Bloodsworth Read online

  Kirk realized for the first time that they might be thinking that he had something to do with that murder in Baltimore. He’d heard about it, as had everybody. He’d also seen the composite and knew it favored him some. But this . . . Shit, he thought to himself. He gulped down some air.

  Kirk said to Capel that he’d read about the murder in the Times and seen something about it on TV. This didn’t seem to help. Capel just nodded, studying him.

  Kirk was uncertain what to do. He was also nervous about the reefer in his shoe.

  Capel asked him again if he could talk to him and take a picture, down at the Cambridge station. It wouldn’t take too long, he promised. Kirk thought about it. He figured why not. He nodded, okay; sure, he’d talk to them and they could take a picture, but he asked if he could change his shirt first. He also wanted Capel to promise that they wouldn’t make him go back to his wife in Baltimore. Kirk hoped he could get rid of the pot when he changed his shirt. Capel agreed to what Kirk asked but stayed with him while he went inside to change. There was just no chance to ditch the pot.

  Back outside, Capel escorted Kirk to an unmarked police car. Before Kirk really understood what was happening, he was being whisked away. He noticed that other police cars had pulled up and that officers were going into Rose Carson’s house and starting to search it. Sitting in the back of the unmarked cruiser, he wondered how he’d gotten tangled in this one. He mostly worried about the pot, though. When the detectives seemed preoccupied, he tried to push the rolled-up plastic bag of redbud further down into his shoe.

  Before arriving at the Cambridge Police Station, Ramsey and Capel had stopped off at the local Kmart and purchased a pair of little girl’s panties and a pair of dark blue shorts matching those Dawn was wearing on the day she was killed. Ramsey had also picked up a piece of loose concrete from the parking lot. This was their gambit. According to agents at the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, Dawn Hamilton’s killer would have a strong reaction if confronted with these items. An innocent person would have no reaction. Ramsey placed the panties, shorts, and rock on the center of a wooden table inside the police interview room before Kirk arrived. When Kirk was brought into the small room, he displayed no reaction to the items on the table. Ramsey then picked the items up and placed them in a corner, out of Kirk’s sight.

  Kirk saw the items clearly and immediately assumed that the rock must be the murder weapon. What else could it be? He was curious, though, why they were all taken off the table so quickly and then never mentioned by the detectives. What kind of game were they playing?

  Capel began asking him questions. He was courteous, though firm. He asked Kirk where he was on the day of the murder.

  “I ain’t sure, exactly,” Kirk said. “I was probably at home on South Randolph Road, because I think that was my day off.” He thought he’d hung around in the morning that day, he told Capel, then gone over to Wayne Palmer’s house for the afternoon. Kirk said there were others in the house that day who might remember if he was at home.

  Capel flipped a picture of Dawn Hamilton down on the table and asked Kirk if he knew her, and Kirk told him no. Capel asked him if he’d ever met her, and Kirk said absolutely not. He asked Kirk whether he’d been by a pond or seen two boys fishing that day, and Kirk answered, “No sir.” He asked if he knew anything about the murder, and Kirk told him only what he’d seen on television and read in the paper.

  Standing the entire time at “parade’s rest” and staring him down was Detective Ramsey. Ramsey wasn’t as tall as Capel but seemed more intense. He wore a short-sleeve white shirt decorated with a nondescript tie and a plastic pocket protector containing several pens. His graying hair was gummed back against his head. His eyes bore into Kirk’s, and Kirk recalled later that he had never felt so small as he did in that room. Ramsey asked Kirk what his shoe size was, and Kirk answered size 10½. Ramsey then ordered him to hold up his shoe for them to see. Kirk’s brow was slick with sweat. He lifted his shoe—the one without the pot. Ramsey told him to lift it higher so they could see what the underside of the sole looked like. He did. The sole was not in a herringbone pattern. Ramsey then snapped several pictures of Kirk. Capel promised Kirk he’d return the photographs to him once he was cleared. Capel asked Kirk where he’d be staying and Kirk told him. He told Kirk there was nothing to worry about but asked him not to leave town until this was resolved.

