by John Bateson
With one car between them, the investigators had to work out a system for handoffs. Around 7:30 A.M., the person whose shift was ending drove to the house of the next person on duty. That person got behind the wheel and drove the first person home. Along the way, the first person briefed the second person on everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. Then the second person drove to work in order to be in the office by 8 A.M. It was a somewhat cumbersome routine, but this way the car was always available and each investigator was apprised of recent developments.
The car itself had two big toolboxes with everything they might need—camera equipment, fingerprint kits, report booklets, collection bottles and bags (zip-lock plastic bags for liquids; sandwich-sized paper bags for biological specimens), tape measures, temperature gauges, digging tools, flashlight, blunt scissors to cut off clothing, body bags of various sizes, evidence seals, insect collection kits, and more. One of the most important items was a magnifying glass, referred to as “the clue finder.”
Investigators carried both toolboxes whenever they approached a possible crime scene because they didn’t want to be going back and forth, contaminating possible evidence. At the front door, they put on booties before going inside. If they had to go back out to the car, they took the booties off, went to the car, came back, and put the booties on again so that they weren’t transferring anything. Just picking up a leaf or sand and bringing it inside a house could change things. It was a practice that developed over time. When Holmes started, they didn’t have booties. Instead he was told, “Watch where you walk.”
Holmes remembers an incident that makes him chuckle today. “The sheriff’s office had a really good crime scene investigator named Ed. One time I walked into a double homicide in Kentfield, and Ed was filling me in on what happened. We were standing just inside the front door, and I said, ‘So, where did this whole thing go down?’ He said, ‘Well, it started here at the door and went all the way down the hall. The first woman is in there and the second one is in there.’ ”
Two women, ages thirty-seven and forty, had been shot. Plastic bags of heroin were near their bodies, and drug paraphernalia was in the bathroom.
“It turned out they were pretty high up in the drug world,” Holmes says, “and were killed in separate rooms. I happened to be looking down when Ed shuffled his feet, and I saw that he was standing on a nine-millimeter casing. I said, ‘So, the shooting started around here?’ ”
Ed said, “Yeah, we think it was right here.”
Holmes said, “Would that be the nine-millimeter casing you were just standing on?”
Ed looked down, saw the casing, and rolled his eyes. “Oh my God, I can’t believe I just did that.”
He went outside and walked around the house a couple of times, muttering to himself. “In that particular instance it didn’t matter,” Holmes says, “but it could have.”
Each investigator had a foot locker in the car to hold his own fire gear—turnout, boots, gloves, coat, and helmet—because they were different sizes. They kept hiking boots and mountain gear in the locker, too, for times when they had to climb up a hillside or down an embankment to get to a dead body.
The expectation was that investigators would be on the scene within a half hour of receiving the call unless they were on another case already or the scene was a remote area of the county. It wasn’t a state or county mandate; rather, it was something Dr. Jindrich required.
“It seemed like the right thing to do,” Holmes says. “In San Francisco, cops wait two hours or more for the coroner to arrive. They’re busier and have a bigger population, so it’s understandable.”
Law enforcement appreciated the fast response. If the scene was a house, though, and no one else was present, the coroner’s investigator made the cop stay because he didn’t want to be there alone due to the liability. A family member could claim later that something valuable was missing and imply that the investigator took it.
CHAPTER 05
AT THE SCENE
Whenever Holmes arrived at a death scene, the police officer who responded to the initial call from the county’s Communications Center met him outside, away from anyone else who happened to be present. Then, in private, the officer told Holmes what he had learned.
“It’s a ninety-two-year-old woman named Bertha,” the cop might say. “She hadn’t seen her doctor in four months. Meals on Wheels came by yesterday and dropped off a meal, and when the volunteer came today the meal was still on the front porch. He knocked, but didn’t get an answer, so he went around the back, looked in the window, saw her in bed, unmoving and not breathing, and called us. We jimmied the door, went in, and confirmed that she’s 10-55.”
With that brief rundown, Holmes knew what the police knew even before he entered the house. From the minute he went inside, however, he was looking around. She was probably in the back bedroom, but he scanned each room anyway. If he saw her walker lying on its side, or that her cane had slid in dust on the floor, he took note of it because he could never back up. It might be that the caretaker kicked the cane out from under her, and she fell and hit her head and the caretaker lifted her and put her in bed. Holmes would never know it if he didn’t notice the cane. Or he might notice the cane, think nothing of it, step in the dust to pick it up, and ruin the evidence.
This scenario was one Holmes actually used at the police academy when it was his responsibility to lay out a death scene for a training session. New recruits who didn’t see the cane or ignored it failed to uncover the truth.
Investigators try to take note of everything, not necessarily writing it down unless it’s a lot to remember, but not ignoring anything, either. There might be a will on a table that police failed to see. Maybe Bertha planned her death. Maybe she deliberately stopped taking her medication, or she took too much of it.
This is why investigators count all of the decedent’s pills, every pill in every bottle that is at least six months or newer. Many people don’t throw away medication for years, which is why only newer medications are counted. The quantity of pills oftentimes is staggering.
