It took some doing, but I managed to manhandle Bell’s box of files out of my truck and lug them as far as the mudroom. I pried open the dented cardboard cover and extracted the first document: “Rush to Judgment: The State of Maine’s Rigged Case Against Erland Jefferts.”
This is going to be good, I thought.
Ozzie Bell’s box included the complete trial transcript (1,334 pages) of the State of Maine v. Erland R. Jefferts; the report of Knox County sheriff’s deputy Dane Guffey on finding Jefferts and his truck on the night of July 12, 2004; the handwritten notes of Detective Joseph Winchenback, recounting the circumstances and exact wording of Jefferts’s “confession,” which disagreed with the investigator’s sworn testimony at trial; a printout from the Maine Sex Offender Registry listing every convicted predator within a ten-mile radius of the crime scene (Calvin Barter’s name was circled, for some reason); a photocopied map showing the location of Jefferts’s truck in relation to both the Harpoon Bar and the swampy spot where Nikki Donnatelli’s body was later located; an inventory of items recovered from his pickup; the report of Warden Katherine Frost concerning the search and discovery of the dead girl’s body; the final report of the state psychologist on the sanity of Erland R. Jefferts; the autopsy report of the state medical examiner, Dr. Walter Kitteridge; snapshots of Jefferts with his J-Team supporters in prison on the occasion of his thirtieth birthday; a letter from Louise Bates to the presiding judge, pleading for mercy for her nephew; and a statement by Maine’s attorney general denying an investigation into prosecutorial misconduct. And that was just half of it.
I decided to read in bed, with my inflamed hand elevated against my chest.
As I rearranged the lumped-up sheets, I found my bottle of Vicodin under a pillow, where I must have tucked it. I swallowed a pill and settled down to immerse myself in a juicy conspiracy theory.
As best I could tell, the J-Team’s argument was that the state’s case against Jefferts was entirely circumstantial and made in bad faith. Investigators hadn’t framed Erland per se, but they’d bent the law to convict a man they believed from the start to be a sex killer. Winchenback had fabricated a confession, the prosecutors had conspired to conceal exculpatory evidence from the defense and jury, and forensic science proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Erland Jefferts could not have committed the crime.
The J-Team stipulated that, yes, Erland had been intoxicated on the night of Nikki’s disappearance. But they took issue with Mark Folsom’s ex post facto statement that he had bounced Jefferts out of the Harpoon for making lewd remarks to Nikki. In fact, patrons remembered the bar owner dragging a stumble-drunk Jefferts into the parking lot, but no one could attest to the exact reason why. After Erland was arrested, however, the story that he had groped Nikki became the accepted version of the event.
Furthermore, Erland Jefferts had no record of violence. So what had made this affable man, so well liked in the community, commit such an atrocity? A credible motive was therefore a problem, according to Ozzie Bell.
Then there was the question of opportunity. The time-of-death evidence indicated that Nikki-like Ashley Kim-was kept alive for some hours before being murdered. She even had a bump on her head that seemed to have been inflicted many hours before her other wounds.
“Somebody played Mr. Jefferts for a patsy,” his attorney said at trial. “They found him passed out in the woods and planted the rigging tape to frame him.”
Typically, sexual predators take an object from the body of their murdered victims, panties being especially popular. So where was Nikki’s underwear if Jefferts didn’t have it in his possession?
When forensic technicians examined Nikki, they found traces of blood beneath her fingernails. But the DNA didn’t match Erland’s. It belonged, instead, to an unidentified male. Dr. Kitteridge countered that there was no reason to surmise it came from Nikki’s assailant. She could have picked it up anywhere.
Bell found this statement ridiculous, and it showed in his overheated prose. “Why is some other man’s DNA in the blood under Nikki Donnatelli’s fingernails, and why did investigators focus on Jefferts to the exclusion of other suspects, including a well-known predator who lived nearby and had recently been arrested for sexually abusing a teenage girl?”
That person was Calvin Barter. Given his criminal record, he was high on the J-Team’s list of alternate suspects. But so was Nikki’s employer, Mark Folsom, along with a bunch of other people, some of whose names I recognized (such as Dave Drisko) and some I didn’t. Reviewing the list of sexual predators-more than sixty within ten miles of the crime scene-made me nauseous. As a game warden, I saw Maine’s crushing poverty and hidden depravity every day, but the sheer number of local perverts stunned me.
Reading through these twice-baked documents, I began to form an opinion of Ozzie Bell. As a “retired” big-city reporter, he had an undisguised contempt for small-town rubes. Dane Guffey, the deputy who found Jefferts, was a “cue ball-headed kid with a cynical streak a mile wide.” Joe Winchenback, the detective who took Erland’s “confession,” was a “bulbous-nosed man with a penchant for telling off-color tales.” I knew neither of these individuals, but I did know Danica Marshall, whom Bell described as an “ice-blooded beauty who might have walked straight out of a cheap film noir.” The one adjective he used for Warden Kathy Frost was “mannish,” which was accurate in the sense that my sergeant could have kicked Oswald’s ass from here till Sunday.
Bell’s worst vitriol was saved for the medical examiner, Dr. Walter Kitteridge, who, more than anyone else, in his view, bore the blame for Erland Jefferts’s wrongful conviction.
