The Education of a Coroner

by John Bateson

  Few members of the general public have ever seen a suicide note, in part because most suicide victims don’t leave one. Even if there is a note, there aren’t any rules about what should be in it. Does the person ask for forgiveness from loved ones, cite reasons of rejection and isolation in order to hurt others, or provide general instructions about money and insurance or the disposal of the deceased’s remains? In Holmes’s experience, the contents of most notes tended to be so meager that they lacked the passion and desperation usually associated with suicide. Mostly, they were just sad.

  A fifteen-year-old girl hung herself from a tree in the woods. She used a felt marking pen to write her note in black letters all over her body. “This is the last place I will step, breathe, speak, or cry,” she wrote on her left arm.

  A nineteen-year-old woman who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge wrote, “I really am very sorry to do this to all of you. I know you were rooting for me, but I wasn’t rooting for me. Please try to let me go.”

  Notes were especially important in cases where a husband and wife were found dead together with the weapon at their side. It could be that they had a suicide pact or it could be a murder-suicide.

  The bodies of one couple were found in a Sheraton hotel room by staff after the couple failed to check out. In her suicide note, the woman wrote that she had “willfully chosen this,” and her husband was “just following my wishes.” The husband confirmed this in his note.

  Another couple left notes to loved ones in which they apologized for living a lie that they were too embarrassed to share. They had been addicted to painkillers for more than fifteen years, tried to quit many times, and couldn’t. “It was our choice and we were stupid,” the wife wrote. “Please do not think there was anything that you or anyone could have done.”

  A thirty-two-year-old woman named Barbara left multiple notes. Holmes found them in her house after he examined her body lying on a morgue table at Marin General Hospital.

  Two years earlier, when she and her boyfriend, Steve, had started living together, Barbara took his surname. They weren’t married, but she felt married, or wanted to be. After they broke up and he moved out, she kept his name anyway, continuing to hope that he would return to her and to her thirteen-year-old daughter, whom she had borne from a previous marriage. He didn’t return, though, and she was devastated. In her mind, there was no reason to go on.

  When Steve talked with her by phone at 5:15 P.M., she told him that she was going away for a while and would leave a note for him inside the house, which he could pick up later that evening. He went by her house at 6:40 P.M., didn’t see anyone or notice anything amiss, and retrieved the note. After driving a short distance, he stopped and read it, which Barbara had labeled as her last will and testament. It was handwritten and postdated to the following day.

  Alarmed, Steve returned to the house, heard a car running in the closed garage, and broke out a window. Barbara had connected a garden hose from the exhaust pipe to inside the car. She was in the front seat, unconscious. He pulled her out and began doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Meanwhile, Barbara’s daughter was taking a bath, heard the glass breaking and Steve’s shouts, ran outside, and then called 911. Paramedics did CPR en route to the hospital, where resuscitation efforts continued for another thirty minutes before Barbara was declared dead.

  When Holmes and a police officer went to Barbara’s house, they saw that the hose was still connected to the exhaust pipe with the opposite end lying near the driver’s door. Holmes removed it and put it in the backyard, then he and the officer swept up the broken glass and nailed boards to close off the garage window. A rear door was unlocked, and they entered the house to close and lock the windows and turn off the lights. That’s when he found the other notes. The one that was addressed to Steve was signed “Your Loving Wife.” A note to friends said, “I know I’ve always had a death wish, and a love wish, and a marriage wish. I’ve secretly waited all my life for these things. . . . I’m still waiting.” A third note was to her brother: “Mom thought I was the healthy and strong one, but look who stayed on the planet.” A fourth was to her mother: “I know you’re dead, but I love you and I’ve missed you.” A fifth was to her father, whom she entrusted with her daughter’s care and of whom she made one request: “Make her know she can make it.” The last letter was to her young daughter, asking for forgiveness and promising to be her “guardian angel.”

  “Barbara’s handwriting was so neat and precise,” Holmes says, “that she could have taught penmanship classes. No words were crossed out.”

  As Holmes was leaving, he secured Barbara’s house and garage with coroner’s seals. The seals were fluorescent orange, had gum backings, and were placed across the frame of any door leading outside. They warned people that breaking the seal was a felony. He wrote the date and time on each seal, then signed them.

  “I always thought the seals should be beige,” he says, “like a grocery sack, rather than such a bright color. It’s hard to miss them, which is the point, but it’s also easy for anybody driving down the street to know that nobody’s home.”

  In this instance, not only was nobody home, but nobody was coming back. Barbara’s daughter stayed with friends a few days, until Barbara’s father could arrive from out of state, handle his daughter’s affairs, and take custody. Holmes could only think, as he did after nearly every suicide, that it didn’t have to be like that. Suicide is an option for people who are depressed, but it’s not the only option. Moreover, suicide doesn’t end the pain. It merely transfers it from the dead to the living.

  CHAPTER 21

  POWER STRUGGLES

  In 1998, when his sixth term as the coroner of Marin County ended, Dr. Jindrich decided not to run again. He had accomplished everything he wanted to and was ready to retire. He encouraged Holmes to consider the position, knowing that although he wasn’t a forensic pathologist, he could contract for the service, and in every other way he was qualified.

