During the pretrial hearings, Muret pointed out that much of the research on how blowflies develop has been conducted not on human cadavers but on dead pigs’ or cows’ livers, and that, he argued, makes the findings inapplicable to homicides. Howell’s lawyer did not exactly cave in when faced with the scientific evidence. In other words, Cisneros could have died no later than the morning of August 5 – a day earlier than Howell claimed she had last seen her husband alive.
Since temperature influences the pace at which flies develop, he consulted the temperature records from the nearest weather stations, then calculated that the maggots had come from eggs laid on the body 72 to 96 hours before discovery. He then determined that these maggots were in their third developmental stage, or instar, the last before they would crawl away from the corpse to pupate and mature into adult flies. Haskell identified the larvae as belonging to two common flies: the black blowfly and the secondary screwworm. Johnson asked Has-kell if he could testify about Cisneros’s time of death based on photographs, case reports, and a few vials of maggots – that is, fly larvae – collected from the body.
#Unclothing growing up skipper license#
Now he crisscrosses the continent in a dusty white van with the Indiana license plate MAGGOT, consulting with the police in homicide cases and conducting research of his own. He is, in fact, the world’s only full-time forensic entomologist, though he counts as his colleagues a dozen or so other researchers who pursue forensics as a sideline. Haskell is a forensic entomologist – a scientist trained in gleaning criminal information from insects. Two calls later, she had located Neal Haskell, one of North America’s most unusual private investigators. As soon as Muret walked out the door, Johnson picked up her phone. If they had, he was entitled to know what they’d found. When she was handing over the forensic reports to Muret, he asked if they had looked at the maggots on the corpse. Ironically, it was Howell’s defense attorney, Frank Muret, who led Johnson to the evidence she needed. None of the reports gave her anything to refute Howell’s claim that Cisneros was still alive two days after their public brawl. Yet when Jackie Johnson, a deputy inspector at the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, looked over the forensic evidence, she wasn’t very confident about the case. The police didn’t buy her story and arrested her for the murder of her husband. She hadn’t seen her husband for two days, since the evening of Saturday, August 6, when he left home to join some buddies. Yes, they’d argued Thursday night, she acknowledged, but they’d made up before morning. The previous Thursday night, August 4, witnesses saw the couple storm out of a local bar, with Howell saying, "You son of a bitch, I’m gonna kill you!" When investigators came to Howell’s door, though, she said she’d been wondering where Cisneros was. Suspicion quickly fell on Cisneros’s wife, Linda Howell. Apparently, after being stabbed in the chest and neck, he had collapsed in front of his house, a short drag mark in the lawn suggested that someone then tried to move the 220-pound corpse before hiding it beneath the heap of dresser drawers, suitcases and blankets. On August 8, 1994, police discovered within that junk pile the decaying, maggot-packed body of Cisneros himself. Thanks to the thick swarm of shiny, fat flies and a ripening stench. But people paid attention to the pile by Aureliano Cisneros’s house, In the cow town of Stroud, Oklahoma, no one thinks twice about a junk pile alongside a neighbor’s driveway. Pigs in stockings may help make the bugs respectable. Insects can help solve murders, but their testimony is being attacked in the courts. This article appeared in the April 1999 issue of PCT Magazine.
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