Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (45 page)

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‘‘I thought if you want me to convict him,’’ he said, playing out

Harris’s analogy, ‘‘you have to show me Scott’s finger on the switch.’’

Like the Robert Blake jurors, Justin Falconer would never believe

Scott Peterson was guilty without seeing a smoking gun in his hand.

He impugned his fellow jurors, saying that the fact that some of them

published a book after the case was over showed they hoped to profit

from the trial. But Falconer himself had asked me right after he was

bounced from the panel how he might go about writing a book, even

though he had served just thirteen days on the case.

Conclusion

Fixing a Broken System

Q Withtheevolutionoflawsandpublicaware-ness—beginning in the 1960s and culminating in 1994 with the

federal Violence Against Women Act and a series of important

statements articulating the extent and seriousness of crimes against

women worldwide by the United Nations Commission on Human

Rights—marriage was no longer supposed to be a shield for domestic

violence.

Yet a legal system with an institutionalized punishment discount

for men who kill an intimate partner is tacitly condoning the ultimate

act of domestic violence. It is telling men that killing a wife or girlfriend

is to some degree understandable and justifiable.

We can’t even begin to get an accurate assessment of the num-ber of women murdered by a ‘‘loving’’ partner because so many of

these cases go undetected or unpunished. Between murders disguised

as unexplained disappearances and those staged to look like acci-dental falls, drownings, suicides, natural deaths, carjackings, or other

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randomly perpetrated crimes, untold numbers of eraser killings every

year are never even recognized as domestic homicides.

An eraser killing is precisely the type of violent crime most

likely to fall through the cracks and loopholes in our justice system,

whether because of problems with death investigation, the handling

of missing persons cases, or other stumbling blocks of legal and police

procedure. Although a complete list of reforms and solutions would

require a book unto itself, the following are some recommendations

for changes that could make it more difficult to get away with murder

and, one hopes, prevent at least some future eraser killings.

Q

Reform the death investigation system
.

The system for investigating unnatural deaths in the United States

is so faulty and antiquated that Michael Baden, one of the top forensic

pathologists in the country and the former chief medical examiner for

New York City, calls it a ‘‘national disgrace.’’ Werner Spitz, another

of the nation’s preeminent forensic pathologists and editor of the text

that is considered the ‘‘Bible’’ on death investigation, has estimated

that less than a third of the country has properly trained staff and

procedures in place to assess suspicious deaths adequately.

In the United States there is no uniform set of standards or

guidelines for investigations either at the scene where the body is

found or later at autopsy. Instead, there are fifty different state systems

and over three thousand county and regional systems with wildly

varying methods and unsettlingly uneven results.

In many jurisdictions, county coroners without any medical or

forensic background are the gatekeepers. Although they do not

generally perform autopsies themselves, they wield enormous power

in determining which deaths merit investigation and which do not,

whether an autopsy should even be performed, and what tests should

or shouldn’t be run, such as X rays that might detect a hidden skull

fracture or toxicology screening that could uncover a case of secret

poisoning. These coroners are merely elected officials, sometimes

with no more than a high school education and a few weeks of

on-the-job training. Accountants, gas station attendants, tow-truck

drivers, and beauticians have served as county coroners. They alone

have the authority to sign death certificates, and because they have

no supervision, it can be very difficult to get them to amend the cause

Conclusion

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or manner of death once officially entered, even if other information

comes to light that draws their findings into question.

In some states that rely on the coroner system, which has its roots

in twelfth-century England, there is a wide variation from one county

to the next in the percentages of deaths that are actually investigated;

some counties investigate only 3 or 4 percent of the number of deaths

per capita as other counties in the state.

Rather than rising with the murder rate and increasing sophisti-cation of criminals, autopsy rates have actually declined dramatically

due in large measure to lack of personnel and funding.

Although many states have reformed and improved their systems

of death investigation over the past three decades, there is nothing

approaching a national standard for education, testing, and certifica-tion for coroners in the way that pharmacists or registered nurses, for

example, must be trained at accredited schools and pass standard-ized national tests for knowledge and competency. It is scandalous

that search and cadaver dogs have rigorous testing and certification

standards but coroners do not.

