PROSECUTION DAY 4
The prosecution's fourth day began quietly enough. Sgt. Steven Nowicki of the Michigan State Police Crime Lab began things at 8:42. He was part of a four- person state police team that arrived at the Hazelwood house to gather and examine fingerprint and bloodspatter evidence. It was the first time he'd been involved with crime-scene bloodspatter.
He described how he looked for and identified fingerprints, which was done back at the lab. He had ink impressions of the fingerprints of both Leann and Mick so he could compare their prints with the prints he found—the protocol calls for eight matching points on a known and unknown print before they can be declared a match. Then, using a process involving Super Glue fumes to harden the prints so they can't be erased, and two different powders—a talcum called volcano white and a red fluorescent called redwop (powder spelled backwards) that is zapped with a laser to excite it—he searched for prints on the gun, on the magazine and on four bullets. He found no prints on the weapon and just a match for Mick's left thumb on a bullet.
He also found no match on the spent cartridge.
Under cross-exam by Marla McCowan, Nowicki said it was usual not to find prints, and that what comes out through the fingertips is 99 percent water and evaporates. It is the remaining one percent oil the experts have to work with.
Lt. Michael Thomas, a supervising firearms examiner, told the jury that bullets range from 29 grains in weight to 250, and that the Federal Hydroshock
.45s in Fletcher's gun were at the far end of the scale, at 230 grains. He said he ran one test firing that showed that the fragments of the bullet that killed Leann came from Fletcher's Smith & Wesson, and that he also conducted a series of test fires to determine the gunpowder patterns exhibited by the gun.
He shot the gun at cloth targets from six inches, twelve inches, eighteen
inches and so forth, until he could no longer detect residue, at thirty-six inches.
On cross-examination, Legghio asked him if he had measured the pull required to fire the gun. The Smith & Wesson fires either with double action or single action. With double action, pulling the trigger first cocks the hammer, then continuing to pull it releases the hammer, which strikes the cartridge and the gun goes off. In single action, if a bullet has been previously racked into the chamber, the gun fires with a single pull.
Thomas told him that he measured the force needed to fire it in double-action mode and found that it was just over twelve and a half pounds. He didn't test it for single action.
"Wouldn't you have thought it important to test this gun for single-action pull? Had you been informed that this firearm may have been placed in single- action status, wouldn't you have conducted a single-pull test?" asked Legghio.
"I likely would have."
(It was the defense claim that while Fletcher had been reloading the gun, he racked a bullet into the chamber, putting it into single-action mode, which presumably would have required less pull to fire it and made an accidental shooting more of a possibility.)
Legghio also asked if any tests had been done involving dropping the weapon to see if it could discharge accidentally. Thomas said he'd never heard of such tests and didn't conduct them.
He also asked Thomas if the kind of shoulder-length hair Leann had could act as "an effective intermediary" and block gunpowder from getting through to the skin and thus interfere with the stippling pattern.
Thomas acknowledged that it could.
And had any of Leann's hair been tested for gunpowder? It hadn't.
*
Following the morning recess, Sheryl Tortigian, a state police crime-scene investigator and member of the bloodspatter team that analyzed the bedroom, said that they didn't do much Monday night, just pulled the drain trap from the
bathroom sink, then came back on Tuesday to interpret the blood evidence.
There were, she told the jury, several types of blood patterns, and she showed them with drawings on white boards she'd made earlier, using real blood and a pair of scissors for demonstration purposes.
When she dipped the scissors in blood and then, holding on to one end, whipped them in front of a board, the pattern of drops that flew off and landed was called a cast-off pattern.
If the scissors with blood on them touched a surface, they left a transfer or
contact stain.
If blood dripped from them under force of gravity and landed on a board, that created a passive drop.
If blood fell and then was walked on or wiped in some way, it left a wipe pattern.
