Homicide. David Simon
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two detectives head first to Latonya’s school to interview the principal, several teachers, and a nine-year-old playmate of the victim as well as the playmate’s mother, who had both seen Latonya on the afternoon of her disappearance. The interviews confirm the substance of the missing persons report:
On the afternoon of Tuesday, February 2, Latonya Wallace returned home from Eutaw-Marshburn Elementary School. She arrived about three o’clock and left the house less than a half hour later with her blue bookbag, telling her mother she wanted to visit the city library branch on Park Avenue, about four blocks from the family apartment. Latonya then walked to the building next door, knocking on the door of the playmate’s apartment to see if she, too, wanted to go to the library. When the younger girl’s mother decided to keep her daughter home, Latonya Wallace set out on her own.
Garvey and McAllister pick up the chronology at the Park Avenue library branch, where the afternoon librarian remembers the visit by the girl in the red raincoat. The librarian recalls that the child stayed only a few minutes, picking out a series of books almost at random, giving little or no thought to the titles or subjects. Thinking back, the librarian also tells the detectives that the young girl had seemed preoccupied or troubled, and had paused in thought at the library door just before leaving.
Then Latonya Wallace carried her bookbag into the daytime bustle of a Baltimore street and vanished, her passing unseen by any known witness. The child had remained hidden for a day and a half before being dumped in that back alley. Where she had been taken, where she had stayed for more than thirty-six hours—the primary crime scene—was still not known. The detectives would begin their pursuit of Latonya Wallace’s killer with little more physical evidence than the body itself.
Indeed, that is where Tom Pellegrini begins. He and Jay Landsman wait in the basement autopsy room of the medical examiner’s offices on Penn Street, watching the cutters extract cold, clinical data from the earthly remains of Latonya Wallace. The facts initially seem to suggest a prolonged abduction: The victim’s stomach is determined to contain one fully digested meal of spaghetti and meatballs followed by a partially digested meal of hot dogs and a shredded, stringy substance believed to be sauerkraut. A detective calls the school cafeteria and is told that the lunch menu on February 2 was spaghetti, and yet Latonya Wallace did not eat anything at home before heading for the library later that afternoon. Had the murderer kept the child alive long enough to provide her with a last meal?
As the detectives stand at the edge of the autopsy room and confer with the medical examiners, Pellegrini’s foreboding at the crime scene begins to take solid form: Newington Avenue had indeed been cleared too soon. At least one piece of evidence was forever lost.
Informed of the child’s murder even as the detectives were finishing their work at the scene, the state’s chief medical examiner, John Smialek, rushed from his office to Reservoir Hill only to arrive after the body was removed. Lost was an opportunity for Smialek to use an internal thermometer to calibrate the body temperature, which would have allowed him to narrow the time of death based on a degrees-lost-per-hour formula.
Without a time-of-death estimate based on body temperature, a medical examiner is aided only by the degree of rigor mortis (the stiffening of the muscles) and lividity (the settling and solidification of blood in the dependent parts of the body). But the rate at which any postmortem phenomenon occurs can vary widely, depending on the size, weight and build of the victim, the external temperature of the body at the time of death and the temperature or conditions of the death scene. Moreover, rigor mortis sets and then disappears, then sets again in the first hours after death; a pathologist would have to examine the body more than once—and hours apart—to assess the true status of rigor correctly. As a result, detectives seeking time-of-death estimates have become accustomed to working within a spread of six, twelve, or even eighteen hours. In cases where decomposition has begun, the ability of a pathologist to determine time of death is further impaired, although the onerous task of sizing individual maggots taken from the body can often bring the estimate to within a two-or three-day span. The truth is that medical experts can often provide no more than a rough guess as to a victim’s time of death; coroners capable of telling Kojak that his victim stopped breathing between 10:30 and 10:45 P.M. are always a source of amusement for cops slumped in front of the tube on a slow nightshift.
When Pellegrini and Landsman press the pathologists for the best possible estimate, they are told that their victim appears to be coming out of first-stage rigor and has therefore been dead for at least twelve hours. Given the absence of any decomposition and the extra meal in her stomach, the detectives make their first assumption: Latonya Wallace was probably held captive for a day, killed on Wednesday night, and then dumped on Newington Avenue in the early hours of Thursday morning.
The remainder of the autopsy is unambiguous. Latonya Wallace had been strangled with a piece of cord or rope, then brutally disemboweled with a sharp instrument, probably a serrated table knife. She sustained at least six deep wounds to the chest and abdomen, suggesting a level of violence and intensity that detectives categorize as overkill. Although the victim was discovered fully clothed, a fresh vaginal tear indicates some type of molestation, but vaginal, anal and oral swabs come up negative for semen. Finally, the pathologists note that a tiny star-shaped earring is present in one earlobe but missing from the other. The family would later confirm that she wore two such earrings to school on Tuesday.
Examining the wounds in detail, Pellegrini and Landsman are convinced that the rear of Newington Avenue is not the site of the murder. There was little blood at the death scene, even though the child’s wounds were severe and bleeding would have been pronounced. The first and most essential question for the detectives is clear: Where was the child murdered, if not in the back alley? Where is the primary crime scene?
As the detectives working the case gather in the homicide office late that afternoon to compare notes, Jay Landsman outlines a scenario increasingly obvious to most of the men in the room:
“She’s found between the library and her house,” says the sergeant, “so whoever took her is from the neighborhood, and she probably knew him if he was able to get her off the street in the middle of the day. He has to take her inside someplace. If you grabbed her off the street in a car, you’d drive her somewhere else; you wouldn’t bring the body back into the neighborhood after you killed her.”
Landsman also suggests, to general agreement, that the girl was probably murdered within a block or two of where she was dumped. Even in the early morning hours, he reasons, someone carrying the bloody body of a child, concealed in little more than a red raincoat, would not want to travel in the open for any great distance.
“Unless he takes her to the alley in a car,” adds Pellegrini.
“But then you’re back to asking yourself why the guy, if he’s already got her in a car, would go and dump her in an alley where anyone could look out a window and see him,” argues Landsman. “Why not just drive her out into the woods somewhere?”
“Maybe you’re dealing with a goof,” says Pellegrini.
“No,” says Landsman. “Your crime scene is right in that fucking neighborhood. It’s probably going to be someone who lives in one of the houses in that block who took her right out of his back door … or it’s a vacant house or a garage or something like that.”
The meeting, such as it is, breaks down into smaller groups of detectives, with Landsman putting men to work on small, insulated parts of the whole.
As the primary detective, Pellegrini begins reading through the key statements of relatives taken by half a dozen detectives earlier in the day, digesting pieces of the puzzle that fell to the other investigators. Q-and-A sheets from the victim’s family members, from some of the child’s schoolmates, from the fifty-three-year-old resident of 718 Newington who, on taking out the trash that morning, had discovered the body—Pellegrini scans each page with an eye for an unusual phrase, an inconsistency, anything out of the ordinary. He was there for some of the interviews; others took place before he returned from the autopsy. Now, he is playing catchup, working to stay on top of a case that is expanding geometrically.
At the same time, Edgerton and Ceruti