Eraser killers already have something of an advantage over investi-gators because of their ability to alter a crime scene to fit the scenario

they want to project, and because they have intimate access to the

victim and knowledge of her habits and lifestyle. They control and

manipulate the evidence, hoping a lazy or badly trained investigator

will swallow their bait. Because an eraser killer usually shares the

same abode as his victim or has easy access to his victim’s home, he

can take all the time he needs to clean up and dispose of the blood,

contaminated clothing, rugs, and so forth, an advantage relatively

few other types of murderers have. He determines how and where to

place the victim’s body and whatever props he chooses, such as an

open liquor bottle, an unsafe ladder, a bag of fish food, or a gun. He

is also the person who controls time. He can make the 911 call or

arrange to have someone else find her. He can contact friends and

relatives of the victim and put on a show of grief, or he can wait to

notify them until the body and other ‘‘evidence’’ have been removed

so that they cannot see anything that might lead them to question his

carefully staged scenario.

If he places himself at the scene or pretends to have ‘‘discovered’’

his dead wife, he has the enormous advantage of being able to

give police and emergency responders the first description of what

happened. His version of events—what he saw, what his wife was

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doing, how she had been behaving prior to her death, his claims

of how he desperately tried to revive her—can create a lasting

impression in the minds of investigators. In addition to physically

setting the stage, the killer is able to provide a verbal narrative that

can have a very significant impact on how the death scene is viewed.

Even if police later change their minds and become suspicious about

his story, the scene where the body was found has almost always

been ‘‘unsealed’’ and turned back to its everyday use, destroying or

contaminating what little forensic evidence might remain.

When an inexperienced or poorly trained coroner arrives on the

scene and sees a dead woman sitting on the sofa with a gun in

her lap, as in the case of Barton Corbin’s first victim, Dolly Hearn,

little if any real investigation may be undertaken. In Dolly’s case,

sheriff’s deputies took pictures at the scene, looked for signs of

forced entry, poked around her apartment a bit, and swabbed her

hands for GSR. The coroner arrived and spent just a few minutes

looking at the body. As soon as he left, the body was removed and

the scene released. Dolly’s friends and roommate were told they

could clean up the blood; it was no longer considered a crime scene

worthy of preservation, even though detectives had yet to talk to the

scary-acting ex-boyfriend Dolly’s roommate told them about, or to

her parents and other people who knew she had not been depressed

and suicidal.

In the state of Georgia, where Barton Corbin managed to get away

with murder for fourteen years, only to be caught when he staged

a second intimate partner killing in the same way, staff shortages

recently forced the state-run crime lab, where autopsies are actually

performed, to temporarily stop accepting bodies after normal lab

hours. Because many of Georgia’s rural counties lack major hospitals

with morgue facilities, some areas had no means of preserving bodies

pending an autopsy. One coroner was told by officials in her county to

store bodies in refrigerated deer lockers until the lab could take them.

Officials tried to assure an alarmed public that bodies of their

deceased loved ones would not be mixed in with deer carcasses,

but the strange crisis underscores how fragile and patchwork Amer-ica’s system of death investigation really is. And no investigations

are at higher risk of being mishandled or lost in the shuffle than

those involving clever cover-ups and staging. No victims are more

Conclusion

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vulnerable in this process than women killed by the men they have

trusted.

Had Barton Corbin been living in one of the poorest counties

of Georgia instead of in one of the wealthiest at the time of his

second murder, the error-prone coroner system might have made

it possible even for a brazen double killer to get away with another

eraser killing.

If the scene is staged well and the killer’s story is convincing, things

may not seem suspicious enough to prompt a forensic autopsy, in

which case the eraser is very close to beating the system permanently.

There are no nationally agreed-on standards for medical examiners

either, although they are MDs. Even when an autopsy is performed

by a well-qualified medical examiner, however, it may not yield

enough information medically to bring murder charges— despite

strong circumstantial evidence that the death was the result of a

homicide.

A North Carolina man named Tim Boczkowski made a 911 call

late in 1990 to report that his wife, Elaine, a healthy woman in her

mid-thirties, had apparently drowned in their bathtub. He said he

found her unconscious with her head underwater, and pulled her out

of the tub. The emergency operator immediately dispatched a rescue

squad from the nearest fire department, while at the same time giving

Boczkowski instructions on how to administer CPR. Very quickly

firemen arrived on the scene, followed by a paramedic team equipped

with defibulators and other tools used to revive drowning victims.

Everything possible was done to get Elaine’s heart beating again as

they rushed her to the nearest hospital, where the effort to revive

her went on into the early hours of the next morning, when she was

finally pronounced dead.

