by John Bateson
Just looking up information wasn’t enough, however. He needed to be able to retain it, which proved to be harder.
“When it came to drugs, memorization was difficult for me. I found myself looking up the same compounds on many occasions. After a while I was able to remember the basics, but still I found myself continually referring to books on drugs and prescription medications.”
In upper-class areas like Marin County, painkiller addiction is rampant. According to the California Department of Justice, doctors in Marin and other Bay Area counties wrote out 2.2 million prescriptions for opiate painkillers—OxyContin, Vicodin, Percocet, and the like—in 2013. That is nearly one prescription for every three people who live in the region. Hard drugs often follow. According to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, nearly 80 percent of people who use heroin have a history of abusing prescription painkillers.
Holmes used to keep a large glass jar on his desk. It was filled with three of every pill that he and other investigators in the office found at the site of drug overdoses.
“These are the kinds of things that you have in your medicine cabinet,” Holmes told parents. “Every pill in this jar came from a bottle that we retrieved after someone died overdosing on them.”
It wasn’t just their own medicine cabinets, Holmes said, that parents had to be concerned about. It was the medicine cabinets of strangers, too.
“Adults are smart,” Holmes says, “but when it comes to drugs, kids are smarter. During real estate open homes, they go into bathrooms and look in medicine cabinets. They also go to garage sales, estate sales, and moving sales, asking whichever adult is there, ‘Do you mind if I use your bathroom?’ ”
As for hard drugs, Holmes kept samples in his office of white, brown, and black tar heroin, plus cocaine and methamphetamine. “This is what heroin looks like,” he told parents. “If you see this on your teenage daughter’s dresser, you know that she’s using drugs. Stop telling yourself that she’s safe. She’s not; she’s using drugs.”
What Holmes tried to impress on kids when he talked with them about drugs was that users didn’t always know what they were buying. The consequences of that ignorance could be deadly.
“I may go to you for my weekly fix,” he told them, “and I trust what you’re selling me because you’re my friend or the friend of a friend or have been my regular supplier, but then one day you’re not there, you’re in jail or whatever. I go to somebody on the street because I’m sick and really need help, and they could sell me anything—it might be shoe polish, or maybe it’s baking soda. I prepare it the same way I prepare the stuff I’m used to, inject it into my arm, and could be dead before I even pull out the needle.” It was a sobering message.
When a fourteen-year-old girl named Diana deliberately overdosed, Holmes found her parents, particularly her father, surprisingly blasé about it. Her body was discovered by her best friend, named Emma, lying on the water bed in her bedroom, under a comforter. A suicide note was next to the bed, along with a plastic bag containing codeine and other prescription painkillers.
She had told her parents that she wasn’t feeling well and wasn’t going to school. Her father said he would check back later to see if she was feeling better. Instead, after work he called Emma and asked her to look in on Diana, then he went to a gym to exercise.
At Emma’s request, Holmes talked with her alone, out of earshot of Emma’s parents. Emma said she had known Diana since first grade, and while Diana didn’t seek out friends, she was well liked. At the same time, she was pessimistic and mentioned suicide periodically.
“Did Diana say how she would kill herself?” Holmes asked.
“Pills,” Emma said. “Always pills. A year ago she experimented with tying things around her neck to see how long it took for her to become unconscious, but she told me pills were how she planned to do it. She experimented with overdosing two or three times, taking pills—mainly Valium, I think—and then falling asleep.”
“Did you know that she was stockpiling medications?”
Emma bowed her head and said softly, “Yeah. Two weeks ago she showed me the bag.”
Holmes considered this. “What else did Diana tell you?”
“She told me she’d written several suicide notes and hidden them in her room.”
“Did you see any of them?”
Her voice was faint. “No.”
“Did you tell anyone about Diana’s suicidal thoughts or previous attempts?”
“I told my mother.”
“What did she do?”
“She told Diana’s parents.”
