I continued to perform my immediate tasks, which were to take a Polaroid of the deceased woman, and to have the husband sign the Polaroid print and ID form as a positive identification, but I functioned on autopilot. My mind was reeling, trying to imagine the life that this interracial couple must have led in Harlem since the 1920s. In the kitchen, the husband could see the mistake from the look on my face. I had assumed that since the elderly husband sitting in the kitchen was black, his wife must be, and the evidence had proved me wrong. I had even filled out the ID form, while talking with him earlier, inking in her race as black. From his gentle smile as he watched me finish my forms and correct his wife’s race, I think he understood that my surprise wasn’t at the existence of an interracial couple in Harlem, as there are many such today. He knew that I had assumed, given their age, that she would also be black. He never said a word about my mistake, but I was so embarrassed that I could not summon the courage to ask him about what surely must have been an extraordinary life.
After that vivid lesson on the power of assumption, I strove always to guard against it, attempting to assume nothing when I entered a death scene, so as not to prejudice what I might find. Learning to interact with families, avoid the pitfalls of assumption, and keep my mind open to consideration of all possibilities—these were skills that I could control, abilities that I would come to carry with me into every death scene.
One of the biggest problems that has the potential to disturb a death scene is the human element, which neither the OCME nor an MLI can control. By the time an MLI arrives on a death scene, two or three sets of people have usually been there already: some combination of family-friends-neighbors (who have found the body), the police, and EMS. Although the OCME has primary responsibility for collecting evidence about the death, the presence of these groups on the scene often causes difficulties for us.
On television shows like CSI, the viewer watches as the stars arrive at a crime scene to find robust perimeters all set up. No one has disturbed anything. Witnesses sequestered off to the side are ready and eager to spill their guts and all of the resources that the investigators will need to conduct masterful feats of forensic heroics are right at hand.
Real crime scenes aren’t so neat.
One of the most difficult tasks that the authorities have to do at a crime scene is preserve its “sanctity” or integrity. Sounds easy, but it’s actually quite difficult. In a perfect world, no one other than those directly responsible for investigating the crime would be allowed access to the scene. In reality, protection of the scene is a complicated process, and crime scene perimeters are notoriously leaky.
In New York City, the police usually establish several checkpoints around a homicide scene. There is an outer perimeter (the classic yellow tape we are so familiar with), a handful of intermediate ones, and finally the inner sanctum that is right around the body itself. The duty of guarding these checkpoints usually falls to rookie uniformed officers who may be very effective at keeping out the general public, but who will be hard-pressed to prevent their police bosses from entering. And so generally, at any given homicide, a parade of sightseeing NYPD brass and their acolytes traipse through the scene, usually for no other purpose than to satisfy their curiosity. While professionals such as the crime scene unit and the squad detectives who must try to solve the case have long viewed the permeability of crime scene perimeters as a joke, a basic problem with crime scene contamination begins even before the police perimeters are set up.
To be fair, there really is no such thing as a pristine crime scene. The German philosopher Heisenberg’s famous observation about the physical universe—that you can’t observe something without affecting it—applies in spades to crime scenes. In the real world, crime scenes are, more often then not, very messy places because by the time a perimeter has been set up, all sorts of people have tramped through it—EMS, police officers, the fire department, friends, relatives, neighbors, and even the occasional pizza deliveryman.
At times the contamination of the crime scene by first responders has gotten so bad that EMS came to be referred to around the ME’s office as the “Evidence Mangling Service,” and its workers, the EMTs, as the “Evidence Mangling Technicians.” The service and its workers earned these monikers because of the tendency of EMTs to rush to do CPR and in other ways disturb death scenes even when that is clearly unnecessary. Though many EMTs feel it is their duty to pronounce a person officially deceased, in New York State there is no law requiring a pronouncement ceremony—and in reality, the EMT who lunges toward the body muttering, “I gotta pronounce, I gotta pronounce,” often disturbs vital information at the scene. It is quite enough for him to take note of the fatal injuries and indicate the time when the decedent was found.
