The Education of a Coroner

by John Bateson

  A thirty-seven-year-old woman was found dead in her trailer after she failed to show up for work. Coworkers told Holmes that she was a dependable employee but recently had seemed exhausted, would become emotional for no apparent reason, and would cry at her desk. She was scheduled to go on vacation the following week and was thought to be flying east to visit her mother. There were no signs of drugs, alcohol, or trauma. The woman was emaciated, however, and had a history of extreme dieting. Holmes found dieting schedules all over her trailer. Was her death accidental or natural, related to an eating disorder? During the course of his investigation, Holmes learned that she was separated from her husband, who currently was out of the area in a rehab program. Friends of the woman described him as “worthless.” Was she so depressed that she lost the desire to live, making her death a possible suicide? It was impossible to know.

  Coroners—and family members—have to accept the fact that there are times when the story of someone’s death is incomplete, and probably will remain that way.

  Some deaths, on the other hand, were just head-scratchers, so strange that they defied belief. A thirty-seven-year-old woman was sitting on her front porch watching her neighbor attempt to cut open a sealed fifty-gallon metal drum with an electric grinder when the drum exploded. The lid flew directly at the woman, struck her in the head before she could move, decapitated her, and continued sailing through a window into her house with her head on it as if on a platter. The drum, which had been on its side, was propelled in the opposite direction, where it struck a picket fence and broke several boards.

  In another case, a forty-four-year-old roofing contractor was squeezed to death when his body was pinned between the frame and bed of his ancient dump truck. The bed was hydraulic and remained up as long as the motor was running, then returned to the down position when the motor was turned off. The man had been performing routine maintenance with the bed in the up position, but the motor wasn’t running when his wife, who was bringing him lunch, found him. A baseball hat and a grease gun were pinned to his body.

  In a third case, a thirty-nine-year-old woman was driving on the freeway and was just about ready to go under an overpass when a truck above her overturned. The truck was carrying large boulders, which went crashing down onto the roadway. One boulder landed directly on the woman’s Mazda coupe, killing her instantly. Adding to the fluke tragedy was the autopsy report, which indicated that the woman had been twenty-six weeks pregnant.

  “You can’t make up stuff like this,” Holmes says. “You just can’t. All you can do is shake your head and say, ‘What were they thinking?’ or attribute it to fate: wrong place, wrong time. That’s all you can do.”

  ASSISTANT CORONER

  In June 1984, Keith Craig, the assistant coroner, told Dr. Jindrich that he was going to retire at the end of the month. A day later, Jindrich called Holmes into his office.

  “Keith’s going to retire,” he said. “I’d like you to be my assistant.”

  Holmes was surprised and flattered, but thought immediately of his two colleagues, Bill Thomas and Don Cornish. Holmes had been working in the coroner’s office nine years by this time, but both Thomas and Cornish had been there four years longer. Moreover, they were the two people who were primarily responsible for training Holmes after he was hired.

  “What about Don and Bill?” Holmes said.

  Jindrich said, “I don’t want them to be my assistant. I want you to be my assistant.”

  “How is that going to work for them?”

  “They don’t have to like it,” Jindrich said. “I want you to be the assistant, and they can either deal with it or not.”

  Holmes said, “Can I have a little time to think about it?”

  There were advantages and disadvantages to the promotion. The salary was higher and meant that Holmes’s retirement benefits would be higher as well. In addition, he would have more authority. Best of all, he would become an eight-to-fiver; he wouldn’t work twenty-four-hour shifts anymore, and for the most part, he would have weekends off. On the negative side, he would be on call all the time. The assistant coroner was everybody’s backup, and if the investigator on duty was tied up on another case and couldn’t respond to a new call, or was sick or on vacation, the assistant filled in. In addition, Holmes enjoyed doing investigations and working with families, and both duties would be curtailed if he became the assistant coroner.

  After he talked it over with his wife, Holmes sought out Thomas and Cornish to see how they felt about it. Both men said it was all right with them.

