by Colin Evans
Such wholesale corruption wasn’t to everyone’s taste. As early as 1852, the New York Times was praying for “some ingenious gentleman [to] inform us of what possible use are coroner’s inquests as they are habitually conducted.” The press had a point. Some of the abuses were eye-catching. Although coroners were notorious for impaneling juries unnecessarily—at five dollars a sitting—this enthusiasm didn’t always extend to letting jurors actually view the body. Not that this omission troubled most panelists, especially those who gained access to the exclusive Jurymen’s Ring, as it came to be known. Every coroner had his favorite jurors. One gentleman, an Albert B. White, served on no fewer than 208 panels. As he had a sideline of supplying dead bodies or “material” to medical colleges, his ubiquity cannot be considered coincidental. Nor did the coroners delve too deeply into their jurors’ antecedents. Yet another gentleman, J. J. McDonald, a veteran of 118 juries, was revealed to be a vagrant who, during one morgue visit, had been caught taking rather too intimate an interest in a recent female admission. Despite this lapse, he continued to serve and receive his juror’s fees.
Records show that in 1868 when a skilled laborer counted himself lucky if he made $2.00 a day, a New York coroner pocketed from all sources, on average, $27.75 per body. It was the kind of return that made dead bodies valuable items indeed. So valuable, in fact, that some coroners would go to almost any lengths to gain possession of a cadaver. On one infamous occasion, when a body was spotted lying in the Hackensack Meadows, it sparked off what amounted to a human gold rush, with three coroners converging from various cardinal points, all desperate to lay claim to the corpse. Only some smart work by the coroner in whose jurisdiction the body actually lay—he had wisely sent some retainers on ahead and they encircled the trophy, holding off the interlopers at gun and knifepoint—prevented him from losing what would have been a good pay day. Occasionally tempers could really fray. In another incident, on an otherwise quiet Sunday afternoon in lower Jersey City, the local coroner was backing up his wagon to the front of his establishment to unload a boxed corpse when his attention was distracted by the crunch of metal-rimmed wheels on cobblestones. Glancing up, he spotted a hated rival coroner reining his own horse-drawn carriage to a halt just yards away. An edgy standoff ensued. The newcomer waited until the box was lifted out, then sprang down from his seat, bellowing that the body had been found in his district and that he was staking his claim. Within seconds the two coroners were tugging at the box in a furious fight for its possession. Such was the vigor of their dispute that the box fell to the sidewalk, pitching its contents out face first onto the pavement. Each of the warring officials made a grab for the corpse. Strong hands grasped hold of the coat so firmly that the body was raised to its feet. When tugging failed to decide the issue, punches were aimed over the dead man’s shoulders. This way and that his frame twisted and whirled. Mortified churchgoers, watching from a distance, cringed in ashen-faced horror as the dead man seemed to take as lively a hand in the affray as the rival claimants. Cries of “Shame!” and loud hissing fell on deaf ears as the two protagonists continued trading roundhouse rights until a detachment of police arrived and put an end to the unseemly brawl. History doesn’t record who won.
Across the Hudson, New York audiences were more hard-nosed. When a similar dispute broke out on the East River—this time a drowning victim, or “floater,” was the prize—chortling spectators thronged the shoreline as coroners from Brooklyn and Manhattan launched dinghies and then waged a pitched battle in midstream, each clubbing the other with oars. Finally, exhaustion set in. One of the combatants lost his balance and tumbled headlong into the river, allowing the victor to haul in the dead body and row back to shore, a chorus of raucous and appreciative cheers accompanying his every stroke.
Being paid by the body led to some creative corpse management. For instance, it was not unknown for a coroner to yank a body from the river, issue a John Doe certificate, and then heave the body back again. A few minutes later, it would be retrieved a second time, a second certificate issued, and a second $11.50 of taxpayers’ money would promptly vanish into the coroner’s back pocket. Sometimes the tactics bordered on the psychopathic. Certain coroners were known to personally bar a funeral’s progress, muttering threats of impromptu and wholly unwarranted inquests, and refusing to permit the weeping cortege to proceed until an appropriate emolument had been handed over. Such extortion was as profitable as it was unethical. A coroner would count it a bad year if he made less than $11,000; most pocketed much more.
For cold-blooded larceny, though, the coroners of Staten Island were unbeatable. In October 1893, when the Warsak family of Elm Park called Dr. F. E. Barber to tend their six-week-old child, he diagnosed the illness as brain fever, declared that death was imminent, and said that he would write up the necessary certificate. As Barber was leaving the house he was confronted by the coroner’s physician, Dr. J. Walter Wood, who had just caught wind of the infant’s potentially fatal illness. Wood barged past him into the house. He cornered the parents, demanding to know what arrangements they had made for their impending bereavement. They told him and then he left. That night the child died. Shortly after dawn the next day, Wood returned with a seven-man jury. He swore them in, they viewed the body, and then they promptly disappeared. Wood was now authorized to do his worst. And he didn’t disappoint. In a loud, portentous voice he announced his intention of performing an autopsy. Mrs. Warsak, uncertain whether to scream or faint, eventually did both, dual displays of emotion that clearly unsettled Wood, who threatened to call the police. Over her hysterical complaints, he conducted the autopsy with utter disregard for the family’s feeling. After the most perfunctory examination—he singularly neglected any investigation of the cerebral region—Wood billed the county for twenty-five dollars, with another twenty-five dollars for his boss, coroner Stephen E. Whitman. This was no isolated incident. Whitman and Wood were notorious body snatchers, hated for a clutch of unnecessary and profitable autopsies.
