Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Shattered Souls: Breakdown

Episode Date: January 2, 2022

Join veteran forensic investigator Karen Smith on the Shattered Souls podcast! Kim Dorsey was found bludgeoned, stabbed and sexually assaulted in her own bedroom. The crime scene had been assigned to two new crime scene investigators the day before Karen and her co-worker, Kim Long, were summoned to help sort out the details of what happened to Kim early in the morning of October 28, 2012. It would prove to be the most challenging case of Karen’s career. Interviews with Detective Kim Long, Prosecutor London Kite, Detective Larry Kuczkowski and Sergeant Karen Dukes.Subscribe to the Shattered Souls podcast and catch up on all of Season 1 available now:Apple PodcastiHeartSpotifyMusic: The New Real by Sam Johnson at www.samjohnsonlive.com  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. This is Shattered Souls. I'm your host, Karen Smith. This podcast contains graphic language and is not suitable for children. Welcome back. This is Episode 11. At around 9 o'clock in the morning of October 28, 2012, a frantic call came into the 911 call center. Jack, is that you? We said Andy was fat. How did she hurt herself? I don't know. She cut herself or something.

Come on. Okay, let me get you on a phone rescue. One moment, Dan. Kim. Kim. Come on, you got to get him out. Come on, you fucking got to go. Okay, sir, tell me exactly what happened.

I don't know. He tried to commit suicide. Send rescue 50. Are you with her right now what happened. I don't know. She tried to commit suicide. Send rescue 50. Are you with her right now? Yes, I am. Okay, how old is she? I don't know. She's 24.

That doesn't make a difference. Send rescue. Okay, sir, we are sending... Why? Sir, we are sending rescue. Is she awake? No, she's not. I think she's dead.

That voice is veteran firefighter Derek Dorsey. His wife, Kim, was found in the bedroom, unresponsive. Derek's life-saving instincts kicked in as he desperately tried to revive his wife with CPR. The operator continued to pry information from him as paramedics rushed to the house. Okay, sir, so you think she's beyond any resuscitation? Yes, rescue anyone. Yes, rescue is on the way, okay? Rescue 50 drove the short distance from the station. Derek tried to piece together what may have happened to his wife,

who now lay naked at the foot of the bed. Blackout curtains made the room very dark, so he moved a table lamp onto the floor to try to see any injuries. And Derek was still on the line with dispatch. Do you have to tell me exactly what she did? What happened? I don't know. She either cut herself or something. I can't see. I'm trying to figure the fuck out. Derek immediately thought about the prescription medication that Kim had been taking for depression. The label clearly said to stop taking it only under a doctor's care, but Kim was very independent, a strong-willed woman, and she would be the type to simply do it herself. He suspected that she had committed suicide as the result of withdrawing herself too quickly from the pills,

a concern that had crossed his mind in the past. The fire truck rounded the final corner and sped up the street. Moments later, Kim was pronounced deceased. Patrol officers were called to the scene, and they quickly dispatched detectives to the proposed suicide. The house was barricaded with crime scene tape, and everyone waited in the driveway for homicide and the crime scene investigators to arrive. This is lead homicide detective Larry Koskowski. When I first went out to the scene, I got there, took a quick look around, met with the patrol officers there,

and I was then tasked with going down to the Police Memorial Building to interview Kim's husband, Derek. The initial walkthrough that I saw, it was obviously a violent scene. I didn't spend a whole lot of time there because we really wanted to talk to Derek, though, at that point. Derek Dorsey had covered Kim's body with the comforter from the bed, which, forensically speaking, could have been a complete disaster. Sergeant Karen Dukes. He had covered his wife's body, which is often something that we look at when a suspect knows his victim. A lot of times they will cover them out of shame. And so initially we were a little concerned about the fact that he covered

his wife's body with a blanket. When you first arrive at a scene and you're taking everything in, there are things that kind of bother you until you can resolve them. And that was one of the things. This is lead prosecutor London Kite. And I just remember like the bedroom just being an absolute disaster. Her body was laying at the end of the bed. And evidence of her husband, who you wouldn't think, you know, he's been in enough crime scenes, I'm sure, of being a firefighter, but he covered her body. Karen Dukes. The reason why he covered his wife's body is because she was naked.

