The Coroner Series

by Thomas T. Noguchi

  In 1970, in another twist in the history of this case, my own attorney, Godfrey Isaac, to my surprise, represented Sirhan Sirhan in the judicial review of his conviction, the basis for which was summed up in the affidavit of an investigator Isaac hired, William W. Harper, a consulting criminalist to the Pasadena, California, Police Department and a former Naval Intelligence officer. His affidavit’s conclusion:

  It is evident that a strong conflict exists between the eyewitness accounts and the autopsy findings. This conflict is totally irreconcilable with the hypothesis that only Sirhan’s gun was involved in the assassination. The conflict can be eliminated if we consider that a second gun was being fired from Firing Position B concurrently with the firing of the Sirhan gun from Firing Position A. It is self-evident that… Sirhan could not have been in both firing positions at the same time. No eyewitness saw Sirhan at any position other than Firing Position A where he was quickly restrained by citizens present at that time and place.

  Sirhan’s conviction was upheld. But scientific evidence of soot and divergent bullet angles, and a host of witnesses who did not actually see Sirhan fire the fatal shot, all seemed to indicate there may have been a second gunman. Moreover, even the most sophisticated forensic techniques were unable to prove that the fatal bullet was fired from Sirhan’s gun.

  And yet…

  My own professional instinct instructs me that Sirhan somehow killed Senator Kennedy alone. He has always insisted he acted alone, and he kept a diary in which he wrote, “RFK MUST DIE.” But instinct and even educated guesses are not enough. Forensic science must concern itself only with the known facts. And I believe that the Kennedy assassination must go down in the history of forensic science as a classic example of “crowd psychology,” where none of the eyewitnesses saw what actually happened. But until more is positively known of what happened that night, the existence of a second gunman remains a possibility. Thus I have never said that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy.

  Perhaps the whole truth will never be known. And that is a dilemma that sometimes confronts modern forensic science—a dilemma that in the Kennedy case began through the discovery of particles of soot in Kennedy’s own hair. The night of his assassination, Robert Kennedy did indeed seem to be riding the ninth wave. It bore him upward to a great political victory, then plunged him to his death. And thinking of him today, I remember what he said to the reporter Jack Smith about the ninth wave. Bobby Kennedy’s reply must be my own as a forensic scientist when I consider the circumstances of his assassination: “I don’t know the number of the wave, but I know the result.”

  5

  * * *

  The Hearings

  The Kennedy autopsy report was hailed by forensic pathologists across the nation as “a prototype for all autopsies of legal significance.” It was an important victory for my profession. At last forensic science was being accorded the attention and respect it deserved. And I was more than gratified when the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to install me as permanent Chief Medical Examiner after all.

  For me, it was the realization of a dream, and I felt I was now in a position to make another dream come true: the expansion and modernization of the Medical Examiner’s Office. We were still housed in the basement of the Hall of Justice, where it was only a slight exaggeration to say that the rats outnumbered the microscopes. We needed larger space and a larger staff—in short, a larger share of the county budget. And I set out to get it.

  Lin Hollinger, the Chief Administrative Officer, was in charge of the day-to-day administration of the county. It was he who ruled on the budget requests from my office. And when I told him that we needed not only a large infusion of new personnel to cope with the escalating case load, but also an entire new building, a Forensic Science Center which would cost more than a million dollars, he felt that my demands were excessive. He seemed to be opposed even to my smaller requests. So I committed the cardinal sin of bureaucracy. Bypassing my immediate superior, I went directly to the Board of Supervisors. And I soon found, to my dismay, that I had another battle on my hands, a battle that would revolve around not my professional competence but my personality.

  Hollinger fired the first shot. One day as I sat with him in his office, I remember, he abruptly drew a finger across his throat in a slitting gesture and said, “You’ll never embarrass me again.”

  The gesture was so sudden that I was taken aback, and I asked him what I had done. He replied hotly that I had gone over his head with a personal request to the Board of Supervisors to hire more investigators. What was worse, the Supervisors had approved the request over Hollinger’s objection, and that, he said, was intolerable. In fact, the finger across the throat symbolized it all. I was through. Finished.

  I knew that the Supervisors, as well as the Administrator, were annoyed by my constant requests for appropriations, but I couldn’t believe that my job was in jeopardy simply because I hadn’t gone through channels. There must be another reason.

  Hollinger confirmed that suspicion. “You’ll have to go,” he said, holding up a file in his hand. “We’ve had too many complaints about you. Everyone is against you, the doctors and everyone. If you don’t resign, we’ll file charges against you.”

  I was startled by his words. How could “everyone” be against me? I hadn’t been in the job long enough to create enemies, I thought. I was so curious that I impulsively reached for the file, but Hollinger quickly withdrew it and stuffed it into a drawer. Then he said that the Board of Supervisors all agreed with him that I must go. And as a lure for me to resign, they would appoint me chief pathologist at Rancho Los Amigos Hospital, at the same pay I was now receiving.

  I told him I liked my present job, but I left his office a confused and beaten man.

