Blood and Money

by Thomas Thompson

  “The fingers,” he went on, “are dehydrated and mummified. The fingernails are well manicured, long and loose.… Tissues of the upper and lower extremities are soft, and there is maceration of the skin on the lower part of the chin and upper part of the neck, posteriorly, as well as on the extremities of both hands, with separation of the epidermis.” Dr. Helpern picked up the left wrist of the corpse, as if he were preparing to take a pulse. He read from a clear plastic bracelet still there, “Joan O. Hill, #23709, Sharpstown General Hospital, Dr. Bertinot.” This was the hospital identification bracelet which no one had removed.

  “There is a sutured Y-shaped autopsy incision on the body … concealed by a strip of white paper gauze.… The toenails are painted with a bright red polish.… The skin of the feet and legs are macerated with separation of the softened epidermis.… Tissues of the extremities and back are very soft with gas formation.… There is a mottled bluish-reddish-gray lividity, with some bluish areas in the skin over the left buttock and separation of the epidermis from the posterior surface of the arms.… The anus is packed with stained wadding.… The tissues around the anus are quite soft and macerated.”

  Dr. Jachimczyk approached the pathologist and cleared his throat to interrupt. He had been in a corner of the room for several moments, talking quietly but agitatedly with a representative from the Settegast-Kopf Funeral Home. “It has come to my attention,” said Dr. Jachimczyk, “that this coffin was opened approximately three days after the interment. A permit was obtained by the deceased’s husband, Dr. John R. Hill. Apparently he had the coffin opened so that he could remove a ring from his wife’s finger. Or some piece of jewelry. Is that right, sir?”

  The undertaker, a Mr. Zernial, nodded. On that March day it had freshly rained, and probably a bit of mud had gotten into the coffin during the reopening. The entire episode was legal, said Zernial. The plastic surgeon had obtained the required permit from the city Health Department, and a representative of the cemetery was present during the exhumation. John Hill was not at his wife’s grave for more than a few minutes. Nothing out of the ordinary happened.

  But now, the stunning news drenching every imagination in the room, two of the doctors representing Ash Robinson stared at each other in wonder. It tended to confirm their suspicions that John Hill was guilty of his wife’s death. Why would he sneak out to her grave and open her coffin, unless he was desperate to view the corpse once again and see if there was an incriminating needle mark somewhere? He was, after all, a plastic surgeon, and plastic surgeons are clever at removing scars and blemishes.

  Dr. Helpern punctured the ballooning speculations. It did not appear that the body has been tampered with, he announced. The autopsy incisions were closed and intact. He had seen too many exhumed corpses not to know if mischief had been done. “Let us continue, gentlemen,” he ordered, bringing the murmuring to a halt. One of the doctors in the room would later remember thinking at this moment, “John Hill’s goose is cooked. Any second now, Dr. Helpern is going to pause, shake his head, and announce that he had discovered some trace of an exotic poison, known only to a remote tribe in the Amazon.”

  But it was not to be. For another half hour the coroner continued to remark mechanically on the appearance of the corpse and its texture to his touch. “The eyelids are sunken … there is some black mold in the frontal portion of the scalp. This mold and macerated epidermis is very easily rubbed away. Eyeballs are soft. Jaws have been wired together with small metal studs. Lower jaw is easily moved.… There is an area of parchment-like drying of the skin near the inner end of the left clavicle.… The breasts are small, firm, and symmetrical, tissues well hardened.…”

  He noted puncture marks, apparent needle injections, on the arm, but Dr. Bertinot identified these as the sites of the IV injections. He searched the body inch by inch, looking for unexplained needle marks, but although several were encountered—on the buttocks and on the stomach, these were accounted for by the Sharpstown hospital charts. The coroner’s meticulous search impressed every doctor in the room. He removed fingernails and toenails and examined the underlying tissues. He spent a quarter of an hour on the elbows alone. The eyeballs were probed, the tongue, inside the ear, the female organs, anywhere that a needle might have injected a deadly poison. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Again and again, Dr. Helpern shook his head in negation.

  Now he took his blade and opened the corpse along the lines of the previous autopsy incision, and where the embalmer had punctured the right groin to pump out the blood and pump in preserving fluids. Dr. Helpern announced the finding of considerable portions of a brown substance, “an abundance of petroleum jelly” and cotton wool placed in the body cavity during the embalming process.

