All that gall, all that education, the refugee background, a misfit—Bennet saw much of his own story in Wecht’s, and Wecht saw it, too. Bennet’s meticulous work habits easily earned him the fellowship, then a staff position at the coroner’s office—and in time the two formed a friendship, albeit a lopsided one.
“You know, I never even wanted to go to med school,” Bennet confessed to Wecht one day.
“Yeah, I didn’t, either,” Wecht said. He was a short guy, compact, always tan, bald as a cantaloupe. “That was my dad’s bullshit idea.”
“Mine too!” Bennet said.
“Because you were smart,” Wecht said.
“If you say so.”
“And you worked hard,” Wecht said. “So what? Good for you. I took four violin lessons a week and practiced four hours every day.”
“Oh—”
“Six hours on weekends. So don’t give me any goddamned father bullshit.”
“Okay.”
“Eat some pastries,” Wecht said.
“No, thank you.”
“Why not? Have some pastries.” He pushed the plate closer to Bennet’s, then reached for the pepper, turned the knob on the grinder over his eggs, again and again. He could never seem to get enough pepper. They were in the kitchen in Wecht’s stately old brick home in Squirrel Hill, a tony neighborhood in Pittsburgh’s east end where fat, towering sycamores provided dense shade for rolling blankets of English ivy. Wecht invited Bennet to his home often on weekends, usually to discuss work.
Sigrid, his wife, came in, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “You got enough to eat, Bennet?” she said. She was dainty, with bright blue designer glasses, silky white hair.
“He won’t eat any pastries,” Wecht told her.
“Maybe he doesn’t want any,” Sigrid said.
“Those are some good pastries,” Wecht said.
“So you eat them,” Sigrid said.
Bennet bounced his head back and forth, listening. He was by now used to Wecht-style constant bickering. Sigrid was badass. She and Wecht had raised four kids, had sent all four to Ivy League schools, had produced a neurosurgeon, an ad exec, an attorney, and an ob-gyn. Here, too, Bennet saw his own family, his brothers and sisters with their big careers. And like his family, the Wecht kids were close; their parents encouraged weekly phone calls to them and to one another.
Now they practically treated Bennet as one of their own. It made him tear up sometimes, just the feeling of being treated like a son, and Sigrid and Wecht would roll their eyes with exhaustion when he got emotional. “Whatever.” “Let’s move on.”
Sigrid, an attorney, was helping Bennet with his immigration papers; he was still on a student visa and until he got a green card she advised him to stay in school somewhere, anywhere. Bennet heeded her advice and started moonlighting at the University of Pittsburgh medical school as a neuropathology fellow. He had discovered a new passion—dead brains!—and Wecht encouraged him to indulge his every curiosity. “Get board certified in that shit if you want,” he told him. “Get a PhD, an MBA, a goddamned law degree if you want.”
“Okay, sir.”
The more degrees Bennet acquired, the more useful he became to Wecht in his burgeoning private practice. Wecht would bring Bennet file after file of crazy cases to work on. Crazy. An eight-year-old girl strangled by her parents’ pet python. Awful. A woman who had committed suicide after bariatric surgery; there was another who did the same thing, and another. “Who knew?” There was a guy who tried to smuggle cocaine by inserting it into his rectum, only to OD when the bag ripped. Then there was the curious series of chain saw accidents. “Death by Chainsaw: Fatal Kickback Injuries to the Neck.” That was one of the published papers Wecht let Bennet put his name on. Also, “Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease in an Exhumed Decomposed Brain After Twenty Months of Burial in a Deep Grave.”
But mostly Wecht didn’t offer to let Bennet put his name on things. Bennet’s work for Wecht was usually without credit, and for minimal compensation, and Bennet convinced himself that was okay. He felt rich, anyway. The coroner’s office paid him enough to repay his family, and he even had begun sending money home to Chizoba, who was trying to buy a farm.
Moreover, he was gaining Wecht’s approval. He was acquiring self-respect. He had found a new father. He had a chance to be the son a father could recognize not just as some inert angel that had fallen from the sky, but as someone reputable, admirable—a real man.
