Fuzz Read online

  Joel rolls our manikin onto its front side, revealing one or two additional perimortem gashes on the back. I point out two small divets along the spine, which exhibit no purpling or blood. I hazard a guess, based on a slide from yesterday showing postmortem rodent damage, that a small woodland creature might have been gnawing on our corpse. Joel exchanges a look with one of my group mates, a wildlife biologist from Colorado.

  “Mary, those are marks from the injection molding.” Part of the manufacturing process of the manikin, he means. This would be less embarrassing for me had I not, as group notetaker in an earlier exercise, transcribed teeth-wound measurements using the abbreviation for centimeters instead of millimeters, entering into evidence a tip-to-tip canine-tooth span not seen since the Jurassic period.

  We move on now from victim evidence to animal evidence: evidence on or in a “suspect” that has been shot or captured near the scene of the attack. For instance, Joel is saying, you can look for the victim’s flesh up in the pockets of the gums of the (immobilized) animal. It’s odd to think of a bear getting human stuck between its teeth, but there you go.

  With cougars, Joel adds, it’s sometimes possible to recover the victim’s blood or flesh from the crevice on the interior of a claw. “So you need to push those out, those retractable claws, and you might have evidence under there, right?”

  Claws can be misleading as indicators of the size of an attacker’s paw. When the animal steps down and transfers its weight onto a foot, the toes splay, making the foot appear larger. Investigators have to be cautious with measurements of claw or tooth holes in clothing as well, because the cloth could have been wrinkled or folded over as it was pierced.

  “ ’Kay, what else are we looking for?”

  “Victim’s blood on the fur?” someone offers.

  “Yup, right on.” Joel cautions that if the bear had been shot at the scene of the attack (rather than trapped afterward), its blood could mingle with the victim’s blood and muddy the DNA tests. “And how do we prevent that?”

  “Plug the wound!” And that is why men with the British Columbia Conservation Officer Service keep a box of tampons in the truck.

  What we’re seeking, the end point of all this, is linkage: crime-scene evidence that connects the killer to the victim. Joel goes over to get one of the skulls from the table at the front of the room. He brings the upper teeth down onto a row of wounds in the manikin’s shoulder. This is the glass-slipper moment. Do the upper canines and incisors fit into bite marks on the manikin’s shoulder? And if so, do the lower teeth match a corresponding set of marks on the other side of the body?

  It’s a match. “Pressure and …” Joel positions the lower jawbone into the wounds on the manikin’s backside. “Counterpressure. There’s your smoking gun.”

  At the outset of this chapter, I mentioned a man found dead on a hiking trail with puncture marks on his neck. Investigators deemed it a cougar attack, even though there were no marks to suggest a set of matching upper and lower teeth. The wounds, it turned out, weren’t made by anyone’s teeth but by an ice pick. The murderer got away with the crime until twelve years on, when he bragged about it to a fellow inmate while serving time for something else.

  Every so often, the opposite happens. A human is found guilty of a killing that was in fact committed by a wild animal. Most famously, there is Lindy Chamberlain, the Australian woman who screamed that she’d seen a dingo run off with her baby while the family was camping near Ayers Rock in 1980. We heard a presentation on the case from one of our instructors, predator attack specialist (and—stay tuned—survivor) Ben Beetlestone. Because the Australian investigators had no body and no dingo in custody, they could not do what we’re doing today. They could not link the victim evidence to the animal evidence. Without linkage, the trial turned on assumptions (for instance, that a dingo could not or would not carry off a ten-pound baby), human error, and a media frenzy that swayed public opinion. About three years after Chamberlain was convicted, a search party looking for the remains of a rock climber found a dingo lair with remnants of the baby’s clothes. Chamberlain was released and acquitted, and her conviction was overturned. The dingo really did eat her baby.

  These days linkage often takes the form of a DNA match. Does DNA from the captured (or killed) suspect match DNA from hair or skin under the victim’s fingernails? Does the animal’s DNA match DNA from saliva on the victim? With animal attack cases, scavengers can complicate these efforts. While animal saliva near tooth marks on, say, a jacket has likely come from the attacking animal, saliva swabbed from the victim’s skin could have come from an animal that fed on the corpse later.

