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The
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The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
3
The
Forensic
Teacher Magazine
Volume 6, Number 18, Winter 2011
The Forensic Teacher Magazine is
published quarterly, and is owned
by Wide Open Minds Educational
Services, LLC. Our mailing address is
P.O. Box 5263, Wilmington, DE 19808.
Please see inside for more information.
Articles
8 Teaching Moments
By Ted Yeshion, Ph.D. What happens when good people
meet bad science?
10 Interview By Mark Feil, Ed.D.
John Douglas was the inspiration for one of
the main characters in Silence of the Lambs,
he started the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit,
and he’s made a career out of getting inside
criminals’ heads. He talked to us about a lot of
things, including how forensics teachers can
make lessons more real.
24 Setting the stage
Do you decorate your classroom to put students in a
forensic frame of mind? We’ll show you how some folks
do it.
26 The Work of an Innocence
Project
By Michael F. Cromett and Susan M. Thurston Myster, Ph.D.
How many wrongful convictions take place every year,
and why? This insightful piece will open your eyes to the
horrible power of justice gone bad.
30 Using Details to Teach
Forensics By Ricky Pelazzo.
We give you the low-down on a class activity that will
have your students talking and talking and talking.
32 Voir Dire By Gil I. Sapir, JD, MSC.
We take you behind the scenes of our legal system to
examine how one does or does not qualify as an expert
witness. Can anyone make it or fake it?
38 Is Handwriting Really
Brainwriting? By J.D. Corleone.
This activity lets your students determine for themselves
if graphology is a valid science. Hint: It’s not coming to
TruTV any time soon.
www.theforensicteacher.com
44 Trial by Fire By David Grann.
Todd Willingham claimed he didn’t set the fire that
killed his family. Even before his execution experts
were pointing out the junk science at his trial.
58 The Dark Side of the DA
By Maurice Kirkwood. An activity that lets your
students play good guy and bad guy as they explore
the world of high-pressure convictions.
Features
2 Editorial
3 Forensic News
4 Mini-Mystery
5 Hot Web Sites
37 Mini-Lab
68 A Day In The Life Of...
73 Bloomin’ Easy
74 Morgue Guy
74 What’s Going On?
75 Just For Fun
76 Stoopid Crooks
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
1
Editorial
Good Things Come in
Threes
Welcome back. By now you’re well into your school year, the holidays are
around the corner, and I hope your year is shaping up as well as, or better than
you’d hoped.
There are two things we want to bring to your attention. The first is that because
of reasons beyond our control we are now going to publish three times a year
instead of four, which explains why this issue is so late. This is our third and final
issue for 2011. We plan to publish in March, July, and November in 2012. And we
need your help.
We depend on our readers for article ideas, lessons, and labs. If something
works well in your classroom and your forensics curriculum please drop us an email
and describe it at admin@theforensicteacher.com. We pay for original materials,
and if you’re unsure about if we’d be interested in something please don’t hesitate
to ask.
The other thing you’ll notice as you read through this issue is a theme. We
chose junk science and the related topic of wrongful conviction because of how the
CSI effect now stretches from jury boxes to the classroom. Television has numbed
our minds to the idea that forensic science isn’t always right, nor are experts
infallible. We’ve teamed with some excellent publications to reprint a few articles
about this topic. And we’ve also included exercises to demonstrate to your students
how egos and sloppy or junk science can get in the way of the truth. Better yet,
they’ll demonstrate it to themselves. We’ve also included information about voir
dire, the process of screening a witness for the stand in a courtroom.
Finally, we’ve included references for some of the reprinted articles for further
reading.
Junk science and wrongful conviction are topics long overdue for this
magazine. We hope you like what we’ve put together.
Enjoy.
Dr. Mark Feil
Volume 6, Number 18, Winter 2011
The Forensic Teacher Magazine is published quarterly and is owned now by Wide Open
Minds Educational Services, LLC. Our mailing address is P.O. Box 5263, Wilmington,
DE 19808. Letters to the editors are welcome and should be sent to letters@
wideopenminds.com. Submissions are welcome and guidelines are available, as is a rate
sheet for advertisers at our website www.theforensicteacher.com. At this time subscriptions
are not available outside North America, otherwise they are free; sign up at our website.
Back issues are available for $6.00 USD each including shipping or on CD priced as per the
website. The Forensic Teacher is copyrighted 2011 Wide Open Minds Educational Services,
LLC, all rights reserved. All opinions expressed by contributors represent their own views, and
not necessarily the views of the staff or editorial board.
2
POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Forensic Teacher, P.O.
Box 5263, Wilmington, DE 19808.
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
Forensic
The
Teacher Magazine
Editor-in-Chief
Mark R. Feil, Ed.D.
Assistant Editor
Tammy Feil, Ed.D.
Book Editor
Enrico Pelazzo
Science Editor
T. Ann Kosloski
Copy Editor
Tammy Feil
Contributing Editor
Jeanette Hencken
Layout/Graphic Design
Mark Feil
Circulation
Don Penglioni
Editorial Advisory Board
Lt. John R. Evans
Section Chief of the Delaware State
Police Homicide Unit
Head, DSP Crime Lab and Forensic
Services Unit
Jeanette Hencken
Forensic Science Teacher
Webster Grove High School, Webster
Groves, MO
Richard Saferstein, Ph.D.
Chief Forensic Scientist of the New
Jersey State Police Laboratory (Ret.)
Consultant and textbook author
Cheri Stephens
Forensic Science Teacher
Washington High School,
Washington, MO
Adjuct faculty at St. Louis U.
Hugh E. Berryman, PhD, D-ABFA
Forensic Anthropologist
Director, Forensic Institute for Research
and Education
Middle Tennessee State University
Ted Yeshion, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Forensic Science
Edinboro University of Pennsylvania
www.theforensicteacher.com
Forensic
Criminals Use 3D Printers to
Create Illegal Objects
Printers that use ink or toner are
commonplace to everyone with a computer. However, 3D printers are able to
take a three dimensional sketch of an
object with measurement and carve the
object out of a variety of materials, from
foam to plastic to metal. Criminals have
used these machines to print everything
from keys to automatic weapon ammo
clips to ATM scammers that steal customers’ bank card information. Some
technology watchdogs are calling for
legislation to regulate the devices, but
the law has been slow to move on the
issue, as often happens with rapidly advancing technology.
iPhone Doubles as 350x
Microscope
Researchers at UC Davis placed a 1
mm ball lens on an iPhone camera with a
rubber sheet. The shape of the additional
lens makes 350x microscopy possible,
though a small amount of photo retouching is necessary to achieve optimum results. The team speculates applications
might include situations where money
and materials for traditional photo-microscopes are hard to come by such as
in underdeveloped areas or with underfunded investigators. To view images
taken with a modified iPhone go to http://
www.pcworld.com/article/241621/researchers_turn_iphone_into_350x_microscope_on_the_cheap.html.
NEWS
Google Maps Help Crooks
Case Homes
Samuel Watson of Chicago confessed to police after he was arrested for
breaking into as many as eight homes that
he’d used Google Maps to find properties
to burglarize. He used the satellite view
where one can see 360 degrees around
the home to decide if their owners were
likely to own enough valuables to make
his crimes lucrative. Police believe about
$100,000 of goods were taken over a six
month period.
John Wayne Gacy’s Victims
Exhumed.
When one of the strangest serial killers in American history was arrested in
1978, investigators found the remains of
33 young men buried in the crawlspace
beneath Gacy’s home. All but eight of
the victims were identified. However,
police saved teeth and jawbones from the
unknown victims in case better scientific
method of identification were developed.
Fast forward 30 years. When cold case
detectives wanted to build a DNA profile
from the remains, they found the teeth
had been buried in four different cemeteries by lab managers who had given
up hope. In October 2011 officials dug
up the teeth, plus bones from two victims whose dental DNA was insufficient
to generate a DNA profile. An entire
generation has passed since the victims
were characterized as drug addicts or
gay men, and detectives hope the stigma
of either label has lessened to the point
where family members might be willing
to come forward.
Corretshun
Correction
The article in the Summer 2011 issue, “Evidence Evidence Everywhere,” found
on pages 22–28, is generously based on a lab activity entitled “Can This Evidence
Be Individualized?” from Kendall Hunt Publishing Company’s Forensic Science
for High School, by Barbara Ball-Deslich and John Funkhouser. We regret that this
information was not provided with the original article. For more information about
this textbook please see their ad elsewhere in this issue.
www.theforensicteacher.com
Can Cops Lie to Grand Juries?
In January 2012 the US Supreme
Court will hear oral arguments on a case
to determine whether or not a government employee is immune from prosecution after lying to a grand jury about an
innocent person.
In 2003 a group of doctors wanted
to open a surgery practice in Albany,
GA. The venture was strongly opposed
by Pheobe Putney, a local hospital with
vast financial and political connections.
Charles Rehberg, the doctors’ business
manager, did some digging and discovered the nonprofit hospital’s CEO made
over $700,000 a year, it had bank accounts in the Cayman islands, and it
charged poor patients more than patients
with insurance. Further, it was very aggressive in pursuing those patients in
court to collect on debts.
The trouble started when Rehberg
and one of the doctors started sending
faxes to local business and community
leaders with information about Putney’s
financial practices. The hospital filed a
lawsuit against the faxers and, when the
faxes didn’t stop, Rehberg and the doctor
found themselves indicted for telephone
harassment, aggravated assault, and burglary. The evidence for the indictments
was provided by a private investigator
who worked for the DA, a man named
James Paulk.
However, it later came out there was
no assault or burglary. Paulk claimed
he was told what to say to the grand
jury by Ken Hodges, the DA. After the
indictment was dropped Hodges managed to secure two more, both of which
were thrown out. Eventually, the hospital dropped its lawsuit, but one legal
issue remained: a suit brought by Rehberg against the DA’s office and Paulk
for abuse of power. Unfortunately for
Rehberg, the court threw it out. It was
appealed to the federal bench in Atlanta
and thrown out again. Now it stands before the US Supreme Court.
The court ruled 25 years ago that
prosecutors and police are immune from
damages for actions, regardless of if the
actions are illegal or not, if such actions
trial-related. However, investigators enjoy no such protection if their actions
are illegal and investigation-related. The
Supreme Court must now decide if what
Paulk did was investigative or trial related. Obviously, each side claims the other
is wrong. Does testimony before a grand
jury count as trial-related or not?
Forensic News (continued on p. 23)
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
3
Mini-Mystery
The Case of the Wells Fargo Money
The daring theft of half a million dollars from a Wells
Fargo armored truck captured the imagination of the entire
Royston area. As the Royston Gazette excitedly summarized
it, the truck had just been loaded with cash from the First
National Bank on the afternoon of June 4 when two or three
men appeared, overpowered the guards, piled the money into
a pickup truck, and disappeared-all in less than five minutes.
The investigation was placed in the hands of Inspector
Matthew Walker. His skillful inquiries led the police to three
men who often worked together and were suspected of several
lesser robberies.
Some 10 miles from the city, in the little town of
Baskerville, Thomas P. Stanwick, the amateur logician,
pushed aside a postal chess analysis
and admitted the inspector to his
bungalow.
“I’m delighted to see you,
Matt,” said Stanwick as they seated
themselves in the living room. “I hear
you’ve been doing fine work on this
Wells Fargo case.”
‘’Thanks, Tom.” Walker smiled
wearily. “All the public attention has
put a lot of pressure on us to solve it
and, if possible, recover the money.”
“I’ve also heard you have some
suspects under surveillance.”
“That’s right. This is strictly confidential, of course.”
Walker leaned forward in his armchair. “We have conclusive
evidence that Charles Acker, Bull Barrington, and Adam
Crowley organized the job, and at least two of them actually
carried it out.
We’ve been monitoring their communications, hoping to
get more information. The money has been hidden, and not all
three of them know where it is. It would aid us enormously to
find out who knows its location.
“To complicate matters, at least one of them
communicates by a ‘lying code’, in which everything he says
is false. The others speak truthfully. We don’t know which, or
how many of them, are using the lying code.”
Stanwick idly twisted the tip of his mustache and
chuckled. “Quite a problem. Can I help?”
“I hope so.” Walker flipped open his notebook. “These
are the only helpful statements we’ve been able to intercept
that might tell us who’s lying and who knows where the
money is: Acker: Barrington is using the lying code, and I
know where the money is.
Barrington: Acker was out of town at the time of the
robbery.
Crowley: Acker was in town at the time of the robbery if
and only if he knows where the money is.
4
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
Barrington: I don’t use the lying code.
Acker: Either I was in town at the time of the robbery or
Crowley does not use the lying code.
Crowley: Not all of us use the lying code. I don’t know
where the money is.
“As you can see, it’s a bit of a tangle,” Walker concluded.
Stanwick took and studied the notebook for a few minutes,
and then handed it back.
“My dinner’s almost ready,” he said, standing up.
“Pot roast, potatoes, and peas. Since you’ll be working late
anyway, I hope you can stay long enough to join me. In the
meantime, I’ll be glad to tell you who is lying, and at least one
man who knows where the money is.”
Who is lying? Who knows where the money is?
Answer on page 9.
Stan Smith is the author of three books of Stanwick minimysteries that have been published in nine languages and
sold over 120,000 copies. Learn more at www.stanwick-minimysteries.com.
www.theforensicteacher.com
Hot Sites
Everything you’ve always wanted to know about fingerprints.
http://onin.com/fp/index.htm
Everything you’ve always wanted to know about materials
engineering for forensics
http://www.istl.org/02-spring/internet.html
The National Institute of Justice’s forensic website.
Need we say more?
http://www.nij.gov/topics/forensics/welcome.htm
Don’t be fooled by the title. Great site. Worth a visit.
http://www.all-about-forensic-science.com/sciencefor-kids.html
A great site to investigate how justice went wrong and innocent
people went to prison, death row, or heaven.
http://www.innocenceproject.org/
A great collection of forensic resources. Neat.
http://www.istl.org/03-spring/internet.html
A good list of forensic lesson plans if you run out of ideas.
http://sciencespot.net/Pages/classforscilsn.html
If you or your students are budding forensic psychiatrists, this
is the place for info.
http://www.write-brain.com/research_mystery_
psych.html
A great place to bone up on your knowledge of forensic law.
Lots of stuff
http://faculty.ncwc.edu/
mstevens/425/425researchlinks.htm
www.theforensicteacher.com
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
5
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The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
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7
Teaching Moments:
Forensic Testimony
and Wrongful
Convictions
By Ted Yeshion, Ph.D.
O
8
ver the last decade the media has inundated our culture
with everything forensic. Although students enjoy
watching CSI and the resulting spin-off shows, these
programs typically offer a greater entertainment value than an
educational one for the viewer. Many teachers responsible for
instructing students about the forensic sciences are challenged
by their limited knowledge of what actually happens in crime
scene investigations and with evidence after it is submitted to a
forensic laboratory. In fact, even experienced forensic analysts
may not have a very detailed understanding of what goes on in
the crime laboratory in disciplines outside their own expertise.
Thus, it can be difficult at times to point out to students the
problems of Hollywood forensics versus real-life forensics.
Viewing specific episodes of these television shows in class
to critique various aspects of forensic investigations, however,
can serve as an enjoyable and valuable opportunity for teachers
to correct misconceptions students may have about the fields of
forensic science and criminal justice.
Last summer, the cable networks TruTV and HLN (Headline
News) aired live the high-profile criminal trial of Florida v.
Casey Anthony for the murder of the defendant’s two-year-old
daughter, Caylee. The prosecutors and defense attorneys in
this death penalty case methodically explored the crime scene
investigation and the analysis of a wide variety of physical and
biological evidence. Some of the evidence presented in this
dramatic trial involved new or cutting edge science like post
mortem root banding (PMRB). Such evidence was critical to
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
the prosecution to show that a hair recovered from the trunk of
the defendant’s vehicle was consistent with having originated
from a decomposing body, which was demonstrated through
mitochondrial DNA analysis to be congruous with the maternal
lineage of the Anthony family. Equally important were the
microscopic findings that the hair in question was consistent
with known hairs from the victim, Caylee and inconsistent
with reference samples from the defendant, Casey. Another
type of unique evidence was the analysis of air samples
recovered from the trunk of the defendant’s vehicle. These air
samples were tested to identify chemical components of odors
consistent with human decomposition. The defense refuted
this evidence through their specialists, which resulted in a
battle of experts equivalent to the trial of the previous century,
People of California v. OJ Simpson. In addition, testimony
from crime scene investigators, forensic anthropologists,
medical examiners, forensic entomologists, K9 handlers, and
a forensic botanist to name a representative sample of forensic
investigators, made the proceedings of this case a huge resource
for forensic teachers to elicit and stimulate student discussions
about a wide variety of evidence.
Issues regarding the chain of custody and admissibility
of evidence (Frye v. U.S. and Daubert v. Merrell Dow
Pharmaceuticals), evidence protocols, basic concepts of class
and individual characteristics, proficiency testing, error rates,
and discussions about the 2009 National Academy of Sciences
(NAS) report Strengthening ForensicByScience
the Ed.D.
United
Mark R.inFeil,
www.theforensicteacher.com
States: A Path Forward made it difficult for me to turn my eyes
away from the television during these fascinating proceedings.
The testimony of experts and the commentaries of the
In Session panelists throughout the trial provided viewers,
and particularly forensic teachers with little or no forensic
experience, many significant concepts about real-life forensics
to bring back to the classroom for enriched discussions.
Forensic Science teachers should make it a priority to become
familiar with the NAS report (www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/
grants/228091.pdf) and other associated perspectives about the
capabilities and limitations of forensic evidence. Assigning
specific readings from this document about topics related to
your course material would enrich student understanding and
assist in identifying and correcting misconceptions. If you
recorded any of the testimony in this trial, I encourage you to
share it with your students and engage them in discussions about
the application of science to the forensic issues in question, and
also to the differences between expert witness and lay witness
testimony. If you did not record testimony from this trial, there
are unlimited opportunities by checking in on the current cases
shown on TruTV. Students must understand that no matter
how good forensic investigators are at their jobs, they are only
as good as their ability to enable a jury to understand what they
did, how they did it, and what the results mean, so the jurors
can deliberate effectively about the innocence or guilt of the
defendant.
Another fertile area worthy of exploration in the classroom
is the role forensic science has in wrongful convictions. Clearly,
forensic science, particularly DNA analysis, is a double edged
sword in that it may be used successfully to prosecute criminals
as well as to exonerate those individuals who are innocent of
the crimes for which they were convicted. What is less well
realized is that forensic science has played a significant role
in contributing to wrongful convictions. Unvalidated or
improper forensic science has been identified as the second
leading cause of wrongful convictions immediately after
eyewitness misidentification (http://www.innocenceproject.
org/understand/Unreliable-Limited-Science.php). It is for this
very reason that the prosecuting and defense attorneys in the
FL v. Anthony case had to keep testimony about questionable
scientific protocols in check. Other causes of wrongful
convictions deserving time for classroom discussion are false
or contaminated confessions, snitch testimony and government
misconduct.
Using these topics to stimulate classroom discussions not
only meets the primary goal of teaching about forensic science,
but also builds critical thinking skills, exposes students to
important issues about ethical practices and expert witness
testimony, and allows them to understand the role of forensic
science in the overall criminal justice system.
Dr. Yeshion is a professor of forensic science and criminal justice
at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. Prior to teaching, he
worked 25 years as a forensic serologist, DNA analyst, crime
scene reconstructionist, crime laboratory director and Special
Agent. Dr. Yeshion also serves as the Chairman of the Science
Subcommittee for the Pennsylvania Joint State Government
Commission on Wrongful Convictions.
www.theforensicteacher.com
Congrats!
To Sally Kruschke of Racine
Lutheran High School in Racine,
WI. She was randomly selected from
those who took the time to offer
feedback on our magazine She’s won
a digital microscope to help in her
classroom.
We’ll have more raffles in the coming
months. Keep an eye on our website
for more information. To be entered
all you have to do is click on the
raffle link on our homepage and let
us know how we’re doing, how can
we improve, and what you’d like to
see more of. Before each issue we’ll
select one name at random. You’ll be
able to start signing up again in late
January.
Mini Mystery (continued from p. 4)
The Case of the Wells Fargo Money
Suppose Acker is lying. Then, from his second
statement, he was out of town at the time of the robbery
and Crowley is lying. If Crowley is lying, they are all
using the lying code, including Barrington. If Barrington is
lying, however, then Acker was in town at the time of the
robbery. Thus, if Acker is lying, he was both in and out of
town at the time of the robbery. This is impossible. Acker is
therefore telling the truth.
Since Acker is telling the truth, he knows where the
money is, and Barrington is using the lying code. Not
everyone is using the lying code, so Crowley is telling the
truth and doesn’t know where the money is. Barrington
may or may not know the location of the money.
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
9
10
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
Photo courtesy Larry Stone Photography
www.theforensicteacher.com
Mind Over Matter
An interview with FBI Profiler Pioneer John Douglas
By Mark R. Feil, Ed.D.
John Douglas: Hello, Mark?
Forensic Teacher: Yes, John. Thank you for calling me.
JD: I’m working on an A&E pilot and with another retired FBI
agent. In fact, he does some of the consulting and writing for
the TV show Criminal Minds. I was thinking the public thinks
that Criminal Minds is really the way that my unit operated
when I was still in the Bureau.
FT: Oh, yes they do.
JD: And so now, for TV, I’d be doing a real case, and they
want it to look like Criminal Minds. [chuckles] There are certain things that are true about how we operate and the types of
people in the unit, but you know we don’t make an arrest or
kick down doors and things like that. And you can’t solve the
case in an hour or so either. That’s just kind of crazy. They want
me to go on a case, so we’d be going down on a double homicide, and they expect you can solve it, like Name That Tune
[ed.note: this was a popular game show in the 1970s).
FT: Oh, that’s just unrealistic. Come on, it’s two days.
JD: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, I mean, we’ve got a tight schedule. You know, they want a couple of days, it’s just goofy.
FT: So, when you were profiling and working with the FBI, did
you guys have your own Gulfstream jet?
JD: No we didn’t, no we didn’t [chuckles]. We flew coach,
[laughs]. We were in the Bureau and on per diem. In fact,
sometimes I have been invited to give a presentation at a major conference at a beautiful hotel. And then after, they see me
leaving, they said, “Where are you going, John?” I said, “Back
to my hotel.” They said, “You’re not staying here?” I said,
www.theforensicteacher.com
“Are you kidding me? I’m staying at La Cucaracha” I said, “I
can’t afford this place. The government won’t allow me to stay
here.” But they had really built things up on television and it’s
just – it’s just so unrealistic.
FT: Right.
JD: Because you’re going in on a case. In fact, I was just telling the guy on the phone. I said, “As far as wanting the solution, you go out on a case and get an idea that it’s an unknown
subject case. Of course, you get the materials you need to do
the analysis, the crime scene photographs, and the autopsy reports and information on the victim and the overall crime in
the neighborhood, all of those things. And then you do your
analysis. Now the analysis may end up hitting a suspect they
have and then if you’ve been doing assessment of the suspect,
you tell them, ‘Hey, you’re on the right track and stay focused
here.”
FT: Okay.
JD: And more times than not, you may get on a case and they
go off in a different direction and you do the analysis and you
say, “Hey, I can’t reinforce you here in your investigation yet.
You have to refocus.” And they might say, “Yeah, but the guy
were looking at you know, he’s really bad, he’s bad ass.” That’s
true, but that person you’re talking about after doing an assessment of him would not have perpetrated this particular crime
in this particular way.
FT: Ooooh.
JD: Yeah. For example, a bombing case. He can make a bomb,
but he doesn’t have the skills necessary to make this particular
bomb.
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
11
FT: I see.
about five years more now.
JD: He can make a pipe bomb, but he can’t make the kind of
bombs that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber was making.
FT: Right.
FT: Right.
JD: I don’t even like to watch Criminal Minds. It just aggravates the heck out of me.
FT: [laughs]
JD: They used all of my books without paying me a nickel.
And so, I just get aggravated every time – in fact, my wife may
look at it or my son and other children, and they say, “Dad, they
did a case of yours, they changed the name of it. You know, it’s
such and such a case.” And yeah, they can do that, so why pay
when you can just take something and just
kind of twist a few little things?
FT: Sure.
JD: Make the victim older, or younger, of
different gender, and it’s not mine. It’s not
my case. So, it’s not John Douglas’s case.
JD: Then, if they’re interested in the field of profiling, they
can’t come directly in. They think like your students. They’re
thinking coming right out of college and come in “Boom!”
right, into the Criminal Profile Behavioral Analysis Unit.
FT: That’s right.
JD: We pick from the field, it’s tough, and it’s just few positions. Now, since I retired it’s increased and it’s like a couple
of dozen positions. So then, you bring a person in the field in
as a profile coordinator. And that means like in Richmond, Virginia, there’s one or two or maybe three agents who are profile
coordinators. We give them some training like a week or two
of training in behavioral science and forensics and different types with different guest
speakers and legal aspects of the investigations. And then, they go back to the field
and are only our seeing eye dogs to work
with police, see cases that the police registered, and then bring the case or send the
case back to Quantico.
FT: Oh man.
JD: Hollywood stuff.
FT: Are there any TV crime-related shows
you do enjoy?
JD: I like the ones that are like a reenactment. I like those, which are actually real
cases and you have real detectives talking.
And there’s been a bunch of profiling shows
and here I’m doing a profiling show. But
what really disturbed me has been that you
can call yourself anything, you can be an
expert in, let’s say, criminal profiling, and
you see these people on these shows on television like Nancy
Grace, and others – and all of sudden here comes the expert
profiler shooting her mouth off, and they have no information
at all about the case. They have no credentials.
FT: Yes.
JD: Playing the profilers – and unfortunately, producers look
for women, they want women. In fact, I’ve had certain networks call up, and say, “John, we need a woman around 30
years of age who has, you know, a couple of graduate degrees
and she’s blonde and that would be really good. But we’ll take
a brunette and we want to use her as profiler.” I said, “What are
you talking about?” First, the average age of new FBI agent
coming into the Bureau office is around 28 years of age. By the
time, they know what they’re doing as a street agent, they need
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The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
FT: Oh.
JD: But, some of those people now have
gotten off in calling themselves profilers
who never actually came back to Quantico
where we put them through an assessment.
We do an inspection of their strengths and
weaknesses. And for example Mark, if you
came back and said, “I’ve got forensic
science, instructed 10 years, these are my
good years of specialties in forensics science”, I’d say man, “That’s great. It’s really good. Now, how about your background
like in death investigation, have you done
anything like that?” “No, I never had it.”
“Well, I’m going to make arrangements and have you ride with
the New York City Police Department for a while.” So we’re
going to make arrangements to go up to New York City or maybe Baltimore PD and ride with them. Someone else may come
in, they may not have all the academics that we want them to,
so we’ll send them off to UVA, or Virginia Commonwealth
down in Richmond.
FT: Right, we’re in Delaware.
JD: You’re in Delaware?
FT: Uh-huh.
JD: Yeah. In fact, Delaware was my – I did the first serial murder case in Delaware. The first, what the hecks the guy there –
www.theforensicteacher.com
FT: Steven Pennell.
around older people. I liked to listen and learn from older people which is just kind of weird. But you could learn so much.
JD: Steven Penell, I testified in that case.
FT: Oh, yes.
FT: You’re kidding.
JD: By being around them and their stories, and what they
would say kind of stayed with me as I grew older and eventually, when I did end up in the Bureau, I saw that, “Well, anyone
can make an arrest.” I mean, it’s working in violent crimes,
bank robberies, and we call them USAF, unlawful flight to
avoid prosecution, like the guy wanted for murder. But upon
the arrest, we’d turn them over now to U.S. Marshals or the
local police, whatever the case may be.
JD: I testified in that case as an expert witness and relative to
the signature versus modus operandi. It was interesting to see.
The attorneys are saying, “How can you say Mr. Douglas that
these cases are related, when over here, this woman was hit
with a hammer and over here the women’s breast was squeezed
with a pair of pliers and other part of her body were squeezed
with pliers and all together these are different cases” I said,
“Well, actually, it’s pretty easy for me to say, because it’s not
so much what weapons was used, as much as the common denominator, the common theme here is torture.
FT: Oh yes.
JD: The common theme. If it’s torture
and these victims were tortured prior to
being killed. And then the other thing,
they were killed in a small tight area and
there was no effort on the part of the killer to conceal the victim.
FT: That’s true.
JD: Pretty much found out in the open,
open view.
FT: Right.
JD: But that was the first case in Delaware and I’ll never forget it. They came
over to pick me up in Fredericksburg,
Virginia, a little local airport and they
flew me over there. I had already done
the analysis and my people at Quantico
helped me. The police were very good
and the prosecutors were excellent, I can’t remember their
names, woman and the male. They did a great job. And he’s
been executed, right?
FT: Oh, yes.
JD: I believe some years ago now.
FT: He’s gone. And wow, it’s small world.
JD: Yeah. Almost every state. I’ve done so many cases over the
years along with my colleagues, I have 5000 cases or so. And
I’ve interviewed hundreds of violent offenders and I continue
to do that and I’m really – that’s what I really enjoy. I really
learn. I mean, I could have been going to high school or college or whatever, but even as a young kid I always liked to be
www.theforensicteacher.com
FT: Right
JD: But I always want to know the “why’s?” The why’s of their
behavior and that’s what fascinated me
about you know, what really motivates
you? Why this particular bank over another bank and what precipitated you to
do this?
FT: This is great.
JD: Okay, so what precipitated this? I
came into Bureau at the age of 25. I just
came out of the Air Force. And I was an
enlisted guy when I went in, I was almost 21, in 1966. And by the time I get
out, I was maybe 25. And I think, ‘I’ve
got to accelerate myself.’ I immediately
got involved in educational programs
that really made me grow up quickly. I
was 21, but was in the mind of 16 yearold, probably.
So, I have to grow up, and grow up I
did. By the time I put my four years in
the military, I also earned an undergraduate degree in behavioral science and
then got a masters degree. But while in
the Air Force, I was in graduate school and staying in New
Mexico, Eastern New Mexico University where the base was.
And it was there that an agent recruited me. I always liked
people that were nice and polite. I don’t believe in luck, you
know, someone is in the right place at the right time. You can
put yourself in the right place at the right time.
In the gym where I worked out, it was a crappy old gym, dilapidated but they were very good people, professional people
there and, they would get to know you and be respectful. But
there’s one individual who came up to me one day and it turns
out he’s an FBI agent. I kidded people that I didn’t even how to
spell FBI. He gets me under his wing and talks to me. Within
90 days I took this test and I was afraid. I was not ready for
college. I was raised on Long Island and I wanted to be a vet. I
worked on farms sponsored by Cornell University.
