Hair in Westerfield home similar to Danielle's: (6-25-2002 Van Dam vs. Westerfield Trial Coverage)

North County Times-San Diego ^ | June 25, 2002 | Kimberly Epler

[FresnoDA]

Hair in Westerfield home similar to Danielle's

KIMBERLY EPLER
Staff Writer

SAN DIEGO ---- A police criminalist testified Monday that tiny pieces of evidence ---- hairs and carpet fibers ---- found in David Westerfield's house and motor home could link the Sabre Springs man to Danielle van Dam, the 7-year-old neighbor he is accused of kidnapping and murdering.

Tanya DuLaney, a trace evidence analyst with the San Diego Police Department, said blonde hairs, dog hairs and tan carpet fibers found on Westerfield's property were similar to Danielle's hair, the short brown-gray fur of the van Dam family dog and Danielle's bedroom carpet.

DuLaney said she could not make a 100 percent match of the hair and fiber evidence.

Westerfield, 50, could face the death penalty if convicted of kidnapping and murdering Danielle. The young girl was reported missing Feb. 2. Her nude and decomposing body was found nearly four weeks later in rural East County.

Westerfield, a twice-divorced design engineer, kept his hands clasped in front of him during Monday's proceedings, occasionally writing notes and consulting with his attorneys.

Danielle's mother, Brenda van Dam, attended the entire hearing. The van Dams live two doors down the street from Westerfield and were passing acquaintances with him. Damon van Dam sat with his wife during the morning session.

Day 12 of Westerfield's trial was dominated by the hair and fiber testimony of DuLaney, who told jurors that light brown-blonde hairs found in Westerfield's motor home and house were similar to Danielle's hair in color, length, diameter. Westerfield has short, dark hair.

Jurors heard testimony that DNA evidence will show Danielle could have left the blonde hairs found on sheets and pillow cases taken from Westerfield's master bedroom ---- the first possible evidence placing the second-grader upstairs in his home.

"They could have come from Danielle van Dam," DuLaney said of tests performed on the hairs. "All six of them."

Further testimony on the hair samples is expected today or later this week when prosecutors are expected to wrap up their side of the case.

Meanwhile, Westerfield's defense attorney, Steven Feldman, focused on what didn't match, having DuLaney go over hair after hair found in the motor home ---- some brown and others color-treated blonde ---- which were determined not to be Danielle's because of color, length or dye.

Earlier in the trial, Brenda van Dam testified her daughter's hair was never dyed and Danielle had a haircut about a week before she disappeared. Van Dam also had testified she took Danielle to Westerfield's house to sell Girl Scout cookies a few days before Danielle disappeared. She testified her daughter went into the house briefly, but did not go upstairs.

The tedium of the fiber and hair testimony prompted Judge William Mudd to give jurors an extra long afternoon break.

Feldman followed the same line of questioning with the carpet fibers, asking about fibers that didn't match. He called attention to a lack of physical evidence putting Danielle in Westerfield's black Toyota 4Runner, the car Westerfield drove when he went to get his motor home on Feb. 2 ---- the morning Danielle was discovered missing.

None of Danielle's hair or blood was found in the vehicle, another police criminalist, David Cornacchia, testified. Nor were any of the carpet fibers lifted from the soles of Westerfield's 25 pairs of shoes similar to Danielle's bedroom carpet, DuLaney said.

Also on Monday, DuLaney told jurors about finding five carpet fibers in Westerfield's motor home that were similar in size and shape to Danielle's bedroom carpet.

She showed jurors enlarged pictures, showing the fibers side by side with those from Danielle's bedroom and magnified 400 times, to illustrate how the fibers were consistent.

Under questioning from Feldman, Westerfield's defense attorney, DuLaney said it was possible that many houses in a development like the Sabre Springs neighborhood where the van Dams and Westerfield lived could have the same carpet.

She also talked about dog hairs found in dryer lint thrown away in Westerfield's garage. More hair was found in the hallway carpet of his motor home, on a bath mat in the motor home and on a white towel. Those hairs were consistent with the hair on van Dam's dog, Leyla, DuLaney testified. Westerfield does not have a dog.

Brenda van Dam testified earlier in the trial that her daughter would often roll around with Leyla, especially after she had changed into her pajamas before going to bed.

While the dog hair found in Westerfield's house and motor home had the unusual pigment formations found in Leyla's hair, DuLaney said she could only say the hairs were similar, not exact matches.

