Coroner's Journal (20 page)

Then there was the child. The little boy was huddled in the corner of the bedroom. He was four years old and so small and vulnerable. As I went over to him I realized that half of his shoulder was missing and a brutal gaping wound exposed his internal organs.

My thoughts tried to grasp how this atrocity could occur. I thought of how terrified this little boy must have been. And I asked to no one in particular, “Why does this happen to a child?”

Actually, I probably knew the answer. I suspected the boy knew who did this, and he would have been able to identify the killer.

How
is the question I can't get past. I cannot answer it. How does a man point an assault rifle at a child, look into those innocent, terrified eyes, and pull the trigger? It escapes me.

When I lifted him up I could appreciate just how light he was. His arm was barely attached by a few shreds of skin. I tucked what was left of his little arm in front of him. Then I gently put his little body into a body bag. It looked too big for him. I had the crazy thought that he would feel lonely in there. You're supposed to hug four-year-olds and put them to bed, not into body bags.

There was also a toddler in the house, a two-year-old. He alone was not harmed. Indeed, when a coworker of one of the murdered women called the house, the two-year-old answered the phone. He said his mother had fallen. The coworker went to check on them and found the murdered man in the carport, and that is how the crime was initially discovered. The toddler had spent twelve hours amid those dead bodies.

An emergency medical responder who carried the two-year-old from the house said the child told him, “My daddy made my mama fall.”

Once in the EMS unit, the child began to call for his mama.

The man charged with this contemptible crime turned out to be the father of the two-year-old toddler. The killer was estranged from the child's mother. She was one of the women whom he murdered there in the house. The other woman was her sister. The child found huddled in the corner was the sister's son. As for the poor guy in the carport, he just picked the wrong time to come a calling on his girlfriend.

The empty cartridge cases found at the scene linked him to the crime. He had several unfired cartridges at his residence, and imprints on those live rounds matched the imprints on the empty cases at the crime scene. They had been cycled—chambered but not fired—through the same weapon. This evidence served to link him to the murder weapon.

That neighborhood and that street are tainted for me now. I know when I turn onto it I think of that gruesome quadruple homicide. A homicide changes lots of things forever. Indeed, the house in which someone is murdered tends to become a sort of morbid landmark. The neighbors are also changed. It's a quantum leap from reading about a homicide in the paper to knowing that it happened next door to you. It shakes the very foundation of the neighborhood. It strikes fear into everyone. That fear tends to linger on, even after the perpetrator has been apprehended.

In the end, the killer was convicted on four counts of first-degree murder. The jury deadlocked during the penalty phase of the trial and he escaped the death sentence and is serving a life term in prison.

A police officer was once explaining to me that there are certain people who are just “throwaways.” Nobody misses them, he went on to tell me, and nobody cares if they drop off the face of the earth.

It was another spectacular fall day in Baton Rouge—clear blue sky, temperature in the mid-seventies, mild breeze—just perfect. It was October 31, 2000, a great day to get out and bicycle or walk the dog. And here I was, stooped over a decomposing body, collecting maggots that were greedily feeding upon the rancid flesh. A bird was chirping in the trees above us. I looked up and thought,
What's wrong with this picture?
Then I got back to work.

The smell is one of the worst things about working on “decomps.” It is natural to be repulsed by such a thing. But, I reached into my mental bag of pearls. I have collected those pearls of wisdom throughout my lifetime, not just in my professional career. They are quips that others have given me. They are coping tools offered in the form of advice. This one had come to me from a very special friend.

It works. It allows me to get past the stench and the maggots and get to the person—the person for whom I am now responsible.

We were behind the levee near a tree line of willows that offered little shade because of the position of the sun—it was about noon. The Mississippi River was about seventy-five yards away. The odor was horrific. It seemed as though everywhere I moved, the wind followed and assaulted me with the stench of decaying human flesh.

People often ask, “How do you do it?” Well, this is one of those times when I just have to get tough and go with it. I keep perspective.
This is a human and she will be examined and handled in a respectful manner.
I think past the current condition of the remains and I envision this woman lying before me as “someone's daughter, maybe someone's mother, maybe someone's wife.” Right now she was Jane Doe and she had things to tell me.

A man who had decided it was a fine day to exercise his Labrador retriever on the levee had discovered this poor woman at about ten A.M. Actually, the dog discovered her. The man and his canine companion were walking along the top of the levee. The dog evidently caught the scent of decaying flesh and bounded down the grassy levee toward her. He found the origin of the scent—much to the horror of the dog's owner, who called the animal away and rushed back home to call 911.

The victim had been down at least a week or more. The maggots would give me a more precise number of days. They were my informants. So I collected them from the various body areas, took temperatures of the maggot mass, and netted the flies that buzzed above her remains.

The whole process of fly development occurs on a fairly rigid schedule: we know how many hours or days it takes for an egg to hatch and go through its various maggot stages. There are a few variables that must be factored into the process, but if the flies can get to the corpse, they deposit eggs almost immediately after the person dies. That's when the “clock” starts. As a general rule, I take samples of eggs and all the different maggot stages I can discern.

I then consult a forensic entomologist to identify all these stages. In order to control for the species we were dealing with here, she would also raise some of the maggots into adults. But this time I was lucky, and I had a forensic entomologist right there on site. She did the specimen collection herself and would present me with a report of her findings in a few days.

