Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (29 page)

Japan made a significant contribution during the 1970s as well. Fuseo Matsumur at the Saga Prefectural Crime Laboratory at the National Police Agency observed his fingerprint on a glass slide and mentioned it to colleague Masato Soba. A few months later, Soba developed latent prints on smooth surfaces with Superglue fuming.

Around the same time, another detection method was developed in England when Bob Freeman and Doug Foster invented the electrostatic detection apparatus. This device, too, had been intended for detecting fingerprints on paper, but indentations from writing corrupted the readings. But then they spotted another application: The apparatus could be used for handwriting analysis—those very indentations that got in the way. The method involved pinning a sheet of writing-indented paper between a glass plate and a sheet of Mylar. It was then placed on a machine with a brass plate and a lid charged with high voltage. A fine electrostatic substance sprinkled onto the paper moved toward the brass plate, filling in the paper’s indentations to reveal a clear presentation of the handwriting. The resulting image could then be photographed. While this was not an advance in the actual art of analysis, it made the process easier in those instances where the original note was missing but the tablet remained.

CONSPIRACY

Issues with the Kennedy assassination resurfaced in 1972 when the
New York Times
announced that Kennedy’s brain was missing. This revelation was the result of work undertaken by Dr. Cyril Wecht, a forensic pathologist, when he examined the Warren Report on behalf of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. He was the first nongovernment forensic pathologist permitted to observe and study the autopsy materials, which had been preserved in the National Archives. He thought that the handling of the former president’s body had been appalling, because the autopsy, performed by a pathologist with no experience in gunshot wounds, had been superficial and the medical photography poorly done. He was also disturbed by the notion that a single bullet could have done as much damage as he saw in the autopsy reports. He concluded that the Warren Commission’s “lone assassin, single-bullet” theory could not be supported. Further, Wecht was dismayed to discover that certain key items were missing from the collection: photographs of Kennedy’s internal chest wounds, glass slides of his skin wound, and most important, his brain. Wecht fed this information to the
Times
, hoping to bring public pressure to bear on the government to get a better investigation.

In 1978, Congress appointed a subcommittee to look into the matter, led by New York City medical examiner Michael Baden, who recruited Wecht and seven other medical examiners to assist. Baden and Wecht both wrote accounts of their experience and findings. One goal was to examine the possibility via trajectory wounds that there had been more shooters than just Oswald. However, Baden’s team soon discovered they were at a disadvantage. As they examined the crime scene and autopsy photographs, Kennedy’s clothing, the x-rays, and other reports, it soon became clear that the people in charge in 1963 had not realized the difference between a forensic autopsy and a regular autopsy. For example, Commander James J. Humes, the physician who performed the autopsy, had apparently not recognized the difference between an exit and entrance wound, and therefore could not pinpoint the bullet’s origin. He also couldn’t tell how many shots had hit the president.

The Secret Service had instructed Humes not to perform a complete autopsy, but only to find the bullet, believed to still be lodged in the body. In his reports, Hume’s medical descriptions were negligible, and he referred interested parties to the photos, which were so poorly focused by the photographer they were nearly worthless for medical purposes. Humes didn’t even turn Kennedy over to look at the wound in the back of his neck, or call the receiving hospital in Dallas to discover that a tracheostomy had been performed, which he’d have found going right through the exit wound in the throat. He erroneously assumed the bullet had fallen out the same hole it had entered. He also failed to shave the head wound to see it clearly, and he had it photographed through hair. In addition, Humes miscalculated its location by an error of four inches.

After only two hours (a very short time), he prepared the body for embalming. Then, because his notes were stained with blood, he burned them. After he found out about the procedure done in Dallas, he rewrote his notes based on what he recalled and what he could figure out. He ended up including material he himself never saw and failing to track the bullets properly. Thus, his report was filled with errors.

By relying on the placement of bullet holes through the clothing and their experience with exit and entrance wounds, Baden’s team managed to piece together the fact that two bullets had entered Kennedy. There was a small hole in the back of Kennedy’s shirt and jacket, and small exit holes going through his shirt collar and tie. That was the bullet that had pierced his throat and gone into Governor Connally (having fallen from Connally’s leg while he was on a stretcher). The other bullet had gone through the back of Kennedy’s head and came out over his right eye, ending up hitting the car’s windshield post and falling to the floor. Both had come from behind.

