Baby Doe

A morgue has a unique smell, at least the morgue here in Prescott does. It doesn’t smell like death so much as it smells like eucalyptus oil and antiseptic, although there is that lingering hint of decomposition always in the air, like a mist that drifts along the ceiling and floors and waits for someone to stir it up. Baby Doe smelled to me like wet charcoal.

I get a knot in my stomach even now when I think back and recall that small, burned infant lying there. It did not sicken me, exactly, because she honestly did not look real. She resembled a life-sized baby doll that had been cast away at a dump site and incinerated. What I felt was revulsion and anger so intense I remember breaking out in a sweat and clenching my teeth until my jaw ached. What kind of animal could do this to a baby? And why would they do such a thing?

Detectives already had a fairly good idea of why it had happened. The assumption was that the baby had been accidentally killed by her parents, perhaps a Shaken Baby Syndrome event or simply parental anger over a fussy, crying child that went too far. As it eventually turned out, they were right, but in the meantime it was still a case of trying to identify Baby Doe.
It is extremely difficult to draw a sketch when your fingers are clenched like a vise on the pencil and your eyes are blurry with tears. I kept picturing my own daughter’s face, even though she was an adult by then, and wondering if Baby Doe’s parents were remembering her? Then I wondered, when the person or persons responsible for her death were finally found, could there ever be a jury that would be able to look past the burned, little child and give unbiased attention to any other facts? Of course, what possible reason could there ever be for anyone to set a child on fire? My thoughts ran amuck as I did my best to bring some semblance of life to Baby Doe’s face. She deserved to be remembered and identified as the sweet, beautiful child she had been before a monster ended her life.

The sketch turned out very well I thought, at least as far as I could tell. It ran in the newspapers and was shown on TV a few times, along with the skull reconstruction, and each time it was exhibited to the public we received another barrage of telephone calls from concerned citizens. This went on for several weeks and every time I saw the image I had drawn, or the reconstruction of that tiny skull, I could feel my stomach knot up with anger. I was very afraid it would become a Cold Case and that Baby Doe would gradually be forgotten. I wanted the person or persons who were responsible for ending her young life to have to answer for their crimes. Not only in another life someday, but here and now, where I could see their faces and maybe have some inkling of why they had done such a hateful thing.
Bay Doe was eventually identified, but not from my drawing or the skull reconstruction. It was another process of witnesses and two-plus-two-equals-four police work. That’s what the detectives do and they do it very well. Amazingly, there was a definite resemblance to her features in my drawing and also in the skull reconstruction, so I felt good about that. It was also good to know her killers, her own parents, were found and the punishment was dealt. As suspected, Baby Jane Doe had been a victim of Shaken Baby Syndrome. Her parents were living in Las Vegas and had chosen a stretch of Arizona highway to discard of their child’s body. Eventually a neighbor got suspicious and reported to the police that she had not seen the little girl next door for quite a while. That was all it took for the investigation to reach an end, even though it took some time.

I still think about Baby Doe from time to time, even after all these years, especially when I am around my own grandchildren. She was a hard way for me to begin my sideline of post-mortem identification sketches but it also gave me a feeling of accomplishment. I felt that if I could get through that drawing, I could probably handle almost anything forensics sent my way, and I was right.

Dead People I Have Known

The term Forensic Artist or Composite Artist means different things to different people. I believe that for most of the population it conjures up a mental image of a man or woman in a suit with a briefcase full of artists supplies, a nice, quiet office in which to work with the witness, and a hefty paycheck at the end of the day. The truth is that very few people actually make their living being Forensic/Composite Artists. There just isn’t enough constant work to keep them busy. It is typically a sideline. Those who have the professional title of Forensic/Composite Artist generally do a lot more than draw or reconstruct faces. They either are involved in teaching the subject to certification classes or they give lectures or are professional witnesses. It is a unique job and actually there are very few people who are truly good at the task. More often than not, it is someone like myself, who works in conjunction with the Police or Sheriff’s Office or some other facet of the law enforcement world and happens to have a talent for drawing faces and
interviewing. In fact, I have often argued that those people who do forensic or composite drawings are not really artists at all. This has nothing to do with creating art. It certainly takes a high degree of talent but it has little to do with expression or creativity.

