Posted on 03/11/2002 12:04:45 PM PST by lady reaper
Police lieutenant, medical examiner testify at hearing for Westerfield
By Jeffrey J. Rose
SIGNONSANDIEGO
March 11, 2002
SAN DIEGO – A preliminary hearing for David Westerfield, charged in connection with the kidnap and murder of 7-year-old Danielle van Dam, opened Monday morning with testimony by a police lieutenant who described the scene where the girl's naked, blackened body was found off Dehesa Road.
"I saw the body of what appeared to be a young child, in an advanced stage of decomposition, on her back," said police Lt. James C. Collins.
Collins said that although parts of the unclothed body had decomposed so much that the tissue had disappeared, he noticed the body was wearing a plastic choker necklace and an earring in its left ear identical to those Danielle was wearing the evening she disappeared on Feb. 1.
There were drag marks in leaves on the ground near the body, Collins said.
"It looked like somebody had dragged it into the underbrush," he said.
Westerfield's attorney, Steven Feldman, asked Collins whether he was aware of blood found by forensic investigators on concrete in the stairwell and on concrete outside the van Dams' garage. Collins, who headed the investigation into Danielle's disappearance, responded that he was not.
Feldman also asked Collins about drag marks found near the van Dams' Sabre Springs home, and Collins responded that he was aware that drag marks had been found near a sidewalk there.
San Diego County Medical Examiner Brian D. Blackbourne, the next to testify, said a lot of the body had been destroyed by animals and the remaining parts were severely decomposed, with the skin "mummified."
Blackbourne testified that the condition of the body was consistent with having been dead for the 3½ weeks Danielle was missing.
Much of the body's tissue was missing, he said, as was its left foot. An autopsy found that the organs of the chest were mostly intact, and fluid and air were found in its lungs, he testified.
Blackbourne testified that in the autopsy he looked for evidence of sexual molestation but was hampered by the body's poor condition.
The cause of death could not be immediately determined, Blackbourne said.
"The deterioration of even the tissue that was there makes it difficult to determine a cause of death unless a major, major trauma was the cause," he testified.
Although he could not immediately determine a cause, Blackbourne said he could determine that the death was a homicide based on the circumstances of Danielle's disappearance and discovery of her body.
The body was found by volunteer searchers Feb. 27 about 25 feet from the north side of Dehesa Road, about a mile east of Singing Hills Country Club and about 1½ miles west of Sycuan Casino.
Westerfield, a 50-year-old neighbor of Danielle's, pleaded not guilty to murder, kidnapping and possessing child pornography at a court hearing Feb. 26. If convicted, Westerfield could face the death penalty.
The blue-eyed, 7-year-old girl was last seen when her father put her to bed in their Sabre Springs home the night of Feb. 1. She was discovered missing the next morning, spurring a hunt that involved hundreds of volunteers.
Investigators believe Danielle was kidnapped from her bedroom and taken to the Silver Strand near Coronado by Westerfield, who then drove sometime on Feb. 2 to the desert.
Feldman is trying to establish there was no murder. Interesting.
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Taken out dead from her home, no one having even momentarily intended for her to die...
Perhaps no crime but unauthorized illegal dumping on a roadside, aka littering.
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"What kind of parents would dump their kid....."
Don't have to go very far for that answer.
Guilty parents, Drug-ABUSING parents, Selfish Parents.
Look at the woman that drove her children into a lake to drown them and blamed someone else.
A mentally disturbed Andrea Yates believed she was protecting her children from the devil as she drowned them last summer, ....
"It was all Feldman" today...
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I had thought maybe they overdosed her (and the boys) to keep them quiet during the swinging downstairs, but the BLOOD, which is what is new today...looks almost like she was taken both UP and down that stairs at a time when someone was bleeding more than trivially.
Might a girl that small die of a hemorrhage or some internal thing BURSTING, if a full size male were to try to penetrate her? Might she bleed to DEATH?
An early posting of mine said that IF Westerfield did ANYTHING to Danielle, he did it at her home and with her parents' acquiescence/amounting to permission.
Yes, Virginia, that includes having sex with her, "just so you don't kill her."
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