Scene of the Crime (25 page)

I've already mentioned that the U.S. military services are now storing a small amount of genetic material of each recruit, so that in the future there will be no more unknown soldiers. What else? The sky's the limit; I would certainly expect that in the near future, DNA codes will be stored on all known sex criminals, and it may well be that within the next hundred years, DNA codes will be automatically stored at the time of birth of every individual. Try to get away with changing your identity—or disguising the corpse of your victim —then!

At present, the Tokyo Police Department leads the world in applying new scientific techniques to criminal investigation; the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Scotland Yard, the New York Police Department and the Los Angeles Police Department all run very close seconds. Beyond them, as close thirds, are many city, state and national police departments, as new discoveries are written up in journals and quickly shared with other departments. This chapter views the autopsy from the point of view of the investigator. For the pathologist's point of view, see Keith Wilson's
Cause of Death
(Writer's Digest Books, 1992).

The Importance of the Autopsy

Gross emphasized the importance of a good working relationship between criminal investigators and medical examiners, and that situation has not changed in the slightest. A good medical examiner can help to guide the investigation in the right direction; a bad one can throw it off track completely. But even a good one, if s/he is uncomfortable working with the police, can cause problems.

During the time I was policing in Albany, Georgia, we had— for a while—two medical examiners working simultaneously. One, though an extremely competent board-certified pathologist, felt very uncomfortable working with police; the other, though not yet board-certified, enjoyed his relation with us. Guess which one we preferred to work with?

If you remember the television show "Quincy," which was about a Los Angeles medical examiner, you undoubtedly were amused by the opening sequence of every episode, which showed a group of police officers trying to watch an autopsy and, one by one, falling over backward. I never did that, though I will admit that I spent my first autopsy sitting on the floor because I was afraid that if I stood up, I would fall over. It's not the sight that tends to bother most people, but the smell, which can best be described as a mixture of too-raw flesh, human mortality (which you may not realize has an odor until you work around it), and body odors including urine, feces and blood.

Why would police need to view an autopsy anyway? (A Fort Worth pathologist told me he prefers "postmortem examination" because, he insists,
autopsy
literally means surgery on oneself. The dictionaries do not agree, and the word
autopsy
seems to be the most common one.) There are several reasons for police to see autopsies. For one thing, if evidence must be collected during the autopsy, having the police officer on hand to receive the evidence directly shortens the chain of custody and reduces the amount of time a busy pathologist has to spend in court. (Busy police officers' time is considered less important.) Second, if the police officer is on hand, police will have access to information much sooner than if they have to wait for the official autopsy report, which may take several days to several weeks. But most important, if the officer is present to ask questions, information may come out which would not find its way into a formal autopsy report, and which might be extremely important. (I must point out that, during that disastrous first autopsy, I did stay in the room, albeit on the floor—a twenty-year veteran police officer who had entered with me stayed only five minutes before going out the door with his hands over his mouth.)

I eventually grew to find autopsies very interesting, especially when "little Santos" was doing the job. Dr. Santos seemed a born teacher; he really enjoyed not only explaining to me what he had found, but also insisting that I look more closely until I could see the same thing. On one occasion, he pulled out the entire digestive tract of the cadaver and laid it out on the table to explain to me how digestion works. I could have understood that a little better if the victim had died of poisoning—in fact, she had been the victim of a simple bashing—but nonetheless, it was extremely informative.

I remember two other autopsies particularly vividly. In one, we had a strangulation murder. We suspected strangulation with some sort of ligature, as there were no hand-shaped bruises on the neck, and there were many creases in the skin, any one of which could have hidden the marks of a ligature. But when Dr. Santos laid open the skin of the neck, he was able to show me, on layers of flesh inside the skin, very deep bluish-purple hand marks. The victim had been manually strangled by someone whose hands were quite large, and the creases on the neck were all just creases.

