Behind the Yellow Tape Page 8

  A prisoner’s thinking time goes to more than just ways to make money or to survive. Many focus their thoughts on how to get out of the place. Prison breaks are a real possibility day in and day out. Movies like Escape from Alcatraz and The Shawshank Redemption depict incredible escapes that are not much different from some that we heard about while we were in Minnesota. One story we remember in particular was about a prisoner who had been working on his escape for years. He hacksawed through the bars in his cell and stole newspapers that he fashioned into the shape of cell bars and painted silver to look like the real ones. Every night he sneaked out of his paper cell and went on recons to search for the best route to escape, climbing up onto one of the windows and beginning the painstaking task of sawing through more metal bars. With his route established, he made the final decision to leave. He stuffed his bed with blankets and pillows to make it look like he was still asleep—pretty basic, something that many teenagers have done while vacating their parental prison. But he came up with an addition to this old scheme: armed with an oscillating fan, a piece of garden hose, and a trash bag, he was able to have the lump in his bed mimic someone breathing. Then, with his apparatus in place, he sneaked out the window to the top of the prison building, where he had created a wooden bridge to the next building, from where he would jump over the fence and escape. But as he traversed his wooden savior, it broke, and he ended up stuck between the two buildings. Guards were finally alerted early in the morning when they heard someone knocking on one of the prison doors. Essentially, the prisoner had locked himself out of his own lockup. Obviously he is now watched more closely.

  It’s unfortunate, but we, the general citizenry, wash our hands of a convict once he or she is put away, believing that justice has been served. But it doesn’t end there. Kris, Tee, and investigators like them all across the country spend their days listening in on phone conversations, interviewing prostitutes, and talking to gangbangers, investigating not only crime on the inside but also crime that is being orchestrated from the inside. It’s a terrible reality, but all kinds of crime continue on—head bashings and stabbings on the inside, and harassments and killings on the outside. Unfortunately, that’s the way the world is and always will be.

  The next day, we caught back up with Sergeant Eric Rish at the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Department within the city limits of Duluth. He had arranged for us to look at the only ROV (remotely operated vehicle) owned and operated by a law enforcement agency in the country. An ROV is a mini-submarine, very similar to the ones used by National Geographic and the Discovery Channel to visit unreachable underwater locations such as the wreck of the Titanic. Homeland Security dollars have allowed many departments to purchase obscure and often irrelevant high-end pieces of equipment, and one could argue that this ROV falls into that category. Duluth is not a port city metropolis that terrorists are seeking out. However, Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes (actually 11,000, but that’s not as catchy on a license plate), has a real need for this type of technology. Too many Minnesotans, under their own volition or with the help of others, often find their way to the bottom of one of the thousands of chilly lakes.

  These underwater law enforcement cowboys, armed with their little sub, are pioneering the use of these aquatic pieces of equipment. Recently, New York City investigators finally decided that they too needed some of these subs to look under the boats that enter their harbor, and they asked the St. Louis County team to come and train them in using these machines. In this small circle of underwater investigation, these guys are well known—so much so that they were also contacted to assist on the Natalee Holloway case in Aruba. Investigators there hoped beyond all hope that an ROV might catch a glimpse of poor Natalee somewhere in the murky depths of the ocean. The St. Louis County investigators declined, however, because too much time had elapsed by then, and they knew their involvement would unfortunately be frivolous.

  Underwater crime scene investigation is in its infancy. A lot of what is studied, including how bodies move in the water and how they decompose, is mostly conjecture. For instance, whenever you hear about someone falling into water, the experts come out and pontificate on where to begin the search for the body. Invariably, the thought is that “they move with the current, so we’d better look downstream.” Then the body isn’t found. Psychics show up pointing in all directions, while others clamor for a pig to be killed and tossed into the water to see where it ends up. But drowning is a very violent death. A victim will brutally thrash about, struggling for air, and a dead pig, believe it or not, cannot mimic that movement.

  Almost always, a body will be found very near the point of entry. More often than not, when a body is not found near the point of entry, eyewitness error is to blame because the person pointed to an incorrect location. The trauma of seeing someone falling into and getting lost in a body of water is hard on the memory. The general rule of thumb is that a body will drift only about one foot horizontally for every foot it falls vertically in the water. There, the body will fall to the bottom and remain—at least for a while.

  As a submerged body decomposes, it fills with gas, just as it will on land. In water, these phases of filling with gas have come to be known as reflotation intervals. The first interval is when the bacteria in the digestive tract cause the abdomen to extend and fill with gases (the bloat stage). This traditionally occurs between twenty-four and seventy-two hours after death. During this interval, the body will bob to the surface, float with the current awhile, and then, if undisturbed, sink back to the bottom until the second interval. The second interval occurs when the bacteria in other parts of the body (the tissues, muscles, etc.) begin to give off gases. Once this occurs, the body will typically start to float again. But none of this is an exact guide. Many variables go into these calculations, including the victim’s last meal, the temperature and depth of the water, and even the body mass index we all love so much—meaning that fat people float more readily and are more likely to be found than skinny people are. Just another thing to keep in mind as you pull into the drive-through at Mickey D’s.

