Part 8 (1/2)
”Yeah.”
”And what is that name, Lieutenant?”
”Jigsaw Jane, or John, depending on gender,” says de Angelo. ”Usually you find heads bobbing in the water.”
One of the older guys on the jury, a retired navy demolition expert, sn.i.g.g.e.rs and covers his mouth with his hand. His forearm under the hair is a mosaic of tattoos. The women on the panel do not smile; instead, they are looking at my client for a reaction. Crone offers none. He is busy as always, taking notes.
”I believe, Mr. Tannery, that there was an objection. I'll overrule it, allow the witness to answer the question.” Coats has not even lost his place.
But de Angelo has. ”What was the question?”
”Was there something unique about the dismemberment of Kalista Jordan, say from the other cases you've seen?” asks Tannery.
”Oh, yeah. That's right. Yeah, there was.”
”And what was that?”
”Two things, really. The legs and arms were severed cleanly at the joints. And the head was still connected to the torso.”
”Let's take the legs and arms first,” says Tannery. ”Did you draw any conclusions from the manner in which these were severed?”
”We did. There was a kind of surgical nature to the dismemberment. We concluded that the person or persons who did it knew what they were doing. We believe that they probably had some special training.”
”Objection.”
”Overruled,” says Coats.
”What kind of training?” asks Tannery.
”They knew something about medical science, particularly anatomy. Might have had at least minimal experience dissecting or performing surgery on the human body.”
”Are you saying that it is likely that the perpetrator was a medical doctor?”
”It's possible,” says de Angelo.
Tannery looks toward our table and Dr. Crone who doesn't even suspend his note taking to lift his gaze.
”You said there was something else unusual about this case, something having to do with the victim's head?”
”Yeah. It was still attached to the body,” says de Angelo. ”We wondered why. Usually, if a perpetrator goes to all the trouble to cut off arms and legs, he's . . .”
”Objection. a.s.sumes facts not in evidence.” I'm into it before he can finish.
”Restate your answer,” says the judge.
De Angelo gives the D.A. a blank stare. He doesn't understand the problem.
”It a.s.sumes a male perpetrator,” says Tannery.
”Oh.” He thinks for a second. ”We a.s.sume they go to all that trouble, whoever it is”-he looks directly at me for emphasis-”is gonna take the head off, too. But here they don't. You have to wonder why?”
”Why would you a.s.sume they'd cut off the head?”
”Why do they go to all the trouble to cut up the body in the first place?” says de Angelo. ”Because they're trying to make it difficult to identify. You take off the hands, there's no fingerprints a.s.suming the hands aren't found. You take off the head, it makes it that much harder. But they didn't here.”
”I see. And you don't have an answer as to why?”
De Angelo shakes his head. ”It's just unusual. Doesn't fit the normal pattern. If anything like this can be called normal,” he says. ”So we thought whoever killed Kalista Jordan was trying to do a copycat.”
”Can you explain for the jury?” asks Tannery.
De Angelo turns toward the box. ”There were two murders almost three years ago now. The bodies of two women were dumped in the harbor. We found the torsos with the heads attached. Arms and legs had been cut off. It was in all the papers. Those cases got a lot of publicity because it looked like a serial murder. Papers always pick up on that,” he says.
”Unfortunately, sometimes it becomes an invitation for somebody who's looking for an opportunity. You get a person, wants to kill his wife, or his girlfriend. He sees the article. So he tries to make it look like the same M.O. They copycat it. Usually they don't succeed.”
”And why is that?”
”Little details,” says de Angelo. ”Things we never disclose to the media. For example, in this case, the earlier jigsaws, out in the harbor. They were in fact done with saws. Bones cut right through like a butcher would do it with a saw. We found tool marks from the teeth of a saw blade. Probably a hacksaw. But that wasn't done in this case.”
”You're talking about Kalista Jordan?”
”Right. Here, the amputation of the arms and legs was done clean, at the joints. Somebody knew right where to go, and they used a sharp instrument to get all the ligaments and tendons.”
”And this clean amputation, at the joints, is what causes you to believe that the killer possibly had medical training?”
”Correct.”
”Therefore, you don't believe these earlier cases are related?” Tannery is driving a wedge, antic.i.p.ating that we may try to defend using the age-old SODDI, Some Other Dude Did It, in this case some crazed serial killer. If we could produce an alibi for Crone in the earlier cases, this would present complications for the state.
”No. But we think that's why the killer left the head attached. Because it was reported in the press in the earlier two cases. It was also reported that the arms and legs were not attached to the bodies, but there was no report as to how this was done. The killer screwed up,” says de Angelo. ”And it wasn't the only mistake they made.”
”What else?”
”We don't want to get into too many details. The other two murders are still open.”
”Unsolved?”
”That's right.”
”But there are other discrepancies?”
”One in particular,” says de Angelo. ”The use of cable ties around the victim's throat. It was reported in the earlier cases that the victims were strangled with a nylon ligature and that a similar nylon tie was probably used to bind the hands and feet. In those cases, we found a set of arms and hands. They floated up on the beach. These were tied together at the wrist. The item used to tie these was referred to as, and I quote, 'a nylon tie,' in one of the local papers. Actually it was a piece of nylon rope. The paper was using the word tie in the general sense,” he says. ”We didn't correct it because we didn't want to get into the details. We think that whoever killed Kalista Jordan read that newspaper article and a.s.sumed that a nylon cable tie was used.”
”In other words, they tried to copycat and got it wrong?” says Tannery.
”That appears to be the case.”
”Let's talk about the cable tie, the one found around Dr. Jordan's neck. Did you have an opportunity to examine that cable tie?”
”I did.”