The Education of a Coroner

by John Bateson

  “Do you know what happened to the children?” I asked.

  Since the coroner’s office wasn’t involved in this aspect of the case, because the children were alive, I was worried that Holmes might not know. He followed it, though, as eager as I was to know how everything turned out.

  “When workers from Child Protective Services entered the house the night after Ndigo died,” Holmes said, “all of the children were removed for their health and protection. None were returned. Each was placed in a new environment, and their health improved once they were nourished, active, and exposed to the sun. Within several months, the boy with the large callus on his forehead was able to stand on his own for the first time in his life, and some of the other children were doing well in school.”

  It wasn’t an out-and-out win, especially considering Ndigo’s death and the fact that many if not all of the children were likely to suffer lasting mental health issues. Still, given the situation, it was the most that anyone could hope for. Doctors, police officers, CPS workers, prosecutors, the judge, and Holmes had to be content with that.

  Not surprisingly, Mary Campbell and Deirdre Wilson, as well as Winnfred Wright, lost all of their parental rights. They were permanently barred from communicating with any of the children or with each other.

  “I had a blessing of being given children,” Wilson said afterward. “I aligned with a warped worldview. I gave up my maternal instincts. I squandered my responsibilities. . . . I will cry daily.”

  Campbell checked out a book from the prison library on grieving, which said that apologizing to the dead can be cathartic. Afterward, she spent hours role-playing with another female inmate who pretended to be Ndigo. Campbell apologized to the substitute Ndigo over and over, weeping all the while. The exercise helped, but only a little.

  “The very first thing I’m going to do when I get out of here,” she said, “is join a grieving-mothers support group.”

  Wright wasn’t as remorseful. Actually, he wasn’t remorseful at all. After he was convicted, he said that the only thing he was guilty of was failing to see that the children got enough vitamin D. He called it an “innocent mistake.”

  CHAPTER 17

  REMEMBRANCES OF OCTOBER

  On October 17, 1989, the Loma Prieta Earthquake, magnitude 6.9, struck the San Francisco Bay Area. As memorable as it was, disrupting the third game of the World Series, and as tragic as it was, considering that 69 people were killed, 4,000 others were injured, and 15,000 homes and businesses were destroyed in San Francisco and Santa Cruz County, it was only the second most important event that Ken Holmes had to deal with.

  At 6 A.M. the day before, coroner’s investigator Bill Thomas was on duty but home when his phone rang. Knowing that it probably was the county Communications Center notifying him of a death, Thomas went into the kitchen to answer it so that he wouldn’t disturb his wife or children. He was forty-one years of age, and after years of womanizing he had settled down, married, and become a father.

  His intuition was correct; a dispatcher was on the phone relaying details of a death. Thomas was leaning against the kitchen counter talking jovially, as was his way, when he slumped to the floor with spasms and seizures, gagging, coughing, and turning blue. He was having a heart attack, and his young son, who had followed him into the kitchen, saw the whole thing. The son started screaming, waking Thomas’s wife. The Communications Center sent an ambulance right away, but it was too late. Doctors kept Thomas alive for a week; however, he had been brain dead by the time help arrived.

  Thomas’s funeral service was well attended, as he had many friends and colleagues. The most noticeable contingent was women, who outnumbered men four to one. “Even though Bill was married and had kids by that time,” Holmes says, “many women were weeping because they liked him so much.”

  The other noticeable contingent was law enforcement. They came in uniform and filled one-third of one side of the church. “Total respect for Bill,” Holmes says.

  As he was sitting there listening to the service, Holmes couldn’t help but think of moments over the years when Thomas’s humor and charisma had lifted the spirits of everyone around him. Two memories in particular stood out.

  The first one occurred early in Holmes’s tenure. The investigators in the coroner’s office—Thomas, Holmes, and Don Cornish—were required to take a two-week course on fingerprint cartooning at the Department of Justice in Sacramento. Fingerprint cartooning sounds like a comic strip but it’s actually making a sketch of an unseen fingerprint that someone is describing over the phone. It’s not as necessary today thanks to modern technology that makes it possible to send the image of a fingerprint electronically and receive the results back in seconds, but it was important at that time.

