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Speaker 1: This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
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Speaker 2: The claims and opinions in this podcast are those of the speaker and do not necessarily represent the Knife or Exactly Right Media.
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Speaker 3: You know, you're sitting in this seat that other people have sat in, and then you go into your car and transfer some of that DNA into your car, and then you go home and you transfer some into your home. God forbid that person ends up murdered. You know, you've got their DNA in your home and you never met them.
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Speaker 2: Welcome to The Knife Off Record. I'm Patia Eaton. If you've been listening to our show for a while, you might have noticed that last week's episode was also an off-record. And typically, I know we alternate between our interview and off-record formats every week. But while Hannah's on leave, we're deviating from that just briefly and we'll be releasing a few more, more conversational interviews before getting back into our usual format. But they are great episodes and I think that you will love them. Today, I'm speaking with Anita Vida, an independent forensic consultant and bloodstain pattern analyst, about her work analyzing evidence for a legal team that was seeking to appeal their client's murder conviction. Anita's work sits at the intersection of science, investigation, and human behavior, where tiny details can become crucial pieces of a much bigger story. It's about asking questions and understanding limitations of evidence, and maybe most importantly, being willing to say when the evidence doesn't support a conclusion. We'll also explore the human side of this work, what it's like examining some of the most difficult and disturbing scenes imaginable, and why maintaining objectivity in the face of that is so important. Let's get into it. Hi, Anita. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.
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Speaker 3: Hi, thanks for having me.
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Speaker 2: So, Anita, you are a forensic consultant with experience in bloodstain pattern analysis and crime scene investigation. And today we're going to speak about your work on one case in particular. But before that, I would love to know, how does one find themselves in a career like this?
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Speaker 3: Well, for me, it was actually kind of a mistake, almost. And I just kind of fell into it. When I went back to school, I wanted to go for behavioral profiling. And, you know, back in the dinosaur age, when I was younger, they didn't really have programs for that like they do now. So most of my work had been in the medical field. I worked in an emergency room. And then on the donor side of transplant, actually, performing the recoveries of bones, eyes, veins, hearts, things like that. And so I really wanted to get into the behavioral profiling. The only program that was remotely similar in the area, because I had a sick parent at the time, I needed to stay here, was a forensic chemistry program. And that program required an internship. And I knew that I did not want to be in a lab all day long. And as it happened, who's widely known as the father of bloodstain pattern analysis, Herb MacDonald lived just a couple hours away. So I ended up doing my internship with him, and it started with a basic 40-hour bloodstain pattern analysis course. And then I stayed on with him for a while for the rest of the internship, and here I am 22 years later still doing it.
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Speaker 2: I mean, I love stories like that where I think all of us in one way or another end up somewhere we didn't think we would be, or at least arrive there in a way we didn't think that we would. But, you know, bloodstain pattern analysis, I imagine, takes a very specific, whether it's personality type or just learned skill, because, I mean, many learned skills, but I'm talking about more the side of what it means to look at bloodstains and to be able to sort of remove yourself from maybe what you're actually looking at and analyze it. Can you speak a little bit to that?
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Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely. I think that the medical background actually prepared me very well for doing this because I had seen a lot of bleeding in my time, but to actually analyze it and see what that means is a whole different ballgame. And learned objectivity is really important in all forensic disciplines. And it really is a learned skill. I think most of us believe that we are not biased and we are objective and things like that. But we have such deep-seated things in us from the way we were raised, the environment we grew up in, all of these things. And I'm not saying that they're bad. It's just who we are, that we don't recognize that there's something we have to turn off to be able to do this.
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Speaker 2: Right. I mean, remaining objective is not always easy. I mean, we're all just human. And especially in the face of what might be really graphic crime scene images where in some of the times someone has died and someone else is being accused of being responsible for their death in some way. The stakes are really high, which brings me to your work as a forensic consultant, which means you're often asked to weigh in on cases as an expert. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
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Speaker 3: Sure. And I just want to backtrack for half a second and say it's not only their freedom on the line. In some cases, it's potentially their life. Right. And it's so important to be able to remove yourself. But on the flip side of that, it can also make you very numb to yourself. things in your life that you shouldn't be numb to. So anyway, back to your question, as a forensic consultant, you're absolutely right. I get retained either by plaintiff, prosecution, defense, even private individuals sometimes, police departments at various stages in the process. It can be anything from a brand new scene to 20, 30 years post-conviction. It can be used in civil cases as well for things like death investigations, you know, equivocal death investigations, product liability, personal injury, things like that. It can be used for as well. Yeah.
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Speaker 2: So getting into the case that we're going to be speaking about, I'll just give a brief overview. On March 29, 2000, a woman named Sandra Deist was found deceased in her home with what initially looked to be one gunshot wound to her head. Sandra lived with her husband, David. They'd been married roughly 18 years and had three children together. All of their children were born in the 1980s, so.
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Speaker 2: When this happened, the kids were adults or nearing adulthood. Sandra was a wife, a mother, a grandmother, and avid equestrian who was born and raised in Michigan, and much of her family still lived there when she passed. Anita, can you start us off with how you were first introduced to this case? I know you were working with Irv McDonald, doing an internship with him.
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Speaker 3: So I was still working with Dr. McDonald at the time, and the case came to him. And at that point, essentially, The general arrangement was that I would do the review of the case and then kind of brief him, and then we would decide next steps from there. So this was a case that he had given me to look at. So it must have been in 2004. So this would be post-conviction. And that's how I got involved. I was down at his place and came back with a box of material and got to work.
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Speaker 2: You know, because you were brought in in 2004 post-conviction, what can you tell us about how the initial proceedings or death investigation played out?
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Speaker 3: Well, from my review of the materials, they were having some marital difficulties. David was having an affair and Sandra had suffered a head injury a couple of years prior. I believe it was 1998 that was said to be a horse accident.
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Speaker 2: Just to provide some context to listeners, the horse-related accident is said to have taken place in November of 1988 when Sandra was feeding her horse Dexter and he kicked her in the head and she was bleeding but was able to essentially crawl to her neighbor's house for help. But this is when it seems like trouble really started for her.
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Speaker 3: Yes. There's many people that testify that she was a very different person after the head injury. And she was very depressed and, you know, things like that. not keeping up with changing bed sheets or anything like that. So David was sleeping out in the living room and she was in the bedroom. He said that he heard a shot, he heard the loud noise. So he went in and he said that he found her, he described it as cocooned in a bed sheet, that it was wrapped around her and under her hand and through the trigger guard of the pistol. And typically, if somebody shoots themselves, they drop the gun because it's just an involuntary thing when your muscles go loose.
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Speaker 2: Right.
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Speaker 3: But because of the way this was set up, it was still kind of in her hand because that sheet was through the trigger guard and, you know, it couldn't freely fall.
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Speaker 2: So just so I'm picturing it correctly, and it's okay if you don't remember too, so her body's cocooned in the sheet, but her hand is free to hold the gun?
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Speaker 3: So it's around the back of her hand and through the trigger guard under her finger.
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Speaker 2: Oh.
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Speaker 3: So that she wouldn't, allegedly or, you know, apparently, so as to not leave any DNA or prints.
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Speaker 2: Oh, so her skin was not making contact with the gun. It was through the sheet? Right.
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Speaker 3: As best I understand it, yes.
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Speaker 1: Okay.
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Speaker 3: Wow.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, that seems unusual.
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Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, it is. And it sounds a little weird. But then you put that together with the fact that there were other suicide attempts, one of which she was wearing, you know, like the yellow kitchen gloves and had a butcher knife up to her chest. And when David walked in and she's down, come on, push it in, push it in, go do it. So in light of that behavior, it's not all that doesn't sound all that crazy anymore. Right.
