Blood on the Table_Greatest Cases of New York City's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner

by Colin Evans

  Exhausted though he may have been, Becker refused to buckle under cross-examination. Even the sight of the clothing and other articles found on the dead woman failed to shake his nerve. First, he denied that the coat was his wife’s, declared that the lock of hair was too dark for Jennie’s. And then, having originally stated that Jennie hadn’t worn a sweater, he now had the barefaced temerity to claim that she had actually been wearing a brown sweater, rather than the gray one found in the pit! What proof was there, he ranted, to show that this was his wife?

  Plenty, was the prosecution’s response. And it all came down to those stomach contents. The samples that Alexander O. Gettler had been asked to analyze showed clear traces of grapes, figs, almonds, and meat paste—the very items Becker had so lovingly fed his unsuspecting wife at the party.

  Becker, obviously shaken by these discoveries, blustered that any woman could have eaten such food, until Gettler administered the coup de grâce: examination of the meat spread found it to be identical to the canapés served by Mrs. Linder—prepared, said the party hostess, according to an old family recipe. Gettler’s testimony ripped the admittedly feeble heart out of Becker’s defense. Surely now there could be no gainsaying the fact that the human remains found buried in the vacant lot were those of Jennie Becker?

  In his closing, attorney Mayper struggled manfully, turning both barrels onto the investigative team for using a stool pigeon, ending with, “It is a well-known fact that this is not the first time a policeman has said more than his prayers. It isn’t the first time a policeman has gone out of his way to fasten the guilt upon an innocent person.” But when Mayper took his seat, few felt that Becker’s chances had been advanced one jot.

  Courtrooms were more rugged venues in those days, used to long sittings, and it was well after midnight on December 23 when the jury retired to consider the verdict. After an hour’s deliberation jurors returned at 1:47 A.M. with a guilty verdict. Becker listened stony faced to his fate. He retained his Keatonesque impassivity three days later when Judge Gibbs sentenced him to the electric chair, and he was led away to become the twenty-seventh resident on Sing Sing’s death row.

  The New Year was just five days old when his erstwhile partner stood trial. While Norkin readily admitted helping to conceal Jennie’s body, his defense pivoted on the argument that he was an innocent dupe, deceived by Becker’s Machiavellian scheming. Norkin claimed to have had no foreknowledge of the murder, telling the court he was “petrified” and “dazed” when Becker suddenly clubbed his wife senseless. Quaking from panic, Norkin waited until Becker began dragging the body round the back, then ran, only for the enraged attacker to chase him down. The two men grappled for a moment. As Becker got the upper hand, he drew a flask from his pocket and forced it to Norkin’s lips, snarling, “Here, take a drink. Don’t be yellow.” When Norkin refused, he said, Becker grabbed his right hand, yanked it upward and swore him to silence. So terrified was Norkin by this experience that for weeks afterward, so he said, his trembling nerves wouldn’t allow him near the shop after dark. Not so, said Harry Gerner, a mechanic who worked at Norkin’s shop. He testified that just two nights after the crime he saw his boss working on an auto, unconcerned and cheerful as always.

  Unlike Becker, Norkin was rock solid on the stand; he told his story and stuck to it, unwilling to give an inch in cross-examination, but it was useless. Another late-night court sitting—this one dragging on until 1:50 A.M. on January 19, 1923—came back with an identical verdict. Ten days later, Norkin’s previously icy resolution melted in a convulsive spasm as he was sentenced to death, then hauled away, trembling violently, to join his confederate at Sing Sing.

  From all accounts the two men mended their differences during their spell in the “Dancehall,” as inmates quaintly termed the cluster of cells that comprised Sing Sing’s death row. Becker passed the time playing checkers, shouting out the moves to a fellow condemned prisoner, who would then reciprocate, while Norkin followed the match with keen interest from an adjacent cell. But all the while the judicial process was ticking, and for Becker it ended on December 13, 1923, when, with all his appeals exhausted, he died in the electric chair. His last reported words were: “If there is another world and I have any influence there, I’m going to do something to District Attorney Cohn!” His ire might have been better directed at Gettler, but this was not a time to appreciate the subtleties of science. The following April it was Norkin’s turn to shuffle those last few terrible yards. As he was being strapped in, he told the witnesses, “I am innocent of any part in that crime…I am guilty of no crime except keeping a secret.” Then the switch was thrown.

