At 10:40 a.m., the state's star witness, Dr. Ljubisa Jovan Dragovic, is called to the stand. Today, Monday, June 12, 2000, is his 50th birthday. The Oakland County medical examiner, he is straight from central casting. Hair cut so short it's nearly shaved bald, thick Eastern European accent that drops the occasional article from the associated noun—as in "victim was brought to office"—loud, even booming voice, walrus mustache, large, natty bowtie, he appears larger than life in a courtroom. He can fill it with his presence.
With a reputation for not suffering fools well, or at all, he can be intimidating for a cross-examiner. He chews up and spits out bad or weak interrogators. He's even tough on good ones. He became the chief antagonist for Dr. Death, Jack Kevorkian, and his high-profile lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger, testifying in several trials that the cause of death in Kevorkian cases was murder and not suicide.
Fieger kept getting Kevorkian off. He lambasted Dragovic as "Dr. Dracula," though in fact Dragovic was one of the few who ever gave as good as he got when it came time for trading quips, or verbal blasts, with Fieger. (The insistence of Oakland County's former prosecutor, Dick Thompson, to keep indicting Kevorkian led to his ouster from office by a young unknown, Dave Gorcyca, whose office brought charges against Fletcher. When Kevorkian was finally convicted, a case based on his infamous "60 Minutes" appearance on CBS where he was shown fiddling with the dials of his killing machinery, Fieger no longer represented him.)
Although Dragovic appears fresh, he feels anything but. He has just spent nine days touring Europe with his wife and another couple. Yesterday, they had suffered through a five-hour delay at the airport before finally taking off and getting in late. He is badly jet-lagged.
The beginning of Dragovic's testimony is pro forma—he is asked to state his
name and spell it for the record. Where is he employed? What are the duties of a medical examiner? Then, to establish his credibility as an expert witness, he is asked about his professional background (10 years in Oakland County; three and a half years with the Wayne County Medical Examiner, when Detroit was the murder capital of the US and there was no better place to work for a fast-track forensic pathologist; the Chief Medical Examiner for the state of Maryland) and his educational background (medical school, University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia; rotating internship and military medical service in Yugoslavia; 10 months general practice; Department of Pathology at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario; board certification by the American Board of Pathology; senior fellowship in Toronto specializing in neuropathology, which involves injuries and diseases of the brain and spinal cord, and related nerves and muscles; Fisher Fellowship for advanced neuropathology and forensic training in Baltimore with that city's Chief Medical Examiner; certification by the American Board of Pathology in the specialty of neuropathology).
And he is asked how many autopsies he has conducted or supervised in his career. "Well, last time it was about two weeks ago in one of the Circuit Courts. Sometimes it happens a couple times a day, sometimes it's once a week— hundreds of times, if not thousands of times."
Townsend moves to have him qualified as an expert witness and Legghio has no objections.
Townsend hands Dragovic People's Exhibit 1, a photo of Leann Fletcher, and asks him if he can identify the picture and if he conducted the autopsy on her body on August 17, 1999.
"Well, I examined the body as it came to our facility, documented any pertinent departures from normal on the body as I saw it on the outside of the body, and then I proceeded to examine the inside of the body and documented the findings within the body cavities, the cranial cavity, the head and chest and belly. In the meantime, photographs were taken as needed."
A diagram made by Dragovic is entered as People's Exhibit 2, and he is asked to explain it. It is part of an autopsy protocol, his written report and related materials explaining his autopsy findings. Dragovic takes the diagram and,
leaning toward the jury so they can follow along as he points with his finger, he says it is a not-to-scale representation of both the left and right sides of Leann's head with numbers to pinpoint the location of her injury. There is, says Dragovic, still pointing, "a wound that is present in the upper part of the right ear and it is four and three-quarters of an inch below the top of the head, five and a half inches to the right of the front midline—that's the measuring line that goes through the front—and this is three-eighths of an inch in diameter, the actual defect. It has concentric marginal scraping."
The large, extended Misener family stares at him impassively, not reacting as he pinpoints her injury and describes the hole caused by the bullet that killed her as a defect.
"What do you mean by that?" asks Townsend.
"This is a particular finding, a physical feature of every gunshot entrance where the projectile, the bullet, coming through the skin punches out a hole and at the same time rubs the sides, the margins of the skin, with its sides and causes the scraping we refer to as marginal abrasion. So I indicated there that there was concentric marginal abrasion and I indicated no soot and underlined that."
"Why did you find that significant, that there was no soot?"
"Soot is gunpowder residue … a very fine carbon dust that is only found in contact and near-contact gunshot wounds. The farther the muzzle of the firearm from the target, that is, the surface of the skin, the less likely there will be any evidence of soot. Soot can only travel so far, maybe a couple of inches at the most, and it is important to see in any assessment of any gunshot wound if there is soot present or there isn't, and also if soot is present within the margins of the wound or around the margins of the wound."
"What does that indicate, if you found nothing within or around it?"
"That indicates that the muzzle of the firearm when discharged, when this person sustained this gunshot wound, was farther away than being within a couple of inches or so."
Townsend is laying a foundation that Leann did not shoot herself. The farther the gun is away from the head when it fires, the less chance there is that the firing was self-inflicted. That segues into the next line of questioning, about
something called gunpowder stippling. When a gun discharges, not all the powder is burned. Some is discharged from the barrel of the gun as tiny projectiles. They form multiple dots on the skin of a victim, a sort of deadly tattoo, and how far the stippling pattern has spread on the skin indicates how far away the gun was when it was fired.
