The Education of a Coroner

by John Bateson

  None of that existed in this instance. The man, six foot four, in his twenties, with long, flowing brownish-blond hair swept back, was found in 1986 on Marin land at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. Based on his injuries, it was apparent that he had jumped. He had no identification, and his face was so damaged that it wasn’t possible to put his picture in the paper. As it turned out, that wouldn’t have helped, but Ken Holmes didn’t know it at the time. A police artist created a concept portrait based on a small portion of the man’s face that wasn’t damaged, and it proved to be fairly accurate. Even so, Holmes learned later that the only people who might have been able to recognize him were several East Bay masseuses who, if they had seen the rendering, couldn’t have provided much information anyway. They didn’t know the man’s real name or anything about him.

  There were no witnesses to the man’s jump, and no one reported him missing. Holmes took fingerprints, but they didn’t produce any hits when he entered them into a national database. The man was well dressed in an expensive sport coat, nice slacks, and a white dress shirt, but the labels had been removed from each item. If not, Holmes would have known at the outset to start his search abroad. The only thing he found on the man’s body was the business card of a Bay Area limousine company.

  Holmes waited a week, thinking someone—a family member, girlfriend, or roommate—would come forward, but no one did. After that he put an article in local papers, without a photo, saying that a young man had jumped from the Marin side of the bridge and landed in the rocks. No leads came from it.

  With nothing else to go on, he called the limo company and talked with the owner. He told him why he was calling, and the owner said he didn’t remember anyone matching the description.

  “How many drivers do you have?” Holmes asked.

  “It’s just me and my brother,” the man said.

  “Have many cars do you have?”

  “Two.”

  Holmes asked to talk with the brother, and was told that he wasn’t there. “Would you ask him if he dropped off anybody at the Golden Gate Bridge recently?”

  The man said he would, but after two days Holmes hadn’t heard back so he called the limo company again. This time the brother, named Dennis, was in. Dennis told Holmes that several days earlier he did drive someone to the bridge.

  “Can you describe him?”

  “He was foreign; I think German. He was real tall and had lots of blond hair.”

  Holmes’s mystery man. “Did you get his name?”

  “No,” Dennis said. “Why would I?”

  “You’re right,” Holmes said. “You wouldn’t have a reason to.”

  Holmes told Dennis that the man had jumped from the bridge. Dennis was upset to hear it.

  “He was really nice to me,” Dennis said. “And seemed so happy.”

  Holmes gave him a few seconds to digest the information, then said, “How did he pay you?”

  “With cash,” Dennis said. “Always with cash.”

  “You mean you drove him more than once?”

  “I picked him up several times,” Dennis said. “He had been using a different limo company before, but something led him to us. I drove him for three days, and he always asked for me so my brother never saw him.”

  “Where did you pick him up?”

  “At the Concord Hilton.”

  The Hilton was forty miles east of Marin, in Contra Costa County. If the man had been staying there, the hotel would have a record of him.

  “Where did you go?”

  “We went to dinner a lot,” Dennis said.

  Holmes couldn’t contain his surprise. “You went to dinner?”

  “He would take me to dinner. He wanted to eat, and he always would buy me dinner.”

  “Did you go to nice places?”

  “Only nice places. He also had me drive him to a massage parlor in Berkeley. He paid for me to have a massage, too.”

  “What!” Holmes exclaimed.

  “Honest to God, I got massages along with him each of those three days.”

  “Just a massage?”

  Dennis was silent for a moment, then said, “His included sex.”

  Holmes didn’t ask what Dennis’s massage included; it wasn’t relevant. He did ask Dennis for the name of the massage parlor. Dennis said he thought it was Interlude.

  The last day, the man paid for an hour at the same massage parlor, Dennis said. After that, he and Dennis ate dinner in San Francisco, with the man again paying for both meals. At 9:30 P.M. Dennis dropped him off at the bridge. The man said he was meeting a friend, and the friend had a car.

  When Holmes called the Concord Hilton, he was told that a man matching the description of the deceased had registered five days earlier under the name Nils Exeter Edison. Hotel staff couldn’t confirm that that was his real name because he hadn’t presented any identification and had paid in cash.

  “It wasn’t the hotel’s practice to accept cash,” Holmes says, “but he was cute and had a German accent, so they let him.”

  Holmes asked when Nils Edison checked out.

  “He didn’t. His luggage is still here.”

  Thinking that it might contain the man’s ID, Holmes asked the clerk if he could pick it up. The clerk wanted to know why.

  “Because I’m investigating his death and need to be able to identify him and contact his next of kin,” Holmes said.

  The clerk was reluctant to release the luggage, but agreed to go through it and let Holmes know if there was anything of value to the coroner’s office. There wasn’t—no paperwork, passport, airline tickets, airline tag on the handle—nothing, not even a toothbrush. The two soft bags just had clothing, none of it with labels.

  “We’ll probably dump it in a few weeks,” the clerk said. “Do you want to come get it?”

  “Not if there’s nothing to identify him,” Holmes said. “Did you refer him to any limo companies?”

  “Yes. Two. I think a limo came every day and picked him up.”

