Working Stiff

by Judy Melinek, Md

  I started with the living room trash can, because it was close to an open window. Letters from Italy were piled on a desk. I admired the handsome collection of books, mostly in Italian, but also in English and French, that lined a narrow bookshelf. Another held a collection of opera CDs, meticulously filed by composer. Mr. Lavagnino had invested in quality hardwood furniture for his scrupulously clean if meager railroad flat. I stepped past pots of fruiting tomato plants, through the open window, and out to the balcony. There I found still more tomato plants. The green scent rising from them instantly flushed away the stench of decomposition, and I wished I could stay, hiding from my colleagues, until it was time to leave. Some of the plants dangled fat, red fruit. The death of a man who could grow such beautiful tomatoes on his balcony was a loss to the city of New York.

  The medicine cabinet contained a full bottle of Tylenol, an old-fashioned double-edged safety razor, a toothbrush. No prescription medications at all. A walnut rack in the kitchen held a few unopened bottles of wine, and there was half a bottle of grappa in a cabinet; no evidence of substance abuse. The refrigerator wasn’t empty, that was for sure—the crisper overflowed with vegetables, wilting but not yet rotten. Cured meat and big jars of homemade pasta sauce lined the shelves. Standing there only feet from the reeking corpse, I closed my eyes and tried to put myself in this small kitchen while Errico Lavagnino was cooking, maybe Sunday gravy with lamb and veal, or minestrone with plenty of homegrown basil. Didn’t work. The place still stank of death.

  Russ pulled four towels out of his duffel bag and wrapped one around each of the corpse’s arms and legs. I asked him why. “Traction,” he replied. “Sometimes the skin peels right off, you never know. Towels are better than hands on a bad decomp.” Russ and the van driver grabbed the corpse by the towels and heaved it into the body bag. A horde of maggots fell off the torso and performed squirming, frantic backbends in the puddle of decomposition fluid, the color and consistency of crankcase oil, left behind on the floor.

  I knew I would find the words “neighbors reported a foul odor” on the MLI report. “The stench of loneliness,” Hirsch calls it. But when I followed the gurney and body bag out of that stinking apartment into the hallway, suddenly I smelled nothing but good, strong coffee. Russ had been right. I pointed this out, and as he started the slow and clattering business of lowering a dead body down three narrow flights of stairs, Investigator Dunn managed that weary smile once more.

  Since I was doing my MLI ride-along the week we picked up Errico Lavagnino, I did not perform his autopsy. The first decomp I autopsied was a floater, a ragged clot of bones. It afforded me a chance to collaborate with Amy Zelson, our in-house anthropologist.

  When a shovel goes into the ground in Manhattan, some kind of bone usually comes up. Construction work stops, the police bring the bone to Amy the anthropologist, and Amy tells the police what it is. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it belongs to an animal. New Yorkers have eaten a lot of pigs, sheep, and cattle over the past three hundred years. Occasionally, though, the bone is human. The police cordon off the area where it was found, our death scene investigators move in, and the construction foreman goes home to take two aspirin for the headache he will endure until the police are satisfied there’s nothing else to find. Usually they uncover other bones, and Amy is able to determine all sorts of interesting things about the long-dead city dweller.

  At midnight on July 19, 2001, a skeleton had washed up on the rocks below the Brooklyn Bridge. The detective on the scene called Amy Zelson. “I can’t tell if it’s a human or a calf,” he said.

  “How many cows do you see grazing around Manhattan?” she replied. “If it doesn’t have feathers or fur attached, bring it in. I’ll look at it tomorrow.” The detective was not pleased.

  The next morning Amy took one look at the “calf” and assigned it a case number. It was missing the head and the lower parts of both arms and legs, but was no doubt a human skeleton. This skeleton was not the familiar Halloween figure of bleached bone, however. It had undergone saponification, a biochemical change that occurs in cold, damp places in the absence of oxygen. The fatty tissues turn into a gray-tan or pale yellow soapy substance called adipocere.

