by Colin Evans
When the defense opened its case, rather than throw Helpern into the fray immediately counsel began instead by attacking a key factor in the state’s case: the fact that van Rie’s clothes were found in Lynn’s cabin, proof positive, according to the state, that he had been sleeping with her. To diminish the impact of these findings, Second Officer Johannes van Brummelen took the stand. His wool socks and a blue sweater had also been found in Lynn’s cabin and were the result of nothing more incriminating than a desire by Lynn to keep warm. Ever since the Utrecht had entered the northern Atlantic, she had complained continually of feeling cold, prompting van Brummelen to lend her his clothes. He further aided the defendant’s cause by stating that van Rie was in the wheel house at about 7:25 P.M., during the period when the state said that Lynn was beaten insensible and thrown overboard.
Next up was Willem van Rie. In a self-assured voice tinged with only the barest hint of an accent, he emphatically denied any involvement in the death of Lynn Kauffman. The damaging statement, he said, had been made after being “scolded and pounded at” for nearly fifteen hours in a Brooklyn police precinct station. He claimed that he had been urged to “make a false statement” by a policeman, though, significantly, he was unable to either name or identify this officer. He also denied ever having given Lynn the impression that he was single, citing the photograph of his wife in his cabin as evidence of his candor.
Most observers were impressed by van Rie’s coolness on the stand. Clearly he wasn’t someone easily rattled or lacking in confidence to judge from his surprise decision to offer yet another version of that day’s events. He now claimed that the last time he actually saw Lynn was about 8:00 A.M. on September 18, in the ship’s lounge in the presence of U.S. immigration and public health inspectors, customary procedure whenever a ship arrived from a foreign country, in this case Canada. For the first time he mentioned that, around midday, he had spoken to Lynn, though only through an open porthole in her cabin. At that time she complained of feeling “terrible.” When he asked if she needed anything, she had said no. He swore that he neither saw nor spoke to her again.
Under cross-examination, van Rie fared less well. He admitted that Lynn had visited his cabin “seven or eight times” during the voyage, and that he had lied to both the New York and the Boston police about this affair. When asked about testimony against him, all he could say was that Mrs. Spector and the captain had “inaccuracies” in their evidence. Similarly, he accused van Oosten, the ship’s purser, Fallon, and Brooklyn police captain William Whalen of lying about whether he had discussed with them the difference between murder and manslaughter.
McAuliffe sneered his disdain. “You beat this girl into submission and dumped her overboard.”
“No,” was van Rie’s measured reply. And then he left the stand.
In a shrewd move, the defense had kept Helpern until near the end, judging that his would be the freshest medico-legal testimony in the jury’s collective consciousness as they began their deliberations. Helpern’s great forte was simplicity. He never made the mistake of trying to sound clever. When Winston Churchill wrote, “Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all,” he could well have been describing Helpern’s courtroom technique. Better than most—certainly at that time—Helpern understood that for the most part juries comprised people with only the faintest grasp of science and that the best way of getting his point across was by delivering it in the clearest terms possible. He began by saying it was perfectly possible for Lynn Kauffman to have fallen or jumped overboard of her own accord.
“Could she have been pushed?” he was asked.
“Yes, sure she could—but you have to prove that some other way; you can’t tell that from an autopsy.” He went on, “In my opinion, her injuries were not due to an assault by a fist or a foot or by punching, kicking or mauling.” Instead, he stated his belief that her injuries were caused by falling forty feet into the waters of Boston Harbor, after which she drowned.
McAuliffe didn’t care for this one little bit. “You did not exclude the deceased’s being thrown into the water, did you?”
“I did not mean to imply that I knew how the fall took place.”
This was McAuliffe’s cue to go through each of the bruises individually, asking whether it could have been caused by a blow from a fist or a kick. Naturally, each one could, but Helpern was far too wily to be suckered in by that sort of advocacy. When it came to deflecting a crafty cross-examination, he was peerless. Unlike many witnesses, he didn’t allow himself to be coaxed and cajoled into an injudicious comment and would often turn the tables on his inquisitor by saying something along the lines of, “If what you are trying to ask is…,” before steering the subject back to the matter in hand. His battle with McAuliffe provided a supreme example of this singular technique.
