Murder at Morse's pond

For four days and nights, 12 strangers were locked in an agonizing debate.

If convicted, Dirk Greineder would spend the rest of his life in prison.

Among the 12, they were a dentist, a professor, a bartender, a CEO, a postman, a banker, a housewife, a mathmetician, a college student, a medical supervisor, and an adverstising man: 7 men and 5 women.

In the jury room they took a straw poll.

Juror: It was a tough call because no one, not one witness testified seeing Dirk kill his wife and that made it very difficult right at the beginning. That we would have to decide this case on circumstantial evidence.

As the jury wrenched back and forth, they struggled to come to terms with the horror of it all:

Would Dirk Greineder—a doctor, father of three — brutally kill his wife, the mother of his children?

Cheryl, juror: That’s the difficulty of the case was really to look at such a horrible situation and in a way you are staring at what is the Adream. And you’re looking at it, and it looks back at you and reveals something horrible underneath that. None of us want to believe that. That something under the perfection and the accomplishments that something like this could happen.

But had the prosecutor scored any points with his theory that this was a man driven over the edge by sexual obsession?

Stan, juror: He was addicted to sex and pornography and hookers and a bunch of things that kind of hard for us to believe.

Sarah, juror: People have vices. People have things, whether you’re on the Internet flipping through porn pages, heck the guy sitting beside me at work could be doing the same thing. I don’t know.

Dennis Murphy, Dateline correspondent: It’s a leap for you to get from there to murder.

Sarah: It’s a big leap.

Stephanie: It bothered me for the character. But it did not change my opinion about his guilt or his innocence.

But some jurors found the doctor’s actions that morning in the park odd.

Why did he leave his dying wife?

Charlie: I’ve been married 32 years, quite a similarity. I couldn’t ever have left her. Even after she was dead.

Stan: The thing that has stuck with me—if one of my family members was on a trail injured there’s one person I would dream that would show up at that moment would be an emergency room-trained doctor. And that’s what he was.

But others were reluctant to read too much, too quickly into the doctor’s behavior that chaotic morning.

Sarah: If I were taking a walk with my husband, like I do every Saturday morning with my dog in a park, and I found my husband dead, I don’t know how I would react.

Murphy: So you gave him that?

Sarah: I gave him that.

But the jury was disturbed by links investigators made between the crime scene and the doctor’s home.

The zip lock bags:

Stan: I think it was the combination the bags matched those from his home as well as his story that may might have gotten them out of the boxes herself, and it didn’t really match up the fact that she would have picked different sizes. Plus her fingerprints were nowhere to be found.

Then there was this receipt for the nails. The hardware store records showed a hammer, like the one that killed May, purchased just minutes later. 

Elaine, juror: We kept a list of the enormous number of coincidences that we would’ve had to accept in order to accept a belief in an unknown killer.

But how could the Harvard doctor be so stupid? If he was going to kill his wife, would he really leave a trail of clues?

It was a question the jury kept coming back to.

Juror: I couldn’t imagine an intelligent man going out on a Sunday morning in a busy park in a yellow rain jacket to kill his wife with a knife. I mean it made no sense at all.

Charlie: He’s not a professional murderer. He’s a professional doctor. But as a killer he’s an amateur.

And the prosecutor had shown the jury a picture every chance he got. It was the picture taken that morning of the doctor’s clean-looking hands. Greineder had told the police he tried to help his wife, his clothes were covered in blood, yet his hands appeared spotless.

Had the doctor killed May while wearing gloves?

Johan, juror: If you look at the blood as to where it was on his sleeve. It goes all the way down to the end of his sleeve and stops right where his hand begins.

Johan: Perfectly in a perfect line. That on a scale of one to ten, that’s getting close to nine.

But the jurors also wondered, if the police really were so suspicious of the doctor’s clean hands that day, if it was such an important observation, then why didnt they test them for blood? 

Charlie: They didn’t test the hands and they could’ve tested the hands.

Jeff, juror: I thought that was a police weakness.

Murphy: So do you think the authorities locked in on one suspect and it was Dirk Greineder and they never really looked beyond that?

Sarah: I think it was a rush to judgment.

And the jury weighed heavily the other brutal murders in the neighboring parks.

Was there a psychopath on the loose, one the police had failed to track down?

Jeff: I live near the towns where two previous murders occurred within nine months of October 31, 1999 where this murder occurred. It was in back of my head that perhaps there could have been another serial killer that wanted to stalk Morse pond on that morning.

Murphy: The defense scored some points by telling you somebody thought they saw a car very near the murder scene?

Jeff: Yes they did.

But what about the seemingly endless testimony on DNA? Some DNA appeared to match up with the doctor’s and some to an unknown person.

The jurors were split.

Elaine: The point was that his DNA was in places that it had no business being.

But other jurors thought the DNA data helped the doctor.

Bill: There was this possibility of another person although there were very faint images of that.

But, perhaps most importantly ... the jurors struggled to come to terms with the man who took the stand.

Was he a grieving husband?Or a cold-blooded killer?

Stan: He couldn’t look up. That he couldn’t look at us while he testified. And despite the fact that his attorney was sending him signals to look at the jury, look at us’ pick your head up,’ he just couldn’t do it. His mannerisms were not those of a person that was feeling confident about what he was saying up on the stand. And that didn’t help him

Bill: I saw a man who cried without a lot of tears. I mean, I was watching closely to see how many tears he was shedding and he wasn’t shedding many tears, but he was crying a lot. His demeanor was solid as a rock. I watched him pick up the pitcher at one side bar and pour a glass of water and pick it up and he didn’t shake at all. That shocked me. That showed me a man who could probably be capable of just about anything.

Others saw a father filled with remorse, utter humiliation and profound grief.

Sarah: I thought he was a guy who had done this stuff, this second life, and was deeply, deeply sorry for it.

Murphy: So he improved his standing with you.

Sarah: With me.

Murphy: His reputation with you when he spoke in his own words?

Sarah: Yeah. He did.

What would they decide?

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