CHAPTER 1
The Categorization Instinct
Progress is man’s ability to complicate simplicity.
THOR HEYERDAHL
WHEN LYNN KIMSEY turned up for work one balmy summer’s morning back in 2003 she had no idea that the events of the day would transform the next four years of her life into a sinister, serpentine subplot of a macabre psychological thriller. That evening, prepped, briefed, and working for the Attorney General, she would be riding the freeway home as the real-life embodiment of Dr Pilcher, the cross-eyed ‘bug guy’ from the film Silence of the Lambs.
Earlier that year, on the morning of Sunday 6 July, a woman called Joanie Harper, her three children and her mother, Earnestine Harper, had all attended a small neighbourhood church service in Bakersfield, California. It was a big day for the family. For Joanie’s youngest child, six-week-old Marshall, it was his first time at church. After the service the family went out to have lunch at a local diner. They then headed home for an afternoon siesta before going back to the church for the evening service. Joanie and her children all slept in the rear bedroom, while her mother slept in another bedroom at the other end of the house.
That had been the plan, anyway. But that evening, no one saw the Harpers at the service.
On Tuesday morning a family friend, Kelsey Spann, decided to look in on Joanie, her mother and the kids. Not only had they not shown up at church on Sunday evening, no one had seen or heard from them since. And they weren’t answering calls. Maybe something was wrong.
Kelsey went to a side door to let herself in to the house with a key given to her by Joanie for safekeeping. But the door wouldn’t budge. The key turned in the lock but there seemed to be something on the other side preventing it from opening. She walked around to the back of the house and tried the sliding glass door. To her surprise, it opened. That was extremely odd. Joanie was always checking that door to see if it was locked. Kelsey entered the house and made her way to Joanie’s bedroom.
At 7a.m. that Tuesday morning a 911 call came through to Bakersfield police. It was placed from 901 3rd Street. Joanie’s address. The scene that awaited them when they arrived shocked even the most experienced law enforcement officers.
Joanie was found lying face down on the bed. She had been shot three times in the head with a .22 calibre pistol and twice in the arm. She had also been stabbed seven times.
Four-year-old Marques Harper was also found on the bed, eyes wide open. He had a gunshot wound on the right side of his head and the fingertips of his right hand had been bitten to the bone. Investigators concluded that this was a fear reaction. Marques must have seen the killer and had instinctively stuck his fingers in his mouth.
Lyndsey Harper, aged just two, was found at the foot of the bed still wearing her little blue dress from church. She had been killed by a single gunshot wound to the back.
Earnestine, Joanie’s mother, was found in the hallway with two gaping bullet holes in her face. She had been shot at close range. By her side lay a pistol. Whoever the intruder might have been she had clearly intended to go down fighting.
Finally Marshall, Joanie’s six-week-old son, initially thought to be missing, was found lying next to his mother concealed under a pillow. Just like his sister Lyndsey, he had also been killed by a single gunshot to the back.
The police investigation into the murders quickly gathered pace and it wasn’t long before a prime suspect emerged. Forty-one-year-old Vincent Brothers, Joanie Harper’s estranged husband, was a pillar of the Bakersfield community. A family man, Brothers had a bachelor’s degree from Norfolk State University and a master’s degree in education from California State University, and, having initially joined a local elementary school in 1987, had, over a period of eight years, risen through the ranks to become its vice-principal.
But Brothers had a dark side. Though Joanie had certainly loved him, and had tried hard to keep things between them on an even keel, their relationship had been on and off. It had been off in 2000, barely a month after they married. Yet later that year Joanie had given birth to Lyndsey, their second child. Just as with their first, Marques, born a couple of years earlier, Brothers wasn’t present at the delivery. In 2001 the marriage was annulled, with Brothers citing irreconcilable differences and Joanie citing fraud. Allegedly, at the time of the marriage, she’d been unaware of Brothers’ two previous wives.
That knowledge, in hindsight, could have saved her life. In 1988, Brothers had been sentenced to six days in jail for abusing his first wife and was put on probation. In 1992 he had married again, only for his second wife to sue for divorce the following year claiming that he was violent and that he’d threatened to kill her. Then, at his home in 1996, Brothers had sexually harassed a female employee of the school where, only the previous year, he’d taken over as vice-principal. According to district records, the woman claimed that Brothers had dragged her into his bedroom and had beaten her and taken pictures of her. Though she had reported the incident to the local authorities the police had dissuaded her from filing charges on the understanding that Brothers was ‘a role model in the community’.
