True Detective Stories

By Wyatt Earp | October 1, 2009

There is really no preamble to this story, mostly because it is completely unnecessary. A friendly warning, however; you may want to have the duct tape handy.

A police officer comes into the division and states he has a domestic assault arrest. The officer hands me the report, and naturally, I read it over. After I am finished, the officer explains the situation thusly:

“Okay, here’s what happened. We get a call for a stabbing on XXXXXXX Street and when we arrived, there was blood everywhere. It was on the floor, the walls, and the bed. The witness told us that the woman inside stabbed the victim, so we arrested her and brought her in. There are officers holding the house as a crime scene.”

Sounds easy enough, right? Yeah, until I get (as Paul harvey would put it) “the rest of the story.” I asked the officer if the victim was brought up or if he was still at the hospital. His response?

“Um, neither. The victim was never found. When we got there he was gone, but he later called our district and said that he wasn’t stabbed. He said he just cut his arm pretty badly on a broken mirror. He also told us that he was not going to come in because he is a parole violator.”

Swell. Well, at least we had a witness to the alleged stabbing, right? Eh, not so much . . .

“Well, we didn’t bring in the witness, but she said she overheard the offender saying that she stabbed the victim. I wrote that on the report.”

It was about this time when the blood started to run out of my eyes, and I calmly, but angrily asked a few important questions.

“Wait a minute. You arrested a woman on second-party information, without a victim and without a witness? And the only reason she was arrested was because she had blood on her clothes?? This after you just told me that the house was covered in blood. Did it ever occur to you that maybe the blood was on her clothes because she was in the house at the time of the incident?”

The officer replied, “Well no, because the witness said that she overheard her saying she stabbed the victim.”

Shaking my head, I asked, “Did this alleged witness say that she saw the woman stab the victim?”

Pausing, the officer replied, “Um . . . no.”

“So,” I said, “We have no witnesses to this alleged stabbing, the victim said that he cut himself on a broken mirror, and you geniuses locked the doer up because she had blood on her clothes? Do you guys want to go to federal court, or what?”

Before this knucklehead could answer, I changed the subject.

“You said the house was being held as a scene. No one in or out, right?”

The response I received elicited more blod from the eyes, and I was about due for a transfusion.

“The officer on the scene said there were four people in the house, so she just let them stay in there.”

Are you frakkin’ kidding me? I wanted to blow up – again – at this disgraceful excuse of a police officer, but self-control got the better of me. Instead, I just gave him this little info nugget:

“Ya know, it sort of defeats the purpose of holding a crime scene when you have other people walking around freely. How do we know they aren’t destroying evidence? How do we know they aren’t arming up for a happy little Thursday shoot out with the po-po?”

I was greeted with a blank stare for a second, until the officer made his final, fatal mistake:

“Well, the sergeant told us to lock the woman up, so . . . “

I swear to God I don’t get paid nearly enough for this nonsense.

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