Scene of the Crime (3 page)

Too Many People at the Scene

Every police officer knows these rules. Every private investigator should know them. Nonetheless, they're more often honored in the breach than in the observance. If you read
Helter Skelter,
you know that investigation was complicated by the fact that someone — nobody ever confessed—kicked a weapon under the couch. In a much more ordinary case, the murder of a prostitute in a small town in south Georgia, I saw twenty-five police officers, only one of whom had any business there, crowded into one small motel room.

What your fictional detective does is your business, and you'll decide that on the basis of the personality of the character and the needs of the plot. You may well want to let your detective—or your detective's rival — do anything or everything I say
not
to do, for the purpose of plot complications or red herrings. But for now, assume that you are your fictional detective. Here's what you should do:

Don't Touch Anything

In real life, officers are (or should be) instructed to put their hands in their pockets or clasp them behind their backs, while they do their initial walk-through. Then they should begin to make notes of what is significant, remembering that they don't know what is significant until the case is concluded. Here are some apparently

unimportant things that in my experience later proved to be extremely significant:

• Black candles on the fireplace mantel - and if the spell to lure your enemy to his destruction doesn't work, you can always resort to the telephone.

• The color of slacks a woman was wearing. We thought at first it was natural death. It wasn't. And six months later a fifteen-year-old boy confessed to strangling "an old lady in green pants." Fortunately one detective had thought to note the color of slacks the woman had on. I hadn't. I should have.

• A pair of pantyhose on the dresser in the motel room, and the package they came out of. We assumed the victim—who apparently was deliberately drowned in the toilet—had opened the package to put the stockings on. In fact, the perp had opened the package and used the stockings to strangle the victim, stopping up the toilet and putting the victim in head-first as an afterthought after returning the stockings to the dresser. By the time we learned that, the pantyhose and the package were in the county landfill.

• The chemical composition of what appeared to be the last in a series of blood puddles, where an injured murderer had repeatedly paused to get his breath. It turned out to be red brake fluid. We'd lost the trail half a block back.

Officers are instructed not to remove anything from the scene, no matter how insignificant it may appear, without properly collecting it. If an investigating officer hadn't decided to flush an upstairs toilet that had a cigarette floating in it, Sam Sheppard might never have been convicted of murder. And, of course, no one should ever add anything to the scene. An investigator's own cigarette butts may confuse the situation badly. In one rape murder, the medical examiner found a combination of spittle and the chewed end of a toothpick in the pubic hair of the victim. It looked significant—until one of the investigating officers confessed that he did the spitting, trying to keep from vomiting and not aiming to hit where he did.

Who Was Sam Sheppard?

He was the man on whom the television series
The Fugitive,
my novel
The Eye of Anna,
and probably many other novels, were loosely based.

It happened in the early 1950s in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. Sheppard's wife Marilyn was bludgeoned to death during the night. According to the prosecution, Sheppard—an osteopath-was guilty. According to the defense, Sheppard was asleep in a downstairs room at the time of the event; he awoke to hear his wife's screams; when he tried to run upstairs to her aid, he was knocked unconscious by a bushy-haired stranger.

Sheppard was convicted and served ten years in prison but was finally released partly as a result of the aid of Erie Stanley Gardner and his "Court of Last Resort," a foundation Gardner established to aid people who appeared to have been unjustly convicted of major crimes. Books have been written arguing for Sheppard's innocence; books have been written arguing for Sheppard's guilt.

The only thing that is absolutely certain is that the crime-scene investigation was hideously botched. For one thing, when the first officers arrived at the scene, there was a cigarette floating in an upstairs bathroom adjoining the bedroom where Mrs. Sheppard was killed. Neither Dr. Sheppard nor Mrs. Sheppard smoked.

Somebody flushed the cigarette, and Sam Sheppard did ten years.

Was he guilty?

Danged if I know. But I do know there was a reasonable doubt, which means he shouldn't have been convicted.

If the crime scene had been done right, there might never have been a question—whichever side was right.

Notes. Sketches. Measurements, triangulated from two fixed points so that the exact spot can always be found again. Photographs, preferably color. And never make assumptions. The victim is lying in a pool of what appears to be blood. Sure, you know it's blood, I know it's blood, everybody knows it's blood—but what if your report said it was blood and it turned out to be red paint, or catsup, or—as in the situation above—brake fluid. So let the lab say what it is.

The victim
appeared
to have been shot, or drowned, or whatever. But let the medical examiner (sometimes referred to as the ME) decide the actual cause of death, or you may find yourself—as I once was—on the receiving end of a telephone call that includes a lot of undeleted expletives. "What do you mean, natural death? That woman died of a broken neck!"

It was at least mildly funny when I adapted it fifteen years later to use in a novel. It was a lot less amusing when it was the real ME screaming at me, even though I had not been involved in the initial investigation—which is just as well, because I, too, would almost certainly have assumed it was natural death. After all, isn't it logical to assume that a woman known to have severe heart trouble, found lying dead on her back in her nightgown in a neatly made bed inside her locked house, died naturally? We thought so, anyway.

Medical Examiner or Coroner?

You'll have to find out what your jurisdiction has.

The coroner system is based, like so many other things, on English common law. The coroner may be elected; s/he may be totally unqualified, or may be qualified only as a funeral director and undertaker. The coroner may be appointed, in which case s/he usually has some medical qualifications.

