I decided to go to Joplin’s hotel room, where an LAPD policeman was on duty when I arrived. He told me that a needle and syringe had been recovered from the scene, but no heroin.
I made my customary survey of the room and looked into a wastepaper basket. It contained a red “balloon” with heroin. “What’s this?” I asked the policeman.
He came over and stared. “Hey, where’d that come from?” The expression on his face was comical. “We went over this room a hundred times and that basket was empty.”
“Have there been any visitors to the room?” I asked.
The policeman said that a fellow band member (or her manager, I have forgotten the associate he named) had stopped around to check her personal effects.
I smiled. “He may have removed the drug after her death and then realized it was evidence. So he came back and dropped it in the wastepaper basket.” It was not an unusual occurrence in drug cases. Often, the first reaction of friends is to remove the evidence of drug use. But they usually return with it when they have thought things over.
I took the “balloon” back to our toxicology laboratory for testing to make certain the substance it contained was heroin. Meanwhile, the results of the lab tests had arrived on my desk, showing that Joplin had morphine in her blood. (Heroin breaks down into morphine in the system.) But judging from the amount of heroin left in the package, it did not appear that Joplin had injected herself with a very large dose. No doubt she had taken a similar dose hundreds of times before with no side effects. But now, suddenly, she had died from a “normal” dose. Why?
The answer to that question is the essence of the danger of street drugs. You never know what you are getting. Heroin is cut in many ways. On the East Coast it’s often adulterated with lactose or quinine. On the West Coast, the dealers most often cut it with procaine (an anesthetic drug) or PCP (a violence-producing drug), Vitamin C or Insitol (lactose sugar). But perhaps the most dangerous adulterant is talcum powder, which is asbestos and ends up in the lungs.
Ironically, the reason for Janis Joplin’s death was exactly the opposite of the many tragedies caused by cut heroin. When an analysis of the contents of the “balloon” came back from the lab, I found that what the dealer had sold Joplin was almost pure heroin, so pure that it had more than ten times the power of the normal heroin she used. Cut drugs are generally one to three percent heroin; the drug Janis Joplin had used was forty to fifty percent heroin. Her system was not prepared for, and could not cope with, the unexpected jolt.
Janis Joplin’s death highlighted once again the dangers of drug abuse. As a medical examiner I have all too often seen its disastrous consequences, and in an attempt to deal with the problem my colleagues and I urged the California legislature to pass a bill which would require that all deceased drivers be tested not only for alcohol but for drugs, thus providing medical examiners with another statistical tool to help identify trends in drug use so that we can better deal with them.
Such trends had been monitored by our office and others around the nation for years. Heroin use, ironically, dropped off in the very year Janis Joplin died—and I believe that the shock of her death may have had something to do with that phenomenon. But today there’s a new danger. The drug of choice is cocaine, which, unlike heroin, is not so devastating and overwhelming that the user can hardly function. In fact, it is a stimulant, whereas heroin is a downer. Nevertheless, cocaine is a risky drug. At least fifteen deaths a year in Los Angeles are a direct result of sniffing or injection, while countless other deaths are related to its use. And the human toll cannot be measured: the deterioration of the brain through habitual stimulation, the damage to the nervous system, the dependency on the drug which causes addicts to steal and even murder to acquire the money for the expensive habit.
Another drug, which has not gained as much publicity, may be the most dangerous of all. PCP, sometimes used to cut heroin, is also widely used by members of the below-poverty community, and it’s a frightening drug indeed, because it directly stimulates violence. Some time ago I noted more and more PCP addicts among decedents in Los Angeles, and I identified its use as a trend which is still not widely recognized in this country, but which I believe will cause much trouble and tragedy ahead.
It was ironic that Janis Joplin died in the Landmark Hotel, for she too was a landmark in the history of rock, a talented young woman who left behind a powerful message in her music and in the tragic circumstances of her death.
8
* * *
Mass Disasters
Surely, of all of the states of the Union, California is among the leaders in mass disasters. Indeed, predictions are constantly being made both by prophets of doom and by distinguished scientists that California will one day slide completely into the ocean, disappearing beneath the sea forever, and that the famous San Andreas Fault will be the breaking point from which the state takes leave of the continent.
There is a San Andreas Fault, and there certainly are earthquakes in California. In addition, the state is annually beset not only by ocean storms that batter its beaches, but by forest fires that rage out of control, avalanches that careen through villages, and mudslides that carry away highways and homes. Regrettably, all of these natural disasters cause loss of lives. So it is necessary for any California medical examiner to set up a plan of operation to deal with them.
Very early in my career as Chief Medical Examiner I established such an emergency plan in which, as soon as word of a mass disaster was received, various special teams would go into action. Among those teams were the investigators who would be sent to the scene of the disaster as quickly as possible; the forensic pathologists who would direct the medical and legal investigation; the toxicologists and criminalists who would find forensic clues; the forensic odontologists and anthropologists who would help identify the bodies of the victims; the identification and notification personnel who would inform local police in cities where the victims lived and would call surviving family members for information which would help identify the bodies; and the liaison team which would help coordinate our efforts with the FBI, the LAPD, the Sheriff’s Office, the LA Fire Department and various other government agencies.
