by Tom Philbin
He was a thief and a con man and a sociopath with enough money to traffic with the upper crust of society, and he was a draft dodger, like so many of the ultra-wealthy. But when it came to fighting women, he was a real tough guy: he beat his first wife unconscious and ripped off her clothes.
But he kept the ugliness and violent tendencies hidden, and used his money to attract socialites who ordinarily would have assumed he was the coat-check boy. He dated several models at once, yet insisted on fidelity from all of them. He bugged their apartments to be sure they complied.
One day he was found strangled on the floor of his palatial Manhattan flat. Police first believed he’d been tortured for revenge or to extract business secrets. Then they started thinking it was a kidnapping gone wrong. The last person to see Rubinstein alive was one of his girlfriends, Estelle Gardner, but she had left his apartment around 1:30 a.m. Around 2:30 a.m., Rubinstein had called another girlfriend named Patricia Wray, but she declined his invitation to come over. The apartment was protected by heavy doors and iron bars, which meant a key had been used to gain entry. Rubinstein gave keys to his staff and girlfriends. All were questioned, and all were cleared.
Rubinstein’s life was depicted in a great 1956 film, Death of a Scoundrel, by a man who in life was also a scoundrel—actor George Sanders, who ultimately took his own life because he said it was a bore.
April Tinsley
April Tinsley was abducted on a chilly Friday afternoon in 1988 while walking home from a friend’s house in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her body was found three days later about twenty miles away in a rural area dotted with Amish farms.
Despite an intensive search, police were unable to find her killer. Two years later, a message written in pencil or crayon appeared on a barn door not far from where April’s body had been discovered. The writer claimed responsibility for the murder.
April Tinsley
Then, in spring 2004, four notes appeared at homes in the Fort Wayne area—several placed on bicycles that young girls had left in their yards—that also were believed to have been written by the killer. The notes, all on lined yellow paper, were placed inside plastic bags along with used condoms or Polaroid pictures of the killer’s body. Several of the notes referred to April Tinsley.
Since those 2004 notes, the killer has not been heard from. But he has left a trail of evidence that the FBI hopes to follow. The FBI investigators believe the case is “highly solvable,” and after twenty-one years, their desire to bring April Tinsley’s killer to justice is stronger than ever. Not so incidentally, anyone who provides information that leads to the arrest of April’s killer will be eligible for a $15,000 reward.
The reason why crimes go unsolved—and remain unsolved—has been touched upon in this book. But the subject merits more attention because it is an important one. Not all true-crime fans know how many investigations go wrong for one reason or another.
We are, of course, deluded by crime stories on TV and in the movies into believing that the most complex crimes can be solved in an hour or two. That simply is not true.
Investigations have demonstrated time and time again how wrong turns can be taken. Perhaps no case has shown this more forcefully than that of O.J. Simpson for the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman. The many mistakes made by investigators in the field and in the lab throughout that investigation may well have influenced the outcome of the trial. Perhaps the most pertinent commentary came from Simpson juror Carrie Bess: “As far as I’m concerned, Mr. Simpson would have been behind bars if the police work had been done properly.”
But the O.J. case was hardly the only one where lab mistakes have been made. Years ago, for example, I remember the lab in a California town identifying dog hair as human hair and routinely misidentifying fluids.
Independent analysis discovered how bad a lab can be while examining the Houston Police Department’s crime lab. That lab repeatedly tested DNA samples incorrectly and, in some cases, made up results without actually testing evidence. Investigative analysts also determined that the HPD performed incomplete serology work or did none at all in more than four hundred cases. Indeed, the investigation into the lab reversed the guilt of three men who had been convicted with erroneous information. Other prisoners also will most likely be exonerated once retests recommended by the investigation have been completed.
Problems in San Mateo Lab
Another lab that has had big problems is the San Mateo County crime laboratory in California. Lab administrators didn’t have a business plan with operational goals and objectives, so the lab lacked focus and was unable to deliver what its varied client base required. Law-enforcement agencies didn’t submit evidence to the lab because they didn’t believe it would be processed in time.
This type of situation compromises criminal justice in two ways—criminals may be on the street longer, and innocent people may be jailed pending evaluation of evidence. Here are examples of other problems at the San Mateo lab:
A suspect in a burglary case had to be released after being detained for forty-eight hours because evidence had not been analyzed in time to file charges.
The police had identified a suspected murderer but could not arrest him because they did not have the lab results needed before charges could be filed. This police department waited for several months without receiving a status report about analysis of the evidence.
An 11-year-old homicide was reopened because a lead developed regarding two suspects. When police asked the crime lab for the original crime-scene fingerprints, to attempt to match them to the new suspects, the police found that the crime lab had never processed the original prints.