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13
FT: Now, when you say college, do you mean in the Air Force
or do you mean after the Air Force?
JD: Even before the Air Force.
FT: Okay.
JD: I went to high school as an athlete. But I wanted to be a vet,
I love animals. And Cornell, it was a big vet school.
FT: Oh yes, still is.
JD: But then I needed to work on these farms. But when it
came time, I did it – all through my summers in high school,
while the other kids were at the beach. I was ready for the big,
fat envelope that would be an acceptance to Cornell, but it
turned out that they said, “No John, your grade point average
is you know – if you would have had a
really strong B, B plus, you could have
made it. But we’d like to recommend you
to another school.” And, “What’s that?”
“It was Montana State.” I said, “Montana, where in the hell was that, Montana
State?” Then it was Montana State College. Now it’s Montana State University.
FT: No kidding.
JD: So, I went off and, while there, I was
very immature. I wasn’t ready. I was a
late bloomer. I was not ready for that. I
got caught up; I was in a fraternity, I got
caught up with alcohol, drinking as a minor.
FT: Right.
JD: And I was working in bars. I was doing bouncing work and stuff, so I said,
“Oh, my gosh. My parents are disappointed in me, and that’s
when I was drafted. And then, I had a choice to go into the
military and that’s why I picked the Air Force and I said, ‘I’ve
got to grow up. I’ve got to get with the program.’ That’s why I
ended up getting educational awards from the Air Force. And
then I was recruited by this FBI agent and I went back to Quantico, 1970, the youngest agent at 25.
FT: Right.
JD: But, what’s interesting, going back to learning from people, is that when I got to Detroit as my first office, it had over
800 homicides a year. It was a violent jurisdiction; we couldn’t
even drive because the violent snipers and even the firefighters,
they couldn’t go into certain areas to put out fires. But one of
the biggest cases occurred on Super Bowl Sunday, I think it
was 1972. J. Edgar Hoover was alive then, and he wanted us to
make a thousand arrests of organized crime figures throughout
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The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
the country. And we had a huge family, an active family of Mafia there. We promised a third of those arrest, a third. So we’re
going to arrest like 300 people.
FT: Right.
JD: We brought in agents from all over the country and we
all hit the doors at the same time. The point is, how I got into
understanding and liking the behavior and trying to figure it out
is that, just one fellow I arrested kind of looked like Paul Newman, a young Paul Newman. And I was 26, 27 years old and he
was in his early 30s.
FT: Okay.
JD: He had a long rap history for narcotics and gambling and
he was a brilliantly bright guy. So I’m in the backseat with him,
have him handcuffed, his handcuffs are in
front, on his lap. There are two agents in
the front seat, so, I’m sitting in the back
and I said, “Frank, what are you doing?
Why did you do this?” I mean, it’s just like
every year you’re getting in, you’re getting
yourself busted I mean you’re a smart guy
you went to school, you did pretty good in
high school, went to couple of years in college.”
FT: Yeah.
JD: “Kid,” he said, “you don’t get it.” And
I said, “What do you mean I don’t get it?”
It was raining that day and he looks over
to the window and he says, “You see those
2 raindrops over here?” And I said, “Yeah,
what about them? And he says, “I bet you
that the rain drop on the right gets down to
the bottom of the glass before the one on
the left. I said, “Okay, okay I’ll bet you.”
So we’re watching those raindrops and Frank’s raindrop beats
mine, he wins and he says, “You get it? You get it now?” And
I said, “So what? You just beat me on a raindrop race what’s
the big deal?”
FT: Go on.
JD: And he says, “No man, you don’t get it. John,” he said.
“We don’t need a Super Bowl, got it man? We don’t need a
super bowl, all we need are two raindrops. We are who we are
and you’re not going to change that.” Yeah, and that was just
so enlightening, and that’s what I enjoyed—asking questions
and learning, and like your young students, just ask questions
of people who have expertise in areas. That’s just how you
learn. Like what you’re doing here, what made you end up becoming who you are, and why did you do it? So by listening
to him, when I finally got transferred out of Detroit I went to
Milwaukee while I continued graduate school at the University
www.theforensicteacher.com
of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. I picked up a couple of graduate
degrees there, but in my spare time I would hang around the
medical examiner’s office. Then I wondered about the world
of the violent offender. I wondered if it’s the same thing, that
that’s who they are and you can’t change them. You hear a lot
about rehabilitation, probation, and parole. There was no degree program there for this sort of thing so the closest I could
come was to become a hostage negotiator. Then after I got my
graduate degrees, I was recruited by the behavioral department
and they would deliberately call us the Behavioral Science Unit
like in the movie Silence of the Lambs, and they didn’t have the
program. But what I decided to do when I got back there, I was
the youngest instructor at the FBI academy. There were 110
instructors in all the different areas. I was the youngest of all of
those. I was now 32,; although I was good at speaking, I needed
more depth. I was placed in criminal psychology classes. The
problem was the instructors there were telling war stories to
people I was supposed to be mentoring
and they were telling war stories without having experiences. So what happens
is some agent would be in class talking
about Charles Manson and the next thing
you know someone raises their hand and
I’ll be in the back of the room watching.
I’m supposed to be learning from this
instructor and a hand pops up and say,
“Hey”, it says, “You’re wrong about your
facts on Manson”, “No, No” the instructor would say, “I’m not wrong.”
“I worked the case,” the officer would
say. “Yeah, your facts are all wrong.”
FT: In front of classroom students.
JD: Oh man this was embarrassing.
FT: Oh yeah.
JD: You’re supposed to go up now in front
of cops, I know I’m getting the wrong information. I got to learn it myself. What I
would do is we used to go out on two weeks road schools we
call them. And then after teaching let’s say to about 4 o’clock
in the afternoon there’s really not much to do after a while. On
weekends in between the trips we’d say let’s go in to the prison.
Let’s go in there and see and talk to the experts themselves.
FT: You had no trouble getting access?
JD: No. Because you’ve got the badge, you’ve got the credentials. But you know, going back to your students, they could do
that. This could be something where bringing someone into a
room and you have a class that goes to where they are, like the
person that perpetrated the crime. But the kind of questions I
would ask would be like the ones I asked with Manson. I interviewed Manson a couple of times, but I would go interviewing knowing everything about the person, knowing everything
www.theforensicteacher.com
about the crime, the crime scene, some of the behavior, probably in my opinion what maybe led up to the individual perpetrating the crime. So it was like, let me tell you about yourself,
and then they look at you like, ‘How does he know all of this
stuff?’ I had this one guy who was a fugitive and he says you
can never catch me. You know this guy was an airplane skyjacker, one that got shot, lived, went to prison, a woman skyjacked a helicopter trying to get him out of the prison. It was
in Ohio. This guy had been walking as the biggest BS’er in the
world. He’s a conman, good looking guy, and women would
fall in love with this guy. So now he’s trying to tell me, “You
never could catch me, you’ve got to be really good. I know you
guys, you watch at Christmas time and see if we made contact
with our family, and cards and things like that and gifts.” His
name was Garrett Trapnell and he wrote a book, The Fox Is
Crazy Too. So I told him, “You were on a crime spree when
you were in your early 20s.” Then he told me, “Yeah.” I said,
“And it was right around the time your
dad died,” and he’s looking at me now.
I said, “You’re telling me I can’t, I can’t
catch you, you’re a fugitive. Now, what if
I would tell my agents here to go to Arlington Cemetery?” and he looks at me.
I said, “Your dad is buried in Arlington
Cemetery. I’ve been to his grave. So I tell
you Garrett, that if I had agents staking
out your dad’s gravesite area in Arlington
around Christmas, holidays, on his birthday, around the day of his death,” and he
starts looking at me, he starts shaking his
head back and forth. Then he said, “You
got me. You got me,” and that was all of
it. So I laugh and say, “You know Garrett
maybe you’re as not smart as you think
you are.” But for someone who is just interviewing and doing all those interviews,
that really worked and I developed the expertise by doing the stuff myself.
FT: Sure.
JD: When I was in Quantico we were affiliated with the University of Virginia and a sociology professor there invited us
down to speak. It was me and another agent, but I pretty much
took over the presentation. It was a 101 sociology class and he
had about 150-200 students in his class. He introduced us and
he sat in the front row, and it was obvious that we were being
set up, that he had his students wanting to ask us questions
about an investigation back then called the ABSCAM Scandal
that was an undercover operation down in Louisiana. There was
some mistakes made by the Bureau. But it really, had nothing
to do with me, I’m a totally different area. So I started talking
about my job, and I say you know how you learn is you learn
by going out, you talk to people, you do individual research,
you critique other people’s research not like some professors
who sit back and all they do is write books, but they have no
life experience. They never experience any life experiences at
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15
all. [chuckles] Meanwhile this guy, this professor, he ends up
slipping out of the classroom. The class is out to be like a career
day where the students are loving it and then they’re asking
questions about investigations, what we do, how do you get
into the bureau, what’s attributes you think you should have.
Totally, the audience gave us a standing ovation.
FT: That’s funny.
JD: And I told my partner we had to find this professor, we’re
not going to let him get away. We hunted him down and we had
to climb up at some tower at the University of Virginia. We had
to climb these stairs and we trapped him up there and didn’t
really stop because he was embarrassed.
FT: Oh, yeah.
JD: I told him, “You kind of left suddenly. We just want to thank you for
inviting us here to speak with your students. I think your students, you will
find, got a lot out of our presentation.
Too bad you had to leave.” [Laughs]
FT: Well that’s funny. That’s funny
and you talked a couple of times about
the why, the why fueled your curiosity,
the why fueled your drive to learn
JD: Right.
FT: I think with most people the why
is very important. Many forensics students at the high school or even the
college level, the why really goes back
to why it matters to them. You know
what I mean?
JD: Why what matters to them?
FT: I mean, well, you wanted to know
why somebody did something.
JD: Oh, I get it yeah, because the formula when you look at a
case is basically WHY plus HOW equals WHO. And so why
are those blood splatter wounds in the area, where they are?
What happened? What was the position of the body?
FT: Exactly.
JD: How is it done? Was a knife used or was it a blunt force
trauma instrument and then and also why this victim? Why?
What’s going on, what happens is, like this case I’m doing right
now for this A&E thing, I mean, it is such a difficult crime,
difficult in the standpoint of figuring out motive and really the
whys of behavior. Because, you have one victim shot in the
eye, a female, and the other one is shot in the neck. The girl is
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The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
16, the guy is in his early 20s. It’s either drug activities, promiscuous sex, everyone and all their friends drink heavily, heavy
in the drugs scene, the risk level, they’re such high risk all of
them to be the victim of a violent crime and it’s hard. I just
tell them that I think it’s really hard because there so many
different things. This could have been a drug deal gone bad, it
could’ve been this girl who is only 15 years of age just playing around with different guys getting other guys jealous. It’s
really difficult to pinpoint and forensically there’s not a whole
lot. I mean shot at close range, the gun powder residue, I mean
trace and the hand was trying to block the weapon. It’s really
more, there’s some staging of the crime scene. They did a little
staging there trying to make it kind of look drug related.
I did a book one time, the Crime Classification Manual. A lot
of forensic students liked that book too by the way and they
used it, University of Penn uses it, Boston College uses it.
FT: Okay
JD: It includes forensic stuff in there,
and it breaks it down to four major types
of crimes by motive: personal cause homicide, criminal enterprise, group cause
sexual homicide. And then I do the same
thing on arson cases, the same thing on a
rape case, and so on.
FT: Very interesting
JD: They like it cause it mixes in the forensics, and is based upon some of the forensic findings to help you in the analysis
so you know some of the whys of behavior.
For example, we have a case of a woman
I use in the presentation. She’s going to be
found in the crawl space under the house.
The husband comes home, he’s separated
from his current wife, but the ex-wife still
comes over to clean the house and he takes
their boy out to the park. He comes home
one day and can’t find his wife. The bedding is off the bed; the kitchen drawer where they keep the
knives is pulled out.
The current wife calls the police hysterical, cops come, search
all around. Didn’t find anything, they find some drops of blood
on the first floor. They looked around outside and they open the
crawl space and there she is wrapped in a blanket. Her pants
had pulled down to her knees, her panties are still on , and
she has been stabbed multiple times in the neck. This evidence
leads them to find marks that could cause manual strangulation
as well. So when I got the case, I usually get instructions. I did
the case. Yeah I knew right away what it was here. So if I was
talking to your forensic science students, I would say, “Who
do you think did that kind of thing?” I’ll say the geographical
profile is prioritized in the area: we have some fire setting arson
cases. There’s been burglaries in the area, these are all things
you have to consider in your analysis, and it may throw you off.
www.theforensicteacher.com
And these are usually things that are going on there. So they
seem to miss the obvious and the questions is why? Why plus
How equals Who. What’s the big why here? I would tell them
and if by the time you don’t get why was the victim moved?
Why was she moved down into the crawl space?
FT: To hide her?
JD: Yes. Hide her and that’s the reason why and it’s kind of
from who, he wants to hide her from.
JD: The kid never saw any of it
FT: Ahhh. Okay.
JD: I don’t know if you heard about the West Memphis Three.
FT: Yes.
JD: In the news?
FT: The husband?
FT: Three kids were killed?
JD: The husband did the killing. The husband takes the child
to the park. On this day he had to come back into that house
for some reason. And he killed her; he can’t leave her there
because he’s got his son out in his vehicle and he’s got to come
back with the son so he’s got to hide the
ex-wife from the son. But he also knows
that she’s going to be found by the police. So he’s going to make this thing
look like a sex crime.
So he pulled her jeans down to her
knees and just leaves the panties up
around to the groin, and her head is covered, covered over and the cops are right
on top of it. They are too emotional.
They couldn’t see it, they couldn’t see
it. I said this is a personal cause homicide. This is a domestic homicide which
means the husband did it. The husband
is distraught and the husband did it because why? Why is it necessary to put
the victim in the crawl space? Of course
he thinks he wants you to believe that
it’s a sex crime. It’s not sex crime. He
did this after she was dead, pulled the
pants down. Plus, the evidence is strangulation and some blunt force trauma,
which is usually the way these things
start. Yeah, it turned out to be the husband. It’s just so simple, but you have to kind of look at things
from a distance.
JD: Are you familiar with that?
FT: Now how did the guys know that he went back to the
house? Was it the son who spilled it?
JD: No. Dad came back into the house, he had to bring back his
son to the house. Because the ex-wife was cleaning his house;
she has custody of the child so he had to bring the child back
it’s his own house and pass the son off to his ex-wife.
FT: Oh, so the kid stayed in the car while he went inside and
killed mom?
JD: Yeah, that’s right.
FT: Oh, okay.
www.theforensicteacher.com
FT: A little bit.
JD: Oh, it’s a great forensic case, let me
tell you. You can Google it. Three little
boys on May 5th 1993 were found in a
bayou, they were naked, and tied with
their shoe laces from their tennis shoes;
they couldn’t even find all the clothing.
Three teens were targeted by the police,
a 16, 17, and 18 year old. The long and
short of it is that the 17 year old by the
name of Jessie Misskelley gave a confession after about a 14 hour interrogation.
It turns out that they turned the tape recorder on for about only 45 minutes. Jessie Misskelley has an IQ of 72.
FT: Really?
JD: So he gives a confession, you can tell
they’re putting words in his mouth even in
those 45 minutes. A great video you might
want to see—it’s called Paradise Lost, it’s
with HBO. And it’s great for forensics for
your students, it would be excellent because what will happen here is prosecutors and the police will say that this was a satanic murder, they
will bring a so-called expert in from Ohio who got a mail order
degree from California Coast University, making him an expert
on satanic murder. And the judge allows his testimony.
FT: Really?
JD: In the courtroom. You would think a forensic pathologist
would know his business when testifying that a knife was used
to remove skin from the penis of one of the boys named Chris
Byers. He said that under the best of conditions he didn’t think
he could have done it this cleanly, this well. I was brought in
on the case and that became public just last week, who brought
me into the case and a lot of entertainers are involved. Johnny
Depp was involved, Eddie Vedder, Natalie Maines. But I was
brought in with Dr. Baden and Dr. Werners Spitz. Yeah I did
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17
the behavioral analysis, I can’t think of his name; you would
know that the forensics odontologist who did Ted Bundy down
in Florida.
FT: Dr. Lowell Levine.
JD: Yes, he was brought into this. So I do an analysis, my analysis says that it’s not satanic murder and I did a group analysis
and it’s not satanic, this is a personal cause, homicide, go on
and on and on, all are the same. Who’s funding this defense
group by the way, that’s what came out, was Peter Jackson of
Lord of the Rings.
FT: Wait, wait, wait. The movie director?
JD: He took an interest in this case, and knowing what he knew
and his wife Fran Walsh was a forensic buff herself. They were
behind it. They went and got all the others.
FT: I see.
JD: What the doctor said about the
knife, the serrated knife was used that
he couldn’t have done this under the best
conditions. They sent the materials out,
the defense did, and these kids were just
released like three weeks ago. They’re
men now. They were convicted; the one
got death and the others got life sentences. It’s forensics. They were trying to
link forensics and a BS defense of satanic
murder into these kids because they wore
black and they liked gothic music and all
that.
FT: Oh my.
JD: So, independently, Mark, different
experts looked at the bite mark and they
all came to the same conclusion independently: that there were no knifes wounds at all. A knife was not
used in this crime. The cause of death was force trauma and
drowning, and that so called serrated knifework identified by
Dr. Peretti was from animal predation, and probably snapping
turtles.
FT: No kidding.
JD: In the bayou where these kids were thrown into the water,
Dr. Spitz told me that this Dr. Peretti down there, the forensic
pathologist, even to this day has still not passed this board examinations. He didn’t pass them in ‘93 when he took it, and
he hasn’t passed it yet. Dr. Spitz said you know you could fail
the first time, that’s common because you don’t know what to
expect. but to fail three times or more, that’s bad.
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The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
FT: Oh man. Oh yeah.
JD: What they did to these guys 3 weeks ago is they let them
out—one was on death row 18 years, and the other two in prison serving life sentences.
They let them plea an Alford plea, which is weird [Ed, note:
an Alford plea is where the defendant does not admit guilt, but
agrees to sentencing by a judge to avoid a potentially worse
sentence if found guilty by a jury. This is sometimes used if
sufficient evidence exists to convince a jury of guilt and the
defense is weak.] What the defense was trying to do was to
present all this evidence, so you can’t blame them. But you just
don’t know, because if you see Paradise Lost you’ll see what
a mockery the justice system is down there. There was another
one that HBO did they called Paradise Lost Revelations, and
the third one is out right now, it’s being played in Canada. But
rather than go through the trial, they were afraid, and that’s
what makes them convicted felons, it still
makes them like child killers serving 18
years. And they don’t have any of the freedoms; they can’t get any money from the
state for reparations for serving their time.
But I’m doing a book, which is going to be
looking at a lot of cases where they have
faulty science used. And the experts.
FT: Right. I’ve heard that called junk science.
JD: Yes right. Faulty sciences has been
used. I’m going to use a case in Texas, a
guy named Willingham was convicted
of murder, and Perry, the guy running for
President, he was the governor at that time
[Ed. note: Willingham’s story was written
by David Grann, published in The New
Yorker, and is reprinted in this issue beginning on page 42]. Right up to the point of
execution he refused to look at the different
reports that came in from independent scientists. They said there was faulty science
used in analyzing this fire, this arson. And this was an accidental file, it was not arson. They went ahead and executed this
guy. It really worries when you see cases like that or, the West
Memphis Three case. We have a case in Virginia, the Norfolk
Four. Four guys were interrogated independently and each of
them confessed to a crime that they didn’t do. The detective,
just this year, was convicted of strong arm tactics which he
used in other cases as well. And so I’ll be writing about that
too and the false confessions. It will be very interesting. If you
could show your class Paradise Lost if you haven’t seen it, it’s
there in the movie. I showed it to my younger son and it just
frustrating to see what a mockery it was. They allowed cameras
in the courtroom.
The second movie, the one with the appeal five years later,
which they lost, and they didn’t allow cameras in the courtroom, but everyone is going after one particular father. And my
www.theforensicteacher.com
analysis said no, it’s not this father; it’s not Chris Byers’s father.
But the experts got my analysis in the area of crime or destruction and all this. They said that what John Douglas is talking
about here is, he’s saying it’s personal cause. That means he’s
saying to this family this is not a stranger. They went back and
they looked at me, “Oh my gosh, the police never interviewed
a guy by the name of Terry Hobbes, one of the other boys, one
of the victim’s father never interviewed him.
FT: Seriously?
JD: And it turned out, that Terry Hobbes had a criminal history,
a violent criminal history, and DNA that was never analyzed
after all these years. The defense analyzed it and they find his
head hair that you could say is transference to his own stepson
who was murdered. Hobbes’s head hair was found under a ligature of one of the other boys.
FT: No kidding.
JD: After all these years, yeah. I mean
at the very least when I went down there
and spoke to Little Rock Law School
with these defense people. At the very
least, the cops should have focused on
this individual back there, but the case
was highly biased by the media just like
the Amanda Knox case.
FT: Oh yes, right.
JD: I’m involved with that case. Amanda
Knox; she’s innocent. She had nothing
to do with it. I said that a year ago. I’d
be addressing that one in the book too,
but its just overzealous prosecutors and
faulty handling of forensic evidence.
FT: Can you comment on what you think
happened in the Amanda Knox case?
JD: Yeah. The victim, Meredith Kercher, was murdered and
tortured. She was murdered by Rudy Guede, this black guy; his
DNA was all over the place. He sat on the toilet, went to the
bathroom, he didn’t flush it, we have bloody prints, we have
footprints, we have semen, she was raped. Even though Amanda lived in that same house with the victim and another girl,
none of it was forensically there of hers or her boyfriend, this
Rafael Socelito. There’s nothing at all, there’s nothing forensically, and the prosecutor was under indictment during the trial
for misuse of his office, misuse of wire taps on another case.
FT: Oh good.
JD: It was, the Monster of Florence case over in Italy.
FT: I remember, in Perugia.
www.theforensicteacher.com
JD: And a writer, Douglas Preston, wrote about that, and he
feared for his life. He thought he was going to be arrested; they
were looking at him as a suspect in the case. That’s a writer.
FT: Oh my.
JD: So, they had nothing to do with it, but she ended up giving
a false confession. It’s hard arm tactics, but they knew their
prosecutor. The prosecutors over there get heavily involved
with the investigations. They put teams of interrogators together that would interrogate her for days without a break at all.
FT: Now, over there, can she ask for a lawyer?
JD: No, no, and just like in these other cases too they just break
them down, they break them down. You think that they’re going to be helpful, and then they turned.
In her case she hardly can speak Italian.
They broke her down where she ended
up confessing that she was in there and
there was this black guy because the
cops knew there had to be a black guy
because they saw a Negroid hair. Where
does the black guy came in? So okay,
we got Amanda we have Rafael the boyfriend, and she works for a black guy
in this restaurant. It was probably him.
Through interrogation tactics, they led
her to confess that it’s her boss. And the
boss, her, and her boyfriend are doing
some crazy demonic sex exercise crime
there, and so now she’s a liar. So even
though she recants her testimony to use
it in court, people don’t understand how
people can break down.
FT: Wow.
JD: That’s two crimes that the defendants had nothing to do with it. Pencil
Park jogging case some years ago. The cops in New York City
broke down a bunch of teens. African-American teens broken
down in the interrogation, all confessing to the rape. And the
woman was beaten into a coma so she couldn’t remember anything, and when she came out in the coma these guys are in jail
for a couple of years. Finally, lo and behold, DNA identifies
a guy who actually did the rape and he was serving time in
prison.
FT: Oh geez. Well let me ask you, I mean along these lines,
what do you think of the CSI effect?
JD: On the influence of jurors or everything?
FT: Yes, the jurors want more evidence because what they’ve
seen in TV.
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
19
JD: Everyone is expecting a magic bullet. Everyone is thinking, where’s the DNA? So what happens is it’s really hurt prosecutors because prosecutors now have to run the screening.
‘Anybody here watch CSI or Criminal Minds?’ or whatever,
and what do you think of the shows? And you have to explain
to them that in not every case will you find DNA evidence,
or blood evidence, or whatever. It could be circumstantial evidence.
FT: Right.
JD: Eye witness testimonies, different things. It does have an
effect, like I said when we first started, it has such an effect that
I’m getting ready to do a pilot, and the cable television thing
said it’s just like it is on television, trying to make reality like
a fictional show.
FT: Right.
JD: But it’s not the way it works.
FT: Have you ever seen the TV show
The First 48?
JD: Oh yeah. I was doing an interview
in prison. I was interviewing Doug
Hardy in Ohio; he killed over 70 hospital patients. And when I was finished
with him. They said the Cincinatti police wanted me to take a look at the case
and they got The First 48 working with
them. Okay it’s a long way to go but I
don’t know if I can help them or anything.
FT: Okay.
JD: So I go there, this is the case, and
then I sat down and I could actually
help them out on the case. But what’s
kind of funny to me was that the camera crews, there are different cities throughout the country, and they give the impression
like a ticking clock 48 hours. I told these guys, “What’s the
First 48? We’re talking, months here?” And they laughed and
said that’s about it, because they had all these cameras there
and they had these ticking clocks. It doesn’t all happen in 48
hours, but you know some say in law enforcement that they
havetil 48 hours until the case gets cold and you really have to
develop it. And those first two days you know first 48 hours.
The impression is like you can get these things signed, sealed,
and delivered in 48 hours. [chuckles] It’s ridiculous. I mean I
like to watch the show, but as far as the time, I don’t get it.
FT: Oh that is funny. Well listen, let me just turn this a little bit
more towards the classroom and what you said about learning.
You sound like someone who is very self motivated because
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The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
you got out of the Air Force and said, ‘Geez, I’ve got to get my
butt in gear’ and you’re very inquisitive and you want to know
why things happen, put things together, so I’m guessing you
like puzzles.
JD: Yeah. Right, I like that kind of stuff.
FT: What advice do you have for teachers, current forensic
teachers who have high school kids, maybe taking it as a science class, maybe taking it as an elective, to keep their kids
interest or make it something extra special that they’re students
would really look forward to?
JD: They have to bring in reality, they have to bring in real kind
of experiences. Teachers are the ones who have to get the experience. They have to broaden their experiences too. Rather than
just be, you know, taught at some University like I said earlier, publishing a bunch of
books, they have to share their experiences, they have whether its through traveling,
through their work. You know we’ve all
taken classes, where, oh, my gosh, teachers
are so dull. Then all of a sudden you bring
in somebody and, oh my gosh this person
has actually done the things he’s talking
about here, whether it’s history, he or she
has traveled to these different areas. Or
science: he’s experimented; he’s trying to
get it patented. It’s just to try to bring some
reality, some hands on, and if they don’t
have it bring in people who do. If you’re
talking forensic science every one of your
subscribers of your magazine should look
inside the telephone book under the FBI.
And every FBI office has someone there, a
spokesperson, who can come to classes and
talk about the bureau, talk about not just
what it is that makes people a FBI agent,
but all different areas, the forensic sciences
or justice areas. Just whatever specialties
that the class will be interested in because I did that when I was
a street agent, out in the field.
FT: Cool.
JD: You know there are tons of different speakers from Quantico to Washington DC or a field office. Even in Delaware, you
go into Delaware and Wilmington, there are people in that office that have expertise in various areas; we have evidence response teams now.
FT: Nice.
JD: And every one of our FBI field offices can talk to the kids
about how they work their jobs, how they go out, how they collect evidence, how they preserve evidence.
www.theforensicteacher.com
FT: Oh that’s great. At the beginning of every year I put out a
little survey to my students and ask why they were taking the
course, what most interested them, and if they were, in any way,
connected with anyone in law enforcement that we could use as
a possible guest speaker. And I was very fortunate because we
hosted a arson investigator, a judge, and a crime scene technician among, other people. I hear what you’re saying and it was
great because it was a break from me, and the kids loved when
an expert walked into the room.
JD: Yeah. I mean, I was doing some research to get some credibility, really. In the research it was Dr. Anne Burgess who coauthored the crime classification with me and another book,
Special Homicide Patterns. And she had a class in personal
violence up at Boston College and University of Penn. What
she does is she just brings in a line-up of guess speakers in
different areas. I mean, just look at arson. Go to the fire department. The fire marshal, the people on a
state level who investigate arson.
FT: Absolutely.
JD: Federal. I mean, geez. If they, teachers, could take a case
in the local newspapers, and you have a prosecutor to prosecute
the case and, and with the forensics we use to implicate and
convict the subject, contact them. You know, maybe what they
should do is pick some of the students in class and see where
their daddies and mommies are, and tap in. “You know Mrs.
So-and-so, your son Tommy here in our class he talked about
your job, you know. Would you mind coming in and talking
about your position within—.” I mean they have like career
day but we want to live more scientific. We want to be more
educational.
FT: Right. That was my approach.
JD: Or how do you become whatever.
FT: Sure.
FT: Absolutely.
JD: You can do it. You can really learn
from these kids. I know because I
got suckered into a lot of these things
[Laughs], but every time I do it I enjoy it.
If I go out now people ask me about the
career of profiling.
JD: You can get them to talk about investigations, collection of evidence, what
they look for, how they detect arson versus an accidental fire. They’ll do it’s great
community relations. It’s great for them.
We all like to do it and it’s there so, I
mean, you can go for about like 2 hours.
I mean, you could beat Billy Graham up
there. That’s allowed. People didn’t nod
off. We used to go out in teams and we’d
take turns teaching so they can hear a different voice, different personality.
FT: Oh yeah.
JD: It’s in every major office so—
FT: Right.
JD: Delaware would certainly have one.
FT: Yeah.
JD: But what really changed me as an
instructor is when I was motivating, selfgenerating. I had to accelerate my learning. The only way I could do that was
to dive into this field. And I would be the guy now who’d be
saying, “Did anyone here work the Manson case?” And they’d
raise hands as well. And I’d say, “Let me tell you something
about Manson. This is what I learned from Manson.” They’re
all ears. It’s so hard to gain respect from law enforcement officers because they were very, you know, dubious, typically for
the FBI and they’re police. But the kids, I know me as a kid.
If you can have someone in a college class, if you can bring
in speakers with specialties in certain areas… And they’re out
there. Like for example, I found even hazmat workers with the
fire department, you know.
FT: Yeah.
JD: And then they have arson experts in the department, even
in a local level, or at state level.
www.theforensicteacher.com
FT: Now, do people often kid you about
that since you’re a profiler, and you’ve
spent many, many years studying individuals and—
JD: I know what you’re going to say. Am I profiling you or
some of them?
