One of his first death cases involved a thirteen-person conspiracy brought to his attention when police found a middle-aged woman slumped over on a chair inside her apartment door, shortly after she’d shot up in the bathroom of a Kentucky Fried Chicken. “She was sitting on a claw hammer when [the officers] found her; they’d just left her there all alone to die.” Her friends had propped her up in the chair, he remembered, placed atop the randomly discarded tool.