“You know, there’s an Igbo idiom,” Bennet said to Wecht that day in the kitchen with Sigrid.
“Oh, Jesus, here we go—” Wecht said.
“Madu bu chi onye,” Bennet said. “It means, ‘Your fellow human being is the God in your life, the God you have, and the God you see.’ ” Wecht shot a glance at Sigrid. Here we go. “Interpreted,” Bennet went on, “it means that God will not come down on earth to help you. Instead, he answers our prayers and blesses us through our fellow human beings. This was why I call you my angel, Dr. Wecht. God blessed me through you. You are the God I see and know.”
“You are so fucking weird,” Wecht said.
“I don’t get it, either,” Sigrid said.
“It’s a compliment,” Bennet said.
“Cyril, say thank you,” Sigrid said.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Wecht said.
Bennet and Wecht didn’t indulge each other’s eccentricities, but they allowed for the fact of them. Abnormal was the characteristic they had in common; the specific brand of it hardly mattered. “Junior Wecht,” some of the people at the morgue had started calling Bennet. It wasn’t a compliment. Wecht was a weird and bombastic boss, and now he had a weird and eccentric sidekick.
In the kitchen, Bennet pushed away his plate and flipped open a file. Here was the reason he had been summoned to Wecht’s house that day.
“What is it?” Bennet said.
“You can’t read?” Wecht said.
Sigrid held up a bowl of miniature muffins, and Bennet popped one into his mouth as he read.
In the summer of 1994, in a red-roofed mobile home in northwestern Pennsylvania’s Shenango River Valley, a woman was fatally stabbed twenty-eight times in her kitchen. Her two small children and a niece were slashed down to the spine and nearly beheaded in the bathroom. A neighbor, Thomas Kimbell, who had a history of psychiatric problems and was said to be mentally retarded, was convicted of the crime and sentenced to death. He languished in prison for six years, awaiting lethal injection, and then the Pennsylvania Supreme Court granted his appeal for a retrial. The new defense team had reached out to super-pathologist Cyril Wecht to help get Kimbell off death row.
“What do you want me to do, sir?” Bennet asked.
“Get him off death row,” Wecht said.
“He’s innocent?”
“How the hell should I know?” Wecht said.
Bennet had never gone solo on such a high-profile case. He felt overwhelmed and thrilled. He would adopt Wecht’s confidence and swagger. He bought new suits and shirts made by Wecht’s tailor. Dress like Wecht. Act like Wecht. The transformation was deliberate, methodical, and precise.
—
The morning after Bennet got the death row case from Wecht, he went to church. Every morning, 7 A.M., he showed up for mass up at the convent on Bedford Avenue, a handsome redbrick building left over from a fancier time in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, once a vibrant community. Now most of the houses in the neighborhood were bent, leaning, boarded up. Even the Garden of Hope had gone to weeds.
Inside the convent was a small chapel, a twelve-seater. Most mornings at mass it was just the six resident nuns—and Bennet. Bennet in his natty suit, dressed for success on the way to work at the morgue, the nuns all smiles and shy waves. So much to be thankful for, Bennet was thinking. Thank God for Dr. Wecht. Thank God for the peace today in my heart. And thank God he found a church he loved in Pittsburgh. Literally, thank God.
Thank you, he was saying, in his prayer voice, eyes closed,
crouched in the tiny pew. He had been coming to daily morning mass for well over a year, ever since he met and became friends with Father Carmen D’Amico, the pastor of St. Benedict the Moor. The main church where he went on Sundays was down the hill on Crawford Street; the convent with daily mass was up here by the school.
“The Lord be with you,” Father Carmen said, standing up, spreading his arms in welcome. He was a young guy, not much older than Bennet, with thick features, a wide smile that took up most of his face. To Bennet he was kind of the anti-Wecht. Humble instead of brash, a person who wasn’t about personal glory, or wealth, or ambition. Wecht would throw a glass of water in your face if you didn’t get the point fast enough; Father Carmen would offer you a blanket and a hot meal.
