The Coroner Series

by Thomas T. Noguchi

  Dr. Gerald Vale was an athletic, white-haired, handsome man, unique in his background. He was not only a graduate of dental school, but also had earned a law degree. I had appointed him as chief of the forensic-dentistry division, and he had trained many forensic odontologists.

  We met in my office at midnight. Vale had obtained from the FBI, which was working in a special office in the building, the dental charts of all suspected members of the SLA—and of Patty Hearst, who, fortunately, had had dental X rays taken just two weeks before she was kidnapped. I instructed Vale to have the jaw surgically removed from each victim before he X-rayed it. That was necessary because we had to duplicate exactly the angle of the X-ray photography taken by the victims’ dentists with our own X rays in order to be absolutely certain of a match. By surgically removing the jaw, along with any partial bridges, crowns and fillings, we could X-ray with more precision.

  Dental matching has always been a very useful tool to forensic scientists. Each set of teeth has a unique alignment. Some teeth are crooked, some are missing—including wisdom teeth, which erupt (break through the skin surface) when a person is twenty to twenty-five years old, thus aiding in the determination of the decedent’s age if that is relevant. Other individual characteristics include the spaces between teeth and the degree of absorption of the teeth into the bone structure of the jaw. Cavities also are unique. And fillings are not exactly alike in configuration or in their location.

  Dr. Vale and his staff, I knew, would very carefully compare their X rays of the dental features of all of the SLA decedents with the dental charts obtained from the FBI, looking for a match, and I awaited the results in my office. I remember the next few hours as a blur. Telephone call after telephone call from the LAPD, the FBI, the press—all eager to know if Patty Hearst was among the victims. Finally, at 6 A.M., I went down to the lab where Vale and his staff were working.

  “First, the bad news,” he said. “So far we’ve positively identified only two victims from their dental charts.” He paused, then said, “But the good news is that Patty Hearst’s dental chart doesn’t match any of the X rays we took. She wasn’t in that house.”

  I could hardly believe it. Patty Hearst had been with the SLA for months. Just the day before, she had been among them at the Inglewood sporting-goods store. Now five SLA members had died in a shootout—and their hostage was absent?

  “And by the way,” Vale said. “I almost forgot the really bad news.”

  I tensed. “What?”

  “Donald DeFreeze wasn’t in that house either.”

  Again I was startled. The SLA leader was missing, too? “Don’t his dental charts match any of your X rays?” I asked.

  “No. We obtained his chart from the prison dental office, and they don’t compare at all. But from our past experience, prison records are notoriously unreliable.”

  It was an unusual situation. As far as we knew, there had been only one black male in the SLA: De-Freeze. And of the three as yet unidentified bodies, one was a black male. It almost had to be Cinque, which meant that the prison records were wrong. But if the prison records were correct, DeFreeze, the most feared of the SLA militants, was still on the loose.

  I spoke immediately to the FBI agents at work in the building and asked them to pass on the good news about Patty Hearst to her parents. Then I told them we hadn’t been able to identify DeFreeze. “Have you had any luck with the fingerprints?” I asked.

  I knew that the fire had almost completely destroyed the victim’s fingertips, so I was surprised when the FBI agent replied, “Sure, we’ve got De-Freeze for you.”

  “From fingerprints?”

  “Not exactly. We’ll come over to your office and show you.”

  A few moments later in my office, I was looking at huge magnified photographs which seemed to show white bands with wavy lines. “Precisely what are they?” I asked.

  “Strips of unburned skin from DeFreeze’s fingers,” the FBI agent said. “They match his prints.”

  It was true. What the FBI fingerprint technicians had skillfully accomplished was an example of pure forensic science at its best.

  With intense heat, hand muscles contract, and the fingers curl up into charred claws. But in the process tiny strips of skin in the inner folds of the finger joints may be preserved from the fire—as was the case with DeFreeze.

  When fingerprints of DeFreeze had been taken in prison, his fingers were laid flat on ink pads. Thus the FBI had photographs of his fingers in their entirety, including the strips of skin at the inner folds. Under intense magnification, the FBI was then able to compare the strips of skin in the finger creases of the decedent with a copy of a fingerprint card of De-Freeze, and to find a precise match of the creases.

  By nine that morning we had identified all of the victims, and at a press conference I told reporters that Patty Hearst had not been inside that house of death on East Fifty-fourth Street. Newspapers and television carried the news of her miraculous escape all that day. But then the next morning we had another shock.

  A sixth body had been uncovered in the debris. A woman.