It was a way of really, instead of being a guilty, shameful thing, it ended up being a thing of respect respect where he wanted to cover her body. So all of these strange men and strange people walking in his house wouldn't see her in such a vulnerable way. Officers could not remove that comforter because the body fell under the jurisdiction of the medical examiner. There was no way to see the extent of Kim's injuries until she was uncovered, so the scene remained stagnant, and the only available initial information was coming from Derek Dorsey. As a seasoned first responder, Derek would certainly have noticed any signs of foul play. There was no sign of forced entry in the house.

He had first-hand knowledge of Kim's medical history, so there was no sign of forced entry in the house. He had firsthand knowledge of Kim's medical history, so there was no reason to suspect any manner of death other than suicide at that point. Kim's battle with depression was a source of worry for Derek for some time, and it seemed as if his worst nightmare had come to fruition. Karen Dukes. Well, I think the whole reason we were thinking suicide is because the husband, Derek, that's what he said when he called it in and he was pacing around. Apparently they had been having problems or she had been having problems and she had been contemplating

the idea of suicide. So when he came home and found her dead, he assumed that she did it. Tragically, the truth was far, far worse. Two crime scene investigators were dispatched to the scene, which was still being worked as a possible suicide. Both of the investigators had less than a year on the crime scene unit, but it was well within their capacity to work a suicide without the assistance of a senior detective. When the homicide investigators and medical examiner investigator arrived, interviews were done and the initial paperwork was filled out. Everyone entered through the front door and walked single file into the foyer, past the staircase to the left, and through the living room into the master bedroom where Kim's

body was still covered on the floor. On the way through the house, everyone noticed the kitchen. It was in complete disarray. Drawers were open and various items were thrown onto the floor. A cell phone, TV remotes, and other items had been tossed into the sink. The master bedroom was situated to the left of the living room and it was quite large with a king-sized four-poster bed and oversized ornate furniture. It was still dark, lit only by flashlights and the lamp moved by Derek, but detectives could see

various bloodstains on the bed and on the floor. The investigators began to formulate questions to ask Derek Dorsey based on the dubious blood evidence since none of it seemed to align with a suicide. The crime scene detectives took their initial photographs, and the medical examiner-investigator used a gloved hand to carefully pull the comforter off of Kim's body. With one glance, dispatch was contacted to change the status of the call from suicide to homicide. Kim Dorsey's body was bloody, beaten, and bruised. The comforter had not only covered her, but it also concealed not one, but several weapons that the perpetrator used to kill her with a vengeance. It was a horrific scene. Everyone went outside to regroup.

Calls were made to the chief of detectives and to the state attorney. Based on this new information, the lead crime scene investigator knew that she would need the help and guidance of a senior detective, and she called for help. This is Detective Kim Long. I was contacted by the crime scene sergeant that was at the scene. Kim, we have this scene, there's floods, there's shooting trajectory that needs to be analyzed. I'm going to need you to come out here tomorrow. The day that I actually received the call, it was our day's off. We were going back to work the next day. I remember asking Curtis Barge, do you want me to come out and look at it now before you guys do anything else?

I would prefer to. And she's like, no, no, I had somebody come out here, another crime scene investigator, one that had a little seniority. He came out and he said, oh, it's not that much. You guys will be able to do this in like one day. The crime scene investigator didn't even really want to go out there in the first place because, I'm sorry, he wanted to go to dinner. You heard that right. That senior investigator left them there to figure it out on their own and went to dinner. So already she, being inexperienced

as a supervisor in the crime scene unit, because she's never worked as a crime scene investigator, kind of relying on this senior investigator telling her, you know, it won't take that long at all. She made the call, come out there. Why not let me just go ahead and come out there that day while you still have the body? We like to see the scene as it is, undisturbed, before anything's moved, including the body. When I got there the next day, I remember walking in after just getting a brief synopsis and going, oh, this is going to take more than a day. That supervisor is the same one that I've spoken about in previous episodes. And in retrospect, I'm glad that detective left and gave me and the others the privilege of working that scene for Kim Dorsey instead.

There's a whole lot more I could say right now, but I will let the tenor of my voice tell that story. They can live with their choices. The two investigators looked at each other dumbfounded. It was getting late, and the scene needed their efforts, limited or not. They worked the scene hour after hour, photographing and collecting numerous pieces of evidence from the bedroom, including the comforter, a revolver, a kitchen knife, and three bloodied, broken pieces of a pool cue. The homicide detectives took Derek Dorsey downtown for an interview to unravel his timeline and discuss how such obvious injuries escaped his notice. Detective Larry Kaskowski.

