The Education of a Coroner

by John Bateson

  A short time later, Young and her husband were arrested for breaking into a building at the College of Marin, stealing computer equipment, and trying to sell it at a flea market. The computers still had College of Marin stickers, but the couple was able to avoid a conviction by claiming that somebody gave the equipment to them.

  Right after that, Mrs. King died and the Youngs lit out for Montana. Months later, when Mrs. King’s estate was settled, they moved back to Marin and into the mother’s mansion. The property had deteriorated in the interim, and it became more run-down in the months that followed.

  Also living with them was Constance Young’s six-year-old son, fathered by a man named Nicklas Stephens. He had married Young several years earlier, then divorced her because of her drug use. Stephens had shared custody, and every time he came to pick up or drop off the boy, it was contentious.

  On one occasion, the two ex-spouses got into a loud and vicious argument. In the middle of it Constance bolted up the stairs and their son cried out a warning to Stephens.

  “Daddy! Daddy! Mommy’s getting the gun.”

  Young was intoxicated and also high on meth. She came down holding a gun, and she and Stephens scuffled while the boy ran upstairs. Stephens claimed that he was trying to take the gun from her when it went off. The boy gave conflicting accounts, at one point saying that when he left the room his mother was sitting on a couch and his father was standing over her holding the gun.

  It was the boy who called police. When officers arrived, they found Constance Young dead on the sofa from a gunshot wound.

  Two things came out of it. First, when people in Montana heard that Young was dead and that she had been living in San Rafael, they called the San Rafael Police Department. Young had told friends that she drowned her mother, they said. All she did was put the palm of her hand on her mother’s forehead and force her head underwater. That was why there were no bruises. As for the blood on the tub, it was Constance’s blood because her mother had bitten her.

  Police officers from Marin interviewed people in Montana and were told that Constance Young laughed about killing her mother and inheriting her mother’s estate.

  “She got the inheritance, she got the house, and she got away with murder,” Holmes says. “She thought it was great fun and didn’t hide it.”

  The second development was that police arrested Stephens and charged him with voluntary manslaughter for Young’s death. Holmes argued against it.

  “Stephens was a straight-arrow, stand-up kind of guy,” he says. “Even if it was voluntary, what purpose was served by putting him in jail? Now this kid had no parents, his grandmother was drowned, his mother was shot almost in front of him, and he was placed in foster care. Not that it’s okay to kill someone; it’s not. But she had the gun, he tried to take it away from her, and she pulled the trigger. The angle of the bullet was absolutely consistent with what he said.”

  Holmes had examined Constance Young’s body, so he knew. He also saw the state to which she had deteriorated in the twelve months since her mother’s death.

  “She looked like a concentration camp survivor,” he says. “She was that skinny. Her teeth were bad and her eyes were sunken. But she was the boy’s mother.”

  The police didn’t listen to Holmes, just as they hadn’t listened to Pam Carter when she pointed out incongruities in Susan King’s death. It might be possible to explain the bloody fingerprints and even the water in Mrs. King’s lungs, but the broken necklace was an indication that she didn’t have a heart attack or a seizure before she died. For one thing, the necklace wasn’t likely to break in that situation unless either the chain or clasp was weak. Carter tested them, and both were solid. More important, though, if the necklace did break accidentally, it would have been on top of Mrs. King’s body, not underneath it. That was the real clue.

  To Holmes and Carter, it couldn’t have been clearer. The problem was they couldn’t prove it at the time, and the district attorney didn’t think he could get a conviction without a confession.

  Nicklas Stephens, meanwhile, was sentenced to seven years in prison. “He was released after three and a half years,” Holmes says, “but still . . .”

  His voice trails off. Sometimes what’s just isn’t what’s right.

