It took Ash very little homework among his attending physicians to discover that the ranking world figure in pathology, the dean of forensic medicine in the United States, the éminence grise of the autopsy chamber, was Dr. Milton Helpern, chief medical examiner of the city of New York, a man of whom the New York Times said, “He knows more about violent and mysterious death than anyone else in the country.” Helpern’s office publicity releases called him “a Sherlock Holmes with a microscope.”
Dr. Helpern’s reputation and credentials were so vast that, in listing them, he seemed like a corporation, his statistics an annual report. In forty years in the New York City medical examiner’s office, he had personally dissected twenty thousand corpses himself, and had supervised or participated in an almost incomprehensible fifty thousand more. On his examining table had been laid out the bodies of more than ten thousand people who were slain by gunshots alone. He was, with no competition, the most celebrated coroner since the art was initiated in the twelfth cenury by an English king who wanted to insure that he received bounties due the throne in the case of suicides.
“I focus not on whodunit, but on whatdunit,” Dr. Helpern once told a news writer. “My job is to determine the cause of death. I’m not trying to find out who did it. That’s the job for the police. But when anyone dies by violence, or suspicion of violence, regardless of whether violence is suicidal, homicidal, accidental, or undetermined, it is an ancient responsibility of government to officially inquire into the death. This is of paramount importance to the administration of justice. If you’re going to have a system of justice, we’re a very intricate part of it.”
Ash requested and received a collection of news clippings concerning Dr. Helpern—a man who did not object to attention from the press—and he underlined two sections of one lengthy interview in a medical publication. The first concerned Dr. Helpern’s appearance in more than three thousand courtroom cases as an expert witness on the cause of death: “He has not only been responsible for sometimes determining the guilt or innocence of a person suspected of homicide, but his testimony has decided the distribution of large sums of insurance money—which often hinges on whether a death was natural, a suicide, or an accident.”
The second clipping dealt at length with Dr. Helpern’s most celebrated case—the matter of Dr. Carl Coppolino. The parallels between the death of Mrs. Coppolino and his daughter’s death were tantalizing to Ash Robinson. Coppolino was a New Jersey anesthesiologist whose wife, also a physician, died in Florida. It was officially termed a heart attack. Suspicion arose that Coppolino actually murdered his wife by injecting her with an exotic poison, and a district attorney in Florida asked Helpern to come down to conduct an exhumation autopsy. In the autopsy, he discovered a previously overlooked needle mark in the upper quadrant of the left buttock—and, more puzzling, no sign of heart disease in the remains of the thirty-two-year-old woman. After six months of laboratory work, Dr. Helpern became convinced that there were traces of succinylcholine chloride—a fatal substance—in tissue taken from the buttocks at the point of the needle mark. Dr. Helpern’s testimony was the principal factor in the conviction of Dr. Coppolino.
“He sounds like the papacita to me,” said Cecil Haden.
District Attorney Vance promptly received several letters from Houston physicians at the behest of Ash, each urging that the death of Joan Robinson Hill be further investigated by an exhumation and new autopsy. Ash Robinson would bear all of the expenses, including the considerable sum required to extricate Dr. Milton Helpern from the recesses of Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital and fly him to Houston, all the way down to the $125 required by the cemetery to pay the gravediggers.
Letters and long-distance telephone calls also went out to Dr. Helpern in New York, who responded by ringing up his colleague in Houston, coroner Jachimczyk, to discuss the peculiar situation. Helpern wanted it made clear before the first clod of earth was disturbed on Joan’s grave that it was highly unlikely he would discover anything dramatic since the cause of death sounded bacterial, and since the body had been hurriedly embalmed.
He agreed to come, however, if someone in official authority would ask him. Helpern worked out his fee with Ash Robinson in private, and the two men agreed to keep the sum secret. Rumors swirled in Houston that Ash was paying dearly to import the star pathologist. Dr. Jachimczyk told a colleague that he had heard “a six-figure sum” being mentioned. When a reporter asked Ash to be specific, the old man refused to tell. One hundred thousand dollars, he said, was “out of line.” But his ego glowed because he possessed the funds and the power to import a medical examiner with a world-wide reputation.
