The Education of a Coroner

by John Bateson

  Dealing with the smell is one of the biggest challenges for coroners. “It hits you,” Dr. Melinek says in her book, as “an assault, not a scent. You flinch, heave back in revulsion. It invades your throat, assails your taste buds, even stings your eyes.”

  Says Holmes, “The odor stays with you for days no matter how many times you shower. When you burp, you smell it. If you fart, you smell it. Sometimes I had to throw away the sports coat and slacks I wore to a death scene. Other times I took them to be professionally cleaned, and the woman at the counter made a face and said, ‘Ew! What’s that smell?’ There’s no escaping it.”

  As a onetime mortician, Holmes was familiar with decomposition. What he learned after he started working in the coroner’s office was that decomposition is an important element of forensic science because it helps coroners estimate the time of death. The kinds of insects found in a body, the sequence in which they appear, and where they are in the life cycle offer clues that narrow the window between the time that a person died and when his or her body was discovered.

  The surrounding temperature and humidity influence how fast a body decomposes. Warm temperatures and high humidity accelerate the process while cooler temperatures and lower humidity slow it down. This is why coroner’s investigators note the ambient temperature at a death scene, so that they can gauge how long decomposition has been taking place.

  Near the mobile home Holmes was met by two other officers and a civilian named Orrell. All of them were covering their noses and mouths with handkerchiefs to try to combat the smell. Orrell told Holmes what he had already told the officers, namely that he was a teacher at San Quentin Prison, and the mobile home was owned by a paroled felon he knew named James McQueary.

  McQueary told Orrell earlier that day that he had picked up a female hitchhiker and brought her to his mobile home before he went off to work. When he returned, she was dead. Her neck had been slashed, and she was clothed only in panties. McQueary said he didn’t know who killed her, but because people would think he did, he called Orrell, whom he thought he could confide in. Orrell told him that he was obligated to notify the police, and McQueary asked him to wait twenty-four hours until McQueary could, in his words, “square it with his wife.” Orrell said he couldn’t do that, that he needed to call the police as soon as he got off the phone with McQueary.

  Behind McQueary’s residence was the shed, and the odor emanated from there. The officers told Holmes that the shed had been padlocked, and they had to use bolt cutters to gain access. The floor was covered with heavy cardboard, and a mattress box spring was standing on edge to one side. Outside the shed, near a chain-link fence, was a freshly dug hole five feet long, two feet wide, and two feet deep—apparently intended as a grave.

  The decedent was in the rear of the shed, wrapped in two blankets and small sections of shag carpet. On top of her battered and slashed body were the clothes she had been wearing when she disappeared—a dark jacket, floral-print dress, and high-heeled shoes—plus a tan purse. Inside the purse was identification. The clothes and identification matched the information in a missing-persons report that had been filed a week earlier for nineteen-year-old Terry Ann Listman. Holmes confirmed her identity through a subsequent comparison of Terry’s dental records.

  The air inside the shed was like a furnace, even at midnight, and the smell of decomposition was overwhelming. As Holmes peeled back the carpet and blankets, the temperature got even hotter because Terry’s body was generating heat. The odor also intensified, almost forcing Holmes out of the shed because it was so pungent.

  After noting the condition of the body, plus the circumstances in which it was found, Holmes and one of the police officers drove to Terry’s house. It was Holmes’s first death notification on his own, and he tried to be factual without sounding officious. He told Terry’s parents that their daughter had been found, that she was the apparent victim of a murder, and that her body had been taken to a funeral home for autopsy. He spared them the details, only telling them that she wasn’t recognizable and they shouldn’t try to view her remains.

  “Instead, remember her the way she was when you last saw her,” he said.

  Terry’s mother had driven her to a bus stop in Novato at 7:30 A.M. the day she disappeared, never knowing that it would be the last time she would see her daughter. Terry was taking public transit to a job she started two weeks earlier as a clerk in a San Rafael office, but she never made it. At 9 A.M. she called her employer “in a shaky voice,” he said, and said she was delayed by personal problems. In all likelihood, she already had been abducted and was forced to make the call.

  Later, her parents pushed to see the photos that police officers and Holmes had taken at the scene. This isn’t unusual. Until they see the photos, family members often hold on to the slim hope that the deceased is someone else and their loved one is still alive. The photos usually aren’t released to families, however, mainly because they tend to be graphic and unsparing in their depiction of what happened. Legally, families can’t be prevented from seeing them, but in this instance the coroner’s office refused.

  “The photos looked nothing like Terry because of the brutality of her murder and because her body was badly decomposed,” Holmes says. “It would have been awful for her parents to have that final memory of her.”

  Terry’s parents could have taken the coroner’s office to court to access the photos, but they didn’t have the fight in them to do that. As a result, the photos stayed hidden.

  “So what happened to McQueary?” I asked.

