I looked at what was going on in the home in the hours before the double homicide. There was no breakfast on the table, no plates set out, no dirty dishes in the kitchen. Dinner was gone-if it had ever been prepared and eaten in the apartment-and it didn’t look like anybody had had breakfast yet.
Frank was on the sofa. He was dressed. He had on a pair of jeans and an undershirt, a long-johns type of shirt, and some soft slippers. He didn’t look like he was going out at that moment. It looked like he was hanging around the house.
Renee was dressed in panties and a silk nightshirt, and her sister, Donnell’s aunt, said, “My sister always laid out her clothes for the morning. That’s one of the things she always did. She laid out the clothes, what she was going to wear, everything ironed and ready to go. She was going to a funeral in the morning. If she had gone to bed, she would have definitely laid those clothes out.”
The most pressing question was no longer who did it but when did the murders actually happen? Did it happen in the morning after they had all gotten up, or did it happen before they went to bed?
Donnell was there sometime in the middle of the night…
I considered the possibility that the crime occurred when Donnell’s son said he heard a thump in the living room. But it is unlikely to be the time it happened. Still, even if it had, some rigor mortis would have set in. The fact remained that neither Frank nor Renee seemed like they had been to bed yet. This is circumstantial evidence, but I needed to think about its implications.
The next thing I wanted to do was check out everyone’s stories; where did they agree, where did they conflict? How accurate were their individual reports?
Donnell said when he returned to Frank’s home later in the morning, he busted in the door. This is one of the reasons I go to the scene of the crime whenever possible and see what I can still see. So I went to the boyfriend’s basement apartment.
To reach it, you had to go through a locked outside screen door and then walk downstairs and gain access through a sturdy locked door.
The apartment door itself had not been changed since the crime, and I could see absolutely no evidence that it was ever kicked in. I had pictures of the door from the scene, and I saw no evidence in those that the door was any different. What door did Donnell kick when he “broke the door down”? Where were the signs of damage?
Nobody paid attention to the fact that Donnell said he broke the door down, and yet the door was just fine and dandy. That lit a bulb in my head.
Next I wanted to see the interviews Donnell did with the police. One concerning issue was the CPR. He told the police that when he did CPR on his mother, he knew he shouldn’t have done that because he disturbed the scene.
“I knew I shouldn’t have done it, but I couldn’t help myself,” he said.
I thought, What a strange comment. Most people would think doing CPR was the right thing to do. If you thought there was a chance in hell of saving someone’s life, not much would get in your way. It would not have been wrong to move your mother’s body under those circumstances. And you probably wouldn’t say the words, “but I couldn’t help myself.” What an odd statement. I kept that statement in the back of my mind, because I thought it peculiar.
There was another very damning set of statements about the CPR issue. Donnell said as soon as he found his mother lying facedown on the floor, he picked her up, turned her over, and put her on the bed. Then he proceeded to give CPR. But Lamont said when he arrived Donnell had run outside to tell him his mother and Frank were dead and when he followed Donnell back into the apartment, he saw his aunt “facedown on the floor.”
Seems to me Donnell didn’t exactly rush to give CPR to his mother. He waited until his aunt and the police showed up!
PEOPLE TEND TO have problems coming up with stories that sound truthful when they have to explain what happened (and they can’t be entirely forthcoming). One method often used is to take an episode that really happened and move it to another point in time. This way the storyteller runs through the events as he saw them and need not continually fabricate details. The result is a fairly honest-sounding tale, which it is, except that events didn’t happen when the storyteller claims they did. The emotions one felt at the time can also be described and come off as sounding truthful because they were truthful at that earlier time.
Donnell made a number of statements that could have related to different actions that occurred at an earlier time than when he found his mother dead in the morning.
The first interesting statement was the one about Donnell doing CPR on his mother: “I knew I shouldn’t have done it, but I couldn’t help myself,” he said.
What if that statement wasn’t about CPR, but about murder? What if he murdered his mother? If you roll that statement back to an earlier time, say, to the time Donnell might have murdered his own mother, the weird statement makes a lot more sense. I know I shouldn’t have done that, but I couldn’t help myself. He shouldn’t have done that. He shouldn’t have killed her, but he couldn’t help himself. Why couldn’t he help himself? Because something got so out of hand that he had to do it?
Donnell made another statement that bothered me: “I don’t mind that my mother’s dead,” he said. “I just don’t like the way it went down.”
He didn’t care that she was dead. That showed a person with a lack of empathy, which is a sure sign of a psychopathic human being. Also, given his criminal history, it was not unlikely that he might have been a psychopath. He had no empathy for the victim, even if she was his mother. He didn’t care that she was dead; he just didn’t like the way it went down.
If he was involved in it, I guess he wouldn’t like the way it went down, because he ended up killing his mother, and chances are he kind of liked having her around. She was useful, and maybe he didn’t mean to kill her. Maybe he had to kill his mother.
What was really going on? Did Donnell Washington tell the truth?
LET’S STEP BACK a bit.
The family said Frank Bishop, the boyfriend, was the target of this crime. It wasn’t the mother. Could they be right? Why would Frank Bishop be the target?
First of all, the attack occurred at Frank’s residence. That makes sense in supporting the boyfriend as the target theory. Usually, if a person wants to kill somebody, they go to where the person lives. Renee Washington, Donnell’s mother, stayed there sometimes, but she didn’t always, so if they wanted to kill Renee, why not go to her own house and kill her there and leave Frank out of it?
Donnell picked up the car after midnight and brought it back at seven a.m., so unless the killer was actually watching the residence, he would not know Renee was even there that night, because her car wasn’t there.
No one was permitted in the house unless they called first; Frank didn’t open the door to strangers. If some crazy person from a gambling joint, or a drug gang, were after Renee, Frank wouldn’t know them and would not have opened the door.
Renee was not dressed at the time she was killed. Frank was. She was in the back room in her nightgown, and he was killed first. So whoever came to Frank’s home was let in by Frank and attacked him. He also received the more violent attack, even though he fought back less than Renee did. He had almost no defensive wounds on him, despite a shockingly violent assault. He was stabbed and stabbed. She was stabbed just enough to kill her. Usually when you see major anger released on a victim, that’s the person the killer was after.
I found evidence that there was a show of anger before Frank was attacked.
The table in the living room was tossed, and it seemed like Frank wasn’t expecting things to turn volatile. He was just sitting docilely on the couch, the table was thrown, and then the attacker went after him.