Bite Mark Identification in the Ted Bundy Serial Murder Case

     The identification of bruises or abrasions usually in the shape of two semi-circles or brackets as a human bite mark made by a particular set of teeth is a function of forensic dentistry referred to as bite mark identification. This form of impression identification, also called forensic odontology, is based on the assumption that no two people in the world have front teeth that are identical in thickness, shape, relationship to each other and patterns of wear.

     The process of comparing a bite mark to a known set of teeth is not unlike the identification of latent fingerprint, footwear and tire track impressions. Bite mark wounds are found on victims of murder, rape, and child molestation. This type of crime scene evidence is preserved by life-size photography, tooth mark tracings onto transparent sheets and dental casts of the impressions themselves. A suspect might be asked to bite down on a pliable surface for an impression sample, have a cast made of his teeth, or both. Usually, connecting a suspect to a victim through expert bite mark testimony will be enough evidence, by itself, to sustain a criminal conviction. For this reason bite mark evidence must be 100 percent reliable. Unfortunately it is not even close to that.

     The field of bite mark identification exploded in the 1980s. Hundreds if not thousands of defendants went to prison on the strength of bite mark testimony. Although bite mark identification has been a recognized branch of forensic science since 1970, it was the 1979 trial of serial killer Ted Bundy in south Florida that put this form of identification on the map the way the O. J. Simpson murder case popularized DNA profiling in the mid-1990s.

The Ted Bundy Serial Murder Case

     After killing 30 to 100 college-aged women in the states of Washington, Utah and Colorado, Theodore Bundy entered a Florida State University sorority house in Tallahassee where he sexually assaulted and murdered two Chi Omega sorority members. The police arrested him a short time later in a stolen car, then put him on trial for murder.

     The prosecutor had plenty of nonphysical evidence against Mr. Bundy, but it was circumstantial and didn't place him in the Chi Omega murder room. The killer had left a hair follicle on a crime scene stocking mask that looked similar under a microscope to samples from Bundy's head. But hair identification wasn't enough by itself to carry a conviction. The rapist had left traces of semen, but these murders were committed more than ten years before the dawn of DNA analysis.

     If the Dade County prosecutor had any chance of convicting Ted Bundy he would have to connect him to the murder scene through a bite mark wound on one of the victims. To do that the prosecutor called on Dr. Richard Souviron, the chief odontologist for the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner's Office. He also enlisted the services of Dr. Lowell J. Levine, a forensic dentistry consultant to the New York City Medical Examiner's Office. To round out his battery of experts the prosecutor brought in Dr. Norman Sperber, an odontologist with the San Diego and Imperial County Medical Examiner's Office in California. These three forensic experts comprised the nation's most renowned bite mark analysts.

     Dr. Souviron took the stand and testified that the sorority house attacker left a postmortem double-bite mark on one victim's left buttock. He had bitten once, turned sideways, them clamped down again. The killer's top bicuspids and his lateral and central incisors had remained in the same position, but he had made two wound brackets with his lower front teeth. When he photographed Ted Bundy's teeth Dr. Souviron noticed they were of uneven length, chipped and oddly aligned, factors that helped individualize the defendant's bite mark pattern. To illustrate for the jury that Mr. Bundy's teeth matched the murder scene wound, Dr. Sourviron laid a photograph of the defendant's teeth, depicted on a transparent sheet, over an enlarged photograph of the bite mark. The bottom edges of Bundy's teeth lined up perfectly with the crime scene wound.

     Dr. Norman Sperber and Dr. Lowell Levine took the strand and lent their expertise to the identification. Bundy, representing himself, brought in his own dental expert, an odontologist from Maryland who testified that "the dental pattern [bite mark] is one I'd expect to find in 20 percent of the population of male Caucasians." The defense expert didn't say the bite mark on the victim couldn't have been Bundy's, he just wasn't willing to identify the wound as coming from the defendant to the exclusion of all others.

     The jury found Ted Bundy guilty as charged. The judge sentenced him to death, and ten years later Ted Bundy was executed. Before his execution he confessed to the sorority house killings and dozens of other lust murders.