  “Are you sure?” Holmes said.

  “Yeah,” they said. “It’s fine.”

  Holmes told Jindrich that he was interested and asked for more specifics. His only frame of reference was how Craig did the job, and he knew that Jindrich would want more from him.

  “Here’s what I expect of you as my assistant,” Jindrich said. “I do doctor; you do the rest. If we have a personnel problem, I don’t want to know about it, I want to know how you handled it. When it’s budget time, I approve it, but you do the line-by-line numbers. If the board doesn’t like it, I don’t want to know it, I only want to know how you worked it out, because I do doctor, and you do the rest.”

  Implied but not specifically articulated was that Jindrich performed autopsies, signed death certificates, and testified in court when necessary, and Holmes hired and fired employees, supervised the investigators, drafted the budget and presented it to the board of supervisors, dealt with personnel problems and contract issues, handled reporters, responded to requests for community speakers, and took care of anything else that came up.

  Holmes accepted the position, and Jindrich was true to his word. Several times when a lot of things were going on Jindrich jumped in and helped, but mostly he was hands-off.

  “It proved to be the best training ground possible for me,” Holmes says. “When I became the coroner, I had been doing everything for fourteen years already, except for autopsies. It was no big deal.”

  A BANK ROBBERY GONE AWRY

  Michael Canfield, twenty-six, and Mark Canfield, twenty-three, were brothers from Southern California. Somehow they got it into their heads to rob the Bank of America branch in Valley Ford, a tiny, unincorporated town that lies just across the Marin border in rural Sonoma County. The population of 150 people consisted mainly of farmers and ranchers, and the brothers may have thought that there would be little or no security at the bank, or that Valley Ford was so remote that police wouldn’t be able to respond quickly. Holmes still has the dog-eared map that the brothers referred to for directions, and he showed it to me. Marked in blue ink is their planned route to and from the town.

  Valley Ford might have looked like it offered easy pickings, but the brothers failed to consider two key facts. The first was that there are only three roads leading into and out of Valley Ford. Each is a country road that doesn’t connect with a main artery for miles. The second was that all of the farmers and ranchers in the area did business at this BofA branch. It was the only bank around.

  The brothers entered the bank wearing ski masks and collected five thousand dollars in cash and traveler’s checks, which they jammed into a pillowcase. After that they fled on a small motorcycle, exchanging it a mile down the road for a thirteen-year-old white Ford sedan they had parked there. As soon as they left, the bank manager made four phone calls. The last one was to the police. The first three calls were to farmers on each of the three roads leading out of Valley Ford.

  The brothers headed toward Petaluma on the Bodega Highway, which, despite its name, is a two-lane road, one lane in each direction. They had only gone a couple of miles when they saw that the road was blocked by a trailer full of hay and a big bulldozer that a farmer had placed there. The brothers spun their car around, went back to Valley Ford, and headed south on Highway 1, another two-lane road. Before they reached the next roadblock, they could see in their rearview mirror units from the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department, Marin County
Sheriff’s Office, and California Highway Patrol in hot pursuit. Desperate to elude them, the brothers turned onto an unmarked dirt road. They had no idea where it led, but at this point they didn’t care. It turned out that the road, which was a mile and a half long, served as the driveway into the Borello Ranch in Marin. When the brothers pulled up to the ranch house, two men came out to greet them, both armed with long guns.

  The brothers whirled around to go back out the driveway, only to see half a dozen police cars racing toward them, lights flashing and sirens wailing. The driveway was next to a wide creek with hardly any water in it. It was steep on the other side of the creek, so the brothers jumped out of the car, ran through the creek, and scampered up the other side of the hill, holing up under a canopy of trees. Police officers pulled up in front of the Borello family’s homestead and huddled to talk about what they should do. They could see the brothers only intermittently because of the shadows.

