Behind the Yellow Tape Page 15
The area known as Capitol Hill in Seattle is home to an eclectic mix that might be termed counterculture, with a large gay community, wannabe grunge rockers, and twenty-somethings dotting the historic sidewalks adjacent to magnificent mansions. It is the second most densely populated area in Seattle, with a very active night scene, including bathhouses, bars, and the occasional rave party. On March 25, 2006, the Capitol Hill Arts Club had been the scene for a special zombie-themed rave party titled “Better Off Undead.” Partygoers had decked themselves out in pale makeup and squirted themselves with fake blood. After hours of waving glow sticks, playing with Hello Kitty dolls, sucking on pacifiers dipped in ecstasy, and lying around in “cuddle puddles” (groups of ravers lying around massaging each other), a crowd moved on to a nearby house popular with the goth crowd for an after-hours party. Ravers are a very friendly bunch and invite anyone and everyone to join in their festivities. Residents of the house had bumped into an unassuming guy at the rave and had unwittingly invited him back to the party. Little did they know that for some, it would be the last invitation they would ever extend.
The inconspicuous guy they had so graciously invited was named Kyle Aaron Huff. Kyle was a twenty-eight-year-old troubled transplant from Montana who had moved to Seattle in 2002. Here he expanded his level of discontent as an unemployed loner with an agenda no one was aware of—a “revolution” against sex and the hippie culture; a revolt against popularity. The young ravers continued with their after-hours party, not knowing that Kyle had a premeditated plan to murder these people, who he felt had contributed to his growing paranoid isolation. One witness said that throughout the entire party, while everyone else was talking, laughing, and having a good time, Kyle just leaned against a wall, silent, looking mad, with his arms crossed over his chest. Then as quietly as he’d entered, he left the party and went down the street to his truck—gathering up, among other things, a Winchester Defender pump-action shotgun and a Ruger P-94 pistol. (Later, officers would find an AR-15, more ammunition, and gas cans full of gasoline still in the bed of his truck.) He also donned two bandoliers completely loaded with shotgun ammunition as well as a pistol holster loaded down with multiple magazines. He meant to kill—there’s no question about that.
As Kyle once again approached the residence, he stopped three times to spray-paint the word Now on the sidewalk. Many have theorized about his choice of word, ranging from blaming the Nirvana song “I Want to Know Now” to simply a motivational tool he used to persuade himself to go through with his plan. Regardless, he continued on up the sidewalk with shotgun and pistol in hand. His first victims were two kids on the porch, whom he shot with both guns. He shotgun-blasted another poor soul in the chest who later died from the massive wounds sustained, and who fell back into the house yelling, “I’ve been shot!” Kyle continued walking over the bodies, trying to push his way inside to continue his killing spree. Others in the house tried to bar him from entering, but one of the victims’ legs kept the door from closing, and Huff managed to push his way in. Panic ensued, and kids ran in every direction, many through the kitchen to the back door, while several escaped from windows to the safety of the outside. Others merely hunkered behind couches, hoping and praying not to be seen. Kyle quickly shot five others, killing three, while yelling, “I’ve got enough ammunition for everyone,” as he proceeded to the second floor of the house. At the top of the steps, he blasted two holes into the bathroom while two kids hid in the corner of the hallway. He did not pursue them. As a matter of fact, he didn’t pursue anyone else at all, though he really could have killed virtually every last one of them. Instead, Kyle roamed the bedrooms, walked downstairs into the basement, and then exited the dwelling.
By this time, phone calls were rapidly coming in to the police department from residents who had heard the shots being fired. As luck would have it, a patrolman near the house arrived approximately two minutes after the melee began, at nearly the same moment that Kyle came out the front door. One of the injured victims stumbled out of the house as the officer approached, while Kyle came out the opposite side and began walking toward the cop. The officer told him to drop his weapon, but instead without hesitation Kyle opened his mouth, inserted the gun barrel, and blew his own brains out before the officer had even completed his sentence, putting an end to what will forever be known as the Capitol Hill Massacre. In the final tally, six young people ranging in age from fourteen to thirty-two were killed (seven if you count Kyle), and two were seriously wounded.
At midafternoon the next day, Mark took us to 2112 East Republican Street—the exact address of the Capitol Hill Massacre. It had been repainted, with new residents now living in the home; it hardly appeared like the scene of the worst crime the city had witnessed in twenty-five years. “What did you think when the call came in?” we asked Mark as we parked conspicuously across the street. The house has become sort of an attraction, a shrine, which people visit on the anniversary of the massacre. “I knew it was going to be an APE,” Mark replied, with a fiendish grin. An APE, we learned, is an Acute Political Emergency—code for “Hey, I wanna see a dead body and I want it solved tonight.” Crime scenes that are or become APEs are tough to work because the media wants a story and the department brass want to get into the scene as soon as possible. “I had to keep telling everyone to take a breath,” Mark continued. “Telling them it was just like any other crime scene. I hate to sound callous, but you have to look at [the bodies] as evidence; they are not people anymore. The fact that it wasn’t a whodunit made everybody calm down a little; otherwise, the stress level would have been even higher.” In essence, whether the crime is a simple burglary or a homicide, the system for working a scene is the same. And there is no difference between a homicide with one victim and a high-profile homicide with multiple victims, except that there’s more pressure for answers and people want them immediately. But giving in to pressure to work a crime scene faster is when mistakes can be made. Ultimately, the Seattle CSI team worked the scene for two days, rotating shifts so that the scene was always being worked by someone with a fresh set of eyes.
