Murder at Morse's pond

The prosecutor was intent on getting a murder one conviction and to get there he would take the jury on a morning walk through Morse’s Pond.

Grundy felt it was so crucial to his case, that he brought the jury in a bus to see the park.

According to the prosecutor, May didn’t throw out her back walking, as Dirk had told the police, but continued strolling with him into the protective canopy of trees.

Rick Grundy, prosecutor: This is probably the only area there that you can be relatively assured that you’re gonna be alone and obscured from view.

There, argued the prosecutor, the doctor took a hammer and struck his wife from behind.

A fellow dog walker heard a scream at about 8:45 am.

McNally: I heard someone yell—very quick, short yells from a distance. I would say it was a higher pitch rather than a lower pitch. 

Grundy: He’s now concerned that somebody heard her scream.

Dennis Murphy, correspondent: So he doesn’t have as much time at that point?

Grundy: Right, and he’s not going to complete his plan. And it knocks him off his list of things to do.

Grundy said he only had time to finish her off with the four-inch pocketknife and drag her body into the bushes.

Grundy: This is an individual that doesn’t ad lib well. So now there’s panic set in. Those things that he conceives as being most inculpatory of himself, he makes sure he’s gonna get out there. The hammer, the knife, the gloves that he’s wearing during the crime.

The prosecutor wanted the jury to look very closely at what Dr. Greineder did that morning. May Greineder lay gravely injured (points) in the path behind. Now Greineder said he was going to get her help. The way to get help is to take this road up and out of the park, but what does Greineder do? Instead, he takes this path way over another way. It’s a dead end. A road to nowhere. And the reason we know he went in that direction, is that a man, up on the hill, walking a dog saw him.

Grundy: What was the course of travel the defendant took after you saw him come from the right hand side? 

Kear: He went behind the planter and to the left there’s an access road and disappeared.   

The dog walker testified that he saw Greineder head down the path that dead ends, and then emerge back out onto the main road after about 45-seconds.

Grundy: And at some point did you see the defendant again, sir?

Kear: Yes.

Murphy: How important is that dog walker to making this case?

Grundy: I think he’s crucial. The two pound hammer was found in the storm drain—down that paved path along with the knife and one of the gloves that were linked to the murder.

And the prosecutor thought it was significant that Greineder not only ran away from possible help when he emerged from the path where May lay dying, but never called out for assistance.

Grundy: When you saw the defendant, sir, what if anything was he saying?

Kear: I didn’t hear him say anything.

Grundy: I find that an incredible story again when you tie in with the entire context that he comes into the circle that he’s not yelling, he’s not screaming “help, help, help.”

After the doctor emerged from the path, he asks Kear if he had a phone:

Kear: I said “no.” I didn’t have a cellular phone and then I asked, “What happened?”

Grundy: What, if anything, did he state?

Kear: He stated that his wife had been attacked.

The doctor then runs into Richard Magnan who was out for a morning jog.

Magnan: The man asked if I had a phone.

Grundy: And what did you respond?

Magnan: I said no.

When the doctor finally reached his mini van on the outskirts of the park he did call for help.

Yet, to Grundy’s ear --  the call hit a false note.  

(911 call) Dispatcher: Wellesley police. This call’s recorded.

Greineder: Help, I’m at the park. I think someone attacked my wife.

Dispatcher: Sir, where are you?

Greineder: I’m at, at the park, Morse’s pond. 

Dispatcher: At Morse’s pond?

Greineder: We were walking the dog. Someone attacked. I left her cause she hurt her back.

Dispatcher: Is she injured?

Greineder: I think she’s dead. I’m not sure. I’m a doctor. I went back.

Dispatcher: Please head over to Morse’s pond.

Greineder: She looks terrible....

Grundy: Everybody who had the misfortune of seeing May Greineder just said this neck wound is one of the most severe wounds I have ever seen.

Murphy: This poor woman is dead.

Grundy: And there was just nothing you could do, and yet you have a physician who makes a 911 call who’s saying, you know, “She’s hurt, she’s hurt bad. You know, I don’t know how bad. She may be dead, she may not be dead.”

Were these the words of a confused husband? Or were they the first signs of the doctor starting to cover up?

And the prosecutor was also troubled by the time that had elapsed before the doctor made the call.

Richard Magnan, the jogger, testified that after he ran into Greineder, he went down to where the body was, had a conversation with Kear, the dog walker, and then ran about a third of a mile back to the van.

