The Skeleton Crew (13 page)

Paradoxically, despite the high level of violence Americans tolerate in entertainment films, U.S. audiences have low tolerance for graphic real-life images. Images of death both fascinate and repel us. While village folk used to lay out the corpses of neighbors and relatives, most people now only experience fantasized versions of death through movies and art, be they zombies or nineteenth-century American photographs of well-dressed, romanticized bodies that appear to be peacefully sleeping. It was acceptable for people to view such images privately, but public display of the kind Jones was proposing was controversial.

Then again, there was a precedent in American history for images of the dead serving a higher purpose. After one of the bloodiest Civil War battles, at Antietam in September 1862, photographers Alexander Gardner and James Gibson reached the battlefield not long after the fighting ended and created seventy photographs, nearly a third depicting corpses. It was the first time the American public viewed its war dead, and the ensuing shock and horror may have helped speed the end of the war. Some of the
Antietam photographs were exhibited in New York City
within a month after the battle. An anonymous writer for
The New York Times
provides the following description:

Of all objects of horror one would think the battle-field should stand preeminent, that it should bear the palm of repulsiveness. But on the contrary, there is a terrible fascination about it that draws one near these pictures, and makes him loth
[sic]
to leave them. You will see hushed, reverend
[sic]
groups standing around these weird copies of carnage, bending down to look in the pale faces of the dead, chained by the strange spell that dwells in dead men's eyes.

These days, we're bombarded by media images of death in catastrophes and wars. We manage to convince ourselves that those extreme situations will never happen to us. The individual dead are harder to contemplate, perhaps because we imagine ourselves in their place. Like Woody Allen, we might not be afraid of death; we just don't want to be there when it happens.

In Murphy's office, Jones kept pushing for a website. He sensed that his new boss could be convinced. It wasn't Jones's intention to shock anyone with gory images. As far as murder victims go, Jones thought Jane Arroyo Grande Doe was pristine. What the coroner's office needed, he insisted, was the public's help in identifying her and the other 180 remains. They needed more sets of eyes. Vegas was already associated with grisly images through the TV series
CSI
, Jones argued. (The Clark County coroner's office was part of the backdrop for the original series.) Why not use the exposure from
CSI
to accomplish something good?

The sense that I was in an office building evaporated as soon as Murphy escorted me through a heavy airlock door. The subdued pastel rooms where family members identified their loved ones from digital images, the gift shop display case filled with black T-shirts with a slot machine and “Cashed Out in Las Vegas” on the back, the toy skeletons, the desk calendars, fax machines, and wall-to-wall carpeting were gone and we were in what looked like
a hospital with an antiseptic smell, tiled walls, and a linoleum floor.

Murphy gestured to rooms where police look over suspicious cases and forensic experts “prep” each body, taking photographs, measuring trajectories of bullets through flesh, analyzing knife tears through clothing and organs. Farther down, what looked like pickles sat in cloudy fluid in gallon-size Tupperware vats; these were hearts, lungs, livers, and intestines awaiting shipment to a lab for testing.

There was movement in one of the rooms, people in scrubs and face masks, a form on a silver table. “Can you please pull this door closed,” Murphy admonished two women in scrubs chatting to one another in low tones. They closed the door, but not fast enough. On the table lay a slight figure wearing knee-length cutoff jeans and a T-shirt with a colorful logo. Her bare feet were mottled and pale, her toenails painted pink. The face was turned away but I could see a shock of straight black shoulder-length hair. A young woman. Later, I sat in on the morning staff meeting and learned she was fourteen, a suicide. She had come home from school, posted a message on Facebook, and hanged herself on a trampoline.

In the autopsy room, one of the women started to snip the neckline of the girl's T-shirt with a pair of scissors. I hurried after Murphy.

In 2003, before Jones had approached his boss with an idea for a website, veteran coroner Ron Flud accompanied the newly elected Murphy down this same corridor. They walked through the thick metal door, past wrapped bodies with protruding, discolored, waxy hands and feet to a small room where boxes and body bags and brown paper evidence bags were stored on racks.

