Christine Wood’s DNA found in Brett Overby’s basement, court says

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CBC NEWS : 02.05.2019

Christine Wood’s blood was found on a weight bench, closet door and stairs in the basement of a Burrows Avenue home owned by Brett Overby, a Winnipeg jury heard on Thursday.

Jillian Taylor · CBC News

Forensic investigators collected a number of swabs from the house in March of 2017, which were sent for testing along with a DNA sample from Wood’s parents. Court heard the tests came back as a positive match to the 21-year-old who went missing in August 2016. Overby was charged with second-degree murder 10 months later. He has pleaded not guilty.

"It was my opinion at the time that something occurred that made blood fly through the air," testified Patrol Sgt. Brian Neumann on Thursday.

Neumann told the jury of nine men and three women that he and two other members of the forensic identification unit began searching Overby’s home on March 22, 2017.

He testified he found 54 small visible stains, which he said appeared to be blood drops, on one of the two closet doors.

Court previously heard there was a large hole between the doors, which was not there in March 2016, when Overby’s ex-girlfriend moved out.

Much of Neumann’s testimony focused on the use of Bluestar Forensic, a chemical solution sprayed on surfaces to detect blood not visible to the naked eye.

He told court he blacked out the basement windows and then used a camera, which exposed traces of blood and cleaning products in blue.

“It was my opinion at the time that some sort of cleaning had been done on the door,” said Neumann about three large bright blue smears on the doors and wall in between.

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Bluestar, the miracle product that solves many criminal investigations

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Bluestar, which was developed in a CNRS laboratory, has become an essential tool in complex investigations and a formidable weapon in the hands of the technical and scientific police.

Le Parisien : 01.04.2019 (France)

Summoned last Thursday before the investigating judge, Jean-Marc Reiser, the main suspect in the disappearance of Sophie Le Tan in September in Strasbourg (Bas-Rhin), fell from above. After nine hours of questioning, the magistrate presented him with a new piece of evidence: a saw discovered in his cellar by the police.

On the handle, the blood of Sophie Le Tan. A “damning element”, according to Gérard Welzer, the lawyer of Sophie Le Tan’s family. A discovery made possible by Bluestar. A product that “now equips the police in a hundred countries around the world,” said Jean-Marc Lefebvre-Despeaux, head of Bluestar Forensic, based in Monaco.

Created in 2003 by Loïc Blum, a researcher at the CNRS, the Bluestar quickly became a must-have for technical and forensic police services, replacing the Luminol. “The reaction of the Bluestar is much more intense and longer,” says Jean-Marc Lefebvre-Despeaux.

“When I was based in Seine-Saint-Denis, my team, which covered a quarter of the department, used it about ten times a year,” explains Christophe, head technician at PTS, who now trains the teams that go to crime scenes. “We use it in camouflaged blood crimes, when we think there may have been traces that have been cleaned up. “

Bluestar’s strength is that it illuminates blood despite the perpetrators’ efforts to clean it up. In the Reiser case, the Bluestar revealed a large amount of blood in the suspect’s bathroom. It is very difficult to achieve perfect cleaning,” says Jean-Marc Lefebvre-Despeaux. We will almost always find it: between a skirting board and the floor, in the tile joints…”. And sometimes years later.

While working in Seine-Saint-Denis, Christophe remembers, for example, finding traces of blood under a carpet that were ten years old. “Even on surfaces that a suspect thinks are impervious, on an object that he has cleaned perfectly, we can find it,” says the forensic technician.

This is the case with the saw found at Jean-Marc Reiser’s home, which had obviously been cleaned by the suspect. The same goes for the screwdriver discovered a few years ago by Christophe and his team in the context of a murder case. “We were looking for an object like an ice pick, which had been stuck in a man’s head. We came across a toolbox with a screwdriver. We sprayed it with Bluestar and it turned blue,” recalls Christophe. And yet, the suspect had cleaned everything up, you couldn’t see anything with the naked eye. “

But science has brought the murderer down. Will Jean-Marc Reiser suffer the same fate? Confronted with this new “damning” piece of evidence, he was “confused”, according to a source close to the case.

Daval trial: life sentence requested against Jonathann Daval accused of a “terrible” crime, relive the sixth morning of the trial (Audio)

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Justice for the Lyon Sisters

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How a determined squad of detectives finally solved a notorious crime after 40 years

For decades, the disappearance of Sheila and Kate Lyon wasn’t just an enduring mystery; it was an unhealed regional trauma. On a March day in 1975, the sisters — daughters of a well-known Washington radio personality — had gone to Wheaton Plaza, a suburban Maryland shopping mall, on an innocent outing, and then vanished. They were never seen again, though the hunt for them was relentless and extensive. Police interviewed countless witnesses and followed hundreds of tips. Every stand of woods or weeds was searched. Storm sewers were explored, as was every vacant house for miles. The residents of a nearby nursing home were interviewed, one by one. Scuba divers groped through mud at the bottoms of ponds. Nothing was found. Nothing came of anything the police did.

I was a green 23-year-old reporter with the Baltimore News-American when the story broke. My job was to show up in the newsroom at 4 a.m. and phone every police barracks in the state, asking whether anything interesting had happened overnight.

When, on the morning of March 26, the desk officer in Wheaton told me about the missing children, I drove directly to the scene. This was a story that was sure to attract attention. Millions of families in the region lived in neighborhoods just like the Lyons’ in Kensington, Md., shooing their kids out the door in the morning and catching up with them at mealtimes, unconcerned about where they went. A story like this struck at suburbia’s idea of itself.

My first story ran two days after the girls vanished, under the headline “100 Searching Woods for 2 Missing Girls.” It had photos of 12-year-old Sheila, in blond pigtails and glasses, and 10-year-old Kate, with her blond hair cut in a cute bob. As days passed with no good news, the tale turned grimmer. In my newspaper the story was still on the front page at the end of the week: “Hope Fades in Search for Girls.” But in time, as nothing happened, the story moved off the front page and then out of the news completely, overtaken by fresh outrages.

 

As the decades passed I wrote thousands more stories, big ones and small ones. I raised five children of my own. I became a grandfather — of two little blond-haired girls, as a matter of fact. To me, the Lyon story was sad and beyond understanding. Few haunted me as this one did.

