By Reason of Insanity (David Brunelle Legal Thriller Series Book 3)

by Stephen Penner

  “It was a homicide call,” Chen said.

  Brunelle nodded. Everyone in the courtroom knew it was a homicide call. He and Edwards had just said as much. But he had to lay the story out, one step at a time. He led Chen through the drive over to the house, parking in front of the house, and walking up to the porch steps.

  “What happened when you reached the front door?”

  Chen turned and looked at Keesha. “The defendant opened the door and let us in.”

  “Did she say anything?”

  “She said, ‘That was quick. I just called you guys.’”

  “So Ms. Sawyer called 9-1-1?”

  “Yes,” Chen answered. “I didn’t realize at first that she was the one who had murdered the victim. Initially I thought she was the first person to find the body. That’s who usually calls 9-1-1.”

  “Not the killer?”

  “Not the killer,” Chen confirmed.

  “When did you realize she was the one who had killed the victim?”

  “Not until after she showed us the body,” Chen said. “Or, what was left of it.”

  Brunelle nodded. Before he asked his next batch of questions, he took a stack of photographs from the bar. They had already been pre-marked by the bailiff. Edwards had objected to them pretrial as too gruesome. Perry had overruled the objection. Sometimes the truth was gruesome.

  “I’m handing you a series of photographs, Detective,” Brunelle said for the record as he did so. “Do you recognize what’s depicted in those photos?”

  Chen nodded as he slowly thumbed through them. “Yes. This is what I saw when I went up to the bedroom.”

  Brunelle took the photos back and stepped over to the overhead projector set up between the counsel tables. There was a projection screen on the far wall. The jury would have to look past Keesha to see the screen. That is, Brunelle knew, when the jurors saw what he was about to show them, they’d see Keesha too.

  He placed the first of the photos on the projector. With a push of a button, the image would be displayed three feet high for all the world to see.

  “Before I show these to the jury,” Brunelle turned back to Chen, “this was a very disturbing scene, wasn’t it?”

  Chen frowned as he considered the question. He turned again to the jurors. “There was a lot of blood,” he said. “A lot. All over the bed and the floor and the walls. I’ve seen that kind of thing before though. What made it so bad was the condition of the victim’s body. Her face.”

  “How did you react to it?”

  Chen grimaced. “I’ve seen a lot in my career. I’ve learned to ignore the smell and look for clues.”

  “Were there other officers there with you?”

  Chen offered a crooked smile to the jury. “Yes. At first. A couple of young patrol guys.”

  “How did they react?”

  “One guy was okay. The other went outside and threw up.”

  Brunelle pressed the button.

  The first photo actually wasn’t all that bad, if you didn’t know what you were looking at. It was a wide shot of the whole bedroom. Without knowing to look on the bed, you might not even have noticed the body in the middle of the blood-soaked sheets.

  Brunelle walked up to Chen and handed him a laser pointer. He wanted the jury to know where to look.

  They went through the photos, each one moving in systematically until they finished with a close-up of what was left of Georgia Sawyer’s face.

  Most of the jurors had looked away more than once as Brunelle had progressed through the pictures. By the end, though, they were all managing to look at the image across the room. Just above Keesha Sawyer’s head. They may have been repulsed, but they were also transfixed. Good.

  “Detective, you said you’ve seen a lot in your thirty years of experience, is that right?”

  Chen nodded. “Yes.”

  “Have you ever seen anything quite like this?”

  Chen thought for a moment, then shook his head. He turned to the jurors. “No.”

  Without looking at his legal pad, Brunelle mentally checked off Part I of his direct examination: The Scene. Time for Part II: The Confession.

  “You said earlier that Ms. Sawyer admitted to killing her mother after you’d seen the body. Where did that conversation take place?”

  “In her living room,” Chen explained. “We all sat down and she got some cookies for us.”

  “Did you eat any?”

  Chen grimaced again. “No. Not after what I’d just seen.”

  A few of the jurors nodded sympathetically. Good. that meant they liked Chen. Jurors usually did. The best detectives weren’t the hard-asses; they were the big, lovable teddy bears. Teddy bears with guns.

  Brunelle nodded. He glanced over at Keesha, so the jury would too. “What did Ms. Sawyer say?”

  “I asked her when she found the body, but she said she didn’t understand,” Chen related. “I thought maybe she was in shock from what she’d seen. So I clarified, asking her what time did she go upstairs and see that her mother was dead. She kind of smiled and said, ‘No, officer. When I went upstairs, my mother was still alive.’ That’s when I got it. She had blood on her clothes, but I had thought that was from trying to render aid or embrace the body. Then I realized it was cast-off.”

  “What’s cast-off?”

  Chen looked to the jury to explain. “When you extract a weapon from a body, the force of pulling it back will cause the blood on it to fly backward off the blade. It gets on the walls and, often, the killer. Usually it’s fine lines of droplets, but she had so much, it blotched like she’d actually hugged the body.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “We placed her in handcuffs and read her her rights.”

  “Did she agree to speak with you?”

  “She insisted on it,” Chen said.

