Blogtober 2023
“Joe Don” was Joseph Donwell Clarkton, head of the County Crime Lab. The youngest homicide detective in the history of the St. Louis Police Department, Clarkton met a country girl on a fishing trip to southeast Missouri. He and June were married a few months after they met, and Poplar Bluff got their first CSI lab years before anyone could spell “DNA.”
Clarkton retired from the city force, and before his first pension check arrived, joined the Sheriff’s Department and re-created his world-renowned crime lab in the basement of an old storage building. His colleagues only called him Joe Don—June’s term of endearment for him—behind his back. Face-to-face, it was always “Detective Clarkton.”
The brown panel van, loaded up with equipment like the Ghostbusters, rolled on location. Clarkton, tall, thin, and wrinkled like a legendary gunslinger, stepped out and said, “Any of you turds fuck up my crime scene?”
“No, sir,” all three deputies said.
“Good,” Clarkton said. “Follow me and do what I say.”
Murphy led Clarkton along his original path, approaching the truck from the front. The detective snapped on a pair of latex gloves and handed duplicates to the other officers. He opened the driver’s door with his index finger.
“Murph, look at this,” Clarkton said. “What do you make of it?”
Tippen’s face looked like a wax dummy; his eyes were open and opaque.
“No color in his eyes,” Murphy said.
“Damn peculiar,” Clarkton said, “but not as bad as what’s in the back.”
Photo by Charity Petras on Unsplash
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