Crime Seen

摘要

The small, half-decomposed body came in for autopsy swathed in champagne-colored sheets, the way it had been found in a mound of leaves. Two sheets were wrapped more or less even- ly around the body. A third, the innermost, was bunched around the woman's head, which had been shattered with repeated blows from a blunt object―perhaps a baseball bat. Within this gruesome bundle was a potential clue: a 3-inch-long tuft of red carpet yarn, along with stray orange and pink fibers. Nestled as these strands were within the sheets, investigators surmised they had become entangled as the body was being wrapped at the murder site before it was dumped near a creek in the Alaskan woods. The dead woman was soon identified as Judi Burgin, 34. She had spent much of her adult life as a free spirit, a poet who kept no fixed address, working when she needed to as a deck hand or cook on commercial fishing vessels out of Kodiak or Dutch Harbor. Things had not been going well for Burgin. She had a boyfriend named Carl Brown who kept her supplied with cocaine and heroin, a man she told friends she feared. Just before her disappearance, a little money came her way; Burgin told friends she was going to Hawaii. Then she vanished; her body was found four months later.