Deadly Deeds (2 page)

‘
What situation have we got here?’ I asked, not presenting myself.

The young woman in the nightgown, obviously aware she was losing the officer’s interest, walked away.

‘Dr Kristin Malina?’ He glanced at my photo-ID and recognised me straight away, probably from one of the many lectures I gave at the University of Melbourne, Swinburne University of Technology, or the Police Academy in Glen Waverley. ‘My partner and I were the first to arrive at the scene. The investigator in charge of the crime scene hasn’t turned up yet.’

Did he just forget why he requested my services in the middle of the night?

‘That’s fine,’ I replied, ‘I’ll be acting as investigator for the time being.’ I pointed to the other uniformed officer. ‘What’s he looking for in the grass? He’s not supposed to collect evidence. That’s our job.’

‘
He’s not collecting anything. He got sick like a dog when he went inside, so he’s chucking his guts out.’

‘
All right, all right. Where’s your log book?’

He gave me a blank look.

‘Log book?’ I asked again, feeling a stream of sweat trickling down the small of my back.

‘
Euh, I thought—’

‘
Jesus, how long have you been here?’

‘
Twelve months or so.’

‘
At the
scene
!’

‘
Fifteen minutes.’

‘
And who the fuck is co-ordinating the crime-scene?’

‘
Well...’

‘
All right, all right, forget it.’ The blood was drained from his face. Amazing, I thought, These guys have been here for fifteen minutes, and neither of them have bothered keeping a log. For all we knew, the killer could have walked out right under their noses.

I shifted from one foot to the other and went on. ‘Any suspects arrested?’

‘No.’

‘
Has anyone entered the apartment?’

‘
Constable Williams has.’ He said, pointing at his partner, who was now on his hands and knees, on the front lawn, receiving attention from a first-aid attendant.

‘
Has anyone one else, apart from Constable Williams, entered the building?’

‘
Nope. Just him, that’s it, Dr Malina.’

‘
Good,’ I noted the information in my log book.

I looked to where Constable Williams was and realised there was no point asking him details of what he’d seen inside the apartment, although that would have been my first requirement. It looked as if he was still trying to cope with reality.

I turned back to young Patterson ‘Did he touch anything?’

‘
Nothing...well, apart from the girl who was there.’

‘
What girl?’

‘
There’s someone in there covered in blood, cuts and bruises. That’s what he said when he came out. I didn’t see anything. I didn’t go in the building. He said it was really weird in there, like something from another world.’

‘
And he touched her?’

‘
He said she was alive. She seemed dead, he said, but she’s alive. So that’s why I called an ambulance, and they’re just about to go in now. I didn’t want to touch anything until you guys got here. I told him you’d be here in a minute, but he said he knew what he was doing and then he went in.’

I spun around, and sure enough two paramedics were rolling a stretcher to the front of the apartment. One was a redneck with tattoos on his forearms, the other looked Italian or Greek.

‘Hey, hold on a sec,’ I yelled across to them.

All eyes were on me.

It was critical that no one entered the crime scene until I had a chance to look around and preserve the largest amount of evidence possible. Once a person who was not authorised to enter the crime-scene area began tempering with objects and bodies, contamination of the exhibits could make the evidence useless in a court of law. I had witnessed hundreds of cases where police officers and paramedics, through their own ignorance, contaminated a crime scene with fingerprints, footprints, gun residues and fibres. Whatever evidence was collected after that was challenged by the defence in a court of law and rendered impermissible because of its unreliability through contamination.

I paced towards the male paramedics. ‘Don’t go in there,’ I yelled. ‘I’ve got jurisdiction over this crime scene. Nobody goes in there until I say so.’

They looked at each other puzzled. Not all men had got used to the idea of being ordered around by a woman. I was glad I was wearing my pants, in spite of the unbearable heat. It forced them to talk to my face, not my legs.

‘
But there’s someone injured in there,’ the first paramedic objected.

‘
I know.’

‘
Look babe,’ the redneck paramedic said, ‘we’re here to save lives, not to play who’s in charge. So, we’re going in.’

I wanted to kick him in the shin for calling me
babe.
‘Like hell you are. I’ll have you both arrested for knowingly tampering with evidence.’

The redneck made a fist with his right hand and raised his voice. ‘There’s someone in there who needs medical attention. That officer down there,’ he pointed at Constable Williams, ‘told us so. I’m here to save lives!’

I gave him a cold stare and shouted louder than him, ‘I
know
and so am I
.
’ I held one hand up in the air, as if I was stopping invisible traffic. ‘Now,
stand-by and wait for my signal.’

