A Civil Action (29 page)

Patti D’Addieco held Schlichtmann in awe. In truth, she later confided, she had a crush on him. She tried her best to please him, but she ran into difficulty finding many of the oldest records. One morning, as she hurried into work, she encountered Schlichtmann by the reception desk.

“You got all the medical records yet?” he asked. “I can’t get complete records for Anne Anderson because the doctor—”

“I don’t care,” interrupted Schlichtmann. “Just get them.”

“Jan, I can’t. The doctor’s dead.”

“I don’t care!” shouted Schlichtmann, loud enough for everyone in the office to hear. “Dig the man out of his fucking grave! Go to his widow’s house and get them out of the fucking basement! Do you think Facher cares why you can’t get the medical records?”

Patti D’Addieco turned abruptly, tears in her eyes, and fled to the library. She heard Schlichtmann coming and she quickly picked up the telephone.

“Patti, put down the phone,” he said.

“I’m upset now. I don’t want to talk.”

“Why are you upset?”

“I’ve been working really hard.” She wiped tears from her eyes. “I just can’t talk now.”

“Okay,” said Schlichtmann gently. “I’ll talk, you listen.” He spoke softly; he said he knew she’d been working hard and he appreciated her efforts; she was a valued employee. He continued in this vein for several minutes, but never actually apologized. Patti felt the tug of a gentle seduction and, against her will, she began to smile. Then Schlichtmann said, “Okay, now go get the medical records.”

Some months later Patti D’Addieco got her revenge. For Schlichtmann’s birthday, she wrote a song—the “Schlichtmann Rap”—and sang it to him at the office party.

Now let me tell you a story ’bout a man named Jan

Gonna rock you into justice like no other mother can

You can see it in his smile as he’s walkin’ into trial

His hands’ll be washed and his clothes’ll have style

Now I want medical records and I want ’em done right

I don’t care if you gotta stay here all night

I want ’em perfect and I want ’em neat

And if you fuck ’em up, you be walking on the street.

What, no juice? I made it perfectly clear

That there’s always gotta be some juice in here

And it’s gotta be natural and it’s gotta cost more

Than any other juice in any other store

Now before we end this Schlichtmann rap

Lemme tell ya one more thing ’bout this Schlichtmann chap

He’s got a quick tongue and he’s got a keen wit

And the best thing about him is he can take this shit.

Collecting all of the medical records had been the idea of a Chicago doctor, a specialist in occupational and environmental medicine named Shirley Conibear. Schlichtmann had gone to Chicago to recruit her almost a year ago. He had drawn up a list of doctors—cancer specialists, pathologists, immunologists, and toxicologists—who had testified in other cases involving toxic substances, such as Agent Orange and asbestos. Some of those doctors had told him they were too busy to get involved in Woburn. Some had rejected him outright, saying they didn’t believe Schlichtmann had a case. To those who had seemed interested, Schlichtmann sent a thick file of material along with a check for twenty-five hundred dollars, his standard payment for his first consultation with an expert witness.

Dr. Shirley Conibear had published many articles about the health problems of industrial workers exposed to toxic chemicals. The Woburn case, particularly Colvin’s T cell tests and the Harvard Health study, had intrigued her. She and Schlichtmann had spent several hours in her Chicago office discussing the medical aspects of the case. She had suggested then that Schlichtmann start collecting the medical records. If these people had indeed been injured by exposure to TCE, Conibear had said, a pattern of health problems should emerge in the records. Furthermore, Conibear could use the records to compare the state of the families’ health before October 1964, the date Well G had gone on line, to the record of their complaints after they’d been exposed to the water.

For a handsome fee, Conibear had agreed to come to Boston and perform thorough physical examinations of all twenty-eight living family members. Schlichtmann had his staff prepare for Conibear’s arrival by leasing a suite of rooms in a doctor’s office building near the Boston University Medical Center and furnishing it with rented equipment. He also arranged accommodations for a week at the Ritz-Carlton for Conibear and her staff, which included two other physicians and a lab technician.

