Event Horizon – The Murder

-WHAT IS A HOMICIDE

Before we start tearing the homicide covered in the novel apart, it might be useful to know what a homicide is.

“Homicide” is defined by Webster’s dictionary as the killing of one human being by another. I thought the definition was interesting because it doesn’t exclude things like war, accidents, or such. The kind of homicide discussed in Event Horizon is more properly labeled good old-fashioned Murder. Webster is a little better at defining “Murder” “as the “the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.” In the eyes of the law, even that definition isn’t good enough.

So why would we use terms like homicide when murder clearly works better. Because homicide can also cover accidents, war, and even a police officer taking down a criminal as lawful act. Murder is about intent and the word “Illegal” is often put into laws. And until you know exactly which one you’re dealing with, you stay clear of terms.

Also, “Homicide detective” sounds cooler that “Murder Investigator.” Definitely looks better on your taxes or on a resume.

Sorry. I digress.

There are different levels of murder to include 1st Degree Murder which is all about intent. In short, the killer set out well in advance and began taking steps towards killing someone. This could mean things like going out and purchasing a weapon to be used, sending threats, or stalking the victim. It always involves some kind of forethought and taking steps in that direction. Often times this is included in commission of a crime such as if I’m robbing a store and I shoot the clerk by either accident or design.

2nd Degree Murder also focuses on intent, but here it’s a little different. I didn’t set out to kill that person, but because of my actions, someone dies. If that happens, then we’re talking second degree murder. An example might be I get in a fight with someone else. I knock that person down and they strike their head on the sidewalk, and they die because of what I did. I didn’t mean to kill the person. But I did. A lot of times murders that “just happen” or “Crimes of Passion” are in this category.

Sometimes it takes some work to decide which is which. An example of the deciding would be If I knock the person down and they hit their head and die, then it’s most likely going to be 2nd Degree Murder or even Manslaughter. However, if we get in a fight, then I go to my car and get a handgun and then kill that person with it, then we’re looking at 1st degree. All that needs to be proven is a seconds worth of thought.

Lastly, there’s something called Manslaughter and this often covers accidents. You’ll see this term associated with auto accidents where someone dies.

So, let’s talk about the murder that occurs in Event Horizon.

-BASED ON A REAL CRIME

First, the homicide in the book finds its roots in one that actually occurred. A man shot his soon to be ex-wife while her boyfriend cowered behind the bed. He then vanished into the mountains. As murders go, this one was rather open and shut as is the murder in Event Horizon.

In the real case, the girl’s killer has never been found. The remains of his camp were found several years later but he was nowhere to be found. It’s thought that something happened to him out in the woods. Maybe he fell and broke a leg and died up there. Maybe, he found himself pursued by the demons that drove him to murder, and he atoned for his sin by shooting himself.

Or maybe the remains of the camp are a red herring, and he escaped someplace and is alive and well. But since the area the camp was in was remote and in very rugged terrain and a dense forest, searching for him was difficult. So even if there was a body up there, finding it wasn’t going to be easy and to date it hasn’t been found.

We may never know what exactly happened to him.

-IN THE NOVEL

That murder and the one in the novel were both the end result of domestic violence. Eva had a restraining order against Max, her ex-husband. He was not supposed to approach her, or even talk to her without lawyers or a deputy sheriff present. What made the situation even more awkward was Eva was living with their hired hand, Zorro. She was also pregnant with Zorro’s child.

When Max came to get a key to the shed, instead of Zorro getting it for him, Eva did. As events would turn out, she invited Max in for a cup of coffee. Maybe she thought the past was the past and it was time to forgive him. Maybe she thought he wouldn’t hurt her.

She was wrong!

A lot of people would say the first step is to secure the scene. In short, no one gets in or out without permission.

I’d argue that the first step in reading the scene would be to ensure the killer is or isn’t there. Upon arrival, that’s exactly what Will, Jonesy, and Andy do.

I stopped the Jeep, and we all piled out with guns unsnapped. “Zorro!” I shouted.

    He started gesturing towards the open door. “Eva’s dead,” he said. His voice was bordering on sheer terror. I’d never seen him this worked up.

    “Did you check her?”

