Blood On The Table

by Colin Evans

  It was clearly a step in the right direction and that same month offered further proof that New York was finally taking its murder problem seriously with the formation on April 19, 1915, of the Homicide Squad. This meant that jurisdiction over a dead victim of crime would now reside with the police rather than boneheaded coroners.

  Not everyone was thrilled by this upheaval. One of the fiercest critics was ex-coroner Dr. Patrick Riordan, a well-connected Irishman whose whisky-laced appearances at countless crime scenes were the object of considerable humor and no little awe. Although Riordan was exactly the type of shady operator that the new system was designed to eradicate, that didn’t prevent him from applying for the new job. Initial chuckles of disbelief soon gave way to a storm of criticism, all of which washed off Riordan’s back like rain off a roof. When the list of candidates was whittled down to a final three, Riordan’s name was still in the mix. Up against him, coincidentally, were the two physicians from Bellevue Hospital whose intervention in the Eugene Rochette case had created such a furor. Not that Riordan was worried. He had bluffed his way through the examination, worked the smoke-filled rooms like the old pro that he was, and was noisily confident of landing the new post. Even the electorate seemed to be on his side, for when it came time for the position of chief medical examiner to be filled, New York had itself a new mayor.

  Despite having been a first-rate chief executive, Mitchel had paid the price for his infamous lack of tact. In the 1917 primaries he failed to win Republican support and ran for reelection on the Fusion ticket alone.* His Tammany opponent, John F. Rylan, a lawyer who mixed mediocrity and malleability in equal measure, buried him. Bumbling and ponderous, without wit, warmth, or wisdom, Rylan took office on the very day that the post of coroner was abolished, January 1, 1918. One of his first acts was to appoint Riordan temporarily to the position of CME, on the tacit understanding that confirmation would be forthcoming at the end of that month.

  Riordan wasted no time in making his presence felt. He ordered that his name be placed on the door of every office occupied by the old Board of Coroners in all five boroughs. In the Bronx office alone, there were nineteen doors and embossed on every one, in fancy gold letters, was the legend DR. PATRICK J. RIORDAN, CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER.

  Just one month later, the sign writers were inscribing a new name. For reasons that remain shrouded in mystery, Riordan suddenly found himself in very bad odor at City Hall and out of a job. (He didn’t even get paid for his month in office). Instead, Rylan offered the post of chief medical examiner to one of the most extraordinary characters in the history of American forensic science, an East Coast blueblood who combined an impeccable social pedigree with outstanding credentials in the field of legal medicine. His name was Dr. Charles Norris.

  At the time of his appointment, Norris was director of laboratories at Bellevue Hospital. That vacancy was now filled by his deputy, Dr. Douglas Symmers, who had placed third behind Norris on the civil service list for the post of chief medical officer, and was the other physician who had stood shoulder to shoulder with Norris in controversially asserting that Eugene Rochette had not died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound but had instead been murdered by an unknown assailant (for that, read “the police”).

  With his deep-set eyes, commanding bulk of more than two hundred pounds, and a glossy Vandyke beard that looked as if it had been polished and then sanded into shape, Norris looked more like a Shakespearean stage actor than America’s premier forensic pathologist of the early twentieth century. But there was real substance behind the showy appearance. He was born into a wealthy Hoboken family on December 4, 1867, and attended Yale before going on to study medicine at the Columbia School of Physicians and Surgeons. He received his medical degree in 1892. Most unusually for medical graduates at that time he was drawn irresistibly to pathology—the “beastly science,” as many derided it—only to suffer the same frustration as that endured by fellow students on his side of the Atlantic: all the best teachers were in Europe. For most this was an insurmountable hurdle; for Norris, with his ever-open checkbook, it provided the chance to soak up the sights and splendor of Europe’s greatest cities while receiving topflight instruction. In 1894 he pitched up in Germany. There he enrolled for two semesters in Kiel and one in Göttingen, before traveling to Berlin, where he fell under the influence of the legendary pathologist, Rudolf Virchow. From 1895 to 1896 he collaborated with two outstanding Viennese teachers, Eduard von Hofmann and Alexander Kolisko. The final leg of Norris’s forensic jaunt across Europe took him to Scotland, and the hothouse university faculties of Glasgow and Edinburgh, where he studied under the Glaisters and the Littlejohns, two academic dynasties that had revolutionized British forensic science. By the time he returned to his homeland, Norris knew more about legal medicine than anyone in America, and he was eager for a chance to demonstrate his newfound skills.