“And also with you,” Bennet said, in time with the quiet voices of the nuns.
Thank you, God, for Dr. Wecht, and thank you for Father Carmen, who provides balance.
He thought about how funny it was the way Father Carmen had misread his intentions in the early days when Bennet first started showing up at St. Benedict’s. That church was such a find! A church for black Catholics! Bennet loved it. St. Benedict the Moor had been serving Pittsburgh’s African American community for well over a century. In 1889 the first National Black Catholic Congress had convened in Washington, D.C., to cry out for greater recognition in the church, and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh’s answer was a golden brick cathedral, topped by a massive statue of St. Benedict, the patron saint of African Americans, his arms outstretched to the sky. Benedict was a sixteenth-century Italian Franciscan friar in Sicily, born to African slaves, who was freed at birth and became known for his charity and the monastic community he established. He was said to be incorruptible.
Father Carmen had been serving at St. Benedict’s for nearly a decade, and recently he had begun encouraging his congregation to open its doors to the small influx of Africans who were just starting to immigrate to Pittsburgh—a whole new concept for a city with so few ties to Africa. Now here came people from Nigeria, Kenya, Sudan, Liberia, Congo, Uganda. A trickle at first, then more, and then more. Father Carmen reached out. “Africans, meet the African Americans!” he all but said. He was a white guy, from a solidly white Pittsburgh neighborhood, with no history in either culture, a deficiency to which he would loudly and brazenly confess, so please, everybody, please be patient with me, and his honesty endeared him. Bennet was one of the African immigrants Father Carmen reached out to. The timing couldn’t have been better. Bennet needed a family. The Africans in the parish needed leaders. Bennet stepped in and got to work, joined the choir, joined Bible study, volunteered at bake sales; it seemed he was always there. Who was this guy? He dressed so well, so much fancier than everyone else. He didn’t appear to have any family, was always solo. He never said what he did for a living. And then he started showing up at daily mass up at the convent, hanging out afterward; the nuns would charge off to school, and so it would be just Bennet and Father Carmen sharing coffee in the kitchen convent, making sure to turn off the pot before they left. And then that one day Sister Josephine left them a plate of Danish to share, and a note: “Enjoy!”
Bennet poured the coffee; Father Carmen passed the cream; at this point they were about a month into the ritual. Their spoons clinked. Something weird. This day was different.
“Bennet, I’m just going to say it,” Father Carmen said.
“Say what?”
“You know, I was thinking, maybe I could just give you literature—”
“Literature?”
“Just to, you know, read,” Father Carmen said. “We don’t have to talk about it. But just if you want information, and how to go about—”
Bennet was deep into the middle of his cheese Danish, chewing eagerly.
“We can talk about this another time,” Father Carmen said, retreating.
“What are we talking about?” Bennet said. “I have no idea what we’re talking about.”
Father Carmen wrapped his hands around his coffee mug, blew. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m sorry. In your own time, of course.”
“Father?”
Father Carmen put his mug down, waited a beat, leaned in. “Vocations, Bennet?” he said.
“Huh?”
“You mean, you haven’t been trying to ask me how to—”
“Vocations?” Bennet said, his eyes popping wide. “Like, being a priest?”
“No?”
“No!”
“I thought that’s where you were headed with all this, why you were doing all this—”
“Me, a priest? Oh, wait till I tell Chizoba! Bennet becomes a priest!” He fell into laughter. Leaned back. His high-pitched cackle. No, Bennet Omalu does not want to become a priest. Oh my gosh, no.
Father Carmen had his eyebrows up. Oops. It had just seemed so obvious. Bennet seemed so…holy. “So devout!” Father Carmen said. “I mean, Bennet, you really love God.” He was laughing now, too, as you do after tension lifts, mysteries are solved.
“All the Omalus love God,” Bennet said. “That’s like the family business.”
“But your singing, Bennet,” Father Carmen said. “The volume!” And the way he led Saturday morning prayer group, the depths he would reach. “That about knocked my socks off. You are a very good pray-er!”
