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." |
If you do possess it, you WILL view it.
Save your breath, doofus. I was born at night, but not last night.
Why on earth are you defending possession of child pornography?
Where in AZ. I used to work on the white River Apache Reservation. True ... as a cook! I lived in a little town about three blocks long. A town called Miami, AZ about 80 miles east of Phoenix.
The town was soooo small, the Sears store was a storefront with a refirgerator on one side, a stove on the other and a catalog on the counter. I do not lie. :-)
It was impossible to adjust to coming from L.A.
I hadn't heard that, just people that go to CA to vacation always say "if you go to CA you have to go to In-N-Out". We were over your way in February, but never did make it to one. Next time we will if they aren't here yet.
`It's sick, disgusting and perverted,'' Stayner said sheepishly. ``I know all these things. I can't go to prison for the rest of my life and be happy without seeing it."
Stayner, who played a kind of poker game with agents, told them he had never seen child pornography but the desire to do so had tormented him for years.
Stayner suggested that if he had been brave enough to find some before his string of killings, ``maybe this stuff wouldn't have happened."
He added to his wish list a request that $250,000 in reward money -- once offered for the safe return of the Sunds and Silvina by their relatives and friends -- go to his parents. "My parents aren't too well off,'' he told the FBI agents.
The nerve and ego this guy has is immense.
His parents would have died before accepting that money.
I live in northern CA and not too far from where this happened. In fact a friend of mine went to school with Cary and told me about the hell the parents went through when Steven was kidnapped. They were still looking for him until the day they got the call from a sherriff from another county(?) asking them if they had a son who was kidnapped named Steven. They had kept every christmas present for 7 years waiting for him always praying he'd come home.
You bet. Anything from L.A. (we don't have that much) ... avocados Mexican food stuff ... you know. :)
It might interest you to know that was a quote from an attorney that was interviewed on KOGO that was both a defense atty and a prosecutor for murder cases.
Are you sure? The Anthropologist today said 4 to 6 weeks from the time the body was found.
Body was found 2/27 so four weeks would put us at 2/1. Six weeks would put us at 1/20 or there abouts.
Thank you for caring enough to respond. I ( a Catholic girl) have an old Jewish doctor who even wears a yamulke. He put me on 2.5 Altace then wanted to see me (still too high) ... then he put me on 5 mg Altace and probably still too high.
Top number in the high 140's. I'm letting him guide me otherwise I will go back to my doctors at Cedars Sinai.
Do you have any recommendations on HBP?
Good point. As a member of the public I vote guilty ... but if I were a member of that jury I honestly don't know what I would vote. But I can definately tell you I would NOT vote for the death penalty for DW even though I firmly believe he killed that little girl.
Astute, and directly to the point. Outstanding.
The best thing for you to do is to QUICKLY advise DAW's top notch attorney, Feldman, Esq. to get the necessary experts to go before the jury, and state there is no statistical correllation, between CHILD porn possession, and child molestation/child rape/child murder.
As for me, one way or the other, I have no idea. You may be entirely right, or dead wrong. One reason I can't tell, is that you provide no EVIDENCE.
It doesn't really matter what you scream at the FR readers, as far as the jurors in this trial are concerned. And at the intuitive level, I expect the jurors are mightily swayed by the audio/visual experience of viewing the CHILD rape scene, from Westerfield's bookshelf.
For weeks, I have been discussing the trial, with a female co-worker. CHILD porn pushes her button, like no other single aspect of the trial. She says there is porn, but CHILD porn is entirely unacceptable, to her. Exactly the same with my wife. Were they jurors, you see the impressions left, if Feldman does nothing?
FYI I'm not much impressed by Feldman, yet. Maybe he will rise in the home stretch, with brilliant closing arguments. The SaveDave gang needs him to do this, or face, IMO, a hung jury at best.
mmm now I'm hungry!
No, my reference to real bug guy was intended to highlight that todays witness wasn't a bug guy but rather an expert in a different field.
I expect that Goff will tie together the missing pieces and be able to explain why the old two bug guys got there dates, why todays guy got his range and why the date should be back to the disapearance date.
If he doesn't then the pros went to a whole lot of trouble setting the stage for nothing.
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