Wanted: Woman to put head in toilet to prove homicide case theory
Sheboygan Press staff • April 13, 2009
If you are a female about 5 foot 8, 140 pounds and willing to stick your head in a toilet, a northern Wisconsin prosecutor wants your help in a homicide case.
Vilas County Dist. Atty. Al Moustakis plans to recruit volunteers for a second round of controversial tests designed to prove that a woman was drowned by her husband in a toilet — and didn’t commit suicide as he claims.
The experiments involve positioning women the size of the late Genell Plude of Land O’ Lakes around a toilet to determine whether the version of events told by her husband, Douglas Plude, is plausible. Defense lawyers say it’s laughable junk science.
Plude, 42, was convicted of first-degree intentional homicide in 2002. But the state Supreme Court flushed the conviction last year after learning an expert witness who conducted the first round of toilet tests exaggerated his credentials. Plude is expected to be tried for the homicide a second time in October.
Prosecutors contend Plude murdered his 28-year-old wife because she was about to leave him. They say he poisoned her with a migraine headache drug and pushed her face into the toilet to drown her while she vomited.
Plude says that she was depressed, committed suicide by taking the pills on her own and then drowned after her lungs filled with toilet water and/or her own body fluid.
Prosecutors called on expert witness Saami Shaibani to shoot down Plude’s story at the first trial.
Shaibani said that, based on his tests involving volunteers he positioned around a toilet, Plude had to be lying about the positions he claimed he found her in. Genell Plude also could not have inhaled toilet water on her own and someone must have forced her head under the water, he testified.
But defense lawyers from across the country have derided the tests and call them an example of unfair expert testimony.
The state Supreme Court ordered Plude a new trial last June after discovering Shaibani lied about being a clinical associate professor at Temple University who taught physicians and surgeons there about injuries.
Moustakis has hired Christopher Damm of the Milwaukee School of Engineering to do a second round of tests. Judge Neal Nielsen III last month granted his request to allow the testing of the toilet and a floor display of the bathroom in the court’s custody.
Damm, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, said he is a consultant in accident reconstruction and has testified in civil cases but this would be his first criminal case.
