Then the following became known, from the Precinct Report:
From further examination of the body, it was noted by the coroner that the right arm and a portion of the right side of the body extending from the right hip to the right shoulder was completely burned away exposing various vital organs [emphasis added here and following quotes].
Later in the same report:
The cause of death was ... 5. Extreme burns of right side of body with complete destruction of right upper extremity and right side of thorax [chest] and abdomen.
The Homicide Report summarized these same autopsy findings, and added:
The right side of the body from the waist to where the right shoulder would be, including the whole right arm, was apparently disintegrated from the fire, yielding the inside organs of the body.
Further, it described the clothes which were piled on top of her body, some of which had not even burned:
The body was nude; however, there was clothing which had apparently been placed on top of the body mostly covering the body from just above the pubic area to the neck. Some of the mentioned clothes had been burned completely while others were still intact, but scorched.
According to the Criminologist, the mentioned clothes were composed of synthetic material which would have to reach a temperature of about 500 F before it would ignite into a flame; however, prior to this, there would be a smoldering effect.
Just to be clear, let me state what I think this is saying. If the temperature in the bedroom had reached 500 degrees Fahrenheit (260 degrees C) the clothes piled on top of Mary would have ignited and burned. Yet they did not. Therefore, the temperature in the room did not reach 500 degrees. The police, however, attributed the massive destruction to her body, including the disintegration of her right arm and the right side of her torso, to this less-than-500-degree fire.
Whatever burned off Mary’s right arm and right torso had to be extremely hot! How hot? Who would know what temperature it took to burn a bone?
Perhaps someone who cremated bodies for a living. Since I did not know anyone in that line of work, I reached for the yellow pages and looked under “F” for funerals. After several calls, I reached a very personable and articulate man whose job it was to prepare cremated remains for burial.
“What temperature does it take to completely burn a body?” I asked promptly, expecting a quick answer with the precise number of degrees.
“Including bones?” he queried immediately.
“Well, that gets straight to the heart of the matter. Yes, including bones. I am writing a book about someone whose arm was completely burned off in a fire, and I am trying to figure out what temperature would be needed to do that.”
“Burned their arm off ?” he exclaimed. “How unusual! What happened to the rest of the body?”
“It was more or less still intact,” I answered cautiously, concerned that he was going to get us off track.
“That’s bizarre,” he said. “I can’t imagine that. Are you sure it wasn’t cut off somehow?”
While he still had not given me the temperature number, I was impressed with how fast he got to the essence of the matter. I had not said anything about the nature of the death. It could have been a car wreck as far as he knew. But I was determined to get a cremation temperature from him before discussing any circumstantial evidence which might somehow color his answer. So I politely asked him to tell me the temperature of a cremation oven.
He said, “Well, the cremation machines are automatic nowadays so you don’t have to set them, but an average cremation takes about two hours at about 1,600 degrees. But when you are finished, there are still bones! Depending on body size and fat content, some take longer. I have seen them as high as 2,000 degrees and for as long as three hours. But when you are finished, you still have bones, or at least pieces of bones like joints, skull fragments, and knuckles.”
I now had my cremation number, but I was busy thinking about his answers. In the lull, he offered to give me some background on cremations and explained some popular misconceptions. The common belief, he said, is that you put a body in the cremation machine and get back ashes. No, that’s not the way it works. Yes, it’s true that there are some ashes produced by burning the skin and soft tissue, but that’s a relatively small portion of what remains. Most of what is left after cremation is a box of dry bone parts. The next step is to grind up those remains so that they are unrecognizable. The final product is bone dust, a powdery substance that resembles ashes. Hence, the term and the misconception. What cremation technically does is rapidly dehydrate the bone material so that it splinters. Then it can be ground into a powder more easily. But bones do not burn. To emphasize his point he explained that even the skull cap, which is in the direct path of the fame during cremation, frequently survives.
While he was being very helpful and I was learning more about cremation than I anticipated, my goal was still to get a temperature figure which would explain Mary’s missing right arm, so I pressed on. “Can you estimate what temperature it would take to completely burn off an arm?”
“Knuckles and all?” he countered.
“Everything,” I confirmed.
“Well, it’s hard to say. Before I got in this business, I saw a lot of burns. Some were military pilots who crashed their jets and got drenched in jet fuel. I would have to go get the bodies out of the wreckage. Jet fuel burns at thousands of degrees, but there were still bones left. I also saw people who had been covered with napalm and the like. But there were still bones left. I can’t imagine how hot or how long it would take to completely burn a bone to the point of disintegration, but it’s way up there.”
I was getting his point. If Mary’s entire apartment building had been burning out of control and had caved in on top of her body, it could not have produced the type of damage described in the police report. The smoky mattress and the smoldering pile of clothes with their less-than-500 degree temperature were certainly not capable of destroying the bones in Mary’s right arm and rib cage. Then the critical point hit me: The crime scene did not match the crime. It was impossible to explain the damage to Mary’s right arm and the right side of her body with the evidence found in her apartment.
