To Die For (28 page)

Antoniadas figured the findings of Dora's autopsy would be similar to those of June and Norma's autopsies. Multiple modes of death linked all of the victims. Dora, like June, was killed by manual strangulation, ligature strangulation, and multiple blunt force trauma to the head. The blows to her skull were so hard, they had literally split her head open, which explained why chunks of hair were strewn on the carpet. When they brought the body in, she was virtually unrecognizable, she was so swollen and bloody. Like June, one eye was hugely purple and swollen shut. An ID tech took pictures from multiple angles, her head still turned to one side and her right hand still raised in a protective posture, even though she was on a gurney. She had defensive cuts and bruises on her hands and her right thumb as well as bruises on her right shoulder and on her chest. A criminalist took tape lifts from her clothing, even though it had also been done at the crime scene. Once the autopsy attendant swabbed the blood from Dora's face and hands, the ligature mark around her neck emerged and the skin on her face was stippled with red dots, the result of the hemorrhaging during strangulation. There were five blows on the left, rear side of the head.

That was the same conclusion drawn by criminalist Ric Cooksey, who'd just spent a few hours diagramming the blood splatter marks in the hallway. Antoniadas was amazed that Cooksey made the same finding as the coronor just by looking at blood dots on the walls. The ID techs had taken photos of the splatter the night of the murder, but Cooksey plotted the marks on graph paper, transferring the gruesome blood splats so they looked like some sort of hyperkinetic graph. Cooksey was good. From the arc, angle and direction of the splatter marks, he surmised there were five blows and was able to approximate the source of the splatter: the location of the victim's head when each blow was struck. Because small drops don't travel far, he could tell the head was very close to the wall when certain blows were struck, but he didn't theorize which blows came first. Splatter marks near the floor by the bathroom and the oblique angle of splatter in the door jamb indicated that the victim's head was near the floor several inches away from the jamb. Cooksey noted that some of the drops had demarcated edges and were very low, leaving open the possibility that two or three of the blows occurred with the head between the attacker's legs. Given the location of the head when the blows were struck and the angle and arc of the splatter, Cooksey also suggested that a left-handed attacker might have produced the blows.

*   *   *

Dana was so goddamned cold. She was smart, but she was also stupid in the way that criminals are stupid. Smart criminals don't talk to cops. Dana had never been arrested and had never been through the system. She'd thought she was smart enough to control the interview and for the most part, she had. But she was not smart enough to express sympathy for the victims. Antoniadas had been around more clever killers who were conniving enough to say, “I have no idea who did this, but I sure feel terrible about what happened to those poor ladies.”

Dana thought she was smarter than the cops, felt superior to the cops and wasn't afraid of the cops. She had a controlling attitude and a lack of sensitivity. It was those qualities that made her a killer. What was he missing? What else did he need? What was he leaving out?

He tried to look at his cases from the standpoint of a defense attorney to see where the holes were and how they were going to attack. Like Bentley, Antoniadas also saw an insanity defense emerging. Right now, he had a paper case. He knew the taped statements would never see the inside of any courtroom since she was screaming for a lawyer. He just wanted to make sure she was working alone so they didn't have to try finding someone else. Now he had to build a profile on her, talk to her friends, find out what she was like and get as much information as possible about her work habits, her finances, her relationships.

Antoniadas didn't feel like his case was weak, but he knew the second you say you're done, some defense attorney down the road will try to poke holes in your case by filing motions to ban items of evidence or statements made by his client. If the judge agrees with any of it, your case has the potential of biting the dust, in which case the defendant walks. You can never have too much evidence. That's one reason he liked to pick up everything at a crime scene, even if it seems superfluous, because you can't collect it three or four years later when the case is in trial. There was one murder case where some woman was stabbed to death and they found what looked like candy at the crime scene. When Antoniadas asked the criminalist to pick it up, they found that it was Tic Tac breath mints and Excedrin. While they were at the crime scene, some guy kept riding by on a bicycle again and again, staring. Antoniadas got a funny feeling and sent a unit to talk to the guy. When they shook him down, he had Tic Tac and Excedrin in his pockets. Apparently, some had fallen out while he was stabbing the victim. At another crime scene, it looked like someone had taken a bite out of a big chocolate bar and left it in the bathroom. The criminalist didn't want to pick it up, but Antoniadas wanted it. It turned out to be a bar of soap. When they went to talk to the victim's son, Antoniadas went to the bathroom and saw the other half of the bar of soap. He arrested the guy. Antoniadas had no idea why the guy had left a half a bar of soap at the crime scene.