  This floater was different from the other decomp cases I would do. The typical decomposing corpse breaks down through putrefaction. It is purple and bloated, and smells horrible—worse by far than a fresh corpse. After you die, bacteria go on a feasting spree, consuming the proteins that make up your cellular structures. First your belly turns green as the “good” bacteria living in your gut invade the surrounding tissues. Your skin marbleizes black and blue as microbes spread through the blood vessels, rupturing red blood cells and releasing their contents. Putrefactive blisters may emerge on the skin. “They come in two varieties, just like wine: red and white,” Dr. Hirsch had warned us in an afternoon lecture one day. “Whatever you do, don’t break those blisters. They are the sine qua non of stench.” If your skin remains intact—if, that is, you aren’t being eaten away from the outside by fly maggots or rats or house cats—you become a bacterial gas balloon. When you come to my autopsy table and I cut into your abdomen with a scalpel, the noxious gases rush out all at once. I have to stand back for a few seconds until they dissipate, to be sucked up by the morgue’s powerful climate-control system, filtered, and expelled.

  Oh, yes—that thing about house cats is true. Your faithful golden retriever might sit next to your dead body for days, starving, but the tabby won’t. Your pet cat will eat you right away, with no qualms at all. Like any opportunistic scavenger, it will start with your eyeballs and lips. I’ve seen the result.

  The decomposed corpse on my table this time carried only a faint whiff of salt-marsh decay. There was no skin left, so I could look right into the open abdominal cavity. The tissues were pale, waxy, and smooth to the touch. Most of the exposed ribs were broken, and Amy pointed out that the jagged edges indicated the damage was postmortem. I documented everything I could, took samples for toxicology, and prayed our forensic biology lab would have some success in obtaining DNA from the fragments of sallow muscle and chipped bone I had put aside. Amy disarticulated the right femur from its hip joint and then cut away pieces of the pubic bones, a clavicle, and two ribs. It seemed to me an odd selection, so I asked her why she chose those specific bones. “The clavicles aren’t yet fused. Bony tips replace cartilage between the ages of eighteen and thirty, so these unfused collarbones give me a rough age for John or Jane here.”

  “John. He’s got a penis.” I pointed to the proof, clinging valiantly to the front of the pubic bone.

  “Okay, good. We know sex. I can use the length of the femur to estimate height, and the development of the ribs and pubes to narrow the age range. The more techniques you use, the more accurate your estimation will be.”

  Amy was my age and height, with brown eyes and thick, wavy black hair imperfectly tamed in a ponytail—and a remarkably muscular grip, an occupational advantage. She had already measured the thigh bone on a board that looked like a giant’s shoe sizer, and was scribbling data. In just a few minutes Amy was able to determine that the pile of grayish bones had belonged to a man in his early twenties who stood five foot two, give or take three inches and two years.

  I presented the mystery floater to Dr. Hirsch at afternoon rounds. He had some intriguing observations. “For one,” he said, “I doubt this is a jumper. Based on the type of decomposition changes we are seeing, he went into cold water several months ago, probably in the winter, and he stayed down there on the silty bottom. Why didn’t he float, and wash up a couple of weeks after he died like all the other bodies as they start to decompose?”

  “Something must have been holding him down,” I answered.

  “Weighing him down. I’m guessing he was hog-tied by his wrists and ankles. You got what floated away after the muscles finally fell apart and the joints disarticulated.”

  “But where’s his head?”

  “Probably had
a bag over it, and it’s still tied to his wrists and ankles, sitting on the bottom of the river,” Dr. Hirsch posited without dramatic effect. “It wasn’t Mafia, though. They would have taken him ten miles upriver. I’ll bet it was drug related.”

  Amy Zelson’s office sat across from the radiology area in one of the nastier corners of the Office of Chief Medical Examiner: parked there bumper to bumper was a line of gurneys holding decomposing corpses, which stank up the corridor grievously while they awaited X-ray. “Oh, I don’t even smell it anymore,” Amy said with perfect nonchalance when I complained. “Guess I’ve developed a tolerance.”

  The forensic anthropology lab was spare and clean, eight by ten feet at most, and crowded with cardboard boxes, scrupulously labeled, full of bones. Perched solidly atop a standing tripod with a gas burner was a cauldron that looked like it must have been army surplus; it could have made soup for forty easily. Two ordinary stockpots on the counter steamed gently over a slow boil.