  Holmes happened to be out on a previous case that was only two miles south of the Borello Ranch at the time this was taking place. A dispatcher with Marin County’s Communications Center radioed him and said, “Since you’re in the area, go there because they’ve asked for anybody who’s armed to respond to the scene. They think there might be some kind of shoot-out or manhunt.”

  As Holmes pulled up, one of the cops said, “What are you, a vulture? They’re not even dead yet.”

  Holmes said, “No. No, Comm Center asked me to come.”

  “Oh,” the cop said. “Okay. Good.”

  For a while everyone stood around, not making a move. From a distance of about two hundred yards, the brothers eyed the police while the police and Holmes watched the brothers, who didn’t even have the money they had stolen. It was in the trunk of their abandoned car, along with the motorcycle. Finally, a cop got on a bullhorn and told them to lay down their weapons and come down the hill. The brothers yelled back that they weren’t surrendering, that the cops had to come get them. Since the brothers were armed, police officers didn’t want to get any closer, so they waited. Meanwhile more cop cars were showing up, plus a police helicopter.

  “All of a sudden,” Holmes says, “there was a boom.”

  Soon thereafter Mark Canfield came walking down the hill with his hands up. He had blood all over the back of him and was shaking.

  It turned out that the brothers had made a pact. They stood back to back, and each of them was going to shoot himself. After Michael, the older of the two, put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, though, his younger brother felt warm blood and pieces of Michael’s brain on the back of his head and couldn’t do it. Instead, he surrendered.

  Holmes climbed up the hill to where Michael Canfield’s body lay. He was dressed in blue jeans and brown boots. A wadded-up pink undershirt lay close to him. At his feet was a twelve-gauge shotgun, and a loaded .22-caliber revolver was nearby. There were two spent casings in the breech of the shotgun, as well as one spent cartridge in the revolver and several unspent cartridges.

  “It didn’t have to end that way,” Holmes says. “They were scared, though, and panicked. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. They would have been a lot better off picking a bank in any booming metropolis.”

  THE BROWNLIE BROTHERS

  Another set of brothers made news a short time later. The Communications Center called Holmes late one night and told him that there had been a single-car accident in Lagunitas, a small, unincorporated area of Marin County that borders Samuel P. Taylor State Park. One person was dead and another person was seriously injured, the dispatcher said.

  When Holmes arrived at the scene, he saw a cream-colored Mercedes, badly damaged, off on the side of the road with twenty-six-year-old Stephen Brownlie dead in the passenger seat. Brownlie had a full beard and was dressed in blue jeans, a blue shirt, lambskin vest, black socks, and brown low-top boots. Among the injuries that Holmes itemized were various abrasions and lacerations, a compound fracture of one leg, and multiple rib fractures. The two cops at the scene told Holmes that the decedent’s brother, Gordon Brownlie, age twenty-three, was the driver. He survived the crash and had been taken by ambulance to Marin General Hospital.

  Holmes and two cops began to inventory the car. They looked through the glove box and checked under the seats, then Holmes took the keys out of the ignition and popped the trunk. That was when he realized that this wasn’t a routine traffic accident. Inside the trunk was an expensive-looking fur coat, but that wasn’t the main attraction. There was a large plastic bag filled with money, all wrapped in rubber bands and stacked. It was more money than he had ever seen.

  The two cops were still looking inside the car. When they saw the bag in the trunk they were equally wide-eyed. “Now what?” one said.

  Holmes said, “We’re going to have to count it.”

  Each of them took about twenty minutes to count the money, which was mostly in small bills, then wrote down the number he came up with. None of the three numbers matched, so they did a recount. This time the three of them got different numbers. It was after 1 A.M. and everyone was beat.

  “Look,” Holmes said. “We know we’re in the ballpark, forty-three thousand dollars and whatever. Let’s all initial the bag, then tie it off. I’ll take it to the auditor in the morning, and someone there can count it.”

  The officers agreed, and Holmes hurried back to the coroner’s office with the bag. He didn’t want to drive around with it, and there was one more place that he needed to go.