The case sounded like an accidental drowning. Tim would later

tell friends that Elaine had too much to drink that evening and simply

drowned. But the firemen, the paramedics, and a patrol officer who

arrived later all noticed one strange fact—the bathtub in which the

woman had supposedly drowned before being dragged out by her

frantic husband was bone dry, and not a single drop of water had been

splashed on the floor. As time went on, the details of what happened

that night changed every time Boczkowski related them. Even before

a homicide detective was assigned to the case, the uniformed officers

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involved had determined that this story of a woman drowning in a

completely dry bathtub just did not make sense.

Unfortunately, the autopsy carried out on Elaine Boczkowski was

inconclusive. The doctor found no water in the lungs to indicate

drowning, but also could not find any other immediate cause of

death and simply wrote the fateful word ‘‘undetermined’’ in the box

under cause of death. It may be surprising to most people, but death

due to drowning is extremely difficult to determine with scientific

precision. In this case there were simply none of the typical conditions

that accompany drowning, but also no other discernable cause for

her death. She had some bruises on her body, but those could be

explained by the fact that she had been subjected to an extremely long

period of vigorous resuscitation efforts. She also had five different

bruises on the interior of her scalp, one of which could have been

caused by an accidental fall in the tub, but not all five. There was also

no alcohol found in her system, despite her husband’s contention

that she had been drinking in the tub.

Still, because the chief medical examiner who performed the

autopsy could not determine what killed her, the case was closed. In

that jurisdiction, if the medical examiner could not determine cause

of death, there would be no further investigation.

As the staged fishpond ‘‘drowning’’ death of Pam Mead in Salt Lake

City demonstrates, there should ideally be a great deal of interaction

and communication between homicide investigators and the medical

examiner and coroner when the cause of death is ambiguous—and

in some states the rate of ‘‘undetermined’’ causes of death among

all homicides and suicides is up to 50 percent. But in Greensboro,

North Carolina, where Elaine Boczkowski died of no apparent cause,

having drowned in a dry, empty bathtub, the homicide investigation

was believed to be pointless. Her husband probably never would

have been charged with murder—as he was four years later after

he moved to Pennsylvania—had his second wife, another perfectly

healthy woman, not drowned suddenly and unexpectedly in the

family’s outdoor hot tub. Mary Ann Boczkowski was still in the tub,

floating in water, when emergency responders arrived. Once again,

Tim was quick to tell emergency responders that his wife had been

drinking alcohol while relaxing in the hot tub— fourteen beers as

well as some wine, he said.

This time, however, the medical examiner determined that she

had clearly not drowned. She had been strangled to death, and the

Conclusion

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forensic evidence was unmistakable. (Eerily, she also had five fresh

bruises on the interior of her scalp, just as Elaine had.) It appeared

that Mary Ann fought hard for her life. Fresh scratch marks were

found on Tim Boczkowski’s neck, torso, and hand, which he claimed

were the result of his wife giving him a ‘‘scratch massage.’’

The determination that his second wife died as the result of

homicide triggered a reevaluation and reopening of the unresolved

cause of death of his first wife. Murder charges were filed against

Boczkowski in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, and juries in both

cases found him guilty. He received a life sentence for killing his first

wife, death in the second case. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court,

however, overturned the death sentence on a technicality and ordered

that he be sentenced instead to life in prison for the second murder.

While Boczkowski was in jail in Pennsylvania awaiting trial, his

cellmate claimed he boasted about his crimes. When the man asked

him why he made the potentially foolish mistake of killing his

second wife in a manner so similar to the first, Boczkowski expressed

chagrin that he wasn’t more creative. ‘‘That was stupid, wasn’t it?’’

he reportedly remarked.

What we don’t know is how many eraser killers elude detec-tion by murdering just once, establishing no pattern to attract

attention. One of the disturbing things that this case demon-strates is that even when an eraser killer makes a major tactical

error—forgetting to fill the bathtub to make his drowning story

credible—he can still get away with murder. Because death inves-tigation depends for success on highly coordinated and interactive

relationships between completely different government entities—an

elected coroner’s office, an appointed medical examiner, patrol offi-cers, and homicide detectives—the opportunities for fumbles, lack

of cooperation, indecisiveness, and slow response times all give an

edge to an even moderately intelligent eraser killer who has planned

a bloodless soft kill.

Efforts have been made in recent decades to reform, modernize,

and establish comprehensive training systems and national qual-ification standards to address weaknesses in the area of death

investigation. Many states have already instituted changes in this

direction, and given the leading role that state governments have

as the shapers of felony law and criminal administration, the only

realistic reform efforts must be aimed at the state level. National move-ments for improved and standardized practices are likely to come

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