Expert: Blood evidence, Vaughn’s story don’t match
The story that Christopher Vaughn told police the day his family died didn’t explain why his blood was found on his wife’s seat belt, an expert testified Tuesday.
It didn’t explain how his blood wound up on the center console of his Ford Expedition and the side of Kimberly Vaughn’s shorts, nor how her blood wound up on his jacket.
And it didn’t explain why investigators found drops of his blood on the floor of the SUV next to the 9 mm Taurus pistol between Kimberly’s feet.
Nearing the end of their case in the quadruple murder trial of Christopher Vaughn, prosecutors called bloodstain-pattern analyst Paul Kish to provide some of the most damning testimony yet against the Oswego man accused of killing his 34-yearold wife and their three young children.
Kish’s testimony suggested a bloody Christopher Vaughn was moving around inside the SUV — and over his wife’s body — after Kimberly was shot under her chin. Defense attorney George Lenard asked for a mistrial after Kish told jurors Kimberly was shot before her husband was wounded that day, based on “the facts of the case.” After a short recess, Judge Daniel Rozak denied the request.
Police
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Vaughn’s family shot to death June 14, 2007, after Vaughn, bloody and limping and nursing gunshot wounds in his left wrist and thigh, flagged down a passing motorist along a frontage road west of Interstate 55. The bodies of his wife and children were in the red Ford Expedition, which was parked nearby.
Vaughn said he was taking his wife and kids — Abigayle, 12; Cassandra, 11, and Blake, 8 — to a water park in Springfield. He said his wife got sick, and he pulled over in a secluded area to give her some privacy. Vaughn said he got out of the car, checked the rooftop luggage carrier and returned to the driver’s seat. That’s when he said his wife shot him and he stumbled out of the SUV onto the frontage road.
But prosecutors contend Vaughn got out of the car and shot his wife and children.
Ballistics expert Matthew Noedel had testified that the bullets that killed Abigayle and Cassandra came from the left shoulder of the front passenger seat. On Tuesday, he said there was plenty of room for someone to reach over Kimberly’s body in the passenger seat and fire the gun at the three children, even inflicting the closerange gunshot wounds investigators said they found on the children’s bodies.
Then Vaughn returned to the driver’s seat and shot himself to make it look like his wife pulled the trigger, prosecutors say. When he was done he dropped the gun between Kimberly’s feet and unbuckled her seat belt, they say.
Kish said he was asked to study the Ford and other pieces of physical evidence in the case. He said blood matching Vaughn’s was found near the front of the center console, on the cover of one of Kimberly’s books, on the floor between Kimberly’s feet and on Kimberly’s seat belt. And he said her seat belt was fully retracted when police found her.
Kimberly’s blood also dripped onto the rear end of the center console. But he said the blood pattern there suggested someone made a wiping motion across the middle of the console from the driver’s side toward the front on the passenger’s side.
“You can clearly see motion going across those stains while they’re still wet and wiping them away,” Kish said.
And he said that motion must have been made by someone other than Kimberly.
“The only other person would have been Christopher Vaughn,” Kish said.
Vaughn sat passively at the defense table Tuesday, as he has through most of the trial.
Lenard tried to counter Kish’s theory, suggesting Kimberly could have been alive and well when her husband reached toward her. He even suggested the sound of a gunshot in an enclosed car could have made her pause as her ears rang.
Kish conceded Lenard’s theory was possible.
“But it doesn’t make any sense,” he said.