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of describing even the most disgusting things, like the stages of decomposition. I loved his engaging way of looking at the jury when explaining things. The first hour with Dr. Vass was spent on the background of his work. His presented his credentials without a hitch. The physical evidence that followed was the kind of presentation that tends to be dry and boring, but Dr. Vass, like an eager intellectual, would light up and say to the jury, “Now this is the cool part.” If he had lingering nerves about testifying, he didn’t show them.

Dr. Vass’s testimony was significant because it was scientific confirmation that what had been smelled by humans and dogs was the odor of decomposition. I wanted to demonstrate to the jury that we had incorporated all that science had to offer as we tried to understand what that smell had been. If they believed Dr. Vass’s findings, they added to the overall quantum of evidence that proved there was a dead body in the car. If they found it too “cutting edge” for their liking, then they were free to ignore it and rely on all of the other witnesses and evidence proving that fact.

Confident as I was in Dr. Vass’s actual testimony, when dealing with more than one hundred pieces of evidence, mistakes are bound to happen.While Vass was on the stand, I made mine. I had five metal cans, each containing a small piece of the stained carpet. I happened to hand Dr. Vass the wrong one. After we moved the can into evidence and after his testimony was done, I realized I had shown him the wrong can. The one I had shown him was the one that had been sent to the FBI, not the one he had worked on. To my embarrassment, I had to put him on the stand again to introduce the correct can. Of all the witnesses to make a mistake with, why did have to be Vass? We put the correct can into evidence and moved forward.

Dr. Vass was a foremost expert on odor mortis, the smell of death. He had asked the crime scene investigators at the Orange County Sheriff’s Office to collect a carpet sample from the trunk of the Pontiac to test at his lab. There, he used a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer to analyze the samples and try to detect compounds consistent with human decomposition. He was successful. In the sample, he found forty-one such compounds, including butyric acid, one of the first compounds released by the body after death.

Dr. Vass described to the jurors how he jumped back when he first opened the can with the carpet sample, so strong was the odor. Before trial, Linda, Frank, and I had considered the possibility of giving one of the cans containing the odor to the jury to open for themselves. To make sure we didn’t have an OJ Simpson moment, I had opened two of the cans in the company of Mike Vincent of the Sheriff’s Office to confirm that the odor was still detectable. We agreed that the odor was both evident and recognizable. However, during the prosecution’s presentation of Dr. Vass and his odor findings, we decided having the jury smell for themselves might create potential legal problems, and we didn’t want to risk an appeal that challenged the can of odor.

Later on in the trial, though, when the defense was presenting its case, I actually revisited the idea. During cross-examination of a defense witness, I was showing the jurors the pieces of garbage that had been in the trunk before being retrieved from the Dumpster. I saw a juror smelling one of the garbage pieces that had been handed to her. Because the defense was claiming the odor in the trunk was from the garbage, I thought this might be my opening to say “in that case, smell the can and compare that with the garbage.”

The idea of having the jury smell the evidence in this trial had originally come from Professor Andy Raum of the University of Florida, Levin College of Law, who was assisting me in the forensics aspects of the case. He mentioned that juries had been allowed to use their sense of smell in the past. These were mostly moonshine cases that had taken place back in the twenties and thirties, where the jurors were allowed to sniff liquids