  I was horrified. Just yesterday I had relayed word to Mr. and Mrs. Hearst that their daughter was alive. And now another unidentified female had been found dead in that house. It had to be Patty Hearst.

  Once again reporters clamored for more information. And I realized the extent of the despair of the Hearsts when I received a telephone call from Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California. He said he was calling on behalf of the Hearsts. In his words, “It’s devastating to the family. Can you help them?”

  I said I would personally call Mr. and Mrs. Hearst as soon as we learned the identity of the last victim.

  I immediately returned with my staff to the scene of the shootout, where we found that someone had placed a lonely bouquet of flowers in front of the burned-out house. We learned that the sixth victim had been deeply buried in debris in the southwest corner of the house. The LAPD’s Special Investigation Division had been examining the debris by the grid system, and this corner had been the last to be thoroughly searched. I ordered the body transported back to the center.

  There, in an autopsy room, Dr. Vale began his work, carefully positioning the X-ray camera for photos of the jaw of the sixth victim. We had to wait until the X rays were developed, then we crowded around anxiously as they were compared with those of Patty Hearst.

  No match. The X rays duplicated those of Camilla Hall, another member of the SLA. Patty Hearst, once again, had proved to be miraculously alive.

  I was a bit frayed when I picked up the telephone and called the number in San Francisco that Ronald Reagan had given me. A man answered the phone. “Mr. Hearst?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “This is Dr. Noguchi, coroner of Los Angeles County. I would like to tell you that the sixth victim is not your daughter.”

  There was a pause, and then, “Oh, thank God.”

  The next voice was a woman’s. Mrs. Hearst wanted to hear the news herself. I told her, and she started to weep with joy.

  …

  The victims who had died in the shootout, in addition to Camilla Hall and Donald DeFreeze, were Nancy Ling Perry, Angela Atwood, William Wolfe and Patricia Soltysik. Autopsies on their bodies revealed that two of the six had died not from SWAT team bullets, but from flames and smoke inhalation. Members of the black community (and many other concerned citizens as well) were already charging that the SWAT teams had overreacted in what some were calling the “SLA massacre.” Therefore I believed it was necessary for the public to know what had actually happened in that battle. And I decided to go back to the scene and try to re-create, from forensic evidence, the last-minute actions of the SLA militants. My plan to do so aroused good-humored skepticism from some members of the media. The house was now only a pile of ashes, with a few foundation stones poking through. How could I show every militant’s movements in a building that wasn’t even there anymore?

  From eyewitnes
s reports and certain tests and examinations that had already been made at the scene, I had an overall impression of the events of that afternoon. And now, as I stood once more near the rubble of the house on East Fifty-fourth Street, I could see in my mind’s eye a SWAT team member kneeling to fire a tear-gas cannister into the house, then another—and I could picture what happened next.

  As soon as the second tear-gas cannister was fired, the SLA had begun shooting, riddling with bullets the cars parked in front of the house. Because they were stationary and had many surfaces, the cars showed perfectly the trajectory of the bullets, thus revealing the location of the guns that had fired them. From those tracks, and from recovered bullets, I knew that two of the SLA militants (and no more than two) had fired from slightly different angles out of the front windows of the house as the battle began. Almost immediately, however, the other four militants found themselves faced with a crisis—fire.

  I walked through the debris to the area where the front bedroom had been. In the ashes I saw a blackened gasoline can. I picked it up and observed a bullet hole in its side. Now I knew how the fire that destroyed the house had begun. A bullet from the SWAT team had punctured the gasoline can, and the leaking gas had been ignited by the tremendous heat given off when a tear-gas cannister exploded.

  From an examination of the bodies at the scene the day of the shootout, I knew that the SLA militants had dressed themselves for combat. They wore many layers of clothes, boots, and even gas masks to deal with the expected tear gas. But they were not prepared for fire. One, and only one, militant panicked. Nancy Ling Perry’s clothes caught fire as the flames spread, and she tried to escape from the rear of the house. We had found her charred body outside.

  But the autopsy had revealed that there were bullet holes in her body. Why had the SWAT team fired at a person in flames? The autopsy of Camilla Hall told us the reason. Hall had died with a bullet hole in her forehead. Almost certainly, she had been firing at the SWAT team, covering for Nancy Ling Perry, and the answering fusillade struck both of them.

