UNSPEAKABLE VIOLENCE
The Brutal Murder of Genore Guillory
By Chuck Hustmyre
Smashswords Edition
Copyright © 2010 by Chuck Hustmyre
For more information visit www.chuckhustmyre.com
(Originally published as "An Act of Kindness" by Penguin.)
Cover by Jeff Hay.
For more information visit www.chuckhustmyre.com.
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Chapter 1
Clinton, Louisiana, Monday, June 26, 2000, 10:25 a.m.
The smell got stronger as Deputy Ronald Johnson pushed deeper into the house. It washed over him and turned his stomach. It choked him. Johnson knew what it was. He had smelled it once before, on a suicide call. It was a smell you never forgot. It was the smell of decaying human flesh. It was the smell of death.
Johnson willed himself to breathe more shallowly. With his pistol in one hand and his flashlight in the other, he crept across the kitchen.
"Sheriff's Department," he called out. "Is anyone home?"
A sudden noise came from upstairs. Fast thumping, like someone running. Johnson squeezed the grip of his service pistol and scanned the open stairwell. The sound got closer. Something moved at the top of the stairs. Johnson aimed his flashlight and his gun. A big black and white dog, a dalmatian, rushed down the stairs. Johnson tensed, his finger on the trigger. Outside, a vicious chow had lunged at Johnson on his way into the house. He'd only gotten past it because the chow had been tied up. Now this dog was charging right at him.
But instead of attacking, the dalmatian brushed past him with barely a glance. It, too, was scared.
Johnson was shaken. He sucked in the foul air to steady his nerves. Something was definitely wrong in this house. He could feel it.
The portable police radio on Johnson's gun belt crackled to life. The tinny voice of the Sheriff's Department dispatcher called to him. "Dispatch to E-F 38, can you read me?"
Johnson tugged the radio from his belt. He keyed the microphone and tried to respond, but the signal wasn't strong enough. The dispatcher couldn't hear him.
"E-F 38?" she called again. "Can you hear me? Is everything all right?"
From Johnson's perspective, things were definitely not all right. He replaced his radio on his gun belt. Just past the kitchen was a short hallway and an open door that led to another part of the house. Johnson inched into the hall.
In the tomb-like silence of the house, the chatter on the police radio was a welcomed distraction. A couple of other patrol deputies told the dispatcher they would head toward the house on Oakwood Lane and check on Deputy Johnson.
In the hallway, Johnson peeked around the edge of the open door. He saw a bedroom. A four-poster, queen-sized bed stood against the far wall, the bed covers piled together on top of the mattress. A small table had been knocked over and sat upended in the middle of the floor. From inside the room the smell came at Johnson hard. He felt sick, like he was going to throw up. He fought past it and stepped through the door.
Inside the bedroom, the walls were splashed with blood. A window that looked out onto the yard had a bullet hole through it. Another bullet had punched through the wall above the bed, and a third had pierced the headboard. The body of woman lay on the floor beside the bed. She was mostly naked, bloated, disfigured. Blood was everywhere.
Johnson refused to believe what he was seeing. The body looked like a mannequin. It's not real, Johnson thought. He took another step closer. The woman lay on her back near the far corner of the room, her swollen body covered only by a green nightshirt that had been pushed up to her breasts. Her head was tilted to the left, and her tangle of black hair only partially masked a face that had been beaten nearly flat.
She wasn't a mannequin. She was real. And she was as dead as dead can get.
Deputy Johnson bolted from the house.
Outside, the sun was shinning. It was a beautiful early summer morning.
In the driveway, Johnson braced a hand against the fender of his Jeep Cherokee. He bent over and retched. From the police radio mounted inside the Jeep, Johnson heard the nearly frantic voice of the dispatcher calling for him. "E-F 38, E-F 38, I need you to respond."
Johnson opened the driver-side door and grabbed the microphone, but he was so overcome with emotion that he couldn't speak.
Several minutes passed before Johnson pulled himself together enough to find his voice.
When he did, he keyed the microphone and called for the dispatcher. Still short of breath, Johnson gasped out, "I have a signal 29 (dead body) out here. I need you to notify the detectives and E-F one."
Chapter 2
East Feliciana Parish Sheriff's Detectives Don McKey and Drew Thompson arrived at the house on Oakwood Lane at 10:50 a.m.
The home where Deputy Ronald Johnson had discovered the mutilated body was a two-story Acadian style, with dark siding and a big front porch. It sat at the end of a long driveway on several acres of semi-wooded property. Beside the house stood an attached carport stacked with fifty-pound sacks of dog food and baled hay. Twenty yards behind the house was a cement slab surrounded by a chain-link fence. It was a kennel for twenty-five, maybe thirty dogs, all of them barking. Other than the sheriff's cars, two Toyotas were parked near the house. One was a small pickup truck, the other a Camry.
The address was 11856 Oakwood Lane. It was about five miles northeast of the town of Clinton and less than ten miles south of the Mississippi state line. Oakwood Lane was a dead end gravel road no more than a mile long. It ran off of Rist Road, a dirt road to nowhere that had been cut between two backwoods state highways. Only a few residences dotted the landscape along either side of Oakwood Lane. The dark side of the moon was more out of the way, but just barely.
The dispatcher told McKey that a State Police forensic team and the deputy coroner were on the way. The two detectives started their initial crime scene survey. They moved from outside to inside, from farther out to closer in.
The purpose of the survey was to get an overview of the crime scene, to look at the big picture prior to getting into the detailed, inch-by-inch examination and before beginning the process of collecting evidence.
After nearly a dozen years with the Sheriff's Department, the last three as a detective, McKey knew that processing a crime scene, particularly a murder scene, was a time consuming and resource draining operation; and for a small department like East Feliciana's, with only eight patrol deputies and two detectives, it could be a ball buster.
