The Mammoth Book of New Csi (24 page)

At the trial that began in Edinburgh on 11 November 2004, the prosecution maintained that Mitchell had repeatedly hit Jodi, tied her arms and stabbed her time after time both before and after she died. Her throat was slashed up to twenty times, severing her windpipe and the main artery in her neck. He stripped her dead body, tied her wrists with her trousers, slit her eyelids and slashed her right arm, left cheek and left breast. He cut her stomach open in three places and thrust the knife through her mouth.

However, they produced no murder weapon or clothes belonging to Mitchell covered in blood – despite the gruesome nature of the murder. There was no damning DNA evidence. Even the wood burner yielded no forensic evidence showing that his parka had been burnt. And all the eyewitness testimony was purely circumstantial. Nevertheless, on 21 January 2005, Luke Mitchell was found guilty of the murder of Jodi Jones.

The judge, Lord Nimmo Smith, described the sixteen-yearold defendant as “truly wicked”.

“You subjected Jodi to a horrible death and one can only hope mercifully quick,” he said. “She still had her full life ahead of her and you snuffed it out. She was loved by her family and you have left them bereft.”

Mitchell was also convicted on an unrelated charge of supplying cannabis. He was said to be a heavy user of the drug.

During the trial, the police came under criticism for their handling of the crime scene. Jodi’s body was left uncovered and exposed to the elements for eight hours after it was first discovered, possibly risking the destruction of vital DNA evidence in the rain. The schoolgirl’s body and the objects around it had been moved before the forensic team started work.

Crime scene investigator Derek Scrimger admitted that it was “not an ideally managed crime scene from the very start”. A tent should have been erected over the scene, he said. Scrimger’s CSI work was further delayed because a female colleague had arrived at the scene, but could not get over the wall to get to the body because she had a bad back.

However, Detective Superintendent Dobbie insisted that the crime scene was one of the “finest I have ever seen” and every care was taken to recover every single piece of evidence that was there. Crime scene photographs showed the initials L. M. and J. J. were found carved into the bark of a tree near to the body. However, even though the knife used to murder Jodi had not been found, the bins in the area were emptied before a thorough search could be carried out.

The way police carried out a virtual identity parade, presenting photographs of Luke and other youths to one witness, was also criticized during the forty-two-day trial. The defence claimed that “a tactical decision” had been taken not to treat the boy fairly. At just fifteen, Mitchell was interviewed without a lawyer being present in an “overbearing and hostile” fashion in an attempt to wring a confession out of him.

“We are driven to the conclusion that some of the questions put by the interviewing police officer can only be described as outrageous,” appeal court judge Lord Hamilton said later. “Such conduct, particularly where the interviewee was a fifteen-yearold youth, can only be deplored.”

Detective Superintendent Dobbie admitted that the case against Luke Mitchell was purely circumstantial, but insisted Lothian and Borders Police Force had done a good job.

“We have been scrutinized by one of the finest defence lawyers in the country, but not one point has been inadmissible,” he said. “I am open to suggestions as to where we could have made improvements in the investigation, but I can’t think of anything obvious.”

However, early in the investigation the police were hoping that their crime scene investigation would lead to a breakthrough in the case.

“We’re hoping we may get something forensically to stand up or knock down our thoughts,” said a police source. “It’s no longer the old detective thing about experienced interviewers breaking down someone’s alibi. The work on hairs, fibres and microbiology, the dependence of the major enquiry on forensic science, has grown.”

That evidence never emerged.

According to forensic scientist Professor Allan Jamieson, who oversaw the crime scene evidence in the case: “There was a prolific amount of scientific work in the Jodi Jones case with zero result. One of the things you don’t see happening much is much being made of the absence of evidence where one might expect to find it. If someone is supposed to have been involved in a violent assault involving transfer of fibres and body fluids and these are not found on the suspect, that is rarely used as evidence [that the suspect was not guilty]. But forensic science is still a relatively new science – that may well change.”

Even so, the jury took just five hours to reach its decision in what was the longest trial of a single accused in Scottish history. The defence bill alone came to £452,687, the biggest ever paid by taxpayers for a murder trial in Scotland. Luke Mitchell was sentenced to life, serving a minimum of twenty years before parole. This was the longest sentence ever given to a youth.

