Читать книгу Trail of Blood - Wanda Evans - Страница 13
ОглавлениеIt was time—past time—English knew, to move the investigation into high gear. Impetus to do just that was provided when Jim Dunn called to relay the information that Scott had type O positive blood, the same type that had been found in that small bedroom.
English and White already had checked with Leisha Hamilton’s employer and had discovered that she had been at work on her regular shift May 16. Now they decided to contact Tim Smith’s employer. The manager was cooperative, agreeing to show them Tim’s work records for the day in question. The time sheets revealed that Smith had not gone to work Thursday, May 16. Tim had told the manager his brother had been involved in a traffic accident. The other party involved in the accident was suing his brother and Smith’s entire family, Tim said, so he had to go to help his brother.
Then English and White drove back out to the Regency Apartments and asked the manager if they could see Tim Smith’s old apartment. They wanted to know if the carpet in that apartment was the same as Leisha’s—gray and green, which was also the same as the carpet fibers found on the duct tape the investigators had found in Smith’s new apartment. The carpet in Tim’s old apartment proved to be tan, brown and white, the same as that in his new apartment.
When the detectives returned to the police building, English spoke with Officer Gary Smith, who had taken the criminal mischief report that Leisha had made concerning the door that had been kicked in. He told them that when he went to the apartment, a blanket of some type was lying in the northeast bedroom. Leisha told him that this is where they slept. He did not notice the carpet missing under the couch. He couldn’t remember if there were sheets on the couch.
White tracked down Tim’s brother, who was at work in another town in Texas. White identified himself and Smith agreed to talk with the investigator. Smith said he had not been involved in an auto accident and that White could check his time card for May 15 and May 16 and see that he had been at work. He told White that on June 15, however, he had driven to Lubbock and helped Tim move to his new apartment.
When White asked the young man if Tim talked about any of his friends, he said Tim talked about a girl he was seeing. Tim seemed to like her a lot, but hadn’t mentioned her name.
English then located Tim Smith’s father, who lived in a small community near Lubbock. Tim had lived there with his family after high school. The elder Smith said to English that his son had told him that he had taken off from work because he was sick on May 16, the day Scott Dunn disappeared.
Meanwhile, White was checking into Leisha Hamilton’s background. Since Leisha had told him she had been living in Albuquerque the previous fall, White called the Albuquerque, New Mexico, police department and talked to Detective Torres. White asked Torres to check their department and see if they had information on Leisha Hamilton, Scott Dunn or Tim Smith. Torres, after a little research, said he found information only on Hamilton. She had been convicted of theft and forgery and was currently on probation. He said she gave the names of a brother and her father, both residents of Texas. Another name she gave was of her husband, whose whereabouts were, Leisha would later tell White, currently unknown.
Later that day, White got a telephone tip from a man who lived about three blocks from Scott Dunn’s apartment. The man, Ralph Jones, said it was his habit to take a walk early in the morning alongside the west perimeter of the Regency Apartments, which was only a hundred feet or so from B4, where Scott and Leisha lived. Jones said that one morning, he couldn’t remember for sure if it was May 16, but it was around that time, he walked past the alley that abutted the parking lot north of B4, as he did on most mornings. In the alley, probably less than thirty feet from the door to B4, was a Dumpster. That morning, several cats had surrounded the Dumpster and were making noises, trying to get inside it. He had never seen this happen before, so he went over to the Dumpster, threw a handful of pebbles at the cats to scatter them away and opened the lid. According to Jones, the Dumpster was not quite full and he could see a large sheet of plastic and some rolled-up carpet that looked dirty and stained. He couldn’t tell what color the carpet was because he could see only the backing and he thought it was brown. He wasn’t sure what color the plastic was, either, but it might have been blue or green.