The district attorney, Vance, put the matter before another grand jury to see if they would order an exhumation. The panel reviewed the material submitted to the first grand jury, the one that failed to indict John Hill. They were also given a letter from Ash, an impassioned, inaccurate, and wildly biased plea. Rather than use his own stationery, with his personal signature printed in type at the top of the page, Ash cannily substituted a letterhead from Chatsworth Farm, crowned with the celebrated photograph of Joan Robinson Hill riding Beloved Belinda, one of the most beautiful and alive pictures ever made. Anyone reading the letter would pause first to examine the lovely girl and horse, then move eyes down into the terrible message beneath:
I have asked for ten minutes of your time to request your authority to have the body of my daughter exhumed for an additional autopsy. Dr. John Hill refused to give me this permission for reasons of his own. It could hardly be because of his love or sentiment for my daughter because he permitted Ann Kurth to move into his and Joan’s home the day after she died and remain there until they were married on June 5.
… I hope to learn the cause of Joan’s death. If it is not pancreatitis, as they first said, or hepatitis, which so many distinguished doctors do not believe—then what did my daughter die from? In this connection, I have asked numerous doctors for the name of the world’s finest and most eminent forensic pathologist and toxicologist. They all said Dr. Milton Helpern, medical examiner for the city of New York. I have never met him or seen him, but I called him and made arrangements for him to come to Houston and perform an additional autopsy if the Grand Jury will so permit him. There is absolutely no fatal drug that does not leave evidence in the muscle, organs, or bones, and I believe that he can find the same if it is there.…
In this case there is certainly widespread speculation and gossip. It should be cleared up to the best of our ability. Then, too, who could object to being proved correct?
Its curiosity whetted, the grand jury voted to let the exhumation proceed.
Until this bit of news reached his ears, Dr. John Hill had not yet hired an attorney. He got one fast, Don Fullenweider, a young lawyer who had represented him in the civil lawsuit that resulted in the angry professional divorce from his first surgical associate, Nathan Roth. The attorney lived across the street from John Hill, and he had kept an idle eye on the comings and goings at the great white colonial mansion. Often Fullenweider saw Ash Robinson prowling around the block in his black Lincoln. Once he noticed the boy Robert Hill playing in the yard. Ash drove by and stopped, watching intently his grandson. The boy glanced up, ran as frightened as a startled deer into the house. “Obviously,” thought Fullenweider, “John Hill does not want his son to talk to Ash Robinson.”
Fullenweider felt it wise to call in his partner, a colorful, aggressive, and successful criminal attorney named Richard Haynes, one of the city’s true characters, known far and wide by his nickname “Racehorse.” This appellation referred not to the way he scurried about the courthouse, or the fast way he talked to juries (except when he chose to don the disguise of a down home country boy with figurative stalk of hay ’twixt his teeth), or even his thoroughbred record of victories won. The name harked back to his youth when, playing football, he once attempted to run sideways across the field and shake a herd of pursuant tacklers. “That kid must think he’s
a race horse,” said the coach, and the name stuck, particularly since the short young man had a Napoleonic ego and felt he would surely be governor if not President someday. “Racehorse” was not a bad handle to run a campaign on.
Racehorse Haynes met with the troubled plastic surgeon on a midsummer’s evening at the Fullenweider home. John Hill began by saying he was not sure he even needed a lawyer, but the activities of his ex-father-in-law had progressed beyond the nuisance stage. “He somehow has it mixed up in his head that I am responsible for the death of his daughter,” said John. “I want that disproved immediately.”
The two lawyers listened as John went over the now familiar tale of his wife’s illness, her hospitalization, her sudden death. Haynes did not probe into the matter of the French pastries, or why the doctor so quickly married a woman he had earlier renounced in a signed letter of repentance. At the end of the evening, Racehorse said he would keep an ear to the courthouse and try to learn what, if anything, the district attorney possessed that smelled of criminal trouble.