In January 2003, in Las Vegas, Joanie and Brothers had got married a second time. But in April Brothers once again moved out of the house due to friction between him and Joanie’s mother, Earnestine. In May, baby Marshall was born. Now, six weeks later, he was dead. Clearly, the prosecution argued, when the trial finally opened to a blaze of publicity in February 2007, here was a relationship that was demonstrably volatile and a man who was not only violent but adulterous. In fact, it was Brothers’ alleged string of extramarital affairs that formed the central thrust of the prosecution’s case against him. The primary motive for the killings, it was suggested, was avarice: Brothers had wanted to relieve himself of the financial burden of supporting his growing family.
He was arrested in April 2004. The charges were five counts of first-degree murder. At the trial he pleaded not guilty.
Brothers’ alibi was geography. At the time of the murders, his defence claimed, he was actually on vacation some two thousand miles away in Columbus, Ohio, visiting his brother Melvin, a brother, incidentally, that he hadn’t seen for ten years. There was a rental car agreement – for a Dodge Neon, later seized by detectives – to prove it, plus a pair of credit card receipts for items purchased in a store in North Carolina on the day that the murders had taken place. Indeed, it was to his mother’s house in North Carolina that police had first tracked Brothers to break the news of the horrific slayings.
But gradually things started to unravel. A more detailed examination of the credit card receipts, combined with analysis of security camera footage taken from the store at the time when the items were bought, revealed that it was, in fact, Melvin who had made the purchases, having appropriated his brother’s card and forged his signature.
Moreover, closer investigation of the rental car confirmed that while Brothers had indeed leased the Dodge in Ohio he’d also put in excess of 5,400 miles on the clock. Unlikely though it was that such a journey would, under normal circumstances, have been completed within three days, that, the prosecution contended, was more than enough distance for him to have driven to Bakersfield and back.
Yet the evidence, though compelling, was still only circumstantial. Brothers may have been an adulterer, countered the defence, but that didn’t make him a murderer. If it did then, statistically, at least one third of the jury would be up for trial themselves. Furthermore, the fact that Melvin had used his brother’s card in a store in North Carolina in no way implied that that brother was on the other side of the country gunning down his family. He may, instead, have been waiting outside in the parking lot. Nor, for that matter, did the 5,400 miles chalked up in the Dodge necessarily entail that Brothers had driven to California. That total, after all, might in reality have been clocked up anywhere. Indeed, to reduce the argument ad absurdum, Brothers could in theory have run it up without even crossing the Ohio state line.
What was needed was fact. Not inferences or assumptions or guesswork. But solid, irrefutable proof.
Things started to look up for the authorities when a neighbour in Bakersfield reported seeing Brothers in the vicinity of the Harper home around the time of the murders. Then again, they could have been mistaken. Was it Brothers or wasn’t it? Could they swear that it was him? The case was proving exasperating. All the evidence consistently pointed at one man but there was no forensic slam dunk to put the case to bed.
The key had to lie with the rental car. Those miles. There had to be a way of tying Brothers, the murders and the tarmac together.
But what was it?
Nature’s bugging device
On 25 July 2003, two FBI agents and a Bakersfield police officer strolled through the doors of the Bohart Museum of Entomology at University of California, Davis with a car radiator in their hands. The grille was spattered with bugs and they wanted to know what they were. Not that there was anything unusual about the bugs, at least not in central California. But whether or not something is unusual is, by definition, wholly dependent on context. The bugs may not have been uncommon in California. But what about other places, the officials wanted to know? Ohio, for instance? Or North Carolina?
A slight, studious-looking woman with sharp hazel eyes and a hardy, no-nonsense pixie cut greeted the trio. In her mid-forties, Lynn Kimsey was professor of entomology at UC Davis and the museum curator. With a specific interest in the biogeography of insects, in particular Californian ones, there was no one better qualified to answer the lawmen’s questions. If that radiator had been anywhere west of the Rockies Kimsey would be able to tell. She could read those bugs like an ecological X-ray. She examined the grille and took it away for analysis.
Last year, I dropped in on Kimsey in Davis to chat about the case. Almost two decades on it was still fresh in her mind. ‘At the time I had no idea that I was actually taking part in a murder inquiry,’ she told me as we wandered around the Linnaean labyrinth of meticulously labelled insect trays deep in the bowels of the museum. ‘They left that bit out, and probably for good reason. Many scientific investigations are best performed blind, without the researcher knowing what particular puzzle they’re trying to solve. That way you don’t risk getting in the way of what you’re trying to do, contaminating the scientific method with your own expectations. It’s very subtle. You can do it without realizing. And as an expert witness in a murder trial that can have serious consequences.’
