The Education of a Coroner

by John Bateson

  Despite the challenges, the coroner’s office was successful much of the time in identifying skeletal remains. Some of it was the result of luck, but mostly it was due to persistence.

  “No one should die in anonymity,” Holmes says. “Even if that’s what a person wants, to just disappear and never be seen or heard from again, I believe his or her loved ones deserve to know what happened.”

  When it came to human bones, Holmes’s most notable case went back forty-four years. One newspaper said that it seemed to be “plucked straight from the plotlines of a late-night TV drama.” Holmes, who sometimes watched late-night dramas, agreed.

  A groundskeeper at Fernwood Cemetery in Tamalpais Valley had been turning over ground in a remote area that wasn’t designated for graves when his tool snagged on what turned out to be a buried wool sweater and a tangle of bones. Digging a little more, the groundskeeper found a broken pair of eyeglasses, two glass lenses, and a 1961 fifty-cent piece. Because no bodies were supposed to be buried there, the coroner’s office was called.

  “Finding a partial skeleton is one of the biggest challenges a coroner faces,” Holmes says, “simply because there isn’t much to go on.”

  In this instance, the skeleton was missing a head and hands. Clearly, someone had removed them thinking that it wouldn’t be possible to identify the remaining bones even if they happened to be unearthed at a later date. The position of the bones indicated that the person had been buried in a fetal position, facedown in the shallow grave.

  The first step was to determine how long the body had been buried. The only clues were the coin from 1961 and the eyeglasses. The frames of the glasses had the words “American Optical” etched on the arms. Darrell Harris, the investigator on the case, contacted a historian with the company, which was in Massachusetts, who said that that particular model was made from 1962 to 1968. Harris then took the glass lenses to an optometrist. The optometrist said that they probably were made in the late 1950s or early 1960s because plastic lenses were common after that. The left lens had a bifocal line and was for a person who was extremely farsighted, while the right lens had no bifocal line and was called a “balance” lens—that is, it had little or no built-in correction and was only for aesthetics. The combination, according to the eye doctor, indicated that the wearer probably had cataracts.

  An anthropologist provided more information. In all likelihood, she said, the bones belonged to a Caucasian female who was between five foot one and five foot three in stature and age forty-two or older.

  Two weeks after the bones were found, and following a fruitless search of the state Department of Justice’s missing-persons database, Harris and another coroner’s investigator, Dave Foehner, began doing door-to-door interviews with neighbors in the area. One longtime resident remarked that a woman known as “Mrs. Jones” had disappeared many years earlier. That tip led Harris to go through county archives, which turned up a missing-persons report from 1964. Bruce “B.B.” Jones, a longshoreman and union boss in San Francisco, had told authorities that his wife, Gertrude, was missing. They had had a heated argument, he said, in which she refused to add his name to the deeds of several pieces of property she owned. She walked out of the house after that and never was seen again.

  With this information, Harris began looking for one of Gertrude Jones’s surviving family members to do DNA testing. After much research he located a niece in Florida, and her mitochondrial DNA was compared to a DNA sample of the skeletal remains. (Mitochondrial DNA is passed along the maternal lines of families. A female can pass her mitochondrial DNA on to her children, male or female, but males do not pass along this DNA to their children.) The Department of Justice lab confirmed with a high degree of certainty that the bones found in the shallow grave belonged to Gertrude.

  Further evidence of the match was that Gertrude Jones was Caucasian, forty-three years old, five foot three, had poor vision, and had undergone cataract surgery shortly before her disappearance. The place where her remains were found was only a half mile from her home.

  The only person who stood to gain from Gertrude’s death was her husband. They didn’t have any children, and the only close relative was Gertrude’s sister, whom Harris managed to track down. She lived in New Jersey and told Harris that she appreciated knowing that Gertrude’s remains had been found after all this time. She said she always believed that Gertrude’s husband was responsible for her death. He hadn’t been in touch with any of Gertrude’s relatives after she went missing, and ignored their requests for keepsakes of hers, the sister said. Then she asked Harris a question.

  “Would you like me to send you a movie of Gertrude’s wedding?”

  “You have film from the day she got married?” Harris said.

  “I can send it to you.”

  She did. It was eight-millimeter film shot on the day a half century earlier when Gertrude Kavesh married Bruce Jones.

  “Gertrude was in this funky little hat,” Holmes says. “She had a 1950s hairdo, glasses, and wore a white dress. Her husband was kind of potbellied and looked aloof.”

  There was sound, so Holmes and his staff heard both of them talk, too, at the reception. Gertrude’s voice was high and excited, like that of a new bride, while Jones’s voice was deep and sounded as if he was a little bored.

  “It was all a little weird,” Holmes says, “because Gertrude’s bones were laid out on a piece of brown butcher paper on the conference table in my office.”

  Anytime Holmes’s staff investigated a case involving skeletal remains, the bones were placed in their anatomical positions on the table. This way everyone could see what they had and didn’t have.

