Blood Will Tell (Part 1)

This is part one of a two-part investigative journalism report about the trial of Joe Bryan. Joe was connvicted of murdering his wife Mikey on the basis of blood spatter evidence. The link leads you to full article (which includes photos), but you only need to read the following sections, which focus on the bloodstain pattern evidence:

Investigators would remain at the house until after midnight, poring over the crime scene. They had little to go on; the neighbors had not seen or heard anything unusual, and there were no leads to chase down — no bloody fingerprints that might have narrowed the search for the killer, no shoe-print impressions to try to match. (No semen was detected on vaginal swabs that were later collected for the rape kit.) Yet slowly, a picture of the crime began to emerge. Mickey had been shot four times: once in the abdomen and three times in the head. A blast to the left side of her face had been fired at extremely close range. A search of the house revealed that the .357 was missing, as was Mickey’s gold wedding band, her watch and a diamond-studded ring. Tiny lead pellets, which lay scattered around the bedroom, were also embedded in her wounds, leading investigators to surmise that she was killed with the .357. The house displayed no obvious signs of forced entry, but a Texas Ranger who found the back door locked was unable to conclude whether it had been secured before, or after, officers arrived. A cigarette butt was discovered on the kitchen floor, though neither of the Bryans smoked. Taken together, the evidence seemed to point in one direction: Mickey had been the victim of a burglary-turned-homicide.

Hoping to glean new insights, the Texas Rangers called in Robert Thorman, a detective with the Harker Heights Police Department in nearby Bell County, who arrived that evening. Thorman was trained in a forensic discipline called “bloodstain-pattern analysis,” whose practitioners regard the drops, spatters and trails of blood at a crime scene as treasure troves of information that contain previously unseen clues and can even illuminate the precise choreography of the crime itself. Thorman peered through his magnifying glass, moving it in slow, sweeping motions. Mickey’s body had been removed by then — only the baby blue mattress, which was sodden with blood, remained — but he surveyed the reddish-brown flecks that dappled the walls, studying their contours and dimensions. He tacked strings to five small bloodstains on the wall above the headboard, extending each strand down to the mattress below. But his work, in the end, yielded little new information, just a theory that Mickey’s killer had most likely been standing on the west side of the bed when he or she fired the gun.

. . . 

WHEN ROBERT THORMAN settled into the witness box on the fifth and final day of the state’s case, it marked a turn in the prosecution’s fortunes. Thorman was the bloodstain-pattern analyst who was called to the Bryan home when investigators were still working the scene. As an interpreter of bloodstains, Thorman possessed a singular expertise, and the prosecution would use this to bring its hazy narrative into focus, lending a sense of scientific certainty to an otherwise equivocal set of facts.

Forensic scientists and criminalists had long looked at bloodstains at crime scenes as potentially valuable clues. A few even attempted to trace the trajectories of the blood back to its source and, in doing so, to reverse-engineer the crimes themselves. They believed that bloodstain-pattern analysis — the examination of the shape, dimension, location and distribution of bloodstains — could help them answer critical questions. What type of weapon caused the fatal wounds? Where was the victim standing when he was shot, stabbed or bludgeoned to death? Was she killed at the location where she was found, or was her body moved there? Trying to find the answers to these questions required an understanding of fluid dynamics and high-level math. But in the decade leading up to Joe’s trial, bloodstain analysis began to migrate out of research labs and into police departments. Thorman was one of a growing number of officers who were taking weeklong training in the discipline and who sometimes testified as expert witnesses. Though these police officers lacked the advanced scientific education of their predecessors, they, too, began to use bloodstain-pattern analysis to reconstruct crimes. Blood, they held, had a story to tell.

The district attorney began by leading Thorman through a recitation of his credentials. The detective explained that he had served as a military police officer for 20 years before working his way up through the ranks of several small law-enforcement agencies and that he had been trained in bloodstain interpretation. The jury did not know that Thorman’s training was limited to a 40-hour class he took four months before Mickey was killed.

Thorman said that he arrived at the Bryan home after Mickey’s body was removed and that he carefully inspected the master bedroom, where he recalled there was “a vast amount of splattering.” He told the jury that the killer, too, must have had “a vast amount” of blood on him. But Thorman did not spend much time describing his analysis of the bedroom, because it had turned up little new information. At McMullen’s direction, Thorman focused instead on the flashlight.

To win their case, the prosecution needed to tie the flashlight, which was found days after the murder, outside the Bryan home, to the crime scene. Thorman, under McMullen’s questioning, did exactly that. Photos of the flashlight that were shown to the jury revealed an object almost wholly devoid of blood, save for a scattering of tiny flecks on the lens and the occasional, minuscule speck on the side. To the untrained eye, it did not look like much, but Thorman claimed that the particular pattern on the lens had deep significance for the case. He identified the pattern as “blowback or, as commonly known, back spatter” — that is, blood that had traveled backward, at a high velocity, from a target. It was the unmistakable signature of a shooting, and of a shooting that had taken place at close range, as Mickey’s had. Back spatter “usually travels no further than 46 inches,” Thorman told the jury — an assertion that echoed earlier testimony from a forensic pathologist, who found that the greatest distance between Mickey and her killer at the time of the shooting was likely no more than a couple of feet.

