Working Stiff

by Judy Melinek, Md

  “Came back negative, but I don’t believe it,” I griped. Quick-tox is just what it sounds like, an instant urine test that detects the metabolic products of alcohol and some other drugs—when it works. It’s notoriously unreliable. “He had a history of alcoholism and smells the part.”

  “True,” Jim agreed. “Do another, and even if it’s negative again, pend him for blood tox just in case.”

  The second quick-tox came back positive, establishing nothing more than its own coin-flip rate of accuracy—but the definitive blood test eventually confirmed that Charlie had a blood alcohol level high enough to diminish the motor skills of even a championship heavyweight drinker. Scene photos from the apartment building showed no sign of a struggle or a fight, and the police found no evidence of forced entry. I concluded that he’d fallen down the stairs all by himself.

  “The head injury didn’t kill him?” Jim asked, when I had finalized the case and presented it at afternoon rounds.

  “No skull fracture. No brain injury.”

  “But did he pass out and fall down, or did he trip and get knocked out when he landed on his head?”

  “Yes,” I replied, to professionally appreciative chuckles. “Take your pick. The cause of death is the same. Maybe he blacked out from intoxication, or maybe he tripped and went down the stairs. Given the lack of spinal injury, it was the effect of the drinking that left him pinned at the bottom of the stairs till he stopped breathing, in either case.”

  “Better write both, just to be safe,” Jim advised. “Blunt impact of head and acute alcohol intoxication.”

  “Positional asphyxia following fall down stairs, due to blunt impact, et cetera,” added Monica.

  In my two years at the New York OCME, I performed scores of autopsies like Charlie’s that could trace their cause to acute alcohol intoxication, but chronic alcoholics, people who spent years drinking themselves to death, ended up in our office even more frequently than the fall-down drunks. If there was no traumatic component to the death, they usually went out as “manner: natural.” They might have liver cirrhosis, fibrous pancreas, heart disease, intestinal bleeding, and a dozen other ailments cultivated over years of perfectly legal substance abuse. My very last autopsy in New York was a double-whammy alcoholic, a man dead of both chronic and acute ethanol poisoning.

  Paul Fanelli had been sleeping on the steps of an Upper West Side church, as he did most nights, when he froze to death in the single-digit morning hours of January 18, 2003. He had refused to go to a homeless shelter despite the bitter temperature. When the paramedics arrived, they found Fanelli unconscious, his breathing shallow, and his core temperature an astonishing 70°—about as low as the living body can get. He died soon after.

  I could tell right away Fanelli had died of hypothermia because his stomach lining, which is supposed to be smooth and pink, was instead deep crimson and pitted with dark brown ulcers. When your core temperature drops below 95°, your body goes into a crisis management mode, cutting off the blood supply to nonessential organs in order to keep critical functions running. The interrupted blood supply to the stomach comes flooding back in the late stages of severe hypothermia and causes a reperfusion injury called leopard skin gastric cardia. To this day I have never seen a more clear case of it. Each body tells a story, and this one told the miserable story of a man freezing to death.

  Fanelli’s blood alcohol level was high enough that he was certainly drunk when he died. It was so high, in fact, that a man with a lower tolerance would have been dead of ethanol poisoning instead of environmental exposure. He had probably passed out and never awakened. People at the church and at homeless shelters had reported that Paul, who lived on the streets for at least thirty years, talked frequently about suicide. He didn’t take his own life, though; not directly enough for the purpose of the death certificate. I ruled the death of Paul Fanelli an accident.

  Alcoholics are commonly found dead in their place of residence. Because alcohol is legal, there’s no need for anybody to cover up an accidental fatal poisoning, at least of an adult. If somebody using a controlled substance croaks while in a friend’s house, however, that friend has to decide whether to call the police—or to dump the body. You can’t avoid scrutiny of your own illegal activities if you invite the cops into your domicile to investigate a death. You might avoid this scrutiny by seeking out a public space to dispose of your overdosed acquaintance. Then again, you might not.

  I caught the postal bin case only because Susan Ely jinxed us. She stopped me while I was on my way out of work on the evening of October 25, 2001. “Wear your running shoes tomorrow,” she joked. “It’s going to be just the two of us.”