  Holmes didn’t remember, but he retrieved a large black binder of newspaper clippings that the coroner’s office maintained in his early years. Every day the secretary pored through articles and notices in the Independent Journal—Marin County’s primary newspaper—and clipped any news story or obituary that pertained to a case that the coroner’s office handled. The clippings were dated with a black pen and Scotch-taped onto twenty-by-twenty-four-inch sheets of paper in more or less chronological order. They ended in 1981 because people lost interest in them, and when Holmes retired thirty years later, he heard that the new coroner was going to throw the binder away.

  “I’ll take it if no one else wants it,” Holmes said.

  The articles had yellowed with age but proved to be an important resource in compiling this book because they added details that weren’t in the coroner’s files or available pre-Internet. Chief among them was what happened to the killer in homicide cases. Typically, these cases take several years to play out, by which time the coroner’s office has moved on to other cases.

  Now Holmes leafed through pages until he found several articles with follow-ups to Terry Listman’s death. It turned out that McQueary had been released from San Quentin the previous year after serving four years for kidnapping, assault, and attempted rape. On parole, and required to have a job, he was employed as a barber in a convalescent hospital. People there knew him as a smooth talker, and he was able to convince his wife that he was innocent. The two of them fled to Washington State, where he was arrested a year later and convicted of Terry’s murder.

  In the coming months and years, Holmes would be called to the scene of many grisly deaths. None would match this first one, though.

  “More police officers were moved that night by the condition of Terry’s body than I ever witnessed again,” he says. “Even longtime cops were visibly affected.”

  The experience would stay with Holmes forever.

  A BUSY FIRST MONTH

  Two days after Terry Listman’s death, Holmes was investigating another murder. This time a thirty-nine-year-old real estate agent named Donald Moore was found dead in a vacant one-story house in Mill Valley. Holmes learned that Moore had had an appointment to show the house the previous evening to a man who said that he wanted to see vacant homes only. The following morning, when Moore didn’t return to his own home, his wife called the police and said that her husband was missing.

  The same day, a
nother realtor went to the house to show it to a client. He discovered that the lockbox had been broken and the front door key was missing. When he looked through the window, he saw Moore lying lifeless on the dining room floor.

  It was clearly a homicide. Moore’s throat had been cut and some of his blood had splattered fifteen feet. Holmes measured the distance, as he had been instructed to do, and took photos. Moore didn’t have a wallet on him, but he did have business cards. A woman from his office came to the morgue and identified his body so that Moore’s wife wouldn’t have to do it. Holmes was left with telling Mrs. Moore that her husband had been murdered. After she recovered from the shock, she told Holmes that she had a six-year-old son from a previous marriage that had been a disaster, and married Moore just recently.

  It didn’t take long for police to solve the case. Mrs. Moore’s first husband, a forty-one-year-old contractor named Darrell Gardner, was spotted the next day, “grinning from ear to ear,” according to a witness. It turned out he paid four thousand dollars to two men to kill his ex-wife’s new spouse. All three men were convicted and sent to prison.

  Moore’s death was followed by the death of a twenty-five-year-old secretary. She died from carbon monoxide poisoning and thermal burns resulting from a fire in her split-level, wood-frame home in Inverness, where she and her husband lived.

  The husband told Holmes that at 1 A.M. his wife woke him and yelled, “Get out of the house, it’s burning!” She even pushed him out of the building. As he exited, he turned to grab her, but she had gone back inside. The last he saw of her, she was outlined in a sheet of flames.

  The Marin County Fire Department responded, and firefighters called the coroner’s office after finding the woman’s remains on top of a bed and beneath fallen roof beams. The fire was still burning in sections of the building when Holmes arrived, wearing a helmet, turnout, heavy coat, and gloves. The woman’s body was completely charred, her abdominal organs were exposed, and both of her legs and one arm were missing. Holmes lifted what was left of her out of hot cinders so that she could be delivered to a funeral home for autopsy. The results, when they came back, were negative; no drugs or alcohol were found in her system. The woman’s husband told Holmes that she must have gone back inside to retrieve something, although he didn’t know what it was.

  Holmes investigated two other homicides his first month, making a total of four—more than the whole office handled in a typical month. In addition, he investigated five suicides, four accidental deaths, two undetermined deaths, and several natural deaths. It was just the luck of the draw as to which investigator was on duty at the time the call came in. When Dr. Jindrich told Holmes that he would need to hit the ground running, it was truer than Holmes knew.

  CHAPTER 03

  THE BARBECUE MURDERS

  Ken Holmes had been on the job only two months when the coroner’s office was called in to investigate a case in Terra Linda that received national attention as it unfolded and was compared to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter. The Washington Post called it a “close-up of a deadly family explosion,” while the Philadelphia Inquirer said it was a “grim tale of love, hate, sex, drugs, and murder.” The Los Angeles Times described it as a “round robin of drugs, shoplifting, [and] sexual kinkiness that transcended mere promiscuity, pop mysticism, demonology, and total rebellion.” Holmes just calls it “the Olive case.”

  Terra Linda is a sleepy bedroom community in Marin County that is annexed to San Rafael. My parents moved there when I was four, and stayed there long past the time when I and my younger siblings attended Terra Linda High School. Violent crimes were virtually nonexistent, and when two sets of human bones were found in a barbecue pit in a park, it set off a wave of local interest that culminated in a courtroom trial that was spellbinding.

