Criminal - The Sailor's Teeth

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

In 1982, forensic dentists examined the teeth of thousands of sailors stationed on an aircraft carrier called the USS Carl Vinson in Newport News, Virginia. It’s been called “the largest dental dragnet likely in U.S. history.”  Chris Fabricant’s book is Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System. We need your help. We are conducting a short audience survey to help plan for our future and hear from you. To participate, head to vox.com/podsurvey, and thank you! Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. This episode contains descriptions of violence, including sexual assault. Please use discretion. In 1982, Teresa and Jesse Perrone, a young married couple, were living in Newport News, Virginia. They had three little kids, all under five years old. And Jesse worked at the local Navy shipyard as a welder. He was working on a dry-docked aircraft carrier called the USS Carl Vinson. On the afternoon of September 13, 1982, Jesse Perrone left to work his regular evening shift. His wife, Teresa, and their three children went to her parents' house to visit.

When they came back home, Teresa said she noticed that a screen was loose over a window in their living room. Later, she went outside to hang laundry to dry. And she looked out at the back gate, and there was a sailor staring at her in a very creepy way. Teresa went inside and locked her doors. She later said she thought back to earlier that day and remembered that a sailor on the side of the road had cursed at her for not giving him a ride. And then that evening, after her kids fell asleep and she took them upstairs to bed, she went back downstairs

and she barred the back door with a 2x4. And that's the entrance that her husband Jesse usually came home in. Teresa fell asleep on the couch, waiting for Jesse to come home. After midnight, a knock at the front door woke her up. And she ran to the door, and it was Jesse that was at the front door woke her up. And she ran to the door and it was Jesse that was at the front door and she let him in. They sat and they chatted for a little while and shared a couple of cigarettes and then went upstairs to bed. About an hour after Teresa and her husband had fallen asleep in their bed and the three little kids were down the hall, also all asleep. She woke up to the sound

of loud thumping. She opened her eyes, and she saw a sailor standing over her bed with a crowbar raised up above his head. The man wearing a white sailor's uniform attacked Jesse, hitting him in the head repeatedly, killing him. He then sexually assaulted Teresa. He told her to be quiet, threatening that if she wasn't, he would, quote, get her children. According to police, the man then drank a Pepsi and took $14 from Teresa's purse.

After the man left, Teresa called her father and the police. Teresa's children had slept through the entire attack. Paramedics came and took her to the hospital. They collected physical evidence and took photographs of bite marks the man had left on Teresa's legs. She hadn't gotten a clear view of the man who attacked her. He'd covered her face so she couldn't see a lot. But she did remember a few details about him, including the markings on his sailor's uniform. She indicated from the chevrons on his sleeve that he was a low-ranking sailor. He was white,

male, about 5'10", about 150, 160 pounds, and clean-shaven. So that description fit about 3,000 sailors in Newport News at the time. They had no eyewitness, including Teresa Peron. They had no motive. They really had nothing to go on apart from that. And at this time, DNA matching technology was not being used. No, it wasn't. There was serological testing was available, which was essentially blood typing,

but forensic DNA analysis had not yet come online. And so what they had was this description and these bite marks. Bite mark evidence is exactly what it sounds like. Trying to use bite marks to figure out who may have committed a crime. We're hearing from lawyer and author Chris Fabrikant. There are certainly, according to most criminal courts, there is belief that bite mark evidence creates a unique impression on skin and that if you were able to compare the dentition, which is the biting surface of teeth,

and really the outlines, like kind of little circles that they make around the outlines of teeth and match those to a bite mark, it's capable of identifying, you know, the biter. Bite mark evidence gained national attention in 1979 when serial killer Ted Bundy was on trial for murdering two women on the Florida State campus. After months of searching for evidence that would connect Ted Bundy to the murders, police had focused in on a bite mark left on one of the victim's bodies. Forensic dentists testified at the trial, including one named

Lowell Levine. State your name for the record. Lowell J. Levine. Here's audio from the trial. Now, Dr. Levine, you were supplied, were you not, with a photograph of the bite mark that was involved in this case? Yes, sir. Okay. And subsequent thereto, did you have occasion to visit the remote sensing laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico in this regard?

Yes, sir. And what was the purpose of your visit mark could be photographically enhanced to see if more detail could be brought out that would allow comparisons to be made. It was the first nationally televised criminal trial in our nation's history, and there was no physical evidence, there was no confession, there were no other eyewitnesses, there was no fingerprints, they didn't even have hair microscopy. And so the case rose and fell on the bite marks. Bolivine testified that after examining the models of Ted Bundy's teeth,

he believed to a, quote, reasonable degree of dental certainty that they could have left the bite marks on the victim. Other forensic dentists agreed. Ted Bundy, who later admitted that he'd killed the two women, along with 28 others, was convicted and sentenced to death. Investigators working on the Peron's case decided they would also use bite mark evidence.