Detectives Walt Crimmins and Billy Hudgeons re-canvassed the apartments around Leisha’s, but learned little new information. However, they did uncover tidbits that confirmed reports others had given them about Tim Smith. Several neighbors thought Leisha was seeing Tim Smith without Scott Dunn’s knowledge. Smith often was seen walking around the complex parking areas, acting as if he were checking to see if the yellow Camaro was gone. The neighbors said Tim acted strange when he was out and about, always behaving as if he were watching someone.
Since Mike Roberts, who had worked with Scott Dunn, was the last person, other than Leisha, who saw Scott alive, English arranged for the man to come to the police building and give a statement. After stating his full name and giving his address and place of employment, he told the detectives he had come to Lubbock from Washington to live with his father. He said he had known Scott Dunn about three and a half months and that Scott had helped him get his job.
The remainder of Roberts’s statement followed the story he had told detectives earlier. He said he had been working late on the van that they were getting ready for the Crank It Up Contest. Mike stopped by Scott’s apartment on his way home. He knocked on the door, but there was no answer. The door was unlocked, so he went in to find Scott asleep on the couch. He shook Scott’s shoulder to wake him up. They talked for an hour or so about what to do to the van. Scott asked him to stay the night, but Mike refused. He had gone back the next morning to get Scott for work, but had received no answer.
“I assumed Leisha had taken him to work,” Roberts said. “When I got to work, no one was there and Max showed up about a half hour later.”
Roberts said that since Scott’s disappearance, Leisha had talked to him about Scott a few times, but mostly she talked to Max.
Another exercise in futility, English thought. Nothing they were doing, no one they were questioning, had given them one iota of information about what had really happened to Scott.
Crimmins, Hudgeons, White and English met to compare notes and decide on the next step in the investigation. English told Hudgeons and Crimmins, “I’ve gotten the information we’ve been waiting for from Jim Dunn; Scott’s blood was type O positive, the same as that found in the apartment.” He felt that Scott’s blood had been spilled in the apartment; the challenge was proving his conviction.
“I know we haven’t had the occasion to use reversed DNA testing much,” Hudgeons said, “but why don’t we try and see what we come up with? If we had blood samples from Scott’s parents, couldn’t tests tell us if the blood we found belonged to their child?”
“Good point,” English agreed and began to research the issue.
His research led him to Dr. Arthur Eisenberg of the University of North Texas Health Sciences Center in Fort Worth, Texas. Dr. Eisenberg was a DNA expert with an international reputation. He was an associate professor in the pathology department at North Texas and director of the DNA laboratory there; he had been part of a group of scientists who developed the field of human identification using DNA testing. Eisenberg also had helped develop a company that was set up to use DNA for medical diagnostics in the field of cancer-based testing. In 1989, the State of Texas had established the laboratory at the University of North Texas Health Sciences Center for DNA testing for use in forensics and medical diagnostics, and to work with the state Attorney General’s office in establishing paternity. The Texas Office of the Attorney General is responsible for child support enforcement, distribution of welfare benefits and the establishment of paternity in those cases where the father—or mother—is not paying the required child support.
When Hudgeons asked Dr. Eisenberg about the possibility of using reversed DNA testing in the Dunn case, the scientist explained to Hudgeons that the term “reversed paternity” is used in cases like theirs, when an unknown biological sample is available and the biologist is attempting to establish the identity of the person who contributed that biological sample. If he had blood from Scott’s natural parents and the LPD sent him samples from the crime scene, a comparison could determine if the sample belonged to an offspring of those parents, Dr. Eisenberg assured Hudgeons.
Now English had to make two painful telephone calls, to Scott’s father and mother, asking them to go to their local police labs and have blood samples drawn so they could be sent to Dr. Eisenberg. English told them he would make arrangements with their local police departments to ensure the unbroken chain of custody of the blood samples until they were mailed to Dr. Eisenberg. From those containers of blood and the samples sent to him from the Lubbock Police Department, the molecular biologist would attempt to ascertain whether the bloodstains came from Scott Dunn.