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Speaker 2: I mean, I owned horses for much of my life. I've been kicked by a horse more than once, luckily not in the head, it can be extremely painful. I mean, they are strong. Like to survive being kicked in the head can, under the right circumstances, be just like an extraordinary miracle. But I imagine it does do a lot of damage to the brain. Do you know if Sandra had MRIs or visits with doctors that were able to examine her her head injury and maybe assess how bad it was?
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Speaker 3: That's a good question. I don't know the answer to that. And, you know, if this were one of my cases now, I'm certain that's something I would know. But this was, you know, back before I was, you know, out on my own and that sort of thing. So that part, I don't know about the history.
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Speaker 2: No worries.
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Speaker 3: I would assume that she got some care. Yeah. Because it was a pretty significant injury. Right. Yeah.
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Speaker 2: And so Sandra also left behind a note. Were you familiar with this part of the case?
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Speaker 3: I am.
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Speaker 2: Do you recall, I guess, what it said, not word for word, but what she was trying to get across?
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Speaker 3: Yes, she had apparently taken it to or let folks in her prayer group know that if anything ever happened to her, there was a letter in the bureau. And the bureau essentially said that if anything happens to me, look at my husband. The accidents in the stall was not an accident that David hit me with a hammer axe. And so if anything happens to me, look to him because I would never kill myself.
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Speaker 2: I mean, that's pretty damning.
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Speaker 3: I mean, I'll be honest, when I read that note or, you know, the copy of the note, I was like, oh, boy.
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Speaker 2: I mean, it's hard to imagine writing that if it wasn't the case. But, you know, you have a lot of different factors at play when there's marital tension and mental illness or head injuries. When Sandra was initially found deceased, do you remember what were the first impressions from the first responders and law enforcement who were at the scene?
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Speaker 3: When EMS showed up, they and the investigators and David told them, you know, his story, they everybody was OK with saying this. This was a suicide. And they took her to the hospital. And then she went from there almost directly to the medical examiner's office. It was not a long period of time. But but in that time, family friends were told that they could clean up the room. So they did that. They balled up all the bedding and threw it in a plastic garbage bag and took it to the dump and the mattress. And there was a comforter kind of folded at the foot of the bed, you know, like in case you need it, that got thrown away and all of that.
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Speaker 2: So probably not great protocol.
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Speaker 3: Yeah. But on the other hand, you know, they didn't have anything to, any reason to suspect that it was not as it appeared. And you know, that's somebody's.
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Speaker 2: Home, right?
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Speaker 3: Where else are they going to go? So it's always a balance for them. It's not, it's not always an easy choice. When she went for her autopsy, they cut her nightgown off and they threw that away at the medical examiners. And when they did the autopsy, they found that there were two entry and exit wounds and They said both of them would have instantly incapacitated her. She could not have pulled the trigger a second time. And so this had to be a homicide. So they went and got stuff back from the dump that they could. Especially that volume of blood takes quite some time to dry. And when you ball it up and put it in plastic, It's going to create all kinds of other bloodstains that were not there to begin with.
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Speaker 2: I see.
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Speaker 3: So those were brought back. They were laid out on the driveway, which is really not best practices. And then for a second time, the comforter that was at the foot of the bed was thrown away because they didn't see any bloodstains on it. So that got thrown away again. And the other things were saved and analyzed by various individuals.
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Speaker 2: And just local law enforcement.
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Speaker 3: Law enforcement, the lab, things like that, and experts, retained experts. And David's T-shirt was collected and examined at the crime lab with a magnifying glass, and they found no visible bloodstains on his T-shirt initially. But then an expert was retained who examined the shirt and said that he found numerous very small stains. They tested a few, and it came back to be Sandra's DNA. Now, David had said that when he came into the room, because the gun was still kind of partially in her hand, he took it out, popped the magazine out and laid it on the bed. So the expert examined the bedding and decided that David had to have been standing behind her. She was kind of laying on her left side. So he would have been behind her with his arm outstretched over the bed and shot her twice. And he was convicted.
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Speaker 2: Sandra's horse accident happens in the fall of 1998. And then in March of 2000 is when she's found deceased with two gunshot wounds to her head. And by March of 2001, a year after her death, her husband, David, is convicted of having murdered her and he's sentenced to life without parole. So who then reached out to you about... taking another look at this case and the photos of the evidence?
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Speaker 3: His appellate attorney. So typically the way it works is that whoever wants you to look at the case will call you, give you kind of a Reader's Digest version of the case and what information they're hoping to ascertain by the analysis. And then they send the materials, you review it, and you have a discussion with them. So cases like this and the other ones where bloodstain pattern analysis are in the news are obviously cases where there's some sort of, you know, the sides don't agree and it's a battle of the experts. But I would say probably even more often in case work, it's the case that we, when we talk to whoever retained us about our findings, it's a, well, this does not match your theory of the case. So this is not, Good for you.
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Speaker 2: I see. So you could very well go to anyone who hires you to, you know, hopefully get someone's conviction overturned, say, and you could very well go back to them and say, no, I can't get on the stand and say what you want me to say.
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Speaker 3: Absolutely. And they don't typically tell you what they want you to say. They'll say things like, is it possible that these bloodstains could have occurred while the person was holding this thing versus it on the ground? Or can you sequence events, particularly if it's a self-defense claim? Can you tell what event happened first, second, third, that sort of thing? Possibly what weapon inflicted what... You can sometimes determine how long somebody may have survived, you know, if they were up and around after an attack, things like that. If the perpetrator might have been injured and which things should be tested, you know, all of those sorts of things. And so then at the end, it's really not uncommon for me at all to say, so can you get a plea?
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Speaker 2: I see.
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Speaker 3: You need to have a come to Jesus talk with your guy.
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Speaker 1: Yeah.
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Speaker 2: So you're really more of an advisor first than.
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Speaker 2: Like, okay, here's how we can look at this in favor of what you're asking.
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Speaker 3: Right, right. My integrity cannot be bought. I've spent 22 years building a reputation of being somebody that is fair and a straight shooter. And I'm not going to compromise that for anything because it just doesn't matter which side puts me up on the stand. The evidence just is what it is.
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Speaker 2: So in 2004, you're contacted by David Deist's defense. They are appealing his murder conviction. And now your job is to review photos because a lot of the evidence has at that point been thrown away. Would you mind describing them for me? Because I think it's important to sort of understand what you're looking at.
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Speaker 3: So there was a large area of saturation and clotting up by her head. Obviously, head wounds bleed profusely. There was some spatter on the blinds behind the headboard of the bed, and then areas of transfer, things like that, on the sheets where EMS extracted her. You can see very linear lines where the backboard, you know, was brought across the bed and that sort of thing. So that's pretty much what we're looking at. It was a fairly confined area, that's the blood was confined to.
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Speaker 2: I saw some of the photos in the case review. They're hard to look at. In one of them, you know, you're looking at her actual head wounds, which requires, you know, peeling back of skin. And you're just looking at things that most of us never look at. When you see pictures like that, Do you ever have to just like take a break?
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Speaker 3: I would say not so much now. I mean, I've been to, you know, dozens and dozens of autopsies in my time and seen thousands of photographs like that. You know, so for me, it's kind of routine that for other people, it's shocking.
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Speaker 2: So you're retained and you're looking at these photos. And what story are these photos telling you?
