Scene of the Crime Read online

  This is the safe that Jack cracked.

  This is the prybar that cracked the safe that Jack cracked.

  This is the fingerprint left on the prybar that cracked the safe that Jack cracked.

  This is the powder that showed the fingerprint left on the prybar that cracked the safe that Jack cracked.

  This is the photo made of the powder that showed the fingerprint left on the prybar that cracked the safe that Jack cracked.

  This is the inked print that matched the photo made of the powder that showed the fingerprint left on the prybar that cracked the safe that Jack cracked.

  This is the jury that saw the inked print that matched the photo made of the powder that showed the fingerprint left on the prybar that cracked the safe that Jack cracked.

  This is the "Guilty!" said by the jury that saw the inked print that matched the photo made of the powder that showed the fingerprint left on the prybar that cracked the safe that Jack cracked.

  In real life, we wish it were always that simple.

  Sometimes it is. Once I went to a service station burglary. Recognizing the fingerprint (Yes, I know this is theoretically impossible, but I can't help that-sometimes I did it anyway.) on the broken glass as that of a known burglar and forger who had fled town six months before, I asked the owner if he had any checks missing. He told me he didn't.

  All too well acquainted with the habits of that particular burglar, I said, "I'm sure you do. Look in the very back of the checkbook."

  He did, and to his surprise—but not mine—the last few checks had been torn out. "Seventy-four to detective bureau," I said into my radio. "So-and-so is back in town."

  "Thank you," replied Detective Johnny Patton. "En route."

  As I went on to other calls, Detectives Patton and Bob Prickett (Yes, these are their real names; I always enjoyed working with them.) hauled the surprised burglar out of his girlfriend's bed, and jailed him before I got back to the police station.

  It isn't usually that easy or that fast — and even when it is, it's

  easy only because all the homework has been done and all the investigators involved know what they're doing.

  In fiction, we want it to be complicated. But no matter how complicated it is, accuracy is important. We're not talking about avoiding that combination of sheer lunacy and total laziness that sometimes turns up in pulp fiction, such as that exhibited by the author who had a security guard in an intelligence agency carrying a cocked revolver inside his jumpsuit. Unless the guard had a real yen to sing soprano, he wouldn't.

  No, we're talking about the mysteries that could be good and just miss because of inaccuracies. One such mystery—by a brilliant writer—was ruined for me because the author assumed identical triplets would have identical fingerprints. They don't; no identical siblings have identical fingerprints. Another book, by an even more brilliant writer, was similarly ruined because, in the second chapter, the author described a brain as ruby red. I spent the rest of the book waiting expectantly for some exotic poison that would have turned the brain ruby "red. There wasn't one. It turned out to be a simple bashing. Years later, I had a chance to meet that author. When I pointed out to him that the brain is light gray, bearing a distinct resemblance to lumpy oatmeal, he replied ruefully, "Now I know. But I didn't then."

  However, that same author had redeemed himself, in my eyes, by writing absolutely the most precise and accurate description of the search for latent fingerprints at a crime scene that I had ever read in any book including my own, and I'm a certified latent fingerprint examiner. I asked him how he'd managed that, and he told me he'd spent two weeks following a fingerprint unit of the New York City Police Department everywhere they went, and asking every question he could think of.

  Most of us have neither the time nor the resources to make that kind of an odyssey. We want our work, whether we're writing fictional mysteries or true crime articles or books, to be as accurate as possible. But for most of us, there's no way to know how a crime scene is really worked or what really happens at the crime lab. We depend on what we read in magazines or glean from books written for specialists.

  I spent five and a half years as a police officer attached to the Major Crime Scene Unit in Albany, Georgia (which was then listed as the smallest Standard Metropolitan Area in the United States), and another year as head of the Identification and Crime Scene Unit in Piano, the "Silicon Valley" of Texas. Since then, I've made every effort to keep up with new processes and methods as they have been developed. And here's an example of how things change: When I first began fingerprint work, it was impossible to get the fingerprints of an assailant from the skin of a victim. By the time I left, less than ten years later, there were three methods for doing just that, and I had the equipment for two of them.

  At the time I left police work, about twelve years ago, the only way to "search a latent"—that is, compare an unknown latent fingerprint from a crime scene to fingerprints of known criminals, when no suspect has been developed otherwise—was manually. In even a small town, that could take months or even years. I once cleared a robbery exactly one year after it took place, and the month Captain "Doc" Luther and I cleared twenty-four cases, each involving a different criminal, by fingerprints alone, we felt like dancing in the streets. In those days, if the inked prints were filed anywhere other than in the police department that had collected the latent, almost certainly the criminal would never be identified by fingerprints alone. Now this work is done by computer. Local and state files can be searched in minutes, and the vast FBI fingerprint file can be searched in a matter of hours.