Emma said that Diana had been nearly blind since birth, and because her eyesight was so bad she never knew what she looked like since she couldn’t see her image in a mirror very well. Then, with her fourth corneal transplant six months earlier, she could see herself clearly for the first time and didn’t like what she saw.
After talking with Emma, Holmes talked with Emma’s mother. “Emma said you told Diana’s parents you thought Diana might try to kill herself soon,” he said.
Emma’s mother nodded. “I did. I said that in addition to her other problems, I thought Diana was fearful of going into high school next year and said they might want to get counseling for her. I was surprised they didn’t do it.”
“Do you know why they didn’t?”
“I guess they decided she didn’t need it or that it wouldn’t help.”
Next, Holmes talked with a sixteen-year-old boy named Justin. One of Diana’s suicide notes was addressed to him and said, in part, “I loved you and still do very much. I’m so so so sorry!”
“How long had you known Diana, and how did you meet?” Holmes asked. Being two years older, Justin was in high school while Diana was in middle school.
Justin said, “We met five months ago, through Emma.”
“How would you describe your relationship with Diana?”
“We were friends,” Justin said. “Not boyfriend-girlfriend, but good friends.”
“Did she ever mention suicide to you?”
Justin hesitated before answering. “Yeah, a couple of times. She said her parents didn’t love her, they only pretended to. The last couple of days she seemed better, though, not depressed.”
“Did she tell you about experimenting with suicide?”
“No, just that she thought about suicide sometimes.”
“Did she tell you that she had written notes a month earlier, or that she had stockpiled pills?”
Justin shook his head.
“Did you know about her medical problems?” Holmes said.
“Yeah,” Justin said. “She told me that for her recent eye surgery she had been in the hospital four or five days and her father never visited her, never called her, never sent a card or flowers. That reinforced her feelings that her parents didn’t love her.”
Holmes talked with Diana’s father three times. The first time was a day after Diana died. He said she was “upbeat,” did well in school, and had no problems. The second time, Holmes questioned him about Diana’s medical history, which included jaw reconstruction surgery and the corneal transplants. Diana’s father downplayed them, saying that she recovered and that her vision after the fourth transplant improved considerably. He was more concerned about who was going to pay for his front door, which had been kicked in during the 911 response.
“Who do I call to seek reimbursement and also investigate who did the kicking and why?” he said. In addition, he wanted to know if anyone was going to investigate Justin and why “a guy so much older was hanging around young girls.”
In their third conversation, Diana’s father said that Diana, Emma, and Justin “may have had a suicide pact of some sort because there is something fishy about the whole thing.”
“Why do you say that?” Holmes said.
The father said, “It’s just a feeling, based on the other suicide notes we found in Diana’s bedroom, dated a month earlier, and knowin
g that she stockpiled pills.”
“Did you ever seek counseling for Diana?”
“No. Why would we?”
“It sounds like she had a lot of issues to deal with, being nearly blind since birth, having a deformed jaw, going through multiple surgeries, taking a lot of medications. All that would affect a young girl’s sense of self-esteem, I would think.”
“She always had everything she wanted,” Diana’s father said, “and really had no problems.”
Holmes was getting a good idea of what Diana’s life probably had been like. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said. There was nothing else he could say.
CHAPTER 12
THE BRIDGE
The Golden Gate Bridge is one of the most beautiful man-made structures in the world. Spanning the mouth of San Francisco Bay, and joining the city and county of San Francisco with Marin County, it’s an architectural and engineering triumph. For all of its grandeur, however, its magnificent setting, elegant design, and storied construction, the Golden Gate Bridge has a dark side. From the day it opened in 1937 until now, it has been the world’s top suicide site.
There are several reasons why the bridge is so deadly. One reason is that it was the first bridge in the world to span a major harbor, so it had to be tall enough to accommodate large ships passing underneath. The roadbed is 220 feet above the water, making jumping from it equivalent to jumping from a twenty-five-story building.
