The Coroner Series

by Thomas T. Noguchi

Q. When Dr. Noguchi … had that discussion about a [707] crashing, you recognized that he was being facetious, didn’t you? … You didn’t take him seriously, did you?

  A. No, of course not.

  Another witness went on to explain, “We pathologists have senses of humor that might not be understood by nonpathologists. In the line of work that we are engaged in, dealing with death and disease so much, a sense of humor is more or less a survival kit for us. This is a sort of gallows humor or … graveyard humor, as other individuals have termed it.”

  Q. This is common practice among pathologists?

  A. Yes, it is. I’m afraid sometimes that if the remarks we made—if the general public were to hear them, they may be misunderstood.

  Finally, as a rebuttal witness, the county unleashed its biggest gun: Lin Hollinger, the county’s Chief Administrative Officer, who had inspired the hearing in the first place. He testified, as Isaac commented, like a god from Olympus. His voice was authoritative, his accusations shook the room. The impression he gave was that firing a local coroner was just a nasty little bureaucratic chore for him. No big deal. As for the charges against me, each and every one of them was true. How did he know? His people had investigated every allegation and confirmed its accuracy. And even one of them, if proven true, was sufficient grounds to fire me, let alone sixty-one. As far as he was concerned, Hollinger said, “The firing of Dr. Noguchi was absolutely justified.”

  Did he have any personal animosity toward Noguchi? No. What about the throat-slitting gesture? It never happened, Hollinger said.

  The commissioners were impressed with this dignified executive, renowned in the county for his straightforward if sometimes blunt approach. But in a brilliant cross-examination Isaac found the chink in his armor.

  “Mr. Hollinger,” he asked, “isn’t it true that you recommended the discharge of Dr. Thomas T. Noguchi because you believed he was too emotionally disturbed to perform autopsies?”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Hollinger replied.

  “Mr. Hollinger, isn’t it true that when you asked Dr. Thomas T. Noguchi to resign, you offered him a post at Rancho Los Amigos Hospital as a pathologist?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Isaac shocked Hollinger with the next question. “Do you have any reservations about sending a person who is too mentally ill to operate on dead bodies to a job where he operates on people who are still alive?”

  Hollinger, caught in the contradiction, seemed dumbstruck. And I believe it was then that the commissioners asked themselves definitively, “Why was Noguchi really fired?” Certainly I may have been a little flamboyant, even a “publicity hound,” an extrovert in a profession which seems to call for quiet serenity. Certainly I had a sense of humor which could seem out of place in a coroner’s office. And if I had irritated the Board of Supervisors with my excessive demands, I was ambitious both for myself and for my department. But whatever the quirks in my personality, the county had been unable to cast a single doubt on my professional competence.

  On July 31, 1969, Richard Capen, the president of the commission, rose in a hearing room filled with people and announced the verdict. “We, the Civil Service Commission of Los Angeles County, after hearing over one million words in over six weeks of testimony, find that not one charge against Dr. Thomas T. Noguchi has been proven. He is reinstated forthwith.”

  My fellow pathologists around the nation wired congratulations. They saw my survival as a victory for forensic science everywhere. But, even though I won my battle, those incredible charges were hard to live down, and sometimes I felt that strangers I met expected me to sprout wings and fly off into space, pausing only long enough to shoot down a 707.

  It would take many years of serious scientific effort to rebuild my reputation. But in 1969 I was happy just to be back in my office in the job I loved. Then, only eight days after the verdict that had reinstated me, Los Angeles was struck by a tragedy that sent shivers throughout the world, and I found myself standing amidst the carnage of a mass murder which was the most brutal I had ever seen.

  6

  * * *

  Medical Examiner’s Case No. 69-8796

  * * *

  Sharon Tate

  Alonely road curved up a hill in Bel-Air until it reached an estate high on a cliff. An iron gate to the grounds was locked and the entire property fenced with barbed wire. Beyond the fence, a red-wood house sat among trees on a spacious lawn, a swimming pool nestled beside it. A small guest house, behind the main residence, was the temporary home of the caretaker, nineteen-year-old William Garretson. Another young man, Steven Parent, who had been visiting Garretson, was about ready to leave. It was just after midnight, August 9, 1969.

