Deadly Vows
Page 19
Dr. Laura Fulginiti, the forensic anthropologist, laid out the body parts, putting each piece as close to its proper anatomical position as possible. Fulginiti soon ascertained that some pieces were missing and the condition of the skull and ribs indicated that something terrible had happened to this poor woman.
Her hip bones showed that she had given birth at least once. Through the shape of the skull and other factors, Dr. Fulginiti tentatively identified the remains as those of a young black woman who had been in relatively good shape when she died.
Much of the body above the sternum had been severed. The aorta, the largest artery in the body ascending from the heart, lies directly beneath that bone. The end result of such a wound would be massive and fatal bleeding. The left side of that same bone, which is where most people assume the heart sits, had deep cuts, as if someone had jammed a knife between the woman’s first and second ribs, beneath which her vital organs sat vulnerable to the blade.
Many of the ribs recovered from the woman’s left side were rife with signs of being stabbed through, including two that had been completely severed by the knife. The murderer had obviously wanted to be very sure she was dead. The hyoid bone, just below the chin, had been damaged by what appeared to be a saw blade as if someone had tried to cut the young woman’s head off.
“The most stunning thing is the back of the sternum is sliced off,” Fulginiti said. “That’s the most startling thing. The sternum is thick, but not so heavy. When the knife went in, it must have caught, and [the killer] pulled down on it so hard that he literally sliced the back half of the sternum off of the front half.”
That wound, Fulginiti said, is the most striking aspect of what happened.
“I have never seen that before,” she said. “And I never expect to see it again.”
The skull to which the long dreadlocks had been attached, even after an extended period of decomposition, was missing something important: a face. The familiar smiling skull with which anyone who has been spooked on Halloween is familiar wasn’t all there. Between the orbs that once housed eyes, there should be a bone called the maxilla, which forms the nasal cavity and at its bottom houses the top row of teeth. That bone was mostly missing, though the part that should have contained teeth was still there. The woman’s cheekbones had been smashed, and lay in pieces near the skull to which they had once been joined.
The bone that should have held her top row of teeth had been sawn clean on the bottom where the teeth would have been attached. The teeth hadn’t just been sawn out; the bone that held the teeth had been sawn away, and the sawing had been done so violently that the blade had ended up cutting into a wisdom tooth at the back of the bone that the killer probably hadn’t known was there.
“It had to be a pretty bloody, gory business,” Fulginiti said. “[The killer] would have had to cut the skin away on her face several inches, sort of like the Joker. I bet he couldn’t see the wisdom teeth because of all the blood and gore.”
That lone wisdom tooth had a twin on the jaw, where the killer had also sawn away the bone so violently that the blade had become buried in the actual bone that attaches the jaw to the skull. On the other side, part of the wisdom tooth that was hiding there had also been sawn into. On both the top and the bottom, the roots of this woman’s teeth were visible, where they had been exposed by the killer’s saw.
The front of the woman’s jaw showed cuts that indicated what might have been false starts with the saw blade that had cut her teeth out. But finally, the killer had gotten an angle he or she liked, and had made one clean cut all the way across her entire jaw, hacking and hacking away at it until there were no more teeth—and no more gums—left in her mouth.
Her killer hadn’t been satisfied with brutally stabbing the woman and trying to cut her head off. When that had failed, the killer had instead violently and repeatedly bashed her face in with what looked to be a hammer, from the marks it left, and then had sawn her mouth completely off.
But that wasn’t all the killer had done.
As she examined the bones that were laid out in front of her, some were missing, but that was to be expected with the condition the body was in. What wasn’t expected was that each hand was too short. By one bone on each finger.
Human fingers are composed of three bones each, with the smallest bone lying between the fingernail and the fingerprint. On this woman’s hands, that bone had been cut off of each finger, likely by the same blade that had so violated her mouth.
“Goddamn CSI,” Fulginiti said. Her anger was triggered by the condition in which they found Joy’s body, as if someone had planned to prevent investigators from identifying her. “Somebody had watched too much TV and they knew exactly what to get rid of to try to thwart us.”
Sean had hacked Joy’s teeth out, cut her fingertips off and bashed her face in just a few months after he and I had invented a fictional killer who watched TV forensics shows to help him get away with murder. Now Phoenix forensics investigators were left to literally try to pick up the pieces to do their best at identifying the young mother someone had hidden underneath a pile of rocks in the desert out by the Mexican border.
All they knew was that it had been a violent death.
“This was calculated,” Fulginiti said. “I don’t even know if you would use the word ‘crazy.’ It’s crazy to normal people, but it looks to me to be far more calculated than crazy.”
Laura Fulginiti is proud of her work as a forensic anthropologist. She’s on the cutting edge of her profession. If Joy could have looked beyond her own death, she couldn’t have picked a better person to handle the case of the unidentified black female in the Arizona desert.
