Murder.com

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  This was a crime that sent shockwaves around the USA, so much so that, following the hysteria generated by the case, three books were written by well-established authors, each unreservedly portraying Darlie Routier as ‘the embodiment of evil’. Now, however, dozens of experts, including several who participated as witnesses, a juror and the author of one of the books that condemned Routier, argue she is innocent. Why? Because, by using the internet, she has convinced them, and the websites that support her cause testify to this fact.

  Millions of US citizens believe that Darlie Routier is innocent and should be freed at once, after which, no doubt, she will ask for apologies and financial compensation for having been detained for so long.

  Twelve days after the deaths of her two young sons, the police arrested Darlie Routier for their murders. The investigating team had no eyewitnesses, no confession, no apparent motive, and the boys’ mother had herself apparently been slashed and stabbed during the attack. One knife wound missed her carotid artery by two millimetres; any closer and she would have bled to death.

  What investigators did have by way of physical evidence was a trail of drying blood. It started at the murder scene on the ground floor of the opulent family home and led through a utility room to a mesh window screen in the garage, where it mysteriously stopped.

  Other than a knife-slashed window screen – the damage most certainly not sufficient to allow an intruder easy ingress and egress – there was no other possible entry point in the Routiers’ house. There were no signs of forcible entry at any of the other doors and windows, ‘all of which were secured and locked’, according to Routier’s husband, Darin.

  This fact naturally gave rise to two theories: either the killer had a key to the house or garage, or the murderer was a member of the family. If the second was the case, only the mother or father, or the two together, could have murdered the two children.

  The other significant physical evidence was a bloodstained butcher knife on which were Darlie Routier’s fingerprints. There were three mysterious fingerprints that couldn’t be traced to any individual whatsoever, and Luminol tests for the presence of blood showed that someone had tried to clean the washbasin in the utility room/kitchenette and a settee in the adjoining recreation room – where the children had been slain.

  Finally, it was clear that the attacker had used a serrated bread knife from a drawer, but more about this later.

  Almost immediately investigators were puzzled and started asking themselves a number of questions.

  What was the motive for the murders?

  If it was a robbery, why were Darlie’s jewellery and purse left untouched?

  Why would an intruder kill two children before trying to kill an adult who posed a more serious threat?

  The two boys were stabbed in the chest. Why did Darlie Routier suffer a neck wound and cuts on her forearm and shoulder?

  Why would the killer, who obviously had no scruples about murdering a pair of small boys, back off when Darlie awoke, leaving a witness alive to identify him?

  Why would he drop the murder weapon on the floor, giving Darlie, his pursuer, a weapon with which to fight back?

  Why would he have used the Routiers’ butcher’s knife in the first place? (Most assailants come to their intended victim’s premises already armed.)

  Why were there no visible signs of an intruder having entered the house?

  And, as the questions mounted, it appeared that a bread knife owned by the Routiers might have been used to cut the garage’s screen. Had the intruder used this bread knife to slash his way in? If so, how did he get the knife in the first place?

  However, there was one question police did not ask themselves at the time, and apparently not one of the tens of thousands of Routier’s supporters has asked this question since. The Routiers owned a white Pomeranian, a yappy little dog, easily excitable, that barked at any visitors to the premises. Deserving of a damn good kick, it even snapped and tore at a police officer’s trousers as he walked through the house. The dog was also heard barking by the emergency dispatcher who took Darlie’s 911 call, so we know that the animal was around when the frenzied murders took place.

  In considering this fact, my mind turns to Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Adventure of Silver Blaze:

  Inspector Gregory: ‘Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?’

  Sherlock Holmes: ‘To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.’

  Inspector Gregory: ‘The dog did nothing in the night-time.’

  Sherlock Holmes: ‘That was the curious incident.’

  And here we sniff our first red herring, for it is entirely reasonable to ask: why did the Routiers’ dog not bark in the night?

