In theory, one could say that someone put a gun to his head and made him drive up there, but that beer bottle between his legs was interesting. The family was convinced somebody put that bottle there.
“What guy is going to think of that?” I said. “Especially after Brian’s head has already been blown off, and there’s a lot of blood all over the place? Would someone really crawl across the seat to put a bottle between his legs?”
Probably not. Chances were that Brian was drinking beer from that bottle. Did somebody abduct him at gunpoint, force him to drive into the mountains, and then give him a beer? We may see it happen in a Western, where a condemned man is given a final smoke, but it didn’t seem terribly likely for somebody who was about to be murdered in cold blood.
Nobody had a real, credible motive for killing Brian Lewis, not even for a rage-induced homicide, where somebody got mad and did something stupid. That would have happened in Brian’s home, where he kept the gun. Or if they went out for any reason, maybe he’d be shot somewhere nearby and the killer would have thrown his body into a ditch or left him in the car where he shot him. But to go up to the mountains to shoot him seems premeditated. And yet, if it was premeditated, why did Brian drive up there and have a beer?
None of the nonsuicide theories made sense.
There were two interesting pieces of evidence, one of which convinced me that Brian probably wasn’t killed by somebody else. The other one, however, made me wonder if somebody was there with Brian.
There was some flesh from the shotgun blast found on the passenger’s seat. There were three pieces where a person would be sitting, so I had to think, if somebody was sitting there and they shot him, how did these three pieces of flesh end up on that seat? That evidence couldn’t be there if something blocked it. Therefore, nothing blocked it. There was nobody shooting Brian from the front seat because then the flesh couldn’t have landed there.
Also missing was a transfer pattern-smears-in the car. When something like this happens, we’ll see smears from a person’s hand or some other part of the body that might have had blood on it. As they moved around in the car, opening and closing car doors, we would see evidence. Except for one location on the side of the driver’s seat by the door, I didn’t see any of that, either. Even that blood pattern was a bit questionable as it was not clear from the photo if spatter just landed in such a position or it was transferred from someone’s hands. Sometimes photos just aren’t totally clear, and they aren’t three-dimensional, so some determinations simply can’t be made.
It still seemed like Brian was alone in the car.
The passenger door was locked, too. If you blew somebody’s brains out, it would take a lot of thought to lock the passenger door behind you. We would have a very clever killer if that were true.
The odd piece of evidence that messed up everybody’s confidence in suicide was a little piece of flesh discovered in the driver’s doorjamb. How did that happen? In the photos of the car taken when Brian was found, the doors were closed. But if the doors were closed when Brian shot himself, how did the flesh get in the doorjamb? Somebody had to have disturbed the scene! There had to be somebody else involved! Brian couldn’t have killed himself and then opened the door! Either the door was open when he got shot and the flesh went there and then the door slammed shut, or somebody innocently opened the door, not yet seeing that the front of Brian’s face was blown off because his head was hanging down. When they pushed his head back toward the seat, they were startled and horrified-“Oh my God!”-and during that moment some flesh flew backward and went into the doorjamb. They slammed the door and ran.
Oh, but then we have the wrench thrown into even that theory. That one photo was taken after the boy was removed from the car. Here again we have the problem of not taking photographs properly or not taking enough photographs. A photo should have been taken of that doorjamb and then another a few feet back from the doorjamb and another a few more feet back from the doorjamb. If I see the flesh in all the pictures and Brian’s body in the one that is far enough away to capture his image as well, then I know the flesh was in the door when the police got to the scene. But all I have is a picture of a doorjamb with flesh on it and I don’t know if the medical technicians bumped Brian’s body against the doorjamb when they removed him from the car. If that happened, then that flesh isn’t part of the crime scene.
So Brian was likely alone at the crime scene. If somebody else actually was there, he or she still didn’t kill Brian.
There were subsequent indications that Brian was more emotionally upset with his life than his family knew or could admit. There were also indications of depression and possible suicidal ideation.
Brian could and did commit suicide, but the family still demanded an official investigation. The police were right about the manner of death, but they still should have taken better photographs, done basic evidence analysis, and interviewed Brian’s friends. Because they didn’t, the family won’t stop hounding them; I bet now, looking back, they realize that it would have been a little extra work to double-check the manner of death but it would have saved them a whole lot of grief.
THE AVERAGE PERSON thinks that the scientific method is strictly performing chemical tests in a lab. We can, of course, scientifically prove DNA and fiber matches. But using the scientific method in criminal profiling is all about being methodical about the analysis, and coming up with a theory and then deliberately trying to strike it down. I spend a great deal of time and energy generating potentially valid explanations for murder-or suicide-and then knocking those very theories out until I can’t come up with any other explanation but the last one standing.
That’s what I did with the shotgun in the Brian Lewis case.
Could Brian shoot himself from the driver’s seat? Could somebody do it from the backseat, either the left or right side, or the passenger seat? There were four inside positions. And could someone shoot him from the outside?
I went to each one of the positions with the gun, trying to prove that it could or could not be done, and as I eliminated each of the possibilities, I was left with only two.
One was that Brian shot the gun himself while sitting in the driver’s seat. The other possibility was that someone else shot Brian from the passenger side.
The flesh on the passenger seat was a piece of scientific evidence that ruled out anyone sitting in that seat.
This was the case that showed me that I had to be able to rule everything out. If I had just looked at the pictures, I might not have figured out the same things that I did with the shotgun in hand.
CHAPTER 14.BOB AND CHRISTINE:DOUBLE MURDER
The Crimes: Double homicide
The Victims: Christine Landon and Bob Dickinson
Location: Midwest
Original Theory: Pedophile committed aggravated murder
I returned to the Midwest. This town was so small that when I asked for a good place to eat, I was told to go back to wherever I came from.
The sheriff’s office was in the nearest “big” town. The sheriff had the same look on his face as the detective in the Hoover murder.
“Don’t tell me,” I guessed. “Problems with the case files?”
The sheriff was disgusted. “The judge won’t release them.”