A Family Business (13 page)

Then Holloway began the
real
work. With no more hesitation than a programmer would demonstrate in switching on his computer, or a mechanic in raising a car hood, Holloway picked up a scalpel and began the customary Y incision, effectively slitting Tim down the front from his shoulders to his groin. Methodically, he reported on what he found inside Tim’s body, system by system, organ by organ.

Regarding the cardiovascular system, Holloway said:
The 440-gram heart is enlarged on the basis of left ventricular hypertrophy and dilation
. The fact that it was enlarged on the left side was a vital clue, one that pointed toward chronic strain on the organ.
The thickness of the left ventricle wall is 1.3 centimeters, and that of the right 0.4 centimeters
. He found it unnecessary to articulate in his notes that this also was unusual.
The valves show no lesion…The coronary arterial tree arises in the usual sites and distributes normally…The aorta has a uniform diameter of only 1.25 centimeters internally…small for the habitus
. Translation: Considering his size, the main artery in Tim’s body was comparatively tiny.
Other blood vessels studied are generally of similar small scale, but not otherwise remarkable
. Conclusion: There were enough irregularities in Tim’s heart—the organ itself was enlarged and the primary artery serving the organ was smaller than normal—to make the pathologist believe, in lieu of any more obvious finding, that these were, at the least, contributing factors in Tim’s death.

The respiratory system:
The left lung weighs 590 grams, and the right 630 grams…There is marked congestion throughout. The bronchial rami are clear
. Conclusion: In themselves these factors were not alarming, but combined with his heart irregularities, they could have been fatal.

Holloway kept searching.

The heptobilary (liver and gall bladder) system:
The 3780-gram liver is enormously enlarged and has a smooth intact capsule and generous rounding of the edges
. Holloway paused to consider the implications of this discovery. A liver that size, more than seven pounds and roughly twice as large as could be expected in an adult male, was a serious matter. Not only was it hugely oversized, but the fact that the edges were generously rounded indicated more problems. In a normal liver the edges are sharp, but Tim’s liver looked like a balloon on the verge of bursting.

The gastrointestinal system:
The stomach contains about 250 milliliters of hemorrhagic mucoid material in which no food particles are identified
. It takes the stomach two to three hours to empty, and since there was no food present, it meant that it had been at least that long since Tim had eaten. That and the presence of blood-flecked mucous pointed to a serious stomach upset just before death.
There is no evidence of pills, capsules, or other residual medication…The duodenum, small intestine, appendix, and colon show no gross abnormalities of mucosal or serosal elements or of content. The rectum is empty
.

Based on what he could see with his naked eye, Holloway developed a three-pronged diagnosis, which he dutifully dictated into the recorder. In the first place, he said, Tim was extremely overweight. Second, he must have had trouble breathing because of his size and the congestion in his lungs. And third, Tim had a “markedly enlarged liver,” a fact that Holloway considered particularly significant.

By this time the pathologist was well on his way toward forming a formal opinion about what had killed Tim Waters. Although he felt virtually certain that he was going to discover that Tim had died a natural death, one precipitated by his extreme obesity, Holloway wanted to reserve final judgment until he could perform the second phase of the autopsy—a microscopic study of tissue from Tim’s organs. But that took time. To prepare for such a study, tissue first has to be dehydrated, then repleted with alcohol and other solvents. That product has to be left overnight, then embedded in paraffin. After that, it can be sectioned—sliced—with a special device that cuts it into incredibly thin, translucent segments. The final stage is the staining and mounting of the sections. Only then can the tissue be examined microscopically.

While waiting for this process to be completed, Holloway issued a preliminary report listing the cause of Tim’s death as “pending.”

Several weeks later Holloway pulled up a stool at a lab table and slipped a slide containing tissue from Tim’s heart under the lens. What he saw confirmed his earlier suspicions: There were serious irregularities present. He dictated:
A section shows focally massive fragmentation of nominal hypoxic myocardial fibers
. Translation: He could detect evidence that Tim’s heart had not been receiving sufficient oxygen.

Holloway also discovered a “marked thickening” on the inside of Tim’s coronary artery, but he did not find that disturbing. He did not notice any unusual change in Tim’s aorta, the body’s main blood-carrying channel, which would have complicated the situation for Tim. He did, however, find evidence of additional problems while studying tissue from Tim’s lungs.
A section shows massive edema and lesser degrees of alveolar hemorrhage and congestion
. Translation: There was a significant amount of fluid in Tim’s lungs, particularly—and distressingly—blood.

Also, confirming what he had already predicted about Tim’s liver, a microscopic examination of the organ tissue indicated big trouble. Although Tim’s liver apparently had been trying to restore itself, the degree of degeneration was considerable. To the pathologist this, too, was a major clue as to what caused Tim’s death.

Another area that troubled Holloway was Tim’s esophagus, the tube that runs between the mouth and the stomach. When he cut into Tim’s food and drink pipeline, he found what he identified as a
mass of inflammatory debris lodged in a wedgelike configuration into a cleft of otherwise unremarkable mucosa
. Clearly, it was material that was not supposed to be there.

Summing up his microscopic studies, Holloway noted that Tim had suffered from a long-standing inflammation of that section of the esophagus just above the stomach; a serious accumulation of fluid in his lungs, namely blood; massive enlargement of the liver, and a dangerous degeneration of that organ.