My eyes trail across the immaculate alignment of white secretarial tags slotted on to the front of the shallow sycamore drawers – Cornell drawers, Kimsey explains. Lepidoptera: butterflies and moths. Orthoptera: crickets and grasshoppers. Hymenoptera: bees, ants and wasps. No other creature on the face of the earth is more punctiliously preserved in death than the insect.
We pause by a tray labelled ‘Xanthippus corallipes pantherinus ’. Kimsey slides it open.
‘As it turned out we found thirty individual insects on various portions of the radiator,’ she says. ‘Or rather, parts of insects: wings; legs; an abdomen; sections of the abdomen; a head and abdomen with no wings or legs … But when it came down to it, it was six that told the story.
‘For a start, there were two beetles that we know only live in the eastern United States. Then there were two true bugs, Neacoryphus rubicollis and Piesma brachiale or ceramicum, which are only found in Arizona, Utah and Southern California. They were on the air filter. There was a large golden paper wasp, Polistes aurifer, minus a few wings and legs – that’s found mostly in California but has been sighted as far east as Kansas. And then there was this little fella, Xanthippus corallipes pantherinus, more commonly known as the red-shanked grasshopper. Or rather, what was left of him. We identified him from one of his back legs. The inside portion, the shanks, are bright red.’
Kimsey takes out the tray and hands it to me. I peer down through the glass lid. It doesn’t require too great a leap of the imagination to figure out the thinking behind the name. The legs are indeed bright red, glowing like embers beneath the mottled grey ash of the body. I slip the tray back into its drawer and slap it shut. It was incredible to think that a simple bug like that had the power to put a man on Death Row.
‘And where does Xanth … the red-shanked grasshopper hail from?’ I ask, as we retrace our steps back to Lepidoptera, the moths and butterflies quarter.
Kimsey smiles. ‘Xanthippus corallipes pantherinus is found no farther east than Kansas and central Texas,’ she says. ‘So, all things considered, yes … the car that that radiator belonged to had at some point been in the eastern United States. But equally, at some other point, it also had to have passed through states west of Colorado which, as it turned out, was consistent with the hypothesis that Brothers had driven west from Ohio on either Interstate 70 or 40.’
The lawmen were more than satisfied. When, a week or so later, they pitched up back in reception to pick up the radiator and hear what Kimsey’s categorical skills had turned up, what she had to tell them was music to the ears. Her entomological satnav was as good as the real thing. It was as if Brothers’ rented Dodge had been fitted with its very own mobile tracking device that charted his progress every few hundred kilometres.
It was the final nail in his coffin. Or, more aptly perhaps, the final pin through his wings. Kimsey duly gave evidence in the Bakersfield Superior Court and, on 15 May 2007, the jury convicted Brothers of the murder of his wife, his three children and his mother-in-law.
We stop by another drawer. The label on the front says Acherontia styx, the Death’s-head hawkmoth from Silence of the Lambs. Kimsey opens it and hands me the tray. ‘The judge rejected the option of life imprisonment without parole and sentenced Brothers to death,’ she states, matter-of-factly. ‘Today he’s in San Quentin awaiting execution.’
The briefest of shivers runs through me.
‘How do you feel about that?’ I ask, studying the contents. ‘It was your evidence that put him there.’
She shrugs. ‘I don’t feel anything,’ she says. ‘I mean, he put himself there by what he did. I was just doing my job. Doing what I do every day. Sorting things into boxes.’
Putting the cat into categorization
In 2005, the year after Brothers was arrested, the American developmental psychologist Lisa Oakes conducted a study at the University of Iowa that shone a fascinating light on how we all, to use Kimsey’s phrase, sort things into boxes. Oakes was interested in how early this box-sorting, or, as I like to refer to it, ‘categorization instinct’ kicked in. Was it something that the brain just did, like hearing, or smelling, or crying? Or did we somehow need to learn it?
To find out, Oakes took a bunch of four-month-old babies and flashed pictures of cats at them on two computer screens side-by-side in her lab. The cats were presented simultaneously, and in pairs, one on the left-hand screen and one on the right. For the fifteen-second duration that each pair were on the screens an observer recorded how long the babies spent looking at each cat, the orientation of infant attention to a stimulus representing a standard measure of its novelty.
But then came the catch. After the infants had attended to six pairs of cats and had started becoming familiar with them – as indicated by a decrease in looking times over the course of the six trials – Oakes snuck in either a new cat that they hadn’t seen before, or a dog.