They would use the marks left on Teresa's body to try to find the sailor who attacked her. And when they looked at the bite mark, it appeared to them that somebody with a crooked tooth, a maxillary right central incisor, had likely created this injury. And so what they did is conduct the largest dental dragnet likely in U.S. history and got two dentists to examine the dentitions of thousands, literally thousands of sailors. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. The Naval Investigative Services, with the help of two local dentists,

set out to examine the teeth of sailors stationed in Newport News, on board the USS Carl Vinson. Those people were in the dining hall. You know, it's a big open area. They put chairs and tables out, but they can put that away, and it's like a big dance floor. But so they were lined up, and they were running people through, you know, just like they would take in brand, you know, animals, whatever. You'd walk up, open your mouth, and they would look inside, and you'd go on.

Did that happen to you? Yes, it happened twice, matter of fact. Keith Harward was a 26-year-old sailor stationed on the USS Carl Vinson at the time of the attack on Jesse and Teresa Perrone. Were you told why you were being lined up to have your teeth looked at? They may have said something. You know, if you're driving down a road and there's a car wreck on the side of the road, it's best to just keep going, not to get involved, you know, rubbernecking and things like that. You know, I honestly, all I remember was they said, you know, they're doing this and

that's pretty much it. So there was no option for you to say, no, I don't want you to look in my mouth. You have to follow orders. Yeah. Yes. Yes. You know, if you want to leave the ship, you know, you want your liberty. Otherwise, they're going to sit you down and talk to you for hours and try to figure out why you didn't want to do this. By some accounts, as many as 4,000 sailors' teeth were examined. Five months after the attack on Jesse and Teresa Perrone, no arrests had been made. In February of 1983, Jesse Perrone's older brother wrote to a senator, complaining about the speed of the investigation. He wrote, I'm requesting your help to get the Navy investigative service off their tails,

on their feet, and on the job. Teresa Perrone told the local paper, I'm afraid if they don't catch him, he's going to come back and get me. Here's Chris Fabrikant. Two United States senators wrote to both the Navy and the Newport News Police Department, pressuring the detectives to make an arrest. And so the town believed that, you know,

they were living amongst a monster, and nothing was being done. No arrests had been made, and there was seemingly no progress in the investigation. And then in March, the police got a call about Keith Harward when he got into a fight with his girlfriend. We were drinking, and we got into an argument,

and it got into an altercation, and instead of fighting, I bit her on the shoulder, and, you know, I shouldn't have done it, but it happened. And afterwards is when I got charged with assault, misdemeanor, came to court, the judge dropped the charges, and then after that happened, that's when the police walked up to me and said, hey, we would like to take you downtown to a dental office and get more moles. Their excuse was they lost the moles to my teeth. What did you think when they said that?

I think, oh, okay, you know, I don't know why, but if that's what y'all want to do, you know, this has been thrown out. So we went down to the little dental office down there, and they put the stuff in there and took the molds and stuff, and pretty much, you know, they asked a couple questions, but that was it. And they said, okay, well, thank you. And so what they did is they called in a forensic odontologist, which is just a fancy word for a forensic dentist, and they called in Lowell Levine. Lowell Levine in New York. Dr. Levine took a look, said that it looked as though Mr. Harward was consistent with his teeth, were consistent with the bite mark, but that he couldn't be sure unless he actually had the evidence himself. So they booked him a flight to Newport News. The day that Lowell Levine arrived in Newport News,

he examined photographs of the bite marks and told police that he could testify that it was Keith Harward who had made them. Five other forensic dentists agreed that Keith Harward had likely left the bite marks, even two who had previously ruled out Keith Howard's teeth as potential matches. A shipyard guard who had reported seeing a sailor with blood on his uniform on the night

of the attack was shown four photographs and identified Keith as the person he had seen. Keith was staying with his parents a few hours away from Newport News when police came to arrest him. They said I was under arrest and rolled out the case and read the paperwork and handcuffed me,

throwed me in the cop car and I said, stick it in your keister. I don't know what you're talking about. The only thing I know is what you're telling me. He was taken to Newport News to wait for his trial, and he was assigned court-appointed lawyers.

