Baby Kate Trial: Testimony of Plant Professor Frank W. Telewski (pt. 1) w/ Analysis

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Michigan State University Botany Professor Frank Telewski is an archetypical professor, replete with a plant-motif on his tie as if to symbolize his specialty and his passion.  His testimony and his interviews thereafter on the topic shows that he knows a lot about plants.  In January of 2012, he began looking at two vials of plant parts that he had received from his colleague James Crum, who testified as a soil expert before him, and consulted with Peter Carrington, a graduate student in the botany field who testified after him. 

 

Most compelling about his testimony was that the vials he had received had parts of six plants that were identifiable (which has grown to ten since) and those were: 

1) a hard pine needle, two-tined, such as Red Pine (Jackpine, Scotch, and Norway)

2) a white cedar 'leaf' fragment

3) moss fragments

4) a fern gametophyte (or liverwort)

5) sedge seeds

6) grass clippings  

 

Now, Professor Telewski, testifies he never saw the shoes until April, even though Prof. Crum said he had passed him the shoes while at MSU under oath, so someone is forgetting something.  This is probably just someone's poor memory, but Telewski says he never saw the shoes until after his April 9, 2012 report and after he traveled to the locations he talks about.  Unfortunately, Prof. Telewski's specialty allows him to identify shoes, but does not allow him to expertly comment on the mechanics of how plants get on, stay on, and get off shoes, and the effects of shoe material and treads on these characteristics. 

 

At the time of this trial, the story is that these are the shoes that Sean Phillips wore when he dispatched Baby Kate somewhere, but with the finding that the shoes he was wearing at the hospital were different shoes, throws this line of investigation further into the speculative range.  The shoes were likely just a pair he wore out around his house, and if they were used for the purpose of getting rid of a baby's body, then they would have had to have been used for that before Sean left the house (presuming Sean's mother testimony is accurate).  If you believe that Baby Kate was killed a while before Ariel called the police, then this fits well with that theory, and doesn't totally discredit this month's search for plants. 

 

In this half of Prof. Telewski's testimony, he describes the six entities found and discusses some of the areas that the police suspected may be areas of concern, and discusses probabilities.  As a former math professor, the probabilities of all six elements being picked up at around the same place with the thin valleys of the shoes bottoms and the sides is exceedingly remote, and the inability of the police to identify matching plant parts in the car makes it remoter still that these shoes were worn during those two hours between 1:15 PM and 3:15 PM on 6-29-2011.  

 

Yet, as a public service, I have surveyed the spots visited by Det. Wells and Telewski in April 2012, and offered my own overview of those places, most of which you can research yourself if you're in the area.  I offer these visit's findings at the end of the transcripts for the places he describes.  The places like Wendy's, DHS, Birch Lake Apt., the hospital which had little chance due to their abundance of concrete and dearth of plants were ignored as statistically insignificant.

                                                 Dr. Frank W. Telewski, MSU Professor of Botany

 

                                            LPD Detective JB Wells and Prof. Frank Telewski at Sutton's Landing

 

 

Prof. Telewski mentioned "railroad tracks west of US 31 Bypass" which would put you into the right corner of this picture, of which I include since it was a 'block' that was investigated thoroughly, and discretely in October 2011.  I investigated this block thoroughly, and it had no White Cedar trees, and only one pine tree, moss wasn't immediately evident.  Though the pine was a red pine, it was almost impossible to get next to due to tree overcrowding and lack of paths.  The end of First Street on this side is very secluded, and one may believe he put the baby into the lake as the police did in October 2011.  But the shoes point away from this spot, as it does the top west corner and beyond.  No hard pines or white cedar that I could find away from the apartment complex, plenty of bracken fern and white pine. 

 

 

This plot is on the opposite side of US 31, where Prof. Telewski calls it the East end of First Street.  He contradicts himself when he says there are white pine and then says there aren't any eastern white pine in the area, they are the same, so they are either there or not there.  But they are there, as was some white cedar, but again hard pines could not be found along the sides of First Street, or anywhere near its terminus. 

Telewski comes to the conclusion that since white pines are abundant in the area, and there were none found on the shoes, it is an unlikely place to search-- which struck me as a fallacy, particularly since he also says that white pine falls off his shoes easily at the previous site.  There are more houses around than someone in body disposal would have likely been comfortable with, and the spots which may have moss, ferns and sedges looked too marshy to travel without getting saturated shoes.

 

 

Lastly, he refers to Sutton's Landing with some glowing reviews.  On page 107, line 18, he claims to have found some red pine needles, but even though white cedar is prevalent here and other of the materials, there is absolutely no two-needled pine trees around.  I looked in some of the imported wood chip piles he mentioned, and still found none, the only pines in the front where the thin-five-needled white pine in front. 

 

So if you still have your money on the shoe's plant parts being the key to the trail of Baby Kate, it won't be any of these sites that fits your bill.  But we still have more sites, and more testimony from Professor Telewski.  The question remains:  being that there wasn't any witnesses (the public knows of) that witnessed Sean at Sutton's Landing, either end of First Street, or the railroad tracks west of the US 31 bypass, were these locations picked under some rationale (such as an anonymous tip) or just a hunch by the investigative agencies? 

 

One thing is for sure in my opinion, if you picked a group of 80 botanists not familiar with our area and told them what to look for, you would have a lesser chance of finding plant clues than if you picked 80 people who have lived in this area, that hike, hunt, fish, and have a general knowledge of plants.