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

by Colin Evans

  While the ethical and succession battles raged, DiMaio struggled with the day-to-day problems of running the busiest medico-legal facility in the world. On June 24, 1975, an Eastern Airlines jet crashed in a violent thunderstorm on its approach to Kennedy International Airport, and to DiMaio and his team fell the grim task of identifying the 110 victims. Just a few months later another large-scale tragedy struck New York again when fire raged through the Puerto Rican Social Club in the Bronx in the early hours of October 24, 1975, killing twenty-five young partygoers and injuring twenty-four others who had leapt from a second-floor window. A grim convoy of four vans transported the bodies to the OCME, where DiMaio supervised a process of mass identification that had been honed into assembly-line efficiency. Each of the bodies was examined by a five-man team headed by an assistant medical examiner and including a fingerprint specialist, a photographer, a property clerk, and a stenographer.

  Gasoline traces found at the club revealed the malevolent hand of an arsonist. All this carnage had resulted from a lover’s quarrel, with one man enraged because his young woman friend had gone to the club with someone else. Eventually three men, none older than eighteen, were convicted of the crime and sentenced to life imprisonment.

  Seven weeks later, DiMaio had to deal with the victims of yet another major fire, when the Blue Angel nightclub on East Fifty-fourth Street was engulfed by flames on December 18, 1975. This was a case where a prompt call to the emergency services might have averted catastrophe; instead, the staff took it upon themselves to attempt to extinguish a small fire backstage, only for it to spread within minutes to the public areas. Pandemonium ensued. Five of the victims were found huddled together in the ladies’ room. All had died from smoke inhalation, DiMaio found, with none suffering serious burns.

  Unbelievably, as the new year dawned, the vacuum at the top of the OCME had still not been filled. The bickering dragged on until spring, when the announcement of a fresh Civil Service examination held out the hope of a resolution at last. Three candidates only sat the test, DiMaio and Baden, and a newcomer, Dr. Elliot Gross, the forty-one-year-old chief medical examiner of Connecticut. When the scores were tallied, DiMaio and Baden were even with 91, six points ahead of Gross. The examining board decided that because of seniority and veteran’s credit, DiMaio should be placed first, and it was assumed that he would finally be named to the $39,563-a-year post. But he still had plenty of enemies. Helpern had originally favored DiMaio’s candidacy—anything to stop Baden—until the acting CME booted Helpern out of his office at 520 First Avenue. Now the former chief turned his fire on DiMaio as well. Rumors persisted that Helpern had even attempted to influence the two tests. Certainly Helpern’s allies at the New York University’s Department of Forensic Medicine ganged up against DiMaio. In a bombastic statement, they expressed displeasure at the prospect of DiMaio—whom they cruelly derided as underqualified—getting the top post. According to anonymous sources deep within the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner itself, the NYU school had threatened to sever its connection with the office if DiMaio was appointed head. (Significantly, no one could ever be found to confirm this scurrilous rumor.) Muddying the waters still further was the announcement that the City Health Commissioner, Lowell E. Berlin, had, very publicly, thrown his weight behind the third-place candidate, Gross. If true, this made a mockery of the concept of an open examination.

  Despite all these setbacks, DiMaio rode out the challenges and seemed just on the verge of confirmation when another bombshell struck: rumors had reached City Hall about some alleged irregularities in his business dealings. The accusations, like so many leveled against DiMaio at this time, were suspiciously nebulous. This time the suggestion was that DiMaio might have acted improperly by accepting nearly four thousand dollars for collating a series of statistics from the OCME’s office for a California research group.

  On July 30, 1976, DiMaio decided to clear the air. He went to Scoppetta and said that he “did not want the appointment with a cloud over my head,” adding that while his reputation was being investigated, he would voluntarily relinquish the title of acting chief.

  DiMaio was confident of exoneration and his confidence proved well placed. After a short inquiry, Scoppetta went to the mayor and announced that the practice of pathologists’ accepting fees for outside work was well established and that he had found nothing to bar DiMaio from being appointed permanently. Finally, DiMaio had made it. On August 19, 1976—more than two and a half years after Helpern’s retirement—New York once again had a chief medical examiner.

  Even Baden professed himself delighted by the outcome. He waxed enthusiastic for the press, lauding DiMaio as a “devoted family man, which is a definite plus in this profession.” Baden could afford to be magnanimous. At the back of his mind was the knowledge that unless DiMaio pulled any Helpern-like stunts with the Civil Service Commission, he had less than two years in office before the mandatory retirement age of sixty-five. His time would surely come.

  For DiMaio it was work as usual. And that meant dealing with disasters. In the early hours of May 25, 1977, the third major fire to hit New York in eighteen months broke out at the Everard Baths on West 28th Street, a bathhouse that catered to homosexuals. Nine men died in the blaze. One firefighter described three of the victims as being so badly burnt that “you couldn’t even tell they were bodies.” The baths had a notorious reputation for promiscuity. In flagrant violation of its operating permit, many of the building’s rooms had been turned into dormitories where patrons stayed overnight. Because many of the clientele had booked in under false names, it made identifying the bodies even more problematic than usual, but within a matter of just days the OCME had put names to all the victims.

