Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist (32 page)

Experts who testify in court can be prone to another disturbing characteristic. As America learned from watching the O. J. Simpson spectacle, witnesses in celebrity trials can become famous names in their own right. More than one forensics pro has let the limelight eclipse the work. I caught sight of a remarkable example of this not long ago while my colleagues and I were doing some work on a crime scene. We were flabbergasted to find another analyst literally signing autographs inside the house where a young man had recently met with a violent death. When the family of the deceased asked to pose for a picture with the man, I thought they were joking. Then the cameras came out and I realized they weren’t. In the world of crime, abnormal behavior is rampant—and not just among the criminals.

One of the stranger things I have done in court is to model a woman’s pink bathrobe for a jury. Here is the story behind it.

Sixteen-year-old Sarah Johnson lived with her mom and dad in a well-kept house in the town of Bellevue in Blaine County, Idaho, which counts itself among the nation’s wealthiest communities. On the morning of September 2, 2003, Sarah said she awoke around six-fifteen
A.M.
to the sound of running water and knew that one of her parents was up taking a shower. She was still lying in bed a few minutes later when gunshots suddenly echoed through the house. She raced across the hall to her parents’ closed bedroom door and called to her mother. When she got no answer, she tore out of the house and
started banging on neighbors’ front doors, screaming that her parents had been murdered.

Local law enforcement officers hurried to the scene and found Sarah’s mother, Diane Johnson, in bed under the covers, dead from a gunshot wound to the head. Sarah’s father, Alan Johnson, lay facedown and naked on the floor nearby, dead from a gunshot to the chest.

Blaine County sheriff Walt Femling had the presence of mind to stop a garbage truck grinding along the Johnsons’ street as it made its morning pickups. Then he secured the entire block as part of the crime scene. After getting a search warrant, deputies began to go over the area inch by inch for clues. One of them opened a garbage can near the curb at the Johnsons’ house.

What lay inside would unlock the truth about events in the Johnson house that fall morning. But if the trash collectors had been a few minutes faster in their rounds, it would have been whisked away forever. On top of the trash sat a woman’s pink terry-cloth bathrobe. Police picked it up, and out fell a left-handed leather glove and a right-handed latex glove.

It was Ian Spiro all over again. Speckling the robe were the familiar traces of high-velocity impact blood spatter. Lab tests also revealed bone fragments and human tissue, deeply embedded in the fibers of the garment. DNA tests showed the blood spatter belonged to both Diane and Alan Johnson. Traces of Sarah’s DNA were also present on the robe and both gloves. When questioned, Sarah admitted that the robe belonged to her but said she had no idea how it had ended up in the trash. She vehemently denied having killed her parents. Instead, she accused a house keeper who had recently been fired by the family for theft.

Police traced the murder weapon, a .264 Winchester Magnum rifle found lying near the bodies, to a man named Mel Speegle, who was renting a garage apartment on the Johnsons’ property. But Speegle
had an airtight alibi: He had been in another city when the shots were fired, and he had witnesses to confirm his whereabouts. They also followed up on Sarah’s accusation of the maid, but she, too, had a legitimate alibi.

Then the sheriff’s office found out about Bruno Santos. Santos was a nineteen-year-old illegal Mexican immigrant with a history of drug use and gang ties. He had briefly attended the local high school where Sarah was a student. He was also Sarah’s secret fiancé, if the teenager’s friends were to be believed.

Sarah’s parents had made no secret of their aversion to her taste in sweethearts. In fact, relatives said that when Alan Johnson discovered his daughter had lied to him and spent the night at the Santos family’s apartment in a Bellevue housing project three nights before the murders, he had threatened to file statutory rape charges.

Santos looked like the logical killer until DNA tests cleared him. That’s when police began to look at suspects closer to home. Sarah had been every bit as enraged as Santos at her parents’ efforts to thwart their romance. After dragging his daughter home from her boyfriend’s place, Alan Johnson had grounded her, taken away her house keys, and relegated her to the garage apartment while Speegle was out of town. Had she found Speegle’s rifle while brooding alone in the guest house and hatched a plan to murder the people threatening to separate her from her lover?

