by Colin Evans
It was a chilling account, so graphic in its detail that it left the jury with one question only to decide: the degree of Crimmins’s culpability. On June 4, 1981, after nine hours of deliberation, jurors returned a verdict of guilty in the second degree. They took the collective view that Crimmins had not set out with the intention of murdering Helen Hagnes but that events had spiraled out of his drunken control. Trial judge Richard G. Denzer threw out the attempted rape charge because of a lack of evidence. At a later hearing Crimmins was sentenced to twenty years to life. At the time of writing, he is incarcerated at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in upstate New York.
This trial proved doubly satisfactory for Gross. Not only did it go a long way toward restoring the OCME’s jaded reputation, but it also overlapped a court ruling that finally settled the department’s messy succession wars. In December 1980 an appeals court ruled that Mayor Koch had not exceeded his authority when he dismissed Baden without giving him a hearing. In a 2–1 decision, the court declared that the length of the probationary period was immaterial and that the mayor could remove the CME without a hearing, even if the probationary period had expired. After a high-wire balancing act that had lasted seventeen months, Gross was civilly and judicially confirmed as the chief medical examiner for New York.
After the relative quiet of Connecticut, the new CME was pitched headlong into a caseload that rarely strayed from the headlines. In the month of his confirmation, he performed the highest-profile autopsy of his career, when the gunshot-riddled body of John Lennon was brought to 520 First Avenue. The four open-nosed bullets that took the life of the ex-Beatle caused massive internal injuries. Gross estimated that Lennon lost 80 percent of his blood volume, adding that no one could have survived such horrendous injuries for more than a few minutes.
In a foretaste of what was to come, in the spring of 1981 Gross obtained firsthand experience of the psychological damage that terrorist activity can inflict on an unsuspecting population, when at 9:30 A.M. on May 16 a bomb exploded in the men’s room at the Pan Am Terminal in Kennedy International Airport. A terminal worker, Alex McMillan, took the full force of the blast. Gross’s autopsy showed that McMillan had died of second-degree burns, a hemorrhage and injuries to the right forearm and thigh. A caller, speaking with a heavy Spanish accent, phoned the airport and said the bomb had been planted in the name of the Puerto Rican Armed Resistance, a group ostensibly campaigning for that island’s independence. Later that day another bomb was found near a Pan Am terminal gate. Fortunately this was defused before it could do any damage. The following afternoon, yet another bomb was found in the Pan Am terminal, this time in the women’s restroom. It, too, was dealt with safely. Over the next couple of days, the NYPD was inundated with more than 170 bomb threats or scares, including seven against the World Trade Center. All needed to be checked out and all proved to be groundless. Even so, this episode provided grim evidence of terrorism’s multilayered assault. Overwhelming the emergency services was only half the story; the real victory lay in the trepidation felt by innocent travelers. Despite a lengthy investigation, no one was ever charged with the murder of Alex McMillan.
Murder of a more traditional kind occupied Gross when police descended on a home in the Charleston neighborhood of Staten Island on April 19, 1983, and began digging up the backyard. The house at 420 Sharrot Road was home to the mother of Richard F. Biegenwald, a paroled killer already in custody in New Jersey on suspicion of triple murder. A tip-off told the police exactly where to dig and they soon unearthed two female bodies, wrapped in green plastic bags and buried one on top of the other, thirty inches deep, in a grave next to the garage. Gross began with the body that had been buried the deepest. The two bullets he extracted from the victim’s skull were sent off for analysis. Judging from the advanced decomposition, he estimated that the body had been in the ground for at least a year, probably longer. To aid in the identification process, Gross turned to odontological analysis. Dental charts showed her to be seventeen-year-old Maria Ciallella who had disappeared on Halloween night 1981 while walking to her home in Brick Township, New Jersey.