  Kirk thought that was the end of it, that it would be over. His picture, he figured, would clear him. But still, the interview had upset him. Ramsey had made him feel awful. And to think they really thought he might be involved in the murder of a little girl. It made him sick. And what was with the panties and the rock? Driving through town, he couldn’t wait to get out of Capel’s car. At that instant, he mostly wanted to get stoned again. He asked Capel to drop him off back on Henry Street. Outside, it was still stifling hot.

  When Kirk got to Rose Carson’s, she was washing dishes. She was spitting mad. She cursed at him because the cops had found a marijuana roach in one of her ashtrays. Still, she let him in. Rose’s sister, Thelma Stultz, was there. Thelma had also known Kirk for a number of years. Both women could see that Kirk was upset, agitated. They’d heard about the murder from the officers who’d searched Rose’s house, but they were curious and wanted to hear from Kirk what happened at the station. They peppered him with questions. Kirk began rolling a joint on the kitchen counter. He was still sweating. His hands were unsteady.

  “Do you know what they wanted?” he said. “I can’t believe this. Jesus. I can’t believe it.”

  “No,” Rose answered, “What?”

  “I’m a suspect in the rape of a little girl. Freakin’ crazy.” He licked two of the rolling papers so they would stick together. “And do you know which one?” he went on.

  Rose again answered, “No.”

  “The one that’s dead. That got murdered up in Essex. That’s the one.” His body gave up a shiver. “I’m really freakin’ out. I just can’t believe this.”

  Rose had heard enough. She was already mad at Kirk over the pot and anxious over so many police coming around. And now she was scared. She started ranting about how much trouble Kirk was causing. She told Kirk not to smoke any more dope in her house. Then she said he’d just have to leave. Kirk shrugged. He’d finished rolling the joint. Thelma, who was pregnant at the time, said, “Well, you going to get me high too?” Kirk said sure. Something he didn’t know was that Thelma was friendly with Detective Cottom. She had promised him, after Kirk had been taken to the police station, that she’d report back anything Kirk said about the little girl. Kirk and Thelma walked outside and started up toward the elementary school. Kirk lit the joint, and the two shared it. According to what Thelma later told Cottom, Kirk couldn’t stop talking about what had happened at the station. He rambled, talked excitedly, acted strange. Kirk told her the police had put the girl’s shorts and a rock on the table. He told her that by putting the girl’s underwear on the table, the cops had gotten him upset, but that he wouldn’t ever let them see him cry. He also said he felt guilty about what had happened to the little girl.

  Kirk was, in fact, distraught. The whole experience had unnerved him. And too, he felt the need to explain what had occurred so that his friends wouldn’t think he’d gotten busted for having weed and agreed to become a snitch. The two walked back toward Rose’s house with Kirk still talking about the little girl, ranting some, and muttering to himself.

  Near Rose Carson’s house, Kirk ran into some guys he knew who needed help lifting a broken motorcycle into the back of a pickup truck. Kirk offered his assistance. There were two girls with them, Tina Christopher and Tina Furbush. Thelma said good-bye and went back into Rose’s. With Kirk’s help, the guys heaved the bike into the pickup and then took it over to Tina Furbush’s garage. Kirk knew Tina Furbush but had never met Tina Christopher. Tina Furbush was nineteen and Tina Christopher was just eighteen. Tina Christopher, it turned out, had dropped out of high school after t
enth grade. After the guys left, the two Tinas invited Kirk into the house. He rolled another joint and they all smoked it. They all got seriously ripped. Kirk started talking about a little girl and being accused of killing her. About how it had happened in Baltimore. He mentioned two boys, a pond, and a rock. One of them asked him if the rock was the murder weapon, if it had blood on it. They talked about whether it was a bloody rock. Kirk kept rehashing what the cops had said to him. He seemed obsessed, went on about the clothes, the rock. His words, at least the ones Tina Christopher claimed to hear, would become the darts that would later be hurled against him.

  Tina Christopher, when questioned two days later by the cops, was vague about what Kirk had said. But she thought he’d talked about the clothes the little girl wore and a rock that was supposed to have been bloody. He mentioned a pond and two boys, she recalled. And she thought she heard Kirk say that the girl went off into the woods with a guy that Kirk was with. She described it as a lot of rambling nonsense. The police typed up a statement and had her sign it. Over the ensuing months, she would often contradict herself to investigators about exactly what it was she’d heard.

