Steve Martini - Undue Influence

‘If I may, your honor?’ Angelo is pointing to the square box in front of him on the railing.

Woodruff nods.

Angelo lifts the lid and pulls a human skull from the box. There are a few gasps, and a lot of murmuring in the courtroom, shifting weight and conversation in the press rows behind us. Laurel grips my leg hard under the table. Then I realize what all the commotion is about. I lean into her ear.

‘It’s not real,’ I tell her. ‘It’s only a model.’

Angelo has fashioned a plastic life-sized model of the human skull, into which he has drilled a hole approximating the path of the bullet, with parts of brain, bone, and other organs that can be removed. He offers this to me for examination before he testifies.

I rise from the table and take it. It looks identical in every respect to the human form that inspired it. I take it and hold it in my hand, turning it upside down, peering into its cavities and crevices. There are structures inside, visible to the eye, soft tissue that has been re-created and fastened to bone, the tongue and palate with neat holes bored through each, shattered bone I can see, through one eye socket. I would bounce the thing like a basketball if I could, to demonstrate for the jury that there is nothing sacred in this. It is not real.

We talk about what it is made of, resins and polymers.

‘Is it identical in every respect to the skull of the deceased?’ I ask.

Angelo makes a face. ‘As close as I could make it without severing the head, removing all the tissue, and making a death-mask mold,’ he says.

Leave it to me to suggest this. I glance at the jury. They are not happy at this moment. A lot of grim looks in my direction, although three minutes ago I would venture that some of them actually thought this was the severed head of Melanie Vega.

I pass on it for purposes of demonstration, and Angelo drifts into his narrative, explaining the fatal wound to the jury, holding the head like Señor Wences in one hand and a pointer in the other.

‘The bullet entered the soft tissue under the angle of the mandible — that’s the lower part of the jawbone,’ says Angelo. ‘Just to left of the midline. Here.’ Angelo points to the hole clearly evident under the chin. ‘It then proceeded in an upward and posterior direction toward the rear of the skull, passing through the sublingual gland, which is just under the tongue, piercing the tongue and the posterior tip of the soft palate.’

I can see several of the jurors swallowing hard, a sensation like ice cream glued to the roof of their mouth.

‘It then passed through the paranasal sinus cavities, impacted and fractured the sphenoid bone, which forms the floor of the brain pan. Here,’ he says. ‘The bullet splintered bone fragments, some of which became embedded in several areas of the brain. The bullet finally came to rest in the left temporal lobe. Here.’ He points one more time.

‘Doctor, can you describe the position — whether Melanie Vega was sitting or standing at the time she was shot?’

‘According to all of the evidence, we believe that at the time she was shot the victim was lying on her back, reclining on a slant of about forty-five degrees, against the back contour of the tub. Her head was tilted back, lying against the back edge of the tub.’ He holds the back of the skull in the open palm of his hand, the empty eye sockets facing up, toward the ceiling. ‘About in this position,’ he says.

He rotates the skull in his hand until the crown of the head is facing the far end of the jury box, and the feet, if they were attached, would be off in the direction of our table.

‘The fatal bullet was fired from off in about that direction,’ he says. Angelo points with an outstretched arm directly at Laurel. Everything calculated for effect.

‘I would estimate the range of fire to be about four to six feet.’

The picture they are painting is clear, a cold and calculating shot while Melanie Vega lay resting in the tub — a veritable execution.

‘The angle of fire would be roughly from this direction.’ Angelo brings the steel rod in on a slow line of flight with one hand, toward the skull resting in the other, until it passes between the curving bone of the mandible forming the chin and engages the structures of tissue. He finds the hole pre-drilled in these, and forces the rod past a few obstructions. You can hear the braiding of plastic as the rough steel pushes its way in. A few grimaces in the jury box. He jams the rod into the head, six inches or more, until it becomes lodged, leaving several inches protruding from under the chin at the base of the skull, tracing the line of fire.

I look, and all eyes are on him. The jurors are mesmerized by the clinical brutality of this, as if Angelo has just committed a second act of mayhem on the victim, retracing what the state says my client has done. One of the women, a divorcé I had fought to keep on the panel, is now looking at Laurel with eyes of wonder, how one woman could do this to another.

It seems Laurel herself is looking a little green.

‘Could you tell us, doctor, did this wound cause instantaneous death?’ says Cassidy.

‘If not instantaneous, the victim died within a very short period of time. Minutes,’ says Angelo. ‘There was massive brain damage,’ he says. ‘Not only from the bullet but from numerous bone fragments that invaded the brain tissue.’

He puts the plastic skull on the railing that forms the front of the jury box, where it rests like some wicked hologram, a head without a body.

Cassidy takes Angelo through some pictures, stills taken at the scene. The doctor identifies these, and after some objection and argument the court settles on five tasteful prints that it says should not enflame the emotions of the jury. These are put into evidence and begin to filter through the jury box. With each passing hand, as the prints make their way, there are eyes darting, quick stolen glimpses of Laurel.

Cassidy asks Angelo about the bullet retrieved from the wound. He describes it as a three-eighty or a nine-millimeter, he’s not exactly sure. But when Cassidy shows him a lead bullet in a plastic bag, he identifies it as the one taken from the head of Melanie Vega the morning of the autopsy, pried from her brain with gloved fingers so as not to scar it for possible ballistics comparisons should they later find the weapon.

Next, Cassidy bores in on the evidence Angelo used to determine the range of fire. This is critical to their case. She wants to avoid any hint that there could have been a struggle for the gun, some unintended mishap, or evidence of some lesser crime than capital murder.

Angelo confirms that without the murder weapon it was difficult for ballistics to perform the usual firing tests.

‘There was no “tattooing” around the wound,’ says Angelo. ‘But we did detect nitrates, evidence of gunpowder residue, on the upper part of the body. The limited amount of nitrates, and their pattern, some of it deposited in a spreading pattern around the level of the nipples on each breast, would indicate to me a range of fire of between four and six feet.’

Cassidy gets him to explain that tattooing is caused by unexploded grains of gunpowder expelled from the barrel under high pressure. At close range these will impregnate the skin, leaving the equivalent of a tattoo on the skin around the wound. The closer the range, the tighter the pattern.

‘Would the lack of tattooing, the probable distance involved in this shot — which you estimate to be between four to six feet — rule out any struggle for the gun?’

‘I would think so. If the victim were actually close enough to reach for the gun at the time it was fired, I would expect to see some tattooing on the body somewhere.’