  PEDRO AND JOSÉ

  Being its own branch of county government, the Marin County Coroner’s Office had a level of autonomy during Holmes’s career that didn’t exist in many other California counties. Dr. Jindrich, Holmes’s predecessor, reminded county supervisors of this shortly after he was first elected. Each January the board of supervisors met individually with every department head to talk about how things were going. Heads who were hired by the board—the county administrator, finance director, human resources director, and health and human services director—were told when the meeting would be. With heads who were elected, the board requested a meeting. Jindrich declined to meet with the board, however. In a formal letter, he said that if voters were unhappy with his performance, they would let him know at the ballot box in the next election, but he wasn’t obligated to meet with the board or explain himself. Board members were aghast, but there was nothing they could do. For years, Jindrich refused to meet with the board. When Holmes became assistant coroner, Jindrich sent Holmes to sit in for him.

  Since it acted autonomously, the coroner’s office was an independent supplier of facts. In some cases these facts implicated an individual and in other cases they exonerated someone. Regardless of the outcome, the coroner was on equal footing with the sheriff and district attorney. This was important because at times the three of them disagreed about whether criminal charges should be filed. It wasn’t the coroner’s place to establish guilt or innocence, but if there was compelling forensic evidence to support criminal charges, Holmes believed that the police and public prosecutor had a responsibility to follow through, that the deceased and next of kin deserved it.

  One such occasion concerned two friends, Pedro and José. They were roommates and worked together at a small delicatessen and grocery store in Stinson Beach that was a few miles from their rented house. José owned a pickup truck but his driver’s license had been suspended because of past arrests for drunk driving. Pedro had a driver’s license but didn’t have enough money to buy a vehicle. Thus, when the two of them needed to go somewhere, to work or into town, Pedro drove José’s truck.

  They started work early in the morning, and generally finished around 2 P.M. At that time their boss often brought out a bottle of red wine and everyone had a drink or two before leaving for the day. One particular afternoon, Pedro and José didn’t make it home from work. Hours after they left, Pedro crawled up a steep hill onto the roadway and hailed a passing car. He was bloody and bruised and his clothes were disheveled.

  José’s truck was two hundred feet down the embankment, upside down. The embankment was covered with poison oak, and José was lying in the bushes, dead, after being ejected from the vehicle. The police asked Pedro what happened and he said he didn’t know. He said José was driving, lost control, and they ended up going over the side.

  “José was driving?” the cops said.

  “Sí,” Pedro said.

  The cops checked a database. “José has a suspended license,” they said.

  “Lo sé,” Pedro said. “I know it. That’s why I always drive. This time he wanted to drive, though.”

  Rescue workers brought José’s body up to the roadway. There was no blood, just evidence of trauma from the crash and its aftermath. A winch was used to haul up the truck. Its roof was caved in, the doors were jammed, and there was blood in the top of the window track on the driver’s side.

  After the pathologist did the autopsy on José, he called Holmes. “This guy wasn’t driving,” the pathologist said. “He has a seat belt mark from his right shoulder down his chest.”

  Photos were taken, then Holmes called the police officer who was handling the case and suggested that photos be taken of Pedro. Pedro had a
seat belt mark from his left shoulder to his right hip. Police talked to people at the restaurant who said that when they left, Pedro was driving and José was in the passenger seat. When confronted with this information, Pedro told police that after they went a short distance, José said he wanted to drive so they switched seats and José was driving.

  Holmes didn’t believe it, and neither did the police. Both thought that Pedro should be charged with manslaughter. When the case reached the district attorney’s office, however, a female prosecutor said she wasn’t going to pursue it.

  “The evidence is insufficient,” she said.

  Hearing that, the police officer asked her to talk to Holmes. Holmes laid the photos he had and the photos that CHP had taken of the accident on a table in front of the woman, lining them up as if she were looking through the front windshield of the pickup. The seat belt marks matched those of the driver and passenger exactly.

  She wasn’t impressed. “It’s a ‘he said, she said’ kind of case,” she said.