  Kirk, after his arrest, said she’d either misheard or misunderstood him. He admitted that he might have told her that the rock was the murder weapon and he agreed he probably told her what he’d read in the newspaper about the pond and the two boys, but he denied ever saying that the rock was bloody or that he was with the man who went into the woods with the little girl. And he never told anyone, ever, that he was involved with the crime.

  Thelma Stultz, back at Rose Carson’s, called Detective Cottom and repeated what Kirk had said to her about a rock and about being upset and feeling guilty when he saw the girl’s clothes. Cottom thought Bloodsworth’s remarks were damning. He filled in Capel and Ramsey on what Kirk was saying. Bloodsworth knows things only the murderer would know, Capel and Ramsey concluded. And by then they had an identification. They had, they believed, found Dawn’s killer.

  Kirk Bloodsworth, unaware of his increasing jeopardy, went over and visited with his parents, who had returned from the beach. His mother cooked fried chicken and cobbler. His parents were both quiet. It was obvious they were waiting for him to tell them what was going on.

  First he told them about leaving Wanda. This was welcome news. Then he mentioned being questioned concerning a little girl’s murder. His mother was sitting at the table quietly. When she heard this she began rocking back and forth moaning, “Oh, God . . . Oh my God . . .”

  “It’s gonna’ be all right, Mom,” Kirk told her. He put an arm around her.

  “You didn’t have nothing to do with that?” she moaned with her lips pursed and her eyes shut.

  “No, Mom,” Kirk answered.

  “What the hell’ve you gone and done?” Curtis wanted to know. He had grown worried, impatient. “People’s been calling here . . .”

  “Nothing, Dad,” Kirk answered. “See, I ain’t done nothing. Believe me, they questioned me, and it’s over with.”

  “Well, just don’t try and get into something to see if you can get out of it,” his mother chimed in. It was a favorite saying of hers.

  “Right, Mom.”

  “Well, if you hadn’t married that bitch,” Curtis started, “and we begged you not to . . .” And with that they began to fight. Kirk and his father started shouting at each other about Wanda. Kirk lost it, got mad, threw his napkin down, and left. It was the last meal he would ever have with his mother.

  Needing a place to sleep he went to the pool hall and from there called his cousin, Cindy Bloodsworth. “Cindy,” he said, “I’ve gone and landed myself in a fine kettle of shit.” He then went on to tell her how he’d left Wanda and somehow become a suspect in a murder case. He was innocent, he assured her. “It’s just that everything seems to be taken the wrong way.” He was sure he’d be cleared, but he needed somewhere to stay and some time to get himself together. Cindy picked him up and took him over to her place.

  Despite having been wasted for most of the day and night, Kirk had a hard time finding sleep. He lay on the couch at Cindy’s for a long while regretting how he’d cursed at his father. He thought of how close he’d come to ruining his life. The doping, the drinking, Wanda—all were wrong turns. Now he was even a suspect in an insane murder. He thought of days past, days more innocent, when all he’d wanted was a fine morning in which to work the river. Knowing the tides and the pull of the moon, knowing the weather, being in synch. Working for himself. No compromises, no excuses. Enough was enough. He promised himself to make a change. And if he put a measure of weight on anything in this world, it was on his own word, on his own commitments, even if only to himself. His time with Wanda was over. Come the new day he planned to hunt down Bill Elliott. To start working the water again. And to save his money and get himself that workboat he’d dreamed of since being a boy. For the first time in an age, he fell asleep with a plan, with a sense of a future.

  Soon after he dozed off, he heard from somewhere far away a pounding noise. It became louder. As he came awake, he realized the pounding was there in front of him, on his cousin Cindy’s front door.

