Maybe Darlie Didn't Do It

Five years after she was convicted of murdering two of her sons, Darlene Routier sits on death row in Gatesville, still maintaining her innocence. This month, as her lawyers prepare to head into court again, new information about her raises the possibility, however slim, that she's been telling the truth all along.

by Skip Hollandsworth

July 2002

(Page 3 of 4)

To evaluate the veracity of Darlie's story, a forensics expert tried to replicate the intruder's series of moves, dropping a bloody knife from waist height onto the utility room floor while making his way toward the garage door. The blood spattered across the floor in a pattern that looked entirely different from the little pools found in the utility room the night of the murders. When a chemical called Luminol was sprayed around the kitchen to reveal traces of blood not visible to the naked eye, bloodstains were discovered in the sink, the kind that would be consistent with someone washing blood off his or her hands. There was also an indication that some of Darlie's blood around the sink had been wiped up with a towel. In her various statements to the police, she had never mentioned standing by the sink. Was it possible that she had cut her own throat at the sink and then tried to wipe up the blood?

When another blood expert found tiny drops of the boys' blood on the back of the Victoria's Secret nightshirt that Darlie had worn that evening, he remarked that a likely way the blood could have gotten there was when it dripped off the butcher knife and onto Darlie's back as she was raising her arm above her while stabbing the boys.

Then Charles Linch, Dallas County's premier trace-evidence analyst, dropped a bombshell: He said that he had found a bread knife in the kitchen that contained a nearly invisible fiber, sixty microns long, made of fiberglass coated with rubber. Under a microscope, Linch had determined that the fiber found on the bread knife looked exactly like the fiberglass in the window screen cut by the intruder. Was this the knife used to cut the screen? If so, only someone already inside the house could have cut it. And because Darin's story—that he had run downstairs and given CPR to Devon until an officer arrived—was consistent with the physical evidence, the police were left with a single suspect: Darlie.

The Case Against

THERE WAS JUST ONE PROBLEM. On the night of the murders, one of Darin's socks was found down a back alley some 75 yards away from the house. It contained two small spots of blood from Damon and Devon but none of Darlie's blood. What was the sock doing there? Police initially speculated that Darlie had carried the sock three houses away to make it look as if the intruder had dropped it during his escape. But they could find none of Darlie's blood—or anyone else's blood—outside the house. There was no blood on the back patio or the back fence or in the back alley. If Darlie had planted the sock, how did she avoid leaving a trail of her own? Once her throat was cut, she lost significant amounts of blood.

The detectives and the prosecutors came up with an interesting theory: Darlie stabbed her boys to death, ran the sock down the alley—perhaps to give the impression that the intruder had used it to keep his prints off the knife—then cut herself at the kitchen sink. Either before she stabbed the boys or before she stabbed herself, she cut the window screen with the bread knife. Once all that was done, she called for Darin and then called 911.

But if Darlie wanted the cops to find the sock, wouldn't she have thrown it closer to the house, perhaps at the end of the driveway, instead of leaving it so far away, next to a garbage can where the police might have overlooked it? And wouldn't she have doused that sock in blood so the police would know what they had found? And even then, would Darlie have had time to do everything before the police arrived? Records indicate that Darlie was on the phone with the 911 dispatcher for five minutes and 44 seconds. Just as that call was ending, a police officer came inside the house, and he was there for at least a minute before the paramedics arrived. The paramedics found Damon still breathing; he died shortly thereafter. Why is that important? According to a doctor who studied the severity and location of Damon's stab wounds, the boy could not have lived longer than nine minutes once he was first stabbed and probably lived no more than six minutes. Let's assume he lived nine minutes. If you subtract from that nine minutes her five-minute-and-44-second phone call to 911, then subtract the additional minute and 10 seconds that she was in the presence of a police officer, Darlie had only two minutes and 6 seconds to stab her sons, head for the garage, step through the slit in the window screen, jump a back fence or go through a back gate, run barefoot for 75 yards down an alley, drop a bloody sock, run 75 yards back, stab herself, clean up the blood around the sink, and stage whatever crime scene there was left to be staged.

The prosecutors did not have a good answer to the timeline conundrum except to say that the doctor was simply guessing about the nine minutes it took Damon to die and that even then Darlie could have had enough time to commit the murders and stage the crime scene. But if she was smart enough to plant fake evidence, wouldn't she have been ready with a more believable story about what the intruder looked like and how the killings occurred? Would she have been so stupid as to tell the police that she slept through the attacks and that she could not remember what had happened?