  Following two contradictory statements by Darlie Routier, who claimed she was attacked by a black man who left via the garage, the police soon concluded that there had been no intruder that night because everything pointed to the crime scene having been staged.

  Doctors who treated Mrs Routier’s injuries formed the opinion that they were self-inflicted, and the investigators’ suspicions were reinforced by a peculiar scene that was caught on videotape a few days after the double murder.

  On 14 June, just nine days after the killings and on what would have been Devon Routier’s seventh birthday, Darlie drove to the cemetery with family and friends, wished her boy a happy birthday and then, in a joyous mood, sprayed Silly String all over the fresh mound of earth.

  ‘Here’s a mother who has supposedly been the victim of a violent crime,’ said Dallas County Assistant District Attorney Greg Davis, the lead prosecutor in the case. ‘She has just lost two children, and yet she’s out literally dancing on their graves.’

  Within eight months of the crime, Darlie was convicted and sentenced to death by a jury in the Kerr County town of Kerrville, where the trial had been moved because of a welter of media hype and publicity. She seemed destined to be remembered as yet another stressed-out mother who had suddenly spiralled out of control. But over the years numerous news stories and an ongoing investigation by Darlie’s appellate attorneys have raised questions about what really happened that night.

  Could it be that the police and the prosecutors manipulated the evidence to implicate someone they decided must have done it? A growing chorus of internet observers believes so. A juror from the trial now says that he and his fellow jurors made the wrong decision. The author of one of the true-crime books has also changed her mind, claiming that the jury heard perjured testimony and were never shown photos that would have proved Darlie was a victim of a savage attack. Adding fuel to the fire, her defenders claim to have found over 30,000 inconsistencies and errors in the court stenographer’s trial transcript.

  Even the most experienced legal eagles have found themselves sucked in by the Routier saga. In March 2004, in oral arguments before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals into whether procedural flaws were made during the original trial, the nine judges began peppering lawyers with questions on other aspects of the case.

  Was there, they asked, an insurance policy on the children, which might have given Darlie a reason to kill them?

  When Darlie talked to homicide detectives, did she make any kind of confession?

  But the most baffling question about the murders has yet to be answered: why would someone show up in a nice new suburban neighbourhood, target a house on a well-lit cul-de-sac, enter through a garage screen window a few feet from a dog’s basket, navigate his way through a darkened utility room, grab a butcher knife from the kitchenette and then head into the living room to stab two boys and slash their mother’s throat? Robbery was almost immediately ruled out as a motive; nor, police determined, did anyone have a grudge against the family.

  The Texas Department of Corrections website makes the facts of the case simple and concise:

  ‘Darlie Lynn Routier, inmate number 999220, currently sits on Death Row, Texas, convicted of the brutal stabbing deaths of her five-year-o
ld son, Damon, and his six-year-old brother, Devon. On Thursday, 6 June 1996, they were murdered as they slept in a downstairs room with their mother at their family home in Rowlett.

  ‘Routier’s husband, Darin, and infant son, Drake, slept through the attack in upstairs bedrooms and they were not harmed. Darlie Routier, who claimed that she was also asleep at the time also suffered stab wounds during the attack but police say that they were self-inflicted. In her defence, she claimed to have awakened to see a black man fleeing the residence.

  ‘Prosecutors argued that she killed her sons because they interfered with the lifestyle she wanted to live. She was arrested after making two inconsistent statements to the police.’

  In the early hours of Thursday, 6 June 1996, a 911 emergency telephone call was put through to the Rowlett Police Department at 4401 Rowlett Road, Dallas County, Texas. The midnight dispatcher, Doris Trammell, took the call and identified the caller’s address as 5801 Eagle Drive.

  The first police officer to arrive at the scene was David Waddell, who was soon joined by Sergeant Matthew Walling. Paramedics Jack Kolbye and Brian Koschak rushed through the front door to find Devon dead; he had been stabbed twice in the chest with such force that the knife had passed almost all the way through his body.

