Blood On The Table

by Colin Evans

  Not so, said the prosecution. Their chronology had Carpi arriving at Laura’s house on the morning of February 8, with murder in mind. At some time between 8:47 and 9:30 A.M., he had inveigled his way into the house, pulled a .32-caliber handgun, and shot Laura to death. After rolling her body in the dining-room rug, he then mopped the floor, thus obliterating most but not all traces of blood, before loading the body into his car. The visit to Morgan Guaranty was a carefully planned smokescreen thrown up to conceal the true motive for his trip to Manhattan—to dump his dead wife’s body in the East River.

  The state felt it had uncovered three highly significant flaws in Carpi’s story. First, there was his initial insistence that he had reached Laura’s house at 9:30 A.M., when phone company records showed Carpi was actually making calls from his home at this same time. (This revelation had provoked a radical revision on Carpi’s part, with him later advancing the alleged arrival at Laura’s by almost an hour.) Doubt, too, surrounded that supposed forty-five-minute call to his mother; according to the phone company, this was closer to two minutes. Also, all the other calls were shorter than previously claimed.

  The second discrepancy came courtesy of a secretary who worked for John Cannon, one of Carpi’s lawyers. Leanne Landefelt testified that at 3:35 P.M. on February 8, she took a call from Carpi, in which he left a message for Cannon, saying that the school had phoned to report Laura’s nonappearance and that he was on his way to pick up his children. If accurate, this testimony could put Carpi in the electric chair, because Leanne’s timings had Carpi making this call a full twenty-five minutes before he said his daughter had called. Only if Carpi already knew that his wife was not going to show, argued the prosecution, could he have contacted his lawyers at the time specified. Phone records at the Carpi children’s private school showed no log of anyone having phoned Carpi at this earlier time. When asked by counsel if she had kept this message, Leanne said no.

  Discrepancy number three was even more curious. Mailman Paul E. Stephens told the court how on February 8 he had delivered Mrs. Carpi’s mail at 12:30 P.M., three hours after Colin said he dropped off the support check, and yet when detectives searched the house that evening they found the support check letter on top of the other mail. This incongruity obviously unsettled Carpi. According to Detective Samuel F. Bianco, five months later at an interview held beside Carpi’s swimming pool, the defendant had raised this topic and said, “I just want to get the record straight.” Carpi had explained how when he took the children to the house that afternoon Jennifer had said something about the positioning of the mail. When the chief defense counsel, Gerald Stockman, tried to question Bianco about whether Jennifer handled the mail, Altman cried foul, saying Jennifer would have to take the stand if her role were to be discussed. Justice Arthur B. Salvatore agreed and threw out this line of questioning.

  Carpi’s prodigious bankroll meant that he could afford high-quality legal representation, and Stockman didn’t let him down. Marshaling his forces skillfully and with no obvious shortage of ammunition, Stockman called John J. Scott to the stand. Quite by chance, on the night of Laura’s disappearance, Scott, an old school friend of Carpi’s, happened to run into Carpi at the historic General Wayne Inn in Merion, Pennsylvania. Carpi was eating there with his mother and children. Although the two men had not seen each other for twenty years, they chatted about old times, and at no time during the conversation did Scott notice any scratches or marks of any kind on Carpi’s face, contrary to what the two earlier witnesses had claimed.

  Stockman next disposed of that alleged confrontation in the elevator. One of Carpi’s lawyers, A. C. Reeves Hicks, had also heard the remark that day and found it hard to believe that anyone would have construed it as a threat. More useful testimony came from Carpi’s other lawyer, John Cannon. He told the court that on February 7 he had called Carpi and recommended that he make the support payment as soon as possible. So far as he was concerned, his client had acted impeccably throughout the painful and protracted divorce proceedings.

