At 6:45 in the morning of November 3, 1984, a man walked into a police station on the
North side of Milwaukee to report that he’d found what appeared to be a body, lying in
a lot near his home.
That’s where police discovered 63-year-old Ione Cychosz, wearing only “a pair of white
socks and a left shoe.”
Her blue shirt and bra were pulled up behind her head, which was bloody and swollen.
She’d been beaten to death
and possibly raped.
Neighbors described the victim as “a nice woman.”
She was known for collecting aluminum cans and playing bingo at a Ukrainian church on
Friday nights.
That’s what she’d been doing the night she was killed.
"And she was let off after midnight by friends who normally dropped her off after the bingo
games.
They observed her walk in front of her home and those are the last people who saw her
alive."
One of the real challenging things about this case among many was you had no eyewitnesses.
You of course had no confession.
You had no motive.
This was before DNA profiling, before home security cameras were common, there were no
fingerprints on the knife they found nearby.
But the killer did leave one clue:
He bit her.
“Investigators took 60 photographs of numerous bite marks.”
"The bite marks are being analyzed by a forensic dental specialist.”
Dr. L. Thomas Johnson, a dentist and professor at Marquette University, examined the bite
marks on the victim the day she was found.
And he gave the cops a lead.
He told the detectives look you are looking for a guy with an abnormality in one of
his upper teeth.
So the cops began knocking on doors.
Three days after the murder, the detectives knocked on the door of Robert Lee Stinson,
a quiet 20-year-old whose only criminal record was a fine for shoplifting when he was younger.
He lived with his mother and siblings in a house right by the crime scene.
Stinson told the police that on the night of the murder, he came home from a party around
11:30, went to bed, and slept until morning.
But what caught the attention of the police was that Stinson had “an upper right front
tooth missing.”
That missing tooth made one of the detectives believe they "got the guy".
His partner later told the Milwaukee Sentinel that they went back inside and told Stinson
some jokes to get him laughing, to confirm that there were those teeth.
So the state had Stinson appear at a secret hearing before a judge — called a “John
Doe investigation” in Wisconsin — where they could have Johnson, the dentist, check
his teeth.
The John Doe was the first time that I met Mr. Stinson, but I'm looking at this
kid who is very warm, very affable, very cooperative.
Everything in my gut, my experience, six years in the DAs office in the sensitive Crimes Unit.
No way.
No way did this guy do this.
He thought they would eliminate Stinson as a suspect.
But that's not what happened.
Johnson looked into Stinson’s mouth for 20 seconds, the same amount of time it takes
to read this:
And then Johnson said Stinson’s teeth matched a sketch that he and a police artist had made
— a sketch of what the suspect’s teeth would look like based on the bite marks.
Nobody brought the drawing to the hearing
but Johnson said “it resembles what I see here.”
Stinson’s mouth, he said, “certainly is consistent with what I drew.
It is remarkable.”
And that was enough for the court to order a full dental examination.
But if they’d had the sketch in the room, they would have seen that it said the suspect
would be missing a lateral incisor.
Stinson was missing a central incisor, his right front tooth.
But now the dentist was on the record saying that they matched.
The field of bite-mark analysis is one of the so-called “pattern matching” disciplines
in forensic science.
Fingerprints are the best known example, but the group also includes shoe prints, tire
treads, handwriting, and bullet casings.
We call them “forensic sciences” but they developed independently of what we typically
think of as the “science world”:
the universities and research hospitals, peer-reviewed journals,
grant-funding organizations.
Those institutions of basic research have fed some forensic fields, but many others
lack that foundation.
You go up the street to the University of Wisconsin and you look for the Department
of fingerprints or the Department of shoe impressions.
It's not there.
That’s because these fields mostly developed in response to crime scenes and the obligation
to study whatever bits of information they contained.
The examiners look at the samples closely, and make a subjective assessment of how similar
they are.
You know, it's funny.
when when people watch CSI or think about forensic science they often think that it's
very high tech and glossy and perfect and often automated.
And in the real world the pattern identification sciences do not work like that.
It's not that subjectivity makes it illegitimate or necessarily incorrect.
But we ought to know something about how accurate it is.
We ought to know something about how accurate it is.
For the criminal justice system, this is still a new idea.
So at the time of Stinson’s case, nobody knew how accurate, or inaccurate, bitemark
analysis was.
The man who examined Stinson’s teeth, L.T. Johnson, is a forensic odontologist.
And bite mark evidence is just a part of what they do.
When we have tragedies, plane crashes or other kinds of terrible events sometimes we use
teeth that are found to help identify human remains.
And that's an important tool.
And I believe quite an accurate one.
“Rescue workers were there quickly but they quickly learned there was no-one to rescue.”
The same year he worked on Stinson’s case, Johnson led a team identifying victims of
a plane crash that killed 31 people.
He would go on to help identify 11 decomposing victims found in
serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment.
Forensic odontology had been an established field for decades.
But it was only in the 1970s that they decided to go beyond identifying victims by their
teeth and started identifying suspects by bite marks.
It began with a 1975 case, People versus Marx, in California.
Edgar Marx was accused of murdering his landlady and leaving a bite mark in the cartilage of
her nose.
The bitemark evidence was deemed admissible even though the appeals court conceded that
there was “no established science” behind it.
And it became the germinal case.
Because all of the precedent establishing cases in high courts across the country cited
back to Marx.
Fast forward a few more years.
Ted Bundy goes on trial and there's bite mark evidence in the Ted Bundy case and it made
a movie stars out of a couple of forensic dentists.
And bite mark evidence took off.
This norm of precedent -- of conforming to past decisions -- it exists for a reason.
But it happens to be the opposite of how science works.
Precedent is really important in the judicial system.
we want constancy, predictability, and we have a rule that like cases should be decided
the same way.
Science by contrast is inevitably and unavoidably and always contingent, progressing, growing
changing, shifting as new research tells us new things and corrects past misunderstandings.
The legal system is not really designed to adapt to that.
So a game of judicial telephone convinced the courts that bite mark identification was
an accepted area of science, when in fact, it had never been tested.
There is no science that we have seen to support that.
It's really quite astonishing.
it's the one thing that gets truly agitated because there's just no science to support it.
A month after Johnson collected models and photographs of Stinson’s teeth, he came
back with his final conclusion.
“The teeth of Robert Lee Stinson would be expected to produce bite patterns identical
to those which I examined in this extensive and exhaustive analysis.”
He said the evidence was “overwhelming.”
The sketch Johnson referenced at the prior hearing?
It was never mentioned again.
He was showing me how you take this overlay of the pictures of his teeth and you put it
on the pictures of the bite wounds on Mrs. Cychosz’s body and you kind of see how they
align.
And he did the same thing with the models.
But I wasn’t completely convinced that I could convince a jury based on what Dr. Johnson
did that Mr. Stinson was guilty of an offense like this.
I said we need a second opinion on this case.
Johnson recommend Raymond Rawson, who was known as one of the leaders in the field.
So the detectives flew to Las Vegas to deliver the evidence.
And they reported that Rawson “gave a verbal confirmation of Johnson’s finding.”
But he didn’t spend much time on it.
According to a memo book that one of the detectives kept and later published, Rawson met them
at their hotel room at the Four Queens, “took a look at the x-rays and the molds, and said
that was good enough for him.”
Five days later, Robert Lee Stinson was arrested at his home.
And we decided that been given a brutal horrific crime like this, we now have two witnesses
who are saying it's him.
And matched against that is what, my gut level feeling?
And so we issued the charge.