Why All the Misdirection?
It is a cold December morning, and you roll up on the address, a house in an affluent suburb. The large custom homes in the neighborhood are decorated for the holidays. The patrol units are already there. The call is a kidnapping.
You have been partnered with Theodore “Ted” Miller for many months now and Ted has always taken the lead on your cases. Ted is short and stocky, balding on top and greying on the sides. He has always been a no-nonsense by-the-book detective and has been an effective mentor, providing you with a great deal of investigative knowledge.
You and Ted are still in the unmarked unit when Ted says, “Okay, we are going to put all that experience, education, and knowledge you have to work. I am going to test you. I am going to ask you your opinion throughout the case. I am going to assess your observation skills, your critical thinking, and your assessment of human behavior. I am going to let you take the lead on this case. You ready?”
“Yes, I am ready,” you say.
“Let’s go.” You and Ted open your doors and get out of the vehicle. Ducking under the crime scene tape, you walk up the front driveway.
You pause for a moment to look at the front yard. You both stand there and carefully observe the scene. noting that there are no foot tracks on the lawn or in the snow. The snow is sparse in some areas and does not completely cover the front lawn. Standing next to you, Ted asks what you think. You say, “Uh, if someone was traversing this area, leaving or coming into the residence, they should have made some impressions in the snow or in the wet grass.” You then inspect a window low to the ground. The window is slightly open, perhaps broken as it does not close completely, and when you look inside it appears to lead to a basement.
Ted asks your impressions. “What do you think so far about the outside of the residence?”
You say, “Erm, well, uh… I don't think anyone really came this way as there are no tracks in the snow, and even if the snow is scattered a little it doesn’t seem like anyone came in or left this way or went into or out of that window.”
Ted smiles and you proceed to the front door and walk up a couple of steps. The front door is ajar, and you carefully step inside. Just inside the front door is a small foyer, a living room is to your left with a fireplace in the corner, and the staircase leading to the upper floors is straight ahead.
You are introduced by a patrol officer to the lady of the house, the mother of the kidnapped child. Her name is Sylvie Garnier. She corrects the pronunciation, “Gar-nee-yay.”
Mrs. Garnier is, of course, very distraught and her face shows anguish. She is wearing a red, black, and grey fleece jacket and black velvet pants, an evening outfit. You ask to see the basement. She is cooperative and takes you past the stairs leading upstairs and around a corner to a set of stairs leading down to the basement.
You walk down the steps to the basement, and you ask to see the window that you inspected earlier. The woman leads you straight ahead into a room that has some toy train sets. You proceed into the next part of the room where there are storage racks along the walls, and shelves with art supplies.
She points to your right, and you see there is a piece of luggage below the open window. Sylvie mentions that the suitcase came from another area in this room where the luggage is normally stored. You move close to the window and inspect it further. The window is high on the wall towards the ceiling of the basement, and you see that it has a small portion of glass that is broken. You also see that the dust is not disturbed and there is a spiderweb that is still intact. Sylvie leaves you and goes upstairs, and you stand and survey the rest of the basement storage room.
“What do you think?” Ted asks you.
“Uh, well… there's no way, in my opinion, that anyone took a young child or would even think they could take a young child out through that window, especially by using that unstable piece of luggage. It also does not look disturbed other than being moved to that spot. My impression of that piece of luggage is that it is staging. It was put there to throw us off the track by the kidnapper. It was not used to enter or leave through the window.” You further state, “The point is not to say that the window was used by the kidnapper. It could have been. The point is everything in visual evidence says that it wasn’t.
“By the way,” you add, “I noticed that she has on makeup, and it looks like she is wearing what she wore last night to a party. And her hair is still together.”
“Interesting. That’s good. I might not have noticed that,” Ted says.
You go back upstairs and turn right into the kitchen off the main living room to find Sylvia there leaning against the kitchen counter. The first thing that strikes you is the black and white checkered floor. There is a lot of clutter on the counters of the kitchen, perhaps from recent meals. It is a small narrow kitchen with doors on either side and another door to a breakfast room.
You stand in the kitchen with Sylvie, who is looking very cooperative and expectant, as if waiting for your questions. You look over at Ted inquisitively. Ted says, “This is all yours, go ahead.”
Out of curiosity, thinking perhaps it was used in the search for her child, you ask about a flashlight sitting on a counter on the other side of the kitchen. “Uh, was that flashlight used last night or recently?”
The flashlight is large, heavy, black, and cylinder-like, like a policeman’s, typically known as a Maglite. From where you are standing it looks like an ordinary flashlight—no damage, nothing unusual about it.
Sylvie says, “I don’t really know where the flashlight came from. I believe it was given to us by a neighbor, erm, or someone. I am not sure why it is out and in the kitchen.”
You have an instinct that leads you to ask about a bowl with a spoon in it on the kitchen counter. “Is that bowl from yesterday?” you ask, initially as a matter of mere conversation, because there are a lot of various plates and dishes there.
“My son, before going to bed, often has a dish of milk and pineapples.”
“Did he have a bowl of pineapples last night?” you ask.
“No, he fell asleep on the way home last night. And we put him right into bed. Both of them fell asleep on the way home and we put them right into bed.”
You stand there in the kitchen looking at your feet for a second. Then you look at Sylvie and say, “Okay, now, where was the ransom note left?”
She guides you and Ted out of the kitchen through the door on the other side. Straight ahead, you notice what appears to be a home office. You follow her as she turns to your right and leads you down a short hall to the bottom of a spiral staircase. “This is where I found the note as I came down this morning.” These seem to be the back stairs, not the main stairs that are near the front door.
“Not the front stairs?”
“This staircase leads up to our bedroom and this is the way I come down every morning.”
“Was the ransom note found right at the bottom of these stairs?”
“Yes, right there,” she says, pointing.
You look around and see that there is a desk to your right, and to your left, there is a door that goes to a mudroom and eventually out to the garage.
You ask her, “Where did they get the writing pad and pen?” and she points out a drawer in the small desk to the right of the stairs. There are pens in a cup on the top of the desk.
You open a drawer in the desk and see some writing tablets. You take out a tablet, carefully handling the edges, thumb through it, then put it down on the desk. You do the same for the next tablet below it. You pick up the third tablet down in the drawer and stop after opening the cover. You inspect the first page, then pick up a pen and use it to turn to the second page. You inspect that page. After continuing to handle the tablet carefully, you put it down on the hall desk.
Ted sees the change in the look on your face and says, “Let’s step in there for a second,” pointing to the door that leads into the mudroom.
You walk into the mudroom so you and Ted can have a little conference. Ted asks you, “What do you think?”
As you begin answering Ted you draw a sketch of the first floor.
“I think…. First, back to the kitchen. It’s interesting about the bowl of pineapples. It was there but she said that her son did not have it the night before. And then there’s the big flashlight that she said she didn’t know how it got there in her kitchen. Also, it seems strange that the ransom note was on the back stairs. How did the kidnappers know she, or anyone, would come down those stairs to find it, and not the main staircase?”
When you retreat back to the hallway near the stairs, Sylvie is no longer there. You proceed down the hallway past the office, through the kitchen and a couple of rooms, to a police officer standing alone in a dining room.
“The note?” Ted says to the officer and looks over at you.
“Right, yes, can we see the ransom note, officer?” you say.
The officer hands you the note and you both view it together, quickly reading the long, rambling, three-page ransom note within plastic covers.
“What do you see?” Ted asks.
“Um, I think this would have taken a long time to write. It looks like a tablet was used and then placed back into the drawer underneath two others. One page shows indented writing as practice and the next page shows the indented writing of the full note. That writing looks like one of those pens on the desk, and they apparently put the pen back in the cup. The wording in the note is just weird. The requested amount is strange. Not a hundred thousand dollars but one hundred eighteen thousand dollars. Why is that?”
“What’s the deal with an ‘attaché’ and ‘exhausting delivery’?” Ted adds.
“Yeah, I don’t know. It says they will call between eight and ten this morning, so I guess we wait.”
You and Ted move over to the other door, and you can see from the dining room into the living room where the victim’s father, Jean-Claude Garnier, is there talking with another man. The officer followed you there.
“Who is with Jean-Claude?” you ask the officer. He tells you that is a friend of Jean-Claude’s, Mr. Rivers, who has come over to help. “That’s… that’s not supposed to…”
“Has anyone talked to the young boy?” you ask.
The officer responds by saying, “No. Jean-Claude prohibited it. No one wanted to go against that.”
Just then you see Jean-Claude and his friend leave the room, walking out the other door toward the stairs.
A minute later, Jean-Claude rushes back into the room carrying a bundle and places it on the living room floor. It is their daughter. The mother races into the room, along with Mrs. Rivers, Sylvie’s friend who has just arrived, as well as Mr. Rivers, and they all crowd around. You hurry over to them and observe what you can in the chaos.
You raise your voice. “Wait! Everyone move back! Do not touch anything! Don’t touch anything.”
Sylvie is kneeling down next to her daughter’s body. Sylvie’s friend, Mrs. Rivers, is trying to hold her back, but she is also kneeling, touching the child’s face with the back of her palm, and crying out.
You move in close and kneel down on the other side of the little girl. She is obviously dead, her body pale and stiff. She is wearing a long-sleeved shirt made of white sweatshirt-like material with an embroidered star on her chest. She is also wearing a pair of white long-john-type bottoms.
Her hands are out over her head with a white nylon cord lightly bound around her right wrist and flowing away from it. There is a similar cord around her neck that has a small, broken paintbrush twisted into it like it was used to tighten the cord.
“Please everyone,” you declare, “I know this is going to be difficult, but we need to preserve the evidence.” Everyone is frozen in place staring at the child on the floor. A white blanket that had been wrapped around her is now laying on the floor next to her.
“Officer,” you say, “please try to keep everyone from touching anything… get CSU on the way and make all the necessary calls.” You don’t want to seem callous by asking for the coroner in front of the family. You turn to the people there and ask, “Where was she?”
“In a room in the basement,” Mr. Rivers says.
“Show me,” you say, holding onto his elbow. “Please, everyone, don’t disturb anything while we’re gone.”
Mr. Rivers takes you and Ted back to the front entryway and down the stairs that lead to the basement. You follow Mr. Rivers down the stairs. This time, instead of going straight ahead into the train room, you walk through another door to the left that leads down a small passageway within the boiler room where there are several pipes and a water heater. It is relatively dark down here, the only light coming from a small window high on the wall above a chest freezer.
Mr. Rivers reaches up above the door, releases a latch, opens the door to a room straight ahead of you, and says, “In here.”
“Nobody checked in here before?” you ask.
“I did. Sort of. I looked in and it was very dark. This whole passage was very dark, and it is difficult to walk around down here. See,” he says, pointing, “the light switch is way over there. It is hard to find.”
You look around the room and see some racks with wine bottles. “That blanket?” you ask about a white blanket on the floor.
“She was wrapped in it.”
“And the nightclothes?” you ask, referring to a small pink nightgown lying spread out on the floor next to the blanket.
“That was just there.”
“What is that piece of black tape on the floor?”
“Oh yes, Jean-Claude pulled that off her mouth just before he picked her up.”
You move toward the back corner of the wine cellar and spot a red pocketknife on the floor. Ted’s eyes widen.
“Mr. Rivers, this pocketknife, did Jean-Claude bring that down to cut the cords?”
“No, that was already laying there.”
“Hmm,” Ted says.
“Have you seen it before?” you ask.
“I think I have seen young Bobby with it a few times.”
“Thank you. Okay, so you two just came down here and found her?”
“Yeah, it was kind of weird. Jean-Claude said, ‘I’m going to search again,’ but he came straight down here, opened the door, turned on the light, and saw her. And, ah…”
“What is it, Mr. Rivers?”
“Well, I swear he gasped before he turned on the light.”
“Thank you, Mr. Rivers.” He slips away down the passage.