  In Bad Blood: A Family Murder in Marin County, author Richard Levine recounts the initial meeting between Charles “Chuck” Riley and Marlene Olive. It was in front of Terra Linda High School, six years after I graduated. Marlene was sitting cross-legged on the ground, “her downcast face hidden from onlookers by the curtain of her long dark hair.” She was sixteen years old and stifling sobs, not because she had been hurt but because she was on her first acid trip and it wasn’t a good one.

  Riley, age nineteen, got the crowd to back off, then knelt beside her. He offered her a marijuana joint to “level her out,” but she refused it, as well as his overtures to learn her name or have a conversation. Several minutes later a female friend came and led her inside the school to a restroom.

  Marlene and Riley would never forget the day, but for different reasons. Riley had never had a girlfriend, and felt that he had met the love of his life. Overweight, sexually naïve, and lacking confidence, he was struck by Marlene’s apparent innocence and hypnotized by her penetrating eyes. She, in turn, believed that after dropping LSD she had undergone a personality change. She started hanging out with a different crowd and began cultivating a wild streak that resulted in frequent fights with her parents, especially her mother.

  Up to that time, Marlene and Riley had led considerably different lives. Neither smart nor athletic, Riley gained a measure of popularity by selling drugs to fellow students. After he graduated, he continued to be their supplier. That was what he was doing at the high school that day, dealing marijuana. Marlene was adopted as an infant by James and Naomi Olive, and she felt perpetually abandoned, first by her birth mother, then by her adoptive parents—her father who always seemed busy with work and her mother who was withdrawn and alcoholic. The family had moved to Ecuador when Marlene was young because of a business opportunity for James, and Marlene—who learned Spanish and English simultaneously—spent a lot of time on her own. She idolized her father, who was tolerant and loving, but resented her mother, whose emotional and psychological problems led to frequent shouting matches between the two. As Marlene grew into adolescence, and especially after the family moved to Marin County, the hostility she felt for her mother escalated. Her mother was too restrictive, too overbearing, and too helpless as far as Marlene was concerned. The world—and certainly Marlene herself—would be better off without her.

  At the beginning of his relationship with her, Riley fawned over Marlene while she paid him scant attention. After a while, though, his puppy-dog devotion began to have an effect and she realized that he would do anything for her. Around this time she developed a strong affinity for the occult, believing that she had mystical powers and was capable of controlling people with her eyes. She also read and believed in The Satanic Bible.

  The Satanic Bible instructs witches in training to manipulate people by attracting and holding their attention. In Chuck Riley, Marlene Olive found a willing subject for her spells.

  The Olives welcomed Riley into their home early on, believing that he was a better influence on their daughter than her other friends. After all, he was working—first selling vacuum cleaners, then water beds. Moreover, he was polite, respectful, and dressed conservatively, buttoning his shirts all the way to the neck until Marlene chided him about it. Meanwhile, Marlene’s mother thought that her daughter dressed “like a whore” in low-cut tops, an opinion that led Marlene to wear even more provocative clothing to annoy her.

  Riley’s parents saw the hold that Marlene had on their son and in one way were pleased; Riley started exercising more, shedding pounds and improving his physique. In another way, though, they were alarmed. He submitted to her demands so willingly that it was as if he no longer was able to make decisions on his own.

  On numerous occasions, Marlene told her friends that she wished her mother was dead. Her friends shrugged it off; after all, many adolescents don’t get along with their parents. Even when Marlene asked if anyone knew someone who would kill for money, her friends didn’t take it seriously. By this time she and Riley were lovers—monogamously on his part, less so on hers—and she felt that she couldn’t tolerate her mother any longer. Moreover, when she saw some of h
er father’s papers accidentally, she realized that she was the sole beneficiary of her parents’ life insurance policy and stood to inherit between $30,000 and $50,000 if her parents died. She told Riley that it would be enough for the two of them to start a new life in South America.

  Riley was mesmerized by the promise of spending the rest of his life with her. Already she had convinced him to shoplift clothes, jewelry, purses, and perfume from local department stores, going so far as to tell him in advance which items she wanted.

  Realizing that Riley wasn’t nearly the positive influence they had thought, James and Naomi Olive forbade their daughter from seeing him. Riley was horrified by the thought that the two of them might be separated. When Marlene told him to get a gun in order to kill her mother, he did.

  What happened next became the subject of newspaper headlines around the country. While James and Marlene were out, Riley went to the Olives’ one-story, ranch-style house in Terra Linda. Marlene had made sure that the front door was unlocked, and Riley stepped inside. Mrs. Olive was in a bedroom napping, and Riley had the gun in a paper bag. He didn’t shoot her, though. Instead, Naomi Olive was bludgeoned with a claw hammer. The hammer became lodged in her head, and Riley was about to pull it out when he heard a car in the driveway. The sudden return of Marlene and her father surprised him, and Riley hid behind a large dresser. When James Olive walked in, he saw the open door and his wife lying on the bed with blood all around her and the hammer buried in her skull. Then he saw Riley.