  At home that night, Danny was his usual hyperkinetic self, so T.J. and I let him do laps around the apartment after dinner while we watched the news—and there was big, bad news. A scaffold had collapsed at a Park Avenue construction site, killing five men. Susan and I were not going to be able to handle those five autopsies alone, especially not if there were other cases to boot. “I’ve got to get to bed,” I told T.J. “It’s going to be insane tomorrow.”

  He just gestured toward Danny, running circles in his pajamas. “Tell it to the monkey.”

  When I got in the next morning, I found water from an overhead pipe showering the Identification office. Two maintenance workers had put out buckets and were mopping up while another stood on a desk, his head and shoulders disappearing into the ceiling. Flome walked back and forth in the middle of all this soggy activity, putting together the assignment list, the day’s multiple-fatality workload too heavy to slow him down.

  “Running shoes,” I said to Susan when I found her. She answered with a wry grimace. “What are we doing about the construction accident?”

  “Flome pulled Karen and Hayes off their paper days. They’re doing two each, and Barb Bollinger’s doing the fifth. She’s also got a little old lady with a probable subdural after an unwitnessed fall. I’m doing a three-week-old, presumptive SIDS, and you get the postal bin.”

  “The what?”

  “Gown up and go to the morgue,” Susan said. “You’ll see.”

  It was hard to miss. Way down the far end of the Pit was a standard-issue U.S. Postal Service mail bin, the canvas kind on casters, roughly six by four and three feet high, that stank like death’s dumpster. As soon as I reached it I realized why. Inside that grimy cart was a pile of New York City street garbage—and, poking out the top, a pair of human feet.

  The bin had been found in an alley off 53rd Street and Eleventh Avenue, in Hell’s Kitchen. Homeless people picking through it for food had called 911. Atop the trash, the police found a black polyester blanket wrapped around the outlines of a human body. It was bound with bungee cords at the neck and feet, an electrical cord around the knees, and a man’s necktie around the hips. As soon as the cops cut through one of the bungee cords and exposed the feet, they decided to deliver the whole cart, body and all, to our office.

  “What the fuck!” was my first reaction. Detective Mueller of the NYPD Homicide Division was standing there waiting for me. “What the fuck is this thing doing in my morgue, Detective?”

  “There’s a dead body in there, Doc.”

  “Yeah, I can smell the dead body! But since when is it my job to document the crime scene? The bin belongs to you!”

  “Well,” he said with a practiced lack of concern, “I guess they made the determination that this is a rolling death scene.”

  I was flabbergasted. Every single thing inside that container was evidence. It all had to be pulled out, examined, bagged, and documented—one fetid piece at a time. It was my case, and now that it was in the morgue, nobody else was going to catalog the contents of the postal bin. So I went across the room, gathered an armful of evidence bags, and got started.

  One frying pan. Two crumpled paper bags. One black ceramic dish broken into thirteen fragments. Two empty cardboard coffee cups with lids. One cardboard coffee cup with coffee, half full. One empty Sunn
y Delight bottle. One broken Dos Equis beer bottle. One dead fish. Twenty-two plastic stir sticks. Several sheets of newspaper, mostly crumpled, some sticky. Two partially eaten sandwiches, one in a take-out wrapper. Assorted loose chicken bones.

  And one human body: male, Caucasian, decomposed, wrapped in a blanket.

  A couple of morgue techs helped me heave the body onto my autopsy table, where I unwrapped it carefully. Coarse black-and-white hairs covered the fuzzy blanket, and when I looked between the corpse’s fingers on both hands I found the same. They did not belong to him—he was a towheaded blond—and looked like they might have come from an animal. The decedent was clad only in a pair of underwear, so I did a rape kit. Decomposition changes made it difficult to determine the state of the body at the time of death. His skin was green and damp. He’d been dumped headfirst into the bin, so his face was misshapen and purple, eyes bugging out. His hair came out easily when I pulled. The smell was atrocious.