While today we can all too readily imagine the disappearance of a child, in 1975 it was shocking — and all the more so because it was two children. Imagining how or why it happened was difficult. The problem of controlling two alarmed children suggested more than one kidnapper, which raised the question, why? What would motivate two people or a group? A sex-trafficking ring? A circle of pedophiles? Just speculating about it conjured scenarios that made you ashamed to be human.

The case haunted the Montgomery County Police Department, too. It was a pebble in the department’s shoe. Generations of detectives had come and gone, and many had taken a crack at it. Periodically, a new team would start over, combing through the many boxes of yellowing evidence, hoping to find something missed. This is what cold case teams do. They embrace the tedium. They are the turners of last stones, laboring in a landscape beyond hope.

But just as the most recent team was preparing to give up, a ray of hope emerged. Detective Chris Homrock stumbled upon a file he had never seen before — the six-page transcript of a statement by an 18-year-old named Lloyd Lee Welch.

On April 1, 1975, Welch, a long-haired drifter with drug and alcohol problems, had contacted Montgomery County police to say that he had witnessed the Lyon sisters’ abduction. Officers had dismissed his elaborate, overly detailed account as a lie, an attempt to insinuate himself into the story, play the hero and collect a reward. But nearly 40 years later, the cold case squad wondered if he really had seen something. At the end of his statement, he had said that the kidnapper walked with a limp, as did the man the detectives, at the time, considered their top suspect. They found Welch in Delaware, at the tail end of a 33-year prison term for molesting a 10-year-old girl, a fact that further piqued their interest.

On Oct. 16, 2013, Detective Dave Davis traveled with Homrock and Montgomery Deputy State’s Attorney Pete Feeney to Dover, Del., to interview Welch, who stunned Dave with the first words out of his mouth. “I know why you’re here,” he said with a sly grin. “You’re here about those two missing kids.”

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Six black girls were brutally murdered in the early ’70s. Why was this case never solved?
Lloyd was nothing at all like the reticent man FBI analysts had led the detectives to expect. He appeared to enjoy talking for its own sake, and even though he knew Dave was working on the old Lyon case, he seemed indifferent to the risk. He talked like a man addicted to talk, free-associating, and Dave, who had worried about how to get him going, just sat back and listened.

In that first session, Lloyd denied any involvement with the Lyon girls’ disappearance. “I didn’t kill anybody,” he told Dave. “I didn’t rape anybody. I didn’t do nothin’ to those girls. I mean, I really don’t have much to tell.”

But he went on talking. And after a full day of interrogation, he let slip something that caught the detectives’ attention. The squad had been working on the assumption that Lloyd had witnessed — or possibly assisted in — the girls’ abduction by a pedophile named Ray Mileski. Wrapping up the session, Dave made a final stab at getting Lloyd to reveal something.

“All right, I think they’re, we’re pretty much done,” he said. “But what I wanted to ask — your opinion only — what do you think [Mileski] did to those girls?”

“Personally?” Lloyd asked.

“Yeah, I’m asking you for an opinion.”

“Well, my opinion is that he killed ’em and raped ’em; he killed ’em and he probably burned ’em. I don’t know.”

In the adjacent room, Chris and Pete looked at each other. “Who says ‘burned them’?” asked Pete.

In subsequent sessions with Davis and Homrock, and later also detectives Katie Leggett and Mark Janney, Welch lied elaborately and repeatedly about his connection to the Lyon case. He eventually admitted that he had helped kidnap the girls but insisted that the crime had been planned and carried out by others in his family — first naming a cousin, then an uncle, then his father, who he said had abused him sexually as a child.

In the summer of 2014, the squad began an extensive probe of the entire Welch clan. What the detectives found shocked them. The clan had two branches, one in Hyattsville, Md., and the other five hours southwest, on a secluded hilltop in Thaxton, Va., a place the locals called Taylor’s Mountain. Here the family’s Appalachian roots were extant, even though some members had gradually moved into more modern communities in and around Bedford, the nearest town. While its environs were markedly different, the branch in Maryland clearly belonged to the same tree.

The family’s mountain-hollow ways — suspicion of outsiders, an unruly contempt for authority of any kind, stubborn poverty, a knee-jerk resort to violence — set it perpetually at odds with mainstream suburbia. Most shocking were its sexual practices. Incest was notorious in the families of the hollers of Appalachia, where isolation and privation eroded social taboos. The practice came north with the family to Hyattsville. Here, where suburban families took child-rearing seriously, some adults in Lloyd’s immediate family exploited their offspring and ignored barriers to incest. It was not uncommon for Welch children to experiment sexually with siblings and cousins. If the Lyon sisters had fallen into this cesspool, as Lloyd claimed and the detectives now suspected, then some of the family might have known — and even helped.

At this point, Lloyd was claiming that the chief culprit had been his Uncle Dick, who he said had planned the girls’ kidnapping and then presided over their gang rape, murder and dismemberment. Wiry, flinty and truculent, Dick Welch was nearly 70 but seemed older. In addition to heart trouble, he faced a frightening array of accusations. Various family members had accused him of ugly and violent behavior toward them in the past.

Dick denied it all; he said little, and what he did say was simple and consistent. Indeed, he behaved like someone wrongly accused, bewildered and frustrated by wounding falsehoods. He was summoned to appear before a grand jury in February 2015. When the prosecutor asked him whether he’d had any involvement in the Lyon case, Dick was succinct and firm.

“God as my witness, no.”

“Did you transport one or both of these girls — Sheila and Kate Lyon — from Wheaton Plaza to your residence?”

“No, I didn’t. I’ve never been there.”

“Did you have sexual contact with either Sheila or Kate Lyon?”

“God as my witness, no.”

“Do you have knowledge of any of these things that I’ve talked about?”

“No, but I wish I did.” He had earlier said that he wished he could help the detectives solve the mystery.

“Do you have any explanation why people would say that you did?”

“I don’t know why I’m getting accused, them saying I did this, I done that. I haven’t.”

