COVER STORY
Faking It
When an expert witness in a notorious Madison murder case turns out to be a fraud, does the man she helped convict deserve a new trial?

By Jason Shepard

Before her fall from fame and power, Sandra Anderson was a coveted tool for law enforcement across the country. At the pinnacle of her career, the Michigan-based Anderson claims to have participated in 200 cases a year in which she and her dog Eagle helped police investigators search for human bodies and blood evidence. Anderson's reputation grew from her unshakeable advocacy of her dog's ability to find evidence that even the most sophisticated crime lab analysts couldn't find.

"Eagle has no unsuccessful hits," Anderson confidently testified in the murder trial of Peter Kupaza, the Madison man who was convicted in June 2000 of killing and dismembering the body of his 25-year-old cousin, Mwivano Mwambashi Kupaza. After crime-lab experts uncovered only a small spot of blood inside the west Madison apartment where authorities believed the murder occurred, investigators invited Anderson and Eagle to help the investigation.

As the prosecutor, Sauk County Assistant District Attorney Kevin Calkins, later told the jury, Eagle "indicated" the presence of human blood all over Kupaza's bathroom: on the furthest wall from the door, to a baseboard, to the toilet, to the side of the tub's faucet, to the towel rack, to the floor mat, to the light switch, and inside the tub itself.

And Anderson herself gave a courtroom demonstration in which Eagle successfully distinguished between bags of human and animal blood. The dog, she testified, "has never indicated on something that's not human or proven to be otherwise."

There was no other reasonable conclusion to draw from Anderson's dramatic testimony but that Kupaza's bathroom once had blood all over it, even though this assertion could not be backed up by traditional forensic science. The testimony supported the prosecutors' belief that Mwivano's murder took place in the Pleasant View Road apartment on Madison's far west side. It was one of several pieces of evidence that led a jury to convict Kupaza, then 40, of murder and hiding a corpse. He is currently serving a life sentence, eligible for parole after 30 years.

But also in prison today is the star witness, Sandra Anderson. As she became a golden child of law enforcement, featured on TV's "Unsolved Mysteries" and searching for remains at Ground Zero, it turns out that she was a criminal herself.

Anderson is serving a 20-month prison term after admitting to planting evidence in seven separate criminal investigations. Her own mother has called her a "compulsive liar," according to news reports, after it was revealed that Anderson concocted a story about her mother's surgery in order to put off reporting to prison. In November, a judge castigated Anderson for lying to him and ordered her into custody, court records show.

The work of Sandra Anderson and the case of Peter Kupaza intersect in a way that raises profound questions about the integrity of our criminal-justice system. What happens when it's revealed that prosecutors have won a conviction by using possibly false evidence? Should it matter more that there is other circumstantial evidence that might have resulted in a conviction anyway? And which is more critical: Achieving finality or an untainted result?

Kupaza's conviction is now being reviewed in light of Anderson's conviction by the Fourth District Wisconsin Court of Appeals. The trial judge, James Evenson of Sauk County, has denied two requests for a new trial, one filed before Anderson's conviction and one after. The latest appeal, by Madison attorney David Karpe, argues that Kupaza's public defenders were ineffective in not challenging Anderson's testimony with other expert witnesses, and that Anderson's conviction constitutes important new evidence that requires a new trial.

Briefs are to be filed in the next several weeks. The court could issue a decision within months, but an earlier ruling suggests it is not eager to reopen the case.

Rhoda Ricciardi, one of Kupaza's two original public defense attorneys, says Anderson's conviction validates her original belief that Anderson was nothing more than "fanatic" who should never have been allowed to testify about evidence that scientists couldn't substantiate. She professes her belief that Kupaza is innocent, and that Anderson's testimony led the jury to the wrong verdict.

"Sandra Anderson viewed her job to be solving these big crimes for law enforcement when they couldn't solve them themselves, and she could say anything she wanted to about what her dog was finding," says Ricciardi, now a public defender in Madison. "And I think that was pretty evident in this trial."

Corrupt Individual
Scientific evidence has, in recent years, played a growing role in police investigations, and crime scene investigators and expert forensics witnesses are a staple of modern murder trials. Juries tend to give great deference to expert witnesses who claim the mantel of science.

But, as the Anderson case shows, what's regarded as science -- and who's a scientist -- is not as clear as it once was. Those who interpret scientific evidence are not as foolproof as they may seem. Indeed, a single corrupt individual can manipulate criminal investigations with remarkable ease.