  Inside the main house a quiet social evening was winding down. Four princes and princesses of the Beverly Hills world were relaxing in the home rented by Sharon Tate and her husband, Polish movie director Roman Polanski. A tall, slender woman with brown hair, brown eyes and high cheekbones, Sharon Tate was considered one of Hollywood’s most promising young actresses. In fact, the year before, in a poll of movie exhibitors taken by the Motion Picture Herald, she had been named a runner-up to Lynn Redgrave as the top “Star of Tomorrow.” At twenty-six, she had already made ten films, and her future was luminous. But now she was happy for another reason. She was eight months pregnant. Her husband was in Europe working on a film, but she was looking forward to his return.

  Abigail Folger was the heiress to the Folger coffee fortune. Her father would later tearfully describe “Gibby” as “a nice young girl from Radcliffe who suddenly found herself in that ‘new world of Hollywood.’” The reason she was there was a tall, handsome man named Voyteck Frykowski, a friend of Roman Polanski and a prototypical member of what used to be called the Beautiful People. Vaguely wealthy, and definitely attractive to women, Frykowski raced sports cars, and had helped finance some of Polanski’s films. Married twice, he was now romancing Abigail Folger, and both of them had been house guests of Sharon Tate for weeks.

  Another “prince” there that night was one whom perhaps only Beverly Hills society would crown. A hairdresser who owned salons in Hollywood and elsewhere around the country, Jay Sebring was once engaged to Sharon Tate. He had become a friend of both Tate and her husband and was frequently a guest at their home. It would later be reported that part of Sebring’s charm was that he was “kinky” in sex. He tied up women with a “small sash cord and then whipped them,” which, if true, was apparently cheerfully accepted by all of his friends.

  At midnight Sharon Tate was relaxing in bed, dressed only in a flowered bra and panties. Jay Sebring sat on the end of the bed chatting with her. Abigail Folger, in a white nightgown, had retired to the bedroom across the hall. She was reading a book. Voyteck Frykowski, her lover, had fallen asleep on a couch in the living room.

  All was quiet at 10050 Cielo Drive.

  A few minutes later, a car drove slowly up the dark road toward the secluded estate. A man, Tex Watson, and three girls, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle and Linda Kasabian, were inside it. The girls were holding knives in their laps. The car stopped next to the gate, and Watson got out. He was carrying a long red-handled wire cutter. While the girls watched, he climbed up a metal pole and expertly cut the telephone wires to the house. Then he returned to the car and drove back down the road to park out of sight of the house.

  It was approximately twelve-eighteen when they returned. The girls were barefoot, dressed in jeans and T-shirts. They carried dark clothes with them—and the long sharp knives they had been holding on their laps. They climbed over the fence and started toward the house. But trouble! Headlights! A car was approaching. “Get down. Get down,” Watson whispered to the girls. They hurled themselves flat on the lawn and watched Watson walk toward the car, which had halted at the gate.

  The next thing they heard was the voice of the young driver. “Please don’t hurt me. I won’t say anything.”

  Crack! A shot, then others. Steven Parent slumped over
the wheel of his car, then toppled onto the passenger seat, dead.

  Strangely, the shots were not heard by the people in the main residence, or by Garretson in the guest house beyond. The intruders waited tensely, expecting someone to emerge from the house to investigate. When no one did, they slipped on the dark garments which would make them all but invisible in the night. Then, holding the knives, the women padded barefoot, following Tex Watson with the gun, toward the pleasant redwood house with lighted windows.

  Thirty minutes later there were unearthly screams—and turmoil as Frykowski and Folger tried to escape. Susan Atkins would later tell a cellmate that Sharon Tate had begged for her life. “I want to live. I want to have my baby.”