  The final year of DiMaio’s tenure was mercifully uneventful. As 1978 unfolded, and DiMaio reached the mandatory retirement age of sixty-five, it became obvious that there would be no extension. During his brief tenure in charge he had been subjected to a relentless and at times spiteful bombardment by the press and colleagues alike. His retirement, which began on May 1, 1978, gave him the opportunity to enter private practice as a consultant and to distill the fruits of his long career into a textbook called Forensic Pathology (New York: Elsevier, 1989), cowritten with his son, Dr. Vincent DiMaio, the chief medical examiner for Bexar County in Texas.

  But if DiMaio thought that leaving office meant putting all the OCME’s cares and woes behind him, he was gravely mistaken. There were plenty of clouds to darken his retirement. In 1980 the New York Times revealed that DiMaio had been plagued by misdeeds at the OCME during his time in office. Those old stories about kickbacks from funeral homes were resurrected, with one OCME supervisor admitting to the Department of Investigation that he had accepted money. In return for his cooperation, the unnamed supervisor had been granted immunity from prosecution. Other names were mentioned, but no one was ever charged. A different level of dishonesty surfaced over the theft of twenty-nine pounds of marijuana from a triple-locked safe in the toxicology laboratory on the fourth floor. The marijuana, with a street value of twelve thousand dollars, had been found in the apartment of a lawyer who had committed suicide and was being kept to determine if it had played any part in the suicide’s death. An OCME employee was allowed to resign after making financial restitution to the family of the deceased. DiMaio admitted having been aware of these transgressions and had passed the accusations to the Department of Investigation, but he insisted that “the end results were never given to me.”

  The 1970s had been a brutal decade for the OCME. Allegations of kickbacks, incompetence, other irregularities, and Machiavellian levels of interdepartmental bloodletting and intrigue meant that it was rarely out of the headlines. With DiMaio retired, most believed that rather than run the highly contentious selection process all over again, Mayor Edward Koch would save time and tax dollars and simply award the top job to the former second-place candidate, Dr. Michael Baden. With Baden in the top job, the fervent prayer was that, at la
st, some sense of stability would be restored to the tumultuous office. It was some hope.

  FIVE

  A SURGICAL REMOVAL

  It all looked so preordained. After years of scrapping with bulldog tenacity to the top of the heap, Dr. Michael Baden was finally going to fulfill his apparent destiny. The official nod came on April 27, 1978. Mayor Edward Koch called a news conference to announce, as anticipated, that Baden was his choice to be the new chief medical examiner for New York City. At age forty-three, Baden was the youngest person ever appointed to the post; with good health and a fair shake from Gracie Mansion he could expect to take the OCME into the twenty-first century. Somewhat overlooked in all the excitement, however, was the fact that Baden’s appointment was provisional. Like Gonzales and DiMaio, the man from the Bronx would have to serve a probationary period before confirmation. At the time, no one thought anything of it; just a formality, was the received wisdom.

  For Baden, the promotion fattened up his paycheck to the tune of $50,000 a year, a 30 percent raise over what he had been earning as a deputy, and gave him control over a department that had grown to a full-time staff of 151 and an annual budget of $3.5 million. It also provided the front center stage that he yearned for. Of all the men who’ve worn the crown at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, none has sat so comfortably in the media spotlight as Baden. By his own admission he reveled in the attention. “I liked the public side of it,” he wrote later about the job. “The excitement and the immediacy of it appealed to me.”

  Bronx born and Brooklyn raised, Baden was educated at City College, where he majored in biology and chemistry. In his spare time, he acted as editor-in-chief of the Campus, the student newspaper, a sideline so intriguing that it tempted him into seriously considering an application to the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. But medicine won out, and after graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1955, he went on to the New York University Medical School. Even in his first year as a student, he found himself drawn toward the morgue at Bellevue. On one of his first visits to the cavernous autopsy room he saw a group of nervous-looking doctors all huddled together, while across the room, in splendid isolation, Milton Helpern was performing an autopsy. The collective trepidation of the onlookers hinged on fears that the man on the slab had succumbed to smallpox, a disease long thought to have been eradicated in New York City. Baden shrugged off their concerns. Calmly and with great deliberation, he walked over and began observing more closely. Helpern, somewhat taken aback—not many young medical students were remotely interested in pathology, and fewer still were prepared to accept the kind of risk that Baden had just undertaken—gratefully accepted the newcomer’s offer to assist as he took samples. The fact that subsequent chemical analysis showed that the man had actually died of chicken pox made not a jot of difference to Helpern. He’d been mightily impressed by Baden’s chutzpah and soon took the youngster under his wing.

