Bringing Ben Home by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

Author:Barbara Bradley Hagerty [Hagerty, Barbara Bradley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

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As a trace analyst for Ohio’s Bureau of Criminal Investigations (BCI) from 1977 to 2009, G. Michele Yezzo specialized in hair, fiber, glass, footwear, tire marks, and blood spatter, but she claimed she could analyze virtually anything. In one case, she was able to look at a photograph of a tire mark in a snowbank and connect it to a tire on a suspect’s car; she didn’t examine the actual tire, but she looked at a brochure for that type of tire.[6] Based on her testimony in an otherwise circumstantial case, the (Black) defendant was given the death sentence. In another case, Yezzo reassembled more than twenty pieces of a broken windowpane and claimed that she found tread marks matching the suspect’s shoes.

One exceptional effort bears examining. On February 12, 1981, Barbara Parsons was bludgeoned to death in her bed in the small town of Norwalk, Ohio. Blood coated the walls and floor, and soaked into the bedsheet and nightgown covering the body. In all this blood, the prosecutor would later claim, lurked a clue.

The police interviewed the victim’s husband, James Parsons, who offered an alibi. He had left home when his wife was still asleep, had gone to the coffee shop and then to his auto-repair shop, where he saw customers all day. No forensic evidence connected him to the crime. The case went cold for nearly a decade, until a young detective began nosing around the town’s most famous murder. He wondered if he could connect the bedsheets and nightgown to what he believed was the murder weapon: James Parsons’s Craftsman breaker bar, which he used to cut off bolts at his garage.

The detective turned to Michele Yezzo, who would later coauthor a textbook called Bloodstain Patterns. Yezzo sprayed a chemical on the bedsheet and nightgown to enhance the bloodstains. As she watched, she later said, the letters “S” and “N” rose to the surface—consistent with the letters on the Craftsman breaker bar. But Yezzo failed to photograph these impressions, and they dissolved in a few minutes. The evidence was ruined and could not be replicated or retested by the defense.

In 1993, twelve years after the crime, James Parsons was charged with murdering his wife. At trial, Michele Yezzo, a seasoned witness, chose her words carefully. She conceded that millions of other Craftsman tools were imprinted with the same logo. But, she testified, “my opinion is that there is nothing that makes it inconsistent with this bar. There are individualizing characteristics that are consistent with this bar.”[7]

Even back then, jurors had come to expect some magic from their forensic experts, and Yezzo did not disappoint. Mike Donnelly, a justice on the Ohio Supreme Court, told me that no testimony is more compelling to a jury than that of a forensic scientist, who presents as clinical and unbiased, and trails a raft of credentials after his or her name. He watched the process in hundreds of cases when he was a trial judge. “I sat there for

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