Authors: Pat Brown
On December 10, 2002, when Donnell Washington’s mom and her boyfriend turned up dead in a basement apartment, the police thought his mother was the target of a drug gang the son pissed off. But Donnell’s family thought the boyfriend was killed because he was going to turn state’s evidence.
Donnell, thirty-two, knocked repeatedly on the door of his mother’s boyfriend’s house, but no one answered. Worried, he kicked in the door and found the boyfriend, Frank Bishop, lifeless on the sofa, a dozen stab wounds to his head and neck. Donnell ran to the back bedroom and found his mother, Renee Washington, on the floor, her
throat cut. He lifted her onto the bed and attempted to give her CPR. He was too late.
The case stalled and no one was arrested. Months went by, then a year, and the police and Donnell’s family were still arguing about who killed the couple. The police said it was someone taking revenge on Donnell over drug territory and for robbing their illegal gambling joints, but Donnell’s family believed the mom’s boyfriend, who was turning state’s evidence, was the target of the crime.
I spent a week in town poring over the evidence. By the weekend, I had an answer as to who I thought was right and who was wrong. Nobody was right and everyone was wrong.
ONE OF THE
compelling aspects of this case was how people tend to form a theory and then fit the case to the theory. This happened both with the families and the police detectives, because it’s a natural human response to go for what seems most likely.
If we find a mutilated naked body, we assume it’s a sexual crime. Why would a body be shorn of its clothes if sex wasn’t involved? We don’t think it could be something else. If we find a man shot in the head in an alley and he was wearing gang clothing, we say, “It must be a gang hit.” Of course, it may have nothing to do with a gang. It may just be that he wears gang clothing because he finds it fashionable and, in reality, his girlfriend shot him.
But people will go to the most likely solution first, and sometimes this can cause trouble, because when you focus in on one particular avenue, you often ignore the other possibilities. It’s like watching a magician who distracts you from the real sleight of hand so what he does appears to be genuine magic instead of a highly practiced trick. By the time you figure out that you were staring intently at the wrong hand, you have lost the opportunity to witness what the other hand was doing (with the evidence, in a crime) and this, I believe, is what happened with Donnell Washington.
* * * *
I WAS BROUGHT
in to study this case by members of the Washington family two years after the double homicide because they believed the police department focused on the wrong motive for the crime.
Two people were murdered, Renee Washington, fifty-two, and her boyfriend, Frank Bishop, fifty-three, and they were killed at Frank’s place. They had been in a committed relationship for a while. They were looking forward to the family Christmas just a couple weeks away and had their Christmas tree up and decorated, presents beginning to collect underneath the limbs.
Renee had last been seen the evening before the murder when she visited with her mother until she left to spend the night—as she did most of the time—at her boyfriend’s house. Frank was known to be already at home.
At seven in the morning, Renee’s son, Donnell Washington, went by the house because he was supposed to take his mother to a funeral. He arrived at his mother’s boyfriend’s home and knocked on the door. Nobody answered. He knocked again and again.
That’s crazy
, Washington said to himself.
They have to be in there. She’s expecting me
.
He went back to his car, where his own son was waiting to be driven to school.
“Why don’t you go up and knock on the door?”
So the son got out and knocked on the door.
“Dad,” he said, “I heard a thump, but I didn’t hear anything else.”
“If you heard something in there, maybe I should break the door down.”
But Donnell didn’t break the door down and instead called his mother’s sister—his aunt—and said, “What should I do? She’s not answering the door. She should be there, because I have to take her to a funeral.”
The aunt said, “Why don’t you call the police?”
“No,” Donnell said, “I’m going to knock the door down.”
But he didn’t do that. Instead, he took his son to school and finally returned—at ten a.m.!
He used his cell phone and called his cousin, Lamont, to come over. When Lamont got there, Donnell had already kicked the door in and ran out of the apartment and told him, “They’re dead!”
Lamont told his girlfriend to stay in the car, went in, and saw Frank dead on the sofa and his aunt lying facedown on the bedroom floor. He said he freaked and left right away. Donnell later said he didn’t know Frank had been stabbed because the body was so bloody he thought he had been shot. Then he ran the five steps into the bedroom, because his mother wasn’t in the front room, and he found her lying on the floor in a nightshirt and panties, similarly bloodied, and he attempted to revive her. He put her on the bed and applied CPR, but didn’t succeed in bringing her back.
This is where—to use a technical term—some of the story points don’t hold water.
Washington’s cousin, Lamont, said he saw the dead woman on the floor but Donnell said as soon as he found his mother he moved her to the bed and gave her CPR. If he did the CPR when he said, how was it that Lamont said he had seen the woman still lying on the floor? When Lamont arrived, Donnell ran out of the apartment, told him that his mother and Frank were dead, the implication being Donnell must have already completed the CPR. Yet Lamont saw the woman on the floor. Had Donnell given CPR at that point? Something didn’t add up.
But others who arrived on the scene witnessed Donnell giving his mother CPR. Next, Renee’s sister, Charmaine, arrived on the scene, went into the apartment, saw Donnell trying to give his mother CPR, and then ran to a neighbor’s, banged on their door, and told them to call 911. There was no landline at Frank’s apartment.
The police came on the scene and completed a routine crime scene process. Donnell was still doing CPR.
Donnell didn’t do CPR when it might have been useful—in the first few minutes after he found his mother. Instead, he waited until his aunt and the police arrived. Was Donnell’s CPR just a show?
The police focused in on the fact that Donnell was a violent felon who had a history of bad behaviors. He had just served seven years in prison for battery, and he told police he had just stolen forty pounds of marijuana from drug dealers.
Sometimes, you look at the last event that occurred in somebody’s life. “What’s the most recent thing that made somebody mad at Donnell Washington? What happened in the last few days?”