“Was there anything unusual about the case?” we asked Mark as we stared at the old house. Beyond the obvious, of course. “The only thing that came up was that the suspect had a twin brother,” Mark replied. This caused a few moments of consternation, considering that the suspect had shot himself in the face, thereby making a visual identification nearly impossible. A homicide supervisor on the scene went into the suspect’s wallet to identify him, which is not standard protocol (technically a body is the property of the medical examiner, and no one else is to touch it until the ME has completed the examination). “You’ve got to be flexible at times, and there are exceptions to every rule,” Mark said, regarding the need to obtain Huff’s identification. “We just record what happened in our report so there are no questions later.”
Seattle Police Department’s Crime Scene Unit works the horrific
scene at the Capitol Hill Massacre.
PHOTO TAKEN BY ALAN BERNER, COURTESY THE SEATTLE TIMES
After the scene had been worked and the suspect, Kyle Aaron Huff, had been positively identified through fingerprints, the case was essentially over from the investigative perspective. But as with any crime or occurrence, everyone still wanted to know why. Why did this person commit such a random, violent act? The Seattle Police Department formed a third-party panel to look into the case and psychologically dissect Kyle’s motives to help ease the community’s pain. The three-month investigation and analysis of Kyle’s behavior concluded that he was a loner with no romantic relationships who liked video games and hard-core music. In an attempt to get inside Huff’s psyche, investigators searched his computer and interviewed his relatives and acquaintances. They found that he and his twin brother had both moved to Seattle from Montana, and though he’d tried, Kyle had never seemed to fit in. Based on the panel’s investigation, it appeared that Kyle had originally sought out the rave crowd to make frie
nds. But the culture of the ravers, particularly their affinity for being very touchy-feely, may have put him off (Kyle had never had a real romantic relationship with a girl). Many people may have viewed the panel’s conclusions as simple guesstimates, based on conjecture, had it not been for another unbelievable event, the last epiphany regarding the Capitol Hill Massacre.
On April 24, 2006, almost exactly one month to the day after the shootings on Capitol Hill, the Seattle bomb squad was called to examine a suspicious-looking package found behind an apartment complex. The landlord of the complex had recently noticed a lot of illegal dumping, so he had been digging around in the Dumpster when he came across a strange-looking object hidden in it. Though the suspicious package turned out to be nothing more than garbage, the landlord had also discovered something nearly as explosive—a suicide letter from Kyle.
Crumpled up in a fast-food bag was a handwritten note from Kyle addressed to his twin brother, Kane, regarding the events that would unfold on that now infamous day in March. Initially, most people thought the letter was a hoax, especially considering the random circumstances in which it was found. Some have theorized that Kane might have been in possession of the letter and wanted to distance himself. He was known to have passed by that Dumpster several times as he prepared to move out of the Seattle area forever. But how the letter got into the Dumpster remains a mystery. A cursory comparison of the letter to other samples of Kyle’s handwriting revealed similarities, but nothing conclusive, so the letter was eventually sent to the Washington State Crime Lab for analysis.
On June 7, the lab released its findings, stating that the letter was in “high probability” written by Kyle Huff. And the contents appeared to be the ravings of a paranoid and troubled young man. The letter was to his brother, ranting about a “revolution” against “a world of sex.” Kyle’s words wove a delusional tapestry about “killing this hippie shit”—a clear attack on the rave kids whom he ultimately killed in cold blood. Kyle ended the letter with the phrase “Now Kids Now,” then signed off by telling Kane that he loved him. Without question, the Capitol Hill Massacre was a tragedy of epic proportions, carried out by a lonely and misguided soul.
CSIs are real people. Every graduate we spent time with has a family. They are ordinary people, except they have an up-close and inside look at just how crappy the world can truly get. Detective Mark Hanf and his wife are no different. They live in a beautiful condo just outside Seattle. She works for Intel and travels across most of Asia, helping to keep the tech industry booming. They have two adult sons, one who recently came back from the war in Iraq. At dinner, which we ate at a local Mongolian grill, we talked about something other than dead bodies: American Idol. It doesn’t get much more everyday than that.
The next morning, after a Mongolian buffet hangover, we reconvened with the rest of the crime scene unit down in their office. It’s a little macabre, visiting all of these different cities and hoping for crimes to occur, thus giving us crime scenes to work. Yet up to this point, we hadn’t had even a sniff of death. But that morning, talk in the department was of a current missing-person case that had caught the attention of the local news media. Flyers had been posted everywhere, and relatives of the missing person had been on television complaining about the police and how little they were doing to find their loved one in the nearly two weeks he’d been missing.