  TWELVE

  FOR A LAW ENFORCEMENT officer, the objective of any identification procedure should be to ensure a reliable and trustworthy result. Because cops sometimes get carried away, become, perhaps, too eager to make that collar, courts must occasionally wade in and remind them of this purpose. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, in a series of criminal cases raising issues of constitutional due process, the United States Supreme Court addressed the problems inherent in eyewitness identification. The Court ruled that identifications stemming from unnecessarily suggestive police identification procedures were fundamentally unfair and would be inadmissible as evidence. The Court recognized that eyewitness identification, particularly in the criminal context, is by its nature difficult and fraught with possible error. People with similar features can easily be confused one with another. For the typical identification witness, who first sees a perpetrator amid the stress of a criminal encounter, the risk of a mistake increases in any kind of suggestive setting. Showing a witness a single suspect at the scene or in a squad car is suggestive. Showing a witness just one photograph is suggestive. This is because such procedures suggest to the witness that the police think the one person, or the person depicted in the single photograph, is the culprit. Some witnesses tend to want to please the police. Others are easily led or susceptible to being influenced. The victim or witness typically wants to identify the culprit, wants to be of help. Giving the witness only one choice stacks the deck. And once a witness’s identification is tainted—that is, the product of an unduly suggestive procedure—all the subsequent identifications that witness makes may be unreliable, mere repetitions of the first.

  The Supreme Court was careful to prohibit only unnecessarily suggestive identifications. It chose a term that could be interpreted flexibly by the lower courts in order to meet the endless exigencies of law enforcement and the varied factual situations that arise. Sometimes an on-the-scene arrest coupled with a prompt identification of the suspect by the victim is as reliable as an identification can be. Police remained free under the Court’s guidelines to solicit identifications in myriad settings. Nonetheless, nonsuggestive identification procedures, as the Supreme Court ruled, were always to be preferred if available.

  To be trustworthy and not suggestive, a good photographic spread should contain numerous pictures of individuals who have the same characteristics the perpetrator was known to have, characteristics consistent with the witness descriptions of the person sought. The people depicted in the photo array should be somewhat similar in appearance. If a suspect has already been apprehended and a photo spread isn’t necessary, a nonsuggestive lineup should be conducted. The lineup also should include a number of people with characteristics consistent with the description of the perpetrator. Witnesses should never see the suspect in a suggestive situation before viewing th
e lineup. Child witnesses are particularly prone to error and suggestion. Working with child witnesses requires extraordinary care in the investigative setting.

  The same evening they’d interviewed Kirk Bloodsworth, August 8, 1984, Detectives Ramsey and Capel drove back from Cambridge to the police station in Towson and prepared a photo array of six pictures. Included in it was the photograph of Kirk Bloodsworth. Of the five pictures Ramsey and Capel put with Bloodsworth’s, one showed a man who was clean-shaven with no mustache and one showed a man with a full beard. Only three photographs depicted men who were similar to the descriptions given by Chris Shipley and Jackie Poling. Later, the detectives testified that several of the photographs in the array were of other potential suspects in the case.

  At eight o’clock that evening, Capel and Ramsey showed the array of photographs to seven-year-old Jackie Poling at his home. Jackie sat at his kitchen table. His mother was out, but a babysitter was there with him. Jackie looked at the pictures one by one. He then told the detectives that he did not see a picture of the man who’d been at Bethke’s Pond with Dawn Hamilton. None of them was the one. Capel later testified that he thought Jackie was distracted, preoccupied, more interested in getting back to the television than in looking at the photos.

  At 9:45 P.M., Ramsey and Capel showed the pictures to ten-year-old Chris Shipley in his home. His mother also was present. Shipley studied the prints, then pointed to photograph number four. “That looks just like him,” Chris told them. Then he added something. He told them that the man’s hair was a slightly different color. “The man at the pond didn’t have as much red in his hair. It seemed lighter,” he told them. Still, he was pretty sure the man in picture number four was the guy at the pond. Picture number four was the photograph of Kirk Bloodsworth.

  Back at the station, Capel and Ramsey discussed the results of the photo ID procedure. Jackie Poling had never been certain of anything. He was maybe just too young. Chris Shipley, on the other hand, seemed to know what he’d seen. He impressed them as a trustworthy witness. While there, they learned of the statements Kirk Bloodsworth had been making in Cambridge, statements that were obviously incriminating. They marveled again at how closely he fit the psychological profile. It all seemed to fit. The difference in hair color mentioned by Shipley when he selected the photo was somehow overlooked. The fact that Jackie Poling had described the man at the pond as skinny and Chris Shipley had described his build as slim to medium was also forgotten. The height discrepancies were rationalized away. Capel and Ramsey were convinced they had their man.