The sedan was right behind. The man skidded to a stop in the middle of the street, ran over to Cruz’s car, opened the passenger door, and dragged Rose Morrison out onto the snow. “This time you die, bitch!” he snarled.
Then he poked his head in the car once more, grabbed Rose’s purse, and warned Cruz that if she said anything, he would kill her. He dragged Rose Morrison back to his car and vanished. The police officer arrived on the scene a few minutes later.
It was an incredible story, backed up by Juliet’s paralyzing wound and the multiple bullet holes the police found in her car. Her descriptions of both her attacker and his sedan led to the arrest of twenty-nine-year-old Roland Smith,* a black man whom she later picked out of a police lineup.
Rose Morrison’s fate wasn’t known for seventeen days. A witness, John Jones,* came forth with the news that he had found a woman’s body hidden under a low bridge approximately twenty miles from the police station. Her blouse and one of her boots also were recovered. There was a large pool of blood nearby, and a bullet lay underneath the body.
Jones reported that, while driving by, he had noticed a woman’s white slip. When he stopped for a closer look, he saw a woman’s leather coat on the ground by the roadway. Near it was a package of condoms. Police would later find another condom package at the same site as well as two empty cigarette packs.
Rose Morrison’s battered, nude body was secreted under the bridge a little farther on. She had been horribly beaten all over her body with blunt force. Her nose was fractured in several places, as were several other facial bones and her skull. The left side of her face had taken the brunt of the assault. It was deformed from his blows.
The blunt-force injuries caused Morrison’s death, but her killer had also shot her in the left forehead and shoulder. A piece of shrapnel pierced her right hip.
No drugs or alcohol were found in her system. Her body bore no defensive wounds or ligature marks. No semen was recovered. A lubricant had been applied to her vagina and anus. It appeared that Morrison had been anally raped after she died.
Strangest and most gruesome of all, two of her upper incisors, the left mid and left laterial, had been taken from their sockets, which the medical examiner described as open and bloody. The teeth were never recovered.
My participation in the case evolved around the pivotal issue of whether Smith had committed a similar crime four years earlier. I was asked to render my professional opinion as to whether the two crimes in fact were linked. I started by examining the facts of the earlier case.
On a Friday night in November, twenty-one-year-old Maria Rodriguez* left a local nightclub about 11:45. A couple returning home from a movie that night reported seeing her at an intersection not long thereafter. They said that a white car, occupied by a single male, and a blue car were right behind her. The male in the white car appeared extremely angry.
A short while later, residents in a nearby, middle-class subdivision heard the sounds of a collision, followed by approximately ten minutes of excited yelling in the street. Two or three male voices were heard. Car doors were repeatedly opened and slammed shut.
Maria Rodriguez’s vehicle was later recovered in the vicinity. It was locked. Her flashers were on. The left front had minor scratches, and the left turn signal lens was broken out.
The next day, on a mountain highway an hour’s drive northwest from where her car was found, Maria’s battered, naked body was discovered at the bottom of an embankment at a roadside rest area. Evidence at the scene suggested that a vehicle had been backed to the edge of the embankment, and that two people had gotten out and thrown her over the edge. Footprints indicated that a third individual had walked from the car over to the highway, probably to keep watch.
Her bloody sweatpants and torn underwear were found along the roadside three miles away. Her car keys were recovered seven miles from the body disposal site. Police did not recover the necklace that Maria Rodriguez wore that night, or her watch, driver’s license, or credit cards.
The victim’s cause of death was listed as “central nervous system contusions and acute blood loss.” She had been beaten to death and her throat cut three times. Her entire body was covered in injuries from blunt-force trauma. Her nose was fractured, and a single huge contusion covered the left side of her face.
No semen was detected, nor was there any indication of direct injury to Maria’s sexual organs. No defensive wounds or ligature marks were noted in the autopsy. The medical examiner did describe extensive bruising of her pubic area and breasts. The most remarkable injury, however, was to her mouth.
Maria Rodriguez’s upper right mid incisors and left middle incisor—three teeth in all—had been taken.
In linkage analysis I must examine the differences between crimes as carefully as the similarities. In the Rose Morrison and Maria Rodriguez cases, these differences began with the fact that one victim was an Anglo and the other Hispanic. Also, a gun was used in the Morrison murder, while Maria’s killer used a knife.
Morrison hadn’t been robbed; Rodriguez had. Only a single offender had attacked Rose; it was believed that several males were involved in Maria’s abduction.
The presence of the lubricant and evidence of postmortem and tearing support the conclusion that Rose Morrison was sexually violated after death. There was no medical evidence that Maria Rodriguez was raped.
However, these dissimilarities did not rule out the possibility that one man had been involved in both women’s deaths. I believed some of them stemmed from the killer’s moving up the learning curve, as successful offenders generally do. It is not unusual for a serial offender to commit his first crime, or crimes, with accomplices then graduate to committing them on his own. Kenneth Bianchi—known together with his cousin, Angelo Buono, as the Hillside Strangler—is a notable example of this pattern of progression.
