spoke into his shoulder radio.

  “But still, he could have just tripped, fallen, hit his head on the tire . . .” Trimble wasn’t ready to give in and continued a steady stream of hypothesizing over his shoulder aimed in their direction.

  “Then why would there be blood over here and his body all the way over there?” Hailey pointed to the distance between the bloody tire and the body. “It’s a good eight to ten feet away.”

  “He stumbled?” Fincher interjected.

  “Maybe. Maybe he did. And if he did stumble, why? But my guess is, he didn’t.”

  “What did you say you did back at Fulton, Hailey?” Billings wondered out loud.

  “She was Chief Special Prosecutor. Ten years. Never lost a case. Over a hundred cases at trial.” Fincher answered for her and did so with much more bravado than she would have.

  “Never lost a case? In ten years? How’d you do that?” Billings gave her a quizzical look as if to size her up.

  “Just picked the right juries. That’s all. Picked the right juries. They convicted, not me. Plus, they were all guilty.” Hailey passed off the compliment.r />
  “Pretty impressive.” Billings said it like he meant it.

  By now, Hailey was counting off the steps from the bloody tire to where Alton’s body lay. She kneeled down and looked.

  “Uh-oh. Glad the ME’s on the way. Come see.” She was looking downward.

  Fincher and Billings joined her and squatted down with her beside the body. Both of them squinted at the body in complete silence. Neither wanted to be the first to admit they had no idea what they were supposed to be looking at . . . what she had spotted.

  After a few more moments of awkward silence, Billings cracked first. “What do you see that we don’t see?”

  But he didn’t sound the least bit irritated, in fact, he sounded pleased she was there. Lots of lawmen would have booted Hailey from the scene at the get-go out of pure turf protection or simple professional jealousy.

  “Well, his head is slightly turned to one side. Look at the back of it. Right there. Do you see it?” Again, without touching anything, she pointed her Tiffany pen toward Turner’s head.

  The two men peered into Turner’s hair toward the back of his head. And sure enough, there it was, under his hair. Blood. Not the same blood from the deep red circle underneath him. This blood was a different color, hidden under Turner’s hair, and was clearly from a deep gash head wound.

  “See, here? There’s a slight abrasion on his forehead, not much but the smudge is the important part.”

  “The smudge?” Shrugging off all sense of ego, Billings asked the obvious question.

  “Yeah, look right here. The black smudge just above his brow. You can make out where he hit his forehead on the tire here, a black tire smudge around it. It’s slight, but an abrasion nonetheless.”

  “So the blood in the back . . .” Billings’s voice trailed off. Hailey finished the thought.

  “The blood in the back of the head has to be from a blow. The most likely scenario is that he got a blow to the head from behind and fell forward, catching the side of the tire with his forehead. That would account for the black smudge.”

  They all stood up. She went on. “In fact, I bet he never even made it as far as opening his car door. Is it locked?”

  Trimble marched around the far side of the car, reaching out his hand for the driver’s door handle.

  “Stop!” Billings and Hailey shrieked in unison. In a flash, Billings’s hand shot out and caught Trimble by the shoulder, pulling him back before he could make contact with the car.

  “Don’t touch anything! We could ruin potential fingerprint evidence.” Billings looked alarmed.

  “Fingerprint evidence? Oh, right. Fingerprint evidence.” Trimble looked flustered. “I didn’t know we had fingerprint evidence.”

  “We don’t . . . not yet anyway. But we may, and I don’t want the crime techs to report the only prints they find are yours!” Billings gave him a wide smile.

  As if by cue, the crime scene investigators pulled up and began to unload from a van elaborately emblazoned with the Savannah Police Department insignia across its side door underneath a depiction of a large, gold police shield. Out they came and headed straight to where Hailey stood with Billings.

  They all trouped forward . . . first out was the print team to pick up any latent prints the killer, if there was a killer, may have left behind. In no time, they’d have their dark powder covering every possible surface the killer might have touched, even inadvertently. Light switches, door handles, doorbell, windowpanes and sills, car handles . . . the works.

  Fingerprints . . . how Hailey loved them when she was a trial lawyer. If any defendant was stupid enough to leave them behind, they had the same effect as a giant neon sign screaming out “I did it!” for the world to see. They could also match up to hand and palm. Even ridges from the foot could be traced . . . basically comparing the raised portion of the skin, practically invisible to the human eye, but not to the microscope.

  Fingerprint impressions could be left behind on surfaces simply by the natural secretions of sweat, ever present on the skin. Even though the word “latent” actually meant hidden, in the crime-scene world it meant any impression left by fingers or palms on a surface, visible or invisible at the time it was left. Different fingerprint patterns, each and every loop, whorl, and arch could be used in evidence at trial.