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Speaker 3: So the proper way to review a case is to really look at all of the photos. and describe what you see. So in this case, the impact spatter could resemble based on size, shape, distribution, and location, which is the definition of bloodstain pattern analysis. Those are the things we're looking at. We can have forward or back spatter because she's got entrance and exit wounds. We could have satellite spatter because blood's dripping. We could have expirated blood. So when you see stains of those sizes. You say, so it could be this, this, or this. And then as you get into the case information, you can rule things in and rule things out. And that was what ended up being kind of the issue in this case. You know, that bloodstains on his shirt were very small, that a scientist with a magnifying glass did not see them. So we're talking about very small bloodstains. So that could be impact satellite or expirated. We really didn't have satellite opportunity. There really wasn't blood dripping into blood where it would have gotten on his shirt. But hugely important is that EMS documented is that she was spraying blood out of her nose and mouth. So, expirated is a real possibility, especially when you take his statement that he went in, you know, kind of in front of her to take the gun out, pop the magazine out, and put it on the bed. So, he would have been standing.
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Speaker 2: Right in the line of fire of all this expirated blood through her nose and mouth. So, when the EMTs arrived, they were seeing that still happening or she was already passed? Oh, gosh.
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Speaker 3: Yes, that is their documentation of what they saw. You really you can't rule that out.
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Speaker 2: Right. Because it's like, well, OK, this part of his story is not tracking.
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Speaker 3: Right. And that's kind of the last step in the in the process is after you go through all the case stuff, then you look at the statements and say, does this support or refute eyewitnesses or victim suspect statements? Right.
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Speaker 2: One of those pieces of evidence was or perhaps should have been the bedding, like the bedding of the bed that she was laying on because that's where she was when she died. But you said that this bedding was laid out on the driveway and then eventually thrown out or missing, but there were still photos of it. So did you consider what you saw in those photos of the bedding when you were reviewing everything or what was your take on that?
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Speaker 3: Well, I would say that the betting was irrelevant and, you know, there's too much artifact for it to be of any practical use. But the prosecution experts felt that they could be used in their analysis. And in that analysis, they described that there was a cone-shaped void on the sheet. that was allegedly caused by David's arm being extended over the unoccupied side of the bed to kind of the back and top of her right ear areas where those entrance wounds were. And they came out kind of the left forehead area. So there's a couple of issues with that in that I didn't see a cone-shaped void on the sheets. And even if there were, that would indicate the blood would have had to have been coming from over his arm in order for it to block deposition on the bed. And so the problem there would be that the blood would have had to skip over the unoccupied portion of the bed and hit him in the shirt, like in his lower chest, abdomen area. Well, that that can't be. I mean, that's just not right. The laws of physics. Right.
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Speaker 2: Like some of those blood droplets spraying on him would have fallen sooner than hitting his shirt.
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Speaker 3: Exactly. Exactly. And blood comes out from a wound like that, 360 degrees, all the way around the wound, like a little cloud almost, like a donut cloud around the wound.
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Speaker 2: So you're going through the photos and determining, like, not everything that you think is lining up with the way the prosecution and their experts saw it. Did you then come to a conclusion or were you able to come to a conclusion about what or who actually caused Sandra's death?
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Speaker 3: So basically, you know, the question was, is the evidence consistent with a homicide or a suicide? Right. That's a pretty common question that is asked. Looking at the size, shape and distribution of stains on his shirt, which is what seemed to be the biggest issue other than the the sheets. both expirated and impacts batter, both forward and backs batter are possible. You can't rule that out. So if you have two equally likely mechanisms, that in and of itself should be reasonable doubt. You know, in getting involved in the post-conviction, it's a lot harder to undo a conviction than it is to acquit in the beginning. So when I saw that, as I got through the case documentation and I read what EMS wrote, that was probably the biggest, most important piece of information that I saw in that case that made me say, hey, this isn't right here.
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Speaker 2: So because he's saying, I approached her walking up to her where she's facing me, and EMS is saying she's expirating blood from her nose and her mouth, your takeaway was there's good potential that that is how these bloodstains arrived on his clothing.
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Speaker 3: Right.
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Speaker 2: Okay. And so you have this piece of the case where you're like, they, in my opinion, have interpreted this differently than I do as an expert myself. But then you were saying you look at it as a whole compared to statements. And do you also weigh it against other evidence brought up in the case?
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Speaker 3: Yeah, so then you compare it to witness, suspects, statements. And then if in a case like this, where it's post-conviction, then you look at the testimony of the pertinent people in the case, EMS, medical examiner, whatever experts they have, the laboratory personnel. And then you compare it with what they've said and if good information got in front of the jury. I see.
00:27:07
Speaker 2: Because there were others, you know, strange things where like David Deist purchased a gun in January of 2000. And in the days before Sandra's death told her that he was leaving her, like you mentioned earlier, he was having an affair. They weren't getting along, but you were being retained by the defense. And so you can fairly then say to the defense, look, this part of what they said, I'm not in agreement with, and here's what I would say about it. Yeah.
00:27:37
Speaker 3: Yeah. Sometimes you can have a case where the evidence will kind of seem like it is good for them. But as you go through the case material, you become aware of the other peripheral things that are not really in your purview or your scope of work. Right. And so the conversation might be that, well, you know, the bloodstain evidence is not bad for you, but I don't think it's going to help you in light of this other stuff. You know, your money's probably better spent with a different expert for this, you know. I see.
00:28:06
Speaker 2: So you could go to them and say, look, here's something I think is slightly favorable for you, but I'm not going to advise you to try to appeal it based on this.
00:28:16
Speaker 3: Yeah. And in the end, obviously, strategy is the attorney's purview, 100%. But they need experts to help them decide what to do because they're not experts in everything. They kind of have to become mini experts in the things that are related to their trial before trial. I mean, in this case, it was Pretty much all good news for them that, yes, expirated can, in fact, resemble impacts better and often does. And we have this documentation that says she was spraying it out of her nose and mouth, which is precisely what expirated is. But then we still have the problem of the two gunshots, right? She was repeatedly described as brain dead prior to cardiac death. which is not uncommon, but there are some involuntary reactions. One of them is actually called a trigger finger because it's like you're pulling a trigger. Now, somebody else, another physician that reviewed her autopsy said that they don't think she would have even been capable of involuntary movement. And that particular pistol, so when it was examined, it was not found to be malfunctioning. However, they also retained a firearms expert who demonstrated, there are several videos, that this gun, and I'll say, for lack of a better word, it can be kind of contaminated in such a way that it malfunctions, but on visual and it doesn't appear as anything is wrong. And it will double fire with one pull of the trigger. And her wounds, if I remember correctly, were an inch and a quarter apart. And on one of the demonstrations they did kind of on a piece of plywood, the wounds were exactly an inch and a quarter apart.
00:30:06
Speaker 2: And so how did their appeal go for them?
00:30:10
Speaker 3: He lost it. He lost.
00:30:12
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:30:13
Speaker 3: Which also is not uncommon. And sadly, he died in prison in 2018.
00:30:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, I read that he passed away in prison after a short illness. Is it difficult for you when you're going through something like this and trying to stick to just analyzing what you're asked to analyze to... make an just internal judgment, guilty, innocent?
00:30:37
Speaker 3: That's another good question. And you know what? I'm a human being. We all have our opinions about somebody's guilt or innocence, but it absolutely cannot play into your evaluation of the evidence. It just can't. And sometimes it feels like a crisis of conscience. There's one in particular that sticks in my head that I was like, oh, this guy needs to be behind bars, but this was done wrong and this conclusion was wrong. And all of this should get thrown out, which means all the rest of it gets thrown out if the judge rules that way. But you have to just do your job and do your scope of work and let the system do its thing. And as it turned out in that case, he did get to go behind bars for a very long time. So what I believed was the right thing happened anyway. But my opinion about somebody's guilt or innocence just doesn't, it's irrelevant.