  The class was a ninety-minute drive each way from Marin, so the three of them carpooled in the Rambler they shared. They had to leave the county at six thirty each morning, and because he was the junior investigator, Holmes was the designated driver. He didn’t mind except that every afternoon, on the way back, Thomas wanted to stop at a topless bar.

  Topless bars were just coming into vogue and two of them opened simultaneously on opposite sides of the highway in Dixon, a small town west of Sacramento. The class ended at 4 P.M., and since he was still young and single, Thomas wasn’t in a hurry to get home. Cornish and Holmes were older and married, but that didn’t matter. Thomas was able to talk people into anything.

  When they walked into the bar, it was early enough that they were the only patrons there. It was just them, the bartender, and a forlorn-looking woman who would get up and gyrate halfheartedly on a small elevated platform behind the bar while raucous striptease music blared.

  “The woman did her best to look tantalizing,” Holmes says, “but the effect was pitiable. The more she took off, the more you wanted her to put something on—a bathrobe, anything.”

  Typically, Thomas sat between Cornish and Holmes at the bar. He did most of the talking, although the conversation was collegial. Thomas also did most of the drinking, with Cornish matching him on occasion. Holmes didn’t drink anything with alcohol because he was driving and didn’t want to risk getting pulled over, especially in a county car.

  The second week they stopped at the same bar three days in a row, not because it was any less run-down than the other bar but because they realized by then that it didn’t matter. Both bars had the same watered-down booze, grating music, and tired-looking, beaten-down women. One bar ended up being frequented more often simply because they didn’t have to cross over the highway to get to it.

  Each time they were greeted by the same bartender, who never seemed to be aware that he had served them the day before. The fourth day, bored and with nothing else to do, Bill Thomas started ribbing the bartender, but doing it in a fake Middle Eastern accent that sounded genuine (among other skills, Thomas had a gift for mimicry). The bartender shrugged it off at first, thinking that Thomas would let up after a while, but he didn’t. The longer Thomas kept at it, the more bothered the bartender became. It was early in his shift and he didn’t need this.

  “Knock it off,” the bartender said finally. “Just enjoy your drink and keep your comments to yourself. If you don’t, I’m going to have to eighty-six you.”

  Thomas looked blankly at Cornish and Holmes. “What that mean, eighty-six me?” he said.

  Cornish and Holmes were fighting not to give Thomas away. They stifled their laughter, covered their mouths, and said nothing.

  Thomas turned to the bartender. “I no understand. What is eighty-six? What you mean?”

  Finally the bartender had had enough. “Get the hell out of here,” he said.

  Thomas looked at him in astonishment. “Why? I do nothing wrong.”

  “Out!” the bartender ordered, pointing toward the door.

  Cornish and Holmes sat at the bar with their heads bowed as if to say, “We don’t know this guy.”

  Thomas shrugged, then walked out the door. Cornish and Ho
lmes decided to stay another ten minutes so that the bartender wouldn’t think the three of them were together, even though they had come into the bar together three days in a row.

  After a few minutes a man entered and sat down several stools away from Holmes. Holmes glanced in his direction but gave him no thought until the man ordered a drink. Then Holmes stared at him. The man’s voice was all too familiar; it was Thomas. He had gone out to their car, changed into different clothes, including a coat and a hat that had been in his foot locker, and returned, this time without the Middle Eastern accent.

  The bartender didn’t seem to recognize him. He brought Thomas his drink, and Thomas sat by himself, straight-faced, sipping his drink as if nothing had happened.

  The other memory was more recent and concerned a murder in Belvedere. It was the first homicide in the city’s history, as far as Holmes knew, and got people’s attention for that reason.