  Gertrude’s head, hands, and other missing body parts were never found. Nevertheless, Holmes was confident in ruling that her death was a homicide. The tiny bone in her throat, called the hyoid bone, which enables people to speak, was intact, so she hadn’t been strangled, but her first cervical vertebra—the bone closest to the skull—was broken in a manner that wasn’t consistent with Gertrude accidentally breaking her neck.

  The undersheriff of Marin County took exception to the ruling. By calling it a homicide, Holmes was opening up a case that law enforcement had no desire to handle.

  “You’re not legally capable of calling it a homicide,” he said. “That’s my call.”

  Holmes was surprised. “Surely you know that the coroner is the person who legally rules on the manner of death,” he said. “If you don’t think it’s a homicide, tell me how she dug the grave, got in it, cut off her head and her hands, and buried herself. It’s not a suicide, it’s not an accident, and it’s not a natural death. What would you call it?”

  The undersheriff sputtered, then hung up. He didn’t have an answer.

  Another piece of circumstantial evidence tied B.B. Jones to the crime. From the backyard of the house where he and Gertrude lived, there was a clear view of her burial site. It would have been easy with binoculars to tell whether anyone disturbed it.

  Shortly after he reported his wife missing, Jones left the country and settled in Tahiti. When Gertrude was declared legally dead, he inherited her property and returned to Marin, bringing a Tahitian wife with him.

  “If he did kill her,” Holmes says, “he didn’t have long to enjoy what he gained.”

  Three years later, Jones died of natural causes. Ownership of his belongings passed to his Tahitian wife, who sold it all before returning to her native land.

  BABY DOE

  In May 1988, the body of an infant washed up on a small beach in Tiburon. Judging by the condition of her body, it was estimated that she had been in the water two or three days. She was wrapped in a white sheet with dark stains, and inside the sheet were a disposable diaper, a woman’s blouse, and a woman’s black dress. Inscribed on the front of the undershirt the baby was wearing were the words “I’m adorable.”

  Holmes consulted with a dentist and a forensic anthropologist regarding the child’s age. Each estimated it to be sixtee
n to eighteen months. The Tiburon Police Department issued an all-points bulletin, but it didn’t produce any leads. After a week, Holmes contacted local TV stations and asked them to broadcast a poster that the coroner’s office created, which included a description of the clothing. They couldn’t picture the baby because she had been in the water awhile, but the clothing was distinctive.

  The poster said, “Have you seen these items? Do you know this baby?”

  Every local station aired the story, but nothing came of it. Holmes didn’t receive one response.

  Meanwhile, Dr. Jindrich determined during the autopsy that the infant, now being referred to as Baby Jane Doe, had a fractured skull. He speculated that someone dropped her on her head or swung her head against a wall. What confused him, though, was that under the microscope he saw changes in the cell structure of some body tissues, and he couldn’t put his finger on what had caused them. He sent copies of the slides to two outside experts, but both of them said that they weren’t sure, either.

  It wasn’t until much later that Holmes learned why no one responded to his news stories, or why Jindrich hadn’t understood what he had witnessed under the microscope. As is sometimes the case, the answers, when they came, were the result of chance.

  In October 1988, five months after Baby Jane Doe’s body washed ashore, a hunter stopped in a remote coastal mountain area in Humboldt County to relieve himself. He was a good distance from any paved road, and three hundred miles north of Marin. Looking down, he saw the skeletal remains of a foot in front of him. The bones were peeking out from underbrush, and he knew immediately that they belonged to a human. Moving aside branches, leaves, and a small amount of dirt, the hunter unearthed a shallow grave and the rest of the body.

  The Humboldt County coroner was called to the scene and the body was exhumed. Then the arduous and time-consuming task began of determining who the person was. Three and a half years later, in the middle of 1992, a positive identification was made by matching dental records. The deceased was Renee June, a Berkeley artist who worked at a San Francisco advertising agency. Six years earlier, in August 1986, she had been reported missing. At that time her car had been found abandoned in Berkeley, but she was never seen again.

  A brief article appeared shortly thereafter in the Marin Independent Journal noting that the remains of a long-missing Berkeley woman had been found and identified. Still missing, according to the article, was the woman’s eighteen-month-old daughter, named Marta.

  Ray Nichols, one of Holmes’s investigators, was off duty and home at the time the article came out. He read it, cut it out, Scotch-taped it to a piece of paper, wrote “Could this be our Baby Jane Doe?” and put it in Holmes’s mail slot the next time he was in the office. Holmes came to work, saw the article, and said to himself that it couldn’t be. The baby was eighteen months old, but disappeared in 1986. That would make her three and a half in 1988, when Baby Jane Doe was found.

  Nevertheless, to cover all bases, Holmes supplied DNA from Baby Jane Doe to the Department of Justice’s lab, which compared it with bone samples from Renee June’s remains. Much to everyone’s surprise, they matched. Baby Jane Doe now had a name, Marta June, as well as a mother. Still unclear, though, was why there was a discrepancy regarding her age. Also unknown, of course, was who killed her and why.