I called the mass-disaster investigators my Go Team, men and women who, in addition to their forensic specialties, were trained in physical fitness by the Sheriff’s Office, for often their jobs entailed considerable risk. And they were prepared to respond not only to natural disasters but also to man-made disasters, including multiple murders, fires, and airplane crashes.
Such a call came in on June 6, 1971. One of America’s worst air tragedies had occurred.
Hughes Air West Jetliner Flight 706, carrying forty-three passengers and a five-man crew, departed from Los Angeles International Airport at 5:50 P.M. that day, heading east. At the same time, a Navy F-4 Phantom jet with a crew of two and faulty radar hurtled through the sky on a collision course. Below it, twenty miles east of metropolitan Los Angeles, were the San Gabriel Mountains, a range of sharp peaks and densely forested gorges often described as one of the most rugged areas in America.
At twelve thousand feet, the Navy jet plowed directly into the commercial airliner. A fiery explosion erupted in the sky, incinerating many passengers in their seats. Then the airliner disintegrated into small pieces, and bodies tumbled through the air. So total was the disintegration of the airliner that no sizable fragment was ever found. The bodies and dismembered parts of the victims were strewn for miles in the mountains.
Our office was notified at once, and within minutes I ordered our mass-disaster teams to report for duty. The bodies of the victims would have to be identified for both medical and legal reasons, including insurance purposes, and for the sake of their relatives.
“How do we get to the site of the crash?” I asked.
“There are no roads,” I was told. “The nearest town is miles away, so we’ll have to drop your men in by helicopter.”
Clad in our Go Team uniforms�
��red hard hats, boots, and khaki overalls with “CORONER” in gold letters on the back—an advance team of investigators and I were flown toward the disaster area. But even before we arrived, I knew there would be trouble, not only from the forbidding terrain but from a dense fog which was rolling in and obscuring the mountains.
The advance team’s job was to work with other Go Teams from the Sheriff’s Office and the LA County Fire Department to clear an area in the mountain forest for a helicopter pad, set up a communication station and begin the search for bodies. Its members were supplied with tools and other equipment and also with a canvas tent and enough food to last for a week. And a week’s time might be necessary, I thought. I had already been informed of the dimensions of our task: bodies separated by miles in the rugged terrain and most likely burned beyond recognition.
As we approached the scene through the fog, we could see helicopters dispatched by fire authorities hovering over a gorge. But when our own helicopter dipped low, we could barely discern fire and rescue personnel moving like ghosts in a shroud of fog in the underbrush. The advance team quickly assembled its equipment and descended by rope ladder to the ground. We lowered the rest of their supplies to them, but even as we hovered right above them they began to disappear in the underbrush and the thickening fog.
I knew that no search for bodies would be possible that night, but the team could begin work on the clearing and set up a radio communications station. I did not envy them their job. But I knew they were well trained and well equipped—with one possible exception. As we were about to leave them on the mountain all night, one of the members of the team had a last-minute request: “Dr. Noguchi, at least drop us a six-pack of beer!”
When I returned the next morning, our advance team and a similar disaster team from the Sheriff’s Office called the Mountain Goats had worked all night, clearing away trees and underbrush to create a helicopter pad and set up a radio communications station. Other members of the Go Team were landed in the area, while I hovered above it in a helicopter, maintaining close radio communication to coordinate our search in conjunction with the helicopters from the fire and rescue authorities. For it was immediately apparent that a ground reconnaissance would be futile; the scrub grass was five feet tall, obscuring everything.
Instead, the search would have to be accomplished from the air. The helicopters flew low until someone spotted a body or a dismembered part. Then they hovered over the site, and the wind from the rotor blades blew the underbrush aside so that the obscured body could be seen. Its location was radioed to our Go Team members on the ground, and they made their way through the dense underbrush to the body.
But it was dangerous work for the helicopters, hovering so closely to the ground in mountainous territory. The whirling rotor blade of one helicopter struck an exposed boulder on a slope, and the copter crashed but did not explode. We quickly rescued the shaken and slightly injured pilot, brought him up into another helicopter and flew him to the medical station.
The difficult search went on for the next several days. The members of the Go Team labeled each body they found “Doe One,” “Doe Two,” “Doe Three,” etc.—not John or Jane Doe, because most of the charred remains could not be immediately identified as male or female. They also searched nearby for articles which might help identify the victim and placed them in a bag with the same “Doe” label as the body. And they were alert for any items that might concern national security as well as property of special significance. (Once in a helicopter crash a few years before, a representative of an auto manufacturer had been carrying the top-secret advance design for the company’s newest model. We retrieved the design on the ground and returned it to the company safely, with its secrecy unbreached.)
