FBI expert concluded cop’s shooting staged to appear as a suicide

CHICAGO — Veteran Chicago police Sgt. Donald Markham was shot by someone else at point-blank range in his home in 2015 before the scene was staged to appear to be a suicide, a forensic pathologist hired by the FBI concluded in a report obtained Thursday by the Chicago Tribune.

The five-page report contradicts Cook County officials’ ruling that Markham had shot himself in September 2015 after a drunken argument with his wife, Dina, also a veteran Chicago cop. The report was part of a yearlong probe by the FBI, which began after questions were raised within the Chicago Police Department about Markham’s death.

The mystery deepened last May when Dina Markham, 47, was herself found dead, submerged in a bathtub in the couple’s home in the 5900 block of North Newark Avenue. Her death, ruled an accidental drowning by the Cook County medical examiner’s office, occurred before the FBI was able to interview her.

As part of its probe, the FBI hired forensic pathologist Scott Denton to review the autopsy reports and photos from the scene of Markham’s death. Denton, a former chief interim medical examiner for Cook County, works in a private capacity in downstate Bloomington.

Denton’s report — submitted to the FBI last February — found a number of troubling aspects about the scene that led him to conclude the shooting was, in fact, a homicide, or “death at the hands of another.” Among the clues, he said, were blood patterns indicating Markham’s arms were “lifted upward after death,” the strange placement of the gun “loosely in his right hand” and a lack of small abrasions or lacerations on his index finger that typically can be seen after someone fires a gun.

“The position of his body, the blood flow pattern on his face, the blood transfer pattern on his chin and left hand under his chin, and the moved and placed appearance of the gun in his right hand are all consistent with his body having been moved after death,” Denton wrote in the report, obtained by the Tribune from the medical examiner’s office through an open records request.

The medical examiner’s office, meanwhile, has doubled down on its original ruling that Donald Markham, 51, shot himself in his own bed that night, writing in a point-by-point refutation that the FBI expert offered “creative and descriptive scenarios” that were not grounded in science.

In her nine-page rebuttal report, also made public Thursday, Chief Medical Examiner Ponni Arunkumar wrote that Denton’s analyses of the blood spatter and position of Markham’s body ignored scientific literature that a body often continues to move — or even convulses — after suffering a gunshot wound to the head.