Thorman’s testimony effectively erased any doubt about whether the flashlight was relevant to the case; he had, in essence, placed it in the Bryans’ bedroom at the time that the murder took place. Moreover, he told jurors, the lack of spatter on the flashlight’s handle indicated that someone had been holding it when it was sprayed with blood. “The handle portion indicates the flashlight was in the hand,” he said. By his telling, then, it had been both present at the crime and held by the killer.

During his time on the stand, Thorman made another critical finding that shored up the state’s case. Until then, prosecutors had not been able to provide an answer for the most troublesome question it faced: If Joe had killed Mickey and then fled with the flashlight, why was no blood found on the interior of the Mercury? Thorman himself had testified that the killer was covered in blood, yet Joe’s car was spotless. It was an inconsistency that called the state’s entire case into question, but once again, under McMullen’s questioning, Thorman offered an explanation. Blood was not found in other areas of the house, he told the jury, leading him to conclude that “the individual that committed or perpetrated the crime cleaned up prior to leaving that bedroom.” The killer, he added, had most likely done so in the bathroom — an assertion that did not appear to be grounded in bloodstain analysis; no blood was found in the bathroom other than some small drops on a receipt of the Bryans’ in the wastebasket. Still, Thorman theorized that the killer had wiped himself off there with a rag, changed his clothes and even slipped on a different pair of shoes before exiting the house.

McMullen took this idea one step further, asking a question that went far beyond the bounds of what a bloodstain-pattern analyst is qualified to evaluate. “There would have to have been shoes there to fit the killer then, would there?” the prosecutor asked, in an obvious allusion to Joe.

“I would assume that,” Thorman said.

McMullen rested his case later that afternoon. When it was finally Joe’s turn to speak, on the trial’s sixth day, he told of his devastation over his wife’s death and of the affection and respect that he and Mickey had shared. “We never gave each other any reason, nor any doubt, about our feeling and our love for each other,” he said. He insisted he never left his hotel room after he spoke with Mickey on the evening of Oct. 14 and recalled attending an 8:30 a.m. session at the principals’ conference the following morning. He also told the jury of his peculiar encounter with the hotel guard, a story that Lewellen, the special prosecutor, used as a cudgel in a blistering cross-examination that cast Joe as a fabulist. “I don’t know,” Joe repeated again and again, sometimes through tears, as Lewellen pressed him about different details of the case and hounded him to say who else could have killed Mickey. “I don’t understand any of this, never have from the very beginning,” Joe said.

No fewer than 36 defense witnesses followed — a succession of friends and former colleagues who each took the stand to praise Joe’s character and reinforce the notion that he could never have committed such a heinous act. But in the end, none of it mattered. Thorman’s testimony had made the state’s tenuous theory of the crime seem plausible, allowing the prosecution to gloss over the deficiencies of its case. Even McMullen seemed to acknowledge these weaknesses in his closing argument. “It was essential to have a special prosecutor in this case because as you’ve seen, that man” — he said, referring to Joe — “is shrewd. He’s intelligent, and it would take a great deal of effort to be able to prosecute him and prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

In his thundering summation, Lewellen drew from Thorman’s testimony as he sketched a chilling portrait of the man sitting at the defense table. “Mickey didn’t go to bed and leave that house unlocked that night,” Lewellen declared. “She locked her door, and a man came in with a key, and after all hell broke loose in that bedroom, he cleaned up, changed clothes, wiped up that lavatory, threw [his clothes] in the bag, walked out that front door.” Then Joe, Lewellen added, “went right back, walking in the front door of the Hyatt hotel, whistling Dixie.”

Less than four hours after jurors began their deliberations, Joe rose from his seat and listened as the judge read aloud the verdict: “We, the jury, find the defendant, Joe D. Bryan, guilty of murder.” His punishment was later set at 99 years. At different times during the trial, Joe told me, he had wanted to scream at the top of his lungs — “to yell at everyone that I did not kill Mickey, and how could anyone think I could, or would, do such a thing.” But in that moment, as he stood in a state of disbelief, he was rendered mute.

VI.

IN THE SUMMER of 1988, two years after Joe’s conviction, a longtime Clifton resident named Carole Smith was shopping at the Richland Mall in Waco when she spotted a man who looked just like Joe Bryan. He had the same wire-rimmed glasses, the same wavy brown hair, the same ruddy complexion — but he seemed to lack Joe’s sense of purposefulness as he meandered through the mall, gazing absently at the window displays. Smith, then an editor at The Clifton Record, the town’s weekly newspaper, knew Joe well — he had guided and reassured her many times when her son was navigating high school — and as the man came closer, she felt certain it was him. “Joe?” she called out.