Notice I did not say a talent for drawing portraits. A composite sketch is not a portrait. It is the reproduction of someone’s memory, or at least that’s what we attempt to do. Most people who witness a crime or are involved as a victim, are pretty stressed at the moment of the crime and end up being somewhat traumatized. If four people witness a convenience store holdup you may have to interview each of those four people to get an idea of what the holdup guy really looked like. One will recall a pair of dark, angry eyes while another will have concentrated on the Fu Manchu moustache and a third will say he was missing an ear. The fourth witness may tell you the perp was a woman in men’s clothing. It’s not an easy task.

Since the artist is drawing a memory, however, it is pretty important to get to the witness as soon as possible. If the memory is over three days old it has probably faded too much to give accurate information. This being the case, the idea of a composite artist sitting in a nice office with a briefcase full of supplies goes directly out the window.

I have done composite drawings with a Number 2 pencil on the back of a bank statement while sitting on the tailgate of an old pickup truck. If that’s where the witness is, that’s where you do the drawing. If you have no supplies with you, you use what you can find. The important thing is to not allow the memory to get old. You also have to know how to draw out that memory. This is where interviewing becomes vital. A forensic artist has to have the ability to interview, to bring out the memory that is stuffed away inside the witness or victim’s head. The more traumatized the witness or victim, the harder this may be, especially with children. To them, every bad guy looks like Freddy Kruger or Cruella DeVille.

Drawing dead people is a lot easier. I can honestly say “I see dead people!” or at least I have seen dead people. Several times. This is typically in the course of trying to identify a victim, someone who has been found deceased with no ID to allow the authorities to notify next of kin or go about solving the crime. It’s extremely difficult to find a killer when you don’t know who the victim is. Naturally the authorities will attempt to match fingerprints, if there are fingerprints to use, but not everyone on earth has a record of their prints on file, especially when it’s a young person.

My first forensic experience in a morgue had to do with the case of Baby Doe. A man and his son were riding horseback along the fence line that follows the highway north of Phoenix when they spotted what they thought to be a burned, discarded doll lying in the brush near the side of the highway. Closer inspection proved the doll was, in fact, a burned human child. There were no fingerprints and even if there had been, a child of that age (a year old or thereabouts) would certainly not have any record on file.

Baby Doe was severely burned but there were some tiny, charred features still in tact. This being the case, authorities decided to attempt to identify the child by means of a composite sketch and then a facial reconstruction from the infant’s skull. It would have been far too traumatic for the general public to see a photograph of the actual, burned baby on the front page of the newspaper with the headline: “Do you recognize this child?” A lifelike drawing is always much more acceptable in any public identification. The problem with this is that on a very young child the features are somewhat generic and reproducing them by two or three-dimensional means is like grasping at smoke. I agreed to try a sketch, however, leaving the three-dimensional skull reconstruction to someone who had been at that job much longer than I.

Easy out...

Then again, one of the very best escapes I can recall had to do with good old Sergeant Scramble. I’m not even sure it can be classified as an escape. It was more like a “kick-out”.

The jail, as I’ve mentioned, is on the second floor of a three-story building and is lined along the front and two sides by big, old sycamore trees. Unless an inmate is a Trusty who is sentenced to County Time, he or she has no business being outside the building, or even off of the second floor. And there are no circumstances when any Trusty is allowed outside at night, with the exception of winter when an occasional snowstorm makes it necessary for the Trusties to shovel the parking area. During these rare occasions, there is always an officer with them to supervise.
I don’t remember the inmate’s name so we’ll call him “Billy-Bob”. That’s a pretty common name among inmates, along with Spike, Bubba, Jose and John Doe. At any rate, how he had gotten outside the main building is unknown at this time, or else I was never informed or have forgotten, but somehow on one dark summer night, Billy-Bob managed to slip the surly bonds of the jail and was up on the roof with one thing on his mind: Escape.

The only way from the third floor rooftop to the ground is by way of the big sycamore trees that formed a kind of canopy between the jail and the street. Being young, agile, and in a desperate and foolish mode, Billy-Bob made it in a leap from rooftop to sycamore tree and was gradually beginning his decent when Sgt. Scramble happened to wander outside for a smoke.

It must have been a moment frozen in time: Billy-Bob hanging from the limbs of the sycamore tree, hovering just below the rooftop of the jail, while Sgt. Scramble stood below, lighting a cigarette and looking up at the man in the jail uniform who was looking back at him. How easy it would have been for Sgt. Scramble to call for help, to stop the escaping inmate and be the hero of the hour. What gratitude the sheriff and all the community would have shown him for keeping a dangerous criminal in the safe confines of the jail and off the streets. He might even have received a certificate or medal, and he certainly would have gotten a mountain of kudos from the Command Staff, the courts and the lawyers. It would have been so simple. So wondrous! It would have gone down in the annals of jail history as one of those glorious moments when a Sergeant proved his invaluable status. It would have, if it hadn’t been Sgt. Scramble.
Instead, he shook his fist at the escaping inmate, who was wearing his orange jail uniform, and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Hey! You! What’re you doing on jail property! Get down out of that tree and get out of here!”

