The Blood Evidence

The afternoon of March 10, 1983, following my interrogation, police took every garment I had been wearing when I found my mother:

• A long-sleeve plaid shirt;
• A yellow Led Zeppelin T-shirt;
• A pair of brown corduroy pants;
• A pair of blue Pacer brand tennis shoes.

Those four items became the prosecution’s primary physical evidence. Van Nuys SID criminalist Doreen K. Music, asked by Detective Landgren to “EXAMINE CLOTHING FOR BLOOD SPATTERS,” claimed to have identified twenty-seven areas of blood across them — but she used the word “spatters” only once, referring to four specks smaller than two millimeters she said she’d found on my plaid shirt.⁶⁷ At my April 4 hearing Detective Monsue turned all of it into spatter. He agreed the stains on my T-shirt and pants were “BLOOD SPATTERINGS,” testified they came from someone who “STRUCK SOMEBODY,” and told the court the lab had found them “CIRCULAR, UNIFORMLY SHAPED.”⁴⁵¹ Music had reported most of the stains on my pants as “DIFFUSE AND IRREGULAR IN SHAPE,” and every stain on my T-shirt as larger than five millimeters — too large for the blood-spatter category he was invoking.⁵¹ Her own report adds that tests on my socks and undershorts, and on the “UNMARKED AREAS OF ITEMS 16, 17, 18, AND 19” — my shoes, plaid shirt, T-shirt and pants — “WERE NEGATIVE.”⁶⁷ The prosecution’s own bloodstain expert, Ronald Linhart, later examined the clothing microscopically³⁷⁹ and found but a fraction of what Music's report claimed. The record contains eight failures in how that evidence was collected, interpreted, and presented to the jury.

1. Police invented stains that did not exist, and overstated ones that did:

   1. Monsue testified he personally saw blood spatters on my yellow T-shirt, indicating "THIS SHIRT WAS BEING WORN BY SOMEONE THAT STRUCK SOMEBODY, CAUSING BLOOD TO SPATTER IN THE DIRECTION OF THE CLOTHING AND BEING PICKED UP BY THE CLOTHING AS IT SPATTERED. BASED ON THE BLOOD ON THIS PARTICULAR SHIRT, I WOULD HAVE THE INDICATION THAT HE WAS PROBABLY STANDING OVER SOMEONE BECAUSE OF THE AREAS ON THE SHIRT THAT IT’S ON."⁵²

      Ronald Linhart, examining the shirt visually and chemically, found no blood on it.⁵³

      Officer Douglas Johnson, who'd stood guard directly over me in the patrol car after my arrest, saw no blood on me at all.⁵⁵

      Monsue’s own follow-up report says the same: no blood on my plaid shirt, yellow T-shirt or pants⁵⁴ — despite ninety minutes²⁰⁸ across an interrogation table from me.

   2. Monsue testified to spatters on my corduroy pants, indicating "THIS PARTICULAR GARMENT WAS IN CLOSE PROXIMITY WITH SOMEBODY THAT WAS STRUCK WITH AN OBJECT CAUSING THE BLOOD TO SPATTER AND WITH THE BLOOD HITTING THIS PARTICULAR GARMENT."⁵⁶

      Linhart found no spatters on the pants — only faint contact smears,⁵⁷ consistent with brushing bloodstained hands against the fabric while trying to aid my mother, or during the ninety minutes Monsue questioned me without letting me wash my hands.²⁶⁷ The prosecution recast those smears as droplets disturbed before drying. Pre-dry smeared spatter leaves patterns forensically distinct from contact transfer,⁵⁸ a distinction sharper still in corduroy’s raised weave.

2. The prosecution’s own expert undercut Music. Where she claimed twenty-seven droplets across my clothing, Linhart’s microscope found eight — plus a few contact smears carrying no inculpatory weight.