  The traditional means of underwater body recovery, and the way it is still done nearly everywhere today, is simply known as drag and dive. That is, get a boat, throw out a hook, and drag the bottom of the water. At the same time, divers go into the water and look around. Submerged bodies are never able to be recovered in “position found,” as at a normal crime scene, because they have been disturbed during their discovery and recovery. Yet with an ROV, for the first time it’s possible to find a body undisturbed.

  The guys in St. Louis County had set up all of their equipment for us, their ROV and their sonar, in the conference room to let us observe them. Then they fired up a laptop computer and showed us tapes of something we’d never before seen—an actual body recovery by an ROV.

  St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office, Minnesota, ROV Team.

  HALLCOX & WELCH, LLC

  Wintertime in Minnesota means playtime on the lakes. And it is not much different from playtime in sunny Florida. But whereas Floridians drive onto their beaches to go fishing, Minnesotans drive right onto their frozen lakes and cut holes in the ice to fish. And instead of piloting Sea-Doos, they drive their snowmobiles all around the frozen waters. But the danger in Minnesota is exponentially worse. A couple of years ago, some guys put inner tubes around their waists and decided to go snowmobiling on a semifrozen lake. Unfortunately, one of the guys fell through the ice, slid right out of his inner tube, and sank to the bottom to die. We watched the screen in awe as the mini-sub lit up the dark lake and showed the unlucky snow-mobiler dead, in “position found.” The team had decided not to send their divers into the subzero waters, but instead used the clamp arm on the ROV to grab the body and hoist it to the surface. Again, we watched as the ROV moved into position, clasped hold of the snowmobiler’s coat, and began pulling the man from the water. It was the first and only time so far that a body has ever been recovered by an ROV.

  The su
rface has only been scratched about what can be done about crime scenes underwater. With the price of underwater technologies dropping (the equipment originally cost roughly $100,000) and the ever-present danger that exists in our country seemingly increasing, this field will soon explode with research and development. For now, though, these guys are as good as it gets.

  The next morning, on the eve of the blizzard of ’07, Eric picked us up to visit the Duluth Police Department, see some old friends, and talk about some of their cases. Duluth has sent four crime scene investigators through the forensic program, including Eric, so we were also able to visit with another forensic academy graduate, Lieutenant Kerry Kolodge.

  Kolodge had had an interesting case not long after he graduated from our program. In July 2005, a call came in to the Duluth Police Department regarding a violent assault. The victim, Deliena Lamberton, had been severely beaten and subsequently taken to the hospital by her boyfriend, Edward Bergren. All indications were that the assault had even continued while en route to the emergency room. Kerry ultimately worked the scene, using the knowledge he had acquired in bloodstain pattern analysis to assess the directionality of the blood in the Ford F-150 truck where the assault occurred. “Either I was right on or way off,” Kerry said, regarding his interpretation of the bloodstains found at the scene. His conclusion conflicted with the suspect’s story.

  “He claimed that his girlfriend went out one way, and the blood spatter evidence proved otherwise,” Kerry told us as the wind began to whistle through the crevices of the old Duluth Police Department structure. In court testimony, Kolodge had educated the jury on forensic details such as height and directionality of bloodstains. The only thing he could not do was physically string the stains and come up with an area of convergence because of the truck’s curved roof. Kerry consulted with Jeff Gurvis, one of the best bloodstain pattern experts in the country. “[He] told me not to worry about stringing a curved surface,” Kerry said. Stringing a curved surface to calculate the area of convergence is a tough proposition left up to the most experienced analysts, and Kolodge had enough evidence without having to take on that challenge.

  In the end, the defense brought in an expert from Florida who had nothing contradictory to say to Kerry’s conclusion. The only question that was asked of the lieutenant was, “Have you ever witnessed anybody who was knocked unconscious standing on their feet?”—a perplexing question, especially when it is the only one asked. Kerry thought a minute and responded resolutely, “Not without some help.” And with that, the jury deliberated and came back with a verdict of guilty. Edward Bergren was sentenced to 158 months for his violent attack on his girlfriend.

  After we chatted with Kerry for a little while longer, catching up on old times, it was time for him to go back to work. We all said our good-byes and laughed a little as Kerry overaccentuated his “oo’s” and “aye’s.” If it is possible, Kerry sounds even more Duluthian than Eric.

  As Kerry vanished down the stairs, Eric grabbed the large three-ring binder that dominated the conference table and turned it toward us. “If we’d had an ROV back then, you know, we might have found Schrieffer sooner,” Eric trumpeted, after our conversation with Kerry. Through the windows, we could see the snow just beginning outside, signaling the official start to what would become the blizzard of ’07. Erik Schrieffer was a wannabe biker who went missing not long after he moved into the Hog Pen—a bar-slash-house-slash-biker-garage. At first, this case was nothing unusual. “These guys get drunk and crawl away or do something bad and run off to Mexico, never to be seen again,” Lieutenant Ron Leino, another CSI with the Duluth Police Department, said as we thumbed through the case file. Leino had been one of the lead investigators in the case. And because bikers are not known for loose lips, no one at the police department expected much to come of it.

