Dead Center

by Shiya Ribowsky

  That dead passenger may be on board because no other jurisdiction was willing to deal with him or her. Gone are the days when people who died at sea were tossed over the side to sleep with the fishes. Deaths that occur at sea are supposed to be off-loaded from the ship at the next port of call, but frequently they aren’t, because in many ports of call the authorities don’t choose to deal with dead people from another jurisdiction and refuse to have the body off-loaded in their port. That is why some of those who die while on cruise ships end up in the port of New York—where on principle we will not refuse to examine a dead person, no matter where he or she came from.

  Here’s the drill: When the ship arrives, we are summoned to dockside, usually very early in the morning. Often the report of the death has arrived at OCME in the middle of the night, long before the ship docks. It has been radioed by the crew to the harbormaster, and then on to us so that we can be standing by when the ship docks. The passengers will want to get off and go home, but if there is a death aboard, technically, they can’t disembark, at least not until OCME says they can. It is within our power to quarantine the whole ship and to not let anyone off if we suspect that the death was caused by a communicable disease. This painful possibility is why we are treated very nicely when we arrive; we are generally met at the pier by a ship’s officer and escorted to the infirmary and the mini-morgue, where we meet with the ship’s doctor and perhaps with the family of the deceased. On many occasions, the offer has been made to me of a cup of tea—or other refreshments—to be served after all the “pesky paperwork” is done, in the hope that I will do my work quickly and the live passengers will not be bothered with having to stay aboard a second longer than they want to.

  If we did suspect a death was due to a contagious disease and had to send the body for an autopsy, the passengers could be forced to remain aboard until we ascertained the exact cause of death and determined whether releasing the passengers posed a danger to the public health. Fortunately, I’ve never had to send a body from a ship to be autopsied. I shudder to think of the chaos that would ensue if I had to quarantine a cruise ship. The natural deaths that I have seen were all of the variety I described earlier, usually attributable to overeating and overexertion in older folks with underlying disease factors. The onboard investigation is usually limited to interviewing the ship’s doctor and the family and taking a quick look at the body before releasing it to the family, who usually has a funeral director (also alerted by the ship long before it arrived) with a hearse standing by at the dock.

  We do, of course, issue death certificates for such bodies, even though the death occurred outside of New York City. There is no other choice—the cruise ship can’t do it. Those certificates are a bit unusual in that they note the exact latitude and longitude at which the death occurred. This archaic practice tickles me, but really, there is no other way to describe the location of the death. In the ocean, there are no street addresses.

  Of all the investigations I’ve done in which a body arrived dead to New York City, one revealed to me that some people really do have actual skeletons in their closets. In what became one of my more memorable cases, I was summoned to a most unusual clothing store in which human remains had been found. The store was actually a large apartment in an Upper West Side pre–World War II building—the kind of apartment that has fourteen-foot-high ceilings and a seemingly endless number of rooms—and the shop specialized in transvestite clothing and costumes. The owner of the store, the sole occupant of the apartment, was a cross-dresser who ran “her” shop out of four of the apartment’s twelve rooms. Before going to the scene, I received this information over the phone from a detective who also told me that the owner had recently died, but that it was not her death that I would be investigating.

  According to the detective, the storeowner had evidently been beloved in the cross-dressing world for providing the very best in women’s clothes for men. After her death, some of her friends had gotten together and thrown a party and rummage sale at the shop to raise money for her funeral. During the sale, a mummified body had been found in a closet.

  When I arrived on the scene, I learned that the finder of the remains had been poking around in the back of a very large walk-in closet and, on a top shelf, had found a surprisingly heavy valise at which he tugged until it came crashing down. The determined shopper, I was informed, was an off-duty NYPD detective, who had been at the rummage sale in search of a costume for the upcoming Halloween parade in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Prying open the locked valise, the detective had found it filled with a large black plastic garbage bag. He also noticed a certain musty aroma, which, I am sure, must have worried him. He opened the bag and found yet another plastic garbage bag inside of it. Abandoning the gentle approach, he ripped open a hole in a corner of the four bags covering the contents, and revealed a dried and shriveled human hand. Peeking through the hole, he discerned the mummified remains of a human being.

  For the detective, finding these remains must have initially presented a dilemma, I mused, because making a report of this mummified person might well mean that he’d have to tell his superiors his reason for being in the shop in the first place. But this didn’t stop him for very long, if at all, because he did his duty.

  Arriving at the scene, I realized that the off-duty detective had done a great job of securing it, because the valise was still in the closet. A uniformed cop and a couple of squad detectives watched me with no attempt to hide their amusement as I pushed my way through racks of long pink boas, neon-colored sequined evening gowns, piles of very large ladies’ shoes, wigs of every imaginable style and color, and stacks of garments that my grandmother would have referred to as unmentionables.

  Kneeling on the floor amid the surreal contents of that closet, I very carefully opened the valise and removed a little bit more of the wrappings, just enough to verify that they did indeed enfold the remains of a human being. I tried to disturb the suitcase and its contents as little as possible, because when dealing with any body packaged in wrappings, it’s always best to wait for full examination in the autopsy room. Less evidence is lost if the body and its wrappings are examined there. But before I closed the suitcase, I noticed two clues that suggested we were dealing with a death that was quite a few years old.

