Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist

by Ann Rule

  Welsh rolled away as she lay on the sidewalk in a futile effort to protect herself. The killer’s final blow was to drive the weapon hard into her lower back, burying the blade almost to the hilt. She lay on her side on the sidewalk until an ambulance arrived, a massive amount of blood running out of her wounds and forming a triangle as it ran toward the curb.

  I explained in my testimony that both low-velocity bloodstains from deep open wounds and medium-velocity impact spatter were evident in the photos. Still, the question arose in court, as it often does, as to why McKiever wasn’t drenched in blood given the violent, gory nature of the crime. You know the answer by now. First, the length of the knife enabled him to avoid contact with Welsh’s skin and bloody clothes. Only the final, fatal deep wound to her back drove his carving knife in to the hilt, bringing his hand in contact with her body. Second, though she was stabbed repeatedly, none of her arteries ruptured, so there would have been no arterial spurt to spray onto the killer—just the minimal spatter that typically lands on a murderer in an attack that produces medium-velocity blood spatter.

  Why wasn’t the murder weapon covered in Mr. McKiever’s finger-prints? Prosecutor John Martin answered that. Afraid removing the knife would exacerbate Welsh’s wounds, doctors left it where it was during emergency surgery, sterilizing it first, which would have made fingerprints undetectable with the technology available at the time. Investigators who retrieved the weapon from the operating room also handled it, which would have corrupted remaining prints.

  McKiever himself rejected an insanity defense. But if the jury had any questions about his mental health, he put their doubts to rest by giving a long, rambling statement in court explaining that Welsh was a witch who had to be stopped, though he still maintained that he wasn’t the one who killed her. It wasn’t the first time he had accused a woman of witchcraft. He had told psychiatric specialists that Kearney (the ice pick victim) and a pair of strangers he saw on a bus were trying to get into his veins and possess him. Doctors who treated him at various hospitals, outpatient clinics, and psychiatric centers had repeatedly expressed concern about his rage toward women.

  McKiever was found guilty of felony murder in the second degree and attempted robbery. He was sentenced to life in prison with parole eligibility in thirty years, though the judge recommended he never be considered for parole. Kunstler himself died less than a year later, leaving a legacy of famous and controversial clients.

  As a longtime homicide detective, I disagreed with the defense about who was ultimately culpable for the senseless murder of Alexis Ficks Welsh. In my opinion, it was Kevin McKiever. But I didn’t doubt that Kuby and Kunstler believed in their argument. In many ways, I respected what they were trying to do to rectify social injustice. I felt the same about Johnnie Cochran—maybe not when it came to O. J. Simpson, but in the many other cases where he represented the underdog. He stood up for the rights of others.

  I do the same whenever I fight for the exoneration of men and women I know are innocent based on what I read in blood evidence from the crime scene. The most important thing blood pattern analysis can do is speak for those who can’t, whether they are victims of crime or people wrongly condemned.

  7

  Cold Blood

  WHEN I WAS ABOUT to graduate from the Los Angeles Police Academy, an instructor gave me some good advice: “Don’t spend all your time with other cops, and don’t take your work home with you. Leave it here when your shift ends.” I followed his suggestion and built a full life outside my career. But checking my work at the door wasn’t always so easy. Certain cases and crime scenes got trapped in my head no matter how hard I tried to shake them out. They wound their way into my nightmares and crept up on me as disturbing memories when I least expected them. Several still do.

  What made them stand out? A few cases haunted me because of their sheer savagery. They were hate crimes, thrill kills, murders of children. Others were chilling in their randomness or because they were so complex and sophisticated that the perpetrators nearly eluded us. Just as crime scene investigators learn from one another, so do murderers. They study the mistakes their predecessors made and figure out how to avoid them.

  More than one murderer would make the hair on the back of your neck prickle if you strolled past him on the street. But others seem the unlikeliest of killers. As Becky Doherty, prosecutor in the Winda Snipes mutilation case, once put it, “He looks like the boy next door, but he’s really the monster under the bed.”

