It was true, killers frenzied enough to cause this kind of mess were often careless enough to cut themselves, leaving their own blood evidence at crime scenes. But puzzles were also solved by analyzing the manner in which the blood had splashed. The splatter patterns told a story.
In addition to the mess in the living room, the only obvious blood were the droplets that led down the hall and across the kitchen. It appeared the killer had been dripping blood as he or she made an immediate exit from the house.
The CSI personnel were used to searching carpets for bloodstains, but that was going to be harder than usual in this case because of the crimson rug.
Each speck of blood had to be identified by location and tested for type. If a second type of blood was found, there was a chance it could be matched later with an accused killer’s. Investigators checked to see if there was evidence of ejaculation elsewhere, first in the living room, and then in the rest of the house. They looked carefully for specks of blood elsewhere in the house. A quick scan of the house told them that most of the blood was in the living room, although there were several drops on the flowered linoleum floor of the kitchen, which turned out to belong to the victim.
Those scientists of the county sheriff’s office paid particular attention to locations near the house’s several sources of running water—bathroom sink and tub, both upstairs and downstairs, kitchen sink, and the outlet for the garden hose at the back of the house. Blood in these areas would indicate that the killer or killers had made an attempt to wash themselves up before fleeing. At this early stage, investigators knew that the husband had called the crime in, and that he claimed the killer or killers had fled before he could get down the stairs to see who they were.
If blood had been found on or near the house’s drains and faucets, it would have been an indication that more time had passed between the crime and the phone call than had been indicated by the husband’s statements.
Of course, from a police mind-set, just the fact that the victim’s husband had reported the crime was suspicious. Add to that the fact that he was offering a seemingly unlikely scenario—attempted burglary, or was it a breaking-and-entering boyfriend? Whatever, it turned—just like that—into savage homicide, on an ultraquiet suburban street.
Deputies doubted right off that Tabatha’s killer was a stranger. Whoever did that to her cared. Maybe it was love, maybe hate, maybe a combo—but he or she cared. There were real feelings involved.
It was a hot-blooded crime. For experienced law enforcement, these things raised the red flag.
After three hours in his driveway, in his shorts, retching every now and again, Kevin Bryant was put into a sheriff’s car and taken to the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office headquarters in Downtown Rochester. There, his interrogation continued.
Back at Pennicott Circle, the fingerprint experts came in and did their thing, dusting all of the surfaces. Those who lived in the house, including the victim, would need to be fingerprinted so that those prints could be matched against those found by the investigators. They were interested in prints that didn’t match the family members. No matter how sure the investigators might have felt at that early hour that the victim’s husband had at least something to do with the death of his young and pretty wife, they knew that fingerprints were not going to help their case. Kevin Bryant’s fingerprints could have been found on every surface of every room in the entire house and it would have been evidence of nothing. He lived there. Fingerprints could help exonerate Kevin; they couldn’t convict him.
Of course, any blood found near the drains would have been evidence that Kevin’s scenario wasn’t true, but it might not have been evidence that he was the killer. It might have been simply a case of cowardice.
Kevin Bryant was a small man—indeed, one of the smaller men that the members of law enforcement at the scene had seen in some time. He was the sort of man who would have had a lifelong vulnerability to physical threats from men and verbal barbs from women—the sort of man who would compensate, try to achieve power in other ways. Because of his size, it was easy to imagine him as less than courageous in moments of danger—such as when there was an intruder in the house with a gun. Perhaps he had waited until the killer or killers had left the house before he went downstairs, waiting upstairs even as the killers cleaned up. And perhaps now Kevin was afraid to admit to that because he didn’t want to expose his cowardice, a weakness theoretically displayed as the life of his wife and the mother of his children hung in the balance.
If the husband had killed his wife, apparently with both a gun and a knife, he would have gotten bloody. There was no indication that Kevin had blood on him at the time sheriff’s deputies first responded to his 911 call.
If Kevin Bryant had done it, he’d had some major cleaning up to do. The search went on, in and around the house, for a pile or bag of bloody clothes that someone might have changed out of and dumped. Except for the mess in the living room—the victim’s blood splattered outward from the point of attack—and the spot of blood on the kitchen floor, no blood was found in the house—not even near cleanup spots, the various sources of running water.
The only thing suspicious the crime scene investigators found was in a garbage can outside, there was a pair of latex surgical gloves, the kind that come out of a box—perfect for a murderer to wear if he or she didn’t want to leave fingerprints. They found DNA evidence in the form of skin cells on those gloves.
Law enforcement gave the house the once-over and there was nothing immediately recognizable at the crime scene that would throw doubt onto Kevin’s story—nothing except for the fact that it didn’t quite make sense.
PART II
CHAPTER 5
Baby Girls
The story starts a generation before when the victim’s mother, waitress Virginia “Ginny” Hentges, got together with the victim’s dad, college student Carroll Leroy Bassett—and they were known to everyone as Ginny and Leroy.
Ginny grew up on a farm in Elk River, Minnesota, until she was thirteen. She was the sixth of eight kids. They were, oldest to youngest, Sharon, Roy, Jerry, Sue, Chuck, Ginny, Russ, and Denise. Her dad worked his whole life for the same company in industrial hard-facing.
“They built a new plant down in Iowa when I was thirteen, and that’s when we moved,” Ginny remembered years later.
Being a rather typical teenager, academics were not at the top of Ginny’s priority list: “I went to the first semester of tenth grade, when I quit. I was young and stupid and bored out of my mind, so I didn’t finish school then.”
Instead, Ginny took a job waiting tables at a restaurant when she was fifteen. “I was a truckin’ waitress,” Ginny said. “I worked at the same place as my sister Sue. She was living in Lamoni, Iowa, at the time and I was living there.”
She met Leroy Bassett because her sister Sue married his roommate in college, Graceland University. The school was affiliated with the Community of Christ (C of C) Church. That was Sue’s first marriage. Sue didn’t go to Graceland, but her first husband did. Ginny met Leroy in 1974 and they got married in 1975.
Leroy was from the Southern Tier Region of New York State, south of Lake Ontario and north of the Pennsylvania border. He was the son of Essie and Carol Bassett, of Greenwood, New York, who were likewise affiliated with the Community of Christ Church. Carol had the same name as his son, but they spelled it differently. Essie and Carol had had five children—four girls and Leroy, their only son.
Ginny and Leroy had their first baby on March 20, 1975. The baby girl, whom they named Samantha, nicknamed Sammy, was born in Leon, Iowa, the county seat of Decatur County, which borders Missouri. It is about