Attempts to perform DNA tests on the hair were unsuccessful, said Holly Ernest, director of the UC Davis veterinary genetics lab. She briefly testified that there was not enough DNA on the dog hair sent to the university for testing to determine whether it belonged to Leyla.

Feldman did not ask Ernest any questions.

Testimony in the case continues today.

Contact staff writer Kimberly Epler at (760) 739-6644 or kepler@nctimes.com.

6/25/02

[Karson]

Bless her heart...... ;-)

[Freedom2specul8]

http://www.websleuths.com/dcf/DCForumID4/740.html

"A shocking $16 to park all day. But I wasn’t about to drive around looking for a parking lot $2 cheaper 10 blocks away. "

[Jaded]

Part of the argument was that Feldman showed that on 2/4/02 while David was visiting with police the internet connection in his home was being used. Also the court see fit to give out the e-mail address of DW's son Neal along with the title of an e-mail he received. A porn site. 5 of the pics shown in court today were lifted from Neal's computer. This is a problem. Apparently daddy had the DSL, junior had the dial up. Junior prolly didn't like the dial-up. I hate my dial-up.

Just 2.5 more cents.

Note to self: Never do blind back ups of computers unless you are the only one with access to it.

[Freedom2specul8]

LOL

[Freedom2specul8]

SO you think neal saved them and stored them in dad's office?

[dread78645]

I do not understand this. Why is porn so hard to get rid of? I can dump other stuff, and even though it stays on my hard drive until I write over it or reformat my hard drive, why it is different than all the other stuff I have deleted?

It's not different. The thing is what operating sytem is used.

A MSDOS (& Windows) filesystem will leave the file, mark the name as invalid, but the invalid entry will still "point" to the file (you can "recover").
BSD (Mac OS-X) leaves the file, removes the name and pointer (no recovery unless you scan the entire disk).

A re-format will just write zeros across the disk.

As far as LE goes, you can get deleted stuff from a Windows box rather easily (city cops and your local 10th grader).

A Unix or Mac OS-X is a lot more effort and expertise to scan the whole disk (FBI or State Police). A low-level format will be beyond these folks.

Next you have hysteresis analysis; The NSA and CIA do this. Get out a hammer and start smashing your hard drive.

[UCANSEE2]

OOPS. Apologies to NED. He went YESTERDAY, not today and the parking was $16.

[Freedom2specul8]

And so, the resourceful secret agent countered the deadly poison by adding a quick dose of a more disgusting and near-poisonous concoction, causing his body to reject both. Feldman did good.

So you think he got all the child porn pics turned into evidence on purpose so to numb or neutralize the jurors? I think I mentioned something to that effect some where too..or thought it...regardless..I don't think normal jurors will forget the screams of those little girls being raped...If he did it on purpose, it's a major gamble isn't it.

[Freedom2specul8]

Dont' feel bad..I was thinking today too...I was paying more attention to the neutral details that he was presenting.. ie: "feldman's classical lawyer running on adrenalin behaviour".

[Freedom2specul8]

"The Accused" based on a rape in Bedford Mass. It won Jodie an Academy Award. thanks for getting that for me. I think I was too young for to go see the goodbar movie. Yep, I was about 11 almost 12 when that came out. ('76 according to google)

[John Jamieson]

Really good question. It was a white Toyota Van, red/orange carpet would a natural.

The one he got rid of....real fast.

[pyx]

A LOT has been and will be said about the "porn" depicted in court today. And, while I would be one of the first to agree that viewing pornography can not only become habitual, I think its definately not healthy. However, what an individual does in the privacy of his own home is his business as long as he doesn't injure someone else.
Now, before someone rightfully shouts that, 'pornography hurts the women and children who are in it !', I want you to carefully think about what I am going to tell you.

The current state of FREE computer graphics image creation software today is such that very few photographs can any longer be trusted as being truly authentic (in a court setting) without very expensive processing and analysis. Even then, its not a given. Once a photograph is stored electronically, ALL bets are off as to the origin of that photograph.

In some cases, its completely and totally ficticious in origin. For example, the plant cells in the test tube at the top of my post never exists. In fact, the test tube itself along with the retort stand its clamped to, never actually existed. The entire image was created from with a computer. The image was totally fabricated from computer commands using special image software that is FREE and has been available to amateurs like myself for over almost decade.

