by John Bateson
Gary Tindel, Holmes’s assistant, was the investigator on the case. He was summoned after Brett’s friends called 911 and police officers confirmed Brett’s death. Tindel saw that Brett’s body was cut down and removed to a local mortuary for an autopsy, then he wrote up his report.
Holmes had the case file on his desk the next morning and was looking at it when he was phoned by a local reporter. People already knew about Brett’s suicide—word had gotten around—and the reporter asked Holmes where Brett’s family resided. Reading off the report, Holmes said that Brett had a grandmother in San Rafael who was his adoptive mother. The next day, the Marin Independent Journal ran a brief story that said Brett was survived by his grandmother. As soon as it appeared, Tabitha called Holmes. She was irate and said she wasn’t Brett’s grandmother, she was his mother, and she wanted him to print a retraction in the newspaper.
Holmes was confused. “You’re his mother’s mother, correct?” he said.
“Yes,” Tabitha said as if it hardly mattered, “but I’m his adoptive mother, and I demand that you print a retraction.”
Holmes tried to reason with her, saying that any kind of retraction would bring more attention to the case, which he didn’t think she wanted. Besides, she was his blood grandmother.
“All my friends think I’m his mother,” Tabitha said. “I’ve never told anybody that I’m his grandmother.”
“Let me get this straight,” Holmes said. “You’re asking me to change my story, which is true, in order to match your story, which isn’t true?”
Tabitha practically spit out the words. “Who’s your supervisor?”
“You are,” Holmes said, “because I’m elected.”
“Don’t go anywhere,” Tabitha said. “I’m on my way down there to talk to you.”
She showed up at the front counter of the coroner’s office with her husband in tow. He wasn’t Brett’s grandfather, but he went along with the ruse and didn’t say a word throughout the conversation.
“I insist that you print a retraction and an apology,” Tabitha said. “I’m Brett’s legal mother.”
Holmes could have been accommodating, and under other circumstances he would have been. Tabitha’s assertiveness and sense of entitlement rubbed him the wrong way, though.
“I’m not going to print a retraction of something that’s true,” he said, “nor am I going to apologize for saying it.”
They went back and forth for several minutes, neither one giving ground. Then Tabitha said, “I heard Brett left a note. I want it.”
Holmes said, “He left two notes. One is addressed to ‘Everyone’ and I can give you a copy of it. The other one isn’t addressed to you, so I can’t let you have that.”
Tabitha was incensed. “Who’s it addressed to?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“I’m his mother,” Tabitha snapped.
Holmes said, “I’m sorry, but the law prevents me from letting you see it.”
Tabitha could barely restrain herself. “Can you tell me what’s in it?”
“No, because it’s a private letter from one person to another.”
Tabitha huffed that she was going to get an attorney. Holmes told her she was welcome to do that, or she could go upstairs and talk to one of the attorneys at county counsel. This wasn’t the first time a situation like this had come up, he said.
For several seconds she stared hard at him. Then, her jaw set tight, she said, “We’ll see about this. I want that letter.”
A short time later, Holmes received a call from an attorney who said he was acting on Tabitha’s behalf. He asked Holmes whom the letter was addressed to.
“It’s not addressed to anyone in the family,” Holmes said, “so I don’t know whether I can tell you. I need to talk to my attorney first.”
Holmes’s attorney was a woman in the county counsel office named Jennifer. She told him that there was no harm in saying that the letter was addressed to Brett’s girlfriend.
“Can you tell her attorney that?” Holmes said. “I don’t want to be involved in that part of it.”
“Sure,” Jennifer said.
Within hours, Tabitha was on the phone again with Holmes. “Where is that little— Where is she?” she sputtered, referring to Boo.
“I have no idea where she is,” Holmes said. “She hasn’t come in to get the letter. I don’t even know if she knows that we have a letter.”
Once a case was closed, the coroner’s office informed someone if the decedent had left that person a note or letter, but usually not before.
“I’ll tell her!” Tabitha said. “I’ll tell her!”
Holmes had barely gotten off the phone with Tabitha before she was in his office again, this time with Brett’s girlfriend. “The girl was as pretty as a picture,” he says, “as timid as could be, and clearly frightened of this overbearing woman.”
Tabitha’s husband was there, too, and once again was silent.
“Give her the note,” Tabitha said to Holmes. “She’s going to give it to me.”
Holmes looked at Boo, who seemed terrified. “Is it your preference after you’ve read the note to give it to her?” he said, motioning in Tabitha’s direction.
Boo bowed her head and said softly, “No, it’s not my preference. She’s telling me I have to.”
“If you don’t want to, you don’t have to,” he said.
Tabitha erupted. “You asshole! You can’t prevent her from giving it to me.”
Holmes nodded. “No, I can’t. But she can.” Then he turned to Boo. “You need legal representation here. You can’t be bullied by somebody who’s not related to you.”
“I’m not a bully!” Tabitha said through clenched teeth. “That note is my property!”
“It’s not,” he said. “It’s her property.”