Even with State Police help, the job of securing and processing the crime scene and of taking witness statements was going to take all day and probably all night. If something else broke loose in another part of the parish, if calls for service started backing up and drawing the patrol deputies away, if the State Police got called to another scene, it would stretch McKey's resources too thin and affect the quality of the work he wanted done on Oakwood Lane.
McKey had heard about what was waiting for him inside the house, and from what he'd been told it sounded like this killer didn't just need to be caught, he needed to be stopped.
The extreme violence suggested that whoever had done it wasn't squeamish. That could mean one of two things: either the killer was enraged or else he got off on the violence. Maybe both. An enraged killer was one thing. Someone or something could push a person to the edge of sanity, could drive him to commit a heinous act of murder, but typically after that it was over. The killer retreated back into the real world. Thinking about what he'd done, he probably felt some remorse. That was someone who needed to be caught.
But a killer who got off on the act of killing, who had acquired a taste for blood, a taste for terror, who maybe even got some sexual satisfaction out of it and felt no remorse about what he'd done, that was someone you had to really worry about. That was someone likely to kill again. That was someone who needed to be stopped.
The initial crime scene survey would help McKey focus on what was most important and decide what needed to be done first. The killer's actions would dictate what had to be done. They weren't going to dig up the yard or dismantle the house unless they had to. McKey needed to find out where the killer had been and what the killer had touched.
He and Thompson also needed to pry open the victim's life and find out who she was and what she had been like. They needed to know who might have been mad at her and who might have profited from her death. Anger and greed were the two most common motives for murder.
The survey of the outside of the house went quickly. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed. There were no obvious blood trails, tire impressions, or footprints. From all appearances it looked to McKey as though the crime scene was contained within the confines of the house. That was good. Houses maintained evidence a lot better than the outdoors. It didn't rain inside houses, the wind didn't blow, wild creatures didn't munch on corpses.
As McKey and his partner stepped toward the side door that connected the carport and the house, a tan chow, a vicious bundle of hair and teeth, lunged at them from under the short set of wooden steps that led up to the house. The detectives jumped back. Instinctively, McKey reached for his pistol. A rope looped around the dog's neck and tied to the near step railing jerked the chow to a sudden stop. McKey asked a uniformed deputy to pull the rope tight while he and Thompson skirted around the dog and slipped into the house.
Inside, the two sheriff's detectives found a comfortable den filled with bookshelves and reproduction antique furniture and a hardwood floor covered with rugs. A glass enclosed, six-foot display case stood just inside and to the right of the door. Arranged on its shelves were a dozen collectible dolls in elaborate dresses. Figurines of horses and more dolls adorned the rest of the den. The room was neat. Everything seemed to be in its place. It had a homey, lived-in feel.
Except for the dried blood.
McKey found the first traces of it on the threshold. There was more on the door. A faint blood trail ran along the left side of the den, past the front door and toward the kitchen. The two detectives followed it. On the inside of the front door they found more blood. The door handle, an old-fashioned brass lever, was splattered with it. A set of keys hanging from the deadbolt had also been smeared with blood.
Neither door showed signs of forced entry. The killer had likely gained access to the house through an unlocked door or window or been let in.
In the kitchen, an antique-style wooden box phone hung on the wall beside the refrigerator. The handset dangled by its chord almost to the floor. Below the kitchen counter, a drawer had been left open. The utensil tray inside was smeared with blood. A couple of the dinner knives were out of place, their ceramic handles spotted with more blood. On the countertop was a reddish-brown smudge.
McKey nearly gagged on the fetid odor that washed over him in the kitchen. He knew the smell. There was no mistaking it. He also knew what was waiting for him in the next room.
The bedroom was a wreck. Blood-splattered walls, an upended table, overturned houseplants, bullet-riddled surfaces, a mangled lamp on the floor, its shattered base lying beside the body--they told the story of what had happened in that room. There had been a fight, a hell of a fight, and the lady lying naked on the floor had lost. But she had fought hard.
The body was that of a middle-aged black woman. She lay on her back, her torso angled toward the back right corner of the room, her bare feet aimed at the door. Her green nightshirt had been pushed up to her chest. She was naked from the breasts down. Her legs were splayed apart, revealing a wide patch of dark pubic hair and the outer labia of her vagina. Dark smears covered the insides of her thighs and milky fluid drained from her crotch. Her head lay twisted over her left shoulder at an unnatural angle, and her face, partly obscured by mop of black hair, had been crushed. Bloody rips in her skin, that McKey recognized as stab wounds and bullet holes, dotted the woman's body.
The detectives threaded their way around the room. Other than the broken lamp base next to the victim's head, there were no obvious murder weapons--no guns, no knives, no blunt objects.
Based on the bloating and the smell, McKey guessed it had been at least a couple of days since she'd been killed.
The deputy coroner arrived at 12:15 p.m. The crime lab techs pulled up at 12:55. McKey and Thompson started working the crime scene.
Everything indicated that the woman lying dead on the floor of the master bedroom was the owner of the house, Jane Nora Guillory. Positive ID would come when a family member identified the body, but there was certainly enough information lying around--mail addressed to her, bills in her name, one of the cars outside registered to her--for McKey to make an educated guess as to the identity of the victim.
If it was her, Jane Nora Guillory had been forty-two years old. She had lived at 11856 Oakwood Lane for several years. The first few with her boyfriend, Eddie Dixon. In October 1998, Eddie died in a car crash on his way home from the overnight shift at the Georgia-Pacific paper mill in St. Francisville in neighboring West Feliciana Parish. Since then Genore had lived alone. She was an animal lover, especially dogs. That was obvious from the twenty-five or so dogs kenneled in the backyard. She also liked horses. She had four of them stabled on her property and figurines of horses scattered throughout the house.
