artery.
Other measurements of the other victims’ wounds suggest the blade was at most three inches in length and an inch wide, with some sort of guard at the top of the handle that left four parallel but irregular abraded contusions spaced one-eighth of an inch apart. Such a pattern injury couldn’t have been inflicted by the granny knife or any kitchen knife I can think of, and it was Colin’s conclusion at the time that the weapon was unknown and inconsistent with anything recovered from the scene. It would seem that the killer carried in what must have been an unusual cutting instrument, and afterward left with it.
Clarence Jordan has no incised wounds or defensive injuries of the arms or hands, arguing against him struggling or even being awake when he was attacked. Toxicology findings of a blood alcohol concentration of.04 and what would be considered a therapeutic level of clonazepam paint a picture of him having a drink or two and taking a modest dose, perhaps a milligram of the benzodiazepine, to calm anxieties or to help him sleep. That thought leads me around to the other side of the table, where a plastic evidence bag that isn’t marked for court contains half a dozen prescription bottles, only one of them with Clarence Jordan’s name on it, the beta blocker propranolol. Other bottles belonged to his wife, including antibiotics, an antidepressant, and clonazepam, and while it isn’t uncommon for someone to take another person’s medication, it surprises me that Clarence Jordan would.
He was a physician with easy access to samples, to any medication he wanted, and it is illegal to share prescription drugs. That doesn’t mean he didn’t get into his wife’s clonazepam the night of January 5 when he returned home from his volunteer work at an area men’s emergency shelter around dinnertime. It also doesn’t preclude the possibility that he didn’t take the sedative willingly. It would be easy to crush pills to mix in someone’s drink, and I continue to think about the security system event logs I reviewed.
According to the actual data from the alarm company’s internal archives, the Jordans armed and disarmed the alarm repeatedly through November of 2001, but something changed in December, when it appears the false alarms, allegedly caused by the Jordan children, began to be a problem. The last month the Jordans were alive, there were five faults that set off the alarm, all involving the same zone, the kitchen door. The police did not respond, and the alarms were cleared because the subscriber, when called by the service, said the alarms were false. The arming of the security system became increasingly erratic through the holidays, based on my review of the logs, but it continued to be set most nights, which is why I find the data for Saturday, January 5, rather odd. The alarm wasn’t set at all that day until almost eight o’clock at night. Then it was disarmed at not quite eleven and never reset, and this seems to be contrary to what has been supposed by journalists and the police over the years.
In fact, it would appear that Dr. Jordan returned home from his volunteer work and set the alarm, then three hours later someone disarmed it, and that detail in addition to his having a sedative on board not prescribed to him disturbs me. I spread out scene photographs of the bloody massacre in the Jordans’ master bedroom, looking at images of the couple’s bodies in the bed, the covers pulled up to their necks, and that bothers me, too. People aren’t manikins when they’re being murdered, and bedcovers aren’t neatly arranged over their dead bodies unless the killer or someone does so for psychological reasons, to restore order or cover up what they’ve done. Colin has commented that the bodies may have been displayed to mock the victims, and I sort through more photos that were taken after he removed the top covers so he could examine Dr. and Mrs. Jordan’s bodies in situ.
He is on his back, his head on a pillow, staring straight up with an open mouth, his arms straight down by his sides, his genitals protruding through the slit in his boxer shorts, and I doubt this was his position at death. Someone rearranged him, and the more I see, the more I understand the hatred that the police, the prosecutor, and others must feel toward Lola Daggette as they imagined her inside this room, enjoying herself after she’s slaughtered everyone, demonstrating blatant degradation and contempt.
The T-shirt and the waistband of Dr. Jordan’s white boxer shorts are completely saturated with blood that has soaked the sheet under him, spreading in a stain that extends to the edge of the mattress and under the body of his wife, the entire fitted sheet bloody. He was stabbed a total of nine times in his chest and neck, and there is no indication he struggled or attempted to ward off the vicious attacks of a knife with an unusual guard that left parallel contusions on his skin. His wife is on her right side, her hands tucked under her chin, facing away from her husband, toward the window that overlooks the street in front and the old cemetery on the other side of it, and I certainly don’t believe she was in this position when she died. Her body was rearranged, staged to look almost pious, as if she is praying, yet her gown is hiked up to her waist and her breasts are exposed.