  Later that morning, police cars and ambulances lined the narrow road which led to the wooded estate. I made my way through the gate, where the LAPD homicide lieutenant in command greeted me. My staff assistants and paramedics were clustered around two bodies lying on the lawn in front of the house.

  I was told that a third body had already been removed to our van because it had been found in a Rambler near the gate, within a few feet of where the press had gathered. A Rambler, I thought, among millionaires? What was the owner of such an inexpensive car doing in this area? I went to the van and checked the body. The young man had been shot in the head. “There’s a caretaker, a kid named Garretson, alive,” the lieutenant said. “He was in the guest house, and they missed him. He says the driver was visiting him.”

  The next body I checked was about twenty feet from the front door of the main residence. My investigator pulled back the sheet, and I saw a male Caucasian, in a purple shirt, open vest, and bell bottoms—all drenched in blood. I was told this was Voyteck Frykowski.

  In my entire experience I had never seen such savagery applied to one person. Frykowski’s face and head were crushed and bloodied by blows; his stomach, chest, limbs and back had been stabbed everywhere by knives; and there were bullet holes in his back. The autopsy would later reveal that he had been stabbed fifty-one times, clubbed with a blunt object thirteen times and shot twice.

  I lifted his shirt and vest and studied the stab wounds. Because blood settles after the heart has stopped pumping, forensic pathologists can tell whether wounds were made before or after death. Postmortem wounds are lighter in color, and I counted several of those. It was quickly apparent that Frykowski had been stabbed repeatedly after he was dead or during the dying process. It was a pattern my staff and I would find repeated in all of the victims.

  The next decedent was female, Caucasian, and pretty, with long hair in disarray. Abigail Folger lay on her back, dressed in a bloodied white nightgown, her arms outflung. She too had suffered multiple stab wounds both front and back.

  Inside the house, I began to inspect the living room. There were pieces of a cracked gun butt near the door. Pools of blood were everywhere, and on the bottom of the front door a word had been scrawled in blood: “PIG.”

  “What do you think that means?” I asked the lieutenant.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “The blacks call the cops ‘pig’—but none of the victims were cops.”

  In the center of the room there was a sofa draped with a large American flag facing the fireplace. I walked around it and found two more bodies.

  The male decedent was Jay Sebring, stylishly attired in white pants with blue longitudinal stripes, an open blue shirt, black boots and a wide belt. Like Frykowski, he had been both shot and stabbed in many places of his body. A bloody towel was wrapped around his head as a hood, and a rope was knotted around his throat.

  The most pathetic victim, because she was obviously pregnant, was Sharon Tate, killed by multiple stab wounds. She was lying with her legs tucked up toward her stomach as if to protect her unborn child. And the rope tied to Settling’s throat was also wrapped around hers. It had been thrown over an exposed roof beam, apparently to hang the two victims.

  I studied Sharon Tate’s face closely and noted a rope burn on the lower part of her cheekbone. I then asked my investigator to examine the top of the beam around which the rope was looped. If the beam was deeply scratched or chipped, then we would know they had indeed been hanged.

  The aide stood on the sofa to check and reported that there was only a slight abrasion, not a deep one, on the beam. That indicated to me that Tate and Se-bring had been only partially suspended by their murderers, with their feet still on the floor.

  I wondered why they had been “hanged” at all? “What does Homicide think happened here?” I asked the LAPD lieutenant.

  “We think it’s drug-connected, Dr. Noguchi,” he said. “There’s junk all over this place.”

  The police would later report that the following drugs had been found in and around the premises: thirty grams of hashish, along with ten capsules of MDA, a hypnotic drug, in the bedroom used by Frykowski and Folger; a gram of cocaine, six grams of marijuana and a partially smoked marijuana cigarette, all in Sebring’s car; 6.9 grams of marijuana in a plastic bag in a cabinet in the living room; marijuana residue in the ashtray on the night table next to Sharon Tate’s bed.

  A drug-connected killing usually meant that its victims had reneged on a payment, and either a fight had broken out with the pushers or revenge had been taken. Drugs might also explain the excessive violence—killers stoned out of their minds, slashing their victims wildly. Criminals heavily into drug traffic were often black, and “pig,” a word they might have used, had been scrawled in blood on the front door of the house.