With the exception of Wecht, most of the pathologists on the Select Committee agreed that these two bullets had caused the wounds to both Kennedy and Connally, and that a single bullet had gone through Kennedy and into Connally. Wecht stood firm on his idea that Kennedy was struck twice in a synchronized fashion, from the rear and the right front side. He noted that before Oswald died, he had been interrogated for two days by top experts, but none had thought to keep any notes or to record the proceedings. It seemed to him unlikely that there was not a single piece of written documentation of one of the most important interrogations in American history. Despite the extensive analysis these pathologists performed, the conspiracy theories have not been laid to rest, and the longer the public is made to wait for the unveiling of documentation, the more firm the belief that there’s something to hide.

ONE MORE BITE

Another bite-mark case became a media sensation in the States. Notorious serial killer Theodore Robert Bundy was intent on defending himself in court. Having been a law student, and assured that his own confidence, charm, and good looks could win a jury, he arrogantly prepared his case. His first trial in Florida began in July 1979, centering on two murders that had occurred on January 15, 1978. Lisa Levy, twenty, and Martha Bowman, twenty-one, were in bed in the Chi Omega sorority house at Tallahassee’s Florida State University. A man wearing a blue knit cap crept in and struck them with a wooden log until they were dead. A sorority sister, Nita Neary, saw the man run from the house, so she called the police.

Levy had been raped, strangled, sodomized with a bottle, and beaten on the head, while Bowman had been severely beaten and strangled with a pair of panty hose. Two other girls in the house had been attacked and less than an hour and a half later, the man assaulted a fifth victim a few blocks away, who survived. Yet there were no leads, no fingerprints, nothing left behind, aside from semen and an odd bruise on the buttocks of Lisa Levy. One officer laid a yellow ruler against the abrasion and then stepped back for the photographers. His presence of mind might have made all the difference between conviction and acquittal of the most notorious killer in America, because by the time the case went to trial the tissue specimens had been lost.

Only a few weeks later on February 9, the killer continued to expose himself. Driving a stolen van, he abducted twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach in the middle of the day from near her school. He took her to a wooded area in a state park, where he raped and killed her, leaving her body there. Less than a week later, on February 15, he was driving a stolen Volkswagen in Pensacola, and because he was driving quite slowly the police ran the plates. He was arrested and fingerprinted, which gave away his identity as Ted Bundy, wanted for murder in several states out west.

While Bundy’s own revelations were often dubious, it appeared that his adult crime spree had begun in 1973 or 1974, when he killed more than two dozen girls in western states. The first apparent victim might have been Kathy Devine, fifteen, who was running away from home. Then there was Linda Ann Healy, who turned up missing in Seattle in January 1974. Blood drenched her mattress and there was a bloodstained nightgown close to the bed, but no body. Dozens of apparent abduction-murders followed throughout the Pacific Northwest and a suspect emerged who called himself “Ted” and who appeared to lure girls into his car by wearing a cast or sling on his arm and acting charming but helpless.

Several young women vanished altogether, while others were found dumped in remote places, such as densely wooded hillsides. Similar deaths in Utah and Colorado alerted law enforcement to the possibility of a transient killer. With the assistance of an eighteen-year-old woman who was nearly a victim but managed to jump out of Bundy’s car, they apprehended him. She said he had posed as a police officer to get her to accompany him. Tried first in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1976, Bundy was convicted of aggravated kidnapping and sentenced to one to fifteen years in prison. Then Colorado charged him with murder and he asked to manage his own defense. Given access to a law library, Bundy slipped through a window and ran. Recaptured eight days later, he managed once again to escape (by losing enough weight to fit through an opening in his cell), and this time he left the Western states and went to Florida.