  Holmes got the name of the other company and contacted it. The story was the same. The young man was picked up at the Hilton on two successive days and driven to nice restaurants and other places. The second day the driver took him to look at a high-rise apartment that was for rent in the East Bay city of Emeryville. On the way there they stopped at Interlude and the man paid for massages for himself and the driver. After that the two of them went to several bars, had drinks, returned to the massage parlor, and subsequently had dinner. The man bankrolled everything, always paying with cash. Both days they went to the massage parlor, the man saw “Debbie,” the driver said.

  “Did he say anything about himself?”

  “He said he was from Sweden and worked as a sound mixer for a rock band named Yellow Submarine. His parents were divorced, and he had been to the United States before.”

  At one point the man had the driver take him across the Golden Gate Bridge. He asked questions about the bridge’s height, the speed of the current underneath, and how the bridge was patrolled.

  Holmes called the massage parlor and asked to speak with Debbie. “When she came on the phone, she sounded like she was ten years old,” Holmes says. “Just a kid.” Holmes told her who he was and why he was calling. When he described the man, she started to cry. She turned away from the phone and said something to one of the other girls, who let out a gasp and started to cry, too.

  Holmes asked Debbie if he could talk with her in person the following day. She said okay but called him back several minutes later to say that her boss said Holmes had to pay Debbie for her time.

  “Fine,” Holmes said. “How much is it?”

  “It’s a minimum of thirty-five dollars per hour,” Debbie said.

  Holmes told Dr. Jindrich that he needed his approval to spend thirty-five dollars at a massage parlor so that he could talk with Debbie. Jindrich thought it was the funniest thing he had ever heard. “What do you think the auditor is going to do with that?” he said, laughing hard.


  “I don’t know,” Holmes said. “I guess we’ll find out.”

  Every unusual or nonbudgeted item needed approval from the accounting department. When Holmes presented his request, the woman looked at him with a mixture of disbelief and amusement.

  “I’ve never had anybody have the guts to ask me for money for a massage parlor,” she said.

  “Honestly,” Holmes said, “I’m only going to talk.”

  “That’s between you and them,” she replied.

  Holmes went to the parlor the next day and talked with Debbie. She said she was nineteen, but he wasn’t sure she was even eighteen and of legal age, although for his purposes that wasn’t important. He assured her on the phone, and her boss when he got there, that he didn’t care what they did at the parlor. Even though it clearly was a brothel, he wasn’t there to bust anyone; he just needed to identify the man who jumped from the bridge.

  “We went into one of the massage rooms,” Holmes says, “and Debbie—if that really was her name—started crying. The whole time we talked she reached constantly for Kleenex. She said she couldn’t believe the man killed himself, he was so nice. She said he took care of the limo drivers, paying for happy endings—meaning sex—if they wanted it, and was friendly and generous with everyone.”

  The last time he was at the parlor, Debbie said, the man saw a woman named “Gina.” He told her that he was leaving afterward to catch a plane, and that this would be the last time he would see any of them.

  Holmes thanked Debbie for the information. Before he left, he talked briefly with the madam and thanked her for letting him talk with one of her girls during work hours. The madam said that the man not only tipped her, even though she had nothing to do with it other than being the house mother, but took her girls to a neighborhood ice cream parlor where he treated them to sundaes and brought back a cone for her, too.

  All of it was interesting but it didn’t lead anywhere. Holmes was no closer to identifying his unknown jumper, John Doe #6-86, aka Nils Edison.

  Holmes did learn from the limo driver who took the man to the apartment in Emeryville that the realtor who showed it to him was a woman named Ilana. Holmes tracked her down, and she started sobbing as soon as he told her why he was calling. She was twice the man’s age, yet they had had several nights of passionate lovemaking and the man had left some clothes in her apartment, which was above Max’s Opera House in San Francisco. She looked forward eagerly to his return, and was distraught to learn that he had killed himself instead.

  Ilana told Holmes that at one point while she and the man were in her apartment, the man flushed papers down the toilet and plugged it. The only remnants were torn pages from a travel visa, which Ilana recognized because she traveled frequently. She gave them to Holmes, and there was part of a registration number, but not enough to do anything with it.

  Running out of options, Holmes talked with the doorman at Max’s Opera House. He remembered the man because he tipped him generously, but had no other information.

  That left only the Swedish rock group Yellow Submarine. Going through Interpol, the international police organization, Holmes confirmed that the group actually existed, then he was connected with someone in it. The person told him that none of the group’s sound engineers was missing, and none fit the description of the decedent.

  Holmes was at an end. “I had tracked everything I could,” he says, “including at least $3,500 in cash the man spent in just a few days. I had everyone in our office go through all the information I had collected to see if there was anything else I could chase.”

  This included correspondence and notes from phone conversations that Holmes had with the German consulate, Swedish consulate (because the man told one driver he was from Sweden), and French consulate (because he told another driver that he was born in France), as well as written summaries of every interview Holmes conducted with the limo drivers, Hilton staff, Interlude masseuses, and Ilana, the realtor. There was nothing.

