[Lucy Lu] killed her husband (cont'd)
"He could quite possibly have slipped and fallen, "Sgt. Mark Thorpe told the court.
Police did notice Zhao's feet. His steel-toed work boots were loosely laced and his socks didn't match. Yet Zhao's belt - a bright yellow plastic type common at the time - was securely fastened around his waist.
Beneath Zhao's pants was a pair of blood-soaked pajamas. Under those, Zhao wore underwear with barely any blood. Bloodstains on the various pieces of clothing didn't match, meaning Zhao was dressed after he was attacked, police believed.
Zhao's pockets yielded a wallet and money, but no house key. He had disappeared from home - an occurrence that had become routine over time - more than a week before his body was found, yet police were convinced the absence of a house key meant Zhao had been inside his own home when he was killed.
Concentrating their investigation on the Zhao apartment, police found, amid the grime, an area beside the bed of Zhao and Lu that stood out for its cleanliness. The floor appeared scrubbed where the rest of the apartment was dirty.
Police pried up the floorboards and found Zhao's blood underneath. Autopsy results said Zhao lay on his back for a period of time and that his body had been moved from the murder scene and dumped in the snowbank.
From there, the trail of circumstances pointing to Lu began to grow. They found blood on a mop and a blood spot on the building's main staircase. Later they discovered a blood smudge on a downstairs wall and a bedspread in the basement also concealing a bloodstain.
Lu's marital dissatisfaction provided motive. Prosecutors developed the theory that Zhao was lying in bed, possibly asleep, when his wife, angry and panic-stricken at the thought of being sent home, picked up a meat cleaver from the kitchen, crept into the bedroom and delivered a crippling blow to her husband's forehead.
Then, they allege, she continued to hack at Zhao, turning him over and delivering additional blows to the back of his head.
Once Zhao was unconscious, prosecutors maintained that Lu removed his pajama bottoms, dressed him in his underwear, put the pajamas back on and pulled on his pants, boots and a coat.
She then carried or dragged Zhao from the third-floor apartment, through the hallways, down two steep flights of stairs and out into the backyard, where she left him in the snow.
Evidence further pointed toward Lu because the murder scene was scrubbed and killers don't clean up after themselves, Sgt. Thorpe testified.
Pathologists were not as certain about the meaning of the evidence.
When Dr. John Deck started to examine the body, he found, once Zhao's head was shaved, a series of 14 abrasions on the front and back of his head.
The abrasions ranged in size from one-half inch to two inches in length and had caused a small amount of internal bleeding. What Deck also found and what he believes eventually killed Zhao - was a fractured skull caused by a significant blow to the forehead.
Pathologist Dr. John Deck guessed Zhao had lived for several hours - perhaps as long as 24 hours - after the blow was delivered before internal bleeding and brain damage caused his organs to shut down.
Deck speculated Zhao could have been saved, had he received treatment, though the extent of brain damage could not be estimated.
What Deck did not say was that a meat cleaver, picked up by police in the kitchenette of the Zhao apartment, was, in fact, the murder weapon. Nor did he state conclusively that all 14 abrasions were caused by the same instrument.
The fatal blow, he said, was as likely to have been delivered with an axe or a machete as with the meat cleaver, which had no blood or other evidence on it to identify it as the murder weapon.
"There is no identifiable characteristic of these injuries that tells me it must have been a meat cleaver that caused them," Deck said.
The pathologist was also unable to tell when Zhao had died or how long he had been lying in the snow. There was no sign of freezing on the body, though temperatures had hovered around freezing for several days.
Police spent scant time interviewing Zhao's father, with whom the son had had a tempestuous relationship at best. During the time frame police believed the murder occurred, the elder Zhao was inside the apartment.
There were other rumours about Zhao's secret life: That he was involved with organized crime through a some-time-job with a local Chinese laundry and that he was a gambler who had amassed substantial debts.
Indeed, the letter he wrote to Lu makes cryptic references to what seems to be a second "family."
"I already explained to the church whatever the family did I am not afraid of them. In Canada there is still a law. The church will help me solve the problem.
"To die is better than to live and wait and see which day accident will happen at work."
And there was a mysterious note, fashioned from a Chinese newspaper, warning Zhao to pay up or suffer the consequences. The note was found by Lu's lawyers in the pocket of the dead man's jacket almost two years after his death.
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