by Alan Emmins
“Describe what you mean, please, ma’am.”
“Just like when I first, when I just answered your question. As I remember, the bathroom door was open. It was not closed on the tenth: it was open.”
“So let me back you up. We’re now going back to talk about August the tenth?”
Not only were they going back to talk about August the tenth, they were going back to talk about the bathroom door being open—a door that the witness stated couldn’t even be seen when somebody was standing in the front doorway.
Dr. Stephens, San Francisco’s medical examiner, was called to the stand.
“Dr. Stephens, are you familiar with the death of Gary Lee Ober?” inquired the assistant DA.
“Yes, sir, I am.”
“Can you give your opinion about what the cause of death was concerning Gary Lee Ober?”
“The cause of death is sharp-force injury to the chest, counsel.”
“Sharp force?” asked the judge.
“Sharp force,” reiterated the medical examiner.
“What’s that based on?” the assistant DA asked, taking up the questioning once again.
“It’s based on the finding of two sharp-force injuries to cartilaginous portions of the rib cage. There was a portion between the bony rib and the breastbone, in older people it’s filled with cartilaginous and calcified material. There were two sharp-force injuries within that material.”
“Doctor, I’m handing you what’s been marked as people’s fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen. Those are three color photographs. Do you recognize fifteen?”
“I do recognize people’s fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, counsel.”
“What is fifteen?”
“Fifteen is a photograph of the inside of the rib cage. The rib cage front portion has been taken off, and this view is looking from inside the chest towards the outside. It’s marked on the photographs as to orientation. It shows the breastbone or sternum, as well as the adjacent portion of the ribs.”
It occurs to me, as I sit here and read, that Dr. Stephens, like Neal, gets real up close and personal with the dead. The jobs have different functions, but there is no denying that they share a similar level of intimacy.
“Does fifteen show the two injuries that you previously made reference to?”
“Yes, sir, it does. There is a pair of instruments, one is pointing to each of the two injuries that are described.”
“Can you tell whether or not … just to be clear, the injuries at the fourth and sixth rib, that’s the location that led to the death of Gary Lee Ober?”
“That is our opinion, counsel. First of all, they are sharp-force injuries. They’re in a particularly dangerous anatomic portion of the body. However, the body is badly decomposed and there’s no clear indication of injuries to any structure or organs underneath.”
“Based upon your training and experience, and this autopsy and the photographs that you have there, are you able to give an opinion about where the blood would be jettisoned or leaped to in this matter?”
“Not really. There’s a considerable amount of material that’s present in the bathroom where the body was found. Most of this is clearly decomposition fluid and some of it has been artifacted by another mechanism.”
“What does that mean, ‘artifacted’?”
“There’s evidence that portions of the scene have been cleaned and, therefore, some of the decomposition fluids have been moved about, potentially contaminating parts of the scene.
“Probably the most significant thing is injuries like this are notorious for bleeding inside the body, so the actual scene of death may not be in the bathtub, and there may be little or no blood at the actual scene of death.”
“I see. Doctor, are you able to give any sort of opinion about the window of time when this homicide occurred? Assuming that the body was discovered on September tenth … in the summertime, are you able to give a window of a period of time when Mr. Ober might have been killed?”
“Well, ordinarily to do an opinion of that nature we need to know when the person was last seen alive with certainty, and then, of course, when they were found, and then use the available information to give a basis of the most logical time of death based upon some information.
“In this particular case, flies have gone through a complete cycle from egg to the pupa and pupa have hatched. That’s a temperature-and humidity-dependant factor for the common flies that can range from as little as seven to ten days, but in colder, dryer conditions it can be a month or more.
“I think, looking at the scene, we’re probably talking about at least two weeks, maybe longer. The body was nearly skeletonized.”
The benches in the corridors of the Superior Court building are not made for long reading sessions, and so with a numb backside I stuff the court transcript back into the manila envelope and head out for an early supper. Or at least I try. The doors to three courts open at once, and immediately the corridor fills with suits and squeaky shoes. With my silly English manners I am bounced around like a ball in a pin-ball machine as I make my way to the exit.
WHEN IT RAINS IT POURS
Alan, get in your car and drive to Campbell. You need to take 101 south towards San Jose, the 85 south towards Santa Cruz, then get on the 280 south, take the Hamilton Avenue exit, exit number 25; from there you need to find North First Street, number 70. You got it?”
“Neal, hold on, I need a pen.”
“Alan, dude. Don’t fuck around. If you want to make this job, you need to get going.”
“Neal, I was asleep. I just need to get a pen. What time is it anyway?”
“It’s two a.m.”
“Okay, I’ve got a pen. So, 101 south, onto the 85, and then what?”
Even though Neal told me to hurry, I have to stop at the gas station for coffee. I need to wake up. Plus, I don’t know how much I want to rush. I have had several days away from death now. I am recovering.
I enjoy driving through San Francisco in the early hours of the morning with a coffee in my hand. At two a.m. there is no traffic stopping and starting every ten feet. You can enjoy the characters on the street: the couple hugging and kissing in drunk abandon, the homeless guy singing songs to them for change, or maybe just singing songs, the officers sitting on the hood of their car drinking coffee. These are the things I want to see.