Grundy: So you had traveled the rest of that distance into the parking lot, correct?

Magnan: Yes.

Grundy: Had this conversation with the individual you knew as Bill with the small dog and then made a decision to go back to the top of the access road, is that correct?

Magnan: Yes.

Even though the doctor had a big head start, when Magnan arrived at Greineder’s mini van—only then was he making the 911 call.

Magnan: As I got close enough to hear I could hear he was making a phone call.

What was the doctor doing during for all that time?

Grundy: There was at least a four or five minute period of time that the defendant would have been at his van but wasn’t on this call yet.

It was a hint of something that would become important later in the trial. Shortly after the doctor called for help, detectives started collecting bits of evidence in the path where May’s body was found: that baking tin, the lighter fluid and three Zip Lock bags in different sizes.

An FBI expert testified that the distinctive creases in the Zip Lock bags identified them as unquestionable matches to the ones found in a search of the Greineder’s kitchen.

Grundy: What, if any determinations were you able to make with respect to those two bags taken from the scene of the death of May Greineder and the bags taken from the defendant’s home?

FBI expert: It was my determination that the bags were at one time a continuous sheet of plastic with the remaining bags in the box.

And a crime scene investigator testified that there were NO fingerprints anywhere to be found on the bags.

Had someone carried them to the crime scene wearing gloves?

Grundy: On that plastic bag, what if anything you found whether it be a print, portion of a print any ridge detail at all?

CSI investigator: No ridge detail on this item.

Grundy: That means they were completely void of any kind of these whirls or loops or valleys that the professionals would look at to see it they can make a fingerprint comparison.

And then there was the lighter fluid—also oddly free of fingerprints and purchased at the grocery store where the doctor usually shopped.

Grundy: This isn’t lighter fluid like for charcoal. This is for an actual lighter that’s also, and it says right on it, you know, “good for removing stains.”

Was the doctor planning to wipe off any potential DNA?

And when the police searched the Greineder home in the days after May’s murder, they found other clues they said pointed to the doctor.

Det. Foley: This is a receipt that was also taken from the workbench area on November 12^th.

Doctor Greineder was known as a hyper-organized man: tools in the work bench kept in precise order, and he kept his receipts large and small. 

And one RECEIPT for a petty cash purchase would be critically important in the circumstantial case against the doctor.

Grundy: Can you tell me sir, is that the receipt for various nails?

Det. Foley: Yes it is.

It was a receipt for nails bought at Diehl’s Hardware where the doctor was a regular customer. The receipt showed the time of purchase: 8:55am.

When the detectives looked at the store’s receipts from that register, they found that the very next sale was for a 2-pound Estwing drilling hammer.

The same kind of hammer used to kill May Greineder. One of only four sold in that store the entire year.

While the prosecutor thought the timing was very telling, he couldn’t definitively prove that the doctor had bought the hammer.

Grundy: Can you compare the date of those two sales?

Beth Murphy: Yes it’s the same date. The sales were sequential.

Grundy: The hammer was sold two and half minutes after the nails were bought by the defendant. Same register.

And, it was during the same search of the Greineder house that the police chief himself noticed another piece of circumstantial evidence wedged in the roof of the doghouse.

Chief Cunnigham: As soon as I lifted the lid up in the upper left hand corner, I noticed a pair of the jersey dot brown work gloves.

A pair that matched the ones the killer had used and ditched in the storm drain.

But a critical element of the prosecution’s case against Dirk Greineder came back to what the police officers first noticed when they arrived at the scene of the murder: an observation that shouted at them... blood.

If the doctor was telling the truth, they say, blood wasn’t where it should be and WAS where it shouldn’t be.

The prosecutor dissected the evidence piece by piece using an emerging area of forensic science called “blood spatter analysis.” Why were the doctor’s sneakers sprayed with his wife’s blood, what the state’s expert, Ken Martin, calls ‘impact spatter’?

Ken Martin: You can see it here. You can see it here—impact type spatter that are located on the shoe itself.

And—the doctor’s jacket? According to the expert, the same type of stains.

Martin: Just a few of the impact spatters, if we go along the jacket we can see them here, here, here, here. 

Those kinds of stains were not from the doctor’s frantic attempts to help his wife, the expert said, but were from what he called blood in motion.     

When the hammer went down and the knife went in, blood flew.