“Good job,” Ted says. “You got a lot out of him. Let’s go back upstairs.”
You leave the wine cellar, go down the passage, and, stopping near the stairs, you draw a sketch of the basement.
After finishing your rough sketch you walk up the stairs to the first floor.
Jean-Claude, Mr. Rivers, Sylvie, and Mrs. Rivers are all standing in the living room. Mr. Rivers has his hand on Jean-Claude’s shoulder and Mrs. Rivers is hugging Sylvie.
You approach Sylvie and Mrs. Rivers. “I’m so sorry. May I talk to you for a bit?”
“Do you really have to?” says Mrs. Rivers.
You say, “Yes, I’m sorry, I must.”
You move past the fireplace and into the front room. Ted is standing next to you now, facing Sylvie and Mrs. Rivers.
Sylvie says, “All right.”
“Could we go over last night again, please?”
“Yes, we came home, she was asleep, and we put her to bed. I put a brand new pair of underwear and a sleep top on her, covered her up, and she went to sleep in her bed.... Then I got up this morning and found the note. And…” Sylvie puts her face into Mrs. Rivers’ shoulder.
“I’m sorry. But I have to ask,” you say, “Where was the blanket kept?”
“Oh, that was in the dryer.”
“Where is the laundry room?”
Mrs. Rivers answers for Sylvie. “The laundry room is down in the basement. To the left of the stairs.”
“The laundry room is near the craft room?”
“Yes. It is near the train room and storage area down there.”
Just then there is some noise at the front entryway. You look through the living room and see more officers arriving.
You meet them at the door. You look at Ted and then bark orders. “Alright, it looks like this is a murder. CSU, photograph everything, tag, and bag. Officers, scour this house for anything that might be evidence and protect it for CSU. Make sure the perimeter of the house is taped off. Officer Jackson, wait for the coroner and protect the evidence on the victim. Try to keep the family away. All right now. Everyone, let’s get to work.”
You look over at Ted and see him smile. “That was impressive,” he says.
***
You and Ted are sitting in your cubicle at the office, reviewing the case reports.
“The family has refused any interviews,” Ted says. “They got a lawyer as soon as we started the second search of the home.”
“Here is the 911 call. Listen.” You play the tape. “911 what is your emergency?”
“[Garbled] – Police.”
“What’s going on ma’am?”
“644 14th Street.”
“What’s going on there ma’am?”
“We have a kidnapping. Hurry please.”
“Explain to me what’s going on. Okay?”
“There. We have a… there’s a note left, and our daughter’s gone.”
“How old is your daughter?”
“She’s… she’s six years old. She’s blonde, six years old.”
“How long ago was this?”
“I don’t know; I just got the note, and my daughter’s gone.”
“Does it say who took her?”
“No, I don’t know. There’s a… there’s a ransom note here. It says SBTC Victory.”
“Do you know how long she’s been gone?”
“No, I don’t. Please, we just got up and she’s not here. Oh my god. Please.”
You stop the tape and add, “Dispatcher says she thought she heard voices, a young person’s voice, at the end there but couldn’t make out what was said. It is hard to tell anything.”
“Ah, the ‘ransom’ note. Quite bizarre if you ask me,” Ted says.
You have it in front of you and say, “It reads:
Mr. Garnier, Listen carefully! We are a group of individuals that represent (spelled wrong) a small foreign faction. We respect your business (misspelled) but not the country that it serves. At this time, we have your daughter in our possession (misspelled). She is safe and unharmed; if you want to see her again, you must follow our instructions to the letter.
You will withdraw $118,000. Make sure you bring an adequate size attache to the bank. I will call you between 8 and 10 am tomorrow to instruct you on delivery. The delivery will be exhausting so I advise you to be rested. If we monitor you getting the money early, we might call you early to arrange an earlier delivery of the money and hence an earlier pickup of your daughter.
Any deviation of my instructions will result in the immediate execution of your daughter. You will also be denier her remains for burial. The two gentlemen watching over your daughter do not particularly like you, so I advise you not to provoke them. Speaking to anyone about your situation, such as Police, F.B. I. , etc., will result in your daughter being beheaded. If we catch you talking to a stray dog, she dies. If you alert bank authorities, she dies. If the money is marked or tampered with, she dies. You will be scanned for electronic devices and if any are found, she dies. You can try to deceive us but be warned we are familiar with Law enforcement countermeasures and tactics. You stand a 99% chance of killing your daughter if you try to outsmart us. Follow our instructions and you stand a 100% chance of getting her back. You and your family are under constant scrutiny (again misspelled) as well as the authorities. Don't try to grow a brain Jean-Claude. Don't underestimate us, Jean-Claude. Use that good, southern common sense of yours. It's up to you now Jean-Claude! Victory! S.B.T.C.
“There are just so many things that are weird about this note,” you state, then continue, “First, it seems like it was written by someone that lived through the time of Patty Hearst and the SLA, the Chicago Seven, and all that. Like what is SBTC?”
“And what is ‘respects the victim’s business’ and ‘get some sleep’? Or ‘be rested’? What kidnapper says that? It is the middle of the night. They would already be asleep.” Ted sighs.
“It also seems like the misspellings are easy words but then they correctly spelled words like ‘adequate,’ ‘attaché,” and ‘hence.’ Hence!” you say, laughing.
“And,” you continue, “the talking to a stray dog, she dies, alert the bank, she dies. Along with don’t grow a brain. Doesn’t that sound like it is straight from the movies?”
“Yeah, it does. And the note implies ‘they’ are a group by saying ‘we’ but then the writer forgets the ruse and writes an ‘I’ and ‘my.’”
Then Ted adds, “The $118,000 is strange. Not one million, not 100,000. I checked and the $118,000 is exactly Jean-Claude’s recent bonus.”
Turning the pages, you say, “The whole ransom note is three pages. I checked with a friend at the FBI, and they think this is the longest ransom note on a kidnapping case in history.”
“What does Documents say?” Ted asks.
“Ah, yes. Documents. They say the note would take about 20 minutes to write. But they also say, unfortunately, that the broad fiber-tip pen distorts the minute details. And that they can eliminate everyone else in this case but not Mrs. Garnier.”
“Yeah,” Ted says, “but can you imagine the pressure a document guy would be under to ID someone in this type of case? I know I wouldn’t want to do it. He is wise to just report that it is very similar, and they can’t eliminate her.”
“Here is the postmortem report,” you say. “It’s nine pages long.” Flipping through the various pages, you continue, “A lot of doctor speak, but it comes down to strangulation as the cause of death. There was that ‘garrote’ around her neck. There is a large hemorrhage on the scalp, a blow that caused a brain injury to the head that most likely occurred before strangulation or death.
Ted says, “Here on page seven, it says, ‘small intestine contains fragmented pieces of fruit material which may represent fragments of pineapple.’
“There is one strange line on page nine that I am not sure what it means,” you say. “It says, ‘focal interstitial chronic inflammation.’”
“Looking at the evidence reports,” Ted says, doodling on them with a pencil, “I see that they found the other part to the broken paintbrush used for the garrote in a plastic craft tote box near the wine cellar.
“And they found some fibers similar to Sylvie’s clothes on the tape that was supposedly over her mouth. It says the fibers on the tape are consistent with her fleece jacket.”
“I also see here in the report that upon examining the tape, they got the impression that it was put on the victim after death. They are not sure, but it looks like it.” You say, “I’ve got a report here. I don’t know how much credence to put into these neighbor interviews, but one neighbor remembers seeing lights on during the night and a light off in the front room that is usually on all night.”
“Another neighbor remembers hearing a scream at about two a.m.”
“You know,” Ted says, “according to dispatch, only four minutes elapsed from the 911 call to police arrival, and yet the parents were both dressed.”
You add, “Yeah, they were fully dressed in what looks like something they wore the night before, at that. Why lie about getting dressed in the morning?”
Ted adds, “Then there is the blanket that was in the dryer. Who knew where that was? And wrapped around her just like a mother would do.”
You respond, “And why lie about the pineapple thing? Why lie about what she was wearing when she went to bed?”
“The staging here is quite weird. It is like staging within staging,” Ted says.
“Listen,” you continue, “if you are in the middle of a kidnapping, you don’t write a three-page 20-minute ransom note while you are in the house. You don’t leave the note by the back stairs. You don’t kill the victim in the house. And you don’t fake or stage an elaborate kidnapping to disguise a murder.”
“That’s the way I see it,” Ted agrees. “If you accept that there has been a lot of staging, staging always means misdirection, and you have to accept there has been lying, like lying about putting her right to bed. Lying is always done by the guilty, so it must be someone in the family who committed the murder. No intruder would stage the suitcase, the garotte, the tape, the long ransom note, et cetera.”
“That’s right. It’s not only staging, but also evidence fabrication. It is unlikely the craft-made garotte is what caused the strangulation. It was fabricated to account for it. The note, the tape, the luggage, the cord—all fabricated.”
After a long pause, Ted says, “Well, we have hashed out the evidence. Overall, what do you think?”
“Here is what I think,” you say. “This is speculation, but I think the children didn’t go right to bed and were not asleep when they got home. Bobby was given some pineapple and milk. For some reason, the little girl took the bowl from him and ate some of his pineapple. He got angry and hit her, perhaps with the flashlight, or maybe she was pushed against the sink. She didn’t die right then but maybe went into convulsions caused by the brain injury. In order to get her to be quiet and stop squirming, he strangled her, and she died. He probably did not intend to go that far. Then the parents came in and saw the situation. Like I say, speculation.”
“But to blame it on an intruder they used the rest of the night to create this ruse. They were in a state of panic knowing that they had just lost their daughter and did not want to also lose their son. They put the suitcase under the window, made the garotte from Sylvie’s craft supplies to account for the strangulation, placed her in that semi-hidden wine cellar, and lightly tied her hands. They got the blanket out of the dryer, and for some reason placed a nightgown next to her. Then they sat down and used the notepad and pen at the desk to write the long ransom note. Including the exact amount of the bonus.
“Then, after everything was prepared, things were put back in their places like the pad and pen, except they forgot about Bobby’s Swiss Army knife and the flashlight. After perhaps even disposing of a couple of items like the tape and the cord, Sylvie called 911. Because they never undressed, they were fully dressed when the first officer arrived four minutes later.
“They would not let anyone talk to Bobby, for good reason. When no one found the victim after a few hours, Jean-Claude couldn’t stand it any longer. So, he went down into the basement and brought the victim upstairs.”
“I’ve got one for you,” Ted says. “What about the DNA they found on the underwear?”
“Sylvie said it was a brand-new package. It’s not in fluid so it is most likely touch DNA. I’m betting it would match a packager in a factory somewhere. If they never get into the system, we may never know whose DNA it is.”
“Yeah, but it’s DNA. People are going to pay a lot of attention to that,” Ted reminds you.
“I get it,” you say. “You got to look at this from a total perspective. If we have a case where you have a murder, a gun is at the scene, a bullet matches the gun, a casing matches the gun, a suspect owns that gun, he is seen that day with the gun, the suspect hated the dead guy. So, all the evidence we have points to that guy. And let’s say they discover foreign DNA on the gun, Should you throw out all your evidence and not prosecute the guy because of the foreign DNA? No. Here, once you recognize the staging and all the things meant to misdirect us actually came from right there in the house—the flashlight, the garrote, the blanket, the note, the pens and pads, even the luggage are all from within. Nothing really points to the outside. Except the DNA.”
“You can’t let one thing overrule everything else.”
“Right you are. But I know this is going to be hard for the DA to come to grips with,” you say. “We’ve got this prominent family who just lost their daughter, and perhaps their son committed the crime. To what end will charging the young boy accomplish? He’s a minor, so we know how that goes. If you charge the parents for their part, that would look really bad politically because they just lost their daughter. To what end would that bring justice for the murder?”
“I sure wouldn’t want to be in the DA’s shoes,” Ted adds with a finality.