Pat, Dick’s wife, would eventually be charged with organizing family efforts to stonewall the investigation. Lloyd’s cousin Teddy Welch, the first family member he named as the girls’ kidnapper — though Teddy was only 11 in March 1975 — had run off as a boy to live with a middle-aged man. Two other cousins, Henry Parker and his sister, Connie Parker Akers, still lived near the family homestead on Taylor’s Mountain. Both would prove to be helpful, if reluctant, witnesses to the strange burning of a bloody duffel bag in a bonfire on Taylor’s Mountain, delivered there by Lloyd. Each of these family members and many others told ugly stories of being either victims or witnesses to inter-family sexual assaults.

loyd had emerged from this culture as both victim and predator. After years of wandering and imprisonment, he had strayed far from the family’s grip, but the peculiar values and behavior he had learned (and endured) had not played well in society at large.

By early 2015, the detectives had formed a much fuller picture of Lloyd in 1975. They could look past the sad, pasty, wily, shackled old man who met them in the interview room and see teenage Lloyd: lean, dirty, mean and high. In ordinary times, this might have made him stand out, but in the late 1960s, many teenage boys were growing their hair long, dressing shabbily, infrequently bathing, and experimenting with drugs. For most, this period was a fling. But for Lloyd it was no pose. He really was poor, desperate, dirty and up for anything.

By 1975 the hippie movement had faded, but Lloyd hadn’t changed. He was then part of a class of shaggy vagabonds thumbing their way around the country on back roads, camping in the woods outside suburbia.

Like Lloyd and his girlfriend, Helen, many were heavy drug users. They still proclaimed the fading mantras of the hippie moment — free love, mind-expanding drugs and the all-encompassing “If it feels good, do it” — but few had considered what such a credo might mean to a man like Lloyd Welch.

At 18 he was already an outlaw, stranded on the fringes of a prosperous world beyond his grasp. Shopping malls then were suburbia’s gleaming showcases, lined with high-end stores stocked with goods Lloyd could not afford. And while he was not the sort to reflect on such things, he must have resented the plenitude, all the comforts of money, family and community that he lacked. As Lloyd himself had put it, “I was an angry person when I was young.” And if he felt scorn, or rage, how better to strike back than to stalk the very thing the mall’s privileged customers most prized? The pretty little girls he saw there, to whom he was perversely attracted, represented everything he was denied. Might a man like this have abducted and killed the Lyon sisters?

The detectives came to realize that you had to forget the narrative. The way to read Lloyd was to look past his stories to their details.

Lloyd continued spinning one story after the next to explain what had happened to Sheila and Kate, always placing the blame for the crime on others. But gradually — often inadvertently — he revealed more and more about himself and the crime.

The detectives came to realize that you had to forget the narrative. The way to read Lloyd was to look past his stories to their details. Running through many of his versions were certain particulars that recurred: stalking girls in the mall, an offer to get high, a station wagon, a crying girl in the back seat, a basement hangout accessed from the backyard, rape, drugged girls, a pool room, an ax, the girls “chopped up” and “burned,” an Army green duffel bag, a bonfire. As if in an ever-churning blender, these stubborn nubs kept surfacing. The more they surfaced, the more they began to look true.

On a Monday in May 2015, Dave Davis went looking for the place where Lloyd said Dick had killed and dismembered Kate before stuffing her remains in a duffel bag and ordering Lloyd to take it to Taylor’s Mountain and burn it. It was a secluded spot under a bridge near his uncle’s old home in Hyattsville. Dick went there to fish and drink and smoke. It was his “comfort area.” Lloyd was “90 percent” sure about it.

Dick’s old house had been razed to make room for a new district court building. But Dave knew where it had been, and he went there first.

Right away, Lloyd’s story didn’t add up. The house was the last place you would choose to bring two little girls who were the object of a bicounty manhunt. Even back in the 1970s, before the new courthouse, the address had been a stone’s throw from the city’s police headquarters. There were officers coming and going all the time.

Lloyd had said that there were railroad tracks behind the house and that the bridge over the Anacostia River was a short distance from the front door. But the tracks were in front of the house, not behind, and across Rhode Island Avenue. The river, which was more like a creek, was not even close. The map showed it four blocks east. The layout was nothing like the one Lloyd had described.

Dave next sought out Buchanan Street, which Lloyd had also mentioned and where members of the Welch family had once lived. It was not far away, running southeast from Baltimore Avenue down to the river basin. Dave drove along that route to a dead end that looked down to the water. To the left was a rail bridge that angled across it.

Dave climbed the low fence and walked down to the water. This was clearly the place Lloyd had described, but it was no secluded haven; the angle of the bridge exposed it to views from neighborhoods all around. With all the dealerships and parking lots in the vicinity, it would have been well lit at night. It was like being onstage in a theater-in-the-round. Another Lloyd Welch curveball.

Dave had begun to lose hope of ever sorting out what had happened to the girls. But as he drove back up Buchanan, staring him right in the face across busy Baltimore Avenue was a house he recognized from snapshots in the file. It was the house where Lloyd’s father, Lee, and his wife, Edna, had lived, 4714 Baltimore Ave., a two-story, white-clapboard duplex with pale blue trim and an uneven front porch. This was the address Lloyd had given when he’d made his original false statement. Lloyd had described seeing his uncle pull out of a driveway with the Lyon sisters in his car, heading toward the river — this now made more sense. The location fit Lloyd’s description perfectly, once you saw that it was not his uncle’s house but his father’s.

It struck Dave with the force of revelation. Just as Lloyd always moved himself off-center in his stories, so he had moved this house. The detective pulled over, crossed Baltimore Avenue, and knocked on the front door.

A friendly Hispanic woman who spoke almost no English answered. Dave managed to make himself understood enough to say that he wanted to look at the basement. She showed him that there was no way to enter it through the house. You had to go outside, down the porch, and along the driveway to the backyard, where steps led down to a padlocked door. In every scenario Lloyd had spun, there was a basement hangout, a place where the girls had been kept. He had placed it first in Teddy’s older friend’s home, then in his uncle Dick’s, but in both it was a room that could be entered only by walking around the house to the rear. Once Dave understood how Lloyd’s mind worked, he knew, without question, this had to be the place.

Dave jiggled the latch, and the door opened. He stepped into a dark, low-ceilinged stone dungeon heaped with old furniture. It was so hauntingly familiar it raised the fine hairs on the back of his neck. This was the place. He knew it. It was exactly where one would stash two stolen, frightened, drugged little girls — two rooms completely cut off from the house above. You could do whatever you wished in this space without being seen or heard.