  With this case, Norris’s dream of an integrated European-style approach to medical jurisprudence in New York City had come one step closer to reality. He had staked everything on a sincerely held belief that the future of crime detection lay in the laboratory, and Gettler hadn’t let him down. Although there is little doubt that Becker and Norkin would have been convicted anyway, given the totality of the evidence against them, Gettler’s painstaking analysis of the stomach contents removed any lingering doubts about identification, and it was his role in their downfall that generated the biggest and boldest headlines. Not that it made a penny’s worth of difference to this modest, unassuming Austrian-born chemist. Unlike so many in the medico-legal field, Gettler deliberately shunned the media spotlight, preferring the reflective anonymity of his lab in the grounds of Bellevue Hospital. (Oddly enough, despite holding the rank of chief toxicologist for New York City, he was actually paid by Bellevue.) Given the frequency of his courtroom appearances, however, where his tersely delivered testimony sent dozens of killers to the electric chair, it was no surprise that the press dubbed him “one of the world’s greatest test-tube detectives,” a verdict that Norris would not have disputed. In temperament and attitude the two men might have been polar opposites, but they enjoyed a warm kinship and a shared intellectual vigor that served the city well.

  Which was just as well, considering New York’s soaring body count. As the numbers swelled, the exploits of Norris and his team, fanning out across the city to investigate suspicious death of every color and stripe, became regular newspaper fare. The sensational murder cases still took center stage, of course—particularly Gettler’s devastating intervention in the Snyder–Gray case of 1927, and the mysterious shooting death of gambler Arnold Rothstein the following year*—but it was still the running sore of Prohibition that exercised Norris like nothing else. In one four-day spell in 1927, Norris himself autopsied no fewer than twenty-four victims of alcohol. By 1930 the carnage was mind-boggling. Norris’s annual report for that year listed 1,295 liquor-related deaths in New York City, with the author adding sourly, “And there are probably hundreds of alcoholic deaths we never know of.” Road accidents, too, were going through the roof. In 1920 Norris recorded 692 deaths in traffic accidents. Seven years later, that number had soared to 1,138. Norris attributed much of this rise to rotgut booze. And not all the drunks were behind the wheel. Scores of jaywalkers, reeling half blind from the latest skinful, were staggering out in front of cars, giving themselves and the unsuspecting drivers virtually no chance of survival.

  With such a caseload, it is hardly surprising that by the end of the 1920s, the OCME was close to a meltdown. Each year it was investigating more than thirteen thousand suspicious deaths on a wafer-thin budget that worked out to around eleven dollars per body. Facilities, too, were stretched to breaking point with just three municipal morgues—one in Manhattan at Bellevue, one in Brooklyn at Kings County Hospital, and one in the Bronx at Fordham Hospital. After ten years Norris’s dream of building a world-class operation was still being thwarted at every turn by City Hall. They resented his self-serving manipulation of a compliant media; he despised their venal self-interest. A remorseless battle of wills ensued as both sides dug in their heels.

  And then Wall Street crashed.

  The Depression that gripped America tore the financial h
eart out of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Salaries were slashed to the bone, so deeply that Norris frequently dipped into his own pocket to supplement staff members’ wages. And it was the same whenever new equipment was needed—microscopes, cameras, and the like—invariably it was Norris who cut the check. Such generosity did wonders for inspiring staff loyalty, but it also presented City Hall with a gilded opportunity to tighten the financial screws to choking point. Even so, Norris’s munificence did little to stem the tidal wave of criticism. He was still catching it in the neck from all quarters.