  The coroner’s office tested the blood on the driver’s side of the truck, and it turned out to be the same type as Pedro’s blood. He had crawled out through the broken window. José’s blood was a different type. The woman still wouldn’t prosecute, so Holmes asked for another meeting with her to try to understand why.

  “It’s vehicular homicide,” he said. “Maybe not intentional, but that’s not my job to decide.”

  She said, “You can call it anything you want, but there’s not enough information.”

  Holmes knew from experience that oftentimes in a traffic accident, the person who survives is the driver. He or she has half a second before everyone else in the vehicle to understand that something bad is going to happen and prepare for it. Also the driver has something to hold on to—the steering wheel—which can reduce the level of bodily injury if the vehicle is hit from the side. This fact didn’t convince the district attorney, either, however.

  Pedro wasn’t charged. It still bothers Holmes to think about it.

  DISASTER PLANNING

  When it comes to county government, the coroner’s office often is the forgotten stepchild. People don’t want to think about it, and they definitely don’t want to know any details of how it operates. Nowhere is this more apparent than in county disaster planning.

  Because Marin is surrounded on three sides by water, any large-scale disaster has the potential to leave county residents isolated. A major earthquake on the San Andreas Fault, for instance, which runs through Marin, or heavy flooding in low-lying areas such as the Canal District in central San Rafael, could stop all automotive traffic into and out of the county. The two primary access points—the Golden Gate Bridge to the south and Richmond–San Rafael Bridge to the east—will close if they suffer any significant damage. West is the Pacific Ocean, so the only direction people in Marin can travel without crossing a bridge is north.

  “Everyone remembers the aerial photos of traffic after Hurricane Katrina,” Holmes says. “There were twelve lanes heading out of town, and cars were backed up for miles. There are only four northbound lanes on Highway 101 from Marin, and just one lane north on Highway 1. The only way to bring in supplies will be by boat.”

  County officials weren’t interested in hearing about it, though, nor did they think in the beginning to even have a representative of the coroner’s office present in the county’s emergency operations center during planning meetings. It was only when someone said, “What happens to the dead bodies?” and another person said, “They go to the coroner,” that people realized Holmes needed to be there. Even so, no one was eager to hear what he had to say.

  “I’d ask about having contracts with tugboat and barge companies,” Holmes says, “and with businesses that had large refrigeration units, and people would look at me blankly, barely stifling a yawn.”

  Holmes’s questions grew out of a relationship he developed with people in the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office. It began in February 2000 after Alaskan Airlines Flight 261, en route from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to Seattle, Washington, crashed into the Pacific Ocean several miles off the coast of Ventura. Everyone on board—eighty-three passengers and five crew members—was killed. Holmes was part of the federal disaster mortuary response team that assisted in retrieving and identifying the remains, and because the wreckage was spread out and most of the bodies were torn apart, three thousand body bags ended up being used.

  Six years later Holmes was back in Southern California, helping out after another aviation disaster. A DC-9 passenger plane from Mexico City was descending into Los Angeles International Airport when it collided with a family-owned Piper aircraft that had just taken off. All sixty-four passengers and crew members in the DC-9 and the three people in the Piper were killed. In addition, the DC-9 crashed into a residential neighborhood in Cerritos, a suburb of Los Angeles, destroying five houses, damaging four others, and killing fifteen people on the ground (the Piper fell onto an empty playground in Cerritos). Ironically, the street the DC-9 landed on was Holmes Avenue.

  The remains were brought back to a large, makeshift tented area that was fully enclosed and refrigerated. It was on a scale that Holmes would have had a hard time imagining prior to seeing it.

  “The L.A. coroner was really well prepared and had the total support of his board of supervisors,” Holmes says. “That made all the difference.”

  Afterward, his contact gave him advice. “As soon as you go back to Marin, begin making formal agreements with people who have large refrigeration units. That’s where you can put the bodies after a disaster until you’ve had a chance to examine and identify them. Tell the county that you’ll only be using the units temporarily, even though the fact is that once they’ve had dead people in them, no one will use them for any other purpose again. The county will have to buy them.”