  Internal examination was unremarkable—no broken ribs, no skull fracture or brain bleed, no signs of strangulation. In the end all I could tell Detective Mueller was that the body didn’t wrap itself in that blanket. “It’s probably a drug dump, but we won’t know until I get tox back.”

  A week later a fingerprint match yielded the ID from a police database, and Michael Donohue’s sister Claire came to my office, with a friend of his in tow. Donohue had been out on probation on an old drug charge, so Claire hadn’t called the police right away when he went missing. “I didn’t want to get him in trouble,” she explained, diffident but dignified. “He used to be a user, but not anymore.”

  “What did he use?”

  “Cocaine. He got arrested for crack. And he was an alcoholic. But he’d been in a program since the summer. He worked in the music industry, as a consultant, and had to go to a lot of TV meetings too.”

  “Mike took care of himself,” his friend added. “Expensive suits and haircuts. He had to look good, he always said. Nobody had heard from him for a couple of days, and that wasn’t like him. I tried calling his cell phone—and a stranger answered, then hung up right away.”

  They had come to my office that day to ask if they could see the blanket and necktie Mike had been wrapped in. After taking one look, the two women agreed they hadn’t belonged to him. I encouraged them to tell Detective Mueller about the cell phone call, and told them I would be in touch with Mueller myself as soon as I had the toxicology result.

  A couple of weeks later I got a call from an assistant district attorney assigned to the Donohue case, asking me to rush the tox report. Detective Mueller had assembled a story for us. A couple of local junkies named Dino and Stacy had met Michael Donohue in a club one night, and they all went back to Dino’s house to party. These two told the detective that Donohue shot up two glassine envelopes of heroin, then fell asleep and started snoring loudly. In the morning he was dead. Dino and Stacy wrapped his body and dumped it in the postal bin.

  The toxicology report revealed that Donohue had a cocktail of cocaine, alcohol, and heroin in his bloodstream. That didn’t absolve his buddies, though—because I hadn’t determined whether he was dead or still alive when they wrapped him up. The next day, after I presented the case at three o’clock rounds, Dr. Hirsch pointed out that Donohue had 0.5 milligram per liter of opiates in his bloodstream, all of which were 6-monoacetylmorphine. “That’s a lot of six-MAM, and the fact that it hadn’t metabolized to morphine yet means we have to believe he was already dead when they wrapped him up twelve hours later. If he’d been alive during that time interval, he’d have metabolized everything to morphine.” So the report suggested the death was an accident, and Michael Donohue had overdosed on that big heroin shot. Dr. Jonathan Hayes pointed out that the “snoring” the other two had heard could have been agonal breathing, typical of an opiate OD.

  I got the police report and filed the death certificate as an accident shortly before Christmas. Then, two weeks later, the assistant district attorney called again. The police had obtained a videotaped confession from Dino—telling the story of how he and Stacy murdered Michael Donohue.

  “What—? It’s a homicide?”

  “That’s what the defendant admits to,” the ADA replied. “On tape.”

  “How the hell did they get that?”

  “Detectives Mueller and Patterson got Dino to admit that he and his girlfriend had cooked up a high dose of heroin and injected it in the guy so they could steal his money. We’re charging it murder two. Just by admitting they injected him makes it so, even without the larceny.”

  “Awesome!” I enthused, forgetting for a moment that a man was dead over this. “My boss is going to love this one!”

  I was right. “Fatal poisonings are exceedingly rare,” Dr. Hirsch said when I presented the latest developments in the case. “You’re going to the grand jury with it?”

  “On Thursday.”

  “How many grand juries have you done now?”

  “This’ll be my third.”

  “Don’t be nervous,” he assured me. “Just remember—you’re not on trial.”

  On Thursday morning I donned my lucky green suit and headed downtown to 80 Centre Street to meet the prosecuting trial counsel, Assistant District Attorney Harvey Rosen. Detectives Patterson and Mueller were there, cooling their heels outside the grand jury chambers. I asked them the question everyone at my office wanted to know.

  “How did you do it?”

  “It was the victim’s sister who got me thinking,” Mueller began. “When I told her that the story was her brother had shot up a double dose of heroin, Claire said that couldn’t be right. He was afraid of needles, had been since he was a kid. She insisted cocaine was his drug, and he never touched heroin. We already had that cell phone call, so we got the DA involved and pulled in Dino and Stacy again.”

