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

by Colin Evans

  Baden wasn’t about to take this accusation lying down. He strenuously refuted Helpern’s allegation and picked up some vigorous support from the metropolitan editor of the New York Times, Arthur Gelb, who said, “None of these stories were called to the attention of the Times by Dr. Baden.” As we shall see later, there was a long history of bad blood between Helpern and Baden—not once is the latter mentioned in Helpern’s autobiography—and this episode marked a sad and acrimonious end to what had been a truly momentous career.

  Shortly before his retirement Helpern estimated that he had performed more than twenty thousand autopsies and supervised and been present at perhaps sixty thousand more. It was a colossal achievement, made all the more remarkable by his fantastic powers of recall. If anyone ever harked back to an obscure case from his career, he was always able to instantly remember the details and explain why they had informed a particular conclusion. Probably no one has dominated American medical jurisprudence in the way that Milton Helpern did. His reputation circled the globe. In 1970 the University of Ghent in Belgium awarded Helpern an honorary law degree. Back home, in 1971, he was named winner of the American Medical Association’s Distinguished Service Award for “distinguished service to medicine over a period of years” rather than for any single accomplishment.

  After his retirement, Helpern continued to serve as a kind of emeritus consultant to the OCME. This arrangement survived for a meager eighteen months, terminating with a brutal and sudden expulsion from his office, kicked out by his successor. The few years remaining to Helpern were spent writing and testifying as an expert witness. He was appointed distinguished visiting professor at the Center for Biomedical Education at City College, but it was always a battle with his health. He was in California when the final illness struck. On April 22, 1977, Milton Helpern died at University Hospital in San Diego. He was age seventy-five.

  His funeral, held at Park Avenue Synagogue on April 26, was attended by more than seven hundred relatives, colleagues, and students. Former Mayor Robert F. Wagner said, “Milton Helpern was more than a man of science. He was more than a man of letters. Above all he was a lovely man, gentle, courteous and gracious.” But perhaps the most fitting tribute came from John Keenan, former chief of the homicide bureau. “As a courtroom witness [Helpern] was unimpeachable because he never testified for either side. He testified for truth and justice.”

  Under Helpern’s leadership, the OCME had graduated from being perceived as an illegitimate offshoot of the Bellevue pathology department, to an independent and world-renowned investigator of unusual death, with a staff of 138 that included sixteen pathologists. When he started at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Americans were driving Model T Fords; by the time of his retirement, men were landing on the moon. The huge technological advances that made this possible, and so profoundly influenced the direction of crime solving, also helped propel Helpern into the homes of America as the very first TV pathologist. New Yorkers who might never have picked up a newspaper in their lives grew used to seeing Helpern’s distinctive visage on their TV screens. In terms of a dominant personality and the impact on his profession, Helpern stood right alongside his mentor, Charles Norris. The only difference was that Helpern operated in a harsher, more censorious age.

  He’d also had to cope with a mind-bending increase in crime statistics. By 1971 the murder rate in New York had soared to an incredible 1,625, almost as many as in the whole of Europe. Little wonder that Helpern would shake his head in exasperation and declare himself amazed at “how many die of homicides in this city—it’s about six a day, and that’s an awful lot.” With no evidence of a slowdown in the crime rate, it was blindingly obvious that whoever took over at the helm of the OCME would have his hands full. Judging from Helpern’s experience, a couple of eyes in the back of one’s head would be no bad thing either.

  FOUR

  THE BRUTAL DECADE

  Filling Milton Helpern’s shoes was never going to be easy. Helpern made sure of that. Being forced out of office on a technicality—he had fought like Rocky Marciano to get the Civil Service rules on mandatory retirement amended but without success—left him feeling thwarted and vengeful. His volcanic antipathy toward Dr. Michael Baden was already a matter of public record, but Helpern wasn’t done yet. Behind the scenes, he groused about the qualifications and suitability of other candidates whose names were being bandied about in the press.

  Some of those who came under Helpern’s withering fire were none too happy either, but for an entirely different reason. It had been generally assumed that Helpern’s successor would be an in-house promotion, someone already on the OCME payroll. Certainly that was the joint impression of the five deputy chief medical examiners as they readied themselves for the Civil Service promotional examination scheduled for the end of April 1974. Then came a bombshell. The Civil Service Commission decided to cancel the examination and throw open the contest to any qualified pathologist, not just those already employed by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. This was a bitter pill for the deputies to swallow. An act of intended egalitarianism backfired badly as morale inside the OCME hit rock bottom. Ask anyone in the American forensic science community the toughest place to work and most would answer “New York City” without hesitation. The politics, the media pressure, the unrelenting scrutiny, the mediocre pay scale, and the nation’s highest body count make the OCME a singular place of employment, one that generates a high level of loyalty. Not unreasonably, most employees expected that loyalty to be rewarded. One of the deputies, Dr. John F. Devlin, summed up the mood of discontent thus: “If they [OCME employees] can’t count on deserved promotion, why should they stay here and ride this tiger when they could go to Oshkosh or some place and become Chief Medical Examiner and have a nicer home and a better salary?”

