Behind the Yellow Tape: On the Road With Some of America's Hardest Working Crime Scene Investigators (16 page)

We and Bobby headed to an old sandwich shop called the Yellow Sub, where he’d been eating his whole life, just minutes from the house he grew up in. The hole-in-the-wall sandwich shop was very busy, but the savantlike owner knew everyone by name and exactly what he or she wanted to eat. We were the only ones in the place who had to place an order. Of course, everyone knew Bobby, from softball or from church or from the police department or just from being Bobby. “You’re famous,” we teased as we waited on our subs. In fact, we had been kidding him about that for years, ever since he’d been interviewed by
Popular Science
magazine right after graduating from our program. “Yeah, yeah, more like infamous,” he replied, turning around to shake hands with someone from his church. Everyone knew Bobby Moore; it was like eating lunch with the Lynchburg Elvis.

Just before Bobby had attended the academy, he’d worked a case in which the victim, Loretta Napier, had been shot at close range and was found sitting upright on the floor. But what Bobby and the other investigators saw at the crime scene didn’t seem to add up, and Bobby never really felt he had a good handle on how the murder had occurred—that is, until he came through the academy. When Bobby got back home, he went to the prosecutors, who were considering going after Napier’s boyfriend, and was able to use his newfound knowledge to explain to them how everything had happened. “I could see the whole thing play out in front of me,” he told the
Popular Science
reporter. With Bobby’s new analysis as evidence, the boyfriend pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. “I guess I learned the most about bloodstain at the academy,” Bobby said, chewing through his usual sub. “I guess I use that the most.” That’s probably true with most of the graduates of our program. Bloodstain pattern analysis is the Holy Grail of crime scene investigation training.

We finished our sandwiches and got a tour of the historical part of Lynchburg, culminating with a drive through the Old City Cemetery, hugely popular among Civil War buffs. It’s two hundred years old and houses twenty thousand of Lynchburg’s famous, infamous, and simply strange dead. We were especially intrigued by the history of the “appalling, terrific, bizarre, and unusual deaths” that dot the old cemetery. Of particular interest was the death of poor Parham Addams, who came to his unfortunate demise when his soda water machine exploded and left an imprint of his face in marble. We will certainly pay more attention to the “contents under pressure” warning on all those soft drink bottles.

With our history lesson complete, it was time to say good-bye to Bobby. We had a long drive ahead of us and a looming cold front coming from behind. Bobby gave us his typical bear hug, wishing us well on our journey. Detective Bobby Moore is the definition of “a character,” and he has become a true living legend among all of the graduates who have graced our program. Every two years or so, graduates from all across the country gather back in Knoxville, Tennessee, to participate in the Biennial Alumni Retrainer, to learn new and cutting-edge techniques that are being taught, and to get as drunk as skunks. That’s where Bobby has really become infamous. At the last event we had back in 2006, Bobby tried to steal our Hummer, and when that failed, he and seven other alumni crammed themselves into a Ford Taurus and spent the night at one of Knoxville’s best haunts—a country-western bar called Cotton-Eyed Joe’s. Unfortunately for the proprietors of the establishment, it was quarter beer night. They didn’t turn much of a profit on that night. But come first thing the next morning, there was Bobby, looking fresh as a daisy. “I’m getting too old for this shit,” he said as he scooped up some runny eggs from the breakfast buffet. He probably
is
getting too old for that stuff, but we hope he never changes.

TEXAS RANGERS

San Antonio is the second-largest city in Texas and one of the ten largest cities in the United States. It is the county seat of Bexar County; the city was founded in 1718, though Spanish explorers had been living there as early as 1691. San Antonio was the site of the infamous Battle of the Alamo, where Texans fought against the Mexican army for their independence; in 1968, it hosted the World’s Fair, of which the Tower of the Americas is the only remnant still standing. The San Antonio River flows one story beneath the city, making the River Walk one of the city’s most popular tourist areas. In 2006, the Texas Rangers were involved in some capacity with 886 murder cases throughout the state.

Very few things are left in the world that transcend time. Elephants and alligators are good examples, windows to a past that no longer exists. But even these living dinosaurs are dying out, and when they are gone, generations will simply wonder in awe about a time when they roamed Earth.

Human history has very few examples like these left. Most of us now walk upright, and less and less of us still wear powdered wigs. Yet scattered across the wild Texas terrain, hundreds of miles from nowhere, still roam 116 of the gun-toting endangered species called Texas Rangers.

The Texas Rangers can trace their ancestry back to 1823, when Stephen F. Austin commissioned ten men he referred to in his journals as “Rangers” to protect the Anglo settlements from the giant Karankawa Indians. Since that time, the Rangers have survived abolishment, Bonnie and Clyde, and even Texas governor Ann Richards.

When it comes to the Rangers and their unique brand of law enforcement, not much has changed since the saloon days of the Wild West. They are still the quintessential cowboys, with the boots, the hats, the ultradecorative handmade leather gun belts, the guns of their own choosing (ornate in every sense of the word), and, last but not least, the badges, which are made from a 1947 or 1948 Mexican cinco peso—a holdover from a time when Rangers had to make their own badges so they could be identified by the town marshal.

In the early days, Rangers were essentially provided nothing by the state (or the republic, as it was called back then). They were organized as a militia-type outfit, with each Ranger bringing with him his own horse, gun, and other necessary supplies as part of the deal. In modern Ranger times, the state does provide them with a few necessities, including a gun—though they are not required to use it. In keeping with their heritage, the Rangers can carry whatever gun they want, so long as it falls within a few parameters. They are the only outfit in the entire Texas Department of Public Safety not required to use the standard department-issue Sig Sauer.