Dave returned the next day with a forensics team. They cleared away some of the old furniture and started squirting Bluestar spray, a blood-detection agent that bonds with even the slightest trace of hemoglobin and glows brightly under a blue light. The floors and walls of the outer room revealed nothing much. Then they cleared debris from the back room and sprayed some more. It lit up from floor to ceiling. It lit up like a murder scene. Someone or something had been slaughtered in this room.

And then Dave knew. All uncertainty vanished. He was even more certain because he had not been led there by Lloyd; he had found it himself. He had extracted it from Lloyd’s stories, bit by bit.

Aglow in blue light, the room announced itself as the place where Sheila and Kate Lyon, lured from Wheaton Plaza, had been drugged, raped and imprisoned, and where at least one of them had been killed and dismembered. Before he had switched the location to a bridge, Lloyd had talked a lot about a basement hangout, his Uncle Dickie’s sanctuary, a place with a locked door, where Dick went to smoke and drink. But it wasn’t Dickie’s basement. It was the basement of Lee’s house, where Lloyd had been living, the space where Lloyd hung out, smoked dope, drank and “partied.” It was his.

Not long after Dave Davis found the likely murder scene, the case against Lloyd was solid enough to charge him with the crime. Whatever illusions he may have had about winning his long-running game with the Lyon Squad were dashed. On Sept. 12, 2017, he pleaded guilty to two counts of felony murder in a Bedford courtroom. Though he still denied that he had raped or killed the sisters, his admission fell well within the confines of a Virginia legal doctrine defining as murder a killing “in the commission of abduction with intent to defile.” He was indicted in the commonwealth because the case against him was stronger there, his cousins having corroborated his final story of driving human remains to Taylor’s Mountain. Lloyd had also several times voiced his fear of execution, so he was considered more likely to accept a guilty plea in Virginia, a death-penalty state — a calculation that proved correct.

The plea spared him from death row, but he would almost certainly never leave prison. His sentence was 48 years. He was 60 years old, and he had, from first to last, talked himself into this outcome.

Although details about their fate — how precisely Lloyd had enticed the girls and what had happened to Sheila — and who exactly was involved remained unsolved, Lloyd’s plea answered my deepest questions: Who would commit such a crime? And why? But I wanted to meet Lloyd Welch. I wanted to size him up for myself, and I also wanted to close the book on the mystery that had been with me my entire professional life. I wrote him a letter requesting an interview and was surprised when he wrote back immediately, saying he would agree to be interviewed if I put $5,000 in his prison account and met certain other terms. I would not meet any of them but offered to discuss them in person.

Sitting directly across from Lloyd felt familiar; I had watched him on video in the interview room for more than 70 hours. He looked thinner than I expected, with a pale pink complexion, and his watery slate-blue eyes were magnified behind his glasses. He was cordial but all business. If I was expecting to look evil in the eye, I was disappointed. What I found was an unimpressive, scheming man, capable of charm but only to the extent that it served his interest, someone natively bright but deeply ignorant and cocky beyond all reason.

If I was expecting to look evil in the eye, I was disappointed. What I found was an unimpressive, scheming man, capable of charm but only to the extent that it served his interest.

He displayed his usual poor sense of situation, believing he had a lot more leverage over me than he did. The terms he repeated were ridiculous, but I heard him out. Then I asked the questions I most wanted him to answer.

“Why did you keep talking to the detectives?”

Lloyd said he had no choice. He said his repeated requests for a lawyer were ignored. Prison authorities told him that he had to continue meeting with the detectives. None of this was borne out by the videos I had watched. His participation throughout had appeared completely voluntary.

Dave Davis had asked me to convey a message. I was to assure Lloyd that his prison account would never be empty if he revealed where the girls’ bodies were. It wasn’t an official offer, but the Montgomery County police had spent millions on the investigation and still didn’t have that answer.

“I have told them all I know,” Lloyd insisted. “Just because a person pleads guilty to something doesn’t mean they are guilty of it. I did not murder or kidnap them girls.”

Who did?

His Uncle Dick was responsible.

“How do you think I would take two little girls out of the mall, kicking and screaming?” he asked. “Who would be able to do something like that? A man with a uniform.” (Dick had worked as a security guard.) He didn’t understand why Dick had not been charged. He said he was afraid of his uncle, as he had been in 1975.

While insisting on his innocence, Lloyd nevertheless seemed a little proud of whatever role he had played in the crime. I told him of my early coverage of the story, and of all the years I had wondered about it. He noted that it had taken the Montgomery County police almost 40 years to link him to the case. “I’ll bet it seemed like the perfect crime, didn’t it?” he boasted.

He complained about being treated as a rapist and child-murderer in the prison. Someone, he said, might still “put a shank” in his back. Then he said he had enjoyed the interview sessions because they got him out of the prison, and he got to eat something better than prison fare. “That’s one of the reasons I kept talking to them,” he said, contradicting what he’d said minutes earlier. He insisted that he had told the detectives the truth throughout, only sparingly. “I was also trying to protect myself.”

By the end of our appointed hour, I saw no strong reason to talk with him further. I had seen him invent and reinvent his version of the story so often that I saw no point in inviting him to do the same with me. But when I wrote back to him a few days later to reject his deal, I added that if he changed his mind about the payment and wanted to talk with me more, I’d come back and listen.

I got another letter from him promptly. “I received your letter and I am very disappointed in this. So let me say this to you so you can understand what I am saying to you. First the documentary you are doing, you may not use any pictures of me or Helen and you may not use my name in anyway at all. … Now, as for your book, I do not give you any permission to use my or any pictures of me or Helen in any way. You do not have my approval or authorization to use anything about the Welch’s name. You may not use any of the interview sessions that you have of me.”

He continued, “Sorry we did not come to some kind of a understanding. … If you want to come see me then you will have to put $300 on my commissary’s books before you can talk to me again. My time is money now.” I noticed that, despite his tone, the price had dropped considerably.

Mark Bowden is an award-winning journalist and author. This article is adapted from his most recent book, “The Last Stone: A Masterpiece of Criminal Interrogation,” published this month by Atlantic Monthly Press.