     The Ted Bundy case established the credibility and usefulness of forensic bite mark analysis, and for a while placed it on the same level, in terms of reliability, as latent fingerprint identification. But following a series of high-profile misidentifications in bite mark cases, this form of impression analysis was no longer considered as reliable as latent fingerprint identification. Today, in most states, odontologists are not allowed, by law, to state unequivocally that a defendant is the source of a bite mark. The most these experts can say is that the questioned bite mark is consistent with having been made by the defendant's teeth. 

The Thomas Gilbert Jr. Golden Boy Murder Case

     Thomas Gilbert Jr. had all of the advantages in life but one--mental health. His father, a managing partner in a successful New York City hedge fund firm, sent him to an expensive prep school in Massachusetts and later to his alma mater, Princeton University. Upon his son's graduation from Princeton Thomas Gilbert Sr. paid for the young man's high-end apartment in Manhattan's fancy Chelsea neighborhood. The ivy league golden boy also received a family allowance of $1,000 a week.

     Early in 2014, frustrated with his son's inability to stand on his feet financially, Thomas Gilbert Sr. cut the 28-year-old's weekly allowance to $800. By the end of that year, young Mr. Gilbert's allowance had dwindled to $300.

     On January 4, 2015 Thomas Gilbert Jr. showed up at his parents' posh Turtle Bay Manhattan apartment. He informed his mother Shelley that he needed to talk to his father about business. To get his mother out of the apartment he sent her on an errand to fetch him a sandwich and a Coke.

     Upon Shelley Gilbert's return to the apartment with the sandwich and soft drink she found her husband on the floor with a fatal gunshot would to his head. The handgun used to kill the victim was resting on his chest.

     Homicide detectives with the New York City Police Department acquired surveillance camera footage showing Thomas Gilbert Jr., about fifteen minutes after his mother found her dead husband, leaving the apartment building wearing a hoodie and carrying a gym bag.

      Not long after the fatal shooting in the Gilbert apartment detectives arrested Thomas Gilbert Jr. for the murder of his father.

     The Thomas Gilbert murder trial got underway in Manhattan in late May 2019. The issue wasn't whether the son had shot his father to death but whether or not, at the time of the shooting, the defendant was legally insane. (Legal insanity is not the same as clinical insanity. To be legally insane the defendant must be so mentally impaired he or she was unable to distinguish right from wrong. This is such a high bar few defendants claiming the defense succeed in proving it.)

     In an effort to establish the insanity case, defense attorneys put on the stand the therapist who had been treating the defendant. According to this witness the defendant suffered from "paranoid thoughts" and had been prescribed anti-psychotic medication.

     The prosecution did not deny that the defendant had a mental problem. The prosecutor argued, however, that notwithstanding the defendant's mental condition he was sane enough to know that shooting his father to death was an act of criminal homicide.

     In late June 2019 the Manhattan jury found Thomas Gilbert Jr. guilty of second-degree murder, a conviction that could put the 34-year-old in prison for life.

     Cases like this are difficult because it is impossible to know the degree to which the defendant's mental illness played in the murder. Was he driven by his sickness or was he simply a spoiled jerk?

     In August 2019 the judge sentenced Thomas Gilbert Jr. to 30 years to life in prison.

The Keith Little Murder Case

     At ten-thirty in the morning of New Year's Day 2011, police were called to the Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland where they discovered maintenance supervisor Roosevelt Brockington's body in his basement boiler room office. Someone had stabbed Mr. Brockington 70 times in the face, neck, chest and back. The 40-year-old victim had the 12-inch knife still stuck in his neck. This looked like a crime of passion committed by someone who hated the victim.

     Five days after the murder a Suburban Hospital worker reported seeing Keith Little, a maintenance employee, washing a pair of black gloves and a ski-mask in chemically treated water. The police recovered these items from the trash bin outside the boiler room and took Keith Little, already a suspect, into custody.

     On February 3, 2003, in an earlier case, Keith Little had allegedly killed his maintenance boss in Washington, D.C. This victim, Gordon Rollins, had been shot six times. The jury in the 2006 murder trial found Mr. Little not guilty. He walked out of court a free man.

     Investigators in the Bethesda murder case had reason to believe that Keith Little hated Mr. Brockington. In 2009, Little had threatened to "get him" after the maintenance supervisor changed his working schedule. As a result of that adjustment Mr. Little had to give up a second job at the federal court house in Greenbelt, Maryland. More recently the murder victim gave the 50-year-old suspect a negative performance evaluation that kept him from receiving an annual pay raise.

