Morgue (22 page)

But as they looked closer, they started to wonder. Her jeans were ripped along the zipper, as if someone had tried to yank them off her. And when they rolled her body over, they also found a small bullet hole, no bigger around than a little finger, in Ernestine's back.

Their theory quickly changed. They knew entrance wounds are usually smaller than exit wounds. So because the wound in Ernestine's back was smaller than her belly wound, they reckoned she must have been shot from behind and the bullet exited her belly in a spectacular (and fatal) gust, spraying the wall just two or three feet away with gore.

This was the first murder in Platte County in five years, but Barney Fife himself could have solved this whodunit. Ernestine couldn't possibly have shot herself in the back with a high-powered hunting rifle, or any other gun for that matter. That seemed clear.

Less than twelve hours later, a clinical pathologist at the University of Wyoming examined Ernestine's barefoot, pudgy body, still wearing her blue-striped cotton tank top and jeans. She was five-foot-two, a hundred and forty pounds, with long black hair. He noted a name tattooed on her left hand—ARCENIO—with an X surrounded by stars, maybe an ex-boyfriend or ex-husband. He also found unexplained bruising on Ernestine's chest, and a staggering blood alcohol level of .26 percent, more than twice the legal limit for driving in Wyoming at the time.

And although Ernestine's innards were a bloody mess, he confirmed quickly what the cops told him: An inch-long oval entry wound in the middle of Ernestine's back that severed her spinal cord, and a jagged exit wound in her belly—more than four inches at its widest—from which pieces of her bowels now protruded. The bullet had passed back to front, according to his autopsy report.

So the pathologist who performed the autopsy and state crime lab technicians swiftly concluded that the bullet entered Ernestine's back and broke into two pieces when it smashed her spine. The fragments then passed perfectly horizontally through her abdomen, piercing her aorta, liver, kidneys, diaphragm, bowels, and spleen before exiting her belly. Two large chunks of the bullet's core and jacket lodged in the bedroom wall. The bullet's path was parallel to the floor, suggesting the rifle had been no more than twenty inches above the floor when it was fired.

Given the path of the bullet and the distance to the wall, state experts deduced Ernestine had been kneeling or squatting when she was shot, and her shooter had also been very low to the floor.

So Platte County's coroner—a quirky, gabby funeral director who campaigned for the job saying he was the only guy in town with a vehicle large enough to haul a dead body—ruled Ernestine's death a homicide.

Martin's fingerprints were found on his rifle's stock and the ammunition box, and Ernestine's prints were on the rifle scope and barrel, but neither of their fingerprints were found on the trigger, the bolt, or anywhere else on the big gun. Vegetable oil and graphite particles were found on Ernestine's left hand and the rifle barrel.

But no blood or human tissue showed up on the muzzle, and the state crime technicians found no gunshot residue anywhere on Ernestine's shirt, suggesting the shot had been fired from at least three feet away.

Martin swore he never heard a gunshot, even though he slept just down the hall in the little trailer. Impossible, the cops said. He must be lying. That .300 Weatherby Magnum—a small elephant gun, really—would awaken the dead.

Friends told the cops that Martin and Ernestine had a stormy, booze-fueled relationship. Her mother told them how Ernestine was threatening to leave him. But for every circumstance that hinted at Martin's guilt, another contradicted it.

Yes, Ernestine had flirted with suicide maybe a dozen times before—several unnatural scars on her wrists were casually noted in her autopsy—but she had been in a happy mood just hours before, partying that day with male friends. After all, Martin had seen her playfully wrestling with one of them in the park hours before the shooting. She didn't seem suicidal to friends who saw her that day.

Yes, Martin had been sleeping on the couch after an argument a few days before, but his newly broken arm in a sling made loading, cocking, and firing a high-powered rifle unlikely.

Yes, cops had been called to domestic disputes at the trailer a half dozen times before, and Ernestine had even begged them to seize Martin's hunting rifle, but time and again in brutal interrogations after the shooting, Martin had steadfastly insisted he didn't kill her. He'd been as helpful as he could the whole time, and the usual liars' tells were missing.