Regardless of EMT presence, someone is always there before we are because it is only after a person is dead that the ME’s office is called. Despite this seemingly logical rule, one memorable “death” scene belied the OCME maxim, “If it ain’t dead, don’t call us.” In this case, we were summoned to an apartment in Brooklyn in which a young woman had apparently killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills. Emergency medical services had been there, pronounced her very dead, and left the scene. The ME’s investigator arrived a few hours later and began to examine the body. Something bothered him, but it took a few moments for him to realize that the body was too warm and relaxed to have been dead for so many hours. He had a stethoscope with him—although it’s not part of our usual equipment—and used it to listen to her chest. To his amazement, he could hear a very faint and very slow heartbeat. Emergency medical services was called back to the scene and the woman was rushed to the hospital, where she eventually recovered from her suicide attempt. In classic New York–style chutzpah, after regaining her health, she sued the city because EMS had misdiagnosed her as dead—and won.
Frequently, when we arrive at death scenes, if EMS has been there before us, we find that forensic evidence has been disturbed. Here’s why: it all starts with the phone call. If someone finds a relative, a friend, or a neighbor unresponsive, and calls 911, emergency dispatch must send EMS, even if the caller has assured the dispatcher that the person is dead and has died of natural causes. The 911 dispatcher will not take the caller’s word for it, and will send the police and EMS just in case there is a chance the unresponsive person might still be alive and could be helped by emergency treatment. In the lingo of 911 operators, these calls are known as “person down,” and a person-down designation provokes the highest level of EMS response, a Code Three. So even if the caller describes the body as bloated, smelly, maggot-ridden, and otherwise thoroughly dead, dispatch is still going to send EMS and the police careening to the location with lights flashing and sirens wailing.
Emergency medical technicians do receive a little bit of training on preservation of evidence, but while many EMTs rotate through our office for a few days during their schooling, EMTs in the field often fail to recognize the importance of preserving forensic evidence. To be fair, the duration of the EMT training program is measured in hours, not years, and as a result I’ve always cut newer EMTs some slack. Veterans, however, should learn from experience how to preserve forensic evidence and a death scene. Much to the detriment of many cases, I’ve encountered far too many instances of “sightseeing”—EMTs coming into a scene in which the person is long dead, and nevertheless touching this, moving that, and generally acting like tourists. I have been at death scenes where EMTs have walked through pooled blood, disturbed blood splatter, and left their fingerprints on walls—even when the body was obviously decomposed. In the worst example of this interference that I personally encountered, an EMT cut off a bloody shirt to gain access to the body and try to resuscitate the victim, only to put the shirt in a biohazard bag. This particular EMT then went on to throw the shirt away because it had blood on it, an act that destroyed potential evidence.
Despite this bone that I am picking, I have a great deal of respect for EMS an
d its wonderful medical staff. There is no doubt that quick response and hard work by emergency technicians save lives every day. Most of the police and EMS personnel that I’ve worked with over the years mean well, and by and large do a great job. Nevertheless, this does not give EMS or anyone else in a position of authority a blank check to hang about a crime scene for no reason, behavior that could be construed as criminal tampering with evidence. Emergency medical technicians are not the only ones who are regularly guilty of this crime. Cops do it, too, mostly rookie patrol officers and neophyte detectives; but I have also been at a death scene in which the chief of detectives decided to go through the pants of a dead man, pants that were hanging over a chair, before I’d had a chance to properly investigate the scene for the ME’s office. Since OCME was responsible for making the identification of the bodies, an understanding of proper legal procedure should have mandated that the chief leave things untouched until I’d finished with them.