Before Tabitha could say anything further, Holmes said to Boo, “Do you want to read it?”
Near tears, Boo nodded.
Holmes took her into a private room, leaving Tabitha and her husband at the counter. With the door closed behind them, he gave Boo the letter that Brett had written to her.
“You can have the original after I make a copy for our files,” Holmes said. “You don’t have to show it to her.”
Boo said, “If I have it when I walk out of here, she’ll take it from me.”
Holmes said, “Well, then read it and don’t take it out of here.”
He left the room so that Boo would have privacy, then told Tabitha that Boo was reading the note and probably would need time to herself afterward. Tabitha was nearly apoplectic, but there was nothing she could do.
When Holmes’s secretary told him that Boo had finished and was ready to leave, he went to talk with her again. “Would you like me to walk you out?” he said.
Boo said, tears streaming down her face, “Would you walk me to my car?” She and Tabitha had come separately and met in the parking lot.
Holmes approached Tabitha at the counter and told her that Boo had read the letter and decided to leave it there. Tabitha lit into Boo. “You told me you were going to let me have it. What kind of a girlfriend are you, you cheap little . . .”
She never actually called her any names, just kept repeating the words “cheap” and “little.”
Boo was sobbing, partly because her boyfriend was dead and partly because she was being browbeaten by Tabitha.
“The part of the letter about Boo was sweet,” Holmes says, “but in the middle Brett vented about Tabitha, about how controlling she was and how she forced him to deny his sister and birth mother.”
A month later, Holmes received a call from one of the five members of the Marin County Board of Supervisors. She happened to represent his district and he had supported her campaign, displaying her signs in his front yard, although that wasn’t why she was calling him now.
“I was contacted by one of my constituents,” she said. “There was a death and a suicide note, and apparently you made a misstatement in the pa
per. Can you and I meet to talk about it?”
Holmes said, “There’s really nothing to meet about. It wasn’t a mistake. The lady has been lying to her entire community for something like fifteen years and wants me to cover for her.”
“What!” the supervisor exclaimed.
He told her some of the details. “It’s his blood grandmother. She adopted him legally, and she demands to be called his mother. She’s told her friends that she’s his mother. She’s a sixty-five-year-old woman with a seventeen-year-old son? It’s possible, but it means she was close to fifty when he was born. I, unknowingly, put the truth in the paper.”
“Okay,” the supervisor said. “That makes a different story.”
Only it didn’t. The following week the supervisor called Holmes again. Tabitha continued to complain to her about being referred to as Brett’s grandmother rather than his mother.
“It’d be a lot easier if you went ahead and put an apology in the newspaper,” the supervisor told Holmes. He was shocked.
“I can’t believe you’re asking me to do that,” he said. “This woman has lived a lie for years and wants us to support her for the sake of her face in the community. Admittedly, I got my back up in the beginning because she came into my office with an attitude, but the bottom line is I didn’t say anything wrong, and I’m going to stand with that. I’m not going to write a retraction or apology.”
Holmes thought that was the end of it, but the supervisor’s secretary contacted him shortly thereafter and said the supervisor wanted to meet with him. When he went to the supervisor’s office, which was on a different floor of the Marin Civic Center building than Holmes’s office, she had an attorney with her, another person in the county counsel’s office.
Holmes looked at him uneasily. “Do I need my attorney?”
The man nodded. “It’d probably be good.”
Jennifer, Holmes’s attorney, came in and got a quick update. Then the supervisor said, “For the good of the community, and to keep peace with everyone, it would be best if you issued an apology and we’re all done with it.”
“What is this woman to you?” Holmes said. “Why are you carrying her banner?”
“I keep hearing from her.”
“I keep hearing from her, too, and I just told her no. I’m not going to write a letter of apology. At this point it’s the principle of the thing.”
Holmes turned to Jennifer for support. She said, “It’s totally up to you.”
The supervisor glared at Holmes. It was the first time they had had a serious disagreement, and she was perturbed. “I’m elected,” she said, “and I’m telling you to write this letter.”
It was an astonishing thing to say, and Holmes gaped at her in disbelief. He was elected, too, and she knew that. He wasn’t her underling.
Holmes couldn’t help but reply, “You’re elected by one-fifth of the people who elected me.”
It was true. There were five supervisorial districts in Marin, and people in each district elected their supervisor. In contrast, everyone in the county voted to elect the coroner.
The supervisor didn’t understand why Holmes was fighting her. In her mind it wasn’t a big deal, just a letter. If it stopped Tabitha from hounding her, it was worth it.
She couldn’t make Holmes write it, though, and he never did. Tabitha didn’t get the retraction or public apology she wanted. She also didn’t get to see Brett’s letter to Boo. Tabitha did exact a measure of revenge, though.
To start with, neither Brett’s birth mother nor his sister—Tabitha’s daughter and granddaughter—was invited to Brett’s funeral service. Holmes learned this later from Lisa, Brett’s birth mother. The two of them struck up a friendship after Lisa came to Holmes’s office and poured her heart out to him. She had cleaned up years earlier, remarried, and owned a small business in San Francisco with her new husband. She told Holmes that when she was young she did a lot of stupid things to try to get away from her mother. She also said that Tabitha forbade Brett from seeing her and was livid when she found out that he was in contact with her.