It is a cold December morning, and you roll up on the address, a house in an affluent suburb. The large custom homes in the neighborhood are decorated for the holidays. The patrol units are already there. The call is a kidnapping.
You have been partnered with Theodore “Ted” Miller for many months now and Ted has always taken the lead on your cases. Ted is short and stocky, balding on top and greying on the sides. He has always been a no-nonsense by-the-book detective and has been an effective mentor, providing you with a great deal of investigative knowledge.
You and Ted are still in the unmarked unit when Ted says, “Okay, we are going to put all that experience, education, and knowledge you have to work. I am going to test you. I am going to ask you your opinion throughout the case. I am going to assess your observation skills, your critical thinking, and your assessment of human behavior. I am going to let you take the lead on this case. You ready?”
“Yes, I am ready,” you say.
“Let’s go.” You and Ted open your doors and get out of the vehicle. Ducking under the crime scene tape, you walk up the front driveway.
You pause for a moment to look at the front yard. You both stand there and carefully observe the scene. noting that there are no foot tracks on the lawn or in the snow. The snow is sparse in some areas and does not completely cover the front lawn. Standing next to you, Ted asks what you think. You say, “Uh, if someone was traversing this area, leaving or coming into the residence, they should have made some impressions in the snow or in the wet grass.” You then inspect a window low to the ground. The window is slightly open, perhaps broken as it does not close completely, and when you look inside it appears to lead to a basement.
Ted asks your impressions. “What do you think so far about the outside of the residence?”
You say, “Erm, well, uh… I don't think anyone really came this way as there are no tracks in the snow, and even if the snow is scattered a little it doesn’t seem like anyone came in or left this way or went into or out of that window.”
Ted smiles and you proceed to the front door and walk up a couple of steps. The front door is ajar, and you carefully step inside. Just inside the front door is a small foyer, a living room is to your left with a fireplace in the corner, and the staircase leading to the upper floors is straight ahead.
You are introduced by a patrol officer to the lady of the house, the mother of the kidnapped child. Her name is Sylvie Garnier. She corrects the pronunciation, “Gar-nee-yay.”
Mrs. Garnier is, of course, very distraught and her face shows anguish. She is wearing a red, black, and grey fleece jacket and black velvet pants, an evening outfit. You ask to see the basement. She is cooperative and takes you past the stairs leading upstairs and around a corner to a set of stairs leading down to the basement.
You walk down the steps to the basement, and you ask to see the window that you inspected earlier. The woman leads you straight ahead into a room that has some toy train sets. You proceed into the next part of the room where there are storage racks along the walls, and shelves with art supplies.
She points to your right, and you see there is a piece of luggage below the open window. Sylvie mentions that the suitcase came from another area in this room where the luggage is normally stored. You move close to the window and inspect it further. The window is high on the wall towards the ceiling of the basement, and you see that it has a small portion of glass that is broken. You also see that the dust is not disturbed and there is a spiderweb that is still intact. Sylvie leaves you and goes upstairs, and you stand and survey the rest of the basement storage room.
“What do you think?” Ted asks you.
“Uh, well… there's no way, in my opinion, that anyone took a young child or would even think they could take a young child out through that window, especially by using that unstable piece of luggage. It also does not look disturbed other than being moved to that spot. My impression of that piece of luggage is that it is staging. It was put there to throw us off the track by the kidnapper. It was not used to enter or leave through the window.” You further state, “The point is not to say that the window was used by the kidnapper. It could have been. The point is everything in visual evidence says that it wasn’t.
“By the way,” you add, “I noticed that she has on makeup, and it looks like she is wearing what she wore last night to a party. And her hair is still together.”
“Interesting. That’s good. I might not have noticed that,” Ted says.
You go back upstairs and turn right into the kitchen off the main living room to find Sylvia there leaning against the kitchen counter. The first thing that strikes you is the black and white checkered floor. There is a lot of clutter on the counters of the kitchen, perhaps from recent meals. It is a small narrow kitchen with doors on either side and another door to a breakfast room.
You stand in the kitchen with Sylvie, who is looking very cooperative and expectant, as if waiting for your questions. You look over at Ted inquisitively. Ted says, “This is all yours, go ahead.”
Out of curiosity, thinking perhaps it was used in the search for her child, you ask about a flashlight sitting on a counter on the other side of the kitchen. “Uh, was that flashlight used last night or recently?”
The flashlight is large, heavy, black, and cylinder-like, like a policeman’s, typically known as a Maglite. From where you are standing it looks like an ordinary flashlight—no damage, nothing unusual about it.
Sylvie says, “I don’t really know where the flashlight came from. I believe it was given to us by a neighbor, erm, or someone. I am not sure why it is out and in the kitchen.”
You have an instinct that leads you to ask about a bowl with a spoon in it on the kitchen counter. “Is that bowl from yesterday?” you ask, initially as a matter of mere conversation, because there are a lot of various plates and dishes there.
“My son, before going to bed, often has a dish of milk and pineapples.”
“Did he have a bowl of pineapples last night?” you ask.
“No, he fell asleep on the way home last night. And we put him right into bed. Both of them fell asleep on the way home and we put them right into bed.”
You stand there in the kitchen looking at your feet for a second. Then you look at Sylvie and say, “Okay, now, where was the ransom note left?”
She guides you and Ted out of the kitchen through the door on the other side. Straight ahead, you notice what appears to be a home office. You follow her as she turns to your right and leads you down a short hall to the bottom of a spiral staircase. “This is where I found the note as I came down this morning.” These seem to be the back stairs, not the main stairs that are near the front door.
“Not the front stairs?”
“This staircase leads up to our bedroom and this is the way I come down every morning.”
“Was the ransom note found right at the bottom of these stairs?”
“Yes, right there,” she says, pointing.
You look around and see that there is a desk to your right, and to your left, there is a door that goes to a mudroom and eventually out to the garage.
You ask her, “Where did they get the writing pad and pen?” and she points out a drawer in the small desk to the right of the stairs. There are pens in a cup on the top of the desk.
You open a drawer in the desk and see some writing tablets. You take out a tablet, carefully handling the edges, thumb through it, then put it down on the desk. You do the same for the next tablet below it. You pick up the third tablet down in the drawer and stop after opening the cover. You inspect the first page, then pick up a pen and use it to turn to the second page. You inspect that page. After continuing to handle the tablet carefully, you put it down on the hall desk.
Ted sees the change in the look on your face and says, “Let’s step in there for a second,” pointing to the door that leads into the mudroom.
You walk into the mudroom so you and Ted can have a little conference. Ted asks you, “What do you think?”
As you begin answering Ted you draw a sketch of the first floor.
“I think…. First, back to the kitchen. It’s interesting about the bowl of pineapples. It was there but she said that her son did not have it the night before. And then there’s the big flashlight that she said she didn’t know how it got there in her kitchen. Also, it seems strange that the ransom note was on the back stairs. How did the kidnappers know she, or anyone, would come down those stairs to find it, and not the main staircase?”
When you retreat back to the hallway near the stairs, Sylvie is no longer there. You proceed down the hallway past the office, through the kitchen and a couple of rooms, to a police officer standing alone in a dining room.
“The note?” Ted says to the officer and looks over at you.
“Right, yes, can we see the ransom note, officer?” you say.
The officer hands you the note and you both view it together, quickly reading the long, rambling, three-page ransom note within plastic covers.
“What do you see?” Ted asks.
“Um, I think this would have taken a long time to write. It looks like a tablet was used and then placed back into the drawer underneath two others. One page shows indented writing as practice and the next page shows the indented writing of the full note. That writing looks like one of those pens on the desk, and they apparently put the pen back in the cup. The wording in the note is just weird. The requested amount is strange. Not a hundred thousand dollars but one hundred eighteen thousand dollars. Why is that?”
“What’s the deal with an ‘attaché’ and ‘exhausting delivery’?” Ted adds.
“Yeah, I don’t know. It says they will call between eight and ten this morning, so I guess we wait.”
You and Ted move over to the other door, and you can see from the dining room into the living room where the victim’s father, Jean-Claude Garnier, is there talking with another man. The officer followed you there.
“Who is with Jean-Claude?” you ask the officer. He tells you that is a friend of Jean-Claude’s, Mr. Rivers, who has come over to help. “That’s… that’s not supposed to…”
“Has anyone talked to the young boy?” you ask.
The officer responds by saying, “No. Jean-Claude prohibited it. No one wanted to go against that.”
Just then you see Jean-Claude and his friend leave the room, walking out the other door toward the stairs.
A minute later, Jean-Claude rushes back into the room carrying a bundle and places it on the living room floor. It is their daughter. The mother races into the room, along with Mrs. Rivers, Sylvie’s friend who has just arrived, as well as Mr. Rivers, and they all crowd around. You hurry over to them and observe what you can in the chaos.
You raise your voice. “Wait! Everyone move back! Do not touch anything! Don’t touch anything.”
Sylvie is kneeling down next to her daughter’s body. Sylvie’s friend, Mrs. Rivers, is trying to hold her back, but she is also kneeling, touching the child’s face with the back of her palm, and crying out.
You move in close and kneel down on the other side of the little girl. She is obviously dead, her body pale and stiff. She is wearing a long-sleeved shirt made of white sweatshirt-like material with an embroidered star on her chest. She is also wearing a pair of white long-john-type bottoms.
Her hands are out over her head with a white nylon cord lightly bound around her right wrist and flowing away from it. There is a similar cord around her neck that has a small, broken paintbrush twisted into it like it was used to tighten the cord.
“Please everyone,” you declare, “I know this is going to be difficult, but we need to preserve the evidence.” Everyone is frozen in place staring at the child on the floor. A white blanket that had been wrapped around her is now laying on the floor next to her.
“Officer,” you say, “please try to keep everyone from touching anything… get CSU on the way and make all the necessary calls.” You don’t want to seem callous by asking for the coroner in front of the family. You turn to the people there and ask, “Where was she?”
“In a room in the basement,” Mr. Rivers says.
“Show me,” you say, holding onto his elbow. “Please, everyone, don’t disturb anything while we’re gone.”
Mr. Rivers takes you and Ted back to the front entryway and down the stairs that lead to the basement. You follow Mr. Rivers down the stairs. This time, instead of going straight ahead into the train room, you walk through another door to the left that leads down a small passageway within the boiler room where there are several pipes and a water heater. It is relatively dark down here, the only light coming from a small window high on the wall above a chest freezer.
Mr. Rivers reaches up above the door, releases a latch, opens the door to a room straight ahead of you, and says, “In here.”
“Nobody checked in here before?” you ask.
“I did. Sort of. I looked in and it was very dark. This whole passage was very dark, and it is difficult to walk around down here. See,” he says, pointing, “the light switch is way over there. It is hard to find.”
You look around the room and see some racks with wine bottles. “That blanket?” you ask about a white blanket on the floor.
“She was wrapped in it.”
“And the nightclothes?” you ask, referring to a small pink nightgown lying spread out on the floor next to the blanket.
“That was just there.”
“What is that piece of black tape on the floor?”
“Oh yes, Jean-Claude pulled that off her mouth just before he picked her up.”
You move toward the back corner of the wine cellar and spot a red pocketknife on the floor. Ted’s eyes widen.
“Mr. Rivers, this pocketknife, did Jean-Claude bring that down to cut the cords?”
“No, that was already laying there.”
“Hmm,” Ted says.
“Have you seen it before?” you ask.
“I think I have seen young Bobby with it a few times.”
“Thank you. Okay, so you two just came down here and found her?”
“Yeah, it was kind of weird. Jean-Claude said, ‘I’m going to search again,’ but he came straight down here, opened the door, turned on the light, and saw her. And, ah…”
“What is it, Mr. Rivers?”
“Well, I swear he gasped before he turned on the light.”
“Thank you, Mr. Rivers.” He slips away down the passage.
“Good job,” Ted says. “You got a lot out of him. Let’s go back upstairs.”