  Holmes didn’t go that far, but he did visit and establish agreements with three large suppliers of cold storage. All were beer distributors. One had a two-story refrigerated building and another had a three-story one.

  “Even if Marin had a morgue,” Holmes says, “it couldn’t have accommodated more than seven or eight bodies. In identifying places, I used the number four hundred. Could it hold four hundred dead bodies?”

  It was an arbitrary number but conveyed the potential magnitude of what the county—and the coroner’s office—might be dealing with. If the unit had that kind of capacity, then Holmes’s next question was simple: “How soon can you empty the place if I need it?”

  These were large, warehouse-type operations, and beer in cases was stacked on pallets, sometimes to the ceiling.

  “A day,” he was told.

  “That’s all?” Holmes said.

  “We have big forklifts and are used to moving product quickly.”

  That solved the refrigeration problem. There was still the issue of water transportation.

  “In a major disaster, we won’t be able to transport anything into or out of the county by road,” Holmes told county planners. “Marin doesn’t have any rail lines, and we’re too suburban to have access to large helicopters—they’ll be deployed in metropolitan areas. Tugboats pulling barges are the only answer, or ferries. Look at all of our landing points—Stinson Beach, Drake’s Bay, Larkspur Landing, Richardson Bay, Tomales Bay, even the Petaluma River.”

  County administrators believed that the possibility of all three major land routes—two bridges and a federal highway—being impassable simultaneously was too remote to consider. They listened to Holmes but didn’t act on what he said. He could only hope that if there was a major disaster in the future, he would be proven wrong in his assumptions or at least would be retired by that time.

  CHAPTER 22

  A SUPERVISOR’S WRATH

  The suicide of a seventeen-year-old boy named Brett wasn’t the last case Holmes handled, but it contributed to the end of his career. He just didn’t know it at the time.

  By most accounts, Brett was an average teena
ge boy. He had a pretty, sixteen-year-old girlfriend, four good friends he hung out with, and a part-time job, and was scheduled to graduate from high school in four months. When he didn’t show up for work, one of his friends who worked with him became alarmed. He knew that Brett had tried to kill himself twice before, and just two days earlier Brett had said that if he should die, don’t be sad but rather be happy for him because he finally had done it. That night the friend tried to phone Brett but couldn’t reach him. The next morning Brett’s mother called the friend to say that Brett hadn’t come home the previous night. The friend rounded up five other boys and they started looking for Brett. They knew some of the places where he liked to go hiking, one of which was near a water tower on a fire road not far from Brett’s house. That’s where they found Brett’s body, hanging by a rope from a pipe that protruded from the tower. Laid out neatly on the cement foundation were Brett’s backpack, wallet, and cell phone. In the wallet were two letters. One was a good-bye letter addressed to “Boo,” his girlfriend. The other was addressed to “Everyone” and said that Brett had never been happy, and this was the best thing for him.

  It seemed like another tragic case of a despondent youth who took his life and left everyone who loved him reeling. Holmes had seen far too many cases like it. This time, though, there was a twist, and it would have repercussions that he couldn’t have imagined.

  Brett’s birth mother had been a drug addict who wasn’t capable of raising him or his sister. When Brett was a baby, his maternal grandmother applied for and received legal custody of him, while another family adopted his young sister.

  From the outset, Brett’s grandmother, a woman named Tabitha, told all of her friends, neighbors, and people in the community that Brett was her biological son, not her grandson, despite the fact that it was highly unusual for a woman her age to birth a child. Once Brett was old enough to talk, Tabitha insisted that he refer to her as his mother, not as his grandmother. As Brett grew older, she told him that when his sister came to visit, he was to introduce her to people as his cousin, not as his sister. Also, at no time was he to mention or try to talk to his birth mother, Tabitha said.