He shrugged and muttered under his breath, ‘Fuckin’ bitch!’

Just at that moment, Frank Moore came and joined me, so I chose to ignore the redneck’s comment.

‘
Nasty shit in there, I heard,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘You don’t have to go in if you don’t want to.’

‘
Give me a break, Frank. I’m not a little girl out of prep.’

In 1991, Frank and I worked on the murder of Sheree Beasley, a gorgeous little six-year old who’d been snatched on her way to a convenience store, near her Rosebud home. After that, I thought I’d be ready for anything.

Violent crimes against children were the worst ones I ever came across. Knowing an innocent young life had been wasted made me angry and bitter. Every other type of crime, I more or less knew I could handle. But brutality against children burned the core of my soul.

Not getting personally involved with the victim’s family was impossible. No matter how tough investigators and police officers might appear to be on the outside, deep down, we’re all human beings. It took me a long time to get over the horrific sight of the young girl when we found her lifeless body in a drain in Red Hill, three months after she disappeared.
              Years later, I kept going back to visit the parents, hoping they were coping well. I became their self-appointed psychological counsellor. But they weren’t coping well at all. The best we could do was stick together through the ordeal and make sure the victim’s family were not forgotten. And long after the killer was in jail, long after the media hype was over, long after everyone had forgotten the torturous ordeal this family had gone through, the agony remained with everyone who was ever involved with this crime. It wasn’t just a crime against one person, but a crime against an entire family, an entire community.

After all the horrific homicides I’d attended, I thought I’d be ready for anything.

But nothing had prepared me for what I was about to see.

I’d always had a belief in basic human goodness. I believed that even in someone really bad, something good was there. Just a matter of tapping into it, getting rid of the demons, getting into the heart of the matter. But I was always surprised by the extent of cruelty humans could inflict on each other, making it extremely difficult to sympathise towards criminals.

Normally, Frank and I would have begun by making a general survey of the area by means of photography, video recording, sketches and notes. We would do that prior to examining the critical area of the crime scene. But because we were informed an injured person was inside the apartment, we decided to change the order of things.

I noted in my log book the reason why we decided to enter the apartment prior to making preliminary notes for a plan of action.

I opened the green, soft bag I had with me and emptied the contents.

Frank and I put on disposable surgical gloves, white cotton overalls, and non-slip steel-plated boots. It was so hot, I thought I was going to pass out.

We headed towards the entrance of the building.

The apartment where the alleged murder took place was the first one to our left on the ground floor.

When I entered the foyer of the apartment, the smell of blood was so strong, I felt my insides churning. My survival instincts told me to get out of this place now.

At this stage I wasn’t concerned about recording anything. This could wait until we managed to rescue whoever was alive. I knew one person was dead already. How the person died, I never had the chance to ask Constable Williams. And now that he was being treated for shock inside the ambulance, the only thing left to do was to find out for myself.

I stood in front of the dark entrance of the apartment and hesitated for a few seconds.

Frank gave me a stare as if to say, ‘you don’t have to go in if you don’t want to’.

That made me even more determined to proceed.

CHAPTER TWO

The front door of the ground-floor apartment had been left ajar. Straight away, I noticed that the lock had been damaged, and this had obviously been the point of entry for the intruder.

I moved forward.

The hallway was filled with darkness.

I reached for the light switch on my left and flicked it on.

Nothing.

Frank Moore wanted to get in front, but I managed to push him out of the way to get in first.

‘Is everything a competition to you?’ he whispered.

I ignored his comment and removed a torch from the leg pocket of my overalls. After I flicked it on, I noticed how warm it was in the apartment. And the smell of blood was starting to make me feel uncomfortable. Perhaps not so much the smell, but the apprehension of what I was about to find. For a spilt second, I pictured Constable Williams outside, vomiting on the lawn. I hoped to God he was the sensitive type. And I also wished he had been in shape to take us through the crime scene to soften the blow from any nasty surprises.

I clenched my teeth as I moved two steps forward into the narrow hallway.

I don’t know why, but I thought of my son Michael back at home. He’d been in trouble at school lately, and his grades were rather border-line. I shook my head slightly, realising this was really an odd time to think about him. Maybe I was somehow trying to avoid what was coming up.

Frank was following closely behind.

Our field of vision was small and circular, the size allowed by the torch beam.

I could feel my heart drilling through my chest. No one had seen the killer, but maybe he was still hiding somewhere in the house.

The first thing I noticed was two picture frames on my left hanging at an odd angle. They were prints of famous paintings which I couldn’t place.