  In 1904 he was offered the post of professor of pathology at Bellevue Hospital and soon began conducting autopsies in criminal cases. The police trusted Norris. They liked his calm, deliberate manner of speech, and the way he delivered testimony, clearly and succinctly with none of the windbag pompousness that afflicted so many so-called expert witnesses. But like everyone else in the medico-legal system, Norris was hamstrung by the coroners’ hegemony. Their fondness for “in-house” autopsies kept him on the sidelines in many big cases, but when incompetence, arrogance, and a general sense that something needed to be done eventually combined to bring about the coroners’ downfall, the professor from Hoboken was waiting, scalpel poised.

  When Norris officially took over his new role on February 1, 1918, the job parameters were sharply delineated: the CME was an appointed post that lasted until the incumbent’s retirement, and only one person could remove him from office—the mayor. Over the years more than one resident of Gracie Mansion would seek to avail himself of this privilege. But for now, thoughts of failure didn’t even enter Norris’s mind as he set about organizing his department. He housed his headquarters in the pathology building of Bellevue Hospital at 400 East Twenty-ninth Street, thus beginning that establishment’s long association with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, a relationship that endures to the present day. Bellevue, besides being home to the New York University School of Medicine, is the oldest public hospital in the United States, able to trace its roots back to 1735. Because of the bountiful supply of violent and unexpected death in New York, it had always been in the vanguard of American pathology, both general and forensic. It welcomed Norris, but no special provisions were laid on. He and his assistants shared the large, skylit autopsy room on the second floor with the hospital pathologists. Some found the close proximity of the four marble tables claustrophobic; others preferred it, taking the view that so many colleagues so close at hand amounted to having access to a human reference library should an especially tricky situation arise. On a more pragmatic level, if the elevator that transported bodies to the second floor happened to break down, then a room in the basement could be pressed into service as a makeshift mortuary. Although bodies were stored in a room lined with centrally refrigerated storage compartments, a lack of air-conditioning elsewhere in the department meant that sometimes, especially at the height of summer, the OCME could be a sensory nightmare, particularly for distressed relatives who had come in to identify a deceased family member.

  One of Norris’s most important innovations was the introduction of a telephone switchboard, manned twenty-four hours a day. Whereas in the past, coroners had sauntered up to a crime scene, either at their leisure or after they had sobered up, Norris expected a professional response at any hour of the day or night.

  The establishment of the OCME coincided with a period of enormous social upheaval, both on the home front and abroad. Just nine months earlier, the United States had entered World War I against Germany, and the number of doctors volunteering for active service overseas left many sectors of the medical profession dangerously understaffed. But Norris was for
tunate in having good people around him. While he oversaw the Manhattan department, the post of deputy medical examiner for Queens went to Dr. Howard Neil, the Bronx to Dr. Karl S. Kennard. After a fitful start Dr. Carl Boettinger assumed responsibility for Brooklyn, leaving Dr. George Mord free to oversee Staten Island. The pay was nothing to write home about. Each deputy received an annual salary of $3,000, except Mord, who, for some reason, had to scrape by on just $1,950 a year. The total package turned out to be one of the best bargains New Yorkers ever got. For $50,000 a year less than the rickety old coroner system had cost them, they had, at long last, a modern cohesive investigative unit, purpose-built to fight crime.

