Everybody laughs.
Tuchio is trying to put as much distance as possible between any of the unidentified hair evidence and the victim or his blood. He doesn’t want any ghost perpetrators popping up on our side of the case, a nameless, faceless killer with three hairs on his head.
“Let’s take the two loose samples of hair that you found just under the toe kick in the bathroom. What color were they?”
“Blond.”
“Anything else you can tell us about them?”
The witness goes back to his notes. “One of the samples was four inches, the other was just under two inches. They were broken at the hair shaft-that is, they were not pulled out of the scalp, and under microscopic examination they appeared to be of similar origin. In other words, under the microscope the characteristics of both samples were sufficiently similar that I concluded they were from the same person. In fact, this was the case with most of the hair samples I found in the bathroom.”
Prichert explains that bathrooms are the place where people routinely comb and brush their hair, often causing breakage or shedding. So you would expect multiple hair samples from the same owner at that location. “I found the samples on the floor under the toe kick of the sink and counter area.”
The prosecutor has the witness describe the area of the counter toe kick in the bathroom. Prichert explains that this is a recessed area running along the front of the bathroom counter at floor level, approximately three to four inches high and the same dimension deep. As the term implies, it is where your toes go when you belly up to the counter to brush your teeth.
“So,” says Tuchio, “if you were standing-say, a maid with a mop-while the mop might fit under this area of the toe kick, would the maid be able to see back into this area to clean?”
Tuchio is trying to go to the same place he went with the chair in the living room, ancient hairs. “Objection. Calls for speculation,” I say. “The witness is not an engineer or an optometrist.”
“The observation is something within common knowledge,” says Tuchio.
Quinn weighs the issue in his head. “The witness can answer.”
“Probably not.”
The inference here again is that the hairs in the bathroom could have been there for some time.
Tuchio knows that the road to reasonable doubt is paved with tiny bricks of imponderables, pesky items in the state’s evidence raising questions for which there are no answers. He’s done a good job diminishing the use of this evidence in our case, but he has missed one point, and I will catch it on cross.
Except for the shoe impressions, much of what follows is window dressing on the state’s case. The heavy hitters will come later, the medical examiner who will testify that the killing was a crime of rage, fingerprint experts who’ll tie Carl to the pinkie print on the hammer handle and the four fingerprints on the floor, and the capper-the two witnesses the cops have lined up, Carl’s former friends who, if Tuchio is to be believed, will step forward with shovels to bury him.
Prichert tells the jury that in addition to the massive amounts of blood in the living room and entry he also found traces, in the form of minute streaks of human blood, on the tiles of the bathroom floor. According to the witness, these resembled similar striations of blood found on the exterior of the plastic raincoat. Prichert discovered that when they laid the raincoat on the tiles in the bathroom, the blood streaks on the floor and those on the raincoat lined up.
“Did you form any opinions or conclusions based on these findings?” asks Tuchio.
“Yes. It’s my opinion that at some point after the victim was killed, the perpetrator entered the bathroom, where an attempt was made to remove blood from the exterior of the raincoat by laying it on the floor and wiping it, probably using a bath towel; that the raincoat was then wrapped in this towel; and that together the two items were then discarded where they were later found by police.”
Prichert also notes that according to housekeeping, though they cannot be certain, it appears that two towels were missing from the hotel suite-a large bath towel, later found in the Dumpster with the raincoat, and another, smaller hand towel that police never found.
Next Tuchio pulls three evidence photos from the cart and has the witness identify them. Two of these are close-ups of items spattered with blood, the large sample case that was on the floor next to the chair where the victim was killed, and a legal-size, zippered, leather portfolio that was on a table near the television. The third shot is of the attaché case that was found open, lying on the couch in the living room out of the line of spatter. Prichert identifies the items in the photos. Then Tuchio brings him to the point.
He directs the witness’s attention to one of the photos, a shot of the attaché case.
“Do you see that mark, that little smudge on the leather right next to the lock?”
“I do.”
“Did you have occasion to examine that mark in your laboratory?”
“I did.”
“Can you tell the jury what that mark is?”
“It’s a bloodstain.”
“Human blood?”
“Yes.”
“Did it belong to the victim?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell the jury whether following your examination of that spot you formed any opinion as to how it got on the attaché case?”
“Looking at the stain under magnification, I observed minuscule, microscopic patterns not unlike brushstrokes in the dried blood at that spot. These strokes were made by the fibers from a fabric, probably cotton. Based on my examination, I concluded that the mark was a transfer stain imparted when a cloth fabric soaked in blood made contact with the leather, and that this contact was probably effected in an attempt to open the lock.”
Tuchio is trying to deal with this, because he knows if he doesn’t, it will fall into my lap. These little smudges of blood, some of them larger than others, were found on the attaché case, the top of the leather portfolio, and the sample case, though on the case they were difficult to make out because, since this was close to Scarborough’s chair, large areas were saturated with blood.
“Let me ask you, with regard to the attaché case, did your examination reveal anything else?”
“Yes. There were similar patterns on the handle where it was touched, on the edge at the top where it was opened, as well as traces of dried blood, again showing evidence of fiber patterns, inside on the bottom of the case.”
“And did you form any conclusions based on these findings?”
“Yes. It appears that someone, probably wearing gloves soaked with blood, opened the case and went through it.”
“Do you know whether they took anything?”
“No.”
Harry and I have had Prichert’s forensics report for months, so I know what’s coming next.
According to the witness, similar evidence of entry and pawing was found in the sample case, but not in the leather portfolio. Prichert says the portfolio was empty and that anyone attempting to open what was essentially a large zippered leather envelope with blood-soaked gloves would of necessity have left stains inside. There were none, either on the outside or the inside.
For Tuchio and the police, this is a puzzle. If anything was taken, it wasn’t found in Carl’s apartment when they turned it upside down during their search. They have also excluded robbery, either as the motive or as a passing frolic after the murder. Scarborough was wearing an expensive Rolex and a two-carat diamond ring, and he had more than three thousand dollars in cash in his wallet when they found his body.
Tuchio quickly passes over all this and gets to the point he wants to make: the gloves. If Carl was wearing gloves when he killed Scarborough, how did his pinkie print get on the hammer along with the other three prints on the floor?
According to the witness, the answer to this question is found back in the bathroom, on the tile floor. There, several fine cotton fiber transfer marks similar to those found on the attaché case were discovered on the bathroom floor. But these were not small dots the size of a fingertip. They were larger, one of them more than three inches in length.