The rationale was simple. If the babies looked longer at the dog than at the new cat then that would suggest they saw the dog as being more different to the familiar cats than the new cat. In other words, it would demonstrate that their brains were processing dogs in a different way to the way they processed cats, ascribing them to a new category. If, on the other hand, the babies’ attention span did not selectively increase on seeing pictures of dogs then that would imply their brains were treating dogs and cats as one unitary, inclusive category. That of ‘animal’.
What Oakes found was extraordinary. Despite the fact that the infants had had such minimal prior exposure to the dogs and cats; despite the fact that, at just four months old, they had yet to acquire the words for ‘dog’ and ‘cat’; despite the fact that dogs and cats are, when you think about it, actually pretty similar to each other – both have four legs, two eyes, fur and a tail – they looked longer at the pictures of the dogs than at the pictures of the novel cats. The brain, at just four months, is already sorting the outside world into boxes.
By extraordinary coincidence – and a modicum of forward planning – a few hundred metres across campus from the Bohart Museum of Entomology lies the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain, where Oakes, having left the University of Iowa back in 2006, now heads up the Department of Psychology’s Infant Cognition Lab.
We talk.
I tell her about my meeting with Professor Kimsey and how entomological taxonomy had snared a multiple murderer. She’s impressed. Not that that kind of minutiae ever darkens the computer screens in her lab. Cat and dog are about as nuanced as it gets.
The world, she explains, is a complicated place. When we first enter it, it appears, as the father of Western psychology William James once put it, as a ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’. It’s a problem that needs a solution. As with most problems, it is easier to deal with once it’s been ‘cleaned up’. And so our brains begin sorting the blizzard of incoming data into separate, more manageable piles. Eyes, noses and mouths become faces. Things that bark, neigh or moo and that have four legs and a tail become animals.
‘Just imagine what the world would be like if our brains couldn’t form categories,’ Oakes says. ‘Even the simplest things that we take for granted on a daily basis would pose a huge challenge. You walk into your friend’s garden and they have a new sprinkler system. But you don’t have the category “watering device”. “What’s that object over there in the middle of the lawn?” you think to yourself. “I don’t recognize it. Is it dangerous? Is it something that could kill me?”’
If we didn’t have the ability to categorize, Oakes continues, waking up each morning would be like getting out of bed on a new planet. Hairdryer: what’s that? Is it trying to attack me? Television: who are those people in there? Are they trying to talk to me? Washing machine: hmmh … do I put my head in there?
Categories enable us to navigate the world, object by object, person by person, in a predictable and orderly way so that our journey through life doesn’t just consist of an endless string of random, novel and essentially meaningless interactions but is planned, controlled and purposeful.
In that sense babies might be considered the R&D arm of the species, I suggest?
‘Absolutely,’ Oakes says. ‘Initially, when we are little, we perceive the world in expansive, broad-brush categories. Like “plants” and “animals”, for instance. Then gradually, over time, as we hone our categorization skills, these categories become more delineated. We see flowers and trees. Dogs and cats. Birds and fish. Large and small. Cuddly and not-so-cuddly. And then, as experience and development continue, we make ever more fine-grained distinctions. We separate Chihuahuas from Labradors; Persians from Siamese; deciduous trees and evergreens; small red cardinals and large pink flamingos; sharks and dolphins.’
Further down the road, she tells me, we become even more picky still. We see red pines, white pines, acacia trees and orchids; golden eagles, grey geese, robins and sparrows; red admirals, purple emperors, orange tips and meadow browns. Eventually, in adulthood, if we enter the fields of botany or biology, our taxonomic systems become so fine-tuned that, much to the irritation of the friends who are out walking with us, we find it impossible not to lapse into unintelligible jargon when they point at the pretty flower.
Or, if you enter the field of entomology, much to the irritation of multiple murderers, you find it impossible not to break into incomprehensible Latin when the police show up on your doorstep with a radiator full of dismembered bugs and moths.
Irrespective of your classification credentials, the punch lines are identical. Predictability, expectation and the minimization of uncertainty. The exact same principle that applies to four-month-old babies on the nursery slopes of categorization also applies to serious Alpine categorizers like Lynn Kimsey high above the taxonomic snowline. Categorization, as Oakes elucidates, is about orderly and efficient navigation, no matter where or when it is done.
Which raises, for the rest of us, a fundamental question: what level of categorization is considered optimal for greatest efficiency within the course of our everyday lives? If our categorization instinct evolved to reduce complexity then doesn’t categorizing the ordinary and commonplace – items like dogs or houses, for example – with the taxonomic voracity of a forensic entomologist somehow defeat the object?
Copyright © 2020 by Kevin Dutton