You leave the wine cellar, go down the passage, and, stopping near the stairs, you draw a sketch of the basement.
After finishing your rough sketch you walk up the stairs to the first floor.
Jean-Claude, Mr. Rivers, Sylvie, and Mrs. Rivers are all standing in the living room. Mr. Rivers has his hand on Jean-Claude’s shoulder and Mrs. Rivers is hugging Sylvie.
You approach Sylvie and Mrs. Rivers. “I’m so sorry. May I talk to you for a bit?”
“Do you really have to?” says Mrs. Rivers.
You say, “Yes, I’m sorry, I must.”
You move past the fireplace and into the front room. Ted is standing next to you now, facing Sylvie and Mrs. Rivers.
Sylvie says, “All right.”
“Could we go over last night again, please?”
“Yes, we came home, she was asleep, and we put her to bed. I put a brand new pair of underwear and a sleep top on her, covered her up, and she went to sleep in her bed.... Then I got up this morning and found the note. And…” Sylvie puts her face into Mrs. Rivers’ shoulder.
“I’m sorry. But I have to ask,” you say, “Where was the blanket kept?”
“Oh, that was in the dryer.”
“Where is the laundry room?”
Mrs. Rivers answers for Sylvie. “The laundry room is down in the basement. To the left of the stairs.”
“The laundry room is near the craft room?”
“Yes. It is near the train room and storage area down there.”
Just then there is some noise at the front entryway. You look through the living room and see more officers arriving.
You meet them at the door. You look at Ted and then bark orders. “Alright, it looks like this is a murder. CSU, photograph everything, tag, and bag. Officers, scour this house for anything that might be evidence and protect it for CSU. Make sure the perimeter of the house is taped off. Officer Jackson, wait for the coroner and protect the evidence on the victim. Try to keep the family away. All right now. Everyone, let’s get to work.”
You look over at Ted and see him smile. “That was impressive,” he says.
***
You and Ted are sitting in your cubicle at the office, reviewing the case reports.
“The family has refused any interviews,” Ted says. “They got a lawyer as soon as we started the second search of the home.”
“Here is the 911 call. Listen.” You play the tape. “911 what is your emergency?”
“[Garbled] – Police.”
“What’s going on ma’am?”
“644 14th Street.”
“What’s going on there ma’am?”
“We have a kidnapping. Hurry please.”
“Explain to me what’s going on. Okay?”
“There. We have a… there’s a note left, and our daughter’s gone.”
“How old is your daughter?”
“She’s… she’s six years old. She’s blonde, six years old.”
“How long ago was this?”
“I don’t know; I just got the note, and my daughter’s gone.”
“Does it say who took her?”
“No, I don’t know. There’s a… there’s a ransom note here. It says SBTC Victory.”
“Do you know how long she’s been gone?”
“No, I don’t. Please, we just got up and she’s not here. Oh my god. Please.”
You stop the tape and add, “Dispatcher says she thought she heard voices, a young person’s voice, at the end there but couldn’t make out what was said. It is hard to tell anything.”
“Ah, the ‘ransom’ note. Quite bizarre if you ask me,” Ted says.
You have it in front of you and say, “It reads:
Mr. Garnier, Listen carefully! We are a group of individuals that represent (spelled wrong) a small foreign faction. We respect your business (misspelled) but not the country that it serves. At this time, we have your daughter in our possession (misspelled). She is safe and unharmed; if you want to see her again, you must follow our instructions to the letter.
You will withdraw $118,000. Make sure you bring an adequate size attache to the bank. I will call you between 8 and 10 am tomorrow to instruct you on delivery. The delivery will be exhausting so I advise you to be rested. If we monitor you getting the money early, we might call you early to arrange an earlier delivery of the money and hence an earlier pickup of your daughter.
Any deviation of my instructions will result in the immediate execution of your daughter. You will also be denier her remains for burial. The two gentlemen watching over your daughter do not particularly like you, so I advise you not to provoke them. Speaking to anyone about your situation, such as Police, F.B. I. , etc., will result in your daughter being beheaded. If we catch you talking to a stray dog, she dies. If you alert bank authorities, she dies. If the money is marked or tampered with, she dies. You will be scanned for electronic devices and if any are found, she dies. You can try to deceive us but be warned we are familiar with Law enforcement countermeasures and tactics. You stand a 99% chance of killing your daughter if you try to outsmart us. Follow our instructions and you stand a 100% chance of getting her back. You and your family are under constant scrutiny (again misspelled) as well as the authorities. Don't try to grow a brain Jean-Claude. Don't underestimate us, Jean-Claude. Use that good, southern common sense of yours. It's up to you now Jean-Claude! Victory! S.B.T.C.
“There are just so many things that are weird about this note,” you state, then continue, “First, it seems like it was written by someone that lived through the time of Patty Hearst and the SLA, the Chicago Seven, and all that. Like what is SBTC?”
“And what is ‘respects the victim’s business’ and ‘get some sleep’? Or ‘be rested’? What kidnapper says that? It is the middle of the night. They would already be asleep.” Ted sighs.
“It also seems like the misspellings are easy words but then they correctly spelled words like ‘adequate,’ ‘attaché,” and ‘hence.’ Hence!” you say, laughing.
“And,” you continue, “the talking to a stray dog, she dies, alert the bank, she dies. Along with don’t grow a brain. Doesn’t that sound like it is straight from the movies?”
“Yeah, it does. And the note implies ‘they’ are a group by saying ‘we’ but then the writer forgets the ruse and writes an ‘I’ and ‘my.’”
Then Ted adds, “The $118,000 is strange. Not one million, not 100,000. I checked and the $118,000 is exactly Jean-Claude’s recent bonus.”
Turning the pages, you say, “The whole ransom note is three pages. I checked with a friend at the FBI, and they think this is the longest ransom note on a kidnapping case in history.”
“What does Documents say?” Ted asks.
“Ah, yes. Documents. They say the note would take about 20 minutes to write. But they also say, unfortunately, that the broad fiber-tip pen distorts the minute details. And that they can eliminate everyone else in this case but not Mrs. Garnier.”
“Yeah,” Ted says, “but can you imagine the pressure a document guy would be under to ID someone in this type of case? I know I wouldn’t want to do it. He is wise to just report that it is very similar, and they can’t eliminate her.”
“Here is the postmortem report,” you say. “It’s nine pages long.” Flipping through the various pages, you continue, “A lot of doctor speak, but it comes down to strangulation as the cause of death. There was that ‘garrote’ around her neck. There is a large hemorrhage on the scalp, a blow that caused a brain injury to the head that most likely occurred before strangulation or death.
Ted says, “Here on page seven, it says, ‘small intestine contains fragmented pieces of fruit material which may represent fragments of pineapple.’
“There is one strange line on page nine that I am not sure what it means,” you say. “It says, ‘focal interstitial chronic inflammation.’”
“Looking at the evidence reports,” Ted says, doodling on them with a pencil, “I see that they found the other part to the broken paintbrush used for the garrote in a plastic craft tote box near the wine cellar.
“And they found some fibers similar to Sylvie’s clothes on the tape that was supposedly over her mouth. It says the fibers on the tape are consistent with her fleece jacket.”
“I also see here in the report that upon examining the tape, they got the impression that it was put on the victim after death. They are not sure, but it looks like it.” You say, “I’ve got a report here. I don’t know how much credence to put into these neighbor interviews, but one neighbor remembers seeing lights on during the night and a light off in the front room that is usually on all night.”
“Another neighbor remembers hearing a scream at about two a.m.”
“You know,” Ted says, “according to dispatch, only four minutes elapsed from the 911 call to police arrival, and yet the parents were both dressed.”
You add, “Yeah, they were fully dressed in what looks like something they wore the night before, at that. Why lie about getting dressed in the morning?”
Ted adds, “Then there is the blanket that was in the dryer. Who knew where that was? And wrapped around her just like a mother would do.”
You respond, “And why lie about the pineapple thing? Why lie about what she was wearing when she went to bed?”
“The staging here is quite weird. It is like staging within staging,” Ted says.
“Listen,” you continue, “if you are in the middle of a kidnapping, you don’t write a three-page 20-minute ransom note while you are in the house. You don’t leave the note by the back stairs. You don’t kill the victim in the house. And you don’t fake or stage an elaborate kidnapping to disguise a murder.”
“That’s the way I see it,” Ted agrees. “If you accept that there has been a lot of staging, staging always means misdirection, and you have to accept there has been lying, like lying about putting her right to bed. Lying is always done by the guilty, so it must be someone in the family who committed the murder. No intruder would stage the suitcase, the garotte, the tape, the long ransom note, et cetera.”
“That’s right. It’s not only staging, but also evidence fabrication. It is unlikely the craft-made garotte is what caused the strangulation. It was fabricated to account for it. The note, the tape, the luggage, the cord—all fabricated.”
After a long pause, Ted says, “Well, we have hashed out the evidence. Overall, what do you think?”
“Here is what I think,” you say. “This is speculation, but I think the children didn’t go right to bed and were not asleep when they got home. Bobby was given some pineapple and milk. For some reason, the little girl took the bowl from him and ate some of his pineapple. He got angry and hit her, perhaps with the flashlight, or maybe she was pushed against the sink. She didn’t die right then but maybe went into convulsions caused by the brain injury. In order to get her to be quiet and stop squirming, he strangled her, and she died. He probably did not intend to go that far. Then the parents came in and saw the situation. Like I say, speculation.”
“But to blame it on an intruder they used the rest of the night to create this ruse. They were in a state of panic knowing that they had just lost their daughter and did not want to also lose their son. They put the suitcase under the window, made the garotte from Sylvie’s craft supplies to account for the strangulation, placed her in that semi-hidden wine cellar, and lightly tied her hands. They got the blanket out of the dryer, and for some reason placed a nightgown next to her. Then they sat down and used the notepad and pen at the desk to write the long ransom note. Including the exact amount of the bonus.
“Then, after everything was prepared, things were put back in their places like the pad and pen, except they forgot about Bobby’s Swiss Army knife and the flashlight. After perhaps even disposing of a couple of items like the tape and the cord, Sylvie called 911. Because they never undressed, they were fully dressed when the first officer arrived four minutes later.
“They would not let anyone talk to Bobby, for good reason. When no one found the victim after a few hours, Jean-Claude couldn’t stand it any longer. So, he went down into the basement and brought the victim upstairs.”
“I’ve got one for you,” Ted says. “What about the DNA they found on the underwear?”
“Sylvie said it was a brand-new package. It’s not in fluid so it is most likely touch DNA. I’m betting it would match a packager in a factory somewhere. If they never get into the system, we may never know whose DNA it is.”
“Yeah, but it’s DNA. People are going to pay a lot of attention to that,” Ted reminds you.
“I get it,” you say. “You got to look at this from a total perspective. If we have a case where you have a murder, a gun is at the scene, a bullet matches the gun, a casing matches the gun, a suspect owns that gun, he is seen that day with the gun, the suspect hated the dead guy. So, all the evidence we have points to that guy. And let’s say they discover foreign DNA on the gun, Should you throw out all your evidence and not prosecute the guy because of the foreign DNA? No. Here, once you recognize the staging and all the things meant to misdirect us actually came from right there in the house—the flashlight, the garrote, the blanket, the note, the pens and pads, even the luggage are all from within. Nothing really points to the outside. Except the DNA.”
“You can’t let one thing overrule everything else.”
“Right you are. But I know this is going to be hard for the DA to come to grips with,” you say. “We’ve got this prominent family who just lost their daughter, and perhaps their son committed the crime. To what end will charging the young boy accomplish? He’s a minor, so we know how that goes. If you charge the parents for their part, that would look really bad politically because they just lost their daughter. To what end would that bring justice for the murder?”
“I sure wouldn’t want to be in the DA’s shoes,” Ted adds with a finality.