The labs I have mentioned represent the tip of the iceberg, investigators say. Lack of money and training are the usual factors involved when incompetence rears its ugly head. Many forensic laboratories are poorly funded and staffed with “experts” who are poorly trained.
Another big problem is the limited evidence showing the accuracy and reliability of most forensic methods, especially those that rely on expert interpretation. A study by the National Academy of Sciences suggested that forensic professionals be certified and laboratories accredited, that uniform standards be followed in analyzing evidence, and that laboratories be independent of police and prosecutors who might bias judgments. In the long run, as detailed in the New York Times, research is needed to determine the accuracy of forensic methods.
As of 2009, only a few states (New York, Oklahoma, and Texas) required forensics laboratories to meet specific standards for quality or practitioners to be certified according to a set of standards. According to the Justice Project in 2009, 96 percent of positions in forensic-science laboratories are held by people with a bachelor’s degree or less.
Chain of Custody
In forensic science, the ability to prove that a chain of custody has not been broken is a vital test of authenticity of both the crime scene and the evidence. The chain of custody shows when, how, and by whom the evidence was found, secured, collected, transported, preserved, and tested. It can be the only thing that ties defendants to the evidence that brought them to trial.
Evidence ceases to be acceptable in the eyes of the law when it is contaminated by preventable technical or moral failings, such as a break in the chain of custody.
The O.J. trial had many lab mistakes in the chain of custody that undermined the credibility of the prosecution. For example, LAPD criminalist Collin Yamauchi confirmed that at one time during testing, he inadvertently transferred blood from the Simpson vial onto his plastic gloves. The defense tried to infer that this blood might, in fact, have then been transferred onto the leather glove found at Simpson’s home (as part of a police conspiracy).
Mistakes Investigators Make
In addition to mistakes related to the lab, a potpourri of other mistakes are made at the crime scene and during the investigation by law-enforcement personnel such as uniformed officers, detectives, prosecutors, med
ical examiners, and just ordinary people.
Probably the most dramatic or stupefying mistake the author has ever heard of was at the scene of the Sharon Tate murders by the Manson family. Investigators were excited when they found a bloody fingerprint on the doorbell, but when they ran it for prints, they were less enthusiastic. It turned out to be the thumbprint of a police officer who, to gain access to the house, had pressed the doorbell, which happened to have blood on it!
And consider the O.J. Simpson case. According to Armanda Cooley, the jury forewoman, jurors believed that criminalists Dennis Fung and Andrea Mazzola were in a rush and mishandled things and then tried to cover up with explanations that never added up. In other words, their techniques just started getting sloppy. Who knows how many people are in jail right now due to these investigators’ negligence?
Dennis Fung, infamous forensic technician in the O.J. Simpson case.
The following is a roundup of other investigative mistakes.
1. Not protecting the evidence.
Most errors in a homicide investigation occur at the crime scene, so it is important that the uniformed cops get on the scene and protect the evidence, if any, so it can’t be altered, destroyed, or lost. This may be physical evidence or the spoken word. For example, say that someone blurts out something like: “Louie, I knew he would kill Jenny. That’s what he said.” That statement should be written down and preserved by an officer at the scene. Later something like that could become important evidence.
The officers should also secure the scene so that people who are not authorized to enter can’t. One investigator found that the brass would often show up and trample over a crime scene. The only way he could stop them was by threatening to subpoena anyone coming into the scene unauthorized so they would have to go to court and explain why.
2. Not notifying homicide investigators as soon as possible.
Homicide investigators are really the only ones who should be processing the scene, so they should be called to the scene as soon as it is identified. Other cops are not trained to do this type of investigation.
3. Not treating a death scene as a homicide.
All suspicious deaths need to be treated as homicides to minimize the possibility of someone staging a scene so it appears to be a suicide. It’s all a question of perception, and if investigators think homicidally, they will be able to determine much more quickly if the death was a homicide.
For example, we know of a crime scene that was staged to look like a man put a rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger. But because of the rifle’s recoil, it would have been impossible for the man to have shot the rifle and for the gun itself to have ended up where it was.
On the other hand, a man was discovered with numerous stab wounds in his chest, leading to the assumption that he had been stabbed to death. In fact, people who commit suicide may be able to stab themselves in the chest numerous times—including the heart—before dying.
The gruesome scene where Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were murdered.
The author remembers one suicide, at first thought to be a homicide, where a man hit himself four times in the forehead with a short ax. Today investigators have to be particularly careful in determining what happened at a crime scene because TV shows like CSI give details on how to commit murder and get away with it.
4. Having a preconceived notion of what happened.
Most law-enforcement agencies send out a team of cops based on what is said to be at the scene. For example, a cop found a man hanging from a ceiling beam and called it in as a suicide. A police team was dispatched, but it didn’t include anyone who was familiar with homicide. The death was determined to be a suicide, but a homicide investigator was in the area. He went to the scene, and when he observed the wear patterns on the top of the rope, he realized that it was a murder. The deceased had had the rope looped over his neck. Then the rope had been thrown over the beam and pulled up until the victim strangled to death.