A very tight stippling pattern means the gun was near the skin. A wider pattern means it was farther back. A wide enough pattern is proof a victim couldn't have shot herself. Contact or near-contact range means from two inches in, close range is out to two feet and distant is beyond two feet.
"There were multiple dots in the upper part of the head on the right side, above the right ear, and it extended all the way up about two and a half inches," says Dragovic.
Townsend then enters a photo into evidence. Dragovic had shaved part of her hair away to show the stippling, and the photo is of her face, with a ruler in place to show the width of the tattooing. He leaves the witness chair to show the jury the photo and to point out the stippling on Leann's face.
Townsend, saying he will return to the stippling later, then asks Dragovic about the course the bullet took through Leann's head. There was no exit wound, says Dragovic. "I examined the cranial cavity, that is the head, and removed the brain and established that the bullet went through and across the base of the skull and through the brain and struck the opposite side of the base of the skull, and I recovered the fragmented bullet in the cerebellum, in the lower part of the brain."
Leann's sisters and father listen to his clinical testimony impassively. Later, they will hear worse, that "there was blood in both ears, as a matter of fact. The blood present in the left ear is the result of the blast of the bullet causing transverse fracture, a hinge-type fracture, at the base of the skull and tearing the tympanic membrane of the left middle ear and allowing the blood to gush out from the left ear canal." Her mother, who will testify later in the day, is outside in the hallway. Until she testifies, she must remain there, so as not to be influenced by other testimony.
Townsend then asks if Dragovic looked for anything on Leann's hands or
arms, and the reason for doing so.
"The information that I received at the time was that there was suggestion of a self-inflicted gunshot wound and I looked for some evidence of fine mist that would be the pinpoint blood dots on the hand if the person had shot self. Every time there is an impact of a projectile onto the surface of the skin, there is a blowback type of mist [which] consists of aerosolized blood because of the high speed and kinetic energy that the bullet delivers to the surface of the skin. There will be a blowback of fine mist just like if you spray for a fraction of a second a can of aerosol, and that will travel for some distance. How far? It's quite variable, but for the most part, this will land on the objects that are in front of the target and a gun may be the object that they land on and the hands of the person that is discharging the firearm.
"There was a lot of smudged blood, there was a lot of coarse blood spatter, like droplets of blood of a rather large size. What I was looking for is fine needlepoint dots on the surface of the skin that would reflect this type of phenomenon of mist being generated as a blowback from the wound."
"Did you find any?" "No, sir."
And then Townsend returns to the stippling. "With regard to the stippling pattern, can that be used at times to make a determination of the distance between the muzzle of a gun and the point of entry?"
"You can only give a projection, of how far would the gun of that category likely be away from the head. I'm talking about the muzzle of the gun, not the gun itself.… I believe, based on what I found on this particular gunpowder stippling pattern, that the gun was discharged with the muzzle being approximately 12 to 18 inches away from the head."
Townsend then shows him People's Exhibits 75 through 80, which were test firings from the gun that killed Leann. The tests were conducted weeks after the shooting by Michigan State Police, who fired the gun into a cloth target from a variety of distances to show various stippling patterns. Fletcher's Smith & Wesson was shot at contact range with the target, at six inches away, and at further six-inch increments out to 30 inches.
Exhibit 75 was firing done at contact range. Exhibit 76 was at six inches; the gun produced stippling, but it also left soot.
"Was there any soot at all found on Leann Fletcher?" asks Townsend. "No, sir."
"Seventy-seven?"
"Exhibit 77 reflects the findings where this gun was discharged at 12 inches away from the target and it shows the gunpowder stippling, the dots. It does not show evidence of soot."
"And then People's 78?"
"At the distance of 18 inches, this gun shows sparse gunpowder stippling pattern."
"People's 79?"
"The test firing of the gun at 24 inches' distance, that is two feet, muzzle to the target, created some very sparse minimal gunpowder stippling pattern, just a few dots there."
Based on the stippling pattern of the test firings, what were his conclusions? "That it would be from 12 to 18 inches when the gun was fired."
"Do you believe it to be closer to 12 or closer to 18?"
"Possibly more toward the 18-inch pattern, but I cannot tell with certainty."
Then followed testimony by Dragovic of Leann's body dimensions—again the family sat impassively as their loved one was reduced to "29 years of age, five-foot-three inches in height and 133 pounds; she was medium developed, medium nourished white female"—as Townsend tried to show that a woman of her size couldn't pull the trigger of a gun that far from the entry wound.
"Did you take additional measurements?"
"There were additional things that I did after finding the gunpowder stippling pattern, because you have to establish some physical parameters to ascertain if it was actually feasible for someone to self-inflict. As I was informed prior to the autopsy, the notion was there was self-infliction by the decedent."
"And what was the measurement?"
"The length from top of the shoulder to the mid-knuckle was 23 inches." "Okay. And did you find that significant?"
"I found it significant because that offers some physical limitations. In order for someone to hold a gun in a fashion that could result in self-infliction, one had to have far longer an arm than this. That's as simple as it is."
*
Anticlimactically, Dragovic goes on to testify that Leann was in the very early stages of pregnancy, that oral, anal and vaginal swabs were taken, and as part of his autopsy he had to make one of five possible determinations regarding manner of death—natural, homicide, suicide, accidental or undetermined.
"Do you have an expert opinion, Doctor, with regard to the manner of death of Leann Fletcher?"
"Yes, sir."
"Can you tell the jury what your opinion is?"
"In my opinion, this decedent, Leann Dawn Fletcher, died as a result of homicide. The manner of death was homicide."
At 11:50, Dragovic steps down from the witness stand and the court breaks early for lunch. Legghio will have the luxury of an hour and a half to prepare his cross-examination.