  Patterson picked up the story seamlessly, as only police partners can do. “From the get-go their stories don’t match. Stacy said Donohue shot up the drugs himself, but Dino told me Stacy had helped him with the needle. She has a long rap sheet, plenty of priors for drugs and prostitution. So I got Dino alone and told him we’d found out Stacy had been turning tricks with Mike, that she was making quite a lot of money behind his back. Dino thought Stacy was his girlfriend, you see. He got mad and had diarrhea of the mouth.”

  Patterson was a squat, square-shouldered man with light eyes. He was the junior partner, ten years as a detective to Mueller’s seventeen. He’d looked pretty irritated to be wasting his afternoon outside the grand jury chambers, but started to perk up at the memory of how he rolled Dino. “So now he changes his story, says Stacy planned to fix a hot shot for Mike, just enough to make him sleep. Then they’d steal his money. She shoots him up, they wait until he’s snoring, then they take six hundred bucks off him. They’d spotted the wad in his wallet earlier. They bought more drugs, shot up—then sat there staring at the dead body for a whole day. It was only after a friend came over and spotted some of Donohue’s blond hair poking out of that blanket that these geniuses realized they had to dump him.”

  That meant the decomposition changes I’d seen on the body were the result of two days at the scene plus one overnight in the morgue refrigerator, where our crew had wheeled the whole postal cart after the police brought it in. The variables determining how a body decomposes are myriad; I try to let each decomp case instruct me. From Michael Donohue’s green body and purple face on my autopsy table, I learned what a man of average build looks like after lying dead for forty-eight hours wrapped in a blanket, dumped facedown into an open-air canvas bin in cool, dry autumn weather, without animal depredation, covered in banana peels and soda cans. I filed the image away.

  “We got a confession,” the detective continued. “Dino puts down the pen and says, ‘So what am I going down for?’ and Harvey here says, ‘Murder two,’ without missing a beat!” District Attorney Rosen smiled behind his gray beard when Patterson recounted this. “I’m telling you, I’ve only got two more
years till my pension is vested, but I’d put in four more if I could see that look on Dino’s face again.”

  “The law doesn’t parse blame,” Rosen added. “Because he intended to steal Donohue’s money, he is just as responsible for the death as Stacy, who injected the fatal shot. Even if they’d just been trying to help him get high and he died after Stacy put the needle in his arm, it’s still a homicide. That would probably be involuntary manslaughter. Giving him a big dose with the intention of stealing from him bumps it to murder.”

  Detective Mueller told me I had been right to document the suspicious hairs I found between Donohue’s fingers and all over the blanket. They were dog hair. Dino has a black-and-white German shepherd, and he said Donohue had been playing with the dog before he passed out.

  The grand jury is a closed proceeding tasked only with determining whether there is enough evidence to send the suspect to trial. Their courtroom is an immense, echoing chamber paneled in dark wood, with twenty citizen-jurors but no judge. I stood behind the heavy oak table in the middle of the room and looked to ADA Rosen. “The people call Dr. Judy Melinek to the stand,” he announced.

  One of the jurors, an older Hispanic man with a mustache, stood and asked me to raise my right hand. “Do you solemnly swear or affirm under penalty of perjury, that the testimony you are about to give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

  “I do,” I swore and affirmed, and sat, my nerves already a little rattled by the theatricality of the legal ritual. I was surprised that the only two questions I stumbled over—the only ones I hadn’t prepared to answer succinctly—were “What is pathology?” and “What is an autopsy?” Other than that, my third time in grand jury testimony went without a hitch.

  When I recounted the conclusion of the postal bin story at three o’clock rounds the next day, Hirsch especially loved the forensic detail about the German shepherd. “They can use the dog hair to place your decedent in the apartment with the two suspects by evidence alone, in case the videotaped confession becomes inadmissible.” I never found out what ultimately happened to Dino and Stacy. They probably took a plea. I did hear that the detectives used the dog hair as evidence in the indictment hearing.