  The evidence room in the coroner’s office was a catchall, serving as a storage room for paper goods as well as for possessions to turn over to next of kin. There was a short hallway with two refrigerators and a freezer that served as the lab. There was also a large, old bank safe and an area with evidence lockers. Each investigator was in charge of evidence for his cases. If a decedent’s purse was found, for example, it was noted in the inventory, which was given to the secretary, along with a copy of the case. Then it was logged by the investigator, placed in a bag or plastic container, and put in his locker. The lockers were metal, seven feet tall, with two doors and shelves inside. A logbook attached to the outside noted the date, case number, decedent’s name, and evidence collected so that any staff member could see what property was contained within. The key for each locker was kept in a locked key-minder wall box in a back room that was off-limits to anyone but staff. All staff needed access because many times only one person was in the office when a family member came in to claim a decedent’s possessions.

  Anytime personal possessions were released, the coroner’s office got a signed, written receipt. Release was based on the concept of consanguinity, which is a legal doctrine that establishes the living blood relations who are closest to a person. His or her spouse is first. If there is no spouse, then it’s children, followed by grandchildren, great-grandchildren, parents, brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, great-nephews and great-nieces, grandparents, aunts and uncles, first cousins, and so on.

  With prescription medications, the investigator took possession, logged them, and kept them for about ninety days. Then they were given to a large firm that burned them at high heat. Street drugs also were burned, unless they were part of a criminal case. Since firearms were the property of the deceased, they were released to the rightful heirs or destroyed if that’s what the heirs wanted, except in homicide cases, where the police took possession. A change-of-custody form accompanied the evidence so that every time it changed hands both the person who was relinquishing it and the person who was taking it signed the form. Once the item was released, the form came back to the coroner’s office, where it was filed.

  In this instance, Holmes locked the money—determined later by the auditor to be $43,700—in the evidence room safe, then drove to Marin General Hospital. He wanted to find out from the surviving brother where his family lived so that he could notify next of kin regarding Stephen Brownlie’s death.

  When Holmes arrived at the hospital, two young wo
men were there. Both were gorgeous, well dressed, and fully made up, despite the late hour. One was Stephen Brownlie’s wife, now widowed. The other was Gordon Brownlie’s girlfriend. He was being treated in the emergency room with serious but not life-threatening injuries.

  Holmes talked with each woman, telling her what would happen next and asking if there was anything he could do to help. His words barely seemed to register. The wife was too upset to listen, while the girlfriend acted removed and distant.

  After that Holmes sat in a chair in the hallway and began writing his report. Among the personal items he found in the car was a small notebook. Thumbing through it at the scene, he had noticed columns of figures next to names and abbreviations: “1 gr.—30.00,” “Lumpy—80.00,” “1 paper bag—30.00,” “½-paper bag—20.00.” There were also title papers in the car showing that Stephen Brownlie—the deceased brother—owned a thirty-eight-foot sailboat that was registered in Florida but had a Stinson Beach, Marin County, address. When Holmes searched Stephen Brownlie’s pockets, he found a traffic citation that Brownlie had received in Oregon two weeks earlier, driving a Porsche.

  While Holmes was writing, Gordon Brownlie’s girlfriend came through the emergency room door and headed immediately into a pay phone booth. She didn’t close the door, and because Holmes happened to be sitting nearby, he could hear everything she said. It was a short message, spoken in a monotone, to somebody’s voice mail.

  “This is Cheryl. Stephen is dead. I’ll call you later.”

  Then she made another, similar call, and another. In all, she placed more than twenty calls. After a few minutes, Holmes realized what was happening. Using an office phone in a different part of the hospital, he called the San Francisco branch of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. It was 3 A.M., but someone answered immediately.

  “I’m at Marin General Hospital,” Holmes said, “after a traffic accident in which one man died and another man is being treated for injuries. I found a lot of money in the trunk of their car, and now this woman is on the phone making calls nonstop, one right after the other, out of a little black book. I think drugs are involved.”