True Crime in Real Time
$15.50USD
Why All the Misdirection?
It is a cold December morning, and you roll up on the address, a house in an affluent suburb. The large custom homes in the neighborhood are decorated for the holidays. The patrol units are already there. The call is a kidnapping.
You have been partnered with Theodore “Ted” Miller for many months now and Ted has always taken the lead on your cases. Ted is short and stocky, balding on top and greying on the sides. He has always been a no-nonsense by-the-book detective and has been an effective mentor, providing you with a great deal of investigative knowledge.
You and Ted are still in the unmarked unit when Ted says, “Okay, we are going to put all that experience, education, and knowledge you have to work. I am going to test you. I am going to ask you your opinion throughout the case. I am going to assess your observation skills, your critical thinking, and your assessment of human behavior. I am going to let you take the lead on this case. You ready?”
“Yes, I am ready,” you say.
“Let’s go.” You and Ted open your doors and get out of the vehicle. Ducking under the crime scene tape, you walk up the front driveway.
You pause for a moment to look at the front yard. You both stand there and carefully observe the scene. noting that there are no foot tracks on the lawn or in the snow. The snow is sparse in some areas and does not completely cover the front lawn. Standing next to you, Ted asks what you think. You say, “Uh, if someone was traversing this area, leaving or coming into the residence, they should have made some impressions in the snow or in the wet grass.” You then inspect a window low to the ground. The window is slightly open, perhaps broken as it does not close completely, and when you look inside it appears to lead to a basement.
Ted asks your impressions. “What do you think so far about the outside of the residence?”
You say, “Erm, well, uh… I don't think anyone really came this way as there are no tracks in the snow, and even if the snow is scattered a little it doesn’t seem like anyone came in or left this way or went into or out of that window.”
Ted smiles and you proceed to the front door and walk up a couple of steps. The front door is ajar, and you carefully step inside. Just inside the front door is a small foyer, a living room is to your left with a fireplace in the corner, and the staircase leading to the upper floors is straight ahead.
You are introduced by a patrol officer to the lady of the house, the mother of the kidnapped child. Her name is Sylvie Garnier. She corrects the pronunciation, “Gar-nee-yay.”
Mrs. Garnier is, of course, very distraught and her face shows anguish. She is wearing a red, black, and grey fleece jacket and black velvet pants, an evening outfit. You ask to see the basement. She is cooperative and takes you past the stairs leading upstairs and around a corner to a set of stairs leading down to the basement.
You walk down the steps to the basement, and you ask to see the window that you inspected earlier. The woman leads you straight ahead into a room that has some toy train sets. You proceed into the next part of the room where there are storage racks along the walls, and shelves with art supplies.
She points to your right, and you see there is a piece of luggage below the open window. Sylvie mentions that the suitcase came from another area in this room where the luggage is normally stored. You move close to the window and inspect it further. The window is high on the wall towards the ceiling of the basement, and you see that it has a small portion of glass that is broken. You also see that the dust is not disturbed and there is a spiderweb that is still intact. Sylvie leaves you and goes upstairs, and you stand and survey the rest of the basement storage room.
“What do you think?” Ted asks you.
“Uh, well… there's no way, in my opinion, that anyone took a young child or would even think they could take a young child out through that window, especially by using that unstable piece of luggage. It also does not look disturbed other than being moved to that spot. My impression of that piece of luggage is that it is staging. It was put there to throw us off the track by the kidnapper. It was not used to enter or leave through the window.” You further state, “The point is not to say that the window was used by the kidnapper. It could have been. The point is everything in visual evidence says that it wasn’t.
“By the way,” you add, “I noticed that she has on makeup, and it looks like she is wearing what she wore last night to a party. And her hair is still together.”
“Interesting. That’s good. I might not have noticed that,” Ted says.
You go back upstairs and turn right into the kitchen off the main living room to find Sylvia there leaning against the kitchen counter. The first thing that strikes you is the black and white checkered floor. There is a lot of clutter on the counters of the kitchen, perhaps from recent meals. It is a small narrow kitchen with doors on either side and another door to a breakfast room.
You stand in the kitchen with Sylvie, who is looking very cooperative and expectant, as if waiting for your questions. You look over at Ted inquisitively. Ted says, “This is all yours, go ahead.”
Out of curiosity, thinking perhaps it was used in the search for her child, you ask about a flashlight sitting on a counter on the other side of the kitchen. “Uh, was that flashlight used last night or recently?”
The flashlight is large, heavy, black, and cylinder-like, like a policeman’s, typically known as a Maglite. From where you are standing it looks like an ordinary flashlight—no damage, nothing unusual about it.
Sylvie says, “I don’t really know where the flashlight came from. I believe it was given to us by a neighbor, erm, or someone. I am not sure why it is out and in the kitchen.”
You have an instinct that leads you to ask about a bowl with a spoon in it on the kitchen counter. “Is that bowl from yesterday?” you ask, initially as a matter of mere conversation, because there are a lot of various plates and dishes there.
“My son, before going to bed, often has a dish of milk and pineapples.”
“Did he have a bowl of pineapples last night?” you ask.
“No, he fell asleep on the way home last night. And we put him right into bed. Both of them fell asleep on the way home and we put them right into bed.”
You stand there in the kitchen looking at your feet for a second. Then you look at Sylvie and say, “Okay, now, where was the ransom note left?”
She guides you and Ted out of the kitchen through the door on the other side. Straight ahead, you notice what appears to be a home office. You follow her as she turns to your right and leads you down a short hall to the bottom of a spiral staircase. “This is where I found the note as I came down this morning.” These seem to be the back stairs, not the main stairs that are near the front door.
“Not the front stairs?”
“This staircase leads up to our bedroom and this is the way I come down every morning.”
“Was the ransom note found right at the bottom of these stairs?”
“Yes, right there,” she says, pointing.
You look around and see that there is a desk to your right, and to your left, there is a door that goes to a mudroom and eventually out to the garage.
You ask her, “Where did they get the writing pad and pen?” and she points out a drawer in the small desk to the right of the stairs. There are pens in a cup on the top of the desk.
You open a drawer in the desk and see some writing tablets. You take out a tablet, carefully handling the edges, thumb through it, then put it down on the desk. You do the same for the next tablet below it. You pick up the third tablet down in the drawer and stop after opening the cover. You inspect the first page, then pick up a pen and use it to turn to the second page. You inspect that page. After continuing to handle the tablet carefully, you put it down on the hall desk.
Ted sees the change in the look on your face and says, “Let’s step in there for a second,” pointing to the door that leads into the mudroom.
You walk into the mudroom so you and Ted can have a little conference. Ted asks you, “What do you think?”
As you begin answering Ted you draw a sketch of the first floor.
“I think…. First, back to the kitchen. It’s interesting about the bowl of pineapples. It was there but she said that her son did not have it the night before. And then there’s the big flashlight that she said she didn’t know how it got there in her kitchen. Also, it seems strange that the ransom note was on the back stairs. How did the kidnappers know she, or anyone, would come down those stairs to find it, and not the main staircase?”
When you retreat back to the hallway near the stairs, Sylvie is no longer there. You proceed down the hallway past the office, through the kitchen and a couple of rooms, to a police officer standing alone in a dining room.
“The note?” Ted says to the officer and looks over at you.
“Right, yes, can we see the ransom note, officer?” you say.
The officer hands you the note and you both view it together, quickly reading the long, rambling, three-page ransom note within plastic covers.
“What do you see?” Ted asks.
“Um, I think this would have taken a long time to write. It looks like a tablet was used and then placed back into the drawer underneath two others. One page shows indented writing as practice and the next page shows the indented writing of the full note. That writing looks like one of those pens on the desk, and they apparently put the pen back in the cup. The wording in the note is just weird. The requested amount is strange. Not a hundred thousand dollars but one hundred eighteen thousand dollars. Why is that?”
“What’s the deal with an ‘attaché’ and ‘exhausting delivery’?” Ted adds.
“Yeah, I don’t know. It says they will call between eight and ten this morning, so I guess we wait.”
You and Ted move over to the other door, and you can see from the dining room into the living room where the victim’s father, Jean-Claude Garnier, is there talking with another man. The officer followed you there.
“Who is with Jean-Claude?” you ask the officer. He tells you that is a friend of Jean-Claude’s, Mr. Rivers, who has come over to help. “That’s… that’s not supposed to…”
“Has anyone talked to the young boy?” you ask.
The officer responds by saying, “No. Jean-Claude prohibited it. No one wanted to go against that.”
Just then you see Jean-Claude and his friend leave the room, walking out the other door toward the stairs.
A minute later, Jean-Claude rushes back into the room carrying a bundle and places it on the living room floor. It is their daughter. The mother races into the room, along with Mrs. Rivers, Sylvie’s friend who has just arrived, as well as Mr. Rivers, and they all crowd around. You hurry over to them and observe what you can in the chaos.
You raise your voice. “Wait! Everyone move back! Do not touch anything! Don’t touch anything.”
Sylvie is kneeling down next to her daughter’s body. Sylvie’s friend, Mrs. Rivers, is trying to hold her back, but she is also kneeling, touching the child’s face with the back of her palm, and crying out.
You move in close and kneel down on the other side of the little girl. She is obviously dead, her body pale and stiff. She is wearing a long-sleeved shirt made of white sweatshirt-like material with an embroidered star on her chest. She is also wearing a pair of white long-john-type bottoms.
Her hands are out over her head with a white nylon cord lightly bound around her right wrist and flowing away from it. There is a similar cord around her neck that has a small, broken paintbrush twisted into it like it was used to tighten the cord.
“Please everyone,” you declare, “I know this is going to be difficult, but we need to preserve the evidence.” Everyone is frozen in place staring at the child on the floor. A white blanket that had been wrapped around her is now laying on the floor next to her.
“Officer,” you say, “please try to keep everyone from touching anything… get CSU on the way and make all the necessary calls.” You don’t want to seem callous by asking for the coroner in front of the family. You turn to the people there and ask, “Where was she?”
“In a room in the basement,” Mr. Rivers says.
“Show me,” you say, holding onto his elbow. “Please, everyone, don’t disturb anything while we’re gone.”
Mr. Rivers takes you and Ted back to the front entryway and down the stairs that lead to the basement. You follow Mr. Rivers down the stairs. This time, instead of going straight ahead into the train room, you walk through another door to the left that leads down a small passageway within the boiler room where there are several pipes and a water heater. It is relatively dark down here, the only light coming from a small window high on the wall above a chest freezer.
Mr. Rivers reaches up above the door, releases a latch, opens the door to a room straight ahead of you, and says, “In here.”
“Nobody checked in here before?” you ask.
“I did. Sort of. I looked in and it was very dark. This whole passage was very dark, and it is difficult to walk around down here. See,” he says, pointing, “the light switch is way over there. It is hard to find.”
You look around the room and see some racks with wine bottles. “That blanket?” you ask about a white blanket on the floor.
“She was wrapped in it.”
“And the nightclothes?” you ask, referring to a small pink nightgown lying spread out on the floor next to the blanket.
“That was just there.”
“What is that piece of black tape on the floor?”
“Oh yes, Jean-Claude pulled that off her mouth just before he picked her up.”
You move toward the back corner of the wine cellar and spot a red pocketknife on the floor. Ted’s eyes widen.
“Mr. Rivers, this pocketknife, did Jean-Claude bring that down to cut the cords?”
“No, that was already laying there.”
“Hmm,” Ted says.
“Have you seen it before?” you ask.
“I think I have seen young Bobby with it a few times.”
“Thank you. Okay, so you two just came down here and found her?”
“Yeah, it was kind of weird. Jean-Claude said, ‘I’m going to search again,’ but he came straight down here, opened the door, turned on the light, and saw her. And, ah…”
“What is it, Mr. Rivers?”
“Well, I swear he gasped before he turned on the light.”
“Thank you, Mr. Rivers.” He slips away down the passage.