FT: No. Do you have trouble getting into a poker game?
JD: Oh no. I never even play cards. I like to watch, I like
to watch people, you know, playing and trying to, figure out
through body language what’s going on.
FT: Yeah.
JD: I thought you’re going to ask, “Are you profiling me right
now?”
FT: [Laughs]
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
21
JD: No, no, don’t flatter yourself. I’m not profiling you. I said,
“Criminals are profilers and they can pick up weaknesses and
they can see a vulnerable child or person in a vulnerable situation, in a family situation. These predators can see what needs
of that child are not being fulfilled.
FT: Right.
JD: Or a woman who just broke up with a boyfriend, or her
husband divorced her. I had these guys tell me they could walk
into a bar and they could spot her and see by just her body
language and her posture, how they hold their drink and their
head, like they’re down, like they’ve been broken.
FT: Oh yes.
JD: She gets after those other teachers who, who don’t see the
full picture of why this child is doing the things they are doing
or behaving, and she can end up seeing the life where this child
is coming from.
FT: Yes.
JD: Where these kids maybe don’t want to go home if the best
part of the day is going to school.
FT: I had some of those kids.
FT: Yeah.
JD: That’s their life.
JD: They move in like the charming white knight on the white
horse.
FT: Yup.
FT: Do you know who else are excellent
profilers?
JD: And they have to go back home where
there’s the domestic violence, even having
two parents they’re lucky.
JD: Who’s that?
FT: Yes.
FT: Students. High School students have
done nothing for the past 18 years but figure out how to make life easy for themselves.
JD: And these kids they’ve always loved
her and she’s been around some tough,
tough kids too, and they really respect her.
But she knows, because she was raised in
Detroit, a tough city, and she goes places
like Fredricksburg, Virginia and some of
these teachers, they just have no patience
with these kids. They are not taking time
to really do a personal assessment.
JD: Yeah. You’re, you’re right.
FT: So the first time they see –
JD: And profiling teachers. Yeah, for sure.
You’re right. I was one of them. You profile, you find out about Mr. So-and-so.
FT: Right. I mean if you, as a teacher,
stand up in front of the class for the first
time, they’re eyeing you up. If you don’t
believe 100% that this classroom is yours,
and this is where you belong, they smell that. And they can
sense even 1% uncertainty.
JD: Yeah. That’s why substitutes go in there with their head
down not even looking forward to that yet. My wife’s a school
teacher. She got her 30 year pin the other day.
FT: Wow.
JD: And she has 8 more years from when she was in Detroit
that they didn’t count. So, she runs a reading program and she’s
working in a State school from Detroit and Milwaukee.
FT: Cool.
JD: But she’s pretty darn good in profiling the children.
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The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
FT: Oh yeah.
the same time and –
JD: And I was doing, you know, just like
the programs that the state makes you do,
you know. They have that certain scores
and, and it’s like everyone has to be taught
the same way and be on the same page at
FT: Oh yes. I hate that.
JD: And that’s what really screwed me up because I was behind maturity-wise or certainly brain washed. It took a while
for me to get going. I end up getting a Doctorate degree, but
when I applied to Cornell University I was rejected. What was
so fascinating was that four years ago they invited me to speak
there.
FT: Really?
JD: At a thousand people in the audience and I told them they
didn’t have any idea that they rejected me in the 1960s because
www.theforensicteacher.com
I wasn’t good enough.
FT: Oh yeah.
JD: And I said, “I would have done this presentation for free,
but you sent me off to Montana State because I wasn’t good
enough.”
FT: [Laughs]
JD: I was not good enough for this place and I published a
dozen books. I mean, I have a doctorate degree now and I busted their chops. But they were right in a way. I really wasn’t
ready for Cornell; I would have bombed. And I wasn’t ready
for Montana. I wasn’t ready until it hit me in the face: ‘My
God, I’m going to be going down in the service for four years.
When I get out I’ll have nothing. I got to accelerate my education. I got to get that foundation under me which I did.
FT: Good.
JD: I want to subscribe to your magazine. I got and I saw your
website. This is really interesting. I know Dr. Henry Lee. You
interviewed him. And you did Kathy Reichs?
FT: Yes.
JD: Yes, she was, she was with the same publisher that I was
with one time, Scribners. She has great practical experience.
FT: Oh my, yes.
JD: And she writes well too because she can relate it.
FT: Oh yeah.
JD: Also, I belong to American College of Forensic Examiners. I think even undergraduate students can join it. They have
a very good glossy magazine they put out 3 or 4 times a year.
It’s really a chock full of good forensic articles.
FT: Cool. Well, listen John; it’s been a real pleasure talking to
you.
Forensic News (continued from p. 3)
Texas Nixes Last Meal Requests
After a condemned man ordered a massive last meal and
then refused to eat any of it, Texas senator John Whitmire called
for, and obtained, a ban on last meal requests for any more prisoners. He called the practice, “a privilege which the perpetrator
did not provide to their victim.” Instead, all last meals will now
consist of exactly what the rest of the prison is eating that day.
Ironically, Jim Harrington of the Texas Civil Rights Project, and
Brian Evans of Amnesty International agreed with the decision,
noting that on the eve of taking a man’s life, the state pretends
compassion for the condemned and makes a pre-consolatory
gesture of food before it murders the inmate.
How Reliable Are Eyewitnesses?
When Troy Davis was executed in September, 2011, his
death reignited a debate over how much credibility courts
should give to eye witness testimony. Davis was convicted
because bystanders said they saw him shoot a police officer.
Dorothy Ferrell identified Davis as the shooter during the
1991 trial, but nine years later signed an affidavit saying she
didn’t actually see the murder of off-duty cop Mark MacPhail.
She said police wanted her to point at someone and she did.
In August, 2011, New Jersey made it easier for a
defendant to challenge an eyewitness’s claims in pre-trial
motions. It also requires judges to speak to juries about some
of the problems with eyewitnesses’ credibility.
“Eyewitness testimony is horribly inaccurate,” said Rob
Warden, director of the Chicago-based Center on Wrongful
Convictions at Northwestern University. His group analyzed
death penalty convictions of people who were later exonerated
by other evidence and found the wrongful conviction rate to
be about 23%.
Researchers have found erroneous eyewitness picks
of suspects declined when police didn’t pressure a witness,
when witnesses viewed photos one at a time rather than in a
group, and when the officer working the case doesn’t know
which man is the suspect to avoid accidentally influencing the
witness.
JD: Likewise Mark. Yeah. I enjoyed it.
FT: And I want to say thanks again.
JD: Oh. Thank you.
www.theforensicteacher.com
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
23
Setting the Stage
Welcoming students to your classroom is important. How you do so, especially
with a subject as graphic as forensics, can really set the tone for what’s to come.
Some our readers were kind enough to show us how they’ve decorated their rooms.
Elizabeth Beks
I wanted to greet students with a bulletin board outside my classroom. Being not very
artistically inclined, I struggled with it. I had the idea that stick figures would be interesting
and not too graphic. Sadly, my stick figures weren’t very impressive, but our physics teacher
is a stick figure genius and came to my rescue in creating this stick figure crime scene! The
labels are evidence types that we will be processing during the course.
They also redid the lighting in our school this year and suddenly my formerly dimly lit,
cave of a door needed decoration! A former Forensics student came up with this. The tape
is hazard tape (so it peels off without messing up the paint) and the footprints are all prints
lifted off our shoes during a footprint lifting lab. They go completely around the door and
down the other side.
24
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
www.theforensicteacher.com
Brian Bollone
As students arrive on the first day of class I have a T-shirt
up at the front of the classroom overhanging the marker board
with the phrase “Locard’s Exchange Principle” written next
to it. Most students just ignore the shirt as they make their
way to a desk talking to classmates. However, as soon as
class starts, I begin with a discussion of Locard’s Exchange
Principle. Using the T-shirt and other examples (pictures of
crime scenes) students quickly identify evidence which may
be of value to a criminal investigation that was left and/or
carried away.
At the end of class I ask the following: I need five or six
students to volunteer to wear a (new) T-shirt and be willing to
wear it for 2-hours prior to our NEXT class. As payment for
helping in this laboratory, the student will earn 10 points extra
credit. In addition, any student who volunteers to wear the
T-shirt must record their movements during the day on a 3 x 5
index card, and describe the location and the people, animals,
and activities they encounter. At the end of the 2-hours, the
T-shirt needs to be sealed in a zip-top bag and brought to
class.
At the end of class, student volunteers pick up a T-shirt
prepackaged in a zip lock bag with the activity directions
above.
The following day, after reviewing Locard’s Exchange
Principle, students are given the following directions:
1. Cover the laboratory bench top with paper to
inhibit contamination.
2. Lay the T-shirt flat on the bench top.
3. Using a hand lens and forceps, scan the shirt for
any hairs or fibers and remove using the forceps.
Place the hairs and fibers you find inside a small
envelop. Take special care around the collar
area.
4. Turn the shirt over and repeat this process.
5. Examine the fibers and hairs and hypothesis
what source they came from based on the
movements provided on the note card. (Hint:
Look by the neck of the shirt.)
6. Share your finding with another group next to
you. Try to identify which hairs/fibers came
from specific sources during the individual’s
movements and/or contacts.
I’ve attached a picture of the shirt, which hangs at the
front of my classroom for the entire school year...a constant
reminder of Locard’s Exchange Principle.
www.theforensicteacher.com
Mark Feil
I used an overhead projector and tempera paint to place
a six-foot fingerprint on one of my cabinets. It’s huge and the
first thing students see when they walk into the room.
I also bought two pairs of shoes from Goodwill, sneakers
for a young girl and workboots for a man. I made footprints
coming in from the window for the girl on the wall, and
the man’s started on the wall on the other side of the room.
Looking at the prints one can see the man start running
toward the girl, the girl trying to flee, and then red paint
where they meet. Finally, after much scuffling, an observer
can see the workboots, now tracking red, go to the window
and escape.
The workboots are left on top of the cabinet in case
someone wonders what made the matching prints. The girls’s
shoes hang from a tack in the laces where she was attacked.
The scenario sounds straight-forward, but it’s interesting
to listen to students try to make their theories fit the evidence.
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
25
The Work of
an Innocence
Project
By Michael F. Cromett, J.D., Susan M. Thurston Myster, Ph.D.
I
26
nnocence projects identify people who, despite being
found guilty in court and having their convictions
affirmed on appeal, may be actually innocent of the
crimes for which they were convicted. Innocence projects
try to exonerate these actually innocent people. Innocence
projects have also examined the trials of people who have
been exonerated to understand how the conviction of actually
innocent people resulted. Armed with that knowledge,
innocence projects seek to prevent further wrongful
convictions through education about the factors which
contribute to the conviction of actually innocent persons and
through proposals to improve systemic safeguards against
wrongful conviction.
This article attempts to open—or hopefully expand—a
dialogue between innocence projects and the forensic science
community; an important, though often neglected, participant
in the criminal justice system. Two members of the Board of
Directors of the Innocence Project of Minnesota, a lawyer
and a forensic anthropologist, will provide an overview
of the background of innocence projects, general factors
identified as contributing most significantly to the conviction
of innocent persons, and the initiatives for systemic change—
focusing on the role science played in wrongful conviction.
It is hoped that through this article, forensic scientists and
others will be encouraged to become involved in the effort to
prevent wrongful convictions by contributing their ideas to
the discussion and assisting in developing and implementing
the necessary changes.
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
Almost everyone would agree that it is wrong to put a
person to death or in prison for something they actually didn’t
do, something for which they are “actually innocent.” That
has been an accepted tenet of our criminal justice system
since time immemorial, exemplified by the familiar adage
“it is better to let ten guilty men go free than to convict one
innocent man.” Early in the twentieth century, however,
scholars and authors began to question whether innocent
persons were being convicted in American courts and
published a number of landmark books arguing that they
were: Convicting the Innocent (1932), edited by Yale Law
School Professor Edwin M. Borchard; The Court of Last
Resort (1952), by Erle Stanley Gardner; The Death Penalty
in America (1964), by Hugo Adam Bedau; and, In Spite of
Innocence: Erroneous Convictions in Capital Cases (1992),
by Michael L. Radelet, Hugo Adam Bedau, and Constance E.
Putnam.
Despite such scholarly studies, there were few cases in
which everyone agreed that the person convicted was actually
innocent of the crime. Traditional investigation techniques
had occasionally resulted in exoneration of a wrongfully
convicted person, but still left questions about whether
the person’s innocence was really established. Cases of
agreement, where the convicted person had been in a prison or
a jail when the murder was committed, or where the “murder
victim” turned up alive after conviction and sentencing, were
written off by some as isolated mistakes that were bound to
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happen occasionally. On the broader question, there remained
sharp disagreement and little definitive evidence to convince
skeptics that actually innocent people had been convicted in
courts in the United States on a larger scale.
In the 1980s, science delivered the prosecution a
powerful new tool, DNA testing, which could link a specific
person to a crime by analyzing bodily materials or fluids
from a victim or a suspect. By the late 1980s, DNA testing
began to be used by defense attorneys as a means of proving
that a person convicted of a rape or murder did not commit
that crime. This post-conviction use of DNA analysis altered
the wrongful conviction debate forever by providing proof
positive that actually innocent people had been convicted in
American criminal courts. In the years 1989, 1990, and 1991,
there were a total of five exonerations.
In the early 1990s, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, two
lawyers already familiar with DNA analysis, believed that
there were many actually innocent persons who had been
wrongly convicted and realized that a coordinated effort, an
“innocence project,” was necessary to address the depth and
national scope of the problem they perceived. They founded
the first “innocence project” in conjunction with Cardozo
Law School in New York, and began reviewing cases and
assisting inmates from across the country who claimed they
were actually innocent. The story of the “Innocence Project,”
and the stories of some of the innocent people whose lives
had been tragically affected by wrongful conviction, are
recounted in Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and
Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted (2000) by Jim
Dwyer, Peter Neufeld, and Barry Scheck and in an updated
edition, entitled When Justice Goes Wrong and How To Make
It Right (2003). As of September 17, 2005, the Innocence
Project has documented that 162 actually innocent people,
convicted and sentenced to death or long prison terms for
crimes they did not commit, had been exonerated since 1989
(http://www.innocenceproject.org/).
Factors Responsible for Wrongful Conviction Through a “post mortem” of individual cases in the
first 74 exonerations, Dwyer, Neufeld, and Scheck (2000)
identified many factors that contributed to the wrongful
convictions of actually innocent persons (Table 1). Mistaken
eyewitness identifications, police misconduct, prosecutorial
misconduct, bad lawyering by defense counsel, false
testimony of jailhouse snitches and informants, false
confessions, and bad science are some of the factors that have
been identified as central to wrongful conviction. Because the
same techniques and types of evidence that had resulted in the
conviction of the innocent people were being used to obtain
convictions every day in courtrooms across the country, the
implications of their findings were clear: actually innocent
people were being wrongfully convicted on a large scale.
With this knowledge, the Innocence Project, and other
similar organizations like the Innocence Project of Minnesota,
has been pursuing initiatives to bring about systemic changes
to the criminal justice process to decrease the chance of
wrongful conviction of an actually innocent person. Two
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non-forensic initiatives undertaken to change criminal justice
processes, which are already in place in some jurisdictions,
involve police interrogations and eyewitness identification
procedures.
Despite the difficulty in understanding why an innocent
person would confess to something they didn’t do, especially
something as serious as rape or murder, the post mortem
showed it happened in 22% (Scheck et al. 2000; 26.92%
in the first 130 exonerations in Scheck et al. 2003) of
exoneration cases. An innocence project initiative to require
recording police interrogations and “confessions” is being
pursued in an effort to decrease false confessions.
Eyewitness identification, often thought of as the gold
standard of a criminal prosecution requiring proof beyond a
reasonable doubt, played a role in convicting the innocent in
81% of the first 72 exonerations (Scheck et al. 2000; 77.69%
in the first 130 exonerations in Scheck et al. 2003), with five
cases involving three or more mistaken eyewitnesses! (For
more information on psychological studies of eyewitness
identification, see, e.g., Gary Wells, Ph.D., Iowa State
University, www.psychology.iastate.edu/faculty/gwells/
homepage.htm.) Wells and his associates have established
that an innocence project initiative to make relatively minor
changes to the common police procedure of displaying
photographs to witnesses—to use a double blind, sequential
display process and to control the information given to the
witness—could dramatically reduce the number of mistaken
identifications, without a reduction in accurate identifications.
Wrongful Conviction and Forensic Science Documenting and understanding the role scientific
evidence and forensic scientists have played in cases
of wrongful conviction is currently ongoing. To date, a
systematic review by individuals with scientific expertise of
all cases of wrongful conviction and exoneration to clarify
and identify the forensic science-based factors has not been
done. General overviews have been published, however, that
provide insight into the role forensic science evidence and
testimony have played in smaller subsets of cases of wrongful
conviction (Conners et al. 1996; Gross et al. 2005; http://
www.innocenceproject.org/, and Saks and Koehler 2005).
Conners et al. provide the most detail when summarizing
common attributes of evidence presented during and after
trial for 28 cases. Several case examples are presented
when discussing the use of forensic evidence and alleged
misconduct and malfeasance by the government (1996:15–
18). Behaviors significant to the wrongful conviction include
perjured testimony (i.e., about qualifications), exaggerating
results, misrepresenting results as conclusive when they were
inconclusive, changing laboratory records, and manufacturing
evidence. To be sure, the focus of these studies is not the role
of forensic science in wrongful conviction. Criteria used to
classify types of forensic science error or misconduct are not
defined in most of these studies, however, and it is clear that a
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
27
Table 1: Factors Leading to Wrongful
Convictions in 74 U.S. Cases. (Schecket
al. 2000)
28
more systematic and thorough review to better understand and
ultimately remedy undeniable problems in forensic science as
it is practiced in the United States is needed.
Personnel from the Innocence Project (based in
New York) identified 25 cases in which forensic science
and scientists played a contributing role in the wrongful
conviction of the first 82 exonerees. Frequency data for
each of the forensic science-based factors identified and
categorized for the 25 cases (of the first 82 exonerations) are
presented in Table 2. Key forensic science factors in wrongful
conviction include, in order of frequency of occurrence,
Misinterpretation (11/25 cases, 44%), Statistical Exaggeration
(10/25 cases, 40%), Suppression of Evidence and/or
Exculpatory Results (7/ 25 cases, 28%), Falsified Results
(7/25 cases, 28%), Falsified Credentials (5/25 cases, 20 %),
Contamination (5/25 cases, 20 %), Testified to Tests Never
Conducted (4/25 cases, 16 %), and Other (2/25 cases, 8 %)
(http://www.innocenceproject.org).
Misinterpretation and Statistical Exaggeration are the two
most significant forensic science-based factors contributing to
wrongful conviction in the 25 cases and are both frequently
present in identified cases. Examples of misinterpretation
include analyst misinterpretation of test results,
misrepresentation or lack of understanding of the limitations
and scope of a particular forensic science discipline, and
confusion over the validity of the result, i.e., indicating
contamination or accuracy. Statistical Exaggeration includes
and reflects a lack of understanding of statistics, probability
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
theory, and calculation
of error rates. A review
of the case summaries of
exonerees featured on the
Innocence Project, New
York website (http://www.
innocenceproject.org),
identifies several cases that
illustrate misinterpretation
of results and presentation
of inaccurate statistics.
Josiah Sutton was
convicted in 1999 for a
rape that occurred in Texas.
Among other errors, an
analyst from the Houston
Police Department Crime
Laboratory testified that
Sutton’s DNA was an exact
match with the DNA found
on the victim and that only
one person in 694,000
could have been
the donor of the semen.
Re-examination of the
evidence concluded that
Sutton could not have
deposited the sperm and, statistically, 1 in 16 black men share
the reported DNA profile. Mr. Sutton, a teenager at the time
of his conviction and incarceration, was released in 2004 after
serving 4.5 years in prison. An investigation of the Houston
crime lab identified serious problems, including insufficiently
trained and poorly educated staff, and laboratory conditions
that resulted in contamination of evidence.
Suppression of Evidence and/or Exculpatory Results
occurred in 7 of the 25 cases and refers to instances where
examiners failed to report or make available to legal counsel,
test results that are inconclusive or exclude the defendant. The
re-investigation of the Gilbert Alejandro case that led to his
release in 1999, illustrates this factor. Alejandro was convicted
in 1990 of aggravated sexual assault in Ulvade County, Texas.
During the trial, the analyst who conducted the DNA testing
testified that Alejandro, and no one else, was identified as the
source of the semen on the victim’s clothing. Upon review,
a DNA analyst from Bexar County reported that the test the
original analyst, the notorious Fred Zain, testified about was
actually inconclusive and that two previous DNA tests had
yielded results that excluded Alejandro. It was reported that
Zain knew of these results and failed to inform the defense
that Mr. Alejandro had been excluded as the donor.
There are numerous other examples that clearly
illustrate the significant and devastating role forensic
science and forensic scientists have played in wrongfully
convicting innocent people (see Connors et al. 1996, www.
innocenceproject.org). The question becomes, given what we
know about what went wrong in cases of wrongful conviction
and recognizing that there is more to learn, how do we move
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forward? How do we as members of the forensic sciences
community remedy these errors and reduce/prevent wrongful
conviction from occurring in the future? Within the forensic
science community, areas highlighted for reform are identified
on three levels: the individual scientist, the crime laboratory,
and the various forensic science disciplines themselves.
Recommended Remedies
On the individual level, attention must be directed to how
students are prepared for a career in the forensic sciences.
What should the educational and experiential requirements
be for future forensic scientists? How many courses in the
natural sciences, the social sciences, statistics, and law,
for example should be required? In response to a National
Institute of Justice sponsored assessment of current needs
and conditions of forensic science in the United States, a
Technical Working Group on Forensic Science Education
(TWGED) was formed and presented recommended
standards for undergraduate and graduate forensic science
education programs, including curriculum, faculty, graduation
requirements, as well as a mechanism by which existing and
new programs could be evaluated. The Forensic Science
Education Program Accreditation Commission (FEPAC)
was formed to evaluate the quality of forensic science
Table 2: Forensic Science Factors
Contributing to Wrongful Convictions
in 25 of the first 82 cases of exoneration
(modified from www.innocenceproject.org;
September 2005)
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education programs and develop criteria and procedures for
accreditation; FEPAC is into their third year as an accrediting
commission. Accreditation cannot ensure that individuals
will not make mistakes in the future but it goes a long way
to building consensus about what is the best course of
study to prepare for a career in the forensic sciences. Also
important, on the individual scientist level, is the role of board
certification in development and maintenance of professional
credentials. Most forensic science disciplines offer the
opportunity for certification. The certification process for
each, however, is different. As a community we must consider
what the significance of board certification is. Should it be
a pre-requisite to expert testimony, the end of a training
period? Again, achieving board certification does not ensure
that mistakes won’t be made in the future, but it does require
the applicant to be current inthe literature and methods and
techniques practiced.
On the agency level, Scheck et al. (2003:351-362) present
several recommendations to reduce the frequency of wrongful
convictions. Many of the recommendations center on
reducing misconduct by the agency and individual examiners.
Required laboratory accreditation is high on the list of
recommendations. Achieving and maintaining accreditation
addresses such issues as the existence of standard operating
procedures, protocols, and laboratory procedures to ensure
high quality performance
of instrumentation and
personnel and accuracy
of results and conclusions
through proficiency testing
(including blind), validation
studies, hiring practices,
and other quality control
and quality assurance
processes. Additionally, it
is recommended that crime
laboratories be subjected
to regulatory oversight via
independent panels that
are empowered with actual
regulatory authority.
At the discipline level,
forensic scientists must
work toward establishing
the scientific validity of
each discipline and the
techniques utilized under
the standards defined by
Supreme Court rulings to
reduce the admissibility of
junk or fraudulent science.
Recent challenges to the
validity of, for example, fingerprint examination, document
examination, and other forensic sciences have encouraged
and resulted in a flurry of research directed at assessing
the evidentiary potential of various categories of physical
evidence, determining error rates, and evaluating reliability.
Innocence Project (Continued on p. 66)
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
29
Forensics
in
Another
Light
Using
Details to
Teach
Forensics
By Ricky Pelazzo
I
n any endeavor, the devil is in the details. Taking a trip to
the beach? Going to a conference? Hosting a yard sale?
All start out with the best of intentions, but if you forget
one tiny component you’ve got a basket of hassle on your
hands. Ask anyone in the above scenarios who’s forgotten
suntan lotion, a pen, or small bills for change respectively
how important one little thing can be and you’ll get an earful.
And details are one of the best things about forensics.
Every discipline looks for things left untouched by every
other. Bullet striations, hair donor species or race, scarring at
the ends of long bones, blood droplet impact angles, instar
stages, and many other tiny things make our deductive juices
flow, especially in a classroom where students are learning
about multiple specialties. And one area where details are
everything especially is questioned documents.
Wurther Crue wrote a short story in 1932 called, “Ordeal
by Cheque,” in which he told the story of a man’s life, but
he didn’t use a narrative. Instead, he used cancelled checks,
33 in all, sorted chronologically. Starting in the year 1903
and continuing through 1931, a number of details become
evident about Lawrence Exeter, the man signing the checks.
By paying close attention to the date, amount, and recipient
of each check a narrative emerges about Mr. Exeter’s life. In
addition, the signature bears keeping in mind as Mr. Exeter
ages and events cause him to alter what he signs. The reader
may ask themselves if Mr. Exeter really did all the signing.
It’s a neat exercise with many interpretations. The end of
the story is tied up neatly if the reader pays attention to the
details mentioned above, but it is the diversions, twists, and
a few mysterious payments that make this a great addition to
the questioned documents unit of any forensics course. Your
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The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
students might wonder what a cheque (check) is in this age of
electronic payments and MAC cards, but the beauty about this
activity is the deeper one looks at the details, the deeper one
can sink into the story.
We wanted to reprint “Ordeal by Cheque” by Wurther
Crue in this issue of The Forensic Teacher Magazine,
but the licensing fee was prohibitively high. However,
U. S. copyright law allows you to make reproductions of
copyrighted materials for educational uses. We came across
the piece by accident after a Google search for the article
revealed it is widely available as a PDF.
However, it was cited in Content area reading: Literacy
and learning across the curriculum (6th ed.), 1999 by Vacca,
R. T., & Vacca J. L. (1999). If you have a copy in your school
please see the above note about making copies for your
classroom.
“Ordeal by Cheque” a great way for students to work in
small groups and create lively discussions, especially if the
groups are allowed to share and challenge others’ narrative.
You’ll be glad you did.
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The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
31
VOIR
Qualifying the Expert Witness: A Practical Voir Dire
By Gil I. Sapir, JD, MSC
L
awyers rarely do more than minimally review the
qualifications of the expert and verify the facts on
which the expert conclusions are based.1 The voir dire
examination is typically based upon perfunctory questioning
about institutional affiliation and publications. The reason
for this limited inquiry is simple: most lawyers and judges
lack the adequate scientific background to argue or decide the
admissibility of expert testimony.1
This article will briefly discuss the basic practical
principles of qualifying a witness for expert testimony. An
understandable, realistic theory and utilitarian method for
expert witness voir dire is provided. The sample voir dire
questionnaire constructed to obtain that objective2,3— get the
witness qualified.
Basis And Function Of Expert Witness
The expert witness’ existence is created and perpetuated
by the legal system. But for the Rules of Evidence, consulting
and testimonial evidence would not exist. A simplified
restatement of Federal Rules 701–706 (Figure 1) is that
a qualified expert may give his opinion to help the court
understand evidence, or to establish a fact in issue. States that
have not adopted the Federal Rules of Evidence generally
have similar rules or statutes governing expert witness
qualifications and testimony.
The expert witness performs two primary functions: 1)
the scientific function — collecting, testing, and evaluating
evidence and forming an opinion as to that evidence; and
2) the forensic function—communicating that opinion and
its basis to the judge and jury. A general rule of evidence is
that witnesses may only testify to what they have personally
observed or encountered through their five senses.
Categories Of Expert Witness
An expert may be used in basically two different
capacities —consultation or for testimony. Consulting and
testimonial witnesses are the basis for expert witnesses. They
are derived from five general categories of expertise.
1. Lay people: common sense and life long
experience.
2. Technician/examiner: limited and
concentrated training, applies known techniques,
works in a system and taught with the system
[e.g., investigator and supervisors (observers and
viewers)]. The technician is generally taught to use
complex instruments (gas chromatographer, infrared
spectrophotometer, mass spectrophotometer) or
even “simple” breath alcohol testing equipment
as “bench operators,” who have only a superficial
understanding of what the instrument really
does, and how the readout is generated. “Bench
operators,” who qualify as expert witnesses, are
not competent to explain the instrumentation used
unless it is established that they received the training
and education necessary to impart a thorough
understanding of the underlying theories.4
3. Practitioner: material and information
analysis and interpretation.
4. Specialist: devoted to one kind of study or
work with individual characteristics.
5. Scientist: conducts original empirical
research, then experiments to verify the validity of
the theory; designs and creates instrumentation and
applied techniques; is published in own field with
peers; and advances his field of knowledge.
A consulting expert is a person who has been
retained or specifically employed in anticipation
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The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
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DIRE
of litigation or preparation of trial, but who will
not be called at trial. The identity, theories, mental
impressions, litigation plans, and opinions of a
consultant are work product and protected by the
attorney-client privilege.5
A testimonial expert is retained for purposes
of testifying at trial. The confidentiality privilege is
waived and all materials, notes, reports, and opinions
must be produced through applicable discovery
proceedings. If an expert relies on work product or
hearsay as a basis for their opinion, that material
must be disclosed and produced through discovery.
Standard Of Review: “Daubert Trilogy”
Whether a witness is qualified as an expert can
only be determined by comparing the area in which
the witness has expertise with the subject matter
of the witness’s testimony. The standard of review
and criteria for expert witness testimony has been
codified by three cases, commonly known as the
“Daubert Trilogy.” These cases consist of Daubert v.
Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc.,6 General Electric
v.Joiner,7 and Kumho Tire Co., Ltd. v. Carmichael.8
The Daubert standard of for evaluating scientific
evidence is based on reliability and the Daubert test
is relevance for “good science.” The reliability prong
of scientific evidence is: 1) whether the scientific
theory can be (and has been) tested; 2) whether the
scientific theory has been subjected to peer review
and publication;
3) the known or potential rate of
error of the scientific technique; and 4) whether
the theory has received “general acceptance” in the
scientific community.9 In evaluating the second prong
(relevance), trial courts must consider whether the
particular reasoning or methodology offered can be
properly applied to the facts in issue, as determined
by “fit.” There must be a valid scientific connection
and basis to the pertinent inquiry.10
General Electric v. Joiner7 upheld the trial
court’s “gatekeeping” function, annunciated in
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SIMPLIFIED RESTATEMENT OF FEDERAL RULES
701–706
Rule Explanation
701 Lay Opinion: If the witness is not an expert, opinion
is admissible only when it is 1) rationally based on
perceptions, and 2) helpful to the trier of fact.