  My first reaction was to send the Board my letter of resignation. I thought there was no alternative. But later, at the prodding of a friend, David Smith, I changed my mind. At the eleventh hour before acceptance of the resignation took place, I sent a telegram to the Board withdrawing it.

  When I refused to resign, I was fired, and no fewer than sixty-one charges were filed against me, perhaps the most lurid ever brought against a public servant, and the newspapers loved it. Suddenly a little bureaucratic controversy in Los Angeles was news around the world.

  Here are just a few of the charges:

  I threw a shoe at a black chauffeur.

  I said I wanted 707 jets to crash so that I could perform the autopsies on the victims and become famous.

  I smiled in the middle of mass disasters.

  I wanted Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty to die in a helicopter accident.

  I “reveled” in the publicity I attracted after the Robert Kennedy assassination.

  I threatened another employee with a knife.

  I described to associates a splendid vision I had in which a fully loaded jet liner collided with a hotel “and amidst the flames, I, Thomas T. Noguchi, stood, and the press was there.”

  I said I wanted to perform a live autopsy on Lin Hollinger.

  In sum, the implication was that I was mentally disturbed—crazy. I was furious, but at the same time I thought it would be hopeless to fight back—indeed, suicidal. The Board would produce witnesses to “support” the charges, and my reputation would be destroyed. Even if I could prove that the charges were false, I would be indelibly stamped as some sort of madman who “prayed” for mass deaths and disasters. I would never be able to find another job in my field.

  It was then that a man literally saved my life. I went to see attorney Godfrey Isaac at the suggestion of a friend, but I told him I felt it was no use to resist, because the Board was determined I should go. Isaac disagreed. Those outrageous charges had been filed and published, he said. If I didn’t fight them, the whole world would believe that the accusations were true. In effect, I had no choice but to resist.

  Isaac was a short, dapperly dressed individual with an informal, engaging personality. I had been told that h
e was a brilliant trial lawyer, a master of the difficult art of cross-examination, and a tough all-around battler for his clients’ rights. I liked him immediately, and when he agreed to act in my defense I sensed for the first time a small ray of hope.

  As he grew more familiar with the circumstances of my case, Isaac would become convinced that there was an underlying motive for the actions of the Board of Supervisors. “It seemed to me,” he later wrote, “that Noguchi was a target because of plain, old-fashioned prejudice. They were out to get him because he was Japanese, that’s all there was to it.”

  I did not want to believe that. But Isaac convinced me that my professional reputation was at stake. I had to fight to save that. We took my case to the Civil Service Commission of Los Angeles. And thus the stage was set for what the newspapers would call perhaps the most sensational hearing in Los Angeles history.

  As we began preparations for my defense, the first problem was money to pay the legal fees. I had very little of my own, and friends suggested that the Japanese-American community might come to my support. That proved to be an unrealistic hope, for we discovered that many people felt that I had embarrassed the Japanese-American community. In sum, I realized, they believed that the charges against me they had read in the newspapers were true. So, because of lack of funds, my legal defense became a family affair. Hisako and I withdrew our entire life savings from the bank. And Isaac’s wife, Roena, became an investigator.

  The hearing before three Civil Service Commissioners was set to begin on May 12, 1969. That day a huge crowd filled the hearing room, eager to witness the action. I sat with Isaac at a defense table, with all eyes—and a television camera—on me. The television people had requested, and received, permission to cover this “trial” in full.

  Martin Weekes, the deputy counsel for the county, stood up to make his opening statement. It rocked the court, not only because of its content but because his voice was actually choked with emotion as he poured out the charges he intended to prove. They were incredible.

  Weekes claimed that I had danced in my office as Senator Kennedy lay dying, saying “I’m going to be famous … I hope he dies … because if he dies, then my international reputation will be established.” And when two giant airliners collided near Los Angeles, I hadn’t been satisfied with the numerous corpses stacked in the morgue, because, according to Weekes, I had fixed a magic figure, fourteen thousand, as the number of deaths I wanted processed in my first twelve months as Chief Medical Examiner. That was when, also according to Weekes, I had “prayed” that a fully loaded jet liner would plummet into a hotel and I would stand “amidst the flames … and the press was there.”

  Then Weekes revealed why his voice was throbbing so emotionally. Just that morning he had heard that my black deputy, Lewis Sawyer, had died. I had worked Sawyer, Weekes said, “until he dropped. And drop he did.” Only as an afterthought did he mention that Sawyer had actually died of cancer. And Isaac whispered to me, “Weekes is all choked up because he forgot to add cancer to the other sixty-one charges against you.”

  Herbert McRoy, my administrative chief of staff, was the county’s first witness, called to substantiate the charge that I wanted 707s to fall from the sky. He said he had heard me utter that wish just after two helicopter crashes in May 1968, adding that the statement had been made in front of him and my secretaries on many occasions in the office.

  It was not enough that that I prayed for accidents. When McRoy finished, an investigator named Day testified that at the height of an influenza epidemic I had walked through a morgue stacked with bodies, looking joyous. He stated that I had said happily to him, “You like it?” And according to Day, whenever there were terrible tragedies, ranging from the helicopter crashes to the Kennedy assassination, I always had a look of “elation” on my face. “This did not,” he testified, “seem to be appropriate for the situation involved.”