The police concluded that the double homicide was a retaliation hit in which they went after Washington’s mom to get back at Donnell, and they took out the boyfriend as collateral damage.
Not a bad theory.
Except that there were several curious things about the case. One was something that Donnell said. This happened to be an African American community, and he said, “In our community, nobody goes after somebody’s momma. If they want me, they are going to go after me. They know who I am. They’ll come after me. They won’t take out my mother.”
Culturally, that is correct in my experience. It is rare that in an African American community a bad guy would attack somebody’s mother in retaliation for something that her son did. But that was the angle the police pursued.
It was the Washington family that disputed this theory.
“I think the police have this wrong,” said Charmaine. “First of all, this was not her apartment. This was her boyfriend’s. I think somebody was going after
him
. Renee stayed at her boyfriend’s home often, but she could have been at her own place. But her boyfriend turned state’s evidence in a drug case. We think they were after the
boyfriend
and
she
was collateral damage.”
That was actually a pretty good theory, too.
Which theory does the investigator work on? Again, the problem with many theories is that people are fitting the available evidence to the theories they like best, ignoring any evidence that will blow their theory out of the water. The evidence should guide you to a theory; you should not be allowing the theory to guide the evidence upon which you focus.
Did anybody stop to look at the actual evidence to see what exactly happened in the home that day and then reconstruct all the available information to determine the culprit and nature of this particular crime?
We knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that somebody definitely stabbed that man and that woman to death. There was no question about that, and it was a very violent crime. Frank was stabbed numerous times, far more than was needed to kill him. Renee fought her attacker but ended up with her throat cut.
The police told the Washington family that Renee had human blood under her fingernails, having scratched her attacker. But if they knew whose blood it was, they never said.
We also knew that a knife was not found at the scene. We don’t know where the knife came from or where it went, so whoever did this took the knife away with him or her. We knew that.
We also know that the man—because of the blood spatter pattern and from the blood that was tested—was killed first, and the woman second. Therefore, the attack began in the living room with the man, and the second attack was on the female in the bedroom.
Of course, that doesn’t tell us who the target was; it just tells us that somebody came into the home and killed the man in the front room. Was he killed because the murderer was on his or her way to get to Renee and he had to get through Frank first, or was Frank killed and then somebody heard Renee in the bedroom and had to kill her, too? Therein lies the question.
I took a look back at exactly what happened over the preceding twenty-four hours.
The night before he died, Frank returned home by seven thirty p.m. from visiting a friend.
As for Renee, she was at her brother’s home until six thirty p.m. She left by herself and visited her mother until nine thirty p.m., knowing that if she was going to spend the night at Frank’s, she had to be there by ten or he wouldn’t let her in. Frank was stubborn about this. Her mother lived ten minutes away from Frank.
The time line itself was pretty intriguing. Donnell said that his son heard a thump in the living room, which upset Donnell. He told
the police that he thought,
If I had broken that door down earlier, perhaps I would have been able to stop this
.
We could look at some physical evidence and find out whether Donnell was correct about that. Was there rigor mortis? Was there livor mortis? Rigor mortis is the stiffening of the body after death; livor mortis refers to the blood that settles in the body after death. If you’re facedown, it settles to your face and stomach; if you’re on your back, it settles to your back as gravity pulls it toward the earth. A smart investigator can identify this and sometimes tell how long a person might have been dead. It depends on how quickly the body is found, too. Then a forensic scientist, coroner, or medical examiner can tell the investigator the probable time of the person’s death.
There is also circumstantial evidence for when a person died, and what makes sense.
The Washington family said there were two interesting points that the police didn’t seem to consider. One is that the boyfriend, Frank, would never open his door to anybody if he did not know who it was. Whether his drug-dealing past had made him paranoid or he just didn’t like to open the door to people he didn’t know, he would not open his door to just anybody. And after ten p.m., he wouldn’t take a chance on anyone, not even his girlfriend—at least that is what the Washingtons claimed.
Frank was involved in some serious drug dealing; a year before the murder, he was caught in another city, in possession of marijuana valued at more than $150,000. A judge gave him probation and he was reported to have turned police snitch against his boss to avoid serious prison time.
Frank had taken the opposite path in life of his brother, Barry. Barry was the general foreman for the city, by all reports an upstanding citizen. Some speculated that the police didn’t solve the murder because it would shine a light on Barry’s brother’s unsavory activities.
When he died, Frank was trying a do-over in his own life, attending barber school in an attempt to learn a legal trade.
Donnell came over at one a.m. the night before to borrow his mother’s car because he did not have one; he was going to come back
and pick up his mother for the funeral in the morning. He called the house that night and he said nobody answered, so he went over in person and knocked on the door. At least this time, Frank answered the door. And despite the late hour, he obviously did let Donnell in. Donnell borrowed the car and went on his way. Donnell was the last one to see them alive.
I looked at what was going on in the home in the hours before the double homicide. There was no breakfast on the table, no plates set out, no dirty dishes in the kitchen. Dinner was gone—if it had ever been prepared and eaten in the apartment—and it didn’t look like anybody had had breakfast yet.
Frank was on the sofa. He was dressed. He had on a pair of jeans and an undershirt, a long-johns type of shirt, and some soft slippers. He didn’t look like he was going out at that moment. It looked like he was hanging around the house.
Renee was dressed in panties and a silk nightshirt, and her sister, Donnell’s aunt, said, “My sister always laid out her clothes for the morning. That’s one of the things she always did. She laid out the clothes, what she was going to wear, everything ironed and ready to go. She was going to a funeral in the morning. If she had gone to bed, she would have definitely laid those clothes out.”
The most pressing question was no longer who did it but when did the murders actually happen? Did it happen in the morning after they had all gotten up, or did it happen before they went to bed?