  Everything now hinged on Colin C. Carpi. In temperament and personality, he wasn’t the type to duck the challenge of the witness stand, and when he testified he did so with an air of invincible self-confidence. His answers, forthright and punctuated with prods of his index finger, frequently irked Judge Salvatore, who ordered him not to expand his answers beyond the scope of the questions. But Carpi was determined to set the agenda. He dismissed Hartman and Annich’s version of the elevator incident as a “complete fabrication…baloney.” As for Hartman’s claims that he had threatened his wife: “Nothing could be further from the truth…In thirteen years of married life I don’t ever remember threatening Laura or ever saying anything derogatory about her to anyone.” He hotly maintained that he had “absolutely nothing” to do with her murder.

  On the morning of February 8, he said, he was outside Laura’s house for a minute or two at most between 8:35 and 8:45, just long enough to park in the driveway, deposit the check, and drive out again. He had not seen Laura and he did not notice if her car was in the garage. By nine o’clock he was back home, phoning John Cannon’s office and leaving a message with his secretary that he had followed instructions to deliver the check and would shortly be heading off to New York City on a bank errand. After working on an affidavit for the custody battle and making several more phone calls, he left for New York at 11:05 A.M., taking the Lincoln Tunnel and going across Manhattan directly to the Morgan Guaranty branch at Park Avenue and Forty-eighth Street. At approximately 2:00 P.M. he left the bank and drove back to Princeton, stopping first at the office of A. C. Reeves Hicks, at 3:30 P.M. for about ten minutes. While there he called John Cannon, only to be told that Cannon was away from the office. Carpi had hung up without leaving a message. In saying this, Carpi directly contradicted Leanne Landefelt’s testimony, vehemently insisting that he had mentioned nothing about Laura not picking up the children from school.

  With the trial turning into a variation on the old tangled theme of “he said, she said,” suddenly one of those Perry Mason moments came along. A surprise witness! Four days after giving her original testimony, Leanne Landefelt was back on the stand. And what she had to say would drive a stake right through the heart of the prosecution’s case.

  An investigator hired by the defense had been through John Cannon’s files and found a sheet of legal-size paper on which Leanne had listed calls received on February 8, 1971. Referring to this list, it reminded her that after 3 P.M., she had taken seven calls for Cannon, before taking one from Carpi. No time was specified for any of them, and the message left by Carpi was that his children had just called from school, not that the school had called.

  As he listened to this astonishing reversal, Altman’s world turned to rubble about his ears. No wonder the State of New York had wanted nothing to do with this case; it was a prosecutorial nightmare!

  The final dagger was plunged into the state’s case by two of the Carpi children. Jennifer, still only fourteen years old, confirmed that she had called her father from school at 3:50 P.M., after twice failing to get an answer from her mother. Her brother, Colin Jr., just one year younger, also testified that he’d tried unsuccessfully to contact his father.

  During his closing address, Altman, in a masterpiece of understatement, professed himself “shocked” by Leanne’s change of testimony. When the trial began, he had promised the jury a single “fatal error” that would prove Carpi’s guilt. Having failed dismally and embarrassingly in that endeavor, he now attempted to hedge his bets by telling the jury that Carpi had committed not one, not two, but three “fatal errors”: (1) the admission by Carpi that he visited the house on the morning she disappeared, (2) the call to his attorney’s secretary on the day of the crime, and (3) his own testimony that he made the call. Altman closed by claiming that Carpi had actually made two calls to the secretary on that afternoon and that the first, which mentioned Laura’s nonappearance, came before he heard from the children. All in all
, it was a fumbling conclusion to a case that had been disastrously mishandled from the outset.

  For the defense, Stockman wanted to know how on earth his client could “have gone to her house in broad daylight, killed her, taken 170 pounds or so [body and rug] to his car with nobody seeing a thing, then return, clean up with a mop, wring it out so well the state police could not even detect that the drop [of blood] remaining on the mop was human, and drive off.” All of these were salient points, and all of them glided past the fact that, quite obviously, someone did exactly that.