702 Testimony by Experts: Expert opinions may be
admissible if 1) the testimony assists the trier of fact, and 2)
the witness is qualified as an expert.
703 Bases of Opinion Testimony by Experts: Expert
opinion may be based on facts or data 1) actually seen
or heard by the expert or 2) communicated to him at or
before the hearing. Admissibility of the facts or data is not
essential if typically relied on in this field.
704 Opinion on Ultimate Issue: An expert may express an
opinion which 1) addresses an ultimate issue of fact, but
opinions or inferences regarding the mental state of the
accused are reserved for the trier of fact, and 2) when that
mental state is an element of the crime charged or a defense
to that crime.
705 Disclosure of Facts or Data Underlying Expert
Opinion: An expert need not provide facts supporting the
reason for his opinion unless 1) the court so requires, or 2)
asked on cross examination.
706 Court Appointed Experts: The court 1) may issue
an order to show cause as to why an expert should not
be appointed, 2) may request nominations of an expert
by parties, 3) may appoint an expert whether or not the
parties agree to that expert, if the expert consents. The
witness shall be informed of his duties 1) in writing, 2)
a copy of which is filed with the court. The witness shall
communicate his findings to the parties, and 1) may be
deposed, 2) may be called to testify, 3) may be cross
examined, and 3) shall be paid as the court directs. The
jury’s knowledge of the court appointment is left to the
discretion of the court. This rule does not limit parties from
calling other experts.
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
33
Daubert, to determine the admissibility of expert
witness testimony absent an abuse of judicial
discretion.
Kumho Tire Co., Ltd. v. Carmichael18 held
Daubert applies to all expert evidence and testimony
regardless if it is “scientific” in nature. One of
the underlying assumptions is that juries tend to
believe almost anything the professed expert says,
therefore, judges “should protect impressionable
jurors from experts who lack objective credibility.”11
Accordingly, a judicial “gatekeeping” function under
Daubert is to limit abuses of FRE 702.
Qualifications And Competency Requirements
The witness must be competent in the subject
matter. They may be qualified through knowledge,
skill, practical experience, training, education,
or a combination of these factors. Minimally, the
expert witness must know underlying methodology
and procedures employed and relied upon as a
basis for the opinion. The background knowledge
includes state of art technology, literature review,
and experience culminating in an opinion based
upon a reasonable degree of scientific certainty.
However, there is no absolute rule as to the degree
of knowledge required to qualify a witness as an
expert in a given field. Once competency is satisfied,
a witness’ knowledge of the subject matter affects the
weight and credibility of their testimony.
Reliance on the person’s resume or curriculum
vitae for an appropriate voir dire is problematic.
Resumes and curriculum vitaes too frequently consist
of superficial self-serving historical embellishments
and highlights of professional achievements,
accolades, and accomplishments. They are designed
and intended to appear impressive through a wellwritten linguistical and promotional presentation.
Unfortunately, some expert witnesses prevaricate
on their qualifications. Some experts blatantly
misstate and exaggerate their qualifications, to the
point of perjury — this is true of state and federal
government, as well as defense witnesses. The vast
majority of witnesses testify truthfully. However,
the “mountebanks” are too numerous to suggest that
it is a remote occurrence. The moving party must
establish the expert’s competency and knowledge in
the profession and field (not experience, education,
or specialized training) subject to judicial approval,
through an examination of the expert’s credentials.
The review process is conducted through a voir dire
examination. Voir dire is from the French language
meaning, “to speak the truth.” The term is used in
two contexts relating to trials: first, the prospective
jury is voir dired by the attorneys to determine their
qualifications, and second, after the proponent of
an expert witness asks questions of the witness to
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The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
bring out the person’s qualifications, the opposing
attorney is allowed to voir dire the witness to bring
out matters that might prevent his qualification as an
expert. A witness is not deemed an expert until so
qualified as such by the court.
The importance of a proffered expert’s testimony
cannot be understated, which is a reason proper
implementation of the voir dire process is paramount.
Voir dire creates the standard for an expert witness’
testimony and credibility. It is the first and foremost
part of any examination process. It is the judge and
jury’s first impression of the witness. Neither the
movant nor witness must take voir dire for granted or
the proffered witness will not be properly qualified.
Whether a witness is qualified as an expert can only
be determined by comparing the area in which the
witness has expertise with the subject matter of the
witness’ testimony.
Neither party should stipulate to the witness’
credentials. An offer of stipulation to the expert’s
credentials is because the expert is marginally
qualified — not to save time. The voir dire can be
made to sound impressive, but without substance
to support qualifications and credentials. A proper
qualifying voir dire should be able to survive a
meticulous cross-examination of the proffered expert
witness.
If there should be a stipulation regarding the
expert’s credentials, the judge should be requested to
recite the stipulation using the witness’ biographical
statement. The movant should still have the
curriculum vitae or resume placed into evidence to
avoid any confusion or misunderstanding about the
expert’s credentials and qualifications.
Nothing is exempt from securitization or
comment regarding the expert witness. Expert
witness discovery relating to scientific evidence
and associated testimony is controlled in part by the
Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26 (a)(2)(A), (B),
(C), Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc.,6
state statutes, and local court rules. The Supreme
Court’s decision in Daubert sought to reconcile
the differences and confusion in the Federal Rules
of Evidence (FRE 702, 703) pertaining to the
foundation of an expert’s proffered opinion for
scientific validity based upon the “Frye Test.”12
According to Federal Rule 26(2-b), before
an expert witness can offer testimony, that person
must provide a written summary opinion discussing
the testimonial subject matter, substance of facts
and opinion, basis for opinion, reports, a list of all
publications authored by the witness in the preceding
ten years, a record of all previous testimony
including depositions for the last four years,
disclosure statement, report signed by the expert,
and disclosing attorney. The disclosure statement
generally includes the following information
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regarding the expert: qualifications; scope of
engagement; information relied upon in formulating
opinion; summary of opinion; qualifications and
publications; compensation; and signature of both
expert and disclosing attorney. Even though many
states have adopted the Federal Rules of Civil
Procedure, including Rule 26, parties should consult
their own jurisdiction regarding rules of discovery
and corresponding requirements.
Once disclosure of the expert witness is made,
under FRCP 26(e)(1), a continuing duty exists to
provide additional and corrective information. The
movant must provide complete current information
on the expert witness. If there is noncompliance,
opposing counsel will undoubtedly ask what the
witness is trying to hide.
Salaries, fees, and compensation affect
the weight and credibility of an expert witness’
testimony – not qualifications or admissibility of the
subject matter.
In Daubert II the court wrote, “That an expert
testifies for money does not necessarily cast doubt on
the reliability of his testimony, as few experts appear
in court merely as an eleemosynary gesture. But
in determining whether proposed expert testimony
amounts to good science, we may not ignore the fact
that a scientist’s normal work place is the laboratory
or field, not the courtroom or the lawyer’s office.”13,14
Therefore, compensation is a relevant area of crossexamination after the person is permitted to testify.
Although prior judicial recognition of an
expert’s qualifications is normally a significant
factor in the court’s evaluation of finding the witness
qualified as an expert, it is not the determining factor.
Assumptions of this nature based upon presumptions
are not reliable. Furthermore, deposition testimony
is not the equivalent to judicial recognition of
qualifications or previous court testimony. A
deposition is a statement made orally by a person
under oath before an examiner, commissioner,
or officer of the court, but not in open court, and
reduced to writing by the examiner or under his
direction. Depositions are used as a discovery device
and not generally subject to the same trial evidentiary
standards.
The imprimatur of a governmental agency,
laboratory, office, or title does not automatically
make either the results or witness’ testimony
inherently trustworthy, credible, and reliable. A
shocking and explosive example of inadequacies,
misrepresentations, flawed science, doctored
laboratory reports, posed evidence, woeful
investigative work, and false testimony was the
epitomized by U.S. Department of Justice, Office
of the Inspector General, The FBI Laboratory:
An Investigation into Laboratory Practices and
Alleged Misconduct in Explosives-Related and
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QUALIFYING QUESTIONS FOR THE
EXPERT WITNESS
(SAMPLE EXPERT
WITNESS VOIR DIRE)
1.Name.
2.Occupation.
3.Place of employment.
4.Present title.
5.Position currently held.
6.Describe briefly the subject matter of your specialty.
7.Specializations within that field.
8.What academic degrees are held and from where and
when obtained.
9.Specialized degrees and training.
10. Licensing in field, and in which state(s).
11. Length of time licensed.
12. Length of time practicing in this field.
13. Board certified as a specialist in this field.
14. Length of time certified as a specialist.
15. Positions held since completion of formal education,
and length of time in each position.
16. Duties and function of current position.
17. Length of time at current position.
18. Specific employment, duties, and experiences
(optional).
19. Whether conducted personal examination or testing of
(subject matter/ person/instrumentality).
20. Number of these tests or examinations conducted by
you and when and where were they conducted.
21. Teaching or lecturing by you in your field.
22. When and where your lecture or teach.
23. Publications by you in this field and titles.
24. Membership in professional societies/associations/
organizations, and special positions in them.
25. Requirements for membership and advancement within
each of these organizations.
26. Honors, acknowledgments, and awards received by you
in your field.
27. Number of times testimony has been given in court as
an expert witness in this field.
28. Availability for consulting to any party, state agencies,
law enforcement agencies, defense attorneys.
29. Put curriculum vitae or resume into evidence.
30. Your Honor, pursuant to (applicable rule on expert
witness), I am tendering (name) as a qualified
expert witness in the field of__________.
Other Cases, April, 1997. The principle findings
and recommendations of the Justice Department’s
report addressed “significant instances of testimonial
errors, substandard analytical work, and deficient
practices” including policies by the Federal Bureau
of Investigation Laboratory.”15
The (517 page Inspector General’s) report
provided plentiful evidence of pro prosecution
bias, false testimony and inadequate forensic work
... No defense lawyer in the country is going to
take what the FBI lab says at face value anymore.
For years they were trusted on the basis of glossy
advertising.”16 Similar revelations were exposed in
2003 concerning the Houston Police Department
Crime Laboratory17 and are probably applicable to
other crime laboratories throughout the country. A
witness is not an expert merely because the term
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
35
is part of their title or job description for example,
Special Agent (FBI), Drug Recognition Expert
or Scientist. The name “special” or “expert” or
“inspector” itself gives an instantaneous indicia
and aura of authority and respect which implies a
specific expertise beyond normal employment (law
enforcement/ police) qualifications to the trier of fact.
Police officers who are trained to “identify
drug impaired drivers” determined an authoritative,
descriptive title was necessary. According to The
DRE (Newsletter), police officers engaged in this
law enforcement activity may call themselves
drug recognition specialists, technicians, and
evaluators.18 The International Association of
Chiefs of Police (IACP) decided to use the term
“technician.” However, on March 25, 1992, the
Technical Advisory panel to the IACP Highway
Safety Advisory Committee voted to change and
use the self-proclaimed term “Drug Recognition
Expert.” 19 The term “expert” is currently used in the
latest training materials.20 If DREs call themselves
experts; it is problematic. Also, fraudulent claims
of professional status and association with an
organization that owns a federal registered trademark
subjects the infringer to injunctive relief and
damages.21
A debilitating invitation to blatant accusations
and findings of motive, interest, and bias exists if the
proffered witness is required to testify based upon
their job description and employment duties. This is
a common problem with government employees.22
Claims of intellectual dishonesty and inherent
prejudice may be insurmountable. An expert witness
cannot have an interest in the outcome of the trial.
An expert may be qualified, but not competent to
render a credible opinion.
In trial, harm to litigants results from improper
qualifications of an incompetent expert or failure
to qualify a competent expert... The incompetent
expert is a vehicle for unreliable proof, while the
later denies the opportunity to present credible
evidence.”23 “In bolstering the credibility of an expert
witness, attorneys will select, as circumstances allow,
witnesses with significant trial experience. Absent
such a source, attorneys select from the community
rather than classified advertisements. Trial tactics
rather than reliability become the impetus for the
selection of experts. Such tactics may influence
selection of the less reliable witness.”24
Once competency is satisfied, a witness’
knowledge of the subject matter affects the weight
and credibility of their testimony. Simply ask,
is the proffered witness qualified? Is the witness
competent? If the judicial determination is yes, only
then may the witness provide opinion evidence.
In addition to credentials and competency, the
subject matter of an expert witness’ testimony must
36
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
be legally and factually relevant. There must also be
a nexus between the scientific theory being proffered
and the evidence at trial. Failure to meet these
threshold criteria will preclude or bar the expert’s
proffered testimony. Next, there must be a finding
the proposed testimony will affect the validity of the
evidence.
Conclusion
Parties should not rely upon or use the
person’s resume or curriculum vitae as the voir dire
questionnaire for reasons presented in this article.
This article’s simple, thorough voir dire questions
can be very effective. The suggested subject order
and format of core questions must be tailored to
each case. However, discretion should be exercised
to keep the voir dire simple. The voir dire is not
perfected until the last question is asked. The
examination can be developed in a clear and concise
manner, using simple, short, single fact questions.
The movant and witness must keep their objective in
mind. Qualify the person as an expert witness.
Disclaimer
This article is intended to provide
general information; it does not provide legal advice
applicable to any specific matter and should not
be relied upon for that purpose. Interested parties
should review the laws with their legal counsel to
determine how they will be affected by the laws.
References
* Article adapted in part from, Gil I. Sapir, Legal
Aspects of Forensic Science, ch. 1, in Forensic
Science Handbook, vol. I, 2nd ed, R. Saferstein, ed.,
Prentice-Hall, c.2002.
1. Peter J. Neufeld and Neville Coleman, When Science
Takes The Witness Stand, Scientific American,
vol.262, p.46, 49 (May, 1990).
2. Gil I. Sapir, Legal Aspects of Forensic Science, Ch.
1, in Forensic Science Handbook, vol. I, 2nd ed,
R. Saferstein, ed., Prentice- Hall, c.2002
3. Gil Sapir, Proper Voir Dire: Qualifying the Expert
Witness, DWI Journal: Science & Law, vol.13,
no.12, Dec. 1998, p.5.
4. Andre A. Moenssens, Novel Scientific Evidence
in Criminal Cases: Some Words of Caution,
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. Vol.
1, p.1, 5-6 (Spring 1993).
5. People v. Adam, 51 Ill.2d 46, 280 N.E.2d 205, cert.
denied 409 U.S. 948 (1972).
6. Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc., 509
U.S. 579, 113 S.Ct. 2786 (1993).
7. General Electric v. Joiner, 522 U.S. 136, 118 S.Ct.
512 (1997).
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8. Kumho Tire Co., Ltd. v. Carmichael, 526 U.S. 137,
119 S.Ct. 1167, 1174 (1999).
9. Daubert, 113 S.Ct. at 2796-2797.
10. Daubert, 113 S.Ct. at 2795-2796.
11. Joseph F. Madonia, Kumho Tire Steers New Course
on Expert-Witness Testimony, Chicago Daily
Law Bulletin, July 2, 1999, p.5.
12. Frye v. U.S., 293 F.1013 (D.C. Cir. 1923).
13. Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc, 43
F.3d 1311, 1317, (9th Cir. 1995).
14. Paul C. Giannelli, “Junk Science”: The Criminal
Cases, Journal of Criminal Law and
Criminology. Vol. 1, p.105, 117 (Spring 1993).
15. Justice Department Investigation of FBI Laboratory:
Executive Summary, 61 Crim. L. (BNA) 2017
(April 16, 1997).
16. John F. Kelly and Phillip K. Wearne, Tainting
Evidence: Inside the Scandals at the FBI Lab,
p.3-4, The Free Press, NY, NY, c.1998.
17. Adam Liptak, Worst Crime Lab in the Country: Or
is Houston Typical?, New York Times, (on the
Web) March 11, 2003.
18. Vanell, What’s in a Name?, The DRE (Newsletter),
p.2, (Sept/Oct 1990).
19. The DRE (Newsletter), p.10, (March/April 1992) .
20. Roderick T. Kennedy, Someone’s On Drugs Here ...
Drugs, Driving Experts and Evidence, NACDL/
ABA Seminar, Defending DUI Cases: Insights
from the Masters, p.285 (June 13, 1997).
21. ABPN v. Johnson-Powell, 123 F.3d 1 (1997).
22. Legal Aspects of Forensic Science, Ch. 1, p.5 in
“Forensic Science Handbook,” Vol. I, 2nd Ed, R.
Saferstein, ed., Prentice-Hall, c.2002.
23. Christopher F. Murphy, Experts, Liars, and Guns
for Hire: A Different Perspective on the
Qualification of Technical Expert Witnesses, 69
Indiana L.J. 637, 649 (1993).
24. Christopher F. Murphy, Experts, Liars, and Guns
for Hire: A Different Perspective on the
Qualification of Technical Expert Witnesses, 69
Indiana L.J. 637, 650-651 (1993).
Gil I. Sapir, Forensic Science Consultant and Attorney;
B.Sc., Microbiology and Biology, Colorado State University
(1976); J.D., IIT/Chicago-Kent College of Law (1980); M.Sc.,
Criminalistics, University of Illinois-Chicago (1987). He
has lectured, testified, and written extensively on scientific
evidence. Mr. Sapir maintains his office in Chicago, Illinois.
This article reprinted with permission of Forensic
Magazine®. www.forensicmag.com.
Mini-Lab: By a Hair
H
Courtesy of Dr. Richard Saferstein
air is one of the most valuable, yet tricky, pieces of
evidence an investigator can come across on a crime
scene. For some, a strand of hair can speak volumes about its
former owner. For others, a hair is like a feather at the start
of a wild goose chase.
If you have students who place a near-religious belief in
the infallability of forensic evidence, this is the lab for you. If
you have students who are leary of forensic testimony being
used to convict the wrong person, you’ll love this activity.
And if you have students who sit in both groups, this
mini-lab is a must-do.
1. When students aren’t around, pluck 24 hairs from
various locations on the head of an individual.
2. Make permanent slides of each hair and number
them. You might want to make more than one set.
3. Give the slides and microscopes to your students
and ask them to determine how many individuals
contributed hairs to the collection. Making drawings
is optional.
4. Try not to give the answer away as they convince
themselves the hairs came from numerous
individuals.
5. Following the lab, after clean-up, ask them to
defend their thinking before you reveal the answer
and segue into a discussion of how hair can be used
to convict an innocent person.
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The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
37
Activity
Is Handwriting
Really
Brainwriting?
Making Up Our Minds About Graphology
By J.D. Corleone
L
38
ike fingerprints, no two individuals’ handwriting, is
perfectly identical. No matter how many handwriting
traits two people share, upon close inspection, an
analyst will discover certain differences. The reason each
individual’s writing style is personal and unique is that
handwriting is the result of unconscious and automatic
movements—actions that stem from the brain. Given the fact
that the act of handwriting is unconscious, many believe an
individual’s handwriting reveals his personality traits, and
therefore, handwriting analysis might be used as a tool for
determining a person’s personality.
The study of handwriting to determine the writer’s
personality type is called graphology. Graphology, in some
form, has been around for nearly four centuries, though the
term itself wasn’t coined until 1875, when Jean Hippolyte
Michon first systemized handwriting analysis by associating
hundreds of graphic signs with specific personality traits.
Today no single method or theory governs graphology.
Indeed, many graphologists have developed their own
system to determine personality traits from an individual’s
handwriting. There are, however, some common elements
found in differing systems. Graphologists tend to seek
particular features, such as the size and slant of individual
letters, the curvature and angularity of certain characters,
and the amount of pressure likely applied to upward and
downward strokes.
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
Graphologists are also particular in the types of
samples they analyze. Most prefer spontaneous handwriting
samples, i.e. samples not written for the express purpose of
analysis. They favor longer samples that were written with
an instrument sensitive to speed and pressure. Of course,
graphologists would also elect to have as much information
about the writer as possible, including age, sex, education and
other biographical material.
The claims graphologists make about handwriting
analysis vary widely. Some claim they can predict what the
writer will do and how he will react in specific situations.
Others claim they can forecast the writer’s future actions and
intellectual performance. Still others suggest that by altering
one’s handwriting, one can alter his own personality.
The validity of graphology is questionable. Some
graphologists offer their services over the Web, while
others market expensive handwriting-analysis software.
Is handwriting analysis an effective tool for determining
personality traits?
It is vital to examine both sides of the issue.
Today graphology is sometimes used to screen candidates
for employment. Despite studies demonstrating graphology’s
apparent ineffectiveness in reflecting future job performance,
many large businesses continue to use handwriting analysis
during the evaluation process. Businesses utilizing graphology
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Activity
generally seek candidates with personality traits consistent
with honesty, reliability, and productivity. For instance, many
graphologists agree that small handwriting indicates an ability
to focus attention and avoid distractions, while missing t-bars
demonstrate forgetfulness and absentmindedness—in other
words, someone who lacks attention to detail, who literarily,
fails to dot his i’s and cross his t’s.
Some large corporations and local governments refuse
to use graphology because Title VII of the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination. An invalidated
pre-employment test could be deemed unlawful – and subject
an employer to legal liabilities – if the test is determined to
have a discriminatory impact. Title VII bars discrimination
on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin,
or reprisal. Given the fact most studies show graphology
is ineffective at predicting future job performance, many
employers decide that employing the test is not worth the
legal risk.
No certification is required to become a graphologist, as
no certification is recognized. Up until the turn of the century,
Felician College in Lodi, New Jersey, offered an associate
arts degree in graphology. However, since 2000, no accredited
academic institution in the United States offers a graphology
degree. Training, however, remains available through
correspondence courses.
The lack of formal training is one argument set forth by
detractors of graphology. Opponents of handwriting analysis
as a way of determining the writer’s personality traits contend
graphology is a pseudoscience and no clear and consistent
correlation exists between handwriting and basic personality
traits. While some detractors concede that handwriting
analysis should be studied further, the research currently
available is generally inconclusive at best.
In 1992, neuroscientist Barry Beyerstein authored a book
titled The Write Stuff: Evaluations of Graphology – The Study
of Handwriting Analysis, which provided a summary of the
research literature available on the subject. In an interview
on PBS’s award-winning science series Scientific American
Frontiers, hosted by Alan Alda, Beyerstein called graphology
a “pseudoscientific ‘character reading’ method,” and
suggested that its use “to make decisions that can seriously
affect people’s reputations and life prospects” is “scandalous.”
In addition, several courts in the United States have
weighed in on the issue of handwriting analysis and its
validity. Courts have routinely ruled that a handwriting
analyst could not offer expert testimony regarding a person’s
physical or mental condition. In order for graphological
evidence to be deemed admissible in court, most jurisdictions
require (at a minimum) that it pass the test set forth in the
case of Frye v. United States, 293 F. 1013 (D.C. Cir. 1923).
The Frye test requires that when scientific evidence is offered,
there must be a general consensus in the appropriate scientific
field that the theory behind the technique is sound, and that it
has been reliably reduced to practice.
In addition, seventy years after the ruling in Frye, the
U.S. Supreme Court set forth an even more rigid approach to
determining whether expert scientific testimony is admissible.
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Under the ruling in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals,
Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993), the trial judge is required to
ensure that an expert’s testimony is “relevant to the task at
hand” and that it is based “on a reliable foundation.” In other
words, scientific evidence must be the product of sound
scientific methodology derived from the scientific method.
The scientific method requires, among other things, empirical
testing that is subject to peer review and publication. The
concept dealt with in Daubert was that a new scientific test
can be considered reliable before it reaches the level of
general acceptance if it meets the requirements for scientific
method.
Although there have been no reported cases of
graphological evidence decided under the Daubert test, it is
likely that such evidence would be deemed inadmissible for
purposes of assessing personality.
Outside the courtroom, however, intriguing questions
remain. Is a writer with wide e-loops broadminded and free
of bigotry? Do tell d and t stems indicate a writer is vain?
Does heavy average stroke pressure demonstrate emotional
intensity?
Some law enforcement agencies believe the answer
is yes; personality traits can be ascertained by examining
a suspect’s handwriting. In determining the identity of a
perpetrator, it is often vital for law enforcement to learn
as much as possible about the criminal’s personality by
gathering and analyzing evidence left at the crime scene.
Personality traits may be determined by the perpetrator’s
actions, choice of weapon, choice of victims, and possibly
by his handwriting. As such, regardless of whether or not
graphological evidence will ultimately be ruled admissible
in court, handwriting analysis has become an interesting
distraction to objective, scientifically verified, forensic
methodologies. Plus, it’s fun to do at parties, and to watch
your students make up their own minds while doing the
exercises on the following pages.
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
39
Putative
Graphology Lab
By jeanette hencken
The principle of graphology is based on determining specific personality traits based on a person’s writing style. This
includes spacing between words and sentences, the amount of pressure applied in upward and downward strokes, and
how certain letters are formed.
Purpose: To experiment with handwriting and the determination of personality traits based on writing style.
Materials Needed: unlined paper, 1 piece per student; pens, one per student
List of attributes only (doesn’t include clues), one per student See the following pages
List of clues that are used to determine the attributes, one per student: See the following pages
Part One:
1. Give each student a pen, piece of paper and the list of clues.
2. Ask the students to look over the list of attributes (e.g., comfortable or uncomfortable in a social setting) and write
on their piece of paper which attributes they believe describe themselves. Label this paper “Known Attributes.”
3. Have the student put their name on the paper and turn it in along with the list of attributes.
Part Two:
1. Give each student a pen, and a second piece of paper.
2. Ask each student to write the phrase “The black fox jumped over the log in the forest. A squirrel gazed suspiciously
at the fox and ran up the nearest tree,” on at least two lines of their piece of paper.
3. Have the student label this piece of paper “Control Handwriting Sample” and place on their piece of paper an
assumed name you have chosen for them (you will need a key that lists the correct name for each student and the
assumed name you give them), and turn it in. Alternatively, you could also use the last four digits of their Social
Security number which most teachers have on their class rosters.
Part Three:
1. Shuffle the papers and give each student a paper with someone else’s “Control Handwriting Sample.”
2. Give each student a copy of the clues that are used to determine someone’s attributes from their writing.
3. After looking over the “Control Handwriting Sample,” ask the student to use the clues to write an analysis of the
handwriting. (What can you tell about this person from their handwriting based on the list of clues?)
4. Have the student turn in the paper containing their analysis after placing their real name on this piece of paper.
Part Four:
1. Hand each person a “Control Handwriting Sample” that has been analyzed.
2. With a projection device, show the class the list of assumed names in order for them to identify the original writer.
3. Give each person the “Known Attributes” paper that corresponds with their person’s “Control Handwriting
Sample.”
4. Ask the students to compare the information on those two pieces of paper.
Questions:
How well did the “analyst” do at determining the characteristics of the unknown person from their handwriting
sample?
A. Did all of their analysis match the “Known?”
B. Ask students how accurate the characteristics described them, and if they think graphology should be admissible in
court or to determine whether or not they get a job.
40
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
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List of Known Attributes
Name_________________________
Circle those attributes you think apply to you
Positive Attributes
1. Social
2. Perceptive
3. Meticulous
4. Logical
5. Emotional
6. Empathetic
7. Caring
8. Attention to detail
9. Positive
10.Cautious
11.Analytical
12.Broadminded
13.Sense of humor
14.Honest
15.Religious
16.Driven to succeed
17.Directness
18.Quick thinking
Negative Attributes
1. Prone to lying
2. Stubborn
3. Likes to gossip
4. Forgetful
5. Often loses temper
6. Uptight
7. Has trouble focusing
8. Has difficulty expressing emotion
9. Uncomfortable in social situations
10.Confused
11.Jumbled thoughts
12.Dishonest
13.Lazy
14.Greedy
15.Looks down on others
16.Self centered
17.Selfish
18.Slow thinking
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The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
41
Graphology Clues
Spacing
Spacing Between Words: Having very little spacing in between words suggests you are a social person,
large spacing in between words means you are uncomfortable in social situations.
Spacing between sentences in paragraphs: Sentences that are close together in paragraphs indicate
a person with jumbled thoughts and confusion. Large spaces in between sentences indicate perception and
meticulousness.
Slant of Writing
Left Slant: Indicates a person who has difficulty expressing emotion.
Vertical Slant: Indicates a person who is more logical than emotional.
Right Slant: Indicates a person who is more empathetic and caring.
Size of Writing
Small: Indicates a person with a high level of concentration and attention to detail.
Average: A person who concentrates enough to perform a task, but not too much that they get caught up in
the details.
Large: Large handwriting indicates a person who has trouble focusing on one task for too long.
Heavy stroke: uptight
Stroke gets heavier towards the end of a word: often loses temper
Long, drawn out words: positive, cautious
42
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
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Letters
V wedges in the middle of the letter M: Analytical thinker
Wide e loop: Broadminded
Missing t bar: Forgetful
Initial wavy upper area down stroke on T: Sense of humor
Lettes with a loop are open when they would normally be closed: petty, prone to gossip
Downward slanting t-cross: stubborn
Making two loops inside an O: prone to lying
Lower case letter A: if closed, honest; if not, dishonest
Lower case B: if the stem is tall and narrow it indicates religious beliefs
Lower case C: if the letter looks like a breaking wave the writer has a drive to succeed
Lower case E: no loop means the writer is a quick thinker, a wide loop indicates directness
Second hump of lower case M is lower than first mark: dishonest
The two legs of a lower case N are close together: lazy
Lower case S: if closed the writer is greedy
Lower case S: if top is sharply peaked the writer looks down on others
Lower case J: if loop is wide, the writer is selfish, if only a downward line, self centered
Lower case T: if upward stroke has a wide loop writer is a slow thinker
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The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
43
Trial by Fire
By David Grann
T
44
he fire moved quickly through the house, a one-story
wood- frame structure in a working- class neighborhood
of Corsicana, in northeast Texas. Flames spread along
the walls, bursting through doorways, blistering paint and tiles
and furniture. Smoke pressed against the ceiling, then banked
downward, seeping into each room and through crevices in the
windows, staining the morning sky.
Buffie Barbee, who was eleven years old and lived two
houses down, was playing in her back yard when she smelled
the smoke. She ran inside and told her mother, Diane, and
they hurried up the street; that’s when they saw the smoldering house and Cameron Todd Willingham standing on the front
porch, wearing only a pair of jeans, his chest blackened with
soot, his hair and eyelids singed. He was screaming, “My babies are burning up!” His children—Karmon and Kameron,
who were one- year- old twin girls, and two- year- old Amber—were trapped inside.