  Holmes had never campaigned for public office before. Fortunately for him, there wasn’t much campaigning to do. When the deadline came to submit an application, he was the only person to file, meaning that he didn’t have an opponent and was certain to be elected. Knowing this, he began thinking about who he wanted to be his assistant.

  Don Cornish had worked in the coroner’s office even longer than Holmes—twenty-seven years—and was an excellent investigator. He was nearing the end of his career, however, and told Holmes that he planned to retire soon. As for the two junior investigators, neither was the right fit. Gary Erickson had proven to be a good hire, but he was a little too cynical and didn’t have the administrative experience that the job required. Ray Nichols, meanwhile, was marginally competent in Holmes’s mind—certainly not deserving of a promotion. Holmes’s thoughts turned to a man he worked with in the state coroner’s association named Gary Tindel.

  Tindel was the three-term sheriff-coroner in Yuba County, a small jurisdiction in the Sierra foothills east of Sacramento. He had a degree in civil engineering but never worked a day as an engineer. Just out of college, he couldn’t find a job in the field and ended up applying to the Yuba County Sheriff’s Office because he had grown up in Yuba City, the county seat, and the sheriff’s office had openings. He took the test, was hired, and moved up quickly through the ranks until he was elected county sheriff. He also served as coroner because the coroner’s office was part of the sheriff’s department.

  In meetings of the California State Coroners Association, Tindel was a presence. Part of it was due to his size—six foot one and 350 pounds of mostly muscle. Mainly, though, it was because he was a natural leader and a driving force wherever he went. Being near the state capital, Tindel got to know many state legislators and was a confidant of Governor George Deukmejian and his successor, Pete Wilson. On the walls in his office, Tindel had photos of himself with every major politician in California.

  In the coroners association Tindel assumed various leadership position
s and twice was elected president. He was a skilled administrator who Holmes knew would be able to handle any personnel issues that came up. Holmes knew something else as well: after three terms as sheriff-coroner, Tindel was being challenged by a female sergeant in Yuba County. Two weeks before the election, Tindel told Holmes that he had underestimated his opponent’s chances, hadn’t campaigned as hard as he should have, and might end up losing. The vote was close, but Tindel’s premonition proved accurate. On the same day that Holmes was elected coroner of Marin County, succeeding Ervin Jindrich, Gary Tindel lost his bid for a fourth term as the sheriff-coroner of Yuba County.

  As soon as Holmes heard that, he asked Tindel if he would consider becoming his assistant. Tindel said he appreciated the offer but didn’t want to move because his three kids were in Yuba. Pete Wilson had offered him a job, as had a lobbying group, and he was considering other options.

  “How about if you come to Marin and just take a look?” Holmes said. “Marin isn’t that far from Yuba so it would still be easy to see your kids. The county is slightly bigger, but we don’t have many homicides so the work isn’t as strenuous.”

  Holmes knew that while he was sheriff-coroner, Tindel had handled multiple disasters, including the second-worst bus accident in United States history to that time, when a Yuba City school bus overturned and twenty-eight students and an adult advisor were killed. Also, Tindel was in charge of the county’s emergency management system and, among other things, dealt with the effect of huge floods one year when cattle drowned and were floating in people’s front yards. In addition, Holmes thought—correctly, as it turned out—that Tindel would like Marin’s landscape and climate. Yuba is fairly flat and arid, hot during the summer and cold during the winter.

  Tindel visited Marin County with his wife, and was sold. In addition to the environment and the weather, he liked the idea of a total change, getting away from local and state politics, as well as all the drama that went with it. He signed on to be the new assistant coroner.

  CASTING BITE MARKS

  One of Gary Tindel’s first cases involved a fifty-five-year-old man who was found dead on the floor in his high-end, two-story duplex in Tiburon. Peter Torrente had been stabbed multiple times and also strangled. In addition, his body had fresh bruises, and chairs and a table in the dining room were upturned and damaged. All of it indicated that Peter had been in a physical fight with his assailant before he was killed. There was something else, though, that caused Tindel to call Holmes and ask him to come to the scene.

  “This is a wild one,” Tindel said. “There are fresh bite marks on the decedent’s nose and one ear. I think the person he was fighting with bit him.”

  Holmes was intrigued. “I’ll be right there,” he said.

  On the way, Holmes stopped by his dentist’s office and picked up forming gel. In other cases he had used plaster of Paris to cast tire impressions, but it wasn’t right for this.

  When Holmes arrived, the entire Tiburon Police Department—five people—was in the living room. Only one person needed to be there, but murders in Tiburon were rare and all of the officers wanted in on the action. Holmes cast the teeth marks on Peter’s ear and nose. Because they were only a couple of hours old, he was able to get good impressions.

  There was an obvious suspect in the case—Peter’s twenty-seven-year-old son, David. He was in trouble frequently, abused drugs, couldn’t hold a job, and browbeat his father constantly for money.

  “Up to a point his dad tried to help him,” Holmes says, “but there came a time when his father said no, no more money.”

