COP DIALOGUE, OVERDOSES, AND JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE - 033

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This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau, cop dialogue, overdoses, and justifiable homicide. I'm Adam Richardson. And this is the Writer's Detective Bureau.

This is episode number 33 of the Writer's Detective Bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality crime related fiction. I want to thank Gold Shield patron Debra Dunbar from debradunbar.com and Coffee Club patrons, Joan Raymond, Guy Alton, Natasha Bajema, Natalie Barrelli, Joe Trent, Siobhan Pope, Leah Cutter, Ryan Kinmill, Richard Phillips, Robin Lyons, Gene Desrochers, Craig Kingsman, Kate Wagner, Marco Carocari, Victoria Kazarian and Rebecca Jackson. Your support keeps the lights on in the bureau. Please support them by visiting their author websites and reading their books. You can find links to their websites in the show notes at writersdetective.com/33 and if you have your own author business, consider joining Patreon. It's free for you and it allows your readers to support you financially through monthly micropayments. Give your fans a chance to show their support by creating your own Patreon account right now. To learn more, visit writersdetective.com/patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N.

This week's first question comes from Laurie Sibley and she writes, my main character is a homicide detective. I found myself at a loss for some of the filler stuff he would be doing between big breakthroughs in the case and action scenes. Sometimes he and his partner just need to have a conversation while whatever they're working on is happening in the background. My problem is I'm not exactly sure what that background work would consist of. I wondered if there was a basic day in the life scenario you could run for us that would include both excitement and paperwork ends of the spectrum. Thanks. Thank you Laurie. The reason I like this question is because I think it's something every writer struggles with when writing about any kind of police procedure. So let's start by simplifying what a homicide detective needs to accomplish. So for starters, everything they do is written in a report.

So we'd obviously don't want to make this story all about report writing, but day one, responded to the scene of the crime and interviewed the responding patrol officers that that right there is a report. Canvas the neighborhood and interview any witnesses. Each witness interview is a report. Forensic unit notifies detectives of evidence findings at the crime scene, which technically is a report that the forensic folks would write, but it's something the detective would need to follow up on to make sure the report is completed and that they read that report and include it in the overall case file or murder book, whatever you want to call it. They would have to attend the autopsy and collect any evidence from that, that again is a report. Anything that identifies someone as a potential suspect, that of course is a report. And then that interview and/or interrogation of that person is another report.

You obviously get the idea, and you certainly don't want to bore the reader with cops writing reports of course. But you as the writer need to do two things. One, take the logical next step in the investigation and two, keep the story moving. So what would you, as you sit here listening to this podcast, what would you do next after you've left the initial crime scene of a murder? Do you have a trunk full of evidence? If so, go book it at the station. Do you have a lead on a possible suspect? Go find them. Were there nearby cameras pointing at the crime scene? If that's the case, go find the owners of those cameras. Homicide detectives are just like you. They're making the logical leap as to what the next step should be. So whatever you would do, whatever seems logical to get to that next step, have your characters do that. If you want to study the master at telling this kind of story, read Michael Connelly.

He is realistic in his storytelling and especially in his more recent books, he has his detectives working multiple cases at a time, which is very realistic. Now, if you've already read Connelly's books, I still urge you to go back and read them again. But this time from a more academic deconstructing the story kind of perspective. So like the car rides from a witness interview to the crime lab are scenes when dialogue is needed to push the story ahead. Now if there's no dialogue there to be had in that car scene, there isn't a car ride scene. It then becomes a chapter break or a jump to a different set of characters doing something else. So this is kind of learning the storytelling craft. It's what will set you apart from other writers. So when you have those scenes of just dialogue, make sure that there's a reason for it.

Now, the luxury of writing books is that you can take a lot more time than you can with the screenplay. But I really urge you to think of your story in the terms of a TV or a movie script. Now, it not only needs to be visual, where you are showing, not telling. I'm sure you've heard that before, but it also needs to push the story forward and have a purpose. And most importantly, I want you to imagine you are the actor in your scene. What most of us non-actors fail to realize is that actors are having to reverse engineer our written words. So what do I mean by that? When we are having a normal conversation in daily life, we have ideas, feelings and emotions that are in our heads that we're trying to convey to another person and we're doing so with words, but we aren't really thinking about how to encode those feelings into specific words, right?