And Billy-Bob obeyed.

The Great Escapes

As long as you have prisoners behind bars you will also have prisoners attempting to get out from behind those bars. Can you blame them? Being held captive, in any form or situation, is not a natural state of affairs for humans or animals alike and any one of us would do our best to alleviate that situation if we could. It is said that captive wolves will chew their own legs off to get free of a trap. My mother had a canary named Dickie that chewed its toes off, but I think that had another implication to it, something akin to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Escape attempts are not uncommon in any jail and we certainly had our share. I mentioned earlier the three Amigos who got out through an air vent and wound up being hosted in an elderly couple’s home until the SWAT team arrived. And there was an inmate who escaped through the roof of the Rec yard and stayed on the loose for a number of years before his own son turned him in.

Work Furlough inmates now and then get the itch to run, too. They leave for work from the jail and for some strange reason, decide not to return that night. It’s like some big stupid cell in their brain takes over and they lose all concept of rational thinking. Their feet begin to move in a direction away from the jail and they end up hitchhiking to Lodi or Tonopah or some other little known outpost. Ah - life on the lam!

The maximum amount of time anyone can be sentenced to jail in Yavapai County is 365 days. Some inmates are there longer than that, but only if they are awaiting trial on major cases. Prison is another thing, that’s for long-term confinement. But the County jail is for less serious offenders and a year or less is as much time as they can do. When they are given a work furlough it is usually after they have already been in jail for a while and so that amount of time is typically much less than a year, four to six months is the average.

When a person does not return to the jail at the end of his work furlough day, he or she is charged with escape, which is an automatic two year sentence in DOC (Department of Corrections). They are not ignorant of this, they know the consequences. So it always has amazed me when a work furlough inmate turns heel and goes on the lam. Let’s weigh this for a moment: six months of work release jail time, or two years prison? Hmmm…big decision. Still, they do attempt it now and then. To date, I believe they have all been apprehended.

There are other ways of trying to escape jail as well. We’ve had inmates swallow weird objects or purposefully break bones to try and get to the hospital for a chance to break away. This has come close to being successful once or twice but so far, to my knowledge, no one has made it.
And then there was Noel, who managed to crawl up into the ceiling from the visitation area and ended up getting hopelessly lost. You have to understand how the jail is constructed to fully get the picture. Yavapai County Jail takes up the second floor of a three-story building and so there is no free space to speak of above or below; just a crawl space area for pipes, vents and electrical wiring. That crawl space is crisscrossed with metal beams, separating it into compartments with the express reason of foiling such escape attempts. Anything larger than a cockroach would have trouble navigating about. If Noel had found his way into an air duct, and was thin enough to wriggle through, he might have eventually found sunlight, but he was not and did not.

It was no secret he had made his way from visitation up into the ceiling. It was also no secret he would be stuck up there and would, in time, have to come back down. So everyone waited. It was summer, it was hot, and there was no food or water or sanitation stations in the crawl space above the ceiling, so it had to be a simple matter of time. We began taking bets on how long Noel could hold out.

It was Lena who made the bust. She had come a long way from her fateful involvement with Misty and the wet roll of cash, and by then she was very good at manipulating inmates into doing what she wanted them to do. She learned that from me, I might add. I was the best inmate-manipulator in the County. It was three days after Noel’s celebrated escape attempt up into the crawl space and Lena was standing just outside the visitation door, not fifteen feet from where Noel had climbed up through the ceiling tiles, when she heard a still, small voice from above, “Leeenaahhh…helllp meee!”

Lena’s reaction was to look up and around in the direction of the faint voice, but all she saw were ceiling tiles, “Yeah? Who’s that?” she asked.

“It’s me – Noel- I’m dyin’ up here - get me out!”

The reaction from Lena was hysterical laughter. The same reaction came from all the officers who dragged Noel, dehydrated, hungry, and filthy from the confines of the ceiling crawl space. He was covered with insulation and dirt, which in turn had swathed his body in an oozing rash. His hair was full of cobwebs and bugs, his pupils were dilated to the size of nickels from being in the dark, and he had worn his elbows and knees raw trying to maneuver about.

