The prosecution's case: A mountain of circumstance |
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With just four months to prepare for a capital murder trial involving multiple alleged crime scenes spread over hundreds of miles, the legal team prosecuting David Westerfield for the murder of his neighbor Danielle van Dam has opted to keep things simple. Prosecutors Jeff Dusek and George "Woody" Clarke, who are expected to wrap up their case this week, have put on 70 witnesses over 14 days in a chronological presentation as straightforward as Dusek's ramrod posture and as orderly as the charts Clarke uses as trial exhibits. Jurors heard first about the panicked Saturday last February when Danielle's parents discovered the 7-year-old missing from her suburban bedroom. They then heard about Westerfield's activities that weekend and finally about forensic evidence linking him to Danielle and child pornography indicating a possible motive.
The case against Westerfield is circumstantial. No one saw the 50-year-old engineer abduct Danielle, nor dump her naked body along a roadside 25 miles away. But with their circumstantial case, prosecutors built a substantial hurdle for Westerfield's defense to overcome. LONG, STRANGE TRIP Westerfield's own words may offer compelling evidence against him. Jurors heard a taped interview in which Westerfield admitted that his alibi for the weekend Danielle vanished — a meandering trip around southern California in his recreational vehicle — sounded "weird." The prosecution spent four days of its case on Westerfield's convoluted account of his whereabouts. In the taped interview, Westerfield recounted going from his home to the beach, then returning home, then driving to the desert, to two other remote spots, back to the beach and finally home. At one point in the tape, he used the first-person plural although he claimed he was alone on the trip. "This little place we were, we were at was just a small turn-off type place," Westerfield said. Dusek seized on that point and other inconsistencies in the account. Although Westerfield was a desert sports enthusiast, for example, he went to the barren outpost of Glamis that weekend without any of the dune buggies he normally took. A host of other witnesses confirmed some parts of his itinerary but also detailed strange behavior on his part, indicating he was trying to hide something. Beach campers testified that he never set up camp at his RV after driving into Silver Strand State Beach Park, but instead remained inside the vehicle with all the shades drawn despite the pleasant day. It was so unusual, camper Joyce Rodgers testified, that she and her son-in-law began discussing, "Why did the front window get closed? Maybe he had a girlfriend. Maybe he had just been traveling and needed to rest." Glamis campers testified that Westerfield drove his motor home so far from the established campsite that he got stuck in a dune and had to be pulled out. During this operation, one man said, he heard a voice and thought Westerfield was engaged in conversation with someone else. Finally, two employees of a drycleaning store who waited on Westerfield at the end of his trip, a stop he failed to mention to police, said he behaved strangely. The usually loquacious man was silent and looked drawn and weary, they testified. FROM THE LAB The strongest evidence against Westerfield came in the second portion of the prosecution's case — the forensic experts. Police officers did not find any evidence of Westerfield in the van Dam home, but fingerprint, DNA and trace evidence analysts testified that there were many indications of Danielle's presence in the defendant's home and RV. A police fingerprint examiner said a handprint found above the bed in Westerfield's motor home matched Danielle's. "The print has been identified as Danielle van Dam's which means she touched the cabinet," Jeffrey Graham told jurors. DNA analyst Annette Peer said blood fitting Danielle's DNA profile was found on a jacket Westerfield had taken to the drycleaners and on the carpet of his RV. The chance that the blood came from someone else was only one in 670 quadrillion and one in 130 quadrillion that the stain was not Danielle's, Peer told jurors to gasps from the courtroom gallery. Other lab analysts testified that hairs found in the RV and Westerfield's laundry likely came from Danielle or her maternal relatives, and another expert said one hair found in the RV's bathroom drain fit her DNA profile exactly. A fiber analyst said that a single strand of orange fiber found in the necklace Danielle was wearing at the time of her death matched 20 to 30 fibers found in Westerfield's washer, 50 to 100 found on top of the washer, another 50 to 100 in his laundry, and 10 to 20 found in the bedding in his master bedroom. "The fact that it is in so many places... it's certainly an additive effect," criminalist Jennifer Shen testified. Other lab analysts said animal hair in Westerfield's home and vehicle was consistent with the van Dam's dog and that carpet fibers on his property were similar to those from Danielle's bedroom. Prosecutors also used these witness to combat defense suggestions that trace evidence like fibers and hairs may have been accidentally spread by lab technicians and police officers going from scene to scene. The investigation, the witnesses said, was divided so that experts like Peer did not visit the van Dam home and the Westerfield home and RV, but rather stuck to a single area. DISTURBING PHOTOS, POSSIBLE MOTIVE The jury seemed most affected by the third portion of the prosecution's case — child pornography recovered from computers and disks in Westerfield's home. Computer forensics examiner Jim Watkins testified last week that there were 10,000 pornographic images and videos on the computers and 85 or about one percent involved children. Watkins showed jurors still photos of naked pubescent girls and several disturbing videos of young girls and teens being raped. In some of the videos, the girls struggled and screamed as men held them down. Several of the jurors started to cry as the pornography was displayed. The medical examiner was unable to say whether Danielle was raped and Westerfield is not charged with sexual assault, but prosecutors were clearly hoping the jury will conclude he was fixated on young girls and took her for sexual purposes. ROOM FOR THE DEFENSE? It is this strong, linear case the defense will begin challenging later this week. In their questions during cross-examination, Westerfield's lawyers, Steven Feldman and Robert Boyce, suggested a number of different fronts of attack.
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They implied that the van Dam parents practice of swinging brought many unsavory people into the family home and any one of those people could have done harm to Danielle. The van Dams acknowledged their unorthodox sex life on the witness stand, but both Brenda and Damon van Dam said there was no group sex the night Danielle vanished and none of their house guests, three of whom testified, went near Danielle's bedroom.
entomologist to testify that Danielle died after Feb. 4, when police began keeping Westerfield under constant surveillance. Danielle went missing Feb. 1 and the medical examiner could not pinpoint an exact time of death, but only a range of 10 days to six weeks prior to Feb. 27, the day her body was found. 