  This question of local experience was echoed by one of the succession favorites, Dr. Michael Baden. “Working elsewhere doesn’t prepare you for the volume and variety of work in our office and it doesn’t give you an understanding of the ethnic groups and political forces that are at play in this city,” he said. “We have to be in a position to call things as we see them, regardless of pressures from insurance companies or hospitals or medical schools or anyone.”

  While the insults flew and bruised egos were nursed back into shape, the city obviously needed someone in charge at 520 First Avenue, and on January 7, 1974, it was announced that Dr. Dominick J. DiMaio had been appointed acting chief medical examiner. He had worked at the OCME for almost a quarter of a century, first under Gonzales, then at Helpern’s right hand. His background was similar to that of his immediate predecessor. He had been born on the Lower East Side on July 19, 1913, and after attending DeWitt Clinton High School, he went to Long Island University. After setting his heart on a career in medicine, he studied at Marquette University in Milwaukee. Unlike most of his class he opted for the deeply unfashionable specialty of pathology. During the war, he served in the U.S. Public Health Service, working at various Coast Guard and Maritime Service Installations in the New York area. In 1950, after a spell as a pathologist at the Polyclinic Hospital on Second Avenue, he moved just a few blocks to the Office of the Medical Examiner, joining as an assistant medical examiner to Gonzales. Under Helpern, his progress through the hierarchy had been steady, if unspectacular. Stockily built and balding with a fringe of gray hair, DiMaio’s avuncular appearance concealed a restless energy that he defused when away from work by collecting stamps and playing the piano. When it came to settling the issue of permanent CME, DiMaio’s name was sure to be in the mix. Provided, of course, he could survive that “temporary” period.

  In many respects, DiMaio was a victim of bad timing. When he took over temporary office, there was the succession battle, of course—that was degenerating into a brutish soap opera—but other factors conspired against him. The last few years of Helpern’s reign had seen a seismic shift in the way America reported its news. The seeds of journalistic change sown i
n Vietnam and the civil rights struggle now manifested themselves in a tougher, more confrontational press attitude toward almost every arm of government. In early 1974 Watergate was nearing its grisly crescendo, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had become media folk heroes, and hungry young reporters everywhere were scrabbling under every promising rock, looking for that next Pulitzer. Nothing was off limits, and that included the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. All at once, New York’s metropolitan news pages were littered with allegations of OCME inefficiency. When Calvin Jackson, a twenty-six-year-old drifter, was arrested on September 12, 1974, for the murder of a fifty-nine-year-old widow named Pauline Spanierman, his blithe admission that over the past fifteen months he had strangled and raped another ten elderly women in a crime-ridden neighborhood by Central Park stunned the interviewing officers. Adding to investigatorial woes was the fact that three of the alleged murder victims had not even been recognized as such: the OCME had ruled their deaths as “natural causes.” To be fair, in each case the body was very badly decomposed and there was no visible evidence—no petechiae in the face and eyes, and no bruising around the neck—to suggest strangulation.* Even so, it didn’t sound good, and the storm clouds that had been building around Helpern in his final months now settled on DiMaio’s shoulders. The press smelled blood. They demanded to know just how many murders in New York went unreported each year. DiMaio didn’t prevaricate. “I’d have to say that there are more homicides in the city than we know about,” he said. It was a reply that virtually every medical examiner in the world—if they were being truthful—could have made.

  Inwardly, DiMaio must have been pondering the wisdom of his promotion. Right from day one it had been one bureaucratic headache after another. Much the worst of these involved a sensational case that the crafty Helpern had kept under wraps for almost two years. The chief had sensed it was nothing but trouble. And now that trouble was about to blow up in DiMaio’s face.

  CASE FILE:

  Colin Carpi (1971)

  In the mid-nineteenth century a young woman named Louisa Van Slyke died at Charity Hospital on Blackwell’s Island (later Roosevelt Island) in the East River. Her life had been brief and lonely. She was just twenty-four years old when she died, an only child, orphaned at an early age, without a single living relative or friend to mourn her passing. Her death, like her life, was unremarkable in all respects save one: on April 20, 1869, she became the first person to be buried in New York’s recently acquired Potter’s Field, the city’s brand-new public cemetery.

  All major cities in the United States accumulate vast numbers of unidentified dead bodies. If they remain unclaimed, then most are buried in a local graveyard known colloquially as Potter’s Field. The name is believed to derive from Matthew 27: 3–7. “Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests…And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in.”

  It had taken New York City a long time to settle on a permanent resting place for its “indigent and unbefriended.” Unclaimed bodies were first interred at Washington Square in Greenwich Village—handily adjacent to the gallows tree—until 1823, when they were removed to Bryant Park on Fifth Avenue. At the end of the following decade, as the urban sprawl pushed ever northward, this site was decommissioned and the bodies shifted to a plot on Fourth Avenue and Fiftieth Street. More upheaval came when this ground was earmarked for the Women’s Hospital in 1855, leading to the removal, two years later, of more than a hundred thousand dead bodies to Ward’s Island, at the northern end of the East River.