Noel was not charged with attempted escape even though we could have done so. Everyone figured he had suffered enough. Even Noel admitted the plan was not a brilliant one. His body finally healed and he got his dignity back to some degree, but no one who was there that day has ever forgotten his mournful, pitiful voice emanating from the ceiling by the visitation room, “Leeenaahh…helllp meee…”

Knowing this difficulty, and for their own sanity as well as ours, the INS had given each Mohammed a wrist band with his photo, his name and his Federal ID number. The photos were all fairly interchangeable but when put with the name Mohammed-Something it did help somewhat to identify who was who.

Then along came Sergeant C. We’ll call him that for lack of anything less incriminating. Sgt. C was a heck of a guy, but just a little bit over the top when it came to jail management. Actually he was over the top and on his way down into the chasm. He was known as Sgt. Scramble.

My first impression of Sgt. C was his unquenchable appetite. The man was a human mulching machine. This was a middle-aged man who was quite slender and not very tall, so where he put the mountains of food he consumed never ceased to puzzle me. He was polite about it, though. He would wait until all the inmate trays had gone out and the rest of the staff had gone through the kitchen food line and then Nellie Bar The Door! Anything left was fair game and after Sgt. C was finished, there was nary a crumb.

Didn’t matter what was served, either. From tacos to tuna, Sgt. C would pile it all up onto his plate, sometimes onto two plates, and carry it on down to the lunchroom to feast. I recall the looks on everyone’s faces as they watched him devour his concoctions; looks of absolute astonishment. It was rumored that Sgt. C did not eat at home, although no reason was ever given for that. According to said rumor, his only meal during the day was whatever he could consume at work in the jail. Some of the Trustys who worked in the kitchen said they saw him stuffing fruit and cookies into his uniform pockets, too, but you had to consider the source of that rumor. It came from inmates who made hooch out of old fruit cocktail and yeast. What did they know? At any rate, there was even a period of time when amazing things began disappearing from the jail refrigerator during the night shift: enormous roasts of beef, gallons of milk, twenty-pound wheels of cheese. Some blamed the missing food on Sgt. C. Personally; I think it was the jail ghost. But that’s another story and we’ll get to him later on.

Meanwhile, Sgt. Scramble was there to take over when the INS officers arrived with their twenty-eight Mohammeds. He was good at that sort of thing, taking over, I mean. He was not particularly good at accomplishing whatever he took over, but he did have a knack for intervening and taking charge. He was gracious with the INS officers and assured them we would take the very best of care of the Mohammeds during their stay, which was to be approximately ten days.

“Not to worry,” Sgt. C proclaimed, “We’ve emptied out a whole dorm for them so they’ll have lots of privacy and the utmost safety.”

And then, as the pleased INS officers drove away, Sgt. C proceeded to remove all the Mohammeds’ identification wristbands.

The reasoning for this, he assured us, was that INS wristbands did not fit the guidelines for Yavapai County safety measures. They had metal pieces on them and the plastic could be used to cut things, like flesh. At the time, Yavapai County did not use any identification on the inmates. Nowadays we also use wristbands, but back then there was, as yet, no such thing. Sgt. C would not allow the Mohammeds to have anything on their person that the rest of the jail population did not have. They were changed from their white robes into orange uniforms and promptly marched up to the second floor where their dorm awaited.

Each inmate in Yavapai County jail is issued a bedroll, which consists of a mattress, sheets, soap, toothbrush & paste, shampoo, and a towel. Within five minutes of placing the twenty-eight Mohammends into the dorm, every one of them had their towel wrapped securely about their head. No jokes, please, they truly did have their towels on their heads. It was as close to their traditional mode of attire as they could come. Why the County was never sued for this infraction of religious culture is a mystery to me, but it did not occur.

The following ten days were pure Hell for the officers in the jail, including Yours Truly. We had absolutely no clue which Mohammed was which. No one knew who had been served his meals, who had gotten the correct medication, whose commissary was going to whom, and the Mohammeds did nothing to help. If they spoke English, which I was pretty sure most of them did, they refused to acknowledge it. If you called out “Mohammed Nassim!” when trying to serve the meal trays, twenty-eight small, dark men with towels on their heads would raise their hands and shout “Ey! Ey!”, which I was pretty sure was Islamic for “Dumb Yankee!”
The Yavapai County jail, much like all jails in the nation, uses certain inmates to work as Trustys. These men and women have to meet certain criteria to earn that position and they are rewarded for their work with privileges of varying kinds. Trustys work from sun-up to dark and often through the night and sleep is one of those rare and valuable things. The dorm in which the Mohammeds were placed happened to be right next to the Trusty dorm. Only a single wall of cinder block separated the Mohammeds from our working inmates and the jail kitchen, and thanks to a myriad of air vents in and about that area, sound traveled with amazing speed and clarity. This was a good thing when it came to security issues because officers could hear when fights or arguments broke out, and it was easy to shout for a Trusty when you needed one to help with some task. It was not, however, a good thing when the chanting started.

