Morgue (36 page)

Yes, the shooting—bathed in wishful conclusions, never fully investigated, and confused by conflicting accounts—is a puzzle. Nobody who was there is still alive, and we must glean forensic details from scant observations at the time. But these details don't support the mythology.

Nevertheless, the manner of Vincent's death has become part of his greater legend, and the mystery might endure forever. As with many of my cases, what you believe might depend more on what you
want
to believe than the forensic facts. It might be more about Vincent's tragic life than his actual dying.

Whether he embraced death is for poets and academics to argue, but the forensic facts point to a shooter who escaped our questions.

My personal verdict: Vincent van Gogh didn't shoot himself. I don't know who did or why. I don't know if Vincent wanted to die. I don't know if he feared the end or embraced it. It all comes down to something no medical examiner can determine with his scalpel, a computer, or sophisticated tests. Maybe he simply came to terms with his accidental dying. Even logic sometimes fails to provide answers.

I can't know what's in a human heart.

 

‹ EPILOGUE ›

At the End of Things

Somebody once said that if you carry your childhood with you, you'll never grow old. Nice sentiment, but not really true.

I have been a forensic pathologist for more than forty-five years. All the lions I looked up to when I was young—Helpern, Fisher, Rose, among many others—are all gone. My father retired as Chief Medical Examiner of New York City at sixty-five and finally retired at about eighty-five. Even my contemporaries are mostly retired or “gone.”

I've carried my childhood the whole time, and yet here I am, getting old. Go figure.

Then there's this: Some researcher recently concluded that an animal's perception of time is inversely correlated with the rate of its heartbeat. The slower the heart, the faster time seems to pass. At least for this researcher, that explained why, as we get older and our hearts slow down, it seems like the days aren't so long anymore. I don't know how that works or if the theory even has legs, but a lot of old folks certainly would agree.

We do stuff like that. We make up little homilies, post cheerful Facebook memes, or contrive bits of pop science to make us feel better about dying. Too many of us end up believing it will be poetic.

In this book, I've told a few stories about endings, even as I was telling the story of my own beginning. I haven't really pondered my own ending. Maybe because in my world endings happen only to other people. So far, anyway.

Still, I don't romanticize death. I've seen too much of it to expect a dreamy Hollywood ending.

Since the 1600s, when cheaply printed pamphlets circulated graphic descriptions of local murder, humans have been fascinated by crime stories. Shakespeare's plays were full of homicide. Nothing sold better than intrigue … and the ultimate victory of morality and reasoning over disorder and depravity. And nothing was more mysterious than death.

We haven't changed much. Modern pop-culture depictions of forensic science, in all their glorious, computer-generated glory, tend to overglamorize the forensic pathologist and credit hypercool high tech with solving every crime and conquering evil. But as with all things Hollywood, it just ain't so. It's not about the gee-whiz technology.

Let me repeat: A good forensic pathologist's best tools are his hands and brain. With a day's training on new sciences like DNA, a smart medical examiner from the 1940s could be operating in a modern morgue quite capably. Why? Because reasoning is still our most powerful forensic tool.

I'm often asked, “How can you work in such a depressing field?” I would like to give a glib answer, but I cannot. If you get depressed in my work, then you do not belong. I will just say that it is interesting and challenging. I could never work with children dying of cancer, but I have had no difficulty handling disfigured corpses or explaining honestly (and gently) to their grieving families how they died. There is a value in that.

Yet, my profession is at a crossroads. As I write this, fewer than 500 board-certified forensic pathologists are at work in America. At full tilt, each one can do only about 250 autopsies a year. We need twice that number.

Sometimes I don't know if I chose medicine or it was just born inside me, a seed waiting to blossom. But I know I became a doctor because I wanted to help people.

Computers and various forensic sciences are booming, with more exciting developments to come, but the human factor is woefully lagging.

Future forensic pathologists must finish four years of undergraduate college, four years of medical school, three to four years of training in pathology, and a one-year fellowship at one of thirty-six approved medical examiners' offices, and pass an American Board of Pathology certification examination. Doing that, they accumulate a median debt of $170,000.

There's money in medicine—except for forensic pathology. Almost every other medical discipline earns far more. The average salary of a medical examiner is just under $185,000 a year; a deputy chief or chief ME are much better off at $190,000 and $220,000 a year. Their salaries are all much lower than those of their hospital-based pathology peers, who commonly earn an average $335,000 a year.

And then there are the irregular hours, weird smells, emotional traumas, unhelpful patients, images that will never be erased from their brains, exposure to disease, lawyers, cops, trial testimony, bureaucrats, and budgets drearier than a morgue cooler. Sure, it looks fascinating on TV and the prospect of solving a real-life mystery is captivating, but who really wants to wade through corpses every day for less money than most of their medical school classmates?

As a result, we train an average of twenty-seven board-certified forensic pathologists every year, but only twenty-one actually go to work as medical examiners.

We need more forensic pathologists. As our population grows and ages, as we trust technology more and more (and humans less and less), and as the number of new pathologists declines, forensic pathology will hit a disastrous wall. Fewer autopsists mean fewer autopsies. Investigations suffer, evidence is lost or overlooked, crimes are unsolved.