00:31:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I don't suppose you could even speak about it on this case, like what your thoughts are overall.
00:31:39
Speaker 3: I would say that I don't think the evidence used to convict him was sufficient. I don't think that the jury got all of the information they should have by which to make an informed decision. And that's really our job. Our job is not to advocate for one side or the other. It's to advocate for the science and to assist the trier of fact in understanding a material issue of the case. And I don't believe the jury in that case got all the information.
00:32:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's a really fair way to be thinking about it and the only way I would want someone thinking about it who was in your shoes if I were being accused of something I mean but it is I'm sure difficult you have someone whose wife has been seriously injured and they're unfaithful and like all of these other things it's hard not to look at them and think okay obviously something happened here you.
00:32:35
Speaker 3: Know how many times do you stay on the true crime stuff and you know for the length of time that you've been doing it yeah I mean, the divorce rate is over 50%. That means there's not a lot of happy marriages out there. And that's just the divorce rate. That's not the ones that are in a marriage that are unhappy and things are going on. And, you know, the vast majority of those do not result in a murder. Is that a motive? Absolutely. Absolutely can be. But the simple fact that somebody was having an affair or, you know, there were marital issues or whatever does not automatically make somebody guilty of the other one's death. You know, you really have to be willing to take a deep dive into the actual evidence and what does the physical evidence say. And I believe in this case that if the jury were told that it is just as likely expirated as impact spatter, that would have been or could have been reasonable doubt. Yeah.
00:33:36
Speaker 2: You know, one thing we talked about on an earlier call that I would love to touch on here is. you know, what are the misconceptions of bloodstain pattern analysis?
00:33:47
Speaker 3: That's another good question. Thank you for asking it. So there's been kind of a lot of bad press about bloodstain pattern analysis over the last, I don't know, decade or so. It seems to come up kind of cyclically every few years and something will come up. And the biggest complaint or issue that people tend to have with that is that they say it's junk science because it's all subjective and it's nothing more than a guess. And that's not true. It's based on the sciences of physics, math, biology. And it's a repeatable thing. That's how we're able to teach it and do the experiments because we will get, you know, when a liquid is acted upon by a force, it's going to behave in a predictable manner. And that's what we study so that we can come to conclusions. The problem comes in where we don't have people that have enough education. The basic 40-hour bloodstain pattern analysis course is not sufficient, in my opinion, and in most people's opinion, to be analyzing a scene and coming up with whether it's more likely or not something is a suicide or not. Because the federal rules of evidence say you're an expert if you have knowledge, education, skills or experience that's greater than that of the average person. So that 40-hour course, by those standards, makes you an expert. But in practice, it's so much more nuanced than that. The basic 40-hour course is to help people who go to scenes identify some of the major patterns and to identify when something, you know, this spot doesn't go with the rest of them. That's know how to document them so that it can be given to a proper expert. But unfortunately, a lot of times what we have is people with only a 40-hour course testifying as experts or pathologists who have never taken a bloodstain course simply because they've seen a lot of blood in their career. And that does not make you an expert either. I had seen a lot of blood in my vocation as well, but I absolutely did not know all the stuff that I know now.
00:35:58
Speaker 2: But you weren't studying the way that blood leaves the body and travels at different speeds and different force. And yeah, it is, it's totally different.
00:36:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a whole different, like I, when I learned about arterial gushing, I can connect that to arterial bleeding that I saw in the operating room and in the emergency room. So I know what that looks like when it happens. So I have that. But I often liken bloodstain pattern analysis to, it's most similar to pathology in that both disciplines have to have a working knowledge of other disciplines like DNA, firearms, things like that. And we have to take scene information into account and all of those sorts of things. and come up with an opinion. And yes, there is subjectivity in what we do, but that's true in all of the forensic disciplines, not just this one. The problem is that, you know, in order to do an autopsy and come to a forensic pathology opinion, you have to be a forensic pathologist first. So that ensures that you have X number of years of school and X number of years of residency and all of that. That's not the case for bloodstain pattern analysis. There is no universal minimum standard. And I think that's where it gets the bad rep because, you know, you only see the cases where there's controversy, right? You don't see the ones where all the experts agree on both sides agree. Those don't make the news.
00:37:25
Speaker 2: It's also, I think you mentioned on one of our earlier calls, it's a piece of the puzzle and not something to be relied upon solely. Right.
00:37:33
Speaker 3: Right. And that's true of all the disciplines, too, including DNA. You know, it's long been held as the quote unquote gold standard. But when you're dealing with mixtures, there is an element of subjectivity that goes into that by the analyst as well, deciding what goes with what profile. And so all of the forensic disciplines are tools in the toolbox. Every once in a while, whatever discipline it is might be the one that is the linchpin of the case. But more often than not, that's how they should be treated as tools in the overall picture. And it's the trier of fact that gets all of the pieces of the puzzle and they put them together. You know, we do have one of the best systems, I will say that, but it's not infallible as we've seen with, you know, the death row exonerations and things like that. And as you said in the beginning, these are people's lives and liberty on the line. Being complacent about that is dangerous. And it could be any one of us. And I think that people, especially with fingerprints and DNA, I think people don't really understand what it can and cannot tell you. You cannot timestamp either one of those. And there's a thing known as the secondary, even tertiary transfer of DNA. You know, and often they'll use the jurors as an example that, you know, you're sitting in this seat that other people have sat in. And then you go into your car and transfer some of that DNA into your car. And then you go home and you transfer some into your home. God forbid that person ends up murdered. Right. You know, you've got their DNA in your home and you never met them. Right. And I remember one time I checked into a hotel. I saw some bloodstains at the bottom of the bathroom door.
00:39:24
Speaker 2: Oh, no.
00:39:26
Speaker 3: I took a picture. I sent it to my boyfriend at the time. I said, listen, this was here when I got in the room.
00:39:32
Speaker 2: You're like high velocity.
00:39:39
Speaker 3: Wow.
00:39:39
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, some kid's got a bloody nose.
00:39:41
Speaker 3: I have a very warped view on life in general. I think most people would not do that, but here I am.
00:39:49
Speaker 2: I understand it. I understand it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I mean, this is a really interesting case and, you know, a tragedy any way you look at it.
00:40:01
Speaker 3: Yes, absolutely. And you know what? Most of them aren't.
00:40:05
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening. We will be back next week. If you have a story for us, we would love to hear it. Our email is thenifeatexactlyrightmedia.com. Or you can follow us on Instagram at The Knife Podcast or Blue Sky at The Knife Podcast.
00:40:21
Speaker 1: This has been an Exactly Right production. Hosted and produced by me, Hannah Smith.
00:40:25
Speaker 2: And me, Patia Eaton. Our producers are Tom Breifogel and Alexa Samorosi.
00:40:30
Speaker 1: This episode was mixed by Tom Breifogel.
00:40:32
Speaker 2: Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.
00:40:35
Speaker 1: Our theme music is by Birds in the Airport. Artwork by Vanessa Lilac. Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer.
Speaker 1: This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
00:00:05
Speaker 2: The claims and opinions in this podcast are those of the speaker and do not necessarily represent the Knife or Exactly Right Media.
00:00:14
Speaker 3: You know, you're sitting in this seat that other people have sat in, and then you go into your car and transfer some of that DNA into your car, and then you go home and you transfer some into your home. God forbid that person ends up murdered. You know, you've got their DNA in your home and you never met them.
