Third Time, Not A Charm

Chapter 1 Information About Death Comes Together-1

Chapter 1

Information About Death Comes TogetherThe third murder within several weeks involving a severe beating and an execution style shot to the head surfaced rather quickly despite it being committed in Pinal County. Maricopa County (the site of Phoenix, Mesa, Glendale, Tempe and many other larger Arizona cities) is located slightly to the east and partly directly to the north of Pinal County. It, Pinal County, is smaller in terms of area, and in terms of population than is Maricopa County. Pinal County has somewhat less police resources available to it in an emergent situation such as a murder investigation.

Pinal County is blessed with bright and able investigators in various departments who are gifted and whose knowledge of the availability of outside resources in Maricopa County makes them more capable than otherwise they might be. By 1990 the willingness of police departments in Arizona to be communicative with each other in the face of unexplained criminal conduct had begun to develop. All was not perfect in inter agency communication but it was developing. This case and others would test the continuance of their communications and its usefulness as well.

There were still problems. The jealousies involving busts of dope dealers who were silly enough to leave a lot of cash laying around and the “seizure” of the cash by a given department still existed. Those seizures, sometimes involving boats or cars or trucks worth thousands in sales potential created income for the departments. Other departments less fortunate in dealing with dopers still harbored envy of those that did. The “this is my bust” mentality in every police officer has had since time immemorial still existed. It would sometimes lead to difficulties between departments, between divisions within a given department and between individual officers as well.

Those factors as well as the “blue wall” which rises to defend any police officer who makes a mistake in judgment or actions still existed in 1990 even as they were likely to exist forever. Likewise the attitudes of higher echelon police officials, the leaders of the units, the leaders of the departments, the CFO's and CEO's as they would be called in other situations came into play in multiple crime situations. Budget considerations might overrule investigative activity. One department would make an investment in an infrared lamp system that would enhance investigation for any CSI and another would just say to its people, sorry, we cannot afford that kind of equipment.

An officer or investigator might feel the need to take a trip to another city for training or to follow a lead and simply be told no by the upper echelon of the department. This would occur because the upper echelon people could not, or would not, justify the expense to the City Council or the Board of Supervisors. Jim had faced these kinds of decisions and attitudes in his past. He had seen the formulation of resentment by one division against another. His experiences in the O' Rourke and Bruce Fletcher cases taught him well about how budgetary considerations could derail an investigation in a heartbeat. The same was true throughout Arizona and especially in the smaller communities.

When a murder occurs anywhere there are immediate protocols to observe, immediate conclusions to reach, immediate investigative actions to take. It depends, of course, on who is killed as to what these protocols dictate being done. All police officers know, as did Jim Cade, in musing about the third murder in a month of virtually the same type, if a woman is murdered her husband, boyfriend, whatever in terms of relationships is the immediate suspect.

When a man is killed there is a tendency to believe that his spouse or significant other might be involved as well. So the instant reaction of police investigations is to go to a family member, a significant other, someone close, someone with a reason to kill, in the initial phases of the investigation. Police officers also know if a murder is unsolved after twenty-four to forty-eight hours there is little chance it will be solved without a lot of luck and a tremendous amount of hard work.

So called recreational killers do not strike with regularity in any given area of the country, much less Phoenix, Arizona and its environs. The first difficulty in dealing with a serial killer or a group of killers is to identify the idea there have been a series of killings done by one or more persons and those killings have no relationship to normal protocols. Only then can an appropriate investigation be commenced when dealing with a recreational killer.

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“The Group” as they called themselves knew police protocols well. They planned for these protocols to prevail, used different areas of the Valley of the Sun as dump sites as a result of their planning. “They” knew given the attitudes of most police investigators “their” criminal activity would not be tied together for a long time, maybe not for years. And “they” intended to be finished with their necessities (as they thought of them) long before the crimes were tied together. And information was available to “them” which most murderers never could have. Those things made them a little careless about what they were doing, but not how they did it. They would never be found, they thought. They were the “good guys” after all. They were invisible and invincible.

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Initially with the victims Johnny Campbell, Joseph Antonelli and Jose Portales each of the police departments involved, Glendale Police Department, Maricopa County Sheriff's Office and Pinal County Sheriff's Office, very standard police techniques were utilized. Right away the Glendale P.D. went to Johnny's wife and asked repeatedly where she had been, what had she been doing, who she had been with at the time of death they thought was appropriate. Their information from the Maricopa County Coroner's Office, via Dr. Ralph Lomati, was that Johnny had died about twenty-four hours prior to being discovered.