  Up in the Canadian wilderness there tend to be a lot of bears around, so good linkage is vital. Van Damme shared a story about a woman killed by a bear in her yard in Lillooet, British Columbia. His team set traps and ran DNA on two “bears of interest” before they scored a match with the third. The innocent bears were released.

  It’s beer o’clock (Canadian for 5:00 p.m.). Instructors are straightening tables and carrying manikins to the back of the conference room and piling them on the floor near the refreshment table. You need to straddle a corpse to get a last refill on your coffee. I waylay one of my group mates, Aaron Koss-Young, of Yukon Conservation Officer Services, for a quick overview of something that isn’t covered in WHART: what people should do in an attack situation, or even just a surprise encounter. Aaron says sure. He’s of the same vintage as Joel, with similar fair features and good manners.

  You may have heard the ditty “If it’s black, fight back. If it’s brown, lie down.” The idea being that brown bears, of which grizzlies are a subspecies, may lose interest in a person who appears to be dead. Right away, a problem: brown bears’ fur can be black, and some black bears look brown. A more reliable way to distinguish the two is by the length and curvature of their claws, but by the time you’re in a position to make that call, the knowledge will be of limited practical use. The most important thing to consider, Aaron says, is not what kind of bear you are facing, but what kind of attack. Is it predatory or is it defensive? Most bear charges are defensive. They’re not really attacks, they’re bluffs. You’ve startled the bear, or you’re too close, and it would like you to back off. “It’s going to come across as big and scary. Its ears are upright, not back.” Aaron pauses to blow his nose. He has a miserable summer cold. “It may be swatting the ground. Huffing.” Popping or clacking its jaws. (But not roaring or growling. That’s mainly a movie thing.)

  Aaron stuffs the Kleenex in the pocket of his fleece. “It just wants to scare the crap out of you.” Grizzlies evolved in more open, less forested terrain than black bears. They often can’t just disappear into the trees as a startled black bear can and typically does. So they make you run instead.

  The recommended response to a bluff is to be as nonthreatening as you can. Back away slowly. Talk to the animal in a calm voice. You’ll probably be fine—even if the bear is a sow with cubs. For all British Columbia’s bears and bear encounters, and for all the hype you hear about the danger posed by protective mother bears, the province has seen only one fatal attack of that nature. (It was a grizzly. No black bear sow with cubs has ever killed a person in British Columbia.)

  With a predatory attack, the survival strategy is the opposite. The rare predatory bear attack begins quietly, with focused intent. Counter to common assumption, it’s more often a black bear than a grizzly. (Though with both species, predatory attacks are rare.) The bear may be following at a distance, circling around, disappearing and reappearing. If a bear starts to charge with its ears laid flat, you’re the one who needs to look scary. Open your jacket to make yourself look larger. If you’re in a group, get together and yell, so you look like one big, loud creature. “Try to give the message, ‘I am not going to give up without a fight.’ ” Aaron says. “Stomp your feet, throw rocks.”

  The same holds true for an attacking cougar. Take inspiration from the Kansas pioneer N. C. Fanche
r, who in the spring of 1871 noticed a cougar eyeing him as he stood inspecting a buffalo skeleton. As recounted in Pioneer History of Kansas, Fancher shoved his feet inside the dead buffalo’s horns, banged its femurs over his head while jumping up and down, and “bellowed desperately.” The cougar, and really who wouldn’t, took off.

  And if the animal goes ahead and attacks anyway? “Do whatever you can to fight back,” Aaron says. If it’s a bear, go for the face. Aaron points in the direction of his nose, a red chapped thing. “Don’t play dead.” If you play dead at that point, there’s a good chance you shortly won’t be playing.

  The worst thing you can do in any situation where a predator seems bent on attack is to turn and run. This is especially true with a carnivorous hunter like a cougar, because running (or mountain-biking) away triggers the predator-prey response. It’s like a switch, and once it’s flipped on, it stays on for a surprisingly long time unless a kill is made.