00:00:45
Speaker 2: Welcome to The Knife Off Record. I'm Patia Eaton. If you've been listening to our show for a while, you might have noticed that last week's episode was also an off-record. And typically, I know we alternate between our interview and off-record formats every week. But while Hannah's on leave, we're deviating from that just briefly and we'll be releasing a few more, more conversational interviews before getting back into our usual format. But they are great episodes and I think that you will love them. Today, I'm speaking with Anita Vida, an independent forensic consultant and bloodstain pattern analyst, about her work analyzing evidence for a legal team that was seeking to appeal their client's murder conviction. Anita's work sits at the intersection of science, investigation, and human behavior, where tiny details can become crucial pieces of a much bigger story. It's about asking questions and understanding limitations of evidence, and maybe most importantly, being willing to say when the evidence doesn't support a conclusion. We'll also explore the human side of this work, what it's like examining some of the most difficult and disturbing scenes imaginable, and why maintaining objectivity in the face of that is so important. Let's get into it. Hi, Anita. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.
00:02:10
Speaker 3: Hi, thanks for having me.
00:02:12
Speaker 2: So, Anita, you are a forensic consultant with experience in bloodstain pattern analysis and crime scene investigation. And today we're going to speak about your work on one case in particular. But before that, I would love to know, how does one find themselves in a career like this?
00:02:34
Speaker 3: Well, for me, it was actually kind of a mistake, almost. And I just kind of fell into it. When I went back to school, I wanted to go for behavioral profiling. And, you know, back in the dinosaur age, when I was younger, they didn't really have programs for that like they do now. So most of my work had been in the medical field. I worked in an emergency room. And then on the donor side of transplant, actually, performing the recoveries of bones, eyes, veins, hearts, things like that. And so I really wanted to get into the behavioral profiling. The only program that was remotely similar in the area, because I had a sick parent at the time, I needed to stay here, was a forensic chemistry program. And that program required an internship. And I knew that I did not want to be in a lab all day long. And as it happened, who's widely known as the father of bloodstain pattern analysis, Herb MacDonald lived just a couple hours away. So I ended up doing my internship with him, and it started with a basic 40-hour bloodstain pattern analysis course. And then I stayed on with him for a while for the rest of the internship, and here I am 22 years later still doing it.
00:03:47
Speaker 2: I mean, I love stories like that where I think all of us in one way or another end up somewhere we didn't think we would be, or at least arrive there in a way we didn't think that we would. But, you know, bloodstain pattern analysis, I imagine, takes a very specific, whether it's personality type or just learned skill, because, I mean, many learned skills, but I'm talking about more the side of what it means to look at bloodstains and to be able to sort of remove yourself from maybe what you're actually looking at and analyze it. Can you speak a little bit to that?
00:04:26
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely. I think that the medical background actually prepared me very well for doing this because I had seen a lot of bleeding in my time, but to actually analyze it and see what that means is a whole different ballgame. And learned objectivity is really important in all forensic disciplines. And it really is a learned skill. I think most of us believe that we are not biased and we are objective and things like that. But we have such deep-seated things in us from the way we were raised, the environment we grew up in, all of these things. And I'm not saying that they're bad. It's just who we are, that we don't recognize that there's something we have to turn off to be able to do this.
00:05:13
Speaker 2: Right. I mean, remaining objective is not always easy. I mean, we're all just human. And especially in the face of what might be really graphic crime scene images where in some of the times someone has died and someone else is being accused of being responsible for their death in some way. The stakes are really high, which brings me to your work as a forensic consultant, which means you're often asked to weigh in on cases as an expert. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
00:05:46
Speaker 3: Sure. And I just want to backtrack for half a second and say it's not only their freedom on the line. In some cases, it's potentially their life. Right. And it's so important to be able to remove yourself. But on the flip side of that, it can also make you very numb to yourself. things in your life that you shouldn't be numb to. So anyway, back to your question, as a forensic consultant, you're absolutely right. I get retained either by plaintiff, prosecution, defense, even private individuals sometimes, police departments at various stages in the process. It can be anything from a brand new scene to 20, 30 years post-conviction. It can be used in civil cases as well for things like death investigations, you know, equivocal death investigations, product liability, personal injury, things like that. It can be used for as well. Yeah.
00:06:41
Speaker 2: So getting into the case that we're going to be speaking about, I'll just give a brief overview. On March 29, 2000, a woman named Sandra Deist was found deceased in her home with what initially looked to be one gunshot wound to her head. Sandra lived with her husband, David. They'd been married roughly 18 years and had three children together. All of their children were born in the 1980s, so.
00:07:07
Speaker 2: When this happened, the kids were adults or nearing adulthood. Sandra was a wife, a mother, a grandmother, and avid equestrian who was born and raised in Michigan, and much of her family still lived there when she passed. Anita, can you start us off with how you were first introduced to this case? I know you were working with Irv McDonald, doing an internship with him.
00:07:29
Speaker 3: So I was still working with Dr. McDonald at the time, and the case came to him. And at that point, essentially, The general arrangement was that I would do the review of the case and then kind of brief him, and then we would decide next steps from there. So this was a case that he had given me to look at. So it must have been in 2004. So this would be post-conviction. And that's how I got involved. I was down at his place and came back with a box of material and got to work.
00:08:00
Speaker 2: You know, because you were brought in in 2004 post-conviction, what can you tell us about how the initial proceedings or death investigation played out?
00:08:12
Speaker 3: Well, from my review of the materials, they were having some marital difficulties. David was having an affair and Sandra had suffered a head injury a couple of years prior. I believe it was 1998 that was said to be a horse accident.
00:08:29
Speaker 2: Just to provide some context to listeners, the horse-related accident is said to have taken place in November of 1988 when Sandra was feeding her horse Dexter and he kicked her in the head and she was bleeding but was able to essentially crawl to her neighbor's house for help. But this is when it seems like trouble really started for her.
00:08:57
Speaker 3: Yes. There's many people that testify that she was a very different person after the head injury. And she was very depressed and, you know, things like that. not keeping up with changing bed sheets or anything like that. So David was sleeping out in the living room and she was in the bedroom. He said that he heard a shot, he heard the loud noise. So he went in and he said that he found her, he described it as cocooned in a bed sheet, that it was wrapped around her and under her hand and through the trigger guard of the pistol. And typically, if somebody shoots themselves, they drop the gun because it's just an involuntary thing when your muscles go loose.
00:09:39
Speaker 2: Right.
00:09:39
Speaker 3: But because of the way this was set up, it was still kind of in her hand because that sheet was through the trigger guard and, you know, it couldn't freely fall.
00:09:48
Speaker 2: So just so I'm picturing it correctly, and it's okay if you don't remember too, so her body's cocooned in the sheet, but her hand is free to hold the gun?
00:09:58
Speaker 3: So it's around the back of her hand and through the trigger guard under her finger.
00:10:03
Speaker 2: Oh.
00:10:04
Speaker 3: So that she wouldn't, allegedly or, you know, apparently, so as to not leave any DNA or prints.
00:10:11
Speaker 2: Oh, so her skin was not making contact with the gun. It was through the sheet? Right.
00:10:16
Speaker 3: As best I understand it, yes.
00:10:18
Speaker 1: Okay.
00:10:19
Speaker 3: Wow.
00:10:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, that seems unusual.
00:10:22
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, it is. And it sounds a little weird. But then you put that together with the fact that there were other suicide attempts, one of which she was wearing, you know, like the yellow kitchen gloves and had a butcher knife up to her chest. And when David walked in and she's down, come on, push it in, push it in, go do it. So in light of that behavior, it's not all that doesn't sound all that crazy anymore. Right.