  Again he turned to address the jurors directly. “You know, it was strange. She was so calm. Not angry, not crying. Just calm. And even though she started justifying what she’d done, she wasn’t defensive. Just very matter-of-fact. She told us her mother was a witch, she’d been turning people into zombies while they slept, so she had to kill her.”

  “Did you arrest her?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you transport her to the jail?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” Chen told the jury, “she was obviously mentally ill. We took her directly to Harborview Hospital’s emergency psych ward.”

  “What happened there?”

  “The nurses administered intravenous anti-psychotic drugs.”

  Brunelle nodded. He remembered the next part himself. “Did that seem to help?”

  Chen shrugged. “I guess so. I’m not a psychologist, but she said the voices in her head were quieter.”

  “Did you speak with her again after she’d been administered the drugs?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Did her story change?”

  Chen thought for a moment. “No. She provided more details, but the story was consistent. Her mother was a witch. She’d been killing Keesha in her sleep every night and turning her into a zombie. Then she started killing the neighborhood children and turning them into zombies too, so she decided she had to kill her mother.”

  Brunelle nodded. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?”

  Chen shrugged again. “It made sense to her. She’d thought about it, planned it, then carried it out.”

  Brunelle suppressed a smile. Chen had just summarized his entire case. A perfect ending to the direct exam.

  A quick check of his legal pad, then, “No further questions.”

  Perry looked over to Edwards. “Any cross examination, counsel?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” she replied, standing up.

  She took her place at the bar, just a few feet from Chen. She had her notepad and a binder of police reports. She took a moment, organizing her materials, then looked up at Chen.

 
“Good morning, Detective,” she started.

  “Good morning,” Chen replied.

  “I’m not going to put that scene photo up again,” she said, a subtle dig at Brunelle’s motivations for having done so, “but do you recall how the scene looked that morning?”

  “I’ll never forget it, ma’am.”

  “I’m sure,” she replied. “You said you’ve seen a lot in your career?”

  Chen frowned to the jury. “Yes.”

  “And that was the worst thing you’ve ever seen?”

  Chen’s frown deepened. “It depends on how you define ‘worst.’ I’ve seen dead babies. I’ve seen bodies left out for weeks, half-liquefied and infested with insects. I’ve seen some seriously nasty stuff. I don’t know if this was the absolute worst I’ve ever seen, but it was right up there.”

  Edwards nodded. “But this was different somehow, wasn’t it?”

  Chen thought for a moment. “Yes. I think that’s fair.”

  “You’ve seen people who’ve been shot or stabbed or whatever, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And usually, the injuries you see are basically just the ones that caused the death, right? Because once the victim is dead, the killer stops, right?”

  Chen considered the question. “Yeah, I suppose that’s true. You might have multiple gunshot wounds, but that’s usually because the shooter fired multiple rounds at once, maybe a final kill shot, but nothing like this.”

  “This was different. This went beyond just killing the victim, didn’t it?”

  Chen nodded. “It seemed like it.”

  “In fact, Detective,” Edwards said, “if there was just one word to describe what you saw in that bedroom that morning, that word would be ‘crazy,’ wouldn’t it?”

  Chen thought for a moment. “I’m not sure that would necessarily be the best word, but it would be a pretty good one.”

  “Crazy?” Edwards repeated.

  “Yes,” Chen agreed. “Crazy.”

  “No further questions,” Edwards announced and she gathered up her things from the bar.

  Brunelle waited a moment for her to sit down again, then stood up for his re-direct exam.

  “Crazy?” he confirmed.

  Chen smiled sheepishly. That word probably hadn’t helped Brunelle’s case any. He nodded. “Sure.”

  “But intentional, right?” Brunelle confirmed. “It wasn’t accidental?”

  Chen’s smile relaxed. “No, it wasn’t accidental,” he agreed heartily. “It would be hard to imagine anything more intentional.”

  That’s better, Brunelle thought.

  “No further questions.”

  Edwards passed on any re-cross and Chen stepped down from the witness stand.

  Brunelle assessed the testimony in his head. Crazy but intentional. It felt like a draw. He hoped Kat would do better.

  Chapter 32

  “Dr. Kat Anderson,” she identified herself in response to Brunelle’s first question. “I’m an Assistant Medical Examiner with the King County Medical Examiner’s Office.”

  “Did you conduct an autopsy on a person named Georgia Sawyer in relation to this case?”

  “Yes.”

  Brunelle wanted to get right to the results, but he needed to educate the jury a little bit so when she gave her opinions, the jury would understand her—and trust her.

  After extracting her education and experience, he moved on to the salient topic. “Could you explain to the jury what an autopsy consists of and what its purpose is?”

  “Of course.” Kat turned to the jury just like Chen. Professional witness. And a pretty damn cute one, too, he couldn’t help but think.

  “‘Autopsy’ is Latin for ‘look for yourself.’ The goal of an autopsy is to determine the manner and cause of death through forensic examination of the remains.”

  This next bit was important. “Could you explain the difference between manner and cause of death?”