Just at midnight, the first night and every night thereafter for ten nights in a row, twenty-eight Mohammeds sat in their individual cells on the dormitory floor, towels on their heads, and chanted at the top of their lungs. Knowing very little about Islam, I had no idea if this activity was truly a part of their religious culture or if they did it simply to annoy everyone. I suspect it was the latter because the chanting did not take place at any other time than in the middle of the night when the rest of the jail was quiet as a tomb.

The Trustys suffered the most, as the off-key wailing came directly from beyond their dorm wall. I don’t think anyone would have complained too much if the Mohammeds were harmonizing to Stardust, but the uneven, nerve shattering chants that welled up from beyond their cell doors were more like an army of cats with their tails being ripped off by iguanas. It was akin to fingernails on a blackboard, or perhaps bagpipes under water.

Actually, there is no description that really gives a true feeling of the sound. Suffice to say it was enough to send the Trustys over the edge. They began hurling shoes and books at the wall and shouting unmentionable threats. The instinct of the officers was to try and stop the Trustys from acting out at the Mohammeds but in all truth we officers were as annoyed by the noise as the Trustys. All we could do was order them to quiet down or threaten to dish out punishment if they did not obey, such as stopping commissary or not allowing recreation or phone privileges, which they did not care about anyway. Their response was the usual, “Ey? Ey?”

The Mohammeds finally left our facility eleven days later, but only after several hours of mass confusion involving which Mohammed was which. It resembled the Keystone Cops with deputies and Federal agents stumbling about and over one another in an attempt to replace the wristbands Sgt. Scramble had so adeptly removed. I’m pretty sure none of the Mohammeds really cared, just as I am sure very few of them got the correct wristband. I am also pretty sure most of them were back in the USA within six weeks of their deportment. At least they did not come back and chant at midnight in the Yavapai County jail.

The Mohammeds

The freedom to practice our own religion, in our own way, is one of our basic rights. It was the reason this country was originally founded and it has been the foundation of many lawsuits, orders, amendments, changes, arguments, joy and progress over the years. There are a few legal restrictions, but not many. If a person decided he wanted to start a Church of Holy Auburn Dissection in which the main belief is the drawing and quartering of people with red hair, his church and his beliefs would most likely not be allowed. But for the most part our government is very tolerant of beliefs and opinions that are stated in the name of Religion.

It is much the same in the jails and prisons. Inmates and prisoners have a right to practice their religion, within limits. If the religion is sanctified, organized and has a base in some sort of Higher Power, jails and prisons are expected to do as much as they can to allow those followers to practice the ideals, services, diets and other cultural aspects of their belief. If an Hassidic Jew comes into jail and states he cannot eat pork, the jail must provide him kosher, pork-free meals. Catholics must be offered a substitute for red meat on Fridays, Native Americans cannot be forced to cut their hair, Islamics cannot be served beef, etc. One questions what a true Hassidic, Catholic or Islamic would be doing in jail in the first place, as well as a Native American who followed his tribe’s traditions and beliefs.

On the other hand, Vegetarianism is not a religion, it is a choice, and so the Vegetarian must make do with whatever meals are served to him or her and choose what he or she wants from the tray. It’s a fine line sometimes, but if jail and prison dieticians had to fix special meals for everyone who did not like fish or believed peanut butter was an alien plot to gum up the brains of our youth (yes, I ran into that once) they would be creating trays twenty-four hours a day and the cost would be astronomical.

Satanism and Witchcraft (Wicca) are tough ones in the jails. They are very organized religions with many followers and for reasons that seem somewhat obvious to me, they are popular among the drug-using crowd. They are not, however, recognized religions, at least not within the framework of law enforcement. Satanists scare the Hell out of other people. And the fear factor in a jail is high enough without adding a circle of men with blankets over their heads, mumbling Gregorian chants at midnight. Hence, the practice of Satanism is not allowed in the Yavapai County jail, although there are a number of inmates whom I have come across who profess to being Satanists.

