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Murder trial testimony focuses on blood spot

BOLLING AIR FORCE BASE, Washington, D.C. — Air Force attorneys used a girlfriend’s testimony, a buddy’s account and even “Top Gun” television showtimes to stitch together a chronology of accused murderer Airman Calvin Hill’s whereabouts on Aug. 14, 2005.

That’s the night prosecutors claim he killed Airman 1st Class Ashley Turner, a former friend and fellow 56th Rescue Squadron airman. They shared a T-shaped dorm on Iceland’s Keflavik Naval Air Base.

Hill’s actions and demeanor were dissected by the hour Wednesday in a Bolling Air Force Base courtroom. He has already pleaded guilty to stealing roughly $2,700 from Turner using her ATM card. His three-person defense team says the crimes end there. They claim Hill was hurriedly accused, that viable suspects went unexamined, and deem the investigation bungled.

But prosecutors believe Hill cracked Turner’s skull with a dumbbell weight, severed her spinal tissue with a knife and left her to die in a seldom-used spare room by the dorm’s gym.

A spot of blood forensic scientists found on Hill’s shoelace — one matching Turner’s DNA — is a major puzzle piece in the prosecution’s case.

On the trial’s third day, the two camps cross-examined several people Hill encountered that night: his then-girlfriend, a friend who stopped by and Navy officers responding to the crime scene. Both sides zeroed in on foot traffic leaving the hectic scene where Turner’s body was found and movement through the blood-spattered stairwell medics later used to carry her outside.

The prosecution says the scene was secure. The defense contends blood could easily have traveled on fingers or footsteps.

The girlfriend

Ethnically Thai, a citizen of Iceland, Vannee Youbanphout was Hill’s girlfriend at the time of the murder. She will not leave her country to testify. Icelandic authorites, prosecutors say, do not want Hill back on their island for a remote trial. So the prosecution and defense agreed to admit her pretrial testimony at an Article 32 hearing last year.

Youbanphout testified that she and Hill cooked dinner that night in his dorm room kitchenette. After eating, Hill left for what he said was a Sunday night meeting with a supervisor. Youbanphout washed dishes and watched the Tom Cruise flick “Top Gun,” based on Navy jet fighters.

Youbanphout recalls Hill was gone between two scenes. One has Cruise’s character wooing a female character in a bar. The other has him considering quitting the service after a friend’s death.

A civilian overseeing the American Forces Network, Larry Sichter, pulled the “Top Gun” run times in Iceland that night. Those two scenes span about an hour, between 9:21 and 10:23 p.m., he testified in court.

Hill hugged Youbanphout tightly when he returned, she said. She noticed him sweating, a drop running down his eye, and told him to take a shower and wash his clothes, Youbanphout said.

Hill suggested she join him. She offered that he run her a bath, something to keep her awake on the 45-minute drive back to her home in Iceland’s capitol, Reykjavik.

Hill’s roommate, Senior Airman Alexander Alonzo, remembers seeing Hill knelt by a washer that night. According to both Alonzo and Youbanphout’s testimony, Hill never acted startled or strange.

The friend

Airman 1st Class Jeremy Ware, a security forces officer nicknamed “A-Money,” climbed the building’s left-hand stairwell to Hill’s floor sometime after leaving work at 10:30 p.m., he said.

He had no clue that, minutes before, emergency responders had carried Turner’s near-lifeless body through that stairwell. That her arm had momentarily slipped off the backboard and she was dripping a trail of fresh blood.

Ware knocked on his buddy Hill’s door, he told jurors. His first question: Have you seen all that blood out there?

There was “quite a lot,” he testified, “consistently quarter-sized, all in the stairwell.”

Ware prodded Hill, who was shirtless, to go check it out. He did, then returned to his dorm bathroom, where Ware remembers the tub was full of water. Ware started chatting with Youbanphout, who was under the bed sheets. Their conversation was halted in less than 10 minutes, Ware said, by Naval Criminal Investigative officers at the door.

Attorneys persistently asked Ware if he stepped in any of the stairwell blood that night. Each time, he answered no.

The investigation

From a third-floor window, someone called out to the officers below.

“Hurry,” Gregory Anderson recalls the voice saying. “She’s got a weak pulse.”

Anderson, now a civilian, was then a Navy petty officer with military police. With a partner, he had been dispatched to Turner’s dorm. They climbed the building’s right-hand stairwell — not the one Ware used — and found Turner face down, pooling blood on the rug. He checked her pulse with two outstretched fingers, Anderson told jurors, but was careful to keep his fist balled the rest of the night so blood wouldn’t travel.

Anderson was soon joined by Master-at-Arms Second Class Kevin Von Trosclair, another military policeman dispatched to the scene. Trosclair cleared out the room, he said during testimony, and ordered other officers to secure the bloody stairwell.

During this time, the officers said, word spread that Turner was set to testify against Hill in an upcoming court-martial. Anderson was one of the first to enter Hill’s room and explain that he was needed for questioning.

Hill, Anderson said, dressed in clothes and shoes he retrieved from a locker. Trosclair arrived minutes later and led Hill, without handcuffing him, down to a patrol car and drove him to an investigative center.

For hours at the trial, attorneys probed Trosclair and Anderson about their every move that night. The prosecution’s questioning suggested the procedure was competent. The defense insinuated it was flawed.

Trosclair, asked repeatedly to tell jurors exactly where he walked through the building after securing the crime scene, could not.

“Simply put,” said defense attorney Stephen Ganter, “you just don’t know.”

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