by Colin Evans
Fiorenza’s insanity plea fell some way short of sounding genuine. The final nail was driven into this particular coffin by Theodore Kruger. He testified how Fiorenza, accompanied by his mother, had come to the store and asked him to provide an alibi for the morning in question. When Kruger pointed out to Fiorenza that his time sheet for the day had not been stamped until 12:30 P.M., the little man had seemed crestfallen. Prosecutors turned to the jury. Did they need any more proof that Fiorenza was a sane person willfully trying to cover up his actions?
At the end of the day, all Fiorenza had left was familial loyalty. His mother, Theresa Cupani, took the stand and swore that “Johnny” was at home until 10:45 or 11:00 A.M. on Good Friday morning, which would have made it virtually impossible for him to get to Beekman Place in time to commit the murder and still be able to report to Kruger’s upholstery shop at 12:30 P.M., as he did. After the murder, she said, there had been no change in his demeanor. “He was always quiet. He never speaks.” She loudly refuted Kruger’s allegation that she had gone to the store and attempted to arrange an alibi for him. Nor, she insisted, had Johnny ever mentioned being at the Criminal Courts Building on the morning in question. He had no need, because he was at home with her.
Dodge treated her gently. “Then why did you go with him to the Criminal Courts Building on April 20?”
Without thinking, Mrs. Cupani blurted out, “Because Mr. Kruger said to go and find out if he [had been] there.” Too late she realized she had been trapped. Twisting her damp handkerchief this way and that, the poor woman lowered her head, sobbing silently. And then, mercifully, she was dismissed.
The jury received the case at 3:00 P.M. on May 26. After eleven hours of deliberations, their announcement that they were deadlocked received a harsh response from Judge Charles C. Nott Jr. He ordered them locked up for the night, with the instruction not to emerge until they had a verdict.
At just after 10:00 A.M. the next morning, the bleary-eyed jury staggered back into court with their verdict: guilty. All night they had argued over one thing: Fiorenza’s sanity. While he was an inmate at Elmira, Fiorenza had been examined by a psychiatrist, Dr. James L. McCartney, who had concluded that Fiorenza should remain incarcerated as he was a “potential psychopathic paranoiac,” highly likely to get into trouble again if released. Clearly several jurors had taken the view, early in the deliberations at least, that Fiorenza’s mental confusion did contribute, in some small way, to the horrendous attack. But under the laws of the day, there can be little doubt that he was quite properly convicted.
His spell on death row was predictably uneventful: Appeal lodged, appeal denied, no great public clamor, gubernatorial clemency rejected. John Fiorenza’s last few moments on this earth were just as silent as most of the others had been. On January 21, 1937, he was the second of four men to be put to death that night in Sing Sing’s electric chair. He never said a word.
Although the Lindbergh kidnapping is widely regarded as the case that brought forensic science into the American mainstream and made the general public aware of the laboratory’s capabilities, in terms of solid, scientific achievement it doesn’t begin to compare with the investigation of Nancy Titterton’s murder. Whereas the Lindbergh case was an example of far too many cooks spoiling the forensic broth—evidence was mishandled, jurisdictions overlapped, egos clashed, and two years would elapse before Bruno Hauptmann, more through his own stupidity than any great feat of medico-legal detection, was run to ground—pure science solved the murder of Nancy Titterton in a matter of weeks. For Fiorenza it was the harshest possible lesson in modern criminalistics, one learned by thousands of murderers since. Had he been just a little more fastidious in his clearing up, then no matter how much suspicion fell on him, obtaining a conviction would have been devilishly difficult. As it was, one blunder—that single strand of twine—reinforced by Gettler’s discovery of the horsehair, was enough to seal his fate.
