CASE 6: BITE ME

You probably know who Ted Bundy is-a notorious serial killer who was linked to the murder of thirty-six victims, although many experts believe that number is closer to one hundred. He would approach a woman in a public place, gain trust by feigning injury or impersonating an authority figure, and then abduct her. Once the victim was in his car, he’d hit her in the skull with a crowbar. He strangled all but one of his victims. Many bodies were driven miles away from where they disappeared. While on death row, Bundy admitted that he decapitated over a dozen of his victims and kept their heads for a while. He visited the bodies and applied makeup to the corpses or engaged in sexual acts. He kept souvenirs: photos, women’s clothing. To this day, many of his victims remain unknown.

It is widely believed that the expert testimony by Dr. Richard Souviron, a forensic dentist, was what secured Bundy’s conviction and eventual execution. Bite marks were found on the buttocks of the victim Lisa Levy. The first was a complete bite mark. The second was rotated so that there were two impressions of the lower teeth. This gave authorities more places to compare dental records against the mark, which increased the odds of a match.

The analysis of the bite marks was possible only because a particularly savvy crime scene investigator who was taking pictures at the scene included a ruler in the photo of the bite mark, in order to show scale. Without this photograph, Bundy might have been acquitted. The bite mark had degraded past identifiable by the time the case was presented in court, so the only useful evidence of its original size and shape was that photograph.

6

“Care to do the honors?” Basil asks me.

We are crowded into Jessica Ogilvy’s bathroom-me and the pair of CSIs who have been combing the house for evidence. Marcy’s taped up the windows with black paper and is standing ready with her camera. Basil has mixed the Luminol to spray all over the tub, the floor, the walls. I flip the light switch and plunge us into darkness.

Basil sprays the solution, and suddenly the bathroom lights up like a Christmas tree, the grout between the tiles glowing a bright, fluorescent blue.

“Hot damn,” Marcy murmurs. “I love it when we’re right.”

Luminol glows when it meets the correct catalyst-in this case, the iron in hemoglobin. Jacob Hunt might have been smart enough to clean up the mess he’d left behind after murdering Jess Ogilvy, but there were still traces of blood that would go far toward convincing a jury of his guilt.

“Nice work,” I say, as Marcy takes a furious run of photographs. Assuming the blood matches the victim’s, this latest piece of the puzzle helps me map out the crime. “Jacob Hunt comes for his appointment with the victim,” I muse, thinking aloud. “They argue, maybe knocking over the CD rack and the mail and a few stools, and he corners her-right here, apparently-beating her up and eventually striking a blow that kills her.” As the Luminol loses its glow, I flip on the lights. “He cleans up the bathroom, and then he cleans up the victim, dressing her and dragging her to the culvert.”

I glance down at the floor. In full light, you can’t see the chemical, and you can’t see the blood at all. “But Jacob’s a CSI buff,” I say.

Basil grins. “I read this article in Esquire about how women find us sexier than firemen-”

“Not all women,” Marcy qualifies.

“And so,” I continue, ignoring them, “he comes back to the scene of the crime and decides to cover his tracks. The thing is, he’s smart-he wants to pin this on Mark Maguire. So he thinks to himself, If Mark did this, how would he try to cover it up? As a kidnapping. So he puts on Mark Maguire’s boots and stomps around outside, and then cuts the screens in the windows. He cleans up the CDs and the mail and the overturned stools. But he also knows Mark would be sharp enough to want to throw investigators off the trail a little, so he types up the note for the mailman and packs a bag full of the victim’s clothes and takes it with him-both hints that Jess left of her own accord.”

“You’re losing me,” Marcy says.

“Jacob Hunt doctored his crime scene to look like it had been committed by someone else-someone who would doctor a crime scene to hide his involvement. It’s fucking brilliant.” I sigh.

“So what are you thinking?” Basil asks. “Lovers’ quarrel?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know.” Yet.

Marcy shrugs. “Too bad perps never seem inclined to talk.”

“Good thing victims do,” I say.

Wayne Nussbaum is up to his elbows in the chest cavity of a dead man from Swanton when I snap on a mask and booties and enter the room. “I can’t hang around anymore,” I say. For the past forty-five minutes I’ve been cooling my heels in Wayne’s office.

“Neither can he,” Wayne replies, and I notice the ligature marks around the guy’s neck. “Look, it’s not like I could have predicted a murder-suicide would throw me off schedule.” He lifts a gleaming red organ in his palm, his eyes dancing. “Come on, Detective. Have a heart.”

I don’t crack a smile. “That the kind of stuff you learn at clown college?”

“Yeah. It comes after Pie Throwing 101.” He turns to his diener, a young woman who assists him during autopsies. Her name is Lila, and she once tried to hit on me by inviting me to a rave in South Burlington. Instead of flattering me, it just made me feel really old.

“Lila,” he says, “give me ten minutes.”

He strips off his gloves and jacket and booties as soon as we’re out of the sterile atmosphere and walks beside me down the hall to his office. He shuffles files on his desk until I see one with Jess Ogilvy’s name on the tab. “I don’t know what else I can tell you that my report didn’t already spell out, crystal clear,” Wayne says, sitting down. “The cause of death was a subdural hematoma, due to a basilar skull fracture. He popped her so hard he drove her skull into her brain and killed her.”

I knew that. But it wasn’t really why Jess Ogilvy had died. That was because she’d said something to Jacob Hunt that had set him off. Or maybe she had refused to say something to him-such as I feel the same way about you.

It would be simple enough to assume that a boy who fell for his tutor-and was rebuffed-might lash out at her.

Wayne skims through his report. “The lacerations on her back-drag marks-were made postmortem. I’d assume they occurred when the body was moved. There were bruises, however, that were made premortem. The facial ones, of course. And a few on her upper arms and throat.”

“No semen?”

Wayne shook his head. “Nada.”

“Could he have worn a condom?”

“Highly unlikely,” the medical examiner says. “We didn’t get any pubic hairs or any other physical evidence concurrent with rape.”

“But her underwear was on backward.”

“Yeah, but that only proves that your perp hasn’t shopped for lingerie-not that he’s a rapist.”

“Those bruises,” I say. “Can you tell how old they are?”

“Within a day or so,” Wayne replies. “There’s not really a reliable technique to determine the age of a bruise beyond color and immunohistochemical methods. Bottom line is, people heal at different rates, so although I could look at two bruises and say one occurred a week before the other, I can’t look at two bruises and say one occurred at nine A.M. and the other occurred at noon.”

“So conceivably, the choke marks around her throat-and the fingerprint bruises on her arms-those could have happened minutes before she died?”

“Or hours.” Wayne tosses the folder to a pile on the side of his desk. “He could have threatened her and then come back to beat her to death.”