Forensic Files

No, I was among the first two people on the scene of a murder. The ambulance beat the police there but not really, because my partner was a constable. This one.



I am pictured more than once (the same picture) in this episode of Forensic Files, although they have actors playing the part in the reenactment. They didn't call me for the retrial.

 

Yes, and Craig Zimmerman is on the right.

 

Everyone was thinking suicide at the time, although his wife was acting oddly. As someone mentions in the Forensic Files episode, she didn't act the least concerned. A drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, she greeted people at the door as if she were having a party. Also strange was that her 16 year-old son, who later became a lawyer who fought for her retrial, supposedly slept through the whole thing. It was a big house, but not that big of a house. It did look like a suicide, though.

 

We probably cut the tee shirt off of him so that we could assess his injuries, and left a portion of it intact. The tee shirt probably got tossed with all of the other bloody stuff when we cleaned the ambulance.

As for the rest, the police did not consider it to be a crime scene at the time that the shooting occurred. Since there was no designated crime scene or tape that would put anything off-limits, I am not surprised that she wanted to get the mess cleaned up before the whole house was swarming with flies.

No, I thought they were wrong when they tried to make that out to be something wrong on her part. Neighbors who offered to help her clean up the mess were threatened with arrest, but were never arrested because the police neglected to establish it as a crime scene. She seemed odd to me, but I didn't see anything that indicated anything other than a suicide.

 

In Texas, they do, as long as the suicide takes place two years or more after the policy is taken out. I am guessing she probably collected on it after her acquittal, but it was withheld at the time because she was being tried for the murder.

 

Most of us never have to deal with anything like this, so I suppose it's hard to know just what's appropriate. On television, if they deal with the cleanup at all, they show a professional forensic cleaning unit coming in and making everything like it was before all of the blood and stuff. The reality is that these agencies cost a fortune and, although these people were once worth a fortune, they were in debt, and she may not have had access to much of what they did have. She probably couldn't afford a forensic cleanup unit and leaving it be just doesn't work.

The reality is that, far too often, the family is left to clean up the mess, and if they wait too long, it's too late for the room to ever be livable again. However long she waited, it would have only been a bigger job once she got back to it.