They came to me and said, “Can you look into this case and bring us some peace?”
One thing I learned right off was that “experts” often disagree with each other. At the beginning of my career, I wasn’t all that familiar with what happens when you shoot yourself with a shotgun, what happens to your head, what happens with the blood, in what direction the pieces go, and what happens to the wadding in the shotgun. I wasn’t a ballistics expert, so I sought out people who were. The original person I approached gave me information that turned out to be incorrect, and I had based a good portion of my initial profile on that.
In the beginning, I agreed with the family. I thought the blood looked like it was going in the wrong direction. But that was an error on my part, because I believed what the first expert told me.
I eventually sought out a different expert, but something still seemed wrong with the picture.
A third ballistics expert brought yet another conflicting opinion but one that came with a much better explanation. That’s how I learned that I shouldn’t blindly believe an expert; I need to find out why they believe what they do. We often see a courtroom expert who will give an opinion, but nobody bothers asking him exactly how he came to that opinion. Just because an expert says “In my professional opinion…” doesn’t mean you should automatically believe he is correct. The courts are a great example of this. How is it that the prosecution expert and the defense expert almost always give opposing opinions? They can’t both be right.
A profiler should always have a thorough explanation of each point in his profile so that anybody, whether a police detective or a victim’s mother, can understand exactly why we believe what we write. Any forensic expert should have a thorough explanation as well. I learned in this case to require any expert who analyzes any portion of a case I am working on to do the same.
The Lewis family believed that Brian did not pull the trigger on the gun that killed him. Someone else must have been responsible.
If you shoot yourself and the trajectory is going in a certain direction, it will continue in that direction. The family and private investigators they brought in looked at the blood spatter. Brian was shot sitting in the driver’s seat, and the shotgun muzzle was up against the right side of his neck, just under the jawline. They expected that the blood would go backward toward the backseat or maybe the back part of the driver’s window. But the blood in this case was mostly over the front half of the driver’s side window and on the roof of the car toward the front. It looked like the shotgun blast went up under his chin toward the back left door but then the blood U-turned and came out through the front of his face. The family and its expert thought the back of Brian’s head should have been blown off, but not his face. Wait a minute, I thought. Geez, that is pretty weird.
If I took a wire starting at the butt of the gun and threaded it down the barrel, wouldn’t it blow off the back of the victim’s head? Why did the front of his face get blown out?
If you don’t understand how a shotgun works, you might misinterpret the blood spatter evidence. Most of us are much more familiar with how a handgun works. Usually, when you shoot a handgun, the bullet sails out in a straight line.
Brian, however, used a Remington 870 Express Magnum twelve-gauge shotgun. He used a shell that contained dove and quail shot, lots of little pellets with a bunch of powder propelling them. Basically, instead of a bullet tearing through the head in a straight line, a bomb is launched into the brain. Once that is accomplished, it explodes, and blood gases come into play. They expand, just like a bomb, and the gases move more easily against the places of least resistance. The skull is pretty strong, but the nose and eye sockets are permeable cavities, so Brian’s face exploded but his skull remained intact.
This ballistics issue was one of the things that confused everybody. The family didn’t understand this, and I didn’t understand this, not having a great familiarity with shotguns and shotgun blasts early on in my career as a profiler. Oddly, the first shotgun expert I approached didn’t appear to understand the physics of shotgun ammunition, either. Fortunately, I found a much wiser, more experienced ballistics expert, and he thoroughly explained it.
Now I was contending with determining from where Brian could have been shot. Could he have shot himself in that position? The family believed the shooter might have been in the backseat. That, they believed, was how blood traveled toward the front. The police never addressed the issue.
I purchased the exact same shotgun from Walmart. The next day, I was planning to take a trip, and I was in a luggage shop trying to buy a new bag, and they wouldn’t accept my credit card.
I called the credit card company while I was in the store, and they said, “There were some unusual purchases with your card. Did you go to Victoria ’s Secret?”
“Yes.”
“And did you purchase a shotgun yesterday at Walmart?”
They must have thought Bonnie and Clyde were on the run again.
I HAD TO find a car with the same dimensions and seat heights as Brian’s. Luckily, I had a big old car in my yard that did fine as a stand-in.
You have to reach really far to pull the trigger on a shotgun. Sometimes people use their toes to push the trigger when they kill themselves; some people use a stick. Brian would have had to pull the trigger with his own hands. Could it be done while he sat behind the steering wheel with the gun on the seat?
I’m five foot seven. Brian was four inches taller than me, five foot eleven.
I was able to reach the trigger on the gun I bought at Walmart and was able to push it with my thumb. That proved to me right away that Brian could have, but it didn’t prove that he did. It also showed me that when I went to push the trigger on the gun-because of the way I had to reach-my head was in exactly the right place for the blood spatter pattern shown in the crime scene photos. Another very important clue had to do with where the wadding inside the shotgun shell ends up. While pellets may disperse, the shotgun wadding will continue on its trajectory, in a straight line. The shotgun wadding was in the left parietal lobe, in the posterior region of Brian’s brain. In order to push that trigger, I had to turn my head to the left and lift my chin in order to get in a position where I could stretch my body and arm enough for my thumb to contact the trigger. And sure enough, if you put a rod along the barrel of the gun that ended under my chin and you pushed that rod straight through my head, the rod would pierce the parietal region of the brain exactly where the wadding ended up on Brian. More fascinating, my face shifted up and a little bit toward the driver’s side window, which was exactly where the exploding blood gases caused all the blood coming out the front of Brian’s face to land.
It sure looked-if he was sitting in that seat-like he could have pulled the trigger, and the wadding in Brian’s head and the blood spatter proved it.
But I wanted to make really, really sure that there still couldn’t be another angle at which the gun could be held, by someone else, that could explain the blood and wadding evidence.
I wanted to hold the shotgun up to somebody’s head in that car and see with what angles the shooter worked, so I said to my son, “David, do you mind coming outside and getting your head blown off?”
And he said, “Okay, Mom.”
(Of course, the gun was definitely not loaded.)
We looked around and hoped nobody was watching. I had a boarder at the time and naturally, he returned home at exactly the time I was in the car holding the shotgun to my son’s head.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “nothing’s going on here. I’m calm. I’m just blowing my son’s brains out.”