  WHART instructor Ben Beetlestone experienced firsthand the determination and persistence of a cougar in attack mode. As a Conservation Officer in the mountainous West Kootenay region of British Columbia, he handles a fair number of predator attack calls—most involving bears and minor injuries. A few years ago, he responded to an unusual call. An emaciated cougar was skulking around a couple’s property. Beetlestone shared the experience during a presentation yesterday. He told us he got out of his truck, unarmed, and went up to knock on the door, not realizing the cougar was stalking the couple at that moment, through their windows. “If the guy left one room and went into another,” he told us, “the cougar went to that window.” The windows had paw prints.

  Suddenly the man slams the door. Beetlestone turns to see the cougar, five feet away, crouched, with its ears flat to its head and its tail swishing. “I’m yelling and screaming and kicking at it, all that stuff we tell the public to do. None of it is working.” The cougar jumps him. He tries to choke it, but it pulls away, turns, and sinks its teeth into his work boot. He grabs a broom that’s leaning against the house and hits the cougar, but it won’t let go. He manages to push the broom handle down the animal’s throat. Meanwhile, the couple in the house are just watching through the window. Beetlestone is holding off a cougar with a cheap tin broom, yelling, “Hey! HEY!”

  “Finally the old guy opens the door and goes, ‘What?’ And I’m like, ‘I need a knife!’ ” The man goes to the kitchen to look for a specific knife that turns out to be in the dishwasher. Finally he finds the knife and gives it to Beetlestone, who “Bates-Motels” the cougar. (A necropsy revealed a piece of a running shoe wedged in the opening of the cougar’s stomach, blocking it and starving the animal.)

  The bingo game is letting out as Aaron and I collect our things and leave the conference room. One of the players, spry but slightly stooped, is making his way toward the men’s room as Kevin Van Damme sets off to cross the hall with a bloody, half-naked manikin under one arm. Van Damme is an imposing figure, a purposeful strider. The bingo player halts. “Excuse me,” says Van Damme, offering no explanation.

  Very few cars drive the quarter-mile road from the Boomtown Casino parking lot down to the Truckee River. Today would be a diverting day to travel this road, because multiple crime scenes are cordoned off with yellow police tape. Uniformed men and women with neon-green Predator Response Team vests come and go with rifles and body bags. It’s WHART field-scenario day.

  My group’s crime scene lies between the guardrail and the bottom of a steep, rubbly embankment. Last night we received a pretend text about an attack. Following a fight with his fiancée, we were told, a young man left the couple’s Winnebago to sleep outside in his sleeping bag. At 4:00 a.m., the sheriff got a missing-persons call from the fiancée and drove out to have a look. He found the empty sleeping bag and saw a wolf, which he shot and killed. Then he turned the investigation over to a Predator Response Team. That’s us.

  Our first task is to secure the area, to be sure no large animals are lurking. Cougars and bears sometimes cache the bodies of their victims, burying them lightly with leaves and brush and coming back later to feed some more. This makes the “crime scene” potentially dangerous for the response team.

  A young woman walks up to the man in our group who has taken the role of Incident Operations Chief. “Where’s my brother?” she says. “What’s going on?” It takes me a moment to realize she’s a role-player. She delivers the line with no trace of agitation. More of a Hey, what’s up. Meanwhile, at the scenario up the road, we have some N. C. Fancher–style desperate bellowing: “YOU HAVE TO FIND HIM! HE’S A TWELVE-YEAR-OLD BOY!” This is how it goes with these scenarios. You have one Al Pacino and everyone else is channeling C-SPAN2.

  Our Ops Chief puts his hand on the sister’s shoulder. “Well, we got a report there’s an animal in the area.”

  “What kind of animal?” Like she might go back and get her binoculars. She lifts one foot to step over the police tape. “I need to be down there looking for him.”

  Ops Chief takes her arm gently. “Now, we don’t want you to go down there and get hurt. We’ve got a strategic team down there, doing a diamond-shaped security sweep.”