Willingham told the Barbees to call the Fire Department,
and while Diane raced down the street to get help he found a
stick and broke the children’s bedroom window. Fire lashed
through the hole. He broke another window; flames burst
through it, too, and he retreated into the yard, kneeling in front
of the house. A neighbor later told police that Willingham intermittently cried, “My babies!” then fell silent, as if he had
“blocked the fire out of his mind.”
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
photo©Ken Light
Diane Barbee, returning to the scene, could feel intense
heat radiating off the house. Moments later, the five windows
of the children’s room exploded and flames “blew out,” as Barbee put it. Within minutes, the first firemen had arrived, and
Willingham approached them, shouting that his children were
in their bedroom, where the flames were thickest. A fireman
sent word over his radio for rescue teams to “step on it.”
More men showed up, uncoiling hoses and aiming water
at the blaze. One fireman, who had an air tank strapped to his
back and a mask covering his face, slipped through a window
but was hit by water from a hose and had to retreat. He then
charged through the front door, into a swirl of smoke and fire.
Heading down the main corridor, he reached the kitchen, where
he saw a refrigerator blocking the back door.
Todd Willingham, looking on, appeared to grow more
hysterical, and a police chaplain named George Monaghan led
him to the back of a fire truck and tried to calm him down.
Willingham explained that his wife, Stacy, had gone out earlier
that morning, and that he had been jolted from sleep by Amber
screaming, “Daddy! Daddy!”
“My little girl was trying to wake me up and tell me about
the fire,” he said, adding, “I couldn’t get my babies out.”
While he was talking, a fireman emerged from the house,
cradling Amber. As she was given C.P.R., Willingham, who
was twenty- three years old and powerfully built, ran to see her,
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then suddenly headed toward the babies’ room. Monaghan and
another man restrained him. “We had to wrestle with him and
then handcuff him, for his and our protection,” Monaghan later
told police. “I received a black eye.” One of the first firemen at
the scene told investigators that, at an earlier point, he had also
held Willingham back. “Based on what I saw on how the fire
was burning, it would have been crazy for anyone to try and go
into the house,” he said.
Willingham was taken to a hospital, where he was told
that Amber— who had actually been found in the master bedroom—had died of smoke inhalation. Kameron and Karmon
had been lying on the floor of the children’s bedroom, their
bodies severely burned. According to the medical examiner,
they, too, died from smoke inhalation.
News of the tragedy, which took place on December 23,
1991, spread through Corsicana. A small city fifty- five miles
northeast of Waco, it had once been the center of Texas’s first
oil boom, but many of the wells had since dried up, and more
than a quarter of the city’s twenty thousand inhabitants had
fallen into poverty. Several stores along the main street were
shuttered, giving the place the feel of an abandoned outpost.
Willingham and his wife, who was twenty- two years old,
had virtually no money. Stacy worked in her brother’s bar,
called Some Other Place,
and Willingham, an unemployed auto mechanic, had
been caring for the kids.
The community took up a
collection to help the Willinghams pay for funeral arrangements.
Fire
investigators,
meanwhile, tried to determine the cause of the blaze.
(Willingham gave authorities permission to search
the house: “I know we
might not ever know all the
answers, but I’d just like to
know why my babies were
taken from me.”) Douglas
Fogg, who was then the assistant fire chief in Corsicana, conducted the initial inspection. He was tall, with a crew
cut, and his voice was raspy from years of inhaling smoke from
fires and cigarettes. He had grown up in Corsicana and, after
graduating from high school, in 1963, he had joined the Navy,
serving as a medic in Vietnam, where he was wounded on four
occasions. He was awarded a Purple Heart each time. After he
returned from Vietnam, he became a firefighter, and by the time
of the Willingham blaze he had been battling fire—or what he
calls “the beast”—for more than twenty years, and had become
a certified arson investigator. “You learn that fire talks to you,”
he told me.
He was soon joined on the case by one of the state’s
leading arson sleuths, a deputy fire marshal named Manuel
Vasquez, who has since died. Short, with a paunch, Vasquez
had investigated more than twelve hundred fires. Arson investigators have always been considered a special breed of detective. In the 1991 movie “Backdraft,” a heroic arson investigator
says of fire, “It breathes, it eats, and it hates. The only way to
beat it is to think like it. To know that this flame will spread this
way across the door and up across the ceiling.” Vasquez, who
had previously worked in Army intelligence, had several maxims of his own. One was “Fire does not destroy evidence—
it creates it.” Another was “The fire tells the story. I am just
the interpreter.” He cultivated a Sherlock Holmes- like aura of
invincibility. Once, he was asked under oath whether he had
ever been mistaken in a case. “If I have, sir, I don’t know,” he
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responded. “It’s never been pointed out.”
Vasquez and Fogg visited the Willinghams’ house four
days after the blaze. Following protocol, they moved from the
least burned areas toward the most damaged ones. “It is a systematic method,” Vasquez later testified, adding, “I’m just collecting information. . . . I have not made any determination. I
don’t have any preconceived idea.”
The men slowly toured the perimeter of the house, taking notes and photographs, like archeologists mapping out a
ruin. Upon opening the back door, Vasquez observed that there
was just enough space to squeeze past the refrigerator blocking
the exit. The air smelled of burned rubber and melted wires;
a damp ash covered the ground, sticking to their boots. In the
kitchen, Vasquez and Fogg discerned only smoke and heat
damage— a sign that the fire had not originated there—and
so they pushed deeper into the nine- hundred- and- seventyfive- square- foot building. A central corridor led past a utility
room and the master bedroom, then past a small living room,
on the left, and the children’s bedroom, on the right, ending
at the front door, which opened onto the porch. Vasquez tried
to take in everything, a process that he compared to entering
one’s motherin- law’s house for the first time: “I have the same
curiosity.”
In the utility room, he
noticed on the wall pictures
of skulls and what he later
described as an image of
“the Grim Reaper.” Then he
turned into the master bedroom, where Amber’s body
had been found. Most of the
damage there was also from
smoke and heat, suggesting
that the fire had started farther down the hallway, and
he headed that way, stepping over debris and ducking under insulation and
wiring that hung down from
the exposed ceiling.
As he and Fogg removed some of the clutter,
they noticed deep charring
along the base of the walls. Because gases become buoyant
when heated, flames ordinarily burn upward. But Vasquez and
Fogg observed that the fire had burned extremely low down,
and that there were peculiar char patterns on the floor, shaped
like puddles.
Vasquez’s mood darkened. He followed the “burn trailer”—the path etched by the fire—which led from the hallway
into the children’s bedroom. Sunlight filtering through the broken windows illuminated more of the irregularly shaped char
patterns. A flammable or combustible liquid doused on a floor
will cause a fire to concentrate in these kinds of pockets, which
is why investigators refer to them as “pour patterns” or “puddle
configurations.”
The fire had burned through layers of carpeting and tile
and plywood flooring. Moreover, the metal springs under the
children’s beds had turned white—a sign that intense heat had
radiated beneath them. Seeing that the floor had some of the
deepest burns, Vasquez deduced that it had been hotter than
the ceiling, which, given that heat rises, was, in his words, “not
normal.”
Fogg examined a piece of glass from one of the broken
windows. It contained a spiderweb- like pattern—what fire
investigators call “crazed glass.” Forensic textbooks had long
described the effect as a key indicator that a fire had burned
“fast and hot,” meaning that it had been fuelled by a liquid accelerant, causing the glass to fracture.
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
45
The men looked again at what appeared to be a distinct
burn trailer through the house: it went from the children’s bedroom into the corridor, then turned sharply to the right and proceeded out the front door. To the investigators’ surprise, even
the wood under the door’s aluminum threshold was charred.
On the concrete floor of the porch, just outside the front door,
Vasquez and Fogg noticed another unusual thing: brown stains,
which, they reported, were consistent with the presence of an
accelerant.
The men scanned the walls for soot marks that resembled
a “V.” When an object catches on fire, it creates such a pattern,
as heat and smoke radiate outward; the bottom of the “V” can
therefore point to where a fire began. In the Willingham house,
there was a distinct “V” in the main corridor. Examining it and
other burn patterns, Vasquez identified three places where fire
had originated: in the hallway, in the children’s bedroom, and
at the front door. Vasquez later testified that multiple origins
pointed to one conclusion: the fire was “intentionally set by
human hands.”
By now, both investigators had a clear vision of what
had happened. Someone
had poured liquid accelerant throughout the children’s
room, even under their beds,
then poured some more along
the adjoining hallway and out
the front door, creating a “fire
barrier” that prevented anyone from escaping; similarly,
a prosecutor later suggested,
the refrigerator in the kitchen
had been moved to block the
back- door exit. The house, in
short, had been deliberately
transformed into a death trap.
The investigators collected samples of burned
materials from the house and
sent them to a laboratory that
could detect the presence of
a liquid accelerant. The lab’s chemist reported that one of the
samples contained evidence of “mineral spirits,” a substance
that is often found in charcoal- lighter fluid. The sample had
been taken by the threshold of the front door.
The fire was now considered a triple homicide, and Todd
Willingham— the only person, besides the victims, known to
have been in the house at the time of the blaze—became the
prime suspect.
46
Police and fire investigators canvassed the neighborhood,
interviewing witnesses. Several, like Father Monaghan, initially portrayed Willingham as devastated by the fire. Yet, over
time, an increasing number of witnesses offered damning statements. Diane Barbee said that she had not seen Willingham try
to enter the house until after the authorities arrived, as if he
were putting on a show. And when the children’s room exploded with flames, she added, he seemed more preoccupied with
his car, which he moved down the driveway. Another neighbor
reported that when Willingham cried out for his babies he “did
not appear to be excited or concerned.” Even Father Monaghan
wrote in a statement that, upon further reflection, “things were
not as they seemed. I had the feeling that [Willingham] was in
complete control.”
The police began to piece together a disturbing profile
of Willingham. Born in Ardmore, Oklahoma, in 1968, he had
been abandoned by his mother when he was a baby. His father,
Gene, who had divorced his mother, eventually raised him with
his stepmother, Eugenia. Gene, a former U.S. marine, worked
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
in a salvage yard, and the family lived in a cramped house; at
night, they could hear freight trains rattling past on a nearby
track. Willingham, who had what the family called the “classic Willingham look”—a handsome face, thick black hair, and
dark eyes— struggled in school, and as a teen- ager began to
sniff paint. When he was seventeen, Oklahoma’s Department
of Human Services evaluated him, and reported, “He likes
‘girls,’ music, fast cars, sharp trucks, swimming, and hunting,
in that order.” Willingham dropped out of high school, and over
time was arrested for, among other things, driving under the
influence, stealing a bicycle, and shoplifting.
In 1988, he met Stacy, a senior in high school, who also
came from a troubled background: when she was four years
old, her stepfather had strangled her mother to death during a
fight. Stacy and Willingham had a turbulent relationship. Willingham, who was unfaithful, drank too much Jack Daniel’s,
and sometimes hit Stacy—even when she was pregnant. A
neighbor said that he once heard Willingham yell at her, “Get
up, bitch, and I’ll hit you again.”
On December 31st, the authorities brought Willingham
in for questioning. Fogg and
Vasquez were present for the interrogation, along with Jimmie
Hensley, a police officer who
was working his first arson case.
Willingham said that Stacy had
left the house around 9 A.M. to
pick up a Christmas present for
the kids, at the Salvation Army.
“After she got out of the driveway, I heard the twins cry, so I
got up and gave them a bottle,”
he said. The children’s room
had a safety gate across the
doorway, which Amber could
climb over but not the twins,
and he and Stacy often let the
twins nap on the floor after they
drank their bottles. Amber was
still in bed, Willingham said, so
he went back into his room to sleep. “The next thing I remember is hearing ‘Daddy, Daddy,’” he recalled. “The house was
already full of smoke.” He said that he got up, felt around the
floor for a pair of pants, and put them on. He could no longer
hear his daughter’s voice (“I heard that last ‘Daddy, Daddy’
and never heard her again”), and he hollered, “Oh God—Amber, get out of the house! Get out of the house!’ ”
He never sensed that Amber was in his room, he said. Perhaps she had already passed out by the time he stood up, or perhaps she came in after he left, through a second doorway, from
the living room. He said that he went down the corridor and
tried to reach the children’s bedroom. In the hallway, he said,
“you couldn’t see nothing but black.” The air smelled the way
it had when their microwave had blown up, three weeks earlier—like “wire and stuff like that.” He could hear sockets and
light switches popping, and he crouched down, almost crawling. When he made it to the children’s bedroom, he said, he
stood and his hair caught on fire. “Oh God, I never felt anything
that hot before,” he said of the heat radiating out of the room.
After he patted out the fire on his hair, he said, he got down
on the ground and groped in the dark. “I thought I found one of
them once,” he said, “but it was a doll.” He couldn’t bear the
heat any longer. “I felt myself passing out,” he said. Finally, he
stumbled down the corridor and out the front door, trying to
catch his breath. He saw Diane Barbee and yelled for her to call
the Fire Department. After she left, he insisted, he tried without
success to get back inside.
The investigators asked him if he had any idea how the
fire had started. He said that he wasn’t sure, though it must
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have originated in the children’s room, since that was where he
first saw flames; they were glowing like “bright lights.” He and
Stacy used three space heaters to keep the house warm, and one
of them was in the children’s room. “I taught Amber not to play
with it,” he said, adding that she got “whuppings every once in
a while for messing with it.” He said that he didn’t know if the
heater, which had an internal flame, was turned on. (Vasquez
later testified that when he had checked the heater, four days
after the fire, it was in the “Off ” position.) Willingham speculated that the fire might have been started by something electrical: he had heard all that popping and crackling.
When pressed whether someone might have a motive to
hurt his family, he said that he couldn’t think of anyone that
“cold- blooded.” He said of his children, “I just don’t understand why anybody would take them, you know? We had three
of the most pretty babies anybody could have ever asked for.”
He went on, “Me and Stacy’s been together for four years, but
off and on we get into a fight and split up for a while and I think
those babies is what brought us so close together . . . neither
one of us . . . could live without them kids.” Thinking of Amber, he said, “To tell you
the honest- to- God’s
truth, I wish she hadn’t
woke me up.”
During the interrogation, Vasquez let
Fogg take the lead. Finally, Vasquez turned to
Willingham and asked a
seemingly random question: had he put on shoes
before he fled the house?
“No, sir,” Willingham replied.
A map of the house
was on a table between
the men, and Vasquez
pointed to it. “You
walked out this way?”
he said.
Willingham
said
yes.
Vasquez was now convinced that Willingham had killed
his children. If the floor had been soaked with a liquid accelerant and the fire had burned low, as the evidence suggested,
Willingham could not have run out of the house the way he
had described without badly burning his feet. A medical report
indicated that his feet had been unscathed.
Willingham insisted that, when he left the house, the fire
was still around the top of the walls and not on the floor. “I
didn’t have to jump through any flames,” he said. Vasquez believed that this was impossible, and that Willingham had lit the
fire as he was retreating—first, torching the children’s room,
then the hallway, and then, from the porch, the front door.
Vasquez later said of Willingham, “He told me a story of pure
fabrication. . . . He just talked and he talked and all he did was
lie.”
Still, there was no clear motive. The children had life- insurance policies, but they amounted to only fifteen thousand
dollars, and Stacy’s grandfather, who had paid for them, was
listed as the primary beneficiary. Stacy told investigators that
even though Willingham hit her he had never abused the children—“Our kids were spoiled rotten,” she said—and she did
not believe that Willingham could have killed them.
Ultimately, the authorities concluded that Willingham was
a man without a conscience whose serial crimes had climaxed,
almost inexorably, in murder. John Jackson, who was then the
assistant district attorney in Corsicana, was assigned to prosecute Willingham’s case. He later told the Dallas Morning News
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that he considered Willingham to be “an utterly sociopathic
individual” who deemed his children “an impediment to his
lifestyle.” Or, as the local district attorney, Pat Batchelor, put it,
“The children were interfering with his beer drinking and dart
throwing.”
On the night of January 8, 1992, two weeks after the fire,
Willingham was riding in a car with Stacy when SWAT teams
surrounded them, forcing them to the side of the road. “They
pulled guns out like we had just robbed ten banks,” Stacy later
recalled. “All we heard was ‘click, click.’ . . . Then they arrested him.”
Willingham was charged with murder. Because there were
multiple victims, he was eligible for the death penalty, under
Texas law. Unlike many other prosecutors in the state, Jackson, who had ambitions of becoming a judge, was personally
opposed to capital punishment. “I don’t think it’s effective in
deterring criminals,” he told me. “I just don’t think it works.”
He also considered it wasteful: because of the expense of litigation and the appeals process, it costs, on average, $2.3 million to execute a prisoner in Texas—about three times the cost
of incarcerating someone for
forty years. Plus, Jackson said,
“What’s the recourse if you
make a mistake?” Yet his boss,
Batchelor, believed that, as he
once put it, “certain people who
commit bad enough crimes give
up the right to live,” and Jackson came to agree that the heinous nature of the crime in the
Willingham case—“one of the
worst in terms of body count”
that he had ever tried— mandated death.
Willingham couldn’t afford to hire lawyers, and was
assigned two by the state:
David Martin, a former state
trooper, and Robert Dunn, a local defense attorney who represented everyone from alleged
murderers to spouses in divorce
cases—a “Jack- of- all- trades,” as he calls himself. (“In a small
town, you can’t say ‘I’m a so- and- so lawyer,’ because you’ll
starve to death,” he told me.)
Not long after Willingham’s arrest, authorities received a
message from a prison inmate named Johnny Webb, who was
in the same jail as Willingham. Webb alleged that Willingham
had confessed to him that he took “some kind of lighter fluid,
squirting [it] around the walls and the floor, and set a fire.” The
case against Willingham was considered airtight.
Even so, several of Stacy’s relatives—who, unlike her,
believed that Willingham was guilty—told Jackson that they
preferred to avoid the anguish of a trial. And so, shortly before
jury selection, Jackson approached Willingham’s attorneys
with an extraordinary offer: if their client pleaded guilty, the
state would give him a life sentence. “I was really happy when
I thought we might have a deal to avoid the death penalty,”
Jackson recalls.
Willingham’s lawyers were equally pleased. They had
little doubt that he had committed the murders and that, if the
case went before a jury, he would be found guilty, and, subsequently, executed. “Everyone thinks defense lawyers must believe their clients are innocent, but that’s seldom true,” Martin
told me. “Most of the time, they’re guilty as sin.” He added of
Willingham, “All the evidence showed that he was one hundred per cent guilty. He poured accelerant all over the house
and put lighter fluid under the kids’ beds.” It was, he said, “a
classic arson case”: there were “puddle patterns all over the
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
47
place—no disputing those.”
Martin and Dunn advised Willingham that he should accept the offer, but he refused. The lawyers asked his father
and stepmother to speak to him. According to Eugenia, Martin showed them photographs of the burned children and said,
“Look what your son did. You got to talk him into pleading, or
he’s going to be executed.”
His parents went to see their son in jail. Though his father
did not believe that he should plead guilty if he were innocent,
his stepmother beseeched him to take the deal. “I just wanted
to keep my boy alive,” she told me.
Willingham was implacable. “I ain’t gonna plead to something I didn’t do, especially killing my own kids,” he said. It
was his final decision. Martin says, “I thought it was nuts at the
time—and I think it’s nuts now.”
Willingham’s refusal to accept the deal confirmed the view
of the prosecution, and even that of his defense lawyers, that he
was an unrepentant killer.
In August, 1992, the trial commenced in the old stone
courthouse in downtown Corsicana. Jackson and a team of
prosecutors summoned a procession of witnesses, including Johnny Webb and the Barbees. The crux of the state’s
case, though, remained the
scientific evidence gathered
by Vasquez and Fogg. On the
stand, Vasquez detailed what
he called more than “twenty
indicators” of arson.
“Do you have an opinion
as to who started the fire?”
one of the prosecutors asked.
“Yes, sir,” Vasquez said.
“Mr. Willingham.”
The prosecutor asked
Vasquez what he thought
Willingham’s intent was in
lighting the fire. “To kill the little girls,” he said.
The defense had tried to find a fire expert to counter
Vasquez and Fogg’s testimony, but the one they contacted concurred with the prosecution. Ultimately, the defense presented
only one witness to the jury: the Willinghams’ babysitter, who
said she could not believe that Willingham could have killed
his children. (Dunn told me that Willingham had wanted to testify, but Martin and Dunn thought that he would make a bad
witness.) The trial ended after two days.
During his closing arguments, Jackson said that the puddle configurations and pour patterns were Willingham’s inadvertent “confession,” burned into the floor. Showing a Bible
that had been salvaged from the fire, Jackson paraphrased the
words of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew:
“Whomsoever shall harm one of my children, it’s better
for a millstone to be hung around his neck and for him to be
cast in the sea.”
The jury was out for barely an hour before returning with
a unanimous guilty verdict. As Vasquez put it, “The fire does
not lie.”
II
48
When Elizabeth Gilbert approached the prison guard, on
a spring day in 1999, and said Cameron Todd Willingham’s
name, she was uncertain about what she was doing. A fortyseven- year- old French teacher and playwright from Houston,
Gilbert was divorced with two children. She had never visited
a prison before. Several weeks earlier, a friend, who worked
at an organization that opposed the death penalty, had encour-
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
aged her to volunteer as a pen pal for an inmate on death row,
and Gilbert had offered her name and address. Not long after,
a short letter, written with unsteady penmanship, arrived from
Willingham. “If you wish to write back, I would be honored to
correspond with you,” he said. He also asked if she might visit
him. Perhaps out of a writer’s curiosity, or perhaps because she
didn’t feel quite herself (she had just been upset by news that
her exhusband was dying of cancer), she agreed. Now she was
standing in front of the decrepit penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas—a place that inmates referred to as “the death pit.”
She filed past a razor- wire fence, a series of floodlights,
and a checkpoint, where she was patted down, until she entered
a small chamber. Only a few feet in front of her was a man convicted of multiple infanticide. He was wearing a white jumpsuit with “DR”—for death row—printed on the back, in large
black letters. He had a tattoo of a serpent and a skull on his left
biceps. He stood nearly six feet tall and was muscular, though
his legs had atrophied after years of confinement.
A Plexiglas window separated Willingham from her; still,
Gilbert, who had short
brown hair and a bookish manner, stared at him
uneasily. Willingham had
once fought another prisoner who called him a
“baby killer,” and since
he had been incarcerated,
seven years earlier, he had
committed a series of disciplinary infractions that
had periodically landed
him in the segregation
unit, which was known as
“the dungeon.”
Willingham greeted
her politely. He seemed
grateful that she had
come. After his conviction, Stacy had campaigned for his release. She wrote to Ann Richards, then the
governor of Texas, saying, “I know him in ways that no one
else does when it comes to our children. Therefore, I believe
that there is no way he could have possibly committed this
crime.” But within a year Stacy had filed for divorce, and Willingham had few visitors except for his parents, who drove from
Oklahoma to see him once a month. “I really have no one outside my parents to remind me that I am a human being, not the
animal the state professes I am,” he told Gilbert at one point.
He didn’t want to talk about death row. “Hell, I live here,”
he later wrote her. “When I have a visit, I want to escape from
here.” He asked her questions about her teaching and art. He
expressed fear that, as a playwright, she might find him a “onedimensional character,” and apologized for lacking social graces; he now had trouble separating the mores in prison from
those of the outside world.
When Gilbert asked him if he wanted something to eat or
drink from the vending machines, he declined. “I hope I did not
offend you by not accepting any snacks,” he later wrote her. “I
didn’t want you to feel I was there just for something like that.”
She had been warned that prisoners often tried to con visitors. He appeared to realize this, subsequently telling her, “I
am just a simple man. Nothing else. And to most other people a
convicted killer looking for someone to manipulate.”
Their visit lasted for two hours, and afterward they continued to correspond. She was struck by his letters, which seemed
introspective, and were not at all what she had expected. “I am
a very honest person with my feelings,” he wrote her. “I will
not bullshit you on how I feel or what I think.” He said that he
used to be stoic, like his father. But, he added, “losing my three
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daughters . . . my home, wife and my life, you tend to wake up
a little. I have learned to open myself.”
She agreed to visit him again, and when she returned, several weeks later, he was visibly moved. “Here I am this person
who nobody on the outside is ever going to know as a human,
who has lost so much, but still trying to hold on,” he wrote her
afterward. “But you came back! I don’t think you will ever
know of what importance that visit was in my existence.”
They kept exchanging letters, and she began asking him
about the fire. He insisted that he was innocent and that, if
someone had poured accelerant through the house and lit it,
then the killer remained free. Gilbert wasn’t naïve—she assumed that he was guilty. She did not mind giving him solace,
but she was not there to absolve him.
Still, she had become curious about the case, and one
day that fall she drove down to the courthouse in Corsicana
to review the trial records. Many people in the community remembered the tragedy, and a clerk expressed bewilderment
that anyone would be interested in a man who had burned his
children alive.
Gilbert took the files
and sat down at a small
table. As she examined
the eyewitness accounts,
she noticed several contradictions. Diane Barbee
had reported that, before
the authorities arrived at
the fire, Willingham never tried to get back into
the house—yet she had
been absent for some time
while calling the Fire Department. Meanwhile, her
daughter Buffie had reported witnessing Willingham on the porch breaking
a window, in an apparent
effort to reach his children. And the firemen and police on the scene had described
Willingham frantically trying to get into the house.
The witnesses’ testimony also grew more damning after
authorities had concluded, in the beginning of January, 1992,
that Willingham was likely guilty of murder. In Diane Barbee’s
initial statement to authorities, she had portrayed Willingham
as “hysterical,” and described the front of the house exploding.
But on January 4th, after arson investigators began suspecting
Willingham of murder, Barbee suggested that he could have
gone back inside to rescue his children, for at the outset she had
seen only “smoke coming from out of the front of the house”—
smoke that was not “real thick.”
An even starker shift occurred with Father Monaghan’s
testimony. In his first statement, he had depicted Willingham
as a devastated father who had to be repeatedly restrained from
risking his life. Yet, as investigators were preparing to arrest
Willingham, he concluded that Willingham had been too emotional (“He seemed to have the type of distress that a woman who had given birth would have upon seeing her children
die”); and he expressed a “gut feeling” that Willingham had
“something to do with the setting of the fire.”
Dozens of studies have shown that witnesses’ memories of
events often change when they are supplied with new contextual information. Itiel Dror, a cognitive psychologist who has
done extensive research on eyewitness and expert testimony
in criminal investigations, told me, “The mind is not a passive
machine. Once you believe in something—once you expect
something—it changes the way you perceive information and
the way your memory recalls it.”
After Gilbert’s visit to the courthouse, she kept wonder-
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ing about Willingham’s motive, and she pressed him on the
matter. In response, he wrote, of the death of his children, “I
do not talk about it much anymore and it is still a very powerfully emotional pain inside my being.” He admitted that he had
been a “sorry- ass husband” who had hit Stacy—something he
deeply regretted. But he said that he had loved his children and
would never have hurt them. Fatherhood, he said, had changed
him; he stopped being a hoodlum and “settled down” and “became a man.” Nearly three months before the fire, he and Stacy,
who had never married, wed at a small ceremony in his home
town of Ardmore. He said that the prosecution had seized upon
incidents from his past and from the day of the fire to create a
portrait of a “demon,” as Jackson, the prosecutor, referred to
him. For instance, Willingham said, he had moved the car during the fire simply because he didn’t want it to explode by the
house, further threatening the children.
Gilbert was unsure what to make of his story, and she began to approach people who were involved in the case, asking
them questions. “My friends thought I was crazy,” Gilbert recalls. “I’d never done anything like this in my life.”
One morning, when Willingham’s parents came to visit
him, Gilbert arranged to see
them first, at a coffee shop
near the prison. Gene, who
was in his seventies, had the
Willingham look, though his
black hair had gray streaks
and his dark eyes were magnified by glasses. Eugenia, who
was in her fifties, with silvery
hair, was as sweet and talkative as her husband was stern
and reserved. The drive from
Oklahoma to Texas took six
hours, and they had woken at
three in the morning; because
they could not afford a motel, they would have to return
home later that day. “I feel like a real burden to them,” Willingham had written Gilbert.
As Gene and Eugenia sipped coffee, they told Gilbert how
grateful they were that someone had finally taken an interest in
Todd’s case. Gene said that his son, though he had flaws, was
no killer.
The evening before the fire, Eugenia said, she had spoken
on the phone with Todd. She and Gene were planning on visiting two days later, on Christmas Eve, and Todd told her that he
and Stacy and the kids had just picked up family photographs.
“He said, ‘We got your pictures for Christmas,’ ” she recalled.
“He put Amber on the phone, and she was tattling on one of
the twins. Todd didn’t seem upset. If something was bothering
him, I would have known.”
Gene and Eugenia got up to go: they didn’t want to miss
any of the four hours that were allotted for the visit with their
son. Before they left, Gene said, “You’ll let us know if you find
anything, won’t you?”
Over the next fewweeks,Gilbert continued to track down
sources.Many of them, including the Barbees, remained convinced that Willingham was guilty, but several of his friends
and relatives had doubts. So did some people in law enforcement. Willingham’s former probation officer in Oklahoma,
Polly Goodin, recently told me that Willingham had never
demonstrated bizarre or sociopathic behavior. “He was probably one of my favorite kids,” she said. Even a former judge
named Bebe Bridges—who had often stood, as she put it, on
the “opposite side” ofWillingham in the legal system, and
who had sent him to jail for stealing—told me that she could
not imagine him killing his children.“Hewas polite,and he
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
49
50
seemed to care,”she said.“His convictions had been for dumbkid stuff. Even the things stolen weren’t significant.” Several
months before the fire,Willingham tracked Goodin down at
her office, and proudly showed her photographs of Stacy and
the kids. “He wantedBebe and me to knowhe’d been doing
good,”Goodin recalled.
Eventually, Gilbert returned to Corsicana to interview Stacy, who had agreed to meet at the bed- and- breakfast where
Gilbert was staying. Stacy was slightly plump, with pale, round
cheeks and feathered dark- blond hair; her bangs were held in
place by gel, and her face was heavily made up. According
to a tape recording of the conversation, Stacy said that nothing unusual had happened in the days before the fire. She and
Willingham had not fought, and were preparing for the holiday. Though Vasquez, the arson expert, had recalled finding the
space heater off, Stacy was sure that, at least on the day of the
incident—a cool winter morning—it had been on. “I remember
turning it down,” she recalled. “I always thought, Gosh, could
Amber have put something in there?” Stacy added that, more
than once, she had caught Amber “putting things too close to
it.”