Court records reveal a long history of misconduct by Anderson that reaches murder investigations and court trials across the country. In seven different cases from 2000 to 2002 -- both before and after her important testimony in the Kupaza trial -- Anderson was proven to have faked evidence.

"Ms. Anderson's activities over a period of years involved the planting of evidence at homicide scenes," Paige Fitzgerald, a Justice Department attorney, said at Anderson's sentencing, according to transcripts. "The gravity of that can scarcely be overstated."

The Kupaza case was not the only area murder mystery in which Anderson played a role. She was also brought to Dane County in July 2001 to help search for Beth Kutz, who disappeared 12 months before. In a scenario eerily similar to those for which she was later convicted (see sidebar, below), Anderson and Eagle expertly found a human bone in a gravel pit. It was immediately deemed to be a very old bone, not Kutz's, and its discovery -- while proving anew Eagle's adeptness -- played no role in the case. (Kutz's body was never found; her estranged husband was later convicted of the murder.)

In January 2000, six months before her testimony in the Kupaza case, Anderson searched the home of a murder suspect in Plymouth, Michigan. There she and Eagle discovered a bloody saw behind a dryer in the basement. It was determined that the blood did not belong to the suspect or the victim. But two years later, after Anderson was under investigation, DNA tests revealed that the blood belonged to Anderson. In her plea agreement, Anderson admitted that she bloodied the saw herself.

A judge has ordered a new trial for the man convicted of murder, saying "the inflammatory and persuasive nature of the falsified evidence was so offensive to the maintenance of a sound judicial process, that regardless of the outcome of the case, it should not be allowed to stand."

Anderson's unraveling began in April 2002, when a police investigator saw her pull a bone out of her boot and then claim to have found potential evidence in a search in the Huron National Forest near Oscoda, Michigan. The U.S. Justice Department launched an investigation, which widened after investigators found at several points that Anderson was lying to them.

But now, as far as the government is concerned, the case of Sandra Anderson is closed. She accepted a plea deal after several rounds of meetings in which she continued to lie to investigators, and is now serving her 20 months in a prison in Alderson, West Virginia. She originally faced up to 30 years in prison.

A clause in the plea agreement states the U.S. government "will not bring any further charges" against Anderson related to her work with law enforcement. It also calls on the Department of Justice to discourage any state or local agency from pursuing their own charges against Anderson. According to news reports from Detroit, some of the records in the Anderson case were sealed by a federal judge.

Missing person
The murder of Mwivano Mwambashi Kupaza, a 25-year-old Tanzanian student, stands among the Madison area's most gruesome and sensational crimes. From a headless torso washing up on the shores of a river 30 miles away, to the first-ever use of high-tech computer reconstruction techniques to identify the victim, to witnesses being flown from Tanzania to the small town of Baraboo, the murder and subsequent investigation were unlike any other in Wisconsin.

It was almost the perfect crime: a nearly anonymous victim from a foreign country whose mutilated remains left precious few connections to her identity or the killer's. The sheriff of Sauk County, where the body parts were found, called the case "almost impossible" to solve.

Mwivano Mwambashi Kupaza was 22 years old when she came to Madison in 1997, leaving behind a rural village in Tanzania. She set out to learn the language, enrolling in classes at the Wisconsin English as a Second Language Institute on the Capitol Square. She lived with her older cousin, Peter Kupaza. The pair moved frequently, because of problems paying the rent. They lived for a time at the Dayton Square apartments on the isthmus, then moved to a home in Mt. Horeb, and eventually landed at the apartment on Pleasant View Road.

According to the case put together by police, Peter was abusive toward Mwivano and others. His wife left him, and soon filed for divorce. Peter allegedly impregnated Mwivano through rape, then forced her to get an abortion at the Madison Abortion Clinic. In the spring or early summer of 1999, as bills began to mount and amid fears that Mwivano might tell her family about the rape, Peter murdered Mwivano, investigators said.

Peter Kupaza then allegedly cut apart his cousin's body, with almost surgical precision, in the bathroom of the apartment. Prosecutors said he wrapped the body parts in Woodman's grocery bags and dumped them into the Wisconsin River near a bridge along Highway 14. To explain Mwivano's sudden disappearance, Peter purportedly told friends that she had returned to Tanzania, while telling her Tanzanian relatives she was doing fine in Madison.

On a summer day at the end of July 1999, a mother and her three children were swimming in the river at Peck's Landing in Sauk County when they stumbled on a gruesome bag of body parts. Over two days, investigators found more body parts nearby.