The medical examiner is almost always appointed, and s/he almost always has some medical qualifications; often s/he is a board-certified pathologist.

In many jurisdictions that by law—often as a result of the state constitution—have an elected (and often unqualified) coroner, a coroner system and a medical examiner system exist side by side. Such a situation is ideal if the coroner and medical examiner work together; it is a nightmare if they fight each other.

A small town may have no medical examiner at all, or may have a multi-county arrangement with one medical examiner serving several small towns. A very large city, on the other hand, will probably have a team of coroners and assistant coroners, or medical examiners and assistant medical examiners. Thomas No-guchi, former deputy coroner of the city of Los Angeles, has written two extremely interesting books showing how the system works.

But now, back to our corpse. You don't know what he died of. Nobody does, yet. All you know is that he's dead, and the way the body was hidden strongly suggests murder.

This time, you won't have any trouble at all with extra people at the crime scene. Nobody wants anywhere near this one. You don't either, but you're stuck with it.

You can wear a gas mask, which is what the ME will do, later, when he's doing the postmortem examination. Or you can wear a floater mask, a modified gas mask designed only to filter out bad smells. But if you're like me—a gas mask doesn't fit around your glasses, and a floater mask fogs them so badly that you can't see-you just go in. This makes you look very macho, even if you do happen to be a five-foot-tall grandmother.

Here's the secret—and let's not tell it to those standing at a distance watching and admiring you. If you stay in a bad odor about three minutes, your olfactory nerves go numb and you can no longer smell the odor. If you keep rushing out to get breaths of fresh air, every time you go back in it's just as bad as it was the first time. That's why I sat on the bumper of the car containing the late—the very,
very
late—Oscar (fake name, of course, and we'll get to this case in chapter five), while Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents were running in and out turning green and arguing frantically about towing the car to Americus with the body still in it, which of course would not have solved the problem of which one of them was
not
going to open the car door and take photographs.

I'm the one who took the photographs, surrendering my own copies years later to an FBI agent who wanted them to illustrate one of his lectures.

Dividing the Work

Now, who does what? If your detective is a small-town cop, s/he's going to do it all. In a larger city, most of the crime-scene work will be done by people who may be called the Identification Section, the Mobile Crime Scene Unit, or (in most of Britain) the Scene-of-Crimes officer. If you're writing about a real department, call and find out. They'll be glad to tell you, and will probably give you a tour of the section in the bargain.

For that matter, they'll give you such a tour even if you're creating a fictitious city. The Galveston Police Department was extraordinarily hospitable when I was doing the research for the first of my Mark Shigata novels, set in a nonexistent town in Galveston County.

But for the purposes of this book, let's assume that you (re

member, you're a fictional detective right now) are a small-town cop. You get to do it all—but you're smart, well trained and well read, so you can handle it.

Back to the Jackson Street Corpse.

I don't have access to my original notes, sketches and reports, and after so many years, my memory is a little shaky. But that's OK, because we're—at least in a way—making this up as we go along, as I'll be doing with other cases in order to make my point in the most effective way.

You've walked through the scene. The unfortunate EMT is scrubbing the inside of his gas mask at a fire hydrant somebody turned on for him; the coroner has finished pronouncing the victim dead and is now cracking jokes with the other EMTs at a safe distance from the smell. You and another detective are hard at work. And where do you begin?

What Da You Do—In Order?

1. Walk through the scene with your hands behind your back.

2. Take all your initial photographs.

3. Take any necessary close-up photos of the corpse, and mark the location of the corpse—with chalk inside, with rope outside—for future reference.

4. Let the corpse be removed
if
removing it won't interfere with anything you still have to do. This has to be decided on a case-by-case basis. If it would interfere, then wait until you can let it be removed. Someone—an ident officer if you have enough, otherwise a detective or a designated uniformed officer—should accompany the body to the hospital or morgue, to take any additional necessary photographs and take possession of the clothing.

5. Take measurements and draw initial rough sketches of the scene.

6. Fingerprint anything that is going to be fingerprinted at the scene.

7. Collect whatever evidence must be collected at the scene.

8. If possible, seal the scene, in case you need to return.

9. At all steps, keep very careful notes.

10. When the autopsy is scheduled, an ident officer should wit-

ness the autopsy in order to take immediate note of any additional information, and to take possession of the slug if any.

11. How long does it take? This is something that cannot, injustice to the victim and to the person who will ultimately be accused, be rushed. It takes as long as it takes. I've known crime-scene searches to take as short a time as fifteen minutes, as long a time as four days. Some —such as the Manson family's crime scenes, the Marilyn Sheppard crime scene — should have taken longer than they did.

12. Keep very detailed notes, and make supplementary reports as soon as possible. Remember that if anything happened to you — and in this business it could—somebody else might have to work from your notes and reports. I learned my lesson on that the day I rolled my car on the way back from a baseball game in Atlanta, with my report on a major murder not yet written and all my partner's and my notes on the crime scene in my purse. Fortunately nobody was injured and the notes remained intact.

13. Wash your hair before you go home. You don't really want to sit down to dinner smelling like
that
, do you? If you keep shampoo and a couple of towels in the locker room or (if you're a woman and they haven't set up a women's locker room yet) in the darkroom, it's easy enough to do. Lemon-scented shampoo helps. The smell gets into the hollow center of your hair shafts and into your sinuses, and it stays there. I never did figure out what to do about the sinuses. Eating hot horseradish or salsa followed by strong peppermints helps some.