  We practiced the diamond-shaped sweep earlier. Four people move along back to back to back to back, weapons ready. It’s a human octopus with guns. Each person scans the quadrant in front of her (named for hours on a clock face: 12, 3, 6, and 9) and calls “Clear” if she sees no danger. Whereupon the person to her right calls “Clear.” Et cetera, around and around. Not only can the surroundings be monitored in all directions, but it’s safe in that no one can inadvertently point a weapon at anyone else. Should someone spot a threat, she calls it out, whereupon the people on either side move into position beside her. Now three rifles are aimed and ready, while one person watches the rear. When we practiced this earlier, Joel played the dangerous animal. I had hoped for some pantomime, maybe even a costume, but he’d just step in front of us and say, “I’m a bear.”

  Four of my teammates move through the brush in the diamond formation. Aaron climbs onto a boulder to assume “lethal over-watch,” his appearance of lethalness dimmed somewhat by the Kleenex wadded in the palm that supports his rifle. I’m on paperwork detail again (because “you’re a writer”).

  “Bear, three o’clock!” It’s not Joel this time. It’s a lifelike bear model, one of those hard-foam target practice items used by bow-hunters. Six o’clock and twelve o’clock glide into position beside three o’clock, sliding their feet along the rough ground without looking down. They raise their weapons in unison. It’s kind of balletic. It’s like synchronized swimming with rifle shooting, and can we please make that an Olympic event?

  On a quick count of three, pretend shots are fired at the polyethylene bear. Someone calls for tampons, and the excitement is over.

  Was the wolf that the sheriff shot last night a red herring, an innocent bystander? It’s our job now to figure that out. It’s a wildlife whodunit.

  The victim—played by one of yesterday’s manikins—is shortly found down the hill from the empty sleeping bag, under a bush. A team member pretends to photograph the body, quickly, because an affable coroner, played by Joel, wants to remove it before the midday heat sets in. We’ll have a chance to examine it later, at the morgue/Ponderosa Room.

  Once the scene is secured, it’s time for evidence collection. Items of evidence, as we know from TV police procedurals, are called exhibits. Bodies, sleeping bag, footprints, paw prints, drag marks—these are all exhibit items. Items destined for the lab are assigned numbers and put into evidence bags after they’re photographed in place. A corresponding evidence flag is stuck in the ground where the item was found. My role is to note all of this—a short description of the item, its number and location—on an Exhibit Report, illegibly and probably in the wrong place.

  The animal tracks in the dirt are from a bear. This is good, because we didn’t learn about wolf attacks in class. (Because they almost never occur.)

  The t
eam is on hands and knees now, searching for animal hairs and blood. It’s uncomfortable, hot, tedious work, but important. Much can be learned from blood at a crime scene. Round drops on the ground suggest a “gravity pattern”: blood falling by its own weight from a wound. Oblong gravity drops suggest a victim running as he dripped. A “force-related pattern”—blood ejected by the force of, say, a paw swipe or the pressure of a major artery—is elongated, with a tail like a comet. It’s a spatter, not a drip.

  Someone finds a trail of drips. Joel tells us to look closely at their size. When drips of blood grow smaller as the trail progresses, they’re probably not coming from a wound. They might be dripping from the animal’s fur, or a murderer’s blade. If the size of the drips remains constant—a “replenishing trail”—they are likely coming from an “active bleeder.” A smear of blood is a “contact pattern,” perhaps a place where the victim fell or placed a bloody hand.

  When we’re sure we’ve found everything there is to be found, Joel reaches down and flips over a leaf, revealing a tiny drop of blood on the underside. We missed this. We missed a lot—blood on rocks, plants, on the ground. “Splatter pattern,” someone says knowingly.

  Joel nods, but adds quietly, “Spatter, not splatter.”

  Together the blood and the marks in the dirt tell the narrative of the attack. Drips and blood on the sleeping bag from the initial bites. A drag mark and replenishing drips as the man is pulled from the sleeping bag into the brush. Scuffle marks and blood in the dirt as the man tries to escape, and then a spatter pattern on the plants and rocks, perhaps caused by the bear shaking the man to stop the struggle. Had the body lain dead for any length of time, the chemicals of its decay would have left a final piece of evidence, a stain or area of blackened vegetation, called a “decomposition island.” No pretty beaches there.