“More important,” urged the lawyer, “get yourself a team of prestigious doctors to stand over Helpern at that autopsy and protect your own interests. You can be damn sure Ash is gonna have his doctors there,” said Racehorse.
The next day John rang Dr. Jachimczyk and inquired whether it would be a good idea to have friendly doctors in attendance as deputy coroners.
“Well, I’m not in a position to tell you what to do or what not to do,” responded the medical examiner. “But let me put it this way. It all depends on whether you believe in offensive medicine or defensive medicine.”
The analogy was clear—and worrisome.
On a damp and overcast Saturday morning, August 16, 1969, at the Forest Park West cemetery, a back hoe scooped away the topsoil from the grave of Joan Robinson Hill and cleared enough earth for a fork-lift tractor to ease steel fingers underneath the blue steel coffin. With a funeral director from Settegast-Kopf in attendance and operating under the decree of the Harris County grand jury, the coffin was swept of dirt and placed once more in a Cadillac coach and borne to the Ben Taub Hospital. There a remarkable group of doctors were waiting.
Dr. Milton Helpern had flown in the night before from New York, had been met by Ash Robinson, and was taken to a suite at the city’s elegant Warwick Hotel. This was a once shabby apartment house which was bought by an oilman who gave his wife a blank check to redecorate it. She flew to Europe and purchased antiques, castle furnishings, and entire flea markets, flying home, it was rumored, $20 million lighter. The Warwick was magnificent, well appreciated in a city that relishes dash and opulence. It was also just the right place for a visiting dignitary.
Waiting in the hallway outside the basement morgue were two teams of doctors, lined up like opponents in a football game, or seconds in a macabre duel. Ash Robinson sent in his regular squad to play for him, those physicians who had met so frequently in his home for theoretical maneuvering. Among them were the heart surgeon Grady Hallman; Ash’s personal physician, Ed Gouldin; and even one obese and socially ambitious fellow who, at that moment, held a medical degree but not a license to practice medicine in the state of Texas. But he recognized the publicity value of the event, and he was negotiating to lease Chatsworth Farm, and he volunteered eagerly to serve on behalf of Ash Robinson.
John Hill’s squad was far more qualified in the business of the day. He sent forth three genuine pathologists, doctors who specialized in this kind of work, including one, Dr. Robert Bucklin, who was medical examiner for the neighboring city of Galveston. Also present in the morgue were the two Sharpstown Hospital doctors, Walter Bertinot and pathologist Arthur Morse.
All were sworn in as deputy medical examiners by Dr. Jachimczyk, each promising to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, though what pertinence this held to the autopsy of Joan Hill no one was quite sure.
Moreover, there was McMaster, the assistant district attorney, who by this time was ambivalent on the subject of John Hill’s guilt or innocence (“One day I’m convinced the son of a bitch did her in,” he told an associate, “the next day I’m not sure of anything”), plus assorted investigators from the medical examiner’s office, representatives of the mortuary and cemetery, and secretaries. “The body is the one lying down,” feebly joked one of the doctors as the crowd entered the room.
Realizing the stakes involved and still smarting from the experience with the first autopsy, Dr. Jachimczyk was anxious to make sure that everything was according to form. Before introducing Dr. Helpern to the assemblage, he set out the protocol. Absolute master of the day would be “our distinguished visitor, the chief medical examiner for the city of New York.” Dr. Helpern would conduct the autopsy from the initial order to open the casket to the final directive to reseal it. No one could enter or leave the room without Dr. Jachimczyk’s permission. There would be no lunch break. “If anyone starts feeling uncomfortable,” began Dr. Jachimczyk, with a wave of his hand elaborating on the queasiness that can come in a procedure of this sort, “then he or she may leave, with an escort of my decision.” Milton Helpern entered, an amiable but imperious doctor. There was no doubt about his star quality; he was the kind of man for whom others opened doors. He seized control from the moment Dr. Jachimczyk stopped talking. Never once did the sixty-seven-year-old doctor falter, show signs of fatigue, or turn his head away from the grotesqueness of the hours.