“If you’ve ever seen a body falling,” he told McAuliffe, “you’ll know there’s a lot of action. It doesn’t fall like a statue. A body falling forty feet is going over thirty miles an hour. The body is folded, the limbs are flexed, the head is moving. The impact is not single, it’s composite. As soon as it strikes, it gets thrashed about. Anyone who has fallen off a boat or water skis knows what sort of impact occurs.”
This was rock-solid testimony, free from the outlandish speculation that Luongo and O’Dea had employed, and the judge, Frank J. Murray, caught the salutary mood. When the defense overstepped the mark and tried to get Helpern to opine whether Lynn had committed suicide, Murray came down on them like a ton of bricks and threw out the question.
As was his right under Massachusetts law, van Rie was permitted to make a final unsworn statement to the jury. Looking gaunt after nearly five months in prison, he said, “As God is my witness, I am not guilty.” In an accent that thickened noticeably with every sentence, he acknowledged that he had “committed a sin—of adultery—with Miss Kauffman, and I know I was wrong,” With a quick glance toward Nella, he said that his wife had forgiven him.
The case went to the jury on the evening of March 1 and deliberations lasted throughout the night. The first ballot had resulted in a tie, but thereafter the doubters were whittled down. It took fifteen votes to reach a consensus, but the next day at 9:12 A.M., the jury came back. Not guilty.
A gasp of relief swept the court. There had been many female spectators throughout the trial, and several women reached forward to touch van Rie as he was bustled from the court. “God bless you, isn’t it wonderful,” cried one admirer, proving that the man from Holland hadn’t lost his appeal for the opposite sex. Following his acquittal, van Rie quit his job as a radio officer and returned to the Netherlands to work for a publisher.
As for Helpern, he journeyed back to New York with his reputation burnished even more brightly by this triumph. He had once described the work of the OCME to a reporter in these terms: “We are strictly a discovery agency…We are not interested in whodunit. All we want to know is what did it.” With the acquittal of Willem van Rie, Helpern had demonstrated to the jury in Boston the relevance of this maxim. Like his transatlantic counterpart and great friend, Professor Keith Simpson, Helpern was never afraid to stand up in court and say “I don’t know.” No forensic pathologist alive could say for certain how Lynn Kauffman wound up in the icy waters of Boston Harbor on that September evening. It just took Helpern to remind everyone of this fact.
All in all, these were momentous times for the man known simply as “the Chief.” Just a matter of months later, on September 19, 1960, the OCME finally got the new headquarters Helpern had been angling after for so long. Built in gleaming black and white brick, overlaid with glazed blue and aluminum paneling, 520 First Avenue was, at the time of its construction, the largest and most modern forensic facility in the world. Standing on the northeast corner of Thirtieth Street, close enough to Bellevue Hospital to ensure that the old associations could be maintained, it had cost $3.7 million to build, with a further $700,000 spent on scientific apparatus.
> The OCME officially took control of the building on April 12, 1961. In the lobby, on a black marble wall, it reads: Taceant colloquia. Effugiat risus. Hic locus est ubi mores gaudet succurrere vitae. Roughly translated, this means: “Let idle talk be silenced. Let laughter be banished. Here is the place where death delights to succor life.” Someone had found the quote on the wall of an old European autopsy room and thought it appropriate for the new building. For the first time, all the OCME’s administrative work and ancillary scientific services were centralized in one building, although branches would still be maintained in borough mortuaries. Inside the building were no fewer than sixty-three laboratories, a library, lecture halls, and various photographic rooms.
One much needed innovation was air-conditioning. In the old Bellevue mortuary at the height of summer, the stench from decaying bodies could become overpowering. For members of the general public who might be called to identify or claim a body, this often only added to the distress. Here, in the basement where the autopsies are carried out, there is storage space for 128 bodies in refrigerated compartments that can be accessed by steel doors. Whenever a body is required for identification, an elevator whisks it up to a glass-enclosed viewing room just off the main lobby. At every step of the way, the intent is to further insulate the bereaved from any unnecessary shock.