A serial offender has several reasons for preferring to act alone. Maria Rodriguez’s killer probably realized he was safer without fellow offenders who could become witnesses against him. He would also recognize the danger of being seen and identified in the suburban neighborhood where Maria was abducted. The interstate was a safer place to operate. Likewise, a gun is a more useful weapon than a knife.
He also did a better job of hiding the second victim’s body. Rodriguez was discovered within twenty-four hours; Morrison’s remains weren’t found for seventeen days. Finally, by stealing Rodriguez’s personal possessions, he had heightened his risk of being connected to her murder. Nothing belonging to Rose Morrison was known to have been stolen except her two teeth.
Investigators should always bear in mind that there will be differences between two crimes, even if the same person committed them. The variables responsible for these inconsistencies include the circumstances, victim behavior, the amount of time the offender has, and his mood.
Next I focused on the similarities. Both victims were females in their early twenties, and both had been out alone in their cars in the early hours of a Saturday. Both were abducted after incidents in which the left front portions of their vehicles received minor damage. There were no witnesses to either collision.
Both victims’ cars were left where they had been abducted. Both women eventually were transported elsewhere in their assailants’ vehicles.
Both cases featured multiple crime scenes, and both victims’ possessions were found scattered in different locations. Both were found nude, near a rural roadside, and in both instances care had been taken to conceal the body. No victim clothing was found near the disposal site.
Both murders appeared to be anger motivated. The victims had been severely beaten over their entire bodies, sustaining injuries far in excess to those necessary to cause death. Both murders were examples of overkill.
Recall that none of Faryion Wardrip’s Texas homicides, bloody though they were, met the overkill criterion. These two homicides, however, passed the threshold of excessiveness.
Both women suffered blunt trauma, primarily to the left sides
of their faces, and both had been kept by their captors at least two hours.
No seminal fluid was found in connection with either homicide.
There were no defensive wounds nor ligature marks on either body.
Both victims had their noses fractured.
And the killer had extracted and kept upper incisors from both of them.
Although four years separated the two crimes, I had little trouble concluding that the same killer had committed both. The extracted teeth were compelling evidence, of course. But since this aspect was totally new in my experience, I advised my client to secure a second expert’s opinion.
My recommendation was Dr. Lowell Levine, the eminent forensic odontologist and director of the New York State Police’s Medicolegal Investigations Unit. Dr. Levine said that he, too, believed the teeth in both cases were intentionally removed. Dr. Levine also could not recall a similar case of deliberately excised upper teeth.
Roland Smith was sentenced to prison in the Rose Morrison case, thanks to Juliet Cruz’s bravery and quick wits.
Linkage analysis can be a useful tool for isolating the probability that one person was, or was not, involved in multiple offenses. In cases where no reliable witnesses, or physical evidence, are available, it can be a critical factor in establishing guilt or innocence. Sometimes, as in the Wardrip case, it has the same sort of value that a good profile has. It helps the police focus their investigation, to perhaps discard unpromising ideas and pursue potentially valuable ones that they hadn’t previously considered.
In this case my analysis did provide survivors with a sense of justice completed. It seemed certain that Smith had indeed murdered both women, and just as certainly he’s serving time for committing the crimes.
13
Equivocal Deaths
Sometimes my job as an investigator is not to help identify the person most likely to have committed an unsolved crime. Instead, the task may be to determine just what happened when a person’s manner of death is unclear or in dispute. This facet of my work is known as equivocal death analysis or EDA.
Equivocal death analysis is by far the most demanding work I do. Unlike a profile, in which I paint a word picture of an UNSUB, in an EDA my quest isn’t who but what. Was the death a homicide, a suicide, or an accident? Besides having broad experience with all three manners of death, the equivocal death analyst requires extensive information about the victim and the circumstances surrounding his or her demise before rendering an opinion.
Finding out just what happened to the deceased is, of course, of vital interest to the victim’s loved ones. In addition, a question of suicide versus accidental death can have profound religious significance—as well as insurance implications.
Then there is the stigma attached to certain deaths. I know of two instances in which parents of boys who died during dangerous autoerotic episodes sought to have their sons’ death certificates altered—one to show the cause of death as an accident, the other to list it as murder—in order to avoid embarrassment.
In this chapter you will read about three cases that illustrate some of the many obstacles that a person preparing an EDA faces.
The Mysterious Watch
Eighteen-year-old Patrick Mahan* died in an unusual way, in an unusual position, at an unusual location. Three days after disappearing from his home, the young man was found hanging from a metal ladder inside a vertical sewer pipe, with a plastic-coated bicycle cable snug around his neck.
Mahan was totally nude except for a rosary around his neck and a bracelet with a cross on his right wrist. His mouth and eyes were wrapped with a single, continuous piece of duct tape, which had prevented the teenager from seeing or speaking, but did permit him to breathe through his nose.
His body was partially visible from a slotted manhole cover above him. But Mahan arrived at the site where he was found from below, via a horizontal sewer main that ran twenty-five feet directly beneath his suspended body. The teenager’s clothes were discovered at the mouth of the horizontal pipe. A partially used roll of duct tape was found another fifteen feet away.