  The monsters under the bed in this chapter were unique in another way, too. Their crimes left us with unusual mysteries to solve. And the truth lay hidden in the blood they spilled. The men described in the following pages might have gotten away with murder or pinned their killings on other people, had subtle traces of blood evidence not betrayed them.

  Case Study: The Telltale Machete Print

  In December 1996, Nanette Toder was eager to start training for her new job with Vans Floral Products. John-Campbell Barmmer would be Toder’s boss at Vans, and he arranged a flight for his new employee from her home base of Miami, Florida, to Chicago for a series of meetings with the wholesale distribution company’s staff and clients. He booked a room for her at the Hampton Inn in the suburb of Crest-wood, a mile from Vans’s offices. The area was largely industrial and hardly scenic, but Barmmer had stayed at the inn himself and deemed it convenient as well as safe. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

  As soon as she checked into the hotel, Toder, a pretty thirty-three-year-old aerobics instructor who exercised daily, asked the staff to recommend a safe local gym. They suggested Gold’s. So Toder spent the next four days in meetings, then generally declined dinner invitations with her new colleagues in favor of hitting the fitness center. On December 12, the night before Toder was scheduled to check out and fly home, she followed her standard work-then-workout routine. Next, she picked up a salad from Wendy’s, stopped by the front desk to request a five A.M. wake-up call, and retreated to her room to eat dinner. At ten P.M., she called her mom in Pennsylvania to say good night. Finally, she checked to make sure her room door was locked and wedged her hefty black suitcase packed with clothes against it, as she did every night for extra protection.

  Hampton Inn desk clerk Lisa Dellorto thought it was odd when the hotel’s maintenance manager, Christopher Richee, called her just after her shift started at eleven P.M. to ask whether she wanted him to bring her a burrito from a local restaurant. “No thanks,” she told him, puzzled. Richee said he was picking up one for himself and would swing by the hotel shortly anyway. That struck Dellorto as even more peculiar, since Richee’s shift had ended at three-thirty that afternoon and he never showed up at work during off-hours. Nevertheless, in he strolled around midnight. He told Dellorto he was going to turn on the inn’s exterior Christmas lights, but a few minutes later she caught sight of him hunched over the computer that contained guest information. She would not fully understand what Richee’s unusual actions meant until much later.

  Early the next morning, Nan Toder failed to answer two wake-up calls placed to her room at five A.M. It was just after ten A.M. when Hampton Inn house keeper Concepcion Dominguez made her rounds of the second floor. She reached room 227 and knocked on the door. No answer. Assuming the room was empty, she inserted her metal house keeping key and pushed on the door. It budged an inch or so and then stopped, blocked by something heavy on the other side.

  Unsure what to do next, Dominguez asked her supervisor, Mirta Arroyo, to help. Arroyo spied the problem immediately: Someone had pushed a big black suitcase against the inside of the door. She knelt and shoved the suitcase back little by little, eventually managing to open the door.

  The two women gasped at the sight inside. The bed nearest to them was covered in blood. Terrified, they ran to get hotel manager Brenda Randazzo, who followed them to room 227 and saw the blood-covered body of Nan Toder lying between the beds. She closed the door, called the police, then instructed staff to stay out of the
room. A few minutes later, to her annoyance, she caught Christopher Richee using his master key to enter the room where the dead woman lay. She repeated her order that all employees were to steer clear of room 227 until the authorities arrived.

  Crestwood police officer John Barolga was the first to reach the Hampton Inn. It was Christopher Richee who led him to room 227 and opened the door for him. Barolga thanked Richee and told him to wait outside. Then he scanned the room carefully. He noticed two things immediately: First, there was a heavy suitcase just inside the door to the hallway. Second, there was a door that connected 227 to an adjoining room.