“Good job,” Ted says. “You got a lot out of him. Let’s go back upstairs.”
You leave the wine cellar, go down the passage, and, stopping near the stairs, you draw a sketch of the basement.
After finishing your rough sketch you walk up the stairs to the first floor.
Jean-Claude, Mr. Rivers, Sylvie, and Mrs. Rivers are all standing in the living room. Mr. Rivers has his hand on Jean-Claude’s shoulder and Mrs. Rivers is hugging Sylvie.
You approach Sylvie and Mrs. Rivers. “I’m so sorry. May I talk to you for a bit?”
“Do you really have to?” says Mrs. Rivers.
You say, “Yes, I’m sorry, I must.”
You move past the fireplace and into the front room. Ted is standing next to you now, facing Sylvie and Mrs. Rivers.
Sylvie says, “All right.”
“Could we go over last night again, please?”
“Yes, we came home, she was asleep, and we put her to bed. I put a brand new pair of underwear and a sleep top on her, covered her up, and she went to sleep in her bed.... Then I got up this morning and found the note. And…” Sylvie puts her face into Mrs. Rivers’ shoulder.
“I’m sorry. But I have to ask,” you say, “Where was the blanket kept?”
“Oh, that was in the dryer.”
“Where is the laundry room?”
Mrs. Rivers answers for Sylvie. “The laundry room is down in the basement. To the left of the stairs.”
“The laundry room is near the craft room?”
“Yes. It is near the train room and storage area down there.”
Just then there is some noise at the front entryway. You look through the living room and see more officers arriving.
You meet them at the door. You look at Ted and then bark orders. “Alright, it looks like this is a murder. CSU, photograph everything, tag, and bag. Officers, scour this house for anything that might be evidence and protect it for CSU. Make sure the perimeter of the house is taped off. Officer Jackson, wait for the coroner and protect the evidence on the victim. Try to keep the family away. All right now. Everyone, let’s get to work.”
You look over at Ted and see him smile. “That was impressive,” he says.
***
You and Ted are sitting in your cubicle at the office, reviewing the case reports.
“The family has refused any interviews,” Ted says. “They got a lawyer as soon as we started the second search of the home.”
“Here is the 911 call. Listen.” You play the tape. “911 what is your emergency?”
“[Garbled] – Police.”
“What’s going on ma’am?”
“644 14th Street.”
“What’s going on there ma’am?”
“We have a kidnapping. Hurry please.”
“Explain to me what’s going on. Okay?”
“There. We have a… there’s a note left, and our daughter’s gone.”
“How old is your daughter?”
“She’s… she’s six years old. She’s blonde, six years old.”
“How long ago was this?”
“I don’t know; I just got the note, and my daughter’s gone.”
“Does it say who took her?”
“No, I don’t know. There’s a… there’s a ransom note here. It says SBTC Victory.”
“Do you know how long she’s been gone?”
“No, I don’t. Please, we just got up and she’s not here. Oh my god. Please.”
You stop the tape and add, “Dispatcher says she thought she heard voices, a young person’s voice, at the end there but couldn’t make out what was said. It is hard to tell anything.”
“Ah, the ‘ransom’ note. Quite bizarre if you ask me,” Ted says.
You have it in front of you and say, “It reads:
Mr. Garnier, Listen carefully! We are a group of individuals that represent (spelled wrong) a small foreign faction. We respect your business (misspelled) but not the country that it serves. At this time, we have your daughter in our possession (misspelled). She is safe and unharmed; if you want to see her again, you must follow our instructions to the letter.
You will withdraw $118,000. Make sure you bring an adequate size attache to the bank. I will call you between 8 and 10 am tomorrow to instruct you on delivery. The delivery will be exhausting so I advise you to be rested. If we monitor you getting the money early, we might call you early to arrange an earlier delivery of the money and hence an earlier pickup of your daughter.
Any deviation of my instructions will result in the immediate execution of your daughter. You will also be denier her remains for burial. The two gentlemen watching over your daughter do not particularly like you, so I advise you not to provoke them. Speaking to anyone about your situation, such as Police, F.B. I. , etc., will result in your daughter being beheaded. If we catch you talking to a stray dog, she dies. If you alert bank authorities, she dies. If the money is marked or tampered with, she dies. You will be scanned for electronic devices and if any are found, she dies. You can try to deceive us but be warned we are familiar with Law enforcement countermeasures and tactics. You stand a 99% chance of killing your daughter if you try to outsmart us. Follow our instructions and you stand a 100% chance of getting her back. You and your family are under constant scrutiny (again misspelled) as well as the authorities. Don't try to grow a brain Jean-Claude. Don't underestimate us, Jean-Claude. Use that good, southern common sense of yours. It's up to you now Jean-Claude! Victory! S.B.T.C.
“There are just so many things that are weird about this note,” you state, then continue, “First, it seems like it was written by someone that lived through the time of Patty Hearst and the SLA, the Chicago Seven, and all that. Like what is SBTC?”
“And what is ‘respects the victim’s business’ and ‘get some sleep’? Or ‘be rested’? What kidnapper says that? It is the middle of the night. They would already be asleep.” Ted sighs.
“It also seems like the misspellings are easy words but then they correctly spelled words like ‘adequate,’ ‘attaché,” and ‘hence.’ Hence!” you say, laughing.
“And,” you continue, “the talking to a stray dog, she dies, alert the bank, she dies. Along with don’t grow a brain. Doesn’t that sound like it is straight from the movies?”
“Yeah, it does. And the note implies ‘they’ are a group by saying ‘we’ but then the writer forgets the ruse and writes an ‘I’ and ‘my.’”
Then Ted adds, “The $118,000 is strange. Not one million, not 100,000. I checked and the $118,000 is exactly Jean-Claude’s recent bonus.”
Turning the pages, you say, “The whole ransom note is three pages. I checked with a friend at the FBI, and they think this is the longest ransom note on a kidnapping case in history.”
“What does Documents say?” Ted asks.
“Ah, yes. Documents. They say the note would take about 20 minutes to write. But they also say, unfortunately, that the broad fiber-tip pen distorts the minute details. And that they can eliminate everyone else in this case but not Mrs. Garnier.”
“Yeah,” Ted says, “but can you imagine the pressure a document guy would be under to ID someone in this type of case? I know I wouldn’t want to do it. He is wise to just report that it is very similar, and they can’t eliminate her.”
“Here is the postmortem report,” you say. “It’s nine pages long.” Flipping through the various pages, you continue, “A lot of doctor speak, but it comes down to strangulation as the cause of death. There was that ‘garrote’ around her neck. There is a large hemorrhage on the scalp, a blow that caused a brain injury to the head that most likely occurred before strangulation or death.
Ted says, “Here on page seven, it says, ‘small intestine contains fragmented pieces of fruit material which may represent fragments of pineapple.’
“There is one strange line on page nine that I am not sure what it means,” you say. “It says, ‘focal interstitial chronic inflammation.’”
“Looking at the evidence reports,” Ted says, doodling on them with a pencil, “I see that they found the other part to the broken paintbrush used for the garrote in a plastic craft tote box near the wine cellar.
“And they found some fibers similar to Sylvie’s clothes on the tape that was supposedly over her mouth. It says the fibers on the tape are consistent with her fleece jacket.”
“I also see here in the report that upon examining the tape, they got the impression that it was put on the victim after death. They are not sure, but it looks like it.” You say, “I’ve got a report here. I don’t know how much credence to put into these neighbor interviews, but one neighbor remembers seeing lights on during the night and a light off in the front room that is usually on all night.”
“Another neighbor remembers hearing a scream at about two a.m.”
“You know,” Ted says, “according to dispatch, only four minutes elapsed from the 911 call to police arrival, and yet the parents were both dressed.”
You add, “Yeah, they were fully dressed in what looks like something they wore the night before, at that. Why lie about getting dressed in the morning?”
Ted adds, “Then there is the blanket that was in the dryer. Who knew where that was? And wrapped around her just like a mother would do.”
You respond, “And why lie about the pineapple thing? Why lie about what she was wearing when she went to bed?”
“The staging here is quite weird. It is like staging within staging,” Ted says.
“Listen,” you continue, “if you are in the middle of a kidnapping, you don’t write a three-page 20-minute ransom note while you are in the house. You don’t leave the note by the back stairs. You don’t kill the victim in the house. And you don’t fake or stage an elaborate kidnapping to disguise a murder.”
“That’s the way I see it,” Ted agrees. “If you accept that there has been a lot of staging, staging always means misdirection, and you have to accept there has been lying, like lying about putting her right to bed. Lying is always done by the guilty, so it must be someone in the family who committed the murder. No intruder would stage the suitcase, the garotte, the tape, the long ransom note, et cetera.”
“That’s right. It’s not only staging, but also evidence fabrication. It is unlikely the craft-made garotte is what caused the strangulation. It was fabricated to account for it. The note, the tape, the luggage, the cord—all fabricated.”
After a long pause, Ted says, “Well, we have hashed out the evidence. Overall, what do you think?”
“Here is what I think,” you say. “This is speculation, but I think the children didn’t go right to bed and were not asleep when they got home. Bobby was given some pineapple and milk. For some reason, the little girl took the bowl from him and ate some of his pineapple. He got angry and hit her, perhaps with the flashlight, or maybe she was pushed against the sink. She didn’t die right then but maybe went into convulsions caused by the brain injury. In order to get her to be quiet and stop squirming, he strangled her, and she died. He probably did not intend to go that far. Then the parents came in and saw the situation. Like I say, speculation.”
“But to blame it on an intruder they used the rest of the night to create this ruse. They were in a state of panic knowing that they had just lost their daughter and did not want to also lose their son. They put the suitcase under the window, made the garotte from Sylvie’s craft supplies to account for the strangulation, placed her in that semi-hidden wine cellar, and lightly tied her hands. They got the blanket out of the dryer, and for some reason placed a nightgown next to her. Then they sat down and used the notepad and pen at the desk to write the long ransom note. Including the exact amount of the bonus.
“Then, after everything was prepared, things were put back in their places like the pad and pen, except they forgot about Bobby’s Swiss Army knife and the flashlight. After perhaps even disposing of a couple of items like the tape and the cord, Sylvie called 911. Because they never undressed, they were fully dressed when the first officer arrived four minutes later.
“They would not let anyone talk to Bobby, for good reason. When no one found the victim after a few hours, Jean-Claude couldn’t stand it any longer. So, he went down into the basement and brought the victim upstairs.”
“I’ve got one for you,” Ted says. “What about the DNA they found on the underwear?”
“Sylvie said it was a brand-new package. It’s not in fluid so it is most likely touch DNA. I’m betting it would match a packager in a factory somewhere. If they never get into the system, we may never know whose DNA it is.”
“Yeah, but it’s DNA. People are going to pay a lot of attention to that,” Ted reminds you.
“I get it,” you say. “You got to look at this from a total perspective. If we have a case where you have a murder, a gun is at the scene, a bullet matches the gun, a casing matches the gun, a suspect owns that gun, he is seen that day with the gun, the suspect hated the dead guy. So, all the evidence we have points to that guy. And let’s say they discover foreign DNA on the gun, Should you throw out all your evidence and not prosecute the guy because of the foreign DNA? No. Here, once you recognize the staging and all the things meant to misdirect us actually came from right there in the house—the flashlight, the garrote, the blanket, the note, the pens and pads, even the luggage are all from within. Nothing really points to the outside. Except the DNA.”
“You can’t let one thing overrule everything else.”
“Right you are. But I know this is going to be hard for the DA to come to grips with,” you say. “We’ve got this prominent family who just lost their daughter, and perhaps their son committed the crime. To what end will charging the young boy accomplish? He’s a minor, so we know how that goes. If you charge the parents for their part, that would look really bad politically because they just lost their daughter. To what end would that bring justice for the murder?”
“I sure wouldn’t want to be in the DA’s shoes,” Ted adds with a finality.