They were in what the coroners knew as a secondary refrigerated unit—reefer 2 for short. Some of the inhabitants were no more than a single bone; some were just skulls; some were what was known as PHRs—partial human remains; some were complete bodies, skeletonized or in full decomp. The oldest had been found three decades earlier.

Clark County had more than 180 unidentifieds back then, more than some coroners and medical examiners see in an entire career. There was Jane Cordova Doe, the little girl found in a Dumpster at the Villa Cordova apartments. John El Cortez Doe had died of a heart attack in the El Cortez Casino. Jane Oakley/Fremont Doe was found at an intersection, and Jane
Canyon Cliff Doe was only bones. Jane Sahara Sue Doe turned up in 1979 in the parking lot of what was then the El Rancho Casino. A murder victim, she wore a complete set of dentures even though she was only around seventeen to twenty-one years old.

Reefer 2 was crowded in 2003,
partly because Las Vegas's population had almost doubled between 1985 and 1995. So many people were moving into the city, if you brought in a U-Haul, you'd have to pay extra to have it taken out. Murphy was all too aware that people came to Vegas to make a fresh start, to reinvent themselves, often under assumed names. He also knew escape was one of those things that works better as a dream than a reality.

Murphy says of his time as a cop, “I can't tell you the number of times I went to handle a domestic disturbance, or pull someone causing trouble out of a bar, only to hear the guy say, ‘Gosh darn it, I came here to make a new start.' The problem was, they brought themselves with them.” Flud and others in the coroner's office were left holding the body bag when those who came to hide from a troubled past died inside county lines.

Newly armed with a business administration degree, Murphy considered himself a hands-on manager, a take-action kind of guy.

“What do you do about this?” he asked Flud, gesturing toward the bags of bones.

Flud had been coroner for nineteen years. He knew what happened to cold cases when every day brought new deaths and urgent demands. “They were here when I got here, and there'll be more here when you leave,” Flud told his younger colleague. “There is no one, and no way, to deal with this.”

Relieved that I hadn't had to see the face of the girl being autopsied, I followed Murphy down the hall. We stopped to don baby-blue booties, sliding in the toes of our shoes and pulling them over and up in back. He handed me a face mask like those worn by surgeons and showed me how to place it over my nose and mouth and edge it down so there was a space to breathe. We went into a receiving bay with garage doors and around a
dozen gurneys neatly lined up. We walked past whiteboards listing the previous night's incoming. I scanned for female names, knowing the girl's was probably up there.

We reached another heavy metal door and he said, “Are you okay with this?” I wasn't sure what he meant. I had asked Murphy to show me where the unidentified remains were kept. Why wouldn't I be okay with seeing a closet? I was clutching my digital camera; he instructed me not to take any pictures of what was on the other side of the door.

I realized then we were walking into the morgue itself. In movies, morgues are walls of stainless steel drawers containing bodies hidden within or zipped up neatly in what look like black fabric garment bags.

A few steps through the door, which slammed behind us with a metallic clunk, and I was uncomfortably close to a row of gurneys. There were at least six, maybe more, but I couldn't bring myself to study them closely enough to count. I thought:
All these people, just from last night?
Each body was on its own gurney, wrapped in something white—plastic, maybe—and they were not smooth and uniform but cinched at the middle, lumpy, vaguely human-shaped packages.

Faces were covered but feet protruded from at least two of the packages. One set was narrow and pale, clearly a woman's, with painted toenails. The other was bigger and mottled greenish brown. I learned later that the coroner does not embalm the bodies or preserve them in any way other than by stowing them in the refrigerated unit; embalming is the undertaker's job, when the body makes its next stop at the mortuary. Refrigeration only slows decomposition that began hours or in some cases days ago.

I was startled to be so close to them. And I was startled by my reaction. The emotion hit me first. I felt so very, very sorry, an overwhelming pity for these people in the bags, which didn't make a lot of sense. Whatever they might have suffered was over.