McKey talked to Deputy Ronald Johnson. He'd responded to the house on Oakwood to do a welfare check. Jane Nora Guillory's co-workers, they called her Genore, had phoned the Sheriff's Department at 10:00. Genore hadn't shown up for work and they couldn't get through to her by telephone. The line had been busy, according to what one of the co-workers, Ann Fendick, told the dispatcher. Fendick said she checked with the telephone company, and the operator had told her that there was no activity on the line. It was either out of service or off the hook.
The dispatcher sent Deputy Johnson to the house to check on Ms. Guillory. Johnson told McKey that he had first pulled up to the mobile home across the street, thinking that was the right address. None of the mailboxes had numbers on them. The guy who lived there pointed out Ms. Guillory's house. Johnson drove across the street and pulled into the driveway of 11856. He'd blown his horn but got no answer. Then he tooted his siren, but still no one came out. The side door had been open so he walked into the house. When he found the body in the bedroom, he got out of the house as quickly as he could and notified the dispatcher.
That's all he knew.
McKey found no bullet casings in the bedroom or anywhere else in the house. From the looks of the victim, she'd been shot at least three times, maybe more. There were four additional bullet holes in the room: one in the headboard, one in the wall, one lodged in a baseboard, and one through the window. All small caliber. At least seven shots fired but no shells. That suggested to McKey that a revolver had been used, but most revolvers held only five or six shots.
Did the killer reload? If so, what happened to the empty shells? Did he pick up his brass? In the old days, when cops carried revolvers, they'd been trained to dump the empty brass in their hands and shove it into their pockets.
In addition to the gunshots, Ms. Guillory--if it was indeed her lying on the floor--had suffered several stab wounds. They dotted the left side of her chest and abdomen. She also had what appeared to be defensive scraping and bruising on her arms and legs.
McKey tried to make sense of the bedroom, to bring some semblance of order to the chaos. Blood was everywhere. The bed was unmade. The rest of the house was neat. Ms. Guillory had probably been the type of person who made her bed every day. She had been wearing a nightshirt. The attack had probably come late at night or early in the morning.
The chord from the shattered lamp was stretched taut and still plugged into a wall outlet behind the nightstand. McKey guessed the killer had jerked the lamp off the nightstand and smashed it down on top of the victim. The damage to her face and head, however, looked too severe to have been done with just the lamp. Another blunt object must have been used.
Shot, stabbed, and beaten. McKey was looking for at least three weapons.
A digital clock lay on the floor, its red numbers flashing. Sometime after the murder, the power had gone out.
While McKey and Thompson tried to read tea leaves in the bedroom, Adam Becnel, a forensic scientist with the Louisiana State Police crime lab in Baton Rouge was scouring the crime scene picking up trace evidence. He swabbed blood from the front and side doors. He bagged the contents of the utensil drawer and the telephone handset. He cut out blood-splattered pieces of carpet and upholstery. He stuffed household documents into evidence envelopes and bagged a hat to preserve any strands of hair that might be inside it. He unscrewed the plate from the bedroom light switch, took a pantyhose package with a bloody fingerprint on it, collected the victim's jewelry box because it showed traces of blood on the lid, and picked up every knife he could find. He also dusted nearly every flat surface in the house for fingerprints.
In the bedroom, McKey eyed a pillow lying on the ground. Like nearly everything else in the room, it was stained with blood. But there was something else about it that attracted his attention. He saw a pattern. Like one of those pictures you have to stare at for a while before you see the hidden images. The pillow had a tread pattern. A tread pattern from a shoe. It was right there on the pillowcase. Sometime during the fight the pillow was knocked to the floor, the floor was covered in blood, the killer got blood on the bottom of his shoes, the killer stepped on the pillow, and left behind an evidentiary gold mine--a bloody shoeprint.
McKey called Adam Becnel over. Wearing surgical gloves, the forensic scientist slipped the pillowcase off of the pillow and cut out the shoeprint. Then he bagged the cut out tread mark and the rest of the blood-spattered pillowcase as separate pieces of evidence.
Upstairs was clean, just a bedroom and a bathroom. No blood, no sign of a struggle, no sign anyone had been there.
Chapter 3
By early afternoon, one of Genore's co-workers showed up. Carl Chenevert had made the one-hour drive from his office as soon as he learned from the East Feliciana Sheriff's Department that something was wrong at Genore's house.
Chenevert had worked with Genore at the Blue Cross-Blue Shield insurance company in Baton Rouge for eleven years. For the first several years their desks had been three feet apart. When the company moved into another building a few years back, Genore and Chenevert had been assigned offices on different floors. He went to the third floor; she went to the second, but they still saw each other every day.
A big man with a hairline that had retreated all the way back to the crown of his head, Chenevert considered himself a close friend of Genore's. At work she confided in him about personal problems, particularly relationship issues, most of which, at least recently, had concerned a man who had been hounding Genore for a date for the last several months.
By the time Chenevert arrived, Detective McKey had already posted Deputy Ronald Johnson at the end of the driveway. He was to keep everyone off the property. Although McKey was fairly certain that the crime scene and any useful evidence was contained inside the house, he didn't want to take the chance that a curious neighbor or co-worker, or even an overzealous law enforcement officer, would trample something important.
Chenevert tried to pry information out of the deputy about what had happened, but Johnson kept quiet. Finding the body inside the house had shaken him badly, and he had no clear idea who was and who was not a suspect. Like most good cops, Deputy Johnson considered almost everyone a suspect until proven otherwise.
After thirty minutes of standing at the end of the driveway, Chenevert saw a couple of Genore's neighbors walk over. Phillip and Amy Skipper. Chenevert had been to Genore's house a few times and had met the Skippers before. They lived with their son--a toddler, still in diapers--and a teenage stepson, named John, in a trailer across the street. Chenevert noticed that Amy was pregnant.