It is a cold December morning, and you roll up on the address, a house in an affluent suburb. The large custom homes in the neighborhood are decorated for the holidays. The patrol units are already there. The call is a kidnapping.
You have been partnered with Theodore “Ted” Miller for many months now and Ted has always taken the lead on your cases. Ted is short and stocky, balding on top and greying on the sides. He has always been a no-nonsense by-the-book detective and has been an effective mentor, providing you with a great deal of investigative knowledge.
You and Ted are still in the unmarked unit when Ted says, “Okay, we are going to put all that experience, education, and knowledge you have to work. I am going to test you. I am going to ask you your opinion throughout the case. I am going to assess your observation skills, your critical thinking, and your assessment of human behavior. I am going to let you take the lead on this case. You ready?”
“Yes, I am ready,” you say.
“Let’s go.” You and Ted open your doors and get out of the vehicle. Ducking under the crime scene tape, you walk up the front driveway.
You pause for a moment to look at the front yard. You both stand there and carefully observe the scene. noting that there are no foot tracks on the lawn or in the snow. The snow is sparse in some areas and does not completely cover the front lawn. Standing next to you, Ted asks what you think. You say, “Uh, if someone was traversing this area, leaving or coming into the residence, they should have made some impressions in the snow or in the wet grass.” You then inspect a window low to the ground. The window is slightly open, perhaps broken as it does not close completely, and when you look inside it appears to lead to a basement.
Ted asks your impressions. “What do you think so far about the outside of the residence?”
You say, “Erm, well, uh… I don't think anyone really came this way as there are no tracks in the snow, and even if the snow is scattered a little it doesn’t seem like anyone came in or left this way or went into or out of that window.”
Ted smiles and you proceed to the front door and walk up a couple of steps. The front door is ajar, and you carefully step inside. Just inside the front door is a small foyer, a living room is to your left with a fireplace in the corner, and the staircase leading to the upper floors is straight ahead.
You are introduced by a patrol officer to the lady of the house, the mother of the kidnapped child. Her name is Sylvie Garnier. She corrects the pronunciation, “Gar-nee-yay.”
Mrs. Garnier is, of course, very distraught and her face shows anguish. She is wearing a red, black, and grey fleece jacket and black velvet pants, an evening outfit. You ask to see the basement. She is cooperative and takes you past the stairs leading upstairs and around a corner to a set of stairs leading down to the basement.
You walk down the steps to the basement, and you ask to see the window that you inspected earlier. The woman leads you straight ahead into a room that has some toy train sets. You proceed into the next part of the room where there are storage racks along the walls, and shelves with art supplies.
She points to your right, and you see there is a piece of luggage below the open window. Sylvie mentions that the suitcase came from another area in this room where the luggage is normally stored. You move close to the window and inspect it further. The window is high on the wall towards the ceiling of the basement, and you see that it has a small portion of glass that is broken. You also see that the dust is not disturbed and there is a spiderweb that is still intact. Sylvie leaves you and goes upstairs, and you stand and survey the rest of the basement storage room.
“What do you think?” Ted asks you.
“Uh, well… there's no way, in my opinion, that anyone took a young child or would even think they could take a young child out through that window, especially by using that unstable piece of luggage. It also does not look disturbed other than being moved to that spot. My impression of that piece of luggage is that it is staging. It was put there to throw us off the track by the kidnapper. It was not used to enter or leave through the window.” You further state, “The point is not to say that the window was used by the kidnapper. It could have been. The point is everything in visual evidence says that it wasn’t.
“By the way,” you add, “I noticed that she has on makeup, and it looks like she is wearing what she wore last night to a party. And her hair is still together.”
“Interesting. That’s good. I might not have noticed that,” Ted says.
You go back upstairs and turn right into the kitchen off the main living room to find Sylvia there leaning against the kitchen counter. The first thing that strikes you is the black and white checkered floor. There is a lot of clutter on the counters of the kitchen, perhaps from recent meals. It is a small narrow kitchen with doors on either side and another door to a breakfast room.
You stand in the kitchen with Sylvie, who is looking very cooperative and expectant, as if waiting for your questions. You look over at Ted inquisitively. Ted says, “This is all yours, go ahead.”
Out of curiosity, thinking perhaps it was used in the search for her child, you ask about a flashlight sitting on a counter on the other side of the kitchen. “Uh, was that flashlight used last night or recently?”
The flashlight is large, heavy, black, and cylinder-like, like a policeman’s, typically known as a Maglite. From where you are standing it looks like an ordinary flashlight—no damage, nothing unusual about it.
Sylvie says, “I don’t really know where the flashlight came from. I believe it was given to us by a neighbor, erm, or someone. I am not sure why it is out and in the kitchen.”
You have an instinct that leads you to ask about a bowl with a spoon in it on the kitchen counter. “Is that bowl from yesterday?” you ask, initially as a matter of mere conversation, because there are a lot of various plates and dishes there.
“My son, before going to bed, often has a dish of milk and pineapples.”
“Did he have a bowl of pineapples last night?” you ask.
“No, he fell asleep on the way home last night. And we put him right into bed. Both of them fell asleep on the way home and we put them right into bed.”
You stand there in the kitchen looking at your feet for a second. Then you look at Sylvie and say, “Okay, now, where was the ransom note left?”
She guides you and Ted out of the kitchen through the door on the other side. Straight ahead, you notice what appears to be a home office. You follow her as she turns to your right and leads you down a short hall to the bottom of a spiral staircase. “This is where I found the note as I came down this morning.” These seem to be the back stairs, not the main stairs that are near the front door.
“Not the front stairs?”
“This staircase leads up to our bedroom and this is the way I come down every morning.”
“Was the ransom note found right at the bottom of these stairs?”
“Yes, right there,” she says, pointing.
You look around and see that there is a desk to your right, and to your left, there is a door that goes to a mudroom and eventually out to the garage.
You ask her, “Where did they get the writing pad and pen?” and she points out a drawer in the small desk to the right of the stairs. There are pens in a cup on the top of the desk.
You open a drawer in the desk and see some writing tablets. You take out a tablet, carefully handling the edges, thumb through it, then put it down on the desk. You do the same for the next tablet below it. You pick up the third tablet down in the drawer and stop after opening the cover. You inspect the first page, then pick up a pen and use it to turn to the second page. You inspect that page. After continuing to handle the tablet carefully, you put it down on the hall desk.
Ted sees the change in the look on your face and says, “Let’s step in there for a second,” pointing to the door that leads into the mudroom.
You walk into the mudroom so you and Ted can have a little conference. Ted asks you, “What do you think?”
As you begin answering Ted you draw a sketch of the first floor.
“I think…. First, back to the kitchen. It’s interesting about the bowl of pineapples. It was there but she said that her son did not have it the night before. And then there’s the big flashlight that she said she didn’t know how it got there in her kitchen. Also, it seems strange that the ransom note was on the back stairs. How did the kidnappers know she, or anyone, would come down those stairs to find it, and not the main staircase?”
When you retreat back to the hallway near the stairs, Sylvie is no longer there. You proceed down the hallway past the office, through the kitchen and a couple of rooms, to a police officer standing alone in a dining room.
“The note?” Ted says to the officer and looks over at you.
“Right, yes, can we see the ransom note, officer?” you say.
The officer hands you the note and you both view it together, quickly reading the long, rambling, three-page ransom note within plastic covers.
“What do you see?” Ted asks.
“Um, I think this would have taken a long time to write. It looks like a tablet was used and then placed back into the drawer underneath two others. One page shows indented writing as practice and the next page shows the indented writing of the full note. That writing looks like one of those pens on the desk, and they apparently put the pen back in the cup. The wording in the note is just weird. The requested amount is strange. Not a hundred thousand dollars but one hundred eighteen thousand dollars. Why is that?”
“What’s the deal with an ‘attaché’ and ‘exhausting delivery’?” Ted adds.
“Yeah, I don’t know. It says they will call between eight and ten this morning, so I guess we wait.”
You and Ted move over to the other door, and you can see from the dining room into the living room where the victim’s father, Jean-Claude Garnier, is there talking with another man. The officer followed you there.
“Who is with Jean-Claude?” you ask the officer. He tells you that is a friend of Jean-Claude’s, Mr. Rivers, who has come over to help. “That’s… that’s not supposed to…”
“Has anyone talked to the young boy?” you ask.
The officer responds by saying, “No. Jean-Claude prohibited it. No one wanted to go against that.”
Just then you see Jean-Claude and his friend leave the room, walking out the other door toward the stairs.
A minute later, Jean-Claude rushes back into the room carrying a bundle and places it on the living room floor. It is their daughter. The mother races into the room, along with Mrs. Rivers, Sylvie’s friend who has just arrived, as well as Mr. Rivers, and they all crowd around. You hurry over to them and observe what you can in the chaos.
You raise your voice. “Wait! Everyone move back! Do not touch anything! Don’t touch anything.”
Sylvie is kneeling down next to her daughter’s body. Sylvie’s friend, Mrs. Rivers, is trying to hold her back, but she is also kneeling, touching the child’s face with the back of her palm, and crying out.
You move in close and kneel down on the other side of the little girl. She is obviously dead, her body pale and stiff. She is wearing a long-sleeved shirt made of white sweatshirt-like material with an embroidered star on her chest. She is also wearing a pair of white long-john-type bottoms.
Her hands are out over her head with a white nylon cord lightly bound around her right wrist and flowing away from it. There is a similar cord around her neck that has a small, broken paintbrush twisted into it like it was used to tighten the cord.
“Please everyone,” you declare, “I know this is going to be difficult, but we need to preserve the evidence.” Everyone is frozen in place staring at the child on the floor. A white blanket that had been wrapped around her is now laying on the floor next to her.
“Officer,” you say, “please try to keep everyone from touching anything… get CSU on the way and make all the necessary calls.” You don’t want to seem callous by asking for the coroner in front of the family. You turn to the people there and ask, “Where was she?”
“In a room in the basement,” Mr. Rivers says.
“Show me,” you say, holding onto his elbow. “Please, everyone, don’t disturb anything while we’re gone.”
Mr. Rivers takes you and Ted back to the front entryway and down the stairs that lead to the basement. You follow Mr. Rivers down the stairs. This time, instead of going straight ahead into the train room, you walk through another door to the left that leads down a small passageway within the boiler room where there are several pipes and a water heater. It is relatively dark down here, the only light coming from a small window high on the wall above a chest freezer.
Mr. Rivers reaches up above the door, releases a latch, opens the door to a room straight ahead of you, and says, “In here.”
“Nobody checked in here before?” you ask.
“I did. Sort of. I looked in and it was very dark. This whole passage was very dark, and it is difficult to walk around down here. See,” he says, pointing, “the light switch is way over there. It is hard to find.”
You look around the room and see some racks with wine bottles. “That blanket?” you ask about a white blanket on the floor.
“She was wrapped in it.”
“And the nightclothes?” you ask, referring to a small pink nightgown lying spread out on the floor next to the blanket.
“That was just there.”
“What is that piece of black tape on the floor?”
“Oh yes, Jean-Claude pulled that off her mouth just before he picked her up.”
You move toward the back corner of the wine cellar and spot a red pocketknife on the floor. Ted’s eyes widen.
“Mr. Rivers, this pocketknife, did Jean-Claude bring that down to cut the cords?”
“No, that was already laying there.”
“Hmm,” Ted says.
“Have you seen it before?” you ask.
“I think I have seen young Bobby with it a few times.”
“Thank you. Okay, so you two just came down here and found her?”
“Yeah, it was kind of weird. Jean-Claude said, ‘I’m going to search again,’ but he came straight down here, opened the door, turned on the light, and saw her. And, ah…”
“What is it, Mr. Rivers?”
“Well, I swear he gasped before he turned on the light.”
“Thank you, Mr. Rivers.” He slips away down the passage.