I mean, they say no one gets talker's block. You get writer's block, but you don't get talker's block because we just talk. It just happens. And the pace of our speech will change, our body language changes. We might start talking with our hands or making gestures to accentuate a point, all in the process of conveying this message in our head out to another person. Now that is how normal human communication works, right? Actors on the other hand are handed the words in the form of a script, but it's just the words they're doing this backwards. It's the actor's job to believably act out the ideas and the feelings and the emotions in that character's head to really sell the words that the script calls for. So the actor has to extrapolate those feelings or figure out how to make them appear on camera along with the words that you wrote in the script. So it's backwards. They're taking that encoded message and trying to figure out what all went into it in the first place.

So if the writer is just adding dialogue for the sake of having two characters talk, you might actually be best served by cutting out the scene completely unless you can devise a bigger reason for the scene to exist. Remember, every scene needs to push the story forward and if it doesn't, your story starts to lag and your readers will get irritated, and irritated readers put books down. So make your scenes ones that actors would want to act in. Now does that mean you'll never use a scene full of patter? Of course not. Just know why you are doing it. Now I call it that, a scene of patter because patter is empty chattering talk. My favorite example of this are magicians, magicians use patter, that empty chattering talk when they're trying to set you up on the premise for a sleight of hand magic trick. It's the otherwise useless story that sets up the context of this trick or misdirection.

So as a writer, you can use patter in the same way, misdirection. So in magic, they say a large action covers a small action. The whole purpose of a magic wand is to misdirect your attention and also to have a plausible reason for the magician to have his palm close from view. So use your patter dialogue in scenes where the scene is really about something other than the dialogue, just like a magician. So like Laurie said in her original question, sometimes he and his partner just need to have a conversation while whatever they're working on is happening in the background. Laurie is absolutely right, but it should be something that's going on in the foreground. There's a scene in the movie Beverly Hills Cop when Rosewood and Taggart, the two detectives that are following around Eddie Murphy's character, Axel Foley are on a stakeout in their detective car and they're watching for Axel Foley to leave the hotel.

Now Rosewood is having that patter dialogue with the hotel's waiter who brought food to their car. So in this patter dialogue, Rosewood's asking for extra mayo with his mouthful as Axel unbeknownst to them is shoving bananas in the Tailpipe of the car. So is the dialogue really about Rosewood stuffing his face and needing extra mayo or is it patter that empty chatter while something else is happening? Allowing Axel to deploy a hilarious counter surveillance tactic, which causes Rosewood's car to conk out and Axel to make a clean getaway. So now that we know when we can use patter dialog, what kind of stuff do cops talk about with each other? Well, it's probably much the same thing that you talk to your coworkers about. We talk about retirement, health insurance, complaining about a boss or gossiping about coworkers. When left to do nothing but talk, cops are really good at complaining, which is why it's better to keep us active. So anyway, I hope this helps. If you want to see the bananas in the tailpipe seen for yourself, I will include a link to the youtube clip in the show notes and the show notes are at writersdetective.com/33 and thank you Laurie for such a great question.

This week's next question comes from Ros Guggi, and Ros asks, are autopsies always done in overdose deaths? If not, which ones would get an autopsy? And does a pathologist always go to the scene of an overdose death? If not, which cases would draw a pathologist? So I guess that was technically four questions. So the first one, are autopsies always done in overdose deaths? No, not always. An overdose death can often be determined just from toxicology and whatever evidence was found at the scene or on the body. So if it looks like a case of an accidental overdose or a suicide, they may not do a full autopsy. An autopsy would occur anytime the circumstances look like there's something more to the story. It could be from conflicting witness statements, a surprising toxicology result, like an indication that the drugs in the system of the decedent shouldn't have been enough to be fatal or something to indicate that the scene was disturbed, like post-mortem lividity being inconsistent with how the body was found.

So real quick, post-mortem lividity, or PML as we call it, is how the blood pulls in the body after someone dies, since we no longer have blood pressure, gravity ends up taking over. So if the decedent dies while laying in bed face up, let's say, the blood will pull to the posterior or backside of the body, then their skin color will be noticeably red or purple in comparison to the more pale or sallow color of the anterior or front side of the body. Now if you find a decedent face down in the bed, but the PML is visibly present on the posterior side, that should tell you that somebody rolled the body over after death. Now, if paramedics did it during their assessment of the victim, then it's not an issue. But if no one can account for why the blood is on the wrong side, then you have some more investigating to do.

As for the forensic pathologists, it's been my experience that forensic pathologists usually stay in the morgue's examination bay. Their job is to conduct the autopsies. So this would make for a good time to introduce you to the job or potential character, really of a coroner investigator or a medical examiner investigator, depending on which agency they work for. So the coroner investigator will be the one that comes out to the scene in the coroner's van, and they will be the one working the overall inquest. They schedule the autopsy with the forensic pathologist. They coordinate toxicology screenings with the lab. They take possession of the decedent's belongings, and they're the one that ensures the next of kin have been notified. And ultimately they're the ones who coordinate with the family and the mortuary for the release of the body. Now I should mention that in many parts of the country here in the United States, mortuaries may handle the transportation of bodies from the location of their death to the county morgue at the direction of the coroner or medical examiner.