So it didn't add up perfectly, but investigators and prosecutors believed they had enough to prove Ernestine died in a homicide, not a suicide.

Their theory, completely circumstantial: A jealous Martin and a drunken Ernestine had quarreled in their bedroom. He'd grabbed her violently enough to rip the zipper and pop the button off her jeans, then thrown her to the floor. As she rose with her back to him, he grabbed his rifle from beneath their bed and shot her in the back from his kneeling position, spraying blood and gore onto the wall. Ernestine then twisted as she fell onto her back, they contended. Martin then placed the rifle between her legs to make it look like a suicide and called police.

Five days after a single, fatal shot in the dark, Martin Frias was arrested for the first-degree murder of his common-law wife Ernestine Perea, and the State of Wyoming seized his children. He was jailed on an impossible half-million-dollar bond.

*   *   *

Court dockets in Wyoming aren't long. Martin Frias went to trial five months later, barely understanding what everybody was saying about him.

His court-appointed lawyer, Robert Moxley, had just passed his bar exam a few years before and was assigned to the sleepy little public defender's office in Wheatland, where murder cases were rare. When his own investigator bought into the prosecution's theory that Martin had shot Ernestine in the back, things looked grim. Moxley threw his entire effort into a reasonable-doubt defense: Without witnesses or solid forensic evidence that Martin premeditated Ernestine's murder and pulled the trigger, the tiniest shred of doubt existed. Moxley crossed his fingers and hoped the jury would acquit.

Moxley miscalculated.

The prosecution put on a convincing case, even though it was entirely circumstantial. Witness after witness painted stroke after stroke on the emerging portrait of Martin Frias as an angry, jealous boyfriend who was capable of a rage killing. The only other people in the trailer that night were three preschoolers. And Frias's undocumented status only made him look more guilty.

Prosecution witnesses also described how a test-firing of the big rifle inside the trailer sounded like a car horn or a jackhammer, casting serious doubt on Frias's claim that he never heard a shot.

Moxley could only parry. He had no reason to dispute the state's autopsy, and he didn't have much of a budget, so he had no medical experts to refute it. About the best he could offer was a vain attempt to cast blame elsewhere.

A therapist who met with Ernestine's four-year-old daughter reported that the child first claimed she shot her mother.

“I shot her in the back. I shot her in the back. I shot her in the back,” the child reportedly told the therapist.

“Did you talk to your grandma about what we talked about?” the therapist asked later.

“Uh-huh.”

“What did Grandma say about that?”

The child just said, “Shhhhh!” then left the office to buy a soda from a machine in the hallway, chanting, “I can't tell you, I can't tell you, I can't tell you, I can't tell you, I can't tell you.…”

Chillingly, a psychiatrist who also examined the child described her as very aggressive with symptoms of deprivation and split personality. At one point in the examination, the child took a notepad and ran it across the psychiatrist's neck several times. “I cut your neck off,” she said each time.

A crime technician testified that Martin's hands had been swabbed for gunshot residue, but inexplicably the swabs that could have helped prove his guilt or innocence were never tested.

Other defense witnesses testified that it would have been nearly impossible for Martin to have fired the big rifle, especially from a kneeling position, because his wrecked arm was in a sling and nearly useless. A crime technician admitted that he'd tried to cock and shoot the big rifle with one arm, but couldn't. The prosecution quickly countered with a doctor who said Martin could have fired the gun.

Finally, the former director of the state crime lab testified that, based on his evaluation of the state's forensic evidence, no substantial inculpatory or exculpatory evidence had been found. He found nothing that would prove (nor disprove) what happened that terrible night.

In the end, nothing stuck for Moxley.

After seven days of testimony, the seven-man, five-woman jury took less than five hours to convict Martin Frias on the lesser charge of second-degree murder. Just before Christmas 1985, the judge sentenced him to twenty-five to thirty-five years in the Wyoming State Penitentiary.

His children and his freedom were taken away, his lover was dead, and Martin Frias would be an old man when he got out. He couldn't understand most of what happened.

America hadn't turned out to be what he expected.