A microphone was hung over the dissecting table, and secretaries were on hand to take down his every utterance. “What I plan to do,” said Helpern, “is to dictate the findings and the observations out loud, and if anybody wants to comment, whether in agreement or disagreement, or if anybody wants to ask a question, he is at liberty to do so. I am very anxious to have one record here. Sometimes these things are done where the pathologist works very quietly and the observer works very quietly, and you don’t realize later, from their reports, that it is the same autopsy.”
As he spoke, a storm broke over the city and thunder rumbled outside. One of the observing doctors would later say, “The day was written by Edgar Allan Poe. It was a weird and frightening experience.”
Dr. Helpern would make three separate sets of tissues and specimens—one for him to take back to New York and study under his microscope, a second for Dr. Jachimczyk, and a third would be made available to the team looking after John Hill’s interests. The group nodded in understanding. Dr. Helpern clapped his hands enthusiastically. He was ready to begin. “The body, I am informed by Mr. Todish of the funeral home, has been removed from the cemetery and is now in the autopsy room. It is in a 6-6 steel sealer, 20-gauge, exterior Queen Blue coffin. Is that correct?”
The funeral home attendant agreed.
“Very well,” said Dr. Helpern. “Let us enter and begin.”
The group took places in a semicircle around the autopsy table, and for the moment all eyes were drawn to the steel-blue coffin. Dr. Jachimczyk approached the box, placed his hand on its cold hard shell, and demanded formally of the mortuary attendant if this was the lawful casket of the decedent, Joan Olive Robinson Hill. It was indeed. “Has it been crushed or damaged in any way?” “It has not.” “Very well, then pursuant to the order of the Harris County district attorney dated August 11, 1969, the order is hereby given to open this coffin.” The six clasps snapped open easily, and the top half of the lid, like a Dutch door, was swung back.
One of the doctors took one look, sucked in his breath, and shut his eyes. Another, who had known Joan well and had seen her win championships on the great horses, turned away. Death had worked its horror; the cleansing of time was interrupted.
Dr. Jachimczyk studied the body and nodded in affirmation. This was the same corpse that he had viewed in the same coffin at the funeral home six months before. “I remember distinctly this gown,” he said, touching his fingertip to its gold glitter. Attendants known as deniers then carefully lifted the body from the coffin and transferred it to the examining table. Dr
. Helpern directed that the gold gown be carefully cut away. The naked body was laid forth for him to study.
But something nagged at him. The old pathologist turned his attention back to the coffin. He brushed his finger against a portion of the white satin lining. He beckoned for Dr. Jachimczyk to move in closer. The two medical examiners bent over the box.
Dr. Jachimczyk shook his head in bewilderment. He snapped his fingers for an aide to come to his side.
The room buzzed. What was happening?
Dr. Helpern broke the suspense. “There is dried mud inside this casket,” he said. Old mud. Well-dried mud. Mud not new from the morning’s official shovels.
The inescapable conclusion, murmured Dr. Jachimczyk, was that this casket had previously been opened. Someone else had already violated the sleep of Joan Robinson Hill.
SEVENTEEN
“This is the body of an adult white woman, appearing to be approximately thirty-five to forty years of age,” dictated Dr. Helpern, electing to proceed with his autopsy while lesser figures sought to find out if and why the coffin had previously been opened. He spoke as dryly and as dispassionately as an archaeologist describing the ninth Etruscan vase unearthed that morning. His eyes roamed over the body before he picked up his scalpel.
The over-all state of preservation was good. The silver-blonde hair was still full and in the pony tail she had worn even to the grave. The facial features were mostly intact, save for an abundant growth of black mold that had crept resolutely over the cheeks and nose, as in a masquerade. The nose itself was dehydrated and beginning to crumble. On the torso, almost graceful trails of blackish-green mold grew, easily brushed aside, like an offending cobweb. One hand was covered with the mold, the other was not, and each gleamed with silver nail polish under the bright lights. And everywhere the flesh was softening, soon to pull away from the bones, destined to disappear.
Blood and Money Page 21