Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist Read Online Free PDF

life involved little more than abject misery and crushing exhaustion. Toiling through the sweltering rows of cotton plants under the Texas sun was grueling, but the Los Angeles Police Academy had it beat for sheer physical punishment.
    I knew I was in trouble when the muscle-bound ex-marine standing next to me collapsed during training. His knees buckled, and down for the count he went. The academy training officers spat on us, humiliated us, called us every foul name in the book. The Los Angeles Police Academy is in Elysian Park, right by Dodger Stadium, and we ran around the field so many times, I lost count. I might have found the experience awe-inspiring in those deep summer days of my childhood, when I was back in Texas idling away hours dreaming of becoming a professional baseball player. But the reality was starkly devoid of romance. There were no cheering throngs urging us on as we barreled through the heat until our legs trembled and our calves balled up into stabbing cramps. The officers running the program did everything they could to break us psychologically and physically. Along the way, they pounded us into shape—just the intense physical andmental conditioning we needed to prepare for what we would soon face on the streets of Southern California.
    I started at the academy with five other new Downey recruits—Frank Riesenhuber, Mike Hadley, Bart Kirk, Bob Bradfield, and Larry Olson. We all stuck it out, went through orientation together, and forged the kind of lasting, loyal camaraderie that comes only through sharing one of life’s defining experiences.
    We never knew when the officers in charge would march solemnly into the police academy classroom at Elysian Park and turn to face a hundred of us new recruits standing at attention, silent and terrified. One of them would belt out a recruit’s last name, followed by the words we all dreaded.
    “Johnson,” they would yell, “get your books!”
    That would be the last you would see of the guy. Head hanging, he would fall out of the ranks, gather his belongings, and slink away, publicly disgraced, weeded out for reasons usually unknown. Sometimes they just perceived a character flaw that convinced them the man in question wouldn’t cut it on the force.
    The classroom work was just as brutal as the physical training—they drilled us on search and seizure, arrest procedure, investigation technique, use of deadly force, radio communication, and every other angle of law enforcement. Then came firearms training, weapons care, marksmanship, defensive driving, pursuit driving, and safe vehicle handling. On and on it went.
    I slogged through and eventually got both my wishes: I became a cop, and I got my bachelor’s degree in fall 1968. L.A.’s own Chief Parker, in full dress uniform, shook my hand and congratulated me at the commencement ceremony as my own new chief, Ivan Robinson of Downey, handed me my badge.
    By this time, I had also married my first wife, Carolyn, whom I metat a wedding I attended with my aunt and uncle. I was twenty-one when we married; she was twenty-five. It sounds young now, but it seemed ordinary then. I was proud to be married, proud to be a full-fledged adult. But nothing made me prouder than being a police officer. I kept my navy blue uniform with its vivid orange patches pressed and my black shoes polished to a glow (a much easier task now that I’d left the academy and nobody was spitting on them). Even my keys hung flat and precise on my gun belt, with one slipped between the three layers of leather to hold them in place, the others dangling below in easy reach.
Graveyard Shift
    I started out working the graveyard shift—the postmidnight hours that the guys with more pull and experience are eager to avoid. For the first few weeks, an older officer rode along with me so that if anything he deemed me too green to handle came up, he could jump in.
    Finally, my first night working solo as a uniformed patrolman arrived. Christmas