English felt strongly that Dr. Eisenberg’s DNA tests would show English’s theories to be true. He was also sure that Tim Smith somehow was connected to the bloodstains in Scott’s bedroom, but he needed some tangible evidence. He called Gaylon Lewis in the Identification Section and asked him if he had finished his examination of the duct tape that had been used to patch the bloodstained carpet.
Lewis told him he had finished the examination of the carpet and the duct tape and had found no fingerprints. He had, however, found some hairs adhering to the tape. Since the LPD facility had no technology to make hair comparisons, Lewis put the hairs in a bag, sealed it and signed it.
The following day, Wednesday, June 12, Leisha Hamilton showed up unannounced at police headquarters. She told English that Tim Smith had made a statement she thought was strange. He had told Rachel Borthe, the assistant apartment manager at Regency, that if he had never met Leisha, Scott probably would still be around.
English called Borthe and asked her about any conversations she might have had with Smith. She verified what Leisha had said. “Tim said something else interesting as well,” she said. “Tim and I had been talking about what could have happened to Scott Dunn. I asked, ‘What would someone do with a body if they wanted to get rid of it?’
“‘They might put it in the landfill,’ Tim answered. ‘The trash has to go somewhere.’”
Then, said Borthe, Tim was silent for a moment, as if pondering her question further. Finally, he said, “Or, they could chop it up and throw it in the lake. You know, they do that in drug shows all the time.”
English felt a cold certainty: Tim’s first response was the instinctive one, probably the truthful one. The body could have been put in the Dumpster that was only a few feet away from Leisha’s apartment door and then dumped into the landfill. Tim’s statement about the lake could have been made to throw Rachel Borthe off the track, to make her think he was merely speculating.
English was certain that Tim Smith could answer many of the questions he had about Scott’s disappearance. He was looking forward to interviewing Smith again when he came for his polygraph test, which was scheduled for that afternoon.
Smith did not show up for the polygraph, however. Instead, he called English and told him that he had hired an attorney, who had advised him not to take a polygraph test and not to speak to the detectives unless the lawyer was present.
English sat in his office, re-reading his notes, berating himself for not leaning a little more heavily on Tim Smith Sunday night, when they had first questioned him. At that time Tim had declined the offer of an attorney, but he had displayed behavior that had seemed suspicious to English.
They had to find Scott’s body, English thought. In his mind he explored the possibilities, asking himself if he were in Smith’s place and needed a place to hide a 6’ 2”, 170-pound man, where would he go? More than likely, Smith would choose a site with which he was familiar, perhaps the area around the community where Smith had once lived with his family for several years. It was far enough out in the country to support farmland, along with some pastureland covered with thorns, a few trees and some dry washes that filled up when West Texas got its meager rainfall, but stayed dusty and weedy most of the year.
The Lubbock Landfill, where the city residents and businesses dumped their refuse, was in the same general vicinity as the airport and the area where Tim had lived. English had a strong hunch that was the place to search for Scott Dunn’s body.
On the other hand, English had learned from two different sources that Tim Smith was fascinated by airplanes. Leisha had said Smith liked to drive out to the airport and watch the planes landing and taking off. Smith’s father had told investigators his son had taken flying lessons at Wheat Aviation, located on the western edge of Lubbock. This piqued English’s curiosity. Wheat Aviation was surrounded by rough, brushy terrain. It would be possible to dispose of a body there fairly easily and it might not be found for months, or even years. Or never.
A third possibility, if Tim Smith was responsible for Scott Dunn’s disappearance, was the mile after mile of scrub grass, brush and shallow gullies that surrounded the community where his father had lived. The ground was hard, but a shallow grave could have been dug with a little work and there was enough dried vegetation and brush to cover it. If one didn’t care if the body was found eventually, it could have been tossed in one of the gullies with dried limbs and grass tossed over it. Even then, it might not be found until wintertime, when the wild grasses and weeds died.
The only thing to do was initiate a search, walk the area around Wheat Aviation and around Smith’s father’s home and talk to the City Sanitation Department about the possibility of searching the landfill for Scott Dunn’s body.