“You should hear my brother Ikem,” Bennet said.
Father Carmen apologized for his mistake, but added that he wasn’t the only one. The nuns thought Bennet was trying to pop the priest question, too. This mysterious man, no family, so devout.
“I’m a forensic pathologist,” Bennet said. “I work with dead people.”
“Dead people—”
“It’s more interesting than it sounds.”
And so they compared notes that day, asked each other questions, confessed more confusion. “You’re a white guy,” Bennet said.
“Right.”
“Running the city’s only black Catholic church?”
“I know—”
“I thought that was very strange from the beginning.”
“It is,” Father Carmen allowed.
They laughed. They talked about race. So much of what they would go on to talk about day after day in their morning chats after mass would be about race relations in America. Bennet needed help understanding: “Why do so many white people hate black people?” Father Carmen needed help understanding: “Why do so many African Americans feel threatened by Africans?” Father Carmen felt he was in way over his head with that question alone. “I will help you as best I can,” Bennet told him. “And I will help you,” Father Carmen said, and that was how their friendship began.
—
How do you get a guy off death row?
Bennet gathered boxes of material on the Kimbell case, the police and autopsy reports, toxicology and histology reports, photos, medical records, transcripts from the first trial. He loaded them into his Mercedes and drove through town, feeling awesome. How he loved that car. That car meant success, meant manhood, meant achievement. The files could have been gold, a treasure, a shelf of trophies so long. He unloaded everything into his condo in Churchill, a suburb of Pittsburgh. He organized it all on his dining room table, and there he worked, rising before dawn each morning, poring over the documents. In the first trial the prosecution had claimed that Kimbell killed the family in a “cocaine-induced psychosis”; this was a drug deal gone bad, they said. Testimony had shown that Kimbell was violent toward his own family and had been diagnosed with “intermittent explosive disorder.” As far as even circumstantial evidence went, they didn’t have much else. The murder weapon had not been found, and Kimbell’s clothes had no blood on them. The prosecution claimed Kimbell had stashed both the murder weapon and his clothes.
Bennet studied cocaine-induced psychosis. A person in such a state would not, he reasoned, be calm or clever enough to successfully get rid of evidence after brutally slashing four people. He studied the gruesome photographs, the patterns of
wounds. So many complex wounds, so many unnecessary to killing someone. It was a case of overkill. Driven by rage, or some exploding emotion. Nothing in the police reports suggested that Kimbell knew the victims at all, let alone well enough to want to slaughter them. The woman weighed 250 pounds and measured 5 feet 4 inches and had obviously fought gallantly for her life. She had at least twelve defensive wounds on her left palm and fingers. She was fighting! And Kimbell was a puny guy, 5 feet 3 inches, 120 pounds. He brutally stabbed this woman—and three children—without sustaining any wounds himself?
The doctor’s report said, Nope. No wounds on Kimbell.
Bennet kept reading. This guy did not do it, he thought. But how could he prove it? He kept looking at the pictures. Night after night, poring over the documents.
His obsessive fixation on a problem, the inability to let go, was the strength that enabled him to discover what others had missed. It was a muscle he had been exercising since childhood, and it was growing strong.
He kept reading. Every page of the trial transcripts and police report, over and over. Maybe he missed something. Maybe there was a clue.
One sentence in the box full of files, one sentence in the papers and books strewn all over his dining room table, kept sticking out. The physician who examined Kimbell a day after the murders stated that he was “a bleeder,” that members of his family tended to bleed a lot and the last time his tooth was pulled he bled for almost two days. A hemophiliac? No, there was no such diagnosis provided.
Bennet asked the defense team to take him to meet Kimbell at the prison. He was excited. Surely the guy would be happy to know Bennet believed he was innocent. They would work together. He would provide clues. They brought Kimbell into the anteroom. He was skinny, scruffy, and pale. He did not take a seat as the attorney suggested. He stood there in his orange jumpsuit and the chains on his wrists and he pursed his lips like he was forming spit. He looked at the attorney.
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