That said, I have a job to do.
When I arrive at 70 North First Street it is alive with police officers—so many that you would think a mass homicide had taken place. There’s a huge cement truck pulled over to one side. People go back and forth, pointing at the ground. I can see Steve, one of the Crime Scene Cleaners, talking to a police officer. I park, slip on my Crime Scene Cleaners baseball cap as a means of ID, and head over.
There’s an air of disbelief. People look shocked.
“Neal, this is crazy. It’s off the fucking chart. You need to get out here,” Steve is saying into his cell phone.
An elderly lady had stepped out into the road from between parked cars. Not only had the driver of the cement truck not seen her, he hadn’t felt her as his truck hit her. It was only after, when his truck violently skidded for no apparent reason, that he stopped. He got out of the truck wondering what had happened.
He didn’t find an old lady.
What he found were the pureed remains of one.
From the back of the truck, leading two hundred yards farther, is the smeared broken line of the old lady’s remains, like the white line in the middle of the road, only red and matted with hair and fabric. It is a staggering mess. There’s just so much blood. It’s as if she were squeezed like a tube of toothpaste.
Neal arrives quickly, and after a swift appraisal of the scene gets on the phone and calls for two more guys to come help with the cleanup. He then signals to me.
“Dude, you’ve gotta come take a look at this.”
I follow him over to where a group of officers stand around in amazement.
“See what that
is?” Neal asks.
I stare down at the road and the red clump that sits there. It takes me a while to form words.
“It can’t be, it just can’t be,” I say a little in awe.
“That’s exactly what it is, my friend, her heart! Pretty fucking amazing, huh? Must a just popped right outta her when she was pressurized. That’s pretty fucking amazing.”
“Ever seen anything like that before?” one of the officers asks Neal.
“Like that? A fresh heart? Intact? Sitting in the middle of the road? Fuck no!”
In a sense, yes, it is pretty fucking amazing. The heart is intact. It is not squashed or torn. It doesn’t lie in or with other remains. It is not in the middle of a puddle of blood. When the heart is removed by the medical examiner, it leaves behind a bloodstain that outlines its shape.
That will probably go on to be the saddest thing I have ever seen, I think to myself.
The reason why there are so many police on the street is because this accident happened right in front of the Campbell police station. The crime scene, if it is in fact a crime scene, has become a training camp, where the more experienced officers are taking on the role of teachers.
“So the first traces of blood are here,” says one officer talking to a younger officer. “So she more than likely came out from between the parked cars somewhere about here, you see?”
It’s not a difficult cleanup, but it is a lot of work. Douse each patch with enzyme, scrub with a stiff brush, and mop up with tissue. There are four Crime Scene Cleaners on the job and a neighbor who has made a tray of coffee. In all, the scrubbing and wiping takes around four hours. It’s gory work. There’s also no avoiding the fact that this is the old lady’s hair and flesh that you are scrubbing. The fact that this was not a suicide but a bad accident makes it all the more poignant. You can only imagine the sweetest of grannies, even though in reality she may not have been. But the blood on the ground allows you only to imagine and your imagination wants to give you a little old lady wearing a cardigan and spectacles.
It’s seven a.m. when all is done and people are starting to head home. I drive back along I 280, but decide not to go back into the city. The road is already jammed with people heading into San Francisco. I could easily spend the next two hours in traffic. I see a Motel 6 sign poking up into the sky and turn off.
I check in with a melancholy state of mind and slip into the motel bed, hoping that I can stop thinking about dead old ladies.
I awake with a start, unable to recall why I am in a motel room when I went to bed in Rachel’s house in Twin Peaks. Then I remember.
“Who is it?” I’m asking the phone, confused.
“It’s Shawn, Crime Scene Cleaners.”
“Hey, Shawn, sorry. I was asleep. What’s up?”
“Hey, I got one for you. Berkeley. Guy took his head off with a shotgun. You interested?”
“Yeah, I’m in a motel just off the 280. Where do I need to go?”
It’s a mere two and a half hours since I checked in. The expression on the receptionist’s face, as I check out so soon, tells me that my behavior is odd. But she also looks vaguely excited by something. Maybe I am a bank robber on the run. Maybe I escaped from prison and needed to rest before continuing my flight from the law. Maybe I’m a murderer. Ooooooooooooh.
I ask her where I can get coffee and she gives me directions to a McDonald’s. While I am there I make a decision to eat, just in case I am on my way to a gruesome scene. I don’t want the dry retches again. I don’t want to be in pain for the next four days if I do get sick. And that’s why I eat a large Quarter Pounder meal en route to a suicide.
The job is in a small storage room. Shawn tells me that somebody shot himself in the head with a rifle. Being a storage room, there are boxes everywhere, and they are covered in blood. It’s a pretty easy job. We empty the contents of the boxes, place them in new boxes, and throw out the old ones. There is, of course, some blood on parts of walls, on the ceiling, and on a standup mirror that is being stored in there. But all in all it is not too bad.
Shawn moves the mirror to one side to see how much mess there is behind it.
