Of the eighty-seven human strands, a good number, fifty-six, were multiple offenders. That is, they were classified as “questioned hair samples,” meaning that their owners were unknown but that microscopic examination revealed they were duplicates and in some cases triplicates coming from the same unknown person.
According to Prichert, this would not be unusual for a hotel room where tenants might spend anywhere from one to several days in close living quarters. He tells the jury that most of the hair samples were collected using a special vacuum with a small micron filter to trap the hair and small fibers. In areas close to the victim’s body where he did not want to disturb other potential evidence, he used tape to lift any hairs or fibers. He explained to the jury that in a suite that size, with deep plush carpets, heavy upholstered furniture, and heavy curtains that hung to the floor, you could easily find a good number of hair samples, most of which have probably been there for a long time.
Tuchio pays particular attention to the thirteen questioned samples of hair found on or near the back of the chair where Scarborough was murdered and six unidentified samples found in the bathroom on the tile floor either near or under the toe kick of the bathroom counter. There were several hair samples on the counter itself and in the sink in the bathroom, but all of these were identified as belonging to the victim. Of the thirteen in the living area, most belonged to the victim himself and were severed by the jagged edge of the hammer’s claws as it punched holes in Scarborough’s head. But five of them on or around the area of the chair where the body was located, one a kind of sandy brown color, three blond, and one that had been subjected to enough different dyes that Prichert could not determine its true color, are unidentified, so-called questioned samples and belonging to persons unknown.
In addition there were two blond hairs, one four inches long and the other much shorter-he can’t remember the precise length-as well as several gray hairs and two brown samples, all of which were collected from the bathroom.
“Let’s start with the five hair samples found closest to the body, the ones you couldn’t identify. Can you tell the jury anything about these hairs?”
“Two of them I might classify as floaters, one blond sample of questioned hair about four inches in length and one shorter brown sample about an inch in length.”
“What do you mean by ‘floaters’?”
Prichert explains to the jury that if you’re looking for trace evidence deposited at the scene of a crime, you don’t usually tear up the carpet and look underneath. In collecting fibers or hair, unless there is some other reason to probe deeper, technicians usually look for surface deposits likely to have occurred during or about the time that the crime was committed, what the witness calls floaters.
“These four strands, the brown and three blond, were not on the surface of the chair,” says Prichert. “They were tucked into crevices formed by the back cushion at the level of the seat on either side at the back of the chair. They were sufficiently shallow that it was difficult to tell how long they might have been there.”
“What about the other eight unidentified strands of hair found on or near the chair?”
“All of those were tucked deep enough into crevices in the upholstery of the chair that I was able to exclude them as not being part of the crime scene. Most of them were balled up and caught up in filaments of dust, indicating that they’d been there too long to be connected to the crime.”
“Would you normally expect to find human hairs in that location, in the cracks of an upholstered chair?”
“It’s very common.”
“Why is that?”
“People sit, hair sheds, sometimes it gets caught in the tight spaces of the upholstery and is pulled out or more likely broken somewhere along the shaft. Repeated body movement in the chair and gravity can cause the loose strands of hair to migrate into crevices, usually between or at the edge of cushioned areas. In this case it was a leather chair. Loose hair would tend to slide easily, and unless it fell on the floor, it would slip into crevices almost immediately.”
“Did you find any unidentified hairs on the body or the clothing of the victim?”
“I found several strands belonging to the victim himself, but no unidentified or questioned samples, no.”
Tuchio turns his attention back to the club chair in which the cops theorize Scarborough was sitting at the time of the attack. He has the witness explain that the cushions on that particular chair were not loose. They could not be removed by a maid in order to dust and vacuum under and around them. Both seat and back cushions were stitched to the fixed upholstery of the chair.
“A maid would have to use a crevice tool to vacuum in the cracks,” says Prichert. “And there was evidence that this had not occurred at any time in the recent past.”
“And what evidence was that?” asks Tuchio.
“There were particles, small tufts of dust at or near the area in the crevices where both strands of hair, the one blond and the single brown hair, were found.”
“And what if anything did you conclude from this?”
“That the area of the chair in question, the crevices along the back cushion at the level of the seat, had not been vacuumed recently.”
I would give Prichert the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval if he weren’t doing such a good job undermining our evidence.
“So what you’re saying is that those two strands of hair could have been there for some time?”
“Yes.”
“In your opinion could they have been there as long as a week?”
“Yes.”
“Could they have been there for several weeks?”
“It’s a possibility. At some point you would expect them either to migrate deeper into the crevice of the upholstery or to fall victim to a cleaning, in which case they would be removed.”
“If they were there for a long time, would they disintegrate?” asks Tuchio.
“The hair shaft itself will resist deterioration for years. In this case neither of the evidentiary strands of hair included a follicle or any tissue; they were broken at the shaft. So there is no way to determine when the hair shaft itself was parted from its owner. Determining how long they’d been there at that location would at best be a guess.”
“Did you find any evidence of blood on either strand of hair?”
“Yes. Under microscopic examination both strands of hair revealed substantial evidence of dried blood.”
“And what if anything did you conclude from this?”
“That based on the fact that the victim’s blood had run into the crevices at the site where each of these hair strands was located, I concluded that it was not possible to determine whether either strand was deposited on the chair at the time of the commission of the crime or at some point much earlier and was therefore entirely unrelated to the crime.”
“So is it your opinion that the questioned hair samples found on or in the crevices of the subject chair are inconclusive in terms of any evidentiary value?”
“That would be my opinion, yes.”
“Let’s turn to the unidentified hairs in the bathroom. Where did you find these?”
“Almost all of them were vacuumed from under the toe kick at the bottom of the built-in bathroom counter. There is a tight space there where the wood at the bottom of the counter meets the tile floor. Most of the questioned hair samples found in the bathroom were located there. There were, I think, two loose unidentified hair samples that were just under the toe kick. Both of these I collected with tape. The others I vacuumed.
“And the colors of these samples?”
“Oh, it was the United Nations,” says Prichert. “Bathrooms tend to be that way.”