Detectives thwarted a modest California school principal’s attempt to cover up his family’s quintuple murder with an out-of-state flight by scrutinizing the car he rented in Columbus, Ohio.
Vincent Brothers, who this year marked 61 years on death row at San Quentin State Prison, was convicted of five counts of first-degree murder in 2007.
To this day, he denies killing his ex-wife Joanie Harper, his mother-in-law Earnestine Harper, his 4-year-old son Marques, his 2-year-old daughter Lyndsey, and 6-week-old baby Marshall on July 6, 2003. .
Retired FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit Special Agent Mark Safarik broke down everything detectives did to disprove Brothers’ seemingly solid alibi and secure his conviction on Fox’s True Crime Podcast.
A friend of Harper, 39, called police on July 8, 2003, after checking on the woman after she uncharacteristically failed to show up for church two days earlier. There, he found the mother of three “lying in bed, dead,” according to recordings of her 911 call obtained by Oxygen’s previous “Family Massacre” podcast.
Harper, her mother, and the woman’s three children had been shot to death. Additionally, her mother had been stabbed seven times post-mortem. Subsequent autopsies put their deaths at around 1 p.m., two days before they were found.
Vincent Brothers was convicted in 2007 of the 2003 murders of his wife Joanie Harper, his mother and their three children. ZUMAPRESS.com
Harper’s home appeared to have been ransacked, but cash, cards, a television and other valuables left in plain view led detectives to consider the crime scene may have been staged, Safarik said. At that point, they called her office to help.
Detectives soon learned that about four days before the homicides, Brothers had flown from Los Angeles International Airport to Columbus, Ohio, to visit his brother and his family.
“So, initially, Vincent was essentially written off,” Safarik recalls.
A photograph of Joanie Harper and her young son Marshall James is displayed above her coffin at the funeral. fake images
The man’s mother-in-law was a community activist who “[spoke] about gangs and gang activity,” which Safarik said led investigators in another direction for a time.
Earnestine, 70, was “incredibly security conscious,” Safarik said: His home was equipped with a spiked fence, burglar bars on every window and multiple locks on every door.
This raised the question of how the killer broke into the house without alerting its occupants. Harper’s wounds indicated that she was sleeping when she was shot and that she had been the first to die.
A photo of Marques Juwan, 4, Getty Images
After examining the crime scene, Safarik decided it “didn’t look like a crime for profit,” he said.
Post-mortem, the killer had placed pillows and blankets over the bodies of the younger victims, Safarik said; Investigators did not find the youngest child until they had been at the crime scene for three hours, and the pillow covering him was moved. This “depersonalization” of the children told Safarik that his killer was upset about his death, he said.
At that point, investigators turned their attention back to Brothers and found and confiscated the rental car he used while in Ohio.
A photograph of Earnestine Harper is displayed above her coffin at the funeral of her and four members of her family. fake images
According to Safarik, the car had about 5,600 miles on it, roughly the distance from Columbus, Ohio to Bakersfield, California, and an additional trip from Dayton, Ohio, to Elizabeth City, North Carolina, that credit card records indicate it took. Brothers.
“The thing is, this is circumstantial evidence,” Safarik said. “It is good evidence, but it is not conclusive. “It doesn’t prove anything.”
Then the Bakersfield Police Department took an unprecedented step, Safarik said. They took the radiator from Brothers’ rental and sent it to a forensic entomologist at the University of California, Davis.
Lyndsey Michelle Harper, 23 months, Getty Images
Forensic entomology, according to the National Institutes of Health, is the study of insects/arthropods in criminal investigation.
“They asked the entomologist, ‘Can you identify each of the insects on this radiator?’ And that’s exactly what [she] I did,” Safarik recalled.
“[She] He removed every fragment and every bit of error, and she identified it. And what she found was that there were about four or five species of radiator bugs that are only found west of the Rocky Mountains. So there was absolutely no way those bugs could have gotten into the radiator if he only stayed in Columbus, Ohio. So that became very powerful forensic evidence,” she said.
The Rev. Eddie L. Harper delivers the eulogy at the funeral of five members of his family who were found shot to death in their home on July 16, 2003. Getty Images
Prosecutors would say Brothers killed his family to avoid paying alimony in their impending divorce, Safarik said.
“If the children are alive, you have three children who are very young. You are going to pay child support for the next 20 years. And he had a relationship. And essentially Vincent just…wanted to wipe the slate clean,” Safarik said.
Although Brothers cried on the stand, Safarik said, the former FBI behavioral analyst “had the feeling that the person he was crying about was not his family; It is because of himself that they caught him and essentially his life was over.”
“I really don’t believe that someone who could kill their own children in that horrific way could really feel remorse,” he said.
The California Department of Corrections did not respond to a question about the impending execution.
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Source: vtt.edu.vn