  They also had one the most remarkable medico-legal experts in history as their CME. Norris had brio to burn. His Runyonesque flamboyance came quite naturally to him, as did the patrician air of elegance that infused his every action. Where other pathologists had to make do with cabs or else hitch a ride to the latest crime scene, Norris would invariably sweep up in a lustrous, chauffeur-driven limousine. Alighting in his beautifully tailored frock coat, wing-collar and the trademark bow tie, looking for all the world as if he’d just stopped off en route to a cocktail party, he would then go about his work. Blessed with a razor-sharp intellect, Norris was a stickler for accuracy and demanded nothing less of those around him. Sloppiness was not tolerated. It was surprising how often back-alley crime scenes transmogrified into ad hoc classrooms as the CME instructed ham-fisted police officers in the correct methods of evidence processing.

  He also possessed enviable reserves of compartmentalization. Most mornings found him in the morgue, dealing with the overnight admissions, but come midday—barring any emergencies—he would down tools, peel off his rubber gloves, and head for a long and often very liquid lunch at one of the glitzy hotels on Park Avenue.

  These were the early days of the newspaper “gossip wars,” a time when columnists such as Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan were slugging it out for the best copy. For those who covered the Broadway beat, larger-than-life characters like Charles Norris were money in the bank. The press loved him and he loved them. But it wasn’t all about ego feeding. Norris, pragmatic down to the soles of his gleaming wingtips, knew the value of “good press,” and in the years to come, as his relations with City Hall soured to the point of disintegration, he went out of his way to cultivate the fourth estate. As a result, reporters were better informed than ever before, the OCME got some great coverage, and Norris gained some powerful allies.

  Not everyone approved. Norris’s elegance or arrogance—it all depended on the point of view—raised plenty of hackles. As early as 1921, a well-organized lobbying campaign designed to strip him of his powers and transfer them to the New York County district attorney’s physician, Dr. Otto H. Schultze, came within a hairbreadth of success. Schultze, a fussy, self-important man with a knack for insinuating himself into high-profile cases—he would later gain prominence in the unsolved Hall–Mills murders of 1922 and the baffling death of Starr Faithfull in 1929—despised Norris. The antipathy dated back to Schultze’s days as a coroner’s physician when, like scores of others, he had been roughly handled by the Wallstein report. Dark hints about his probity, or lack thereof, meant that when the mayor was casting around for candidates to fill the post of CME, Schultze’s name got spiked almost immediately. It was a stinging rejection, one that Schultze never forgot nor forgave. And he was a world-class grudge bearer. For the rest of his increasingly erratic career, he sniped and fumed incessantly at the man whom he believed had robbed him of his medical birthright.

  If Norris was able to shrug off Schultze’s maledictions like so many unwanted flies, then he was allowed no similar luxury when he found himself almost overrun by the consequences and the victims of Prohibition. Passage of what became popularly known as the Volstead Act (after its promoter, Congressman Andrew J. Volstead), might have been implemented with the best intentions, but it played havoc with the nation’s health and gave the OCME a decade-long hangover. Thirsty Americans had no intention of modifying their behavior just because of some government diktat. They crowded into chic speakeasies if they were rich, and sleazy back-rooms if they were not, and guzzled whatever was shoved in front of them. For many it was the last drink they ever swallowed. Some of the fluids that masqueraded as whisky or gin would have powered a Model T Ford. In 1920 an estimated 1,064 persons died from poisoned liquor in the United States. By 1925 that figure had soared by more than 400 percent, although the true figure will never be known, owing to the fact that many sympathetic doctors—unwilling to compound a bereaved family’s grief with the possibility of legal action—excised all mention of alcohol from death certificates.

  Norris autopsied hundreds of these hooch victims. An unashamed bon vivant himself, he found the human toll depressing and avoidable. To his way of thinking, just about the only beneficiary of Prohibition was organized crime. Certainly the OCME’s workload came under increasing strain, as trigger-happy mobsters battling for control of the bootleg market pumped bullets into each other with lavish disdain.

