The Education of a Coroner

by John Bateson

  A Coast Guard crew found her body—no small feat, especially in the dark and given the conditions.

  “I have nothing but admiration for the crew members who retrieve the remains of Golden Gate Bridge jumpers,” Holmes says. “They go out in all kinds of weather, in choppy seas, day or night, oftentimes battling strong currents, and get to the spot within minutes after being called. They’re just amazing.”

  The coroner’s investigator on duty, Ray Nichols, met the Coast Guard boat at the dock and took several photographs of Denise’s body. Then he followed the mortuary van to the funeral home, where he undressed her, fingerprinted her because she didn’t have identification, took some mug-shot-like photos, measured her height, and estimated her weight because he didn’t have access to a scale. Nichols also recorded the labels on all of Denise’s clothing, noting the manufacturer’s name and clothing size because sometimes that was the only information the coroner’s office had to work with when trying to determine a person’s identity. After that Nichols wrote a brief report, which accompanied the body so that Dr. Jindrich, the coroner, had that information when he did the autopsy. A fuller report would be prepared later, for the files. Then Nichols drove home to bed.

  Seven hours later, at eleven o’clock in the morning, Holmes was at his desk when he got a call from Jindrich. “Who handled this case?” Jindrich said. Jindrich rarely lost his temper, but this time there was anger in his voice.

  “Nichols,” Holmes said. “Why?”

  Jindrich had hired Nichols to replace Holmes when Holmes was promoted to assistant coroner. Nichols was a former mortician who had been working in the sheriff’s office and wanted to transfer. On paper he seemed like a good fit. He was comfortable dealing with death, and he had been through the police academy so he could hit the ground running. From the outset, though, he had presented problems, the main one being that he was neither observant nor curious. He was good working with families, but that was all. A big man—six foot four and 250 pounds—he had strong opinions and ended up alienating his coworkers.

  “Did he say anything about the gunshot wound?” Jindrich said.

  Holmes’s jaw dropped. “What!”

  “She has a gunshot wound in her head,” Jindrich said.

  As soon as he got off the phone, Holmes called Nichols, waking him up. “Are you trying to keep the gunshot a secret?” he said.

  There was a pause, then Nichols said, “What do you mean?”

  “Doc just called. Your bridge jumper from last night has a gunshot wound in the head.”

  Nichols was incredulous. “That can’t be.”

  “Well, it is,” Holmes said.

  One of the things that investigators did in cases where the decedent’s identity wasn’t known was wash off any blood or dirt that was on the person’s face and comb his or her hair back so that a clear picture could be taken. In this instance, Denise’s face didn’t have any blood on it, mainly because she died immediately and her blood stopped circulating, but also because bay waters washed away what little there was. In addition, she had a lot of hair, so that even when it was combed back the wound was covered. Still, Nichols should have seen it.

  The question now was whether someone shot her and threw her over the short railing. In every questionable death, the coroner’s office proceeded as if it was a homicide.

  The motorist who called it into the toll plaza said, “I saw her climb over the rail and let go.” She didn’t mention seeing anyone else.

  Holmes went to the Golden Gate Bridge District, got the motorist’s name and contact information, and went to talk with her. The woman told him that there wasn’t anyone else around. She saw Denise only because Denise was wearing a white shirt under a dark jacket. The flash of white caught the motorist’s eye. Also, Denise was a big, heavyset woman, and it wasn’t easy for her to get over the side.

  A fingerprint match confirmed Denise’s identity and the fact that she lived in San Francisco. Holmes arranged for someone to go to Denise’s residence. A female roommate was frantic because Denise hadn’t come home, but had left a note. The note said that Denise was going to jump from the bridge and planned to shoot herself on the way down because she didn’t want to feel the impact of hitting the water. Denise had a long history of depression and previously had told her roommate that if she decided to kill herself, this was how she would do it: she would shoot herself as soon as she jumped. The roommate said that in the past few months Denise had purchased a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun from a private party. The gun was never found—no one attempted to look for it—but that didn’t matter. It was enough to know that it was a suicide.

  “Thank God for the note,” Holmes says. “Without it, Denise’s roommate could have been a prime suspect, even though the motorist didn’t see anyone else. Maybe the roommate was on the other side of the rail, out of view, inciting her to jump. You never know. We were lucky that she wrote it down rather than just told somebody.”

  BRIDGE OPERATING PROCEDURES

  When the Golden Gate Bridge Patrol or California Highway Patrol sees or is notified that someone has jumped, an officer goes to the location on the bridge as determined by the light pole number. The bridge has 128 light poles, and each one has a number painted on it. Even-numbered poles are on the west side, illuminating the bike lane and facing the Pacific Ocean, and odd-numbered poles are on the east side, lighting the pedestrian walkway and facing San Francisco. The poles are spaced evenly from the parking lot at Vista Point in Marin County to just before the toll plaza into San Francisco.

