In his police interview, Donnell made a point of saying that he was never on time. But this particular day, oddly enough, he showed up exactly on time! He even got there early! On this date, he was methodical and did everything exactly correctly.
“When I kicked the door in,” he said, “I saw Frank on the fucking couch, dead. I knew my mom was fucked up, dead or something. I went in there; I panicked. I picked her up, turned her over, I tried to give her CPR. I knew; I just, I just couldn’t stop is what I did. I put her on the bed. I couldn’t leave her on the floor, so I picked her up off the floor. I knew I was fucking up, I knew I was fucking up when I did that. When I grabbed her, I couldn’t control myself.”
He tried to overexplain what occurred. He said he started CPR immediately on his mother, and then he moved her to the bed and continued CPR. His CPR statements were all out of context. Rigor had already set in. Can you imagine doing CPR on a person with rigor mortis? I don’t think so. And if the person was really stiff and their eyes were open and staring, you wouldn’t want to be doing CPR on them. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But you might fake doing it for a minute if you were trying to pretend to be saving her life.
Interestingly enough, he also said that he picked his mother up off the floor. But Renee had been stabbed heavily, and there was blood all over her. She was a mess. He said he did CPR, then picked her up, moved her to the bed, and performed CPR on her again. Before he moved her to the bed, he came out and leaned on his cousin’s car. But no blood was found on his cousin’s car. And neither the cousin nor the cousin’s girlfriend recalled seeing any blood on Donnell.
It had also been snowing, so bright red bloody footprints would have been easily spotted.
He also told the police that after trying to revive his mother, he knocked on a neighbor’s door. There was no blood on that door, either. How did a man who handled his bloody mother, held her head and pushed on her chest while he was doing CPR, have no blood on him and leave no blood anywhere he went? That was impossible.
Based on what I saw, Donnell never touched his mother until after his cousin left the scene. It was only when Donnell’s aunt and the police arrived that he moved his mother’s body to the bed and started CPR.
AT TEN A.M., Donnell Washington was at the house for the third time in less than twelve hours and it was the second time in that period that he was in the residence.
None of this made a lick of sense.
I think that when the aunt arrived, followed by the police, Donnell tried to show himself as a distraught son. He did CPR on a very stiff stiff.
Donnell made yet another interesting statement.
He actually said that after he saw the slash on his mother’s throat, he started looking “for the motherfucking knife.” Most people, when they are at a crime scene and see somebody’s been killed, don’t usually look around for the murder weapon. That’s just not the first thing in a person’s head. Why would you be looking for the knife? Was the knife left there the night before? Because after the cousin was in the room with Donnell, the cousin suddenly jumped in his vehicle and fled. One of the questions I had was, did Donnell return at seven a.m. because he realized, Oh, my God, where is that goddamn knife? Did he then find it, call his cousin, and hand the knife off? That would explain why the cousin disappeared so quickly from the scene. That was one of the possibilities that I developed in the profile.
A person who commits a crime must manufacture a fact-based statement of events, finding a level of truth that fits the crime without revealing a truth he doesn’t want told. I believe Donnell wanted to come up with a fake story, but he had none. He borrowed liberally from the truth and tried to reconstruct it to a later time, a later place. It came off sort of true, because parts of it really did happen. I just didn’t believe it happened when he said it happened.
I TOOK ALL the statements that Donnell Washington made about coming to Frank Bishop’s home in the morning when he came with his son to pick up his mother and moved them back to one a.m., when he came over to get the car.
Donnell said, “I got out of that car, and I banged on the door. I was banging hard as hell, because I’m like, what the fucking hell, she knows I’m here.”
Is that what happened at seven a.m., or is that what happened when he went to pick up the car at one a.m.?
Clearly, Donnell was mad and getting madder. He got crazy about how he would have to kick the door in. He ranted and raved about kicking the door in. Why, if it was seven a.m., didn’t he just kick the door in if he thought something was wrong? His mother might be hurt, dying, or dead on the other side. Why didn’t he kick the door in? Why did he just talk about kicking the door in?
The answer seemed to me to be that he wasn’t worried about what was going on inside, he was just mad that nobody opened the goddamn door. He was pissed off because he was being refused entry-and it probably was sometime after the hour that Frank didn’t like to open his door. It probably wasn’t the first time he had been refused entry.
SUPPOSEDLY, DONNELL CALLED his mother when he wanted to come get the car and told her he was on the way. But if that was true, when he got there, why did he have to bang and bang on the door? At some point, Frank relented and let him in, maybe because he didn’t want him waking up the whole neighborhood.
“What took you so damned long to let me in?” Donnell might have asked Frank. “Why didn’t you answer the phone when I called earlier?”
Donnell was known to have problems controlling his anger and it was possible that Frank threatened to call the police if Donnell didn’t calm down, because Frank had done it before when Donnell’s temper flared up.
Donnell wanted his mother’s car keys. He wanted to be let in; he wanted what he wanted. My hypothesis is that Donnell went over to get the car, and they were too slow, so he became pissed off when Frank wouldn’t let him in, lectured him after he did, and threatened to call the police on him if he didn’t calm down. So Donnell killed them.
Here’s another thing Donnell said in his police interview: “I know she was fighting, man, I know she was trying to hold on. I know my momma, man.”
He might have known she fought her attacker because he was the attacker. Maybe he watched her struggle. Frank went down without a fight but his mother, he knew, lasted longer.
In the early rounds of Donnell’s police interrogations, when they asked him about his mother and Frank’s relationship, he had nothing bad to say. None of the relatives had anything bad to say about Frank, either. But the longer the interview went on, the fewer nice things Donnell said about Frank. At one point he called him a coward. Why would he say that? Somebody killed his mother. Frank was the only one there, and Renee was dead, so it was Frank’s fault. He didn’t feel a bit sorry for Frank. He said Frank was the cause of it. Maybe he was telling the truth there.
Oh, and there was another great statement: “Frank was just a cool guy. All this shit I’m telling you now is shit, is just coming to me. I’m making this shit up.”
Donnell said he spit on Frank on the way out of the crime scene. Yet he told the police that Frank was a nice guy who treated his mother well. Why then would he think that this nice guy got his mother killed, and why would he spit on him?
I think he despised Frank because he felt that if Frank hadn’t antagonized him, none of this would have happened, and his mother wouldn’t be dead. In other words, Frank pissed Donnell off, Donnell killed Frank, and then he killed his own mother, and it was Frank’s fault.
Donnell also said, “I’m not fixing to go to prison behind this shit.”