Morgue (23 page)

Then there's the myth of small entrance wounds and big exits. Fact is, it's generally true that a bullet often makes a smaller hole when it enters a body; then it tumbles and fragments inside, making a large hole when it exits in a surge of metal, blood, and tissue. But it's certainly not true in every case.

And in Ernestine Perea's case, it wasn't true at all. And the clues were all hidden in plain sight in Moxley's photographs.

When you fire a gun, it's not just a bullet that comes out of the barrel. There's a flame that burns up to 1,500 degrees, followed by hot gases, soot, burning gunpowder, and the bullet, of course.

If you press the muzzle of a gun against the skin, then that flame burns the skin, the soot is deposited around the rim of the wound, and the gases have their own effects.

There in Moxley's photos of what he believed was an
exit
wound, I saw it all. Burns and soot on the edges of her abdominal wound. That meant the muzzle was against her skin when the gun was fired. Those small but unmistakable signs told me this was an entrance wound, not an exit.

By the same token, the little wound in her back showed none of the searing or soot. It was clearly the exit path of a bullet (or piece of bullet).

And there was another thing. The torn zipper and missing button on Ernestine's jeans had been presumed by investigators to be the sign of a struggle. But they weren't.

Remember all that hot gas from the muzzle? With the barrel against her skin, it all blew into her, temporarily inflating her abdomen with enough force to rip her jeans and tear open the entrance wound. The muzzle gases had briefly expanded her abdominal cavity with a force of three thousand pounds per square inch, so forceful her jeans were torn open and the waistband was imprinted on her skin.

Poor police work and a bad original autopsy by a doctor with little or no forensic training had led to the wrong conclusion. Their erroneous leap to the conclusion that the entrance wound was always smaller than the exit supported a flawed prosecution theory that sent a man to prison.

Did it mean that Martin Frias didn't put the gun against Ernestine's belly and pull the trigger? By itself, no. But Moxley's other experts were examining other pieces of evidence and quickly coming to the conclusion that Ernestine had committed suicide—just as it had appeared at first glance to investigators, and consistent with Martin's account.

The prosecution claimed Ernestine had been shot from behind, then twisted around to fall onto her back. But blood-spatter expert Judy Bunker saw no way Ernestine could have twisted around with a smashed spine. And even if she had, she would have slung blood in a semicircle as she fell. There was no sign of that.

Using a scanning electron microscope, forensic chemist Dr. Robert Lantz determined that gunshot residue had traveled from Ernestine's front, through her abdomen, and out her back … not the reverse. The prosecution argued that the residue on the front of the shirt might have been deposited there after blowing through Ernestine's body from the back.

And prosecutors thought it preposterous that if Ernestine had shot herself, Martin would not have heard the hunting rifle's blast. But Dr. Harry Hollein, an acoustics expert, showed how Martin might have missed the Weatherby's thunderous boom. A similar rifle fired into the body of a dead horse from several feet away emitted up to 120 decibels, equal to a live rock concert or standing within three feet of a power saw. But when the muzzle was placed against the skin and fired, there was only a muffled thump, akin to somebody kicking the side of a trailer house. All the sound was absorbed by the body, which acted like a silencer.

A thump.

Exactly what Martin Frias said he heard in the dark that night.

It all made more sense now, at least to Moxley. The forensic facts were consistent with Martin's story, and Ernestine most likely killed herself by sitting or kneeling on the floor of her bedroom, pulling the muzzle of the upside-down Weatherby against her tummy, and pushing its trigger with her thumb.

Four months after interrupting my steak dinner in Cheyenne, Robert Moxley was convinced he'd found the truth that would set Martin Frias free. He asked the trial court for a new trial, based on his discovery of new evidence, supported by a string of forensic scientists who'd examined the evidence.

The judge rejected his appeal.

So he took his case to the Wyoming Supreme Court with a unique, gutsy argument. Martin Frias, he said, should get a new trial because new evidence proved Ernestine's shooting didn't happen the way the prosecution said, and because Frias clearly had a bad lawyer.