The second body had been horribly mutilated, with multiple stab wounds, and dental records were again the key to unlocking her identity. Deborah Osborne was also just seventeen years old when she left the Idle Hour Tavern in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, on April 8, 1982, to hitch a ride back to the motel where she worked as a chambermaid. Somewhere along Route 88 she was picked up by Biegenwald. In addition to her extensive dental work, Deborah was also identified by a cross found on the body.
Biegenwald was a habitual killer. At age nineteen, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering Bayonne City prosecutor Stephen F. Sladowski during a botched robbery on December 18, 1958, at a delicatessen owned by Sladowski’s family. Despite being repeatedly disciplined for misconduct while in prison and three times being denied parole, he was released in 1975. A string of parole violations led to more prison time, until he was once again freed in February 1981. Nine months later he murdered Maria Ciallella, the first of five more victims. Four were young women; the only male was William J. Ward, a video games operator, who had reportedly attempted to hire Biegenwald as a contract killer, only to end up dead himself.*
The positive identification of Maria Ciallella was only made possible because of the huge advances made in forensic science in recent years. But these developments were proving to be a double-edged sword. Because the detection levels of departments like the OCME seemed on a never-ending upward curve, police forces were putting an ever-greater reliance—and strain—on them to deliver the goods. Gross addressed this problem when he spoke to forty-nine medical examiners and pathologists from around the state at a two-day seminar held at New York University Medical School in May 1983. He complained that an intolerable pressure of work led to inexperienced staff dealing with cases beyond their expertise. He talked frankly about the recent death of Frank Sandola, a forty-two-year-old health club manager who was found slumped over a table in his Manhattan apartment. The assistant ME dispatched to the scene signed off the death as natural causes after she found a lump of meat in the man’s throat, concluding that he had choked to death. Later, doubts crept into her mind. Returning to the dimly lit apartment, she found traces of blood around where the body had lain. This didn’t seem right. When her doubts were passed further up the chain of command, a full autopsy was ordered. This found that a .22-caliber bullet had been fired at close range into the canal of the right ear. Because of the misdiagnosis, the crime scene was improperly processed and the killer never caught. (Even this blunder paled when set against one New Jersey case in 1982 where the medical examiner concluded that a young man in his twenties, Thomas Acevedo, had died from pneumonia. What the seventy-three-year-old medical examiner missed, the mortician did not: four bullets in the skull. No autopsy had been performed, despite a request from detectives that one be conducted.) Such sloppiness, said Gross, was unforgivable, making him speculate just how many other possible homicides were slipping through the net. For a crime to be investigated, he said, it is first necessary for a crime to be recognized. And that requires vigilant doctors. Harking back to Helpern’s scathing attack on those “five o’clock doctors” in the medical profession who refused to leave the comfort and safety of their consulting rooms, Gross spoke for forensic pathologists everywhere when he said, “It’s very difficult to find doctors in Manhattan willing to go to the scene.”
Gross’s own interdepartmental headaches, although temporarily abated, were by no means at an end. In September 1981 Baden had taken a year’s leave of absence from the OCME to become chief deputy medical examiner for Suffolk County on Long Island. But the old grievances were still gnawing away at him, and in 1982 he filed a civil suit, claiming that Koch had fired him knowing that some charges against him were untrue. Baden was seeking several million dollars in damages because, he said, the groundless allegations had him “a pariah” in his profession, one whose ability to testif
y as an expert witness had been severely jeopardized. The battle of words, both in court and in the media, raged back and forth for two years until, in July 1984, a judge awarded Baden one hundred thousand dollars in damages for emotional stress.
Ironically, even before this judgment, Baden was once again on the OCME payroll. The controversy that had followed him to Suffolk County had blighted his chances of promotion, and as a result he decided to return to the office where he had built his reputation. In August 1983 the peripatetic pathologist announced that he was quitting Long Island and returning to New York to head the Brooklyn office.