  As his blade moved through the body, he cut off tiny slivers of the organs, handing them to attendants who quickly placed them in plastic containers and marked the contents. And his narration continued: “The liver, lungs, one kidney and the spleen are detached, showing evidence of sectioning during the prior autopsy. These are now covered with a granular compound which had been placed in the abdomen during the embalming process. The stomach is now being opened and, attached to it, the unopened small bowel and the large bowel are found.…”

  At this Dr. Helpern paused and pursed his lips. His attitude seemed to say, “Here is a woman who died abruptly and mysteriously of something perhaps ingested—and the first pathologist did not even slice open her gut to examine it!” Opening the stomach, Dr. Helpern discovered an empty region, a gray and foul-smelling organ. The gassy odors of the corpse became so strong that a nurse passed through with an aerosol room freshener.

  Nothing significant was encountered there nor was there any content of note either in the bowel or its lining. Throughout the interior of the body was gray, mushy mucosa material, product of the passage of time and the breaking down of the flesh by nature’s forces.

  Moving to the chest cavity, Dr. Helpern noted that the aging process had been going on in the aorta, the body’s principal blood vessel, but nothing curious about a woman almost forty suffering from narrowing of the arteries by cholesterol and fats. It happens to everyone. Some suspicious-looking black material in the trachea turned out to be the result of terminal aspiration. Lungs were blue-gray in color, soggy, and collapsed. Not unusual.

  The pathologist poked around for several moments in the thoracic cavity as if looking for something that should be there. Then he shook his head in mock despair and gestured with his cutting instrument to the place where the human heart normally reposes. The doctors strained to see.

  “The heart is missing, gentlemen,” said Dr. Helpern. And, just after removing the metal undertaker’s clamps that held the scalp in place, and further compounding the mysteries of the day, the pathologist announced, “The brain is absent, too.”

  Dr. Jachimczyk suggested a recess. Ordering one of his deniers to stand guard over the corpse, he led the bewildered assemblage out into the corridor for cigarettes and colas. “Damnedest case I ever saw,” said the Houston coroner. Dr. Morse, the Sharpstown pathologist who performed the first autopsy on Joan Hill in the funeral parlor after she was embalmed, approached and requested a moment of privacy.

  The missing heart was easy to explain, he said. During his autopsy, he decided to cut out the organ and take it back to his laboratory for study. If he had been working in a large hospital with a first-rate pathology lab, and if he had had access to the body before it was swimming with embalmer’s fluid, then this would not have been necessary. A few slivers from the heart would have been sufficient for study. “But I knew this was a case where I couldn’t ‘go back in’ … so to speak … and I decided I’d better take the entire heart.”

  A little testily, the coroner accepted the explanation. It is not unusual for a pathologist to remove a heart for study, even though the news is delicately withheld from a mourning family which would not enjoy knowing that the deceased was buried without its most glamorous organ. Sometimes the pathologist takes
out the heart, studies it, then at the last minute, before the coffin lid is closed, tosses it back in, wrapped in a plastic bag. The fault this day, felt Dr. Jachimczyk, was simply lack of communication. He was sorely embarrassed to have no answer when Dr. Helpern could not find Joan Hill’s heart.

  And the brain? Perhaps Dr. Morse could enlighten him about its absence?

  Yes. As a matter of fact, the brain was in the trunk of his car at that very moment and he would go outside and get it and bring it to the autopsy room. “In the trunk of your car?” echoed the coroner in disbelief. The Sharpstown pathologist’s explanation was that he was currently in the process of transferring several pathological specimens from one laboratory to another, and the container of slivers from Joan Robinson Hill’s brain was among them.

  At the time of the original autopsy, he had elected to remove the entire brain—a common procedure—because he needed to place it in a liquid called formalin. This “fixes” the tissue after a week or ten days and makes it easier to study microscopically. Brain tissue is usually too soft and mushy otherwise.

