Criminal
Aug. 1, 2002
Bug Doc Supports Prosecution Timeline
SAN DIEGO - A forensic entomologist testifying in the kidnapping and murder trial of David A. Westerfield said Tuesday that the body of 7-year-old Danielle van Dam was exposed to insects two weeks earlier than defense experts estimated.
M. Lee Goff, a professor at Chaminade University in Honolulu, said maggots found in Danielle's body would have been laid as eggs between Feb. 2 and Feb. 9. The date depends on the temperature used to calculate their growth, he said, and varies from estimates by defense experts because of different temperature calculations.
"We have a difference of opinion with regard to including or not including what I think of as maggot-mass temperatures," Goff said of estimated dates previously provided by defense entomologists. "You have a large number of eggs that are there, that are laid at the same time, and that are all going to hatch at about the same time."
The maggots feed more efficiently in a group, he said under questioning by Deputy District Attorney Jeff B. Dusek, and their metabolism creates heat, which, in turn, speeds growth.
But controlled laboratory growth of fly larvae at different temperatures, the method used to determine standard growth rates, already takes into account the mass of laboratory larvae, Goff said. For that reason, to add heat generated by the maggot mass to the growth charted in the laboratory is to consider that heat twice.
Goff's testimony came on a day when San Diego County Superior Court Judge William D. Mudd once again cautioned the 12 jurors and six alternates that he may have to sequester them, although he said he is inclined not to do so.
Defense attorney Steven E. Feldman has asked for sequestration several times. He mentioned that possibility Monday, and asked that Mudd at least warn the jurors about reading about the death of another little girl or watching a television documentary.
On Tuesday, Mudd advised the jurors that publicity about the Orange County kidnapping and killing of 5-year-old Samantha Runnion would be difficult to avoid, but he said that case and the slaying of Danielle had different facts and circumstances. He also said witnesses who testified in Westerfield's trial had been commentators for a recently broadcast documentary about the "body farm," an area in Tennessee where scientists conduct experiments on corpses to learn about decomposition. He advised the jurors not to watch the program.
"You've heard it at first hand," Mudd said.
Those new dates by Goff, a rebuttal witness, for the beginning of insect activity on Danielle's body are critical to the prosecution's case against Westerfield. Two defense experts testified that Danielle's body was first exposed to insect activity no earlier than Feb. 12, and likely later than that.
Westerfield was under constant police surveillance at the time those defense experts said Danielle's body, dumped beneath a clump of oaks beside a rural road, was exposed to insect activity. Feldman argued in his opening statement that science would show Westerfield could not have left the body there.
Danielle's parents discovered early Feb. 2 that the second-grader had vanished from her upstairs bedroom. A massive search for her began immediately. Westerfield, who lived two doors away in the northern San Diego community of Sabre Springs, was the only neighbor not at home.
When Westerfield returned home two days after Danielle vanished, he told police a story of an unplanned trip to the beach in his 35-foot motor home and, when he didn't like the weather there, to the desert in eastern Imperial County. But, he told police, he didn't have any fun there so he headed back to the beach. He claimed that the entire trip was made on steep, winding backcountry roads.
That story contributed to police suspicion of Westerfield. After Feb. 5, police were constantly with him or following him. He was arrested Feb. 22. Danielle's nude, decomposed body was found Feb. 27. Because of the condition of her body, the medical examiner was unable to determine a cause of death or whether she had been sexually assaulted.
Goff said his calculations used temperature data from the Singing Hills Golf Course, about two miles away, and from Brown Field, an airport about 16 miles distant. From that data and known growth standards for blowflies, he derived what he called "accumulated degree hours." By counting those hours backward from the time Danielle's body went into a refrigerated crypt at the morgue and insect activity stopped, he arrived at estimates of the date when the body was first exposed to insects.
Goff said that one defense entomologist, Neal Haskell, was wrong because he included maggot mass heat twice in his calculations, and the second, David Faulkner, reached mistaken results because he used growth standards from 1958 that were based on a temperature of 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
On cross-examination by Feldman, Goff conceded that the new growth standards, published a year ago, had not been subjected to years of testing as had those from 1958.
In other rebuttal testimony, police fiber expert Tanya DuLaney said that she tested an orange vest worn by a search dog, orange shirts worn by search and rescue volunteers, an orange rope and an orange strap used by the volunteers, and a red shirt worn by a police detective. None of the fibers were acrylic, as were orange fibers found on Danielle's body and in Westerfield's property.
Prosecutors used that testimony to reply to still photographs collected by the defense from television footage shot in the first days of the search for Danielle. The apparent purpose of the photographs, which were marked as evidence but not further explained, was to suggest that searchers might have been the source of the ubiquitous orange fibers.
The prosecution rested its rebuttal case Tuesday afternoon. Surrebuttal will begin Thursday. There will be no testimony today.
Claude Walbert
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