One floor up from the lobby is where all the administrative and statistical work is collated. It houses the records of every case investigated by the OCME. The three floors above this are mainly devoted to laboratories, where the examiners can study case notes and prepare their reports. In the toxicology labs, the work has multiplied exponentially. (When Helpern joined the OCME there were approximately thirty known toxic agents. By 1961, that number had soared to more than five thousand.) At the top of the building, on the sixth floor, is the so-called Black Museum, a collection of curiosities and noteworthy exhibits harvested from half a century of crime fighting. Helpern, like Spilsbury, was an assiduous collector of this medico-legal memorabilia, not from any morbid curiosity, but for the part that such items might play in the solving of future crimes. Murderous ice picks, sections of skull, autopsy specimens preserved in formaldehyde, and the shredded clothes of a boy who had been struck by lightning all found their way into the Black Museum. On a rather more prosaic note, this floor also housed the Milton Helpern Library of Legal Medicine, the most comprehensive collection of its kind to be found anywhere in the world.
And there were plenty of physicians who wished that Helpern would spend more time in that library. All his life he’d found certain aspects of the medical profession hard to stomach. Perhaps this distaste can be dated back to when, while still a young assistant medical examiner, he was called to testify in an insurance case that hinged on a disputed time of death and found himself opposed by two older, more experienced practitioners. To Helpern’s way of thinking, their evidence was incredible, wholly unsupported by the facts. The case was eventually settled out of court, but later, when Helpern ran into the two doctors at a medical conference, he confronted them. “Would you have told your students in class the same thing that you testified to in that courtroom?” he asked.
The graying, venerable pathologist smiled patronizingly. “You’ve got a lot to learn. Don’t ever confuse the courtroom with the classroom.”
“Would you have testified that same way,” Helpern asked the other man, “if this had been a murder case and the defendant’s alibi hinged on the exact time of death?”
“That’s the trouble with you young fellows,” the doctor cooed. “You’re always speculating and worrying about things that do not really happen. Come on! Let me buy you a drink.”
Helpern didn’t take the drink and he never forgot. Forever afterward, this case figured prominently in his lectures whenever he railed against physicians who become “more partisan than the lawyers.”
Helpern’s unpopularity with certain sections of the medical community was legendary. At an October 1961 gathering of the Medical Society of New York, he made his audience squirm with an eviscerating attack on what he scathingly termed the “five o’clock doctor,” the physician who put private pleasure above patient need. Helpern said, “It has become hazardous to develop a serious illness over a weekend or on a holiday, and now even at night.” Warming to his theme, he next delivered a stinging rebuke to those who regarded the Medical Society as “a citadel or defense against criticism.” He urged those listening to speak out when a physician commits a “misdeed, either through thoughtlessness or carelessness, in not responding to a medical emergency, or overcharging.” Deep down, Helpern knew he was spitting in the wind, as events in the subsequent Dr. Carl Coppolino murder trials would demonstrate,* but silence wasn’t an option.
Outbursts such as this, coupled with an explosion in the crime figures, meant that Helpern was rarely out of the headlines for long. Noted crime novelist Erle Stanley Gardner even dedicated The Case of the Hesitant Hostess to the pathologist who had become the most famous medico-legal expert alive. This celebrity only added to the demands on his time. In 1966, Helpern, alongside Keith Simpson, testified at the Ottawa Supreme Court tribunal held to establish whether the Canadian teenager Steven Truscott had been wrongly convicted of murder. Neither pathologist found anything in the evidence to suggest that the original medical testimony had been flawed or that the verdict should be overturned, and the court agreed.