  Barolga turned his attention back to the scene at hand. The pillow and bedspread of the bed closest to the door were soaked with blood. What looked like a bloody towel lay on the bathroom floor. The officer stepped into the bathroom for a closer look when, to his surprise, he saw Richee walk past the open bathroom door toward the center of the guest room. Barolga ordered him to leave—the third time the maintenance manager had been told to vacate room 227—but instead Richee backed into the alcove near the suitcase. “Get out,” Barolga barked in no uncertain terms.

  Once he made sure Richee had exited, Barolga stepped into the center of the room. Toder was lying on her back on the floor between the two beds, propped up on her elbows. Her head was tipped back and her robe was hanging open so that her breasts and pubic area were exposed. A pair of panty hose was tied tightly around her neck. A phone cord had been used to bind her left wrist and her feet. Miscellaneous items from the room lay strewn over the floor. Though it looked like a sex crime, there was no sign of rape.

  An autopsy would soon reveal that Nan Toder had been strangled and slashed on the back of the head no fewer than seven times with a heavy blade that had caused massive bleeding.

  The prosecutor’s office asked me to examine the bloodstains and offer an interpretation of exactly what had happened during Toder’s murder. I read the reports and scrutinized roughly four hundred photographs from the crime scene. I also examined the clothing and bedding taken from room 227. It appeared that Toder was asleep facedown on the bed closest to the door, with her head at the top of the bed, when someone crept up and struck her multiple times in the head. The wounds were parallel, which indicated that she did not fight back. Judging from the blood all over her bindings, the killer tied Toder up and strangled her after the initial attack, then pulled her to the floor and posed her body.

  What weapon caused the massive gashes to Toder’s skull? On one of the sheets were several large bloody transfer prints of what appeared to be a machete, with its distinctive long, wide blade. Voids in a blood pattern can be as meaningful as blood itself, and here there were definite voids consistent with the brass insets of a machete handle. I conducted a number of experiments that involved dipping machetes and their handles in stage blood and pressing them against a white fabric background to test my theory. The patterns were identical.

  Blood transfers on the sheets also suggested that the killer was male and wore gloves. There was the bloody outline of a large hand near one of the machete patterns, but it was devoid of fingerprints—a ghost print. In fact, every scrap of evidence was tested and no finger-prints were retrieved. Nor did investigators find any incriminating hair or fibers. An examination of the bloody towel retrieved from the bathroom floor bore traces of DNA from a previous hotel guest. But police followed up on the lead and soon concluded that Toder’s killer had deliberately dipped a used towel from another room in her wet blood and tossed it on the bathroom floor to mislead them.

  The exterior of the door that connected room 227 with the hallway had one magnetic key card lock and another lock operated by a metal key. The key-operated lock had been recently damaged with a sharp object, most likely a screwdriver. Metal filings were strewn over the carpet outside the room. But the lock still worked. So did all three locks on the door’s interior. Given the position and heft of Toder’s suitcase and the struggle the two maids had to move it, it was almost inconceivable that the killer had entered from the hall. Like the bloody towel, the damaged door appeared to be a red herring left by the killer to throw the cops off track. The same held true of the items scattered over the floor of Toder’s room: Police concluded that they were staged to suggest a robbery, though nothing was missing.

  The windows were all locked from the inside, as was the dead bolt to the vacant room 229, which the inn generally reserved for disabled guests. There was no damage to the ceiling, no secret passage into the chamber. It was the proverbial locked-room mystery right out of an Agatha Christie novel. It looked as if the killer had appeared out of thin air and vanished into it.

  In what seemed a terrible twist of fate, the guest rooms at Crest-wood’s Hampton Inn were set to be upgraded to a new computerized electronic locking system on December 13, the day Nan Toder’s body was discovered. The staff had been briefed on the replacement system, which would keep track electronically of whose key was used to enter each room and when.

  It wasn’t long before Christopher Richee became the prime suspect in the Toder murder for several reasons. First, as maintenance manager, he was one of only four employees with master keys to the guest rooms. Second, Richee was in the vicinity at the approximate time the murder occurred, which was atypical for him, and he seemed to have no legitimate reason for being there. Third, he injected himself into the murder scene, which is common among killers. He just kept hovering around, the same way Brett Hartmann did after the Winda Snipes murder. (Whenever a body is found, a cop will be assigned to take the license plates of cars that drive past and the names of people who approach the scene. The officer will follow up on all these potential leads to find out whether one of the passersby is actually the perpetrator, overcome with curiosity about how investigations are progressing.)