   1. All eight droplets — six on the right sleeve cuff, one on each shoe — were consistent with innocent actions I had described to Monsue at arrest.⁷¹

      1. I told Monsue I had lifted my mother’s fractured right arm^{72, 127A} to check for a pulse, then let it fall when I felt the bone was shattered. Police established that the hardwood floor beneath her was bloodied,⁵⁹³ as were her hands.

         Linhart testified the arm falling back into that bloodstain could have produced both droplets on my shoes⁷³ and spots like those on my plaid cuff.⁷⁴ The force required, he said, was not great.⁷⁶ The contact smear at the extreme corner of the right cuff⁷⁷ — worn unbuttoned and hanging loose⁷⁸ — is consistent with the cuff brushing that same floor.

      2. Linhart separately testified that cradling my mother’s head and then releasing it could have produced the six cuff droplets on its own.⁷⁹

         Monsue countered that holding her tightly against me would have soaked the front of the shirt.⁸⁰ But I had told him I didn’t want to move her — “I DIDN’T WANT TO PICK HER UP”⁸⁹; “I DIDN’T WANT TO MOVE HER OR TOUCH HER”⁹⁰ — and that the blood horrified me: “I DIDN’T REALLY WANT TO GET ALL THAT, YOU KNOW, ON MY BODY. BUT THEY THINK I DID IT OR SOMETHING, I DON’T KNOW.”⁹¹ Monsue eventually conceded I had never described how I held her — only that I had held her.⁸¹ He built a full-body embrace from the imprecise words “hugging” and “holding”⁶⁶⁰ — spoken by a 17-year-old who had just found his mother dying.

   2. Monsue argued the absence of heavy saturation on my pant knees was inconsistent with my having knelt beside her. Linhart disagreed: light smears were consistent with kneeling in an area that was itself smeared, not pooled.⁸³ Monsue’s own testimony confirmed it — shown a photograph of the floor where she lay (People’s 10-A), he could point to just one stain on the floor larger than a quarter coin.^{106, 84} My father recalled the same: the only blood on the entry-hall rug was in one corner, its southwest corner¹⁰⁷ — the rug Monsue helped him discard that evening.¹⁹¹
3. In a hypothetical posed to Linhart, prosecutor Phillip Rabichow instructed him to assume I had physically lifted my mother’s body from the floor.⁸⁸ I never said any such thing — not to Monsue, not to anyone.^{600, 603} The distortion started with Monsue, who recast my account to suggest I had held her tightly against my body. Rabichow then extended it, asserting I had lifted her clear of the floor. At interrogation I had told Monsue plainly that touching her was the last thing I wanted to do. [Cf. § III (2) (a) (ii) above]

4. In a second hypothetical, Rabichow directed Linhart to accept four premises as established fact:

   1. A body on the floor of a house, with severe blunt-force head injuries and at least two deep stab wounds to the back.
   2. The person has bled heavily onto their shirt, such that paramedics were required to cut or tear it away.
   3. A lot of blood around the body where it lay — all around on the floor, around the head and the whole upper torso.
   4. One individual wore all the clothing Linhart examined.

   Two of those premises — (b) and (c) — are materially false.

   Premise (b): Paramedic Jay Lovato testified my mother’s shirt was removed simply to assess her injuries — a routine clinical step, not a response to bloodiness.¹⁰⁵ The bloodiness of that shirt was the load-bearing pillar of Linhart’s opinion on transfer staining; his understanding of “SIGNIFICANT QUANTITIES”¹¹³ of blood on the garment came entirely from Rabichow, since he was never allowed to examine the shirt.¹¹⁴ Without that assumption, he conceded, his opinion “CERTAINLY COULD” have changed.¹¹⁵

   Premise (c): On the stand, shown a photograph of the floor where she lay, Monsue himself could find only one stain on the floor larger than a quarter coin.⁸⁴