  Several days after Erik Schrieffer went missing in January 2001, with the case fast becoming cold, investigators got a break when two eyewitnesses came forward to talk about the events they had seen at the Hog Pen. The fellow bikers, Herb and Charlie, said that Erik and another biker, Joseph Wehmanen, had gotten into a dispute over something about “living in Arizona.” Nobody knew the specifics of the argument, but it grew more intense, with Wehmanen eventually accusing Schrieffer of being a narc. The two men spilled out into the street in front of the Hog Pen and fought, Wehmanen getting the best of Schrieffer, leaving him hunched over in the alley as Joseph went to his truck. And that’s when the unthinkable happened. Wehmanen floored his truck and ran over Schrieffer, then hit reverse and backed up over him, and then rammed the truck back into drive and ran over him yet again, dragging him more than eighty yards in the process. The two witnesses said that at that point Wehmanen got out of his truck, threw Schrieffer into the back, and sped away. That’s all they knew, and after their one conversation with the police, neither Herb nor Charlie was ever seen or heard from again.

  Investigators were sent to examine the supposed scene of the crime, several days and several snows later, hoping to find some evidence of what had transpired. As the team scoured the area, one of the investigators noticed a reddish spot in the snow. Not knowing for sure but assuming it was blood, the team decided to do an excavation of the snowy area, just as they would if exhuming a body from a grave. After excavating down several inches, the investigators found a layer of blood, lots of blood, in a large swath, permeating underneath the snow. In order to collect the bloody snow evidence for analysis, ingenious investigators used foam cups and coffee filters as their forensic collection kits. The bloody snow was scooped up and its contents were put into a coffee filter set on top of a cup, thus filtering out the liquid as it melted and separating the blood from the snow. The blood that collected on the filter was eventually sent to the lab for DNA analysis. After the area was excavated and all of the blood revealed, the investigators then called in the medical examiner, who determined that even without a body, the amount of blood lost was sufficient enough to rule that a homicide had taken place. Erik Schrieffer was no longer thought to be missing; he was now presumed to have been murdered, and Joseph Wehmanen probably knew something about it.

  Joseph Wehmanen was arrested on suspicion of murder, and his truck was seized and sent to the lab for analysis. Investigators were initially thrilled to collect the truck for the laboratory investigators, hoping that it might contain blood evidence. Earlier in the week, investigators had been called to a car wash where lots of blood was found being washed down one of the drains. Thinking their suspect might have taken his truck there to clean it up, they rushed to the location, but the blood they found was animal. It was hunting season, and animal blood would be found in many trucks in Duluth. Someone must have pulled into the car wash to wash out a fresh kill. Wehmanen, of course, had nothing to say about anything. Unfortunately, after three months of examination by the lab, neither did his truck. The lab couldn’t find a trace of anything human or from a human—blood, hair, skin, clothing fibers, nothing. With Wehmanen still not talking and with no tangible evidence against him, investigators were desperate. One theory was that Wehmanen might have disposed of Schrieffer’s body via an ice hole out at Joseph’s friend’s ice-fishing house (in Minnesota, icehouses are considered dwellings akin to mobile homes), but unfortunately the investigators did not even have enough evidence to get a search warrant for the fishing house. They could not hold Wehmanen indefinitely, and prosecutors would not prosecute him without something more than just conjecture to pin on him. Could Wehmanen be innocent?

  The icehouse where police searched for Erik Schrieffer.

  COPYRIGHT © BY DULUTH POLICE DEPARTMENT, MINNESOTA

  With nowhere else to turn, the investigators decided to take a look at Wehmanen’s truck themselves. They culled the truck, top to bottom, inside and out, and just like the lab initially found nothing. They crawled into the back of the truck, through the camper top, searching every crack and crevice. Still nothing. Then one of the investigators happened to look behind a piece
of the camper top frame that supported the roof. And there it was: blood that had been splashed up behind the aluminum frame of the camper top, as if someone had sprayed a hose trying to clean something up. Still, it wasn’t a tremendous amount of evidence.

  The investigators decided, without even testing the blood to see whose it was (or whether it was even human), to inform Wehmanen’s lawyer of what they had discovered and what their next move would be—to prosecute his client for murder. The lawyer and Wehmanen immediately decided to plead guilty to second-degree murder. Without a body or a lot of evidence, the prosecutor had little choice. As part of the plea deal, Wehmanen agreed to tell the investigators what had happened, at least his version of events, as well as where Schrieffer’s body was, if he knew. Wehmanen was ushered to the St. Louis County district attorney’s office right away, where he immediately began his testimony, even before the plea had been officially entered into the system.