Scene of the Crime

by Anne Wingate

  It means you aren't going to get a look at any of the crime-scene photographs or any of the evidence.

  But wait a minute. If Snoop wants to convict somebody else, that means he's sort of on Ralph's side, because he doesn't want Ralph to get convicted, so you go and talk to Ralph's lawyer.

  Who is Ralph's lawyer?

  He's a public defender, of course, because since when could a maintenance man afford an attorney?

  He's a public defender, which means he probably graduated from law school last year, and although he knows quite well what a motion for discovery is, he's never filed one in real life, and the idea makes his stomach hurt. He can get the format from a book, but he's not very happy about trying to follow the format, and he's not 100 percent sure it will work.

  Well, that's okay; Sam Snoop can afford to hire a more expensive lawyer. You get a motion for discovery.

  That means the district attorney has to tell you what evidence there is against Ralph. It does not mean Molly has to talk to you. It does not mean the State Crime Laboratory or the State Medical Examiner's Office, both located in Salt Lake City, have to give you any information. It does not mean you can get an independent expert to look at the evidence.

  While the lawyers have been playing their legal games, you haven't been sitting still. No, you've been out to the condo, where you find there's been a sudden meeting of the condo owners association and guess what? It's embarrassing enough that Brigette was murdered there and Ralph has been arrested. Do you think anybody is going to talk to you?

  If you do, think again.

  At this point, you have exhausted all of the usual places for beginning an investigation, and for all practical purposes you haven't begun your investigation at all.

  Does this mean P.I.'s—in real life or fiction—can't function?

  No. It does mean that P.I.'s have to be smart. In real life, smart is enough. In fiction, the P.I. had better be very, veiy smart.

  Of course, there are ways around many of these problems. Many fictional P.I.'s have close friends on the police department who will leak them information, or close friends who are crime reporters and will let them in on the little secrets that the police asked them not to print.

  Many other fictional P.I.'s work almost entirely on the basis of the psychological elements of the crime and the talking-to-people area of investigation, and avoid crime scenes most of the time.

  And in fiction, unlike real life, the P.I. sometimes is the first person on the scene of the murder.

  You know what s/he should do then—back off, call the police, and stay out of the way. But if you read enough fiction to have any business thinking about writing it, you also know what s/he will do— surreptitiously search the victim's pockets if that seems called for; collect part of the evidence if possible (surely the police don't need all of this cup of probably poisoned coffee); examine the evidence if collecting it would be too damning (don't mess with the brass ejected by the automatic, but if you look at it long enough to find out the caliber and make, well, the police won't know the difference); sketch the scene; maybe take a photo or two; and then call the police.

  In real life, this would certainly lose you your license; it might also lead to an arrest for murder or for accessory after the fact. But in fiction it works well.

  This is the state of crime-scene investigation today. It has been said that writing is one part inspiration and nine parts perspiration. Crime-scene work is the same. The nine parts perspiration are critical; if the evidence isn't treated right, it can't tell anybody anything. But that one part inspiration is equally critical. It's the matter of knowing what to ask the evidence.

  I Know Who Did It But I Can't Prove It

  Sometimes it's maddening—situations in which police know who did it and know there is no way they can possibly prove it to the jury. I remember one case, a burglary, that I went to with Doc, after I'd been on the department about eighteen months. On the way back into the police station, I said, "Doc, that didn't look right."

  "What didn't look right?" he asked.

  "The whole thing," I said. "It didn't look like a burglary. It looked like the stage setting for act two, scene one, the crime is discovered."

  Doc chuckled. "And now," he said, "you can call yourself a crime-scene officer."

  Why Is an Innocent Person on Trial?

  And sometimes, if you're an expert, you know that somebody who is commonly believed guilty is innocent. Several years after I left police work, I read about a case like that. An industrialist had been accused of setting up the murder-for-hire of a judge. The proposed assassin had reported to police, and police and the judge had worked together. The assassin told his employer the job was done, and the police moved in. The employer was charged not with murder, because the judge was perfectly healthy, but with conspiracy.

  The newspapers were carrying blow-by-blow accounts of the trial, and I was interested. Several times people who knew my background asked me what I thought, and each time I replied, "I didn't work the case." At that point, neither the prosecution nor the defense had made a case, as far as I was concerned.

  And then along came a crucial bit of testimony. The "murderer" had taken a Polaroid picture of the judge, supposedly dead, in the trunk of a car. (The judge had cooperated by climbing into the trunk and posing for the picture.) Police then coated the picture with thief detection powder, and the "murderer" supposedly showed the picture to his employer, who handled it, examined it closely, and returned it-inside a white Cadillac. When the employer was arrested within the next two hours, there was no trace of thief detection powder on his clothing, his person, or his car upholstery. And that was the point at which I said, "This man is innocent."

  Why?

