Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (26 page)

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Just five days had passed since Liana disappeared. Yet left in that

ditch, exposed to the elements, her corpse had been so scavenged by

animals and maggots that it took months to complete an autopsy.

She had been stabbed twice in the back and also had cut marks on

several fingers, indicating that she fought for her life and may have

been trying to run away from her attacker when she died.

The medical examiner could not determine the exact cause of

death because so much of her body tissue was missing. He believed

that she most likely died from an injury to the neck, either from

stabbing or strangulation—in part because he was able to rule out

other causes. The degree of insect infestation in the neck area led him

to believe that there had been an open wound. Strangulation was also

a possibility because Liana’s hyoid bone, a small bone in base of the

throat that is often broken during manual strangulation, was missing.

He believed that abrasions on her backside occurred post-mortem,

probably as a result of the corpse’s having been dragged.

There was no evidence of sexual assault.

A few hours before finding his wife’s body, White complained

to the local newspaper, the
Edmonton Sun
, about being compared

to Scott Peterson. In fact, he was very much like Peterson. In that

interview, he was already speaking of his wife as dead, and described

plans for her funeral. He seemed eager to move on, saying he had to

‘‘get back to normalcy’’ for their daughter’s sake.

‘‘Liana would want me to,’’ he said.

He made another gratuitous remark about how clean detectives

found his house on the day his wife disappeared, saying that his wife

‘‘hated mess.’’ That was the same explanation Scott Peterson gave

for why he claimed that his wife mopped the kitchen the day she

disappeared— strange considering that their maid had cleaned the

whole house just the day before.

White told the paper where he planned to search that evening—the

very place he would find his wife—saying that was where he believed

a body would most likely be abandoned. It was another eraser-killer

prophecy that would come true.

Q

White was the son and grandson of farmers. His life took a major

turn at age ten, when his parents split and his mother married the

farmer next door. On the surface, he was a polite and obedient child;

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underneath, some darker traits were evident at an early age. As a

teenager, he stole from relatives and friends. When caught, he would

deny the allegations as convincingly as he would years later when

charged with murder, with tears in his eyes and feigned sincerity.

He was prosecuted twice in the military for stealing equipment.

One item, a computer, he gave to his wife as a Christmas present.

When military police confiscated it, he told her they needed it back

because it contained classified information. He only came clean with

his wife on the eve of his court martial. He was fined and demoted but

not discharged. According to her mother, Kelly, Liana told Michael

that if he ever stole anything again, their marriage was over.

With the demotion they struggled financially. White left the

military and found work as a mechanic. The couple managed to buy

a small bungalow, but he still wasn’t earning enough to satisfy himself

or, he said, his wife. He began stealing again, this time tools from the

trucking company.

Revealing perhaps more about his own mind-set than Liana’s at the

time of the crime, he claimed that his wife was tired of living paycheck

to paycheck and that she wanted to ‘‘buy things, have things.’’ Yet he

said his wife didn’t like him working so much overtime and asked

him to cut back after she became pregnant with their second child,

wanting him around to help her with their three-year-old, as she was

still working full-time and was tired and ill from the pregnancy. He

agreed, but he didn’t seem that happy about it. The night before she

disappeared, he stayed out late—not working, but drinking with a

coworker.

Despite their financial troubles, Liana was clearly happy about

having another child. She repeatedly checked a Web site on her

computer that tracked the developmental stages of her pregnancy,

and excitedly reported her findings to her friends. White claimed

that he also very much wanted the baby his wife was carrying, but

that seems less certain. He had long harbored the fantasy of one day

buying the family farm and running his own machine shop. Another

mouth to feed must have made those dreams seem remote.

And there was an even more serious obstacle to that goal. Liana’s

mother says her daughter had no intention of ever moving to the farm,

where Liana felt that both she and her daughter were unwelcome

among Michael’s family.

The day Liana went missing, Kelly rushed over to talk with her

son-in-law, but he wouldn’t answer her questions. While she stayed

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up all night in the couple’s bedroom, pacing anxiously, keeping vigil

for her missing daughter, she could hear Michael snoring away in

front of the television, sleeping like a baby. The next morning, she

was shocked to overhear Michael say he had been unable to sleep a

wink.

