Bone Deep by Charles Bosworth

Author:Charles Bosworth [Bosworth, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Citadel Press
Published: 2021-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Wednesday, November 20, 2013—

third day of trial testimony

The numbers sounded impressive, but they proved very little.

The chance that the blood found on the outside and the sole of Russ Faria’s right slipper belonged to someone other than Betsy Faria was one in 178 quadrillion—quadrillion being the number that comes after a trillion, which comes after a billion. So that’s one in 178,000,000,000,000,000—with fifteen zeroes. And the chance that the DNA found inside the slipper was from anyone other than Russ Faria was one in 978 billion—one in 987,000,000,000.

So, Joel Schwartz thought, the jury now knew the blood at the scene of Betsy’s murder was hers and Russ had at some time worn his own slippers.

The rest of the testimony by Daniel Fahnestock from the crime lab at the St. Charles County Sheriff’s Department didn’t prove much, either. The DNA analysis only proved that someone—no one knew who—had put Betsy’s blood on Russ’s slippers. And proving that Russ had worn his own slippers certainly didn’t prove he killed his wife.

But Askey had Fahnestock, the crime lab’s DNA technical leader, present all of his analysis, starting with his description of the blood on the slippers as “droplets,” adding “they weren’t smears. They didn’t appear to be transfers.”

“So, not like someone could pick up the slipper and rub it in the blood?”

“That’s not what it appeared to be to me.”

Fahnestock said the blood on the switch plate from the master bedroom was a mixture from two people. The major contributor was Betsy. The other contributor was male, but the sample was so small as to be “of no comparative value” for identification. A loose end Schwartz thought didn’t cut in favor of the prosecution or the defense.

Fahnestock said the rape kit—standard in the murder of a woman—showed a mixture of material from Betsy and Russ, including eight sperm cells, in her vagina. A swab from the outside of the rectum showed a mixture of materials from Betsy and a male. But again, the sample was too small to allow identification.

* * *

Swanson used cross-examination to put the lab tests into perspective. Fahnestock had not found any blood on Russ’s T-shirt, jeans, socks, belt, and wristwatch. He did not know how old the blood on Russ’s slippers was or how it got there. Betsy’s T-shirt showed extensive amounts of her blood, but Fahnestock never saw Betsy’s pants. No blood was found on any of the cabinet doors or the floor tiles from the kitchen and dining room, including one he tested after it reacted to Bluestar/luminol. He agreed with Swanson that the reagents had a high level of false-positive results to “things like plant materials. It could be dirt, bleach. A lot cleaning supplies will give false positives.”

Material from fingernail clippings from Betsy’s right hand was mostly Betsy’s. There was one particle of DNA called an “allele”—a tiny form of a gene located on a chromosome—from someone else. It was not from Russ, but it was too small to identify another source.

Askey immediately

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