     DNA analysts at the Montgomery County Crime Laboratory determined there was not enough trace evidence on one of the black gloves to declare the presence of blood. A second analysis by a private firm, Bode Technology, found no evidence of blood either, but did find evidence of blood after applying a serology test that can detect more diluted traces. According to these results the glove contained DNA from the victim, Keith Little and an unidentified person.

     Charged with first-degree murder, Mr. Little went on trial on December 2, 2011 at the Montgomery Court House in Rockville, Maryland. His attorney, Assistant Public Defender Ronald Gottlieb, in his opening statement to the jury pointed out that the police found no traces of blood in the defendant's home, car, or work locker. As for the motive behind the murder, attorney Gottlieb asserted that several former maintenance employees could have been angry with the victim. At this point the prosecution had a stronger case than the defense.

     On December 6, 2011, Montgomery County Circuit Judge Marielsa Bernard ruled that the prosecution could not introduce the results of the DNA test linking defendant Little to the glove that supposedly contained traces of the victim's blood. The judge felt the disparity of lab results rendered this evidence unreliable.

      Judge Bernard also prohibited the prosecution from making any mention of Little's previous trial in which he was found not guilty of killing his maintenance boss in Washington, D.C. This information, according to the judge, was too prejudicial to the defendant's current case.

     The Montgomery County prosecutor, notwithstanding the procedural setbacks, went ahead with the case. On February 13, 2012 the jury found Keith Little guilty of first-degree murder. The judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole. 

Who Killed the Barajas Children and Murdered Jose Banda?

     On the night of December 7, 2012 the pickup truck carrying the Barajas family--David and Cindy and their four children--ran out of gas on a dark narrow country road near Alvin, Texas thirty miles southeast of Houston. Because they were 100 yards or so from their home, Mr. Barajas asked his boys, David who was 12 and 11-year-old Caleb, to push the truck the rest of the way. At eleven o'clock, when they were within 50 yards of their house, another vehicle plowed into the back of the pickup. The crash killed David Barajas instantly and seriously injured his brother who died later that night in the hospital. Mr. Barajas suffered minor injuries. His wife Cindy and their two daughters were not hurt in the accident.

     Deputies with the Brazoria County Sheriff's Office when they looked inside the vehicle that slammed into the Barajas pickup found 20-year-old Jose Banda. Having been shot once in the head, Mr. Banda was breathing but unresponsive. (I don't know if he had been shot from the passenger's or driver's side of the car.) The officers found him slumped over in the front passenger's seat. He died in the hospital a few hours later. Deputies searched both vehicles and the area surrounding the accident without finding a gun. There were indications that Mr. Banda had been drinking.

     While the county coroner ruled Jose Banda's death a homicide, the person who shot him was a mystery. If David Barajas or his wife had shot Banda for killing their two boys, where was the gun? Could someone besides Jose Banda been behind the wheel of the vehicle that crashed into the pickup? Could that person have shot Mr. Banda and fled the scene with the murder weapon before being spotted by members of the Barajas family? This would explain why the deputies did not find the murder weapon.

     In speaking to a reporter, Brazoria County sheriff's deputy Dominick Sanders said, "We are not sure if Banda was shot before or after the wreck." (If shot before the wreck, the murder might have caused the accident. If this is what happened, was the shooter inside the car or along the road?)

     Deputy Sander did not say if David Barajas and his wife had been subjected to gunshot residue tests to determine if they had recently discharged a firearm. Moreover, the sheriff's office did not indicate if Mr. Banda had been shot at close range, or if a shell-casing has been recovered from the scene. (If the area around Banda's entrance wound featured gunpowder staining, he was shot from a distance no farther than eighteen inches. The more powder staining, the closer the range.)

     A week after the fatal accident and criminal homicide the deceased boys' parents, in hiding following Facebook threats, had not been questioned by the police. According to the boys' uncle, Gabriel Barajas, his brother remembered the accident in a "blur."

    Tests revealed that Jose Banda had twice the legal limit of alcohol in his blood at the time of his death. Forensic gunshot residue tests showed that Mr. Barajas had not fired a gun that night.

     On February 10, 2013, notwithstanding a lack of evidence in the case, a Brazoria County grand jury indicted David Barajas, Jr. for murder of Jose Banda. If found guilty he faced up to life in prison. Upon his arrest Mr. Barajas maintained his innocence.