For months, detectives poured through missing persons reports. Investigators created a composite sketch of the victim using computer techniques with the help of the Milwaukee School of Engineering and a forensic anthropologist in Kentucky. A critical tip in January 2000, later traced to Kupaza's ex-wife after she saw the computer sketches, led police to identify the remains.

Once police knew Mwivano's identity, they questioned Peter Kupaza at his Madison apartment. Detectives arrested him following an interview which prosecutors said contained "one lie after another," including Peter's claim to have spoken to Mwinvano's father in Tanzania and been assured she had arrived safely home. The father told police no such call occurred.

In the months leading up to the trial, investigators compiled several pieces of circumstantial evidence, but their case was far from solid. A judge ruled that evidence of Mwinvano's rape and abortion could not be introduced at trial. The coroner couldn't rule on the manner of death because of the decomposed state of the body. Two searches of Peter's apartment turned up some evidence, including a small quarter-inch spot of blood behind a baseboard in the bathroom. DNA tests confirmed the blood was Mwivano's.

Then, a captain at the Sauk County Sheriff's Office was told by two Madison police officers about a powerful tool that turned up evidence in other cases -- a dog that could identify the presence of human remains unseen by the naked eye. Anderson and Eagle were flown to Madison and taken to Peter Kupaza's apartment on Feb. 15, 2000.

Blood everywhere
In hindsight, there were signs of Anderson's instability. She refused to provide advance copies of her training logs to defense attorneys, and in an intense one-hour session of questioning outside of the presence of the jury, she admitted she had no college degree, and that many of the awards she'd won were actually granted by an organization she created. She also was flummoxed when asked to explain the scientific method, and said she relied on the press, rather than her own records, to keep track of her cases.

"I was even more shocked after this hour-long questioning that the judge allowed this testimony to be admitted," says Ricciardi, whose objections to Anderson's testimony were overruled.

Still, Anderson proved to be a formidable witness, unflappable in her insistence that Eagle had detected traces of blood all over Kupaza's bathroom and on several items in the apartment, including kitchen knives, a mop and doorknobs. (Eagle also indicated blood on the trunk of Kupaza's car, although the judge ruled the jury could not hear that evidence.)

"The picture was painted for the jury that this apartment was covered with blood, that that bathroom was covered in blood," says Ricciardi. The fact that the crime lab was only able to find a tiny speck of blood using Luminol -- a chemical that finds traces of blood unseen by the human eye -- was lost to the jury, given the dog evidence.

But it was not lost on Ricciardi. "Our experts told us that if there was once blood all over that bathroom, it would be lighting up like Times Square when they Luminoled it, and that didn't happen," she says. "The crime lab tried to verify this stuff. The dog supposedly hit on the mop. They found nothing on the mop. The dog hit on the cutting board and knives. The crime lab couldn't find any blood. The dog hit on the boots. No blood was found. Anywhere she said that dog indicated, they could not back up with scientific evidence."

Ricciardi says that when she visited the apartment after Peter Kupaza's arrest, she was taken aback at how small it was, including the bathroom. And yet the only blood found was the quarter-inch spot behind the baseboard, for which there are many possible explanations. If indeed the "gruesome disarticulation" of the sort the prosecution alleged really did occur there, she says, "you wouldn't be finding just one spot. There would be God knows how much blood behind there." Exactly as Anderson attested.

Other evidence, mostly circumstantial, did point to Kupaza as the killer. Besides the inconsistencies in Kupaza's statements, police found Mwivano's fingerprint on an envelope postmarked two months after Peter Kupaza said he last saw her. And a black duffle bag containing some of the body parts was the same type of bag Peter Kupaza's ex-wife bought for him. Police also suggested that Kupaza learned how to dismember a body during his childhood, in which he butchered animals.

The evidence was such that even Peter and Mwivano's family members, who were flown from Tanzania for the trial, believed in Peter's guilt. At the sentencing hearing, Raphael Mwambashi, Peter's uncle, called upon Peter to "humbly ask for forgiveness."

True believers
The case of Sandra Anderson highlights both the best and worst aspects of law-enforcement. It shows the system's willingness to prosecute one of its own, but also its reluctance to revisit past cases. There is logic to that; the courts are set up to bring finality to questions of guilt or innocence. And if the threshold of proof required to convict a person of murder is high, the threshold required to overturn a conviction is higher still.

Even if Anderson fabricated her claims regarding blood evidence in the Kupaza case, that doesn't mean he's innocent, or even that he's entitled to a new trial. The Wisconsin Court of Appeals has already once denied one such request, in April 2003, after questions about Anderson came to light but before she was convicted.