With a lot of private jobs where Crime Scene Cleaners have been called by a victim’s family, as opposed to a motel manager, there is a family member present, or at least hovering around to keep an eye on the cleaners. At this job we have a tall Italian-looking guy in jeans and a leather jacket. He doesn’t say much. He just hovers around, smoking cigarettes.
“You might not want to see this,” says Shawn as he stands up from behind the mirror and turns toward the disposal bag. In his hand, quite unmistakably, is half a brain. It’s bloody and messy, but still clearly visible for what it is—half a brain!
The family member and I jar against each other in the doorway. Pretty quickly we find ourselves doubled over with about ten yards between us as we throw up in the gutter. His problem is my old problem. He has nothing to throw up. My cheeseburger and fries come up at pretty much the same speed it probably took to make them. Of course, there is some dry retching after this, but the initial, more powerful retches were reduced by stomach content.
The McDonald’s, I feel, was a very smooth move.
“Sorry!” Shawn calls out from the doorway.
It’s a few minutes before I can go back in and help Shawn with the rest of the job.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“Yeah, let’s just get the fuck out of here,” I say, picking up a brush and going to work on the wall. I work hard and fast. My new attitude toward the blood, toward this suicide, is that I want to be somewhere else, and the blood is in my way. The quicker I clean it, the quicker I can be somewhere else. It’s that simple. There is no more vomiting, not even a retch. I feel annoyed now, annoyed at the blood, and I don’t want one drop of it to survive.
The job is done in little over an hour. On the way out, Shawn and I stop at McDonald’s, and I eat my second cheeseburger meal of the day. But something has changed in me. I have crossed a boundary. No matter what the rest of the day has in store for me, I know this cheeseburger will not see the light of day ever again.
MAN IN THE BATH PART IV
The court transcript I have been reading is formatted very much like a film script. It is missing certain elements, like direction: “Lawyer enters from left—looks longingly at judge.” But the dialogue is set out with the speaker’s name in bold font. It seems a little risky to me, the similarity in the two formats. It’s another blurred line between reality and entertainment. As I read I sometimes forget that these are real people discussing a real event. They end up as characters on a page and little more. But something sits uncomfortably in my mind as I read. Because there is no movement and gesture in the court transcript, the characters have no life; they’re hard to get off the page.
Shortly after Jim McKinnon was arrested, journalist Ed Walsh visited him in jail and interviewed him. He is called as a witness for the prosecution. This is where, this time sitting in a café in a nice comfy chair with a pile of pancakes,I pick up on my reading of the court transcript. It reads as follows.
THE CLERK: Please be seated. Please state your name and spell your name for the record, please.”
THE WITNESS: Ed Walsh, W-A-L-S-H.
THE JUDGE: Thank you, Mr. Walsh. I’ll ask you to please make sure you let the lawyers finish their questions before you answer so only one person is talking at one time.
Please make sure that you answer with words because the court reporter can’t take down gestures or “mm-hmms,” and please make sure you speak loudly enough so everyone can hear.
All right? Thank you. Mr. Beckelman …
MR. BECKELMAN: Your Honor, I’m conscious of what’s known as the Press Shield under Evidence Code 1070, and my intent in asking questions will be limited to the four corners of a newspaper article which has been marked as People’s Exhibit 19.
I am aware of the case law which does not allow me to ask about any unnamed sources or
any unnamed material or unpublished material that this reporter might have collected, and I’m referring specifically to a case called Hammarley, H-A-M-M-A-R-L-E-Y, versus Superior Court, at 89 CAL. App.3d, 388–397, and “unpublished information” includes notes and summaries of interviews with murder eyewitnesses, and that’s within the scope.
So I am limited to just the four corners of the newspaper article, and that is how I would intend to conduct my direct examination of this witness.
MR. OLSON: Your Honor, if I may, Carl Olson, representing the witness.
I appreciate Mr. Beckelman’s statement that he will not attempt to go beyond the four corners of the article, and we will object to anything that does go beyond the four corners of the article.
DEPUTY PUBLIC DEFENDER FELDMAN: Judge, I have two concerns: The first one is a discovery problem.
By way of offer of proof, the court is essentially going to be presented with a confession coming through Mr. Walsh’s voice. This is my reading of Evidence Code Section 1054.1 a violation of Subsection (b), which requires the prosecution to hand over to me all statements of the defendant’s.
It also requires the prosecution to turn over relevant written or recorded statements or reports of witnesses upon whom the prosecutor intends to call to trial.
So the first problem we’ve got is we’ve got a discovery problem. I have not been given any notes, I have not been given any background material on what this gentleman is going to testify to.
THE JUDGE: Mr. Beckelman, do the People have any such material?
MR. BECKELMAN: No, we don’t, Your Honor.
MR. FELDMAN: Judge, the court has got the Haight and Cotchett book in front of you. I would cite you on the matter, 18—Section 18, Page 149, that says:
“The Shield law does not provide a sweeping privilege against disclosure, but merely an immunity from contempt for failure to disclose. Therefore, the argument that Section 1070 prohibits a discovery order requiring disclosure of reporter’s notes is without merit.”