Holmes’s stubbornness had consequences for him as well. Within months the supervisor mounted a quiet campaign to get rid of the coroner’s office by merging it with the sheriff’s department. Holmes couldn’t be fired for dereliction of duty, and he didn’t have any health problems, so the only way to get him out of office was to consolidate his department with the sheriff’s.
To be fair, the supervisor wasn’t the first person to consider a merger. The county administrator had asked Holmes previously when he planned to retire because combining the two offices made sense to him. He didn’t want to do it while Holmes was still in office, though. Holmes said that he didn’t have any immediate plans to retire and expected to serve one more four-year term, through 2014.
Soon after the incident with Tabitha, the supervisor began lobbying her fellow supervisors. A merger would save the county money, she maintained, and place the operation of the coroner’s office under the sheriff the way it was in most other California counties. Sheriff Robert Doyle was in favor of the merger—it increased his power—and the triumvirate of an influential county supervisor, the county administrator, and the sheriff was formidable.
Holmes pointed out the advantages of having the coroner’s office separate from the sheriff. Death investigators came into the job already trained in medicine and forensics while police officers lacked this knowledge. An independent coroner paid greater attention to accident victims, suicides, and individuals who died from natural causes than did cops, whose focus was on homicides. Families also received more and better support because investigators were willing to spend time with them and help them deal with their grief rather than move quickly to the next case.
Unsaid but implied was that the outcome of many cases would have been different if the coroner’s office hadn’t devoted considerable time and resources to them. Gertrude Jones’s remains wouldn’t have been identified forty-four years after she disappeared, and the cause of her death—murder—wouldn’t be known. Little Devon Gromer’s death would have been attributed to natural causes when, in fact, his father killed him. A foot and shoe found in San Francisco Bay wouldn’t be connected to a specific person, and the cause of death—a jump from the Golden Gate Bridge—would be a mystery to next of kin and others.
There were so many instances when coroner’s investigators, working independently from law enforcement, unveiled the truth in cases that would have been dropped if they hadn’t been given the freedom to pursue them. Sammie Marshall died in the course of being removed from his cell at San Quentin, but the cause of his death wasn’t natural, despite what prison officials said. Wolfram Fischer, whose body was found without any identification beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, would have died in anonymity if Holmes had been less determined and if Wolfram’s body had been cremated rather than buried, making future DNA testing impossible. Peter Torrente’s son might have gotten away with murdering his father—much the same way that Constance Young got away with murdering her mother in her bathtub—if Holmes hadn’t cast the bite marks he left behind.
This wasn’t a slap at law enforcement. Rather, Holmes noted that police officers had different responsibilities and priorities than coroners, and keeping the offices separate benefited the county in several ways.
Despite his efforts, Holmes knew well before the issue was voted on that it was a done deal. There was no opposition except his, and barely any discussion.
In November 2009, the county board of supervisors approved the merger of the coroner’s office with the sheriff’s department effective January 1, 2011. The vote was unanimous.
CHAPTER 23
ENDING AND BEGINNING
After the merger was announced, Holmes considered his options. By the time it occurred, he would be sixty-eight and have spent more than half his life working in the coroner’s office, including the past twelve years as coroner. It was a good run, and he had a lot to be proud of, in particul
ar the positive relationships forged over the years between his office and thousands of families who had lost loved ones. He could collect his pension and just walk away. That was what most people would do.
Holmes wasn’t ready to retire, however. While he had many interests outside of work, which he looked forward to pursuing when he had the time, he continued to be energized by the job and felt that he had more to give still.
In June 2010, elections were held for several county positions, including, for the first time, that of sheriff-coroner. If the merger hadn’t taken place, the coroner would have been a separate item on the ballot with Holmes seeking a fourth term. Instead, beginning in 2011 Sheriff Doyle would be the coroner and would appoint a staff person to oversee the coroner’s function. Already he had indicated that he had a sergeant in mind, so Holmes would be out of a job.
Two months before the election, Holmes filed papers to run against Doyle. The chances of Holmes winning were slim since there were no serious black marks against the sheriff and the majority of voters would assume, given concerns about safety, that it was better to have a sheriff who was also the coroner rather than a coroner who was also the sheriff. Holmes knew he was a long shot, especially with only two months to campaign, but decided to try anyway.
Doyle was sixty-two and had spent his entire career—forty years—in the sheriff’s department, starting as a court bailiff. He had been sheriff fourteen years and, like Holmes, had never faced a contested election. He was experienced, savvy, and had a solid base of community support. In addition, he was in charge of 316 employees and managed a budget that was nearly fifty times larger than the coroner’s budget. Holmes matched him in tenure, but his office was much smaller. Doyle emphasized the disparity of their respective departments by featuring in his campaign literature the image of a minnow trying to devour a much larger bass.