Morgue (25 page)

But our questions
did
matter. While my team of forensic sleuths continued to work feverishly on this case that had drawn international media attention, the FBI and CID agents probed deeper. In the few days after he was discovered dangling in the stairwell, they found signs that Ownby's life might not have been as idyllic as it appeared.

At the time of his death, his comfortable home was mortgaged to the hilt, and several bank loans were coming due. To make matters worse, his former oil-field employer was being sued by several creditors—including Liberty Frost Bank's parent—for unpaid loans. In all, he owed an estimated $2 million, bigger money than most of us will earn in a lifetime.

Ownby's safety net was two life insurance policies for a total of $750,000. Both contained “suicide clauses” that would have prohibited any payments if the general killed himself, but not if he was murdered. In fact, if he had died in any way other than suicide, his family would have received all the money and have avoided the oncoming financial catastrophe.

This bizarre case was coming into focus, but all the dots hadn't yet been connected. We suspected but couldn't say with certainty that there had been no terrorists or conniving murderers.

In our re-creations with the FBI, we discovered Ownby could have easily bound his own hands behind his back with a canvas belt, as some of Ownby's own military colleagues demonstrated for us.

First, he tied his hangman's rope to the top railing of the stairwell and looped the noose around his neck. Then he likely slipped his hands through a loosely knotted belt behind his back and tightened it by pinning the loose end against the railing and tugging.

Then he simply straddled the second-floor railing and slipped off, falling six feet. Not far enough to break his neck or to let him escape his predicament … just far enough to strangle him as he thrashed, maybe having ghastly second thoughts. But it was too late.

So we could prove that it was
possible
he bound his own hands and killed himself, but we needed more.

Then we found the typewriter that had created the reputed “execution” note.

In the general's civilian work office. Not his home or military office, but a place where only he and a few others had access.

It was an IBM Selectric, a popular electric model that employed a typeball and a pre-inked plastic ribbon in a disposable cartridge. When the typist touched a key, the machine instantly rotated the ball and banged it against the carbon-film ribbon, transferring the corresponding letter, numeral, or symbol to the paper. In less than the blink of an eye, the ribbon moved a fraction of an inch to expose fresh carbon “ink” for the next keystroke.

What General Ownby might not have known is that the carbonized plastic ribbon essentially recorded everything he typed. Investigators were able to actually read the terrorist note in letters left directly on the ribbon when he'd typed it in his private office at Bristow.

With no unidentifiable fingerprints on the keys, and the unlikelihood that the killers would have typed their note here and killed the general elsewhere, it was the last proof we needed.

Nine days after Ownby died, I officially ruled his death a suicide. I announced my decision and explained all the evidence to a swarm of reporters who'd been impatiently awaiting an ending to this strange tale. Ownby's family remained militantly unconvinced, but federal and Army investigators concurred. There was simply no evidence to support that the general had been killed by someone else—a terrorist, a serial killer, a jealous lover, a hit man.

Reserve major general Robert G. Ownby killed himself.

If he had given his family a choice between his life or a check for $750,000, it's safe to assume his family wouldn't have hesitated to choose his life. But he didn't give them that choice, and in the end, they got neither.

People fake murder. They do it for many reasons. In Ownby's case, maybe only because a big life-insurance policy wouldn't pay for a suicide. But he might also have considered the act of suicide a disgrace, the ultimate admission of failure. Maybe he had religious reasons for his ruse. Or maybe he just felt it was his only chance to appear a hero in death.

I'd seen such fatal subterfuge before and since. It wasn't even the last faked murder of a San Antonio military officer I'd see. General Ownby's suicide bore an eerie resemblance to the peculiar 2003 death of Air Force colonel Philip Michael Shue, a military psychiatrist who crashed his car into a tree one April morning on the outskirts of San Antonio.

When rescuers got to Shue, they found his undershirt had been ripped open from the chest to the navel and there was a six-inch vertical gash in his chest. Even more bizarre, both of his nipples had been removed (and were never found). His earlobe and part of a finger had been amputated. Both wrists and ankles had been wrapped in torn duct tape, which now dangled from his cuffs.