00:10:47
Speaker 2: I mean, I owned horses for much of my life. I've been kicked by a horse more than once, luckily not in the head, it can be extremely painful. I mean, they are strong. Like to survive being kicked in the head can, under the right circumstances, be just like an extraordinary miracle. But I imagine it does do a lot of damage to the brain. Do you know if Sandra had MRIs or visits with doctors that were able to examine her her head injury and maybe assess how bad it was?
00:11:23
Speaker 3: That's a good question. I don't know the answer to that. And, you know, if this were one of my cases now, I'm certain that's something I would know. But this was, you know, back before I was, you know, out on my own and that sort of thing. So that part, I don't know about the history.
00:11:40
Speaker 2: No worries.
00:11:40
Speaker 3: I would assume that she got some care. Yeah. Because it was a pretty significant injury. Right. Yeah.
00:11:47
Speaker 2: And so Sandra also left behind a note. Were you familiar with this part of the case?
00:11:54
Speaker 3: I am.
00:11:55
Speaker 2: Do you recall, I guess, what it said, not word for word, but what she was trying to get across?
00:12:01
Speaker 3: Yes, she had apparently taken it to or let folks in her prayer group know that if anything ever happened to her, there was a letter in the bureau. And the bureau essentially said that if anything happens to me, look at my husband. The accidents in the stall was not an accident that David hit me with a hammer axe. And so if anything happens to me, look to him because I would never kill myself.
00:12:28
Speaker 2: I mean, that's pretty damning.
00:12:30
Speaker 3: I mean, I'll be honest, when I read that note or, you know, the copy of the note, I was like, oh, boy.
00:12:37
Speaker 2: I mean, it's hard to imagine writing that if it wasn't the case. But, you know, you have a lot of different factors at play when there's marital tension and mental illness or head injuries. When Sandra was initially found deceased, do you remember what were the first impressions from the first responders and law enforcement who were at the scene?
00:12:59
Speaker 3: When EMS showed up, they and the investigators and David told them, you know, his story, they everybody was OK with saying this. This was a suicide. And they took her to the hospital. And then she went from there almost directly to the medical examiner's office. It was not a long period of time. But but in that time, family friends were told that they could clean up the room. So they did that. They balled up all the bedding and threw it in a plastic garbage bag and took it to the dump and the mattress. And there was a comforter kind of folded at the foot of the bed, you know, like in case you need it, that got thrown away and all of that.
00:13:36
Speaker 2: So probably not great protocol.
00:13:39
Speaker 3: Yeah. But on the other hand, you know, they didn't have anything to, any reason to suspect that it was not as it appeared. And you know, that's somebody's.
00:13:47
Speaker 2: Home, right?
00:13:48
Speaker 3: Where else are they going to go? So it's always a balance for them. It's not, it's not always an easy choice. When she went for her autopsy, they cut her nightgown off and they threw that away at the medical examiners. And when they did the autopsy, they found that there were two entry and exit wounds and They said both of them would have instantly incapacitated her. She could not have pulled the trigger a second time. And so this had to be a homicide. So they went and got stuff back from the dump that they could. Especially that volume of blood takes quite some time to dry. And when you ball it up and put it in plastic, It's going to create all kinds of other bloodstains that were not there to begin with.
00:14:29
Speaker 2: I see.
00:14:30
Speaker 3: So those were brought back. They were laid out on the driveway, which is really not best practices. And then for a second time, the comforter that was at the foot of the bed was thrown away because they didn't see any bloodstains on it. So that got thrown away again. And the other things were saved and analyzed by various individuals.
00:14:53
Speaker 2: And just local law enforcement.
00:14:55
Speaker 3: Law enforcement, the lab, things like that, and experts, retained experts. And David's T-shirt was collected and examined at the crime lab with a magnifying glass, and they found no visible bloodstains on his T-shirt initially. But then an expert was retained who examined the shirt and said that he found numerous very small stains. They tested a few, and it came back to be Sandra's DNA. Now, David had said that when he came into the room, because the gun was still kind of partially in her hand, he took it out, popped the magazine out and laid it on the bed. So the expert examined the bedding and decided that David had to have been standing behind her. She was kind of laying on her left side. So he would have been behind her with his arm outstretched over the bed and shot her twice. And he was convicted.
00:16:01
Speaker 2: Sandra's horse accident happens in the fall of 1998. And then in March of 2000 is when she's found deceased with two gunshot wounds to her head. And by March of 2001, a year after her death, her husband, David, is convicted of having murdered her and he's sentenced to life without parole. So who then reached out to you about... taking another look at this case and the photos of the evidence?
00:16:34
Speaker 3: His appellate attorney. So typically the way it works is that whoever wants you to look at the case will call you, give you kind of a Reader's Digest version of the case and what information they're hoping to ascertain by the analysis. And then they send the materials, you review it, and you have a discussion with them. So cases like this and the other ones where bloodstain pattern analysis are in the news are obviously cases where there's some sort of, you know, the sides don't agree and it's a battle of the experts. But I would say probably even more often in case work, it's the case that we, when we talk to whoever retained us about our findings, it's a, well, this does not match your theory of the case. So this is not, Good for you.
00:17:21
Speaker 2: I see. So you could very well go to anyone who hires you to, you know, hopefully get someone's conviction overturned, say, and you could very well go back to them and say, no, I can't get on the stand and say what you want me to say.
00:17:36
Speaker 3: Absolutely. And they don't typically tell you what they want you to say. They'll say things like, is it possible that these bloodstains could have occurred while the person was holding this thing versus it on the ground? Or can you sequence events, particularly if it's a self-defense claim? Can you tell what event happened first, second, third, that sort of thing? Possibly what weapon inflicted what... You can sometimes determine how long somebody may have survived, you know, if they were up and around after an attack, things like that. If the perpetrator might have been injured and which things should be tested, you know, all of those sorts of things. And so then at the end, it's really not uncommon for me at all to say, so can you get a plea?
00:18:26
Speaker 2: I see.
00:18:27
Speaker 3: You need to have a come to Jesus talk with your guy.
00:18:29
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:18:29
Speaker 2: So you're really more of an advisor first than.
00:18:34
Speaker 2: Like, okay, here's how we can look at this in favor of what you're asking.
00:18:39
Speaker 3: Right, right. My integrity cannot be bought. I've spent 22 years building a reputation of being somebody that is fair and a straight shooter. And I'm not going to compromise that for anything because it just doesn't matter which side puts me up on the stand. The evidence just is what it is.
00:18:59
Speaker 2: So in 2004, you're contacted by David Deist's defense. They are appealing his murder conviction. And now your job is to review photos because a lot of the evidence has at that point been thrown away. Would you mind describing them for me? Because I think it's important to sort of understand what you're looking at.
00:19:22
Speaker 3: So there was a large area of saturation and clotting up by her head. Obviously, head wounds bleed profusely. There was some spatter on the blinds behind the headboard of the bed, and then areas of transfer, things like that, on the sheets where EMS extracted her. You can see very linear lines where the backboard, you know, was brought across the bed and that sort of thing. So that's pretty much what we're looking at. It was a fairly confined area, that's the blood was confined to.
00:19:52
Speaker 2: I saw some of the photos in the case review. They're hard to look at. In one of them, you know, you're looking at her actual head wounds, which requires, you know, peeling back of skin. And you're just looking at things that most of us never look at. When you see pictures like that, Do you ever have to just like take a break?
00:20:15
Speaker 3: I would say not so much now. I mean, I've been to, you know, dozens and dozens of autopsies in my time and seen thousands of photographs like that. You know, so for me, it's kind of routine that for other people, it's shocking.