“Three cases out of five,” Holmes says, “we came back to the office with shopping bags—literally—full of bottles of meds.”
Every case other than a natural death was treated as a homicide. Even if there was a suicide note, the coroner’s office considered it a homicide until the investigator knew for a fact that it wasn’t. Murders draw the most attention, mainly because there is a good chance that the case will end up in court, and this way it was less likely that something would be overlooked or wrongly assumed.
After talking with the responding officer, Holmes sought out anyone who was present at the scene and knew the deceased—family members, neighbors, caretakers, friends, apartment managers, janitors—whoever. He sat down with them if it was appropriate, or remained standing if that was more proper, and asked them to tell him everything he needed to know. He didn’t say, “All I want are the facts, ma’am.” Instead, he said, “Tell me about Bertha.”
He gleaned what he could, and always went to these individuals first, before examining the deceased. For one thing, Bertha was dead and not going anywhere until Holmes okayed it, so she could wait. More important, though he couldn’t help Bertha he might be able to help the people around her, even if it was nothing more than helping them understand why he was in their house.
Until Quincy and other TV shows, coroners were foreign to most people, thrust into their lives without them knowing or comprehending why. Even today, many people have misperceptions about the role of the coroner. Fictional characterizations emphasize the detective and doctor sides of the job because these are what interest readers and viewers the most, while other facets—consoler, advocate, educator, mentor, teacher, and bureaucrat—are largely ignored. Yet all are important.
Holmes might tell family members and others that the reason he was there was that Bertha’s doctor wasn’t available and police officers thought it would be
best for the coroner to come out and take a look. If everything was as it should be, Holmes told them that he would leave soon and Bertha’s doctor could complete the death certificate when he or she had the chance.
If the surviving family member was an elderly woman, Holmes sat next to her on the couch—“I wouldn’t sit across from her or stand over her, I would sit next to her on the couch”—and if it was appropriate he’d take her hand before he told her why the coroner was involved. It might be because a doctor wasn’t present and the decedent could have an infectious disease, so it was a safeguard for her to have the coroner make sure that that wasn’t the case. If it wasn’t a natural death, then the reason he was there might be more obvious, but he always explained it anyway.
After that, he went to the room or place where the body was. Sometimes family members followed, and he never asked them not to, because it was their home and their loved one. From a few feet away, he tried to match what he was seeing with what he already knew. The cop said this and the family said that. Did it jibe with what he observed? Next, he did the TV thing, putting two fingers on the side of the person’s neck to see if there was a pulse. If loved ones were present, Holmes nodded for their benefit, confirming that the person was indeed dead. He didn’t say, “Yeah, the fireman was right.” He just nodded.
At the police academy, and as part of his initial training, Holmes learned to look for indications of foul play even if that didn’t seem likely. He learned to pull down the decedent’s lower lip and raise the eyelids because if a person suffocates, his or her lower lip might be chewed up. Even a frail, elderly woman who died because someone put a pillow over her head might have a chewed-up lip. He also examined the little fold of tissue at the front of the mouth, before the teeth, called the frenulum. If it was torn, or if the tongue was bitten, those were signs that the person might have been strangled or had a seizure. Broken fingernails were another clue. They indicated a struggle and a possible homicide.
Next, Holmes looked at the decedent’s eyes using a magnifying glass if necessary to check for petechia hemorrhages. These are little dots from broken blood vessels in the whites of the eye. Oftentimes the dots are no bigger than pinpricks, but if they are present it means the decedent ran out of oxygen or his or her blood supply returning to the heart was cut off.
“In a manual strangulation,” Holmes explains, “if you close down over somebody’s neck, you stop the blood from getting back to the heart so it starts backing up. The pressure from the heart pumping blood ruptures all of the tiny arteries, and these little petechia hemorrhages start to appear. You see them all over in the white of the eye, and it’s an indication that there was some restriction to the blood flow back to the heart. It could be caused by several things, but the most likely one is someone had his hands around the decedent’s neck, or a sheet around the neck, or a whole pillow over the face. The killer thinks he’s restricting the person’s airway, and he is, to a point, but he’s also restricting the blood flow. He sees the decedent’s eyes go wide, but he doesn’t see the tiny dots. We do.”
If somebody was dead and a witness said the person had a heart attack, Holmes lifted up the decedent’s shirt. This was because in a typical heart attack, a person’s skin color is normal from the heart down and berry-colored from the heart up. The heart has stopped working while everything else is still functioning.
“The person’s neck, cheeks, and all around the mouth might be deep red or purple—not so much the lips,” Holmes says. “The change isn’t due to strangulation or to being inverted and hung by the heels; it’s the result of a heart attack. Thus, if someone said that the deceased had multiple heart attacks in the past and this was just one more, and I didn’t see lividity to prove it, then I had to ask more questions. It still could be a heart attack; it just wasn’t a typical heart attack.”
There were other signs that he learned to look for. Were the hands relaxed or were the fingers stretched? Were the toes curled under or were they stretched? Were the legs crossed?