Dr. Jan Garavaglia, then one of my medical examiners in the Bexar County ME's office and now one of the most recognizable faces in forensics as TV's “Dr. G,” autopsied the fifty-four-year-old Shue while investigators dug into the case. They found a history of psychiatric problems, and he had been seeing some of his professional colleagues for depression and panic attacks.

She also found superficial hesitation wounds around the colonel's deeper cuts, shallower incisions or abrasions commonly caused by tentative attempts to build up courage before the final, fatal wound is inflicted.

He had no alcohol in his system, but Dr. Garavaglia found the anesthetic lidocaine—self-prescribed by Colonel Shue ten days earlier—in his blood. It had likely been smeared or injected around each nipple and in the middle of the chest. If his torturers had intended to cause pain with such cruel mutilation, would they have given him a drug to ease the pain?

In the end, there was no evidence that anyone but Shue himself had inflicted his weird wounds, and he died of massive head trauma caused by the crash. The death was ruled a suicide by both my medical examiner's office and a grand jury.

Colonel Shue's widow continues to believe he'd been abducted and sadistically tortured before escaping his captors and dying in a car accident during his urgent flight. She argues that no cutting tools, no body parts, and no injection sites were ever found. The lidocaine, she says, was to relieve itchiness on Shue's shaved chest before a routine medical procedure. And she points to the fact that Shue's fingerprints were not on the duct tape, and no rubber gloves turned up.

Motive? The colonel's widow points to a life insurance policy that paid $500,000 to his ex-wife and ominous, threatening letters in weeks before his death. No charges have ever been filed, although a Texas court ruled Colonel Shue's death a homicide in a 2008 civil suit over insurance payments—but didn't suggest any suspects.

The physical evidence simply didn't support his widow's scenario at the time, and no new evidence has come to light since. Ask yourself: If you had been perversely tortured and had broken free, where would you go? Probably the police or a hospital, or maybe a public place where someone could help. But Shue was driving
away
from the city and its many hospitals. He passed three of the exits into his own suburban town. He even had a working cellphone in the car. Does that sound like someone fleeing a vicious, pitiless assailant?

Shue's widow's reaction is normal, even reasonable, but her view of the case is distorted by her love. I feel genuinely sorry for her and for thousands of other relatives who have simply refused to accept my forensic conclusion that their loved ones committed suicide. Even in a modern society where we know more about mental illness, many relatives feel embarrassment or guilt, so it's common for families to doubt or reject such a conclusion.

But my first priority is to establish the cause and manner of a death as precisely as I can, using all the tools at my disposal. In this case, we simply found no hard evidence of homicide and plenty to suggest suicide.

Around this same time, death touched me, too.

My mother died on a Monday in the lull between holidays in 2003. She was ninety-one. My parents had been married for sixty-three years, shared a good life, and had likely forgotten a time when they weren't together.

Violet Di Maio died of the natural causes one might expect at ninety-one, but it was the one death my father couldn't set aside. Six days later, a Sunday, he died, too. Maybe he died of a broken heart, because he loved my mother with all of it, but I couldn't see into his heart either.

Their funeral brought my sisters and me home to Brooklyn, where we gathered to say good-bye and lay them together in Green-Wood Cemetery, among many of the people—mobsters and mechanics, mothers and teachers, some famous and most unknown—my father had examined in his long career.

I didn't cry. It wasn't that I didn't grieve for them. I did. It's just that my mother would have been horrified at the undignified display of public tears, and I loved her too much to break her rule.

I cannot know the real why in these deaths. It's beyond knowing. Fantastic tools allow us to analyze microscopic remnants of what actually happened, but we have no science to detect traces of the fears, nightmares, and inner demons that caused it. The human heart isn't a hard drive that I can open up to discern every secret single keystroke of a life. I'm sure the families of General Ownby and Colonel Shue would like to know even more than I do.