  Damon was still clinging on to life; he had been stabbed half a dozen or more times in the back.

  Darlie, who had also been sleeping downstairs with her sons, had knife wounds in her right forearm and her left shoulder and her throat had been cut. Doctors said she survived only because the knife stopped two millimetres short of her carotid artery. No one, either at the house or later in the hospital’s emergency trauma room, noticed any bruises on her wrists and arms.

  Other medics soon turned up. Larry Byford, Eric Zimmerman and Rick Coleman assisted where they could and Damon was rushed to the Baylor Medical Center, where he was certified dead on arrival.

  CID Commander Lieutenant Grant Jack had been on the force for 20 years. He was summoned from his bed and at 3am arrived at the murder scene, where he met Detective Jimmy Patterson, a veteran of the Crimes Against Persons Division. Patterson explained to his superior what little he knew about the incident: that the mother claimed a stranger had committed the atrocities and a bloodstained butcher knife – the murder weapon – lay on the worktop in the utility room.

  Lieutenant Jack put Patterson and his partner, Chris Frosch, in charge of the investigation and Frosch sped off to the hospital to interview Darlie Routier at the first opportunity. He needed to get as much detailed information as he could about what had happened to cause such blood-letting and havoc.

  In a written statement given to the police a few days later, Darlie, then 26, told the following story.

  She was awakened by Damon’s cries of ‘Mommy! Mommy!’ In the dark, she said, she didn’t even notice she had been stabbed several times and that her carotid artery had almost been severed. She did, however, see a man moving through the kitchen and she followed him as he went towards the garage. When she got to the utility room, she saw a knife and picked it up. Only then, she said, did she return to find Devon and Damon and realise that she had been stabbed too. Darin, who was sleeping upstairs with their infant son Drake, came downstairs after hearing his wife’s screams and began administering cardiopulmonary resuscitation to Devon. By then the assailant had disappeared.

  A few days later, Darlie Routier would significantly change this account.

  Blonde, hazel-eyed Darlie was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on 4 January 1970. As a teenager she was attractive to boys, among them Darin Routier. Darin worked in a Western Sizzler restaurant alongside Darlie’s mother, who found him a bright, talkative good-looking boy with ambitious plans for his future. He would be, she figured, a good catch for her oldest daughter. Playing matchmaker, she introduced the two kids and by all reports it was love at first sight for both of them.

  The dark-haired tall boy with wavy hair flipped for the five-foot-three, heart-faced Lubbock, Texas, belle with the big eyes. And she, in turn, for him.

  The couple dated in high school and continued to correspond after Darin, two years older than Darlie, went away to a technical college in Dallas. However, at Darin’s going-away party Darlie showed a possessive and cunning nature that had lain hidden beneath her surface sweetness. She became annoyed that she wasn’t getting enough attention, so she left the party. Then she came back frantic, claiming that someone had tried to rape her.

  ‘That ruse gave her just the attention that she craved,’ said a friend, and this incident was a portent of things to come.

  After graduating from high school, Darlie joined Darin in Dallas, where he had been hired as a technician at a computer chip company. Darlie landed a job with the same firm and they lived together while saving their money until, in August 1988, they married. The couple honeymooned first-class in Jamaica.

  On returning to Texas, the newlyweds first moved into an apartment in Garland, close to where Darin worked learning the booming computer chip industry. Within a year, they relocated to a home in conservative Rowlett, a small town as neat as a pin. Here Darin started a home-based company named Testnec which tested circuit boards for computers.

  Their first child was born in 1989 – a healthy boy named Devon Rush – to be followed by another son in 1991 – Damon Christian. With two children and a fast-growing business, the Routiers found it necessary to rent space in an office building. Their life seemed to be fulfilling the American Dream.

  By 1992, their company had earned them a small fortune. The up-and-coming couple yearned to enjoy the prestige they felt was due to them and had a house built in Dalrock Heights Addition, an affluent suburb of Rowlett, some eight miles north-east of Dallas and adjacent to shimmering Lake Ray Hubbard. This was a model community of upper-class business people, crime-free streets and happy families who drove Subaru pickups in which they would convey their kids half a block to school.