There were plenty of congratulations flying round in the wake of this triumph. The police, quite rightly, were proud of the part they played. Hayden and Waldron, the two detectives who traced the twine, were both promoted and given pay raises; and while the plaudits heaped on Gonzales and Gettler were less noticeable, certainly in the paycheck department, they were equally warm. More important, this case highlighted the need for the city to get on with the task of appointing a permanent chief medical examiner. Six weeks after Fiorenza’s execution, the Municipal Civil Service Commission did just that. Eighteen months of heel dragging came to an end with the announcement that an exam would be held to fill the vacant post, with the winner of that exam virtually certain to take Norris’s job full time.
In the end it came down to a two-horse race between Gonzales and fellow deputy ME Dr. Manuel E. Marten, who was in charge of Brooklyn and Queens. In a three-part examination that rated the candidates according to their experience, mental ability, and record, Gonzales scored 94.75 percent, almost ten points clear of his rival. After such an emphatic victory, not even La Guardia could prevaricate any longer, and on July 21, 1937, Gonzales was sworn into office at a ceremony held at the Summer City Hall in College Point, Queens.
That same year also saw Gonzales’s debut as an academic author. In association with two colleagues at the OCME—Morgan Vance and a promising newcomer named Milton Helpern—he published Legal Medicine and Toxicology (New York: Appleton-Century), a seven-hundred-page volume that would become the most authoritative textbook in its field (and the source for countless contemporary detective novelists; Raymond Chandler, for one, was an avid reader).
All this achievement did not go unrecognized by Gonzales’s peers. In June 1938, he was elevated to the position of professor of forensic medicine at New York University. Lofty though these academic heights were, they formed just a tiny part of the Gonzales workload. First and foremost he was an administrator, and that meant paperwork, lots of it. His first annual report came in July 1938 and recorded that the OCME had investigated 16,313 deaths during the previous year, an increase of 499 over 1936. Like Norris before him, Gonzales was dismayed by the part played by alcohol in sudden death. Chemical analysis showed that 40 percent of auto deaths in New York were alcohol related, with a staggering 69 percent of these being pedestrians. These were depressing statistics. On his more familiar home turf of crime fighting, Gonzales was able to lighten the gloom with one bright spot. At his request, the OCME had been provided with a small truck and driver in order that specimens from the various boroughs could be transported to the centrally located toxicological laboratory in the Pathological Building at Bellevue Hospital. This was an important development. Previously, delays in the transportation of organs—particularly in the middle of summer—meant that many specimens were too decomposed to provide useful data when analyzed. Gettler, in particular, had always harbored suspicions that some poisoners were literally getting away with murder because of this delay. The hope was that, now, this door had been slammed shut.
As always, the OCME investigated more than its share of bizarre deaths. Gonzales was forever advising his assistants on the need for constant vigilance, urging them to never accept anything at face value and to always see out corroborating evidence. He liked to talk of one utterly incredible case that occurred early in his career, back in the days of gaslight. It concerned a man driven by despair to attempt suicide. He began by slashing his wrists with a razor. Although he bled profusely, he lost patience before he lost consciousness and decided to turn the razor on his throat. This again was not quick enough for the would-be suicide, and with blood pumping from jugular and wrists, he struggled to a bureau, grabbed a revolver, and shot himself in the chest. Perhaps understandably in the circumstances, his aim was less than true. The bullet passed through his body, missed every vital organ, and succeeded only in adding to his frustration and agony. Still he clung unwillingly to life. In his misery, one last solution presented itself. He tore off his belt, knotted it around his neck, tied the other end to the old-fashioned gaslight
chandelier and stepped off a chair. This time he succeeded. However, as the autopsy clearly showed, it wasn’t the hanging that killed him, nor was it the slashed throat and wrists, and neither did the gunshot wound play any part in his death. No, he died from asphyxia. Apparently, when he stepped off the chair, his body weight tore the gas chandelier from its fixings. The exposed pipework was now able to flood the room with gas, and it was carbon monoxide that ultimately extinguished the man’s life.
Of all the incumbents of the CME’s post, Gonzales managed to keep the lowest profile. Two factors dictated this: first, as his first four years in office demonstrated, he was naturally reserved, quite unlike his flamboyant predecessor; second, on December 8, 1941, Japanese warplanes bombed Pearl Harbor.