The bicycle chain was looped through the third topmost rung of the metal ladder, then under his left arm and around his neck in a bizarre configuration. A lock—its keyhole facing up and toward Mahan—secured the ends of the chain. The key later was discovered directly below the victim in the horizontal pipe, lying in five inches of sewer water.
Mahan’s hands and feet were free and unmarked, though dirty with debris from the ladder. His body showed no injuries other than that caused by the bicycle cable. Strangest of all, Patrick Mahan’s most prized possession, his grandfather’s pocket watch, was discovered in his mouth.
THIS IS AN INVERTED “T” SITUATION
Local authorities spent a year investigating this death. Among themselves they debated what to call it—a homicide, a suicide, or perhaps an accident—before the District Attorney’s Office contacted the BSU to request an equivocal death analysis.
Knowledge of the victim’s personality and behavior is critical to an EDA. In this case our sources of information would be a wide selection of Mahan’s family, friends, and acquaintances, a real cross section of those who knew him. Each sat down for a structured interview with a police officer, who asked the witnesses a number of questions I had provided in the order I had listed them. These procedures helped ensure a balanced and detached picture of Mahan and not just a general discussion of “how wonderful he was.”
Subjectivity among witnesses is a common problem for criminal investigators. For example, if you asked my mother what kind of person I am, I believe she would have answered that God personally chose me to be her son. My own three sons would each tell you something a bit different about me. I don’t care to guess what my first wife would have to say. My neighbors, business partners, and fellow church members would each have their independent perspectives. Although their views might differ sharply, collectively their views would probably add up to a pretty fair and accurate appraisal.
In some equivocal death analyses I ask the police to reinterview subjects a second time within three to six months of the initial interview. Often, the same person will offer two highly contrasting views of the deceased. At first we tend to remember only the good things about the dead. “Oh, he was a wonderful husband and neighbor” is a typical comment. Six months later, however, the same source might say, “I know I told you what a great guy he was, but he could be arrogant at times. He could really irritate people.”
In the Mahan case, the police conducted excellent interviews with a large number of people who knew the young man in various ways and obtained for me a well-balanced description of the victim.
Patrick Mahan lived in a small northeastern community and attended a vocational high school. His teachers said he paid attention to his studies. Until just before his death he had done well in class. Patrick resided alone with his mother, who was separated from her husband, Patrick’s stepfather. Mrs. Mahan told police her son was highly inquisitive and easily bored by any sort of routine. She also said that he was a very observant Catholic.
The teenager was physically well developed and lean, about five feet, six inches tall, and very athletic. He participated in a variety of sports, from swimming, karate, soccer, and weight lifting to football and baseball. Patrick moved in a small circle of close friends. These boys and girls said that Mahan did not go out on many dates but wanted to. There was also a rumor that he had fathered a child, they said, but the police were unable to verify this allegation.
He had a collection of ornamental swords that he recently had destroyed and discarded after using one of the weapons to decapitate a cat—or so I was told. The incident was not described more fully. Mahan kept the rest of his prized possessions, including his grandfather’s pocket watch, in a locked chest in his room.
The goal of an equivocal death analysis is not to prove the manner of death, but to arrive at an informed opinion whether homicide, suicide, or an accident
most likely occurred. To remain as unbiased as possible, I identify and list every material fact or instance of behavior that is consistent, or inconsistent, with homicide, suicide, or an accident. What results is a kind of evidence tally sheet, a three-column graph of all relevant data.
In the Mahan case I focused first on the possibility of homicide. I found four factors consistent with this hypothesis. First, two sources told the police that the young man may have owed money to drug dealers. The rumored amounts ran from two thousand dollars to two hundred thousand. Further investigation failed to verify any such drug connection in Mahan’s life. Nevertheless, we had to consider the reports as elements consistent with murder.
Second, one of the victim’s female friends reported she had observed Mahan speaking to a person in a white car with tinted windows shortly before his death. She said Patrick had ignored her as she walked by. The alleged incident further fueled conjecture that Mahan was involved with drug dealing.
The third factor was a report to the police that the victim was part of a male prostitution ring. He allegedly was seen riding in a car belonging to the group’s pimp on the evening he disappeared. The pimp, if he existed at all, was never identified.
Some pretty far-fetched stories of this nature can surface in the course of a criminal investigation. Usually they are based on nothing more than hearsay. However, the people reporting such tales often sincerely believe them to be true and can be quite convincing in reporting them. All such leads must be investigated.
In Patrick Mahan’s case, the police found no evidence to suggest the victim was a prostitute or that such a ring even existed. Additionally, the pathologist who conducted Mahan’s autopsy found no medical evidence that he was engaged in homosexual practices.
Another intriguing bit of evidence was a red mark, wider than the bicycle chain, around the victim’s neck. Although this discovery caused some concern initially, it was determined to be the result of livor mortis, a common case of tissue discoloration due to the settling of the victim’s blood after death. The mark was consistent with blood pooling above the noose, which had impeded its normal postmortem flow to the lower parts of the body.
Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind Page 19