  The $130,000 two-storey home of neo-Georgian design was a miniature mansion replete with classic porch, colonial shutters and a working fountain on the front lawn. Complementing their new life, the family boasted a Jaguar that sat gleaming on a circular driveway.

  By all accounts, Darlie was happy. She was a very good mother, doting on her two children, living to celebrate the good times with them. At Christmas, their house was the most illuminated in the area. At Halloween, their windows displayed more goblins than any other. At Thanksgiving, it was said, the Routiers’ turkey was the largest and tastiest. On the children’s birthdays, Darlie threw gorgeous parties inviting classmates for an afternoon of frolics in their spacious entertainment centre.

  There was never any suggestion that Mrs Routier did not love her children, and, for his part, Darin wore shirts with the sleeves rolled up to show his muscles, grew his hair long at the back, and sported a diamond watch and several gold-nugget-and-diamond rings. He doted on his kids, too.

  But there was another side to Darlie, claim some who knew her – a side that loved to show off to cover a low self-esteem. She revelled in materialism and creating an impression, often to the point of the bizarre.

  She had 36-DDD breast implants that she further accentuated by wearing tight-fitting tops, she made regular visits to the tanning salon and wore diamond rings on every finger, she bought a toy Pomeranian with white hair matching her own. When she bought clothes, they were revealing outfits she wore for a night’s dancing just to grab the attention of onlookers, and her wardrobe bills skyrocketed.

  Darlie’s detractors – there are always plenty of those with jealousies and axes to grind – say that her need to be the flashiest, gaudiest woman around eventually overcame everything else in her life – including her children. Neighbours complained that Damon and Devon, not far past the toddler stage, were left unsupervised. And, when Darlie did attend to them, she often seemed frustrated at having to take the time to do so. Her patience with them, it was said, had waned.

  The roots of domestic problems sur
faced when guests at a Christmas party silently watched as Darlie and Darin argued violently when she danced too many times with another man, fuelling rumours of extramarital dating by both partners. But the couple continued to play the surface charade, buying, buying and buying.

  Then they splashed out on a 27-foot cabin cruiser and a space for it at the exclusive Lake Ray Hubbard Marina.

  In 1995, research shows, Darin’s company brought in about half a million dollars in gross revenues, from which he paid himself a salary of $125,000. ‘At the time, we were in the top 2 per cent of the tax bracket for our age,’ he boasted. And they spent every cent they made, with almost $12,000 worth of new equipment being purchased for the flourishing business. However, the flip side of the coin is that the Routiers’ tax return for that year indicated a gross income of $264,000 and, with a profit margin of 40 per cent, the couple netted a little over $100,000.

  But, if the financial problems were causing stress in their marriage, no one in the neighbourhood saw it. Their neighbours thought they were a hoot, Rowlett’s version of the Clampetts from The Beverly Hillbillies. Then Darin got behind on the bills; he was at least a month late on the mortgage and owed $10,000 in back taxes to the IRS and $12,000 on credit cards.

  With his finances in serious trouble, Darin decided to start a second business, which he called Champagne Wishes. He would take people around the lake on his boat at sunset while they sipped Champagne and, if they wished, avail themselves of the vessel’s sleeping quarters.

  However, Darin’s difficulties didn’t seem to concern Darlie: her shopping didn’t slow down and she made plans to take a trip that summer to Cancun, Mexico, with some girlfriends.

  Nevertheless, even if they were a little flashy, the Routiers were not disliked. One neighbour called them ‘the Ozzie and Harriet of the nineties’. Darlie was known as a cookie-baking housewife who always let the local kids hang out at her home, which they called ‘the Nintendo House’ because of the elaborate games room that Darin had designed. She cooked for neighbours going through hard times and generously made a mortgage payment for a neighbour with cancer.