by Colin Evans
PRAISE FOR THE BOOKS OF COLIN EVANS
THE CASEBOOK OF FORENSIC DETECTION
“[A] well-organized compendium…Even the most dedicated devotee of the genre will find much that is new in these brief but exciting accounts of the brilliant and persistent scientific work that brought murderers…to justice.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Pithy, concise, and remarkably accurate.”
—Science Books & Films
“Written in a popular style as clear as it is brief.”
—Library Journal
“An interesting read.”
—NewScientist
THE FATHER OF FORENSICS
“True-crime readers, historical division, are served a full plate of murder with this biography of a forensic pathologist who was once one of the most famous people in Britain…. Evans proves to be a verbally agile narrator of the macabre, figuratively shaking his head about toxic love triangles and murder-for-insurance schemes that produced dismembered bodies and charred corpses. Crediting Spilsbury for making medical evidence acceptable to British courts, Evans delivers a page-turner for fans of the hot genre of criminal forensics.”
—Booklist
BLOOD ON THE TABLE
The Greatest Cases of New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner
Colin Evans
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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BLOOD ON THE TABLE
This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
Copyright © 2008 by Colin Evans.
All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Evans, Colin, 1948–
Blood on the table: the greatest cases of New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner / Colin Evans.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-1-1012-0680-5
1. New York (N.Y.). Office of Chief Medical Examiner. 2. Homicide investigation—New York (State)—New York—Case studies. 3. Criminal investigation—Case studies. 4. Forensic pathology—Case studies. I. Title.
HV8079.H6E927 2008
614'.1097471—dc22
2007042358
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
ONE
THE EARLY YEARS
TWO
A QUIET HAND ON THE TILLER
THREE
A TOWERING PRESENCE
FOUR
THE BRUTAL DECADE
FIVE
A SURGICAL REMOVAL
SIX
THE POISONED CHALICE
SEVEN
THE DARKEST HOUR
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am greatly indebted to several people and the numerous organizations that have assisted me in the preparation of this book. These are Dr. Vincent DiMaio, Ellen Borakove at the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, the New York Police Department, Hugh M. Cook at the University of Illinois Alumni Association, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the marvelously helpful staff at the British Library, and their colleagues just a few miles up the road at the British Newspaper Library in Colindale. Samantha Mandor and Shannon Jamieson Vazquez, at Berkley Books, have been unfailingly supportive; while a vote of special thanks goes to my agent, Ed Knappman, and all at New England Publishing Associates. David Andersen once again put his exhaustive private library at my disposal, and Greg Manning helped in more ways than he knows. As always, the final thank-you is dedicated to Norma. Needless to say, while all the above contributed enormously to this book, any errors are the responsibility of the writer alone.
INTRODUCTION
Each year approximately sixty thousand people die in New York City.* Most do so quietly and unnoticed, except by grieving families and friends, carried off either by old age or diagnosed illness. These are what we might term “normal” deaths. But New York is no ordinary city. And each year around fifteen thousand of its citizens die in extraordinary circumstances. In broad terms these deaths fall into one of three categories: sudden, unexplained, or violent. The only unifying thread is that all these bodies will ultimately find their way to the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME).
Since its inception at the end of the First World War, the OCME has investigated well in excess of one million deaths. Most are found to be not at all suspicious and can be cleared up with an experienced eye, an external examination, or else a helpful telephone call to the most recent attending physician. But around half—approximately seven thousand per annum—only give up their secrets on the mortuary slab. Of these, the overwhelming majority never make the headlines. Those that do—murders, mostly—have a knack of grabbing national attention. The roll call of killers reads like a Who’s Who of American homicide: Francis “Two Gun” Crowley, Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, Robert Irwin, Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, Alice Crimmins, David Berkowitz (“Son of Sam”), Joel Rifkin, Vincent Johnson (“the Brooklyn Strangler”)…The list goes on and on and on. Even nowadays, at a time when its per capita homicide rate has plummeted to levels not seen since the early 1930s, New York still manages to murder more of its residents than any other major city in America. Little wonder, then, that its medical examiners are so highly regarded: they get to see more homicides in one year than most forensic pathologists experience in a decade.
Overseeing what has become a well-oiled operation is New York City’s chief medical examiner (CME), arguably the most influential position in American medical jurisprudence. It is a post that combines prestige and pressure in equal amounts. You’d better have a lot of talent and the hide of a rhino if you want this job. Get ten thousand cases right and the media will just yawn; botch a single investigation and they will be at your throat like jackals. In the ninety years or so of the OCME’s existence, the rank of chief medical examiner has been held by just seven men (women have yet to crack this particular glass ceiling on a permanent basis). In background and education, five CMEs enjoyed a commonality, being New York born and educated, while the remaining duo had very close ties to the region. But that is where the similarities end. Their personalities were carved from all kinds of different rock. Some were close drinking buddies; some couldn’t stand the sight of each other. Some were magnetically attracted to the reporter’s notebook or TV camera; others made Calvin Coolidge look positively chatty. At times, their feuds
and battles for succession wouldn’t have looked out of place in a medieval European royal court. But one thing’s for sure: the OCME has never been dull, and many of the homicide cases it has investigated have become medico-legal classics.