Or to put it even more bluntly, the damage to Mary’s right arm and thorax did not occur in her apartment. It had to have happened somewhere else. Her body was then quietly brought back to her apartment and deposited so it could be found there. A second fire was set to create an explanation, however tenuous, for the burns suffered earlier. It’s no wonder nobody heard anything.
Something else had happened to Mary earlier that evening. It would require something much more violent than a common house fire to disintegrate her entire right arm and right rib cage. It would take something that could generate thousands, if not millions, of degrees of heat even if for only a fraction of a second, vaporizing and destroying everything in its path. Something more on the scale of lightning or a fire-ball from an extremely high-voltage electrical source which would destroy any tissue in its path, but leave the rest of the body which it did not hit relatively intact. Perhaps it was even an extremely powerful beam of high-energy electro-magnetic radiation just like the one that disintegrated electrical engineer Jack Nygard when he accidentally got stuck in the path of his 5,000,000 volt linear particle accelerator near Seattle, Washington.
The general outline of the explanation made sense, but the stakes were now getting to be enormous. Imagine how differently the investigation would have turned out if the initial newspaper headline had read,
Cancer Doctor Mangled in Laboratory Mishap;
Secret Research Exposed
Monkey Viruses Roasted with Radiation
And it put new emphasis on our question: Did Mary Sherman have access to a linear particle accelerator?
I had fairly good personal information that there was at least one linear accelerator in New Orleans in the 1960s: The Jesuit priest who taught physics in 1968 confided to our class that there
was a linear accelerator being used “for research” at a medical facility in New Orleans. And I think that it is reasonable to suggest that a doctor with Mary Sherman’s reputation for researching treatments for bone cancers may have had access to it. But the question remains: Did she?
My focus was on the physical evidence. Was the arm really completely burned off as suggested in the police report? What about the rest of the body? Remember that Dr. Talley identified the victim by body shape and hair color.
What about the proximity of charring burns to easily flammable hair? What could cause such localized damage? Did the nature of the burns on Dr. Sherman’s body suggest high-powered electrical equipment? Or perhaps a powerful beam of radiation? I realized I finally had to get a copy of the autopsy report itself. I called an attorney in New Orleans and had him secure a copy for me.
The Autopsy Report
THE AUTOPSY WAS PERFORMED on the morning of 7/21/64 by Pathologist Monroe S. Samuels, M.D., who signed the report and in the presence of Assistant Coroner Lloyd F. LoCascio, M.D. who did not. Dr. LoCascio did, however, sign the Inquest summarizing the conclusions which were reflected in the police report. Dr. Nicholas J. Chetta was actually the Coroner at the time, but his name does not appear anywhere in the newspaper articles, in the police reports, or in the autopsy report. Nor do his signature or initials appear on any related document from the Coroner’s office. The only place the late Coroner’s name appears in the entire file is on a pre-printed section of the Inquest which the Assistant Coroner completed and signed.
Here are the relevant sections of the autopsy report. Since many readers are unfamiliar with medical jargon, I have interpolated explanatory comments. I have also omitted the descriptions of most of the stab wounds as redundant, and have clustered related matter together for ease of reading. The full Autopsy Report is shown as Document C (p. 354).
The report summarized the general appearance of the body with the pathologist’s laconic comment:
It appears to be that of a white female.
Continuing,
External examination of the body shows the hair over the head to be long and dark brown to black in color. It shows extensive charring and there is destruction of hair and scalp over the entire right temporal region of the head and extensive burns.
“Charring” is carbonization resulting from a high-temperature burn, as in burning a steak. The “temporal region of the head” is between the eye and the ear, in the area commonly called the temple. There were intense high-heat burns on the scalp, immediately adjacent to the unburned hair. This is evidence of an intensely focused heat source, such as a bolt of high-voltage electricity or a beam of radiation.
There are extensive charring burns all over the right side of the face, the right thorax and the right flank.
“Thorax” is essentially equivalent to “rib cage.” She was carbonized from the right side of her head down to her right hip.
There has been complete destruction of the right upper extremity. The only portion remaining is a charred fragment of the proximal portion of the humerus.
“The right upper extremity” is of course the right arm. The “humerus” is the bone extending from the shoulder to the elbow. “Proximal” indicates the end of the bone closest to the center of the body. This confirms that her right arm was missing, and all that remained was a short piece of charred bone extending out from the shoulder. This is the critical evidence which demonstrates that these burns were not the result of the fire in the apartment. Again, such destruction could only come from an extremely high-temperature event such as a bolt of high-voltage electricity or a beam of radiation.
There is extensive destruction of the entire right hemithorax with exposure of the lung and the pleural cavity.
The “right hemithorax” is the right half of her rib cage. The “pleural cavity” is the area inside the rib cage where the lungs and other organs are housed. Exposure of the lung means massive destruction of both the rib cage and the chest wall. Again bones were destroyed.
There is desquamation of skin over the right thigh and also over the posterior portion of the left side of the body.