At work, Genore had often talked about her neighbors. Both Phillip and Amy did odd jobs for Genore around her house, more so since Eddie had died. Genore helped the young couple out a lot with money and gifts for their son. She had even paid for a party at a pizza joint in the nearby town of Denham Springs, just south of Clinton in neighboring Livingston Parish. When the Skippers first moved in across the street, Phillip and Amy had been living in a dilapidated trailer. After she got to know them better, Genore lent the couple the money to buy a much newer mobile home. The two women talked on the telephone at least once a day while Genore was at work, sometimes two or three times a day.
Amy looked devastated at the news she heard when she and Phillip walked over from their trailer: Barring some miracle of mistaken identity, Genore Guillory was dead.
A half hour later, a thin nervous woman walked to Genore's house from the Skippers' trailer. She joined Phillip and Amy, who'd been standing with Chenevert at end of the driveway. She introduced herself as Phillip's mother, Isabella Skipper. The four of them stood together, talking in muted tones about what had likely happened to Genore.
Isabella Skipper said she'd spent Sunday night with her son and daughter-in-law. She mentioned having heard Genore's dogs barking a lot the previous night. They'd woken her up sometime around two o'clock in the morning. Other than that she hadn't heard or seen anything suspicious.
Amy Skipper said she'd been home all weekend, and, like her mother-in-law, she hadn't heard or seen anything out of the ordinary.
Phillip said he had been out of town most of the day Saturday, helping a friend move, but had gotten back home Saturday night. He had not noticed anything unusual. Phillip said he'd been helping Miss G a lot, especially since Eddie Dixon had died, feeding the dogs and horses and mowing the grass. He'd never known Miss G to have an enemy or to say a bad word about anyone. Only once had there ever been anything even close to trouble at her house. When some male friend of hers wouldn't leave, Miss G--that's how Phillip referred to Genore--called Phillip for help and he came over and escorted the man off of her property.
Carl Chenevert had never known Genore to have a problem with anyone. "She never met a stranger," he later said. "Anybody she would meet, she treated them just like they were a family member."
***
Later that afternoon, Genore's family arrived at her house. It started to rain. Don McKey pulled Deputy Johnson in from his post at the end of the driveway and let Genore's family, friends, and neighbors huddle under the carport. Having them all close at hand would make it easier for McKey and his partner to interview everyone.
McKey pulled Phillip Skipper aside. Did Ms. Guillory have any regular visitors? Did she have a boyfriend? What was his and his wife's relationship to Ms. Guillory? His home was the closest to Ms. Guillory's. Had he seen or heard anything unusual over the weekend?
Skipper was very cooperative and repeated what he'd told Carl Chenevert. Then he added something. He told McKey that his wife had gotten into an argument with Ms. Guillory about a month ago. The Skippers had owned a goat. One day a dog got loose from the kennel behind Genore's house and wandered over to the Skippers' trailer. After spotting the goat, the dog attacked and killed it. Amy got upset. She and Genore exchanged harsh words. They didn't speak for a few weeks, but eventually the two women worked everything out.
Genore had few visitors, Phillip said. She mainly kept to herself. She was gone at least ten hours a day during the week at her job in Baton Rouge and spent her weekends tending to her animals and working on her property. She had a few admirers. A guy named Donald Johnson came by every couple of months and delivered hay for Genore's horses. They'd known each other for a long time, something like ten or fifteen years. He would always stay and chat for a while.
A guy named Tommy Alexander came by sometimes. He had horses, too. Alexander and Genore were friendly, they may have even had something going on, but Phillip had never seen him spend the night.
The guy Phillip had run off of Miss G's property was named George. Phillip couldn't remember if that was his first name or his last name. He knew that George lived somewhere in East Feliciana Parish. Phillip said he couldn't give McKey directions to George's house, he didn't know it well enough, but if the detective wanted him to, he could probably find it for him.
Phillip said his wife used to have a key to Genore's house, but Genore had asked for it back after the two women got into the argument about the goat. Genore also kept a spare key under a seashell in the carport. Later, when McKey picked up the seashell the key was gone.
While they talked, McKey noticed scratches on Phillip Skipper's arms. The detective pointed at them. "Where'd you get those?"
Skipper rubbed the palm of one hand across his arm. "Horsing around with my stepson. We was wrestling in the yard and trading punches."
"What's his name?"
"John Baillio. We call him Little John. He's scratched up, too."
"How old is he?" McKey asked.
"Fifteen."
"Is there anything else you can tell me about Miss Guillory's personal life?" McKey asked. "Besides George, was there anyone else she ever had a problem with?"
"Just one person," Skipper said.
"Who?"
Genore had told Skipper about a guy she was having trouble with, a guy from Baton Rouge who'd been bothering her for a while. Recently, the problem seemed to be getting worse. His name was Steve Williams. He was a Baton Rouge policeman.
***
Carl Chenevert knew a good bit about Steve Williams. Williams was in his mid-40s and lived in Baton Rouge. He was a retired corrections officer and had recently been hired by the Baton Rouge Police Department. Chenevert told McKey that for the last few months Williams had been calling Genore at least twice a day at her office. The calls were like clockwork, the first one at noon, the second one around four p.m.
Genore and Williams sometimes got into loud arguments on the telephone. Genore often asked her co-workers to tell Williams that she wasn't in or that she was busy on another line and couldn't talk. Williams left messages for her all the time.
From what Genore had told Chenevert, Steve Williams' actions and phone calls had reached the point of harassment. Although Genore had known Williams for many years, she was fed up with him. She told Chenevert that she wished Williams would just leave her alone.