If Fulginiti is prone to the occasional outburst of profanity, it can be excused by her expertise—and her determination to see the victims of violent crimes get justice.
“When they found the gravesite, they weren’t sure what was in there,” she told me. “It was this weird cairn that someone went to a lot of trouble to make. All the stones matched, and he had to have traveled quite some distance to find them all. There were hundreds of them. The guy walking out there had a dog, and the dog is what sparked to it. He just knew there was something there with that cairn built up there.”
When investigators painstakingly pulled the cairn apart, stone by stone, they realized the remains were human when they saw a partial, skeletal hand sticking up from inside it. But they didn’t know yet what they had. No one at the scene even noticed that the fingers were missing the ends, the parts where fingerprints would have been. That wasn’t noticed until detectives had a look.
“Bill McVey [an investigator at the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department] came to the autopsy,” Fulginiti told me. “It’s kind of standard practice, and they ask questions through the intercom as we’re doing the autopsy. On this one, he said, ‘Doc, are her fingertips cut off?’ That’s exactly what was there.”
Fulginiti then examined the maxilla and mandible—the upper and lower jaw—of the remains, and when it became obvious that the victim’s teeth had been sawn off after the victim had died, she said she knew then this wouldn’t be an average case. The front of the skull had been viciously bashed in to the point that it was completely unrecognizable.
“Someone had done a tremendous amount of damage to her face,” she said. “There was a lot of trauma. Immediately, we were all on the same page, and we all knew whoever had done this to her knew this person.”
Generally killings with extreme violence are crimes of passion during which the violence is sparked by love—or hate. But there’s a huge gulf between being able to tell someone has been through a lot of trauma and finding out who did it to her—or even who she was. And in this case, the violence actually wasn’t done out of passion, they later discovered, but out of a calculated desire to disguise the identity of the victim.
“Looking at her, I told the detective, ‘this is going to be a weird case.’ And it was. It was even weirder than I imagined.”
But finding out who she was—and who she had left without a mother—would be akin to finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. There just wasn’t much to go on and investigators didn’t even know if they could get DNA from the remains. They weren’t sure the existing DNA databases would be anywhere near comprehensive enough to have this poor woman in them even if they could. The various DNA databases were far less interconnected than TV shows made it appear, which meant the effort might not pay off anyway.
“Getting DNA from bones was still in its infancy then,” Fulginiti said. It was also prohibitively expensive. “We weren’t sure what we would get, so in the beginning we didn’t even try.”
Frustrated, Fulginiti told the team investigating the case that they should focus on the unique aspects of the remains: “Follow the dreadlocks.”
The style of the woman’s hair indicated that she was probably from an urban area with a straight line to Arizona on Interstate 8, which was just six miles south of where the body was found, about 2,500 feet off of Agua Caliente Road, out in the middle of nowhere. This woman was from either Texas or California, Fulginiti told investigators. But she didn’t stop there. She got together with Detective Bob Powers, who was a forensic artist, and decided they had to do more to identify this body. After all, she had given birth at least once; she was someone’s mother.
Powers was relentless in his quest to find out who this young woman was.
“Bob is the real hero of this story,” Fulginiti told me. “He and I spent a couple of days piecing together the parts of her skull. At the time, he was experimenting with casting skulls, trying to piece them back together after a lot of trauma. He had reassembled the face of a guy who had gone off a parking garage, so he had some experience, but it still was tough. We barely had any of this woman’s face; we weren’t convinced we could get a drawing done, but we had to try. So with me holding the bones where they should have been and Bob sculpting it with clay, we finally got somewhere and he could do a drawing.”
Powers put the drawing, which bore some resemblance to what Joy looked like in life, out everywhere he could but initially there were no hits on it. It seemed like no one knew who this missing woman was. It was frustrating for the investigators, who had put so much time, effort and emotion into trying to make sure their unidentified woman could get some kind of justice for what had been done to her.
Fulginiti and Powers were both busy investigators, so circumstances forced them to move on to other cases, though the unidentified mother with the missing teeth and fingers never traveled too far out of their minds. The brutal manner of her death and the dismemberment of her body afterward left too deep a scar in their minds to just forget about her after their efforts had been thwarted.
Months later, Powers came across a “have you seen me” flyer from Nevada that fit the description of the woman he and Fulginiti had reconstructed—and who neither of them could get out of their heads. He was elated and called Fulginiti to let her know he had a possible lead on the unidentified woman.
The drawing was a close enough match that the department thought it might be worth the expense of trying to get a DNA sample from the remains to see if it was her.
“We submitted the DNA from our lady,” Fulginiti said. “It turned out not to be her, but when they ran the DNA, they discovered ‘guess what, it’s someone else.’
“I’m getting chills as I tell you this story,” she continued. “They said, ‘We have identified this girl.’”