He knew they would not use all the blood, all the fibers, the carpet exemplars, every single blood smear, the hair chunks, the hair combings from the autopsy, the tape lifts from the body and the blood splatter patterns in this case. The most pressing matter was to get a documents examiner to compare the signature on the checks Dana passed at the grocery stores, the stationery store, and the health food store against the handwriting from her own checks and checkbook and the exemplars she wrote out during the interrogation. He wanted the same checks compared to Dora's signature in her own checkbook. He'd also coordinate with Greco and get the examiner to compare Dana's handwriting to the signature on the credit card slips where she signed June Roberts' name. There was no doubt in Antoniadas' mind about what the examiner would say about who had signed those checks.

There was something else. Antoniadas pulled out his cell phone and dialed a familiar number.

“Yeah, Detective Antoniadas, Elsinore station. I want to put a mail cover on this inmate. I want everything sent to me.”

He waited a moment.

“Dana. Sue. Gray. G-R-A-Y. 187. She was arrested on the sixteenth. She'll probably be in P.C.,” he said, the shorthand for protective custody. Antoniadas asked that everything be sent to the Southwest station of the Riverside County Sheriff's Department in Temecula, which covered Sun City.

From now on, every piece of mail Dana sent and every piece of mail coming to her would be copied and sent to Antoniadas. They would also conduct periodic sweeps of her cell, common for many inmates, and collect any unfinished letters and anything else she had written, copy it, return the originals to her and send the copies to Antoniadas. Her phone calls would be monitored and her jail visits would be monitored and taped. What they could not review or copy were incoming and outgoing letters marked “legal.” Other than legal mail, prisoners have no right and no expectation of privacy. If she was going to confess or describe her crimes to someone in a letter, he wanted it. He also wanted to protect the only living witness, Dorinda Hawkins, in case Dana had worked with a partner.

FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 3 P.M.

Tom fished the yearbook out of the box. There were still a few unpacked boxes from when they'd moved out of their home in Canyon Lake. The little house they'd bought on Ketch Drive for $108,000 several years ago was ratcheted up in value by the real estate market, but they had taken a second and a third mortgage to pay off the credit card bills that Dana had run up. When they'd split up, they moved out of the house and Tom had moved to a small studio, his personal belongings taking a back seat to his drum set and his recording equipment.

Music had always been a big part of his life. Even though he drove a backhoe to make a buck, he dressed like a hard rock musician—ripped jeans, long, wild, wiry blonde hair and lizard-skin boots, black leather jacket. He'd been playing drums since he won a talent contest in junior high in Covina, a suburb of Los Angeles about fifty miles northwest of Riverside County. It was in junior high that he first laid eyes on Dana. She was so beautiful, he had a hard time breathing when she was around. He couldn't help but look at her and stare. She was a little blonde spitfire, full of energy and sassy attitude, a free spirit.

From that moment, he was head-over-heels in love with Dana. But for all he knew, she had no idea he existed. His boyhood crush never went away and he continued to worship her from afar in high school until she moved away after her freshman year. Ten years passed and when he ran into her at a grocery store, his knees felt weak. He took her to his tenth high school reunion and a little more than a year later, they married. Tom was the happiest man in the world and knew that with the golden-haired, athletic goddess of his dreams, they could tackle anything together. But after he and Dana got married, everything changed.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Woo-woo!”

The guys unloading boxes from a truck at the dock behind the May Company department store stopped in their tracks and looked up at the two teenaged girls speeding around the docks on a moped.

Dana, her blonde hair flying, and her dark-haired best friend Carrie Ann on the seat behind her, buzzed the guys on the docks at the local outdoor mall, catcalling over the sound of the moped's whiney engine.

“Woo-woo!”