My attorneys came to me and says, because they're worried, they're saying, you know, we might want to go to the prosecutor and offer up a plea, see if they would offer up a plea bargain. What do you think about that? I said no. Keith said repeatedly that he was innocent. He refused to plead guilty to any of the charges. He says his lawyers couldn't believe it.

It floored them. You could be put to death behind there. Well, I know this sounds kind of bold, but I would rather die than spend the rest of my time in prison knowing I agreed to something I didn't do. So I said, no, we don't want no plea bargain. At his trial, Keith testified in his own defense.

He presented an alibi for where he was that night. And even though there was very little information about what the attacker looked like, he pointed out that his appearance didn't match. He wasn't clean-shaven. He'd had a mustache. And his uniform didn't have the chevrons on the sleeve. His girlfriend also testified

that they were together on the night of the attack. Forensic dentist Lowell Levine also took the stand. He showed the jury the bite mark and how it lined up with Keith's teeth, which, he said, had some, quote, very unique characteristics. He said it is, quote, a practical impossibility for another human being to have all those characteristics in a combination exactly like this. But he added, quote, I haven't examined every set of teeth in the world. The jury deliberated for two days. The local paper reported that when they came back into the courtroom, several of them looked like they had been crying.

Keith was found guilty of all the charges against him, including capital murder. When it came time for his sentencing, his parents spoke, asking the court not to give their son the death penalty. The local paper reported that when his parents were speaking, Keith, quote, broke down for the first time. On October 29, 1983, he was sentenced to life in prison. Keith appealed.

In court, he repeated that he had nothing to do with the crime. He said, I feel sorry for everyone who thinks the streets are rid of a killer. In 1985, the Virginia Supreme Court overturned his conviction on a technicality and granted him a new trial. Forensic dentist Lowell Levine took the stand for a second time, as well as a forensic dentist from Virginia named Alvin Kagey. Alvin Kagey told the jury that Keith Howard's dental molds

and the photographs of the bite marks on Teresa's legs were very much like a key in a lock. It goes right in there. Keith's lawyer told the jury, the only thing that Keith Harward is guilty of is having crowded teeth and a rotated incisor. He was again sentenced to life in prison. He was 29 years old.

Forensic dentistry, or odontology, has three main branches. Dental identifications, helping to identify bodies of deceased crime victims through dental records. Age estimation, using teeth to help identify the age of an unidentified crime victim. And bite mark analysis and comparison. Let's just start with you introducing yourself. My name is Adam Freeman. I am a dentist in Westport, Connecticut, and I do a lot of work in forensic dentistry. Adam Freeman has been a dentist for 30 years.

His father was a dentist, too. After a few years of working in general dentistry, Adam Freeman got interested in forensic dentistry. So I got interested, really, in the late 90s. I took a course with Dr. Henry Lee, who's a Connecticut guy and world famous on forensics. And then 9-11 happened. And post 9-11, it was clear that forensic dentists played a large role in identifying the victims of that tragedy. And the location of my office is such that a lot of people from Westport, Connecticut

work in New York City. And we lost, just from our patients and one friend, three people during 9-11. And as I did more research on forensic dentistry, it became apparent that not only did we need more forensic dentists, but there's not a lot of people who go on to become board certified in forensic dentistry. Adam Freeman decided to become certified by the American Board of Forensic Odontology, or ABFO. And during these courses, were you taught to identify bite marks? Oh, yeah. And not only could you identify a bite mark, moreover, they taught that you could identify a perpetrator from that bite mark. You could match somebody to a bite mark. What were you taught to look for? Oh, I mean, you know, there was a real range. I mean, there was the sort of what they would call like the classic perfect bite mark, which was two semicircular arches opposing each other with class characteristics, meaning the size and shape of a human dentition, and that there were individual components within it, that you could

see teeth within that injury, things like that. That is the definition of a bite mark today. And those are the things that you would ideally look for. But very often, bite marks weren't those. And they're really just these diffuse bruising patterns that people would identify as bite marks, and they would work them up as bite marks. And additionally, I would sit through lectures, and very often somebody would be lecturing about a particular case or a bite mark, and I would be like, wow, I mean, look what they can see in that injury. One day, I am going to study this hard enough where I'm going to be that good, where I can see all the things that they can see in this injury. I drank the Kool-Aid of this discipline and absolutely believed in it for a while. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts.

Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend W highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these Series Essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence.

We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. he says he did a few bite mark cases every year when you're an expert witness in a case do you make money you can make money yes um i mean i know of people who make lots of money working as an expert witness in a bite mark case i've heard numbers as high as doing one case, making $100,000, doing a singular bite mark case.