Willingham had often not treated her well, she recalled,
and after his incarceration
she had left him for a man
who did. But she didn’t
think that her former husband should be on death
row. “I don’t think he did
it,” she said, crying.
Though only the babysitter had appeared as a
witness for the defense
during the main trial,
several family members,
including Stacy, testified
during the penalty phase,
asking the jury to spare
Willingham’s life. When
Stacy was on the stand,
Jackson grilled her about
the “significance” of
Willingham’s “very large tattoo of a skull, encircled by some
kind of a serpent.”
“It’s just a tattoo,” Stacy responded.
“He just likes skulls and snakes. Is that what you’re saying?”
“No. He just had—he got a tattoo on him.”
The prosecution cited such evidence in asserting that Willingham fit the profile of a sociopath, and brought forth two
medical experts to confirm the theory. Neither had met Willingham. One of them was Tim Gregory, a psychologist with a
master’s degree in marriage and family issues, who had previously gone goose hunting with Jackson, and had not published
any research in the field of sociopathic behavior. His practice
was devoted to family counseling.
At one point, Jackson showed Gregory Exhibit No. 60—a
photograph of an Iron Maiden poster that had hung in Willingham’s house—and asked the psychologist to interpret it. “This
one is a picture of a skull, with a fist being punched through
the skull,” Gregory said; the image displayed “violence” and
“death.” Gregory looked at photographs of other music posters
owned by Willingham. “There’s a hooded skull, with wings
and a hatchet,” Gregory continued. “And all of these are in fire,
depicting—it reminds me of something like Hell. And there’s
a picture—a Led Zeppelin picture of a falling angel. . . . I see
there’s an association many times with cultive- type of activities. A focus on death, dying. Many times individuals that have
a lot of this type of art have interest in satanic- type activities.”
The other medical expert was James P. Grigson, a forensic
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
psychiatrist. He testified so often for the prosecution in capitalpunishment cases that he had become known as Dr. Death. (A
Texas appellate judge once wrote that when Grigson appeared
on the stand the defendant might as well “commence writing
out his last will and testament.”) Grigson suggested that Willingham was an “extremely severe sociopath,” and that “no pill”
or treatment could help him. Grigson had previously used nearly the same words in helping to secure a death sentence against
Randall Dale Adams, who had been convicted of murdering a
police officer, in 1977. After Adams, who had no prior criminal record, spent a dozen years on death row—and once came
within seventy- two hours of being executed—new evidence
emerged that absolved him, and he was released. In 1995, three
years after Willingham’s trial, Grigson was expelled from the
American Psychiatric Association for violating ethics. The association stated that Grigson had repeatedly arrived at a “psychiatric diagnosis without first having examined the individuals in question, and for indicating, while testifying in court as
an expert witness, that he could predict with 100- per- cent certainty that the individuals would engage in future violent acts.”
After speaking to Stacy,
Gilbert had one more person
she wanted to interview: the
jailhouse informant Johnny
Webb, who was incarcerated
in Iowa Park, Texas. She wrote
to Webb, who said that she
could see him, and they met
in the prison visiting room. A
man in his late twenties, he
had pallid skin and a closely
shaved head; his eyes were
jumpy, and his entire body
seemed to tremble. A reporter
who once met him described
him to me as “nervous as a cat
around rocking chairs.” Webb
had begun taking drugs when
he was nine years old, and had
been convicted of, among other things, car theft, selling marijuana, forgery, and robbery.
As Gilbert chatted with him, she thought that he seemed
paranoid. During Willingham’s trial, Webb disclosed that he
had been given a diagnosis of “post- traumatic stress disorder”
after he was sexually assaulted in prison, in 1988, and that he
often suffered from “mental impairment.” Under cross- examination, Webb testified that he had no recollection of a robbery
that he had pleaded guilty to only months earlier.
Webb repeated for her what he had said in court: he had
passed by Willingham’s cell, and as they spoke through a food
slot Willingham broke down and told him that he intentionally set the house on fire. Gilbert was dubious. It was hard to
believe that Willingham, who had otherwise insisted on his innocence, had suddenly confessed to an inmate he barely knew.
The conversation had purportedly taken place by a speaker
system that allowed any of the guards to listen—an unlikely
spot for an inmate to reveal a secret. What’s more, Webb alleged that Willingham had told him that Stacy had hurt one of
the kids, and that the fire was set to cover up the crime. The
autopsies, however, had revealed no bruises or signs of trauma
on the children’s bodies.
Jailhouse informants, many of whom are seeking reduced
time or special privileges, are notoriously unreliable. According to a 2004 study by the Center on Wrongful Convictions,
at Northwestern University Law School, lying police and jailhouse informants are the leading cause of wrongful convictions
in capital cases in the United States. At the time that Webb
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came forward against Willingham, he was facing charges of
robbery and forgery. DuringWillingham’s trial, another inmate
planned to testify that he had overheardWebb saying to another
prisoner that he was hoping to “get time cut,” but the testimony
was ruled inadmissible, because it was hearsay. Webb, who
pleaded guilty to the robbery and forgery charges, received a
sentence of fifteen years. Jackson, the prosecutor, told me that
he generally considered Webb “an unreliable kind of guy,” but
added, “I saw no real motive for him to make a statement like
this if it wasn’t true. We didn’t cut him any slack.” In 1997, five
years after Willingham’s trial, Jackson urged the Texas Board
of Pardons and Paroles to grant Webb parole. “I asked them
to cut him loose early,” Jackson told me. The reason, Jackson
said, was that Webb had been targeted by the Aryan Brotherhood. The board granted Webb parole, but within months of
his release he was caught with cocaine and returned to prison.
In March, 2000, several months after Gilbert’s visit, Webb
unexpectedly sent Jackson a Motion to Recant Testimony, declaring, “Mr. Willingham is innocent of all charges.” But Willingham’s lawyer was not informed of this development, and
soon afterward Webb, without explanation, recanted his recantation. When I recently asked Webb,
who was released from prison two
years ago, about the turnabout and
why Willingham would have confessed to a virtual stranger, he said
that he knew only what “the dude
told me.” After I pressed him, he
said, “It’s very possible I misunderstood what he said.” Since the trial,
Webb has been given an additional
diagnosis, bipolar disorder. “Being
locked up in that little cell makes
you kind of crazy,” he said. “My
memory is in bits and pieces. I was
on a lot Gran_9780385517928_1p_
all_r1.f.qxp 11/16/09 3:25 PM Page
56 Tr i a l b y Fi r e 57 of medication
at the time. Everyone knew that.”
He paused, then said, “The statute
of limitations has run out on perjury,
hasn’t it?”
Aside from the scientific evidence of arson, the case against
Willingham did not stand up to scrutiny. Jackson, the prosecutor, said of Webb’s testimony, “You can take it or leave it.”
Even the refrigerator’s placement by the back door of the house
turned out to be innocuous; there were two refrigerators in the
cramped kitchen, and one of them was by the back door. Jimmie Hensley, the police detective, and Douglas Fogg, the assistant fire chief, both of whom investigated the fire, told me
recently that they had never believed that the fridge was part
of the arson plot. “It didn’t have nothing to do with the fire,”
Fogg said.
After months of investigating the case, Gilbert found that
her faith in the prosecution was shaken. As she told me, “What
if Todd really was innocent?”
III
In the summer of 1660, an Englishman named William
Harrison vanished on a walk, near the village of Charingworth,
in Gloucestershire. His bloodstained hat was soon discovered
on the side of a local road. Police interrogated Harrison’s servant, John Perry, and eventually Perry gave a statement that his
mother and his brother had killed Harrison for money. Perry,
his mother, and his brother were hanged.
Two years later, Harrison reappeared. He insisted, fanci-
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fully, that he had been abducted by a band of criminals and sold
into slavery. Whatever happened, one thing was indisputable:
he had not been murdered by the Perrys.
The fear that an innocent person might be executed has
long haunted jurors and lawyers and judges. During America’s
Colonial period, dozens of crimes were punishable by death,
including horse thievery, blasphemy, “man- stealing,” and
highway robbery. After independence, the number of crimes
eligible for the death penalty was gradually reduced, but doubts
persisted over whether legal procedures were sufficient to prevent an innocent person from being executed. In 1868, John
Stuart Mill made one of the most eloquent defenses of capital
punishment, arguing that executing a murderer did not display
a wanton disregard for life but, rather, proof of its value. “We
show, on the contrary, most emphatically our regard for it by
the adoption of a rule that he who violates that right in another
forfeits it for himself,” he said. For Mill, there was one counterargument that carried weight—“that if by an error of justice
an innocent person is put to death, the mistake can never be
corrected.”
The modern legal system, with its lengthy appeals process
and clemency boards, was widely
assumed to protect the kind of “error of justice” that Mill feared.
In 2000, while George W. Bush
was governor of Texas, he said, “I
know there are some in the country who don’t care for the death
penalty, but . . . we’ve adequately
answered innocence or guilt.”
His top policy adviser on issues
of criminal justice emphasized
that there is “super due process to
make sure that no innocent defendants are executed.”
In recent years, though, questions have mounted over whether
the system is fail- safe. Since
1976, more than a hundred and
thirty people on death row have
been exonerated. DNA testing,
which was developed in the eighties, saved seventeen of them, but
the technique can be used only in
rare instances. Barry Scheck, a co- founder of the Innocence
Project, which has used DNA testing to exonerate prisoners,
estimates that about eighty per cent of felonies do not involve
biological evidence.
In 2000, after thirteen people on death row in Illinois were
exonerated, George Ryan, who was then governor of the state,
suspended the death penalty. Though he had been a longtime
advocate of capital punishment, he declared that he could no
longer support a system that has “come so close to the ultimate nightmare—the state’s taking of innocent life.” Former
Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has said that the
“execution of a legally and factually innocent person would be
a constitutionally intolerable event.”
Such a case has become a kind of grisly Holy Grail among
opponents of capital punishment. In his 2002 book “The Death
Penalty,” Stuart Banner observes, “The prospect of killing an
innocent person seemed to be the one thing that could cause
people to rethink their support for capital punishment. Some
who were not troubled by statistical arguments against the
death penalty—claims about deterrence or racial disparities—
were deeply troubled that such an extreme injustice might occur in an individual case.” Opponents of the death penalty have
pointed to several questionable cases. In 1993, Ruben Cantu
was executed in Texas for fatally shooting a man during a robbery. Years later, a second victim, who survived the shooting,
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
51
told the Houston Chronicle that he had been pressured by police to identify Cantu as the gunman, even though he believed
Cantu to be innocent. Sam Millsap, the district attorney in the
case, who had once supported capital punishment (“I’m no
wild- eyed, pointy- headed liberal”), said that he was disturbed
by the thought that he had made a mistake.
In 1995, Larry Griffin was put to death in Missouri, for a
drive- by shooting of a drug dealer. The case rested largely on
the eyewitness testimony of a career criminal named Robert
Fitzgerald, who had been an informant for prosecutors before
and was in the witness- protection program. Fitzgerald maintained that he happened to be at the scene because his car had
broken down. After Griffin’s execution, a probe sponsored by
the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund revealed
that a man who had been wounded during the incident insisted
that Griffin was not the shooter. Moreover, the first police officer at the scene disputed that Fitzgerald had witnessed the
crime.
These cases, however, stopped short of offering irrefutable
proof that a “legally and factually innocent person” was executed. In 2005, a St. Louis prosecutor, Jennifer Joyce, launched
an investigation of the Griffin case, upon being presented with
what she called “compelling” evidence of Griffin’s potential
innocence. After two years of reviewing the evidence, and interviewing a new eyewitness, Joyce
said that she and her team were
convinced that the “right person
was convicted.”
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in 2006, voted with
a majority to uphold the death
penalty in a Kansas case. In his
opinion, Scalia declared that, in
the modern judicial system, there
has not been “a single case—not
one—in which it is clear that a
person was executed for a crime
he did not commit. If such an
event had occurred in recent
years, we would not have to hunt
for it; the innocent’s name would
be shouted from the rooftops.”
52
“My problems are simple,” Willingham wrote Gilbert in
September, 1999. “Try to keep them from killing me at all
costs. End of story.”
During his first years on death row, Willingham had pleaded with his lawyer, David Martin, to rescue him. “You can’t
imagine what it’s like to be here, with people I have no business even being around,” he wrote.
For a while, Willingham shared a cell with Ricky Lee
Green, a serial killer, who castrated and fatally stabbed his victims, including a sixteenyear- old boy. (Green was executed in
1997.) Another of Willingham’s cellmates, who had an I.Q. below seventy and the emotional development of an eight- yearold, was raped by an inmate. “You remember me telling you I
had a new celly?” Willingham wrote in a letter to his parents.
“The little retarded boy. . . . There was this guy here on the
wing who is a shit sorry coward (who is the same one I got into
it with a little over a month ago). Well, he raped [my cellmate]
in the 3 row shower week before last.” Willingham said that he
couldn’t believe that someone would “rape a boy who cannot
even defend himself. Pretty damn low.”
Because Willingham was known as a “baby killer,” he was
a target of attacks. “Prison is a rough place, and with a case like
mine they never give you the benefit of a doubt,” he wrote his
parents. After he tried to fight one prisoner who threatened him,
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
Willingham told a friend that if he hadn’t stood up for himself
several inmates would have “beaten me up or raped or”—his
thought trailed off.
Over the years, Willingham’s letters home became increasingly despairing. “This is a hard place, and it makes a person
hard inside,” he wrote. “I told myself that was one thing I did
not want and that was for this place to make me bitter, but it is
hard.” He went on, “They have [executed] at least one person
every month I have been here. It is senseless and brutal. . . . You
see, we are not living in here, we are only existing.” In 1996, he
wrote, “I just been trying to figure out why after having a wife
and 3 beautiful children that I loved my life has to end like this.
And sometimes it just seems like it is not worth it all. . . . In
the 31⁄2 years I been here I have never felt that my life was as
worthless and desolate as it is now.” Since the fire, he wrote, he
had the sense that his life was slowly being erased. He obsessively looked at photographs of his children and Stacy, which
he stored in his cell. “So long ago, so far away,” he wrote in a
poem. “Was everything truly there?”
Inmates on death row are housed in a prison within a
prison, where there are no attempts at rehabilitation, and no
educational or training programs. In 1999, after seven prisoners tried to escape from Huntsville, Willingham and four hundred and fifty- nine other
inmates on death row were
moved to a more secure facility, in Livingston, Texas.
Willingham was held in
isolation in a sixty- squarefoot cell, twenty- three
hours a day. He tried to distract himself by drawing—
“amateur stuff,” as he put
it—and writing poems. In
a poem about his children,
he wrote, “There is nothing
more beautiful than you on
this earth.” When Gilbert
once suggested some possible revisions to his poems,
he explained that he wrote
them simply as expressions,
however crude, of his feelings. “So to me to cut them up and try to improve on them just
for creative- writing purposes would be to destroy what I was
doing to start with,” he said.
Despite his efforts to occupy his thoughts, he wrote in his
diary that his mind “deteriorates each passing day.” He stopped
working out and gained weight. He questioned his faith: “No
God who cared about his creation would abandon the innocent.” He seemed not to care if another inmate attacked him.
“A person who is already dead inside does not fear” death, he
wrote.
One by one, the people he knew in prison were escorted
into the execution chamber. There was Clifton Russell, Jr.,
who, at the age of eighteen, stabbed and beat a man to death,
and who said, in his last statement, “I thank my Father, God in
Heaven, for the grace he has granted me—I am ready.” There
was Jeffery Dean Motley, who kidnapped and fatally shot a
woman, and who declared, in his final words, “I love you,
Mom. Goodbye.” And there was John Fearance, who murdered
his neighbor, and who turned to God in his last moments and
said, “I hope He will forgive me for what I done.”
Willingham had grown close to some of his prison mates,
even though he knew that they were guilty of brutal crimes.
In March, 2000, Willingham’s friend Ponchai Wilkerson—a
twenty- eight- year- old who had shot and killed a clerk during
a jewelry heist—was executed. Afterward, Willingham wrote
in his diary that he felt “an emptiness that has not been touched
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since my children were taken from me.” A year later, another
friend who was about to be executed—“one of the few real
people I have met here not caught up in the bravado of prison”—asked Willingham to make him a final drawing. “Man, I
never thought drawing a simple Rose could be so emotionally
hard,” Willingham wrote. “The hard part is knowing that this
will be the last thing I can do for him.”
Another inmate, Ernest Ray Willis, had a case that was
freakishly similar to Willingham’s. In 1987, Willis had been
convicted of setting a fire, in West Texas, that killed two
women. Willis told investigators that he had been sleeping on
a friend’s living- room couch and woke up to a house full of
smoke. He said that he tried to rouse one of the women, who
was sleeping in another room, but the flames and smoke drove
him back, and he ran out the front door before the house exploded with flames. Witnesses maintained that Willis had acted
suspiciously; he moved his car out of the yard, and didn’t show
“any emotion,” as one volunteer firefighter put it. Authorities
also wondered how Willis could have escaped the house without burning his bare feet. Fire investigators found pour patterns,
puddle configurations, and other signs of arson. The authorities
could discern no motive for the crime, but concluded that Willis, who had no previous record of violence, was a sociopath—
a “demon,” as the prosecutor put it. Willis was charged with
capital murder and sentenced
to death.
Willis had eventually
obtained what Willingham
called, enviously, a “bad- ass
lawyer.” James Blank, a noted
patent attorney in New York,
was assigned Willis’s case as
part of his firm’s pro- bono
work. Convinced that Willis
was innocent, Blank devoted
more than a dozen years to
the case, and his firm spent
millions, on fire consultants,
private investigators, forensic
experts, and the like. Willingham, meanwhile, relied on
David Martin, his court- appointed lawyer, and one of
Martin’s colleagues to handle his appeals. Willingham often
told his parents, “You don’t know what it’s like to have lawyers
who won’t even believe you’re innocent.” Like many inmates
on death row, Willingham eventually filed a claim of inadequate
legal representation. (When I recently asked Martin about his
representation of Willingham, he said, “There were no grounds
for reversal, and the verdict was absolutely the right one.” He
said of the case, “Shit, it’s incredible that anyone’s even thinking about it.”)
Willingham tried to study the law himself, reading books
such as “Tact in Court, or How Lawyers Win: Containing
Sketches of Cases Won by Skill, Wit, Art, Tact, Courage and
Eloquence.” Still, he confessed to a friend, “The law is so complicated it is hard for me to understand.” In 1996, he obtained
a new court- appointed lawyer, Walter Reaves, who told me
that he was appalled by the quality of Willingham’s defense
at trial and on appeal. Reaves prepared for him a state writ of
habeas corpus, known as a Great Writ. In the byzantine appeals
process of death- penalty cases, which frequently takes more
than ten years, the writ is the most critical stage: a prisoner can
introduce new evidence detailing such things as perjured testimony, unreliable medical experts, and bogus scientific findings.
Yet most indigent inmates, like Willingham, who constitute the
bulk of those on death row, lack the resources to track down
new witnesses or dig up fresh evidence. They must depend
on court- appointed lawyers, many of whom are “unqualified,
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irresponsible, or overburdened,” as a study by the Texas Defender Service, a nonprofit organization, put it. In 2000, a Dallas Morning News investigation revealed that roughly a quarter
of the inmates condemned to death in Texas were represented
by court- appointed attorneys who had, at some point in their
careers, been “reprimanded, placed on probation, suspended or
banned from practicing law by the State Bar.” Although Reaves
was more competent, he had few resources to reinvestigate the
case, and his writ introduced no new exculpatory evidence:
nothing further about Webb, or the reliability of the eyewitness
testimony, or the credibility of the medical experts. It focussed
primarily on procedural questions, such as whether the trial
court erred in its instructions to the jury.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals was known for upholding convictions even when overwhelming exculpatory evidence came to light. In 1997, DNA testing proved that sperm
collected from a rape victim did not match Roy Criner, who
had been sentenced to ninety- nine years for the crime. Two
lower courts recommended that the verdict be overturned, but
the Court of Criminal Appeals upheld it, arguing that Criner
might have worn a condom or might not have ejaculated. Sharon Keller, who is now the presiding judge on the court, stated
in a majority opinion, “The new evidence does not establish
innocence.” In 2000, George W. Bush pardoned Criner. (Keller
was recently charged with
judicial misconduct, for refusing to keep open past five
o’clock a clerk’s office in
order to allow a last- minute
petition from a man who was
executed later that night.)
On October 31, 1997,
the Court of Criminal Appeals denied Willingham’s
writ. After Willingham filed
another writ of habeas corpus, this time in federal
court, he was granted a temporary stay. In a poem, Willingham wrote, “One more
chance, one more strike /
Another bullet dodged, another date escaped.”
Willingham was entering his final stage of appeals. As his
anxieties mounted, he increasingly relied upon Gilbert to investigate his case and for emotional support. “She may never
know what a change she brought into my life,” he wrote in his
diary. “For the first time in many years she gave me a purpose,
something to look forward to.”
As their friendship deepened, he asked her to promise him
that she would never disappear without explanation. “I already
have that in my life,” he told her.
Together, they pored over clues and testimony. Gilbert says
that she would send Reaves leads to follow up, but although he
was sympathetic, nothing seemed to come of them. In 2002, a
federal district court of appeals denied Willingham’s writ without even a hearing. “Now I start the last leg of my journey,”
Willingham wrote to Gilbert. “Got to get things in order.”
He appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but in December,
2003, he was notified that it had declined to hear his case. He
soon received a court order announcing that “the Director of
the Department of Criminal Justice at Huntsville, Texas, acting
by and through the executioner designated by said Director . .
. is hereby directed and commanded, at some hour after 6:00
p.m. on the 17th day of February, 2004, at the Department of
Criminal Justice in Huntsville, Texas, to carry out this sentence
of death by intravenous injection of a substance or substances
in a lethal quantity sufficient to cause the death of said Cameron Todd Willingham.”
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
53
Willingham wrote a letter to his parents. “Are you sitting
down?” he asked, before breaking the news. “I love you both
so much,” he said.
His only remaining recourse was to appeal to the governor
of Texas, Rick Perry, a Republican, for clemency. The process,
considered the last gatekeeper to the executioner, has been
called by the U.S. Supreme Court “the ‘fail safe’ in our criminal justice system.”
IV
54
One day in January, 2004, Dr. Gerald Hurst, an acclaimed
scientist and fire investigator, received a file describing all the
evidence of arson gathered in Willingham’s case. Gilbert had
come across Hurst’s name and, along with one of Willingham’s
relatives, had contacted him, seeking his help. After their pleas,
Hurst had agreed to look at the case pro bono, and Reaves,
Willingham’s lawyer, had sent him the relevant documents, in
the hope that there were grounds for clemency.
Hurst opened the file in the basement of his house in
Austin, which served as a laboratory and an office, and was
cluttered with microscopes and diagrams of half- finished experiments. Hurst was nearly six and half feet tall, though his
stooped shoulders made him seem considerably shorter, and
he had a gaunt face that was partly shrouded by long gray hair. He
was wearing his customary outfit:
black shoes, black socks, a black
T- shirt, and loose- fitting black
pants supported by black suspenders. In his mouth was a wad
of chewing tobacco.
A child prodigy who was
raised by a sharecropper during
the Great Depression, Hurst used
to prowl junk yards, collecting
magnets and copper wires in order
to build radios and other contraptions. In the early sixties, he received a Ph.D. in chemistry from
Cambridge University, where he
started to experiment with fluorine and other explosive chemicals, and once detonated his lab. Later, he worked as the chief
scientist on secret weapons programs for several American
companies, designing rockets and deadly fire bombs—or what
he calls “god- awful things.” He helped patent what has been
described, with only slight exaggeration, as “the world’s most
powerful nonnuclear explosive”: an Astrolite bomb. He experimented with toxins so lethal that a fraction of a drop would
rot human flesh, and in his laboratory he often had to wear a
pressurized moon suit; despite such precautions, exposure to
chemicals likely caused his liver to fail, and in 1994 he required a transplant. Working on what he calls “the dark side of
arson,” he retrofitted napalm bombs with Astrolite, and developed ways for covert operatives in Vietnam to create bombs
from local materials, such as chicken manure and sugar. He
also perfected a method for making an exploding T- shirt by
nitrating its fibres.
His conscience eventually began pricking him. “One day,
you wonder, What the hell am I doing?” he recalls. He left the
defense industry, and went on to invent the Mylar balloon, an
improved version of Liquid Paper, and Kinepak, a kind of explosive that reduces the risk of accidental detonation. Because
of his extraordinary knowledge of fire and explosives, companies in civil litigation frequently sought his help in determining
the cause of a blaze. By the nineties, Hurst had begun devoting significant time to criminal- arson cases, and, as he was
exposed to the methods of local and state fire investigators, he
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
was shocked by what he saw.
Many arson investigators, it turned out, had only a highschool educa- tion. In most states, in order to be certified, investigators had to take a forty- hour course on fire investigation,
and pass a written exam. Often, the bulk of an investigator’s
training came on the job, learning from “oldtimers” in the field,
who passed down a body of wisdom about the telltale signs of
arson, even though a study in 1977 warned that there was nothing in “the scientific literature to substantiate their validity.”
In 1992, the National Fire Protection Association, which
promotes fire prevention and safety, published its first scientifically based guidelines to arson investigation. Still, many arson
investigators believed that what they did was more an art than
a science—a blend of experience and intuition. In 1997, the
International Association of Arson Investigators filed a legal
brief arguing that arson sleuths should not be bound by a 1993
Supreme Court decision requiring experts who testified at trials
to adhere to the scientific method. What arson sleuths did, the
brief claimed, was “less scientific.” By 2000, after the courts
had rejected such claims, arson investigators increasingly recognized the scientific method, but there remained great variance in the field, with many practitioners still relying on the unverified techniques that had been used for generations. “People
investigated fire largely with a flat- earth approach,” Hurst told
me. “It looks like arson—therefore, it’s arson.” He went on,
“My view is you have to have a
scientific basis. Otherwise, it’s
no different than witch- hunting.”
In 1998, Hurst investigated the case of a woman from
North Carolina named Terri
Hinson, who was charged with
setting a fire that killed her seventeen- month- old son, and
faced the death penalty. Hurst
ran a series of experiments recreating the conditions of the
fire, which suggested that it
had not been arson, as the investigators had claimed; rather,
it had started accidentally, from
a faulty electrical wire in the attic. Because of this research,
Hinson was freed. John Lentini, a fire expert and the author of
a leading scientific textbook on arson, describes Hurst as “brilliant.” A Texas prosecutor once told the Chicago Tribune, of
Hurst, “If he says it was an arson fire, then it was. If he says it
wasn’t, then it wasn’t.”
Hurst’s patents yielded considerable royalties, and he
could afford to work pro bono on an arson case for months,
even years. But he received the files on Willingham’s case only
a few weeks before Willingham was scheduled to be executed. As Hurst looked through the case records, a statement by
Manuel Vasquez, the state deputy fire marshal, jumped out at
him. Vasquez had testified that, of the roughly twelve hundred
to fifteen hundred fires he had investigated, “most all of them”
were arson. This was an oddly high estimate; the Texas State
Fire Marshals Office typically found arson in only fifty per cent
of its cases.
Hurst was also struck by Vasquez’s claim that the Willingham blaze had “burned fast and hot” because of a liquid
accelerant. The notion that a flammable or combustible liquid
caused flames to reach higher temperatures had been repeated
in court by arson sleuths for decades. Yet the theory was nonsense: experiments have proved that wood and gasoline- fuelled fires burn at essentially the same temperature.
Vasquez and Fogg had cited as proof of arson the fact that
the front door’s aluminum threshold had melted. “The only
thing that can cause that to react is an accelerant,” Vasquez
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said. Hurst was incredulous. A natural- wood fire can reach
temperatures as high as two thousand degrees Fahrenheit—far
hotter than the melting point for aluminum alloys, which ranges from a thousand to twelve hundred degrees. And, like many
other investigators, Vasquez and Fogg mistakenly assumed that
wood charring beneath the aluminum threshold was evidence
that, as Vasquez put it, “a liquid accelerant flowed underneath
and burned.” Hurst had conducted myriad experiments showing that such charring was caused simply by the aluminum conducting so much heat. In fact, when liquid accelerant is poured
under a threshold a fire will extinguish, because of a lack of oxygen. (Other scientists had reached the same conclusion.) “Liquid accelerants can no more burn under an aluminum threshold
than can grease burn in a skillet even with a loose- fitting lid,”
Hurst declared in his report on the Willingham case.
Hurst then examined Fogg and Vasquez’s claim that the
“brown stains” on Willingham’s front porch were evidence of
“liquid accelerant,” which had not had time to soak into the
concrete. Hurst had previously performed a test in his garage,
in which he poured charcoal- lighter fluid on the concrete floor,
and lit it. When the fire went out, there were no brown stains,
only smudges of soot. Hurst had run the same experiment
many times, with different kinds of liquid accelerants, and the
result was always the same. Brown stains
were common in fires; they were usually
composed of rust or gunk from charred
debris that had mixed with water from
fire hoses.
Another crucial piece of evidence
implicating Willingham was the “crazed
glass” that Vasquez had attributed to the
rapid heating from a fire fuelled with liquid accelerant. Yet, in November of 1991,
a team of fire investigators had inspected
fifty houses in the hills of Oakland, California, which had been ravaged by brush
fires. In a dozen houses, the investigators
discovered crazed glass, even though a
liquid accelerant had not been used. Most
of these houses were on the outskirts of
the blaze, where firefighters had shot
streams of water; as the investigators later wrote in a published study, they theorized that the fracturing had been induced
by rapid cooling, rather than by sudden
heating—thermal shock had caused the
glass to contract so quickly that it settled
disjointedly. The investigators then tested
this hypothesis in a laboratory. When they heated glass, nothing happened. But each time they applied water to the heated
glass the intricate patterns appeared. Hurst had seen the same
phenomenon when he had blowtorched and cooled glass during his research at Cambridge. In his report, Hurst wrote that
Vasquez and Fogg’s notion of crazed glass was no more than
an “old wives’ tale.”
Hurst then confronted some of the most devastating arson
evidence against Willingham: the burn trailer, the pour patterns
and puddle configurations, the V- shape and other burn marks
indicating that the fire had multiple points of origin, the burning underneath the children’s beds. There was also the positive test for mineral spirits by the front door, and Willingham’s
seemingly implausible story that he had run out of the house
without burning his bare feet.