Credits: Story by Mark Bowden

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Photographing bloodstains

July 7, 2016

Photographing bloodstains: Bluestar reagent FORENSICS 4 AFRICA 07.07.2016 (Nick Olivier) In the late summer of 2012, police officers in a small Midwestern town were called

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Murder of a woman by her son

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This matricide was solved by the French Gendarmerie Nationale using BLUESTAR® FORENSIC. The woman had been missing for 15 days.

BLUESTAR® FORENSIC was sprayed in one of the victim’s houses where his son lived. Positive reactions appeared and were identified as having been caused by the victim’s blood.

Her son admitted his guilt and explained the murder. In fact, he had killed his mother with a shovel and then scrupulously cleaned the crime scene with detergents and bleach.

Tache de sang effacée à l’éponge
Tache de sang effacée à l’éponge
Trace de sang nettoyée à l’eau de javel
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Alexia Daval case: other acts and hearings to come

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L’est Républicain : 07.07.2018

New forensic experts
About forty experts of all kinds have already worked on the case: no less than five forensic doctors; several automobile experts from the Gendarmerie’s criminal research institute (tire tracks, tracker analysis, etc.); an army of criminal identification technicians for the collection of traces left in various places (DNA, pollen, fingerprints, sheets, etc.); fire specialists and computer experts…

“Everything has come back without interest, except for the autopsy which shows that Alexia was massacred”, sighs Me Florand (read elsewhere). An outburst of violence that makes the lawyer say that “nothing fits between Daval’s different declarations and the objective elements of the case”.

Does this mean that everything has been tried in terms of expertise? Probably not. The investigating magistrate will have to take into account the last statements of Jonathann Daval and act quickly. New telephone expertises (analysis of fadettes, boundary markers, SMS…) should be launched, this time concerning the communications made by the members of the family entourage, which Daval is now blaming. The video surveillance system of the city of Gray could be scrutinized.

If a search of the parents’ house seems difficult, a search for traces at their home, according to the “blue star” method, seems “inevitable”, concedes their lawyer. It is there, indeed, that Daval now places the crime. “The judge is investigating the case against him, so he is going to check it out,” observes the lawyer for the civil parties. According to Me Randall Schwerdorffer, Jonathann Daval’s lawyer, many investigations “have not been done” and “will have to be done” in the light of his client’s statements.

Alexia Daval case: other acts and hearings to come (Audio)

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JESSIE BARDWELL CASE: WAS TEXAS WOMAN’S DEATH AN ACCIDENT OR MURDER?

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A father dreams his daughter has been killed, then she disappears -- what does her boyfriend know and could the dad's nightmare have been an omen?

CBS NEWS : 23.06.2018

Jessie Bardwell, 27, a beloved daughter and friend seemingly vanished from the Texas home she shared with her boyfriend, Jason Lowe. Fearing the worst, her father traveled from Mississippi to Texas to start the search for his daughter. Jessie’s body was later found in a remote spot of farmland wrapped in a sheet.

Jessie Bardwell GARY BARDWELL

Police suspected murder, but was it?

“This story is about a young girl,” Richardson, Texas. Detective Eric Willadsen tells “48 Hours” correspondent Maureen Maher. “Thinks she finds love and it turns out he’s pure evil.”

Jessie was fun-loving and outgoing, say friends and family. She lived in Orange Beach, Ala., where she worked at a local hotspot.

Then she fell for Lowe. To the surprise of her family, one day she moved to Texas. Turned out she was following Lowe, who had landed a job in Dallas. She suddenly disappeared in May 2016.

“I knew she was dead,” Jessie’s father, Gary Bardwell, tells Maher.

Bardwell said he had nightmare before his daughter disappeared. “Something was terribly wrong. Jessie was … was killed. …And when I woke up, it was just a dream.”

“And I felt it – she was not on this earth anymore,” he says.

Gary Bardwell immediately filed a missing person’s report. After multiple visits to Jason and Jessie’s home, detectives had a sense something was wrong. There were things out of place and the unmistakable scent of death. Soon after, Lowe was arrested and charged with murder.

Lowe later claimed Bardwell’s death was an accident. His attorney had a plan, and he put together a mock trial to test the defense theory. The result of the stand-in jury? Lowe was not guilty. Prosecutors, however, maintain it was murder and Lowe tried to hide her body.

“I think about what I think happened to her. And I couldn’t protect her,” Bardwell tells Maher. “It’s just unimaginable. It’s unthinkable. It’s unforgivable.”

What happened to Jessie Bardwell?

A GUT FEELING

Gary Bardwell: Yesterday — I went down to the river and just — set there and watched the boats go by and took some deep breaths and said, I don’t know how much of this I can take, you know, any longer.

There are days when it’s hard for Gary Bardwell to get out of bed. But he always does, determined to get justice for Jessie, his 27-year old daughter who disappeared from her apartment in Richardson, Texas, in May 2016.

Gary Bardwell: I’m doin’ it for Jessie, takin’ one day at a time, one step at a time.

Bardwell knew something was wrong before he even knew Jessie had gone missing.

Gary Bardwell: Somethin’ from my soul was gone. And I was afraid that it was her.

“I called her my beautiful daughter. And I still do. Beautiful Jessie,” said her father, Gary Bardwell GARY BARDWELL

That connection, that bond deeper than words, formed the moment Jessie was born, says Bardwell.

Gary Bardwell: As soon as she was born I immediately started crying. …It was just such a happy moment — such a happy moment.

Jessie grew up alongside her older brother, Brandon.

Brandon Bardwell: Me and Jessie have been two peas in a pod since we were young.

Gary Bardwell, a now-retired firefighter with the Pascagoula, Mississippi, Fire Department, loved being a dad.

Gary Bardwell: She kinda didn’t want me out of her sight … She just liked to know where I was.

[Holds Jessie’s teddy bear] She slept with this every night.

Gary Bardwell: I just loved those days.

Gary Bardwell: Daddy’s little girl, for sure.

When Jessie was 14, Gary and her mother, Carla, divorced.

Gary Bardwell: She loved her mother too. …Very much so.

Jessie spent her high school years with her father and her new stepmother, Gina.

There were a few tries at college life.

Gary Bardwell: Somewhere along the line, she was having more fun than school.

That’s when Jessie moved to Orange Beach and started working tables at Cobalt, a popular beachside restaurant.

Gary Bardwell: She just loved being around the water …. She would be in the water fighting the waves and having fun.