At the police station after his arrest in Tallahassee, the investigators requested that Bundy provide a dental impression that they could use to compare to the suspicious bite mark on victim Lisa Levy, but Bundy refused. They got a search warrant that authorized them to get the impression in any way they could, and made a surprise trip so as to prevent Bundy from grinding his teeth down in an effort to disguise his bite. During this examination, Dr. Richard Souviron, a dentist from Coral Gables, took photographs of Bundy’s front upper and lower teeth and gums. He noted the uneven pattern, which he knew would facilitate making a match.

Bundy acted as his own attorney for most of his trial, until Dr. Souviron took the stand. At that point, Bundy sent in the lawyer assigned to assist. This same lawyer had already requested that the bite-mark evidence be thrown out because there had been no grounds for the warrant. The judge had ruled the evidence admissible.

In the many different analyses preceding the trial, the tissue from Lisa Levy’s buttock had been largely destroyed, but the photograph with the ruler still remained. Souviron described the bite mark on Levy as the jury examined the photographs. He pointed out how unique the indentation mark was and showed how it matched the dental impressions of Bundy’s teeth. He demonstrated the structure of alignment, the chips, the size of the teeth, and the sharpness factors of the bicuspids, lateral, and incisor teeth. Then he put an enlarged photo of the bite mark from Levy on a board and laid over it a transparent sheet with an enlarged picture of Bundy’s teeth. There appeared to be no doubt that Bundy had bitten her that night in some mad frenzy.

Souviron went on to explain that there had been a double bite: The attacker had bit once, then turned sideways and bit again. The top teeth remained in the same position, but the lower teeth left two rings. That gave Souviron twice as much to work with to prove his case. When questioned by the defense about the subjective nature of odontology interpretation, Souviron explained that he had done several experiments with model teeth to be assured of the standardization of his analysis. The attorney pointed out that the ruler in the photo had been lost, but Souviron countered with the obvious fact that it once had existed because it was in the photo.

Then the state called Dr. Lowell Levine, the chief consultant in forensic dentistry to New York City’s medical examiner. He testified that for the marks to have been left on the skin in the manner evident, the victim had to be lying passive, probably already knocked unconscious or killed. He also educated the jury on the long history of forensic odontology.

Along with the eyewitness testimony of Nita Neary, the bite-mark evidence was the best the prosecutor had. On July 23, Bundy was found guilty and sentenced to die in the electric chair. This was the first case in Florida’s legal history that relied on bite-mark testimony, as well as the first time that a physical piece of evidence actually linked Bundy with one of his crimes. In February 1980, he was tried for the murder of Kimberly Leach, whose remains had been found two months after she was abducted, and he was convicted for this one as well, receiving a third death sentence. Afterward, he confessed to the murders of thirty women over a span of four years, although experts estimate there were more victims. He was executed in 1989.

ASSISTANCE FROM THE DEAD

Among the difficulties of cases like this are victims found so long after their murders that time of death estimates are difficult to make. Dr. William Bass III, a forensic anthropologist for the State of Tennessee, discovered this himself one cold day in December 1977, which precipitated a rather unique and innovative response to the problem. A detective asked him to estimate the age of a set of human remains found on some family property. It was lying in the grave of a former Civil War colonel, William Shy, who had been killed and then buried in 1864. The police suspected that someone had used the grave as a dumping ground for a more recent death. Bass arrived with the police and could smell for himself the presence of the dead. Not three feet below the surface, where deputies had dug a hole, lay a man without a head and dressed in a tuxedo.

Bass agreed to go into the grave, which reeked of decay, and carefully remove the remains. It took him four hours in the freezing cold to maneuver them from the tight squatting position he was in. He handed the parts out as they came undone, and then laid them on a plank. The flesh was pinkish, and he estimated that the remains were those of a white male between the ages of twenty-four and twenty-eight, and since the flesh still retained a powerful odor and was fairly intact, this person had been dead between six months and a year. Bass said that he would need to examine the remains more closely in his lab. Then he went back into the grave to retrieve the head by having the officers hold him by the feet so he could rummage around upside down inside the broken cast-iron coffin. What he saw with a flashlight was evidence of the remains of Colonel Shy, so he left them alone and returned to the surface without the head. Wherever it was, the search could wait. Night was falling and it was getting quite cold.