  Day’s testimony about my “elation” was so absurd that Isaac spent little time on cross-examination. But later he would produce our own expert witness, who brought laughter to the hearing room by saying it was not surprising that a Japanese looked “elated” during a disaster: “They smile no matter what happens.”

  An ex-secretary, Eleanor Schmidt, testified next and said that I referred to Orientals as “Yellow Submarines.” Then she described a vivid scene. One day, she alleged, I took a knife from my belt, slashed a sheet of paper in two, then said to her ominously, “I could use this knife for an autopsy on the living—and perhaps an autopsy on Mr. Hollinger.”

  According to another secretary, Ethel Fields, I was a racist. I “hated all niggers, Jews, and Japs,” she said. As I myself am Japanese, the remark brought chuckles even from one of the presiding commissioners.

  I was also a publicity hound. Fields testified that I instructed her to activate my beeper device when I was making a speech, so that I would look important. And not only that. I was profane.

  Q. What words did he use, ma’am?

  A. Well, frequently he said “goddam it,” and then other times he said “son of a bitch.” And, once when he received a letter he was upset about, he said, “Goddam son-of-a-bitch pissing peters.”

  Laughter in the hearing room.

  Q. Did you find his language offensive?

  A. Well, I was rather shocked.

  Fields also stated that I had waited gleefully for Senator Kennedy to die, and she repeated to the commissioners what the newspapers were now calling “Noguchi’s famous prayer for disaster.” “Relative to the helicopter crashes,” she testified, “he said that … he hoped other helicopters would crash, and that this would be in his jurisdiction. And that … the press would be there and … he would become well known internationally and nationally.”

  Q. Then with reference to the other aircraft crashes, what statements did he make?

  A. He also said that he hoped some other large jets would crash so that he could handle the case.

  Testimony about Kennedy and the air crashes coming from one of my own secretaries was damning. But on cross-examination Isaac elicited information which surprised even him.

  Q. From whom did you get what you call the full story [of my statements about Kennedy and the air crashes]?

  A. Well, partly from the papers.

  Isaac stopped. Usually in control of a cross-examination, he had obviously been caught off guard.

  Q. You mean that a good part of your testimony that you have given here is based upon what you have read in the newspapers?

  A. Yes, and what I have obtained from Mr. Weekes [the county counsel]—what they have told me.

  Fields’s testimony, seemingly direct from her own experience, had, instead, apparently come from the newspapers and from the county’s attorney.

  Q. Did you read about the so-called prayer for disaster in the Los Angeles metropolitan dailies?

  A. I don’t take the Los Angeles Times. All I take is [a local paper].

  Q. Did you read in the newspaper about Dr. Noguchi’s statement about air disasters?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. Did you read in the newspaper about Dr. Noguchi’s behavior about Kennedy?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Fields’s testimony was a shocker to the commissioners—and symbolic of the turn the hearing was taking in my direction. Then witnesses who testified in my favor began trooping to the stand: secretaries who said that I was “a really great boss,” and that I even paid for their Christmas office party out of my own pocket; a dozen employees who stated under oath that they had never heard me wish for disasters.

  Was I crazy? Dr. Frederick Hacker, a respected psychiatrist who had studied my case in preparation for the hearing, was asked, “Is Dr. Noguchi ‘normal’?”

  “No, not normal,” Dr. Hacker replied. “Supernormal. It’s certainly not normal for a man to do all the things he has managed to do… . Dr. Noguchi may be unusual in some areas, in his ability, in his accomplishments, and, yes, in some of his customs and habits. But that
is not abnormal.”

  A pathologist was called to the stand to testify about my work on the Robert Kennedy autopsy. “[It] was what I would call a complete autopsy,” he said, “as complete as a pathologist can make one. It was highly organized.”

  “Object!” Weekes’s voice cut through the hearing room. “May we approach the bench, Your Honor?”

  I sat there watching as both attorneys went into a huddle with the three commissioners. Isaac told me later what had happened. Weekes had demanded that the commissioners not listen to our witness’s testimony about the Kennedy autopsy. His reason? The autopsy report had been placed in evidence at Sirhan’s trial, and a courtroom battle over it might lead to an “international incident.” In truth, Isaac told me, Weekes didn’t want my skill extolled and was using a fake issue, national security, to keep it out of the hearing.

  Obviously, the county’s case against me was crumbling, and the Kennedy-autopsy issue, in which we triumphed, completed the rout. The media, sensing that the county’s actions had become more and more unfair, came over full square to my side. As did the Japanese-American community, which formed a group called JUST—Japanese United in Search of Truth—to help raise money for my legal defense.

  After that, every day in court was a fiesta. I had become a hero to many of the people who crowded the hearing room. Meanwhile, the parade of witnesses testifying in my defense continued as Isaac sought to show that the county’s charges against me were based on simple misunderstandings and had no substance in fact. Charles Maxwell, the chief of the mortuary division, testified that he personally had heard the celebrated prayer for a 707 accident.