If that happens, we don't just lose money or time … we lose justice. My patients no longer are suffering, but I know many of them would want justice. I can't give them their lives back, or even a few more minutes to say good-bye, but I can give them justice.

 

Acknowledgments

We are profoundly grateful to our many friends whose contributions, large and small, made this book possible. Some of them became more than mere sources during the two years that we worked on this book, and some were friends long before.

For their various contributions, we must thank many in the forensic and medical community, chiefly: Dr. Randall Frost of the Bexar County (Texas) Medical Examiner's Office; Dr. David R. Fowler, Bruce Goldfarb, and Shea Lawson in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Maryland; Platte County (Wyoming) coroner Phil Martin; Dr. Irvin Sopher; Dr. Werner Spitz; Dr. Douglas Kerr; and Dr. James Cottone.

We could not have told these stories without some expert legal interpretation, either. We are grateful for the legal minds of Charles Bernstein, Don West, Robert Moxley, Bruce Moats, Mark Drury, David Houston, Washoe County (Nevada) alternate public defender Jennifer Lunt, and Laury Frieber.

And for their various contributions and courtesies, we also thank Steven Naifeh, Robin and Edward Cogan, Rudolph Purificato, Allen Baumgardner, Leigh Hanlon, Jessica Bernstein, Mark Langford, Lee Miller of the Platte County (Wyoming) Public Library, Lisa Milliken of the Platte County (Wyoming) Sheriff's Office, Paul McCardell of the
Baltimore Sun News
Archives, and Maryland state trooper (Ret.) Rick Lastner.

Patrick Connelly of the National Archives in Philadelphia was the single bright note in our copious federal research. He found most of Martha Woods's 60,000-page federal trial transcript, and tried hard to find the rest, without success. Sadly, we are disappointed that five separate Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed in 2013–14 with the National Archives in Washington, DC, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) remain unsatisfied to this day.

Creating a book requires like-minded company, too. Dr. Jan Garavaglia, a former colleague, has our deepest thanks for her beautiful foreword. Many thanks to editor Charles Spicer, April Osborn, and their team at St. Martin's Press for making the book you now hold. And literary agent Linda Konner has been an extraordinary adviser of infinite value.

Closer to home, we relied heavily on the memories and scrapbooks of three amazing Di Maio sisters—all of them medical doctors—Therese-Martin, Mary, and Ann. Without them, the autobiographical segments of this book would lack focus and poignancy.

And finally, to the two women who sustained us through this project, Theresa Di Maio and Mary Franscell. They were always in our corner. Without these two remarkable wives, these stories aren't worth telling.

 

Notes

 

Index

The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

Abramson, Leslie

Adelson, Lester

ADX Florence Supermax federal prison

aging

airline disasters

Alderson Federal Prison Camp

Alford plea

Alhambra, California

Al-Amin, Jamil Abdullah.
See also
Brown, H. Rap

Antistius

antiwar unrest

Arbuckle, Fatty

Arkansas.
See also
West Memphis, Arkansas

Corning

State Crime Lab

Supreme Court

Armed Forces Institute of Pathology

Medico-Legal Section

Wound Ballistics Section

Army

CID

Kirk Army Hospital

Medical Corps

Ownby, Robert, and

Attica Prison

autopsies

in Bel Air explosion case

of Branch, Byers and Moore

of Clarkson

crime solving through

of Dean, Malakai

early historical

of Kennedy

of Martin, Trayvon

of McClellan, Chelsea

of Oswald, Lee

of Ownby, Robert

of Perea

of Shue

Auvers

Baden, Linda Kenney

Baden, Michael

Baldwin, James.
See also
West Memphis Three

Alford plea and release of

arrest of

imprisonment of

murder trial of

West Memphis boys' murder and

Baltimore

Johns Hopkins Hospital

morgue

Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Maryland

Bao, Shiping

Baylor University Medical Center

Bel Air, Maryland

courthouse

Bel Air explosion case

autopsies in

Brown, H. Rap, and

dead bodies from

Di Maio, Vincent, and

FBI and

Featherstone and

Lastner and

note found in

Payne and

Bernstein, Carl

Bernstein, Charles

Bexar County

Chief Medical Examiner

Hospital

justices of the peace

Medical Examiner's Office

blacks.
See also
race

black power movement

Featherstone and

freedom schools and marches

Martin, Trayvon, killing and black leaders

militant racial politics

separatist

Blakey, G. Robert

Bloch, Emanuel

bombings.
See also
Bel Air explosion case

Beirut suicide car bombers

threats of

Booth, John Wilkes

Branch, Stevie (“Bubba”).
See also
West Memphis boys' murder

autopsy of

murder of

Brooklyn

Brown, H. Rap

as Al-Amin

Bel Air explosion case and

FBI and

imprisonments

trial

Brown, Hubert Gerold.
See also
Brown, H. Rap

Brown, Michael

Bunker, Judith

Byers, Christopher (“Wormer'').
See also
West Memphis boys' murder

autopsy of

father of

murder of

Cabey, Darrell

Caesar, Julius

Cahill, Robert

California Supreme Court

Cambridge, Maryland

Capone, Alphonse

Carswell Federal Medical Center