As it developed new methods of tracking down killers, the OCME helped change the face of forensic science across America. This came about through a combination of technological innovation, top-quality personnel, superb science, and painstaking diligence. Oh yes, and the odd inspired hunch. (Dr. Milton Helpern, in particular, was always very big on “hunches.”) The biggest beneficiaries of this forensic bonanza were the residents of New York City itself. And none too soon. To put it charitably, New York’s earliest settlers had a fairly relaxed attitude when it came to the willful removal of human life. Especially if the killer was white. The state’s first recorded execution took place on June 25, 1646, when a black slave named Jan Creoli was first choked to death and then “burned to ashes” for the crime of sodomy, and yet we have to wait until 1673 before we find anyone paying the ultimate price for murder. On this occasion the culprits were two Native Americans. Astonishingly, another hundred years would pass before we have the first verified case of a white person being hanged for murder. (Treason, buggery, counterfeiting, and horse stealing were a different story. Several white people were hanged for these offenses.) Given the freewheeling nature of colonial life—and the fact that a century-long moratorium on homicide flies in the face of human nature—all we can assume is that New Yorkers had one standard for Caucasian killers and another for the rest. Unlike their cousins to the north. Inhabitants of Massachusetts, for instance, had been hanging homicidal descendants of the Pilgrims since as early as 1630.
But all that changed in the nineteenth century. The tidal wave of immigration that hit New York brought about a quantum shift in public sentiment. As the population rate soared, so did the crime figures and, with it, demands that the authorities crack down hard. Punishment, where it was exacted, was harsh and retributive. When it came to meting out capital punishment most, though not all, of the racial inequities were ironed out, but one serious problem remained: how to catch the bad guy? Across the Atlantic, western Europe’s law enforcement agencies had pinned their crime fighting future on scientific analysis. It was a stratagem that had brought spectacular success. Killers and other criminals who left their fingerprints at crime scenes were paying a high price for this sloppiness, as the magnifying glass came into its own, and the fingerprint expert did the rest. Blood grouping and sophisticated ballistics analysis had also been added to the forensic arsenal. But it wasn’t that way in the New World. When it came to catching criminals they were decidedly old time. For two decades at the start of the twentieth century, frustrated American scientists, medical men, and criminologists banged the drum to play catch up. Eventually in New York State they created enough clamor to force Albany’s hand and in 1918 the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner was created in Manhattan. The OCME might not have been the first dedicated medico-legal facility in America—that distinction belongs to Boston—but it soon became the most powerful and the most emulated, as it uncovered ways of closing off many of the loopholes through which killers had been wriggling free.
As we noted earlier, the OCME has never been concerned solely with murder. Besides homicide, there are countless ways of prematurely abandoning the mortal coil—train wrecks, illness, airplane crashes, bombings, suicide, auto wrecks, domestic accidents, and falls, to name just a few—and the OCME has seen them all. Some of the more esoteric often occur during so-called sex games. Autoeroticism, with its nooses and lethal lack of muscle tone, is always a chancy business, as hundreds have discovered just a second or so too late. So, too, is “playful strangulation” between partners, where many a dominant partner had stared down disbelievingly at the lifeless flesh beneath his or her fingers. In both of the foregoing examples, the participant is driven by the belief that cutting off oxygen to the brain will trigger the ultimate orgasm. What many fail to appreciate is that while interfering with the flow of oxygen to the brain may or may not elevate sexual pleasure to Olympian levels of ecstasy, it does tend to play havoc with various other minor bodily functions—such as the ability to breathe. Incidentally, while we’re on the subject of dangerous liaisons, how about a special mention for the housewares enthusiast who became amorously attached to his vacuum cleaner. You’ve guessed it. One consummation too many and his heart called it quits. The OCME has dealt with all these deaths and more, but overwhelmingly, when people think of the OCME they think of murder, and that is where the core of this book lies.