  If the jump is witnessed—75 percent are—an officer drops a nineteen-inch-long marine location marker into the water. Known as “smoke floats,” the markers are supplied by the Coast Guard and are stored on the bridge for easy access (they’re not reusable). They emit both smoke and a flare for up to thirty minutes. In addition, they are weighted and indicate which way the tide is moving, enabling the Coast Guard to develop search patterns. On the bridge, officers follow the marker with binoculars and maintain radio communication with the Coast Guard.

  When the body of a Golden Gate Bridge jumper is recovered, Coast Guard crews bring it to shore at Fort Baker in Marin County. The coroner’s investigator meets first with the California Highway Patrol officer who is handling the case, and the officer relates any information he or she has, such as whether the jump was witnessed, whether a purse or wallet with identification was found, and whether the jumper left a suicide note. Then the investigator goes to work.

  In most instances, the decedent has “pattern injuries”—deep bruises, broken bones, and damaged internal organs—that are consistent with a fall from a great height. About 5 percent of jumpers also have water in their lungs, indicating that they survived the fall and subsequently drowned. In these cases the person’s last seconds are filled with excruciating pain and terror.

  “Some people think that jumping off the bridge is a light, airy way to end your life,” Holmes says. “I’d like to dispel that myth. When you jump off the bridge, you hit the water hard. It’s not pretty.”

  During the four-second fall, jumpers’ bodies travel at a speed of seventy-five miles per hour. The impact is equivalent to a pedestrian who is struck by a car driving that fast. The outer body stops abruptly, but internal organs are still moving. They hemorrhage or are lacerated by broken bones, which is one reason why only a small number of people survive the fall.

  The biggest challenge in some cases is determining the jumper’s identity. Even if people have a wallet in their pocket when they jump, their clothes can be shredded on impact and any belongings lost.

  In one case, a man’s foot in a white cotton sock and a black canvas Rockport shoe, size seven and a half, washed up on Stinson Beach, eleven miles away. That was all; nothing else.

  Holmes turned to local media for assistance. He placed an article in multiple newspapers asking for help in connecting the foot to a person. An inventive headline proved to be the key.

  “If you ju
st say ‘Coroner’s office is trying to identify an unidentified person,’ ” Holmes says, “few people will notice it. If you say ‘Foot found in a shoe in the bay,’ though, they’ll read it.”

  Several days later, a woman who had seen the article called Holmes. She was a nurse at a hospital in San Francisco and said that one of her coworkers, a forty-nine-year-old man named Julian, had disappeared two months earlier. He was depressed because he had been diagnosed with AIDS, she said, and had transitioned from being a nurse to a patient. She added that he always wore black Rockport shoes with white socks.

  Julian’s apartment had been cleaned out by his brother, but police were able to find a razor and a toothbrush. They also found suicide notes and a diary hinting at a possible jump from the Golden Gate Bridge. DNA samples from the toothbrush and razor matched the bone marrow samples taken from the foot. According to his brother, the shoe size was a match, too.

  BRIDGE RAIL FOUNDATION

  On October 26, 2003, a twenty-six-year-old student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge. Kathy Hull drove her white Honda Accord an hour and a half to San Francisco, crossed the Golden Gate Bridge at twilight, and parked at Vista Point on the Marin side. From there she began walking across the bridge. Midway, near light pole seventy-one, she laid down her purse and cell phone, climbed over the railing, and jumped.

  Several suicide notes were in her car. One said, in part, “Spirit is the glue that holds mind and body together, but mine is broken. It was held together for a very long time, and now it has crumbled. I don’t seem to care anymore. I can’t keep the pieces together.”

  A bridge worker found the phone, looked at Kathy’s contact list, and pressed her home number. Dave Hull answered.

  “Did you lose your cell phone on the Golden Gate Bridge?” the man asked.

  “No,” Hull said, confused.

  “Did your daughter lose her phone? Her purse was found on the bridge.”

  Hull and his wife, Jean, sat in stunned silence. Later that night, they were contacted by the police. Kathy’s car had been found at Vista Point, and her body had been retrieved by the Coast Guard after someone on the bridge had seen and reported it.

  Dave Hull’s world stopped, and he didn’t want it to go on. “It was as if I could be closer to her if nothing changed,” he says. “It was Joan Didion’s magical thinking; just a few hours separated me from Kathy alive. That’s not much. Isn’t there something I could do that would change that?”

  Hull’s own thoughts turned to suicide, but he had another child, a son, at home who needed him. Still, Hull remembers how close he came. “Suicide is contagious,” he says. “It puts everyone else at risk.”

  In time, Hull resumed elements of his life. He wrote poetry about Kathy. He returned to his job as the principal librarian at the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park. He disposed of Kathy’s possessions, including her car. Each step was painful.

  Hull also began talking about the need for a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge. With two other people—Patrick Hines, whose son Kevin was one of the few people to survive a jump from the bridge, and Paul Muller, whose business partner lost a relative to the bridge—Hull founded a nonprofit, all-volunteer organization called the Bridge Rail Foundation. It had one mission: to end suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge.

  The organization didn’t have any funding, but it did have a core of passionate volunteers, many of whom were grieving the jump of a loved one. Holmes was an early recruit. He didn’t have any kin who jumped, but two good friends did, including a police detective whom he had worked with on many cases.

