The Guardians(19)

russo himself was a ladies’ man. anyway, enough of that. he’s dead.

tyler didn’t know why they killed russo, but, when you’re dealing with a drug gang you have to figure he double-crossed them in some way. maybe he kept too much of the money. maybe he was snitching. maybe his wife didn’t want to lose everything they had. i met her a few times when i was in the office and didn’t like her. one tough gal.

after my trial, tyler got threats and he was really scared. they finally ran him out of town. he said there were some bad people back there and he was moving on. years later, after my appeals were over, and he wasn’t my lawyer anymore, he told me that a deputy sheriff got killed in seabrook. said he thought it was related to the russo murder and the drug gangs. but he was only speculating by then.

so there it is, post. tyler’s theory of who really killed russo. and he also thought that russo’s wife was probably involved too. but it’s too late to prove any of that.

thanks again, post. hope this is helpful and i hope to see you soon. get busy.

your client and friend, quincy miller.





Chapter 10



The bloodstain expert who testified against Quincy was a former Denver homicide detective named Paul Norwood. After working crime scenes for a few years, he had decided to hand in his badge, buy a couple of nice suits, and become an expert witness. He had dropped out of college and did not have the time to pursue a degree in criminology or anything related to actual science, so he attended seminars and workshops on forensics, and he read books and magazine articles written by other experts. He was a smooth talker with a good vocabulary, and he found it easy to convince judges that he knew his stuff. Once qualified as a forensics expert, he found it even easier to convince unsophisticated jurors that his opinions were based on solid science.

Norwood was far from alone. In the 1980s and 1990s, expert testimony proliferated in the criminal courts as all manner of self-anointed authorities roamed the country impressing juries with their freewheeling opinions. To make matters worse, popular television crime shows portrayed forensic investigators as brilliant sleuths able to solve complex crimes with infallible science. The famous ones could practically look at a bloodied corpse and, within an hour or two, name the killer. In real life, thousands of criminal defendants were convicted and put away by shaky theories about bloodstains, blood spatter, arson, bite marks, fabrics, glass breakage, scalp and pubic hair, boot prints, ballistics, and even fingerprints.

Good defense lawyers challenged the credibility of these experts, but were rarely successful. Judges were often overwhelmed by the science and had little or no time to educate themselves. If a proffered witness had some training and seemed to know what he was talking about, he was allowed to testify. Over time, judges adopted the rationale that since a witness had been qualified as an expert in other trials in other states, then certainly he must be a genuine authority. Appellate courts got into the act by affirming convictions without seriously questioning the science behind the forensics, and thus bolstering the reputations of the experts. As résumés grew thicker, the opinions grew to encompass even more theories of guilt.

The more Paul Norwood testified, the smarter he became. One year before Quincy’s trial in 1988, Norwood spent twenty-four hours in a bloodstain analysis seminar put on by a private company in Kentucky. He passed the course, was given a certificate to prove his knowledge, and added another field of expertise to his growing repertoire. He was soon impressing juries with his scientific knowledge of the many intricate ways blood is dispersed in a grisly crime. He specialized in blood, crime scene reconstruction, ballistics, and hair analysis. He advertised his services, networked with law enforcement and prosecutors, and even wrote a book on forensics. His reputation grew and he was in demand.

Over a twenty-five-year career, Norwood testified in hundreds of criminal trials, always for the prosecution and always implicating the defendant. And always for a nice fee.

Then DNA testing arrived and put a serious dent in his business. DNA testing not only changed the future of criminal investigations, it brought a fresh and devastating scrutiny to the junk science Norwood and his ilk had been peddling. In at least half of the DNA exonerations of innocent men and women, bad forensics have been the cornerstone of the prosecution’s evidence.

In one year, 2005, three of Norwood’s convictions were invalidated when DNA testing exposed his faulty methods and testimony. His three victims had spent a combined fifty-nine years in prison, one on death row. He retired under pressure after a single trial in 2006. On cross-examination, after giving his standard bloodstain analysis, he was discredited like never before. The defense lawyer painfully walked him through each of the prior year’s three exonerations. The questioning was brilliant, brutal, and revealing. The defendant was found not guilty. The real killer was later identified. And Norwood called it quits.

However, the damage was done. Quincy Miller had long since been convicted because of Norwood’s analysis of the bloody flashlight, which, of course, he had never seen. His razor-sharp analysis of the case consisted of reviewing large color photos of the crime scene and the flashlight. He never touched the most crucial piece of evidence, but rather relied on photos of it. Undaunted by this, he testified with certainty that the specks of blood on the lens were back spatter from the shotgun blasts that killed Keith Russo.

The flashlight disappeared before the trial.