Other forms of blood patterns, she said, included projected blood, where an artery was cut and blood spurted out onto a surface; a void pattern, where blood had been sprayed around an object that was later moved, revealing a pattern; low-velocity blood spatter, caused when someone stepped on a pool of blood, forcing some droplets to scatter; medium-velocity spatter, which might be caused by a hammer or weapon hitting a blood stain while being swung; and high- velocity bloodspatter, the kind of aerosolized mist of blood sent out into the air from the impact of a bullet.
Finally, she showed the jurors how a drop of blood forms different shapes when it hits surfaces at different angles, one shape for 10 degrees, another for 20 and so on through a 90-degree, vertical fall.
At the scene, she saw a large contact blood stain on the bed cover, high- velocity blood mist on the wall mirror, and lots of blood on the computer stand. They looked for blood drops consistent with projected blood. The object was to find various drops around the room that had been flung out from the body, which left a tail when they hit and splattered. Taking strings and running them back from the various tails, investigators could determine where the shot entered the head. That would be where the strings crossed.
The stage was being set, though no one yet knew it, for one of Legghio's
critical arguments, and one of the critical elements of Fletcher's defense. The state police, testimony was about to show, had run those strings and the place they crossed was in the middle of the room, nine inches above the carpet. Leann, it would seem, had been shot while kneeling on the floor, her head bowed.
Legghio, and his witnesses, would argue that the police were clearly wrong when they did their string work, that such a theory actually violated the law of physics. The jury would agree with Legghio—but that's getting ahead of the story.
*
After lunch, Vickie Hall, a trace-evidence analyst for the Institute of Forensic Science in Dallas—a for-fee private lab that conducts forensic tests for police agencies and defense attorneys around the country—took the stand.
She described atomic absorption tests, used to find evidence that someone has fired a weapon. She said the tests show traces of antimony, lead and barium, three components of the primer mixture in the cartridge. The firing pin ignites the primer, which sets the gunpowder on fire, which launches the bullet.
She received two test kits from Oakland to analyze, the one used to test Leann's hands at the autopsy, and the one used on Hendricks' hands at the subsequent test firing. The kit from Leann's hands tested negative; the kit from Hendricks showed elevated levels of all three elements, meaning more than one part per million of lead, .5 part per million of barium and .05 part per million of antimony.
In the test firing, the levels came back at 4.95 for lead, 13.68 for barium and
2.226 for antimony. "That's an extremely high level of antimony," she said. "This particular weapon is a very good depositor of gunpowder residue on the shooter's hands."
On cross-exam, Legghio asked her if it was possible to shoot a weapon and not have the test show positive.
Yes, she said, "it may give negative results when a person actually fires a weapon. In the thousands of cases I've seen, I've seen numerous cases."
Then she put a smile on Legghio's face when she acknowledged that fully 50
percent of the known suicide cases in her lab come back with negative results. Hardly a precise science.
Legghio asked her if a scanning electronic microscope could have been used instead of a spectrograph to do the analysis. "Yes." Was it? "No." Is it more expensive? "Yes."
And then he asked her if someone didn't have the gun in a traditional position, but was holding it with the thumb on the trigger when it went off, could that affect the results.
"Yes."
Townsend repaired some of the damage on redirect. Hall clarified that guns that are bad depositors of gunpowder residue cause most of the false negatives, and that Fletcher's was a good depositor of residue. And that she'd expect some residue even if it were fired with the thumb.
Up next was a prosecution witness Townsend thought would be key in piecing the forensic bits that were emerging into a clear picture of Mick Fletcher pulling the trigger and murdering Leann. The result was anything but what he anticipated, and would have a shocking effect on the jury.
*
Lt. David Woodford had nearly two decades of experience at the state police crime lab and was supervisor of the microchemistry unit, with expertise in trace fibers and body-fluid analysis. He was dressed in a dark suit, and was blond and bland looking, with a bit of a baby face. He had, he said, analyzed blood on clothing in thousands of cases and had worked on dozens of homicide scenes. He had testified more than 500 times in federal, state and local trials on forensic serology and was an expert in bloodstain-pattern analysis.
