“You did not let them onto the deck?”
“No, sir.”
“But Mr. Freeman continued to be there?”
“No, sir. We moved him outside our tape barrier, too, and our photographer took pictures of the entire scene before recovery began.”
“Permission to approach?” asked Burke.
I nodded.
He handed a packet of four-by-six color photographs to Fletcher. “Are these the pictures that were taken on the deck?”
Fletcher did a pro forma flip-through. “Yes, sir.”
Burke then handed copies to Ms. Delorey and to me.
Long framing shots captured the whole deck, from a handful of mailers carelessly heaped on a table beside the French doors that opened into the stone house to pots of bronze-colored chrysanthemums ranged along the steps. I saw exposed joists where the old decking had been removed, as well as a section of the railing. New planks were stacked next to a pair of sawhorses, and a circular power saw lay on a piece of wood across the sawhorses. From another angle and well behind the yellow police tape, Freeman stood near an older woman and an adolescent girl—the same older woman who now sat on the front row behind Lucius Burke.
I glanced across the aisle. The two young women seated there in support of Freeman were probably Patricia Ledwig and her sister, Carla. I wasn’t sure which was which, though, because they were very similar in looks—same long brown hair, same thin faces.
Two pictures were of a body crumpled on a rocky ledge amid vivid orange and red underbrush. The close-up of Ledwig showed the head at an unnatural angle.
“Explain the photographs numbered five, six, and seven, please.”
These were close-ups of the foundation joists, which seemed to run perpendicularly from the house out to the edge of the deck where part of the railing was missing.
“As you see, there is a large patch of blood here on the edge of the joist.”
“Did you form a hypothesis as to how the doctor died?”
“Yes, sir.”
Looking up at me, Fletcher pointed to the line of new planks that had been nailed to the joists. “It would appear that he had been working near the edge here, probably on his hands and knees. See this can of nails?”
I nodded.
“We think he was struck from the front and fell backward, hitting his head on this first joist and opening the wound that was subsequently found in the autopsy.”
The next picture was a close-up of the joist. “This is where we found hair from the doctor’s head. Whoever did it then pulled him to the edge and shoved him over, getting smears of blood on the edge of the planks.”
Burke directed our attention to photograph number ten. “You are speaking of these smears here on the joist and at the edge of the deck?”
“Yes, sir. If you’ll notice, there’s also a fingerprint.”
“Has the source of that blood been identified?”
“It was the decedent’s.”
“What about the fingerprint?”
“It was from the defendant’s right middle finger.”
“Photograph twelve?”
“Those are fibers caught in some splinters at the edge of the deck.”
“Did you subsequently identify the source of those fibers?”
“Yes, sir. They came from the decedent’s trousers.”
“Were these photographs taken before or after Dr. Ledwig’s body was retrieved?”
“Before.”
“You’re quite clear on that?”
“Yes, sir. As you can see, the photographs are time-dated. I believe you have photographs taken when the body was being lifted up and you can see that the time is several minutes later. The fibers and blood were photographed before we brought the body up.”
“Describe photograph eighteen, if you would. What are we looking at there?”
Fletcher dutifully shuffled through the pile while Ms. Delorey and I did the same. It showed the reddish brown imprint of a diamond and two indistinct lines on the decking. I’d looked at enough shoe tracks in the last month to realize these were the tread marks of someone’s sneaker. And guess who was the only one on that deck wearing sneakers with those marks?
You got it.
Further questioning revealed that it was the blood on the joist that made them question whether the doctor had fallen accidentally. Dr. Ledwig had spoken by phone to a colleague at the clinic at 2:15. Freeman’s 911 call was logged at 4:37. The autopsy confirmed that Ledwig had indeed died during that time period, but when the autopsy also showed that the fatal head wound had probably been administered with a hammer, deputies had gone back to the ravine and searched until they found it. Blood and hair from the doctor’s head were still on the hammer.
Finally, in addition to the traces on the soles of his sneakers and his fingerprint on the edge of the deck, a smear of the doctor’s blood was also found on the young man’s jeans.
Each separate thing could be explained away by a skillful attorney, and when it was her turn, Ms. Delorey proved to be just that. She suggested that the young man’s actions were the natural actions of a close friend of the family. Of course there was blood on the soles of his shoes. He had come to help his girlfriend’s father work on the deck. When the doctor didn’t answer the door, he’d walked around to the back, and yes, he’d crossed the deck to see how the repairs were coming. He hadn’t noticed the blood on the edge of the planks and walked right through it. And when he saw the body and knelt down to call to the doctor, he’d knelt in blood and accidentally got some on his fingers.
“Couldn’t all that be true, Detective Fletcher?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he agreed.
“The blood on my client’s pantleg. Was it a smear or a spatter?”
“It appeared to be a smear.”
“But if he’d hit the doctor with a hammer, wouldn’t he have been spattered with some of the blood?”
“Not necessarily, ma’am.”
“When the hammer was found, was it tested for fingerprints?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Were any found?”
“Only the decedent’s, ma’am.”
“He hit himself?”
“No, ma’am. The handle is made of a spongy black rubber with so many tiny holes that it didn’t yield fingerprints. The prints we found were on the shaft and head.”
“So no fingerprints of my client on the hammer, no spatters on my client’s clothes, which would have happened if he’d been the one to use that hammer—”
“Objection,” said Burke. “Is counsel asserting that she’s an expert in blood spatters?”
“Withdrawn,” said Delorey.
She had made a plausible explanation for the blood, but what couldn’t be explained away was the rest of Fletcher’s testimony. The statements he had taken from the various participants that evening and the next morning made it quite clear that Daniel Freeman had not gone to the Ledwig home to help repair the deck. He had gone to try and change the ultimatum the doctor had laid down to Freeman and his daughter when they told him she was pregnant and that they wanted to marry immediately.
Over his dead body, Ledwig had reportedly said. He told them he would arrange for an abortion and ordered her never to see the baby’s father again. If she refused to comply, he would see to it that Freeman’s scholarship at Fletcher-MacLeod was revoked. He would also cut her allowance immediately, stop paying her tuition, and would forbid her to come to the house or to see her younger sister for so long as the younger daughter expected his support.
Now, young women have been getting pregnant without benefit of clergy for as long as the world has been turning, and fathers have been angry and threatened to kill the man or kick out the daughter for just as long, but in this day and age? When illegitimacy carries few social stigmas in most circles beyond a shrug and a sheepish smile? It puzzled me that a man of Dr. Ledwig’s presumed intelligence and education would try to employ heavy-handed patriarchal power instead of psychology and common sense.