Entering the evidence vaults

BYLINE: Jon Shainman
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St. Lucie County, FL



ST. LUCIE COUNTY, Fla. - On the video screen is Henry Dreverrman. He's in the interrogation room. One moment he cries, the next he suddenly lunges at a detective with a pen. The detective gets a superficial stab wound as others wrestle Dreverrman to the ground. Dreverrman was found guilty of burning several churches in Port St. Lucie. While he's now serving life in prison, his case lives on.

On the second floor of the St. Lucie Clerk of the Court building in downtown Ft. Pierce, there's a desecrated church cross Dreverrman left behind at one of his crime scenes. It has a doll's face nailed to it. Items like this are the responsibility of evidence custodian Tiffany Wile.

I ask her if she likes her job. "It's interesting," she replies with a nervous laugh.

Criminal courts manager Gale Ivey says there is 50 years of history in this space. But what's in here wouldn't be in your school kid's history book.

"You have guns, knives, bats. Anything someone can do harm to another person is in here," said Ivey.

When a judge admits a piece of evidence, it becomes the responsibility of the clerk's office to take custody of it and preserve it during a trial.

"You can't make mistakes. You make a mistake with a piece of evidence. It could mean someone gets out of prison for a crime they committed," said Wile.

Perhaps the most infamous of the 889 cases in the evidence vault involves serial killer Gerard Schaefer, a former Martin County Sheriff's Deputy who may have killed 30 women back in the 1970s. He was only convicted of killing two. Here in the vault there are chilling reminders from two teenagers who survived an encounter with Schaefer. Back in 1972, Schaefer abducted the two girls on Hutchinson Island. There is the thick rope he used to tie them to a tree. Parts of the tree the girls were bound to are also there. Detailed letters Schaefer wrote on committing execution-style murders are still in the files.

"I think if you dwell in this you can become where you believe that nothing in the world is good," said Gale Ivey.

Even though the Schaefer case is more than three decades old, all of the evidence is still here and some of it in fact was even used again recently. Not long ago, investigators in Ft. Lauderdale came to the vault to take a tooth from the Schaefer case hoping to identify a body found in their jurisdiction. There was no match.

In Martin County, the evidence vault is actually that, a vault. In one corner, there is a bullet-riddled door from a deputy cruiser. Back in 2006, now Sergeant Dale Howard was hit by an AK-47. Besides the door, there is the uniform Sgt. Howard was wearing. The shooter was convicted, and Howard hopes to get that gun once all the appeals are exhausted.

Marsha Ewing, the Martin Clerk of the Circuit Court says, "Three years after a sentence is served in a criminal case we can dispose of most evidence. However, in a capital case we maintain evidence throughout the lifetime of an individual."

One of the odder pieces of evidence is in this small refrigerator. It's a vial of milk. As Sandi Storm shows it off, she recalled the day they had gotten a court order to take a sample out of a gallon jug. "The whole second floor smelled!" according to Storm. The milk came into play this year during the trial of Christopher Tomlinson, found guilty of killing his girlfriend's stepfather Gerald Jensen. The pair first tried to poison him with laced milk. When that didn't work, Tomlinson stabbed Jensen to death with a sword. His body was left in a Dumpster and eventually discovered at the Palm Beach County landfill.

"Each piece of evidence is part of a puzzle that goes together in order to tell a story. In order to ensure justice is done," said Marsha Ewing.

It takes a special type of individual to do this type of cataloging. Tiffany Wile says working in the vault has made her more vigilant as a mom because of what she comes face to face with. "It's very weird to think you could be shopping in a mall and a person like this could be around the corner."



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