     On August 27, 2014, after a one-week trial, the jury found David Barajas not guilty. Without a murder weapon, an eyewitness or a confession, the prosecutor simply did not prove his case beyond a reasonable doubt. Moreover, the community supported and had sympathy for the defendant from the start.

The Johnson Family Mortuary: The Funeral Home Horror Show

      On July 15, 2014, James Labenz, the owner of the building in east Fort Worth, Texas that housed the Johnson Family Mortuary, went to the funeral home to evict the tenants. Dondre Johnson, 39, and his 35-year-old wife Rachel Hardy-Johnson owed the landlord $15,000 in back rent. The place looked vacant so Mr. Labenz entered the building. What he saw and smelled caused him to quickly exit the premises and call 911.

     In his report, the police officer who responded to the 911 call noted that he detected, from the funeral home's parking lot, the odor of decaying flesh. Inside the building he found the unrefrigerated remains of several corpses in various states of decomposition. The officer called the Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office.

     Police detectives accompanied by a medical examiner's office crime scene technician encountered a scene right out of a horror movie. But unlike its fictional counterpart, the funeral home tableau featured insects, maggots, leaking body fluids and the overpowering stench of death.

     That day, the medical examiner's office took possession of the remains of two stillborn children and five adults. The partially mummified corpse of an adult lay in a casket inhabited by swarms of flies and other bugs. In a small container the crime scene technician discovered a tiny skeleton. The funeral home's flooring was wet with draining bodily fluids.

     A Tarrant County prosecutor charged the mortuary owners with seven counts of abuse of a corpse. If convicted and sentenced on each count the couple faced up to seven years behind bars. On July 18, 2014, police officers arrested Rachel Hardy-Johnson at the couple's home in Arlington, Texas. The next day Dondre turned himself in at police headquarters in Fort Worth. After putting up their $10,500 bonds the suspects were released from custody.

     The day after he walked out of the Tarrant County Jail, Dondre Johnson said this to a reporter: "This is a funeral home, you can expect to find bodies." 

     Rachel Hardy-Johnson told reporters that she had been absent from the funeral home due to the birth of her child. Dondre, who wasn't good at keeping up with the paperwork associated with either burying or cremating bodies, had been in charge of that aspect of the business. She said that Dondre was all about the pomp and circumstance and show associated with the funeral service.

     Dondre Johnson's lack of administrative skills cost his landlord $8,000 in cleanup fees. Moreover, the macabre publicity associated with the building had significantly lowered the property's real estate value.

     Following the gruesome discovery of the results of Dondre Johnson's gross mismanagement and callous disregard for the postmortem dignity of the deceased in his care, the Texas Funeral Service Commission revoked the Johnson family funeral license. Angered by the revocation, the couple petitioned the state to have their license returned.

     Dondre and Rachel Hardy-Johnson, already in trouble with the law, were indicted on four counts of fraud by a federal grand jury in September 2014. The couple stood accused of obtaining food stamps, a housing subsidy, federal education funding and Medicare benefits without revealing their income and other personal assets. The alleged government fraud took place between April 2010 and July 2012. If convicted on each count the former funeral home owners faced up to 20 years in prison.

     Federal fraud investigators determined that Hardy-Johnson had in 2011 received government benefits while claiming to be an unemployed single mother living alone with her children. During that period she purchased a 2006 Hummer H2 for $26,000 and a 2008 Mercedes-Benz CL S500 for $41,700. The next year, while still representing herself as an unemployed single mother, she bought an expensive Land Rover.

     On January 20, 2015 a Tarrant County grand jury indicted Dondre Johnson and his wife for stealing up to $20,000 from families who had paid for and did not receive funeral services in 2014. If convicted they faced maximum sentences of 20 years in prison and thousands of dollars in fines.

     Rachel Hardy-Johnson, on January 27, 2015, pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of food stamp benefit fraud involving $6,000 in payments from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Stamp program and its successor, SNAP. She was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

     In February 2015, reporters with the CBS television affiliate in Fort Worth discovered that Dondre Johnson and his twin brother Derrick were conducting funerals in Sherman, Texas. Travis Mitchell, the owner of Serenity Chapel Funeral Services told the reporters that he handled the business aspects of the operation while Dondre and Derrick performed the funerals.