Another reason is that access is easy. There are walkways on each side of the bridge—on the west side for bicyclists and on the east side for pedestrians—that run the bridge’s length and are open year-round. In addition, there are parking lots at both ends, and buses to the bridge operate frequently.
A third reason is that some people believe jumping from the bridge spares family members the agony of finding their body. A person’s remains are either swept out to sea, never to be seen again, or retrieved by the Coast Guard. Either way, there is no gruesome cleanup for loved ones.
Then there is the lure of the bridge. Suicide sites, by virtue of their repute, tend to attract depressed people to them, and no site exerts a stronger pull than the Golden Gate Bridge. Each new death adds to its siren’s call.
These reasons wouldn’t be important if the bridge had a suicide deterrent, but to date it doesn’t. In fact, the Golden Gate Bridge is the only major international landmark without one. The existing railing is only four feet high—short enough for almost anyone to jump or climb over it. Original plans included a higher railing specifically to prevent suicides, but in a last-minute design decision the railing was lowered to enhance the view.
Ken Holmes wasn’t always in favor of a suicide deterrent on the bridge. He didn’t oppose one, but he didn’t think it was a high priority. Until 1990, the Marin County Coroner’s Office handled one or two cases a year where the body of a Golden Gate Bridge jumper either washed up in the county or the person jumped on the Marin side close enough to shore that he or she struck land rather than water. Holmes knew that the coroner’s office in San Francisco handled a few more cases because Coast Guard Station Golden Gate, which retrieved the bodies of jumpers, was based in the city and delivered them there, but he didn’t know how many more. No one really did. Unlike Marin, the San Francisco Coroner’s Office didn’t track Golden Gate Bridge suicides as a separate category of deaths. Instead, cases were lumped in with jumps from other structures, such as hotels. In 1990, however, Station Golden Gate relocated to Marin County and Marin assumed responsibility for investigating most of the suicides from the bridge. That was when Holmes realized the problem was much bigger than he had thought. Instead of one or two cases a year, Marin began handling thirty to forty cases annually.
In one case, a thirty-two-year-old San Jose man murdered his wife, grabbed their three-year-old daughter, and drove to the Golden Gate Bridge. Two Bridge Patrol officers noticed him acting strange and stopped their car mid-span to talk to him. Seeing them, the man stood with his back to the railing, lifted his daughter over his head, and threw her off the bridge. Before the officers could get close to him, he followed her over the railing.
Father and daughter were recovered in the water by the Coast Guard within fifteen minutes, only five feet from each other. CPR was started immediately on both of them by Coast Guard personnel, then continued by paramedics when the boat docked. The father died shortly thereafter. Holmes observed him still lying on a Stokes litter, covered with a blanket. He noted “extensive subcutaneous emphysema over the entire upper half of the body, most notably to the mouth, face, neck, and upper chest, resulting in marked distension of all facial features.” Subcutaneous emphysema is a condition in which air gets into tissues under the skin, causing the skin to bulge and producing an unusual crackling sound when the skin is touched. Typically, it results from a collapsed lung due to a rib fracture, or to fractured facial bones, a ruptured bronchial tube, or a ruptured esophagus. Coast Guard members told Holmes that the man wasn’t distended when they recovered him from the water, but his distension grew as they continued CPR.
The daughter, named Kellie, was still alive, and emergency room doctors at Marin General Hospital worked on her frantically for ninety minutes. It was a losing battle, however.
When Holmes examined her, she was supine on a backboard in the emergency room. An immobilization collar was still around her neck, and there was an endotracheal tube in her mouth, a catheter below, and IV lines in one wrist and ankle. Holmes could see subcutaneous bruises and multiple fractures. He didn’t take fingerprints because she was too young for matching prints to be in a database.
Kellie’s death was the third documented instance of a child who was thrown over the short railing of the Golden Gate Bridge by a suicidal parent, who jumped afterward. Holmes could only hope that she was the last.