“Good job,” Ted says. “You got a lot out of him. Let’s go back upstairs.”
You leave the wine cellar, go down the passage, and, stopping near the stairs, you draw a sketch of the basement.
After finishing your rough sketch you walk up the stairs to the first floor.
Jean-Claude, Mr. Rivers, Sylvie, and Mrs. Rivers are all standing in the living room. Mr. Rivers has his hand on Jean-Claude’s shoulder and Mrs. Rivers is hugging Sylvie.
You approach Sylvie and Mrs. Rivers. “I’m so sorry. May I talk to you for a bit?”
“Do you really have to?” says Mrs. Rivers.
You say, “Yes, I’m sorry, I must.”
You move past the fireplace and into the front room. Ted is standing next to you now, facing Sylvie and Mrs. Rivers.
Sylvie says, “All right.”
“Could we go over last night again, please?”
“Yes, we came home, she was asleep, and we put her to bed. I put a brand new pair of underwear and a sleep top on her, covered her up, and she went to sleep in her bed.... Then I got up this morning and found the note. And…” Sylvie puts her face into Mrs. Rivers’ shoulder.
“I’m sorry. But I have to ask,” you say, “Where was the blanket kept?”
“Oh, that was in the dryer.”
“Where is the laundry room?”
Mrs. Rivers answers for Sylvie. “The laundry room is down in the basement. To the left of the stairs.”
“The laundry room is near the craft room?”
“Yes. It is near the train room and storage area down there.”
Just then there is some noise at the front entryway. You look through the living room and see more officers arriving.
You meet them at the door. You look at Ted and then bark orders. “Alright, it looks like this is a murder. CSU, photograph everything, tag, and bag. Officers, scour this house for anything that might be evidence and protect it for CSU. Make sure the perimeter of the house is taped off. Officer Jackson, wait for the coroner and protect the evidence on the victim. Try to keep the family away. All right now. Everyone, let’s get to work.”
You look over at Ted and see him smile. “That was impressive,” he says.
***
You and Ted are sitting in your cubicle at the office, reviewing the case reports.
“The family has refused any interviews,” Ted says. “They got a lawyer as soon as we started the second search of the home.”
“Here is the 911 call. Listen.” You play the tape. “911 what is your emergency?”
“[Garbled] – Police.”
“What’s going on ma’am?”
“644 14th Street.”
“What’s going on there ma’am?”
“We have a kidnapping. Hurry please.”
“Explain to me what’s going on. Okay?”
“There. We have a… there’s a note left, and our daughter’s gone.”
“How old is your daughter?”
“She’s… she’s six years old. She’s blonde, six years old.”
“How long ago was this?”
“I don’t know; I just got the note, and my daughter’s gone.”
“Does it say who took her?”
“No, I don’t know. There’s a… there’s a ransom note here. It says SBTC Victory.”
“Do you know how long she’s been gone?”
“No, I don’t. Please, we just got up and she’s not here. Oh my god. Please.”
You stop the tape and add, “Dispatcher says she thought she heard voices, a young person’s voice, at the end there but couldn’t make out what was said. It is hard to tell anything.”
“Ah, the ‘ransom’ note. Quite bizarre if you ask me,” Ted says.
You have it in front of you and say, “It reads:
Mr. Garnier, Listen carefully! We are a group of individuals that represent (spelled wrong) a small foreign faction. We respect your business (misspelled) but not the country that it serves. At this time, we have your daughter in our possession (misspelled). She is safe and unharmed; if you want to see her again, you must follow our instructions to the letter.
You will withdraw $118,000. Make sure you bring an adequate size attache to the bank. I will call you between 8 and 10 am tomorrow to instruct you on delivery. The delivery will be exhausting so I advise you to be rested. If we monitor you getting the money early, we might call you early to arrange an earlier delivery of the money and hence an earlier pickup of your daughter.
Any deviation of my instructions will result in the immediate execution of your daughter. You will also be denier her remains for burial. The two gentlemen watching over your daughter do not particularly like you, so I advise you not to provoke them. Speaking to anyone about your situation, such as Police, F.B. I. , etc., will result in your daughter being beheaded. If we catch you talking to a stray dog, she dies. If you alert bank authorities, she dies. If the money is marked or tampered with, she dies. You will be scanned for electronic devices and if any are found, she dies. You can try to deceive us but be warned we are familiar with Law enforcement countermeasures and tactics. You stand a 99% chance of killing your daughter if you try to outsmart us. Follow our instructions and you stand a 100% chance of getting her back. You and your family are under constant scrutiny (again misspelled) as well as the authorities. Don't try to grow a brain Jean-Claude. Don't underestimate us, Jean-Claude. Use that good, southern common sense of yours. It's up to you now Jean-Claude! Victory! S.B.T.C.
“There are just so many things that are weird about this note,” you state, then continue, “First, it seems like it was written by someone that lived through the time of Patty Hearst and the SLA, the Chicago Seven, and all that. Like what is SBTC?”
“And what is ‘respects the victim’s business’ and ‘get some sleep’? Or ‘be rested’? What kidnapper says that? It is the middle of the night. They would already be asleep.” Ted sighs.
“It also seems like the misspellings are easy words but then they correctly spelled words like ‘adequate,’ ‘attaché,” and ‘hence.’ Hence!” you say, laughing.
“And,” you continue, “the talking to a stray dog, she dies, alert the bank, she dies. Along with don’t grow a brain. Doesn’t that sound like it is straight from the movies?”
“Yeah, it does. And the note implies ‘they’ are a group by saying ‘we’ but then the writer forgets the ruse and writes an ‘I’ and ‘my.’”
Then Ted adds, “The $118,000 is strange. Not one million, not 100,000. I checked and the $118,000 is exactly Jean-Claude’s recent bonus.”
Turning the pages, you say, “The whole ransom note is three pages. I checked with a friend at the FBI, and they think this is the longest ransom note on a kidnapping case in history.”
“What does Documents say?” Ted asks.
“Ah, yes. Documents. They say the note would take about 20 minutes to write. But they also say, unfortunately, that the broad fiber-tip pen distorts the minute details. And that they can eliminate everyone else in this case but not Mrs. Garnier.”
“Yeah,” Ted says, “but can you imagine the pressure a document guy would be under to ID someone in this type of case? I know I wouldn’t want to do it. He is wise to just report that it is very similar, and they can’t eliminate her.”
“Here is the postmortem report,” you say. “It’s nine pages long.” Flipping through the various pages, you continue, “A lot of doctor speak, but it comes down to strangulation as the cause of death. There was that ‘garrote’ around her neck. There is a large hemorrhage on the scalp, a blow that caused a brain injury to the head that most likely occurred before strangulation or death.
Ted says, “Here on page seven, it says, ‘small intestine contains fragmented pieces of fruit material which may represent fragments of pineapple.’
“There is one strange line on page nine that I am not sure what it means,” you say. “It says, ‘focal interstitial chronic inflammation.’”
“Looking at the evidence reports,” Ted says, doodling on them with a pencil, “I see that they found the other part to the broken paintbrush used for the garrote in a plastic craft tote box near the wine cellar.
“And they found some fibers similar to Sylvie’s clothes on the tape that was supposedly over her mouth. It says the fibers on the tape are consistent with her fleece jacket.”
“I also see here in the report that upon examining the tape, they got the impression that it was put on the victim after death. They are not sure, but it looks like it.” You say, “I’ve got a report here. I don’t know how much credence to put into these neighbor interviews, but one neighbor remembers seeing lights on during the night and a light off in the front room that is usually on all night.”
“Another neighbor remembers hearing a scream at about two a.m.”
“You know,” Ted says, “according to dispatch, only four minutes elapsed from the 911 call to police arrival, and yet the parents were both dressed.”
You add, “Yeah, they were fully dressed in what looks like something they wore the night before, at that. Why lie about getting dressed in the morning?”
Ted adds, “Then there is the blanket that was in the dryer. Who knew where that was? And wrapped around her just like a mother would do.”
You respond, “And why lie about the pineapple thing? Why lie about what she was wearing when she went to bed?”
“The staging here is quite weird. It is like staging within staging,” Ted says.
“Listen,” you continue, “if you are in the middle of a kidnapping, you don’t write a three-page 20-minute ransom note while you are in the house. You don’t leave the note by the back stairs. You don’t kill the victim in the house. And you don’t fake or stage an elaborate kidnapping to disguise a murder.”
“That’s the way I see it,” Ted agrees. “If you accept that there has been a lot of staging, staging always means misdirection, and you have to accept there has been lying, like lying about putting her right to bed. Lying is always done by the guilty, so it must be someone in the family who committed the murder. No intruder would stage the suitcase, the garotte, the tape, the long ransom note, et cetera.”
“That’s right. It’s not only staging, but also evidence fabrication. It is unlikely the craft-made garotte is what caused the strangulation. It was fabricated to account for it. The note, the tape, the luggage, the cord—all fabricated.”
After a long pause, Ted says, “Well, we have hashed out the evidence. Overall, what do you think?”
“Here is what I think,” you say. “This is speculation, but I think the children didn’t go right to bed and were not asleep when they got home. Bobby was given some pineapple and milk. For some reason, the little girl took the bowl from him and ate some of his pineapple. He got angry and hit her, perhaps with the flashlight, or maybe she was pushed against the sink. She didn’t die right then but maybe went into convulsions caused by the brain injury. In order to get her to be quiet and stop squirming, he strangled her, and she died. He probably did not intend to go that far. Then the parents came in and saw the situation. Like I say, speculation.”
“But to blame it on an intruder they used the rest of the night to create this ruse. They were in a state of panic knowing that they had just lost their daughter and did not want to also lose their son. They put the suitcase under the window, made the garotte from Sylvie’s craft supplies to account for the strangulation, placed her in that semi-hidden wine cellar, and lightly tied her hands. They got the blanket out of the dryer, and for some reason placed a nightgown next to her. Then they sat down and used the notepad and pen at the desk to write the long ransom note. Including the exact amount of the bonus.
“Then, after everything was prepared, things were put back in their places like the pad and pen, except they forgot about Bobby’s Swiss Army knife and the flashlight. After perhaps even disposing of a couple of items like the tape and the cord, Sylvie called 911. Because they never undressed, they were fully dressed when the first officer arrived four minutes later.
“They would not let anyone talk to Bobby, for good reason. When no one found the victim after a few hours, Jean-Claude couldn’t stand it any longer. So, he went down into the basement and brought the victim upstairs.”
“I’ve got one for you,” Ted says. “What about the DNA they found on the underwear?”
“Sylvie said it was a brand-new package. It’s not in fluid so it is most likely touch DNA. I’m betting it would match a packager in a factory somewhere. If they never get into the system, we may never know whose DNA it is.”
“Yeah, but it’s DNA. People are going to pay a lot of attention to that,” Ted reminds you.
“I get it,” you say. “You got to look at this from a total perspective. If we have a case where you have a murder, a gun is at the scene, a bullet matches the gun, a casing matches the gun, a suspect owns that gun, he is seen that day with the gun, the suspect hated the dead guy. So, all the evidence we have points to that guy. And let’s say they discover foreign DNA on the gun, Should you throw out all your evidence and not prosecute the guy because of the foreign DNA? No. Here, once you recognize the staging and all the things meant to misdirect us actually came from right there in the house—the flashlight, the garrote, the blanket, the note, the pens and pads, even the luggage are all from within. Nothing really points to the outside. Except the DNA.”
“You can’t let one thing overrule everything else.”
“Right you are. But I know this is going to be hard for the DA to come to grips with,” you say. “We’ve got this prominent family who just lost their daughter, and perhaps their son committed the crime. To what end will charging the young boy accomplish? He’s a minor, so we know how that goes. If you charge the parents for their part, that would look really bad politically because they just lost their daughter. To what end would that bring justice for the murder?”
“I sure wouldn’t want to be in the DA’s shoes,” Ted adds with a finality.