As Hurst read through more of the files, he noticed that
Willingham and his neighbors had described the windows in
the front of the house suddenly exploding and flames roaring
forth. It was then that Hurst thought of the legendary Lime
Street Fire, one of the most pivotal in the history of arson investigation.
www.theforensicteacher.com
On the evening of October 15, 1990, a thirty- five- yearold man named Gerald Wayne Lewis was found standing in
front of his house on Lime Street, in Jacksonville, Florida,
holding his three- year- old son. His two- story wood- frame
home was engulfed in flames. By the time the fire had been
extinguished, six people were dead, including Lewis’s wife.
Lewis said that he had rescued his son but was unable to get to
the others, who were upstairs.
When fire investigators examined the scene, they found
the classic signs of arson: low burns along the walls and floors,
pour patterns and puddle configurations, and a burn trailer running from the living room into the hallway. Lewis claimed
that the fire had started accidentally, on a couch in the living
room—his son had been playing with matches. But a V- shaped
pattern by one of the doors suggested that the fire had originated elsewhere. Some witnesses told authorities that Lewis
seemed too calm during the fire and had never tried to get
help. According to the Los Angeles Times, Lewis had previously been arrested for abusing his wife, who had taken out
a restraining order against him. After a chemist said that he
had detected the presence of gasoline on Lewis’s clothing and
shoes, a report by the sheriff ’s office concluded, “The fire was started as a result of a
petroleum product being poured on the front
porch, foyer, living room, stairwell and second floor bedroom.” Lewis was arrested and
charged with six counts of murder. He faced
the death penalty.
Subsequent tests, however, revealed
that the laboratory identification of gasoline
was wrong. Moreover, a local news television camera had captured Lewis in a clearly
agitated state at the scene of the fire, and investigators discovered that at one point he
had jumped in front of a moving car, asking
the driver to call the Fire Department.
Seeking to bolster their theory of the
crime, prosecutors turned to John Lentini,
the fire expert, and John DeHaan, another
leading investigator and textbook author.
Despite some of the weaknesses of the case,
Lentini told me that, given the classic burn
patterns and puddle configurations in the
house, he was sure that Lewis had set the
fire: “I was prepared to testify and send this
guy to Old Sparky”—the electric chair.
To discover the truth, the investigators, with the backing
of the prosecution, decided to conduct an elaborate experiment
and re- create the fire scene. Local officials gave the investigators permission to use a condemned house next to Lewis’s
home, which was about to be torn down. The two houses were
virtually identical, and the investigators refurbished the condemned one with the same kind of carpeting, curtains, and furniture that had been in Lewis’s home. The scientists also wired
the building with heat and gas sensors that could withstand fire.
The cost of the exper- iment came to twenty thousand dollars.
Without using liquid accelerant, Lentini and DeHaan set the
couch in the living room on fire, expecting that the experiment
would demonstrate that Lewis’s version of events was implausible.
The investigators watched as the fire quickly consumed
the couch, sending upward a plume of smoke that hit the ceiling and spread outward, creating a thick layer of hot gases
overhead—an efficient radiator of heat. Within three minutes,
this cloud, absorbing more gases from the fire below, was banking down the walls and filling the living room. As the cloud
approached the floor, its temperature rose, in some areas, to
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
55
more than eleven hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Suddenly, the
entire room exploded in flames, as the radiant heat ignited every piece of furniture, every curtain, every possible fuel source,
even the carpeting. The windows shattered.
The fire had reached what is called “flashover”—the point
at which radiant heat causes a fire in a room to become a room
on fire. Arson investigators knew about the concept of flashover, but it was widely believed to take much longer to occur, especially without a liquid accelerant. From a single fuel
source—a couch—the room had reached flashover in four and
a half minutes.
Because all the furniture in the living room had ignited,
the blaze went from a fuel- controlled fire to a ventilation- controlled fire—or what scientists call “post- flashover.” During
post- flashover, the path of the fire depends on new sources of
oxygen, from an open door or window. One of the fire investigators, who had been standing by an open door in the living
room, escaped moments before the oxygen- starved fire roared
out of the room into the hallway—a fireball that caused the corridor to go quickly into flashover as well, propelling the fire out
the front door and onto the porch.
After the fire was extinguished, the investigators inspected the hallway and living room. On the floor were irregularly
shaped burn patterns that perfectly resembled pour patterns and
puddle configurations. It turned out that these classic signs of
arson can also appear on their own, after flashover. With the
naked eye, it is impossible to distinguish between the pour patterns and puddle configurations caused by an accelerant and
those caused naturally by post- flashover. The only reliable
way to tell the differ- ence is to take samples from the burn
patterns and test them in a laboratory for the presence of flammable or combustible liquids.
During the Lime Street experiment, other things happened
that were supposed to occur only in a fire fuelled by liquid accelerant: charring along the base of the walls and doorways,
and burning under furniture. There was also a V- shaped pattern by the living- room doorway, far from where the fire had
started on the couch. In a small fire, a V- shaped burn mark may
pinpoint where a fire began, but during post- flashover these
patterns can occur repeatedly, when various objects ignite.
One of the investigators muttered that they had just helped
prove the defense’s case. Given the reasonable doubt raised by
the experiment, the charges against Lewis were soon dropped.
The Lime Street experiment had demolished prevailing notions
about fire behavior. Subsequent tests by scientists showed that,
during post- flashover, burning under beds and furniture was
common, entire doors were consumed, and aluminum thresholds melted.
John Lentini says of the Lime Street Fire, “This was my
epiphany. I almost sent a man to die based on theories that were
a load of crap.”
56
Hurst next examined a floor plan of Willingham’s house
that Vasquez had drawn, which delineated all the purported
pour patterns and puddle configurations. Because the windows
had blown out of the children’s room, Hurst knew that the
fire had reached flashover. With his finger, Hurst traced along
Vasquez’s diagram the burn trailer that had gone from the children’s room, turned right in the hallway, and headed out the
front door. John Jackson, the prosecutor, had told me that the
path was so “bizarre” that it had to have been caused by a liquid
accelerant. But Hurst concluded that it was a natural product
of the dynamics of fire during post- flashover. Willingham had
fled out the front door, and the fire simply followed the ventilation path, toward the opening. Similarly, when Willingham had
broken the windows in the children’s room, flames had shot
outward.
Hurst recalled that Vasquez and Fogg had considered it
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
impossible for Willingham to have run down the burning hallway without scorching his bare feet. But if the pour patterns
and puddle configurations were a result of a flashover, Hurst
reasoned, then they were consonant with Willingham’s explanation of events. When Willingham exited his bedroom, the
hallway was not yet on fire; the flames were contained within
the children’s bedroom, where, along the ceiling, he saw the
“bright lights.” Just as the investigator safely stood by the door
in the Lime Street experiment seconds before flashover, Willingham could have stood close to the children’s room without
being harmed. (Prior to the Lime Street case, fire investigators
had generally assumed that carbon monoxide diffuses quickly
through a house during a fire. In fact, up until flashover, levels
of carbon monoxide can be remarkably low beneath and outside the thermal cloud.) By the time the Corsicana fire achieved
flashover,Willingham had already fled outside and was in the
front yard.
Vasquez had made a videotape of the fire scene, and Hurst
looked at the footage of the burn trailer. Even after repeated
viewings, he could not detect three points of origin, as Vasquez
had. (Fogg recently told me that he also saw a continuous trailer and disagreed with Vasquez, but added that nobody from the
prosecution or the defense ever asked him on the stand about
his opinion on the subject.)
After Hurst had reviewed Fogg and Vasquez’s list of more
than twenty arson indicators, he believed that only one had any
potential validity: the positive test for mineral spirits by the
threshold of the front door. But why had the fire investigators
obtained a positive reading only in that location? According
to Fogg and Vasquez’s theory of the crime, Willingham had
poured accelerant throughout the children’s bedroom and down
the hallway. Officials had tested extensively in these areas—including where all the pour patterns and puddle configurations
were—and turned up nothing. Jackson told me that he “never
did understand why they weren’t able to recover” positive tests
in these parts.
Hurst found it hard to imagine Willingham pouring accelerant on the front porch, where neighbors could have seen
him. Scanning the files for clues, Hurst noticed a photograph
of the porch taken before the fire, which had been entered into
evidence. Sitting on the tiny porch was a charcoal grill. The
porch was where the family barbecued. Court testimony from
witnesses confirmed that there had been a grill, along with a
container of lighter fluid, and that both had burned when the
fire roared onto the porch during post- flashover. By the time
Vasquez inspected the house, the grill had been removed from
the porch, during cleanup. Though he cited the container of
lighter fluid in his report, he made no mention of the grill. At
the trial, he insisted that he had never been told of the grill’s
earlier placement. Other authorities were aware of the grill but
did not see its relevance. Hurst, however, was convinced that
he had solved the mystery: when firefighters had blasted the
porch with water, they had likely spread charcoal- lighter fluid
from the melted container.
Without having visited the fire scene, Hurst says, it was
impossible to pinpoint the cause of the blaze. But, based on
the evidence, he had little doubt that it was an accidental fire—
one caused most likely by the space heater or faulty electrical wiring. It explained why there had never been a motive
for the crime. Hurst concluded that there was no evidence of
arson, and that a man who had already lost his three children
and spent twelve years in jail was about to be executed based
on “junk science.” Hurst wrote his report in such a rush that he
didn’t pause to fix the typos.
V
“I am a realist and I will not live a fantasy,” Willingham
once told Gilbert about the prospect of proving his innocence.
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But in February, 2004, he began to have hope. Hurst’s findings had helped to exonerate more than ten people. Hurst even
reviewed the scientific evidence against Willingham’s friend
Ernest Willis, who had been on death row for the strikingly
similar arson charge. Hurst says, “It was like I was looking
at the same case. Just change the names.” In his report on the
Willis case, Hurst concluded that not “a single item of physical
evidence . . . supports a finding of arson.” A second fire expert
hired by Ori White, the new district attorney in Willis’s district,
concurred. After seventeen years on death row, Willis was set
free. “I don’t turn killers loose,” White said at the time. “If
Willis was guilty, I’d be retrying him right now. And I’d use
Hurst as my witness. He’s a brilliant scientist.” White noted
how close the system had come to murdering an innocent man.
“He did not get executed, and I thank God for that,” he said.
On February 13th, four days before Willingham was
scheduled to be executed, he got a call from Reaves, his attorney. Reaves told him that the fifteen members of the Board
of Pardons and Paroles, which reviews an application for clemency and had been sent Hurst’s report, had made their decision.
“What is it?” Willingham asked.
“I’m sorry,” Reaves said. “They denied your petition.”
The vote was unanimous. Reaves could not offer an explanation: the board deliberates in secret, and its members are
not bound by any specific criteria. The board members did not
even have to review Willingham’s materials, and usually don’t
debate a case in person; rather, they cast their votes by fax—a
process that has become known as “death by fax.” Between
1976 and 2004, when Willingham filed his petition, the State
of Texas had approved only one application for clemency from
a prisoner on death row. A Texas appellate judge has called the
clemency system “a legal fiction.” Reaves said of the board
members, “They never asked me to attend a hearing or answer
any questions.”
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The Innocence Project obtained, through the Freedom of
Information Act, all the records from the governor’s office and
the board pertaining to Hurst’s report. “The documents show
that they received the report, but neither office has any record
of anyone acknowledging it, taking note of its significance, responding to it, or calling any attention to it within the government,” Barry Scheck said. “The only reasonable conclusion is
that the governor’s office and the Board of Pardons and Paroles
ignored scientific evidence.”
LaFayette Collins, who was a member of the board at the
time, told me of the process, “You don’t vote guilt or innocence. You don’t retry the trial. You just make sure everything
is in order and there are no glaring errors.” He noted that although the rules allowed for a hearing to consider important
new evidence, “in my time there had never been one called.”
When I asked him why Hurst’s report didn’t constitute evidence of “glaring errors,” he said, “We get all kinds of reports,
but we don’t have the mechanisms to vet them.” Alvin Shaw,
another board member at the time, said that the case didn’t
“ring a bell,” adding, angrily, “Why would I want to talk about
it?” Hurst calls the board’s actions “unconscionable.”
Though Reaves told Willingham that there was still a
chance that Governor Perry might grant a thirty- day stay, Willingham began to prepare his last will and testament. He had
earlier written Stacy a letter apologizing for not being a better
husband and thanking her for everything she had given him,
especially their three daughters. “I still know Amber’s voice,
her smile, her cool Dude saying and how she said: I wanna hold
you! Still feel the touch of Karmon and Kameron’s hands on
my face.” He said that he hoped that “some day, somehow the
truth will be known and my name cleared.”
He asked Stacy if his tombstone could be erected next to
their children’s graves. Stacy, who had for so long expressed
belief in Willingham’s innocence, had recently taken her first
Trial by Fire (Continued on p. 65)
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
57
Activity
The Dark Side Of
the District Attorney
The DA is one of the good guys. He or she fights for the community,
city, or state they work for, and their job is to win convictions. The cops
catch the crooks, the district attorney puts them away. The DA’s office
has many tools in its belt. Among them are evidence, prior convictions,
eye witnesses, and plea deals for cases where guilt is assured, but the
defendant doesn’t want to take their chances with a jury.
But the stress on a DA can be enormous. Part of it comes from their
bosses, part of it comes from pressure to convict everyone who comes
in front of them, and part of it comes from within. To be a DA you have
to be driven, you have to believe in your job, and you have to be able to
cope with political demands for a high conviction rate while balancing
an insanely huge workload. Anyone who can make a career of this job is
something of a superhero.
But once in a while, about as often as the Philadelphia Eagles win a
Superbowl, a DA’s ego gets in the way and they’ll stack the deck against a
defendant they just know is guilty, even if it means withholding evidence.
If your students think that’s impossible, wait until they try this activity.
58
By Maurice Kirkwood
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
www.theforensicteacher.com
Activity
The Dark Side
TEACHER DIRECTIONS
The purpose of this exercise is to show class members the importance of including all evidence found in a criminal case
and what happens when egos get in the way of justice. Some prosecutors become convinced of guilt to the exclusion of reason,
and powerful individuals deem their careers worthy of what they feel are insignificant lapses in the law.
The evidence collected in this case would cast reasonable doubt on the guilt of the accused if it were all analyzed.
However, some of it has not been. The DA’s office has not bothered to perform tests on some evidence because it is sure it
would point to the defendant. It’s also possible they think testing the evidence could hurt their case. If the defense team insists
on going to trial, and performing the tests, the defendant would be set free. Further, a stray hair and semen stain would point to
another individual thought beyond reproach.
The goal is to watch your students wrestle with the issue of guilt vs. convenience, and, assuming at least one of them takes
the bait, to help them understand how innocent people can be convicted.
Teacher directions:
1. Assign students to defense and prosecution teams. Each team should have from two to four individuals on it. Each
prosecution team will have a matching defense team. Appoint one student district attorney and one student lead
defense attorney on each respective team. The rest of each team works for their leader.
2. Hand out each team’s respective instructions. Allow the leader of each team time to read the directions to
themselves before sharing with their team. While leaders are reading team members should familiarize themselves
with the facts of the case.
3. Give the teams a chance to talk amongst themselves (5-15 minutes) before consulting with the opposing team.
Give the teams time to talk with each other.
4. No one will play Joseph, the defendant. He is still in jail, but will do what his attorneys recommend.
5. Ask all teams to decide the course of action they’d like to take, and to write and indicate their consensus on the
agreement paper provided later in this exercise.
6. Collect the papers and start a discussion of the case, giving each pair of teams time to reveal their final decision,
and the reasoning that led to it.
7. Quickly look through the papers you collected. If anyone withheld evidence ask that person why he or she did it
after you reassure them they’re not going to fail (in fact, you can elect to give all students a healthy participation
grade). Mention the instructions threatened a failing grade for the marking period because you wanted to give an
accurate feeling of how high the stakes are for withholding evidence in real life. Point out the following:
• Some prosecutors have large egos, don’t want to lose, and even ignore new evidence if it means the
accused will go free. As one student put it, “I don’t need the facts, I know the truth!”
• If students doubt this happens, take them to a computer lab, or give them homework, to find a case where
an innocent has been jailed, or worse, executed. One excellent source for this kind of information is www.
innocenceproject.org.
SECRET FINAL NOTE: Joseph is innocent. If all evidence is analyzed. Simon killed Sharon.
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The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
59
DISTRICT ATTORNEY DIRECTIONS:
This paper is for your eyes only. Read ALL of it before sharing any of it. You are the district attorney of the city of
Smithville, population 1,240,000. You have been elected to this position and have one more year of a five-year term, with
aspirations to run again or to seek a higher political position. This is a very prestigious job, and you feel everyone looks up to
you. You are proud of your 98% conviction rate, and feel your team is top notch. This team of one to four individuals has been
with you for three years.
Facts about the case:
1. Joseph Rabid called 911 on May 1 at 6 pm, , upon returning to the apartment he shared with Sharon Sharalike and
finding her dead. The ME would later report the cause of death as strangulation.
2. Joseph had once been arrested for assault, but it was on an old girlfriend six years ago, and she dropped the charges,
saying she provoked him.
3. A neighbor, Tom Collins, reported hearing a man and woman shouting about 15-25 minutes before the 911 call was
placed, according to his statement and the 911 log.
4. Joseph’s hair, fibers, and semen were found on the body, which was discovered in the couple’s bedroom.
5. Joseph admits to having a fight with Sharon earlier that afternoon because she wanted to invite an old high school
boyfriend over to catch up. Joseph says he was so upset about this he went for a long walk. When he returned he found
her dead.
6. Joseph said he and Sharon had sex that morning.
7. Joseph said the old boyfriend is Simon Brown, a doctor, who claims he was doing rounds at the hospital the hour
before and after the murder.
8. Joseph was interrogated for four hours at police headquarters, but still claims to be innocent. He does admit his
previous arrest was because he had rage issues. He says he went to counseling and does not have anger issues
anymore. No one can corroborate his walking route, and he finally admits to driving around, but not stopping
anywhere before he returned home.
9. A cop mentions that while Joseph was waiting to be interrogated and before his release, Frank Snitch, Joseph’s
cellmate, told the police that Joseph admitted to him he raped and killed Sharon. Later it is shown that Frank recanted
his statement and was simply seeking leniency for his own case.
Evidence:
1. Semen from the victim matched Joseph’s DNA.
2. Nearly all of the fingerprints found at the scene matched either Joseph or Sharon. An unrecognizable thumbprint
was recovered from the night stand next to the body, but it was smudged.
3. Hairs were recovered from the bed, but they were presumed to belong to Joseph.
4. Semen recovered from the bedclothes was presumed to belong to Joseph and wasn’t tested for DNA, although it
was recovered.
Procedure:
1. You are obligated by law to turn over all evidence and interview tapes and transcripts to the defense team.
2. However, if you withhold any evidence from the defense team, no one will know about it unless you tell them or let
them see this paper. Your grade in this exercise will not depend on your conduct, only if Joseph agrees to plead guilty.
If you are discovered withholding evidence you can receive an F for the marking period.
60
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
www.theforensicteacher.com
DISTRICT ATTORNEY DIRECTIONS (Continued)
Obstacles to conviction:
1. A quick look by a CSI revealed the hairs on the bed were human. If need be, you have Dr. Infallible, a college
professor who sometimes consults on forensics for the city for a fee, to testify the hairs match Joseph’s based only on
the CSI’s report.
2. The smudged fingerprint is mostly unusable, but what little detail there is could make it different from any of Sharon’s
or Joseph’s. You have a photograph of it. You’ve informed Dr. Infallible the print is trashed and, although he’s only
glanced at it, he’s ready to testify to this.
3. There are no internal cameras at the hospital due to federal privacy laws, so Dr. Brown is not on tape during the time
he claims he was doing rounds. Nurses don’t remember seeing him, but a plane crash accident kept everyone at the
hospital swamped for hours.
4. Joseph claims he’s innocent.
Grading:
•
•
•
You either get a conviction or get the defense team to plead guilty. Grade = A.
If the prosecution and defense teams can’t reach an agreement, you will go to trial for
the same grades, except now if Joseph is acquitted your grade will be an F.
This grade counts as a major test.
Your move: (read all points before acting)
1. Make sure you share your trial strategy with the defense. Let them know what you have and how you’re going to
use it in the courtroom. Tell the other team Joseph will get 30 years if he’s convicted. Or, he can plead guilty for a
manslaughter charge and receive 10-15 years (out in six with good behavior).
2. What evidence are you going to share with the defense team?
3. Your grade will depend on what the defense team agrees to. What grade will you get?
If, and after, Joseph agrees to plead, please fill out the legal agreement form with the other team. Joseph will do whatever his
lawyers think best. Turn in all papers together.
www.theforensicteacher.com
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
61
DEFENSE ATTORNEY DIRECTIONS:
You and your team have the job of defending Joseph Rabid. Your opponent is the district attorney of the city of Smithville,
population 1,240,000. He has a 98% conviction rate. And 95% of all cases that are brought before his office are settled with
plea deals.
Facts about the case:
1. Joseph Rabid called 911 on May 1 at 6 pm, , upon returning to the apartment he shared with Sharon Sharalike and
finding her dead. The ME would later report the cause of death as strangulation.
2. Joseph had once been arrested for assault, but it was on an old girlfriend six years ago, and she dropped the
charges, saying she provoked him.
3. A neighbor, Tom Collins, reported hearing a man and woman shouting about 15-25 minutes before the 911 call
was placed, according to his statement and the 911 log.
4. Joseph’s hair, fibers, and semen were found on the body, which was discovered in the couple’s bedroom.
5. Joseph admits to having a fight with Sharon earlier that afternoon because she wanted to invite an old high school
boyfriend over to catch up. Joseph says he was so upset about this he went for a long walk. When he returned he
found her dead.
6. Joseph said he and Sharon had sex that morning.
7. Joseph said the old boyfriend is Simon Brown, a doctor, who claims he was doing rounds at the hospital the hour
before and after the murder.
8. Joseph was interrogated for four hours at police headquarters, but still claims to be innocent. He does admit his
previous arrest was because he had rage issues. He says he went to counseling and does not have anger issues
anymore. No one can corroborate his walking route, and he finally admits to driving around, but not stopping
anywhere before he returned home.
9. A cop mentions that while Joseph was waiting to be interrogated and before his release, Frank Snitch, Joseph’s
cellmate, told the police that Joseph admitted to him he raped and killed Sharon. Later it is shown that Frank
recanted his statement and was simply seeking leniency for his own case.
Your move:
You will ask the district attorney to turn over all their evidence during the discovery phase of trial preparation (which is when
you’re done reading these directions). The district attorney, or one of his staff, will verbally give you all evidence as required by
law. They will not show you their papers. If they withhold any evidence they will fail the marking period, so they have a good
reason to be forthcoming.
They will also tell you how they think the trial will go, based on their evidence. Take a minute to think about the case and how
you want to defend Joseph. You will be able to get your own experts to testify, but that’s going to take time and money (another
class period). You don’t have to take it, but ask if a plea bargain is on the table.
If the evidence sounds airtight, and a plea is offered, think about it. If you like it based on the terms and the evidence,
recommend it to your client. If not, don’t. Joseph will do whatever you suggest.
In order for this exercise to end you must sign off on what you’re going to do: go to trial or take a plea.
Grading:
You go to trial and Joseph is acquitted. Grade = A.
Joseph takes a plea bargain. Grade = B.
You go to trial and Joseph is found guilty. Grade = D.
62
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
www.theforensicteacher.com
PROSECUTOR AND DEFENSE TEAM MEMBERS quick facts sheet.
(All members of both teams should look over these facts while team leaders examine their own
materials:
Facts about the case:
1. Joseph Rabid called 911 on May 1 at 6 pm, , upon returning to the apartment he shared with Sharon Sharalike and
finding her dead. The ME would later report the cause of death as strangulation.
2. Joseph had once been arrested for assault, but it was on an old girlfriend six years ago, and she dropped the
charges, saying she provoked him.
3. A neighbor, Tom Collins, reported hearing a man and woman shouting about 15-25 minutes before the 911 call
was placed, according to his statement and the 911 log.
4. Joseph’s hair, fibers, and semen were found on the body, which was discovered in the couple’s bedroom.
5. Joseph admits to having a fight with Sharon earlier that afternoon because she wanted to invite an old high school
boyfriend over to catch up. Joseph says he was so upset about this he went for a long walk. When he returned he
found her dead.
6. Joseph said he and Sharon had sex that morning.
7. Joseph said the old boyfriend is Simon Brown, a doctor, who claims he was doing rounds at the hospital the hour
before and after the murder.
8. Joseph was interrogated for four hours at police headquarters, but still claims to be innocent. He does admit his
previous arrest was because he had rage issues. He says he went to counseling and does not have anger issues
anymore. No one can corroborate his walking route, and he finally admits to driving around, but not stopping
anywhere before he returned home.
9. A cop mentions that while Joseph was waiting to be interrogated and before his release, Frank Snitch, Joseph’s
cellmate, told the police that Joseph admitted to him he raped and killed Sharon. Later it is shown that Frank
recanted his statement and was simply seeking leniency for his own case.
www.theforensicteacher.com
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
63
LEGAL AGREEMENT FORM FOR THE CASE OF
STATE VS. JOSEPH RABID
We the defense team for Joseph Rabid, after consultation with the district attorney’s office for the city of
Smithville, agree to the following course of action:
Signed on this _______ day of ______________(month) ____________ (year).
64
Defense Team members (print & sign name below)
DA Team Members (print & sign name below)
Lead Defense:
DA:
Team members
Team members
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
www.theforensicteacher.com
don’t understand why those who survive often can’t rescue the
Trial by Fire (Continued from p. 57)
look at the original court records and arson findings. Unaware victims. They have no concept of what a fire is like.”
The warden told Willingham that it was time. Willingham,
of Hurst’s report, she had determined that Willingham was
refusing
to assist the process, lay down; he was carried into
guilty. She denied him his wish, later telling a reporter, “He
a chamber eight feet wide and ten feet long. The walls were
took my kids away from me.”
Gilbert felt as if she had failed Willingham. Even before painted green, and in the center of the room, where an electric
his pleas for clemency were denied, she told him that all she chair used to be, was a sheeted gurney. Several guards strapped
could give him was her friendship. He told her that it was Willingham down with leather belts, snapping buckles across
enough “to be a part of your life in some small way so that in his arms and legs and chest. A medical team then inserted inmy passing I can know I was at last able to have felt the heart of travenous tubes into his arms. Each official had a separate role
another who might remember me when I’m gone.” He added, in the process, so that no one person felt responsible for taking
“There is nothing to forgive you for.” He told her that he would a life.
Willingham had asked that his parents and family not be
need her to be present at his execution, to help him cope with
present
in the gallery during this process, but as he looked out
“my fears, thoughts, and feelings.”
On February 17th, the day he was set to die, Willingham’s he could see Stacy watching. The warden pushed a remote
parents and several relatives gathered in the prison visiting control, and sodium thiopental, a barbiturate, was pumped into
room. Plexiglas still separated Willingham from them. “I wish Willingham’s body. Then came a second drug, pancuronium
I could touch and hold both of you,” Willingham had written
Trial by Fire (Continued on p. 70)
to them earlier. “I always hugged Mom but I
never hugged Pop much.”
As Willingham looked at the group,
he kept asking where Gilbert was. Gilbert
had recently been driving home from a
store when another car ran a red light and
smashed into her. Willingham used to tell
her to stay in her kitchen for a day, without
leaving, to comprehend what it was like to
be confined in prison, but she had always
found an excuse not to do it. Now she was
ST
paralyzed from the neck down.
While she was in an intensive-care unit,
she had tried to get a message to Willingham, but apparently failed. Gilbert’s daughter later read her a letter that Willingham
had sent her, telling her how much he had
grown to love her. He had written a poem:
“Do you want to see beauty—like you have
never seen? / Then close your eyes, and
open your mind, and come along with me.”
Gilbert, who spent years in physical
rehabilitation, gradually regaining motion
in her arms and upper body, says, “All that
time, I thought I was saving Willingham,
and I realized then that he was saving me,
giving me the strength to get through this. I
know I will one day walk again, and I know
it is because Willingham showed me the
kind of courage it takes to survive.”
Willingham had requested a final meal,
and at 4 P.M. on the seventeenth he was
served it: three barbecued pork ribs, two
orders of onion rings, fried okra, three beef
enchiladas with cheese, and two slices of
lemon cream pie. He received word that
Governor Perry had refused to grant him a
Build Your Case with Celestron ’ s line
stay. (A spokesperson for Perry says, “The
of digital MiCrosCopes
Governor made his decision based on the
facts of the case.”) Willingham’s mother
Turn your standard optical microscope into a digital imager with our Digital LCD & Camera
and father began to cry. “Don’t be sad,
Microscope Accessory. (LEFT)
Momma,” Willingham said. “In fifty-five
Our Deluxe Handheld Digital Microscope (CENTER) allows you to view specimens and solid objects
minutes, I’m a free man. I’m going home
on a computer or laptop, with a detachable body to examine unorthodox objects. With a 2MP digital
camera take snap shots and video for easy record keeping.
to see my kids.” Earlier, he had confessed
The award-winning Deluxe Digital LCD Microscope, (RIGHT) with 3.5” rotatable touch screen and
to his parents that there was one thing about
built-in 5MP digital camera, allows you to capture, save and share snapshots or video of all your findings.
the day of the fire he had lied about. He said
that he had never actually crawled into the
children’s room. “I just didn’t want people
DISCOVER MORE AT
to think I was a coward,” he said. Hurst told
me, “People who have never been in a fire
21
CENTURY
CLUE GATHERING
www.theforensicteacher.com
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
65
Innocence Project (Continued from p. 29)
Such research can only strengthen and enhance the role of
science in the courtroom. Technical working groups (TWGs)
are engaged in the development of professional standards and
guidelines to ensure the best practice of various disciplines in
the areas of analysis, reporting, and expert testimony.
National and Local Reform Initiatives In addition to the initiatives mentioned above, the
Innocence Project formerly associated with Cardozo Law
School, is spearheading and pushing several initiatives they
would like to see occur on a national level, including stateby-state formation of Innocence Commissions (IC), Audit
Oversight Committees (AOC), and the severance of crime
labs from law enforcement agencies. Innocence Commissions
would be comprised of stakeholders from many different
agencies and organizations including defense attorneys,
prosecutors, victim advocates, judges, law enforcement
personnel, forensic scientists, and legislators. The ICs could
evaluate wrongful convictions and assist in determining
what went wrong and propose ways of improving the
practice of forensic science. The formation of AOCs is
explored in a position paper written by Peter Neufeld and
available for viewing on http://www.innocenceproject.org.