  If crime-scene techs picked them up, that is. If Trimble had wrestled with the door handle, it would have only complicated things.

  It was hard enough to ascertain and lift latent prints with no interference whatsoever. Latent prints often exhibit only a portion of the fingertip and can easily be smeared, distorted, or even overlapped by prints from the same or different persons.

  The crew converged around Billings.

  “Start with the car, the handles, the entire side closest to the kitchen door, then the other side just in case a perp was hiding out over there. Then, of course, the kitchen doorknob, all around it.”

  “What about the garage door remote?” Hailey suggested it quietly to Billings, who was standing next to her. She didn’t want to appear to upstage him.

  “Good thinking, Hailey. Any other ideas?” He asked it as if he genuinely wanted her thoughts.

  “As a matter of fact, yes.” She walked across the garage toward the side of the door, looking up at the door’s chain mechanism. “Bet this was an older model, no automatic reverse.”

  “Right. An automatic reverse,” Finch thought out loud as he, too, looked up toward the far upper corner of the door. “The feature that causes a closing door to reverse if it detects something in its path.”

  “Exactly,” Hailey went on. “I can’t tell from here whether there is one or not; it would probably be part of the mechanism itself. And if there is an electric eye, like a sensor, it can be programmed to override.”

  “Anything else?” Billings asked her without the least hint of sarcasm.

  “Well, yeah. Look at the lower edge of door itself right above where his body is. The rubber trim is cut away in just that one spot. It’s left the sheet metal exposed. If he was simply trapped under the rubber edge of the door, at most he’d have been asphyxiated. But the sharp metal actually cut into the guy’s torso. That’s an awful lot of coincidences.”

  Billings was listening intently, jotting more notes in his notebook. She was right. There was a good three feet of the rubber edging gone from the bottom of the door and by the looks of it, it had been cleanly and precisely cut away.

  “And what about the manual device, the in-garage mechanism he would have used if things had gone wrong. Maybe the perp used that. And, oh yeah, the driver’s side sun visor. I see Turner clipped his garage door remote to that; maybe the perp fumbled and touched the visor. I mean, hey, it’s worth a shot . . . you never know where you might just get a fingerprint.” Hailey was looking into the car though the front window.

  Leaving the immediate vicinity of the car, she began to prowl around the garage, staring intently at everything from power tools to golf clubs to a bicycle pump. Fincher knew what she was doing . . . looking for something . . . anything that might have rendered the blow to Alton Turner’s head.

  “You’re right. Maybe the guy did use Turner’s own remote.” Billings bent down over her shoulder to look into Alton’s car as well.

  “Might as well do the whole area around the steering wheel and the window too, just to be safe, don’t you think, Hailey?” Fincher weighed in.

  “Yep.” Billings spoke before she did. He called out the orders to the crime-scene techs over his shoulder. They immediately set their black suitcases—looking for the world like big makeup kits—down on the garage floor, kneeled down, and began unloading the tools of the trade.

  Out came the dark powder that would soon be strewn everywhere, made of pure, nearly black ground graphite. Then, the Zephyr brushes, resembling a very delicate shaving brush, would apply the latent powder. Then finally, the precut, one-inch fingerprint lifting tape.

  The trick was to dip the Zephyr brush into the
graphite, tap its handle gently on the beaker to get rid of excess powder, and lightly brush the powder all over the area in question: in this case, Alton Turner’s Corolla, inside and out, the garage door itself, and its remote opener. Then a magnifying glass would be used to determine if there were, in fact, any prints left behind.

  Hailey stood watching. She’d always been fascinated with prints and loved producing them to juries. The medical examiner’s detectives had also arrived and were busily measuring distances from here to there, the car tire to the body, the body to the kitchen door, the blood on the tire from Alton’s bloody, upper torso, and so on.

  “Hey, guys. Want to take a look inside with me?”

  Billings was heading through the door leading into Alton’s kitchen.

  “Sure!” They said it at practically the same time.

  The three walked carefully into Alton’s kitchen, scoping the room to take in every single detail. Finch whipped out a writing pen from his pocket and used it to open the fridge.

  “Check this out. Every single thing except the milk is in Tupperware and labeled.”

  Staring into the highly organized fridge, she checked out the contents. Lettuce in a crisper, butter in its specifically designed niche in the fridge door alongside eggs also in their designated holders, canned drinks stacked in two neat, horizontal dispensers . . . everything in its place.

  Finch pushed the fridge door shut and turned toward the sink. Hailey followed but something caught her eye. Alton’s calendar taped squarely onto the upper right portion of the refrigerator. Today was the 24th. But his calendar said the 25th.

  That wasn’t like Alton Turner at all, based on what Hailey could surmise. Where was the tear-away sheet for today?