Jeana--here is installment number three regarding the Darlie Routier case. This part involves staged crime scenes. I have to preface my remarks here by saying that I feel a lot of sympathy for the people at the justicefordarlie.com website who have signed that petition stating that they believe she is innocent and should be set free. I would think that, too, if this was the only case like this I had ever seen, but, unfortunately, it is not.
I suppose the best place to start here is with that Charles Stuart case, which, again, is the one in October of 1989 where he shot his wife to death and claimed that a robber had done it. Almost everyone in that case was fooled, as I certainly was, because Charles Stuart merely switched the real motive, an economic motive, for the murder, the insurance money on his wife, to someone else's economic motive for the murder, a robbery ending in the fatal shooting of the wife and the non-fatal shooting of Charles Stuart. This case would not have been cracked, and Stuart would not have committed suicide in January of 1990 had someone who assisted Stuart not have gotten disgusted and gone to police and told them what happened.
The next case I have considered is Susan Smith in October of 1994. She said a black man with a knit cap had carjacked her and her two little boys, an apparent economic motive, when, in fact, she had strapped them in her car and driven them off a boat ramp in order to be with someone else, a personal motive. Both the Stuart and Smith cases involve staging because the assailants told us one thing had happened and we found out that, in reality, another thing had happened. After Susan Smith, I started to get the idea that the true crime often involves one motive and the staged crime often involves another motive. Stuart did a good job of almost getting away with murder because he swapped one economic motive for another economic motive. In Susan Smith's case, police were on to her pretty quickly.
I think in my section on "phantom killers" or "intruders," the next two murders I discussed were the shooting of the bank vice-president's wife in Lake-of-the-Ozarks, Missouri and a separate shooting of a man's wife at a campground. Since I have not been able to find those cases on the Web, I am not going to rely on them heavily. I only want to mention here that in both cases, the victim was shot in the head once. That is what a killing for money often looks like: the assailant is not interested in having the victim suffer, so he shoots her once in the head and claims that the "intruder" showed up and did it. In the case of the bank vice-president, he claimed that a burglar came in their house and for no reason at all, shot the wife in the head and left without taking anything. The bank vice-president was convicted and given a life sentence. What I distill from these cases is that a killing for money typically does not involve someone trying to inflict pain, but, instead, someone who wants to get things over quickly and is willing to use the old, "interrupted burglary" story. In other words, the killing itself has a personal motive and the staging has an economic motive.
The amazing thing about the next case, the Dr. Sam Shepard case from July of 1954, is that the killing of his wife involves her being stabbed 35 times in the face, which indicates a personal motive, but there are two staged motives in the case. The staged motives in the case are her pajama top being thrown over her head, which a good crime scene analyst will recognize as a personal motive and a common staging technique to lead an investigator to believe that a sexual assault has occurred, and drawers being pulled out of a dresser and their contents being messed with, which is a classic staging technique to get someone to believe a burglary (i.e. economic motive) was in progress.
In the Valerie Percy case from September of 1966, two reporters from the Chicago Sun Times won Pulitzer Prizes a few years later for investigating whether a burglar had hit Valerie in the head two to four times with a hammer, had stabbed her 10 to 12 times (some sources say up to 14 times) around her body with a knife, and had thrown her nightgown up around her shoulders. Unfortunately, the nature of the wounds suggests a personal motive, while the conduct with the nightgown suggests a staged motive of sexual assault and the interrupted burglary theory suggests an economic motive even though nothing was taken. As I have indicated, that crime has never been solved, but it looks like the true motive was a personal matter and not an "interrupted burglary."
I could probably go through many more of these cases where there are "mixed motives" present, but I think the only other one that should be mentioned at this point is the David Hendricks case from November of 1983 in central Illinois. Mr. Hendricks was fortunate not to be at his house but on a sales call in Wisconsin when somebody entered the house, and brutally murdered his wife and three children (ages 5, 7, and 9) with an ax and a knife, apparently as they slept. I believe a responding police officer said it was the most brutal crime scene he had seen in his 24 years on the job. The wounds indicate a personal motive, but there were dressers drawers pulled out, which is a classic staging technique to indicate a burglar had come in the house, an economic motive. Hendricks was initially convicted, but his conviction was overturned and he was acquitted at a retrial. The important thing about the Hendricks case is that the real motive, a personal one, and the staged economic motive, the drawers being pulled out, are pretty far apart, which indicates more than likely that one of the motives is real and the other is not.