  This surge in gun crime forced a radical rethink in the way that gunshot wounds were investigated. Norris and his assistants fired all kinds of guns into different materials from various ranges and angles, studied the gunpowder marks and shot patterns, and then applied this knowledge to cases. The recent invention of the comparison microscope, which allowed two bullets to be viewed side by side, had transformed ballistics analysis, and Norris was one of the first to grasp its potential. Drawing on the power of the comparison microscope, and combining it with his own experiments, he was able, on one occasion, to disagree with a former coroner’s physician (who was now working in law enforcement) and successfully establish that a death previously considered a suicide was actually a homicide. It also worked the other way. In another case, Norris was successful in changing an apparent homicide to a suicide.

  With departmental problems multiplying exponentially, Norris refused to lose sight of his strategy. “My only object is to run the office efficiently and to obtain results along medical lines,” he declared. “I mean by this the establishment of a medico-legal institute which would do research work along the lines being done in the larger central European cities. There is no reason why a city of the size and magnificence of New York should not do this work.” And in 1922, the OCME got the chance to demonstrate just how much leeway it had made up on its European counterparts.

  CASE FILE:

  Becker and Norkin (1922)

  Harry Becker was only eight years old but he sensed—no, make that knew—something was seriously wrong. For the past several months, ever since Pop had deposited him and his brother, Alexander, age nine, at the Hebrew Orphans’ Asylum in Manhattan, Harry had been begging the welfare workers to find their mom. The hard-pressed staff told Harry what Abraham Becker had told them: their no-account mother had hightailed it with another man, and he just couldn’t cope with four kids on his own. Harry didn’t believe that. Mom had loved her children too much to just abandon them. In between pestering the nurses and wardens, Harry fretted over his twin sisters, Celia and Sarah, just three years old, anxious for news of their whereabouts. Last he’d heard they were at the Home for Hebrew Infants up in the Bronx, but that was months ago; they could be anywhere by now. At the back of his mind lurked an icy dread—he’d heard the other kids’ taunts—that they’d probably been adopted. When prospective parents came to the orphanage to view the children, eight-or nine-year-olds like him and Alex rarely got a look-in; cute little twins, barely age three, now that was a different story. Harry, old beyond his years, shuddered at the prospect. More than anything else, he wanted the family back together. Which is why he kept bugging the staff. In the end, his nonstop badgering paid off. Someone from the Asylum contacted the police.

  It turned out that Harry Becker wasn’t the only person concerned about the disappearance of his mother. Just a few days earlier, two women from the Bronx—longtime friends of Jennie Becke
r—had also taken their concerns to the police. An investigation was promised. Without any great conviction or indeed desire, a couple of detectives began going door to door in Home Street where the Beckers had lived. It was routine stuff at first, but by nightfall their investigative antennae were twitching. Just about everyone they talked to—or so it seemed—told the same story: Abraham Becker had gotten fed up with his wife, murdered her, and buried the body close by. The detectives were staggered. For months this close-knit community had managed to bottle up these rumors and keep them from official ears, but gradually, as suspicions waned and tongues loosened, the officers were able to piece together the whole, incredible story…

  Abraham Becker’s antecedents had a familiar ring. He’d been born in Russia in 1888, at the height of the vicious pogroms. As a youngster he saw mobs attack Jewish homes, loot businesses, burn synagogues, all without hindrance from police or soldiers. Murders, too, went uninvestigated. Those able to flee this tyranny did so, and these included Becker’s family. While still an infant, he joined millions of others on the long trek westward. His journey to the United States had been haphazard. He’d traveled first to Johannesburg, South Africa, and then on to London, which is where he met and married Jennie Karbritz, who was some nine years his junior. A short time later the couple booked passage for America. After clearing immigration at Ellis Island, the family settled in the Bronx where Becker found work as a chauffeur/truck driver. Each month was a struggle to support his rapidly expanding family. Not that Becker was overly concerned. Although functionally illiterate, he was blessed with a quicksilver tongue and a brash, cocky attitude, useful traits for a serial lecher wholly disinterested in monogamy. He also had a mean streak. Judging from the tearful letters that Jennie wrote her mother in London, she suffered regular beatings from her violent, philandering husband, although, according to some friends, at five foot three and almost two hundred pounds, Jennie was more than capable of landing a few solid blows of her own when the occasion demanded.