A Broken Trail? The Shoes of Sean Phillips

[XLFD]

"How do I know that you have been getting yourself very wet lately, and that you have a most clumsy and careless servant girl?"

"My dear Holmes," said I, "this is too much. You would certainly have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago. It is true that I had a country walk on Thursday and came home in a dreadful mess, but as I have changed my clothes I can't imagine how you deduce it. As to Mary Jane, she is incorrigible, and my wife has given her notice, but there, again, I fail to see how you work it out."

He chuckled to himself and rubbed his long, nervous hands together.

"It is simplicity itself," said he; "my eyes tell me that on the inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the leather is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they have been caused by someone who has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had been out in vile weather, and that you had a particularly malignant boot-slitting specimen of the London slavey."

                      -- "A Scandal in Bohemia"  (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

 

Does the trail of Baby Kate depend on the forensic material that was found on Sean Phillips' shoes the day that the baby went missing?  It is compelling-- up to ten different plants were supposedly found in Sean's shoes and identified by plant experts at Michigan State University and from the University of Michigan.  But to be of any assistance in helping us find Baby Kate we must presume two things.  First, that Sean Phillips left Baby Kate (either alive or dead, either buried or open to the elements) out in the wilderness.  Second, that the various plant parts he picked up were picked up exclusively on his route to drop off Kate in the wilderness and return to his car.

 

We must therefore eliminate any possibility of Sean leaving Baby Kate with another party (as part of a black market adoption scheme, for example) and that all ten plant specimens found their way onto Sean's shoes in a brief foray into a moist area to drop off the baby.   The investigators have written off the possibility of the first contradiction to their presumption by calling it a 'murder' investigation, without conclusively ruling out a baby-transfer as an impossibility.  Did they use similar 'brute-force' methods to rule out arguments to the second presumption, namely that all ten plant parts could have been picked up at varying times? 

 

The prosecution's plant experts could not make this presumption at Sean Phillips' trial, nor will they assign a likelihood to it now.  If an honest probability was assigned to it, it would be remarkably small.  Dr. Frank W. Telewski, MSU professor of botany, was interviewed after the Ludington Police Department (LPD) declared a June 29, 2013 search would be conducted to find areas where Baby Kate might be on the basis of plant bits found on Sean's shoes:

 

Dr. Frank Telewski: "well I don't know what he did with the infant, but wherever he was walking the different plant parts, seeds, fruits, foliage, would have been collected on his shoes."

WZZM Reporter: And how do we know it was on that day and not a week before.

Telewski: "primarily the material is fairly fresh on his boots, and the mud, it is my understanding,I did not see them, the boots, the shoes, when they were collected, they were not boots. They were still fairly moist, and fairly fresh, and so when that material was collected, it pretty much represents material that was collected from that day. And one thing about mud on shoes, and things in general, is that when the shoes dry out, as you walk, the shoe is fairly flexible, and I believe these were more like a sneaker kind of shoe, a little more flexible type of shoe. The more you walk, the more it dries out, the more friable that material is, and hence you are tracking mud through the house. And you won't track mud through the house when it's really wet, it's when it starts to dry out and begins to crumble when it falls off. So really we feel very confident that the material represents fresh material. "

That quote is about 2:00 into the following video: 

 

Dr. Telewski did not have the privilege of seeing the shoes when they were fresh from being taken from the Phillips' house, and so I have a bit of advantage in that regard, as I have received pictures taken of these boots by the LPD shortly after they were.  As the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes would note, withholding the entirety of the evidence from the investigator can only lead to erroneous deductions on their behalf.  Keeping the forensic experts in the dark about aspects that could alter their conclusions is not a good practice, it reminds me of the Indian parable about the blind men and the elephant. 

 

In that tale, a group of blind men touch an elephant at different parts of its body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then compare notes and learn that they are in complete disagreement as to what the elephant is.  Compartmentalization has led to a lot of blind men in the Baby Kate case, the blindest being the public at large. 

 

Records show that Dr. Telewski never saw these plant parts until early 2012, after his colleague Dr. Crum scraped the dirt and seeds off the shoes in December of 2011.  So any notion of moistness or freshness was transmitted through Detective Wells of the LPD.  Detective Michael Kenney of the Mason County Sheriff's Office (MCSO) was the person who retrieved the shoes from Sean's house later in the day of June 29, 2011. 

 

Kenney (same link) also claimed at trial that Sean changed his shoes between the time he was interviewed by police and when he was caught on hospital surveillance camera around noon, leading one to believe that these shoes  were the ones he wore earlier, and got soiled.  He made the statement that these were the Seedless shoes they found later, worn with white socks.

But such footage (no pun intended) would probably not conclusively show these were the same shoes, and they purposefully never asked Kim Phillips or anyone else who saw Sean that day, about his shoes.  One would think that Prosecutor Spaniola would have asked Kim Phillips about whether he changed his shoes when he got home. 

 

Here are the shoes that he purportedly was wearing when doing a nefarious deed that day:

 

 

This picture (and all others presented here ) was presumably taken just after the shoes were taken as evidence on June 29, 2011.  They both have what looks to be like grease or oil stains in the front, but otherwise are not moist or fresh from a marshy romp.  What strikes me as fairly remarkable for shoes that may have crossed a half mile or more of swampy land in the middle of summer is the lack of any seed material on the laces.  As someone who has grown up in the area, the only time this would reasonably occur is when you follow a trail; overgrown areas will almost certainly get you some seeds in the laces, but these are clean except for dirt at the bottoms.  The tips and curls of the laces, that look as if they would drag on the ground, should also be dirty and likely have seed material, but they are quite clean. 