The state's Supreme Court justices refused to grant Moxley's motion on new evidence. Why? He'd had every chance to gather it before Frias's trial. It's not “new” evidence if he merely failed to look for it at all.

But ironically, his failure to look for that evidence in the first place proved that Martin Frias's lawyer—Robert Moxley—had been ineffective. Because of that, they said, Frias should get a new trial.

*   *   *

With a new trial granted, Moxley had one last chance to save Frias and he didn't want to screw it up again. This time he'd collect all the medical evidence that he'd missed the first time.

The first order of business: exhume Ernestine. I wanted to attend the second autopsy myself, but my schedule wouldn't allow it, so in my place, the defense hired my friend, the renowned forensic pathologist Dr. William Eckert, to observe the new autopsy instead. Eckert already agreed with me that Ernestine's bullet wounds had been misinterpreted.

Dr. Eckert was a New Jersey–born forensic pathologist who'd made his bones as a deputy coroner in New Orleans and Kansas before becoming a much-sought-after consultant in retirement. When Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, Los Angeles county coroner Thomas Noguchi sought advice from Eckert, who knew the jurisdictional issues that plagued JFK's death investigation five years before. He told Noguchi not to let Washington steal the case, and he didn't.

At the time the Frias case was revived in 1985, Eckert was fresh from a Brazilian expedition to identify the remains of Josef Mengele, the chief doctor at the Nazis' Auschwitz concentration camp who vanished after the war and secretly continued medical experiments in South America. The team concluded the corpse in Wolfgang Gerhard's grave in a small coastal town was indeed Mengele (and DNA confirmed it in 1992).

Later, Eckert was part of an eight-person team of pathologists—all fascinated by the new “science” of criminal profiling—who reopened the coldest case in modern history: Jack the Ripper's slayings of seven prostitutes in London in the late 1800s. They concluded the faceless killer had probably been a butcher by trade.

Although nobody had ever heard of or even cared about Martin Frias, this invisible immigrant laborer who lived on the margin of a small town in an alien place called Wyoming, his case was more important than finding Jack the Ripper or Josef Mengele. They were dead, and no amount of forensic skill would bring justice to them or their victims. But we had a chance to right this wrong and let an innocent man live the rest of his life, free.

Aside from the gross error on the bullet wound, Eckert was also perturbed that the scars on Ernestine's wrists—artifacts of prior suicide attempts—had been ignored, and how the original pathologist had overstated his qualifications to do forensic work. In the hearing for a new trial, Eckert had spoken eloquently about how good forensic pathologists work tirelessly to find the right answer.

Now he joined the prosecution's doctors at the graveside of a troubled young woman whose violent death had sent a man to prison. A year after she was buried in a Cheyenne grave, could she tell us anything new?

On a frosty autumn morning in 1986, a small army of doctors and lawyers—the defense lawyers, the hospital pathologist who performed the original autopsy, the state's hired experts, and my old colleagues Drs. Charles Petty and Irving Stone from the Dallas Medical Examiner's Office, Dr. Eckert, and some state investigators—converged on Ernestine's grave in Cheyenne's Olivet Cemetery, where her father had buried her four days after she died. Her obituary had asked that in lieu of flowers, mourners contribute to crime prevention programs, a subtle but deliberate accusation of murder.

Around dawn, more than two years after her funeral, they lifted Ernestine's coffin from the high plains earth and drove it an hour west to a basement morgue at the university in Laramie. Because of a ripe odor emanating from the box, the pathologists opened the casket in the ambulance garage.

Inside lay Ernestine, wearing her glasses. Although she'd been embalmed, her remains had naturally flattened out somewhat. She looked as if she'd been left out in the rain; her body was covered in large beads of condensation, formed by the change of temperatures between her cold grave and the warm hearse.

In the morgue, new X-rays were taken of Ernestine's remains from every angle, and Eckert observed that Ernestine's liver was shredded by the blast. The state's pathologists used a reciprocating saw to remove her spine where it had been hit by the bullet, then sent it to Dr. Petty's state-of-the-art crime lab in Dallas for analysis.

When science had finished with her, most of Ernestine was returned to the frigid earth in the Cheyenne cemetery, where she could lie unmolested for the rest of eternity.