  Dr. Morse re-entered the autopsy room where Dr. Helpern and the others were waiting. In his hands he bore a white plastic container, similar to the kind women use to store frozen food. Within were several sections of what he said was the brain of Joan Robinson Hill. Immediately Dr. Helpern began examining them with his naked eye. As the visiting pathologist perused the gray and rubbery slices of human brain, Dr. Morse volunteered a new theory for the cause of death. Meningitis. Under the microscope, he suggested, Dr. Helpern would encounter inflammation, specifically an inflammatory exudate consisting of approximately fifty per cent polymorphonuclear leucocytes and fifty per cent mononuclear cells. Dr. Helpern nodded, not in assent but in acknowledgment. He would have no snap comment on this latest hunch as to the woman’s mysterious demise—first it was pancreatitis, then it was hepatitis, now it was meningitis—until he could study the brain specimens under his own microscope back in New York. Dr. Helpern’s attention returned to the spinal cord and its meninges. “The cord is fairly well preserved throughout its length,” noted Dr. Helpern.

  At 4:35 P.M., concluding almost seven hours of an emotionally and physically exhausting ordeal, Dr. Helpern put down his blade. If none of the doctors had a further notion, if no one had an idea of some other place to search for nefarious deeds, then he would release the body back to the undertaker for reburial.

  As he packed his bag with the officially marked tissue specimens, the mortuary attendants fell to the unpleasant task of redressing the corpse in the glittering gold brocade and returning it to the steel-blue box.

  “What do you think, Joe?” asked one of the doctors of the Houston coroner on the way out of the hospital.

  “I think it’s a classic example of Murphy’s Law,” Dr. Jachimczyk responded. “Everything that could possibly go wrong—has.”

  Ash Robinson drove Dr. Helpern to the airport and en route pumped him for the results of the autopsy. The pathologist was reluctant to reveal anything, realizing the volatile character of the vengeful father who was his employer in his matter. But he did volunteer that no unexplained needle marks were found, and nothing dramatic or incriminating was discovered thus far. But most of the detective work would be accomplished in the laboratory, under the microscopes.

  Then Dr. Helpern revealed the startling news about the dried mud on the lining of the casket and the tale that the grave had been opened three days after burial.

  Ash gripped the wheel to keep the big Lincoln from swerving. Why had John Hill opened his daughter’s casket without telling anybody? “That son of a bitch told me he did not want her body disturbed,” said the old man angrily.

  Racehorse Haynes asked his client for an explanation of the secret journey to his wife’s grave. Why was the casket reopened three days after burial? Nothing much to it, answered John Hill, nonplused. During their marriage he had given Joan a valuable ring. And the day after she was buried he could not locate it among her possessions. He looked everywhere, then decided it was probably on her finger. He wanted it back for sentimental reasons. That was all. Turned out it wasn’t there. Never did find the thing. Months later, this story reached Yvonne Roper, the college friend who chose Joan’s dress for her burial, and she remembered John Hill’s dictum: No jewelry. The dress was glittery enough. “My insides started to scream,” she told a friend.

  One of the doctors who represented John’s interests at the exhumation autopsy telephoned him the next day. “I think the whole thing was a farce and a waste of time,” the doctor said. “Helpern didn’t find anything that wasn’t already known. I hope your ordeal is over.”

  John murmured thanks. He was ready for a piece of hopeful news. Up to that telephone call, he felt his life was disintegrating all around him, like a cliff giving way to the sea.

  First his medical partner had left. John had hired Dr. Jim Moore fresh out of plastic surgery training, and the handsome, modish young doctor had eagerly joined the office just one year before. Not only was he skilled—with fast and sure hands—he was a powerful lure for the carriage trade. Matrons would lie down on his table happy just to have him snip their eye bags. And now John needed him for reasons above and beyond his appeal to patients. The notoriety of Joan’s death had pared his practice. Referrals from other doctors were down by at least one third. It was John’s notion that Jim Moore could keep the money coming in until the hoorah was over.

  Once or twice during the grand jury investigation, the junior man went into John’s office, shut the door, and blurted out that their relationship was being jeopardized by kooks. “We’re getting a lot of sensation seekers coming here ostensibly for consultation, but what they really want is to see the show—us,” he said. Jim Moore had hoped that his senior partner, obviously flustered and under enormous strain, would want to talk the problem out. But John merely shrugged. There was nothing he could do about it. “John won’t talk to me,” Moore told his wife. “I don’t think he talks to anybody. How can he keep everything bottled up like that?”