00:20:29
Speaker 2: So you're retained and you're looking at these photos. And what story are these photos telling you?
00:20:35
Speaker 3: So the proper way to review a case is to really look at all of the photos. and describe what you see. So in this case, the impact spatter could resemble based on size, shape, distribution, and location, which is the definition of bloodstain pattern analysis. Those are the things we're looking at. We can have forward or back spatter because she's got entrance and exit wounds. We could have satellite spatter because blood's dripping. We could have expirated blood. So when you see stains of those sizes. You say, so it could be this, this, or this. And then as you get into the case information, you can rule things in and rule things out. And that was what ended up being kind of the issue in this case. You know, that bloodstains on his shirt were very small, that a scientist with a magnifying glass did not see them. So we're talking about very small bloodstains. So that could be impact satellite or expirated. We really didn't have satellite opportunity. There really wasn't blood dripping into blood where it would have gotten on his shirt. But hugely important is that EMS documented is that she was spraying blood out of her nose and mouth. So, expirated is a real possibility, especially when you take his statement that he went in, you know, kind of in front of her to take the gun out, pop the magazine out, and put it on the bed. So, he would have been standing.
00:22:05
Speaker 2: Right in the line of fire of all this expirated blood through her nose and mouth. So, when the EMTs arrived, they were seeing that still happening or she was already passed? Oh, gosh.
00:22:18
Speaker 3: Yes, that is their documentation of what they saw. You really you can't rule that out.
00:22:23
Speaker 2: Right. Because it's like, well, OK, this part of his story is not tracking.
00:22:28
Speaker 3: Right. And that's kind of the last step in the in the process is after you go through all the case stuff, then you look at the statements and say, does this support or refute eyewitnesses or victim suspect statements? Right.
00:22:44
Speaker 2: One of those pieces of evidence was or perhaps should have been the bedding, like the bedding of the bed that she was laying on because that's where she was when she died. But you said that this bedding was laid out on the driveway and then eventually thrown out or missing, but there were still photos of it. So did you consider what you saw in those photos of the bedding when you were reviewing everything or what was your take on that?
00:23:10
Speaker 3: Well, I would say that the betting was irrelevant and, you know, there's too much artifact for it to be of any practical use. But the prosecution experts felt that they could be used in their analysis. And in that analysis, they described that there was a cone-shaped void on the sheet. that was allegedly caused by David's arm being extended over the unoccupied side of the bed to kind of the back and top of her right ear areas where those entrance wounds were. And they came out kind of the left forehead area. So there's a couple of issues with that in that I didn't see a cone-shaped void on the sheets. And even if there were, that would indicate the blood would have had to have been coming from over his arm in order for it to block deposition on the bed. And so the problem there would be that the blood would have had to skip over the unoccupied portion of the bed and hit him in the shirt, like in his lower chest, abdomen area. Well, that that can't be. I mean, that's just not right. The laws of physics. Right.
00:24:25
Speaker 2: Like some of those blood droplets spraying on him would have fallen sooner than hitting his shirt.
00:24:32
Speaker 3: Exactly. Exactly. And blood comes out from a wound like that, 360 degrees, all the way around the wound, like a little cloud almost, like a donut cloud around the wound.
00:24:44
Speaker 2: So you're going through the photos and determining, like, not everything that you think is lining up with the way the prosecution and their experts saw it. Did you then come to a conclusion or were you able to come to a conclusion about what or who actually caused Sandra's death?
00:25:03
Speaker 3: So basically, you know, the question was, is the evidence consistent with a homicide or a suicide? Right. That's a pretty common question that is asked. Looking at the size, shape and distribution of stains on his shirt, which is what seemed to be the biggest issue other than the the sheets. both expirated and impacts batter, both forward and backs batter are possible. You can't rule that out. So if you have two equally likely mechanisms, that in and of itself should be reasonable doubt. You know, in getting involved in the post-conviction, it's a lot harder to undo a conviction than it is to acquit in the beginning. So when I saw that, as I got through the case documentation and I read what EMS wrote, that was probably the biggest, most important piece of information that I saw in that case that made me say, hey, this isn't right here.
00:26:01
Speaker 2: So because he's saying, I approached her walking up to her where she's facing me, and EMS is saying she's expirating blood from her nose and her mouth, your takeaway was there's good potential that that is how these bloodstains arrived on his clothing.
00:26:18
Speaker 3: Right.
00:26:19
Speaker 2: Okay. And so you have this piece of the case where you're like, they, in my opinion, have interpreted this differently than I do as an expert myself. But then you were saying you look at it as a whole compared to statements. And do you also weigh it against other evidence brought up in the case?
00:26:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, so then you compare it to witness, suspects, statements. And then if in a case like this, where it's post-conviction, then you look at the testimony of the pertinent people in the case, EMS, medical examiner, whatever experts they have, the laboratory personnel. And then you compare it with what they've said and if good information got in front of the jury. I see.
00:27:07
Speaker 2: Because there were others, you know, strange things where like David Deist purchased a gun in January of 2000. And in the days before Sandra's death told her that he was leaving her, like you mentioned earlier, he was having an affair. They weren't getting along, but you were being retained by the defense. And so you can fairly then say to the defense, look, this part of what they said, I'm not in agreement with, and here's what I would say about it. Yeah.
00:27:37
Speaker 3: Yeah. Sometimes you can have a case where the evidence will kind of seem like it is good for them. But as you go through the case material, you become aware of the other peripheral things that are not really in your purview or your scope of work. Right. And so the conversation might be that, well, you know, the bloodstain evidence is not bad for you, but I don't think it's going to help you in light of this other stuff. You know, your money's probably better spent with a different expert for this, you know. I see.
00:28:06
Speaker 2: So you could go to them and say, look, here's something I think is slightly favorable for you, but I'm not going to advise you to try to appeal it based on this.
00:28:16
Speaker 3: Yeah. And in the end, obviously, strategy is the attorney's purview, 100%. But they need experts to help them decide what to do because they're not experts in everything. They kind of have to become mini experts in the things that are related to their trial before trial. I mean, in this case, it was Pretty much all good news for them that, yes, expirated can, in fact, resemble impacts better and often does. And we have this documentation that says she was spraying it out of her nose and mouth, which is precisely what expirated is. But then we still have the problem of the two gunshots, right? She was repeatedly described as brain dead prior to cardiac death. which is not uncommon, but there are some involuntary reactions. One of them is actually called a trigger finger because it's like you're pulling a trigger. Now, somebody else, another physician that reviewed her autopsy said that they don't think she would have even been capable of involuntary movement. And that particular pistol, so when it was examined, it was not found to be malfunctioning. However, they also retained a firearms expert who demonstrated, there are several videos, that this gun, and I'll say, for lack of a better word, it can be kind of contaminated in such a way that it malfunctions, but on visual and it doesn't appear as anything is wrong. And it will double fire with one pull of the trigger. And her wounds, if I remember correctly, were an inch and a quarter apart. And on one of the demonstrations they did kind of on a piece of plywood, the wounds were exactly an inch and a quarter apart.
00:30:06
Speaker 2: And so how did their appeal go for them?
00:30:10
Speaker 3: He lost it. He lost.
00:30:12
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:30:13
Speaker 3: Which also is not uncommon. And sadly, he died in prison in 2018.
00:30:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, I read that he passed away in prison after a short illness. Is it difficult for you when you're going through something like this and trying to stick to just analyzing what you're asked to analyze to... make an just internal judgment, guilty, innocent?