Many uniformed officers will wrongly assume suicide rather than homicide and then blithely go through the motions of the investigation because they don’t view suicide as a serious thing.
Top investigator Vernon Geberth has been to 8,000 death scenes. He says: “In the many suicides that I have reviewed as a consultant, it was apparent to me that the investigation did not take each point to its ultimate conclusion. Instead, certain things that should have been done were not done, sufficient photographs were not taken, and certain tests were not conducted. Even though in some instances the deaths were suicides, the fact of the matter was that the incomplete and insufficient preliminary investigation raised legitimate concerns.”
5. Not controlling the scene.
The book City of the Dead contains a scene in which a prostitute had been murdered and the perp had jammed a half-full whiskey bottle into her anus. One of the detectives grabbed the bottle with a rubber-gloved hand and offered it to his partner, saying: “Want a slug?”
Some people might find this scene hilarious, but what’s happening is the opposite of what should be happening at a crime scene. The detective in charge should maintain a dedicated, take-charge attitude and be serious about the work at hand. If he’s not, then the atmosphere of the crime scene could get away from him. Chain of custody can be damaged, something that might show up later in court when the detective in charge takes the stand. Investigators should always follow an established procedure.
6. Not having a protocol in place to ensure that everything that should be collected has been collected.
Investigators should keep a list of items to check off as they collect them, such as hair, fiber, paper, and shell casings.
7. Not taking enough photos.
Who knows, in a murder investigation, or any crime investigation for that matter—what will or will not become important in the scene later on. Taking an abundant number of photographs of anything and everything is vital. For example, in the case described in Chapter 11, “The Enemy Within,” the crimescene photographer took a picture of the inside of the empty bureau drawer. Later a checkbook was found in that drawer, placed there by the murderer. Fortunately, the photographer had taken all the photos he could. “When in doubt, click away,” says one detective.
8. Doing a poor canvass.
A canvass is police speak for talking to people in the neighborhood where the crime occurred. That may take place at a roadblock at the same time of the day as when the crime occurred to catch anyone who might have been passing by then and noticed something. Or it may be quick conversations with people on the street or a door-to-door canvass.
As one NYPD investigator put it, “One of the most important things in an investigation is GOYAKOD: get off your ass and knock on doors.” A street looks quiet and empty, but you never know who is looking out a window and will spot a car in the area or a passerby, or be able to verify the time someone said they left the house—or entered it. People who live on a street are used to it being a certain way, and when there is a slight deviation, they notice.”
9. Not talking to enough people.
Victimology is the process of interviewing everybody who knew the victim, and it is a vital part of an investigation. But sometimes cops are simply lazy and unwilling to talk to the hundreds of people—friends, neighbors, business associates—that must be interviewed in the average homicide investigation. Indeed, a detective who talks to enough people will know the victim better than the person knows himself. From this, the detective can ascertain what the victim was involved in—and with whom—and start looking for a motive for murder. Without doing that, the detective simply will not know enough about the victim and the case will almost surely go cold.
10. Not sharing information.
The lifeblood of any crime investigation is disseminating information to all of the members of the team. One NYPD detective explained why the squad has meetings every week on a case: “Ten brains are better than one.” Very true, and a number of people are involved in a ma
jor investigation, including the medical examiner, detectives, crime-scene technicians, the district attorney, and ambulance personnel. The supervising detective has to make sure everyone gets all the information needed to do their jobs better. “Too often,” Vernon Geberth says, “egos and turf battles occur, which derail or compromise the investigation.”
However, the detective in charge also has to contain information and contend with bigwigs who show up at the scene. Where the case is major, everyone may be there, including the DA’s mother. That means all kinds of superior officers, the mayor, and others—with some of them talking to reporters to further their own ends and thereby compromising the investigation. That is a disaster waiting to happen, and all the detective in charge can do is hope that they all don’t show up or threaten them with a subpoena, like Geberth did.
Incomparable Incompetence
Vernon Geberth has seen all kinds of incompetence, but perhaps the example that follows is the last word. Says Geberth: “Undoubtedly the worst case of investigative incompetence I ever experienced involved a detective (or defective) from Glenwood, a suburb of Chicago. He was one half of a two-person detective squad where he outranked the other cop so this moron called himself, naturally, ‘the Chief of Detectives.’
“I was hired as a consultant by CBS News for an investigative report after a whistleblower had alerted the local station to the work of the incomparable Chief of Detectives, whose name is Brian Meyers. I got embroiled not only in evaluating his investigations, but with the entire police department, and my word plus CBS’s report ultimately got Meyers and the police chief fired.