According to Chenevert, things with Williams had recently gotten worse. In early May, Genore had invited Williams to stop by her house after he mentioned to her that he was going to be in the area that weekend visiting his mother in St. Francisville, a small town twenty miles west of Clinton on Louisiana Highway 10. Shortly after Williams arrived, however, he and Genore got into an argument about Genore's dogs. Williams said she had too many of them. He thought it was cruel to keep them penned up in a kennel. Genore later told friends at work that inviting Williams to her house had been a mistake.
A couple of weeks later, Williams talked Genore into going out to lunch with him. When Genore got back to the office, she told a friend: "I will never go out to lunch with him again. Steve is crazy. He had his hands all over me."
After their lunch date, Williams showed up unannounced at a barn on U.S. Highway 61 where Genore stabled a couple of her horses. He was wearing military-style pants. Genore later told Chenevert that she didn't see Williams until he was right up on her and that his sudden appearance startled her.
After Genore stopped taking Williams' phone calls at work, she told her co-workers that she'd seen him a couple of times waiting for her in the parking lot when she got off. Chenevert said Genore starting staying late at the office to avoid running into Williams.
"The situation with Steve was pretty tense at the time," one of Genore's co-workers later said.
On Friday, June 23, three days before sheriff's deputies discovered her body, Genore got into a heated argument on the telephone with Williams. She later told Chenevert that Williams said he was going to St. Francisville the next day to do some work around his mother's place and that he planned to stop by Genore's house sometime Saturday.
Around noon Friday, Genore told friends at work that she was taking a half-day of vacation time. She was going home to do some work on a fence. Before she left, Genore told Chenevert that she hoped Steve Williams wouldn't show up that weekend.
It was the last time Chenevert ever spoke to Genore.
Chapter 4
At 6:00 p.m., McKey and Thompson sent the woman's body to Lane Memorial Hospital in Zachary, twenty miles south in East Baton Rouge Parish, for an autopsy. Drew Thompson arrived at the hospital at 7:20. Don McKey got there at 8:45.
Louisiana law requires that an autopsy be performed in the case of any death not attended by a physician. What that means is that anyone who dies outside of a hospital or who is not under the direct care of a doctor has to be cut open.
The autopsy, or post-mortem examination as it's also known, is crucial to a homicide investigation. The word homicide means the killing of a human being. A homicide can be legal or illegal, depending on the circumstances. People kill one another all the time. Sometimes by accident. Sometimes on purpose. Sometimes it's legally excusable. Sometimes it's not.
If a drunk decides to take a nap under your car and you roll over him and crush his head, it's a tragic accident. If someone breaks into your house and tries to rape your 11-year-old daughter and you fire a string of .40-caliber bullets into his chest, it's a justifiable homicide.
The line that separates homicide from murder is occasionally a little hazy, but in most cases it's pretty clear. If you meant to do something, then by definition it wasn't an accident. So if you meant to kill someone and you lacked a legally justifiable reason, then it was murder.
However, in Louisiana, as in every state, not all murders are created equal. There are varying degrees of murder.
In the Louisiana hierarchy of criminal homicide, a.k.a. murder, the act of manslaughter occupies the lowest rung. (In a case in which death is caused by accident but happens as a result of sheer stupidity or recklessness on the part of the killer, the perpetrator is usually charged with negligent homicide, known as involuntary manslaughter in some states.) The crime of manslaughter is loosely defined as murder for a reason. Someone does something that would enrage an average person to the point that he or she loses control and takes a human life.
The key phrase in the manslaughter statute is "an average person." Whatever it is that the troublemaker did that led to his or her death must be of sufficient seriousness that it would make an average person so mad and so unable to control himself that he took a human life. There is also a time element. The killing must be close enough in time to the event that an average person would not have had time to regain control of his emotions or to cool off.
If you kill your best friend when you catch him in bed with your wife, if you kill your neighbor immediately after finding out he beat your son senseless and put him in the hospital, it's manslaughter. If you wait a week, or a month, or a year, it's not manslaughter anymore, it's murder.
Nor is it manslaughter if the provocation wasn't sufficient. If an average person wouldn't have become so enraged that he lost control of his senses and was driven to kill--you stab your boss to death with a letter opener because he asked you to work late--it's not manslaughter, it's murder.
Manslaughter also covers the unintentional killing of a person during the commission of certain nonviolent crimes--both felony and misdemeanor. You grab a handful of cash from the open register of a store and run off with the store manager in hot pursuit, but during the chase he dies after falling and cracking his head on the pavement. You didn't mean to kill him, but he died as a result of your crime. It's manslaughter.
In Louisiana, manslaughter is punishable by up to forty years in prison.
Second-degree murder is your average, run-of-the-mill killing. Somebody pisses you off and you kill him. There was no reasonable provocation as in a case of manslaughter. You're shooting dice with a friend, sharing a bottle of Mad Dog. He drains the last quarter of the bottle in a single gulp. You pull out your Lorcin .380 and punch a couple of holes in his chest. Second-degree murder carries a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole.
Then there's the top rung of the hierarchy of criminal homicide, first-degree murder. In Louisiana, the charge of first-degree murder is reserved for that special brand of killer who, through stupidity, bad luck, or just a gutful of evil, kills a policeman, kills more than one person, kills a child, is a contract killer, or kills someone in what would normally be considered second-degree murder but does so while committing a violent felony such as armed robbery, burglary, rape, or kidnapping. The punishment for first-degree murder is left up to a jury, but includes only two options: death by lethal injection or life in prison without parole.
The key to any successful murder prosecution is the establishment of proof beyond a reasonable doubt that a specific person or persons caused the death of the victim. To do that, a prosecutor needs to know the answers to two questions: How did the victim die? And who killed the victim?
Law enforcement answers the second question. Science answers the first.
Enter the autopsy. The prosecution can't prove murder unless they can prove how the victim died. Expressed another way, to prove murder means to eliminate the possibility that death came as a result of natural or accidental causes.
The post-mortem examination has a single purpose: to determine the cause of death.