I mean, I have one of my colleagues who likes Ferraris, and he has said, you know, that Ferrari was the so-and-so case, and that Ferrari over there was the, you know, this case. The same year that Adam Freeman became board certified, the National Academy of Sciences released a report about forensic science in the United States. It stated, With the exception of nuclear DNA analysis, no forensic method has been rigorously shown to have the capacity to consistently demonstrate a connection between evidence and a specific individual or source. The report went on to state that bite mark evidence has, quote, never been exposed to stringent scientific scrutiny, and that, quote, bite marks on the skin will change over time and can be distorted by the elasticity of the skin.

Adam Freeman remembers that his colleagues just dismissed the report. The overarching attitude of the ABFO was they just don't get it. They don't understand. At that point, was there any, you know, anything from you that was starting to say, well, whoa, this is pretty clear here? Or were you yourself, you know, dismissive? Yeah, I think that there was, it started getting me to question things. That was sort of the time where I went, you know, I at least took a pause and started looking at, like, what's going on here? But on the other hand, also, my mentors at the time were promoting this dialogue of, you know, they just don't get it. So, you know, it definitely was the start of reexamining what was going on.

By 2015, Adam Freeman had become president of the American Board of Forensic Odontology. By then, more and more people who had been convicted in the 1980s and 90s based on bite mark evidence were being proven innocent by DNA. Adam, along with some of his colleagues, decided to put together a study. They started by gathering photos of bite marks from cases their colleagues had worked on, a hundred of them. And they sent them to every board-certified forensic dentist to decide whether what they were looking at

was a bite mark or not. Do the people that look at these injuries have some level of agreement at what they're looking at? I have to tell you, I thought we were going to get like 95, 98% agreement on this. I thought this was going to be the slam dunk. We would get this validated. Well, when the results started coming in, it was incredibly disturbing. We had very little agreement.

There was widespread disagreement. You would look at a case and there'd be, in some cases, a third of the people saying it was absolutely a bite mark. A third of the people saying it's absolutely not a bite mark. And some people saying it's suggestive of a bite mark. And maybe the most troubling of them was one of our board certified forensic dentists, an older gentleman at the time, he was probably in his 80s, had been opening up a corrugated cardboard box. And in the process, he cut himself. And when he looked at this injury that was left on his forearm, he said, you know, this looks awfully like a bite mark.

And he took a bunch of photos of it and sent them to me and he said, now we know definitively what caused this. Put it in the study, let's see what happens. We did. And so this is the only injury that we absolutely knew ground truth. We knew this was not a bite mark. A third of the people approximately said, this is a bite mark. A third of the people said, there's not even enough information here for me to offer an opinion as to the origin of this injury at all. That's really troubling. I mean, that is

really, really troubling. Adam Freeman presented those findings to other board-certified forensic dentists. He says that after that, longtime colleagues who he considered friends stopped talking to him. He eventually resigned from the organization. When you look back at the years you spent, you know, dedicated to working in forensic dentistry, but also working on bite mark evidence and believing in it, I mean, do you feel kind of like a, kind of like a fool? Yeah. Parts, yes. I mean, I feel foolish that I didn't do enough of my own due diligence at the time. I'd spent probably 10 years of my life trying to become board certified. And to realize that it's based on a house of cards

and that there is no scientific validity surely did not make me feel very good. In 2016, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology released a report about forensic science. In it, the council wrote, And they wrote that the prospects of developing bite-mark analysis into a scientifically valid method were low. The same year, the Texas Forensic Science Commission, the agency that oversees forensics in the state of Texas,

recommended a moratorium on using bite-mark evidence in criminal cases. But it was just a recommendation, and it's still used in courts across the country today. The American Board of Forensic Odontology revised its standards and guidelines for evaluating bite marks in 2018. Quote, An odontologist should recognize that many human dentitions are similar, and that bite marks are not always accurately recorded in human skin. We reached out to the ABFO and to Lowell Levine, but haven't heard back.

Adam Freeman still works as a forensic dentist. He volunteers to work on dental identification cases for the state of Connecticut and on a federal disaster response team. And he still works on bite mark cases, ones from the past. He tries to help people who have been convicted based on bite mark evidence. People like Keith Harward. We'll be right back. but you still find yourself occasionally rebounding with junk food and empty calories? You don't need to wait for the new year to start fresh. New year, new me? How about same year, new me? You just need a different approach. According to Noom, losing weight has less to

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That's Stripe.com to learn more. Stripe. Make progress. After Keith Harward was convicted for the second time of the murder of Jesse Perrone and the rape of Teresa Perrone, he moved through a series of Virginia State prisons to serve his life sentence. I mean, I gave up. When they convicted me the second time, I was done. I was nobody. I wasn't going to get out of prison. They weren't going to let me go. I was hoping one day there would be a deathbed confession. You know, I just did every day I could and try not to cause any problems, try to stay to myself and, you know, and tried not to cause any problems, tried to stay to myself, and, you know, and tried not to get hurt or anything.