There were just a lot of unanswered questions, a lot of questions that needed answers at that point, being early in the investigation. So we wanted to make sure that we were able to get Derek's statement and lock him into what he found when he got home and days leading up to the discovery of his wife's body. Kim Dorsey's body was transported downtown, and the scene was locked up for the night. When Detective Kim Long checked on duty the following morning, she pulled up the call on her laptop and went to the scene to offer her assistance.

First thing when I got in there, the body was already gone. They had collected some items of evidence, but I started looking around and I started noticing bloodstain patterns. There was a broken pool cube broken in several pieces. There were stains like saturation stains in the carpet in like, I think, maybe two or three different areas. There were bullet defects in the door jamb and in the adjacent walls kind of leading toward the kitchen. So this raised a lot of red flags to me. There's something more that happened than this person possibly killed himself.

Senior crime scene personnel came out there. That's when everybody should have put on the brake, hold up. We need to back out and we need to reassess what we have here and what we're going to do. She promptly called my cell phone and she nervously laughed when I asked her what was going on. She just replied, bring coffee. The call screen gave some of the details, and I could see that it had been changed from a suicide to a homicide. The complainant was the victim's husband, and it didn't seem out of the ordinary, appearing at first blush to be a domestic-related homicide. So I drove across town, and I stopped for four large coffees.

I pulled into the housing development and the enormous steel gates swung open. It was unusual to respond to a murder in such an affluent neighborhood, but money doesn't make anyone immune to violence. I turned the corner and I parked behind the other three crime scene vans. Yellow tape was strung across the enormous house and some of the neighbors were milling around the cul-de-sac. I called Kim on my phone and all three of them came outside to get their coffee and orient me on the few details that were available. Kim told me that the others had worked the scene since the day before and gave me the story. I was really pissed off.

But there was nothing to be done at that point but do the best that we could with what we had to work with. Kim Long. The junior crime scene investigators that were tasked with originally handling this case, just the evidence that we're seeing, we can already tell you this is not a suicide. And there's a lot more to it. And I feel bad for them because they were very junior. And as a matter of fact, one of them, I think it was their very first major case, homicide. They were overwhelmed. I put my coffee in the cup holder and put on a pair of shoe booties and gloves. The three of them walked me through the massive house. In the master bedroom, they pointed out the areas where evidence had been located the day before. There were five bullet holes,

two were lodged in the bedroom doorjamb, and three of them terminated across the hallway in the kitchen ceiling. Bloodstains covered nearly every surface of the bedroom, including the upper area of the 10-foot walls and across the ceiling. I thought, how is this going to play out? Was the scene compromised or was it salvageable? Could I reconstruct this crime scene with the information and evidence that was left behind? We only had the husband as a possible person of interest. If his alibi was

corroborated, this case would become a stranger murder, a whodunit, which is the most difficult type to solve. The odds of the case resulting in an arrest and conviction dwindled as time passed, and we were already 24 hours into the investigation. In that moment, I felt the heavy burden settle into my neck and shoulders, and I took a breath and remembered that control of a scene only begins on my arrival. Nothing that happened prior to that moment was in my charge, and it was now our job to work together for the victim. Kim and I looked at the photographs taken of Kim Dorsey the day before. She had suffered numerous bruises, a stab wound to her neck, a broken nose, and black eyes.

What became very obvious was that she put up one hell of a fight against her attacker or attackers before she lost the battle. Bloodstains covered the carpet and walls from one end of that room to the other. Her body had been positioned on her back, and bruises were apparent on numerous areas of her face, her chest, and her arms. Bloodstains covered her body, and a gray t-shirt had been pushed up and wadded around her neck. On the other side of the bedroom, a pair of ripped women's underwear had been located on a pile of decorative pillows between the wall and the bed. A large black zip tie was looped through a smaller clear one and hung from the nightstand handle. More zip ties were tightly pulled around her wrists and her ankle, and another one lay on the floor next to the bed. The upper drawer of the

nightstand was open, and a black Taurus gun box sat off kilter inside. At some point, it had housed a pink-handled Taurus revolver found just under the foot of the bed. A knife matching the ones in the woodblock in the kitchen was left on the bedroom floor with the bloody blade pointing at Kim Dorsey's head. The bottom half of a pool cue had been unscrewed from the top half and smashed into three separate pieces. One of the pieces was pressed into her skin and left a blanch mark identical to its shape along her left side. Kim's blood and hair were embedded in the broken shards of the pool cue, evidence that she had been bludgeoned in the head. Liver mortis, the settling of red blood cells after death, turned her skin dark purple, except where pressure points left it stark white in contrast. It showed that she had been moved post-mortem, which likely occurred when Derek Dorsey attempted CPR. A broken pool cue, three separate weapons used in this massive scene that involved a beating,