Broken hearts happen, even if they leave no trace evidence.

Dying is sometimes easier than living with dying.

SPARKS, NEVADA. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2010.

Malakai Dean was an ordinary two-year-old, with the gift of boundless curiosity and the energy of a whirlwind. His heart was as big as his smile and he showed both when he picked all the neighbors' pretty flowers and delivered tiny bouquets to their porches. In some ways, he belonged to his whole neighborhood. A child of the village.

They all knew his story. His young mother Kanesia, only sixteen when she got pregnant with him, still lived at home with her own mother, and her baby daddy was in prison. Grandma's busy suburban duplex was crowded with her other kids, some just a few years older than her first grandson, little Malakai. Kanesia and her son lived in the garage of the crowded little house. Ends were met, but life was in constant motion and upheaval.

So the kid didn't have the best start in life, but things were looking up. Now nineteen, Kanesia had met somebody. Kevin Hunt was a responsible guy with a future. A handsome active-duty US Marine who'd even gone to college to become a cop. A friend had introduced them while Kevin was on a weekend leave from his base in California. Now Kevin spent all his free time in the Reno area, with Kanesia and Malakai.

He and Kanesia had already talked seriously about getting married. Kevin treated Malakai like a son and planned to adopt him after the wedding. He changed his diapers, read him bedtime stories, and took him to the movies. Malakai had begun calling him “Dad.” He'd already bought Malakai his first bike and spent almost as much time with the child as he did with Kanesia. Oh, there was some friction with Grandma, but Kanesia just reckoned it was her mother's protective streak rearing up. Grandma was protective and wanted only the best for all her kids. Yeah, Kanesia had made some bad choices before, but this time, to her, it felt so right.

And now Kanesia was pregnant again. Five months along. Stuff was getting real.

But today their world was in more upheaval than usual. The pregnant Kanesia (and others in the house) had some kind of stomach bug. Because Malakai had been born six weeks premature and had required three weeks of constant, expensive medical care, she was nervous about anything that could disrupt this pregnancy. When her stomach cramps began, not wanting to risk damaging her unborn child, Kanesia needed some medical reassurance. So Kevin took her to the hospital—where they hooked her up to an IV drip as a precaution—and Grandma took Malakai to her Sparks beauty salon, where everybody was getting ready for a big family portrait that weekend.

But Malakai being Malakai, he was soon bouncing off the salon's wall like a turbine in a bottle. He scribbled in the magazines, flirted with the hairdressers, jumped on the chairs, and ran amok. When Grandma couldn't control him any longer, she called Kevin to fetch the toddler.

Kevin arrived at the salon within minutes and left with Malakai at 4:21 p.m. He didn't want Malakai to see his mom in a hospital bed, connected to strange wires and tubes, and it was an unusually warm winter day in the Sierra foothills, so he drove to a small park nearby where Malakai could blow off some energy while he waited for Kanesia's all-clear call.

Unleashed on an empty playground, the rambunctious Malakai was in heaven. He clambered over the enormous play structure, exploring its tunnels, climbing up ladders, dangling on swings, skittering across its elevated bridges, leaping onto its slides.

Then Malakai fell.

While scrambling up a slide, the little boy lost his footing and tumbled over the edge, dropping four or five feet into the sand below. He started to cry, but Kevin brushed the sand from his face and calmed him. There were some superficial scrapes on the right side of his face, but nothing worse than a thousand kids on a thousand playgrounds suffered a thousand times a day. It didn't take long for Malakai to return to his old self, happy and ready to play.

But this ten-minute playdate was done. Around 4:30 p.m., Kanesia called Kevin to pick her up.

On the sidewalk outside the hospital a few minutes later, a security camera caught Malakai reaching up to hold Kevin's hand, smiling and nearly running along beside as they went inside.

Kevin Anthony Hunt had been part of Malakai's life for more than six months. In a house full of women and children, he'd been instantly cast as the father figure in the boy's life. But who was he really?