  Newspapers wrapped around the body dated from the 1970s. And there was a soda-can tab of a type I had not seen in a long time (a metal ring attached to a sort of little metal tongue, a tab that was designed to be pulled completely off the can). Years ago, antilittering legislation had forced manufacturers to stop using that type of tab.

  The next morning, X-rays of the suitcase showed us a body curled into the fetal position, wrapped in layers as though the suitcase was a macabre womb, with a bullet inside the skull that told us we were dealing with a homicide even before we opened the suitcase itself. The autopsy on the mummified remains revealed that the decedent was a man who had been killed by a single gunshot wound to the head from a small-caliber weapon and the bullet was still lodged in his mummified brain. The victim had been short and very slender—the perfect body type to have ended up as a mummy.

  The newspapers and soda tab, combined with the extreme mummification of the body, indicated that the body had probably been in the suitcase for more than twenty years. Even so, we were able to successfully identify the body by fingerprinting the mummy. However, as you might imagine, obtaining those prints was a challenge. Well-preserved skin is so dry that attempting to “ink” the fingers and roll them for prints will result in unreadable blotches. Instead, over the years OCME experts have developed an ingenious method for obtaining fingerprints from mummies, one that most people, even at OCME, find rather icky to watch. First a syringe injects saline into the leatherlike skin of the mummy’s hands to rehydrate and soften the tissue. Once the skin is again pliable, we ever so carefully peel it off the hands, beginning at the wrists, and continuing down to the fingertips. A good peel results in a perfect inside-out glove of hum
an skin that can then be further softened if necessary by soaking it in a saline bath. When the skin is finally ready, an examiner dons a tight-fitting latex glove over which the human skin is carefully rolled, reversing the peeling process by which it was removed. If done correctly, the examiner now wears the skin of a dead man on his hand, and, wearing this gruesome glove, he inks “his” fingers and rolls them onto the print card, leaving the prints of the dead guy.

  The excellent prints we obtained were then circulated around the country, and specifically to the Midwestern city from which the newspapers in the suitcase had come. By matching his prints, authorities there were able to identify the mummified remains as those of a burglar with an extensive rap sheet who had gone missing in the mid-1970s. As best we could reconstruct the story, he had tried to rob the transvestite store owner’s previous shop, located in that city, and had been shot dead in the course of the robbery. Perhaps fearing that she would be prosecuted for the shooting, she never reported the incident and, instead, wrapped her dead burglar in newspaper and plastic bags, stuffed his body into a suitcase, and hid him in a closet. And during the ensuing decades, she took along her skeleton in the closet whenever and wherever she moved.

  Eventually, the family of the long-deceased burglar showed up in New York, claimed the body of their dead relative, and took him home for burial.

  NINE

  I CAN NO longer remember every one of the more than eight thousand deaths that I have investigated, although a photo of a particular death scene can sometimes bring back memories of that particular dead body. On occasion, even looking at a photo doesn’t summon up the memories and reviewing the case file makes me feel that I’m reading someone else’s notes or summary. However, hundreds of my cases have been so memorable that I have no chance of forgetting them.

  Each of those is indelibly imprinted on my mind—some are memorable for their “Agatha Christie” moments, while others are unforgettable for different reasons. High on my list of Agatha Christie moments was arriving at an upscale apartment in one of Manhattan’s swankiest neighborhoods on a weekend evening and making my way through the vestiges of a recently concluded seventieth birthday party toward a den/office at the end of a hall. I saw inside that room a man slumped forward over his desk, facing away from the door, in a chair on the visitor’s side of the desk. I was told that this was the birthday boy, a well-regarded financial professional—dead at his own party. Tilting him back in the chair, I discovered a letter opener thrust into his chest and, from the looks of it, right into his heart.

  This could have been murder; someone could have come up from behind him and stabbed him in the chest. But it was equally possible that his death had been a suicide. Although a layperson might think that a would-be suicide couldn’t stab himself to death in the chest, I know differently. I’ve even seen one man who stabbed himself multiple times in the chest until he got it right.

  The relatives of the man lying dead at his desk said he had a history of psychiatric problems but that these had not seemed very serious. I checked some of the medications and hospital paperwork in the room and had to agree with that estimate. Adding to the mystery was that I couldn’t find a suicide note. The letter opener was nowhere near as sharp as a kitchen knife, and it would have required tremendous force to push it through the man’s body into the heart. Could he have done it himself, without aid? I was dubious, yet there was no indication that anyone else had been involved in the death. The den was immaculate, with no indications of any struggle. There were several delicate figurines on the desk that surely would have been smashed in a tussle. Aside from the wound caused by the letter opener sticking out of his chest, the victim displayed no other surface damage.