The test tube is pretty convincing, isn't it. Well, computer generated image creation can and does go FAR beyond that into the world of animation. And some of the models created now (for the past five or so years) have human life-forms that behave and act in a VERY convincing fashion. On your own home computer in Windows or in Unix or Linux an amateur can very easily create animations that rival professional studio animation. The Titanic movie had several scenes that were entirely created on a cluster of Linux PCs. And example of FREE software that has been around for a LONG time is POVRAY. POVRAY can be found here. And many animations and images (like the one above) of varying quality, often with their source program files, can be found at the Internet Ray Tracing Competition (IRTC) website by clicking here.

Back to the Westerfield trial.
The market for pornography has created an industry of creating images and animations that appear VERY real but are not and cater to every imaginable craven and sick fantasy one could imagine. Why not use real live human models instead of computers ? Because its cheaper to assemble them inside of a computer and the result will do whatever author asks them and without the computer ever complaining. All that's needed to finish such a putrid production is, some reasonable sound editing and dubbing and the result is marketable filth for a very large and readily available market.

Was what was seen in the courtroom today real ? I don't have the faintest idea. It may have been, but I wouldn't want to bet on it. There are some commercial image and animation creation programs that work with medical modelling that will run on a reasonably good home computer. They cost money of course. Their results, like POVRAY, are also phenomenal.

Just for the record, I don't make pornographic images myself. Attempting to make images like the one above (I should wish I had such talent ! :) )is FAR more challenging and fun, imo. Especially when it can even fool the author at times. :)

[Jaded]

I think that's the direction. It's certainly possible. He'd be less likely to notice something like that in that office, IMO. Some is definetly DW;s, that goes with out saying. But if 5 of the pics were off Neal's computer, that changes things dramatically, doncha think? I need to check my computer now. I'm getting paranoid.

I'd rather have a DSL. Wouldn't you? My child would certainly prefer it, since this is on her phone line. She has to beg to make phone calls. You know how that goes, right?

[It's me]

OOPS. Apologies to NED. He went YESTERDAY, not today and the parking was $16.

Parking still isn't $16 dollars a day! Not that it really matters but, parking is $8 in the lot next to the courthouse!

Unless, of course, they jacked up the fees just for this trial??? I kinda doubt it, though. However, you never know...

[John Jamieson]

Maybe there's some dirty pictures of local swingers in action on those disks, that he whats to show?

[Southflanknorthpawsis]

Very interesting and informative. Thank you.

[Rheo]

Good post..thanks for that info.

[UCANSEE2]

When I was 18 I went to see "CLOCKWORK ORANGE". It was 'the thing' to do then. It was a first of it's kind movie here in the US.

Anyway, it had several RAPE SCENES, one being a GANG RAPE scene.

It didn't make me a murderer.

BTW, I went back to that last link you had and those people are terrible. They seem to be into a GANG EMOTION, VIGILANTE style discussion board.

They don't care about any facts at all.

Of course, if you asked them how they felt about ex-President Clinton (who got oral sex from a girl young enough to be his daughter, in the WHITE HOUSE, and that is PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE), they would most likely adore him. Who supposedly RAPED several women. Who had viewed the EXACT SAME PORNO, including SEX WITH ANIMALS, while IN THE WHITE HOUSE. AM I RIGHT ?

[cyncooper]

Does anyone believe that Feldman's opening the door for the flood of porn was a misstep? Think again. His questioning was anything but spontaneous and he has a plan in mind. Maybe it's a gamble; but nonetheless a method to his madness. If you have a jury that has just seen very disturbing and obscene pictures, do you want to leave those images in their minds as THE thing DW was into? I doubt it.

I certainly do think it was a misstep. He seriously ticked off Judge Mudd. They had spent hours in closed hearings with the judge ironing out the limits the prosecution would be allowed to show the jury so as not to prejudice them against DW! That means the prosecution was NOT given free rein to choose the worst scenes.

I don't know if you have heard descriptions of what was shown, but it was bad, bad stuff. I don't believe the prosecution is going to show alot more to the jury. But the jury will find out Feldman tried to mislead them----and it won't be the first time.

JMO

[John Jamieson]

There's more.....Ordinary PC's gerate enough RF that people outside your house (with the right equipment) can see what your looking at and typing. The Gov uses "Tempest Approved" PC's and still puts them in leadlined rooms.