     On September 24, 2015 a jury in Fort Worth found Dondre Johnson guilty of two counts of felony theft. The judge sentenced Johnson to two years in prison and a $20,000 fine. He still faced possible prosecution on seven misdemeanor counts of abuse of corpse. 

     In September 2018 Dondre Johnson pleaded guilty in a Fort Worth courtroom to nine counts of abuse of corpse. The judge sentenced him to two years in prison.

The Orville Fleming Murder Case

     In 2012, 53-year-old Orville "Moe" Fleming and his wife Meagan separated after she accused him of cheating on her. That year the 20-year veteran and battalion chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (known as Cal Fire) began dating 24-year-old Sarah Jane Douglas. Douglas came to Fleming's attention through an Internet site that advertised her services as a paid escort. Shortly after they met she moved into his house in south Sacramento County. At this time Fleming worked as an instructor at the fire academy in Ione, California.

     By April 2014 Mr. Fleming's divorce from Meagan was about to be finalized but his relationship with Douglas had deteriorated into turmoil. Having grown weary of his obsessive, controlling behavior Sara Douglas wanted out of his life.

     On April 28, 2014, shortly before the finalization of their divorce, Orville Fleming reached out to his estranged wife with the following text message: "Can we put us and our family back together!?" She replied, "No!!! It's over, sorry. I gave you many chances. Please leave me in peace now. You already hurt me so bad. I'm over it. Never going back to a cheater. Never. But God bless you. Now leave me alone!!!" Fleming responded by texting: "Come and pick me up. We're supposed to grow old together." She did not respond to his plea.

     On Wednesday night, April 30, 2014, Sarah Douglas, her younger sister Stephanie and their mother spent time together at a local gambling casino. During the evening Sarah revealed that she planned to leave Mr. Fleming.

     Just before midnight, after their night out, Stephanie Douglas and her mother dropped Sarah off at the house she had been sharing with Mr. Fleming. Not long after that, Stephanie received a phone call from her sister. In the background she could hear an angry man's voice. Sarah screamed and the phone went dead.

     After the disturbing phone call Stephanie tried but failed to get back in touch with her sister. Sometime after midnight she went to the house to check on Sarah. She found her sister lying face down and dead with a blood-soaked bed sheet wrapped around her neck. Orville Fleming and his vehicle were not at the scene. Stephanie called 911.

     At two-thirty that morning, May 1, 2014, Orville Fleming sent the following text message to his soon-to-be ex-wife: "You should have come and picked me up."

     At the murder scene detectives encountered the stabbed-to-death victim as well as pools of blood and bloodstains scattered throughout the house. A few hours later a judge issued a warrant for Orville Fleming's arrest on suspicion of murder.

     At seven that evening police officers in nearby Elk Grove, California found the fugitive's abandoned white 2007 Chevrolet pickup truck with Cal Fire written on the doors. The vehicle had been sitting there all day.

     Because the firefighter had outdoor skills and a familiarity with the Yosemite Valley and other regions of the Sierra Nevada and Santa Cruz Mountains, officers figured he might be hard to find. Fleming also possessed keys to dozens of state buildings, lookout towers, and storage sheds stocked with food and water. He was also presumed to be armed with two handguns that were registered in his name.

     Fleming's superiors at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, a few days after Sarah Douglas' murder, terminated him from his $100,000-a-year job. (In 2013, in addition to his base salary, Fleming earned $30,000 in overtime pay.)

     On Friday, May 16, 2014, police officers arrested Orville Fleming as he boarded a bus in Elk Grove, California where he had been hiding all along. The following Monday, at his arraignment hearing, Fleming pleaded not guilty to the murder charge. Relatives of the victim were infuriated when the defendant winked at an acquaintance in the courtroom.

     A few weeks after the murder, Meagan Fleming, the murder suspect's ex-wife, told reporters that Orville Fleming and other firefighters had sex with prostitutes on firetrucks at the academy. Moreover, someone had made a sex tape of this activity. She claimed to have seen a tape of her ex-husband and other firefighters having sex with Sarah Douglas. Because of the seriousness of this allegation the Sacramento County Sheriff's Office asked the California Highway Patrol to investigate the claim.

     On Monday December 29, 2014, a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection spokesperson announced that sixteen firefighters, most of whom were instructors at the fire academy, had been placed on paid administrative leave. The spokesperson did not say why these firefighters had been given "administrative time off."