He'd been in prison for more than 10 years when the lead investigator in the Perones case retired. The detective told the local paper that he'd kept a memento from that case, dental impressions of Keith Howard's teeth, cast in bronze. Keith told us that he'd wondered many times how his teeth could have been scientifically matched to the bite marks on Teresa Perrone's body by forensic dentists. They say they're experts.

So, you know, I'm thinking, okay, well, this is like fingerprints and blood type, because there was no DNA then. How could it be? And there were times later on that I started to question myself. You know, I tell you, I'm a drinker. Was it blackout? I would question myself, you know, how can this be? In 2015, lawyer Chris Fabricant was working at the Innocence Project.

His focus was looking at bite mark cases. He had asked his paralegal to dig up as many of them as he could. And then one day he came across an appellate opinion from the Virginia Supreme Court. And it was Keith Allen Harward's case. And I was reading the opinion and I read about this dragnet and I read about, you know, the lack of other evidence in the case. And if you were skeptical about bite mark evidence, like, of course I was, you know, he sounded innocent even reading the opinion that was affirming his life sentence. Chris's team got to work reviewing the case, and they called the Virginia Supreme Court looking for case files. And a court officer was gone for, you know, 10, 15 minutes, you know, poked around, said he couldn find an evidence box marked, you know, Commonwealth v. Harward with the

date and the indictment number on it, you know, and asked if we were interested in this. And we were like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, we are interested in that. Please don't touch it. The district attorney allowed the box of evidence to be sent away for DNA testing, including the bottle of Pepsi that Teresa and Jesse Peron's attacker drank from. On every item tested, Keith Howard was not a match. The DNA profile was uploaded to a national DNA database called CODIS and identified a sailor named Jerry Crotty who had been on the USS Carl Vinson at the time of the murder and the rape and had gone on to commit numerous other crimes across the country and had died in prison. On April 6, 2016, the Virginia Attorney General issued a statement. He said,

Based on a careful and exhaustive examination of the circumstances, including the latest DNA testing of evidence recovered at the crime scene, it is clear that Keith Howard is innocent of the crimes for which he has been convicted. He went on to state, When the system gets it wrong, when the system fails to deliver justice, we have to say so. In this case, the Commonwealth got it wrong. The very next day, Keith Harward was declared innocent by the Virginia Supreme Court.

And a day later, he was released from prison after 33 years. What was it like to be with Keith on the day he got out of prison? I'll never forget it. You know, so we were allowed into his prison and we met with Mr. Harward in the warden's, essentially his office, this area that prisoners are not allowed. And we sat talking with him. And, you know, as we're sitting there, the door to this inner sanctum in the prison opened very slowly. And these two old men walked into the room who were plainly not prison guards.

And Keith Harward was sitting behind me and I heard him gasp and then stand up and walk over to them. And these men just fell into this hug and it was his brothers who he hadn't seen in close to 30 years. And they just hugged and hugged and hugged, and nobody was not crying in that room at that time. What was it like when you walked out of prison a free man? Well, I'm not free. I'll never be free. I'm unincarcerated. And free is a great thing to say, freedom,'m not free. I'll never be free. I'm unincarcerated. And free is a great thing to say, freedom, freedom, free, free.

But I have stuff in my head that will never be free. I still to this day think, sometimes I think, you know, I wonder if they made a mistake. It happened, you know, the first time. And then it happened again. I got convicted twice. You know, what's my chances of anything? It worries me, and I know I didn't do it. Everybody knows I didn't do it, but, you know, you can't help but think, wow, what could they do to me again? You know, there's no freedom to that. I'm just not incarcerated.

It's always a great day not to be in prison. But as far as a free thing, let there be no doubt. The day I drop, Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Samantha Brown, and Libby Foster. Our technical director is Rob Byers, engineering

by Russ Henry. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com, where you can also find a link to Chris Fabricant's book, Junk Science, and the American Criminal Justice System.

If you like the show, tell a friend or leave us a review. It means a lot. We're on Facebook and Twitter, at Criminal Show, and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC.

We're a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcasts.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Jach. This is Criminal. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation, Botox Cosmetic Adabotulinum Toxin A is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults. Effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk.

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