He was aware, Holloway noted, that Tim had been brutally beaten not long before his death. However, he felt that the attack had nothing to do with what happened.
There was no evidence from gross and microscopic findings of any residua of blunt trauma
. Rather, he opined, Tim died from a combination of natural occurrences. Tim had been so overweight and his liver was so enlarged, Holloway concluded, that his diaphragm had been pushed upward. In the best of times, this would have made Tim significantly short-winded; there probably were times when he was fairly gasping for breath. Then, when Tim’s lungs became congested, it put unexpected strain on his heart—an intolerable strain, it seemed. A fatal strain. Holloway determined that, taken all together, these conditions were more than Tim’s body could stand. His heart simply stopped beating.

His official ruling, issued on May 20, reflected that conviction. In the space on the form for “Cause of Death,” Holloway filled in:
Acute myocardial insufficiency with pulmonary edema
. The next line, the one that said “Due to,” Holloway typed:
Massive fatty metamorphosis of [the] liver
. And in the third blank, the one set aside for “Other Conditions,” the pathologist added:
Exogenous obesity
.

In Holloway’s expert opinion, Tim’s death was unfortunate but perfectly explainable, perfectly natural. The causes, in fact, were so apparent to the pathologist that he did not bother to order the toxicological tests that normally round out a complete autopsy. He had not seen anything to give him reason to believe that Tim had been intoxicated either by drugs or alcohol. Whether the possibility of poison crossed his mind is not known. Still, in keeping with policy dictated by his boss, Dr. F. Warren Lovell, the Ventura County coroner, Holloway collected samples of Tim’s fluids: a vial of his blood; a small amount of bile from his liver; some fluid from his kidneys, and slices from his major organs. He filed these away in the morgue’s huge refrigerator, where they routinely would be kept for five years. He had no way of knowing it at the time, but the fact that he had saved the material would, many months later, prove invaluable.

Satisfied that he had performed a thorough postmortem, Holloway pushed Tim Waters out of his mind and concentrated on his worries about his own future. For some time he had been unhappy in his job. The workload kept getting heavier, and new demands for increased paperwork were coming down daily from Lovell’s office. He had been in Ventura County for five years, Holloway reminded himself, but it was time he considered going somewhere else.

Less than four months later, he submitted his resignation. By August he had taken a job as a contract pathologist in Kern County, which abutted Ventura County on the north. Tim Waters quickly slipped into his past; it would be years before he would give him a second thought.

13

David apparently did not give much thought to Tim Waters, either, although he did mention him to several people at various times. Soon after Tim was beaten in February, Richard Gray was at Lamb Funeral Home to deliver several bodies for the retorts when he ran into David in the parking lot. He brought up the attack. To his surprise, David’s response was unnecessarily abrupt. “It seems to me he got what he deserved,” David said. “Maybe now he’ll keep his mouth shut.”

What David said about Tim to Dave Edwards, according to Edwards, was considerably more significant. And more chilling.

A number of weeks after Edwards and Augustine lied to David about beating Tim, Edwards was talking on the phone to his boss when David casually mentioned that the “fat guy” had died.

At first Edwards was not sure who David was talking about. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“He had a heart attack,” David said, then added cryptically, “but he had a little help.”

It clicked. Edwards realized David was talking about Tim Waters. Although he pressed for more details, David refused to say more about it. All he would add, Edwards recalled later, was that he—David—had gotten Tim away from “the table” and “slipped something” into his glass of water. He did not explain what table, why he was sharing it with Tim, or what he had “slipped” into his glass.

At the time, Edwards wrote it off as typical David braggadocio, not unusual for David, who liked to talk tough. Nevertheless, when he connected it with some other things David had said, it began to trouble him.

Earlier in the year, after the fictitious attack by Edwards and Augustine on Tim, and after David had mentioned to Edwards that he might like him to “take care” of a “guy in Glendora,” David told Edwards that he was interested in having his grandfather, Lawrence Lamb, killed.

Edwards kept silent, not sure that David was serious. But when David brought up his grandfather again not long afterward, Edwards felt certain that he was not joking. The second time David raised the subject, he said he would like to find a poison he could use to get rid of him.

Still later he mentioned to Edwards that he was angry at another of his neighbors. This one, David explained, owned a dog that had attacked one of his cats. “I’d like to find a poison to get rid of that dog,” he told Edwards. “Do you have any ideas?”

Edwards thought a minute. He didn’t know anything about poisons, he said, but he had a book that might offer some insight. He said the book,
The Poor Man’s James Bond
, contained information about a variety of subjects, such as how to make a silencer for a handgun and how to build a bomb. He was pretty sure it had a section on poisons as well.

In fact, it did. The book, authored by former Angelino Kurt Saxon, devoted several paragraphs to “Plant Poisons,” specifically listing rhubarb, castor beans, oleander, poinsettia, yew, and laurel. “Plant poisons are very easy to administer and are hard to trace,” Saxon wrote. “A few leaves in the salad aren’t noticed, and the victim dies without knowing why.”

Edwards promised David he would bring him the book. He kept his promise and delivered it to David. But he never got it back.

Although some of David’s references to Edwards about various people he considered to be enemies were vague, he was more forthright in conversations with Danny Galambos.

Not long after Galambos and Chris Long had beaten Tim, David approached the weightlifter again, with a request to beat up a man named Frank Strunk. Strunk owned a business called the Cremation Society of California, another rival cremation service. Although he was the father of one of David’s employees, Stephen Strunk, the elder Strunk evidently had worked his way onto David’s hit list because he had refused to sell him his business. Apparently, by David’s reasoning, that made him eligible to be “done.”

Galambos and Andre Augustine went to Strunk’s offices on three different occasions. Each time, they waited in their car outside the building, hoping for a chance to catch him alone and work him over. In each instance, however, there were too many other people around for them to attack him and escape undetected. Eventually they gave up and reported to David that it was an impossible job.