With so many calls on his schedule, it was a miracle that Helpern found any time for his first love—teaching. But even this had its downside. While he never doubted the willingness of his assistants, he could only watch in impotent dismay as many fell by the wayside, discouraged by the high workload and low pay. In 1966 a full-time ME in New York City could expect to earn ninety-two hundred dollars a year on average. Part-timers had to make do with a per diem of just twenty-five dollars a day. Drawn by the lure of the greater financial rewards available elsewhere—and a hell of a lot less hassle—many of Helpern’s apprentices took up job offers right across America. Helpern’s sole consolation in this exodus was the knowledge that his students, rigorously trained in the toughest school anywhere, would help spread the OCME doctrine of ME-based crime investigation in those states that still clung on to the coroner system. Incredibly, of these, only Louisiana and Ohio restricted their candidates to physicians. In North Carolina, for instance, applicants for the post of coroner merely had to be persons who “had not denied the being of Almighty God or participated in a duel.”
Suddenly, though, Helpern was having to fight the “no coroner” battle in his own backyard. In January 1967, the New York Academy of Medicine attacked the OCME in a stinging report that recommended greater decentralization, closer links with medical schools, and more use of lay investigators. Helpern was apoplectic. This sounded like yet another attempt to hark back to the bad old days. What he needed, said Helpern, wasn’t more decentralization but more money.
Certainly the battle was getting harder. All through the sixties, the homicide rate climbed with grim inexorability. When Helpern joined the OCME in 1931, New York had about four hundred murders a year. In 1969, for the first time ever, the death toll exceeded one thousand. Too many guns and too many knives, said Helpern. As it turned out, not all the knives were being wielded on the streets of New York, quite a few were being aimed squarely between the broad shoulders of the chief medical examiner. Or so Helpern suspected.
A whispering campaign against Helpern had been under way for some time. It was the age-old problem: some younger employees at the OCME felt that their career ambitions were being thwarted by Helpern’s refusal to quit. At age seventy-one, Helpern had already been granted five extensions by the city to stay in office beyond the customary retirement age, leading to ugly comparisons with J. Edgar Hoover’s reign at the FBI, with accusations that he had stayed in the job too long. The backbiting reached critical mass in July 1973, when a story appeared in the press alleging that certain OCME staff members were taking kickbacks from funeral dir
ectors seeking business and favors. (Under the law, undertakers were allowed to advertise, but they were prohibited from soliciting business.) An immediate investigation was announced by Nicholas Scoppetta, the City Investigations Commissioner.
Helpern came out swinging, hotly denying that any such practices existed in his office. However, one anonymous OCME employee was ready to plunge the dagger, telling a reporter that employees were being paid up to fifty dollars by certain funeral homes for each body steered their way. “It’s been going on for fifty years,” confided the source. The case that sparked all the kerfuffle began when two brothers from Troy, North Carolina, went to the mortuary at 520 First Avenue to claim the body of their sister. The Troy undertakers who were handling the funeral had told Richard and Amos Harris to advise the OCME that the New York Funeral Service would arrange to ship their sister’s body to North Carolina. But, according to the brothers, when the mortuary assistant heard this, he was “very hesitant about calling the New York Funeral Service and suggested that we call the Metropolitan Funeral Service.” Later, the Harrises learned that the MFS was contacted and that they, in turn, called the Troy Funeral Home, stating that the family wanted them to handle the arrangements and the shipping. When contacted about this purportedly unethical action, Richard A. Santore, president of the New York Funeral Service, stoked the flames by saying that some OCME employees had been receiving kickbacks and gratuities “all the time.”
Although Scoppetta’s inquiry would drag on for two more years and uncover even more egregious examples of undertaker malpractice—mainly in the handling of deceased indigents—no charges were ever leveled at any OCME staff member. But the damage had already been done. On December 15, 1973, it was announced that Helpern would be retiring at the year’s end. The very next day, an obviously hot-under-the-collar Helpern appeared on TV, protesting that he had been the victim of a coup organized from within the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In typical fashion, Helpern didn’t soft-pedal the issue. The ringleader, he said, was none other than one of his deputies, the supremely talented Dr. Michael Baden. He claimed that Baden had leaked the undertaker story to the New York Times in an attempt to discredit him. There had been a concerted campaign, he said, “to put me on the shelf and to insert young Sir Galahad into the position,” an obvious reference to Baden. Rather unnecessarily in the circumstances, Helpern felt compelled to add that he would not be recommending Baden as his successor.