***
The term autopsy comes from the Greek word autopsia and means to see for oneself. Italian physician Giovanni Battista Morgagni first catalogued autopsy procedures in 1769 in his classic book The Seats and Causes of Diseases Investigated by Anatomy.
Sometimes cause of death is easy to determine. A shotgun blast to the head of a person who is otherwise healthy and uninjured doesn't leave a lot of room for doubt as to the reason the victim is lying naked on a stainless steel table in a morgue. But a charred body with a crushed skull found in the collapsed remains of a house fire is a different story. Did the victim die in the fire and then get crushed in the collapse, or did someone bash the victim's head in and then set fire to the house to make the death look accidental. In that case, the presence, or lack thereof, of scorching along the trachea or soot in the lungs means the difference between an accident and a murder.
Because they are always gruesome and often quite bloody, autopsies are usually performed in out of the way corners of hospitals, far from public view. The basement is a popular place for a morgue. The symbolism is hard to miss.
To get a body to a hospital morgue requires subtlety and a bit of discretion. Dead bodies aren't rushed to the hospital in ambulances with lights flashing and sirens wailing. Once the death scene investigation--whether criminal or unexplained--is completed and the detectives release the body, the body snatchers, usually a couple of coroner's men, sometimes assistant medical examiners or funeral home attendants, zip the remains into a clean, black rubber body bag and load it into a vehicle. Most of the time the body travels in an unmarked van, sometimes in a hearse. The trip to the hospital is made with no fanfare. Once there, the body is usually wheeled on a collapsible gurney through a discreet back entrance.
The reason for the discretion is one of faith, but not the religious kind, rather the institutional kind. The dead must be kept hidden so that the public's faith in the institution of medicine is maintained.
No one wants to see the dead hauled from the rear of an ambulance and rolled through the brightly lit entrance of the emergency room. No one wants to see the dead carted out of hospitals. Once the paramedics reach someone, that person is supposed to survive. Once the sick or injured make it to a hospital, they're supposed to get well or be healed. They're not supposed to die.
Death is taboo. Real death--as opposed to the sanitized fictional version portrayed on television and in the movies--is messy and unpleasant. It's also scary. You may escape your taxes, but you won't escape your death.
Because death is messy, because death is unpleasant, because death is scary, people don't want to hear about it, they don't want to talk about it, and they sure as hell don't want to see it. Left in their natural state, one of advancing decomposition and putrefaction, and without the preservative arts of the mortician, the dead are just...gross.
The reason people spend so much time, effort, and money on preserving and clothing the dearly departed is so they don't look so...dead. People want to be deceived. They want the last time they see a deceased friend or loved one to be pleasant. They want the dead to look more...alive.
Because death is taboo, the public demands it be kept hidden. To look death in the face, to actually see the dead in all their horror, is to say, at least on some level, that could be me, or, even worse, that will be me.
Autopsies begin with an exterior examination. The body lies on a stainless steel table. The surface of the table is rimmed and slightly concave and looks something like a one-inch-deep bathtub. The examination table comes equipped with a flexible hose with an attached spray nozzle and a drain to wash away the blood and other bodily fluids.
The corpse is stripped of all clothing and jewelry. Naked, it's weighed and measured and, in the case of a homicide investigation, photographed. The pathologist examines the surface of the deceased inch by inch, noting each mark, scar, and blemish. Exterior injuries and wounds are probed and their exact measurements catalogued. Wounds are photographed. Bullet holes are tracked and their angles calculated. In the case of a homicide, hair and nail clippings are collected for later comparison to suspects. In suspected rape cases, the mouth, genitals, and rectum of female victims--sometime male victims also--are examined for abrasions, tears, lacerations, or the presence of semen or foreign objects.
Then comes the interior examination. To begin the examination, the autopsist uses a scalpel to make the initial opening, called a "Y" cut, along the torso. It's a two-part incision, with the first cut a lateral slice across the top of the chest, just below the collarbone. The blade carves through the muscle until it hits bone. The second cut is linear and runs from the top of the sternum, down the belly, and past the navel to the pubic bone. Once the flesh is peeled back from the ribs and abdomen, the pathologist uses an electric, high-speed circular saw to split the breastbone. The rib cage is pulled apart and the interior of the thorax and abdomen are exposed.
In the case of a homicide victim who's been shot or stabbed in the upper body and whose insides have been ripped apart or punctured, the opened torso can resemble a pool of blood. The circular saw the autopsist uses to cut through the rib cage can sling blood across the examination room.
The internal organs, which sit in the freshly opened corpse like a bowl of Jell-O, are given a detailed examination. Their general condition and any indications of the presence of disease are noted. They are removed and weighed. The contents of the stomach and intestines are extracted and inspected. Tissue and fluid samples are collected from each of the organs for later analysis and vials of blood are drawn for toxicology testing. The completed autopsy report will list the presence and amount by volume of any drugs--legal or illegal--or alcohol.
In many cases, particularly those in which there has been head trauma, the dead person's brain needs to be examined. To get to the brain, the autopsist has to open the skull. To the uninitiated, it's a messy and gruesome process.
It begins with a scalpel slice across the scalp. The cut starts at the bony notch behind one ear and runs laterally across the top of the head to the notch behind the opposite ear. The pathologist then jams his gloved fingers into the front edge of the incision and yanks the face and ears down to the chin.
It's surprising how easily someone's face--without a doubt a human being's most recognizable feature, and the one that serves as a window into the personality, into the person's mood, into someone's very soul--can be torn off. Similarly, the back of the scalp is pulled down and away from the bone, leaving nothing but a bloody, sticky, gooey mess, and what appears to be an almost grinning skull.
