This morning Beth Karas of CNN made a fascinating comment about the Dossett-Leath case: an investigator noted that a clothes drier was running when he arrived at the scene of the crime.

Ms. Karas points out that most drier cycles last only an hour or so. If a drier was running shortly after Ms. Dossett-Leath called 911, the question is when it was started. The defendant claims to have been away from the house from 9:00 a.m. to about 11:20 a.m. The only innocent explanations would be either that the drier had a very long cycle (or a timer?) or that the defendant started the drier as soon as she got home and before she found the body. Unfortunately, the investigator failed to ask about this (maybe it takes a woman to wonder about clothes driers).

What interests me is how often washers and driers filled with laundry are found at the scenes of crimes. If I remember correctly, investigators found a washer filled with damp clothes at O.J. Simpson’s home on the night of his ex-wife’s murder. They found the same thing at Scott Peterson’s on the night his wife disappeared. They found the same thing in Hope Schreiner’s home after she reported finding her husband bludgeoned to death.

The implication is that killers know enough these days to wash the bloody clothes they wore when they committed their crimes. (No one, apparently, believes that some people wash their clothes frequently.)

In the Dossett-Leath investigation, the cops tested the washing machine for blood but not the drier or its contents. This, of course, was an oversight. But I wonder what value such evidence would really be. I believe that laundry products, such as OxyClean, destroy blood. (Enzymes destroy blood.) Melanie McGuire  was convicted of sawing her husband’s body up in a bathroom where no blood was found, presumably because—as a nurse—she knew how to get rid of blood.

In most domestic violence cases, trace evidence on clothing can easily be explained—it isn’t suspicious. At best, laundry is merely suggestive: it might suggest an unexplained change of clothes, for instance. Or something totally unexpected might be found in the laundry, like leather gloves.

But, in the Simpson, Peterson, and Schreiner cases, the discovery of clean laundry hardly “aired any dirty laundry” in my opinion. On the other hand, the running drier in the Dossett-Leath case cries out for an explanation, given that the defense relies heavily on an alibi.

Is this another situation in which the courts expect jurors to use their common sense? Or if the jurors hold this against the defendant, would it be considered to be a case of wild speculation?

Many followers of this blog seem interested in what to wear to jury duty. I wonder if I should write a post about what to wear when you discover a body.