Grundy: Is that consistent with an individual being within inches or feet of the person whom is the source of that blood?

Ken Martin: Yes, sir.

Grundy: During the time when the blows--?

Martin: During, what I would call it during the incident, the bloodshed incident.

And the blood stains on the jacket?

Martin said they were consistent with how the doctor would have carried his wife to drag her off the path.

Martin: With the type of transfer on the sleeves it would be certainly consistent for one to take their arms and place them under the victim to move the victim in that fashion.

And more than anything else how could the doctor explain why his hands—pictured here in the police photographs taken the morning of the murder—look perfectly clean—even though he said he felt his wife’s very bloody wound.

Grundy: Did you make any observations of his hands?

Det. Jill McDermott: I noticed that there was no visible blood on his hands. The defendant had blood on the sleeves and the shoulder part of his windbreaker. His hands were completely clean. There was no blood on his hands.

Murphy: And yet he said he’d cradled his wife’s head, attended to her?

Det. McDermott: Right. He had told us twice that he checked her carotid artery and yet he had no blood on his hands.

The answer to why he had no blood on his hands was obvious to the prosecutor:

Dirk Greineder’s hands looked clean because he was wearing gloves when he murdered his wife.

Though the doctor would have a different explanation later, that’s how the prosecution’s expert, Rod Englert, accounted for this telling smudge of blood on the doctor’s glasses—a smudge he says precisely matches the dimpled pattern on the fingers of the killer’s glove.

Grundy said the doctor made the smudge when he touched his glasses with glove-clad hands.

Grundy: There is a large smear across his glasses. What do you touch your glasses with? You touch your glasses with your hands. How do you get a blood smear on your glasses, on the lens of your glasses where you would take them off if you don’t have any blood on your hands

And the police said the doctor immediately began acting like a murder suspect not a man despondent over his dead wife.

Grundy: Did he ask you any questions?

Fitz: After a while, he asked me if she was dead.

Grundy: What, if anything, did you state when the defendant asked if she was dead?

Fitz: I told him she was dead.

Grundy: Did he ask you anything further, sir?

Fitz: He asked me if I was going to arrest him.

According to the detective, Greineder also seemed overly concerned with his two dogs even though he’d just found his wife brutally murdered.  

Det. McDermott: Towards the end of this initial conversation he had mentioned his dogs. That he has two dogs. One dog Zephyr was in the van and one dog Wolfie was home alone. And that he wanted to get home and take care of them.

Murphy: Did anyone think that was odd? The consuming interest in the dog? And what he’s going to do with it.

Grundy: Yeah, I think we all did? At this point in time his planned trip assuming that he and may went for their walk got back to the van and went home is only off by maybe 20 minutes. So with your wife in that condition is your over-riding concern going to be that this dog is 20 minutes past being needed to let out of the house.

And when they brought him to the police station, to the detective’s ears, he started to try to account for potential evidence ...

Det. McDermott: He said, “I’m thinking of all these crazy things.” He said that last night may Mad given him a backrub and therefore may would have his skin underneath her fingernails. 

Greineder was worried, the detective said, that the police were zeroing in on him—just as he had seen on the TV cop shows.

Murphy: This was what three to four hours after his wife has been found murdered in the park and he’s talking about backrubs and traces of skin material?

McDermott: Yep. And then he made a few other statements that he had seen this on TV and they were going to think it’s him.

And the prosecutor was interested in Dirk’s conversations with family members as they began to arrive in Wellesley after hearing news of May’s murder.

While the doctor told a detective that he and his wife had not been intimate for years, when Greineder’s niece arrived he—appropos of nothing—told her he and May had had sex the morning of her murder.

Belinda Markel: He said, “We had had sexual intercourse but that’s okay because we’re married.”

To Grundy, the doctor was preoccupied with physical evidence because he was worried that he had left behind tell-tale traces of DNA.

Grundy: The damage control started in that pathway. As a man of science, he’s providing an explanation for the exchange of bodily fluids. He’s going back through his mind and saying, “Where did I go off my list?” “Where did I make my mistakes?” And I need to provide an explanation for those things.

The prosecutor was enveloping the doctor in a damning web of circumstantial evidence.

Grundy: This really was a case where we had a number of bricks and together the bricks made a very strong wall.

But the doctor and his lawyer were about to get their chance to explain it all—every last bit of it. 

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