We MLIs work closely with the men and women of the NYPD, and often with many of the rookies, since one of the traditional jobs given to rookies is “sitting on a DOA,” or, in non-cop parlance, waiting with a dead body until the ME’s office has arrived and examined and released the body to the family, or until the morgue transportation has arrived and taken the body in for autopsy. We MLIs do our share of teaching these rookies, and not always in the classroom.
The really fresh rookies, just out of the police academy, are easy to spot, as they still display a puppylike eagerness to please. Their uniforms are perfectly creased and starched because they haven’t yet been dry-cleaned, and their gun belts are so new that they are shiny and stiff, creaking when the rookies move around. Many of these fine young men and women are clearly nervous around dead bodies, and the more decomposed the body is, the harder it is for me to resist getting them involved. First I tell them—truthfully—that they must remain in the room with me while I examine the body. (This is actual protocol to protect us both in case there are later allegations that valuables are missing from the death scene.) Once I get the rookie into the room, it’s awfully hard to resist saying, “Hey, come here and help me turn over this decomp.” That’s when they usually turn a few shades of green, and bolt. Over the years, I have seen some rookies vomit, and one or two nearly pass out, though most of them just grimly help me while looking like they would rather be anywhere else.
Every so often, I would come across a cop who displayed a surprisingly high level of comfort around dead people. I came to learn that there are quite a number of police officers who have been funeral directors, and even some who continue to moonlight as funeral directors, so when a rookie affected nonchalance at the scene of a spectacularly decomposed body, I was often able to correctly guess why. The NYPD is aware of the value of having cops who are also morticians and knows that they are made-to-order for assignment to the so-called ME squad, an NYPD Missing Persons detective unit permanently attached to OCME.
Though most rookies handle the realities of babysitting a DOA just fine, many find themselves lured in by any of the number of urban legends about cops and dead bodies. With childlike anticipation, the cops would often approach me while at death scenes to ask me about a frequently repeated urban legend concerning a rookie cop and a very dead body. The time is 3:00 A.M., and the rookie is all alone with the corpse, and getting more and more freaked out by that fact, when suddenly, due to rigor mortis, the body bolts upright into a sitting position. The completely terrified cop empties his service revolver into the body, making sure it stays dead.
While many who ask me about this tale would love to believe it, in truth it is nothing more than an urban myth. The key is a misunderstanding of rigor mortis (the literal English translation of the Latin phrase rigor mortis is “the stiffness of death”). It is a biochemical process that brings about the contraction of all the muscles of the body after death. Rigor doesn’t set in immediately, but rather over a period of hours the contraction process slowly engulfs the entire body until it is rigidly stiff. Rigor mortis generally takes around twelve hours to manifest fully. The stiffness persists for an additional twelve to twenty-four hours, and then dissipates over a further twelve hours, until the body once again becomes floppy.
The mechanism is a chemical one. During life, muscles contract when actin and myosin, fibers within the muscles, slide together. (The sliding motion of the fibers is akin to what happens when you move your two hands together, interlacing the fingers.) The fibers use calcium ions to form a bond that holds them together. At the same time, the live body is also producing the energy molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP). The body uses ATP to release the calcium that the fibers have gathered, by knocking the calcium ion out from in between the actin and myosin. This allows the muscle to relax. When a person dies, actin and myosin fibers continue to grab calcium and slide together, limited only by the availability of intracellular calcium. But since the dead body no longer makes ATP, the fibers cannot release their captured calcium and so the muscles are unable to relax. The result is rigor. Rigor mortis proceeds so slowly, though, that there is not nearly enough oomph in it to make a body sit up; over the course of twelve hours, the body slowly stiffens, freezing in the last position it held.
One question often asked is how rigor mortis eventually dissipates without the production of ATP. The answer lies in the fact that immediately after death, the body starts to decay and this structural deterioration of the muscle fibers slowly causes the calcium bonds to break down. This eventually allows actin and myosin fibers to fall free of one another. High-end steak houses tenderize prime cuts of beef by allowing but controlling this decomposition process, but the chefs more palatably call their process “aging” the beef.