Determining the time of death has been described as both an art and a science, and there are many techniques at a medical examiner’s disposal. The temperature of the body is one method, but Kitteridge never measured Nikki’s. Nor did he record the ambient temperature of the forest in which the corpse was found. He also failed to conduct a standard test of her eye fluid, which can indicate the hour of death.
Then there were the blowflies.
In his trial testimony Kitteridge was quoted as saying, “With a cadaver found in the woods in July, I would have anticipated seeing more fly activity, especially after two days. Flies land and lay eggs on the body at sites of injury, as well as the eyes.” That statement suggested, in Bell’s mind, that Nikki hadn’t been dead quite as long as the coroner claimed-and the longer she’d been alive, the more the case against Erland Jefferts fell apart, since he’d been in police custody for a full day before Pluto sniffed out the dead body. So the fly evidence might have been exculpatory.
There was only one problem: The forensic lab had somehow, mistakenly or deliberately, discarded the fly larvae collected at the scene.
In the end, Dr. Kitteridge based his estimation of time of death exclusively on rigor mortis, the extreme stiffening of the body that follows death. From my course work, I understood the process to be a chemical change in the muscles-something about the stoppage of the blood flow causing various proteins to begin locking up in weird ways until digestive enzymes start the process of decomposition.
Bell described the progression: “In an adult, under general conditions, rigor mortis begins in about two hours after death, spreads through the skeletal muscles within ten to twelve hours, and resolves within thirty-six hours after death before the muscles become flaccid again.” Hot temperatures can speed the process up. Body size and physical condition play roles, too. There are innumerable variables, but generally speaking, a body that still shows signs of rigor hasn’t been dead all that long.
When Kitteridge examined Nikki Donnatelli’s body, he reported that “rigor mortis was easily broken.” In the J-Team’s interpretation, this meant that it was scientifically impossible for Erland to have killed Nikki, since he was under police supervision during the entire window of time when she might have been murdered.
Unfortunately for Jefferts, his country bumpkin attorney had failed to pick up this bombshell. And now the lobsterman was serving a life term without the possibility of parole.
Ozzie Bell described himself as an unwilling recruit to the cause. He hadn’t known Jefferts or Donnatelli. But as a former newsman from Queens who’d retired to quiet Seal Cove, he couldn’t help but take an interest in such a heinous crime. He began researching the evidence, spoke with Lou Bates and the principals on the other side, but it was only when he encountered Dr. Kitteridge’s testimony that he had his eureka moment: “The state’s own forensic evidence proved that Erland Jefferts couldn’t possibly have murdered Nikki Donnatelli!”
I didn’t know enough about rigor mortis to share Bell’s certainty. And I had more than a few questions of my own. What about Jefferts’s confession, for example?
“Do you remember what you did with Nikki?” Detective Joe Winchenback had asked him.
“What if I said yes?” replied Jefferts.
Bell and the J-Team waved off this statement. Jefferts had been confused, half-drunk, sleep-deprived. Winchenback never taped Jefferts’s “admission,” and his own contemporaneous notes contradicted the exact phrasing he used in court. Therefore, the detective must have been lying on the witness stand. The primary investigating officer had coerced a vaguely worded confession out of a suggestible young man who couldn’t remember his own actions on the night of Nikki’s disappearance. In effect, Erland had been bullied into making a hedged admission, which the prosecutors instantly held up as proof positive of his bloody deeds.
It makes for one whopper of a story, I thought sleepily. But I doubted any of it was true. It didn’t surprise me that the cops might have conducted a messy investigation. Half my own arrests were fucked-up in one way or another. Had Danica Marshall used every weapon in her arsenal to shoot a rocket up Jefferts’s ass? Of course she had. When a prosecutor got a sex killer in the courtroom, and there was a chance he might walk free, what else was she supposed to do?
I swung my legs off the bed and crossed the creaking floor to the box of files. I leafed through the contents until I came to the collection of photographs I’d noticed earlier. They were pictures of Jefferts having a birthday party in prison with the J-Team. The convict had put on weight over the years, but he was still devilishly handsome, with wavy blond hair and a Hollywood smile.
Attached to one of the photos was a poem.
Solitary
I don’t know why
A man can’t cry.
Holding on to his father’s pain
That will become his son’s in time.
The only legacy left now.
Imprisoned in himself first
And in four walls second.
Iron bars for an iron soul.
From yourself there’s no escape.
No time off for good behavior.
No parole or earthly savior.
Hours go by
And become days.
Days become months.
Months become years.
Walled up in this place
Without sunlight or air.
We are all dead here.
We just don’t know it.
BY ERLAND R. JEFFERTS
The thought of this handsome con man selling his bullshit story to naive friends and family infuriated me. Nothing I could say to Lou Bates or Ozzie Bell would change their minds about him. Those fools were absolutely convinced of Erland’s innocence, just as Jill Westergaard was certain her missing husband was a model of fidelity.
But I knew what kind of a monster Jefferts was. Better than anyone, I knew.
I found the phone number I was looking for on a business card stapled to a folder. I dialed the seven digits and waited until a man with a thick New York accent answered.
“Oswald Bell here.”
“Mr. Bell, this is Mike Bowditch. I read the files you gave me. I’d like to meet Erland Jefferts.”