“What, if anything, did you conclude from these transfer marks, the ones on the bathroom floor?” asks Tuchio.
“Based on the evidence, everything I examined, the entire pattern, it would be my opinion that at some point, probably at the same time that the raincoat was wiped down, the perpetrator removed the gloves from his hands, and at that point one or both of the gloves brushed the floor.”
“Do you have any idea what might have happened to these gloves?”
“No.”
The police have never found them.
Having disposed of all the nitty-gritty details they can’t explain, Tuchio moves to the one they can: the shoe impressions left behind in the blood at the entry hall.
The prosecutor has Prichert identify the two dark running shoes already in evidence. These are the Nikes with traces of blood on the soles found in Carl’s apartment the day they arrested him. The bailiff sets up the overhead projector, and within seconds the first transparency is shot up onto the screen. It shows a picture of the right shoe impression lifted from the tiles of the entry floor. Next to it is an impression lifted at the crime lab from the sole of the right shoe belonging to Carl, all the little swirls and marks, jurors leaning over the rail in the box to get a better look.
You don’t need a microscope to see it. Right down to the tiny breaks in some of the ridges where the wear pattern on the sole has eroded them, like the whorls and ridges of a fingerprint, the two images are identical.
If it’s possible, the transparency of the left shoe is even more dramatic. There is a small V-shaped cut near the heel, where Carl obviously ran over something sharp. It isn’t large, but magnified as it is on the screen, all of the cut’s peculiar and jagged edges stand out like a mirror image on the side-by-side impressions.
Two of the female jurors in the box are nodding their heads, another is standing bent over the rail looking closely. Almost all of them are making notes. That it proves a point not in dispute, the fact that Carl was there, can easily get lost in the clarity and definitive nature of the visual evidence. It makes you wonder, when the time comes for a verdict, will they ask themselves, What do I believe-the picture I saw with my lying eyes or the spin of a hired lawyer in the courtroom telling me what it means?
15
Why would the killer remove the gloves before he left the room?” This is my opening question to Prichert on cross-examination.
“The gloves had blood all over them. You’re not going to leave the room and walk through a busy hotel with your hands dripping blood.”
“Why didn’t he leave the gloves in the room?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you be so certain that he didn’t take them off after he left the room?” This is the question. I can see Tuchio looking up at his witness, hoping he’s caught the drift.
Implicit in my question, of course, is the fact that my client could not have been wearing gloves when he left the room. If so, how did his fingerprints get all over the entry floor and on the hammer?
“It doesn’t fit the evidence,” says Prichert. “Because it doesn’t account for the smears, the transfer marks on the bathroom floor. Or any of the other evidence.” He’s sticking to his story. “For example-”
“I think you’ve answered the question.”
“Let him complete his answer.” Tuchio, slouched in his chair, directs this to me, but for the judge to rule on. “Your Honor, counsel asked a question, the witness should be allowed to complete his answer.”
“Sustained. You can answer the question,” says Quinn.
“For example, if he was wearing the gloves when he left the room, he would not have left fingerprints on the floor in the entry,” says the witness.
Prichert turns it around on me in front of the jury and force-feeds me the theory of their case.
“Also, the blood smears on the handle of the door on the way out of the room. Gloves would be inconsistent with this evidence. Those smears were made by bare hands moving too quickly to leave clear latent prints.”
Carl must have been flying at the speed of light on his way out of that room. From the smeared prints all over it, you might have thought he was frisking the door. Forensics couldn’t get a single print that didn’t resemble the inkblots on a Rorschach test, not that it matters given the bonanza of evidence they found on the entry floor.
“Of course, your answer assumes that the fingerprints on the floor and around the hammer belong to the killer and not someone else?” I say.
“Yes, but the issue is whether that assumption is reasonable,” says Prichert, “and in this case I would say that it is eminently reasonable, considering the absence of physical evidence pointing to any other possible perpetrator.” He sticks his sword in me one more time.
When I turn away from Prichert, I am greeted by Detective Detrick sitting at the prosecution table. If the toothy grin is any indication, he’ll be organizing a human wave out in the audience any second.
“Let me ask you, if the killer took off the gloves in the bathroom, why were there no prints found at that location?”
“I would have to assume it was because he was very careful,” says Prichert.
Of course this begs the question under their theory: Why was Carl so careful in the bathroom only to leave finger paintings all over the entry-hall floor? After being stabbed twice, I leave this as one of those rhetorical items you drop on the jury in closing argument, where Prichert won’t be hiding behind a bush to give me an answer. If I were to pop the question to him here on the stand, he would no doubt say, I don’t know. You’d have to ask him. The “him” in Prichert’s answer naturally would refer to the killer, but you can bet that the glasses on the neon nerd would be flashing their beams at Carl. At the moment I have no need to be walking around with that particular pike sticking out of my chest.
I move on to the extraneous hairs.
“Mr. Prichert, can you tell the jury the purpose of gathering hair and fiber evidence at the scene of a crime?”
“To examine and preserve them,” he says.
“Yes, but for what purpose? What do you use them for?”
“Well, in the case of hair, you would compare, say, a questioned hair sample found at the scene of a crime with a known hair sample taken from a suspect, or it might be a known hair sample, say, taken from a victim and transferred to an article of clothing belonging to a suspect.”
“Is there some vast database of known hair samples maintained somewhere so that if you find an unidentified hair at a crime scene, you can go there and compare it in an effort to find a match?”
“Not in the way you describe it,” he says. “There may be some small collections of known samples held by some law-enforcement agencies, but these would be specialized, confined to certain crimes. Repeat offenders, for example, in sexual-assault cases.”
“But that wouldn’t apply in a case like this?”
“No.”
“So in this case you’re left to compare the so-called questioned hair samples found at the scene with known hair samples that you find where?”
“On various parts of the body. It depends on the particular crime.” Like a cabdriver, Prichert knows where I want to go, but he takes me on a ride through the park.
“But whose body?”
“Ah. I see what you mean. That would depend.”
“On what?”
“Well, for example, you might want to take hair samples from known subjects who might have had occasion to contaminate the scene. First responders, for instance, police officers or emergency medical personnel who might have come on the scene.”
“Was any of that done in this case?”