  After graduating from NYU in 1959, Baden continued to moonlight at the OCME—he was not allowed to process the murder cases, which were understandably regarded as far too important for a novice—before joining permanently in 1965. With Helpern as his mentor, Baden’s star began its inexorable rise, and in 1968, he and Helpern combined forces to coedit a medico-legal textbook.* Articles and reports flowed from the young man’s pen. Many dealt with the calamitous impact that drugs and alcohol were having on the health of America. By 1970 Baden was the undoubted wunderkind of American medical jurisprudence: a recognized international authority on the effects of substance abuse; a deputy chief medical examiner at the early age of thirty-five; and he had what looked, to outsiders at least, the inside track with Dr. Milton Helpern. Already he was being mentioned as a possible successor when “the Chief” decided to call it a day.

  And then the bubble burst.

  For some reason, Helpern turned against the younger man. As we have already seen, the last few years of Helpern’s reign, and a hefty chunk of his retirement, were dominated by his unrelenting determination to thwart Baden’s chances of succession. Since most recollections of Helpern highlight his kindness and humanity—Professor Bernard Knight, Helpern’s biographer, caught the general mood when he wrote, “Above all else, [Helpern] was a gentleman, and a gentle man”—such out-of-character malevolence obviously had its roots in something bordering on the cataclysmic. Most mutual acquaintances dated the feud back to the late sixties, when Baden’s then wife, Dr. Judianne Densen-Gerber, ran a controversial drug treatment program called Odyssey House. Like her husband, Densen-Gerber was not temperamentally disposed to the concealing of lights under bushels. She was brash, belligerently outspoken, a regular headline-generating machine. Her well-publicized attacks on rival state and city drug rehabilitation programs infuriated Helpern, who, as part of the city health apparatus, bridled at being criticized, however obliquely, by an underling’s spouse. Helpern suspected—and later events tended to bear him out—that Densen-Gerber was more interested in financing a fancy lifestyle than in helping addicts, and he made his antipathy toward her brutally apparent.* Trapped between two warring factions, Baden inevitably caught some of the flak intended for his wife. As we have seen, Helpern’s frigid hostility toward Baden did not dissipate with retirement, but Baden had youth on his side, enabling him to ride out the attacks with a certain élan. And in 1978, when the top job became vacant for the second time in two years, his longtime bête noire was dead. This time a clear run to the winning post beckoned.

  Baden brought enormous credentials to his new job. He was on the faculties of three medical schools: Columbia, New York University, and Albert Einstein College at Yeshiva University in the Bronx. In addition, he taught courses on law and medicine at New York Law School. There was not a better qualified forensic pathologist in America. He first rose to national prominence in the aftermath of the Attica prison riot in September 1971, when the autopsies that he and others performed on the thirty-nine victims helped defuse the lurid myth that several hostages had had their throats slit. (All ten hostages who died were shot accidentally by troops). This led to him serving on the New York State Correction Medical Review Board, where it was his duty to investigate deaths in prisons. His appointment didn’t please everyone. Many found his independence jarring. Baden was not about to button his lip for anyone; if he found any suspicious circumstances, he didn’t hesitate to say so.

  Candor can either help or hinder a career, and in Baden’s case there was no doubt that the frankness pendulum swung decidedly in his favor. Right from his earliest days, he’d always been a lightning rod for controversy, and when he took over the reins at the OCME it was no different. Already he was embroiled in the most controversial case of his career.

  CASE FILE:

  Dr. Mario Jascalevich (1978)

  The whispered rumors had begun doing the rounds of New York City newsrooms in the mid-1960s: Something weird was going on at a small, unnamed hospital in New Jersey. Patients were dying for no good reason—murdered, so the story went, by a doctor who had resigned from the hospital under a cloud. Inevitably, such talk revived memories of another homicidal medico, Dr. Carl Coppolino, who was currently serving a life sentence in Florida. Was it really possible that in Coppolino’s adopted home state of New Jersey another murderous physician was at large? Try as they might—and to be honest, no media organization did try that hard—no one could nail down the facts. In the late sixties, several journalists heard the whispers, only to decide that the details were too vague, the case just too old, and probably not worth pursuing.

  And there the story languished; interesting, no doubt, but probably nothing more than overwrought hospital gossip. Lives moved on and memories faded. Until June 1975. That was when a letter found its way to the New York Times. The editor thought it interesting enough to pass on to Myron Farber, a top-rate investigative journalist who regularly covered medical stories. Farber scanned the letter, which came from a New York writer and PR consultant named Eileen Milling, with an appropriately skeptical eye. In t
he letter, Ms. Milling claimed that a surgeon whom she refused to name, working at a hospital that she declined to identify, had gone on a two-year killing spree that left as many as thirty or forty patients dead. She described it as a “case of a warped mind playing chess with other people’s lives.”

  At first glance the claims seemed unbelievable, the product of a febrile, possibly even deranged imagination. Yet when interviewed, Ms. Milling came across as balanced and credible, clearly not a crank, even if she was maddeningly evasive about specifics and names. Farber decided to go digging. First, he needed to identify the hospital. Trawling down through records and jogging often reluctant memories was a gargantuan task that occupied several months. Eventually a contact in the world of forensic toxicology recalled a similar story, something about strange happenings at a small private hospital out in New Jersey. The toxicologist couldn’t provide any more leads, unfortunately, as it had all happened so long ago.