Perspective is everything in politics; the interdepartmental sniping and personal backbiting that passes daily muster in peacetime takes on an entirely different hue when a nation is at war. Suddenly the criticism becomes more muted, the rivalries less severe, with no one wanting to run the risk of being branded as unpatriotic. With events in the Pacific and Europe suddenly taking center stage, the operations of the OCME were relegated to the inside pages. Not that Gonzales entirely escaped the upheaval. Following the havoc of Pearl Harbor, rumors raged that it was only a matter of time before the American mainland itself came under attack on both coasts from German and Japanese warplanes. However unlikely the reality—given the fact that the United States was many thousands of miles from its nearest enemy—the government, eager to reassure its citizens, realized that something needed to be done. In July 1942 it was announced that a special task force of volunteer medical examiners, under the leadership of Gonzales, had been formed to aid in the treatment and identification of victims of possible air raids. In the event, Gonzales’s team was not called into action, but as a morale-boosting gesture it did no harm.
Largely insulated from public view, Gonzales went about his day-to-day work, investigating the victims of sudden death on the streets of New York. Since 1935 there had been a steady decline in the homicide rate, and with the outbreak of hostilities that number had fallen further still. Despite this, Gonzales’s mortuary table remained a conveyor belt of domestic tragedy and his department was still performing feats of Holmesian investigation that even fiction’s mightiest detective would have marveled over.
One forensic triumph every bit as remarkable as the Titterton case had its genesis on the morning of November 2, 1942, when Fridolph Trieman was exercising his German shepherd in a remote part of Central Park. As the dog disappeared into some tall grass, Trieman ran to keep up. Puffing and panting, he paused for breath, then stopped abruptly. Ahead of him, beneath the low hanging branches of a dogwood tree, lay the fully clothed body of a young woman. She looked ominously still.
At first the police were uncertain how the woman had died. Apart from a trace of blood at the nose and a faint welt around the neck, there were no other obvious signs of assault. It might even have been natural causes. Then a sleeve torn from the coat at the shoulder was found several feet from the body. This raised the prospect of some kind of struggle.
An autopsy carried out by Gonzales confirmed strangulation as the cause of death. Her larynx was fractured, but other than that there was no sign of injury, nor had she been raped. The fact that she had no handbag or money strongly suggested that this was a mugging gone tragically wrong—except the woman still wore a gold chain bearing a crucifix around her swollen neck. No self-respecting thief was going to leave that.
Later that same night, detectives Joseph Hackett and John Crosby of the Missing Persons Bureau identified the woman as Louise Almodovar, a twenty-year-old waitress and Sunday school teacher, who lived with her parents in the Bronx. They had reported her missing the previous day. According to the tearful parents, Louise’s recent home life had been abusive and turbulent. Against their wishes, she had married Anibal Almodovar, a diminutive Puerto Rican ex-sailor, just five months earlier, only to leave him after a few weeks because of his insatiable womanizing.
When tracked down and told of his wife’s fate, the twenty-one-year-old Almodovar just shrugged. She had made his life hell, he said. The bitch even had the nerve to beat up one of his girlfriends and swear at another! Good riddance, was his verdict, though he vehemently denied any involvement in her death. And the facts seemed to bear him out. According to Gonzales, Louise had met her death most probably between 9:00 and 10:00 P.M. on the night of November 1, at which time Almodovar had been carousing in a dance hall called the Rumba Palace with the very woman whom Louise had attacked. Furthermore, there were dozens of other witnesses who could testify to his presence. In the face of such an ironclad alibi, detectives understandably began widening their search for suspects, until Louise’s parents produced several threatening letters that Almodovar had written to their daughter. The bile that dripped off every page convinced detectives to hold the amorous former seaman as a material witness.