Again the high-speed saw. The pathologist makes a circular cut around the circumference of the skull an inch or so above where the top of the ears once reached. A stainless steel pry bar--called a skull chisel--is wedged into the cut and used as a lever to force open the top of the calvarium, the vault-like part of the skull that houses the brain. A quick scalpel incision at the base of the skull severs the brain stem and allows the entire brain to be pulled out.
If the head trauma wasn't too severe, the brain comes out intact, wet and pink and looking like a three-pound ball of compressed hamburger meat. If the trauma was severe, say from a high-velocity bullet that carried with it a pressure wave many times larger than the bullet itself, the brain slides out in a gelatinous ooze that looks remarkably like cranberry dressing. Either way, the pathologist deposits the brain into a steel pan so that it can be measured, weighed, and later dissected.
Chapter 5
McKey and Thompson met Dr. Emil Laga in the morgue at Lane Memorial Hospital for the autopsy. Laga had been a forensic pathologist since 1968 and had performed more than five thousand autopsies.
The first step in the process was to try to get a positive identification before the body was cut up. At 8:00 p.m., Genore Guillory's brother-in-law, Elbert Guillory, an attorney from Opelousas who'd married Genore's sister 20 years before, and who, coincidentally, had the same last name, stepped into the morgue at Lane Memorial. Detective Drew Thompson stood beside him. Elbert Guillory looked at the mutilated face lying before him. The woman's head had been beaten almost beyond recognition. After a few moments, Elbert Guillory nodded. There was no doubt about her identity. As everyone had suspected all day, the body was indeed that of his sister-in-law, Jane Nora "Genore" Guillory.
Dr. Emil Laga began his post-mortem examination immediately after Elbert Guillory made the identification. Detectives Don McKey and Drew Thompson, along with State Police forensic scientist Adam Becnel, were there as witnesses and to collect the evidence.
Dr. Laga started with Genore's green nightshirt. Manufactured by Simply Basic, the nightshirt was a one-size-fits-all. It bore no logos or cleaning labels. Along the front left side of the nightshirt Dr. Laga found five thin holes. The fabric around the holes was covered with dried blood. Embedded in the blood were hard splinters, possibly of bone, and strands of hair. He identified the holes as having been made by a knife or other sharp object.
High on the back right-hand side of the nightshirt, up near the shoulder, was a single small-caliber bullet hole. There were no powder burns around it. To Dr. Laga, that suggested a shot fired from at least a foot away. Shots fired from closer than a foot usually leave traces of burned gunpowder around the edge of the hole.
Dr. Laga removed the nightshirt and handed it to Adam Becnel; then he began his exterior examination of Genore Guillory. Along her front left side, corresponding to the holes in the nightshirt, the pathologist found five stab wounds. They were lined up vertically, each about one to two inches from the next. The stab wounds measured approximately three-quarters of an inch long. When he probed the wounds, Laga found they measured from five to seven inches in depth. The uppermost wound pierced the bottom of the left lung; the three in the middle penetrated the stomach; and the bottom wound sliced through one of the ligaments that connect the liver to the stomach. In Dr. Laga's opinion, none of the stab wounds had been fatal.
Next, he examined the gunshot wounds. One corresponded to the hole in the back of Genore's nightshirt. The bullet had struck the upper right portion of her back and blown apart the joint between her shoulder and upper arm. Another had hit her in the left buttock. One bullet struck her left forearm, and another buried itself in her left wrist. A fifth shot tore completely through the ring finger of Genore's left hand.
Laga recovered four of the five bullets from Genore's body. All of the bullets appeared to McKey and Thompson to be .22 caliber. In the pathologist's opinion, although all five bullet wounds were inflicted while Genore was alive, none of them were the cause of her death.
The most severely damaged part of Genore's body was clearly her head. Laga identified five separate blunt impact injuries to her skull. Later in his report, Dr. Laga described the condition of Genore's head and face as "markedly disfigured, swollen, blood splattered...with blood plastering together curly hair strands and embedded batches of dried grass."
Genore's eye orbits were smashed, her nasal bones shattered, her upper and lower jaws fractured, her front teeth knocked out. Crusty reddish-brown streaks showed where she'd bled from her ears, nose, and mouth. The back of her skull had been crushed.
The killing blow had come from behind. It came at high speed, traveling upward at a thirty-degree angle and from left to right. It struck Genore just behind her left ear and severed her spinal chord. Paralysis was instantaneous. Death was not.
According to Laga's examination, the impact ruptured Genore's brain stem, the mechanism responsible for most of the body's autonomic functions, life-sustaining functions such as respiration and blood pressure. The blow cracked Genore's skull and ripped open the arteries that carried blood to her brain. The hemorrhage inside Genore's head was severe. It was as if a tap had been opened inside her skull.
"There was a massive loss of blood," Dr. Laga later said.
In Genore's stomach and lungs, the pathologist found at least seventy milliliters of blood. Its presence meant that after having her head nearly crushed, Genore was still gasping for air as she tried to swallow the blood that was pouring into her mouth through her shattered sinus cavities. Laga estimated that Genore may have lived for as long as five minutes after being struck in the back of the head.
The blow that landed across the bridge of Genore's nose, one that McKey and Thompson thought had likely come from the lamp base they found broken beside her head, was potentially fatal and may have killed her had she not suffered the one to the base of her skull. But Laga was sure it had been that one, the high-velocity strike to the back of her head, that was the cause of death. "The one behind her left ear killed her," he explained later.
There were indications of rape, but nothing definitive. Although there was no tearing or abrasion of the vaginal walls or inside the rectum, Laga noted in his report what he described as a "white...fluid running out of the vagina."
Genore's fingernails were trimmed off and bagged. Later, technicians at the State Police crime lab would put them in a chemical wash to leech away any skin scrapings that might have been trapped under them. A comparison sample of hair was pulled from her scalp. Oral, vaginal, and rectal swabs were taken. And a combing from her pubic hair as well as pulled hair follicles were collected. Genore's blood was collected in test tubes for toxicology screening and alcohol testing.