Some places in America clamor for gun control, even to the point of pushing for legislation to stop police officers from carrying weapons. But not in Texas and certainly not with the Rangers. Their jurisdiction is the state, and their means are by whatever means necessary.

“They should have ironed him out right there,” Ranger John Martin told us, with a sheepish grin as wide as the Rio Grande Valley. To “iron someone out” is the euphemism many Rangers use in reference to shooting a bad guy. Martin was telling us a story about how he had persuaded a renegade truck driver to stop his rampage through the town. “He was running over troopers, and we weren’t gonna have that,” Martin said coyly, crossing his full quill ostrich boots up on top of his desk. These boots have seen many a crime scene and have been put through many a perp’s door. “What did you do?” we asked, already assuming the answer. “I shot him,” Martin said, as matter-of-factly as if he’d offered the driver a piece of candy.

That’s the Texas Rangers in a nutshell. Try that anywhere else and a cop might get fired, or at least time off without pay and a lot of paperwork. But Ranger Martin was never even questioned. Texas Rangers have been empowered like no other law enforcement agency in the country.

We first met Ranger John Martin at Session VIII of the academy in 2004. During our customary meeting the Sunday night before the class begins, Martin was easily identifiable as the first person we’d ever had wear a cowboy hat to the event. He even kept his hat on during a burial exhumation, while working and digging in heavy, wet snow—the same snow our Minnesota investigator experienced. Since Martin’s graduation from the program, we’ve had four other Rangers follow in his footsteps and have added two others as instructors.

We had come to San Antonio to visit Martin and his unique Ranger unit, UCIT (Unsolved Crimes Investigation Team). UCIT was formed in 2002 after much politicking by a local influential family whose invalid patriarch had been erroneously accused of killing his wife. The case was a tragic example of shoddy police work, not to mention just plain stupidity.

The case was doomed from the initial call, considering that dispatch was informed that they should call “the meat-wagon” (a nickname for the coroner) because they had a “natural causes” death, even though the woman was naked from the waist down and had had her throat slit from earlobe to earlobe.

Eventually, the sheriff’s department showed up and determined that it was a homicide. Yet after working the crime scene for less than two hours, they collected the body and packaged four cigarette butts as the only evidence in the case. They quickly decided that the husband was the perpetrator, even though he was bedridden when they arrived. “Hell, he had three days’ worth of shit in his diaper,” Martin explained to us. Despite the husband’s having no blood on him and the lack of blood trails to where he lay, the sheriff’s department’s whole case was attributed to the invalid husband “acting” sicker than he really was. Eventually, they filed a case against him with the district attorney and considered the case closed.

The case remained unsolved for six years until the son, who had been working relentlessly to get somebody to listen to him about the case, finally got the attention of a victim advocate who got him a meeting with the Texas Rangers. The son told his story to Al Cuellar, the Texas Ranger who’d drawn the short straw, who read the case notes and looked at the crime scene photos. At the end of the conversation, Ranger Cuellar told the son something he had never heard from anyone but had wanted to hear for six years—his father did not kill his mother. Cuellar knew that the case was FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recognition), and that finding out who did kill his mother would be very tough if not virtually impossible. So he promised the son that he would devote one entire week to the case, dropping everything else. If nothing came out of that one week, then there was nothing more that he or the Texas Rangers could do.

Within a couple of days, Cuellar discovered that although a rape kit had been collected on the victim six years ago, it had never been processed. Every day rape kits are collected from victims, many of which are never sent to the lab for profiles. Even in today’s modern forensic world, some people in law enforcement still look at the technology as if it’s witchcraft. Without a profile, DNA cannot be run through the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) for a possible match to another crime, but the backlog in laboratories and the huge caseload of investigators unfortunately puts the rape kit at a very low priority. However, once the kit was finally processed, although the DNA could not confirm who had committed the murder, it was able to exclude who didn’t. The husband was exonerated and removed from the suspect list, though the case still remained unsolved.

Six years of accusations were wiped away with only two days’ worth of good police work. Cuellar would now be elbow deep into the case until he retired. Everyone considered him a great police officer, one of those investigators who lived and breathed the areas he worked, and who knew everybody in town. Some people just have a knack for investigating crime, and Cuellar was one of them. “This is one of those crimes where I bet you could throw a rock from the victim’s house and hit the son of a bitch who did it,” Cuellar said, about the case. He went into the neighborhood and resurrected the time frame, going door to door to ask the folks who lived in the community “who was the meanest no good son of a bitch who lived around here back then,” when the murder happened. The answer for most was easy—Billy Sutherland. Billy Sutherland became a suspect and was coaxed into giving a DNA sample. But at this point in 1996, DNA technology was still evolving, and the test did not pinpoint him as the assailant, though it didn’t rule him out either, as it had the husband. Of course, without any definitive evidence, no arrest could be made, and Cuellar, who was fast approaching retirement, turned the case over to Ranger John Martin. The case was a quagmire, but Martin was eventually able to confirm that Billy Sutherland was the killer through an advanced DNA test from a lab in North Carolina. (Oh, and the four cigarette butts? They were from the guys who’d originally worked the scene.) In the end, it was still hard to prosecute because everybody got their feelings hurt. “It was a pissing match,” Martin said. Even in the face of DNA evidence that proved it impossible, some people were still holding on to the theory that the invalid man had killed his wife. Though Billy didn’t get the sentence that he probably should have, justice was finally served. Solving the case was the impetus behind the creation of a dedicated cold-case unit, and thus UCIT was born.