The other was one of the most horrible cases I ever saw. It actually happened outside our normal jurisdiction, but our evidence collection facilities were far better than those of the jurisdiction where the crime took place, and Butch and I were called out on it. Doc was unavailable; I think he was on leave.

The victim, a young housewife, had been sexually assaulted and stabbed more than a hundred times. The first attack apparently took place in the kitchen; most of the stabbing was in the laundry room; and then, the best we could determine, the murderer had stood and watched while the mortally wounded victim crawled down the hall toward her bedroom, trying to reach a telephone to call for help.

After Butch, some local officers, and I worked the crime scene the rest of the day the body was found, Butch and I went to the autopsy. Butch had never seen one before. All three of us—Dr. Santos, Butch and I—were never able to figure out exactly how many stab wounds there were, as there were places where the knife had repeatedly entered the same wound. Dr. Santos found at least four wounds that would have been fatal within minutes. And he found one thing that helped, later, to pin the crime on the right person: He found that the knife blade was short and either slightly serrated or very dull. (It turned out to be the latter.)

Here's what Butch and I were proudest of about that case: The day after we finished the crime scene, the head of the state crime lab flew down to do everything we had missed. He went out to the

scene, viewed it, and then said there was nothing left for him to do. Butch and I had done it all. And he got in his plane and flew back to Atlanta.

What are some of the things that can be determined from an autopsy? What are some of the things that cannot be determined from an autopsy?

A Heavy Case of Typhoid!

Henri Girard of Paris committed the perfect crime—almost.

The way J. H. H. Gaute and Robin Odell tell it in
The Murderers' Who's Who,
after blowing a family inheritance, Girard set out to locate another fortune. Charming Louis Pernotte into giving him power of attorney, Girard then insured Pernotte's life for 300,000 francs. Shortly thereafter, M. and Mme. Pernotte and their two children all came down with typhoid—a problem that couldn't, of course, have been related to the typhoid bacilli Girard had recently bought. Mme. Pernotte and the children survived; Pernotte died. Girard was heartbroken by his friend's death—but not too heartbroken to tell Mme. Pernotte that M. Pernotte owed him 200,000 francs!

Expanding his technique, Girard then tried poisonous mushrooms on his next two intended victims. They survived, but the one after that, a widow, succumbed a little too soon after her insurance purchase. The insurance companies investigated, La Surete became involved, and Girard sadly explained that he was unhappy and misunderstood despite his warm heart.

Perhaps wisely, he then swallowed one of his own doses before he could reach trial.

Other people have tried Girard's technique since then. Some have not succeeded. If any did, we don't know about them.

Secretors

First, because of genetic fingerprinting, it is possible to determine far more now than when I was in police work. Then, we could— about 60 percent of the time —determine blood type of the assailant from semen, spittle or other body fluids left on the victim's body.

That's because about 60 percent of the population are secretors, and about 40 percent are not.

A
secretor
is a person whose blood type can be determined from body fluids other than blood. A nonsecretor's blood type cannot be determined from any body fluid other than blood. The difference is probably genetically determined, but nobody knows why or how. After the gene-mapping project is complete, maybe we will know. Police wish all sex criminals were secretors. Now, with DNA fingerprinting, if the assailant has left any of his/her own body fluids behind, we may have enough to identify the assailant with almost certainty.

The Cause of Death

The pathologist can usually determine the cause of death, bearing in mind that almost always there is a chain of causes rather than a single cause. If you have ever seen a death certificate, you saw on it several lines that look like this:

Legal Cause of Death

Under English common law, and under statute law in many states, death must occur within a year and a day following the injury to be considered murder. The reason for this originally was the medical uncertainty about cause of lingering death. It may well be
medically
true that the injury is still the cause of death, but in many jurisdictions it is no longer
legally
true. According to Black's—a very important legal reference source — the rule is obsolete, but the common-law presumption hasn't been overturned by statute in most jurisdictions.