Free Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist by Ann Rule Page B

have a hard time believing it.
    I filled page after page in notebook after notebook with my findings, documenting the visual effects with photos. Sometimes the experiments were purely theoretical; at other times they sprang from cases I was working and evidence that was puzzling me.
Case Study: The Twenty-Nine Slashes
    Take the case of John Lee Hipsher, for example. Hipsher was a long-time transient, well-known in the homeless community that populated some of the parks in Portland. He was found dead one morning in early September 1983 at the end of a secluded hiking trail in Lewis & Clark State Park, lying next to a triangular pool of his own blood. His throat had been slashed twenty-nine times. The lower halves of his arms were covered in the blood-into-blood patterns and satellite spatter that occurs when blood drips repeatedly onto an area.
    When I interviewed the other drifters who had been in the park the night Hipsher died, one told me he and Hipsher had been hanging out on a bench when a man and a woman walked by. “Hey!” Hipsher exclaimed. “There’s the dude that stole my backpack. I’m gonna go get my stuff back.” Hipsher then lumbered off in pursuit of the pair, according to his pal, and that was the last he had seen of any of them.
    A few yards down from the spot where Hipsher’s body was discovered lay a campsite with a fire pit. I searched it and found a partially eaten pear that someone had tossed away. I overnighted it to forensic odontologist Dr. William Alexander in Eugene, Oregon, to examine before it could decompose, taking vital clues with it. Today, we could most likely have retrieved DNA from the pear. But in the early 1980s, forensic technology was much more limited. Still, Dr. Alexander managed to extract some intriguing information from the fruit.
    “Whoever ate this pear was missing a front tooth,” he concluded. “The person was probably also wearing a Pendleton shirt, judging from the multicolored threads in the flesh of the pear.”
    Unfortunately, extensive searching turned up nobody fitting the suspect’s description. It would be almost two years before we caught a break in the case—when narcotics agents in our office arrested a woman named Patricia Marcus* for drug possession.
    “What if I tell you about a murder you never solved?” she offered, hoping to barter for reduced charges. “I know who did it. I saw it.”
    As soon as she started talking, I realized she was describing the Hipsher case—and she knew enough details to convince me that she was telling the truth. Marcus claimed she was partying in the park with her ex-boyfriend, Richard Salmon, when a bum approached them. Neither she nor Salmon knew the guy, but a heated argument soon erupted. According to Marcus, Salmon beat up the drifter, then dragged him off into the woods and cut his throat. They were all wasted at thetime, she explained, but Salmon was violent even when sober, and she had been too scared of him to come forward until now.
    I tracked Salmon down a few days later. Not only was he missing a front tooth, but he actually admitted to killing Hipsher. He insisted, however, that he had done it in self-defense. Hipsher had attacked him, shouting some cockamamie tale about stolen stuff, and he had had no choice but to protect himself. Yes, he was carrying a knife. Yes, he cut Hipsher’s throat. But it was pure accident. He swung the blade wildly, trying to fend off the crazed derelict, and inadvertently caught Hipsher across the jugular. Terrified by the sight of all that blood pouring out, he and Patty bolted.
    I didn’t buy it. Not with twenty-nine slashes. Not with those peculiar blood patterns. I was sure the blood was the key to learning what really went on in that wooded corner of the park that night. My colleagues agreed. But when we dug the crime scene photos out of the files and reviewed them, the bloody triangle in the grass still mystified all of us. Nobody in homicide had seen one like it