It is worth remembering that at the start of the twentieth century, New York City had approximately three hundred murders each year, an incredibly low total by modern standards. By 1990 this had soared to 2,245 per annum. Fast-forward to a ghastly September morning in 2001, when 2,749 people were murdered in a matter of minutes. When the first World Trade Center tower collapsed and the rubble began to fly, an advance guard from the OCME found itself caught in the killing zone. The blast literally took them off their feet. Almost miraculously all survived with nothing worse than broken bones and cuts. Patching up their injuries was the easy part. What lay in front of them, buried beneath the smoldering ruins of the Twin Towers, was the most daunting forensic puzzle that any medico-legal team has ever faced. It would be their job—the pathologists, the forensic biologists, the DNA specialists, and all the other scientists—to make some sense of the maddest day in contemporary American history.
How the OCME came to acquire the specialized knowledge that enabled it to handle mass murder on such a scale is a fascinating tale. But to understand and contextualize that development, we need to go back further, to discover what homicide investigation was like in those shadowy days before there was the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. And that is where this book begins.
ONE
THE EARLY YEARS
A “Coroner’s Quest” is a queer sort of thing!
—R. H. Barham (nom de plume: Thomas Ingoldsby), 1788–1845
On January 1, 1898, something quite remarkable happened. The biggest city in the United States suddenly became very much bigger. Overnight, New York City quadrupled in area to three hundred square miles and boosted its population by approximately 65 percent to almost 3.4 million. This meticulously planned demographic explosion was detonated when Manhattan and the Bronx, hitherto known collectively as New York, merged with urban Brooklyn and the largely rural areas of Queens and Staten Island to form the modern-day conurbation we call New York City. It was a bold, brash move in readiness for the new century, one that instantly catapulted this sprawling archipelago of more than five hundred islands and a snatch of mainland—the Bronx—into the front rank of world cities.
And, like most metropolises, New York City had more than its share of dead bodies. They turned up everywhere. Leaving aside the natural wastage generated by old age, death was depressingly commonplace. Construction sites, road accidents, disease in all its forms, indifferent medical care, premature births, and food poisoning—restaurateurs appear to have been alarmingly lavish with the toxins they served up on their menus—all combined to send the mortality rate skyrocketing. And this was without factoring in homicide.
By law, every death from anything other than natural causes was supposed to be investigated fully, and for that New Yorkers turned to the coroner, a post that could trace its lineage to medieval England. Although the job description dates back to pre-Norman times, it was King Richard I who gave the office statutory authority. This came about in September 1194, when a group of traveling judges who dispensed justice in the absent king’s name—he was château-hopping somewhere in his beloved France—fetched up in the county of Kent, and there issued the Articles of Eyre, number twenty of which stated, “In every county of the king’s realm shall be elected three knights and one clerk, to keep the pleas of the Crown.” In the original Latin this office was called custos placitorum coronas, and from this th
e title coronator or crowner evolved, from which we get the word coroner.
At the outset the coroner’s primary function was to protect the king’s financial interests, something very close to Richard’s heart. For despite what popular legend would have us believe, there was nothing especially endearing or honorable about “Good King Richard.” In reality, he was a grasping opportunist with an appetite for expensive and ruinous wars. Moreover, he utterly loathed England. In a reign that lasted ten years, fewer than six months were actually spent in the “sceptred isle,” which probably explains why he never even bothered to learn the language. Richard used his kingdom like an ATM, plundering its citizens’ pockets to finance weaponry and pay soldiers, then disappearing on the latest crusade. In his absence these fund-raising activities were delegated to the coroner.
From being little more than a revenue gatherer, the coroner gradually extended his authority into other areas. An early addition to his duties involved making sure that the property of executed felons—which meant pretty much everyone convicted of a serious crime at this time—was confiscated for the Crown. But gradually, as Parliament became stronger and more influential, especially in matters of tax collection, the powers of the coroner waned, until they became almost solely confined to the investigation of suspicious death. In this capacity, over the next several hundred years, the office of coroner became thoroughly entrenched in English law, so it was only natural that when the early immigrants arrived in America, they brought the coroner system with them.
New York State, like the rest of the thirteen colonies, embraced wholeheartedly what became known as “crowner’s quest law.” Unlike its English forebear, the New York coroner was an elective office, rather than appointed, although by the end of the nineteenth century the benefits of this egalitarianism were somewhat muted. As the Democratic Tammany machine tightened its grip on the political landscape, graft and corruption ran riot, and the coroner’s office was no exception. Overwhelmingly it degenerated into a sinecure for party hacks brought in to balance a political ticket. Few had any legal training, and fewer still knew anything about medicine, but to a man they knew how to turn a blind eye and a quick buck. Even if dear old Uncle Silas had been found sucking coal gas through a rubber tube, it was a rare coroner indeed who wasn’t prepared to ease the bereaved family’s grief and shame by ruling that death to be natural—provided, of course, that a few bucks changed hands. Ten dollars was reckoned to be the going rate. Rumors abounded that for fifty dollars even an inconvenient homicide could be overlooked.