Legghio then voir dire'd, which meant he wanted to explore the witness's supposed expertise.
Of his more than 500 appearances as an expert witness, just one—in 1995 or 1996, he didn't remember which—was on bloodstain patterns.
Legghio objected to his being qualified as an expert in bloodstain patterns and was overruled by Judge Cooper. Woodford proceeded as Townsend
continued with his direct examination.
He said that he ran the analysis on the gunk removed from the drain trap in the bathroom and that it had tested positive for the presence of blood.
Had he ever found blood in a sink trap before? "No." But he did this time?
"Yes. Whoever used that sink last had blood on their hands. To me it had to be a fair amount of blood on their hands for any blood to be in the debris. There had to be a significant amount of blood flowing through, especially since it was flowing through with water. And the next person to turn on that faucet would wash that blood away."
Woodford said he ran the test on Leann's vaginal swabs and on a microscope slide found an intact sperm, one he could tell from the shape was fresh. "The tail was intact with the head, and the head was perfectly round and not out of shape in any way."
He also conducted an acid phosphotase test on the boxer shorts confiscated from Fletcher and they tested positive for semen.
And he said he found blood, including high-velocity blood mist, on the gun and on both clips, but found no blood on Fletcher's socks, shoes or pants.
Next came a gripping power-point presentation—a computer controlled slide presentation—of the crime scene.
First, the living room—piano, TV set, red leather chair. The dining room, the small kitchen, with dishes stacked in the sink. The basement stairs off the kitchen. Another of the living room, with a black leather couch and a black-and- white painting hanging over it.
All the mundane ordinariness of mismatched furniture, clutter, dirty dishes, tacky paintings turned into high drama by the knowledge of what lay down the hall. The bedroom photos showed the blinds closed at the foot of the bed, a bed and headboard, a chest next to the bed, a sport coat on a dresser, a mirror, a plant, a five-drawer tall chest, a computer stand and computer, and now, finally, as the Miseners stare transfixed at the big screen, a full-color shot of the massive blood stain that seemed to fill the room, spreading out across much of the carpet, a deep, too deep, red. Red becoming black as the eye moved from the edge of
the stain to the middle.
Woodford broke the tension by going over, again, the various kinds of blood droppings and their corresponding sizes—low-velocity, six millimeters in width; medium-velocity, three to six millimeters; high-velocity, three millimeters and smaller, down to one-tenth of a millimeter, so small the human eye could barely see it.
At one point Legghio objected to a piece of narrative involving blood and how close a gun must be to get it inside the barrel. Where does that information come from? he asked. From this book, said Woodford, pulling a book out of his briefcase and holding it up. "It's a book on bloodspatter by Professor MacDonell."
"Professor Herbert MacDonell?" Legghio asked incredulously. "Yes."
"I withdraw my objection," said Legghio, barely able to contain himself. Herbert MacDonell would be Legghio's star witness the next week.
Woodford had just acknowledged that his guide book—the one he keeps in his briefcase so he can refer to it—was written by the very person who would shred Woodford's testimony in the next week. Legghio couldn't have scripted a better moment, the key forensic witness for the prosecution proclaiming the surpassing expertise of the defense's star—and certainly key—witness.
(Someone later crudely but colorfully asked Legghio if he "creamed his pants" when Woodford held up MacDonell's book. "Yes," he said, breaking into a big smile.)
The best was yet to come. Woodford was only just beginning to help the defense. It was 4 p.m. and his testimony was adjourned until Monday. The jurors were sent home for the weekend. The defense and prosecution went right to work on strategy for week two.
Woodford's return to the stand would be one of the keys in the trial, with one moment of cross-examination that was nothing short of pivotal. It would be a moment that would help galvanize the jury, help it become more of a single- minded entity with a common perception of the events and not merely a collection of individuals and individual thought processes. And the direction this
single-mindedness would take was not what Townsend was hoping for when Woodford had taken his oath.