body had slid down the hill afterward. That was evidenced by a trail of blood leading down the hillside to the final resting position of the body.”
“These are the contact smears of blood we heard about yesterday?”
“Yes. When I arrived, the body itself had been rolled over face up, and I could see that the victim’s T-shirt was soaked with what appeared to be wet blood.”
“What significance did you attach, if any, to the large amount of blood on the victim’s body?”
“At the time, none. Obviously, the wounds were significant and fatal, but I knew that before I arrived.”
“But doesn’t the large amount of blood at the scene suggest a bloody struggle?”
“Not necessarily. Blood circulates through our bodies constantly. It is a hydraulic system: it is being pumped around and around. It moves through the circulatory system, through the veins, under pressure. When a person is killed, the blood is no longer under the pressure of a pump and its movement is then controlled by the ordinary laws of physics. So a lot of the blood that was apparent at the scene, both on the victim himself and on the ground underneath and around him, might have simply drained out of him because of gravity, because of the way the body was lying: feet above head, facedown. So the blood on the body might have been postmortem bleeding. I could not tell yet.”
“Okay, so what did you do next?”
“I examined the scene more closely. I observed some blood spatters near the top of the hill, at what seemed to be the point of the attack. There were only a few spatters here.”
“Let me stop you there. Is there a discipline in the forensic sciences of blood spatter analysis?”
“Yes. It is the study of the patterns of blood spatters, which can yield useful information.”
“Were you able to get any useful information from the blood spatters in this case?”
“Yes. As I was saying, at the point of attack there were a few very small blood spatters, less than an inch in size, and it was apparent from their size that they had fallen more or less straight down to the ground, spattering evenly in all directions. That is called a low-velocity drop or sometimes ‘passive bleeding.’ ”
Logiudice: “Now, yesterday we heard some discussion by the defense about whether you could expect to find blood on the attacker’s body or on his clothes after an attack like this one. Based on your observations of the blood spatters, do you have an opinion about this?”
“Yes. It is not necessarily true that the attacker here would have blood on him. Going back to the circulatory system that pumps blood through the body: remember that once blood is ejected from the body out into the air, it is subject to the ordinary laws of physics just like anything else. Now, it’s true, if an artery is cut, depending where it is on the body, you would expect the blood to gush out. That’s called ‘arterial gushing.’ Same with a vein. But if it’s a capillary, you might see just dripping like this. I did not see any spatters at the scene that seemed to have been cast off with force. That sort of cast-off blood would land at an angle and spatter unevenly, like this.” She demonstrated by sliding her fist along the length of her forearm to show how the blood drop would spread across the surface at impact. “It is also possible that the assailant stood behind the victim when he stabbed him, which would put him out of the trajectory of any spraying blood. And of course it is possible the assailant changed his clothes after the attack. All of which is simply to say that you cannot automatically assume that the assailant in this case would be covered in blood after the attack despite the large amount of blood found at the scene.”
“Are you familiar with the saying ‘The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’?”
“Objection. Leading.”
“He can have it. You can answer the question.”
“Yes.”
“What does that saying mean?”
“It means that, just because there is no physical evidence proving a person’s presence at a particular time and place, you cannot necessarily conclude that he was not actually there. It’s probably easier to understand if I put it this way: a person can be present at a crime and leave no physical evidence there.”
Rakowski’s testimony went on for some time. It was a critical part of Logiudice’s case and he took his time putting it in. She testified in detail that the blood found at the scene was all the victim’s. There was no physical evidence found in the immediate vicinity of the body that could be linked to any other person-no finger-, hand-, or shoe prints, no hairs or fibers, no blood or other organic material-with the single exception of that damn fingerprint.
“Where precisely was the fingerprint located?”
“The victim was wearing a zippered sweatshirt with the zipper open. On the inside of that sweatshirt, about here”-she indicated a spot on the inside of her own jacket, on the left side of the lining where an interior pocket is often located-“there was a plastic tag with the manufacturer’s name. The print was found on that tag.”
“Does the surface on which a fingerprint is found affect its value?”
“Well, some surfaces take a print better. This was a flat surface. It had been wetted with blood, almost like an inked pad, and it showed the fingerprint very clearly.”
“So this was a clean print?”
“Yes.”
“And after studying this fingerprint, whose print did you determine it was?”
“The defendant, Jacob Barber’s.”
Jonathan stood and said with a shrug in his voice, “We’ll stipulate it’s the defendant’s fingerprint.”
The judge said, “Without objection,” and he turned to the jury: “The meaning of a stipulation is that the defense concedes that a fact is true without the prosecutor having to prove it. Both parties agree to the truth of this fact, therefore you may take it as true and proven. Okay, Mr. Logiudice.”
“What significance, if any, did you assign to the fact that the fingerprint was in the victim’s own blood?”
“Obviously the blood had to be on that tag first in order for the defendant’s finger to be pressed into it. So the significance is that the fingerprint was put there after the attack had begun, or at least after the victim had been cut at least once, and soon enough after the attack that the blood on that tag was still wet, since dry blood would not have taken the print the same way, if at all. So that print was put there during or very soon after the attack.”
“How big a window are we talking about? How soon before the blood on that tag is too dry to take the fingerprint?”
“There are a lot of factors involved. But not more than fifteen minutes on the outside.”
“Even sooner, is it likely?”
“Impossible to say.”
Good girl, Karen. Don’t take the bait.
The only sparring took place when Logiudice tried to enter into evidence a knife, a sleek and wicked thing called a Spyderco Civilian, which was the knife Jacob specifically named in his story imagining the Rifkin murder. Jonathan vehemently objected to this knife being shown to the jury since there was no evidence that Jacob ever owned such a knife. I had dumped Jacob’s knife long before the cops searched his room, but I blanched at the sight of the Spyderco Civilian. It looked very similar to Jacob’s. I didn’t dare turn around to look at Laurie, so I can only report what she later told me: “I died when I saw it.” Judge French ultimately did not allow Logiudice to enter the knife in evidence. Its physical appearance, he said, was “inflammatory” given how weakly the government had linked the knife to Jacob. Which was Judge French’s way of saying he was not about to let Logiudice start waving a lethal-looking knife around the courtroom as a way to work the jury up into a lynch mob-not until the government offered a witness who could say Jacob had such a knife. But he would allow the expert to testify about the knife in general terms.
“Is that knife consistent with the victim’s wounds?”
“Yes. We examined the size and shape of the blade relative to the wounds and they were consistent. The blade on that particular knife is curved and has a serrated edge, which would account for the ragged tears at the edge of the wounds. It is a knife designed for slashing at an opponent, as you would in a knife fight. A knife intended to make a neat slice will typically have a smooth, very sharp edge, like a scalpel.”
“So the killer might have used exactly that sort of knife?”
“Objection.”
“Overruled.”
“He might have, yes.”
“Could you tell from the angle of the wounds and the design of the knife how the killer might have inflicted