Dr. Lomati also told the detectives of Glendale P.D., Will Jamieson and George Johnson, Johnny had been shot in the head once with a large caliber bullet. After completion of the autopsy Dr. Lomati had been able to remove the remainder of the bullet from the skull of Johnny. But the bullet had been a full “wadcutter” or “dum dum” as they were sometimes called. It had mushroomed badly. Not much could be obtained from observation of the bullet by a technician/firearms expert (sometimes mislabeled as a ballistics expert). All the expert could glean from the bullet was it was fired from a nine millimeter pistol, maybe a Glock, maybe even a Beretta.

The lands and grooves on the bullet taken from Johnny's head were so badly misshapen and covered by the spread of the bullet when it entered the head there was no way to tell for sure what kind of weapon fired it. The questions Jamieson and Johnson asked led nowhere. The information developed by the experts led to nothing. The interviews conducted by Jamieson and Johnson were fruitless. They failed to establish the suspicion of a motive, much less proof of how Johnny was beaten and shot.

By 1995 many modern techniques of investigation had evolved which were not available to Jim Cade or any other police investigator in prior years. DNA testing was perfect by 1990 to the point of making it a near lock on identity. At least it was a conclusive tool when there was a known suspect that left DNA available to investigators. DNA testing was so well developed by then much smaller and even smaller samples of skin or hair or blood or any other body excretion such as saliva could used to determine much information.

But in Johnny's case there was no DNA. Despite yeoman work by the CSI's of Glendale P.D. there were no hairs found, no blood that didn't belong to Johnny, no skin samples under his fingernails or elsewhere on his body, no saliva anywhere that was discernible. Of course even had there been saliva on the ground it would not have been detected. The heat of the day would have long dried it out and made it invisible even to infrared examination. The evidence would have been gone long before the CSI's began their work. When CSI's who are professionals, as they were in each of these cases, examine a potential crime scene they do it microscopically, tediously, tirelessly until all evidence of any kind is found and placed in envelopes of one kind or another, catalogued and sealed. In these cases there was no evidence to find. There was no blood other than that of the victims, no hair, nothing.

It was evident to Dr. Lomati, and he put into his report, the man or men who had beaten Johnny were large, powerful men, or if not large then certainly very powerful. Lomati could not imagine, though he had seen much such damage done to human beings in his career, could not believe one man could do such damage by himself. He was a little concerned with that conclusion in light of the fact there were what appeared to be ligature marks on Johnny's wrists. It was evident from Johnny's condition, bruising around his eyes, around his mouth, around his upper chest and rib cage especially, that he had been beaten for some time prior to being killed. As Jim Cade would eventually review all this information he would think the beating was unusual to say the least. And as he would say to Lieutenant Jaime Ontiveros at the time, “Someone was sending a message by this beating Jaime.”

So it would be with the body of Jose Portales. He was autopsied in Tucson by a different forensic pathologist named Cyndie Portmeyer. She made many of the same findings as Dr. Lomati did about Johnny Campbell. Jose had also been severely beaten and shot in the head with a nine millimeter pistol. She also noted the presence of ligature marks on Jose's wrists. In that case the bullet was recovered from the head of Jose with enough left of the lands and grooves to tell her it had been fired from a Glock Model 19 handgun. Knowing the make and model of the g*n narrowed the suspect pool to several million people nationwide and well into the thousands if not the tens of thousands in the State of Arizona.

But Dr. Portmeyer made an additional observation which Dr. Lomati had not made. Her note was cryptic and speculative in some regards. What she said was that Jose had been beaten by someone large and powerful, or at least very powerful, while the perpetrator was wearing gloves. She could see no other way there would be no skin residue nor any hair which might have come off a fist impacting a body or face. Dr. Lomati had indeed felt the same about the issue of the beating and when queried later he said, “Yeah I thought it was true as well but I didn't want to speculate on it at the time.”

Maricopa County Sheriff's Office also sent its murder victims to the Forensic Center in downtown Phoenix where Dr. Lomati was one of the forensic pathologists on staff. But he didn't perform the autopsy for Joseph Antonelli. Instead that autopsy was done by Dr. James Rozinskiy. The doctor was a relatively new forensic pathologist who was assigned most if not all Maricopa County S.O. murder cases. Dr. Roszinskiy found Joseph Antonelli had been severely beaten by a large, powerful man either using instruments to inflict pain or wearing some kind of implements doing the same job. Dr. Rozinskiy speculated that the instruments might be gloves filled with “shot” or some other form of gloves that had metal protrusions or implements attached. The doctor in Joseph's case also found that the decedent was shot in the head but in this case with a forty-five caliber bullet. Only fragments of the bullet could be retrieved from the head since a large portion of the bullet had gone through and through. No fingerprints were found at the scene of the body dump where Joseph Antonelli was found. No hair, no blood, no saliva, nothing containing DNA other than that of Joseph Antonelli was found in the area where his body was dumped.