I pointed the torch to the wall on my right side. A small, wooden telephone table was overturned. There seemed to have been some kind of struggle in the hallway. Maybe the owner had intercepted the intruder at the door.

Apart from the disturbed telephone table and the crooked pictures on the wall, the hallway was clean and well-maintained. Although I was uncertain in the semi-darkness, the salmon-coloured carpet seemed brand new. I circled the floor with the torch and noticed dark footprints.

‘Hold on a sec,’ I commanded Frank.

He froze behind me, obviously not in a hurry to find out what was lurking beyond the hallway.

I kneeled down, passed two fingers over one of the footprints, and brought the fingers to my nose. The smell of blood filled my nostrils. I wiped the gloved fingers over my overalls.

‘
Fresh blood,’ I said.

I knew it could have been footprints left behind by Constable Williams, since he had entered the apartment. And that was what I had been afraid of. Contamination of the crime scene. Constable Williams had no gloves on when he entered the apartment. He’d almost certainly left his fingerprints all over the place. I hope he hadn’t tampered with the body of the person who had been killed. I made mental note that Constable Williams fingerprints would have to be taken as a reference sample against all the fingerprints found in the apartment.

While still on my knees, I noticed a telephone cable ripped from the edge of the wall. I followed the telephone cable to its end with the torch. It had been pulled from its connection.

My mind was racing with possibilities.

Whoever broke into the apartment knew what they were doing. This was premeditated otherwise they wouldn’t have bothered with the telephone.

‘
Okay,’ I said and stood back on my feet.

Frank didn’t say a word. He just followed like somebody’s pet.

Halfway up the hallway, there was a room to my left. I would have gone straight past it if it wasn’t for the moaning of a woman coming from the direction of the room.

A chill rippled down my spine. ‘There’s someone in there,’ I said.

And I remembered the girl Constable Williams’s partner mentioned.

Frank nodded with a grunt.

I pushed the door open.

Immediately, Frank came up behind me and, without warning, reached for the light switch.

When the light came on, we both stared, unable to comprehend what was in front of us. Everything in the room had been overturned.

I circled the room with my eyes. A dressing table, two tallboys, a linen chest, bedside cabinets, a chair. The doors of the wardrobe were wide open and clothes thrown everywhere in the room.

The smell of blood was strongest now, entering my lungs, filtering itself through every cell in my body.

After the initial shock, I realised this was the bedroom of the apartment. At one time, it must have looked warm and inviting. Even though the furniture was overturned, I could tell it was good quality solid timber.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Frank whispered behind my back. ‘What the hell happened here?’

‘
A burglary gone wrong?’ I suggested, because it seemed obvious to me someone had been looking for something.

I could still hear the woman moaning, but couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.

And then I noticed a cylindrical shape in the centre of the room.

A blue and grey rug covered in what looked like red paint. So much was splattered on the rug, I wished it was red paint. But it didn’t smell like red paint. Now I knew where the smell of blood came from. I made sure my surgical gloves were properly fitted. The last thing I wanted was to catch AIDS or some other blood-transmitted disease.

I jabbed Frank with my elbow gently and pointed towards the blood-soaked carpet. It was very dense in colour. I looked up to see his reaction. His eyes expressed surprise more than anything else.

‘
You okay?’ I asked, knowing he wouldn’t tell me even if he wasn’t.

‘
Yeah, yeah.’ His eyes wouldn’t leave the rolled up rug.

I walked up to the bloody rug, still trying to figure out why it was covered in so much blood. As I stood inches from it, I saw a man lying behind it. He was naked, his body stretched in full, half turned from the waist. It took me seconds to register the other half of what I was seeing.

Next to the body was the man’s head lying upside down.

‘
There’s a guy there who’s been decapitated,’ I informed Frank who was still two feet behind me.

He moved in to inspect the damage. ‘Holy shit,’ he muttered. ‘That’s quite a find.’

I couldn’t disagree with him, but I didn’t find the discovery half as exciting as shocking.

The woman moaned again.

We both looked at each other and then towards the bed.

Frank moved in first.

I kneeled down next to the decapitated man and took down some mental notes.
Neck cut close to shoulders. Severed larynx cartilage flapped out on hollow in collarbone. Victim mid-thirties, brown hair, medium build.
I had never come across a beheaded person before and was kind of intrigued by what I was observing. At the top of his shoulder, where his neck had been cut off, blood was streaming out like a small mountain spring. I looked down the body. He was still wearing his socks, which must have been a colour other than red at some stage.

‘
She’s under the bed,’ Frank said, kneeling down, his head tilted at a forty-five degree angle.