DUANE GARRETT
One of the suicides was a prominent Bay Area lawyer, radio personality, and Democratic Party fund-raiser named Duane Garrett. His jump wasn’t witnessed, but two girls spotted his body floating in the water underneath the bridge. There was nothing on his person to indicate who he was, however, and no one recognized him, so his identity wasn’t known immediately.
When someone is found underneath the bridge who doesn’t have identification, the Bridge Patrol and California Highway Patrol begin searching bridge parking lots. They note all of the cars that are there, then return thirty minutes later because turnover is rapid. If after two hours a car hasn’t moved, that’s probably the jumper’s car. Once officers know which car it is, they usually are able to get inside it. Oftentimes the doors aren’t locked and the keys are in the ignition because the person is past the point of caring. Police might find the individual’s wallet or purse, which may be left behind and have ID. They also may find a suicide note on the front seat.
In this instance the California Highway Patrol found an abandoned dark blue 1993 Lexus. The vehicle was registered to Garrett, the driver’s-side door was unlocked, and papers inside confirmed that the heavyset man with straight brown hair and a short beard who had jumped the day before from the bridge was, indeed, Duane. He was forty-eight.
His name didn’t mean anything to police on the scene or to Gary Erickson, the investigator who was on duty when the call came in. It didn’t mean anything to Holmes, either, who was now the assistant coroner and Erickson’s supervisor. Holmes rarely listened to the radio, and never to talk shows.
Erickson went with an officer from the Tiburon Police Department to the Garrett home to do the death notification. When he told Mrs. Garrett, she was shocked. She said she had no idea her husband was worried or depressed. Erickson expressed condolences and said that he would come back the following day with her husband’s personal effects.
When he returned, he was met outside the front door by two men in dark suits. Both of them were stone-faced, wore dark glasses, and had earpieces.
“What do you want?” one man said. His tone of voice wasn’t welcoming.
Erickson showed
them his identification and said he was there to give Mrs. Garrett her husband’s effects. Both men eyed him carefully, then one man opened the front door to get Mrs. Garrett. When he did, Erickson could see a group of people inside, two of whom he recognized immediately—Vice President Al Gore and his then wife, Tipper. That explained the presence of the Secret Service agents.
Unbeknownst to Erickson or Holmes, Duane Garrett was a close personal friend of the Gores. He had managed political campaigns for Al Gore as well as other Democratic candidates. As soon as the Gores heard about Garrett’s death, they had flown out from Washington, D.C., to be with the family.
Garrett was well known in political circles, and the coroner’s office fielded so many inquiries regarding Duane’s death that Holmes issued a press release. It was a way to control some of the rumors that were circulating, one of which was that Duane killed himself because of mounting financial troubles and allegations of impropriety. He owned a sports memorabilia business that had been heavily leveraged when the market for baseball cards collapsed, and was accused of selling fake memorabilia. In a letter to his attorney and personal friend, Duane said that he had been misled and didn’t profit personally from the wrongdoing. Still, his reputation was impugned, and for someone in his position, reputation was everything. The public didn’t need to know the details, though, Holmes decided. Besides, there was no reference in the letter to suicide.
KILLED ON THE WAY DOWN
Three months after Duane Garrett’s suicide, Holmes was involved in the investigation of another jump from the Golden Gate Bridge. This one didn’t attract media attention, which was a good thing considering that the coroner’s investigator who responded failed to notice a critical piece of information.
Denise Atchison, age forty-two, was a card dealer at a gaming business. At 3 A.M. she stopped her car on the bridge and went to the pedestrian walkway. This was before the walkway was closed after dark. The fog was heavy, only a few cars were on the bridge at that hour, and no pedestrians were around. A female motorist driving home from work saw Denise climb over the rail. What the motorist didn’t know, and neither did the police officers who responded or the coroner’s investigator who was called out, was that Denise was dead before she hit the water.