  The drug connection would remain the LAPD’s main theory for weeks. And, in following it, they would ask me to withhold temporarily from the press the information that narcotics had been found on the premises. They had leads on two drug dealers and asked for my cooperation. I would give it to them, but I didn’t believe their theory, even from the first moment I inspected the scene of the crimes. That symbolic hanging bothered me, especially in the context of such bizarre killings. To me, the massacre in the Tate house looked like ritual murder.

  I knew there was a religious cult in San Francisco that practiced voodoo ceremonies, including the blood sacrifice of animals. We had been warned recently that the cult was establishing chapters in Los Angeles. But there were no animal sacrifices present here. Searching for another explanation, my eye fell on the large American flag draped over the couch. Could the murders be the work of a right-wing superpatriotic group? That theory also proved untenable when the housekeeper told me, “That flag has always been here. It came with the house.”

  When my investigation of the scene was complete, my aides started readying the bodies for transport to the morgue, placing paper bags over the hands so that any hair or skin caught under the nails in a struggle would be saved. Then they were wheeled out on stretcher carts to the waiting vans.

  The sun was shining brightly that morning as the macabre parade of stretchers began. I paused for a moment before I followed them. To the right of where I stood, a cliff fell away hundreds of feet, and, below and beyond, the city of Los Angeles stretched to the horizon. It was my jurisdiction, I thought; my job to probe the underworld of terror and violence beneath the veneer of that city. But I had rarely faced brutality such as this.

  Out by the fence, reporters were straining at a barricade manned by police. They waved note pads while television microphones and cameras poked over their shoulders. “Dr. Noguchi, Dr. Noguchi, what went on in there?” “Was it a sex party?” “How did they die?”

  I shook my head. “No comment.”

  I was driven in our official car through the crowd of reporters and down the curving road up which the killers must have come the night before. After turning left on Sunset and driving through Beverly Hills into Hollywood, I saw the “flower children” who, in 1969, had taken over that section of the boulevard and transformed it into a hippie highway. Long hair, beards, jeans, sandals, boots, chains, bandanas, T-shirts, guitars and backpacks—hippies with beatific smiles, holding signs of love, and pounding an
grily on a car if it didn’t pick them up when they were hitchhiking. Their songs lyricized love for all mankind, in endless variations, but there was a violent undercurrent in the music, too.

  However, most of the violence I had witnessed had occurred among the hippies themselves, not in the outside world. To them that world, filled with “straights,” didn’t even exist except as an object of derision. They had dropped out, creating their own society in communes in the countryside and in special sections in cities, such as Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, and central Hollywood, through which Sunset Boulevard ran. They rarely ventured outside those areas. And that was why no one in the LAPD, nor I, as yet suspected hippies in the Tate killings. It wasn’t their pattern to invade wealthy residential areas, either to steal or to kill.

  When we stopped at a red light on the boulevard, two long-haired sixteen-year-old girls in cut-off jeans looked into the front of the car. “Hey,” one said, “there’s the Japanese coroner.”

  “Mr. Ghoul,” the other one said. “Who are you burying today?”

  Behind them I saw a boy sitting on the curb, his back against a lamppost, singing and strumming a guitar. I remember the words to this day. “It takes a worried man to sing a worried song… . It takes a worried man to sing a worried song.”

  Then we were off, turning onto the freeway for the long ride downtown to our office beneath the Hall of Justice. And there, as I remembered the scene of horror I had just left, I was indeed a worried man. The police theory of a drug-connected crime indicated that the orgy of murder in the Tate house would be a single event, not to be repeated. My theory of a ritual murder meant that the killers might be on the prowl again for new victims.

  Leno and Rosemary La Bianca were “straights”—as different from hippies as they were from the Tate victims. La Bianca was a businessman, the president of a supermarket chain. His wife was the owner of a ladies’ dress shop. They lived in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, an area of solid upper-middle-class working citizens.