a stabbing, zip tie bindings, evidence of a sexual assault, blood that was spattered across every surface, and five gunshots fired into a wall. Nothing about this scene was simple or ordinary. It was one of the most heinous crime scenes I had ever seen. It was extremely complex and would require every fragment of the thousands of hours of training, education, and decade of experience I had under my belt. No margin of error remained. I didn't respond to the Dorsey house knowing that I would be spending the next five or six days reconstructing a homicide. Beginning the process in the middle of another six days reconstructing a homicide. Beginning the process in the middle of another investigator's work is a difficult task. Working through a complex

forensic analysis without benefit of the majority of evidence in place makes it even harder. After reviewing the photographs of the scene from the day before, I asked to be left alone in the bedroom to begin sorting through the bloodstains left behind, while Kim Long focused on the bullet trajectories. There was no blood found in any other area of the house, so logically all of the violent events occurred within that room. It was devastating. Blood was on nearly every single object and surface. It had been dripped, cast off, smeared, pooled, transferred, and impacted. It was really easy to feel overwhelmed when faced with the enormity of a scene like that. And the only way to reel it in

is to take things slowly and methodically, one step at a time. My doctoral chair, Dr. Barb Zembeck, told me that obtaining a doctorate is like eating an elephant. You just have to take it one bite at a time. Well, it's the same thing with a crime scene like this one. As I looked around the room, I studied the possible cause

of each blood-stained area. Nothing just happens. Some type of action caused blood to be on every surface, whether it was gravity or some other physical force. I looked toward the ceiling and saw smaller droplets up high, the result of cast-off events when a bloody object is swung through the air. A large mirror hung on the wall next to the bathroom door, and it had numerous small droplets spattered across the glass. The droplets continued up and out in a fan pattern across the wall, which was a textbook example of an impact pattern. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough for me to simply discern the patterns and possible causes. I had to sample every single area and droplet to find out whose blood it was, especially since that scene was just so violent. Kim Dorsey's injuries were

extensive, and she had several defense wounds, which meant that she and the perpetrator were in close contact. Whoever did it may have also been injured and left blood behind. Separating the potential causes of the patterns did nothing to prove whose blood it was, and it was my hope that the suspect was hurt badly enough to leave some of his own blood behind. I popped open my DNA case to see how many cotton swab packets I had because I was going to need to take dozens, if not over a hundred, samples. Before I started analysis of that impact pattern on the mirror, I went to the opposite side of the room near the area where Kim's body had been found. I looked down at a side table directly underneath a window. A single dried blood drop lay in the center of that marble top nightstand. This was an anomaly.

Why was it there and how was it deposited? There were no other similar bloodstains anywhere near it, so there had to be a logical explanation. The edges of the stain had begun to peel up from the surface, leaving a cracked circle. The implications were potentially enormous. At some point during the violence, the person who was the source of this drop had been directly above that table by the window. The room was still pretty dimly lit because the dark red blackout curtains were drawn, so I pulled a curtain back, and I was stunned to see bloodstains on the window glass behind them. I flipped the fabric around and saw matching stains on the sheer white liner. I flipped the fabric again.

Blood had soaked through the material and left identical stains on the dark red side. To the right of the window, the white pull cord for the blinds was stained red, and those blinds had been raised. When this was coupled with the blood drop on the side table, it meant that either Kim Dorsey was ambulatory and tried to escape after she was hurt, or the perpetrator was injured and attempted to flee out of that window. Either way, that blood drop did not belong there. It became a crucial juncture in the investigation. I scraped that dried blood drop into a glassine envelope, and there was a gentle knock on the bedroom door.