Dr. Laga finished his post-mortem examination of the remains of Genore Guillory at 1:30 Tuesday morning. East Feliciana detectives Don McKey and Drew Thompson went back to Clinton. Adam Becnel took the evidence and photographs to the State Police crime lab. Dr. Laga went home. Genore Guillory traveled by hearse to the Owens-Thomas funeral parlor in her hometown of Eunice, Louisiana, in St. Landry Parish, halfway between Baton Rouge and the Texas state line. Two days later, she was laid to rest in St. Mathilda Cemetery in Eunice.
Later his report, Dr. Laga would estimate the time of Genore's death to have been between noon Saturday, June 24, and noon Sunday, June 25. The manner of her death he listed as homicide. The cause of that death, the doctor explained in his report, using the necessarily cold and stilted language of the autopsist, was "multiple trauma, including lethal blunt trauma to head (5 blows), fracturing skull, directly injuring brainstem and causing intracranial subdural hemorrhage (50 ml), in addition to five non-lethal gunshot wounds to left upper/lower extremity and right shoulder, five non-bleeding trunk-penetrating stabwounds..."
The report went on to say that Genore's blood alcohol concentration had been 0.03 grams percent. Enough to indicate she'd had a glass of wine with the partially digested dinner Dr. Laga had found inside her stomach.
***
Tuesday morning, the day after Genore Guillory's body was discovered, Steve Williams, the Baton Rouge police officer who, according to Genore's co-workers had been harassing her, called Genore's office. Linda Cueno answered the call.
Linda had worked next to Genore for eleven years. The two women were close friends. Linda had attended Eddie Dixon's funeral a year and a half before. She had also screened many of Steve Williams' telephone calls for her friend. A week before her death, Genore asked Linda to tell Williams not to call her anymore. When Linda told Williams what Genore had said, that she didn't want to speak to him ever again, he launched into a monologue about what a wonderful woman Genore was and how someday the two of them were going to be married. Linda listened politely then hung up. Later, the two women laughed about it. "That Steve is crazy," Genore said.
On Tuesday, Williams told Linda that he'd heard about Genore's murder on the television news the previous night. He seemed genuinely upset, but Linda didn't feel like talking about it with him. She asked for his telephone number and said she would call him later. Williams refused to give out his number. He said he would call back. Then he hung up.
The next day, Williams called again. This time he asked Linda Cueno for the telephone number for Genore's parents. Linda said she didn't have it nearby. She would have to go to another office to get it. She told Williams that she would call him back with the number. Williams again refused to give her his telephone number. He said he would call her later, and he hung up.
Chapter 6
Wednesday morning, two days after Genore Guillory's body had been discovered, McKey and Thompson were in their cinderblock-walled office in the jail complex. They'd gotten in early and were going over the list of evidence they'd collected and reviewing witness statements. The case was a stone cold whodunit, and on top of that it was a real murder.
In the world of homicide investigation there are misdemeanor murders and there are real murders. There are so-what victims and there are true victims.
A misdemeanor murder always involves a so-what victim. So-what victims are nearly always of the male persuasion. When a so-what victim winds up dead, the cops often classify it, although certainly not officially, as a misdemeanor murder because the victim deserved what he got. He brought death upon himself, he invited it, so the cops reason, because of the poor choices he made in life and because of the lifestyle he engaged in. In the often cynical world of homicide investigation, most dope killings are misdemeanor murders, and a doper who gets whacked is always a so-what victim.
However, just because a case is a misdemeanor murder, at least in the eyes of the investigators, doesn't mean that it isn't going to get worked. After all, cops like to put bad guys in jail, so they'll usually work a misdemeanor murder as hard as they can, but if the physical evidence doesn't pan out and witnesses don't come forth, very few detectives are going to lose much sleep over a dead dope dealer.
But if the victim is a child or a woman, or a man who lived a relatively clean life, then the crime gets bumped up a notch on the priority list. A true victim turns a run-of-the-mill killing into a real murder.
In the mind of nearly every detective, child killers deserve a special place in hell. The murder of a child can transform a cynical, cold-hearted detective into the right hand of God and launch him on a crusade to strike down the wicked.
Most detectives feel the same way, if to a slightly lesser degree, about the murder of a woman. The reason is simple. Law enforcement is a profession dominated by men, mostly conservative men. They look conservative--short hair, maybe a neatly trimmed mustache. They act conservative--most vote Republican. And they think conservative. What that means is, despite the best efforts of modern feminism to stamp out the last traces of that old misogynistic code once known as chivalry, most cops still have a touch of it in them. And that code says that you're not supposed to kill women. So the murder of a woman--even if her old man is a drug dealer or she's been in and old of jail since she was thirteen years old or she's a prostitute or she's a dope fiend--is likely to strike a homicide detective as just plain wrong.
The killing on Oakwood Lane was a real murder, and Genore Guillory was a true victim. From what McKey had pieced together from talking to Ms. Guillory's family and friends, she hadn't done anything to deserve what happened to her. She had a low-key, low-risk lifestyle. She worked hard. She wasn't involved in anything illegal. And she spent most of her spare time taking care of her animals. McKey had to find her killer. He had to put this case down.
About ten o'clock Tuesday morning, McKey called Deputy Ronald Johnson and told him to go back to Oakwood Lane and find Genore's closest neighbor, Phillip Skipper. McKey wanted to talk to him.
When Johnson turned into the Skippers' driveway and pulled his Jeep to a stop in front of their trailer, it had been almost exactly twenty-four hours since he'd pulled into the same driveway the day before. Then he'd been on a welfare call. Now he was helping with a murder investigation. Phillip's wife, Amy, who stood about four feet, ten inches tall and had long dark hair, told Johnson that her husband was across the street at Miss G's house.