  Amy gestured for me to have a look. There, simmering in the smallest pot, was the pelvic bone of my Brooklyn Bridge cadaver. I could see the grayish tissue loosening off. In the larger was somebody’s forearm and a badly scarred lower jaw. “Ah!” I exclaimed. “Perez?” Amy nodded. I had done Diego Perez’s autopsy earlier in the week and had requested Amy’s consultation in determining what had caused some of his healed fractures.

  Amy pulled a hinged box from her desk and opened it with care. Inside, a collection of slender plastic casts nested in foam rubber molds. These, she told me, were models of the sternal end surface of the right fourth rib, for each sex at different ages. She took John Doe’s right fourth rib and compared the end that had been attached to the breastbone to one plastic rib-end after another, until she found a match. “See how the ribs develop a deeper groove, with scalloped edges? Then it flattens out again.” The cadaver’s rib had a noticeable lip—exactly like the corresponding surface on the model for a twenty- to twenty-three-year-old male.

  “That is too cool!”

  “I have a set of models for pelvic bones that’s even more accurate, but we’ll have to wait for your guy’s tissues to cook off before we can give those a try. It’s always best to have multiple modalities when we estimate age. The odds of getting it right increase if you study more than one anatomical structure.”

  I poked around Amy’s lab, looking into boxes of bones. “Here,” she said, and produced an evidence bag holding a pair of cervical vertebrae. “Ax murder. Guy hacked to death by his uncle for stealing from the family business.”

  “Oh, yeah, I remember Lucas talking about that case.” I examined the violent, sharp-edged breaks in the neck bones. “He said the fatal blow severed the vertebral artery.”

  “Yup—but you can see that the ax didn’t pass all the way through to the spinal cord.” The degree of detail she was showing me in the vertebrae would not have been apparent during the autopsy. If the ax was recovered as evidence, Amy could perform tool mark analysis to match it to the bony injury—or exclude it as the murder weapon.

  I picked up a skull. Amy told me it had belonged to a homeless woman who was found decomposed under a train viaduct. “Her teeth show a major life change. She has expensive dental work in her molars, from a time when she could afford good health care, or held a job with benefits.” Her top canines and lower incisors showed extensive cavity damage, however. Extensive enough, in fact, that she must have been suffering from chronic toothache. She had probably spent the latter years of her life destitute. Amy took the skull from my hands, considered it, and handed it back. “Each one of these tells a different story,” she said. “I love my job.”

  Over the weekend another floater came in, this one with the head attached. It went to a colleague, Dr. Karen Turi. Detectives from Missing Persons faxed over a report for a man last seen a month before, suspected of having jumped off the 59th Street Bridge. The fax described a five-foot-two, twenty-two-year-old man, which made the missing person six inches too short to be Karen’s case—though it fit the description of my waxy headless floater perfectly.

  I called the missing man’s family. He had been hospitalized after an accident a month before his disappearance, they told me. When his hospital X-rays arrived, I took them straight to Amy. She and I crossed the stinky hallway to the radiology room and put the films up on the light board, side by side with the films of my John Doe. Amy took one look—and stifled a tweenish screech. “Look at those spinal processes! The seventh cervical and first thoracic are exact matches!” The two X-rays each showed an identical pair of bright white pentagons. These were spinal processes, the nubs sticking up on your backbone. Everybody’s are slightly different, so matching two adjacent spinal processes is forensically definitive. It was proof that the missing person and our John Doe shared the same backbone. “You’ve got your ID, baby!” Amy beamed, and I high-fived her.

  Five days. I couldn’t believe we had identified Stefan Branko, a headless, decomposed cold case, in five days. At rounds that first afternoon, Hirsch had cautioned that some John Does stay Does forever. Through a combination of science, police work, and luck, however, we had figured out who Stefan Branko was less than a week after he surfaced.

