The next witness called by the defense was Faris Bandak, a Ph.D. specialist in biomechanics, the study of forces and motion on living things. He prepared a flashy video to enhance his testimony.
The video was too stylish by far—the animated model wore black nail polish, and black lipstick on an otherwise blank face. It also had problems in its content. The lift chair so prominent in all the photographs of the stairwell at Cedar Street was not present in the film. Its presence at the scene gave the initial impression to investigators that Kathleen was disabled.
The computer-generated woman was shown leaning forward and holding the railing before she fell backwards—in direct contradiction to the laws of physics. It did not demonstrate any movement that would cause Kathleen to get blood on the soles of her feet. The pratfall seen in the animation would have caused bruising on the buttocks of a real woman. Kathleen had no such marks. And if the impact on the doorjamb was the first, as shown, the blood evidence found there would not have existed.
On cross-examination, Freda Black gave her most effective performance up to this point of the trial. “What experience do you have in scalp lacerations?”
“None.”
“Thyroid cartilage?”
“None.”
“No research that you’ve done personally?”
“Do I have to build a 707 to know how to fly one?” Bandak was cocky now, but in a few minutes, Black would have him stammering like a schoolboy.
“So how many autopsies have you attended before?” she asked.
Bandak gave a rambling answer that included his experience in live surgeries with animals and children.
“Sir, I didn’t ask you about surgeries and I didn’t ask you about animals. How many autopsies have you attended where the ultimate opinion of the pathologist was that an adult person died because of a beating death? Any?”
“None.”
“Not having that experience and not being a forensic pathologist yourself, you come to this courtroom and tell this jury that Dr. Deborah Radisch, who actually performed the autopsy, is just dead wrong about this?”
“Well …”
“That’s what you told them, correct?” Black pushed.
Bandak stammered out his objections to being paraphrased and justified his interpretation of the biomechanical evidence. Black jerked him back to the question at hand: Did he disagree with Dr. Radisch’s testimony that the lacerations were inconsistent with a fall?
Bandak stuttered his way through his responses as Black lobbed one direct response after another at him. He tried to discredit Dr. Radisch’s expertise, but left the impression that he didn’t believe his own testimony.
He was still rambling on when Freda Black interrupted, “Do you remember my question?”
Then Rudolf interrupted her. “Objection. Argumentative.”
“Assuming it is not argumentative,” Judge Hudson said, “overruled.”
“Sir, my question was, would you agree that a person that’s actually there, whether it’s a doctor or pathologist or even someone in your position actually there visualizing a person’s body, looking at their wounds, feeling their wounds, measuring their wounds, looking at all the different things on their body—Would you not agree a person with that vantage point could really have an advantage in making a decision in a case like this?”
“[…] Not on the cause, not in the causation.”
Freda asked Bandak to get up from the stand and use the Kathleen doll and acrylic model of the staircase. He held the doll awkwardly, like a man caught playing Barbie and trying to deny it. She asked, “Can you show us another scenario of what might have happened? Such that she received those injuries in the stairwell?”
Bandak bumbled through a clumsy response. Black then switched to photographs of the crime scene. Bandak held the photos before the jury box as Black fired a rapid series of questions. Bandak did not fare well under the constant volley.
Black’s attack then led to one big question: “How many lacerations do you contend she had to the back of her head?”
After a long pause, Bandak answered, “If you count it, you count it per, per hit she has, uh, uh, four lacerations. If you count it as individual slices, she has more. Individual—if each individual fork is counted, she has more. It’s just a bookkeeping issue.”
“So the number of lacerations she has is a bookkeeping issue?” Outrage screeched like fingernails on a chalkboard on the edge of Black’s voice.
“Objection. Argumentative,” Rudolf shouted.
“I think she’s just asking a question,” Hudson responded. “Overruled.”
“What do you mean by that?” Black asked again.
Bandak gave a disjointed response about the different ways you could count the injuries.
“So the number of lacerations wasn’t important to you?” Black asked.
After another aimless response from Bandak, Black asked, “So, what was the answer to my question, sir?”
Rudolf called out an objection.
“Three—three lacerations,” Bandak answered before Hudson overruled. “By my way of counting.”
After establishing that Bandak had billed $40,000 to Michael Peterson so far, Black let him go.