While 122 items were taken from the murder scene, including hairs and saliva on Jodi’s body and clothing, attempts to discover the killer’s DNA profile proved unsuccessful, the prosecution said. However, the new defence team brought in to fight Mitchell’s conviction said that the original police forensic service laboratory report contradicted the prosecution case that the murder did not have a sexual motive as semen was found on Jodi’s body. The report is also said to show that a blood sample found on Jodi produced a full DNA match with a named individual and a second full DNA profile, for an unknown male, was retrieved from a condom found near the body.

The latter individual was identified three years later when he committed a crime and provided a match on the DNA database. Mitchell’s new solicitor, John Carroll, said: “The DNA evidence could put two people, two associated people, at the locus in circumstances that require an explanation.”

Mitchell’s original defence team had a copy of the reports but never raised them in court because of issues over who would pay for an expert opinion, according to Sandra Lean, an author studying wrongful convictions who has been campaigning on Mitchell’s behalf.

Two appeals have already been turned down.

Dismissing an appeal in 2008, the Lord Justice General said that the identification of Mitchell along the path “not only destroyed the appellant’s alibi (that he was in his home during that period) but also put him in the company of Jodi Jones at a point of time which on other evidence may well have been shortly before she met her death. Further, it rendered the place of her death on the general route which the appellant would have had to take to proceed from one locality where he was sighted to the other. The absence of any signs of struggle on the path side of the wall which ran along the northern side of the Roan’s Dyke Path suggests that, if Jodi Jones went through the break in the wall close to where she met her death with someone, she did so with someone she knew – such as the appellant, whom she had gone expressly to meet that evening. The manner of her death was also significant, as was the unexplained disappearance of a knife which the appellant was in the habit of carrying and of the jacket which he may have been wearing on that day. The appellant’s conduct later that evening was also significant – not least in the apparent ease with which he was able to identify the location of the body in relatively dense woodland on the far side of the wall . . . there was sufficient evidence in law, in our opinion, to allow the jury, if they accepted it, to draw the inference of guilt.”

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6 June 1996, the emergency phone rang at the Police Department in Rowlett, Texas. The night dispatcher Doris Trammell picked up the phone to find a hysterical woman on the line.

“Somebody came here . . . they broke in,” she screamed.

“Ma’am?” said Trammell.

“They just stabbed me and my children,” said the caller.

“What?”

“They just stabbed me and my kids, my little boys.”

“Who did?” said Trammell, trying to calm the woman. It was her job to get the details down in as orderly a manner as possible. But the caller began screaming: “My little boy is dying! Oh my God, my babies are dying!”

Trammell punched the button for the main police unit and said: “Stand by for medical emergency, woman and children stabbed!”

Then she advised the woman caller that she was calling an ambulance. The woman was now sobbing.

“My babies are dying! My babies are dying!” she cried. Then she said: “My baby’s dead.”

“Ma’am, please calm down,” said Trammell. “Tell me what’s happened!”

But by then the woman was incoherent. Trammell turned to her computer screen and traced the caller ID to a number at 5801 Eagle Drive, the residence of Darin and Darlie Routier. It was in the peaceful suburb of Dalrock Heights Addition.

The caller identified herself as Darlie. Eventually, she calmed down enough to give the dispatcher some of the details.

“While I was sleeping . . .” she said haltingly, “me and my little boys were sleeping downstairs . . . someone came in . . . stabbed my babies . . . stabbed me . . . I woke up . . . I was fighting . . . he ran out through the garage . . . threw the knife down . . .”

“How old are your boys?” asked Trammell.

Damon was five; Devon six. By then an ambulance and a squad car were on their way.

Awakened by Darlie’s screams, her husband, twenty-eight-year-old Darin Routier, who had been asleep upstairs, rushed down to the living room. When he had gone to bed some hours earlier, the boys were lying on the floor watching their big screen television, while Darlie lay on the sofa in a sexy Victoria’s Secret nightshirt. Now all three of them were covered in blood.