The defense in that appeal advanced two main arguments: There was insufficient evidence for a conviction, and the dog-sniffing evidence should not have been allowed. The three-judge court acknowledged the suspect dog testimony "appears to have been significant evidence" in the jury's verdict. But it also found "there was a "preponderance of evidence that would have convicted Peter Kupaza, even without Sandra Anderson and Eagle."

Some of the police officers in the case go further, arguing that, despite what is known about Anderson's treachery in other cases, her work in the Kupaza case was sound. Liz Feagles, a special agent with the state Division of Criminal Investigation, who supervised Anderson's work in the case, says she wishes that Eagle, who died last year, could have been cloned.

"I have no idea what caused [Anderson] to self-destruct as she did, but I had complete confidence in her dog, Eagle," says Feagles via e-mail. "I also have complete confidence in our investigation of the death of Mwivano Kupaza." Beyond that, Feagles declines to answer questions about Anderson's involvement in the Kupaza investigation, saying the appellate court ruling rendered them "moot."

Patricia Barrett, the Sauk County district attorney, says she won't comment on Anderson's involvement while the second court appeal is pending. But she appeared on the CBS program "48 Hours" in March 2004, after it was widely reported that Anderson was under investigation, and said she still believed in Eagle's "indications." More incredibly, Madison Police Officer Bill Murphy told the show he still had great faith in Anderson and trusted her to be used in future searches and in trials.

Not all those in law enforcement stick by Anderson's work. During Anderson's sentencing hearing in Michigan, Justice Department attorney Fitzgerald said her office had reviewed about 50 cases in which Anderson helped law enforcement and found "no case" in which evidence located by Anderson was independently verified as being related to the crime scene at issue. "While a number of those cases could not be directly linked to Ms. Anderson planting the evidence, none of these cases were of value to law enforcement, not one."

In his new motion, now before the appellate court, Madison attorney Karpe says Kupaza's attorneys should have introduced experts to attack Anderson's credibility and her statement that Eagle "had been successful 100% of the time." Karpe also argues that Anderson's plea agreement and sentencing transcript provide new evidence that justifies a new trial, calling it "reasonably probable that...a different result would be reached at a new trial" if the dog evidence were excluded.

Ricciardi, for her part, says any sense of vindication she feels to have Anderson exposed rings hollow if it doesn't result in a new trial. She still believes in Kupaza's innocence, and is tormented by the thought that she did not get do enough to prove it in a court of law.

"In retrospect, I wish I had been more prepared for her testimony," she says. "Had I thought for a moment that this unreliable, completely incredible evidence was coming in against our client, I would have prepared more. And that will haunt me for the rest of my life."

Sidebar:
Liar Liar
Anderson left long trail of deceit

In the 29-page plea agreement signed by Sandra Anderson and the U.S. Department of Justice, Anderson acknowledges planting evidence in seven cases:

Jan. 7, 2000 - While searching the basement of a homicide suspect's home in Plymouth, Mich., Anderson planted a saw with her bodily fluid on it behind the dryer, then alerted officers that her dog was indicating there. The blood on the saw was later matched by DNA to Anderson.

Oct. 24, 2000 - Anderson placed a bone fragment on the grounds of a business in Bay City, Michigan, during a search for human remains. A bone fragment at Anderson's home and three bone fragments from this search scene were physically matched.

May, 2, 2001 - During a search of a field in Monroe County, Michigan, Anderson alerted authorities to coins that had blood on them. DNA tests verified the blood belonged to Anderson.

Jan. 4, 2002 - During a search of the Proud Lake Recreation Center in Oakland County, Michigan, for evidence in a homicide, Anderson planted a bone in the dirt and later tried to convince a person to falsify a written report about the finding.

Feb. 27, 2002 -While searching for evidence in a murder in Lindsey, Ohio, Eagle found a cloth gauze with some blood in it. The blood was later matched to Anderson.

April 9, 2002 - In a search of Bad Creek in Delta, Ohio, Anderson and Eagle found a human toe in mud from the creek. The toe was later found to match body parts that Anderson had received from a friend, a fire captain.

April 17, 2002 - While searching the Huron National Forest in Michigan for remains of woman who disappeared in 1980s, Anderson directed law enforcement officers to a small piece of carpet in a pile of debris. The carpet fiber was later matched to fiber in Anderson's home "and the pocket of the jeans she was wearing during the search."