Q

Ultimately, the Edmonton authorities amassed a wealth of evi-dence against Michael White, one of the strongest circumstantial

cases ever presented in an eraser killing. They managed to do so,

however, only because they acted quickly and astutely. If they hadn’t

moved rapidly, the security tape that refuted White’s time line of

the morning’s events and served as a virtual eyewitness account of

his dumping his wife’s car and setting up the abduction scenario

might have been taped over. If they hadn’t set up surveillance on

Michael when they did, the evidence in the trash bags, unimpeachable

proof of his guilt, would have been lost forever, buried in the city

dump.

They picked up on clues that didn’t fit the supposed crime scene.

They expertly worked their relationship with their suspect, ratcheting

up the pressure as needed but also holding back on their suspicions

enough to fool him into making mistakes and revealing his hand.

They intuitively grasped something about his psychology and played

into his ego, giving him enough rope to hang himself.

According to the theory presented by Crown prosecutors, some-time in the early morning hours of July 12, 2005, White killed Liana

in the couple’s bedroom, knocking over the bedside lamp during the

attack. Criminalists detected traces of blood in the bedroom, hall,

front doorway, garage, and the back of Liana’s SUV— revealing the

trail her killer took as he dragged her lifeless body through the house

and drove her out to the ditch where he left her. The murder weapon,

which has never been found, was ditched someplace else.

There was evidence that White did not randomly select the area

where he dumped his wife’s body. His next-door neighbor testified

that he and White had once dumped a load of dirt in that same

area while constructing a shared driveway. Many residents illegally

dumped trash there. Liana’s body lay near someone’s discarded toilet.

It was an ugly insight into his psychology. She meant so little to him

that he would leave her body next to a broken-down toilet.

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White then returned home to clean up the mess and went on

another dumping run, stashing the blood-soaked items and shattered

lamp in the grassy field. White apparently marked this site, preparing

all along to return at some point and more carefully dispose of

the evidence. Detectives later found the shade to the broken lamp

propped up on a fence post like a beacon guiding his way to the exact

spot where White had pulled over to retrieve the bags.

DNA tests matched the items in the trash bags to both Michael and

Liana White. The clothing, which bore Michael’s DNA, was stained

with Liana’s blood. Liana’s blood was on the outside of the rubber

gloves; his DNA was found inside the fingertips. The same brand of

sponges and towels as those in the trash bags were found in the White

home. Clothing identical in size and brand to the articles in the bag

was also found among Michael’s possessions.

A DNA expert testified that the odds that the blood on the gloves

was from anyone other than Liana were 1 in 5.1 trillion. The odds that

the DNA extracted from skin cells inside the gloves did not belong to

Michael were even more astronomical: 1 in 8.7 trillion.

At five on the morning she vanished, White made his third

foray, abandoning Liana’s car in the parking lot and setting up the

kidnapping ruse. In addition to the security tape, a neighbor testified

that as he arrived home at five that morning from working a graveyard

shift, he saw White heading out in his wife’s car, speeding away as if

in a big hurry.

White raised the usual defenses employed in eraser killings. The

prosecution did not prove when, where, or how Liana died, White’s

attorneys contended, nor did it establish motive for why her husband

would have killed her.

‘‘He gained nothing from this crime,’’ defense counsel Laura

Stevens contended. ‘‘He lost everything.’’ However, that argument

fails to grasp (or purposely attempts to obscure) the peculiarly

insidious nature of motive in eraser killings. The gain the killer is

seeking is inextricably tied to the loss of his victim. Eraser killers

think they will be better off without a particular woman or child in

their life, without having to support them or share their estate or give

up their home. They simply cannot abide for their victim to go on

living.