It was Karen Dukes. She peeked her head around the corner and asked how things were going, so I told her about the blood drop and what that might mean. She made a quick call to Larry Kaskowski, and we filled out a chain of custody form, and she took the sealed envelope directly to the state laboratory for analysis with the hope that the blood did not belong to Kim Dorsey. Because the room remained dark, even with the curtains pulled back, I used the alternate light source to view the top of that side table,

just in case I missed some smaller, minute droplets. Instead, the light illuminated numerous smears and possible fingerprints all over it in a greasy residue. The rest of the house was very tidy and dust-free, so this evidence was certainly out of place as well. I stepped outside for a break and called a latent print analyst to come and take a look at it, and when he arrived a short so this evidence was certainly out of place as well. I stepped outside for a break and called a latent print analyst to come and take a look at it. And when he arrived a short time later, he determined that the entire table

needed to be transported to the lab. So we loaded it onto brown paper and he drove it back across town in his van. I was already three hours into my investigation and I hadn't made it past the first item of evidence. While we worked the crime scene, the homicide detectives started chasing leads provided by Derek Dorsey, even though he wasn't out of the woods yet as a possible suspect. Detective Larry Kaskowski.

Initially on, Derek gave a decent alibi. However, that morning, he was supposed to pick up an individual that was going to do some work for him. So there was that concern early on that maybe it was a setup. It wasn't on the forefront, but it was definitely in the back of the minds of myself and the other investigators. But once we started going down, associates and individuals, we were able to determine that it was probably somebody else that came to the home and did it. We felt confident, though, that whoever did it actually knew the Dorseys or had some connection to them. It wasn't just a random act. Sergeant Karen Dukes.

I do remember at one point, because he was a firefighter and he had worked the overnight shift, we were thinking that if he was a suspect, that he could use working as an alibi. And so I was tasked with going up to his fire station and confirming that he was either there or not there during the entire shift. So I got to interview some of his co-workers, but determined that he did, in fact, he was there the entire shift and never left. He was always within sight of the other firefighters. Prosecutor London Kite. Obviously, in a case like this, there was no forced entry,

which was a huge fact in our minds as investigators and prosecutors. So we knew kind of off the bat that it would have to have been someone that either knew her or she knew or would feel comfortable being in her house. So when there's no forced entry, no kicked in door, the first person comes to mind is the husband. However, we were able to scratch him off the list in short order because we had an airtight alibi. So he was scratched off the list. Now satisfied that Derek Dorsey was not Kim's killer, the detectives began asking him who had been at the house recently and who might have had motive to commit this murder. Derek offered three possibilities. A technician who had recently been at the house

to modify the stereo and surround sound systems, another repairman who had worked on their computers, and a third man who worked with Derek at his part-time construction company, who was a no-show for work the day after the murder. The Friday night prior, the video guy had come to the house to work on the surround sound system. We obviously had to talk to him to rule him out. We had him.

We had a computer repairman. We also had the individual that Derek was supposed to pick up that morning on Sunday that was a no-show. Why was this person that was known to work for Derek who was somewhat reliable

just that morning, he doesn't show up. So there were definitely multiple people who we had to track down and find out where they were and what their alibis were. Sergeant Karen Dukes. I was tasked with going to interview the audio technician. Now, mind you, I had seen that scene and seen how violent of a struggle it was for the victim. And so I knew if I contacted a suspect that he would have to have injuries on him because she fought. She fought hard against him.

When you look at it from a citizen standpoint, when two homicide detectives come in your business and they ask to speak to a certain technician that went to a certain address, it's very alarming. And so you're trying to kind of act cool and nonchalant about it, but the reality is it's kind of hard to do that. But we ended up in a back room interviewing the technician that came out and he remembered the house, he remembered her. But what really got me was that he had scratches all over his hands and arms. When I saw that, I got this really weird feeling, and I started thinking that I was our suspect. And so I asked him, I said, what's up with all these scratches on your arm? Where did you get them? And I mean, I was watching him so hard for his reaction, and he just very casually, casually yeah I scratched myself a lot doing installations I work with wires and I'm putting my hands in small spaces and I mean he explained it very well

for probably two or three seconds I just looked at him and I looked at all the scratches on his hands and I thought oh my god but then ended up he had an alibi everything worked out for him and we were actually able to rule him out. While they ran down the leads outside of the house, Kim Long, the other junior detectives, and I continued our work at the scene. Kim was out in the hallway working on the bullet trajectories and I continued sampling and documenting the stains by the window and figuring out where to go next. In the middle of all of that, my phone rang. It was the chief of detectives. I pulled off my gloves and tossed them into a biohazard bag. Hey, chief. Hi, I'm at the medical examiner's office attending the autopsy. There are some pattern bruises on

her scalp that I need identified to either a weapon or some other source. I'm going to send you a couple of photos to work with, and the doc is going to wait to open her cranium until we hear back from you. Yes, sir. Do you have any ideas about the cause of them at this point? No, they're pretty unusual, so I'll need you to get back with me as soon as you can. Okay, sir. I'll see what I can figure out. My phone dinged several times as the photos and texts came through. I went into the hallway and showed Kim Long the picture files, and we looked at the bruise pattern. The chief was right. They were distinct and very unusual. I had absolutely no idea where to begin to look for whatever may have caused them.