      Amid the fire department scandal, Orville Fleming remained incarcerated in the Sacramento County Jail awaiting his trial for the murder of Sarah Douglas.

     On July 15, 2015, after a jury in Sacramento found Orville Fleming guilty of second-degree murder, the Superior Court judge sentenced him to 16 years to life in prison. 

The Impulse Murder

     Murders cannot always be explained or understood. While the majority of criminal homicides are motivated either by greed, lust, power, fear, rage or mental illness, every once in awhile someone takes a life for no apparent reason. These cases are disturbing because there is a need to make sense out of such deviant, violent behavior.

     In 1958 Dr. Marvin Wolfgang (1924-1998) a criminology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, coined the term "victim precipitation" in his classic text, Profiles in Criminal Homicide. 

     According to Professor Wolfgang, in a high percentage of criminal homicides the victim contributed to his or her fate by being the first to begin "the interplay of criminal violence" such as drawing a weapon or striking the first blow. In terms of motive, these homicides are easy to understand.

     In his 1967 book The Subculture of Violence Dr. Wolfgang found that a high percent of criminal homicides are crimes of passion that are "unplanned, explosive and determined by sudden motivational bursts." These killers act so quickly on their impulses there is simply no time for reasoning or restraint. Homicide investigators are familiar with subjects who have killed people for the smallest of reasons such as a casual argument over an insignificant point, a minor insult or a mild frustration over something trivial. Investigators call these killings "simplicity of motive" cases.

What is Forensic Science?

     The principal role of the forensic scientist is to identify physical crime scene evidence by comparing it to known samples acquired either from a suspect's person or from an object such as a gun, shoe or burglar tool this person possessed, worn or otherwise was associates with.

     Forensic science relies on the principle that the criminal leaves part of himself or something that he's associated with at the scene of the crime. Evidence left at the site of a crime might include blood, semen, latent fingerprints, shoe impressions, bite marks, hair follicles, textile fibers, bullets and tire tracks. Moreover, the suspect will often inadvertently take something away from the scene. A criminal might, for example, leave the crime site carrying traces of the victim's blood and tissue under his fingernails, or follicles of the victim's hair, or fibers from her carpet on his clothing.

     Practitioners of forensic science fall generally into three groups: police officers who arrive at the scene of a crime and whose job it is to secure the physical evidence; crime scene technicians responsible for finding, photographing and packaging physical evidence for crime lab submission; and forensic scientists working in public and private crime laboratories who analyze the evidence, and when the occasion arises testify in court as expert witnesses.

     While uniformed police officers and detectives may be trained in the recognition and handling of physical evidence, they are not scientists and do not work under laboratory conditions.

     Forensic science fields include document examination, firearms identification, toxicology, forensic pathology, forensic chemistry, latent fingerprint identification and DNA analysis. 

The Andrew McCormack Murder Case

     On September 23, 2017, 31-year-old Andrew McCormack and his one-year-old daughter entered their home in Revere, Massachusetts. McCormack had returned to the house after finishing a carpentry job at a friend's place. Shortly after arriving home he called 911 and reported that someone had entered the dwelling in his absence and murdered his wife. 

     Police officers found 30-year-old Vanessa Nasucci lying face down on the bedroom floor with a garbage bag over her head. The bag had been taken from the kitchen trash container. When a first responder removed the bag it became obvious that the Vanessa Nasucci had been brutally beaten. An autopsy revealed she had also been stabbed many times and strangled. 

     The murder bedroom gave off a strong scent of bleach and there were chemical burns on the victim's body. Investigators believed the killer had used bleach to destroy crime scene evidence. A large kitchen knife was missing from the kitchen butcher's block and there was no evidence of forced entry into the house. Moreover, the victim had not been sexually attacked and nothing had been stolen from the dwelling. The fact the killer had taken the time to sanitize the crime scene suggested that Vanessa Nasucci had not been murdered by an intruder. Suspicion immediately fell up the husband, Andrew McCormack.

     Detectives quickly determined that the couple's marriage had been on the rocks. To support his $500-a-day cocaine habit, Andrew McCormack had drained his wife's credit card accounts, forged checks on her bank account and had even stolen her wedding ring. On the day of the murder, after finishing the carpentry job, McCormack took his 1-year-old daughter with him to East Boston where he purchased cocaine from his drug dealer. 