The consolidation of New York’s five boroughs in 1898 did nothing to arrest these abuses. Coroners’ juries were packed with cronies, favored undertakers continued to snaffle most of the business, and even insurance companies got sucked into the vortex. (Because life policies rarely paid out in the event of a suicide, coroners kept a mental list of those underwriters prepared to pay handsomely for a favorable death certificate.)
But it was the area of crime investigation that really exposed the coroner’s shortcomings. Although exact figures are difficult to come by, in the early twentieth century New Yorkers were slaying around three hundred of their fellow citizens annually. In terms of murder per capita, it worked out at around six per hundred thousand. (Compared with some southern cities, this was positively pedestrian: Memphis, at this time the most dangerous city in America, had a murder rate of sixty-four per hundred thousand per annum!) But murder was clearly a problem in New York, and its newfound status as a global city demanded that something be done.
Envious eyes were cast across the Atlantic, where Europe was in the midst of a forensic science revolution. Slowly at first, and then with greater rapidity, Old World law enforcement agencies had warmed to the notion of laboratory-led crime detection. In 1901 the Austrian scientist Karl Landsteiner developed the ABO blood grouping that later won him the Nobel Prize. One year earlier in Germany, Paul Uhlenhuth had devised his precipitin test for distinguishing human blood from that of other animals. These two advances added further muscle to what had unquestionably been the great identification breakthrough of the nineteenth century: the discovery that no two humans have the same fingerprint. Blood grouping, fingerprint analysis, and blood typing united in a tri-pronged attack that utterly transformed crime fighting. Killers in Europe were now going to the gallows or guillotine, convicted on the evidence of their fingertips or bodily fluids, while detectives processing crime scenes suddenly found themselves down on their hands and knees alongside scientists with magnifying lenses and trained
forensic pathologists.
It was all so very different in the United States. Crime solving here, for the most part, was still rooted in the old traditions of eyewitnesses, informants, posses, and confessions. Science played virtually no part in the law enforcement process. The field of forensic pathology was no better. Any frustrated student who yearned for the latest advances in legal medicine needed some seriously deep pockets in order to travel to the great universities of Berlin, Paris, and Vienna, where the study and teaching of forensic science could be traced back to the eighteenth century.
With a murder rate ten times higher than that of its great rival, London, New York City clearly needed all the help it could get. Here, as in the majority of America, responsibility for the early stages of any homicide investigation still resided with the coroner. Only one state bucked the trend. As early as 1877, Massachusetts, fed up with the corruption and graft that went hand in hand with the old system, had voted to replace the position of coroner with a properly trained medical examiner, appointed by the governor for a seven-year term. The intention was that being nonelective, the post would be impartial and objective.
New York City could only dream of such independence. As the twentieth century entered its second decade, Gotham’s coroners were as inefficient, corrupt, and autonomous as ever, with no sign of a shift in this balance of power. One particularly egregious example of their misconduct occurred on March 9, 1914, when a character named Eugene Rochette, holed up in a cheap hotel that had been under police surveillance, somehow managed to sustain a bullet wound to the head. A coroner’s physician summoned to the scene had no hesitation in declaring it to be a case of suicide. But two doctors at Bellevue Hospital, who’d taken a much closer look at the body, disputed this finding. They were baffled by the absence of powder burns or scorching on the skin around the entrance wound. Most suicides who shoot themselves in the head hold the gun either against or very close to the skull. As the bullet is fired, explosive gases also belch from the barrel, often traveling many inches. These blacken and scorch an area around the entrance wound. The further away the muzzle is from the skin, the less noticeable are the powder burns. Although ballistics analysis was still in its infancy at this stage, the two Bellevue pathologists—and it should be remembered that Bellevue in the early 1900s saw more cases of shooting than any other U.S. hospital—already understood this correlation, and what they saw convinced them that the fatal shot had been fired from some distance, certainly not by Rochette himself. On their recommendation, the matter was referred to the district attorney. He agreed that it sounded fishy and ordered an immediate inquiry. However, the investigation never even got off the ground. Unbeknownst to everyone except the coroner’s office, Rochette’s body had been cremated forthwith. And there the matter was closed. Little wonder that Dr. James Ewing, the eminent professor of pathology at Cornell Medical School, shook his head and sighed, “New York gets along with practically no aid from the science of legal medicine.”
But all that was about to change.