After the second autopsy, the state's doctors stuck to their opinion, but Moxley was more firmly convinced she had died in a tragic suicide, not a homicide.

Both sides were utterly convinced their theories were correct.

And Martin Frias's freedom hung in the balance.

*   *   *

In December 1986, almost exactly two years after he was convicted of murdering Ernestine Perea, Martin Frias's new trial began. But this time, his defense team came loaded for bear.

For seven days, the prosecution pushed its same old theory: Ernestine had been shot from behind during a struggle with someone in her bedroom, fell onto her back, and died as her assailant staged the room to look like a suicide. Lack of gunshot residue and char on Ernestine's cotton-knit, blue-striped tank-top suggested to state crime technicians that the shot had come from at least three feet away, from an assailant lying on or crouching near the floor. That assailant was an enraged, jealous Martin Frias, they said.

This time they put the eminent Drs. Petty and Stone on the stand to say the physical evidence pointed to homicide.

Then all of Moxley's forensic experts took the stand—blood-spatter expert Judy Bunker, forensic pathologist Dr. Bill Eckert, acoustics expert Dr. Harry Hollein, electron microscopist Dr. Robert Lantz, and others—to connect the dots that ended in Ernestine's suicide.

The blood spatters were consistent with a contact wound in the belly as Ernestine sat on the floor, and gunshot residue was present but nearly invisible to the prosecution's outdated technology, they said. The sights and sounds were consistent with Martin's account, they said. And Ernestine's past flirtations with suicide suddenly weighed heavier.

I testified again how the telltale clues around the young mother's belly wound told us everything we needed to know about the shot that killed her, from the seared edges of her wound to her torn jeans.

And this time around, the investigators' failings loomed larger. They had made no diagrams of the crime scene, taken no measurements. Some crucial tests were never done. The jury was left with reconstructions based largely on crime scene photos.

Bottom line: Moxley's experts—who all worked for free—agreed that Ernestine almost certainly shot herself. And in the end, even the small-town coroner admitted that he now believed our suicide theory, too.

This time the jury deliberated for less than three hours. At one point in the jury room, they even requested Martin's rifle and reenacted how Ernestine might have shot herself while sitting on her floor. It was possible and now it all made sense to them.

As they announced their “not guilty” verdict, Martin Frias wept and hugged Moxley. His two years and ten days in prison had been hard on him, but now he was free.

In coming days and weeks, he was granted citizenship under new federal amnesty legislation, and he petitioned the court for custody of his children. Ultimately, he moved away from Wyoming, remarried, and had another child, although, tragically, he never won back custody of his kids with Ernestine. And even today, his prosecutors, investigators, and many locals in the town of Wheatland continue to believe he's a murderer.

But he's free.

Martin Frias's case had to be recognized as a puzzle before it could be solved. Sometimes these mysteries are never recognized and justice isn't done. Murders sometimes present as suicides, accidents as murders, or suicides as accidents. It's not just the stuff of Hollywood drama. Humans are imperfect and they sometimes see only what their subconscious is secretly whispering for them to see. Real-life mysteries often unfold into unexpected conclusions.

I've seen more than my share of cases where the
first
conclusion isn't always the
best
conclusion. Sorting them out is one of the few real rewards of the grim work I've chosen.

Forty-two percent of Americans die from natural causes, and 38 percent in accidents. Nine percent are suicides, and 6 percent are homicides (not always murder, but always deaths caused by other humans). That leaves 5 percent of deaths that we simply can't explain.

So in America today, almost one of every five Americans dies in a suspicious way. Something is out of time or place, and we must go deeper to find answers.

Frias's puzzling case wasn't the first time nor the last that poor police work, shoddy forensics, and rushed conclusions clouded the real cause or manner of a death. It is the bane of medical examiners everywhere. A gut reaction isn't always correct. Sometimes, as Martin Frias's experience proved, the most significant clues aren't always obvious, but they're there. We must only be willing to see them and open-minded enough to interpret them honestly—and even then, as we've seen so often in the relatively recent shooting deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, the world might prefer its own conclusions, in spite of the facts.