  When I left police work, genetic fingerprinting did not exist. Now just about everybody has heard of it, and it's turning up in fiction as fast as it is in real life.

  This book is as up to date as it can be, but in some areas it will be outdated before it is off the press. So use this as a starting point, and keep reading.

  Let's walk through a real crime. I've changed a few details, partly for protection of those innocently involved, partly because the crime, after all, was eighteen years ago, and I've forgotten this and that. But with those exceptions, everything is as it was then—except, you are there.

  The Jackson Street Corpse

  Saturday, August 17th. It is hot in the city, hot and so humid that the air is not just sticky but almost dripping. It's rained every afternoon for a week, and everything is molding including the clothes you're wearing.

  Uniform division gets the call first. It's probably nothing. A citizen has reported a bad smell and a lot of flies in a thick growth of bamboo between two "shotgun" houses. You know the reason for the nickname: These houses are laid out in straight-line fashion,

  and they're so small that if you fire a shotgun through the front door of one of them, the shot pattern will just about fill the back wall.

  Uniform division has no trouble finding the house. The officers are used to this address. Three middle-aged winos live together here, two sleeping in the double bed and one on the couch, and when they're not drinking, they're fighting with each other.

  The call looks simple, at first....

  Who Gels the Call First?

  In all but the very smallest jurisdictions, where there are no more than two or three police officers at the most, uniform division gets the call first. What happens then varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Where I worked, if the crime was "heavy"—that is, if it was a serious crime, such as murder or armed robbery— detectives would be dispatched at the same time the uniform officers were dispatched, but would generally arrive later because detectives are not usually in the immediate area; the beat car is. Identification Section—sometimes called the Major Crime Scene Unit-would be requested by the first officers at the s
cene if photographs, fingerprinting or evidence collection was needed. But every jurisdiction has far fewer ident technicians than uniform officers or detectives, so depending on how busy ident is, ident might get there considerably later.

  When the detectives arrive, the uniform officers back off. They may be asked to "control the scene"—that is, to keep unauthorized people out of the way; they may be asked to help with questioning and transporting witnesses. If there are many witnesses and the scene is somewhat chaotic, patrol officers may be called from other beats and the patrol sergeant will come to help direct crime-scene protection.

  Detectives will question some witnesses at the scene and transport others to the police station to make formal, written statements.

  But in a fairly large police department, ident section actually does the crime-scene work.

  So for the time being, you—Detective N.E. Boddy—work in ident.

  It looked simple, to start with.

  But by the time you get there, an emergency medical technician is vomiting in his gas mask, and the coroner has just pronounced the victim dead from half a block away.

  The victim might be one of the winos, but you can't tell by looking, not now. His own mother wouldn't recognize him now.

  After death, and after something—you don't yet know what — that left the body curiously flattened, he was bent double and wrapped in quilts loosely wired around him with straightened metal coat hangers. After semiconcealing the unwieldy bundle in the bamboo thicket, the culprit—henceforth to be called the "perp" (police slang for "perpetrator")—laid a sheet of plyboard over the bundle.

  But the moisture and the flies had no trouble getting into the coverings, and the body has been dead for at least a week. It's semi-decayed, seething with writhing white footballs composed of thousands of maggots.

  Somebody has gone to get a search warrant, to allow you inside the house where the death—natural, suicide or homicide, but the disposition of the body tells you which is most likely—almost certainly occurred.

  The case is all yours.

  Enjoy.

  When Do You Need a Search Warrant?

  You need a search warrant any time the person in control of the location—not necessarily the owner—is either unable or unwilling to sign a consent-to-search form.

  At the time this case was really worked, you did not need a search warrant to work a crime scene. We just went in and set to work. But as a result of more recent Supreme Court decisions, you now do need a search warrant in such situations.

  If the premises are rented, "the person in control of the location" is the renter, rather than the owner, because the owner has in effect rented the control of the location to the renter. If husband and wife together rent or own a house and the wife signs a consent-to-search form, police may not search the workshop which is used only by her husband unless he also signs, because he is in control of that location. Similarly, the husband may not give police consent to search the wife's sewing room.

  Under what circumstances may a search warrant be issued?

  Read the U.S. Constitution. The rules are spelled out in careful detail. We'll discuss them after you've had time to think about them a little.

  Learn the Givens, Then Break the Rules

  Do not try to break the rules spelled out in the U.S. Constitution.

  Given Number One: The ideal situation is what you never have.

  Given Number Two: Whatever you didn't write down is the first thing the defense attorney is going to ask you.

  Given Number Three: The least competent person on the police department is always the first on the scene; hence, witnesses' names will be omitted or recorded incorrectly unless you do it yourself. If not carefully watched, s/he will—heedless of locations, heedless of fingerprints—proudly collect and bring to you the shotgun which was fired at your fellow officer, which half the department has been out here looking for.