The defense ridiculed the evidence against White, casting the mis-takes he made in staging, his inconsistent statements, his inexplicable

behavior, and even the hard physical evidence as proof not of guilt but

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of innocence. It was another argument invariably made by defense

attorneys in eraser homicides, but a logically specious one: that a

cunning killer would not make mistakes that would give him away. As

eraser killers go, Michael White was not a particularly sophisticated

or adept one. But even the best are often tripped up by their own

hubris, by their abiding belief that they are above scrutiny, and by

the sometimes warring aspects of their psychology.

If White were lying, Stevens argued, he should have been able to

come up with a better explanation for the blood in his home and on

the items in the trash bags than the far-fetched tale he told in court.

If he were guilty, he wouldn’t have left incriminating evidence lying

around just waiting to be discovered.

‘‘There have to be a thousand better places to get rid of evidence

than an open field,’’ she said. ‘‘It doesn’t make any sense.’’

And if Michael had stabbed his wife to death in their home as the

state contended, ‘‘that place should have lit up like a Christmas tree,’’

said Stevens—referring to forensic tests with the chemical luminol,

which causes blood to glow when viewed under a blue light. However,

the articles in the trash bags proved that a major cleanup job had

taken place. They also found traces of blood on a bottle of bleach in

the house.

When police confronted White with the contents of the bags, he

initially claimed not to recognize anything. He later came up with an

explanation that attempted to cover all the evidence. He blamed it

on his three-year-old.

While playing horsey in their bedroom with a coat rack as her

steed, White said, Ashley accidentally hit her mother in the face and

broke the lamp. Liana suffered a bloody nose, and White put on the

rubber gloves to attend to her because his hands were dirty from his

mechanic’s work.

Liana wanted to go to the hospital, but Michael didn’t want to

take her. Like a ‘‘cold-hearted idiot,’’ as he described himself at trial,

he didn’t want to spend the day in the ER because her nose wasn’t

broken. They fought about it as they walked through the house,

leaving the blood trail. Liana gave in and later cleaned up the mess.

She must have dumped the bags in the field herself, which they had

used before to dump car parts, yard clippings, and other debris.

He said the nosebleed incident occurred three weeks before his

wife disappeared—a time frame that defies credulity, considering

that the towels in the trash bags were still wet with blood when

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police discovered them. What also defies credulity is the astounding

number of missing women who are alleged to have had innocent yet

blood-provoking accidents in their homes right around the time they

disappeared.

The blood pattern on the recovered clothing contradicted White’s

account. A pair of men’s pants found in the bag were soaked in blood

all the way up to the waist. A nosebleed that copious would have

been fatal. Blood on a sock (as well as the bedroom wall) revealed a

high-velocity spatter pattern, consistent with someone’s being struck,

not a dripping nose.

When lab technicians checked the pants pockets, they discovered

something even more eerie and highly significant. Stuffed inside was

a piece of cardboard emblazoned with the brand name Extreme

Edge—which appeared to be packaging for a knife. White was

charged only with second-degree murder because police said they

did not have evidence that the crime was planned. But the fact that

White was apparently carrying a newly purchased knife in his pocket

at the time of the killing certainly makes it appear that the murder

was premeditated.

White’s explanation for his bizarre retrieval of the garbage bags

was as implausible as his nosebleed story. Because he had allegedly

used the field before to dump trash, he assumed without ever opening

the bags that they must belong to him, and brought them home to

dispose of them properly— what his attorneys characterized as a

‘‘Good Samaritan’’ act.

He also backed off from the time line he had given for when Liana

left home that morning. He told police the day she disappeared that

he had spoken to Liana as she left for work at 6:15 A.M. He described

what she was wearing, her mood, and plans they talked about for

later in the day.

Now he said he was asleep when she left and just assumed that

she departed at the time she normally did. However, that revision

did nothing to explain his appearance on the security video an hour

earlier.

‘‘That’s not me,’’ he simply stated when a detective showed him

the security footage after his arrest. When the videotape of that

interrogation was played at trial, it was as if he were daring the jury

with the old adage, ‘‘Who are you going to believe, me or your own

lying eyes?’’ He grew out his hair for the trial, perhaps hoping that

jurors would not recognize him as the man on the tape.

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