I stopped my observation of the severed head and joined him.

The woman was naked and curled up like an embryo. I aimed the beam from my torch towards her. Her entire body was smeared with blood. Her face was covered in cuts and bruises. Her hair looked wet, limp and greasy. It fell half way across her face, concealing her eyes. She looked like a baby seal who had just been bludgeoned to death. She was humming erratically and fidgeting with her hands.

‘
Let’s get her out of here,’ I ordered.

We eased her from under the bed and covered her with a blanket.

‘Go and tell the paramedics to get in here quickly,’ I went on.

Frank gave me a sour look. He loved working with me, but he hated when I started giving him orders. He seemed to forget I was the investigator in charge of the crime scene.

‘For Christ’s sake, Frank,’ I snapped, ‘not now. Just get the goddamn paramedics!’

He raced out the room without further notice.

After the paramedics whisked the girl outside the apartment, I was left alone with Frank.

‘What do you think?’ he asked, although he probably knew as much as I did.

‘
Murder, of course. If it was suicide, the guy is rather skillful.’ I glanced around the room. ‘I’m going to get the cameras from the car. Why don’t you begin a general survey so we can work on a plan of action.’

‘
Yes,
sir
,’ he grunted.

I walked back to the hallway, and wondered why we had gotten on each others’ nerves since the beginning of this investigation.

What I had just seen hadn’t sunk in yet. But I knew it wouldn’t take long. I had always been good at accepting reality face on, for better or worse.

Before I reached the front door of the apartment, I realised this was one of the worst jobs I had been involved in. Most homicides in Melbourne were pretty straight forward. A bullet in the head. A knife in the back. Drowned in the bathtub. Only in the USA had I read about cases which could turn a level-headed forensic investigator into a raving lunatic within days. But I had never dealt in real life with anything as bloody as what was in that apartment. After all decapitation was not a common way of killing someone.

Surprisingly enough, in spite of my sensitive reaction to the bloody find, I remained level-headed and believed I would have no problem coping with the investigation. The evidence I had seen began forming in my mind a scenario of what might have happened.

When I stepped outside the apartment, the air felt cool. I knew it was only an illusion, because the temperature had remained above thirty for the last few days. It’s just that it had been so hot in the apartment, anywhere else felt cool in comparison.

The paramedics had already left the scene, but a crowd of on-lookers were still hanging around like flies over a decomposing body.

Before the Channel 10 media crew launched its attack on me, I managed to get to the Constable I had spoken to when I arrived at the scene of the crime.

‘Why isn’t there any crime-scene tape around the area?’ I asked. Before he had time to answer and rationalise his lack of experience at a crime scene, I went on, ‘I want the area sealed off. I also want anyone who’s not a potential witness out of the perimeter immediately. I don’t want you or anyone else to speak to the media. That’s my job. Is that clear?’

‘
I’ll get on to it.’ He took my orders well, and as a result, I liked him straight away.

‘
What’s your name?’ I asked, realising I had forgotten since I last spoke to him.

‘
Constable Gus Patterson,’ he said, extending his hand while I checked his name tag.

I gave him a quick but firm handshake and said, ‘All right, Gus, you’re in charge out here. I’m counting on you to keep everything in order. I want you to prevent any unnecessary walking about in and out of this building, control people moving items anywhere within the crime-scene perimeter, anyone touching surfaces of any type, or removing items from the scene. You think you can handle it?’

‘Yes, Dr Malina.’

‘
And make sure you keep everyone on the other side of the crime-scene tape.’

He nodded.

I managed to get to Frank’s Ford without the media hassling me, but I wasn’t so lucky on my way back. I carried a large silver hard case filled with camera equipment when they blocked my path. I hadn’t noticed straight away, but there were more media 4WDs and vans than when I first went inside the apartment. Journalists from the
Age
, the
Herald-Sun,
Radio National and 3JJJ were also present.

In the distance, I recognised Tim Simons, my personal media-liaison contact at the
Herald-Sun.
We had a mutual respect for each other. Tim Simons, dark-haired, blue-eyed and with a hint of a British accent, had worked with Frank and I on many homicides. He helped us with press releases and fed only enough details to the public for an investigation to proceed with a greater chance of success. In return, whenever an investigation was over, I gave him exclusive rights to a story. For the past two years, Tim Simons won the prestigious Gold Walkley Award for outstanding contribution to journalism.

‘
Dr Kristin Malina,’ yelled a broad-shouldered, blond male journalist. ‘You promised you would keep us informed.’ That must have been the journalist who’d been hiding behind the two-thousand watt light when I arrived at the scene.