Gary Bardwell: We talked every day. She’d text me every day.

Jessie’s good friend, restaurant manager Kimberly Asbury found out Gary Bardwell was an accomplished musician, and booked him at the restaurant.

Kimberly Asbury: Like he came and they went boating and they went fishing … She’d go to his gigs. I mean they were friends. They weren’t just father and daughter.

Jessie had been living with a long-term boyfriend, but surprised everyone when she fell for a new guy, Jason Lowe.

Kimberly Asbury: It kind of came out of nowhere.

Jessie’s friend Terri Ellis saw the romance start.

Terri Ellis: Jason seemed friendly. …He definitely — was outgoing as well.

Jason Lowe FACEBOOK

He was handsome, had two college degrees and was ambitious. For Jessie, not just a new love - but a ticket to a more exciting life. When Jason went to Dallas for a six-figure job in the tech industry, Jessie decided she would join him and pursue her own dream of cosmetology.

Terri Ellis: She thought of it as more of an adventure. Like,” I’m trying something new.”

But Jessie failed to mention that she was about to go to Dallas when she saw her family that Christmas.

Gary Bardwell: I had no clue of what was going on.

Gary Bardwell: She knew that she was fixing to leave for Texas and I would have done everything I could to try to talk her out of it.

Shortly after the holidays, Jessie left for Texas. And suddenly the girl who always had her iPhone was now never on it.

Kimberly Asbury: You couldn’t reach her.

Kimberly Asbury: It just went from hearing from her a lot and talking to her to nothing.

Terri Ellis: The moment that I really started to get worried was when her phone number was cut off and everything that we talked to her had to go through Jason.

The only way to get Jessie was to call Jason’s phone or the house phone. They would come to find out that Jason was monitoring all her calls. Eventually, every time Bardwell called Jessie, he only got Jason.

Gary Bardwell: I said, “Let me speak to Jessie.” He said, “She said she’ll call you later.”

Two months later, Bardwell finally got his chance to meet Jason Lowe. Jason and Jessie came to Pascagoula for a visit. Bardwell tried to persuade Jessie not to go back to Texas.

Gary Bardwell: I remember Jessie was — huggin’ me more than normal … And I was goin’, “Are you OK?” “Yeah, yeah. I — I definitely wanna go to Texas. I just want you to be proud of me, you know?” …They left. I watched the car drive away.

Even though Jessie never let on that anything was wrong, Bardwell had a bad feeling. He went into his studio — Jessie’s childhood room — and wrote the song, “Taken Away.”

Gary Bardwell: That song, “Taken Away” was written the very last time I saw Jessie. …It was written about seein’ them leave, me gettin’ a gut feelin’ of something was bad wrong.

In May, four months after Jessie moved to Texas, she stopped answering his calls all together. Bardwell called Jason, and insisted on knowing where Jessie was. He says Jason told him he didn’t know.

Maureen Maher: What was he saying?

Gary Bardwell [mimicking Jason’s voice]: “I don’t know where in the hell she is. We don’t live co-dependent … She can go … and come as she pleases.”

But when she didn’t call her mom and stepmom on Mother’s Day, Bardwell had had enough.

Gary Bardwell: I said, “We’re leaving in the morning. Let’s pack some bags. And we’re going to Texas.”

A FATHER'S MISSION

When Gary Bardwell got in his truck and headed to Texas, he was angry. Very angry.

Gary Bardwell: I get so angry that it scares me.

His little girl was missing and he believed Jason Lowe was behind it.

Gary Bardwell: I text him on the way there. I said, “If Jessie’s not there when I get there, you are in a tremendous amount of trouble.”

But when he got to Jessie and Jason’s apartment, she was nowhere to be found. Bardwell immediately filed a missing persons report with the Richardson Police Department. Over the next 24 hours, the police repeatedly visited the apartment and still she never showed up. That’s when Detective Chiron Hale got assigned to the case.

He first made contact with Jason by phone.

Det. Chiron Hale: He stated … the last time he saw her was on May 8th, which was Mother’s Day — that morning at 10:00 a.m. and she left in her Acura.

AUDIO RECORDING:

Det. Chiron Hale: And is that car still gone?

Jason Lowe: Yes.

The next day, Detective Hale, the lead detective, made a house call and made another audio recording:

AUDIO RECORDING:

Det. Chiron Hale: Still haven’t heard from Jessie, right?

Jason Lowe: I haven’t.

By then Jessie had been reported missing for three days.

Det. Chiron Hale: As the father of three girls, I was very determined to get to the bottom of what had happened to Jessie Bardwell.

It seemed everybody was desperate to find Jessie except the man who claimed to be in love with her.

AUDIO RECORDING:

Jason Lowe to Det. Chiron Hale: We just did our own thing, always. I didn’t question her she didn’t question me and it worked.

The detective looked around the apartment and saw no sign of a struggle. Jason stuck to his story that she left home in her Acura.

Jessie Bardwell posing with the Acura that police learned had been sold three weeks before her disappearance.

GARY BARDWELL

There was just one problem with that story. The police learned that Jessie and Jason had sold that Acura three weeks before Jason claimed she drove off in it. They found it in the new owner’s driveway.

Det. Eric Willadsen: Jason’s lies were not very smart. Who would lie about an Acura that had been sold? … it was pretty clear that there was definitely something — going on other than just a missing person.

It became even clearer the following day. A team of detectives including Hale and his partner Eric Willadsen returned to the apartment. They saw what appeared to be a line of cocaine

AUDIO RECORDING:

DETECTIVE: You have coke on the countertop? A line of it? Yes or no.

JASON LOWE: Yes, sir.

But it was an odor coming from the garage that really got their attention.

Det. Eric Willadsen: It’s a smell that you never forget. Once you’ve smelt it, you know instantly when you smell it again.

It was the smell of death. And it was coming from the back of Jason Lowe’s black Audi. Detective Hale opened the hatch door. There was no Jessie Bardwell, but a body had clearly been there.

When police searched the garage, they came across Jason’s Audi. It was covered in mud and the bumper was ripped-off and stuffed inside the car. The thing that stuck out the most to the detectives was the odor emitting from the back hatch of the vehicle. It was the smell of death. COLLIN COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S OFFICE

Det. Chiron Hale: There was standing fluid in the back hatch. And it smelled like just decaying flesh. …It had front-end damage. It did not have the bumper. The bumper was inside the vehicle … it had a lot of mud on the inside and on the outside.