Conibear’s first round of reports, more than nine hundred pages long, cost Schlichtmann $88,729. He felt they were worth every penny. He read that in 1964, the year Well G came on line, Richard Toomey had suffered an episode of gastric and abdominal pain so severe that he’d gone to see a doctor. By 1971, when the wells were operating full-time, Toomey’s stomach problems had become chronic. He had also complained repeatedly of sore throats, headaches, nausea, severe sweats, and various rashes. Toomey’s daughter, Mary Eileen, born in 1965, had suffered repeated rashes on her face and legs, sinus problems, vomiting, chills, and abdominal pains. To Schlichtmann, the record of her complaints looked remarkably similar to her father’s.

The records of Anne Anderson told of a history of chronic abdominal pain, intestinal cramps, irritable colon, nausea, vomiting, and fatigue. Anne’s oldest son, Chuck: rashes during the first three years of his life and upper respiratory tract infections. Kathryn Gamache: sore throats, epigastric pain, nausea, abdominal cramps, light-headedness, vertigo. Kathryn’s daughter, Amy: rashes on the head, abdomen, and legs, nausea, diarrhea, irritable colon. Diane Aufiero: sore throats, nausea, light-headedness, skin eruptions. And each of the five children who had died of leukemia had experienced rashes, sore throats, and chronic earaches before their diagnoses.

One after another, the case histories of the plaintiffs looked astonishingly alike. Conibear told Schlichtmann that the pattern of chronic solvent poisoning was unmistakable. She had conducted a computer search of scientific journals and found more than a hundred articles on the toxic effects of TCE. Most of those articles dealt with workers who’d been exposed to the solvent, and they cited the same constellation of symptoms—dizziness, nausea, vomiting, fatigue, skin rashes. Among the Woburn families, any one person might have the misfortune to suffer repeated rashes, chronic abdominal pains and nausea,
and sinus and upper-respiratory-tract infections. But for a group of families, related to each other only by geography and the water they used, to suffer so many common ailments and to have a leukemic child in the family—to Schlichtmann, that could not be coincidence.

Conibear had also made another important finding—nine of the fourteen Woburn adults showed signs of cardiac arrhythmia, or irregular heartbeats. This, too, seemed to fit the pattern of exposure to TCE. The scientific literature contained a dozen case studies documenting what one study called the solvent’s “significant effects on the cardiovascular system.” Autopsies of workers overcome by TCE fumes confirmed that several had died of “ventricular fibrillation”—a fatal arrhythmia—and “primary cardiac failure.”

Conibear had given the Woburn adults standard twelve-lead electrocardiograms, but she told Schlichtmann that there were a battery of more extensive tests that could be administered by a trained heart specialist. Schlichtmann decided to send the families to a first-rate cardiologist. He found one in Boston, not far from his own office. This cardiologist, Saul Cohen, taught at the Boston University School of Medicine and also maintained a private practice. Schlichtmann called him up and explained that he wanted thorough cardiac workups, examinations of the sort the nation’s president would receive.

Cohen was familiar with TCE and its pathological effects on the heart. But he was openly skeptical about the danger of such low-level exposures, especially in drinking water. All of the case studies he had read involved workers who had inhaled TCE vapor in much higher concentrations than the levels found in the Woburn water. “Are you going to want me to testify?” Cohen asked Schlichtmann.

Schlichtmann said yes, he hoped Cohen would testify.

“I’ll testify to what I find, but I may not find anything,” warned Cohen.

Schlichtmann didn’t mention the fact that Conibear had already found nine cases of arrhythmia. It would be best, he thought, to have Cohen discover the arrhythmias on his own.

It took Cohen six weeks to complete his examinations of all the Woburn adults and the three oldest teenage children. He began with routine physicals followed by blood tests, resting electrocardiograms, treadmill cardiograms, and twenty-four-hour-long ambulatory heart recordings by Holter monitor. When he finished, he delivered to
Schlichtmann’s office a summary of his findings, along with a three-foot stack of reports that contained hundreds of pages of rhythm strips from the electrocardiograms. And, of course, a bill for services rendered: $55,762.

Schlichtmann read that not just some but all of the seventeen individuals tested by Cohen experienced irregular heartbeats. The results, Cohen told Schlichtmann, had surprised him—“quite striking” were his exact words. Schlichtmann asked Cohen to review Conibear’s physical exams and the index of past medical complaints that she had assembled. “That, in addition to my own findings, really stunned me,” Cohen would testify later at his deposition. “I was very impressed with the consistency of these findings and the similarity of complaints in this particular cohort of patients.”