The case was a little strange: On Cinco de Mayo, a father and son had apparently gone down to Pioneer Square to drink, snort cocaine, and, it seems, share a hooker back in their hotel room. (Not our idea of what the holiday’s meant for.) There was little information to go on. Supposedly the son had walked out of the bar they’d been drinking at, headed north, and never been heard from since. The father was not considered the most credible witness; he seemed to be sketchy when asked about the events that occurred on the night his son went missing. His timelines did not match the time frames on the bar security camera, and phone calls from the hotel room seemed to contradict his story. Dad said his son had gotten into a fight with the bouncer before he was kicked out of the bar, but the bouncer said something quite different, telling the cops that the father was never even at the bar and that the son had come and gone on his own. Though the father was turning out to look very suspicious, there was nothing warranting an arrest. However, the investigators wanted to talk to him and had scheduled him to be polygraphed the very next day.
The next morning on our way to the department, we stopped at one of our favorite places—Krispy Kreme—and brought in a dozen doughnuts for breakfast, keeping the stereotype alive. (We opted for traditional doughnuts, rather than another Seattle treat—a humbow. A humbow is simply a steamed or baked Asian pastry filled with a very sweet red meat. Think of it as a Krispy Kreme glazed doughnut filled with barbecued pork. Mark had introduced us to them during our first visit to Seattle three years earlier, and we realized that there was another reason for all of the coffee consumption in Seattle—to wake up its residents from humbow-induced comas.) Back in the office, we sat around for a while, doughnuts in hand, talking to Mark about how his NFA training had helped him with his work. “For me, [the most valuable part] was the forensic anthropology component,” Mark stated. Not many in his department, with the exception of some members of the Green River Task Force, had ever had any formal training in human remains recovery until then. Just as we were getting deep into the conversation, however, a call out to a crime scene came in.
A body had been discovered underneath the Magnolia Bridge, one of the myriad of bridges permeating the heart of Seattle. They didn’t know who it was, what condition the body was in, or even how long it had been there. As a matter of fact, they had no idea if a crime had even taken place. Armed with only this little tidbit of information, we piled into the backseat of an unmarked cruiser with the crime scene van following close behind. The exact location of the body was hard to determine from the initial call. We drove up, down, and all around the Port of Seattle pier trying to find where the body had been discovered. Initially, a security guard working the entrance to the pier barred us entry, even with the flash of a badge. Homeland security is alive and well in Seattle. Finally, after what seemed to be a dizzying quarter of an hour later, we found where we were supposed to go.
The crime scene unit sergeant was already there, awaiting our arrival. And the moment we got out of the car downwind from the body, we could already smell that all-too-familiar smell of human decomposition. As we moved a little closer, we could see the hump of a body lying facedown in the weeds, just a few feet on the other side of a chain-link fence that had been partially torn down.
The body of a dead man lies beneath the sheet, having fallen
to his death from the bridge above.
HALLCOX & WELCH, LLC
After gathering what information was available from the initial responding officer, the team began to work the scene. As if they had performed this dance a hundred times before, they each worked on a different task, never having to speak but each knowing what the other was doing. Don Ledbetter (a graduate of Session XIII at the NFA) went to the top of the bridge to take pictures of the victim, who lay down below. We assisted Don, directing traffic to keep him from getting run over. Then Don and Brian Stampfl began mapping the entire crime scene area with a total station, a measuring instrument used in surveying as well as in crime scene work and traffic collision reconstruction. It is used to electronically measure and map outdoor crime scenes accurately. Lisa Haakenstad (also an NFA alumnus) took notes while Mark assisted wherever necessary. Meanwhile, it had been determined that in all probability, the victim found under the bridge was the same young man who had gone missing twelve days earlier on Cinco de Mayo. Several investigators from both homicide and missing persons were also on the scene trying to confirm that was the case, discovering that a call had come in to 911 on May 5 about a drunken man who’d been seen walking in traffic. The CSIs continued to map, photograph, and work the scene until they reached the body, while
the sergeant went to procure the most important tool a Seattle crime scene investigator needs—coffee. Then it was time to call the ME’s office.
As the team drank their Starbucks coffee while waiting for the medical examiner to arrive, stress-related black humor began to emerge. Someone started whistling Ode to Billie Joe, particularly emphasizing the line that goes “today Billie Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.” Another began referring to May 5 as “Stinko de Mayo.” You’ve got to love the morbid humor of a CSI.
The ME arrived on the scene to a swarm of flies, which had begun hatching right before our eyes. Up until this particular day, the spring weather had been cool and cloudy, with virtually no sun. But on this day the weather was spectacular—too hot for Seattleites—and the warmth had allowed the flies to begin popping from their wiggly cocoons. The victim had been wearing a hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled up when he’d apparently plunged to his death from the Magnolia Bridge, landing facedown and thus obscuring his face. From all outward appearances, the victim looked “fresh,” with no visible signs of decomposition. But when the ME worked his way around to the head area of the victim’s body and pulled down the sweatshirt hood, we were privy to the most unnerving sight we had ever experienced.