On October 31, 2003, Sarah Johnson was arrested and charged with her parents’ murders. Because the case had already received such widespread publicity, her trial was moved to Boise. Blaine County prosecuting attorney Jim Thomas and Scott Birch, chief investigator for the Idaho State Attorney General’s Office, asked me to examine the blood evidence and help them reconstruct the murders.

That was tricky. The pink robe had clearly been in the room when both shots were fired. But the spatter was in all the wrong spots. Sarah
was right-handed, yet the majority of the blood droplets were on the back of the robe and the left sleeve. Did it mean she had assisted someone else in the killings? Local police and I went over various scenarios, but time after time we turned up nothing that made sense.

I pored over the photos and went to the crime scene to inspect the room where the homicides occurred, struggling to piece it all together. The pictures showed a trail of bloody water and footprints leading from the bathroom to the bedside, suggesting that Alan Johnson had been shot in the chest while he was in the shower and had then stumbled out toward his wife before collapsing. His body was naked and wet, and the showerhead was still running when the police arrived, splashing bloody water all over the walls in a scene straight out of Alfred Hitch-cock’s classic
Psycho
. Diane had been asleep, burrowed under the covers, when she was shot in the head by someone standing no more than three feet away from the bed.

Sarah kept changing her story about how she realized her mom and dad were dead. First she said her parents’ door was open a crack when she stood in front of it. Then she said it wasn’t. At one point, she said her own door was closed. Then she changed her mind. But airborne blood, bone, and tissue fragments from Diane’s head had landed on the outside of Alan and Diane’s bedroom door, the hall, and a wall inside Sarah’s bedroom. That meant both doors must have been open during the murders, despite what Sarah claimed.

The “open sesame” that finally melted away the cave door and revealed the truth hidden behind it did not come from Jim, Scott, me, or any of the many other investigative specialists working obsessively on the Johnson case. It happened when Sarah’s defense attorney, Bob Pangburn, made a guest appearance on Nancy Grace’s nightly current affairs program on CNN. While all of us insiders were still grappling with how such atypical blood patterning had gotten onto the bathrobe and Pangburn was maintaining that it exonerated Sarah,
Grace started pondering possible explanations. In the midst of one spontaneous “what if,” she mimed putting on an article of clothing backward.

Jim, Scott, and some of their colleagues were burning the midnight oil together in their office and, as luck would have it, took a break to watch Grace’s show. It was the eureka! moment in the prosecution’s case. Scott grabbed the phone and called me. “Rod, think out of the box,” he said. “She wore it backward!” Suddenly it all clicked into place. And once again, the crucial insight came from an unexpected source.

Say you put your clothes on back to front. If you normally shoot right-handed, your right becomes your left and your left becomes your right. What if Sarah had slipped the robe on backward to protect her clothing before firing the rifle that killed both her parents?

Not surprisingly, the Johnson trial was lengthy and emotional. Bruno Santos’s links to the drama brought him to the attention of immigration authorities, who first deported him and then brought him back to appear in court. The young man for whose love Sarah, by then eighteen, had apparently sacrificed so much took the stand and testified against her through a Spanish-language translator.

To help prepare his case, the ever-thorough Jim Thomas spoke with a number of experts on parricide. What makes a teenage girl with no prior criminal record and no history of mental illness, sexual abuse, or any other trauma in her life decide single-handedly—with no partner in crime, no accomplice egging her on—to murder both of her parents at point-blank range with a high-powered rifle? It doesn’t happen often. In fact, he learned that Sarah Johnson’s was the first documented case of its kind since Lizzie Borden’s more than a century earlier. There were a few other parallels to the famous ax murders, too. Borden stuffed her dress in the stove and burned it after her parents died. Johnson stuffed her robe in the trash. But, of course, she
wasn’t quick enough to dispose of it effectively, and that made all the difference in the trial.

The most important task for me was to reconstruct the crime scene according to what I was now certain had happened. I described how events had unfolded step by step, slipping on the pink bathrobe over my own suit with the opening to the back. Then I grasped the rifle to show the jury exactly how the murder had unfolded based on the story told by the blood spatter.

After deliberating for three days, jurors found Sarah Johnson guilty of first-degree murder on March 16, 2005. She received two consecutive life sentences plus fifteen years with no possibility of parole. She appealed the verdict, but she lost.