    “She’s dead. He shot her!”

    “Who?”

    “Max!”

     “Is he still here?” Jonesy yelled.

     He hesitated and then answered, “I don’t know.”

      Rich, the LJPD officer, jumped out of his car. He’d already grabbed the shotgun from the secure rack and had cranked a round into the chamber.

    “Zorro, stay with the La Jara cop,” I ordered. “Rich, give us cover. We’ll clear the house.”    

Rich nodded, pointed at Zorro, and motioned towards the back seat where he’d have some protection if things went wrong. We’d drawn our weapons and rushed for the door.

     I was reasonably confident Max was gone, but there was no point in taking chances.

      We hit the sides of the door with Andy and I on one side, Jonesy on the other. The log construction made for good cover.

     “On three,” I whispered. “One. Two. Three.” I took a step back, gun up and ready, and then dashed through the door. 

    “Sheriff’s Office,” I yelled. “Max, it’s Will!”

     Silence. The only sound in the house was the ticking of the clock on the wall.

     Close on my heels, Jonesy and Andy rushed in, each covering a part of the room with their drawn weapons.

     The room we’d charged into was a kitchen and Eva lay on her back in the middle of it. A jacket had been placed over her face.

    Who covered her? 

    But I couldn’t think about that now. We had to make sure the area was secure. I headed left to cover the hall as Jonesy came in, his gun covering the center and then Andy moved towards the living room.

     “Hallway clear,” I said and Jonesy moved into the small hall, taking a position near the backroom doors.

    “Living room, clear!” Andy yelled. Andy joined Jonesy in the hall. I nodded and Jonesy went swiftly into the bedroom. Andy followed him in. I heard a closet door open and some hurried sounds of movement.

    “Bedroom, clear,” Andy called. They did the same for the guest bedroom and the bath.

    “Bedroom and bath clear!”

    “House is secure,” I announced. 

They also check the barn, a bunkhouse and shed, and quickly determine Max is indeed gone.

One thing you want to do is preserve your crime scene till you can get it processed. That means denying access to anyone who doesn’t need to be there and being very careful yourself that you don’t screw it up. An example of how bad a scene can get screwed up by not denying access to it is the crime scene of the so called “Fatal Vision Murders.” The book is largely treated as a How Not to Work a Homicide.

The background of the case is chilling and the sentence imposed on Captain McDonald is mired in controversy. The case began on the morning of February 17,1970 when Military Police responded to the on base quarters of Army Special Forces Captain Jeffery McDonald M.D.. They arrived to find two children and McDonald’s wife brutally murdered, and McDonald injuried.

McDonald alleges that a number of unknown assailants entered his home at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, attacked and injured him, and killed his wife and two daughters. The case is complex, frightening, and controversial with some insisting McDonald is innocent and others saying he’s not. The book is a hard read because of the subject matter.

One of the many mistakes made in that case was the investigators let numerous people into the scene. The place was a mess following what had happened and more than a few MPs started picking up fallen items and cleaning things up. By doing this, they inadvertently began editing the story the crime scene tells. There was a whole host of other things done that could have really messed things up.

In the novel Will, Jonesy, and Andy do a good job keeping their scene pristine until RJ arrives to begin recording and collecting. The biggest challenge they faced would have been locals attracted to the scene by the activity. You’d be surprised how many people will show up just wanting to know what’s going on or worse insist on going in.

The biggest problem on this case as mentioned on another blog, is Will has a friendship with the victim, and it’s up to Andy to make him start thinking like a detective again.

His words snapped us back to the here and now.

   “Looks like the bullet impacted the heart.”

    I looked away from her eyes and down to her chest. There was blood on the shirt, almost directly between her breasts. Amazingly, there was very little blood. Andy’s speaking made me stop thinking of what lay here as a friend’s remains and to think like a detective again. 

    “There’s no exit wound,” I replied. If there had been, we’d have been kneeling in blood.

     “Of course,” Jonesy said. “Her heart stopped instantly, therefore little bleeding out.”   

    It was a sure bet her chest cavity was full of blood.

    “Hollow-point bullet?” 

