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Book: Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist by Ann Rule
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Authors: Ann Rule
Tags: Fiction, General, Social Science, Medical, True Crime, Law, Murder, Criminology, blood, Forensic Medicine, Criminal investigation, Forensic Science, Hematology, Evidence, Bloodstains, Evidence; Criminal, Forensic Hematology, Evidence; Expert
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physics. You have to understand disciplines like trajectory and pathology. And you must be able to apply scientific methods to your work when you conduct experiments. But you also have to put in years of fieldwork to understand it thoroughly. You can’t learn what my colleagues and I do from sitting home reading books. You have to be able to read crime scenes. And that’s a skill you get only from going to crime scenes. Lots of them.
When I walk into a blood-soaked room with a dead person sprawled in the center, it’s like opening a book and starting at the end. The crime scene is the last page. I read that. And then slowly, carefully, often painstakingly, I work my way backward through the chapters—who, what, when, where, and how—until at last I reach the first page and find out how the story began.
3
Blood, Drugs, and Murder
in Multnomah County
B Y 1969, I WAS spending far more time immersed in L.A.’s gritty, treacherous drug culture than I was with my family. I loved under-cover work. In fact, I wanted to work all the time. And that was easy to do in a place like Los Angeles, where barbiturates, cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens, marijuana, and hashish changed hands faster than traders swap shares on the stock exchange floor.
But my constant absence was putting a strain on my family. Finally, we decided to move to Oregon, where I hoped to strike a better balance between career and home and where my kids could grow up in a more wholesome, rural environment. I was also eager for them to get a taste of the farm life that had shaped my childhood.
I contacted the sheriff’s office in Multnomah County, which covers Portland, and they offered me a job. I left the station in Downey at five P.M. on a Friday afternoon, loaded my family and all our belongings into a moving van, and reported for duty at nine A.M. Monday, where I discovered that I had been assigned once again to narcotics. It wasn’t the most auspicious start for someone who had vowed to work less, but we soon felt at home in Oregon and the move proved to be a wise one for all of us.
We settled on five acres of rambling, hilly farmland close enough to Portland that I could travel between work and home easily, but far enough away that Gary, Cherie, and Ron could go to school in a small farm community, enjoy plenty of room to roam and play outdoors, and, in the summer, swim and water-ski at nearby Willamette River.
My first home improvement project was to build a barn. Over the years it held horses, cats, dogs, and a pet sheep named Sammy who would make a break for the house every time he saw the door open and butt poor Ron in the stomach. Mainly, though, it held cattle, which I hoped would prove a lucrative enough sideline to help me cover the costs of raising three children.
I went to a few auctions and bought a handful of skinny three-hundred-pound feeder calves, planning to fatten them up to a robust eight hundred pounds each. It was easy for me to fall back into the familiar routines of farm life still ingrained from my childhood—getting up in the wee hours to feed the cows, mucking out the stalls every night. My kids weren’t so easy to convince, though. I was adamant that the cattle were to be a family affair—everybody pitched in, everybody got their hands dirty, and, ultimately, everybody would benefit. From the time they were about nine, the three of them took turns—one week on, two weeks off—handling cow duty. That meant dragging themselves out of a warm bed, puffy-eyed and shivering, at five A.M. to don sweatshirts, knee-high boots, hats, and heavy gloves, then trudgingdown the hill to the barn to feed the cows, stifling yawns and resentment. The work had to get done even in the rain, sleet, and snow. Sometimes a steer would break out of the barn in the middle of the night and we’d roust the kids at three A.M. to grab flashlights, help us find the runaway, and chase him back home, slipping on the mud and ice. It was tough work for
When I walk into a blood-soaked room with a dead person sprawled in the center, it’s like opening a book and starting at the end. The crime scene is the last page. I read that. And then slowly, carefully, often painstakingly, I work my way backward through the chapters—who, what, when, where, and how—until at last I reach the first page and find out how the story began.
3
Blood, Drugs, and Murder
in Multnomah County
B Y 1969, I WAS spending far more time immersed in L.A.’s gritty, treacherous drug culture than I was with my family. I loved under-cover work. In fact, I wanted to work all the time. And that was easy to do in a place like Los Angeles, where barbiturates, cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens, marijuana, and hashish changed hands faster than traders swap shares on the stock exchange floor.
But my constant absence was putting a strain on my family. Finally, we decided to move to Oregon, where I hoped to strike a better balance between career and home and where my kids could grow up in a more wholesome, rural environment. I was also eager for them to get a taste of the farm life that had shaped my childhood.
I contacted the sheriff’s office in Multnomah County, which covers Portland, and they offered me a job. I left the station in Downey at five P.M. on a Friday afternoon, loaded my family and all our belongings into a moving van, and reported for duty at nine A.M. Monday, where I discovered that I had been assigned once again to narcotics. It wasn’t the most auspicious start for someone who had vowed to work less, but we soon felt at home in Oregon and the move proved to be a wise one for all of us.
We settled on five acres of rambling, hilly farmland close enough to Portland that I could travel between work and home easily, but far enough away that Gary, Cherie, and Ron could go to school in a small farm community, enjoy plenty of room to roam and play outdoors, and, in the summer, swim and water-ski at nearby Willamette River.
My first home improvement project was to build a barn. Over the years it held horses, cats, dogs, and a pet sheep named Sammy who would make a break for the house every time he saw the door open and butt poor Ron in the stomach. Mainly, though, it held cattle, which I hoped would prove a lucrative enough sideline to help me cover the costs of raising three children.
I went to a few auctions and bought a handful of skinny three-hundred-pound feeder calves, planning to fatten them up to a robust eight hundred pounds each. It was easy for me to fall back into the familiar routines of farm life still ingrained from my childhood—getting up in the wee hours to feed the cows, mucking out the stalls every night. My kids weren’t so easy to convince, though. I was adamant that the cattle were to be a family affair—everybody pitched in, everybody got their hands dirty, and, ultimately, everybody would benefit. From the time they were about nine, the three of them took turns—one week on, two weeks off—handling cow duty. That meant dragging themselves out of a warm bed, puffy-eyed and shivering, at five A.M. to don sweatshirts, knee-high boots, hats, and heavy gloves, then trudgingdown the hill to the barn to feed the cows, stifling yawns and resentment. The work had to get done even in the rain, sleet, and snow. Sometimes a steer would break out of the barn in the middle of the night and we’d roust the kids at three A.M. to grab flashlights, help us find the runaway, and chase him back home, slipping on the mud and ice. It was tough work for
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