  For a long time, Holmes was opposed to media stories about Golden Gate Bridge suicides—particularly stories that included a chronological count. He thought they incited more people to jump. If the number wasn’t publicized, he believed, suicidal people wouldn’t be encouraged to go to the bridge. Over a fifteen-year blackout period, however, when local mental health professionals lobbied the media not to report bridge jumps in order to avoid a contagion effect, the number of bridge jumps didn’t go down. On the contrary, it increased.

  Once he realized that limiting media coverage wasn’t helping to save lives, that all it was doing was hiding the problem, Holmes decided to try a different tack. If silence wasn’t working, then maybe it was time to be vocal about it.

  In 2007, Holmes issued a report with the Bridge Rail Foundation that stated the total number of recorded suicides to that point. It was nearly 1,500, even though hundreds of other suicides were excluded because they couldn’t be confirmed—a body was never found or it was found far enough away that the death couldn’t be attributed with certainty to the bridge. The number received a lot of press because during the blackout period no one knew that suicides were continuing or that there had been so many.

  Holmes’s report summarized demographic data on Golden Gate Bridge suicides over the previous ten years. The majority of bridge jumpers were white, male, under forty (making them younger than most suicide victims in the country), and lived locally. Despite the myth that the bridge attracted jumpers from all over the world, 85 percent of the victims lived in the Bay Area, and 95 percent lived in California. Fewer than 5 percent came from out of state or another country.

  The release date of the report coincided with the seventieth anniversary of the bridge’s opening and also its first suicide, by a forty-seven-year-old World War I veteran named Harold Wobber. He walked partway out on the span, turned to a passerby, and said, “This is as far as I go,” and leaped over the side. Shortly thereafter, three other men jumped, and the parade of deaths was under way.

  In 2008, Holmes issued a second report. This one covered the previous fifteen years and, among other things, listed the occupations of jumpers. No names were mentioned, but by listing the occupations the report allowed readers to see the societal impact of bridge suicides. Included were doctors, nurses, engineers, artists, caregivers, homemakers—people from all walks of life. The most common occupation was student. The second most common was teacher.

  Both reports put new pressure on officials at the Golden Gate Bridge District to end these deaths from the structure that they managed. For his work in bringing the problem to the public’s attention, Holmes was honored by the American Association of Suicidology at the organization’s next annual conference, which happened to be held in San Francisco.

  In October 2008, the Bridge District board voted to add a marine-grade stainless steel net under the bridge to prevent suicides. It was a historic step—the first time that the board approved a suicide deterrent for the bridge—but only a start. At the same time that board members approved the net, they voted not to allocate any bridge monies to pay for it. As a result, the deaths continued.

  Ironically, a net was strung the length of the Golden Gate Bridge at the time it was being built to protect construction workers. The net cost $120,000 in 1937 ($2 million in today’s currency) and saved the lives of nineteen men who, at various times, fell into it accidentally. Four months before the bridge was completed, a section of scaffolding broke away and tore through the net, killing ten workers. Another $120,000 was spent to have a new net installed. Once the bridge opened, the net was removed.

  Holmes and other Bridge Rail Foundation volunteers (myself included) began working on a variety of fronts with Bridge District staff to identify and leverage funds. It all came together in 2014 when the board reversed its six-year-old decision and voted unanimously to allow bridge revenues to be used to match funds for the project that were committed by three other sources—the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the California Department of Transportation, and the state’s Mental Health Services Act—for the net.

  “We did it!” shouted Sue Story after the final vote was cast. She was a Bridge Rail Foundation volunteer whose twenty-eight-year-old son jumped from the bridge in 2010.

  Family members in attendance who had lost loved ones to the bridge stood and applaud
ed the board, prompting board members to stand and applaud family members in return. Everyone acknowledged that it was the willingness of family members to be public with their grief that had turned the tide and resulted in the decision.

  It was one of the most satisfying moments in Holmes’s life. He knew that the families who had been victimized by the lack of action on the part of the Golden Gate Bridge District had made a huge sacrifice. For more than seventy-five years, since the bridge opened in 1937, there had been an endless procession of unnecessary deaths. Once the net was up, these tragedies wouldn’t be known to future generations who would be spared. When the net was in place, families and friends wouldn’t realize that their loved one who was troubled remained alive because the world’s top suicide magnet no longer exerted a deadly pull. They wouldn’t know—except in a general way—of the losses that others had suffered, largely in anonymity, or even that their loved one would have been at risk because jumping from the bridge was so easy. There wouldn’t be any thought given to the fact that the bridge was now safe from suicide, much less any thanks to the people who had been responsible for making it happen. That was okay. It was enough to know that everyone would be able to enjoy a magnificent structure because the tragedies associated with it had ended.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE GERMAN TOURIST

  It’s rare for an intact body to remain unidentified. Oftentimes someone reports the person as missing, maybe not immediately, but at some point paperwork is filed. Fingerprints can be checked in national databases for a match. In a worst case, labels in clothing and jewelry can be tracked to determine where and when various items were made.