Whisper
#byefelicia
Oswaldo Martinez
A Teen Is Raped and Killed, And a Suspect Is Charged. But the Legal Case Has Both Sides at a Loss for Words.
August 2, 2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/02/AR2005080200023.html[...]
girl, raped and strangled, had been dead for nearly 48 hours when two police officers and a dog handler burst into Y-B's tavern, led by a drooling bloodhound named Patton, the big dog sniffing
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From the hound's pawing and howling, it was clear that the man they were looking for had recently spent time in the bar, a blue-collar watering hole done up in a NASCAR motif. The tavern,
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is a short walk from the trailer park entrance where 16-year-old Brittany Binger, estranged from her broken family and struggling to build a life, had been attacked and killed.
In the dim light
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as a dozen or so late-afternoon regulars looked on, the dog circled the barroom, his nose dipping and darting at the carpet, the booths, the pool tables, the jukebox. The suspect's scent was everywhere.
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officers, Bill Gibbs and Lesa Branch, gave the startled patrons no explanation -- they just asked them to hold still while Patton did his work -- but the folks in the bar knew what the search was about.
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James City County, 160 miles south of Washington on the Virginia Peninsula, homicides don't happen often -- there are two a year, on average -- and whodunits are rarer still. In the hours since a newspaper carrier had discovered Binger's body on a roadside patch of grass, the killing had been the buzz of the tavern, a topic of nonstop beery speculation that would persist as the case grew stranger.
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search would go on for weeks -- the biggest investigation in years for the county's 73-member police force. Detectives finally made an arrest, and the chief prosecutor here said he hopes to seek the death penalty. But he knows he may not get the chance.
There may not be a trial for years. In fact, there may not be a trial at all: It's possible that the alleged killer, who remains something of a mystery even now, after five months in custody, will sit confined in legal limbo indefinitely.
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it turned out, the scent Patton chased into the tavern that January day had come from no ordinary suspect.
Following a Hound's Nose
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as she clung to the dog's leash, Margie Spencer couldn't tell whether the suspect had been in the bar before the killing or after it. But she knew he wasn't there at the moment.
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all people, the man they were looking for shed a microscopic trail of dead skin cells with a unique odor that Patton could follow. The dog had picked up the scent at the trailer park entrance and tracked it a few hundred yards to Y-B's. If the suspect were in the bar, Patton would have homed in and then turned to Spencer, his owner, for a treat.
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the hound was hitting on instead were "scent pools" in places in the barroom where the suspect had lingered. And one of the strongest of these was on the yellow plastic booth nearest the restrooms, between a shelf of dart trophies and a life-size cardboard cutout of Dale Earnhardt Jr.
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Tuesday, Jan. 4. Binger had been killed Sunday night, her body found on Monday. As Gibbs watched the dog sniff and paw at the booth, he recalled what Y-B's bartender, Tim Parks, had said the day before, when police were canvassing in the tavern.
Gibbs had asked Parks if he'd noticed anyone unusual in the bar Sunday evening.
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replied Parks, just "the Mexican guy."
"The Mexican guy," odd but seemingly harmless, had been coming in regularly, sitting alone, sipping Budweiser and staring silently. Parks knew nothing about him, not even his name. But he remembered seeing him Sunday night, drinking quietly as usual -- in the booth nearest the restrooms.
"Tim referred to him as just this Mexican guy who kept to himself all the time,"
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A guy who didn't talk to anyone."
A Trail of Mystery
"The Mexican guy" isn't Mexican; he's a Salvadoran immigrant, Oswaldo Martinez, and he had just turned 33 at the time of the killing.
A day laborer then, 5-foot-4 and 130 pounds, with a thin mustache and black hair pulled into a short ponytail, he had been in the country illegally for about a year. And for weeks, before and after the Jan. 2 killing, he was a fixture
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"He was a lonely person, I think," said Tom Cail, 60, drinking beer one recent night with a half-dozen other denizens of the bar.
Y-B's draws a working-class crowd, many of its regulars coming from trailer parks nearby. They show up on their lunch hours and after quitting time -- women with sore hands and tired feet, men in NASCAR ball caps and old jeans, their fingernails rimmed with factory grime. They drink Bud in bottles for $2.15, drafts for $1.25, and lounge or shoot pool
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Cail and his friends said that Martinez started showing up in November. And because he had nothing to say to people, most folks stopped wondering what his story was and just accepted him as part of the scenery.
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Adrift in a foreign culture, he seemed socially clueless. Women in the bar said he sometimes propositioned them by waving to get their attention, pointing to himself, then pursing his lips and making kissing sounds. They laughed him off. Mostly, he sat quietly, and on the few occasions when people tried to talk with him
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When he wanted a beer, he'd show waitress Carol Howard his hands, one above the other -- close together for a draft, farther apart for a bottle. If he flashed six fingers, she'd bring him a half-dozen fried dumplings. If he wanted a burger, he'd cup his hands as if he were about to bite into one.
He never acted drunk and, except for his occasional leering at women, he never got out of line in the bar
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"For a long time, he'd just sit over there and stare," said Patricia Pratt, 37. "I got real mad at him one time for staring at me."
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December night, Pratt decided to sit down with him.
"I felt sorry for him," she said.
Although his staring had angered her at first, her attitude had softened. He had become a familiar face in Y-B's over the weeks, and a few of the regulars eventually had caught on to his problem. Pratt knew why he behaved as he did.
"I found out he was deaf."
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didnt talk because he didn't know how. He could emit some intelligible sounds, low and dense -- "Mama" and "Mario" -- but he'd never heard words strung together.
Sitting in the bar or walking the streets, he looked out at the world from a peculiar kind of solitary confinement. Even in crowds, he was isolated. He didn't know sign language and couldn't read lips -- and he was illiterate. Enveloped in silence since birth, never able to share his thoughts, to absorb or question ideas, he lived each day inside himself, a loner, learning what he could by watching other people.
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didn't take long for Pratt to grasp the extent of his disability. He could print his name in a child's scrawl. But except for crude drawings and simple hand gestures, he couldn't communicate.
"I was trying to teach him a little sign language," said Pratt, who once considered training to be an interpreter for the deaf and had read a book on the subject. "I don't know nothing but the basics: 'good boy,' 'good girl,' 'thank you,' 'you're welcome.' . . ." With Martinez, she realized the difficulty of conveying even the simplest abstract word concepts to a man as removed from language as he was.
"I didn't teach him much,
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Brittany Binger