These committees would ideally function to investigate
individual scientists that are implicated or accused of serious
misconduct. More information on ICs and AOCs is availableat
http://www.innocenceproject.org.
On the local level, the Innocence Project of Minnesota
has undertaken a number of initiatives in order to address
the role of forensic sciences in wrongful conviction. First, as
an organization, we feel very strongly that a diverse board
of directors and advisory board comprised of professionals
in the areas of criminal defense, criminal prosecution,
forensic science, and law enforcement will facilitate a more
holistic multidisciplinary approach to understanding the
factors involved in wrongful conviction and developing
remedies to decrease the occurrence of wrongful conviction.
Our organization currently consists of forensic scientists
from crime labs (state, city, county), medical examiner/
coroner’s offices, private consultants, law enforcement
personnel, educators, and attorneys. Together we have
organized educational workshops and seminars designed
to bring law enforcement, forensic science, and attorneys
together to discuss issues of wrongful conviction, disseminate
information about various forensic sciences, and discuss and
begin to implement possible remedies. We have also entered
into discussions with representatives of local law schools
in regard to teaching courses about forensic science and
eventually making such courses a permanent component of
the law school curriculum. In conclusion, in-depth, detailed
analyses of known exonerations, both those accomplished
through DNA analysis and by other means, are needed to
better understand the role of forensic science in wrongful
conviction and to formulate strategies to develop and initiate
reform in order to decrease, and perhaps one day, eliminate
our role in wrongful conviction.
66
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
References 1. Bedau, Hugo Adam (editor). The Death Penalty in
America: An Anthology. Chicago:Aldine
Publishing Company, 1964. 2. Borchard, Edwin M. Convicting the Innocent:
Sixty-Five Actual Errors of Criminal Justice.
Garden City, New York: Garden City
Publishing Company, 1932.
3. Conners, Edward, Thomas Lundregan, Neal Miller,
and Tom McEwen. Convicted by Juries,
Exonerated by Science: Case Studies in the
Use of DNA Evidence to Establish Innocence
After Trial. Research Report, National
Institute of Justice, 1996. 4. Gardner, Erle Stanley. The Court of Last Resort.
New York: William Sloane Associates, 1952. 5. Gross, Samuel R., Kristen Jacoby, Daniel J.
Matheson, Nicholas Montgomery, and Sujata
Patil. Exonerations in the United States, 1989
Through 2003. The Journal of Criminal Law
and Criminology 95(2):523-560, 2005. 6. Radelet, Michael L., Hugo Adam Bedau, and
Constance E. Putnam. In Spite of Innocence:
Erroneous Convictions in Capital Cases.
Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992. 7. Saks, Michael J. and Jonathan J. Koehler. “The
Coming Paradigm Shift in Forensic
Identification Science.” Science 309:892895, 2005. 8. Scheck, Barry, Peter Neufeld, and Jim Dwyer,
1st Edition. Actual Innocence and Other
Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted.
New York: Doubleday, 2000.
9. Scheck, Barry, Peter Neufeld, and Jim Dwyer, 3rd
Edition. Actual Innocence: When Justice
Goes Wrong and How to make It Right. New
York: New American Library, 2003.
We would like to thank everybody at the Innocence
Project in New York, especially Maddy
deLone, Peter Neufeld, Huy D. Dao, and
Sarah Tofte for graciously providingus with
unpublished information in such a timely
fashion.
Michael Cromett, J.D., is Assistant State Public
Defender with the Minnesota State Public Defender’s Office
in Minneapolis, MN. Michael can be reachedat michael.
cromett@state.mn.us.
Susan M. Thurston Myster, Ph.D. is a forensic
anthropologist and Associate Professor and Director of the
Forensic Sciences Program at Hamline University in St. Paul,
MN. Susan can be reached at smyster@gw.hamline.edu.
Reprinted with permission of Forensic Magazine®. www.
forensicmag.com
www.theforensicteacher.com
www.theforensicteacher.com
www.theforensicteacher.com
The
2011
TheForensic
ForensicTeacher
Teacher• •Winter
Fall 2010
67
31
A Day in the
life Of...
A Criminal Profiler
By John Douglas
What I Do
Profiling: Fact vs. Fiction
Before I begin going into current cases, which I will do in
future articles, I thought it might be useful for visitors to this
site to have an overview of what profiling is, and what it’s not.
Some of you may be very familiar with my work, but for those
of you who aren’t, I hope this brings you up to speed.
During my first years with the FBI’s Behavioral Science
Unit (later called the Investigative Support Unit) in the late
1970’s, the word “profiling” hardly existed, not in the sense
that it does now. I think it’s become a familiar concept to most
people these days, thanks to my books those by my former
associates, television shows, movies, and other media. But a
lot of people have misconceptions about profiling—either an
overblown sense that we close our eyes and magically “see” the
crime we’re investigating as it occurred, or a restricted notion
that all we do is create profiles of subjects who are unknown
and at large.
First, the world of entertainment. While I served as a
technical consultant on The Silence of the Lambs, and my work
has been used as a reference for other movies and TV shows,
I have to say that none of it represents what profiling is really
like. It’s highly unglamorous, and never easy. Our work includes
long, lonely hours poring over paperwork, photographs, and the
like. Profilers have to examine a lot of information: crime scene
photographs, eyewitness accounts, autopsy reports, police
reports, and, whenever possible, victims’ statements. In a case
where the identity of the assailant is unknown, we find patterns
in the evidence based on the behavior either demonstrated or
indicated, and we form a “profile” of the UNknown SUBject
(or UNSUB). This profile can be used to narrow the search
conducted by law enforcement, helping them zero in on their
man.
Proactive Techniques: Reaching out to the Public
68
This is just one function we perform. As I mentioned, to
see that as all we do is a limited view. In fact, toward the end of
my career in the FBI, I was doing fewer and fewer of those sorts
of profiles. We were doing a lot more crime scene analyses,
crime reconstructions, and spending more time developing and
incorporating proactive techniques for ongoing investigations.
These proactive techniques are among the most exciting
advances we’ve made. Sometimes we’ll use the amazing
power of the media to get potentially identifying information,
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
like copies of handwritten notes and descriptions of probable
post-offense behavior, about the criminals we’re looking
for out to the public. Somebody out there knows something
about our UNSUB or about a suspect, but they may not fully
realize it. They may need us to connect the dots, to present
some information that will help them understand what may to
that point have been no more than a funny feeling or vague
suspicion they’ve had about their brother, boyfriend, aunt, coworker, and so on.
In one instance, at the suggestion of Jana Monroe, an
extraordinary agent in my unit, we publicized an UNSUB’s
handwriting by mounting a billboard campaign in Tampa
Bay, Florida, the location of the 1989 murders of Joan Rogers
and her two daughters, who were vacationing in the area. We
posted an excerpt from directions we knew the UNSUB had
written by hand on a brochure and given to the victims, and
which was found in their car. Within three days, witnesses had
come forward to identify the person whose handwriting they
recognized from the publicized excerpt, and they all named
the same man—Oba Chandler, who was convicted of the three
murders in 1994 and is now sitting on Florida’s death row.
Tightening the Noose
e also support law enforcement in “tightening the noose”
around a suspect. A good example of that is in the case of Robert
Hansen. Hansen was the suspect local and state authorities
felt was their man in the murders of four women, all either
prostitutes or topless dancers, and all of whom had been shot
with a high-powered hunting rifle and found in remote areas
of the Alaskan wilderness. One had been shot naked. But there
was no evidence; all the authorities had was the testimony of a
prostitute who said she was nearly Hansen’s next victim—and
he had an alibi (which later proved to be fabricated) for the
night she said he tried to abduct her.
The authorities were at an impasse. They knew there was
evidence out there, and if Hansen was the killer it stood to reason
that some of it would be on his property. But they couldn’t
get to it without a search warrant. So instead of just preparing
a behavioral profile of an UNSUB in order for authorities to
know who they were looking for, it was our job to come up
with a set of behavioral indicators from the four murders and
www.theforensicteacher.com
the alleged attempted abduction to support a request for the
search warrant.
The Starting Point: A Behavioral Profile
First, before we were given Hansen’s name or any
information about him, I came up with a behavioral profile
of the killer. When this matched what the police knew about
Hansen, they began to give me information that would help me
expand my profile to include specifics about the sort of killer
he might be and what sort of evidence might be found on his
property.
They said he had pockmarked skin and a stutter, so I
deduced that he’d probably had a difficult time with women
during his teen and young adult years, potentially causing him
to have a great deal of anger at women. Selecting prostitutes
and topless dancers indicated that he wanted victims no one
would miss and whom he could see as less than human because
of their occupations. Neither of these deductions was much of
a leap from those in my original profile.
More importantly, they told me Hansen was a hunter,
and a respected one, so I surmised that he would have held on
to “trophies” from these murders, and maybe even a list or a
journal of his kills. I also knew, from the account given by the
witness, that Hansen had a cabin in the woods; it was where he
was trying to take her when she escaped. And I knew Hansen’s
family was away in Europe, giving him complete freedom to
do what he liked best—to hunt.
Hunting the Hunter
I began to get an idea of how Hansen operated, and it gave
me a cold, sick feeling in my stomach. It seemed clear to me
that he was definitely the killer, but he wasn’t simply killing
these women. I believed he was releasing them into the woods
and then hunting them down like animals—and this proved to
be the case.
We gave our assessment to the authorities, and they were
able to get a search warrant. Hansen’s rifle, which matched
the bullets that killed the four women, was found at his home,
along with some cheap jewelry, ID cards, and other items taken
from them. There was also a sort of “journal,” an aviation map
marked with the locations of his victims’ bodies.
Confronted with the evidence, Hansen confessed.
We’re Only as Good as our Information
We did our work well in that instance. But what if we
hadn’t? Or what if a different group had been assigned to the
case? Not all profilers are equal; we’re just like doctors in
that respect. We have equivalent training, but not equivalent
personalities, amounts of experience, and so on. And we’re
human. We have bad days, even weeks, when there’s so much
work that it’s inevitable that something somewhere will fall
between the cracks.
That’s what keeps us up nights. It’s also why it’s so
important to realize that, while it has been proven to be a
groundbreaking tool, profiling is just one part of the process
that leads from investigation to conviction. The other
elements, including forensic evidence, like weapons and DNA,
eyewitness accounts, autopsy reports, and police reports, are
vitally important. I don’t think we should ever elevate one
element of the process above another. Each element is critical,
especially for profilers—even at our very best, we’re only as
good as the information that’s provided to us.
www.theforensicteacher.com
So, You Want to Become a Profiler...
As the Bureau will tell you, there is no job specifically referred to
as a “profiler.” It’s a term that everyone uses, but it’s not written
on anyone’s business card or posted on someone’s office door.
Supervisory special agents (SSAs) at the National Center for
the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) are assigned to the FBI
Academy in Quantico, Virginia, where they perform behavioral
investigative functions. This includes examining evidence
and information from preliminary police reports, crime scene
photographs, witness accounts, medical examiner’s reports,
victimology, etc. All of this information is carefully reviewed
and analyzed in an effort to potentially develop a criminal
profile or possibly provide some other investigative technique
and/or strategy. Criminal profiles are used by investigators to
help them narrow the search for violent criminals of unsolved
cases and to assist both police and prosecutors in determining
motive—a critical element in most prosecutions.
As a new special agent, you cannot immediately become a
profiler. You must first serve at least five years as a special agent
and, in addition, be assigned as a profile coordinator in an FBI
field office. The job of the profile coordinator is to work closely
with local and state law enforcement agencies in identifying
cases with which the NCAVC may be able to provide assistance.
As a general rule, profile coordinators do not have the overall
training and authority to provide their own profiles. However,
whenever there is a profiler position opening at the NCAVC, the
profile coordinators are the first candidates that are considered
for the position. These criminal profiling positions are very
competitive, and it may take several years before you are even
considered as a viable candidate.
The selection process is complicated. An education
in Behavioral Science or Forensic Science is preferred.
Investigative experience in violent crime is a real must, so a
special agent’s experience with the Bureau should include
homicide, rape, and other crimes of interpersonal violence. This
experience may have also been obtained from employment
prior to working for the FBI. This is a very subjective and
highly competitive process. If your goal is to become a criminal
profiler, you should be certain that being a special agent serving
in some other capacity would be just as satisfying to you.
I don’t mean to discourage anyone. The field needs good
people. If you understand the requirements and believe you
have what it takes to work in this investigative field, please
work towards that goal. There’s nothing like hard work to get
you where you want to go, no matter what the odds tell you.
Do You Need a Particular College Major to Become a
Profiler?
The answer to that is “no.” In regards to education, it is certainly
necessary to have a bachelor’s degree as a foundation, as well
as good verbal and writing skills, but there is no specific degree
that would make someone much more or less qualified for this
position than someone else. I might recommend a degree in the
area of forensic psychology, but the people who have worked
for me have had an assortment of different degrees from
business management to psychology to even music. Therefore,
you should choose whatever interests you the most.
At some point in your career you will have to get an
advanced degree. However, when you are working towards your
undergraduate or graduate degree, the most important factor
that will separate you from everyone else is actually gaining
hands-on experience in delving into the minds of criminals. To
do that, you’re going to have to work or do research where you
will personally come into contact with a variety of incarcerated
felons. Remember, “In order to understand an artist, you must
look at the art work.” The crime is a reflection of the offender.
A Day in the Life (Continued on p. 70)
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
69
A Day in the Life (Continued from p. 69)
As the Bureau will tell you, there is no job specifically referred to
as a “profiler.” It’s a term that everyone uses, but it’s not written
on anyone’s business card or posted on someone’s office door.
Supervisory special agents (SSAs) at the National Center for
the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) are assigned to the FBI
Academy in Quantico, Virginia, where they perform behavioral
investigative functions. This includes examining evidence
and information from preliminary police reports, crime scene
photographs, witness accounts, medical examiner’s reports,
victimology, etc. All of this information is carefully reviewed
and analyzed in an effort to potentially develop a criminal
profile or possibly provide some other investigative technique
and/or strategy. Criminal profiles are used by investigators to
help them narrow the search for violent criminals of unsolved
cases and to assist both police and prosecutors in determining
motive—a critical element in most prosecutions.
As a new special agent, you cannot immediately become a
profiler. You must first serve at least five years as a special agent
and, in addition, be assigned as a profile coordinator in an FBI
field office. The job of the profile coordinator is to work closely
with local and state law enforcement agencies in identifying
cases with which the NCAVC may be able to provide assistance.
As a general rule, profile coordinators do not have the overall
training and authority to provide their own profiles. However,
whenever there is a profiler position opening at the NCAVC, the
profile coordinators are the first candidates that are considered
for the position. These criminal profiling positions are very
competitive, and it may take several years before you are even
considered as a viable candidate.
The selection process is complicated. An education
in Behavioral Science or Forensic Science is preferred.
Investigative experience in violent crime is a real must, so a
special agent’s experience with the Bureau should include
homicide, rape, and other crimes of interpersonal violence. This
experience may have also been obtained from employment
prior to working for the FBI. This is a very subjective and
highly competitive process. If your goal is to become a criminal
profiler, you should be certain that being a special agent serving
in some other capacity would be just as satisfying to you.
I don’t mean to discourage anyone. The field needs good
people. If you understand the requirements and believe you
have what it takes to work in this investigative field, please
work towards that goal. There’s nothing like hard work to get
you where you want to go, no matter what the odds tell you.
Do You Need a Particular College Major to Become a
Profiler?
The answer to that is “no.” In regards to education, it is certainly
necessary to have a bachelor’s degree as a foundation, as well
as good verbal and writing skills, but there is no specific degree
that would make someone much more or less qualified for this
position than someone else. I might recommend a degree in the
area of forensic psychology, but the people who have worked
for me have had an assortment of different degrees from
business management to psychology to even music. Therefore,
you should choose whatever interests you the most.
At some point in your career you will have to get an
advanced degree. However, when you are working towards your
undergraduate or graduate degree, the most important factor
that will separate you from everyone else is actually gaining
hands-on experience in delving into the minds of criminals. To
do that, you’re going to have to work or do research where you
will personally come into contact with a variety of incarcerated
felons. Remember, “In order to understand an artist, you must
look at the art work.” The crime is a reflection of the offender.
70
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
Trial by Fire (Continued from p. 63)
bromide, which paralyzes the diaphragm, making it impossible to breathe. Finally, a third drug, potassium chloride,
filled his veins, until his heart stopped, at 6:20 P.M. On his
death certificate, the cause was listed as “Homicide.”
After his death, his parents were allowed to touch his face
for the first time in more than a decade. Later, at Willingham’s
request, they cremated his body and secretly spread some of
his ashes over his children’s graves. He had told his parents,
“Please don’t ever stop fighting to vindicate me.”
In December, 2004, questions about the scientific evidence
in the Willingham case began to surface. Maurice Possley and
Steve Mills, of the Chicago Tribune, had published an investigative series on flaws in forensic science; upon learning of
Hurst’s report, Possley and Mills asked three fire experts, including John Lentini, to examine the original investigation.
The experts concurred with Hurst’s report. Nearly two years
later, the Innocence Project commissioned Lentini and three
other top fire investigators to conduct an independent review
of the arson evidence in the Willingham case. The panel concluded that “each and every one” of the indicators of arson had
been “scientifically proven to be invalid.”
In 2005, Texas established a government commission to
investigate allegations of error and misconduct by forensic scientists. The first cases that are being reviewed by the commission are those of Willingham and Willis. In mid- August, the
noted fire scientist Craig Beyler, who was hired by the commission, completed his investigation. In a scathing report, he
concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of
flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and
failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of
the fire. He said that Vasquez’s approach seemed to deny “rational reasoning” and was more “characteristic of mystics or
psychics.” What’s more, Beyler determined that the investigation violated, as he put it to me, “not only the standards of today but even of the time period.” The commission is reviewing
his findings, and plans to release its own report next year. Some
legal scholars believe that the commission may narrowly assess the reliability of the scientific evidence. There is a chance,
however, that Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually
innocent person.”
Just before Willingham received the lethal injection, he
was asked if he had any last words. He said, “The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man convicted of a
crime I did not commit. I have been persecuted for twelve years
for something I did not do. From God’s dust I came and to dust
I will return, so the Earth shall become my throne.”
In September, 2009, just days before the government commission on forensic science was scheduled to hear testimony
from Dr. Craig Beyler about his findings, Governor Rick Perry
removed the body’s longstanding chairman and two of its members. Perry insisted that the three commissioners’ terms had
expired and the changeover was “business as usual.” But the
chairman, Sam Bassett, who had previously been reappointed
and had asked to remain, told the Houston Chronicle that he
had heard from Perry’s staffers that they were “concerned
about the investigations we were conducting.”
“Trial by Fire” © 2002 by David Grann. This article originally appeared in the New Yorker. This updated version of “Trial by Fire” appears in David Grann’s collection, THE DEVIL
AND SHERLOCK HOLMES. Reprinted by permission of the
author.
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The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
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Bloomin’ Easy!
One of the best things about teaching forensics is watching your students
mature intellectually. Benjamin Bloom first published his taxonomy of
thinking skills in 1956. As teachers we have an obligation to help students
learn to use their minds in more powerful ways. The chart below lists
suggestions for you to push your students mentally to higher places. Give
them a try; often the difference between an easy forensic assignment and a
challenging one is what you ask of your students.
Chart courtesy of Dr. Alicia T. Wyatt, McMurry University, Abilene, TX
Next issue
will be about
the body.
How it lives,
dies,
decomposes,
and remains.
And the clues
it leaves behind.
Please send
your ideas, labs,
and articles!
admin@
theforensicteacher.com
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The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
73
What’s G
Below are only some of the great training offered by the American Academy
of Forensic Science’s website (www.aafs.org). Please note: all email and
website links are active.
Ask the
Morgue Guy
Q. Over the summer we got a
new principal, an older woman
who had a career in a religious
district. We’re required to submit
our curriculum to her. When I
got it back it was covered with
red marks. She doesn’t want
me to use the words “semen,”
“rape,” “pubic,” or “breast.”
These are words that arise in a
forensics class, especially when
the subject of violent crime
comes up. I suppose I can use
alternative words for some of
these, but semen is a biological
fluid
whose
importance
springs up throughout modern
criminalistics history. What am I
supposed to do? Alan Pushcar,
Elkton, VA.
74
A. Get your ducks in a row. Set
up a meeting and take down
the textbooks, case studies,
and videos you use in class.
Be sympathetic as you listen to
her. Then, calmly explain what
the word means to the criminal
justice system. Show her your
materials that mention this fluid,
and explain it doesn’t have the
cultural meaning it did 20 years
ago. Point out also that students
today know all about it, and
they have many other words
for it that are much worse. If
you taught forensics without
mentioning semen it would
be like not mentioning bullets:
you’re cheating your students
out of the whole picture. Then,
reassure her your class will be
respectful while on the subject.
If all else fails, swear the kids to
secrecy.
DECEMBER 2011
4-9
Alcohol & Highway Safety: Testing, Research & Litigation
To be held at
Indiana University in Bloomington, IN.
CONTACT:
www.borkensteincourse.org
5-9
Basic Bloodstain Pattern Analysis Workshop
Presented by the Specialized
Training Unit at the Miami-Dade Public Safety Training Institute in Doral,
FL.
CONTACT:
Toby L. Wolson, MS
Miami-Dade Police Department
Forensic Services
Bureau
9105 Northwest 25th Street
Doral, FL
(305) 471-3041
Fax: (305) 4712052
twolson@mdpd.com
19-21
Latent Fingerprint Processing Class
To be held at the Great Bay Community
College in Portsmouth, NH.
CONTACT:
www.focossforensics.com
(603) 337-5536
JANUARY 2012
9
Animal or Human? Forensic Determination of Animal and Human Bone
To
be held at the School of Forensic and Investigative Sciences at the University of
Central Lancashire, UK.
CONTACT:
Peter Cross
pacross1@uclan.ac.uk
9-13
Medicolegal Death Investigator Training Course
To be held at Saint Louis
University in St. Louis, MO.
CONTACT: Julie Howe (314) 977-5970
howej@slu.
edu
www.medschool.slu.edu/mldi
12-17
Certified Evidence Photographer Training
To be held in New Orleans,
LA.
CONTACT:
Professional Photographic Certification Commission
229 Peachtree
Street, NE
Suite 2200
Atlanta, GA 30303
(888) 772-2780
Fax: (404) 6146404
www.evidencephotographers.com
13
Melendez-Diaz, Bullcoming, and Williams: Scientific Evidence and the Right
to Confrontation
To be held at Arcadia University King of Prussia Campus in King
of Prussia, PA.
CONTACT:
http://forensicscienceeducation.org/melendez-diazbullcoming-and-williams-constitutional-challenges-and-solutions-to-the-right-toconfrontation/
15
Animal or Human? Forensic Determination of Animal and Human Bone
To
be held at the School of Forensic and Investigative Sciences at the University of
Central Lancashire, UK.
CONTACT:
Peter Cross
pacross1@uclan.ac.uk
23-27
Math and Physics of Bloodstain Pattern Analysis Workshop
Presented by the
Specialized Training Unit at the Miami-Dade Public Safety Training Institute, Doral,
Florida.
CONTACT:
Officer Rosa Holtz
Miami-Dade Police Department
Miami-Dade
Public Safety Training Institute
Specialized Training Unit
9601 N.W. 58th St.
Doral,
FL 33178-1619
(305) 715-5022
Fax: (305) 715-5107
Rholtz@mdpd.com
30- Feb. 3
Outdoor Recovery Courses To be held at the Forensic Anthropology Center at
Texas State (FACTS) in San Marcos, TX.
CONTACT:
www.txstate.edu/anthropology/
facts The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
www.theforensicteacher.com
Going On?
FEBRUARY 2012
3-5
3rd International Conference on Current Trends in Forensic Sciences,
Forensic Medicine & Toxicology
Organized by Indian Association of MedicoLegal Experts (Regd). To be held at the Ramada Hotel Jaipur in Jaipur, Rajasthan,
INDIA.
CONTACT:
www.iamleconf.in
MARCH 2012
5-9
Basic Bloodstain Pattern Analysis Workshop
Presented by the Specialized
Training Unit at the Miami-Dade Public Safety Training Institute in Doral,
FL.
CONTACT:
Toby L. Wolson, MS
Miami-Dade Police Department
Forensic Services
Bureau
9105 Northwest 25th Street
Doral, FL
(305) 471-3041
Fax: (305) 4712052
twolson@mdpd.com
5-9
Detection, Recovery and Examination of Footwear Impression Evidence
To
be held at the Ramada Inn in Jacksonville, FL.
CONTACT:
wbodziak@earthlink.
net
(386) 986-6494
12-14
The 1st Saudi International Conference of Forensic Medical Sciences
To be
held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
CONTACT:
www.scfms.org
12-16
Medicolegal Death Investigator Training Course
To be held at Saint Louis
University in St. Louis, MO.
CONTACT: Julie Howe (314) 977-5970
howej@slu.
edu
www.medschool.slu.edu/mldi
19-23
Basic Facial Reconstruction Sculpture Workshop
To be held at the University
of Oklahoma in Norman, OK.
CONTACT:
Betty Pat. Gatliff
SKULLpture Lab
1026
Leslie Lane
Norman, OK 73069-4501
(405) 321-8706
www.sculpture.outreach.
ou.edu
26-30
Advance Facial Reconstruction Sculpture Workshop
To be held at the
University of Oklahoma in Norman, OK.
CONTACT:
Betty Pat. Gatliff
SKULLpture
Lab
1026 Leslie Lane
Norman, OK 73069-4501
(405) 321-8706
www.sculpture.
outreach.ou.edu
APRIL 2012
3-5
International Marine Forensics Symposium
To be held at the Gaylord National
Hotel in Washington, D.C.
CONTACT:
www.sname.org
15-20
The Borkenstein Drug Course
To be held at Indiana University in Bloomington,
IN.
CONTACT:
Suz Frederickson
(812) 855-1783
info@borkensteincourse.
org www.borkensteincourse.org
23- 27
Outdoor Recovery Courses To be held at the Forensic Anthropology Center at
Texas State (FACTS) in San Marcos, TX.
CONTACT:
www.txstate.edu/anthropology/
facts
Do you have an event or workshop coming up you’d like to get word out
about? Send information about the event, dates, and contact information
and how to register, as well as a website to admin@theforensicteacher.com.
Please send information at lease 3-6 months in advance of the event.
www.theforensicteacher.com
Just
for Fun
Celebrate Holidays
The school year has many
opportunities for the celebration
of holidays. Unfortunately, most
students stop celebrating after
they leave elementary school.
But you have a chance to tie
your curriculum to the calendar.
If you read case studies try to
find some where the crime took
place the same month or week
your class goes over them.
You can even indulge in bad
puns, something expected of
everyone over the age of 25.
For instance, an innocent intro
about carving a turkey can lead
to the topic of dismemberment
and forensic anthropology. Halloween is great for discussing long-dead people and cold
cases. Ireland has had its share
of criminals and St. Patrick’s
Day would be a good time to
highlight some. And who could
forget the St. Valentine’s Day
Massacre? Forensics played a
role in solving that case.
The Lindbergh baby was
snatched on March 1, 1932.
The case was a gold mine of
forensic evidence, and the trial
highlighted police efforts. Ask
your students to look into it.
A quick Google search for crime
and timeline will reveal a wealth
of dates to work with. Set your
students loose, and tie history
to your classroom. Decorations
are practically required!
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
75
The Body
Stoopid
Crooks
The police just dream about geniuses like these guys...
A 19-year old man in Fort Walton Beach, FL arrived home one day and found police
executing a search warrant on his house to look for drugs. When he asked why he
was being detained, deputies said it was because he smelled like marijuana. He replied, “That’s cool. I smoke weed, a lot of weed.” After police found pot in his house
he was arrested.
A 22-year old Bradenton, FL woman was asked for her receipt as she attempted to
leave a Walmart store with a cart of household times. She apparently took offense to
the request and went psycho, trashing a number of displays, hitting a manager with
a stool, punching and spitting on employees, and causing over $1000 of damage. As
if her rampage wasn’t enough, police found pot in her purse and she was booked for
a laundry list of charges.
In a case of applied forensics that would make Gil Grissom proud, an 82-year old
woman and her friend exited a pizza shop where they’d just enjoyed lunch. That
was when 21-year old Tatiana Vargas of New Castle, PA snatched the octogenarian’s
purse. The older woman was so incensed she whacked Ms. Vargas’s car hard with
her cane. Police were able to find the car because of a description the woman gave
to the authorities, and then match the cane exactly to the imprint on the car’s hood.
Next
Issue
Police in South Greensburg, PA chased a car thief into an office building about a
block away from where he was spotted trying to put gas into a stolen car. Unfortunately, the police lost the man in the building. One employee on the fourth floor later
thought it strange to smell cigarette smoke at her desk. She thought it even stranger
that the smoke seemed to be coming from the crawlspace above the ceiling tiles over
her desk. Police were recalled to the building and the thief surrendered peacefully.
76
Lukas Peterson, Charles Iliffe, and Nicholas Mercurio used knives and a hatchet
to demand what they thought was the day’s receipts from the 21-year old clerk at a
Dunkin’ Donuts in Hyannis, MA. Unfortunately for them, the store’s cameras captured them on camera well enough that police were able to track them down. One
of the robbers explained they demanded the bag containing the money because they
glimpsed it sticking out of the clerk’s purse. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until the men
ran from the eatery that they realized the bag only held donuts. They were charged
with armed robbery among other things.
A 90-year old West Harrison, IN man was arrested for public indecency after exposing his private parts to an undercover police officer at a county park. The gentleman’s name was Leonard Dickman.
Douglas Martin, 38, of Riverside, IL wanted his ex-girlfriend to feel something for
him again, and decided the best way to do this was to post on his Facebook page
that he was holding a Korean woman against her will at his home. An acquaintance
saw the post and called police who went to Martin’s house where Martin denied the
kidnapping. In fact, he said, they were welcome to enter and search. Authorities did
not find anyone else in the residence, but did come across a room strewn with pot,
cocaine, and heroin.
Rebekah Michal Tracht-Kader of Holiday, FL was pulled over for driving through
a stop sign. Sheriff’s deputies noticed the car reeked of alcohol and marijuana, as
did its driver. Officers were able to pinpoint the problem when they spotted a box
labeled, “Rebekah’s pot.” She was charged on multiple counts.
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
www.theforensicteacher.com
Stoopid Movies
More stoopid criminals; these guys are priceless.
Click on the cameras below to see the movies (internet connection
required).
www.theforensicteacher.com
The Forensic Teacher • Winter 2011
77