A slaughtered American girl would warrant great care, but the Olivia Grant case required just a bit more. International incidents were an albatross for any jurisdiction.
Fourteen containers, each holding pieces of potential evidence collected from the four-thousand-square-foot Connors residence, were checked in and sent to the appropriate lab for additional analysis. Most of what was gathered the night of the murder and throughout the morning after Halloween was mundane, however, and would likely never be part of any court proceeding. Case in point: thirty-two red plastic drinking cups, taking up the space of two boxes.
It, without a doubt, had been some party.
Seven objects, however, were of special and considerable interest: the multiple pieces of a broken crystal vase; Olivia’s slip, which was literally a bloody mess; Brianna’s robe; Beth Lee’s kimono; and three men’s neckties—one of which had been retrieved from the victim’s mouth.
Cheryl Raines, a veteran lab worker with twenty-one years of experience to her credit, carefully removed all seven items from their plastic packaging and logged them into her evidence ledger. It was crucial that from the minute these items were recovered from the crime scene, each time the evidence was handled was noted on the tag. Chain of custody was important because if the evidence was compromised by less than attentive supervision, it was akin to handing the perpetrator a “Get Out of Jail Free” card, especially if he or she had a good defense attorney. And judging by the crime scene photos it was clear that much of the evidence had been disturbed by the throng of investigators. Compromised evidence was a defense attorney’s best friend.
After Olivia’s slip was hung on a clothesline to dry in a lab designed to preserve blood on a garment, Cheryl carefully spread it out on a stainless steel table. Although now stiff and wine-brown with dried blood, the fabric was once a shimmery white sateen. The tech could also see a scattering of loose sequins caught on the slip in various places and threads that didn’t match the fabric.
Next, Cheryl turned her attention to the slices in the material. She counted the number of slashes at three, although it was hard to tell if another irregularity in fabric had been caused by a knife or was simply torn as the British girl tried to get away from her killer. None of the cuts went all the way through to the other side.
Birdy Waterman’s accompanying autopsy report indicated that Olivia Grant had been stabbed once in the throat and three times in her chest and abdomen. The wounds were consistent with the incisions in the slip.
Cheryl snapped photographs of a small ruler placed along each of the slices in the blood-drenched fabric and by the thread and sequins before running each item underneath a microscope.
Through a magnifying lens, Cheryl easily confirmed her hunch. Neither the sequins nor the ivory-colored thread came from the slip. They’d come from another garment.
What else had the dead girl been wearing that night?
The shards of the vase, it turned out, were easier to re-assemble than Cheryl had originally thought. Almost all of the pieces had been recovered, and it was immediately evident that none had been used to murder Olivia. The pieces were thicker than the wounds noted in Dr. Waterman’s report, which meant the murder weapon was still out there. Somewhere.
Seeing a single red smear along one edge of a splinter of crystal glass, Cheryl tested for blood. Positive. A quick run through the samples of the principals collected by Kitsap County provided a clear and indisputable match to Brianna Connors, the hostess of the party.
The blood on the trim of Brianna’s robe was a match to the victim, but it was much too small an amount to have been worn during the violent attack that left Olivia on a slab in the morgue.
The final thing Cheryl did before clocking out was photograph and examine the kimono and the three ties under ultraviolet light. Under her examination, Cheryl noted a red spot on a sleeve of the kimono. She also noted that two of the three ties were without any blood, DNA, or anything. She found a single black fiber on the third one, the one marked with Olivia’s saliva, which tested positive for blood.
It was Olivia’s, of course.
AT FIRST, BRIANNA CONNORS, and to a lesser degree Drew Marcello, seemed to revel in the swarm of attention that came with the glow of the media’s unblinking spotlight. Everyone wanted a sound bite from the not-so-grieving best friend. Overnight, the Kingston High School student had become bigger than Paris-Lindsay-Nicole-Winona-Snookie-Britney and all of those annoying TV Teen Moms combined. It wasn’t for a good reason, either.
The hashtag #WORSEBFFTHANBRIANNA started trending on Twitter almost immediately after the story hit the news about Brianna’s indifference to what had occurred in her bedroom:
My BFF stole my boyfriend. #WORSEBFFTHANBRIANNA
One time my BFF borrowed my car and smashed it up and stuck me with the bill. #WORSEBFFTHANBRIANNA
My former BFF stole my mom’s jewelry and hocked it. #WORSEBFFTHANBRIANNA
“Look,” Brianna told a reporter in a sit-down TV interview that she insisted was her last until the mess sorted itself out, “I get that I’m not all crying about it like you want me to be, but it isn’t like I don’t have feelings. I don’t know what you all want from me. I feel like I’m being attacked for being different. I’m not a lawyer—my dad is—but criticizing me for the way I grieve and how I look could be considered a hate crime.”
The story played even better in the UK. Fleet Street in London trumpeted the tale of the British girl murdered in a tawdry sex game in the US as an example of American culture gone wrong. A reporter who knew her way around the Internet better than her American counterparts found an old online journal that Brianna had kept in the dark ages of social networking—on MySpace. Before Facebook, before Instagram and Pinterest, she had posted pictures there, mostly of “hot shirtless” (as if there were any other kind) Abercrombie guys. She called herself Easy-Breezy.
Headline writers in the UK could have kissed her for that moniker, and British tabloids covered the newsstands with the scandal:
EASY-BREEZY SAYS “I WANT YOUR SEX!”
EASY-BREEZY SAYS “I DON’T KNOW HOW MANY LOVERS I’LL HAVE!”
BEDROOM DOOR WIDE OPEN—as his mother Shania insisted— Colton James looked at the articles with girlfriend Hayley on his homebuilt laptop and clicked through the links provided by the Daily Mail newspaper in the UK. As available as “Easy-Breezy” proclaimed to be in the articles they’d just read, the high school girl they knew didn’t seem so wild. Others at Kingston were far wilder. As they read on the screen capture of the suddenly-deleted MySpace page, they saw that the reference to “I want your sex” was a joke Brianna had made about her father’s George Michael CD collection. The “don’t know how many lovers” comment so boldly touted on the front page of the paper was pulled out of a sappy post Brianna had made about not knowing how many boyfriends she’d have before she found the one she’d marry. She was only thirteen years old at the time.
“This isn’t right, Colton,” Hayley said.
Colton fixed his dark eyes on her. “I don’t like Brianna, but yeah, it isn’t right.”