The pattern was located on the posterior right side of Kim's head behind her ear. The injury was about three inches long, and it looked like a capital letter T with extra crossbars and spaces in between. At that point, I went back into the bedroom and closed the door so I could think. I hadn't been able to piece together the possible movements of Kim Dorsey or the suspect at that point, which made the search for something so unusual a lot more difficult. The chief and the medical examiner were waiting for my return phone call with some semblance of an answer before the autopsy could continue, and I felt my heart flutter in my chest with an adrenaline dump. Just breathe. Slow down.

I looked at the photographs again, and I burned that pattern into my brain. I walked around the room and looked for anything that might remotely match. Going back to the window and empty space where that side table had been, I glanced behind me, and I saw the large bloodstain on the carpet where Kim had been found by Derek. The saturation stain was located right next to the large square bedpost that was also covered in blood stains. I knelt down to see just how much blood had been deposited onto that wood post. The pattern was indicative of more impact spatter. Kim's head had been right next to it when Derek found her, meaning that the

suspect either hit, stabbed, or kicked her while she was down in that position. If Kim was trying to escape through that window and she was the one who bled on the curtain and table, how did she end up on the floor again? I looked at the photographs for a third time, and I held my phone next to the bottom of that bedpost, juxtaposing the photograph of Kim with the square corner. I could not believe what I saw. The lines on the pattern bruise lined up identically with the pattern of the bedpost corner. A central channel, crossbar, space, crossbar, space, crossbar. I glanced back and forth between the photo and the bedpost several times, and I zoomed in to make the picture and the corner about the same size. It appeared to be a damn good possibility,

so I called Kim Long back into the bedroom for a second opinion, and she agreed. I called the chief. Hey, I think I have an answer for you. Oh yeah, what'd you find? I have you on speakerphone so the ME can hear you. Well, it looks like it matches the corner of the bedpost, but I'm going to send you some photos so you can see for yourself. Great, can you stay on the line while we look, he asked, and I said, of course I can. Like I'm'm gonna say no to my chief. I took several pictures with a millimeter scale next to the bedpost so that the medical examiner could perform some rudimentary comparisons with the bruise. I sent the texts, and I waited, and I could hear mumbling on the other side of the phone, and after several minutes, the chief got back on the line. Hey, great work, Thanks. It looks like a match,

and the doc says she's going to put it in her notes. That was a bittersweet conclusion. The bruise could now be explained, but it also meant that Kim's head had been slammed into the bottom of that bedpost with a force hard enough to leave that mark. It also helped me to begin to reconstruct the final moments of her life. Working backward from her final position, I now understood that she had been upright by the window before either being pulled or falling backwards into that bedpost where additional impacts were inflicted on her body and face. We had to wait for the DNA to come back from the sample I gave

to Karen Dukes from that side table, but I was pretty sure at that point that it would come back to Kim Dorsey. After working into the evening hours, the scene was locked up again with the patrol officer keeping guard outside, and we all went home for some much-needed sleep. And I did not sleep very well, knowing the extent of work that was waiting for me the next day. But the next morning, we met back at the house and started where we left off. For me, it meant trying to discern each blood pattern to start putting the puzzle pieces together.

So using yellow measurement tape, I created visually separate areas to help distinguish one pattern from another. I placed letter designators in the corner of each area so that I could reference them in my report. And I started with the impact pattern on that mirror by the bathroom. Let's go into the science of blood pattern analysis for a minute. When liquid blood is impacted, it behaves in predictable ways.

