Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist

by Ann Rule

  “I don’t know where my hotel is,” I admitted sheepishly. “My colleague has that information.”

  “Any guesses?”

  “Well, it might be the same place we stayed last year.”

  “Why don’t you call and find out?” he said, handing me his cell phone. I did and, to my relief, the desk attendant told me we were registered there.

  Our helpful new friend got his pickup, helped me load my equipment, and, though it was a forty-five-minute drive, dropped us off at the hotel I recognized from my previous training session. It was one A.M. when we heaved the trunks through the front doors, bedraggled and drained from the tension and the long trip.

  “I’m sorry, but you’re not registered here,” said the clerk at the desk.

  “What?!”

  The clerk shook his head. “There’s no record for you.”

  By this point, I was desperate. Should we go back to the airport and catch the next flight home? I glanced at Penny, surrounded by mounds of luggage.

  “Have you got any vacancies?” I asked.

  He checked his computer. “We have one room available.”

  “We’ll take it.”

  It turned out to be a luxury suite that had been readied for a no-show VIP. Baskets of fruit, flowers, and other luxury amenities covered every table. Ignoring them, Penny collapsed and I got on the room phone and started making calls. At last I reached Dayle, who was still wide awake and trying to locate us. I could hear the worry in her voice. She and our official room reservation were all the way across town.

  Some detective. I couldn’t even track down my own hotel. After coordinating with Dayle to meet the next morning and transfer our luggage, I gave in to my exhaustion, resolving never to travel internationally again without writing down my reservation information and getting a cell phone guaranteed to work abroad.

  We soon realized why people were so stunned to find two lost-looking Americans milling around the airport after dark. Just how seriously Colombians took security became apparent once the conference began and we were all given bodyguards. We spent the rest of the week being escorted everywhere we went in a bulletproof Suburban with two-inch-thick glass in the windows and a professional driver from the American embassy. Our driver never stopped for a red light if he could help it. If a motorcycle he deemed suspicious pulled up behind us, he simply veered over the median and sped off in the opposite direction. Every day when we arrived at the police academy, a thirty-minute drive from our hotel, officers on duty used mirrors to scan the underside of our vehicle, despite the fact that we were invited guests. Armed guards were posted at our hotel at all times.

  My students were a sharp and dedicated collection of about twenty-one local pathologists, psychiatrists, intelligence agents, police investigators, and dentists with expertise in bite-mark identification, all handpicked by the Colombian government. In addition to lecturing while students wore earphones for simultaneous translation, I made use of the trunks I had brought by setting up a series of elaborate re-creations of crime scenes with mannequins, stage blood, and other props, all inspired by real homicide cases I had worked. One mannequin was propped up in a bathroom with its head literally shot off using a shotgun. Another setup simulated a hanging, with only the faintest traces of blood as clues.

  It took Penny, Dayle, and me long, painstaking hours to set it all up, and whenever we made the smallest mistake, we had to clean up the damaged scene and start all over. We finally finished staging the vignettes at four A.M. Class started at eight A.M. When the students arrived, I divided them into teams, then invited them to rotate from scene to scene, with forty-five minutes allotted to examine each “crime.” At the end, the teams gave opinions about the crimes and compared notes, and I explained how the cases had actually unfolded.

  We also conducted a number of blood spatter experiments, and as always, I learned something new through teaching. One afternoon, a cluster of my students came hurrying over excitedly. The translator explained that they wanted to show me the work they had done. They dragged me to a gutter and pointed down at a trail of blood they had dropped into the sand-strewn cement channel.

  “Which direction does the trail lead?” they asked.

  I grimaced. My experience with sand was severely limited. I leaned over to examine it. The blood had soaked into the porous surface, and directionality was almost imperceptible. They watched me expectantly. If I made the wrong deduction, my credibility would be shot.

  I crouched down for a closer look. The droplets were round, but I thought I discerned minuscule specks that had broken out of them on one side, creating what’s called a “leading edge.” I took a deep breath. “This way,” I said, and pointed in the direction of the subtle tails.