Friday morning, a week after the discovery of blood stains in Leisha Hamilton’s apartment, Tal English, Billy Hudgeons, Walt Crimmins, Randy McGuire and Texas Ranger Jay Peoples went to Wheat Aviation. The five men divided the area into grids and walked through the tall grass, thorny weeds and shallow ditches. Finally, sweaty, tired and frustrated after a morning in the ninety-degree weather, the group had found nothing indicating a recent burial or other method of disposing of a body.
English was discouraged, but determined not to give up. After a quick lunch, the group of searchers drove across town to East Municipal Drive. The area where the Smiths had resided was rugged, with a great deal of vegetation. The men combed that area, just as they had the Wheat Aviation area, but discovered nothing remotely resembling a grave.
While they were in the area, English stopped at the private company that collected garbage from businesses and dumped the refuse into the city landfill. English was introduced to Johnny Quintavilla, a supervisor who could give him information about the routes and schedules for the company’s trucks. Quintavilla said his company collected garbage from Dumpsters on both sides of the alley behind the Regency Apartments.
“Can you tell me if a Dumpster from the Regency Apartments was picked up on May 16?” English asked.
“The Dumpsters in that area fill up quickly because of the large numbers of people in the complexes,” Qunitavilla told him. “We pick up the Dumpsters on Mondays and Fridays, so a pick-up should have been made in the early morning of Friday, May 17.”
Perhaps, English thought, Scott Dunn’s body had been discarded in the Dumpster a few feet from his own front door. If the murder had occurred after Leisha got home Thursday evening, she and Smith might have felt safe disposing of the body in the Dumpster, knowing it would be only a few hours before the garbage was collected.
Back at the police building, English contacted Lee Ramirez, the superintendent for solid waste management for the City of Lubbock, and asked if he could locate the area where refuse from Regency Apartments was dumped. The superintendent assured the detective he could and offered to drive out to the landfill with English and show him the spot.
The two men drove to the landfill and met the site supervisor, John Alamanza, there. The supervisor showed Ramirez and English the approximate area where garbage from the Regency complex was dumped on May 17. The area was approximately seventy-five feet by thirty feet and was about fifteen feet deep. Alamanza told them that another layer of refuse would be dumped there in about two weeks.
Alamanza told English it would be possible to conduct a search of the area for a body, but it would require heavy equipment to dig up compacted refuse. English and Ramirez headed back for town and English wondered how he could justify to his superiors the expense of digging up a rather large portion of the city landfill. When he got back to the office, however, his attention was directed elsewhere.
While English had been out trudging through ankle-high grass, over dried rubboard washes and grass burrs, a Crime Line tip had come in from a police informant that a man named Doug Holden had once threatened to kill Scott Dunn. According to the informant, Holden was an insurance salesman who moonlighted selling cocaine. The informant said Holden had believed that Dunn had ratted on him to the Drug Enforcement Agency. Holden was described as a white male, about twenty-five years old, muscular build, red hair, with almost an albino complexion.
Following up on this tip led English to a conversation with Lubbock Sheriff’s Deputy Billy Tims, who said he had received the same information from a confidential informant. Tims’s informant reported that Holden had said he was going to kidnap Dunn and then kill him.
English thanked the county deputy. He appreciated the help, but at that point, he could not correlate Holden’s alleged threat with the other evidence the LPD had obtained. Too much time had passed since the incident between Scott and Holden.
On June 17, Leisha Hamilton called Tal English once again. He thought ruefully that she was calling him almost as much as Jim Dunn. Scott’s father called every morning and English filled him in on everything he could about the progress of the investigation.
Leisha, on the other hand, seemed to find some new evidence to bring to the detective every day. In this case she told English that she had seen Tim Smith waiting for her in the restaurant parking lot when she got off work the day before. She hadn’t wanted to talk to him, she said, so she asked one of the cooks from the restaurant to walk with her to her car. Leisha confided that Tim had told her he wanted to talk to her, but she had refused. When she arrived at home, though, he was standing near her apartment and again said he wanted to talk to her. “I told him to leave me alone and went into my apartment.”