The skin was dehydrated and scaling on both her right thigh and her left rear torso. These burns, and the cooking of her brain, heart, liver, and lung, could have been the result of either the mattress fire in her apartment or the initial burn.
There are extensive drying type burns over the entire face producing marked shrinkage of the skin, with deformity of the facial features and drying and shrinking of the eyeballs, bilaterally.
The shrunken skin, deformed face and dehydrated eyeballs sound more like a corpse from a science fiction movie than that of the victim of a mattress fire. Is it any wonder that the first two people who tried could not identify her?
There is evidence of two sets of knife wounds: one before death, and the other after.
Examination of the left chest wall ... shows a stab wound to pass through the 6th intercostal space immediately adjacent to the sternum of the left side.
Tat is the wound that killed her. The “sternum” is the breast bone. The location is between the sixth and seventh ribs, directly over the heart.
On removing the sternal plate the left pleural cavity is seen to contain approximately 1000 to 1200 cc of fluid and clotted blood. The pericardial cavity contains approximately 50 cc of partially clotted blood.
Upon removal of the breast bone, there was found more than one quart of variously-clotted blood near the heart, evidence that she was still alive when she was stabbed in the heart.
Examination of the heart in situ shows a slit-like wound on the anterior aspect of the right ventricle immediately adjacent to the interventricular septum. A probe inserted into this wound extends into the right ventricular cavity.
A heart is composed of four chambers, two small upper chambers called “atriums,” and two large lower chambers called “ventricles.” The “interventricular septum” is the wall that divides the heart in half and separates the two large lower chambers. A stab wound “on the anterior aspect of the right ventricle immediately adjacent to the interventricular septum” means that she was stabbed dead center in the middle of her heart.
The heart is mostly muscle, and the thickest muscle in the heart is the dense wall of the powerful ventricles. The “probe” determined that this precise slit-like wound, inflicted in the exact middle of the heart, completely penetrated its thickest muscle. This would appear to be the basis for the rumor that whoever killed Mary Sherman knew what he or she was doing, and may have had medical training.
The right side of the liver is markedly hardened and leathery and coagulated ... There is no hemorrhage noted around this particular wound.
The absence of hemorrhage around the liver wound means that the wound did not bleed, indicating that this wound to the liver was inflicted after death, during the second set of stab wounds.
Examination of the external genitalia shows a through and through tear through the left labia majora measuring approximately 1 cm [0.4 inch] in length. There is a smaller similar tear in the right labium which does not extend through and through the structure. Further examination of the external genitalia shows it to be essentially normal. There are no areas of hemorrhage around the lacerations of the labium.
Again, no hemorrhage indicates that this stab wound was part of the second set of wounds, and occurred after death as well. The report continues its discussion with the internal genitalia, noting that the uterus had been previously removed by surgery, but it does not mention any other wounds.
The general pattern of stab wounds extends diagonally from the left shoulder across the abdomen and groin to the right thigh. These wounds appear to have been hastily inflicted immediately prior to setting the fire in her apartment. This last-minute jab to the genitals does not contribute to the idea of a sexual motive in her death. In fact, given the cuts in the clothing piled on top of the body, it indicates the body was covered at the time the second stab
bing occurred; it is possible that whoever did the second stabbing was not even aware that her genitals had been stabbed. Considering this evidence, claiming “mutilation of the sexual organs,” as stated in the press reports, is truly a gross exaggeration.
There were two sets of burns and two sets of stab wounds. The first set of burns was from an extremely hot and very focused heat source, and occurred somewhere other than her apartment. The total destruction of her arm is evidence of a very powerful device capable of producing thousands of degrees of heat. The partial charring of her scalp (without burning the rest of her hair) is evidence that this device focused its energy very precisely. Very few pieces of equipment would be capable of producing such a combination of burns. A linear particle accelerator is one.
The instant Mary Sherman received those initial burns her right arm was missing, her rib cage was destroyed, and she would be, from that point forward, a crippled vegetable. But her heart was still beating. She was still alive. The question at that point: Save her? Or kill her? The first stab wound (to her heart) killed her. All of the other stab wounds (all across her chest, abdomen, groin, and leg) occurred later, after her death, probably back at her apartment.
Finally it all came together for me. A perspective that explained most of the mysterious elements of the crime scene in a logical manner. Here is one scenario:
ON MONDAY NIGHT MARY WAS GOING TO BE WORKING on the secret project. This work had to be done at night, away from the normal daytime traffic. She took Monday afternoon off, to go to the dentist and to run an errand. Then she went home and washed her hair around 4:00 P.M., because she would not have time to do it later. She told her housekeeper, who was curious about why she was washing her hair in the afternoon, that she was expecting visitors from out of town. She asked her housekeeper to lay out her polka-dot dress for her trip to the children’s hospital across the lake in the morning. The children were always happy to see her, even though they were the ones who suffered. She wanted to look happy when she saw them. It was one of the private joys of a childless widow.
Dr. Mary’s Monkey Page 22
