Posted on 07/24/2002 10:44:59 PM PDT by FresnoDA
Bugs: The best witnesses? |
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On one side there are Danielle van Dam's fingerprints, her blood drops, strands of the 7-year-old's blond locks, hair from a dog like her weimaraner and carpet fibers that seem to be from her room. There is child pornography and a convoluted alibi even the defendant calls "weird." On the other side, the side for David Westerfield's acquittal, there are bugs. The pile of evidence painstakingly assembled by prosecutors in Westerfield's capital murder case got a jolt last week from an entomologist who suggested that insect evidence from the 7-year-old's body may exonerate the defendant, who is accused of abducting Danielle from her bedroom, killing her and then dumping her body.
Its practitioners say forensic entomology, which stretches back to 13th century China and has gradually gained acceptance in American courtrooms over the past two decades, is both art and science. There are only nine certified forensic entomologists in North America and about 30 more who offer their expertise in criminal cases without certification. When done correctly, a study of flies, maggots and beetles at a crime scene can yield crucial evidence about a victim's death, including the time and location, whether the victim had drugs in his system, and in some cases even the DNA of the perpetrator. But more than other forensic sciences like DNA analysis, forensic entomology eschews straightforward analysis. For analysis concerning time of death by far the most common task for entomologists in criminal cases there are no mathematical formulas, no easy calculations. Accuracy depends on the scientist's ability to determine how a host of variables at the crime scene, including temperature, precipitation, time of day, humidity and geography, affected insect life. "If you are not a very imaginative person as a scientist, you won't go far," said K.C. Kim, a Penn State professor and certified forensic entomologist. The subjectivity of the field makes for what another forensic entomologist, Jason Byrd of Virginia Commonwealth University, calls "showdowns" professional disputes over results. According to Byrd, haggling over conclusions has become increasingly common in the last three or four years as lawyers have become more familiar with the evidence and how to attack its credibility. "A court case with a single entomologist is a thing of the past," said Byrd, a certified entomologist who consults on about 100 criminal cases a year. A "showdown" seems likely in the Westerfield case. Just two days after damaging testimony from the defense entomologist, the San Diego district attorney's office hired M. Lee Goff, an entomologist from Chaminade University in Hawaii, to consult on the case.
The defense expert, David Faulkner, is particularly difficult to attack because he was initially hired by the prosecution. Faulkner, a research associate at the San Diego Natural History Museum, attended Danielle's autopsy and collected insects from her remains. Searchers found the second-grader in a trash-strewn lot three and a half weeks after she vanished. Her body was badly decomposed and the medical examiner could only offer prosecutors a wide range 10 days to six weeks for her time of death. Investigators hoped Faulkner could narrow that window to Feb. 2, 3 or 4, the days immediately following Danielle's abduction when Westerfield's activities seemed suspect. Faulkner examined maggots from her body and told authorities the insects began growing 10 to 12 days prior, putting the first infestation between Feb. 16 and Feb. 18. Infestation can start as soon as 20 minutes after a dead body is dumped outdoors. Faulkner's conclusion did not fit prosecutors' theory. Westerfield was under constant police surveillance from Feb. 5 until his arrest, offering him no opportunity to dump her body in the window of time the entomologist's testimony indicated. Faulkner quickly became a witness for the defense. The lives of insects If prosecutors get Goff or another expert to rebut Faulkner's findings, he or she will likely attack the defense expert on how he calculated the post-mortem interval (PMI), entomologist-speak for the first infestation. Insect life arrives at a dead body in stages. Immediately, flies land on a body. In as little as 20 minutes, they lay eggs. Those eggs hatch into maggots in a day, and those maggots feed on the body. The maggots molt repeatedly, and each stage of larvae is slightly larger, indicating to entomologists how long the insects have lived in the body. Beetles also are attracted to decaying flesh, and the size of their larvae also indicate the time they have been at the body. But just recognizing the size of the larvae is not enough. Entomologists must also determine the growth rate of the insects. There are two ways to do this. Experts can simply match the size to textbook tables showing the rapidity of growth in a climate-controlled laboratory or they can try to determine the growth rate by themselves. The latter is considered the most accurate, but also the most difficult. "It has a lot to do with the investigator's experience and intelligence and that has a lot more to do with art than science," said Kim of calculating the PMI. Among the crucial factors is weather. Hot temperatures mean quick growth, cold temperatures mean slow or no growth. Wind affects the rate as does access to water and other forms of food, like trash cans. Rain and humidity play a role, as well as exposure to sunlight. In the Westerfield case, prosecutor Jeff Dusek grilled Faulkner about how February's hot, dry weather might have affected his PMI conclusion. Faulkner acknowledged there were fewer flies last winter in San Diego than ever before, but refused to budge off his estimate. Entomologists also consider unnatural factors, like whether a blanket or sheet around the victim may have retarded insect life. Goff once worked on a case in Hawaii involving a woman missing 13 days. She was discovered murdered and wrapped in blankets. The life stages of the insects indicated a PMI 10 and a half days prior. To determine how the blankets affected the PMI, Goff wrapped a pig carcass in blankets and left it in his backyard. He found it took