Dead Guilty

Diane took a rope she had purchased that morning and laid it beside the crime scene rope. ‘‘You forgot,

I’ve seen pictures of you as a kid.’’

David threw back his head and laughed one loud

Ha! ‘‘You had me going. Good thing you told me. I’d

have been thinking about that all day.’’

‘‘You’d have figured it out. The point is, there’s

always evidence.’’

David went back to the crime lab, shaking his bald

head, leaving Diane to study the rope. Near one end

was a cluster of six kinks about an inch to an inch

and a half apart—some kinks were more crimped than

others. Fifteen inches down, there was a larger kink

with significant wear on the inside of the curve. Two

and a quarter inches from there, another series of

worn places. The wear was not continuous, but in

patches down the rope.

She photographed the rope and measured all the

places where it was kinked and worn. Altogether,

there were eleven kinks of varying sizes and seven

places where the rope had been worn, some quite ex

tensively, some barely noticeable. Sometimes the wear

was inside the kink, other times it was alone. Diane lay her new rope beside the crime scene

rope—called the ‘‘lone rope’’ in her notes. She took

red and green Sharpies and began marking the new

rope to match the lone rope—green signifying a kink,

red signifying wear.

‘‘Okay, smarty,’’ she muttered to herself, ‘‘what

kind of knot was tied in this rope?’’

The obvious first choice—obvious to her, at least—

was a sheepshank. Perhaps the person wanted to use

the rope, but was worried the worn places had weak

ened it. A sheepshank is a method of strengthening a

rope by tying it in such a way as to take the strain off the weak areas. It shortens a rope, but is a good way

to use a damaged rope in a pinch.

She tied a sheepshank several times, each time try

ing to match the green kinks to the turn of the knots

and placing the red worn areas where they would be

strengthened by having good rope on either side. Even

after numerous attempts, she never got close to match

ing her red and green points to the turns of the

sheepshank.

The initial failure made her

Okay, the kinks are the turns of

more determined. the knots—or . . . where the rope looped around an object. And so where does the wear come from—from rubbing

object, or itself ? Diane fished a handful

against an of colored rubber bands out of a drawer and dropped them on the table next to the experimental rope.

First she located each green kink with no red wear on the inside, made a bight—a loop—and placed a yellow rubber band around it to hold it in place. She took the kinks with inside wear and did the same thing. Where the rope showed several kinks close to gether, she didn’t bother with how the knot was actu ally tied, but simply looped them together and held them with a blue rubber band. Okay, now it looks like a mess, but that’s all right.

Diane examined the crime scene rope again and studied the red wear marks on her experimental rope. She tried several ways of folding the rope so that the wear marks—the red marks on her experimental rope—touched each other. Each way was a tangle of rope with no significant pattern.