  In 1931 one particularly hostile source of censure did run dry, for it was in September of that year that Norris’s old nemesis, Dr. Otto Schultze, took it upon himself to deliver one of the most entertaining and suicidal courtroom performances that anyone could recall. He’d been in bad health for some time, and when asked to testify before a Long Island inquest that was investigating a recent murder, he threw a tantrum and refused to appear. Even though a threatened subpoena for contempt did provoke a change of heart, it did nothing to improve his demeanor. Obviously grumpy, Schultze took the stand and raised his spirits by first favoring the jury with a rousing hymnal chorus. Next, as open-jawed court officials looked on powerlessly, or seemingly unwilling to stop him, he delivered a homily on the relative merits of salt and sugar in the American kitchen, denounced the English system of numerals as vastly inferior to that of the Romans, dismissed with a contemptuous wave suspicious marks found on the victim’s body—“Oh yes, those little things”—before suddenly standing up, bidding the jury good-bye, and disappearing from public view for good.*

  Schultze’s spectacular self-immolation marked a severing of all ties with the old coroner system. Not that Norris felt much like celebrating. The wearisome and ongoing quarrel with City Hall was rubbing his nerves raw. With frustration on all sides building to volcanic levels, something had to give, and the eruption came in 1932.

  It began with a regular enough occurrence: Norris tackling the then acting mayor Joseph V. McKee about a further 20 percent cut in OCME funding. McKee had only been in office a matter of days, taking over from the disgraced Jimmy Walker, after that mayor’s fondness for willowy showgirls and unexplained additions to his bank account exhausted the patience of even hardened Tammany block captains. McKee might have been a makeshift mayor, but he was obviously feeling his oats and he showed Norris the door. Norris’s patrician nature rebelled. No damned carpetbagger was going to push him around—or make him grovel for funds!

  On September 20, after fourteen years in the job without a pay raise, Dr. Charles Norris quit. Being Norris, he made sure that the press got his side of the story first, and the media went to bat for him big time. Sympathetic editors reminded their readers of the OCME’s many successes, contrasting them vividly with the shady old coroner system that it had replaced. As the groundswell of protest began to surge, calls for Norris’s reinstatement from the Medical Alliance, an organization of physicians, were echoed by the many doctors and scientists who worked under him.

  In the end, the pressure overwhelmed McKee. Backed into a corner, his nerve gave way and through gritted teeth he was obliged to ask Norris to reconsider. Never one to gloat—at least not in public—Norris accepted the capitulation with his customary good grace and returned to work on September 27. McKee put his own spin on it for the reporters, saying, “We felt the doctor was too valuable a public servant to lose.” One very public humiliation for McKee was followed shortly by another. Barely a month later his brief tenure as New York mayor was brought to an abrupt conclusion when a specially convened poll saw Tammany candidate John P. O’Brien elected to power.

  So far as Norris was concerned, it was the hollowest of victories. He returned to an OCME in which virtually nothing had changed; the budget was still risible and the end of each month still found him plundering his own bank account in order to keep the ship afloat.

  But one shaft of sunlight did illuminate the gloomy horizon. For years Norris had been on the stump, noisily urging the abolition of Prohibition to anyone who would listen—“There would be less crime and less need for inquests, if the bootleggers and the speakeasies were destroyed”—and on December 5, 1933, his prayers were answered. That was the date when Utah became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution, thus ending state-sponsored teetotalism in America for good. (Within nine months, the rate of alcohol-related deaths in New York State had plunged to a twelve-year low. Suicide, too, fell to levels not seen since 1928.)