00:30:37
Speaker 3: That's another good question. And you know what? I'm a human being. We all have our opinions about somebody's guilt or innocence, but it absolutely cannot play into your evaluation of the evidence. It just can't. And sometimes it feels like a crisis of conscience. There's one in particular that sticks in my head that I was like, oh, this guy needs to be behind bars, but this was done wrong and this conclusion was wrong. And all of this should get thrown out, which means all the rest of it gets thrown out if the judge rules that way. But you have to just do your job and do your scope of work and let the system do its thing. And as it turned out in that case, he did get to go behind bars for a very long time. So what I believed was the right thing happened anyway. But my opinion about somebody's guilt or innocence just doesn't, it's irrelevant.
00:31:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I don't suppose you could even speak about it on this case, like what your thoughts are overall.
00:31:39
Speaker 3: I would say that I don't think the evidence used to convict him was sufficient. I don't think that the jury got all of the information they should have by which to make an informed decision. And that's really our job. Our job is not to advocate for one side or the other. It's to advocate for the science and to assist the trier of fact in understanding a material issue of the case. And I don't believe the jury in that case got all the information.
00:32:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's a really fair way to be thinking about it and the only way I would want someone thinking about it who was in your shoes if I were being accused of something I mean but it is I'm sure difficult you have someone whose wife has been seriously injured and they're unfaithful and like all of these other things it's hard not to look at them and think okay obviously something happened here you.
00:32:35
Speaker 3: Know how many times do you stay on the true crime stuff and you know for the length of time that you've been doing it yeah I mean, the divorce rate is over 50%. That means there's not a lot of happy marriages out there. And that's just the divorce rate. That's not the ones that are in a marriage that are unhappy and things are going on. And, you know, the vast majority of those do not result in a murder. Is that a motive? Absolutely. Absolutely can be. But the simple fact that somebody was having an affair or, you know, there were marital issues or whatever does not automatically make somebody guilty of the other one's death. You know, you really have to be willing to take a deep dive into the actual evidence and what does the physical evidence say. And I believe in this case that if the jury were told that it is just as likely expirated as impact spatter, that would have been or could have been reasonable doubt. Yeah.
00:33:36
Speaker 2: You know, one thing we talked about on an earlier call that I would love to touch on here is. you know, what are the misconceptions of bloodstain pattern analysis?
00:33:47
Speaker 3: That's another good question. Thank you for asking it. So there's been kind of a lot of bad press about bloodstain pattern analysis over the last, I don't know, decade or so. It seems to come up kind of cyclically every few years and something will come up. And the biggest complaint or issue that people tend to have with that is that they say it's junk science because it's all subjective and it's nothing more than a guess. And that's not true. It's based on the sciences of physics, math, biology. And it's a repeatable thing. That's how we're able to teach it and do the experiments because we will get, you know, when a liquid is acted upon by a force, it's going to behave in a predictable manner. And that's what we study so that we can come to conclusions. The problem comes in where we don't have people that have enough education. The basic 40-hour bloodstain pattern analysis course is not sufficient, in my opinion, and in most people's opinion, to be analyzing a scene and coming up with whether it's more likely or not something is a suicide or not. Because the federal rules of evidence say you're an expert if you have knowledge, education, skills or experience that's greater than that of the average person. So that 40-hour course, by those standards, makes you an expert. But in practice, it's so much more nuanced than that. The basic 40-hour course is to help people who go to scenes identify some of the major patterns and to identify when something, you know, this spot doesn't go with the rest of them. That's know how to document them so that it can be given to a proper expert. But unfortunately, a lot of times what we have is people with only a 40-hour course testifying as experts or pathologists who have never taken a bloodstain course simply because they've seen a lot of blood in their career. And that does not make you an expert either. I had seen a lot of blood in my vocation as well, but I absolutely did not know all the stuff that I know now.
00:35:58
Speaker 2: But you weren't studying the way that blood leaves the body and travels at different speeds and different force. And yeah, it is, it's totally different.
00:36:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a whole different, like I, when I learned about arterial gushing, I can connect that to arterial bleeding that I saw in the operating room and in the emergency room. So I know what that looks like when it happens. So I have that. But I often liken bloodstain pattern analysis to, it's most similar to pathology in that both disciplines have to have a working knowledge of other disciplines like DNA, firearms, things like that. And we have to take scene information into account and all of those sorts of things. and come up with an opinion. And yes, there is subjectivity in what we do, but that's true in all of the forensic disciplines, not just this one. The problem is that, you know, in order to do an autopsy and come to a forensic pathology opinion, you have to be a forensic pathologist first. So that ensures that you have X number of years of school and X number of years of residency and all of that. That's not the case for bloodstain pattern analysis. There is no universal minimum standard. And I think that's where it gets the bad rep because, you know, you only see the cases where there's controversy, right? You don't see the ones where all the experts agree on both sides agree. Those don't make the news.
00:37:25
Speaker 2: It's also, I think you mentioned on one of our earlier calls, it's a piece of the puzzle and not something to be relied upon solely. Right.
00:37:33
Speaker 3: Right. And that's true of all the disciplines, too, including DNA. You know, it's long been held as the quote unquote gold standard. But when you're dealing with mixtures, there is an element of subjectivity that goes into that by the analyst as well, deciding what goes with what profile. And so all of the forensic disciplines are tools in the toolbox. Every once in a while, whatever discipline it is might be the one that is the linchpin of the case. But more often than not, that's how they should be treated as tools in the overall picture. And it's the trier of fact that gets all of the pieces of the puzzle and they put them together. You know, we do have one of the best systems, I will say that, but it's not infallible as we've seen with, you know, the death row exonerations and things like that. And as you said in the beginning, these are people's lives and liberty on the line. Being complacent about that is dangerous. And it could be any one of us. And I think that people, especially with fingerprints and DNA, I think people don't really understand what it can and cannot tell you. You cannot timestamp either one of those. And there's a thing known as the secondary, even tertiary transfer of DNA. You know, and often they'll use the jurors as an example that, you know, you're sitting in this seat that other people have sat in. And then you go into your car and transfer some of that DNA into your car. And then you go home and you transfer some into your home. God forbid that person ends up murdered. Right. You know, you've got their DNA in your home and you never met them. Right. And I remember one time I checked into a hotel. I saw some bloodstains at the bottom of the bathroom door.
00:39:24
Speaker 2: Oh, no.
00:39:26
Speaker 3: I took a picture. I sent it to my boyfriend at the time. I said, listen, this was here when I got in the room.
00:39:32
Speaker 2: You're like high velocity.
00:39:39
Speaker 3: Wow.
00:39:39
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, some kid's got a bloody nose.
00:39:41
Speaker 3: I have a very warped view on life in general. I think most people would not do that, but here I am.
00:39:49
Speaker 2: I understand it. I understand it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I mean, this is a really interesting case and, you know, a tragedy any way you look at it.
00:40:01
Speaker 3: Yes, absolutely. And you know what? Most of them aren't.
00:40:05
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening. We will be back next week. If you have a story for us, we would love to hear it. Our email is thenifeatexactlyrightmedia.com. Or you can follow us on Instagram at The Knife Podcast or Blue Sky at The Knife Podcast.
00:40:21
Speaker 1: This has been an Exactly Right production. Hosted and produced by me, Hannah Smith.
00:40:25
Speaker 2: And me, Patia Eaton. Our producers are Tom Breifogel and Alexa Samorosi.
00:40:30
Speaker 1: This episode was mixed by Tom Breifogel.
00:40:32
Speaker 2: Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.
00:40:35
Speaker 1: Our theme music is by Birds in the Airport. Artwork by Vanessa Lilac. Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer.