On January 1, 1914, John Purroy Mitchel was sworn in as mayor of New York City. The election of a candidate who had run on a Fusion (Liberal and Republican) reform ticket sent shivers through a Tammany political machine that had run the city as its personal fiefdom for over a century. Just thirty-four years old and bursting with vigor, Mitchel was brilliant, abrasive, and honest! And he wasted no time in getting out the broom.
He ordered his Commissioner of Accounts, Leonard M. Wallstein, to conduct a root-and-branch investigation of New York’s coroner system, to see if all the rumored corruption and excesses were merely the product of partisan political pamphleteering or if they were grounded in the truth. Wallstein opened his inquiry on June 13, 1914, little realizing the difficulties involved. After seven months spent weathering and not always overcoming just about every form of prevarication and obfuscation known to man, he finally submitted his report in January 1915.
It made for mighty uncomfortable reading. Wallstein cataloged a string of ineptitude and blatant dishonesty that shocked even hardened New Yorkers. Describing the current coroner system as a “public scandal and disgrace,” he showed how of the sixty-five men who had held the office of coroner since consolidation, not one was thoroughly qualified, by training or experience, for the adequate performance of his duties. By occupation, nineteen were general physicians without any formal training in legal medicine, eight were undertakers, seven were politicians, six were real estate dealers, two were saloonkeepers, and two were plumbers; the rest were, respectively, a lawyer, a printer, an auctioneer, a contractor, a carpenter, a painter, an expressman, a dentist, a butcher, a wood-carver, a marble cutter, a labor leader, an insurance agent, a musician, and a milkman. The remainder had occupations that were unknown.
With so much medical ignorance on display, coroners generally relied on hired physicians to establish the cause of death and took their verdicts without quibble. This created its own set of problems. For instance, Wallstein discovered that in 1913 the Manhattan coroners recorded only one case of infanticide but found an abnormal number of alleged stillborn and premature births. Such a discrepancy made it hard to escape the notion that baby killers were operating with impunity in New York City. Another feature that disturbed Wallstein was a curious uniformity in causes of death; each coroner tended to have his own favorite. In Brooklyn, over a three-day period, he found that one acting coroner’s physician reported four deaths owing to valvular heart disease and four owing to acute cardiac dilation. In each case only the most superficial of examinations was performed. Elsewhere, another death certificate recorded an impressive list of ailments that included chronic nephritis, myocarditis, and pulmonary edema, though nowhere did it confirm police and hospital reports that showed the poor fellow had committed suicide by gassing himself.
Further frustration attended the discovery of a man found dead in a lodging house, with a clearly visible bullet wound in his mouth and a .38-caliber revolver clutched in his right hand. The gun contained three loaded cartridges and one expended shell. An ambulance surgeon pronounced the man dead at the scene and the body was removed, on the orders of the coroner, to the morgue. By the time the coroner had tidied up his papers, the cause of death had mysteriously transmuted to a “rupture of thoracic aneurysm,” and all reference to a bullet wound had been excised. In this manner, yet another suicide was swept conveniently under the carpet. Nor were these anomalies uncommon. Of the 320 cases that Wallstein reviewed, approximately 40 percent displayed a complete lack of evidence in the official papers to justify the cause of death.
One of the Manhattan coroners singled out for particularly “scandalous” conduct was Herman Hellenstein, and he was dragged kicking and screaming before the commission. It soon became evident that not only was he on the payroll of several insurance and railroad companies, but that his predilection for corporate arm-twisting had secured lucrative jobs for several of his friends. After a miserable grilling, Hellenstein, white and visibly shaken, conceded that the office of coroner should be abolished. Another coroner called to testify added little to his already murky reputation by declaring that he always declined to refer to legal books for fear that they might “confuse him.”
At the time of Wallstein’s review, Manhattan had four coroners; there were two in Brooklyn, two in Queens, two in the Bronx, and one in Staten Island. Those based in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx each received $6,000 per annum, while coroners in Queens and Staten Island had to make do with $4,000. In addition, each office employed a coroner’s physician who was paid $3,000 a year, and a clerk who received another $2,000. Wallstein estimated that the coroner system was costing New York’s taxpayers approximately $172,000 a year. By contrast, the Suffolk County medical examiner’s office based in Boston, Massachusetts, operated efficiently on just $32,500 per annum. Wallstein recommended that the old elective coroner system, with its graft and political quid pro quos, be replaced by a system based on the Suffolk County template, whereb
y a medical examiner was appointed—in New York’s case, by the mayor—for seven years.
Mitchel took Wallstein’s recommendations on board (although the seven-year term was not adopted; the New York position would last until retirement), and on April 7, 1915, a bill passed the New York legislature abolishing the coroner system. The small print stated that current holders of the post would be replaced when their engagement ended on January 1, 1918. After that, the city of New York would have its first chief medical examiner. Qualification criteria for the new post were rigid and trifold. Each candidate needed to be a physician, a trained pathologist, and an expert microscopist. Applications would be vetted and then the final candidates would sit a competitive exam. The successful applicant would be based in Manhattan and receive an annual salary of seventy-five hundred dollars and the power to appoint deputy medical examiners in each of the other four boroughs, all of whom would be under his authority.