Eventually, each body found on the ground from the Hughes Airlines crash was wrapped and placed in a helicopter for transport to an emergency staging area. Dismembered parts of bodies were also placed in bags and brought to the staging area, a high-school playground in the city of Duarte, where huge tents had been erected to house the rescue teams and the sheriff’s deputies and to receive the bodies.
When all the victims of the crash had been assembled at the staging area, they were transferred to the Medical Examiner’s Office in Los Angeles, where the process of identification could begin. Any stranger who had seen the bodies in the staging area might have said that such identification would be impossible. Almost all of them were totally charred, with no fingerprints. But we set out to do it by what could be called simple deduction, or what computer engineers call, more technically, “the branching technique.”
To begin with, all the dismembered bodies were made whole—that is, arms and legs reassembled. When bone and tissue are torn, the tear leaves a unique pattern which can be used to match body parts. There were forty whole victims, but because of the burning none of them could be visually identified by relatives, and only one or two had discernible fingerprints.
To establish their identity, we made a huge chart to match information. From the passenger manifesto we listed the names and addresses of the victims. Each was classified by sex and approximate age; the presence of arthritis or an enlarged prostate gland, for example, indicated an older person. And then, under the direction of Dr. Dean V. Wiseley, chief of the forensic-medicine division, deputy medical examiners performed autopsies with a special mission: to discover any unique feature of every body. Was there an old fracture? A hysterectomy or an appendectomy? A still-visible scar? If so, this information was placed on the chart under the appropriate “Doe” labels.
Meanwhile, our identification and notification team was telephoning relatives for information about each of the victims. Among other questions, they asked for the precise height, the color of eyes and hair (the hair roots sometimes survive fire), the surgical history, and the presence of unique scars or body characteristics.
As this process was going on, the deputy dental examiner was at work obtaining the victims’ dental charts from all over the United States. And the forensic anthropologists in our office were separating the victims’ bodies by race.
Once all this information had been assembled, we could match it to the information we had discovered through autopsies and X rays of the entire body of each victim. Surgical histories were particularly useful in identifying the victims. In some cases, surgical pins associated with an operation were still in the body, and those pins often contained serial numbers relating to a patient. Depending on the model, we could tell where the manufacturer was located, and sometimes even the area where the surgery had been performed.
To establish the color of the hair and eyes of each victim, we sometimes placed roots of hair from the scalp or the armpit that had survived the fire under the microscope. Melanin is a brown pigment which gives color to hair. Lighter amounts of the chemical cause blond hair and blue eyes, larger amounts dark hair and brown eyes. Matching the color of hair and eyes with the information obtained from relatives of the victims provided two more clues in the identification procedure.
Artifacts found on the body or nearby, such as rings or unburned ID papers, also helped in the massive identification effort. And false teeth. Dental laboratories often place the doctor’s name and the date of manufacture on their dentures. Thus we could find out the name of the wearer, a process that would be even easier if, as I had suggested many times to dental associates, the wearer’s Social Security number was also stamped on the dentures. (In 1983, such a law was passed in California.)
In the end every victim of the San Gabriel tragedy was identified. Our mass-disaster teams—from the advance investigators to the notification and identification personnel—performed so efficiently and expeditiously that our office gained a worldwide reputation for our work, with the result that years later, when a Pan American airliner crashed on the Pacific island of Pago Pago thousands of miles away, killing 102 people, all of the bodies that were burned beyond recognition were flown to our forensic center in Los Angeles, by request of the Fede
ral Aviation Administration, for identification.
That was an even more difficult job than the San Gabriel disaster. One third of the passengers were Samoans, there were a few Taiwanese and other Orientals, and the rest were Caucasians. And the initial job of differentiating between the Caucasian and Oriental victims fell largely to the forensic anthropologists in our office, working with the following skeletal characteristics of both races:
1. Almost all Orientals have high cheekbones.
2. The dimensions of the heads from front to back and from right to left are rounder in Orientals than in Caucasians. The typical Caucasian skull is longer from front to back than from right to left. It is also longer vertically than the typical Oriental skull.
3. Most Orientals have shovel-shaped incisor teeth.
4. The opening for the nose in most Oriental skulls is different because the nose is shorter and wider than the typical Caucasian nose.
To differentiate the Samoan victims of the crash from the Taiwanese, we relied on one anthropological fact. Polynesian Orientals, such as Samoans, tend to have heavier bones because they are, in general, a more muscular people. And to support those muscles, their bones are substantially stronger and larger than those of other Orientals.
Once racial classifications had been made, we used the same forensic techniques to identify the victims that had proved so effective in the San Gabriel disaster. But dental and fingerprint records were almost nonexistent for the Samoan victims, and when our investigators telephoned Samoans for information about their relatives their replies were often too vague to be helpful. To the question “How tall was your brother?” would come over the telephone the answer “As high as this,” with no further amplification.
The Coroner Series Page 12