One explanation was that he had gotten stuck in the mud while searching for Jessie.

Det. Chiron Hale: He still held onto the fact that he did not know where Jessie was.

When the detectives sprayed the luminol-based chemical Bluestar in the Audi, the cargo compartment lit up — indicating the presence of blood. COLLIN COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S OFFICE

But when they sprayed the chemical Bluestar in the cargo compartment of the Audi, it lit up like crazy – indicating the presence of blood.

Det. Chiron Hale: It pretty much turned into a homicide investigation at that point.

AUDIO RECORDING:

DET. CHIRON HALE: We’re wondering if you wouldn’t mind coming down to the station so we could talk?

JASON LOWE: Like right now?

DET. CHIRON HALE: Yeah.

Jason Lowe was initially arrested on drug charges and thrown in jail. Detectives used the opportunity to further question him on Jesse’s whereabouts.

Det. Eric Willadsen: We spent a long time speaking with him to try to relate to his emotions, his feelings.

DET. HALE TO LOWE: You see this picture? Look at the picture. Jason.

DET. WILLADSEN TO LOWE: The girl you were in love with. The girl that you wanted to marry.

Det. Eric Willadsen: …and nothing seemed to work.

JASON LOWE: Don’t f—ing patronize me.

Det. Eric Willadsen: He didn’t seem to care … He seemed irritated and thought that — we were trying to pin things on him that he hadn’t done.

DET. WILLADSEN: Will you tell me where she’s at.

JASON LOWE: I don’t know any of that, man I’m wrapped up –like I’m good—I’m not going to be accused of stuff and I’m done talking.

Jason Lowe was charged with the murder of Jessie Bardwell RICHARDSON POLICE DEPARTMENT

Even without a body, Jason Lowe was charged with murder.

Det. Eric Willadsen: I had no doubt that he had killed her.

But they did have doubts — grave doubts — that they would ever find Jessie.

Det. Eric Willadsen: Texas is a huge state. We’ve got lots of rivers, lots of lakes, lots of ponds, fields. There are — 100 million different places you could hide a body in Texas.

Back home in Pascagoula, the town rallied around the family.

Kitty Bardwell | Jessie’s grandmother: They had a candlelight vigil at the beach … praying that she’d be found, maybe safe somewhere.

On May 19, almost three weeks after Jessie was last seen alive, they finally got an answer. The police had reason to believe Jessie was on a remote ranch in North Texas. Gary Bardwell says they wouldn’t tell the family how they knew; only that it was a reliable source. Chief Jimmy Spivey called the Bardwell family into the station.

Gary Bardwell: The chief said, “It’s gonna be a bad day for y’all today because we do not expect to find your daughter alive.”

A team of detectives, FBI investigators, and prosecutors made their way to that remote ranch in Farmersville, Texas. They arrived late afternoon and started walking through the fields.

Det. Eric Willadsen: We saw where he had gotten stuck in the mud.

Maureen Maher: You could still see the car parts on the ground?

Det. Chiron Hale: You could.

Det. Eric Willadsen: We found a piece of metal…looked like it was shielding something — kind of a makeshift burial area, and at that point you could start to smell, you know, decaying flesh, so…

Det. Eric Willadsen: …we walked closer. She was covered with a sheet, so you could tell — but you could see the outline of the body under the sheet.

Jessie Bardwell had been crudely wrapped in a blue fitted sheet and covered with a pile of debris, including a red blanket and two red and gold towels.

Maureen Maher: What was the condition of this body?

Det. Eric Willadsen: It’s one of the worst we’ve seen.

It would take seven days to officially identify her body. The medical examiner ruled Jesse’s death a homicide. But her body was so badly decomposed officials could not say how she was murdered.

Against his better judgment, Jessie’s father read the autopsy report.

Gary Bardwell [overcome with emotion]: I felt it was my responsibility as Jessie’s daddy to read the report. …she was brutally murdered. And she was thrown away like a piece of trash … wrapped up in a sheet barely looking like a person.

Gary Bardwell [overcome with emotion]: They sent the hearse to Texas to pick her up and my firemen buddies loaded her into the back of the hearse … This is my life now.

Over 900 people showed up at First United Methodist Church to mourn the death and celebrate the life of 27-year-old Jessie Bardwell.

Kitty Bardwell: If this town could be washed with all the tears that were shed over Jessie, it’d be real clean. We wouldn’t even need for it to rain for the tears that were shed for Jessie.

While the Bardwells spent the next year grieving, a very different looking Jason Lowe was in a McKinney, Texas, jail cell preparing his defense.

Andy Farkas | Defense attorney: One of the key issues in this case is whether or not to have our client testify.

Jason’s court appointed attorney, Andy Farkas, says he is sure that Jason did not murder Jessie. He’s not so sure Jason can convince a jury. But he has a plan.

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Photographing bloodstains

July 7, 2016

Photographing bloodstains: Bluestar reagent FORENSICS 4 AFRICA 07.07.2016 (Nick Olivier) In the late summer of 2012, police officers in a small Midwestern town were called

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They capture the partner of a mannequin

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The subject claimed that when he arrived at the apartment he found the woman dead, but technical evidence contradicts this version and indicates that he is the main suspect in the incident.

El Espectador: 21.11.2020 (Colombia)

The subject stated that when he arrived at the apartment he found the woman dead, but technical evidence contradicts this version and indicates that he is the main suspect in the incident.

The apparent suicide of an erotic model in western Cali has taken another course, after a series of technical tests conducted by professionals at the scene, whose results suggest that it would be a suspected case of femicide.

On April 22, police officers arrived at an apartment in the west of the city where they found the lifeless body of Paula Andrea López Flores , who had an obvious gunshot wound to the head . At that time, the statement was taken from Iván Alfonso Rubio Londoño, the sentimental partner of the woman, who assured that he found her dead when he arrived at the residence. The first hypothesis suggested that it was a suicide. (Read also: the shooting in the disco of Juanchito leaves one dead and one injured)

However, members of the Criminal Investigation Section continued to investigate to clarify the facts. Everything began with the process of gathering information; The autopsy report was reviewed, in which it was determined that the characteristics of the wound presented by the victim were not the result of a suicide; It was carried out the monitoring of security cameras that seem to the show entering the Rubio Shut garbage can where it was found the firearm

…and tests carried out by Bluestar (a luminol-based blood visualization agent) showed blood in different parts of the apartment, including the sink.