*   *   *

As Moxley prepared for his appeal in the dead of Wyoming's winter, he got an unexpected break. A crime lab tech happened to mention over coffee with Moxley's investigator that infrared photos of Ernestine's bloody tank top might show something they'd missed. Surprising everyone on the defense team, the subsequent images showed what nobody had seen with their naked eyes: a huge flare of powder residue from the contact gunshot … on the blouse's front.

All at once, new evidence suggested Martin Frias might have been telling the truth.

The dogged Moxley didn't stop there. He sought out the experts he now knew he should have called before the trial. He asked prominent blood-spatter expert Judith Bunker to take a look at the evidence, and she in turn suggested Moxley call me, too. He did.

It was the sort of call I got routinely as the Chief Medical Examiner in Bexar County: A despairing but earnest young defense lawyer with a futile case, grasping at forensic straws that didn't exist. The way he described his case, it sounded like a desperately slim chance.

I discouraged him about his chances of finding a forensic absolution for his client, but I mentioned that, as luck would have it, I was scheduled to speak to a law enforcement convention in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in just a couple of weeks. Maybe I'd take a look but I was busy and I didn't have much time to waste.… In his Wyoming way, Moxley left all the details loose, and hung up.

I never expected to hear from the poor guy again.

*   *   *

January in Wyoming is beastly. I flew from San Antonio to Denver and rented a car for a wind-blown, icy, two-hour drive to Cheyenne to talk to a bunch of cops about gunshot wounds. I was cold the whole way.

The workshop planners put me up in the same hotel where I spoke. After a day of convention food, I craved something more substantial, so I went down to the hotel's Old West–themed restaurant, where I expected they'd know how to cook a nice, big steak. I sat alone in a booth and a waitress took my order. I ate my salad, and after a few minutes, she delivered a thick, sizzling steak. I was just about to cut into it when I sensed somebody standing at my table, and it wasn't the waitress.

“Dr. Di Maio?”

I looked up to see a young guy, prematurely balding, wire-rimmed glasses, more rumpled than he should have been for his age. He held a manila folder.

“Yes.” Maybe my reply was more question than answer.

“I'm Robert Moxley. Martin Frias's attorney. We talked on the phone.…”

It took a bit but I remembered him. The desperate lawyer who'd lost his case. He'd found me. I admired his persistence, but I was more focused on my steak at the moment.

Still, he flopped his manila folder on the table.

“These are the crime scene photos. I just want you to look at them and tell me if you see anything. Anything at all.”

Over dinner?

“I'm not sure if I can help you.…” I told him. Again.

“If you'd just take a look, Doctor, I'd really be obliged.”

I picked up the folder and thumbed through the full-color photographs. In my career I'd seen thousands, maybe millions, just like them. A bloodied corpse on a floor. A gun nearby. Closeup photos—intimately close—of wounds, torn clothing, dead fingers. All the violent colors of death.

I paused a little longer over one image of a large, tattered wound in a young woman's belly.

“She was shot with a hunting rifle. That's the exit wound,” Moxley informed me.

I looked closer, just a few seconds. But I'd seen more bullet holes than a battalion of M*A*S*H surgeons. I'd written the premier textbook on gunshot wounds. I knew exactly what I was looking at.

“No,” I said. “That's not an exit wound.”

He looked at me funny, as if I'd just told him he was adopted.

“Sorry, but that's not your exit wound,” I repeated. “That's an
entrance
wound.”

*   *   *

It's one of the great myths of forensics that bullets always make smaller holes when they go in and bigger holes when they go out. It's perpetuated by our media, which almost never portrays gunshot wounds authentically.

For example, when a human is shot in Hollywood, he is almost always blown backward sensationally, sometimes several feet, sometimes through a plate-glass window, sometimes through walls. In real life, though, a streamlined bullet focuses its awesome kinetic energy into a very tiny area at its tip, so it doesn't have the power to drive a human body backward. It penetrates, it doesn't punch. The bullet is going so fast when it hits a reasonably inert mass of flesh that it simply zips through and the body crumples on the spot. The victim drops straight down.