  In a final desperate roll of the dice, the state produced Eleanor Perone, a receptionist for the legal firm representing Mrs. Carpi, as a rebuttal witness to Carpi’s claim that he had always treated Laura well. Mrs. Perone told how, three days before the murder, Laura had told her that the defendant had once burst in while she was vacuuming. “She said his eyes were wild and he told her time was coming near.” Perone ended quietly, “She said ‘he’s really out to get me, Ellie.’”

  Now it was up to the jury. On January 30, after two days of deliberation, they came back with a verdict of not guilty. Carpi pounded the table in triumph. Outside the court, both sides continued to trade punches. Carpi contended that the prosecution had “lied about the facts, concealed important evidence, and [engaged in running] a massive, prejudicial publicity campaign.” He also declared his intention of writing a book about inequities in the legal system, a promise, thus far, unfulfilled.

  For its part, the prosecution almost choked on sour grapes. No losing gracefully here. Acting prosecutor Wilbur H. Mathesius went straight for the jugular: “I want everyone to know, I want the jury to know, that he [Carpi] flunked a lie-detector test three times.”

  What the jury would have made of this revelation is, of course, pure conjecture, but, traditionally, juries are hostile to two things: a proven liar and flawed testimony from expert witnesses. The first speaks for itself; the second is far more insidious. As the O. J. Simpson trial demonstrated, just a whiff of forensic incompetence is often all it takes to wreck the strongest seeming case. Give a skillful defense team the tiniest of scientific blunders and you can be sure that what started life as a barely visible molehill will rapidly assume Everest-like proportions. By and large, juries put enormous faith in the testimony of expert witnesses; they expect them to be 100 percent right 100 percent of the time, and although what happened at the OCME regarding the Carpi case was incompetent and bizarre and ought not to have affected the outcome, it just didn’t smell right. Few people are comfortable with the concept of medical examiners lopping off skulls to use as paperweights. Devlin’s groveling explanation sounded hopelessly makeshift.

  Of course, the biggest irony surrounding Devlin’s bizarre conduct—largely overlooked at the time—is that had he not indulged himself in some kind of surgical conceit and removed the head, then the fate of Laura Carpi would remain a mystery to this day.

  Judged on the evidence presented at the trial, Colin Carpi was rightly acquitted. No gunshots were heard at about the time that the prosecution said the murder was committed; no firearm of the type used to kill Laura Carpi was ever traced to him; no witness saw him enter the house on the morning of February 8, 1971; no one saw him leave; no one saw him dump any body in the East River; and there was not a single scrap of forensic evidence linking him to the crime. In the end the jury quite properly decided that even though the circumstantial case against Carpi raised certain legitimate questions, it fell some considerable distance short of precluding that elusive quality known as reasonable doubt.

  This verdict, although embarrassing for DiMaio, did not reflect on him personally as he set himself the task of restoring faith in the OCME and consolidating his own position. Like Gonzales before him, he was hamstrung by his status as acting chief medical examiner. As the months passed, for some reason, the powers-that-be still seemed reluctant to fill the post permanently. All DiMaio could do was to keep plugging away. As always, there was plenty to occupy his mind. The surge in drug-related deaths that Helpern had first noted back in the 1930s had, four decades later, turned into a tidal wave. Much the most worrying development was the sudden appearance of methadone on the streets of New York. First synthesized in Germany during World War II, methadone was introduced into the U.S. drug treatment program in 1950 as a means of weaning addicts off heroin. For the most part it remained of peripheral interest to the drug community until 1971, when international sanctions to curb the growth of opium poppies in countries such as Turkey were put in place. While this had achieved the desired effect of shriveling the supply of heroin, it failed to take into consideration an immutable law of economics: reduced supply leads to higher prices. As the street price of heroin went soaring through the roof, junkies scrambled around feverishly for other, cheaper means of getting high. Methadone was the surrogate of choice. Cheap to produce and incredibly plentiful, it was also lethal. Addicts, used to measuring out their fixes in powder form, were completely thrown by this liquid substitute. Hundreds got it wrong, overdosed, and wound up in hospital beds if they were lucky, or on mortuary slabs if they were not. In 1974 a report compiled for DiMaio showed that in the previous year, 181 deaths had been attributed to the synthetic narcotic, as compared to 98 to heroin. Drug-related deaths were a sad and sickening trend, one that showed no sign of abating.