Rigor mortis is just one of many changes occurring naturally in the body after death, changes that are of immense help to homicide investigators. It is through these changes that we can determine many facts at crime scenes, such as when and where a person has died, whether there was a struggle before death, whether the body was moved after death, or even if it has been stored in a freezer for a while.
Unless a body is immediately cremated or embalmed, decomposition commences promptly. There is more to decomp, though, than is generally understood by the lay person. A body usually decomposes in one of two ways, putrefaction or mummification, though on occasion it decomposes via both pathways simultaneously.
Putrefaction is a very smelly decaying process in which the body is slowly liquefied by autolysis and bacterial activity. Autolysis literally translates as “self-destruction.” Here’s how it works: Most cells in the human body contain tiny double-walled sacs of powerful digestive enzymes. These sacs, called lysosomes, require ATP to maintain the integrity of their double walls. After death, when the ATP gravy train stops, lysosomes break down, spilling their cargo of acid-like enzymes into the body of the cell. This process is repeated millions and millions of times, all over the body, eventually turning it into mush.
Bacteria also play a key role in the decaying process. Human beings normally harbor well over a hundred types of bacteria and billions of individual organisms, mainly in the digestive tract. In a live, healthy body, the bacteria are mostly kept in balance, but when death stops the working of the immune system that maintained that balance, a dramatic shift occurs. Freed from the drudgery of digesting food in the intestinal tract, the bacteria quickly switch to digesting the intestinal tract itself. Soon bacteria spill out of the intestines into the abdominal cavity and begin to attack the organs. They also speed along the body’s built-in superhighways, the blood vessels, munching on muscles and skin along the way.
Bacterial digestion of a corpse really puts the putrid in putrefaction. Frenzied microbial feeding produces enormous amounts of gas and fluids, or in other words, bacteria poop. The body swells up and fluids begin to leak out of the various orifices. Putracine, methane, and hydrogen sulfide are examples of the gases that bacteria produce, and some of these stink to high heaven. If you are wondering wh
y these gases are so repulsive to humans, the answer is that evolution has equipped human beings with extremely sensitive noses for the detection of spoiled meat. Those cavemen who were unable to detect that the carcass they were devouring was spoiled died from food poisoning. Those who survived went on to become our ancestors, in part because their olfactory sense allowed them to avoid rotten food and to live long enough to have progeny.
Putrefaction may smell bad to human beings, but it smells like ambrosia to insects and even to some animals. A fly can detect the off-gassing of putrane from a carcass a mile away, in quantities as small as a few parts per billion. Vultures and some scavenging mammals will make a beeline for the source of the aroma that, to them, means dinner.
In the decomposing human body, it is almost a race to see which team can do more damage to the flesh, the bacteria or the lysosomes. No matter which team wins, given a couple of months or so an average human body’s soft tissues will completely melt away. Time-lapse photography would show the flesh gradually melting and puddling until all that’s left are bones.
The other major pathway of decomposition, mummification, usually occurs when something dies in a very hot, dry environment. During the mummification process, moisture evaporates out of the body’s soft tissues, which then shrivel up until they have a leatherlike texture and the whole body begins to look like, well, a mummy. The process stops when no further moisture can be wrung from the tissue. Mummies do smell—they have a sort of cheesy/old library book odor—but not nearly as bad as a putrefied body. Most often, when we find a mummified body, putrefaction is absent because both bacteria and enzymes require water to function properly; if the body dries out quickly enough, putrefaction cannot occur. Occasionally we see decomposition simultaneously along both pathways, such as a body whose trunk is putrefied but whose extremities are mummified. This can also happen when one part of the body is exposed to a hot, dry environment and the other exposed to a warm, moist environment, such as happens when a part of a body is wedged against a radiator. The side near the heat source will more likely mummify, while the side exposed to the regular atmosphere in the room will probably putrefy.
Dead Center Page 8