  “We had to put it to bed,” he says. “We didn’t have a choice. There were no other leads to pursue, and everybody else had lost interest. Sometimes you just don’t get the person ID’d.”

  TWENTY YEARS LATER

  After two decades, there had been no new developments. Then, one day in 2005, Holmes received an unexpected call. A private investigator in Los Angeles asked him if, by chance, his office had handled the case of a young man who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in 1986. Holmes thought immediately of Nils Edison, and his heart began beating faster.

  “Yes, we did,” Holmes said. “But we were never able to identify him. He didn’t have identification, no one reported him missing, and there wasn’t a record of him in any database.”

  “Tall kid?” the PI said. “Big shock of hair, well dressed?”

  Holmes couldn’t believe it; it almost seemed like a dream. He had to catch his breath before saying, “That’s him.”

  The PI said that he had been hired twenty years earlier by the Fischer family in Germany to find their son, Wolfram. He had disappeared after telling friends that he was going to the United States with a lot of money, which he planned to spend in grand fashion before jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. For some reason the family had hired an investigator in Los Angeles rather than one in San Francisco, even though it wasn’t clear that Wolfram had ever been in Los Angeles. In any event, back in 1986 the PI had contacted the San Francisco Coroner’s Office, explained who he was, and asked if anyone matching Wolfram’s description had jumped from the bridge recently. He was told no, that everyone who had jumped either had been identified or looked considerably different. The PI told the Fischer family that the coroner didn’t have any record of their son, so he must not have jumped.

  At that time the Coast Guard was handing over the bodies of Golden Gate Bridge jumpers to the San Francisco coroner. Wolfram had landed on the Marin side, however, so his case was handled in Marin.

  “People in the San Francisco Coroner’s Office should have told the investigator to check with coroners in other Bay Area counties,” Holmes says, “but no one did. Thus the PI didn’t know to call me until he happened to read a recent article that said the Marin coroner’s office handled most Golden Gate Bridge suicides now. The PI no longer was in touch with the Fischer family, but he thought, what if?”

  Holmes was elated by the news, and also upset. “Twenty years of uncertainty and irresolution for the Fischer family, and hundreds of hours of work on my part, could have been saved if only someone in the San Francisco Coroner’s Office had told the investigator to call Marin.”

  The PI got back in touch with the Fischers and informed them that he had found their son. They called Holmes immediately.

  “It turned out that Mr. Fischer was an industrial CEO who commuted to work in his personal helicopter,” Holmes says. “He didn’t fly it; somebody else did. One of the answers to the question, ‘How did the young man have so much money?’ was because his family had so much money.”

  Holmes learned that when Wolfram Fischer left Germany in 1986, he took with him more than fifteen thousand dollars in cash. His parents knew it. He had told them that he was coming to the United States to find himself and didn’t say anything about wanting to end his life. He had been in touch with friends while he was here, though, and they knew his plan. He had sworn them to secrecy, so they didn’t tell his parents. Later, when he didn’t come home, his parents got in touch with his friends and they told them what he had said.

  The Fischers flew to the Bay Area and met with Holmes and his staff. They had long since given up hope that their son was still alive and were grateful to know what happened to him. Holmes had an arrangement with two cemeteries to bury unidentified bodies in plots without a name but with a marker so that the remains could be exhumed if necessary. This was the case with Wolfram. His body was exhumed, his parents had his remains cremated, and they took his ashes home with them.

  “I spent more time on this than on any other c
ase,” Holmes says, “except Carol Filipelli and Tammy Vincent. Much of it was my own personal time outside of work. My wife started to get snarly about it, saying, ‘Why can’t you let it go? You’re never going to identify the guy.’ The thing is, though, when you just have a skeleton, your chances of identifying the person are slim, but when you have somebody who has been dead only a few hours, it should be easy to identify him. When you can’t, it sticks in your craw. In this instance, it took twenty years and some luck, but eventually we did.”

  He pauses, thinking about it. “One of the most amazing mysteries I ever handled,” he tells me, “and with the possible exception of Carol Filipelli, one of the most challenging. But a better outcome.”

  CHAPTER 14

  INVESTIGATING THE UNUSUAL

  Most of the time, Ken Holmes and other investigators in the Marin County Coroner’s Office were able to make a determination regarding the cause and manner of a person’s death. Sometimes, though, too much remained unknown.

  A fifty-six-year-old mother of three was found dead in a closed car on a hot day, with a blood alcohol content of .23. She had a history of depression and alcohol abuse, and Holmes learned that she was in an unhappy marriage that included domestic violence. There were no signs of trauma, and no alcohol inside the car. Heat prostration? Alcohol intoxication? Accident? Suicide?

  A forty-two-year-old man had a history of somnambulism in which he was able to walk, talk, and even eat while asleep. On the first anniversary of his marriage to his second wife, they were watching TV when he fell asleep in a chair. When the phone rang and she went to answer it, he left the room, came back with a handgun, and shot himself. His wife told Holmes that her husband had been enjoying their anniversary and repeatedly said that he hated the thought of suicide. She believed he was acting out a dream at the time he killed himself and didn’t intend to end his life. True?