Blood is a fluid and fluids are incompressible. So it will extrude out when a solid object comes into contact with it and there's force behind it. The blood will break up into droplets commensurate in size with that force that are then deposited onto the available surfaces. For impact patterns like the one on the mirror and the wall, some of the resulting droplets can be measured and using a trigonometric calculation the angle of deposition can be ascertained. When several droplets are

measured and a two-dimensional line is drawn through the long axis of each droplet, a central area of convergence can be seen. This shows the approximate height of the central area of that impact. Now in order to pull that pattern out in three dimensions, strings or lasers can be used to show the area of origin, the area in space where that impact occurred. In this case, I used string, purple string, and I photographed the height and distance away from the wall. The central area was five feet two inches high and about a foot away from the wall. Kim Dorsey was five feet six inches tall, which would place that impact somewhere around her nose or her eye, both of which were severely injured. And I started to think, was she sucker punched? Did the suspect blitz attack her? Did she even have a chance to fight back or see it coming?

And I was not sure, so I continued my analysis by moving to the floor by the bed where there was a large saturation stain. I cut through the carpet and the padding, and the blood had soaked all the way through to the concrete floor. Kim Dorsey was badly injured and remained in this area for a period of time in order to allow that much blood to seep into the rug and carpet padding. A broken nose would certainly cause heavy bleeding. It would also make her eyes water, and it could have knocked her unconscious. There were zip ties that were still attached to the drawer of the nightstand, and Kim's ripped underwear had been located on top of the decorative pillows covering that saturation stain. To sequence these events, I knew that the impact happened first in order to create the pattern on the mirror and the wall.

The saturation pattern came next when Kim went down after being hit or punched. The pillows were then tossed on top of that blood on the rug, so she could have been zip-tied while she was either unconscious or unable to defend herself. The top drawer of the nightstand was still partially open, with that Taurus gun box sitting off-kilter inside. A closed zip-tie hung from the dresser handle. This led to another set of questions that begged for answers. Did the killer tie her to the nightstand and leave the room? How did the gunshots end up in the doorjamb and in the kitchen? Who fired that gun? As I worked on the bloodstains in the bedroom, Kim Long worked on the reconstruction of the bullet defects.

She attached lasers to the trajectory rods and those lasers pointed down at a sharp angle from the kitchen ceiling showing that three of the shots originated just above the floor in front of the nightstand where the Taurus box was found. The other two that were lodged in the door jam couldn't be reconstructed because the projectiles got wedged in the door frame, but it was an easy supposition that they likely originated from the same area based on the other three. The flight path of the bullet put her between the wall and the bed closer back towards the nightstand. We hypothesized that Kim Dorsey had come to after being hit in the face and emptied all five shots from the revolver toward the kitchen while she sat on the floor in front of that nightstand. The external and terminal ballistics reconstruction assisted me

with continuing an analysis of the events, this time from the start of the attack. At this point, we knew that Kim Dorsey had been struck in the face, rendering her semi-conscious or unconscious on the floor by the nightstand where the sexual assault then took place. Her attacker left the room and she regained consciousness, grabbed the gun from the drawer, and fired all of the rounds toward the kitchen. There were still plenty of unanswered questions, but the story was starting to unfold since we seemed to now have a beginning and an end. The next areas I had to concentrate on were the upper wall, the bed canopy, and the ceiling. Above the nightstand, to the left of the bed,

hundreds of small blood droplets followed numerous separate parabolic arc patterns across the wall at an angle. They continued onto the ceiling and canopy fabric and backed down toward the floor on the perpendicular wall. These linear lines, cast off, were the result of blood being released off of an object or weapon as it was swung through the air, the bottom half of that pool cue. The suspect struck Kim Dorsey over and over again, breaking that pool cue into three pieces, which required an enormous amount of force. Kim Long. They contacted the company. The company told them how much stress and energy and force was needed in order to break that particular type of pool cue. It was quite a lot that she was hitting her with it to break apart like that.

There were several distinct linear arcs of blood droplets across that wall, and as I marked them, something caught my attention and made me stop in my tracks. Every single swing showed only a forward motion. Normally, cast-off events will evidence forward and backward swings, but none of the droplets were traveling in the opposite direction. I stood back for a few minutes and thought about how an object could cause forward motion droplets but no reverse motion droplets.

And the answer became obvious and sadistic. Instead of a blitz-style attack, a fury of swings back and forth, the person swinging it paused between strikes and brought the object down to his side before going forward again. He struck Kim Dorsey, and then he waited to see if she responded. And he hit her over and over and over and over again, pausing between each strike. And when I realized this information, I put down my equipment, and I went outside to my van for a break. And I stifled a much-needed breakdown. I took some deep breaths. And I took my frustration out on my steering wheel. And I bruised the heel of my hand in the process.

