The Science of Murder

January 2009



Someone killed Melissa Trotter and dumped her body in the Sam Houston 
National Forest. But according to six forensic experts, that someone 
was not Larry Swearingen.

by Michael Hall

Innocent men in prison often have two things in common. They 
stubbornly refuse to plead guilty, even if it means a reduced 
sentence or freedom. And they never quit trying to prove their 
innocence, whether it’s by writing letters to lawyers and 
journalists, filing writs on their own, or just camping out in the 
prison library studying law books or anything else that could help 
their cases. The wrongly convicted never give in, and they never give 
up.

Larry Swearingen, an eight-year resident of Texas’s death row, is 
almost certainly a member of this unhappy group. From the beginning, 
when he was arrested in December 1998 for murdering Melissa Trotter 
in rural Montgomery County, just north of Houston, he has insisted he 
didn’t do it. He never asked for any kind of a plea deal, once 
saying, “I’m not going to plead guilty to something I didn’t do.” He 
took the stand at his trial and testified that he didn’t kill 
Trotter. Ever since, he has worked diligently from his cell at the 
Polunsky Unit to prove his innocence—filing writs to the court 
system, writing letters to journalists, even poring over 
climatological charts to prove his case.

But there are other reasons besides pride and perseverance to believe 
that Swearingen didn’t kill Trotter. Six different physicians and 
scientists—forensic pathologists and entomologists—say there’s almost 
no way Swearingen could have done it. One of those doctors was 
instrumental in convicting Swearingen back in 2000 but has now 
changed her mind after seeing all of the evidence. Dr. Glenn Larkin, 
a retired forensic pathologist in Charlotte, North Carolina, says, 
“As a forensic scientist since 1973, I always kept an objective 
stance when called to testify; however, there comes a point when as a 
human, and as a Christian, there is a mandate to speak in the 
interest of justice. This is a moral issue now; no rational and 
intellectually honest person can look at the evidence and conclude 
Larry Swearingen is guilty of this horrible crime.”

And it is a moral issue with real urgency. Swearingen just got an 
execution date of January 27. His lawyers are frantically trying to 
get a stay of execution as well as DNA testing. If they don’t 
succeed, it is entirely possible, even likely, that the State of 
Texas will execute an innocent man in two and a half weeks.

A Shaky Case

Back in 2000, the prosecutors of Montgomery County used mostly 
circumstantial evidence, some of it remarkably weak, to convict 
Swearingen. Trotter was a nineteen-year-old student at Montgomery 
College in Conroe when she disappeared on December 8, 1998. An 
extensive search was organized, and her body wasn’t discovered until 
January 2 in the Sam Houston National Forest by a couple of hunters—
in an area that had been already searched three times. She had been 
strangled with one leg of a set of panty hose. Around her neck and 
face there was some decomposition from maggots as well as evidence of 
rodent scavenging. She was clothed but her shirt had been bunched up 
around her neck, and though her torso was bare, it showed no evidence 
of having been scavenged by the wild pigs, crows, raccoons, or 
vultures that live in the forest. Her corpse was not bloated, and 
police reported no foul smell. In fact, the hunters had initially 
thought she was a mannequin. The body appeared to have been in its 
final resting place for only a short period of time.

Swearingen, an ex-con who was working as an electrician, had met 
Trotter on December 6 and asked her out on a date. She stood him up 
the next day, but on December 8 they rendezvoused on campus. That 
same day she disappeared, making Swearingen one of the last people to 
see her alive. Three days later, he was arrested for outstanding 
traffic warrants and put in jail, where he remained after becoming a 
suspect in Trotter’s disappearance. When her body was found, 
Swearingen had already been in jail for three weeks.

Though no one saw Trotter leave the campus with Swearingen, the state 
was able to stitch together a tenuous narrative that had Swearingen 
kidnapping her in his truck, taking her to his trailer, raping her, 
killing her, and dumping her in the forest. (In order to get the 
death penalty, prosecutors had to prove murder in tandem with another 
felony, such as kidnapping or rape.) The motive? Prosecutors brought 
forward testimony from construction worker pals of Swearingen’s who 
said he had been furious at being stood up. As for proof about the 
kidnapping, there were witnesses who saw the two together on campus 
earlier that day, and there were fibers found on her jacket that 
“appeared to be” from Swearingen’s jacket and other fibers found on 
her and her clothes that were “similar to” carpet fibers from his 
trailer and truck seat.

