Police officers respond to hundreds of calls each month and most are short and forgotten within a week or two. However, Bothell Police Department (BPD) Det. Mike Stone received a call from dispatch on Feb. 12, 2012 he will remember for the rest of his life.
Stone was standing in the department’s parking lot when the call came over the radio – suspected crime scene. Ironically, Stone was staring right at the department’s crime-scene van.
That call came nearly two years to the day that Snohomish County Court Judge Linda Krese read the verdict of guilty to Alan Smith for the murder of his estranged wife Susann Smith. It was two years that changed many lives in Bothell.
A photo of Susann Smith motivated department staff to find the truth, including Stone. It wasn’t the DMV photo plastering the news or court room – someone took it for her for a job application – to show the real Susann Smith.
However, the Smith house was not just a crime scene. There’s an undeniable truth that helps to spur many police to find answers at the scene of a homicide, but it can be difficult to set aside emotion.
“How do I separate the two? When you come to a scene like this, everyone is in professional mode to begin with, so it’s easier for me – third person Mike Stone – can draft off this,” Stone said. “Now is to be professional, later is to try to make it personal with a trusted core group of family, but now, it’s professional.”
There’s a time and a place to vent the emotional impact that any death investigation may bring. Having had so much time invested in the case, when it came time to arrest Alan Smith, Stone handed that off to someone else in the precinct. Not wanting the arrest to seem, in any way, a personal matter for the lead detective who had questioned Smith many times.
The case started like any other: by following procedures and using skills that have been honed through training and on-the job experience – like natural death investigations or petty crimes.
“Each officer here is given training on the basic preservation of a crime scene [and] that was done in the Smith case, as well,” Stone said. “Fortunately we had a prior detective working patrol at that time, so he knew exactly what to do.”
First, officers went through the scene in order to confirm there were no safety risks, then the scene was locked down. Only required personnel and resources were brought in to process the scene. It was imperative to ensure the evidence was usable in court.
Officers were required to obtain a search warrant in order to enter the house, even though they knew that the house belonged to the victim.
There’s even a death investigation checklist that detectives used in order to establish that not only were proper procedures were followed, but also to ensure certain evidences were looked for and found. However, it’s not just detectives going into the scenes, it’s a team effort through the entire department – from patrol to the highest levels.
“The initial officers did a very good job, by the way; we were fortunate that we had a previous detective there at the scene and we also had a very experienced sergeant, Sgt. Crispin, who has a lot of training and experience in blood spatter and crime scene processing,” Stone continued. “So we were very fortunate to have those two. We rely on them for their expertise.”
It was these two responders who took the first photos of the house the first photos that Stone would use when he came on scene as lead detective of the case.
“I didn’t even enter the scene until a search warrant was written and served at the residence some time later,” Stone said. “My initial thoughts were just that, based on what I saw in those photos and what I had been told by my sergeant. There was a lot of blood, a body in the bathtub and some unusual circumstances in there, too.”
The detectives would come to find that Susann had been bludgeoned in the bedroom and then dragged into the bathtub where she would drown.
“My mind starts transitioning into processes, again, and the investigation checklist,” Stone said. “And then obtain the necessary information to move up the chain of command in the event we need more resources.”
“The system isn’t just for me to say ‘we need more resources,’ we have to give a reason and why you need those resources, so you have to be articulate to the boss and to the command staff,” Stone said.
And those outside resources ended up being pivotal. Not only did the Washington State Patrol crime scene van help out in processing, but Stone and fellow detectives had to search out a forensic footprint morphologist to help identify the many prints found at the location.
It was professionalism that enabled the police department to cooperate with outside investigators. From Bothell detectives looking into the electronic data, such as the Garmin’s GPS data or the text messaging, to the WSP’s crime scene processing coordination to finding the morphologist in Canada, Bothell police did everything they could to ensure that the circumstantial evidence they had was strong.
There were only two footprint forensic morphologists in North America. One is a retired FBI agent who, at the time, was out of the country on vacation. The other was a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in Vancouver, BC, who was going on vacation very soon. Time was of the essence.
Since they had Smith in custody for failing to produce his passport, the detectives decided to get what the footprint morphologist needed for the comparison to footprints found in the house where Susann was killed, with a search warrant in hand, of course.
They conducted the required footprint actions in the basement of the BPD, one wall away from where Stone had first received the initial call about the suspected homicide some months before.
However, no matter what kind of evidence they gathered, it seemed that nothing could directly tie Alan Smith to the scene of the crime.
“There was the blood transfer stain on the tub, and then the Tyvek suits that were located in Alan Smith’s car when he gave us consent to search his car,” Stone said. “Let’s go further with this to see if we can either include him or exclude him as a suspect.”
Alan had purchased crocs, Tyvek suits, a mallet, a bicycle found during a search warrant of his financials (of which Smith had not told police) and found ditched later on, and even a gas can on the day the police came to speak with Alan; but none of that was concrete. It’s coincidental, yes, but not concrete.
“They’re not absolute, they’re what we call ‘circumstantial evidence,’ but those were major components,” Stone said. “Those were very interesting pieces. That’s why we have a team, though.”
It was because so many minds were working on the case from different aspects that detectives were able to gather so much evidence prior to Alan’s confession to another person.
“We have the confession, but we didn’t have the hard direct piece that linked him, evidence wise,” Stone said. “To a judge who is not vested – not in a negative way… that’s what her job is – that was always a challenge for me. I always think ‘did I overturn every rock that needed to be overturned’? Is there something out there? Should we have gone to the landfill [to search for the murder weapon]?”
Previous experiences of Stone’s told him it wouldn’t be worth the manpower spent on searching a landfill. However, those kinds of questions kept Stone up at night some nights.
“Professionally, it’s there, but we couldn’t get that piece, and we may never have gotten that piece,” Stone said. “Sometimes that wasn’t good enough for me, that midnight hour, two or three o’clock in the morning, thinking about it, going over it, going over it, going over it…”
“Personally, it was that Alan Smith never confessed to us,” Stone said. “And I understand that.”
However, Alan Smith did confess to one Wendell Morris, without whose confession Alan may never have been convicted.
“That’s why I liked Wendell Morris’s statements, he was trying to help Alan come to that point and thought that he did,” Stone said.
It was that confession that was the key piece of testimony that led the judge to render a verdict of guilty. The judge believed that Morris was a vetted and honest witness and, as such, saw his testimony as truth: that Alan Smith, in a moment of weakness, had confessed.
“In the end, all of this evidence has to be considered in light of Mr. Smith’s actions with Wendell Morris,” the judge said at the verdict hearing. “Therefore the court finds Alan Smith guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of committing the crime of first degree murder while armed with a deadly weapon, and that the murder of Susann Smith was a crime of domestic violence and that she was a family or household member.”
“I know that Alan, as much as he’s trying to block it out, and I can only imagine, to come to that realization of what he had done,” Stone said. “I still believe in mankind and that most of us want to do the right thing, and that also we can be misguided, and make critical mistakes, the worst.”
While the confession was key, a verdict may not have been possible without the bigger team effort of the Bothell Police Department to gain the evidence to support the confession to Morris.
“I look at that photo every once in a while, and think ‘Have I done enough to help her, help the family’?” said Stone as he looked at the picture.
The verdict of guilty would prove that the nights of sleepless thinking on the parts of the BPD detectives was well worthwhile. The efforts they took the gather all the evidence they could to include or exclude suspects, was worthwhile.
Whether or not this helps Susann’s family find peace, is another matter, however it will ensure that Alan Smith thinks of what he’s done for years to come – from behind bars. For how long, is an unknown until the sentencing hearing on Feb. 23.