The city and Gross certainly needed him. Record numbers of New Yorkers were being murdered each year and the OCME was close to meltdown. In 1979 the official police department tally showed that there were 1,733 murders. By 1981 that number had risen to 1,832, with one-fourth of those deaths drug related. Gross and his understaffed office were expected to investigate all these deaths. An added irritant was the mandatory requirement that in homicide cases, two qualified pathologists should be in attendance at every autopsy. The wholesale exodus of staff from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner—largely, it must be said, inspired by disgust over Baden’s original ouster—meant that corners were being cut. In the last year of Baden’s tenure, ten of the fourteen full-time medical examiners had been board certified in forensic pathology; under Gross that number had shrunk to six out of sixteen. Some MEs were being called upon to perform six autopsies a day, three times the maximum number recommended by the National Association of Medical Examiners. This left little or no time for teaching and research, two disciplines that had always been central to the OCME ethos. Disgruntled former staff members lined up to take potshots at Gross, with accusations of disinterest, incompetence, and allegations that he was far too cozy with the police. Significantly, all these charges found their way into print, culminating in a series of highly critical articles about the OCME that ran in the New York Times in January 1985. Of these, the most damning concerned the notorious death of Michael Stewart, a twenty-five-year-old black man, arrested by transit police officers for allegedly scrawling graffiti on a subway wall. He was seized at 2:30 A.M. on September 15, 1983, in the subway station at First Avenue and Fourteenth Street while on his way home to Brooklyn after spending time at a disco. According to the officers, Stewart had resisted arrest and had to be subdued. Almost an hour later a police van pulled into Bellevue Hospital. When hospital orderlies loaded Stewart on to a gurney, they noted that he had been hog-tied—his ankles bound together, yanked up behind his back, and tied to his hands with cord. Equally obvious was the mosaic of livid bruises that covered his body. Much the greatest concern, however, centered on Stewart’s heart—it had stopped beating. Although resuscitation attempts were successful, Stewart never did regain consciousness and he died thirteen days later.
His death came at a time of bitter racial strife. Congress had just concluded a hearing into charges of racially motivated police activity, and black activists seized upon Stewart’s death as just the latest example of NYPD brutality. Because of the case’s notoriety, Gross performed the autopsy himself, accompanied by Dr. John Grauerholz, a forensic pathologist who had been hired by the family. After an unusually long autopsy—more than six hours—during which Gross took scores of photographs, he announced that he found no evidence that any injury sustained by Stewart had contributed to his death, which he attributed to cardiac arrest. This surprised Grauerholz who thought he had seen petechial hemorrhages in the eyes—usually an indicator of asphyxia. If Grauerholz were correct, this would add muscle to the Stewart family’s belief that Michael had died from a police choke hold. Unfortunately there wouldn’t be a chance to test Grauerholz’s findings, because one day after the autopsy, Gross returned to the autopsy room, removed Stewart’s eyes, and placed them in formalin, a solution that preserves tissue but does tend to eliminate any traces of blood. When, a few days later, the toxicology report showed traces of alcohol in Stewart’s blood, Gross decided that this, too, may have contributed to the death.
Then came a quite extraordinary U-turn. After conferring with other experts, Gross decided that death was due to a traumatic injury to the cervical vertebrae, with the implication that Stewart had injured himself having fallen down drunk. Gross’s volte-face caused an outrage, so much so that he decided for the integrity of the department to stop personally carrying out autopsies. This, of course, only increased the burden on his colleagues. Morgenthau decided that the case stank enough to warrant charging six officers with complicity in the death of Michael Stewart.
Gross couldn’t dodge the hailstorm of flak being aimed in his direction. Especially since most of it emanated from within the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Certain staff members there strongly believed that Stewart had died from a choke hold administered by the police, and they weren’t shy about sharing these beliefs with grateful reporters.
By the time the case came to trial in June 1985, attorneys for both prosecution and defense were gunning for the beleaguered chief medical examiner. On the stand, Gross performed horribly. He now offered a third version of how Michael Stewart died—no opinion! Thereafter the trial teetered from fiasco to farce to ignominy, and on November 24, 1985, all six officers were acquitted of all charges.