She also told English she had remembered something else about the days just prior to Scott’s disappearance. She said that on the Tuesday night, before she had brought Scott home from Max Gianoli’s, Tim had followed her to the grocery store when she went to get food and medicine. He had asked her to come home with him, but she had refused, telling him that Scott was sick and she had to stay home and take care of him. “That night,” Leisha said, “Tim called the apartment several times, but I refused to talk to him.”
The following day, when she had gone again to the store to get more food for Scott, Tim had followed her again, asking her to go to his apartment. Again she had refused.
English made notes of what she told him, wondering if she had conveniently forgotten to tell him this earlier or if she was simply stepping up a campaign to blame Smith for Scott’s death.
For several days, English had been anxiously waiting for the Registrar’s office at Mississippi State University to return his call concerning Jessica Tate, the girl Scott had told his father he’d gotten engaged to. Finally, it came and he learned that Jessica’s records contained her mother’s telephone number and that of her sister, both of whom now were living in Texas. English called Jessica immediately and, as the conversation went on, the investigation took a new direction.
Jessica Tate told English she had met Scott Dunn when she went to the store where he worked to buy a stereo system for her car. At that time she was eighteen years old and a senior in high school. Scott was twenty-two. She lacked only two courses to graduate, so she went to class for those two periods each day and worked part-time at a supermarket. Her mother and stepfather had given her a new car and she decided to use some of her earnings to get a better stereo system for it.
“I was frugal enough to try to talk Scott down on the price,” Jessica told English. “We negotiated for a while. Finally, he said he would come down on the price if I would go out with him.”
She didn’t take him up on his proposition for several days, but she kept going back to the store to talk to him. “The weather was warm, so he didn’t wear a shirt when he was working in one of the cars and he had a nice tan. He was cute.
“And he was funny, really funny,” she said. “I just liked being around him. Finally, I told him I would go on a date with him and all through spring and summer, we were together a lot. “He treated me like a queen and he was very, very romantic. He would sing to me and do other things no other man had ever done for me.
“He was just sweet,” she said. Scott also was very polite and respectful to her parents, who liked him and did not object to Jessica’s dating him, although he was several years older than she.
During the summer, their days were rather unstructured, she said. Jessica still was working a few hours a week and Scott worked on a contract basis, so they had free daytime hours to cruise in Scott’s yellow Camaro, “Yellow Thunder,” she called it, or go to the park. If Scott had to work, sometimes Jessica would go to the shop and talk to him while he worked. Other times, she said, they would go to his house and watch television or movies.
The Simpsons was Scott’s favorite television show, Jessica said, and they often watched it together. There was one couple with whom they spent a great deal of time. The woman was neat and they had a lot of fun, but the man made Scott mad. Scott didn’t like the way the man treated his wife. He was violent and abusive and Scott couldn’t stand that.
Scott also taught Jessica to play pool, she said. He was an excellent player and loved the game. Jessica said that they both had other interests and led busy lives, so they were not together all the time, but they did see a lot of each other.
English asked Jessica if she knew Leisha, but Jessica had not heard of Leisha Hamilton until shortly before Scott disappeared.
Jessica’s stepfather was an alumnus of Mississippi State University and it was because of him that she had applied to that university and had been accepted. When she told Scott she was going away to college, he had not been happy about it. In fact, he had asked her to marry him. She had told him she intended to go away to college, no matter what he thought. Scott wasn’t happy with her decision and they became estranged.
However, they had seen each other briefly the next Christmas, when she came home on holiday break, and Scott had told her that Max Gianoli was planning to open a new store in Lubbock and he would be moving there.
In mid-March, Jessica called Scott at work to tell him she was planning to come home for spring break and stay with her sister. The weekend she was to arrive coincided with the annual Rattlesnake Round-up, held in Sweetwater, Texas. Scott asked her to meet him there and they would spend the weekend together.