If the hands were relaxed and the person’s legs were crossed, it meant that at the moment of death, he or she wasn’t afraid and didn’t know that anything bad was going to happen. If appendages were stretched, however, it meant the person had a heavy muscular contraction and may have experienced pain before dying.
“Somebody who is suffocated with a pillow, for instance, won’t have his or her feet crossed, and the typical killer won’t think afterward to position them that way,” Holmes says.
All of these were part of the picture that he was looking at. The picture was a puzzle and the pieces needed to fit together.
“If I didn’t see any of these things,” he says, “that was good because it matched the story I was told when I got there. Even if I saw some of these things, however, it didn’t necessarily mean that there was anything wild or crazy going on. It just meant that I needed to ask more questions in order to better understand what I was seeing.”
LIVIDITY, RIGOR, AND TEMPERATURE
After taking a stand-back look, then doing “the little run-through,” as Holmes calls it—checking the lip, examining the eyes, looking at the tongue, seeing whether the fingernails were broken or blanched (turning red or purple or white), and noting the position of fingers, legs, and toes—he checked for lividity, rigor mortis, and body temperature. These are the big three when it comes to estimating the time that has elapsed since the person died. Each one provides part of the answer, and Holmes tried to get the three of them to converge until the window of time was narrowed as much as possible.
Lividity refers to the coloration of a person’s skin after death. The heart stops pumping, and blood begins to settle in response to gravity, turning the skin dark red or purple. For example, if a dead man is lying on his back, the backs of his ears and the back of his neck will be red, but his cheeks won’t be. If he’s lying on his stomach, then his chest and the front of his legs will be red. It’s a little harder to tell if the person has dark skin, but still discernible.
Lividity usually starts within thirty minutes of death. After eight hours it is fairly fixed because blood congeals and vessels begin to break down. There are exceptions, though.
“Lividity happens rapidly when people have been lying for days, dying slowly,” Holmes says. “Their blood is getting sluggish, and when their heart finally stops, their blood gravitates within minutes. Conversely, if someone is riding a bicycle, pumping hard, right before dying, his or her blood might not even start to coagulate for an hour.”
Lividity is important for another reason besides helping to determine the time of death. If Holmes saw that the decedent was lying on his right side, for example, but his left side was red, then the person had been moved. Maybe paramedics changed the person’s position to put a monitor on. If he knew this, Holmes didn’t need to ask any more questions about lividity. If no one claimed to have moved the decedent, though, more investigation was needed.
Rigor mortis, from the Latin words for “stiffness” and “of death,” refers to the condition of a body when limbs become rigid and hard to move due to chemical changes in muscles after someone dies. It begins about eight hours after death in most cases, and always starts in the jaw, regardless of the person’s position or the ambient temperature. This is because the jaw is the strongest muscle in the human body. With the onset of rigor mortis, the jaw begins to clamp down or lock shut. Then rigor mortis works its way down, affecting the elbows before the wrists and the wrists before the fingers, the legs before the ankles and the ankles before the toes. After twenty-four to forty-eight hours, depending on the temperature, rigor mortis starts to dissolve on its own. The order is the same. The jaw starts to loosen, then the arms and fingers, followed by the legs and toes. Thus someone with a rigid jaw but flaccid legs is in the early stages of rigor mortis, meaning that he or she has been dead roughly eight hours. If it’s the reverse, if the jaw is loose but the feet are tense, then the person is in a later stage and probably has been dead a day
or more.
Again, though, there are exceptions. In one case, Holmes observed rigor mortis start in only twenty minutes.
“He was a professional body builder who was in the middle of a strenuous workout when he died,” Holmes says. “He was in rigor so fast that I would have thought he had been dead for several hours. Other people were with him, though, so I knew exactly when he died.”
At the other end of the extreme, Holmes examined people who he knew had been dead fifteen hours yet didn’t have any rigor. They had been bedridden for so long that their muscles had atrophied to almost nothing.
Holmes knew a little about lividity and rigor mortis from his experiences as a mortician, but the importance of body temperature was new to him. So were the variables.
Bodies cool down after death until they become the temperature of the room they are in or the surrounding environment. In the first hour, body temperature actually can go up a degree or two due to the chemical reaction of dying. After that, though, it goes down one to two degrees every four hours until it reaches the ambient temperature.
Many death investigators, including Holmes, take a decedent’s temperature the old-fashioned way, by sticking their hand on the person’s forehead and in an armpit. A lot of it is feel.
“If someone’s body temperature was close to my hand temperature,” he says, “which was less than ninety-eight degrees—it was probably ninety-five or ninety-six degrees because it had been out in the air—then the person probably had been dead an hour because I had to account for a slight increase at first. The exception was if the decedent had a fever. Then I asked why. Oh, she was on ecstasy? Ecstasy increases your body temperature two to three degrees immediately. Methamphetamine can increase a person’s temperature five degrees. A person can have a fever of 103 to 105 degrees for days on end if he or she stays on meth.”