  Because I've worked with thief detection powder. It is almost invisible when it's dry; in fact, when it's dry and spread thin you need ultraviolet light to see it. But it clings—oh, how it clings! You cannot brush it off — any attempt to do so merely spreads it. You cannot wash it off. The more you wash, the more purple your hands and clothing become.

  The day somebody spilled some thief detection powder and I accidentally sat in it, I wound up having to completely discard the clothing I was wearing; ten washings with strong detergents and bleach did not wash the stuff out, and despite washing with every kind of soap I could think of, my hands did not get clean. It took about a week for the stuff to wear off.

  And the prosecution team was trying to make a jury believe that this man handled a photograph liberally coated with this powder, but had no trace of it left two hours later? That's not even a good joke.

  The jury agreed.

  The work continues. As I took a break from this chapter long enough to watch the television news, I saw clips of a blood-spatter expert from California entering a West Valley, Utah, house, where two weeks ago, a woman and three children were knifed to death. Police think they know who did it, but they can't prove it. They hope the blood-spatter expert will help them prove it.

  Right now I don't have an opinion. I didn't work the case. But I'll be interested in watching it develop.

  This has been an overview of the state of crime-scene investigation today. I strongly recommend that you locate and read as many as possible of the books in my bibliography and other books like them, and that you keep constantly informed on changes. This is one of the fields, like physics and astronomy, in which what is true today and what is true tomorrow may not be the same thing. It was exciting to work in; it is exciting to read about and to write about.

  And there's one important difference between real crime and fictional crime. In real life, people love to kill each other at two o'clock in the morning.

  You don't have to write at 2:00 a.m. unless you want to. But, weirdos that we are, most of us want to.

  TABLE 10_

  What Is That Thing?

  When you know what something looks like but not what it's called -or you know where on some other object it's located but not what it's call
ed—or you know from other research what it's called but you're a little vague about exactly what it is or what it does—special reference books might help you.

  The Facts on File Visual Dictionary enables you—as it says on the cover—to "look up the word from the picture and the picture from the word." It's well organized and extremely easy to use, and I consult it often.

  A good encyclopedia, particularly one such as World Book that is designed largely for children's use, tends to be very well illustrated, with fine drawings and exploded diagrams. If at all possible, you should have at least one encyclopedia in your home. Often out-of-date encyclopedias, which for most purposes other than history, geography, politics, astronomy and physics are entirely adequate, are available from library sales or used bookstores for as little as twenty-five dollars a set.

  As words change so much, and so many new words enter the language every year, there's really no substitute for purchasing a new dictionary at least every ten years. For most purposes, the most recent Merriam-Webster College Dictionary is adequate; when you need an unabridged, which is outside the price range of most of us, you can always make a trip to the library.

  Any mystery or true crime writer should own at least one book on human anatomy. Gray's Anatomy, originally published in 1901, was republished by Crown in 1977 in a beautifully illustrated edition. It remains the classic in the field, and is generally available, particularly by mail order, at a reasonable cost. Any other good anatomy, such as Helen Dawson's Basic Human Anatomy, is acceptable, although most of them are not as well illustrated as Gray's.

  I really haven't found any satisfactory substitute for Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, which helps to clarify matters on which other medical forensic books are unclear.

  Dictionaries of criminal slang may be very useful, but bear in mind that slang becomes dated quickly. This means that it is critical to use a slang dictionary written during, or historically written about, the exact period and area the writer has in mind.

  A thesaurus can help the writer to locate a word conveying the exact shade of meaning s/he has in mind. A dictionary-style thesaurus, which enables you to look up a specific word and then look for related words, is usually easier to use than a topical thesaurus, but you may find you prefer the topical style. Either is excellent.

  Afterword

  I do not subscribe to the tenet that everything that is worth doing is worth doing well. Bed making, for example, should in my opinion be done as quickly and as seldom as possible, and when someone is writing a book, s/he may be excused for not sweeping the floor until the dust-bunnies start chasing the cats.

  But every book that you write, published or not, is likely to outlive you. A published book will certainly outlive its author.

  I keep thinking of a book I once read in which the author proclaimed that all the houses in Texas look alike (they range from mansion to shanty; tar paper siding to wood siding to asbestos siding to aluminum siding to brick to stone; wood frame to steel frame to adobe); that orange trees grow in Tyler, Texas (the closest to Tyler you'll find orange trees is the Corpus Christi area, almost a full day's drive to the south); and that the landing approach to a particular airport is over barren mud flats (when I flew into that airport, the approach was over a lush pine forest).

  We can all make mistakes, and I make my full share of them. But there is absolutely no excuse for egregious laziness in writing. The information is available, and we have the responsibility to make our fiction as truthful in factual areas as we possibly can.

  The fact that you're reading this book proves that you care. I hope I've helped you to meet your goals.

  222 / Scene of the Crime

  224 / Scene of the Crime