  They erupted into applause.

  “Phew. That was a close one,” I mumbled.

  “What?” asked the translator.

  “Never mind,” I told him.

  On the day before we left, Dayle and Penny decided to squeeze in a bit of shopping. That gave us yet another window into the harrowing aspects of daily life in Bogotá. They were assigned a bodyguard and chauffeured in an armored car to the area’s most upscale mall. Before they got out, the driver and bodyguard had them remove all their jewelry, and the driver stashed it in his trunk. Then the bodyguard briefed them on proper mall behavior: “Never separate. Never walk by yourself. Always stay next to each other,” he cautioned, slinging an AK-47 over his shoulder in addition to his sidearm. “I will be ten feet behind you at all times.” It was more like heading into an undercover narcotics operation than into a department store.

  My work in Colombia made me proud of the system we have in America. It’s not perfect here, but it’s very, very good. I also developed tremendous respect for the men and women who fight crime in Bogotá. Their work is demanding and unending in the face of such high homicide rates. Yet they are passionate about and proud of what they do, and they remain optimistic in spite of the odds. By the time our farewell reception rolled around, we had developed some lasting friendships.

  “Weren’t you afraid to be here?” asked a female forensic patholo-gist who had joined with another doctor to serve as my bodyguard team for a portion of the week.

  “No. I felt protected by you,” I told her.

  “Well, we were afraid for you,” she said.

  “Aren’t you afraid for yourself?”

  “Yes,” was the answer, “but what can I do? This is my life.”

  Not Far from Home

  Although I thoroughly enjoy the journeys my work entails, some of the most compelling crimes happen in my own backyard of the Pacific Northwest. One memorable example came early in my consulting career. Let’s call it the Case of the Vanished Mariner.

  At a glance, Ruth and Rolf Neslund looked like any other retired couple living out their golden years on picturesque Lopez Island, one of the San Juan Islands in the northwestern corner of Washington State. Norwegian-born Rolf had enjoyed a long and largely illustrious career captaining ships for the Puget Sound Pilots Association and was a popular local figure. So when the gregarious octogenarian failed to turn up in any of his usual haunts in the late summer and fall of 1980, his friends at the pilots association got worried and called the San Juan County Sheriff’s Department. Deputies paid a visit to his wife, sixty-year-old Ruth Neslund, to see if she could enlighten them on his whereabouts. Ruth said she had no idea where her wayward husband had gone. “Probably ran off with her,” she said, a bitter edge in her voice. When police asked Ruth to clarify, she explained that Rolf had never broken things off with his mistress of many years earlier.

  Police checked out the possibility but soon dismissed it. Rolf’s “affair” had long since cooled into a platonic friendship, it seemed. In fact, the woman who had given birth to two sons with Rolf before Ruth had entered the picture and gone from mistress to wife herself was newly married at the time of Rolf’s disappearance. When police brought Ruth up-to-date on all this, she shrugged. Well then,
she suggested, maybe Rolf left because he was still despondent over a notorious 1978 accident in which he had crashed the Chavez—the forty-ton, 550-foot freighter he was piloting—into the east end of the West Seattle Bridge over the Duwamish West Waterway. Fortunately no one was hurt, and Neslund retired two weeks later. But in the process, the old sea captain single-handedly forced the city of Seattle to replace the bridge, a notorious bottleneck, with a new larger, higher $60 million six-lane West Seattle Bridge and freeway that would take seven years to complete. Everyone knew Rolf’s name because of the incident. Some had even quipped that the new bridge should be named in his honor. Maybe he just needed to get away for a while.

  But the more police delved, the less likely any of Ruth’s theories seemed. Rolf was diabetic, yet he had failed to refill his prescriptions for months. On one of their visits with Ruth, detectives noticed Rolf’s medicine was still sitting in his home on Lopez Island. Nor had he withdrawn any money from the bank since the previous summer. Even more peculiar, Rolf’s glasses were still sitting on the dresser.