two and a half days for the flies to penetrate the blanket. Dusek quizzed Faulkner about the impact of some sort of shroud in the Westerfield case. There is no evidence Danielle's body was wrapped in a blanket, but the prosecutor got Faulkner to admit that a covering, perhaps later dragged away by animals, might have skewed his results. Will the jury care? But even when there are disagreements between entomologists on results, they rarely involve as wide a gap as in the Westerfield case. "A lot of the disagreements involve a variation in one day, two days," said Richard Merritt, a certified forensic entomologist and professor at Michigan State University. "Not over a week and a half. If it's that big a time, someone screwed up." If the prosecution cannot find an expert who substantially disagrees with Faulkner, the bug evidence would appear to be the defense's chief argument to jurors at closings. The defense has tried to chip away at the other forensic evidence. Defense lawyer Steven Feldman has suggested Danielle secretly played in Westerfield's motor home and left hair, blood and fingerprints on that occasion. Evidence in his home, the lawyer has hinted, might have been deposited when the girl and her mother sold him Girl Scout cookies. And fiber evidence could have been transferred when Danielle's mother was dancing with Westerfield the night of the abduction. None of those explanations carry the certainty of Faulker's testimony. But just how persuasive Faulkner's testimony will ultimately be is a subject of hot debate in San Diego, where the case dominates the media. Former prosecutor Colin Murray said the mountain of other physical evidence pointing toward Westerfield's guilt made the insect evidence little more than a footnote. "You're asking a lot of this jury to acquit this guy on capital charges based on the presence of bugs," he said. Even without a rebutting witness, Murray said, prosecutor Dusek could undermine the entomological evidence in closings by harping on the subjectivity of the field and asking the panel to instead rely on common sense. "Common sense tells you, if you're just looking at her body, that it's been out there a long time. It's severely decomposed," said Murray. But Curt Owen, a retired public defender, disagreed, saying that depending on how the prosecution rebuts the evidence, the case could end in a hung jury or even acquittal. "It may not be enough to say he's innocent," Owen said, "but it certainly is enough to introduce reasonable doubt." |
I have worked with numerous organizations in the state of Ohio to stop this very thing. Last year, HBO showed the actual rape of a woman, taped on her own camcorder when the perp broke in, on one of their late night programs. It was very graphic and NOTHING was edited out.
I had to stop my children from surfing the web in search of Dragon Ball Z information because I saw that alot of these web sites lead to anime sites that lead to porn anime sites that lead to porn sites.
Visit Winmx sometime and do a search for porn or XXX videos - you will be shocked at the number of child porn videos and rape videos that are being shared.
I might also add that many of these pictures/videos are often labled as something else - and only found out about after you open the file.
What ashame we can't carry on a civil conversation...too bad, I really would have liked that.
sw
Travis, where do you get the idea that Danielle was raped? Can you point me to the specific forensic evidence of rape? because if there is evidence of such, then everyone must have missed it.
DW does not fit, in this regard. He could have buried her in the desert. Why would he want her body found, if he was a "situational" pedophile?
Who would want the body found???
A serial killer ala Avila
The parents, for "closure".
A friend of the parents, for their "closure".
Yes I do....i'm still waiting for the evidence as explosive as a confession that feldman says he has. That has kept me from saying "westerfield is guilty" although my instincts want me to say it. Yesterday ruled out his son...so if he is withholding something that strong..he's really doing his client an injustice.
You just don't get it. If the CDs were merely backups of the hard drive, the backup would transfer all the folders and sub-folders. Did the prosecution ever point out that the only stuff on the CDs was porn? If so, your argument has much more merit, but if not then they could just be backups that would reflect the way he organized his hard drive.
And the computer guy said that these "Attack" files had been deleted, time of attempted deletion uncertain, but that he had been able to recover them. It's not so easy to scrub a computer clean, although DW tried!
That actually cuts both ways -- DW could have just as easily deleted the files out of disgust once he saw what they were. The fact that they were named "attack" doesn't necessarily mean anything, people who post porn online use all sorts of weird titles for file names.
All the above MAY be true......BUT.....it DOES NOT automatically make him the killer.....The prosecution screwed this case up by not PROVING how the blood got there....how (and this is BIG for me)DW managed to get her out of her house without leaving ONE piece of evidence.
Someone posted awhile back that the evidence collected against him could have possibly fit many people in the neiborhood. God forbid that one of my neighbors children plays in my house and then goes missing on a weekend i decide to take off on my Harley. I have left many times not knowing exactly where i was going until i got home. Somethings look bad for DW (he may really have done it) but i could not send him to the death gurney because the DA has not removed ALL REASONABLE doubt from my mind. If he did it and gets off, it is the DA's FAULT.......They have built a case on assumptions NOT proof....there are innocent explanations (in the absence of proof)no matter how far fetched, as to how the evidence they have, could have gotten there.
With that said i'd probably have to vote guilty on the kiddie porn charge.
I think The defense's rebuttal case is limited to what the prosecution presented as evidence in its rebuttal. I cannot imagine what Feldman has up his sleeve.
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