  Renee June was married to a Berkeley architect named Arthur Mount. Once her remains were identified, he became the primary suspect in her death. He had moved to Washington State by this time but remained in touch with a longtime lover in the Bay Area named Chan. When the story broke in the San Francisco Chronicle about the murders of Renee and Marta June and the suspicion cast on Arthur Mount, Chan contacted Mount and let him know. Three days later, police in Blaine, Washington, found Mount in a hotel room, dead from a gunshot wound to the head. A note signed by Mount said, “I repent my sins. I pray to forgive and to be forgiven.” He didn’t say what those sins were.

  Working backward, Holmes and the police were able to piece together what probably happened, starting with the fact that Arthur Mount was Marta’s biological father. A comparison of his DNA with hers confirmed it. His daughter’s legal name was Marta June Mount. After killing his wife and daughter in 1986, Mount put their bodies in a chest freezer in his basement. Two years later, when he decided to move to Washington, he didn’t want to take the freezer with him so he had to dispose of their remains. He wrapped Renee June’s body in several layers of clothing and drove to Humboldt County, where he found an old logging road. A mile or so in, he stopped, dug a shallow grave, laid her wrapped body in it, and covered it with branches and leaves, thinking that she never would be discovered. As for Marta June, it seemed likely that he threw her body in the bay near Berkeley and currents carried it to Tiburon.

  It all made sense now. Marta June was two years older than originally thought because her body had been frozen for two years. No one responded to Holmes’s media appeal because no one knew of an eighteen-month-old infant who went missing recently; Renee June’s friends only knew of a child that age who disappeared two years earlier, along with her mother. Also, Jindrich had seen evidence of ice crystals that had been present in Marta’s body, but then they had melted and destroyed various cells.

  It was all conjecture—there was nothing concrete that tied Arthur Mount to the murders—until Mount shot himself. Then everything fell into place. Mount’s girlfriend, Chan, confirmed that he had had a chest freezer in his basement in Berkeley. No one tracked what happened to it, and Chan said she didn’t know, but it seemed likely that Mount had it taken to a dump.

  As for motive, Tiburon police speculated that Mount killed his wife and daughter to collect insurance money. Holmes had a different theory, however. He thought it was because Mount wasn’t close to his wife—he and Chan were lovers before Mount married Renee June, and continued to be lovers after—and he didn’t want the added burden of providing for a child.

  “I thought then, and still think now, that Mount killed Renee out of anger and frustration, then killed Marta because he didn’t know what else to do with her,” he says.

  When police interviewed Chan, she said that Mount had been depressed and dealing with financial problems. The two of them talked about the Chronicle article, and Chan said that Mount didn’t deny being involved but also didn’t confess to anything. In her mind, he wouldn’t hurt a fly, much less kill anyone. As close as they were, though, she said there was a lot about his life that he kept from her. For instance, she didn’t know that Mount had married Renee June until months later. He hadn’t told her.

  CHAPTER 16

  INVESTIGATING ABUSE

  The worst injury Holmes incurred in his career was when he wrenched his back helping to carry a two-hundred-pound dead man from a third-floor walk-up in San Rafael. Usually the mortuary that was contacted to pick up the body sent two people, but this time only one person came, a young woman who weighed under one hundred pounds. Holmes took the heavy end of the litter, but before they had even gotten to the stairs the woman dropped her end without warning, unable to hold the weight. Holmes lurched forward, his back gave out, and he went down on his knees. After that, he wasn’t able to lift the gurney and had to call the fire department and ask firefighters to take the dead body down the stairs. He managed to drive home, all the while vowing to avoid that situation again.

  When Holmes became coroner, local mortuaries said that they no longer could afford to send people out for what the county could pay—three hundred dollars per trip. Holmes understood.

  “It’s hard to run a removal service,” he says, “because you have to have a lot of people available on a moment’s notice. I ended up using a special company that was located across the bay, in Richmond. This one contracted with coroner’s offices in multiple Bay Area counties and couldn’t have been better. They would be in San Rafael in twenty minutes from the time we called them, two guys, shirts and ties, suit coats, shined shoes, perfect gentlemen.”

  The only time th
e removal service wasn’t contacted was when the deceased was an infant or young child. Then the investigator put the body in the back of his or her car, with as much compassion as possible. Investigators’ vehicles weren’t big enough to accommodate an adult-sized gurney, but babies and small kids could be laid on the backseat and taken to the mortuary. Given the coroner’s tight budget, any opportunity to save money was seized.

  Devon Gromer was only seven weeks old when he died. His parents, Katja and Jereme Gromer of San Rafael, told Gary Erickson, the coroner’s investigator who responded initially, that their son had had multiple health problems since birth, and had been in and out of various hospitals. When they found him unresponsive at 3:50 A.M. one day in April 2000, they called 911. Paramedics responded, but resuscitation efforts were unsuccessful. The cause of death was unclear, and the case probably wouldn’t have gone any further except Holmes was contacted by a relative of one of his closest friends who knew about the baby’s medical history.