 

Here is the bottom of the right shoe with some areas marked for clarity.  The outer trench is a narrow valley running the circumference of the shoe that looks as if moist dirt could easily squeeze into and be held with whatever else was in the dirt for a long time, as does the inner trench.  The middle inner trenches would probably be more likely to hold dirt for lesser periods, like Dr. Telewski hypothecates.  The diamond trenches have the capacity to hold very little dirt, and only along the perimeters where they are less diamond shaped.  Ironically, the shoes brand name is "Seedless", as seen in the middle.

In the outer and paralleling inner trench, there is a lot of soil and plant material stuck in the shoe.  The plant forensics expert says that this material was likely picked up that day, independent of the shoe type.  The scientific method experts typically use calls for experimentation, so I tried an experiment with a couple of pairs of my own shoes.  One had trenches throughout that were like Sean's middle inner trenches, the other had a trench resembling the outer trench of Sean's shoes.  I invite others to replicate my experiments, and don't take my amateur findings for granted.

 

For my first experiment, I put colored play-dough clay in the trenches of both shoes.  After a couple of trials, the wide-trenched shoe lost most of its clay, not near all, some of the trenches had other dirt in its place, some had both clay and new dirt, most were clear.  The other shoe with thin trenches, kept much of their clay intact some dirt and seeds had pressed them further in, but the clay stayed on for days, and after walking on a variety of surfaces including concrete and carpet. 

 

My second experiment dealt with wet coarse dirt placed at the bottom of the shoes, and Dr. Telewski's hypothesis was mostly confirmed with the wide-trenched shoes.  Very little of the original dirt was still there, but there wasn't much extra dirt either, or plant material.  In the narrow-trenched shoes, it was hard to tell whether the old dirt was replaced with new dirt, so I put dill seeds into the original dirt paste.  Quite a bit of the dill seeds were still stuck up the trench after extensive travel on the shoes, along with some extra plant material at the top of the trenches.

 

My conclusion was that any plants found in the wide or diamond trenches of Sean's shoes were likely freshly picked up at the last wearing of the shoe, however, the concentric outer and inner trenches of Sean's shoes could have held material for many wearings of the shoe.

 

 

The top of the left shoe (seen here) has a lot of dirt towards its back end, as seen above, and some plant material.  The plant part in the upper portion of this picture is probably the largest plant part visible without digging in the trenches, and yet this part isn't pictured in any of the exhibits used during the trial.  Was it lost between June and December 2011?  The picture shows other narrow trenches similar to those on the bottom.  Experimentation shows these retain soil and material even better than the narrow trenches below. 

 

 

This close-up of the right shoe (seen here) shows a bit of dirt on the upper part of his shoe.  One could believe some mud/dirt may have wound up on his sock above this stain, if it happened that day.  Then again, one could look at the instep of his left shoe shown below (and even on his right shoe) and figure out that if he was in a wet area that day, his socks would likely be soaked in this area.

 

 

Let's not forget that Sean lives out in a swampy area to begin with, he has forested wetlands on his 20 acres, including a pond in his backyard.  A shoe with mucky dirt on it, dirt which appears to be dry, is going to be the norm for a 20 year old young man.  The same day they took his shoes, they impounded his car, and there was never a word about fresh dirt, or lack thereof around the pedals.  No seeds either. 

 

Forensic work on shoes is fascinating, but the forensic work was flawed in this case for half of a year before the experts even got a glimpse of the clues attached to a pair of shoes thought to have been worn by a person who was thought to have committed a heinous crime in the wilderness.  It was used as an afterthought to make flimsy criminal charges stick to someone who is guilty of something, which only he may know the full extent of.  And there are big limits to shoe forensics:

Reporter: (at the end of the interview above)  Can you tell anywhere that I've been by looking at my shoe?

Dr. Telewski: (Laughs)  Probably not much; they look pretty clean walking on the carpet of the building... You've come into the building, you've walked across a paved surface, and I can pretty much tell you've walked across a paved surface, you've got a stone embedded in the shoe right there. But when you walk across a paved surface like a parking lot or a sidewalk into a room like this with carpeting, that's pretty much going to wipe everything off, and there's really nothing on the side of your shoes, it's pretty clean, so I could not really tell you pretty much where you've been except for someplace where there was a little gravel.

So be wary when LPD's Chief Mark Barnett tells you that the plant search will turn up the most likely place that Baby Kate is located, and that it is only a matter of when and not if her young body turns up, for the chances are very small that a place with all ten species therein is going to be any more likely to have Baby Kate (if dead) than a place with half of the plants thereon.  As Sherlock Holmes would say, using his keen observation rather than forensics:

 

"There was no possible escape. He forgot his gloves, but he caught up his shoes and darted into the bedroom. You observe that the scratch on that table is slight at one side, but deepens in the direction of the bedroom door. That in itself is enough to show us that the shoe had been drawn in that direction, and that the culprit had taken refuge there. The earth round the spike had been left on the table, and a second sample was loosened and fell in the bedroom. I may add that I walked out to the athletic grounds this morning, saw that tenacious black clay is used in the jumping-pit, and carried away a specimen of it, together with some of the fine tan or sawdust which is strewn over it to prevent the athlete from slipping."

     -- "The Three Students" (A.C. Doyle)

NEXT UP:  Back to the trial with testimony of soil expert, Dr. James Crum.

[Marilyn Weinberg]

Very interesting and impressive investigation and report on the shoe evidence!

[XLFD]

Thanks Marilyn.  Of course, here at the Trail of Baby Kate we would appreciate any other observations about the shoes, any additional information that is known, or anyone's own experimentations. 

I believe that if the police do honestly believe that Sean Phillips is guilty of murder without any complicity by any other party that there is nothing to lose by releasing all relevant data and research the investigation has turned up.  Two years is enough time for a couple of investigators to sit on the facts.  Enough secret confinement of the truth.