That February, Joe’s conviction was overturned on a technicality, and though Smith knew that Joe had been released from prison, she had been unaware, until that moment, of his whereabouts. The ruling did not exonerate Joe; it only found fault with his trial. A three-judge panel had concluded that the trial judge erred when he denied a particular defense request to reopen testimony late in the trial. In doing so, the judge prevented Joe’s attorneys from reading to the jury a deposition they conducted with the Bryans’ insurance agent, in which the agent refuted a brief, but noteworthy, piece of testimony: Wilie’s claim that Mickey, upon her death, was “worth over $300,000” to Joe. (Her life insurance, it turned out, was valued at about half as much.) The ruling made no determination as to Joe’s guilt or innocence. He still stood charged with murder, and the Bosque County DA’s office would retry him the following summer. For the time being, though, Joe was a free man — or as free as a man can be while waiting to stand trial for a murder he had already been convicted of once.

Joe was glad to catch sight of Smith, his expression softening. “Carole,” he said, brightening. Smith asked him if he would like to sit and visit, and they settled on a nearby bench. She was mindful not to overwhelm him with questions. She listened, letting him guide the conversation. As he spoke, it was apparent that the strain of the trial and his incarceration had been almost more than he could bear and that he felt the need, even as shoppers strolled by them, to unburden himself. The words came quickly as he enumerated all that he had lost — “my wife, my job, my home, everything,” he said, his voice welling with disbelief, as if he were still trying to grasp how he had found himself in such a fantastical situation. It had been nearly three years since Mickey’s death, but he still had not had time to properly grieve, he told her. He said nothing about his time in prison, and Smith did not venture to ask him about it. When they rose to say goodbye, she embraced him and wished him well. “I got the feeling he didn’t have anywhere to go or anyone to talk to,” she told me.

By then, opinion in Clifton had turned against him, so much so that just talking to Joe at the mall could be seen as a radical act. The Record, which covered Joe’s first trial exhaustively, did not question the verdict; the reporter who was dispatched to write about it walked away believing that Joe was guilty. The prevailing wisdom held that the jury rendered its decision after hearing all the facts. “Most people felt he was probably guilty, because he’d been convicted, even if no one was real sure why he’d done it,” Richard Liardon, the former superintendent, told me. Many of Joe’s former colleagues and friends had distanced themselves from him since the trial, though privately, some still struggled to reconcile the man they knew with the person the prosecution had portrayed him to be. “It was very hard for me to believe Joe had taken Mickey’s life,” Cindy Horn, the former teacher’s aide, told me. Yet like most people in Clifton, she held the criminal-justice system in high regard. The widely held assumption was that law enforcement and the courts always got it right. “I based what I thought on the verdict,” Horn said. “I assumed Joe was guilty because he was found guilty.”

At his retrial, which spanned seven days in June 1989, the erosion in trust was visible: Joe’s witnesses had dwindled from 36 at the first trial to just five. Gone were the TV reporters, the crush of spectators and the sense that Joe, by virtue of his good reputation, could overcome a vigorous prosecution. McMullen, the district attorney, was again assisted by Lewellen, the special prosecutor, as they summoned largely the same witnesses who appeared at the first trial.

It was in every way a repeat of the story the prosecution told before. Wilie recounted the horror of the crime scene (“There was blood all over the bed. … Blood splattered on the ceiling, the walls”), and Blue narrated the moment he discovered the flashlight (“When I opened the trunk, there was a cardboard box, and my eyes just zoomed in on it”). McMullen asked Almanza, the crime-lab chemist, if a bit of blue plastic on the flashlight lens had the same “chemical properties” as shell casings at the crime scene, and she agreed that it did. And once again, when Thorman took the stand, he was the one who tied the disparate strands of the state’s case together.

Thorman told the jury not only that the flashlight was in the bedroom at the time of the shooting but also that the killer, before fleeing the scene, had changed into clothes that were already in the Bryan home. He delivered his findings with the authority of an expert, stripping away the ambiguities of the state’s case. As he spoke to the jury, he grounded his findings in the certainty of science. “Based on my knowledge and experience in bloodstain interpretation,” he said, “the flashlight itself was right next to or near the source of energy, that being the gun.” By the time the guilty verdict came down on the last day of the trial, it seemed like a foregone conclusion. Joe was again sentenced to 99 years.

Joe was sent back to the same prison where he was previously held: Texas’ oldest penitentiary, known as the Walls Unit in Huntsville, where the state’s execution chamber is housed. In letters back home to his mother, his older brother and the few friends who remained in touch with him, Joe was circumspect, revealing little about his existence behind bars or the emotional toll of incarceration. By then, he no longer heard from many people he loved — including Jerry, his twin brother, who distanced himself after Joe’s first trial. Even his last remaining Clifton friends gradually faded away. Linda Liardon wrote to Joe every now and then, but eventually she let the correspondence languish. “I was busy raising my boys, and life moved on,” she said. “I’m ashamed to admit that. But after a while, I struggled with what to say.”

Still, she was left with an uneasy feeling. After Joe’s first conviction, she told me, people had stopped talking about Judy Whitley’s death. “One rumor went around that maybe Joe killed her too,” she said. “I think wrapping all this violence up in one neat little package was comforting to people. Everyone could put this behind them and not have to think that maybe someone was out there who had gotten away with murder.”