  Belvedere is one of the most affluent communities in the United States. It has the highest per capita income—$250,000—of any city in the country with a population over 1,000 (Belvedere’s population is 2,000). The average home price is more than $2.5 million. There are no restaurants or stores on Belvedere’s two island peninsulas, just jaw-dropping views of San Francisco, Angel Island, Sausalito, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Mount Tamalpais.

  The victim was a wealthy antiquities collector who also happened to be a major drug dealer, although neither the police nor Holmes knew it at the time. As far as everyone at the scene was concerned, he was just a middle-age man who was sprawled on the deck of a megamansion with a gunshot wound to his head. Inside the house were Ming vases, statuary behind glass, and other rare Oriental artifacts, many nearly priceless. It was in these artifacts that Chinese heroin was smuggled.

  Thomas was the coroner’s investigator who was called to the scene. Holmes was assistant coroner at the time, and he instructed the investigators to contact him anytime a case was unusual or likely to attract the media. Given the rarity of a murder in Belvedere, Thomas called Holmes.

  When Holmes arrived, Thomas was talking with a young female cop. There was a seven-foot-high grape-stake fence along the street, and the two of them were in front of a gate that led down a path to the house, which had its own dock and panoramic views of the bay. The female cop had a clipboard and was responsible for noting the name and affiliation of every person who entered the crime scene, the time he or she arrived, and the time the person left.

  Thomas had been inside already and was just waiting for Holmes. Holmes took one look at him and knew what he was up to.

  “Bill was this sage coroner’s investigator who was romancing the pants off this woman who was fairly new to the job,” Holmes says.

  Thomas introduced Holmes to the woman and said, “Ken is my supervisor. He has been at this game much longer than the rest of us, and has seen it all.”

  Thomas laid it on thick, making up all sorts of stories. Holmes had less experience than Thomas, but the woman would never know it.

  After several minutes, Thomas and Holmes went through the gate and down the path to the house. The decedent was still lying on his deck, with police officers milling around him. The officers didn’t have anything specific to do but weren’t going to miss out on the opportunity to be involved in a homicide in their small, well-to-do community.

  There wasn’t much for Holmes to see. The man was clearly dead, and it was clearly a homicide, as no weapon was found. The fact that the victim was at the top of the pyramid of an international drug-smuggling ring, without any connections to the people who did the actual dealing, would come out later, long after the coroner’s office had put the case to bed.

  When they went back through the gate, Thomas resumed his conversation with the female cop. “How long have you been on the force?” he asked.

  “Six months,” she said.

  He nodded as if that was what he expected. “Have they given you bullets yet?” He said it with a perfectly straight face, so she wasn’t sure if he was joking.

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Are they real ones or the wooden ones?”

  She didn’t know what to say before she realized that he was pulling her leg. “Oh, you,” she said, and she punched him playfully on the arm.

  “That was the epitome of Bill,” Holmes says today. “He was the funniest person I ever knew.”

  Thomas’s death left a vacancy that needed to be filled. In the short term, Holmes could handle the added work, but given his other responsibilities he needed to hire a new investigator as soon as possible. He turned to a deputy he knew, Gary Erickson. Erickson had been a tunnel rat in Vietnam, then a longtime cop. He was tired of police work and frustrated that when he arrested someone, more often than not the person was released and back on the street before Erickson had even completed the paperwork. It made him cynical and somewhat bitter, although he was inquisitive and a good thinker.

  Because he had been a cop, Erickson was especially good at talking to other cops. “If they tried to bullshit him, he saw through it and didn’t accept it,” Holmes says. Erickson didn’t have Bill Thomas’s sense of humor, but then, no one did. Thomas would be missed, and Holmes felt badly for his widow and children, who should have had many more years to enjoy his company.

  It wasn’t until after Thomas died that Holmes learned something that surprised him. Don Cornish, the other senior investigator, said that Thomas was offended when Dr. Jindrich passed over him five years earlier and chose Holmes to be assistant coroner.

  “Bill didn’t hold it against you,” Cornish told Holmes. “He held it against Doc.”

