Behind the Yellow Tape: On the Road With Some of America's Hardest Working Crime Scene Investigators by Jarrett Hallcox, Amy Welch Page B
Authors: Jarrett Hallcox, Amy Welch
Tags: General, True Crime
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dominated the conference table and turned it toward us. “If we’d had an ROV back then, you know, we might have found Schrieffer sooner,” Eric trumpeted, after our conversation with Kerry. Through the windows, we could see the snow just beginning outside, signaling the official start to what would become the blizzard of ’07. Erik Schrieffer was a wannabe biker who went missing not long after he moved into the Hog Pen—a bar-slash-house-slash-biker-garage. At first, this case was nothing unusual. “These guys get drunk and crawl away or do something bad and run off to Mexico, never to be seen again,” Lieutenant Ron Leino, another CSI with the Duluth Police Department, said as we thumbed through the case file. Leino had been one of the lead investigators in the case. And because bikers are not known for loose lips, no one at the police department expected much to come of it.
Several days after Erik Schrieffer went missing in January 2001, with the case fast becoming cold, investigators got a break when two eyewitnesses came forward to talk about the events they had seen at the Hog Pen. The fellow bikers, Herb and Charlie, said that Erik and another biker, Joseph Wehmanen, had gotten into a dispute over something about “living in Arizona.” Nobody knew the specifics of the argument, but it grew more intense, with Wehmanen eventually accusing Schrieffer of being a narc. The two men spilled out into the street in front of the Hog Pen and fought, Wehmanen getting the best of Schrieffer, leaving him hunched over in the alley as Joseph went to his truck. And that’s when the unthinkable happened. Wehmanen floored his truck and ran over Schrieffer, then hit reverse and backed up over him, and then rammed the truck back into drive and ran over him yet again, dragging him more than eighty yards in the process. The two witnesses said that at that point Wehmanen got out of his truck, threw Schrieffer into the back, and sped away. That’s all they knew, and after their one conversation with the police, neither Herb nor Charlie was ever seen or heard from again.
Investigators were sent to examine the supposed scene of the crime, several days and several snows later, hoping to find some evidence of what had transpired. As the team scoured the area, one of the investigators noticed a reddish spot in the snow. Not knowing for sure but assuming it was blood, the team decided to do an excavation of the snowy area, just as they would if exhuming a body from a grave. After excavating down several inches, the investigators found a layer of blood, lots of blood, in a large swath, permeating underneath the snow. In order to collect the bloody snow evidence for analysis, ingenious investigators used foam cups and coffee filters as their forensic collection kits. The bloody snow was scooped up and its contents were put into a coffee filter set on top of a cup, thus filtering out the liquid as it melted and separating the blood from the snow. The blood that collected on the filter was eventually sent to the lab for DNA analysis. After the area was excavated and all of the blood revealed, the investigators then called in the medical examiner, who determined that even without a body, the amount of blood lost was sufficient enough to rule that a homicide had taken place. Erik Schrieffer was no longer thought to be missing; he was now presumed to have been murdered, and Joseph Wehmanen probably knew something about it.
Joseph Wehmanen was arrested on suspicion of murder, and his truck was seized and sent to the lab for analysis. Investigators were initially thrilled to collect the truck for the laboratory investigators, hoping that it might contain blood evidence. Earlier in the week, investigators had been called to a car wash where lots of blood was found being washed down one of the drains. Thinking their suspect might have taken his truck there to clean it up, they rushed to the location, but the blood they found was animal. It was
Several days after Erik Schrieffer went missing in January 2001, with the case fast becoming cold, investigators got a break when two eyewitnesses came forward to talk about the events they had seen at the Hog Pen. The fellow bikers, Herb and Charlie, said that Erik and another biker, Joseph Wehmanen, had gotten into a dispute over something about “living in Arizona.” Nobody knew the specifics of the argument, but it grew more intense, with Wehmanen eventually accusing Schrieffer of being a narc. The two men spilled out into the street in front of the Hog Pen and fought, Wehmanen getting the best of Schrieffer, leaving him hunched over in the alley as Joseph went to his truck. And that’s when the unthinkable happened. Wehmanen floored his truck and ran over Schrieffer, then hit reverse and backed up over him, and then rammed the truck back into drive and ran over him yet again, dragging him more than eighty yards in the process. The two witnesses said that at that point Wehmanen got out of his truck, threw Schrieffer into the back, and sped away. That’s all they knew, and after their one conversation with the police, neither Herb nor Charlie was ever seen or heard from again.
Investigators were sent to examine the supposed scene of the crime, several days and several snows later, hoping to find some evidence of what had transpired. As the team scoured the area, one of the investigators noticed a reddish spot in the snow. Not knowing for sure but assuming it was blood, the team decided to do an excavation of the snowy area, just as they would if exhuming a body from a grave. After excavating down several inches, the investigators found a layer of blood, lots of blood, in a large swath, permeating underneath the snow. In order to collect the bloody snow evidence for analysis, ingenious investigators used foam cups and coffee filters as their forensic collection kits. The bloody snow was scooped up and its contents were put into a coffee filter set on top of a cup, thus filtering out the liquid as it melted and separating the blood from the snow. The blood that collected on the filter was eventually sent to the lab for DNA analysis. After the area was excavated and all of the blood revealed, the investigators then called in the medical examiner, who determined that even without a body, the amount of blood lost was sufficient enough to rule that a homicide had taken place. Erik Schrieffer was no longer thought to be missing; he was now presumed to have been murdered, and Joseph Wehmanen probably knew something about it.
Joseph Wehmanen was arrested on suspicion of murder, and his truck was seized and sent to the lab for analysis. Investigators were initially thrilled to collect the truck for the laboratory investigators, hoping that it might contain blood evidence. Earlier in the week, investigators had been called to a car wash where lots of blood was found being washed down one of the drains. Thinking their suspect might have taken his truck there to clean it up, they rushed to the location, but the blood they found was animal. It was
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