There were two huge gashes in Devon’s chest where the sixyear-old had been stabbed. Darin checked for a pulse. There was none. Devon’s lifeless eyes were wide open and stared vacantly back at him. He turned to five-year-old Damon, who was lying against the wall with his back to the room. Blood was oozing through the back of his shorts and his lungs rattled as he struggled to suck in air. But he was, at least, alive.

Darin turned back to Devon and began to give him the kiss of life. But as he placed his hand over Devon’s nose and breathed into the child’s mouth, blood sprayed back into his face.

The first policeman on the scene was Officer David Waddell. He was struck by the overpowering smell of blood. He had not come across such a scene of carnage during his career as a lawman in sleepy Rowlett. Quickly assessing the situation, he instructed Darlie to get towels, cover Damon’s wounds and apply pressure. But she ignored him, screaming that the intruder might still be in the garage where he had fled.

Waddell was soon joined by Sergeant Matthew Walling and paramedics Brian Koschak and Jack Kolbye. They found one child dead, another dying and their mother drenched in blood with a bloody rag pressed to her throat. Quickly they radioed for backup.

While the casualties were being attended to, Officer Waddell and Sergeant Walling followed the trail of blood that ran through the house. From the living room, it led through the kitchen and a small utility room into the garage. Their flashlights lit the scene as they moved forward with pistols drawn. But there was no one there. However, the screen on a side window of the garage had a slash down the centre where an intruder could have got in or out.

The attacker may still have been in the house, so they went back into the kitchen. It was a mess. There was blood on the tiled floor. The vacuum cleaner had been knocked over and there was a bloody butcher’s knife on the island countertop. Next to it was a woman’s purse and some expensive jewellery. The motive for the crime was not, apparently, robbery.

They continued their search. Upstairs they found a third child, an infant, whimpering in its crib. Sergeant Walling gently lifted up the baby boy and examined him for bruises. There were none. This was the Routiers’ youngest son, Drake. He was just six months old.

Three more paramedics turned up – Rick Coleman, Larry Byford and Eric Zimmerman. They noted the two large gashes in the boys’ chest, which had penetrated the children’s lungs. Devon was beyond help, but Damon was still alive. Coleman quickly installed an IV tube to sustain the boy until they reached hospital. Paramedic Kolbye scooped Damon in his arms to carry him to the stretcher. It was then that he thought he heard the boy’s death rattle as his lungs expelled what little air they contained.

Once they had the boy on the stretcher, Kolbye and Coleman performed chest compressions in an attempt to keep the boy alive. Then they headed across town to the Baylor Medical Center, but the child had died before they got there.

Meanwhile, the hunt for the intruder was on. A canine unit had arrived at Eagle Drive. The dogs were unmuzzled and went sniffing for scent. The paramedics had staunched Darlie Routier’s bleeding neck with gauze. Out on the front porch, Sergeant Walling managed to calm her. She told him she had awoken to find an intruder straddling her on the sofa. She screamed. There was a struggle. She managed to ward off his blows and he fled towards the garage. Then she noticed her two boys. Apparently, while she was still sleeping, the intruder had butchered them. She had heard and seen nothing.

Byford and Koschak put an IV line into Darlie’s arm and placed Steri-Strips across a shallow but ugly cut to her throat. Afterwards, she continued talking to Sergeant Walling, describing her attacker as a man who was medium to tall and wearing black jeans, a black T-shirt and a black baseball cap.

At 3 a.m., Sergeant Walling concluded his interview. The paramedics then escorted Darlie to the ambulance and took her to Baylor Medical Center for further treatment. Too shaken to drive, Darin called on his neighbour Tom Neal to take him there, while Neal’s wife Karen stayed to babysit Drake.

More policemen arrived and threw a cordon around the Routiers’ house. Neighbours awoke to find their quiet cul-de-sac full of flashing lights. Lieutenant Grant Jack, commander of the Investigative Division, arrived at Eagle Drive shortly after three. In the hallway of 5801, he met Detective Jimmy Patterson, a veteran of the Crimes Against Persons Division. Together they examined Devon, who was lying under a blanket. Patterson explained that the child’s mother claimed a stranger had attacked her and the children. The butcher’s knife still lay where the police found it on the kitchen counter. The mother, said Patterson, had put it there after picking it up off the floor where the killer had dropped it.