I became aware that Murphy was talking to me, his voice indistinct through the mask covering his mouth. He pointed to brown paper bags, labeled in black marker with numbers and letters, on a table opposite the row of corpses. “You can take a picture of this,” I heard him say. He held up one of the labeled bags, which looked like something you'd bring a six-
pack home in but apparently held human remains.

I aimed the camera. It took a superhuman effort for my spinning brain to instruct my finger to press the shutter.

Murphy returned the bag to the table and walked away. I saw where he was heading; the doorway to reefer 2 was on the right-hand wall, just past the last of the gurneys. I followed a few steps. I tried to edge away from the row of bodies, but they took up a lot of space in the narrow room and were less than an arm's length away.
Breathe,
I told myself.
You need to breathe.
It was then that I became aware of the smell. Sour and acrid, it was there when we'd entered, of course, if somewhat dulled by the face mask, but it hadn't affected me—I thought—as much as the waves of sadness and horror that settled in my chest and throat.

I didn't think I was in danger of passing out, but I didn't want to take another step into the room; I was especially loath to walk past the bodies whose feet were visible. I had an irrational fear that they might move, or get up, or try to touch me if I got too close, like zombies with ravaged, reaching hands. I was ashamed of this reaction, but I knew that if asked to touch one of them, I would have been powerless to so much as raise my arm. In fact, I couldn't take another step.

I looked over at Murphy, around ten paces away, a gap that seemed at that moment about as easy to navigate as the Grand Canyon. He turned and peered at me over his face mask and I thought he was going to say something sympathetic about my sorry demeanor but he barked, “You're not taking a photo, are you?” I realized then I was frozen in place, in as advanced a state of rigor mortis as our compatriots on the gurneys, still holding the camera up in the air. “No, no,” I said, lowering my arm.

I knew then I was not going to make it all the way inside. My brain was cajoling:
Follow the nice man. Don't be such a sissy. What kind of reporter are you, anyway?
But my feet were heeding some ancient impetus that demanded, pretty clearly:
Get. Out. Now.
My feet were not open to discussion. “Um, I don't think I can go any farther,” I said weakly through the face mask.

Back outside the metal door, I slumped against a wall, gulping down untainted air and peeling off the face mask and booties. “Do you remember your first time . . . in there?” I asked Murphy, who was tossing his own
booties and mask into a trash can. He had been in and out of the coroner's building many times when he worked as a local cop and police chief, he explained. He recalled his first time was a hot summer day, the hundred-­plus-degree kind that's more the norm than the exception in Vegas. Other cities have climates that support human life, but Vegas's atmosphere seems best suited to those single-celled organisms able to withstand heat emanating directly from the earth's core.

Murphy followed the then coroner inside the well-chilled thirty-­eight-degree room. “The place was packed,” he said, meaning more than the six gurneys I had just seen. “The coroner's looking at a toe tag or something and I started to lose my peripheral vision.”

The smell doesn't help, he said. “Not to be inappropriate, it kind of reminds me of when I was a kid and went to the butcher shop in back of the grocery store. It is meat. The smell is a combination of things—sweet, acidic, putrid. In some instances it has a landfill kind of smell.” It sticks to hair and clothing. Murphy offered to have his secretary sniff us before we headed back into the outside world, but I wondered what would happen if we didn't pass the test. Would she douse us with Lysol or Chanel No. 5?

Urban legend has it that you can mask the smell by dabbing Vicks Vapo­Rub in your nose or smoking a cigar, but the truth is, the only thing that works is olfactory shutdown. You just stop noticing it, Murphy said. He's a fast talker, but he paused. “Once you smell it, you never forget it.”

Later, I pressed Rick Jones about the morgue's emotional jolt. He was giving me a lift downtown in one of the coroner office's white SUVs. Why do we have such a visceral reaction in the presence of death? I asked.

He signaled, turned at an intersection. His eyes didn't leave the road. After a bit he said, “Someday we're all going to pass through the coroner's office. And we understand that and that's not a problem; when you pass through it when it's your time to go. Nobody's going to live forever. But when you have people your age or younger, a fourteen-year-old girl, whatever the case is, those people shouldn't be dead.