All of these findings, plus the unconvincing version of the victim’s romantic partner, were presented to the 47th District Attorney’s Office, which issued a warrant for Rubio’s arrest, which became effective in the last few hours. (You might be interested in: seven-month-old baby died in hitman attack allegedly directed at his father )

“According to the information we have, they were already organizing a separation . To date, we have not found any formal complaint before the family prosecutor’s office or the police station for abuse or domestic violence and the investigations that have been made with neighbors give no indication that the woman was raped ” , said Colonel Fabián Ospina , police. Metropolitan Subcommander of Cali, who added that the captured had no criminal record.

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Scientific advances have made a blood trail speak for itself

by NewsPress articlesReal Cases solved with BLUESTAR® FORENSIC

Maëlys: how scientific progress made a microscopic trace of blood talk

FRANCE 3 : 09.12.2019

They escaped the meticulous cleaning of Nordahl Lelandais. Then, at first, from the attention of the investigators. It is micro traces of blood, discovered under floor mats, in the trunk of the Audi A3 of the suspect of the homicide of Maëlys de Araujo, which allowed to confound him and to extract a confession.

In the last ten years, science has made spectacular progress in making tiny bloodstains speak for themselves. “In 2000, a trace of half a centimetre was needed to identify a victim, but today it can be done when the traces are not visible to the human eye,” explains Colonel Patrick Touron, the director of the Gendarmerie’s criminal research institute (IRCGN).

Nylon instead of cotton

For a criminal, it is becoming increasingly difficult to remove evidence. “The blade of a knife may have been carefully cleaned, and by taking the object apart, we can find traces inside the handle that will be useful, even if there is not much left. Or in the case,” says Marie-Gaëlle Le Pajolec, co-director of the Institut Génétique Nantes Atlantique (IGNA).

Over the past ten years, the whole chain leading to the identification of victims from their blood has evolved, starting with the detection of blood cells. “Blood developers such as Bluestar allow us to find invisible traces. There are also devices that trigger lights at particular wavelengths,” continues Marie-Gaëlle Le Pajolec. These are the kind of tools that were used to find the micro traces of Maëlys’ blood.

The next step, sampling, has also been perfected. “We used to use swabs with cotton stems where moulds could grow. Today, we use swabs with nylon stems that dry much faster,” adds the IGNA expert.

Study the projections

Extracting DNA from the cells and duplicating it for investigative purposes (‘amplifying’ it in scientific language) is also made easier. “Blood is a very rich material in DNA. From very small traces, it is now possible to obtain fingerprints. For DNA extraction, we have much more efficient kits than ten years ago,” says Marie-Gaëlle Le Pajolec. This stage, which used to take a week, now only takes a few hours…

Investigators can also count on the experts in morpho-analysis of blood traces from three French centres, including the IRCGN and the IGNA. This discipline, developed in France since the end of the 1990s, makes it possible to develop scenarios based on blood projections: was the victim hit? Were there several protagonists? As in the case of Maëlys, the size, shape and distribution of each drop of blood are carefully examined.

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Invisible bloodstains revealed by Bluestar

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Mallouk case: the long trial of a murder without a confession (FRANCE 3)

Hafid Mallouk is to be tried for a fortnight for the murder of his girlfriend, a young nurse whose body was found burnt in a forest in Villers-les-Nancy.

The judicial path has been very long and tortuous to bring Hafid Mallouk to the courtroom of the Nancy assizes court. And his trial promises to be just as long and tortuous. It will open on 22 January at 2pm and is due to last two weeks.
 
Two weeks during which experts of all kinds will take the stand. For in this case, the courts have had recourse to almost every possible means of scientific investigation. This was not enough to overcome the block of denials in which Hafid Mallouk was locked. But it did drastically reduce the room for doubt.
 
The 39-year-old from Nancy, employed on a fixed-term contract in an insurance firm before his arrest, is accused of having killed his companion, Julie Martin, a 34-year-old nurse with whom he had a baby daughter. The case dates back to 30 June 2014. That day, in the early afternoon, the police and fire brigade intervened at the couple’s home, on rue Jean-Prouvé, next to the Place de la Croix-de-Bourgogne, in Nancy. It was Hafid Mallouk’s brother who alerted them because he came to the door of the house and nobody answered his calls.
 
The firemen entered through the window and discovered the thirty-year-old locked in the bathroom. He was frantically washing his hands. His hands show signs of injury. The man looks shocked and is unable to give coherent answers to the police’s questions.

Invisible bloodstains revealed by the Bluestar

In particular, he is unable to explain where his girlfriend has gone. This suspicious behaviour prompted the police to search the flat. They used “Bluestar“, a product that reveals bloodstains invisible to the naked eye. They then realised that there were significant traces of blood throughout the flat, from the bathroom to the bedroom and the kitchen, and that everything had been cleaned.

 

For the investigators, it is clear that Julie Martin has been killed and they are at the scene of her murder. But there is no body. The victim remains unaccounted for. Until 14 July 2014. A walker discovers the completely charred body of the young woman in the Clairlieu forest in Villers-lès-Nancy.

This was the starting point of a marathon of scientific investigations. Everything was examined: analysis of the soil from the pyre as well as various objects found burnt with the body, autopsy of the charred bones, DNA research, study of the shape of the bloodstains found in the flat on Rue Jean-Prouvé and analysis of the couple’s mobile and fixed telephone lines.

All of this leads to a body of damning evidence against Hafid Mallouk. The last investigating judge in charge of the case retained nine elements to send him back to the court of assizes (see elsewhere). However, the thirty-year-old persists in denying it.

His psychological health seems to have deteriorated since he has been in detention. He regularly turns his cell into a dumping ground or degrades it. What will be his attitude at the trial? The answer will be given on 22 January. He is facing life imprisonment.

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Photographing bloodstains

July 7, 2016

Photographing bloodstains: Bluestar reagent FORENSICS 4 AFRICA 07.07.2016 (Nick Olivier) In the late summer of 2012, police officers in a small Midwestern town were called

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