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MURDERED BY OKLAHOMA

KEN TRENTADUE

Ken and Carmen Trentadue

21 Aug 1995 Oklahoma City, OK

Kenneth Michael Trentadue is beaten to death in his cell at the Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center, where he is incarcerated for a minor parole violation. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons tells his family that he hanged himself, but upon inspection at the funeral, they discover injuries over his entire body.

Since August 21, 1995, Salt Lake City trial lawyer Jesse Trentadue has led a small, relentless crusade against Janet Reno, the FBI and the United States Department of Justice.

The quest is a family affair, and includes Trentadue's aging mother who has handed out T-shirts on the steps of "Main Justice" in Washington, D.C. For four years now, the family has doggedly searched for the truth about how family member Kenneth Trentadue died while in federal custody. And now smoke blowing in from the direction of Waco, Texas, where dozens of people met their death in a standoff with Reno and the FBI, may spell more trouble for embattled Attorney General Reno and her FBI director, Louis Freeh.

For the Trentadue family, their personal nightmare began in the early morning hours of August 21, 1995, shortly after prison guards claimed to have found the body of Kenneth Michael Trentadue hanging in a suicide proof cell in the new "Federal Transportation Center" in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

Kenneth Trentadue had been returned to federal custody there for a "parole violation" hearing. According to family members who had contact with him hours before he died, he was positive and upbeat about his chances for an early return home.

Originally locked up for a bungled bank robbery, Trentadue was a model prisoner while in custody. A slip-up had resulted in his return to jail, but family members say he had made important changes in his life and had prospects for a good future.

"He left a wife and new baby behind," says older brother Jesse. The family describes Kenneth as a peaceful person, unless you pushed him into a corner. "He was not the kind of man to back down from a fight," says older brother Jesse.

A recent twist in the Trentadue case coupled with newly discovered evidence in the Branch Davidian cases, may well set the stage for explosive confrontations in both the halls of Congress and federal courtrooms in October of this year. While Congress prepares to peel back layers of FBI secrets, families of the dead victims will be in federal court seeking once and for all to learn what the Justice Department and the FBI are doing in secret behind their closed doors.

In the Trentadue case, older brother Jesse Trentadue says that from the very beginning, Justice Department lawyers have lied about the existence of critical evidence, including death scene pictures. Federal officials finally admitted that photos existed only after a number of them were leaked to a writer for GQ Magazine, Mary Fischer.

Though they admitted photos existed, Justice then they claimed they couldn't find the negatives of the 35-millimeter snapshots taken of Cell 709A where several prison guards have testified Trentadue's body was found hanging at 3 AM on August 21, 1995.

Early-on, a literal "swearing contest" erupted between the prison guard who took the pictures, and the FBI Special Agent he swore under oath he gave them to. The agent testified that he never received them. After several years, the negatives mysteriously reappeared in the Oklahoma City's FBI field office where another Special Agent, Tommy Linn, says he found them in a stack of pictures of the Oklahoma City's paramilitary FBI "SWAT" team.

The prison guard, Kenneth Freeman, has testified he used two different cameras to film the cell at different times that morning.

In a deposition, Freeman said he took one set early in the morning of August 21, 1995, before sunrise. Later that morning he went back with his assistant Serena Israel and took more pictures. In his testimony Freeman admitted "rearranging" several items of evidence: a plastic knife and two plastic toothpaste tubes. Freeman said he posed the evidence to better photograph the items.

The government now claims Trentadue used the plastic items to inflict deep gashes in the right side of his neck before he supposedly fabricated a noose from bed sheets and hanged himself in a cell which the architect who designed it says is "suicide proof."

Earlier this year, Trentadue lawyers filed papers with the federal court in Oklahoma City refuting the conclusions of experts hired by the Justice Department to help defend it in the civil suit. Former Oklahoma City police captain, and self-styled "blood spatter expert" Tom Bevel maintains that Trentadue viciously beat himself to a bloody pulp and then hung himself. Other experts, including Rudy Riet, and a Chicago homicide investigator disagree.

The House Judiciary Committee had previously assigned a veteran homicide investigator, on loan from the Chicago Police Department, to investigate the Trentadue case. The detective, in a telephone interview, said that Trentadue "was clearly murdered." The investigation was derailed by the Clinton-Lewinsky matter and never taken back up by the House committee.