I pick up her flannel gown, long-sleeved, with buttons up to the neck and a lacy collar that seems to fit with the demure serious-looking woman in the Christmas portrait taken not even a month before she was to be photographed again, this time vulgarly positioned on her blood-soaked bed. Flakes of old dark blood drift to the white paper covering the table as I look at every perforation and cut left by a blade that stabbed her a total of twenty-seven times, her face, her head, her chest, her back, her neck, her throat slashed for good measure. The gown is stained front and back, so saturated with blood that only areas of the sleeves and the bottom of the hem indicate the flannel is a pattern of floral blue.
I’m aware of Mandy O’Toole sitting in a chair she’s moved near a window to stay out of my way. She’s watching me intently, curiously, as I arrange the gown on top of the paper, putting it back the way I found it, dried blood making some areas of the fabric as stiff as petticoat netting. Mandy doesn’t say a word or interfere, and I don’t offer my thoughts, which are getting darker and uglier by the minute. I check Gloria Jordan’s case file again. I study body diagrams and review laboratory reports of blood samples taken from her gown, confirming the presence of her DNA, as one would expect, but also her husband’s and their five-year-old daughter’s. Why Brenda’s blood?
I notice from Colin’s measurements and descriptions that the wound to Gloria’s neck begins behind her left ear and travels down in one clean incision, under the chin, below the right earlobe, consistent with her having her throat cut from behind. If she didn’t see it coming and her carotid was severed, that would explain the lack of defensive injuries Colin mentioned, but it raises more questions than it answers. Next I notice another photograph of her on the bed, a close-up taken from the foot of it. Blood spatters are on the tops of her feet, and the soles of them are bloody, which doesn’t seem possible if she was lying down when she was cut and stabbed. But it’s hard to say. There was so much blood everywhere, and I try to imagine an assailant cutting Mrs. Jordan’s throat from behind if she was lying down, sound asleep, drugged out on clonazepam.
I follow blood that is streaked, smeared, pooled, stepped in, and splashed on the stairs, and then the arterial pattern that may have been from the slashing of the knife, perhaps to the neck, perhaps Gloria Jordan’s neck, the spatter arching in rhythm to the beating of a heart that was about to quit. But whose heart, and which direction was the person heading, up or down, in or out? Crime scene investigators, even good ones like Sammy Chang, can’t swab every blood drop or streak or mop up every pool and puddle at a scene, and the labs couldn’t possibly analyze all of it.
Down the stairs to the landing at the bottom, and I pause in the area near the entryway and front door where Brenda collapsed as I try to come up with an explanation for why her blood would have been transferred to the nightgown of her mother, who supposedly died in bed. I look for any evidence that efforts were made to clean up blood in the foyer, on the stairs, in the hallway, or anywhere in the house, but I see nothing that hints of it, and there is nothing to suggest it in any of the reports I’ve seen. I continue going back to the area of the entryway, to Brenda’s body, a sight that must have horrified police when they arrived at the house after the next-door neighbor discovered the broken glass in the kitchen door and called 911.
No normal person likes to look at dead children, and it’s a temptation not to look closely enough. The flooring in the area of the entryway is a chaotic pattern of drips and spatters cast off by a weapon, and smears and puddles, and bloody prints left by footwear and also marks that appear to have been made by bare feet. Toe prints and a heel that are too large for a child’s, and I pick up the SpongeBob pajamas again. They have footies. The marks left by bare feet could not have been left by Brenda when she was fleeing downstairs toward the front of the house and the door, and I find myself back to the same conundrum, the cut, which is significant, on her mother’s left hand.
Colin speculates Mrs. Jordan sliced open her thumb while pruning in her garden, and I follow the thread of this theory through photographs, returning to the sunporch and the garden in back. I revisit the round drops of dried blood, approximately eighteen inches apart on terra-cotta tile and flagstone and foliage, Mrs. Jordan’s blood, believed to be unrelated to the case and excluded from evidence at the trial. If what Colin suggests is correct, and I don’t think it is, she must have injured herself almost immediately after she began pruning. But there’s no tool