The DNA, which Maricopa County’s team had initially been pessimistic would yield anything useful, had put the puzzle back together quite accidentally—almost as if God wanted the killer to be caught. Joy Risker’s DNA, it appeared, had been entered into the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System database by San Diego police when Joy was still considered a missing person, before Sean had turned himself in.
The database had only been launched five years before, so police weren’t yet accustomed to its use on a regular basis. In the beginning, in fact, only nine states had participated in the database. California was one. And Joy was in there, the detectives discovered.
“[The detective] said, ‘this is weird. This girl was in a bigamous relationship and then she disappeared,’” Fulginiti said. “I was in my truck at the time and I stopped right then and yelled, ‘I told you this was going to be weird!’”
Putting a face to the unidentified body, Fulginiti said, was the key to finding out who she was, even if that face had just been the first stumble on an accidental trip that quite chaotically put the pieces of the puzzle together. The long, tireless work of Powers, she said, gave Joy Risker the only hope she could possibly have had to not end up just another Jane Doe found decomposing in the desert, forever unidentified. Now, thanks to Fulginiti and Powers—and the new FBI DNA database—Joy could tell her story from beyond the veil of death.
In a sense, she was resurrected just long enough to tell police that Sean’s story wasn’t true. It wasn’t the final resurrection her religion had taught her to hope for, the one her friends and family were now hoping she had already entered into, but this metaphorical resurrection was at least enough to give Joy the final say in the disagreement that had left her dead.
With Joy identified eight months after she was killed, a key plank in Sean’s plan had fallen out of place. Without a body, it would have been nearly impossible to convict him of murder, because his story that it was self-defense—that Joy had attacked him and he had merely defended himself against her attack—depended on no one seeing the damage he had done to Joy, and on no one being able to find out that Joy’s body had no defensive wounds, as might be expected if she had participated in a fight over a knife. But with a body, and with the brutality of the killing—and the heinous mutilation of her body after she was dead—it would be a lot more difficult for Sean to say he had acted merely in self-defense. Suddenly, because Fulginiti and her team had worked tirelessly to find an identity for the nameless woman they had discovered in the desert, not only did the remains have a name—Joy Risker—but the person whose remains they were stood a much better chance of seeing her killer come to justice.
When I heard that Sean had killed Joy but wouldn’t reveal what he had done with the body, I immediately recalled our conversation.
I was on the phone with Sean’s first wife’s younger sister, who had broken the news to me about Sean turning himself in and confessing, when I blurted out, “Holy shit, Sean and I had just had a conversation about committing the perfect murder.”
She was silent for a moment, then she screamed, “You helped him plan this? Oh my God!”
And then she hung up the phone. It took several calls for her to finally answer the phone again.
“I didn’t help Sean plan anything,” I explained. “We were talking about writing a book about the perfect murder. How the hell could I know he was actually planning to kill someone?”
It didn’t make sense initially that he wouldn’t tell anyone where Joy’s body was after confessing that he had killed her. I, along with everyone else who knew about the case, wondered what he might have done with Joy’s body, and why he wouldn’t tell police where she was. It was only after the body was found and identified that the true reasons behind Sean’s silence became obvious.
He had kept Joy’s location to himself because her body told a story that no claim of self-defense could support. The tale Joy’s remains told was brutal, but more importantly, they told another tale: that whoever killed her had done so with a plan.
For Sean and his defense, the finding
of Joy’s body was incredibly bad news. He had to come up with a revised narrative that now accounted for a stabbing that was shockingly violent—and a dismembering of the corpse that sounded more like something out of a horror movie than the actions of a loving husband who acted merely out of self-defense.
Sean had to come up with reasons for how he treated Joy and her remains; anything he said would be a tough sell, though. He had mutilated her body so violently out of fear of being caught while acting in self-defense? Anyone who knew Sean knew he was smarter than that. If Joy had attacked him and he had killed her while trying to stay alive, the genius mind that had helped him become so successful at everything he tried would have known his best bet would be to call the police and tell them what had happened; sure, he might initially have faced arrest, but the facts would have come out and borne out his side of the story if that’s really what had happened.
Sean wasn’t the kind of guy to crumble when a situation spiraled out of control. If he had really killed Joy out of self-defense, the in-control-at-all-times guy would have done the most logical thing and contacted the authorities. But he hadn’t done that. Instead, he had hacked up her body and disposed of it as far away as he could reasonably get it—and then had spent weeks telling people she had run off with another man.
So with her body found, Sean and his attorney had to tell a story that made it plausible that he was a reasonable guy who had momentarily lost his cool and panicked, doing everything he could to disguise Joy’s body and keep it from discovery. They would also have to explain the litany of lies Sean had told, the fabricated e-mails, the lack of blood and the carefully-assembled “murder kit.”
Suddenly, by finding and identifying the body, the Maricopa County forensic investigators had put Sean in a whole new level of, as Fulginiti said, “deep shit.”