Compared with the arrhythmias and the leukemias, and even with the rashes, many of the recurring health problems that the Woburn families had reported to their family doctors over the years were vague and hard to quantify. Headaches, fatigue, and depression, for example, could be caused by any number of things. They might simply be manifestations of stress or of psychological problems, without any underlying biological cause. But the scientific literature on TCE showed that the solvent had a potent effect on the central nervous system. It acted as a depressant, and it could have caused those sorts of symptoms. Conibear believed that the frequency of those symptoms pointed to neurological damage.

So Schlichtmann called a prominent Boston neurologist—Dr. Robert G. Feldman, the chairman of the Department of Neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine. Schlichtmann had met Feldman during the Carney case. He had asked Feldman to review Carney’s file, and the neurologist had gone on to become Schlichtmann’s star expert witness in that case.

Feldman was skeptical. He told Schlichtmann that he could give the families the same battery of neurological tests that he gave to workers who had been exposed to TCE. Cohen’s results, Feldman admitted, were impressive. But even so, Feldman thought that the concentrations of TCE in the Woburn water were very small. The neurological tests were time-consuming and expensive—a thousand dollars for each person—and they might not show any nerve damage.

To Schlichtmann it seemed that everything was falling neatly into place, including Feldman’s skepticism. Cohen had been skeptical, too, and then he’d discovered even more arrhythmias than Conibear. Schlichtmann wasn’t worried. He had come to believe, at this point, that he had already discovered the truth of this case. Now it was just a matter of everyone else catching up with him, bringing along the details of proof that he would need in a courtroom. He arranged for the neurological examinations of the Woburn families.

Feldman had written several articles on the neurological effects of TCE, including a landmark case study published in 1970 in the journal
Neurology
. Alone in the conference room one night, Schlichtmann read all of Feldman’s papers. The 1970 case study told the story of a twenty-six-year-old worker who had attempted to fix a leak in a large industrial degreasing machine filled with TCE. The worker had worn a faulty gas mask. After an hour and a half of exposure to the fumes, the man had emerged feeling slightly giddy. Twelve hours later he was suffering waves of nausea and vomiting, blurred vision, numbness of his face, mouth, and pharynx. On presentation, Feldman saw a lethargic, confused individual who had difficulty speaking and could not follow even the simplest commands.

Feldman’s article cited two dozen other studies of exposure to TCE. Schlichtmann read one early account that told of a British shipworker who had swabbed the boilers of a frigate with TCE. This worker had emerged after four hours with a severe headache and complaining of dizziness. The next day, he was overwhelmed by nausea, unable to cough, swallow, or speak. The area around his mouth and nose was completely numb. His heart rate was greatly elevated. Until his death from a respiratory infection several weeks after his exposure, he was unable to retain any food. An autopsy revealed extensive damage to the fifth cranial nerve, also known as the trigeminal nerve. The myelin sheath, the fatty layer of tissue that insulates nerve fibers, had dissolved into “irregular globules.” The TCE had literally
degreased
the man’s nerve fibers.

As for his own patient, Feldman could do little to treat the symptoms, but he could measure the severity of the damage. He began with a series of nerve conduction studies, computing the speed and amplitude
with which the worker’s nerve fibers conducted electrical impulses. Feldman found that the young man’s nerves functioned at the same rate as someone suffering from early-stage multiple sclerosis. Feldman also gave the man a wide range of psychological tests designed to measure memory and motor control. Over the next sixteen years, he followed his patient’s progress closely. The numbness of the worker’s face abated slowly during the first year, and nerve-conduction velocities gradually increased, but they never returned to normal. And the worker had lingering neuropsychological problems. Although he scored in the “bright-normal” range when tested for verbal intelligence, his short-term memory, his attention span, and his ability to think sequentially were all impaired. Psychological tests indicated a lingering depression, which Feldman attributed to the physical damage of his patient’s central nervous system. “The affective disorder observed in this patient after 16 years is particularly disturbing,” wrote Feldman in March 1985, in his second report on the worker. “[M]easurements indicate the likelihood of permanent neurological deficit following a single acute exposure to trichloroethylene.”