  Everyone knew the couple was prone to drinking binges that sometimes escalated into violent fistfights. The police had been called to the Neslund residence to sort things out more than once. They noticed it was generally Rolf—not Ruth—who bore the scratches and cuts. Had she finally snapped during one of her benders and done her spouse in, as she had threatened to do so many times after tossing back a few too many?

  Circumstances grew even more suspicious when police learned that shortly before his disappearance, Rolf had realized Ruth was secretly transferring money out of his accounts into her own and hiding information about their finances from him. One friend came forward to say that the retired ship’s pilot had discussed changing his will and writing his wife out in favor of his two grown sons. People who were close to the tightfisted Ruth knew how she would feel about that: She would sooner see Rolf dead than let him give his boys a penny. She had said so herself.

  That was just the beginning. Though Ruth’s relatives seemed downright terrified of the pudgy, nondescript middle-aged woman, two of her nieces met privately with investigators to say that Ruth had called them and confessed to shooting Rolf in the head with one of the many guns she kept in the house. She had even told Donna Smith and Joy Stroup that she was burning her husband’s body in a barrel in the yard. But she was drunk when she said it, so neither woman took her seriously at the time. Could she have been telling the truth?

  In the spring of 1981, police got a search warrant and combed the Neslund home but turned up nothing incriminating. It would take another year and another member of Ruth’s own family disclosing even more lurid details about precisely where in the house and how the murder had occurred before a second police search uncovered the blood that had lain hidden in plain sight all along. Ruth’s brother Paul Myers claimed he had overheard Ruth describing the killing in sickening detail. Ruth explained how another of her brothers, Robert Myers, had held Rolf still so that she could shoot him in the head. Then Robert dismembered Rolf in the bathtub so his body would be easier for her to burn.

  Based on Paul Myers’s information about where to look, deputies inspected the living room once more. This time, they noticed that several new sections of carpet appeared to have been pieced together with older ones. When they pulled these back, they found large, dark stains that looked like blood on the concrete. They used a jackhammer to remove them for testing and submission into evidence. There was also what looked like high-velocity impact spatter on the ceiling. They even discerned tiny brownish dots on the edges of the shower doors in the master bathroom—the bathroom where Paul Myers claimed his brother had chopped up Rolf’s body for Ruth with an ax and a knife. A .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver with what appeared to be a few flecks of blood still clinging to it was also retrieved from one of Ruth’s dresser drawers. Though sophisticated DNA testing that could link blood to a specific individual would not appear for more than a decade, the samples were tested and determined to be human blood of type A, the same as both Rolf’s and Ruth’s.

  Ruth stuck to her story. Any blood, she said, came from her own nosebleeds or the injuries Rolf had inflicted over the years. Since there was no body, it would be a challenging case to make, particularly with the department’s scant resources. So the San Juan County Prosecutor’s Office tapped the attorney general’s brilliant team of Bob Keppel and Greg Canova, with whom I worked earlier on the Donna Howard “horse kick” case. As you will recall from the Howard case, Keppel and Canova had been appointed to a special unit designated to help local prosecutors with criminal cases when their offices were under-staffed or their resources fell short.

  Investigations continued, and in March 1983, Ruth Neslund was formally charged with first-degree murder in connection with her vanished husband. The case would be plagued by countless delays stemming from motions filed by Ruth’s lawyers and from her own failing health. During jury selection, she had to be put in intensive care for high blood pressure and suffered delirium tremens from alcohol withdrawal before her release. Ruth’s case eventually went to trial in November 1985. By then, her brother Robert was living in a nursing home and suffering from senility. He was never charged in connection with Rolf Neslund’s murder.