  Given the suspicious nature of this death, it was imperative that I bring him in for an autopsy, which caused some difficulties for the Jewish family. Since it was in the evening, we would not be able to perform the autopsy and have the body ready for burial within twenty-four hours as Jewish law demanded, but I promised the family that we’d do it as quickly as possible so that they could have a proper funeral. The autopsy confirmed that the decedent had, indeed, died of a single stab wound to the heart and that there was no sign of a struggle. The angle at which the letter opener had gone in was consistent with his having used his own hand, so suicide was still a possibility. However, in New York City, to label a death as a suicide, we need an additional piece of information not required for any other manner of death. We must prove, of course, that the person did the act themselves, but moreover we must be able to prove intent—to aver that by this action the victim has deliberately taken his or her own life. This requirement is common sense since, in a suicide, intent makes the manner of death. In this particular death, even though we were confident it was not a homicide, and it was unlikely that the letter opener ended up in the victim’s chest by accident, we had no way of proving intent. No way of asserting categorically that the decedent did this to himself and meant to take his own life by this action. We certainly could not do so by the next day when we released the body for its funeral. So we issued a death certificate that read “pending further investigation,” and continued investigating. As the family was preparing for the burial, a relative found—in a bag containing the dead man’s tallis, his ceremonial prayer shawl worn for religious observances—a suicide note. He had been depressed, and the final straw had been that he felt that the guest list for his birthday party did not contain enough distinguished names. He had placed the suicide note in a location where he knew it would eventually be found because Jewish men are buried in their prayer shawls. Holographic examination of the note revealed that it was authentic and in the victim’s handwriting, so the case was closed. The manner of death was listed as suicide.

  The actual reason that this man committed suicide was not, of course, a guest list; the real reason for the suicide was also in his note—pain. He was in pain, mental pain, and possibly even associated physical pain. That was consistent with every other suicide note I’d seen—and I’ve seen more than enough of them. They all mention pain, unbearable pain.

  What I have come to understand, from years of investigating such deaths, and what I am convinced families, friends, and doctors of would-be suicides must understand, is that the pain is there, and it is very real. Pain cannot be dismissed as “only mental,” and, indeed, it often consists of physical pain accompanied by, and worsened by, mental anguish. In the suicide’s own words, and in the words of their loved ones left behind (whom I frequently have to interview), the victim is always described as being in unbearable torment. Given the lengths that some people go to kill themselves, the wish to escape that torment is the motivating factor for the suicide that makes the most sense to me. Many suicides conveyed in their notes that they were being burned alive by pain that no one else could see, and they felt that killing themselves was the only way to stop the agony.

  In cultures different from the United States, suicide is not considered a failure of the courage to face life, but as a legitimate response to certain life situations. In Japan for example, suicide is highly ritualized and one who commits suicide is respected, particularly if the deed is done in a spectacular manner. Immigrants to our shores from such cultures sometimes do things we might not comprehend at first glance, but when we view the act within its cultural context we have a better chance of understanding the motivation—intent—of the victim. Case in point was the suicide of a Japanese nanny. I was called to a death scene in another, even more posh, Manhattan apartment, where two young children were in near hysteria because their Japanese nanny lay dead in front of them, with a sharp kitchen knife through her gut. Her other hand clutched a spatula.

  The story, as I reconstructed it from conversations with neighbors and with the children, was this: The apartment belonged to a wealthy couple who were not at home at the time. They had left the youngsters in the care of the nanny, who had been with the family for some time.

  However, the nanny had been having
a difficult time controlling the children. When they wouldn’t obey her, she lost face and threatened the children with committing seppuku (ritual suicide) right in front of them to shame them. Being very young and American, the kids had no idea what she was talking about, but she persisted on this line, and they persisted in disobeying her orders. So she went into the kitchen and seized the knife and the spatula. I never found out why she wielded the spatula, but I wondered if it had been used to try to spank one of the children. In any event, she used the knife to perform her ritual suicide right in front of the children.

  Investigating this case, I learned that in Japan ritual suicide has more to do with honor than with pain, but to my American eyes the mental rationale in this case made even less sense to me than the case of the suicide at the birthday party.

  There is one type of suicide that I fully understand and wholeheartedly condone. I believe that terminally ill patients with intractable disease should have the right, by law, to end their lives comfortably and with dignity. During the mid-1990s, we saw a fair number of suicides that were right out of the book Final Exit, an unfortunate bestseller by Derek Humphry, founder of the Hemlock Society. I say unfortunate because his book is really a textbook that shows people the various ways to commit suicide. On a disconcertingly regular basis, I would find people dead in their dwelling places, with a copy of the book nearby, having used one of the book’s well-described methods to end their lives. Many of those people had been dying of a terminal illness, and for them, I suppose, Humphry’s book was a blessing. But not all the Final Exit suicides were of terminal patients, and that is the part that bothers me.

  All over the country, mayors and police commissioners talk a lot about the homicide rate (and they should), but city governmental officials almost never mention the suicide rate, which in New York hovers just under one thousand a year (and we should all be talking about that). Currently, almost twice as many people commit suicide as are being murdered. I have wondered how many of those who commit suicide might have been able to live on, with better lives, had they received proper counseling and medication? It is impossible to give a numerical answer, but my guess is that at least some of them would have had some of their problems ameliorated, and would have been encouraged to go on living.