It is a complex case to investigate. The alleged death scene, Cell 709A, was completely "sanitized" shortly after 7 AM on August 21, 1995, after Oklahoma State Medical Examiner staff were denied access to it. A "crime scene" investigation was never accomplished on the cell and all sides to the controversy agree that critical evidence was lost because of that. Since the scene was never properly documented and vital evidence lost or destroyed, the government and the Trentadue family have been at war over what the remaining evidence actually proves.

And since the government is in control of virtually all the physical evidence in the case, the Trentadue family has had to fight lengthy battles to gain even limited access to the evidence. And when they do get access, inevitably it causes problems for the U.S. government.

A person close to the Trentadue case said that one such problem the government will soon face is in the nature of explaining how the strips of sheet that supposedly formed a noose were "cut" into strips with either scissors or a knife. Bureau of Prisons records indicate that Trentadue was held in the most secure part of the facility. He was supposedly alone in a cell where there were no sharp objects, certainly no scissors or knives.

A motion filed by the family revealed that forensic analysis of the sheet strips, a number of which are still missing, precludes their having been ripped by hand and confirms that they were cut.

If sheets are a problem, the photos are a nightmare for the government. In May, 1999, the government finally produced a set of twenty-nine glossy enlargements of what they claim is the only roll of film ever shot at the scene. The Justice Department stands on that claim despite the fact that government lawyers had previously produced two separate "photo logs," and even the photographer, Freeman, says otherwise.

"When we began to analyze the photos," said Trentadue, "we thought they had been faked." Beside the 35-millimeter photos, the government also produced a series of eight Polaroid pictures.

An experienced trial lawyer, Trentadue says he was immediately suspicious when he was told the negatives could not be examined by Trentadue family lawyers and their experts. Agents and lawyers from the Justice Department's Office of Inspector showed Trentadue and his attorneys strips of negatives they claimed constituted "a roll." When they handed over the prints, they also produced several volumes of CD ROM's which supposedly contain digitized copies of the negatives. The attorneys for Trentadue werre never allowed to touch the negatives or closely examine them.

Despite that, a photographic expert presently employed by the U.S. Navy as an image analyst, says the attempt by the FBI to fake the pictures is "an amateurish result produced by professionals."

The pictures are a gory collection that begins with a sheet of paper with a handwritten date on it. What follows are pictures of Kenneth Trentadue's body, covered with blood. His knuckles are bruised. Huge patches of scalp are bloodied. Government officials claim it's the result of him beating himself. His neck bears a long gash on the right side. After the gruesome pictures shot in the prison hospital, the scene switches to the cell where it is claimed he first beat then hung himself. The cell has puddles of blood on the floor. A bloody noose is tied at an impossible height off the floor to a grate that has not a single drop of blood on it.

The analyst, speaking on condition of anonymity, examined the original prints at the request of Arkansas Chronicle on his off-hours. After nearly two months of comparing the prints, the digitized CD-ROMs, the testimony of the witnesses and the actual photo logs, the expert eventually unraveled and explained the faked photos.

He said his first resource was the Navy's own Naval Observatory. The observatory keeps incredibly accurate records of sunrise times for every place on earth. That includes Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on the morning of August 21, 1995.

According to the National Weather Service, the weather was clear with a thin haze in the air at sunrise, August 21, 1995. But, if the government's negatives are to be believed, the sun rose and set at least twice that morning at the Oklahoma City airport. If it did, nobody seemed to notice it.

"The sequence of exposure of the pictures is tracked by 'frame numbers' that appear on the edge of the film. Even after the negatives are cut into strips and placed in plastic sleeves, you can always tell which order they were shot in by looking at the frame number just beneath the actual image," said the Navy analyst. "Those frame numbers are put on the film by the manufacturer, not the camera."

It is this "image sequence" that creates the most problems for the Justice Department. When you take the pictures, in the sequence that the government claims they are on the roll and compare it to the testimony, and, to other pictures on the same roll, the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the government defense to a murder case becomes shockingly apparent.