5. The prosecution kept critical evidence from its own expert, ensuring Linhart could render only a partial, structurally skewed opinion. He was never taken to the crime scene.⁹³ He never examined my mother’s clothing and did no blood-typing,⁹⁴ though its bloodiness was central to his conclusions. He never examined the entry-hall rug or saw any test results for it.⁹⁵ He was shown no photographs of my mother’s body or her injuries,⁹⁶ and he did not use the Coroner’s photographs in forming any opinion.⁹⁸ He was shown no photographs of me at arrest — pictures that would have documented my complete absence of injury or staining.¹⁰⁰ He never spoke with the police photographer about the angles at which the spatter photographs were taken,¹⁰¹ a basic prerequisite for reliable interpretation.¹⁰²

   In place of evidence he was handed hypotheticals¹⁰⁸ — hypotheticals the record shows were materially false. [Cf. § III (3) and (4), above] By controlling what their expert was permitted to see, the prosecution shaped his conclusions before his analysis began.

6. Conspicuously absent from the entire blood-evidence presentation was any consideration of expiratory blood.

   Expiratory bloodstaining occurs when a victim with airway injury continues to breathe, projecting droplets from the nose and mouth onto surrounding surfaces. Landing on a person nearby, they can closely mimic impact spatter and are easily misidentified as such.¹¹⁶

   My mother was fighting for breath when I found her — making wet, audible sounds, bleeding from her nose and mouth.¹¹⁹ She had sustained fractures to the sinus cavities¹¹⁷ and a stab wound penetrating the left lung,¹¹⁸ which by autopsy had filled her left chest cavity with 1,600 ml of liquid and clotted blood. At my April 4 hearing, Monsue — relaying Dr. Golden’s findings — put the second stab wound “ON THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE BACK”; the autopsy puts both wounds to the left of her spine, six inches and an inch and a half from the midline.^118A

   She lay on her side, arms raised toward her face.¹²⁰ I reached over with my right hand — sleeve cuff unbuttoned, hanging loose¹²¹ — and lifted her right wrist to try for a pulse.^127A That motion placed my cuff directly in front of her face as she breathed through an injured, bleeding airway. The mechanism for expiratory transfer onto my sleeve could hardly be more direct.

   Forensic literature is unambiguous: where the victim has sustained airway injury, spatter analysis must account for expiratory blood before any conclusion is drawn. No such consideration appears anywhere in this record.

7. Monsue testified that a faint bloody footprint in the kitchen appeared to lead toward the sink¹²² — directly below the window I had entered through by removing three louvered panes.¹²³ He argued it contradicted my account, since I had not mentioned returning to the sink or window.

   Police never photographed the impression. [My own account] Monsue’s partner, Detective Landgren, testified under oath that he could not tell whether it had been made by a left or right shoe, or what size the shoe was.¹²⁴ In 2004, DNA testing established that other bloody footprints recovered from the house were not mine. [My own account] The unphotographed, unpreserved kitchen impression almost certainly was not either.

8. The crime against my mother was savage and sustained. Her attacker used at least five weapons. She was struck ten or more times about the head at close quarters with a marble-based Little League trophy, producing extensive scalp hemorrhage. She was stabbed five to thirteen times as she thrust her left hand forward in defense, sustaining deep gaping lacerations to that hand. Her skull was fractured by a heavy blow, and her right upper arm was shattered; by Dr. Golden’s theory, a single heavy blow, such as from the exercise bar, could account for both.³⁵⁷ A yellow cord was drawn around her neck with enough force to leave ligature abrasions documented at autopsy. Bloodstains covered walls and floor throughout the house — what Detective Monsue himself, writing to the Board of Prison Terms in 1991, called a “PARTICULARLY BRUTAL” attack.³⁷¹

   The proposition that I committed this extended, blood-intensive assault and then presented myself to arriving officers within minutes — carrying only the trace blood consistent with a brief, horrified attempt to aid her — defies any rational reading of the physical evidence. I had no injury anywhere on my body. Not a scratch, abrasion, bruise, or mark of any kind.