  Kat nodded. She’d done this before.

  “Cause of death refers to the specific injuries or illnesses which caused the death. Manner of death refers to one of four broad categories that all deaths fall into, regardless of the specific mechanism.”

  “What are those four categories?”

  “Homicide, suicide, accident, and natural causes.”

  Thank you, Brunelle thought. We’ll be coming back to that.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s talk about the cause of death first.”

  “All right,” Kat replied. That wasn’t the usual order of this kind of testimony, but then again this wasn’t the usual case.

  “Were you able to determine a cause of death?”

  “Oh, yes,” she told the jurors. “There was no doubt about the cause of death.”

  “What was the cause of death?”

  “Sharp force trauma to the anterior head.”

  Brunelle figured he’d better have Kat translate that. “What is sharp force trauma?”

  “Sharp force trauma occurs when a bladed or otherwise sharp object strikes the body, resulting in lacerations.”

  “Something sharp,” Brunelle repeated. “Like a hatchet?”

  Kat nodded. “Exactly.”

  “And what is the anterior part of the head?”

  “Anterior means front,” she translated. “The anterior head is the face.”

  “So sharp force trauma to the anterior head means…?”

  “Someone struck her in the face repeatedly with a something sharp.”

  Brunelle knew this part was dragging a little long, but he didn’t mind giving the jury extra time to think about the type of weapon used, and the location of the injuries. Diminished capacity basically meant accidental. This was anything but.

  “Can you determine what type of weapon was used based on the injuries?”

  Kat thought for a moment. “Sometimes. The human body is elastic, so it’s not like you can just match up a suspected weapon with an injury. But generally speaking, I can tell the difference between a knife slash, a knife stab, or say, an ice pick.”

  “What about the injuries here?”

  “The injuries here,” she told the jury, “were consistent with a broad-bladed weapon delivered with a great deal of force.”

  “A hatchet maybe?”

  “Yes. I would guess this was a hatchet or small axe.”

  Time for more photos. And the jurors thought the scene ones were bad… These would be medical close-ups of Georgia’s face. But they were necessary to fully explain Kat’s testimony. She quickly identified the photos, taken over the course of the autopsy, and without apologies Brunelle put the first one up on the screen.

  Several gasps escaped the jury box, and one choked sob. The gallery surrendered a few of its own gasps, followed by troubled whispers. Edwards looked impassively at the gore. Unfortunately for her, so did Keesha. Kat picked up the laser pointer and Brunelle asked his next question.

  “Could you show the jury how you were able to determine that the weapon was most likely a hatchet?”

  Kat nodded. “Of course.”

  So she explained it. Using the roving red dot, she pointed out the series of long lacerations, parallel and criss-crossing. She confirmed what everyone could see with their own eyes: the repeated blows resulted in sections of the flesh being completely severed. That allowed her to point out the fractures to the bone underneath. Which led to the next photo.

  “Can you tell us what we’re looking at here?” Brunelle asked, although he supposed everyone knew what a skull looked like.

  “That,” Kat answered, “is the skull, toward the end of the autopsy, after we peeled away the soft tissue. We needed to be able see the fractures up close. As you can see here, there are actually several deep cuts to the bone itself where the blade embedded itself before being pulled out again. You can also see the multiple fractures to the surrounding bone structures around the eye sockets and nasal cavity. In fact, several bone fragments were recovered elsewhere in the bedroom.”


  “What does that tell you?”

  Kat paused. “Everything about this told me the same thing. The multiple strikes, the fractures, the extraction and cast off of soft tissue and bone fragments. They all told me that the killer drove the hatchet into the decedent’s face repeatedly with tremendous force.”

  “How much force?”

  “Enough to cleave bone.”

  “And how many times?”

  Kat shook her head. She looked at the blown up photo of the broken skull. “I don’t know. At least a dozen.”

  Brunelle nodded and turned off the projector. Two more areas, then sit down.

  “Doctor, what are defensive wounds?”

  Kat nodded and turned back to the jury. “Defensive wounds are injuries—usually to the hands and forearms—which indicate that the victim attempted to stop the attack.”

  “So, cuts to the palms from grabbing the blade,” Brunelle got more specific, “or to the arms from blocking the blows?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Did you locate any defensive wounds on Georgia Sawyer’s body?”

  Kat shook her head. “No. None.”

  “What does that tell you?”

  “It tells me she didn’t see the first blow coming, and the first blow was fatal.”

  Okay, last area. The one that mattered the most, given Edwards’ defense.

  “You said there are four manners of death?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what are they again?”

  “Homicide, suicide, accident, and natural causes.”

  Brunelle nodded. “Were you able to determine the manner of death in this case?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “What was the manner of death.”

  “It was clearly homicide,” Kat confirmed what everyone knew. That wasn’t the important part.

  “Not accident?” That was the important part.

  “Correct. Not accident.”

  “Thank you, doctor,” Brunelle smiled at her, but managed not to wink. “No further questions.”

  He sat down, satisfied with how the direct exam had gone, but anxious about what Edwards might do. She was good. Damn it.