     Shortly before her murder, Vanessa Nasucci, a second grade teacher at Connery Elementary in Lynn, Massachusetts, told her husband that she planned to sell the house and hire a divorce attorney. 

     A week after the killing, police officers arrested Andrew McCormack on the charge of first-degree murder. He was booked into the Suffolk County Jail. Through his attorney the suspect pleaded not guilty. The magistrate denied him bail. 

     The Andrew McCormack murder trial got underway in mid-October 2019 in a Suffolk County courtroom. The prosecution, without a murder weapon, an eyewitness, confession or physical evidence connecting the defendant directly to the murder had an entirely circumstantial case. What the prosecutor had was a strong case of motive, means and opportunity and the argument that, given the facts of the case, it was unreasonable to conclude that anyone other than the defendant had committed this murder.

     The defense relied heavily on reasonable doubt and the argument that investigators never considered the possibility that someone other than Andrew McCormack had murdered his wife.

     On November 16, 2019, following eleven days of testimony, the jury, after deliberating a week, found Andrew McCormack guilty of first-degree murder. At his sentencing hearing on December 2, 2019 the convicted killer said this to the judge: "I did not murder her. There is someone else getting away with murder." 

     The Suffolk County judge sentenced McCormack to life in prison without the possibility of parole.  

The Selena Irene York Poisoned Smoothie Case

     Selena Irene York and her teenage daughter, after falling on hard times, were taken in by 79-year-old Ed Zurbuchen who let them live in his Vernal, Utah home. On September 29, 2008 Mr. Zurbuchen's 33-year-old house guest gave him a peach smoothie. Shortly after drinking it he was taken to the hospital complaining of dizziness, face numbness and speech difficulties. At first doctors thought he had suffered a stroke. After four days in the hospital Mr. Zurbuchen underwent a series of liver and kidney tests that revealed he had ingested ethylene glycol, the main ingredient in anti-freeze.

     Although Selena York had given Mr. Zuburchen the drink that made him sick and herself the beneficiary of his life insurance policy, and had taken control of his bank account, Mr. Zurbuchen didn't want to press charges against her. Without the victim's cooperation and testimony the Uintah County prosecutor didn't have a case. In 2009 the poisoning suspect and her daughter moved to Eugene, Oregon. Although the authorities in Utah believed Selena York had tried to murder Ed Zurbuchen, the investigation went cold.

     On April 2011 the poisoning case came back to life when the Uintah County prosecutor received a letter from Joseph Dominic Ferraro, Selena York's former boyfriend and the father of her child. Ferraro, who was in jail for sexual assault, had been living with her and his daughter in Eugene, Oregon. According to Mr. Ferraro, Selena York had bragged to him about poisoning a man in Utah in an effort to kill him so she could take over his estate. Since she had drained his bank account and sold both his cars while he was in jail, Mr. Ferraro believed her story. And so did the authorities in Utah.

     In June 2011 police officers arrested Selena York in Eugene on the charge of attempted murder. After being extradited back to Utah, she, in exchange for the reduced charges of aggravated assault and forgery, confessed to poisoning Mr. Zuburchen. She said she had purchased the smoothie at a nearby store, dumped out half of its contents then poured in the antifreeze. After his death she planned to gain power of attorney over his estate. Before she left Utah after the failed homicide she forged a check on the victim's bank account for $10,000.

     In December 2011 Selena York was allowed to plead no contest to the reduced charges of aggravated assault and forgery. Two months later the judge sentenced her to three consecutive five-year prison terms.  Had Mr. Zubuchen died of poisoning she would have been eligible for the death sentence. Had she not ripped-off Joseph Ferraro (who was convicted of 21 felony sexual abuse counts) she would have gotten away with attempted murder. 

     Mr. Ferraro, the father of York's child who informed on her was sentenced to ten years in prison on the sexual abuse case. However, he won an appeal that led to the overturning of his conviction. The trial judge improperly denied Mr. Ferraro's motion to postpone his trial in order to acquire more time for his attorney to prepare his defense. The Lane County prosecutor, rather than schedule a second trial, allowed Ferraro to plead guilty to a single count of second-degree sodomy. Sentenced to three years on that charge the sex offender walked free because he had already served four years on the multiple felony conviction.