And I can remember yelling, Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Each time I punched it. And I had to get it out somehow. And after a few minutes, after I pulled my shit together, I wiped my face on a towel. And I went back inside. It was nearing the end of another 12-hour day,

so we packed up, we locked the house again, and we took that day's evidence downtown to the property room. And I went home, and I drank a huge glass of ice-cold water, and I sat down on the kitchen floor, and I drank a huge glass of ice-cold water, and I sat down on the kitchen floor, and I cried. The next morning, I looked at that wall again and just stood there for a minute. I had to move on to the additional bloodstains on the marble bedposts,

the fitted sheet, and the footrail of the bed. More impacts. And I thought, Jesus Christ, the amount of violence here is just unfathomable. Absolutely unfathomable. The homicide detectives continued running down leads, and we were late into the third day. The three other possible suspects, the computer repairman, the stereo technician, and Derek's no-show employee had all been eliminated through substantiated alibis. So the detectives were back to square one. They went to Derek Dorsey for any other possible persons of interest.

At that point, they really started talking to Derek Dorsey about who he thought might have done it. When Karen Dukes arrived at the scene on the very first day of the investigation, she noticed one piece of evidence that would prove to be crucial. The first thing that I remember about this murder is when I walked up the front sidewalk. First of all, this is a beautiful neighborhood. It's a gated community and it was just a really nice looking home, which is probably a little different from most of the crime scenes that we go into. But the very first thing that I noticed as I was walking up that front sidewalk was a concrete, a very small concrete statue near the front door that was tipped over.

You know, as you're walking up, you know, you're looking at the doorframe to see if there's any signs of forced entry. Someone kicked the door in or how did they gain entry? And for some reason, that statue being tipped over, the first thing I thought is someone hid the spare key to the front door under that statue and it was tipped over because someone knew that there was a key there or had been searching right around the front door and found it there. That's honestly what I thought. As we continued to check all the points of entry in the home, we realized we had no forced entry at all. They were both hopeful that Derek would be able to provide some additional possibilities, and while they interviewed him again, we continued

piecing the evidence together. At that point, Kim Long was finished with her trajectory analysis, and she came into the bedroom to help me with the rest. We brought in the alternate light source to look at the faux marble bedposts, which had more smears and prints on them, just like the top of that nightstand under the window. They had to go to the lab for processing. So we used a sawzall to cut them away from the bed rails, and each one weighed about 75 pounds, and transporting them without disturbing any possible fingerprints was a challenge. The latent print analyst would have his work cut out for him, but we were hopeful that there was some ridge detail on the smooth surface that might help identify a killer. If there were identifiable prints on those posts,

I wanted to make sure that the jurors could understand where they'd been located in relation to the room if the prosecutor decided to use them as a demonstrative in court. I labeled the two posts with north, south, east, and west delineations at the top so that jurors could see which sides had bloodstains on them and which didn't, along with any latent prints. After the bedposts were removed, we dismantled the rest of the bed and we saw more bloodstains. Underneath the footrail near Kim's final resting place, there was yet another area of impact spatter. This was a coup de grace, one last blow as she lay dying or dead at the foot of the bed. Kim and I wanted to show Kim Dorsey's possible path across the room, so we sprayed a chemical called Blue Star, which is very

similar to luminol, all over the room. With the windows blacked out and the lights off, we sprayed two bottles across the room, and instantly we could see Kim Dorsey's bare footprints moving across the carpet from the initial impact by the mirror over to that window. We set up a camera and took timed photographs so the jury could see those horrible details as well. With the bed now dismantled, all of the impacts, cast off, and other bloodstains documented, there was one area left. The saturation stain where Kim had been when Derek found her. We cut away the carpeting and saw that it had soaked through to the padding all the way to the concrete. At that point, the other two junior detectives had worked their way through

the mess in the kitchen. They had processed a number of items from the upstairs loft area, including the upper thin half of that pool cue, a container of zip ties, and a green plastic drinking cup. Whoever the suspect was, he knew the interior of this house like the back of his hand. We were all hoping that the homicide detectives were getting closer to an answer after they spoke with Derek again. Larry Kaskowski. There were definitely multiple people, along with, eventually, with Lance. Lance. Lance.

Next week on Shattered Souls, the conclusion of the Kim Dorsey case. Opening music by Sam Johnson at samjohnsonlive.com Underscore music by Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com All rights reserved by Angel Heart Productions. This is an iHeart Podcast.