Swearingen made two cell phone calls that afternoon, and because the 
calls were routed through a tower near the crime scene, the 
prosecution said that proved he had dumped the body there. As for 
proof of rape, Harris County chief medical examiner Joye Carter, who 
did the autopsy, found no evidence of violent penetration of Trotter, 
but she did say there was some discoloration of the vaginal wall. 
Though this could have come from normal intercourse, the prosecution 
used this as evidence that Swearingen had raped Trotter. When the 
Court of Criminal Appeals later took up Swearingen’s appeal, it 
admitted, even as it affirmed his guilt, “The forensic evidence is 
inconclusive.”

The most damning piece of evidence against Swearingen was another leg 
of panty hose found in the trash outside his trailer four days after 
Trotter’s body was located. Even this was not as clear-cut as it 
should have been. When the fabric was found, the trailer had already 
been fruitlessly searched twice by half a dozen deputies who turned 
up nothing. It was matched to the piece around Trotter’s neck by a 
DPS criminologist. Swearingen’s appellate attorney James Rytting 
wrote in an appeal that the pantyhose matching “was not based on 
scientific or forensic principles. The pantyhose material . . . can 
be easily stretched or distorted, so ‘matching’ may easily be the 
artifact of the examiner’s manipulations, whether intentional or 
unconscious.”

The case wasn’t entirely circumstantial. The state also called 
medical examiner Carter, who testified that she thought Trotter had 
most likely been killed on or about the day she disappeared. She 
based her opinion on the body’s external condition—the decomposition 
and maggot activity around the head and neck. She wasn’t asked—and 
didn’t tell—about the condition of the body’s internal organs, which 
were remarkably intact for a person who had supposedly been dead for 
so long.

The defense had two important things on its side that should have 
given the jury pause. Most critically, blood was found underneath one 
of Trotter’s fingernails and DNA analysis proved it was not 
Swearingen’s. Also, a pubic hair found in a vaginal swab was found 
not to be his. But the defense pathologist didn’t question why 
Trotter’s body was in such good shape, nor did the expert question 
the prosecution’s theory that she had died on or around December 8. 
The jury found Swearingen guilty and gave him the death penalty in 
June 2000.

The Science of Death

It wasn’t until Swearingen was given his first execution date, 
January 24, 2007, that he began to get medical science on his side. 
First came the bug guys, or forensic entomologists, who use insect 
larvae found in corpses to figure out time of death. On January 22, 
appellate attorney Rytting filed a habeas corpus appeal anchored by 
the testimony of an entomologist who said that, based on temperature 
reports that said the average temperature that month was 50 degrees 
with highs in the mid-70’s, the earliest those maggots could have 
begun colonizing her body was December 18—a week after Swearingen was 
put in jail. (Swearingen himself, while studying the temperature 
data, had found a crucial error in the numbers that showed it had 
actually been warmer than the climatologists had initially reported.)

The CCA stayed the execution and called for a hearing to look into 
the matter in the trial court. At the hearing, another entomologist, 
James Arends, testified; he noted that there was no evidence of 
maggot colonization in the anal and vaginal regions, as would be 
expected in a body left in the wild for so long. He also pointed out 
that the body hadn’t been picked on by the thousands of wild pigs, 
crows, and vultures that live and feed in the forest. (Or, as he 
wrote in an affidavit, “It is very common to find near to complete 
skeletonization, and bones scattered over a wide area by scavengers, 
in cases where remains of missing persons are not recovered for 
significant periods of time after being left in locations such as the 
location in this instant case.”) Arends’s conclusion? Trotter’s body 
had been there no longer than a week.

Pathologist Luis Sanchez, the current Harris County medical examiner, 
also testified at the hearing, saying that a body in the forest 25 
days would show more decomposition, color change, bloating, and skin 
slippage. He also explained that the autopsy showed Trotter’s 
internal organs had been in good enough condition to be pulled out 
and sectioned; however, organs begin to break down upon death. The 
pancreas, for example, usually liquefies completely within 24 to 48 
hours. Sanchez’s conclusion: The body hadn’t been in the forest for 
more than 14 days.