It's common for a coroner's office to be part of the sheriff's department, especially here in California where I am. So if you are a deputy sheriff working for an elected sheriff coroner where it's one person that is elected as the sheriff and coroner, you may also be a deputy coroner as part of your regular deputy sheriff patrol duties. So as the deputy coroner, you can direct a mortuary to assist you with moving the body back to the morgue. So not to sound crass or disrespectful to the dead, but using a mortuary is a lot like using a tow truck to take a vehicle to the impound yard, the mortuaries will cycle through an on call list and the next mortuary up takes the call just like a tow truck company does for accidents. Now, the reason why I bring this up or my point I guess is that it isn't always the coroner investigator or the medical examiner investigator that moves the body. It's certainly done at their direction, but it may be the mortuary acting on behalf of the coroner or ME with that coroner or ME person present.

So if I'm the deputy sheriff/deputy coroner working this dead body call while on patrol, I'm certainly going to need help with the transport because we don't put dead bodies in our patrol cars. So anyway, the coroner or the ME's investigator will get called in after hours if it's a homicide, a mass casualty incident or some other large scale cluster. The key thing to realize is that people die every day and fortunately only a small fraction are homicide victims. So the mortuaries and coroner investigators and ME investigators stay really busy even without a homicide occurring. So in the case of an overdose with no signs of foul play, the body would get transported to the morgue and a fluid sample would be sent off to the tox lab. And I should mention that when the decedent gets to the morgue, even if it's a mortuary transporting the body on behalf of that patrol deputy, the decedent is stripped of clothing and a visual examination of the decedent is made by the deputy coroner, whether that's a patrol deputy or a coroner investigator or the ME investigator, and this is done to ensure nothing was missed that might indicate foul play. You don't want to find out later that you missed a bullet hole or a stab wound when you thought the decedent just died of a heart attack or a drug overdose. Thank you so much for the question, Ros.

Voni Harris from voniharris.com asks, if there are no security cameras and no witnesses, how does someone prove they killed the bad guy because he was attacking a good woman? So no arrest despite fingerprints and bullet evidence. Excellent question, Voni. First of all, we here in the United States are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Now this means that the authorities have the burden of proving that someone committed the crime of murder or manslaughter. So in other words, it's not the legal burden for that killer, the person that was justified to prove that they were justified in killing this person. It would certainly be a good idea for that person to do so if they want the killing to be deemed a justifiable homicide, but it isn't legally required. So first and foremost, that killer, the one that justifiably killed this bad guy should be open and honest as to everything that happened and why, that's probably the smartest thing to do.

Now, the next thing in this scenario, separate from the legal stuff, is there would be some form of evidence if the attack of this woman was in fact a physical attack that the good Samaritan interrupted. The premise behind this thinking is the concept of transference. So if the now dead bad guy was attacking the woman, both he and the woman would have some sort of physical evidence transfer. So think of a hit and run car accident where the paint from one car transfers to the other. The same thing applies to things like the bad guy's DNA because his skin might be under the woman's fingernails as she tried to fend off his attack or the bad guy has abrasions from her fighting back. Her sweat or saliva or her hair might be on his clothing. Those are the microscopic bits of evidence that forensic investigators will be looking for.

And then the detective handling the case will be looking to see if the physical evidence matches up with the story that's being told to him. To prove the killing was a murder, the detective and the prosecutor, going back to the burden of proof concept, would have to prove to a jury that the killer had malice of forethought. In other words, that killing this guy was a preplanned event, a preplanned crime. If the detective and the prosecutor think the story and evidence show that this could actually have been a justifiable homicide, that is exactly the kind of doubt, that reasonable doubt that a jury will cite as their reason for a not guilty verdict. So if those are the facts of the case, it's very likely the prosecutor won't file murder charges in the first place. Thank you for the question, Voni. You can find Voni Harris @voniharris.com.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Writer's Detective Bureau podcast. You can find the show notes at writersdetective.com/33. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you hit that subscribe button and if you belong to a writer's group, I would love it if you could share this with your friends. So this podcast is created for you by you. Please send in your questions to writersdetective.com/podcast, I would love to give you a shout out on the air and answer your questions. So thanks for listening. Have a great week and write well.