  As DiMaio wrestled with an ever increasing workload, the city fathers, after considerable breast-beating, announced that they were finally getting round to holding an open and competitive examination for the post of chief medical examiner. The criteria for applicants were as follows: must be a graduate of an accredited medical school and licensed to practice in New York State; must have completed at least five hundred medico-legal autopsies; must have five years of full-time paid experience in a chief medical examiner’s office or a comparable agency, at least two years of which had to be in a supervisory capacity. An undercurrent of resentment still bubbled within the OCME about outsiders being permitted to sit the exam, but these complaints fell on deaf ears, and eventually ten applicants took the written test on January 10, 1975.

  When the scores were tallied, three candidates were deemed to have performed significantly better than the rest. Coincidentally all three happened to work at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. These were DiMaio; Helpern’s longtime nemesis, Dr. Michael Baden; and Dr. Farouk B. Presswalla, a British subject who had served in London and Bombay before joining the OCME in 1970. He was currently an associate medical examiner.

  On April 5 these three applicants passed to the next stage—the oral examination—at which they were tested for “speech, manner, and judgment.” A result was confidently expected in days. But it didn’t turn out that way. Instead, an ominous silence fell over the proceedings. As the weeks dragged by, the candidates became edgy, totally in the dark about the outcome. Finally, the reason for the delay became apparent: some of the original out-of-state applicants were crying foul. They felt that questions in the January test had been stacked in the “home team’s” favor.

  Presswalla scoffed when he heard this. “I don’t see how it could be considered unfair. There was nothing in it [the test]…that would give the New York people an advantage. It was about principles that would apply any place in the world.” Despite this protestation, Presswalla still found time to reiterate his belief that the examination should have been restricted to OCME applicants, a stance that received Baden’s full support. He said, “To keep good people you have to give them the assurance that if they do well they will be promoted.”

  No fire, maybe, but more than enough smoke to trouble the Civil Service Commission, which ordered an inquiry into the disputed test. The results were made public on July 28, when it was announced that the January test was being set aside on grounds that some of the candidates had “a competitive advantage.” Although the report could find “no evidence of willful misconduct,” it was learned that some applicants knew beforehand which examiners would be preparing and grading
the questions on the test and were thus able to familiarize themselves with the areas of expertise of the examiners.

  DiMaio, as bewildered as everyone else by the ongoing promotion saga, was simultaneously caught up in yet another very public spat, this time between the OCME and the city’s hospital system. It concerned organ transplants. Since the first successful kidney transplant, carried out in 1954, physicians had been pushing back the boundaries of transplant surgery year after year. By the mid-1970s transplants of the heart, pancreas, and liver were commonplace, along with the kidneys. Naturally, this progress was dependent on a constant supply of donors. And one of the best sources of donors was murder victims. This posed an ethical dilemma for DiMaio. He took the view that the bodies of murder victims should always remain intact until a full autopsy had been conducted. The city hospitals didn’t see it that way at all; they wanted to harvest organs as soon after death as possible. The dispute peaked on March 7, 1975, when doctors at Jacobi Hospital in the Bronx defied DiMaio and removed the kidneys from a gunshot victim before an autopsy had been performed. The surgeon who carried out the procedure, Dr. Samuel Kountz, chief of surgery at the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, cheekily said that Helpern had always permitted transplants prior to autopsy, where to do so would have no bearing on the autopsy itself. This reference to Helpern was unfortunate, as the former CME was still hovering in the background and still sniping at his successors from behind the barricades. But Kountz had a point. “There are 1,800 homicides a year in the New York area,” he said, “and many of the victims are young, healthy people—the best kind of donors. If we could use a third of them, it would completely eliminate the need for dialysis treatment and for live donors.”