The heat was brutal. 

The Witch was not doing well. At least I called her a “Witch.”  My investigator called her a “Medium.”  

We had been searching for the old man’s body for weeks.  Andy.  Murdered by a young wife and her brother.  Thanks to the work of two great detectives with the Tulare Police Department, we knew his killers had buried him in the wasteland of Kettleman Hills, just off Highway 41 on the well-traveled route to the coast.  After the intensive first effort at recovering his body had failed, I and two investigators from the D.A.’s office, who had taken over the case, went back periodically to look around.  These two investigators were not the type to give up.  So once again we had journeyed across neighboring Kings County to brave the dust and filth of that awful place.  This time though with the hopes of generating a little “other worldly” intervention.

I had enough evidence to proceed with the homicide prosecution without a body.  In law it was rarely attempted, but I had researched the issues, briefed the court, and constructed an elaborate edifice of circumstantial evidence.  So far it had withstood the fusillade of defense motions to dismiss.  I was confident my case would hold up on appeal.  There was precedent in the case books.  But finding the body would make things so much easier.

After our repeated failure to find old Andy, one of my investigators had come to me with a proposal to bring in a deputy sheriff from a county up north who also maintained she was a “Medium.”  I was skeptical.  Highly skeptical.  Understandably skeptical. 

He had met her at a law enforcement conference.  First, of course, he had to weather the expected gibes from me about how long he and his colleagues had spent in hotel bars to come up with such an idea.  He persisted.  He insisted that she had actually solved some missing person cases.  Even had a newspaper article about her assistance in the recovery of a child taken in a child custody dispute.  

He caught me in a weak moment.  I wanted to find the old man.  I wanted to find Andy.  I agreed to hire her.  But, by then, I had advanced in the office far enough that I was becoming ever cautious about political fallout from controversial decisions. And beyond that there was the fear of how defense attorneys could use allegations about the misuse of government funds against me and my case in court.  I decided to use my own money. I wasn’t going to put any county funds into such an endeavor.  I agreed to pay her a hundred dollars for her time.  It was my practice based on years ago advice of an older brother to squirrel a hundred dollars away.  For “emergencies.”  Let’s just say that word had an expansive definition.  The hundred-dollar bill was folded up and salted away in a never used pocket in my wallet. I dug it out and gave it my investigator to pass along to the “Witch.’

To obviate the oppressive heat that day I was standing in the shade of a backhoe we had brought out from the County yard.  We had used it before to dig in various spots we thought might reveal the location of the body.  I noticed the “Witch” was sitting in the passenger side of my investigator’s car holding her hand over her eyes. I misinterpreted it as a posture of concentration.  I walked over and asked her, “How you feeling?  Getting some vibes there?  Maybe a conjuring up a vision?” She looked up at me, shook her head and replied, “No. What I’m getting is heatstroke.”

I laughed.  Might as well. At that moment I figured my hundred dollars had been wasted anyway.  I began forming excuses I would use on the wife who knew about me hoarding the hundred and would find out it was missing.  My investigator who overheard the conversation began walking away.  I noticed he was studying the hills around the area. I gave the signal to the rest of the search crew to wrap it up.  I was ready to get out of the heat, head back to civilization, open a cold beer and plan how I was going to confess to the wife I had wasted our money.  

My investigator wasn’t ready to leave the area.  He stayed behind and kept studying the terrain as the sun went down.  He later told me, the angle of the afternoon sun that day put an old broken lawnmower someone had dumped out there in a different light. One he hadn’t seen before.  We had a description from a witness statement that there was an old chair near where the body had been buried.  My investigator thought the lawnmower in that light resembled an old chair.  Over the next several days he said, he couldn’t get the image out of his mind.  

He went back the next week and took the search crew along.

He instructed the ever-patient backhoe operator to dig near the lawn mower.  On the very first drag, a blue tarp was uncovered.  His heart started beating faster because we had information Andy, when he was buried, had been wrapped in a blue tarp.  

The investigator stopped everything and called the office.  I had been in court that day and was back in my office reviewing some reports.  I was being kept company by a good friend and fellow prosecutor when the call came in that Andy may have been found.  My friend had just purchased a brand new chevy IROC.  Red.  She volunteered to drive.  We jumped in that car and to say we broke some speed records getting to the site would be an understatement.  

Everyone was standing around waiting for us when we arrived.  I gave instructions to videotape the rest of the excavation.  First though, we loosened the wrap enough to verify that indeed it was a human body.  Soon the van from the coroner’s office arrived. The body still wrapped in the tarp was lifted out of the hole and carefully placed in the back of the van for transport to Tulare where the pathologist would be waiting.  There the body would be unwrapped for a formal autopsy–all on film.  

The case from that point on would encompass the most interesting forensic investigation of my career. 

(I’ll give more detail on how it was used in court to reconstruct the murder in a future segment.)

Once the coroner’s wagon and assisting personnel left, it was only me, my fellow prosecutor and investigators remaining at the site.  Even though the weather and the surroundings were miserable, we were reluctant to leave.  Turns out, one of my investigators had broken away at some point and secured a six pack of beer.  Iced it down.  We leaned against the cop car and stared at the hole where Andy had been removed. 

Yes, we toasted him.  

Andy was going home.

And, yes, I couldn’t help but wonder.  Had something happened the day the “Witch” (“Medium”) had walked the site?  Did that cause us to find Andy near the place we had looked for him so long?

Maybe my old moth eaten hundred-dollar bill wasn’t wasted after all.  

At least that’s the way I put it to the wife. 

In Part Two of “Finding Andy” we will discuss the Trial of one of Andy’s killers and how Andy’s skull and bones found their way into evidence. 

The photographs are of me and my investigators searching the area for Andy’s body and examining the wrapped body the day of the recovery.

Courthouse Tales is published Sundays.

For more writings by Phil Cline, visit philcline.com

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