Still, they couldn’t get past that seemingly impregnable alibi. Only when detectives visited the dance hall, just a few hundred yards from the murder scene, did they realize that it would have been possible for Almodovar to have sneaked unnoticed out of a back door, gone to Central Park where he might have previously arranged to meet his wife, killed her, and then crept back into the Rumba Palace without anyone being the wiser. It was theoretically possible, nothing more. Without a scrap of solid evidence against Almodovar, he was released.
Given the absence of any alternative suspects, this was one of those cases that looked destined for the “Unsolved” cabinet, until Gettler had a flash of inspiration. More out of curiosity than anything else, he happened to glance at the crime scene photographs. He noticed that the body was lying in some very tall grass. This set him thinking. At the time of Almodovar’s arrest, his clothes had been given to Gettler for analysis, and in the trouser cuffs and jacket pockets, he had found some tiny grass seeds. Gettler now sent the crime scene photographs off to be enlarged. When they came back, this higher magnification allowed him not only to identify the individual strain of grass but also to declare it identical to the seeds found in Almodovar’s clothing. When confronted with this evidence, Almodovar blustered that he had not visited Central Park for over two years. Any seeds in his pockets, he said, must have been picked up on a recent visit to Tremont Park in the Bronx.
Gettler decided to test this story. He forwarded the seeds to Joseph J. Copeland, formerly professor of botany and biology at City College, and a recent addition to the U.S. Air Force. It didn’t take Copeland long to identify the grasses in question—Plantago lanceolata, Panicum dichotomiflorum, Eleusine indica—all were exceptionally rare and grew only at two spots on Long Island and three places in Westchester County. The only place in New York City where such grass occurred was Central Park. Moreover, it could be further isolated to the very section were Louise’s body had been found.
Almodovar panicked, suddenly recalling a walk he had taken in Central Park two months previously, in early September. Copeland shook his head. The grass in question was a late bloomer, mid-October at the earliest, therefore Almodovar could not possibly have picked up the seeds in September. But on November 1…?
After nearly two months of parrying questions, Almodovar was utterly floored by Copeland’s intervention. On December 23, he broke down and confessed. He had arranged to meet his wife in Central Park on the night of November 1; they had quarreled again, and he had killed her in a fit of rage. Later in court, he recanted this confession, saying it had been beaten out of him in the interviewing room. But the jury did not believe a word and after just three minutes’ deliberation, they found him guilty of first-degree murder. When sentence of death was passed, Almodovar, despite being shackled from head to toe, fought like a madman. No fewer than nine guards were needed to restrain him. Howling demonically, he was dragged off to Sing Sing. Six months later, on September 16, 1943, he died in the electric chair.
While the OCME kept churning out investigati
ve miracles, La Guardia was still threatening to deliver that elusive Institute of Forensic Medicine he’d been promising for years. The mayor’s dream was for a building near Bellevue, with its own morgue, laboratory, dissection room, lecture halls, and a chemical division, a regular clearinghouse for all matters pertaining to medical jurisprudence. Gonzales adopted his customarily laconic “Okay, we’ll wait and see” attitude and simply got on with his job.
Although the war had initially seen a decrease in the number of murders, by 1945 they were on the rise again, and there was something else, something Gonzales hadn’t seen before: a sudden spike in the number of deaths attributable to sleeping tablets. Many were suicides, some accidental, most were preventable, thought Gonzales. He blamed the increase on a new and thriving black market in prescription drugs. In the first half of 1945 he had recorded forty-seven deaths, already more than he had seen throughout the entire year of 1944. By 1948 the numbers had doubled, reaching such a pitch that in September 1949 a police sting netted eight pharmacists for peddling under-the-counter sleeping tablets. Most of the druggists bought their pills in Pennsylvania, which had no restrictions on the sale of barbiturates, paying the wholesale rate of nine dollars for a thousand tablets, later selling them in New York at a huge profit.
Gonzales’s caseload was on a steep upward curve. By 1949 the OCME was investigating eighteen thousand deaths a year, of which some five thousand were violent. More ominously, each year the OCME was uncovering between thirty and forty deaths that general practitioners had reported as nonsuspicious but which chemical tests showed had involved violence or poison.