Throughout the Johnson trial, reporters converged on anyone who would talk. But they were still no match for the media frenzy the O. J. Simpson case sparked. Before my particular expertise plunged me into the double-murder investigation, I knew there were upstanding journalists and underhanded ones just as there are good and bad members of all professions. But what I saw was still an eye-opener.

During the months I was traveling to Los Angeles and back regularly to consult on the blood evidence in the murders of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, Penny and I were having landscaping work done around our house. Glancing out the window one afternoon after she got home from work, Penny was puzzled to notice that some of the workers seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time around our trash cans. When she spotted them there several days in a row, she stopped the manager of the crew and asked him what was going on. Did they need extra trash bags? A Dumpster, maybe?

He stared at her blankly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mrs. Englert,” he said. “My men haven’t been anywhere near your garbage cans.”

Penny and I were aghast to discover that the people sifting through the Hefty bags from under our kitchen sink were actually reporters. Somehow they had gotten wind of the fact that I was involved in “the trial of the century” and they were hoping to dig up some front-page dirt. I never knew what they were hoping to find. Crumpled faxes? Discarded notebooks? A pair of blood-covered shoes with “O.J.” stenciled inside?

Penny and I didn’t wait to find out. We moved our trash bins to a locked location inside our yard and resolved to tell any uninvited guests we found snooping through our garbage to clear off our property.

Around this same time, I went to Seattle to lecture at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. I had finished my talk and was stuffing my notes back in my briefcase when a woman sidled up to me and whispered an astronomical sum of money in my ear.

“What?” I asked, assuming I had misunderstood her.

“That’s what my boss will pay you if we can get our hands on those bloody clothes,” she said with a conspiratorial grin.

“Who the hell are you?” I asked, looking for a name tag. All hers said was “Guest.”

As my blood pressure rose, she proudly rattled off her credentials. She explained that she represented one of the country’s best-known tabloid newspapers. Before joining it, she had made her bones writing for another gossip power house. Now she was hot on the trail of the O.J. case.

“It’s worth
a lot
of money to my editor if you can get your hands on that shirt,” she said.

“You must be out of your mind to think I would do a thing like
that,” I hissed, working hard to maintain my composure. “How did you even get in here?”

“Think about it,” she said confidently.

Without another word, I turned my back on her and stalked off to complain to the conference organizers about their attendee-screening procedures.

In the years since then, I have run across that same reporter a number of times. These days, we are cordial when we see each other. I know that’s how she earns her living. And she knows I will never answer any questions she asks beyond where the restroom is located and what time the seminar ends.

One murder that garnered little interest from national tabloid reporters but that sticks in my memory more than many higher-profile trials was the case of eighteen-year-old Mark Sells in Tipp City, Ohio. On January 5, 2003, Sells and two younger friends smoked a little pot and tossed back some vodka to steel their nerves, then headed for the home of sixty-five-year-old city activist Sharid Gantz.

Sells, who knew Gantz and had done yardwork for him, was armed with a baseball bat and keyed up for a robbery. He barged in while his fourteen-and seventeen-year-old pals waited outside to act as lookouts. Before long, the pair heard raised voices and peered through the window. Sells was in a sort of frenzy, bashing Gantz in the head over and over with the baseball bat, turning the room bright red, they would later testify. It took the shell-shocked youths only a few days to roll over on Sells and spill the details about what they had watched.

You could tell by the blood arcing over the wall that the batter had swung from right to left, and Sells was right-handed. But that
was hardly enough to tie him to the murder. Even the testimony of two eyewitnesses might not be enough. Why? First, Sells had a charmingly sweet and childish face, which could predispose a jury to believe him innocent. Second, there was the issue of his clothing. It had been thoroughly examined and only one drop of the victim’s blood had been found on the collar of Sells’s red Windbreaker. Yet the murder scene was a horror show. Bits of skull, tissue, and brain matter had reached the ceiling. Prosecutor Gary Nasal knew that this would be no easy win. If he and his colleagues were struggling to believe a killer could walk away from a scene so bloody without his jacket and pants looking like a butcher’s apron at the end of a long shift, how would he convince a jury?