Unbelievably, the CCA denied that appeal without even commenting on 
the forensic science. Rytting filed another habeas appeal last year 
that included affidavits from Larkin and Lloyd White, the Deputy 
Tarrant County Medical Examiner. Larkin said, “December 23 is the 
soonest that Trotter’s body could have been left in the woods, which 
is to say, twelve days after Mr. Swearingen was incarcerated.”

White thought the conditions of the organs made it more likely 
Trotter died close to January 2, 1999. He viewed photos of her heart; 
they revealed that “the muscle is still red and relatively fresh 
looking . . . the appearance of the heart is what one would expect to 
find upon an autopsy of a recently deceased individual.” White also 
wrote, “Unfortunately, the conviction in this case rests upon 
misleading forensic pathological testimony.”

He was referring to the words of Joye Carter. She had moved on from 
Harris County, but Rytting tracked her down in Marion City, Indiana, 
where she was the chief forensic pathologist. He got her to reread 
the Trotter autopsy report and other materials—such as the 
temperature reports. Carter realized she had made a mistake, and now 
she submitted her own affidavit, in which she admitted it. By her 
calculations, the body had been in the forest for only 14 days, not 
25. Carter based her new opinion on the condition of Trotter’s bare 
torso as well as her internal organs. Plus, she noted how Trotter had 
weighed 109 pounds at a doctor’s examination on November 23; when 
found, she weighed 105. As Larkin wrote in his affidavit, “even if a 
corpse is not scavenged, a body will lose up to 90 percent of its 
weight in less than 25 days.”

Once again, the upshot of all of this is simple: Trotter was murdered 
while Swearingen was in prison. Rytting added other claims in the 
2008 appeal—that detectives knew Trotter was getting threatening 
phone calls from another man and that there was evidence that Trotter 
and Swearingen had actually been dating. The CCA again asked the 
trial court to hold a hearing to look into these allegations—but only 
the latter ones, not the ones dealing with pathology or entomology. 
Again, the highest court in the state said nothing about the science 
or the doctors and their claims that Trotter was killed long after 
Swearingen had been locked up. “How can that not merit a new trial?” 
asks Rytting. “In order to merit a new trial, we have to show that, 
given the new evidence, no rational juror would have convicted 
Swearingen. There is solid forensic evidence to show this and there 
is nothing to counteract it on the other side except for Carter’s 
testimony, which she has since recanted. The truth is, if they tried 
Swearingen today he would walk. You put the testimony of those 
physicians and scientists in front of a jury, they’re going to acquit.”

Reckoning

The CCA denied those final two claims in December, and Swearingen was 
given his new execution date: January 27. At this point, he doesn’t 
have a lot of options. Rytting will petition the US Court of Appeals 
for the Fifth Circuit to try and get them to allow another federal 
appeal, though the federal standard for bringing in new evidence is 
tough. On January 7, Rytting, with help from the New York–based 
Innocence Project, filed a request for a stay of execution—as well as 
more DNA testing. The attorneys want to use modern-day short tandem 
repeat (STR) testing, unavailable in 2000, to compare the DNA profile 
taken from the blood found under Trotter’s fingernail and put it into 
the federal CODIS database of DNA profiles of 6.3 million convicted 
offenders. They also want to use the new technology of “touch DNA”—it 
can detect DNA left behind in skin cells (it recently exonerated the 
parents of JonBenet Ramsey)—on the panty hose around Trotter’s neck 
and on her clothes, under the theory that the killer left cellular 
evidence behind as he dragged Trotter’s body through the forest.

It would be nice if, at this late date, the CCA showed some respect 
for science and granted the testing. It would also be nice if the 
high court took a step back and showed some respect for all the 
medical science it has ignored in Swearingen’s case. His conviction 
was based, as Dr. White said, on “misleading forensic pathological 
evidence”—as well as flimsy circumstantial evidence. Of course, cases 
are tried on circumstantial evidence all the time (often, that’s all 
law enforcement can find), but when circumstantial evidence is as 
tenuous as this was, and when it butts up against scientific evidence—
when one says one thing and the other says another—you would like to 
think that the highest court in the state would at least give the 
science a look.

The bottom line: Someone killed Melissa Trotter and dumped her body 
in the Sam Houston National Forest. But that someone was not Larry 
Swearingen.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/2009-01-01/webextra6.php#