  I swear. It happened to me. And I don't think the turkey ever did figure out why his sergeant, his lieutenant, my captain and I all began screaming at him. I had him in mind when I created the character of Patrolman Danny Shea in my first Deb Ralston novel, Too Sane a Murder.

  WHAT DO YOU DO FIRST?

  Rule #1: Don't touch anything.

  Rule #2: Don't touch anything.

  Rule #3: Don't touch anything.

  Rule #4: Don't touch anything.

  Rule #5: Don't touch anything.

  Unless there is an injured person who must be helped and transported at once. In that case, assist the victim as much as you can until the medical team arrives; remember as much as you can; make notes if you are not needed for the first-aid effort; get out of the way if necessary; and after the ambulance has departed, do what you can with what's left.

  The Deathbed Statement

  This is as good a place as any to mention the deathbed statement. Under normal situations, no person may testify as to what any person other than the defendant said to him or in his hearing, because the law assumes that the person who said whatever it was is perfectly capable of coming into court and testifying. The one exception is the deathbed statement, and the rules that define it—carried over from English common law—are pretty specific:

  1. The person making the deathbed statement must know s/he is dying.

  2. The person must really die.

  In that one situation, what would otherwise be considered hearsay testimony and, hence, be inadmissible, becomes admissible. The legal presumption is that a person who knows s/he is dying has no reason to lie.

  Getting a deathbed statement is likely to feel pretty brutal to the officer asking for it, and to witnesses, to say nothing of the way it must feel to the dying person. The conversation would go something like this:

  Officer: You understand that you're dying?

  Victim: Uh-huh.

  Officer: Who shot you?

  Victim: My wife.

  Officer: Why'd she want to do that?

  Victim: Said I was messin' around____

  (Victim dies.) The officer may now testify as to what the victim said.

  Rule # 6: Write everything down. Rule # 7: Write everything down. Rule # 8: Write everything down. Rule # 9: Write everything down. Rule #10: Write everything down.

  Everything means everything. What time of day is it? What day of the week? What is the outside temperature? What are the weather conditions otherwise? Which other officers are present?

  What is the building made of? How many windows and doors does it have on the front? What color clothes is the victim wearing? Is the victim lying face up or face down? Was the door open or closed?

  I'm serious—I saw a case lost in court once because two officers who arrived at the scene together could not agree on the position of a car door. One told the defense attorney a car door was open; the other said it was closed. Although the position of the car door was absolutely immaterial in terms of whether the defendant was guilty, the defense attorney managed to convince the jury that if the officers could not agree on whether the door was open or shut, they obviously could not be trusted on anything else.

  Rule #11: Isolate the witnesses.

  Isolate means isolate. Keep them apart. Don't let them talk with one another. If they discuss the crime before they've made their formal statements, they'll begin to conflate stories and agree on details—and they might not agree correctly. It will always be the person with the strongest personality, not the person who is the best observer, who will impose his/her opinions on everybody else. (This knowledge, of course, can make a terrific red herring—or yellow herring, if you prefer—in your story.)

  Personally, I wouldn't hang a mad dog on the basis of eyewitness testimony. Psychologists are agreeing more and more on what good police officers knew all along: Eyewitness testimony is the next worse thing to worthless. Memory is funny. It plays tricks on people. It wants very much to cooperate, so it thinks up things that might have been useful if they had actually happened the way the witness remembers
them as having happened.

  Rule #12: Define the scene.

  The crime scene is what you have to protect. But just how large an expanse does the crime scene cover? It may be no more than one small part of one small room; it may be an entire house; it may be the interior of an automobile, or an entire city block or—as in one case I was involved with—a whole swamp.

  Be sure that whoever's protecting the scene protects it from everybody. Whether it is a reporter who handles the bank door the robber handled on the way out before you've had a chance to fingerprint it, or the chief of police who does it, the evidence is just as demolished. An adequately protected scene can produce wonderful results.

  Perjury Wholesale

  In one case, the robbery of a small mom-and-pop grocery store and the shooting (fortunately not fatal) of its owner, the store was in the process of closing when the robber walked in. The store owner had just finished wiping down the meat counter. The robber put his entire hand flat on the meat counter—and the victim, despite his serious injury, managed to convey that information to the first police officer on the scene before the ambulance departed.

  The D.A. did not present the fingerprint evidence in his original case. The defense produced six witnesses who claimed the defendant had been at a football game at the time of the robbery. The prosecution produced, as rebuttal, the fingerprint evidence. The jury convicted. And the six alibi witnesses were arrested in the courtroom and charged with perjury. Some of us enjoyed that case. The defendant and his friends did not.

  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: