Behind the Yellow Tape: On the Road With Some of America's Hardest Working Crime Scene Investigators (13 page)

On our last day in Duluth, the day after the blizzard, with all schools closed and most of the roads too, Sergeant Eric Rish braved the weather to pick up us two lowly stragglers, with empty stomachs and day-old waffle burps. We drove around a bit as best we could, looking for something to eat, reminiscing about the academy and our friendship, and eventually ending up back at the station. We talk often to Eric, checking in with him from time to time, if for nothing more than to see how the weather is. But we knew something about Eric that we had never discussed with him before. Eric is a cancer survivor, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

As we sat at Eric’s minimalist desk, snow permeating all around the windowsill, we clicked on a tape recorder and began our questions. “How has cancer changed you?” we asked tentatively, as if we shouldn’t be prying into such a personal part of his life. In typical Eric fashion, a small tear slipped out of his left eye. He dabbed it with his thumb. We’d seen this before in him, back when he’d flown to Knoxville to tell the feds about his experience at the CSI School and what it meant to him and the City of Duluth. “I don’t let things bother me,” Eric said matter-of-factly. “One day, I finish a half-marathon and that night while I’m in bed I reach down and feel around my stomach and feel something the size of a block of Velveeta. I didn’t feel bad; I just knew that it wasn’t right.” Eventually, after Eric endured eight horrible sessions of chemotherapy, his cancer went into remission.

We then shifted gears, asking him how he had found out about the academy in the first place. “We got a fax about the training,” Eric told us. Fax blasting is a traditional means of recruiting cops for training. Many law enforcement agencies still don’t have e-mail, and not just small departments—the CSIs in New York City don’t have working e-mail either. “Then we had a case where a graduate from Tennessee came to town on an investigation, and we talked about the academy.” Around the same time Eric had received the fax from us, NFA graduate Tim Williams, from the Gatlinburg, Tennessee, police department, had come to Minnesota on the tail of a suspected murderer who had fled to Duluth. (The suspect had never bothered to change cars, and it was eventually found in the Home Depot parking lot where the suspect was then working.) While in town, Tim had talked to Eric about the academy.

“How did you get into this awful business in the first place?” we asked Eric, winding down our conversation. “Three words,” he said: “the Congdon murders.” The Congdon murders were dubbed the “trial of the century” in Minnesota. The case is a strange and convoluted tale of Marjorie Congdon and her husband, Roger Caldwell. Marjorie was the adopted daughter of Elisabeth Congdon, heir to a taconite fortune in Duluth. In 1977, Marjorie was suspected of having conspired with her husband to kill her partially paralyzed mother and her nurse, though she was ultimately found not guilty, and Roger pleaded guilty as part of a deal to have his sentence reduced to time served. In 1982, while in high school, Eric had heard one of the investigators talk about the case and the fingerprint evidence that had led to Caldwell’s arrest. Even though the fingerprint evidence against Roger Caldwell proved to be erroneous, it nevertheless sparked Eric’s interest in forensics. He was hooked from that moment on and chose policing as his career path. Though he has been promoted out of the day-today minutiae of the unit, he still champions forensic training, sending as many Duluth investigators as possible through the NFA program.

With our visit to Duluth over, we clicked the tape player off and prepared to leave, with hopes of catching a flight from Minneapolis, which had received considerably less snow. Driving the two-hour journey, we discussed the cold and the snow, and laughed about a picture Eric’s wife, Kris, had shown us of two young boys sweating in a traditional (i.e., nude) Finnish sauna. Eric, of course, had been one of the boys. Eric’s mother is a full-blooded Finn and had passed on the tradition to her son. “For Christ’s sake, you didn’t have to show that,” Eric had exclaimed to Kris as we sprayed asparagus from the hotdish we were eating. Like all good Finns, Eric uses the sauna regularly to combat stress and decompress from life’s worries. We know Eric well and know that deep down, regardless of what he might say, he does let things bother him, stressing about them day and night because he’s a good officer, a damn good officer, and has great aspirations to one day be chief of the town in which he has worked all of his life. And we know that when he meditates in the heat, he thinks about his cancer, his wife, and his kids. Kris had told us, again with that one tear streaming down Eric’s face, about how they had found out his cancer was in remission. Their daughter had “wished” it away around Christmas time, throwing a penny into a wishing well at a local mall. That same day, the call had come from the hospital telling them that his cancer was gone. In typical childlike fashion, the daughter was nonchalant about the information, telling her parents that she’d already known it was gone because she had just “wished it away.” And when we think of Duluth, the snow, the ROV, the root beer, and the Rishes, we wish for Eric’s cancer to continue to stay away, too.

LYNCHBURG POLICE DEPARTMENT, VIRGINIA

Lynchburg, Virginia—the fifth largest city in the state—is unique in that it doesn’t lie within a county. Instead, Lynchburg is surrounded by five counties, and is almost at the geographical center of Virginia. In its early days, Lynchburg was home to the largest Quaker population in America, but most of the Quakers abandoned Lynchburg in the early 1800s in opposition to the slavery that was happening at the time. Founded in 1786, Lynchburg was named for John Lynch, who owned a ferry service allowing people access to the other side of the James River. Mr. Lynch also put up the first bridge across the river, which eventually replaced his own ferry system. The James River was a major source of economic importance to Lynchburg, transporting tobacco and other items on shallow boats called
batteaus
, which were so important to Lynchburg that even today the city hosts an annual Batteau Festival. The police department has 202 employees.

Robbery. Assault. Vandalism. Grand theft auto. Sounds like the rap sheet of a hardened criminal, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not. It’s the unofficial rap sheet of a cop—one of the most notorious graduates of our crime scene program, Bobby Moore from the Lynchburg, Virginia, police department. Bobby Moore spent his ten weeks at the National Forensic Academy working hard and studying hard, but playing even harder. We had no idea what we had gotten ourselves into when he arrived with all of our information already written down on a sheet of paper: birth dates, home addresses, Social Security numbers—when we met, he was already screwing with us. He partied and pranked us day in and day out as soon as class began. None of the staff of the school were safe. With the help of his fellow student cronies, we were, over the course of ten weeks, abducted from our vehicles, chased at high rates of speed, crime-scene-taped, and Silly Stringed. Our houses were rolled with toilet paper; our yards were vandalized with every Garage Sale sign, For Sale sign, and Lost Dog reward sign within a twenty-mile radius; and our doorknobs were strategically wiped down with Vicks VapoRub—a gift that keeps on giving, well into the night. If he hadn’t already been a cop, we might have considered calling one.

As a matter of fact, we should have never even met Bobby in the first place. As a native Virginian, he shouldn’t have been attending the school in Knoxville, Tennessee. Virginia is the only other state in the country with a forensic training program for crime scene investigators, and although its academy is open only to Virginians, it’s free to the officer’s department—if he or she can get a slot. When the time came for Bobby to go through the program, he discovered he’d been put on a waiting list that was more than a year long. Bobby is what we call in the South a “shit stirrer,” and the fact that the Virginia academy wouldn’t let him into its program didn’t sit well with him. So he found our CSI training school in Knoxville; persuaded his chief to let him come to Tennessee; and, for the first time in history, someone left Virginia to be forensically trained in the art of crime scene investigation elsewhere. Since that time, three other investigators have followed his lead. This has caused quite a stir at the Virginia academy, not to mention a curriculum change. Needless to say, they are not that happy with Bobby. Good thing for us he is a shit stirrer.

“Hell, all they do all day long is sit in the classroom and jabber,” Bobby claimed of the Virginia academy, as he revved up his Taurus police car. “They can’t compare to what you guys are doing down there, and they know it,” he continued. Bobby speaks with a wonderful antebellum drawl. He was taking us on a tour of Lynchburg, where he has lived and worked all of his life. Lynchburg, Virginia, is a quintessential Civil War town, located on the banks of the James River. Its location made it an essential transportation and supply hub for the confederates. Modern-day Lynchburg is known for basically two things: Liberty College, home to Jerry Falwell’s ministry, and the tallest water fountain east of the Mississippi River. This water fountain, a water pump donated to the city from an old construction site, sprays tannic-acid-colored water hundreds of feet into the air in a fine stream. It looks more like a burst water main than a water fountain.

Bobby’s law enforcement career began simply enough in the Virginia corrections system as a jailer, which had two prerequisites: a high school education and size. Bobby is a big and intimidating fellow, and with his diploma in hand, he was hired on the spot. Here is where he honed his craft—not in law enforcement practices per se, but in his ribald sense of humor. And with a literally captive audience, he practiced night and day.

Now imagine how you would feel if you were lying in a jail-cell bunk, sound asleep in the middle of the night, when all of a sudden this big corrections officer busts into the room with a flashlight, nervously scrambling to shine it under the bunk. Imagine, then, him doing this in several cells, not saying a word. The inmates would of course get restless, demanding to know “what the hell was going on.” Then, without having uttered a single word during the commotion, Bobby, just before shutting the door behind him for the night, would say straight-faced: “Got a report that a python had gotten loose,” and slam the door for good after finishing the sentence.

Believe it or not, deep down inside Big Bobby’s tough outer shell lies the heart of an extremely good guy, and if you survive all of the bullshit that his big ol’ mouth puts out, you might just get lucky enough to find it. Just as long as you’re not a prisoner on his watch.

We had come to Lynchburg to help Detective Bobby Moore and the rest of his gang look for some human remains that were thought to be part of a cold case dating back to 1989. In 1995, a skull had been found near the entrance to Blackwater Creek Park, which, coincidentally, is located almost directly below (down an extremely deep decline off a cliff) the house where the missing person from the cold case in question once lived. This was where we would begin our search, in the hopes of finding more remains.

On the morning of our search, we met Bobby and the other CSIs at the Lynchburg Police Department, housed in one half of the First Methodist Church of Lynchburg, which was erected in 1815. The other half of the church is condemned; it’s falling in on itself and is too dangerous to occupy or worship in. Bobby’s group consisted of a ragtag bunch who, though not dedicated to a crime scene unit, all include crime scene investigation as part of their duties. One of these guys, John Romano, another graduate of our program, is unflatteringly called “Monkey” because he indubitably looks exactly like Curious George. Every crime scene unit has a whipping boy, and in Lynchburg, Monkey is theirs. When we arrived and were introduced to the group, we said hello to everyone and “Hi, John,” to our former student. Nobody, absolutely nobody, in the unit knew who we were talking about. They had no earthly idea who “John” was. Monkey had become the only name by which anyone knew him.