Trail of Blood. Wanda Evans
the patched area a closer look, then reached down and pulled at the edge of the clean carpet. The smaller piece of carpet came loose. White peeled back a small portion of it. It was stuck to the padding with duct tape that was crusted with a large amount of a dried ruby substance. Blood?
English, his heart pounding, exchanged a meaningful look with White. Then English turned around and looked through the bedroom door to where Leisha sat on the couch, watching television as if oblivious to their presence.
“Leisha,” English called.
She appeared in the doorway.
“What is this?” English asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe some mud or something Scott tracked in.”
“How long has it been here?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t used this room since Scott left.”
“You didn’t put the afghan on the floor? You never moved the afghan or looked under it?” English persisted.
“No. I told you. I’ve been sleeping on the couch.”
“Let’s call the ID boys over here,” White said and headed for the telephone.
While English and White were waiting for an officer from LPD’s Identification Section, they examined the room in minute detail. A closer look at the bedroom wall revealed a collage of whitish smears, lighter than the surrounding wall, as if someone had tried to wash the wall and had done a poor job of it. The smears were markedly evident along the baseboard in that area, but English’s eyes followed the smears higher up the wall, where he could see red-brown specks. “Blood?” he suggested to White.
“Leisha, do you know what this is?” White asked.
Leisha walked up to the wall and looked at a brown fleck just above her eye level. “It looks like blood,” she said. “And look, there’s a hair in it.”
She volunteered that she had not noticed the spot before. She pointed to the afghan. “This is where Scott was sleeping the last time I saw him.” Her voice was as cool and as calm as if she had been telling them what she had eaten for lunch.
English stared at the woman, scrutinizing her.
English continued to track the brown specks up the wall. He could see droplets on the ceiling, too. Blood spatter? With a chill in his chest, English began to feel that something bad had happened in this room.
ID Officer Gaylon Lewis arrived and began taking photographs. White showed him the bare place in the living room where the piece of carpet had been removed and Lewis photographed that area. In the bedroom, White had replaced the corner of carpet he had pulled away from the wall so that Lewis could photograph the patch in place. Then, White pulled up the half-circle of carpet again, revealing padding underneath that bore dark stains. Duct tape had been taped to the underside of the existing carpet and to the half-circle. This was a fairly neat job and undoubtedly took some time to do. Pictures were taken of the underside of the patch of carpet and of the padding underneath. Lewis collected the duct tape for processing for latent fingerprints. Then the carpet padding and sections of stained carpet were cut out for testing. The detectives noted that the area that was cut from under the couch would have been large enough to cover this semicircular area. There was a large smear of what looked like dried blood between the carpet nailing strip and the wall. A section of the nailing strip was taken up and several scrapings from the wall collected. One area near the upper center of the semicircle had another brown spot that looked a lot like dried blood on the cement.
This was the spot, Leisha had told Tal, where Scott Dunn’s head rested when he was in bed.
Carefully, Lewis cut away portions of the Sheetrock containing the dark droplets scattered over the walls, put them in bags and sealed them. The ID Section protocol dictated that everything that might have evidential importance be collected, carefully placed in boxes and bags, sealed and labeled, signed by the officers present, ready to be delivered to the appropriate departments. In this case, everything except the duct tape would be taken to the Texas Department of Public Safety crime lab. The Lubbock Police Department had its own facility for examining fingerprints, but it had no forensic laboratory where other crime scene evidence, such as bloodstains, could be tested. The DPS had a crime laboratory in Lubbock, a few blocks from the police building. Evidence usually was sent there for testing. In some cases, the local lab forwarded evidence on to the State DPS Lab in Austin or to the FBI lab.
Lewis would take the duct tape back to the police department’s ID office and check it for fingerprints. Any other evidence he could obtain, such as fibers or hairs, would be turned over to the DPS lab.
While the ID officer was gathering the items, a woman came to the door and introduced herself as the apartment manager, Gail Rose. When English explained what they were doing, she nodded. “I thought something peculiar was going on, with Leisha driving Scott’s car all the time. It’s none of my business, of course, but Scott was always out there working on his car, which was parked right next to their apartment. Then suddenly, she’s driving it and it’s all torn up and I didn’t see Scott anymore. I thought they might have had a fight or something.”
English nodded. “I noticed the car. You say it’s torn apart?”
“Let me show you,” Gail offered.
He followed her outside to where the yellow Camaro was parked perpendicular to the building, in an area that contained spaces for about six cars. Looking inside, English understood what Gail meant. The back seat had been removed, the passenger seat was tilted a little to one side and the dashboard was missing. Unattached wires were protruding through the firewall. He remembered that Jim Dunn had told him Scott was transferring the motor and parts from this car to another Camaro with a better body. Apparently the work had already begun. He was surprised the car was operable.
Back inside the apartment, English showed Gail the stains in the living room and in the bedroom. She looked stunned. “That carpet was not stained or patched when Scott and Leisha moved in,” she said firmly.
In the meantime, White had called the DPS crime lab and talked with Jim Thomas, a chemist and the supervising criminalist at the lab, which analyzed crime scene evidence in a ninety-county area. Evidence received at this laboratory covered a variety of substances: blood evidence for DNA and serological examination, hair and fibers, glass, shoe prints, tire tracks, controlled substances and various types of trace evidence that might be involved in a criminal investigation.
Although Thomas was the lab supervisor, he also was involved in analyzing certain types of evidence and giving testimony about his analyses. On occasion the chemist responded when an officer requested assistance in the collection of evidence at crime scenes.
White apologized for asking Thomas to stay late on a Friday afternoon and asked if he would stand by to look at samples the detective wanted to bring him. Thomas agreed. White called his LPD supervisor, Sergeant Randy McGuire, and asked him to come to the apartment. When McGuire arrived, English told Leisha, “We really need to ask you to come with us to the department. We’ll need to talk more.” Leisha agreed. McGuire and English drove Leisha downtown to the police department for further questioning.
White hurried to the DPS crime laboratory and waited while Thomas conducted a preliminary test for blood on a portion of the wooden carpet-tack strip, used as a nailing strip, that White had pried from the wall in Scott Dunn’s bedroom. The method Thomas used was a presumptive test with Tetraethyl Benzedrine. Thomas’ test revealed that blood was present on the wooden strip. There was one big question that had to be answered before the detectives proceeded. “Is it human blood?” White asked Thomas.
“I can’t tell you right now,” Thomas said. “The test to determine if this is human blood will take a while, but I’ll call you when we run more tests.”
White nodded. “I’ll be at the office. Call when you know something.”
Tal English and Leisha Hamilton were waiting in English’s office when White returned. At 6:48 PM Friday, June 7, English read Hamilton her rights.