If Darlie is indeed a calculating murderer, wouldn't she have made sure both boys were dead before she called 911 so they could not finger her as the attacker? Wouldn't she also have made sure to get rid of her diary so that the cops wouldn't see her suicidal musings? Wouldn't she have made sure to weep at the hospital so that the nurses would see the depth of her grief? And when she went to the cemetery on Devon's birthday in the presence of television cameras, wouldn't she have made sure to turn on the tears instead of singing and spraying Silly String?

What really made no sense was why she would choose Damon and Devon to kill. If Darlie, as the cops and the prosecutors believed, had become increasingly upset about money, why didn't she murder Darin and cash in his $800,000 life insurance policy? The policies on Damon and Devon totaled only $10,000, and their funerals alone cost more than $14,000. If she was overwhelmed by the stresses of motherhood—another theory—then why didn't she also kill Drake, the baby, who required most of her attention?

At her trial, Darlie's lawyer, Doug Mulder, one of Dallas' most prominent and charismatic criminal defense attorneys, kept asking the jurors if they really believed that a doting mother could, in the course of a single summer night, pop popcorn for her boys, watch a movie with them, and then suddenly snap and turn into a knife-wielding nut. A psychiatrist who had interviewed Darlie for fourteen hours after her arrest said she was telling the truth about the attacks and that her loss of memory about certain details that night was the result of traumatic amnesia, which can occur following emotionally overwhelming events. Vincent DiMaio, the chief medical examiner in San Antonio and the editor-in-chief of the prestigious Journal of Forensic Medicine Pathology, testified that her injuries were not at all consistent with the self-inflicted wounds he had seen in the past; he said that the cut across her throat, in particular, was hardly "superficial," as the prosecutors alleged. Mulder produced notes taken by the nurses at the hospital that said Darlie was "tearful," "frightened," "crying," "visibly upset," and "very emotional" on the night she was brought in. Finally Darlie herself took the stand, explaining that she had stood at the kitchen sink to wet towels and place them on her children's wounds and that the Silly String scene was her heartfelt way of wishing a happy birthday to Devon, who she hoped was watching from heaven.

Darlie, however, was not a persuasive witness. She cried at odd times and became far too defensive under the cross-examination of Toby Shook, the veteran Dallas County prosecutor who kept slamming her for what he called her "selective amnesia." One of the prosecution's expert witnesses aggressively promoted the theory that Darlie was guilty, and in the end, the evidence, however circumstantial, was too much for the jurors—even if they never could figure out how the bloody sock got down the alley. During their deliberations, they watched the Silly String video a reported seven times. Perhaps Mulder made a mistake in not introducing another videotape secretly recorded by the police that showed Darlie weeping over her sons' graves. Perhaps the outcome would have been different had he found more expert witnesses to counter the prosecution's experts. But even then, it's hard to see how a jury would have gotten over the finely honed image of Darlie as a mentally unbalanced, gum-chewing bleach blonde who seemed to be unmoved by, if not outright exhilarated over, the deaths of her children.

Scenarios

IN THE YEARS SINCE DARLIE'S conviction, various well-wishers have attempted to prove her innocence. A writer in the Dallas suburb of Lewisville who published a book on the case told reporters that he believed the killer was the son of a Rowlett police detective. A Waco millionaire, Brian Pardo, reportedly spent $100,000 on an independent investigation of the murders, conducting handwriting analyses and other tests on Darlie. He also persuaded Darin to take a lie detector test administered by a Waco police officer. Pardo told reporters that Darin was shown to be lying when he answered no to four questions: Was he involved in any plan to commit a crime at his house on June 6, 1996? Did he stab Darlie? Did he know who planted the sock in the alley? Could he name the person who stabbed Darlie? Darin did not deny that he failed the test but told me that he was manipulated by the examiner, who he said spent two hours upsetting him with "a million questions" about the murders before hooking him up to the polygraph. Darin also speculated that he was suffering from survivor's guilt, in which he envisioned himself at the scene trying to help the kids but was unable to reach them. (According to knowledgeable sources, Darlie too was given a lie detector test by one of her original court-appointed attorneys. The attorney refuses to comment on the results, which have never been made public.)

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