  David Torrente lived with his father off and on. He wasn’t living with him at the time that Peter was killed, but he had come back to the house that day, seeking another handout. He was high on drugs and his father refused, saying that he wasn’t going to subsidize his son’s wasteful habits anymore. They got into a fight and ended up on the floor.

  Peter was somewhat frail and not in good health. At one point as they were fighting, David Torrente bit his father’s nose and ear. Eventually he stabbed him with a steak knife and a utility knife, then strangled him before fleeing the scene.

  Police were led to the house by Peter’s girlfriend, after she couldn’t reach him by phone. She used to live with Peter but had moved out because David Torrente scared her.

  Over the next two days, David Torrente tried to use his father’s credit card to withdraw cash from ATM machines in San Francisco and South San Francisco but was unsuccessful because he didn’t use the correct PIN number. Police caught him in the East Bay after a person reported that someone was rustling in the bushes outside his home and eating lemons.

  When Holmes heard that David Torrente had been arrested, he encouraged sheriff’s detectives, who had been called in by Tiburon police to assist with the case, to get a casting of the son’s teeth so that it could be matched against the bite marks he had cast on Peter Torrente. The detectives pooh-poohed the idea, telling Holmes that it wasn’t necessary, they already had more than enough evidence for a conviction. Among the items found in David Torrente’s possession were two knives that police were confident belonged to his father and had been used in his stabbing.

  David Torrente’s defense was “I wasn’t there.” Inasmuch as he had lived with his father periodically, it was natural for his fingerprints to be all over his father’s house, including on the knives, which his father could have given him or he had borrowed.

  During one of the pretrial conferences, Holmes told the district attorney about his castings. The police had never mentioned them.

  “If he bit his dad during this fight,” Holmes said, “that’s one of the few ways you’re going to be able to say he was there at that time. Even if the son said he was in another room when the attack occurred and didn’t know anything about it, the teeth marks prove otherwise.”

  The district attorney got a search warrant, and a jail dentist did a casting of David Torrente’s teeth. When the sheriff’s detectives heard about the castings, they hired another dentist to race down to the mortuary and get castings of the bite marks on Peter’s nose and ear. It was five days after the incident took place, however, and Peter’s features were shriveled by this time so the castings were useless. Holmes’s castings ended up cinching the case for jurors and led to David Torrente’s imprisonment.

  A BROKEN NECKLACE

  One of Pam Carter’s early cases concerned a sixty-seven-year-old woman named Susan King, who died in her bathtub. Her nude body was found submerged in bathwater by her thirty-eight-year-old daughter, Constance Young. Young said that her mother had been ill for several weeks, experiencing vomiting, diarrhea, and weight loss. She had been treated three times at Kaiser, rehydrated, and released. The last time was two weeks earlier.

  Carter knew from the moment she arrived that something wasn’t right. For one thing, dead bodies float, but Susan King’s body was completely underwater. That meant all of the air had been forced out of her lungs prior to or during her death. For another thing, there were three bloody fingerprints on the tub—an antique, clawfoot model—that had dried. The fingerprints looked to be recent, although there wasn’t any blood in the water.

  The responding police officers decided on their own that Mrs. King had a seizure. When Carter got there, they said they were leaving. Carter tried to convince them to at least consider the possibility of foul play. After all, there was evidence that didn’t add up to a natural death.

  One of the officers helped Carter lift Mrs. King from the tub with the aid of webbing straps. As they did, Carter noticed a broken, yellow-metal necklace lying directly underneath the body.

  “Look,” Carter said. “How can you ignore this? You can’t account for the fact that she’s not floating. She’s dead and her lungs are full of water. You can’t account for the three bloody fingerprints. There’s no blood in the water, and these prints are fresh and dry. Now how are you going to account for this broken necklace?”

  The officers down
played the meaning. There were no bruises or marks on Mrs. King, they said, or other signs of trauma. While they acknowledged that she wasn’t taking any serious medications, only Lomotil (for diarrhea) and Flagyl (an antibiotic), that didn’t rule out a health problem. Moreover, Constance was quite emotional—appropriately so, in their minds—further convincing the officers that Mrs. King’s death was natural.

  “We’re 10-8,” they told Carter. Out of here.

  After they left, Carter took lots of photos. She also took a specimen of the bathwater to make sure it was the same water that was in Mrs. King’s lungs (it was). There was nothing else Carter could do, though. The bloody prints weren’t clear enough to be helpful, and without the police looking into the case further, there was little chance that new information would turn up.

  “The curtain came down,” Holmes says. “We didn’t have anything. The only thing we could do was rule that the manner of death was undetermined because it just didn’t feel right.”

  The rest of the story unfolded over the next several years. Constance Young, Mrs. King’s daughter, had been in and out of trouble. She was a meth addict and continually solicited money from her mother to support her habit, much as Peter Torrente’s son had done. From time to time, Young and her husband, a onetime inmate at San Quentin, lived in Mrs. King’s house, a beautiful, well-maintained mansion in an older part of San Rafael. They weren’t living there at the time Mrs. King died—she lived alone—but they had resided in the house in the past. Eventually Mrs. King told her daughter that she wasn’t giving her any more money because it just went for drugs. She had had enough.