In Darlie's case, we see mixed motives as well. Anyone looking at this crime should draw a big, imaginary circle around the boys being stabbed because that is the true crime here and that indicates a personal motive. The whole business about the "phantom" or "intruder" is an attempt to introduce an economic motive into the crime ("somebody came in here and tried to steal our things!"). This is simply another case of someone trying to claim an interrupted burglary and it is fairly common even though the economic motive parts are staged. That is, the overturned vacuum, the smashed wine glass, and the sock in the alley are all there to try and make people believe this crime had an economic motive when it is fairly clear that the real crime, the stabbing of the boys, had a personal motive.
In this case, the importance of the intruder is obvious: to show that someone else committed the crime or that there is at least reasonable doubt about who do it. However, the more important reason for suggesting an intruder is to introduce a second motive for the crime, the all-too-common "interrupted burglary," an economic motive. In other words, if someone had entered the house just after Darlie had finished stabbing the children, she would not be able to explain away the stab wounds on the children, a personal motive. The staging suggests an economic motive, and many of those people who believe she is innocent do so because they can't separate the genuine motive, the stabbing, from the staged motive, the economic one.
Too, Darlie and her family have tried very hard to sell the staged motive, the economic one. On the 911 call, as we know, Darlie suggests that an intruder, not she, committed the crime because she says that if she hadn't touched the knife, maybe police could have gotten some prints off of it (translation--it was somebody else who committed the crime, not Darlie). Later in the 911 call, she says that she and Darin "have to find the person who did this" once again suggesting that an intruder did it. Finally, she also adds in the call the question of "who could have done this" which is once again a sorry attempt to suggest that someone else, not Darlie, committed this crime. There is, of course, the other staging I have mentioned and my belief is that it was Darlie who smashed the wine glass, overturned the vacuum, and cut the screen while it was Darin (by process of elimination, the only person who would have had the time to do it), who placed the sock in the alley to suggest that an intruder had broken in their house. The 911 call is what I like to refer to as the first sorry attempt to create the intruder and the sock in the alley, etc, is the second sorry attempt to create the intruder. The third sorry attempt to create the intruder is when Bob Kee, Darlie's stepfather, files an affidavit two years after the trial that says Darin talked to him about a fake burglary scheme a few nights before the murder. I believe this is simply a clever trap. A reporter approached Darin and asked about whether Darin talked about a faked burglary scheme with his stepfather-in-law. Darin initially denied it, but the reporter went and got the affidavit that Bob Kee had filed and confronted Darin about it. Although Darin has been described as "headstrong," he meekly caves in and says that yes, he had talked about a faked burglary scheme with Bob Kee, and someone may have overheard it and acted upon it. In my opinion, Darin meekly caved in to try and introduce the intruder in this case, an economic motive. He also added that he told someone years earlier that he wouldnt mind if his Jaguar got stolen, and it was; in my opinion, he is simply trying to bolster his street credentials as someone who would do this sort of thing all in an attempt to create the thought that yes, it is possible that there was an intruder in this case. Notice how Darin is utterly defiant when it is pointed out to him that he could not get the loan he was seeking shortly before the murders and when people bring up his failures on the lie detector test, yet he meekly caves in when people suggest he is a little bit shady and someone could have broken in his house at his suggestion to further a burglary scheme. The fourth sad attempt to create the economic motive is the defense effort to try and get items DNA tested to show that the intruder was involved. I believe the defense should do that, but I am not holding my breath that we are going to find the intruder that her family is desperately trying to create because the true motive, in my opinion, was the personal one of stabbing the two children in a jealous rage