  Canova and Keppel asked me to consult on the evidence and give an analysis of what the bloodstains indicated. So I read all the documents from the investigation to date and visited the Neslund home. The droplets of human blood on the ceiling were indeed consistent with a gunshot wound, particularly with the larger, heavier drops that travel farther than the bloody mist in high-velocity impact spatter. And enough of them were visible to conclude that whoever had been shot had been seriously injured or killed. Even though Rolf’s body was nowhere to be found, it looked as though he had left a good deal of his blood at home.

  The trial lasted over a month and the jury deliberated for four days before finding Ruth Neslund guilty of the murder of her husband, Rolf. She was sentenced to twenty years to life in prison. She was released while her case was on appeal. But after she got behind the wheel of her van under the influence of alcohol and seriously injured two bicyclists, the judge ordered her to begin serving her sentence. She died in prison of a pulmonary blood clot in 1993 at age seventy-three, still protesting her innocence, still claiming her seafaring husband had sailed off into the sunset somewhere. Rolf Neslund’s remains have never been found.

  9

  Trials and Errors

  “MR. ENGLERT,” THE DEFENSE attorney began, taking a step forward and regarding me shrewdly, “isn’t it true that you once got an F in a high school algebra class?”

  “Yes, I did,” I replied. “And I was lucky to get it.”

  A few chuckles emanated from the jury box.

  The stern-faced, smartly dressed woman was taken aback but recovered in a flash. “Do you find this funny?” she demanded. “A man’s life is at stake.”

  “No, ma’am,” I said. “I don’t find it funny.”

  “Yet clearly you enjoy getting a response from the jury. You like people.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I do like people. I even like you.”

  This time, full-fledged laughter erupted from several jurors.

  The lawyer’s eyes narrowed and her skin deepened to an apoplectic red. This was a high-profile multiple-murder case and she had a lot at stake. She wasn’t going to be lampooned by an expert witness whom she fervently wanted the jury to dismiss as a “hired gun.”

  “Don’t you think your struggle with simple high school algebra calls your credibility on mathematical and scientific matters into question?!”

  “No, ma’am. It has no bearing on my analysis of the blood evidence in this case.”

  I wasn’t trying to be glib in the courtroom that day. In fact, I admired the defense attorney for doing her homework. She and her colleagues must have gone to some trouble to dredge up my old transcripts from forty-odd years ago in San Angelo. But by the time she went in for the kill in this
particular midwest trial, I had already endured so many character assassination attempts on the witness stand that my skin had thickened. If I hadn’t learned to deflect the countless slings and arrows criminal lawyers hurl at me whenever I testify as an authority on blood patterns, I would have crawled off to nurse my wounds long ago.

  During my years as a police officer, I took the witness stand many times to explain ordinary actions taken in the line of duty. But nothing could have prepared me for going into court to give expert testimony. As a law officer, even jurors who claim to hate cops automatically view you as an authority figure. They assume you know what you’re talking about. They listen to you. As an expert witness, you start from scratch. You have to build credibility. The only way to earn the jury’s respect is to prove that you know your subject matter.

  That’s not easy when opposing counsel is deliberately trying to humiliate and discredit you. The first time a lawyer hissed in my ear, “I’m going to destroy you,” it knocked me off balance. The first time one struck up a casual conversation in a corridor, then turned on me in court like a striking rattlesnake spewing venom, I was stunned. I once had a lawyer step resolutely into my path, staring me down and blocking my way to the courtroom until he was certain that I had seen his tie. It was covered with circling sharks.

  The symbolism wasn’t far off. There are courtroom attorneys out there every bit as ruthless and cutthroat as the criminals, especially when they know their case hinges on a jury’s decision to trust or doubt what I say about blood evidence. But by now I’ve heard almost every threat they can conjure up. I’ve been told I’ll never work in this business again, never eat lunch in this town again, never show my face in public again, more times than I can count. I’m used to it.

  I know brilliant, ethical lawyers who ask for no more than an honest analysis of evidence to help them give their clients the best defense possible. But I have also met my share of scoundrels. If my analysis of the blood spatter in a crime scene doesn’t work in their favor, they are not above pleading, “Can’t you come up with anything better than that for me?”