  Still the search wasn’t over. In 1868 the commissioners of the New York City Department of Public Charities and Correction were authorized to purchase and take title to any plot of ground, convenient and accessible to the city and large enough for a public cemetery. They set their sights on Hart Island, a scrubby outcrop of rock in Long Island Sound, owned by a family called Hunter. It was a good deal for everyone concerned. The Hunters pocketed an impressive seventy-five thousand dollars and the city finally had the space it needed for a permanent potter’s field.

  The cemetery itself occupies almost the entire northern half of Hart Island, and in the early part of the twentieth century it was a busy place indeed. Each year close to eight thousand unclaimed bodies were buried within its confines. By 1969 the cumulative total had reached six hundred thousand, almost two-thirds of them infants or stillborn. In recent times, better medicine, better communications and more stringent ID checks have reduced the annual intake to around twenty-five hundred, but the bureaucratic rigor is undiminished.

  Any citizen who becomes aware of the death of any person is required by law to report that death to the local police precinct, which notifies the chief medical examiner. If a person dies in a city hospital or institution, and his body is not claimed within twenty-four hours, the Department of Hospitals is authorized to allow his burial at potter’s field.

  The body of a deceased pauper is sent to the morgue of the county in which he dies, and the medical examiner applies to the Board of Health for a burial permit. If the body remains unclaimed, the burial permit and the deceased are sent to the central morgue at Bellevue Hospital.

  At the morgue, the bodies of the deceased are wrapped in shroud paper and sealed in pine coffins lined with waterproof paper. Unknowns are fingerprinted and photographed and then interred with all their clothes and belongings in case it becomes possible to identify them later. Copies of the burial certificate, chemically treated so they remain legible for decades, are placed both inside and on top of the coffins.

  From the dock on City Island, in the Bronx, it’s just a five-minute ferry ride out across the Sound to Potter’s Field. Because of the numbers involved, a strict rota is maintained. Tuesday is reserved for bodies from Queens; Wednesday, it’s the turn of Brooklyn and Staten Island; on Thursday, Manhattan dispatches its dead; Friday is set aside for the Bronx. The interments are carried out by inmates of nearby Riker’s Island, who are paid between twenty-five and thirty-five cents an hour. The coffins are buried one hundred to a pit, three high and two abreast. Because of the numbers involved and multifaith issues, no rites are read out at the graveside.

  All the burials are recorded in the interment registers. The entry for each body includes permit number, section number, plot number, grave number, age of the deceased (if known), date the permit was issued, date of death, cause of death, signature of the medical examiner, place of death, and date of burial. Although there are no individual tombstones, plot and section markers indicate the location of the coffin by a numerical system. Despite the daunting number of burials, the forty-five-acre site is in no danger of being exhausted. It is a grim, dignified system, and for the most part it works well. But nothing is flawless, and in 1971 Potter’s Field suddenly found itself at the epicenter of the biggest PR disaster in the OCME’s long history.

  No one could—or would—ever say exactly how Jean Pierre Lehary came to be handling the skull on that July morning. As the curator of the OCME museum, it was his job to catalog and, if necessary, clean those items of forensic evidence deemed worthy of retention. Many of the specimens in the jars were kept for teaching purposes; some had historical significance—a major case, for instance—and some found their way onto the museum’s shelves courtesy of the gallows humor that seems part and parcel of medical examiners’ offices worldwide. So far as the records for this particular skull were concerned, they showed that on June 9, 1971, Patrolman Thomas Krant of the NYPD had spotted a body floating down the East River, 250 feet from Pier 70, and had summoned assistance. The female body was brought to the shore. When Detective John F. Hackett, who had been attached to the OCME for twenty years, saw the advanced level of decomposition he realized immediately that the best chance of identification would come through dental records. He contacted Bellevue, and two dentists, David E. Kenny and Carl Gardiner, duly charted the teeth in
routine fashion. Although there was still some flesh attached to the skull, neither saw anything out of the ordinary. Nor did the OCME pathologist who carried out an external examination. Judging from the body’s poor condition, he estimated that it had been in the water for several months.

  The find was depressingly familiar. In the first half of the twentieth century, literally hundreds of drowning victims were recovered each year from the East River, with most of the bodies being found in spring.* This is because about 95 percent of victims who drown in cold weather will submerge, and their bodies linger on the riverbed until the air temperature reaches a regular 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Then, like a soggy cork, they will invariably rise to the surface. Sometimes, if the body gets trapped, it can remain submerged for so long that it is covered with barnacles when eventually dragged from the water.

  In this instance, with no obvious signs of external injury, the medical examiner decided against performing a full autopsy and duly recorded the cause of death as “drowning.” After twenty days in the mortuary, longer than was legally necessary for an unidentified body, the corpse was dispatched to Potter’s Field—minus the head.