  Any exultation that Norris felt over this reduced caseload was tarnished, however, by the bizarre happenings at an autopsy that took place on May 1, 1934. The circumstances were mundane in the extreme, an unidentified man struck down and killed by an automobile. Only when Norris entered the morgue did he realize that the man on the slab was thirty-six-year-old Dr. Ladislaus Schwarz, who just one day earlier had been appointed as Norris’s assistant at the newly created Department of Forensic Medicine of the New York University–Bellevue Hospital Medical School, the first establishment wholly dedicated to medical jurisprudence in America. The incident jolted Norris to his core. “One of the greatest shocks of my life,” was how he described it. What should have been the crowning achievement of his career felt oddly marred. Ever since taking office he had campaigned for a teaching facility to rival those in Europe. The path to that goal had been rocky and strewn with setbacks. But Norris had stuck to his guns. Now, with his dream a reality at last, came the painful reminder that forensic science does not exist in a vacuum. No matter how revolutionary the technology, how smart the physician, forensic pathology is all about hurt. That body on the slab has died in unnatural circumstances and the grief tends to radiate concentrically, affecting all it touches. This time it reached Norris.

  His health, never the best, now began a rapid decline. As early as 1925, Norris had been forced to take four months off work and travel to Europe for treatment. Thereafter the job interruptions were frequent and lengthy. His lifestyle, uncompromisingly hedonistic, did little for a flagging heart or a wheezy respiratory system, and on September 11, 1935, it was the former that finally gave up the ghost. He was age sixty-seven.

  At Norris’s funeral, thirty patrolmen from the NYPD formed a guard of honor, and it was their boss, Commissioner Lewis J. Valentine, who best captured the mood of general loss: “Probably no one in our generation has contributed more from the standpoint of science to police work and its correlated activities.” The New York Times, one of the most enduring and vociferous critics of the old coroner system, lauded Norris as “incorruptible and free from political influence of every kind. When he said a man had committed suicide, that was the truth of the matter. When he said that a man had been murdered, even the doubting police usually came to his way of thinking.”

  Norris was a fine pathologist, a great administrator, and an even more remarkable person. His was the era of noblesse oblige, a time when many in the privileged classes felt the weight of social responsibility on their shoulders. Certainly it bore heavily on Norris. With his background it would have been all too easy to slide seamlessly into the Social Register circuit—Broadway first nights, sailing off Rhode Island, sipping cocktails at Saratoga in August, that kind of thing. Instead, he dedicated his life to finding out why others had died. Immaculately tailored physicians bent low in some alleyway over a corpse writhing with maggots are not common sights. But Norris was a most uncommon man. He was also blessed with an unquenchable humanity. Nothing better demonstrates this quality than an incident from May 1920, when Ernest Goetz, a seventy-year-old German immigrant, crippled and half blind, was found dead by his own hand at Bellevue Hospital. Just two years before, Goetz had retired from that selfsame hospital where he had worked as a morgue assistant. Norris knew him well and had paid for an operation to relieve Goetz’s glaucoma. Now, in a letter to the New York Times, Norris expressed his outrage that after thirty-seven years of devoted service to Bellevue Goetz—this “p
ersonification of honesty”—was pensioned off at just $362 per annum, not even a dollar a day. When found dead, he had just forty-five cents in his pockets. “Is it to be wondered or is it strange that he committed suicide?” Norris mused sadly. “The city should indeed deplore the loss of such a servant.”

  Much the same could be said about Norris. There would never be another CME like him. The advantages of his birth—his estate was valued at almost a half-million dollars at the time of his death, not including several properties squirreled away in Pennsylvania—meant that he enjoyed a uniquely enviable immunity when it came to dealing with meddling mayors and the other inconveniences of public life. Norris didn’t need the job and everyone knew it. This gave him unusual bargaining strength. As we have seen, he didn’t win all the battles with City Hall—in fact, he probably came out on the short side more often than not—but he was able to fight every crusade without regard to career advancement or financial reward. By doing so he acquired for the OCME an invaluable degree of autonomy when it was needed most. New Yorkers were lucky to have him.

  The only problem now lay in finding a replacement for Charles Norris. Transitions in power are often tricky, and this one was no exception. McKee might have been history, but politics goes on forever, and by 1935 New York City had a new mayor. Fiorello La Guardia was now the man in charge, and, as events would show, “The Little Flower” was no shrinking violet when it came to sowing seeds of discontent at the OCME.