    “Probably,” Jonesy said. He’d seen his share of gunshot victims working LA. “My guess is we’re looking at a low velocity round. Certainly not a magnum or a nine.”

    Those last two bullets would have passed clean through her.

    I nodded, looking at how the body was lying. “She was facing her killer.”

    I paused in my comment, noting how I’d just made someone I knew and considered a friend into a regular, everyday victim. “He or she fired, and the impact knocked her straight back.”

    “She was dead before she hit the floor. I doubt she even saw it coming,” Andy concluded.     

We could only hope. When the heart stops, there’s still enough oxygen in the blood that a victim can remain conscious for several long seconds. That’s more than enough time for someone to know they’re dying. We might have seen evidence of thrashing about if that were the case.

    There was none of that. When the bullet destroyed her heart, it may have set up what’s called a hydrostatic pressure wave. Basically, it’s a surge of blood and is supposed to happen with such force that it either knocked her out or killed her right then.

      If so, it would have been quick, and Eva hadn’t suffered.

There’s testimonial evidence from Zorro who hid under the bed.

    “He was bringing out saddles and packs. Eva woke up and said he had hunters coming in and not to worry. She said he’d stay away. He kept looking at the house.” He gulped. “We made love, and I fell asleep. About half-hour later, I woke up.

     “She wasn’t in bed anymore. I heard voices out in the kitchen. Then the voices got angry. She was shouting at him in English and German and he was calling her names. Awful names!” 

    And then it happened. Right there in front of me, all the work Victory had done was swept aside. In the subsequent few sentences, Zorro damned himself for all time.

     “And he called her a name again!”  He sobbed, leaning on the hood of the Jeep. “I heard the gunshot!” 

    I handed him my handkerchief. 

    “I heard her fall and I knew he was coming for me.”

And finally, there’s what Max tells Will. None of what was said could be admitted into a court of law. Will never ever read him his rights and had also made it clear that the question was asked as a friend. But Will is still a police officer and there’s no such thing as “Off the record” with him. No matter what, it still makes the statement inadmissible. Not that he’d have needed the admission from Max to prove anything.

“Max,” I said after a second or two of awkward silence. “As a friend. Not as cop to suspect, but as friends. What happened?”

    He paused and shook his head sadly. “I wish I knew, Will. You know I’ve been having problems lately.”

     “I know.”

     None of what he was about to tell me could be used in court. I hadn’t Mirandized him, so it was inadmissible. This was between him and me.

     “I was getting ready for my hunting party to come in and I forgot the key to the shed. I went to the house to get her key and Eva invited me in. We were sitting and drinking coffee. I knew Zorro was in the other room, but that didn’t bother me.”

      “Go on.”

     “And then she started talking about the baby, Will.” He had tears in his eyes.

     “What did she say?”

     I studied the distance between us. Could I spring to my feet, knock him down, take the gun away from him? His defenses were down. But Max was plenty fast. I added up my chances of taking him and they didn’t look good. 

     “She was having a baby, Will. She was hoping for a girl, but Zorro wanted a boy.” A half moan, almost instantly squashed, escaped his throat. “I can’t have children of my own and something about that just didn’t sit right.    

“And then I don’t know what happened. It was like I’d stepped outside my body. I saw me stand up. I pulled the pistol from my holster, and I pointed it at her. It was that detective special like the ones we carried at MPI.

     “I remember the shot and she just fell straight back.” He paused, thinking about what he’d done. “I did it so fast.” He nodded to himself. I couldn’t tell if it was a nod of regret or satisfaction. Then he said, “I don’t think she knew I’d killed her.”

Now in every mystery written or on TV, the detective expounds on motive. In the real world, motive doesn’t mean a whole lot. It is a nice thing to know, but you don’t have to prove motive. Why? Because it doesn’t matter why they did it. All that matters is they did and you can prove it.

But here, Max pretty much confesses a motive to Will. it’s not logical by any stretch of the imagination, and it gives us some insight into his thinking. It’s also very chilling because it might explain a lot of the problems we have today.

He hefted his rifle, smiled slightly, and said, “If you want a ‘why’ for your report, I killed Eva because she was happy, and I wasn’t. That’s the best I can do for an explanation.”

Sadly, that’s the only explanation ever given.