“We fell in love all over again,” Jessica said. “I couldn’t resist him. He looked at me with those sweet puppy dog eyes and asked me to take him back and he sang romantic songs to me and I said yes.”
A carnival atmosphere had prevailed, complete with amusement park rides and entertainment, in addition to the rattlesnake hunt. “After I went back to school, we talked on the phone all the time,” Jessica said. “Then one day just before the school term was over, I called him and a woman answered the phone.
“I couldn’t believe it. I was so shocked. And when I asked her who she was, she said she was Scott’s wife.”
“You can’t be Scott’s wife,” Jessica answered. “I’m Scott’s wife and I want to talk to him.”
“I don’t know who you are or what you are talking about,” the woman said. “I’m telling you, I’m Scott Dunn’s wife.”
Jessica slammed down the phone. Who was this woman? She couldn’t be married to Scott. Jessica was certain of that.
The next day, when Scott called Jessica, she told him about the woman who had answered his telephone, claiming to be his wife. He assured her that he was not married to Leisha and that he was moving out of that apartment. He told Jessica there was nothing to worry about. Jessica told English, “He just went on and on about how much he loved me and that we were going to get married and he described the ring he was having made for me.” Because she was in love, and because she wanted to believe him, Jessica accepted his explanation. Scott told her he really wanted to see her as soon as she got home from Mississippi, which would be the first week in May.
Jessica called Scott when she arrived at her sister’s and told him she would be there for a while. He asked her if she would go to Pennsylvania with him in August, to meet his family. Delighted at the prospect, she agreed.
Scott also told her that he had to make a business trip that week and would have a layover at DFW airport. He asked her if she would meet him at the airport. He said he had only one more payment to make on her ring and would bring it with him when he came. She agreed to meet him. He told her he would call her back and let her know the exact day, time and flight number. She never heard from him again.
A day or two afterward, Jessica said, Leisha Hamilton had called her. “It was really weird. I already thought she was strange, because of what Scott had told me about her. She wanted to know if I had heard from Scott. She said he had left and had taken all his things and she thought he might have gone to Fort Worth because I was there.”
Jessica confirmed what others had told English about the way Scott felt about his possessions. She said he loved Yellow Thunder so much that he would never let anyone else drive it. In fact, she said, she had never driven it and she could not believe he would have gone away somewhere and left it behind. Nor, she said, would he have left his tools. He would not even let other people use his tools, she said, unless the person was a “really, really good friend.”
English went over and over in his mind all that he knew, trying to integrate the statement Jessica had given into the information the police already possessed. At this point he felt that Tim Smith was a promising suspect for several reasons. He had the opportunity and he had the motive. English believed that the roll of duct tape found in Smith’s apartment would, when tested, put him at the scene of the attack on Scott. He was anxious for the DPS crime lab to finish testing the tape and the green carpet fibers that had been stuck to the tape. He felt strongly that the evidence would show that those carpet fibers had come from Scott Dunn’s apartment. That would give the police solid, scientific evidence that Smith was at the scene.
Smith also had a motive for wanting to harm Scott—his obsession with Leisha and his belief that with Scott out of the way, Leisha would be all his. Smith also knew that Scott was sick and could have known that Scott was home alone after Leisha went to work the morning of May 16, because he obsessively watched Leisha’s apartment.
The question in English’s mind was how Leisha fit into the picture. He wondered how she could have lived in that apartment for two weeks without noticing the bloodstained, clumsily patched carpet in her bedroom. Had she been present when Scott was killed? If the attack on Scott occurred sometime after 1:00 AM, after Mike Roberts had left the apartment, then she had the opportunity either to kill Scott and persuade Tim to help her eliminate the evidence or to commit the killing with Tim. That made more sense to English. They could have killed Scott together and disposed of the body, then attempted to clean up the evidence. She knew more than she was telling; of that English was certain. The hole in that theory was lack of motive.