  Fourth, and perhaps most significant, Richee had a criminal past that involved arrests for theft and illegal use of weapons as well as allegations of stalking a female co-worker. That was news to hotel management. It turned out the Hampton Inn had hired the twenty-eight-year-old ten months earlier and handed him a key that opened all their guest room doors without bothering to run a criminal background check on him.

  But Richee insisted he knew nothing about the crime, and police could find no forensic evidence to link him to it. So the brutal murder of Nanette Toder remained a mystery. It might have gone unsolved forever had one of Richee’s pals not gotten arrested in the spring of 1999. Eager to trade information for reduced charges, Michael Duello told police that he had recently helped Christopher Richee break into and enter a building in the area.

  Based on Duello’s information, Richee was arrested and charged with burglary. He was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison in March 2000. He soon pleaded guilty to an additional charge of harassing a witness in his burglary case—a woman whose car he asked friends to vandalize—and received another seven years.

  But burglary was just the beginning. Christopher Richee had much more sinister secrets to hide, if his onetime pal was to be believed. Duello claimed that on December 16, 1996, Richee called him on his cell phone in a panic to say that police were following him to his home—a room in the garage of his mother’s house—to search it. There was a bloody towel in there that he needed to get rid of pronto. Could Duello slip through the window and snatch it? Duello agreed, found the towel, and tossed it into a Dumpster nearby.

  He also told police that he was hanging out in Richee’s room in late December 1996 when he noticed that the machete Richee always kept in a cargo net was missing. He soon spotted the blade, but the handle was gone.

  “What happened?” Duello asked, pointing to the knife.

  Richee shrugged. “I was screwing around with it and the handle broke.”

  Duello watched his friend warily. “Did you kill that girl?” he asked.

  Richee shot him a glance. “What do you think?” he replied coyly.

  “No,” said his friend.

  “Stick with that,�
�� was Richee’s answer.

  Duello repeated his question.

  Richee first said no, then yes, then no again, leaving Duello unnerved and at a loss about what to think.

  Based on Duello’s statements, investigators decided to reexamine Christopher Richee’s role in the Nan Toder slaying. At last, the pieces began to fall into place.

  Richee’s former girlfriend Jill Paoletti told police—and later testified in court—that she had been with him at his house on the evening of December 12, 1996, when he suddenly ordered her to leave around eleven P.M., claiming he had a stomachache. The police questioned her at the time, and something they said made her suspect that Richee had lied to get rid of her, then slipped out. She confronted him a few days after her conversation with the cops. Richee said sure, he left. He got hungry and went to get a burrito. That seemed odd for someone with nausea. Besides, Paoletti had never seen Richee eat late at night.

  It wasn’t the only bizarre behavior he exhibited that week. Paoletti also remembered clearly that her boyfriend had shaved all the hair off his legs, pubic area, armpits, and face the first week of December that year. The only body hair he didn’t shave was on the top of his head.

  Patricia Yodka, whom Richee was also sleeping with in late 1996, unbeknownst to Paoletti, told investigators and later testified that Richee sometimes asked her to lie on her back, nude, propped up on her elbows with her head tilted back. He even photographed her in the pose—the same pose in which Toder’s body was found.

  Other acquaintances shared tales that left little doubt about Richee’s skill in breaking and entering. Jill Alexejun, yet another onetime girlfriend, stated that when she dated Richee in 1994, she was working as an assistant manager for the Lincoln Property Company. Richee was a maintenance technician there at the time. She often watched him change locks on apartment doors, access vacant apartments, and pick locked knobs deftly with a screwdriver. If the dead bolt was on, he used a drill. She also remembered once watching him unlock a door with a credit card.