Most of the maggot activity was at the usual sites—every body orifice. I looked for unusual sites of maggot accumulation, because they also get very active in areas of open wounds. Such accumulations can help lead to the cause of death. That was not the case here. The bug infestation was very heavy. Her skin appeared to move or ripple at times because maggots had found their way up under it. It was a horrible sight.
I have to keep this in perspective.

I tried to identify some discerning characteristics that would help with identification. She had no face left and her hair had fallen away. She had some teeth. “That might help with an ID.” Her skin had decomposed to the point that made it impossible to tell what race she was. I examined her hands and was encouraged by the fact that there was some drying or early mummification of the fingertips. “Maybe we can get a fingerprint here.”

There was no clothing about and no shoes. We searched the area for any personal effects but came up empty. She was probably killed elsewhere and then dumped at this location. She was literally “thrown away.”

We ultimately got a print and ran it through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS. She had an arrest record. She turned out to be Mary Nevils, a white female, age thirty-eight. She'd had a rough life and was estranged from her family. I am told that she was pretty much on her own. She was supposedly streetwise, and that put her into a high-risk category for this type of death. In the end, we cremated her as a pauper's case.

She turned out to be an alleged victim of serial killer Sean Vincent Gillis, who confessed to her murder and several others when he was apprehended in April of 2004.

“Throwaways.”
I've thought about that a lot. It bothers me—a lot. If you accept the premise that it's possible for some victims to be “throwaways,” your motivation for justice will be less than it should be. In other words, you'll do a half-ass job.

I was back to “cognitive emotive dissonance” in that my thinking does not match my emotion. I was doing my “analyzing” and “intellectualizing” about throwaways a great deal. I could not embrace the concept.

My wife accuses me of ruminating. I prefer to call it processing. Rumination is chewing on something, swallowing it, and then, when it comes back up, chewing on it some more. It's an endless, nonproductive process. It's what ruminants do; think cows—they chew their cuds. I was also accused of being “grumpy.” Can you imagine? At any rate, it's times like these when I definitely need a reality check.

I got my reality check. It was at my youngest son's school. On the night of parents' open house, DeAnn and I were walking down the hall. I was still “processing” when I saw it on a wall. It was the answer to the question that had been nagging at me. The question that I was afraid to acknowledge even to myself.

It was a drawing of a child, with the caption: “God don't make junk!”

My philosophy precisely:
We don't do “throwaways” at this coroner's office!

NINE

On the afternoon of Monday, January 10, 2000, I got a call that a body had been found on the roof of the Prescott Middle School, and it had been there a while. That familiar feeling of nausea crept into my stomach when I heard the words “middle school.” I don't do well with dead kids, especially murdered ones. Then I was informed the victim was an adult—that was something of a relief. It didn't make the crime any less a crime, but it did quell my nausea a bit.

Some crimes just have a surrealistic aura about them and seem to take on a life of their own. I guess that almost mystical notion stems from trying to make sense out of situations that just don't. The murder of Edwin Robillard was an unusual homicide from the “git-go.”

Sadly, I knew the area from previous official visits in the vicinity. The last time I was in this neighborhood, a dead man was found just opposite the school. He had been beaten and strangled to death with a phone cord. He'd made a lasting impression on me, and I had no trouble finding the school. I did have a little trouble navigating past the numerous vehicles already surrounding the site. A ladder was set against the front of the school building to allow access to the crime scene, and of course there were the news cameras. A policeman motioned me over to the rickety ladder. With some mild hesitation—and, to the chagrin of the officer, with a steady shaking of the ladder—I started up.

Once the precarious climb was accomplished, I had only to glance over to see that there had recently been a fire at the rear of the school. I commented on the blackened area and was informed that it represented an automobile that had been burned there several days before and had subsequently been hauled off. Nobody had thought to check the roof for dead bodies at the time.

The body of a black male was indeed on the roof. The victim was bound and attempts had been made to burn the corpse. That is never an easy thing to do, and it was a failed attempt. His body had been visited by the ubiquitous flies of the area and there was maggot activity.

I had concerns that attempts at visual ID would be useless. If a body is not badly decomposed, we frequently take a Polaroid of the face and show it to people who might know the person—“people” usually being possible family members. This definitely was no Polaroid moment. Yeah, I know the phrase is “Kodak moment,” but out here on the streets we often take a Polaroid of the victim's face if the face is not too distorted. We can then use that photograph to show family members for possible identification on site. A Polaroid is just a tool, it is not used for a definite or final identification of the deceased.

I had no positive ID, I wasn't sure of the cause of death (though I
was
damn sure it wasn't natural), and I don't know the time or even the day of death. In short, I had a mystery on my hands.

A murderer could conceivably go free if I screwed up. And this murder was becoming more and more complicated as events unfolded. Complexity, of course, equates to a greater likelihood of mistakes. I have only one shot at the evidence, and from an evidentiary standpoint, once the body is disturbed, things are forever changed. I approach every homicide with the same professionalism. And therein, as you shall see, lies my salvation.

I have a limited budget and manage to operate within those parameters in part thanks to the good will of volunteers and professionals who have never failed to step up to the plate. Why? Because it is the right thing to do. I called in Mary Manheim, forensic anthropologist at the LSU FACES Lab, and Dr. C. Lamar Meek, the best forensic entomologist I know. (FACES is shorthand for Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services.) Dr. Meek died June 27, 2000. He was fifty-six years old. His untimely death was a loss to all of us. I might add that both of these folks were always very generous with their time.