According to the negatives, the sun had risen an hour early, just in time for prison guard Freeman to take his first picture of the cell. His camera, a Minolta with a built-in flash, failed to flash on the first shot in the cell. And through the vertical slit window at the back of the cell, you can see daylight, trees and grass. "Another picture after that one shows a clearly illuminated outdoor scene," said the expert. "Somehow, the sun set again. Additional pictures, but with higher frame numbers, show total darkness outside the very same window. There's just no way the sun was going up and down. It's the pictures that are all wrong."

Pressed for an explanation as to how such images could be faked, the image expert explained. He described the process whereby a computer with two "peripherals," a negative scanner and a film output printer were used to fabricate a roll of film that appears to be "original," but really isn't.

"What someone obviously has done is this: they had the two rolls of film all along. And I would guess that there is surely something on one or both of those rolls they don't want anyone to see. So, they simply used a common computer tool, a 'negative scanner,' to import the negative images into a graphics program.

"Once they have scanned in the images they can electronically reassemble them into any sequence they want to. The original sequence of pictures can be shuffled just like a deck of cards. Picture number one can become number eight, and so on. The images can also be electronically altered, special effects filters used, and information added or subtracted.

"Once the original negative is scanned in, the sky's the limit with a skilled operator, and there are a bunch out there. But whoever did this job got into trouble when the 'reassembled' the faked roll and forgot to take into consideration the incredible documentation that exists on paper about who took which pictures and when they took them. That's why they have some of the pictures out of sequence with daylight where darkness should be, and vice-versa.

"After they had the fake roll assembled they merely issued a command to 'print' the images to a new roll of film. There are printers that you can hook to your computer, even at home, and create a whole new roll of film. The printer created a 'perfect' roll of film that was conventionally processed using what is known as a 'C-41' process. The negatives were then cut into strips and placed into the plastic sleeves just like the originals," explained the imagery expert. "You could take the bogus roll to the local Moto-Foto and have them developed and printed, and nobody would be the wiser," he added.

Government lawyers also produced the faked negatives for copying onto CD-ROM's. The analyst said that there are tell-tale "artifacts" on the digital imagery that further confirms the negatives are "second generation," but would not offer specific details on the methodology used to identify the fake photos. Arkansas Chronicle was able to obtain a set of the CD-ROMs and have them analyzed at the same time as the prints were analyzed.

The analyst said that the most damning piece of evidence is that one of the pictures released earlier by government lawyers somehow does not appear on the "roll" that the FBI produced. "It's sort of an obscure shot. But the point is, the picture is not on the roll of their negatives, and without question, it was indeed shot between two frames that I can absolutely identify on the roll they released." Other evidence suggests, he said, that the roll they produced was in fact shot from two different cameras with "two different lens systems."

"There is strong evidence to support a claim that several of the pictures were altered, and, in once case, some photos were electronically cropped to make it appear that one photo was in fact two different photos. The cycle time of a Minolta camera, such as the one they used is too slow to create to images that are otherwise so completely similar in intricate detail," said the analyst. "My opinion is that they had a quota to fill . . . somebody said, 'here, fill up this roll with pictures and don't use any of these shots to do it.' So they left some pictures out, got many of the real pictures out of sequence, and then doubled up on some of the pictures which were safe to use in order to try to make up a full roll. The big problem is that the sequences are all wrong and they don't coincide with the photo logs and they don't have any relation to the light conditions outside the window of the prison cell."

One polaroid picture, supposedly shot at 4:30 a.m., has a picture of part of a watch band on the hand of a man who has testified under oath that he didn't come to work until at least 6:30 a.m. that date.

"I suppose that's why they have refused to let us have them tested by an independent lab," said Trentadue.

"Since the case record would indicate that the FBI had custody of these negatives for several years," said the imagery expert, "that's where I would be looking in terms of identifying who manipulated this imagery. It took really expensive equipment to produce these fakes and not a lot of people have it."

Contacted again shortly before press time, the expert would neither confirm nor deny that he is one of two imagery experts now examining video tape of aerial FBI infrared photography from Waco for a U.S. Congressional committee headed by Rep. Dan Burton.

According to court records in the Trentadue case, the Department of Justice's Office of Inspector General has indeed been investigating Bureau of Prisons and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents for complicity in criminal misconduct in the Trentadue case.

It was in the process of having the pictures and CD-ROM's examined that a chilling allegation surfaced about the capabilities of the FBI's lab, especially its ability to alter physical evidence such as photographs, video and audio tape.

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