  DNA results came back from the Forensic Sciences Division soon thereafter, confirming our conclusion. I signed the provisional death certificate right away, and we released the remains to the family’s mortician, who told me the Brankos were grateful for the unhappy news. Their son had been depressed and suicidal. The police told them multiple witnesses had reported a man fitting his description jumping off the 59th Street Bridge into the East River on the same day Stefan had gone missing. That had been five weeks before. They were relieved to know the truth, to be free to mourn him.

  In the end, the case still held one forensic mystery. Dr. Hirsch had been wrong about this being a drug dump—but I could see how his guess had been a scientifically logical and informed one. We find bodies with Branko’s type of decomposition in wintery marshes or cold, silty river bottoms. We do not find them in the East River in mid-July, after only a month underwater. Summer jumpers typically float to the surface after a day or two, because they have putrefied and bloated with bacterial gases. What had kept this body on the bottom? How had saponification advanced at such an accelerated rate?

  These unanswered questions led me once again to contemplate the value of a Hirschism: “Don’t confuse the autopsy with the death investigation. One is only part of the other.” Dr. Hirsch’s own hypothesis that the guy had been hog-tied and dumped was based on the only piece of the death investigation available on the day I did the autopsy: the state and type of decomposition. Without Amy’s evaluation of the skeletal anatomy, the pair of X-rays, and the police missing person report, we never would have figured out the truth. We might have concluded Stefan Branko was an unidentified murder victim, and the Branko family might never have known his fate.

  Even Amy the anthropologist doesn’t have the power to conjure every body’s identity. The city’s potter’s field holds nearly a million anonymous bodies. Once in a while, however, even the forgotten dead return to recover their names. In October 1986, a man in New York City drank himself to death and was buried under one of those numbered grave markers on Hart Island. Fifteen and a half years later Jaime Rubio got his name back.

  Rubio was an alcoholic living on the street. He was found lying on a sidewalk vomiting blood, and died in a Manhattan hospital shortly thereafter without regaining consciousness, without identification, and without anybody figuring out who he was. No autopsy was performed. The dead man was buried at public expense as a John Doe, and forgotten. His two sisters had filed a missing person report in 1986. Nothing came of it, but Rosa and Irma were persistent, and kept bugging the police. Finally, in 2002, the Missing Persons Squad managed to match two sets of fingerprint records and put the name Jaime Rubio, from an old arrest report, to our John Doe’s postmortem investigation file.

  When Mr. Rubio’s sisters learned that no
autopsy had ever been done, they requested one, and he became my case. The exhumed skeleton arrived at the Pit in a body bag full of grave dirt. The best I could do was scoop some brown mush admixed with soil from the region where his stomach would have been, and dig out some of the green mush inside the skull. It would be interesting to see if our toxicologists found anything after fifteen years in a coffin. I also evaluated the skeleton with Amy, looking for fractures or other signs of trauma. We ran X-rays, as we do for all decomps, and found nothing at all. After finishing this hyperpostmortem examination I called Jaime Rubio’s sisters. I tried to explain that the body was skeletonized and there wasn’t much I could tell about their brother’s death. Rosa started wailing as if Jaime had died yesterday. Eventually Irma calmed her down, and both sisters thanked me profusely for my kindness and hard work.

  Several weeks later I was working on the report for an especially complicated suicide—a young man who had lit himself on fire and then plunged a knife into his belly, dying weeks later after several surgeries—when the phone rang. It was the OCME receptionist. Jaime Rubio’s sisters had arrived unannounced in our lobby—and declared emphatically that they weren’t going anywhere until they saw their brother.

  I went downstairs to talk to Rosa and Irma. Both sisters had been crying. They told me Jaime’s bones were going to go straight to burial, but they wanted to see the remains before we shipped them off to the mortuary. It was obvious they didn’t have the money to pay for a viewing at a funeral home. I sympathized, but worried. Our office isn’t really set up for viewings. Despite what you see on TV, we don’t bring the next of kin into the morgue. If we needed to ask a family member to identify a body, we would do it with Polaroid pictures, in a small office off the quiet and solemn lobby. Marching these poor women through the Pit so they could be in the presence of their dead brother’s pile of dirty bones would be macabre to the point of cruelty.