  Not only were the curious taking up their time, the office was a mass of continuing intrigue—taping devices on certain telephones, Ann Kurth Hill bustling in and out giving orders to nurses and upsetting them, anonymous threatening calls, patients canceling long-time relationships. When the situation worsened, Jim Moore stopped John in the hallway of their consulting rooms and said, “My patients are starting to look at me in a funny way, John. It’s guilt by association. And I can’t handle it. I’m sorry as hell. But I’m quitting.”

  “If you do, I’ll never forgive you,” said John in a rare moment of public anger.

  Later Jim Moore would feel compassion and guilt, but at this moment all he wanted to do was get out. Fast. Moving his case records out in the middle of the night. A medical career could not tolerate scandal, even hints of it.

  Next, John learned that he was the vortex of a vicious telephone campaign that was intensifying. The principal of his son’s elementary school received a call suggesting that Robert (Boot) Hill’s father was a murderer and an intolerable influence on the other children. A dermatologist called John to say that he had just been telephoned by Ash Robinson, who was giving out his ex-son-in-law’s private home telephone number with an urging that it be used. He quoted the old man as saying, “Call John Hill in the middle of the night. Pressure him. Make him confess.” The Harris County Probation Department received an anonymous call that described John Hill and his new wife, Ann Kurth, as “unfit parents.” Even the minister of the Church of Christ which John attended, the religion that shaped his life, was telephoned, and a whispery voice croaked that John Hill’s presence in the sanctuary of God was an affront to Christian people.

  At this, John was outraged. He would not tolerate slurs on his religion. The next Sunday he asked that he be given permission to make public confession before his congregation. An elder of the church, Jerry Ferguson, commented later that the surgeon was clearly devastated by w
hat was happening to him. “He asked all of us to forgive him for bringing reproach on the Church,” said Ferguson. “He said he was sorry that all of these things were happening, and that he needed the prayers of the Church to help him sustain his burden.”

  Even this painful rite of repentance somehow reached the ears of the district attorney’s office. An investigator called the church. No, the DA’s man was informed, John Hill did not make any “confession” to his wife’s death. He was merely conforming to church policy, which demands that any member who brings notoriety on the congregation must ask for forgiveness from the membership.

  Perhaps John Hill could have borne the discomfort of scandal had he found solace in the embrace of his new wife. But Ann Kurth gave him hardly more comfort than had he driven down Kirby Drive and knocked on Ash Robinson’s door. “She is driving me crazy,” the embattled surgeon told his lawyers at the end of August, just after the exhumation autopsy. “It was the biggest mistake of my life to marry her,” he said, enumerating a catalogue of violence—both verbal and physical—that he and his second wife were engaging in. Ann, he said, was possessed of a roundhouse right-hand punch; and during a quarrel she shattered her new husband’s nose—no small accomplishment since she weighed less than a hundred and twenty and he almost two hundred pounds. John drove immediately to a hospital where he set the fracture himself, using a mirror, and commenting on the procedure to a group of fascinated medical students who were watching. On another day John’s arms were so scratched—from a fight with his wife—that he searched for a long-sleeved scrub suit top to wear into surgery. To a sympathizing nurse, he remarked, “New cat at home.”

  If John Hill’s first marriage to horsewoman Joan Robinson was a mismatch, wedding number two to the ripe peach Ann Kurth was a disaster. From the beginning of the relationship, Ann was wildly jealous of her predecessor in John’s marriage bed, and she launched an assault to erase all the ghosts from the white mansion. In one violent Walpurgisnacht, John would later testify in a sworn deposition, subject to the penalty of perjury, Ann went on a rampage, shrieking deprecations at her husband, ripping up photographs of Joan, throwing her trophies against a wall, seizing a kitchen knife and scratching the silver cups and platters, hurling paint against a carved stone frieze of horses galloping on a courtyard wall outside the kitchen window. Then she lit a bonfire in an outdoor barbecue pit, threw more mementos of Joan Robinson into the flames, and stood beside it laughing. “I was helpless,” John told Racehorse. “I’d never seen a woman, any woman, behave that way.”