They zipped around town a bit before speeding home. But the young girls caught the eye of a patrol officer who stopped them and cited Dana for driving the moped without a license. He also didn't like her flippant attitude. He sat Dana and her friend in his black-and-white, loaded the motorized bike into his trunk and carted them home.

“Watch out for her,” he told Dana's mother. “If you're not careful, she's going to lead a life of crime.”

Beverly, Dana's mother, let Dana have her moped back with a warning: “Next time, don't get caught.”

At 13, Dana was more than a handful. She was developing into a beautiful girl, but she couldn't take “no” for an answer. A simple request to do household chores would result in a screaming match because she wanted to go to the movies or do something with her friends. All Beverly wanted was to instill a little discipline and responsibility, but Dana would have none of it. Dana was temperamental and demonstrative.

Sometimes she acted more like a teenaged boy. One year Dana had gotten her mother a snake for Christmas. Afterward, Dana said that her first choice had been an iguana, but it had died under her bed, so she went back to the store and got a ribbon snake. On Christmas Eve, it got out of its box and Beverly finally found her Christmas present slithering around the bathtub. Beverly's little lecture to Dana about gift-giving—it's for the person you're giving it to, not for yourself—fell on deaf ears. Dana had simply expected to get in trouble.

Once when they were getting ready for dinner, Dana asked if she could start the car and Beverly said no because Dana was still rather petite and the driveway was on an incline. Dana didn't argue, but a few minutes later, there was a crash in the front yard. When Beverly ran out of the house to look, Dana had crashed the car trying to get it started.

Beverly was an ex–beauty queen and still tried to play the part. She liked being made-up and dressed. She had been a Rose Princess in the Tournament of Roses Parade in the 1930s, modeled at Bullock's and was the model in the Hamilton watch ads. She had the drop-dead looks that attracted men in numbers. A would-be actress, her Hollywood career never quite took off, and she drifted from job to job and eventually had two sons by two different fathers.

Ten years later, she met Russell, Dana's father, a women's hairstylist, and she charmed him with her outgoing personality and bubbling sense of humor. People who knew her well said she'd never met a stranger because she immediately put people at ease as if they were old friends. Russell and Beverly married. Russell bought a house in Covina and worked at being a father to Dana as well as to Beverly's sons, Rick, 10, and Craig, 8. Beverly and Russell tried many times to have another baby and Beverly suffered several miscarriages until she finally became pregnant. By the time Dana was born, their little family was ecstatic and Dana was the cherished new addition. Beverly, who worked at a beauty supply shop Russell owned, soon began using an assortment of medications. Russell thought the house resembled a drug store, with bottles of pills all over the house. He didn't like it. He also didn't like the fact that she charged his credit cards to the limit. He could not get her to stop spending money. Beverly was aggressive and liked being the queen bee of her own home as well as the small block where they lived, but she didn't get along with one of their neighbors. One day he came home to find Beverly outside the house wrestling with the woman in the gutter. He left her soon after that. Dana was not quite 2 years old.

As Dana was growing up, Russell visited once or twice a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. Early on, Dana exhibited daredevil and destructive antics to get attention, from dying her hair green to recklessness in sports. Dana thought her mother paid more attention to her older step-brothers because Rick had appeared in a sky-diving television commercial for Marlboro cigarettes and Craig, a musician, had played a big gig at Disneyland, caught the eye of a record producer and cut an album. Dana tried to play Craig's guitar and would sing in the driveway of their home where she thought no one could hear, but resented that her mother never gave her the praise she gave her older half-brothers. She felt that her mother didn't pay enough attention to her and that she was too young to compete for her mother's affections. Feeling rejected, she retaliated by using pinking shears to cut a hole in one of her mother's dresses. At 5 years old, she knew she'd get punished and didn't try to hide what she had done. With her eldest half-brother, Craig, out of the house playing gigs with his band, Dana retaliated against Rick by crawling into his bed to take a nap, and wet his bed. He was furious at her, but she kept doing it because she thought it was funny. She finally stopped wetting his bed when she was 8 years old. Rick moved out of the house to live with his great aunt, Beverly's mother's sister, who agreed to take him in.