The other, more recent phenomenon is Odinism. This is popular among the White Supremists and stems from ancient Celtic and Viking times when Odin ruled with his lightening bolts and Druids partied in the woods under big rocks. I’m not sure how White Pride fits in with Druids and Celts but somehow they have evolved into a pseudo-match. At any rate, some of the Odinists we have had in jail claimed to be Vegetarians by religion. So have some who follow other, better known religions, but unless it can be proved in their church’s bylaws, the jail considers it a preference and they get meat just like everyone else.

So into the picture, one fine day, came the Federal order that Yavapai County was going to play temporary host to twenty-eight Islamics who were being held by INS (Immigration & Naturalization Services) for the purpose of deporting them back to the Middle East. This was in the days before terrorists were running rampant and we had no colored code for daily terrorist activity. These deportees were not considered to be exceptionally dangerous. They were not mad bombers or carriers of anthrax; they were simply here, in the USA illegally and had been involved in some sort of criminal activity that got them noticed. Typically it had to do with drugs or some sort of fraudulent schemes.

The INS had been extremely careful in the process of identifying and tagging these men. Every one of them was named Mohammed-Something. There was Mohammed Nassim, Mohammed Ismeal, Mohammed-Jamal, Mohammed Al-Duran, well, you get the picture. On top of that they were all slender, had black facial hair and seemed to be the same age. We had a booking area full of white-robed identical men who shared the same first name: Mohammed.

Crystal did finally tell me what happened to her boyfriend, though, but only after all chance of her plea bargain for twenty-five years being reneged was past. Let me set the stage a little before I get into her story. Crystal was an adorable, little gal: blonde, blue-eyed, freckled, with a turned up nose and a dimpled smile. If your son took her to the prom you would be thrilled. You would take a dozen snapshots of the darling couple and rave to your friends at how cute and sweet and adorable your son’s girlfriend was. And you would tell them how smart she seemed, how personable, how “likeable”. You might notice just a hint of coolness in her blue eyes, like when she looked at you she sort of looked through you, but you would throw that aside as just teenage idiosyncrasies and a little bit of shyness. Crystal was the perfect, All-American girl.

Crystal’s boyfriend, we’ll call him Stuart, was a handsome, smart, affable young man from a well-to-do California family. He was a student at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University who got good grades, mostly stayed out of trouble, and was making his parents very proud. He was assured of having a boundless future after he graduated. He had, as they say, “everything going for him”.

Then he met Crystal, the All-American girl. Stuart probably did like to party a little because that was no doubt how he met Crystal, but what nineteen-year-old boy doesn’t tip a beer now and then? It was also likely he and Crystal had partied in that same mine where Stuart finally ended up. I doubt he had any foresight into this eventuality.

Crystal and Stuart dated for some time before the murder took place. During this time, Crystal told me they were prone to “pillow talk” and had spent a lot of hours in bed, sharing cold beer and a puff or two of good weed and just talking. She also told me she came to realize she may have talked a little too much while under the influence of beer and weed because Stuart began asking her little questions about the murder of the girl several months before and how much Crystal may have known.

Also during their time together, Crystal had gained access to Stuart’s bank account. It was never made clear to me if this was with Stuart’s approval or not, only that Crystal took it beyond a casual twenty dollars here and there for gasoline. When Stuart began to complain, and then finally told her to stop raiding his checking account, Crystal grew angry and several rather violent arguments ensued. A breakup was inevitable.

But Crystal realized if they broke up, as angry as Stuart was over the theft from his bank account, he might just go to the authorities with the information he had gleaned from her during their pillow talks: information about the murdered girl whose case had not yet been solved. Crystal, being the clever little sociopath that she was, decided it might be best if Stuart and his information just disappeared. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, she told me.
Stuart was learning to fly and so many of their dates had involved driving out by the local airport at night and smooching in the car while watching the planes come and go. On that fateful, dark night their smooching and plane watching was interrupted by Crystal’s pistol and Stuart wound up in the trunk of the car like so much luggage. Access to his bank account was now much easier; at least until she was caught, and the information she had regarding the murder of the other girl would remain a secret.

Crystal ended up going to prison for killing Stuart and she took her secrets with her, but during her time in jail it was overheard by other girls in her dorm, that she was bragging about how Stuart was not her first kill. All of this was hearsay, of course, and never brought to light, but I, for one, never put it past her. In all my years spent working in the Yavapai County jail, that pretty, freckled, All-American girl had the most empty, emotionless eyes I have ever seen.