One Autopsy, Two Stories
The bodies of Pam Phillips and Ed Dansereau were burned in the car fire off of Rosetown road. X-ray evidence as well as recovered bullets in the skulls of both victims and the thoracic region of Ed Dansereau indicated that both had been killed by shots from a 22 caliber weapon. Calvin Phillips’ body was intact, and an autopsy was performed.
Ballistic evidence indicated that Calvin had been shot by a 45 caliber weapon and by a specially designed bullet called a RIP bullet, as in rest in peace. The reason this bullet had that name was that it was designed to kill. The bullet consisted of a base and between 6 or 8 trocars. A trocar, referred to in earlier testimony as petals, were fragments of the bullet designed to separate upon impact and take different paths into the body, striking internal organs and causing internal bleeding.
Police raided Kit’s house on November 20, 2015, two days after the murders. They collected hundreds of rounds of ammunition. They did not recover a single RIP round. The shell casing that was recovered five months later was not the right type of casing for the RIP bullet.
Calvin Phillips had five gunshot wounds. The bases of three bullets were found. There was no report of the number of trocars found. Twelve trocars were shown in an image to give jurors an idea of what the trocars looked like. Three bullet bases were recovered. The two bullet bases from perforated wounds, meaning the bullets exited the body, were not recovered, suggesting that perhaps Calvin had been shot outside.
Interestingly, the autopsy report showed that Calvin had three entrance wounds from trocars. Doug Moore tried to get clarification on this in his cross-examination, but he got an unclear answer, and he didn’t ask for clarification. But the fact that the trocars, which are designed to separate upon impact, were entrance wounds had to have meant that the bullet struck something else before it hit Calvin, such as a door frame, window, or mirror.
Calvin also suffered blunt force trauma to his face and upper and lower extremities. The prosecution would insinuate, but not say directly, that whoever killed Calvin had done so in a fit of rage. Thus the facial trauma. One other thing about the facial trauma, it occurred antemortem, meaning before death. That also supports a beating, perhaps from the but of a gun as Alex Garcia suggested.
But there is another explanation for what happened to Calvin Phillips. Rather than a beating, the evidence points to Calvin’s injuries occurring as a result of him being thrown down the cellar stairs. A couple of things point to this as the most likely scenario. First, Calvin’s blood was found on the stairs. There were also two items recovered in the cellar after the body was removed: a tooth and a trocar. Additionally, some of the injuries to Calvin were perimortem, having occurred near death.
Why is this important? A beating requires someone to have enough strength to overpower Calvin, even if it was the but of a gun. Pushing an incapacitated person down a flight of stairs requires only enough strength to drag the person to the foot of the stairs. That’s the argument that the defense should have made but didn’t.
A likely scenario is that Calvin was first shot somewhere outside. It was raining at the time. Blood evidence would have been washed away. Calvin was wearing a rain poncho with the hoodie cinched tight around his head. One thing that was never introduced at trial by the prosecution or the defense was the trajectory of one or more of the bullets. The shots to the neck and right clavicle had exit wounds that were on a downward trajectory, which could have occurred if Calvin had been shot once as he approached the vehicle and then two more times as he fell to the ground. The evidence of the rain poncho and the three trocars that entered his chest, however, support that at least one shot struck something such as a door frame, window, or mirror. Calvin was still alive as he was rolled onto the blue tarp and dragged to the back porch and tossed down the steep cellar stairs. All of the blunt force trauma was caused by the fall down the stairs. As he lay there clinging to life, one or more fatal shots were fired from the top of the stairs.
The above scenario of the first shots being fired outside would account for the missing bullet bases and trocars, but it does not account for the blood-soaked t-shirts and towels found underneath the body. Someone used the shirts and towels to clean up the blood. So where is that scene? Pam was most likely killed in the kitchen where she was talking to Marlene Larock. Bluestar showed the presence of blood in the kitchen. One of the shirts used to clean up the scene had Pam’s DNA. The rest had Calvin’s DNA.
In the series of questions asked in the video below, the roles are reversed. Doug Moore describes a story involving a fight and Alex Garcia tells a different story, one that does not involve a fight.