  At the time, Thomas had told Holmes that he was fine with the change. Not once in Holmes’s presence had Thomas expressed any hard feelings about it.

  Holmes couldn’t help but ask Cornish, “Did you feel the same way?”

  Cornish shrugged. “Basically, yeah. After a while we understood it, though. You were the right person for the job. Besides, you haven’t been a jerk.”

  It was an obvious reference to Keith Craig, Holmes’s predecessor, whose prickly personality had been difficult to deal with. In contrast, Holmes had made a point of being open, honest, and fair. The emphasis was on “we,” not “I,” and they respected that.

  KEEPING A COOL HEAD

  A year earlier, also in October, Holmes left work at 5 P.M., planning to spend a quiet evening at home watching Monday Night Football. He was divorced by this time and living on his own, and he stopped at a local Safeway store to pick up a couple of TV dinners. As soon as he entered, he noticed a large Halloween display in the front of the store, on the left-hand side. He has always had a special fondness for Halloween—it’s his favorite holiday of the year—and he stopped to look at the items that were being featured. As he did, a shopper went out the exit doors near Holmes and a big, muscular African-American man in his twenties charged in through the same doors like a freight train. He was wearing a watch cap and jacket, and his hands were buried in his jacket pockets. Right behind him was a smaller black man wearing a beanie and army peacoat. The smaller man had one hand in his pocket and the other at his side.

  The big man looked right at Holmes but was too focused on the rest of the store to see him. Holmes knew immediately that they weren’t going shopping, and said to himself, This isn’t good.

  The big man rolled the watch cap over his face to form a ski mask, pulled out a .45-caliber handgun, held it up in the air, and announced as he walked down the row of check stands, “This is a holdup. Everybody get down.”

  The small man left his beanie on and followed in his partner’s footsteps, giving everyone dirty looks as if to say, He means business. It wasn’t necessary; the big man was walking strong and all who saw him knew it. No one was going to challenge him.

  Holmes moved around to the back of the display so that he wasn’t in their line of sight and considered his options. He was required to carry a gun while on duty, and since he was coming from work he had the gun on
him. It was strapped to his waist and concealed by the sport coat he was wearing. When he got home, he would put it in a drawer, but at the moment he was armed.

  It wasn’t much of a gun, though, a five-shot .38. It was the smallest and lightest gun he could carry within regulations. He didn’t want more weight on his hip than absolutely necessary, and wasn’t interested in wearing a shoulder strap or ankle holster. More important, he had never fired it at anyone. He had no desire to be a cop, and his attitude was that if he witnessed a crime, he didn’t want to draw on somebody because he was at a disadvantage—the other person probably had no qualms about shooting someone, while Holmes did.

  Several people were slow to get on the floor and the big man was impatient. “Everybody down!” he said again. For emphasis, he took the butt of his gun and knocked one of the check stand baggers, a slender East Indian teenager, to the ground.

  When the robber hit the boy, the gun flew out of his hand. It slid under the steel bar at the check stand and went a couple of feet beyond it. In a flash the man vaulted the bar and retrieved it. Seeing the violence with which he had coldcocked the bagger and the catlike reflexes he displayed getting his gun back, Holmes knew that the man was trouble. He calculated the odds of intervening with his .38 when the man had a much bigger .45 with ten or more shots, and didn’t like them.

  The better course of action, he decided, was to go to the back of the store and say in a loud voice because there were a lot of shoppers at that time, “Stay here. A holdup is going on in front and the robbers have guns. Someone call 911.” After that, he hurried down several aisles to alert other shoppers of the robbery.

  After Holmes had told as many people as he could, he walked cautiously toward the front of the store. Everyone but the two robbers was lying on the ground. While Holmes watched, the robbers went from check stand to check stand with the big man pointing his gun at people and the small man taking out trays full of money. The small man also hurriedly scooped up some of the loose bills that had been stashed underneath the trays and stuffed them in his pockets.