Even before this debacle, Gross sensed that he was in a fight for his professional existence. In the wake of those scathing Times articles, he had taken a paid leave of absence to prepare his defense. This entailed him handing over day-to-day duties to his deputy, Dr. Beverly Leffers, who became the acting chief medical examiner. Gross’s spell in the wilderness was brief. A mayoral report concluded that while Gross might have “mishandled” some cases, there was no underlying or systemic problem with his stewardship. Buoyed up by this verdict, Gross returned to work. Then came a more lethal arrow. This time it was fired by the state health department. In a report compiled for Governor Mario Cuomo, the department criticized Gross’s management skills and lodged twelve charges of gross incompetence or neglect against him. Under fire from all sides, in August 1985 Gross was again forced to hand the reins of power to Leffers while he took a second leave of absence. His position was clearly untenable: the largest city in the United States had a chief medical examiner who was forbidden to perform autopsies. Gross fretted and fumed, absolutely convinced he knew where to pin the blame for his current predicament. Gross’s lawyer, Howard Squadron, told the press that Baden and allies of Baden had been trying “to undermine Dr. Gross for years.” Gross also had plenty of venom left over for the New York Times, and in January 1986 he filed a libel suit over that string of articles, firing the first shot in a legal battle that would drag on with Jarndyce-like longevity into the next century.*
Baden suffered his own legal setback during this period. In August 1986 a federal appeals court reversed a lower court’s decision and ruled that Mayor Koch had not violated Baden’s constitutional rights when he’d fired him. The court also overturned the hundred-thousand-dollar award. Baden, already on leave from the OCME for several months, decided that now was the time to sever all connection with the department that he had joined more than twenty years earlier. In 1986 he left to help organize the New York State Police Forensic Sciences Unit.
Any triumph Gross may have felt over his longtime rival’s departure was short lived. His own time was running out fast. In September 1987 a mayoral advisory board appointed by Koch found that Gross was competent as a pathologist but deficient as a manager. The gun was loaded on October 11, 1987, when Koch summoned the press and proclaimed that he would decide within ten days whether to dismiss Gross. (From all accounts, Gross spurned a string of inducements to commit professional hara-kiri, including the offer of a professorship at NYU and the payment of his legal fees, in order to stay and fight his corner.) The coup de grâce was delivered on October 29, 1987. For the second time in a decade, Mayor Koch fired New York’s chief medical examiner.
SEVEN
THE DARKES
T HOUR
Koch didn’t pull any punches when quizzed by reporters over his reasons for firing Gross. The ousted chief, he said, lacked the “level of leadership and level of management” needed to head the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. And just in case anyone questioned his authority to take such peremptory action, Koch cited the ruling handed down in the Baden exit. (The mayor’s robust self-justification didn’t prevent Gross from filing the inevitable lawsuit for wrongful dismissal.) Although the search for a successor began the day after Gross’s departure, it was conducted at an unhurried, almost leisurely pace. Only one selection marker seemed set in stone; this time around there would be no in-house promotion. Years of interdepartmental score settling had taken a heavy toll on the OCME’s reputation and standing within the medico-legal community, a fall from grace that a city the size and caliber of New York could ill afford. Koch decided to cut out the cancer for good by casting his selection net further afield. A few ruffled Manhattan egos, he reasoned, was a small price to pay for the restoration of public confidence. The same mayoral advisory board that just months earlier had delivered such a damning indictment against Gross was now charged with compiling a list of suitable replacements.
In the meantime, for the third time in as many years, Dr. Beverly Leffers was appointed the acting chief medical examiner. The mess she inherited was horrifying: a backlog of more than three thousand cases in the toxicology lab, autopsy reports that took as much as six months to complete—the national average was about two weeks—sagging morale, and a dire shortage of staff. It was time to get out the begging bowl. Special pleading brought a favorable response from City Hall: an additional one million dollars was tacked on to the OCME’s 1988 budget request, specifically targeted to hiring more toxicologists and pathologists.