  Near the body of Hall was the first victim who had died from smoke inhalation and fire, Angela Atwood. The fact that she had not been found with the other three SLA members who were then still alive showed me that she too was involved in the Perry breakout. From the position of her body when discovered, it appeared to me that she must have tried to pull Camilla Hall back to safety after she was hit. By then Atwood was surrounded by flames, her clothes on fire. She could have dashed out at that point, but she did not, and burned to death.

  With a fire raging throughout the house, consuming all with flames, the SWAT teams outside had ceased firing. No one could live in that inferno. But inside, three SLA members were making a desperate—and ingenious—effort to survive. And I knew they had lived for an incredibly long time, because they kept firing at police from the crawl space beneath the house.

  But there was no entrance to that crawl space. How had they ended up there and avoided the fire for so long? I roamed through the wreckage, until I reached the debris of the bathroom, where I saw evidence that a large hole had been chopped in the floor. An ax had been found near the hole. Then I noticed something else odd in the ruins. I crouched to examine the blackened bathtub and observed that both faucets were stuck in the on position. I found the faucets in the sink also on. And at that moment I was able to picture the final apocalypse.

  When the fire exploded in a front bedroom and spread, three of the SLA—DeFreeze, Wolfe and Soltysik—had run to the bathroom. There they drenched their clothes in water, then chopped a hole in the floor. And before climbing into the crawl space they turned all the water faucets in the bathtub and sink to the full on position. They reasoned that the water would overflow and pour down into the crawl space, flooding it and protecting them from the raging fire above.

  In their drenched clothes, with water gushing down on them, they were able to continue shooting from a house engulfed in flames. But the fire was unrelenting. Plumbing pipes melted and twisted, shutting off the water. The flames licked closer, and they knew they must die—if they chose to stay.

  Stay they did, even as the gas masks melted on their faces. William Wolfe died from smoke inhalation and burns. Patricia Soltysik died from a combination of smoke inhalation, burns and multiple gunshot wounds. Donald DeFreeze died of a gunshot wound.

  Thus the SLA had perished. And by using basic forensic science I was able to establish the order in which all of them died. Fire creates smoke, and smoke and carbon monoxide are inhaled. Therefore, the victim with the most carbon monoxide in his blood, DeFreeze, died last; the one with the least, Hall, perished first. And with reasonable certainty I could state the exact order of death of the others by the same principle.

  Symbolically, Cinque—Donald DeFreeze—was the final SLA member to die. And when I found what might have been gunpowder burns on his forehead, I first thought that he, like Hitler, had killed himself when the end was near. But tests in our laboratory revealed that there were metallic elements in the fatal wound which were not present in the .38 bullets in DeFreeze’s own pistol. I believed, therefore, that the gunpowder burns came from exploding ammunition near DeFreeze.

  The fiery Götterdämmerung of the SLA gave all Americans a frightening insight into the potential of political terrorism. Educated young people, inspired by a political belief, however naïve or chaotic, would not shrink from any peril, including death by fire, in pursuit of their goals.

  As I said when I released my report to the public on the last moments of the SLA: “They died compulsively. They chose to stay under the floor as the fire burned out. In all my years as a coroner I’ve never before seen this kind of conduct in the face of flames.”

  The strength of their dedication was so incredible to me that I ordered a psychological autopsy to be performed. And we learned that political terrorists believe that the most effective way to arouse public sympathy for their cause is death. Therefore they are not afraid of dying, and that’s why conventional police tactics fail when used against them. Faced with a choice to surrender to the authorities or to die in action, they will almost always choose to die.

  My reconstruction of the last moments of the SLA helped cool public resentment against the SWAT teams. The public now knew that the militants would never have surrendered. Even engulfed in flames, they kept firing, trying to kill the “oppressors,” to the end. That legacy of terrorism is still with us today as it rose from the inferno of a little house in south Los Angeles.

  11

  * * *

  Forensic Science at Work

  Our work in the SLA shootout brought the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office nationwide publicity, and suddenly I was besieged by magazine and newspaper reporters intent on writing about me in particular. In the same week, both Time and Newsweek featured articles on the American coroner of Japanese descent in Los Angeles. Interestingly, most of those journalists seemed to be fascinated by a phase of my work which was apparently little known to them: forensic pathology with a related investigative approach. And they portrayed me as a Japanese version of Sherlock Holmes, an Oriental sleuth who specialized in solving “impossible” murders through hunches and seemingly invisible clues.

  Flattering, but exaggerated. I’m no Sherlock Holmes—nor even a Charlie Chan. But after those articles appeared I began to receive requests from all over the country to solve mysterious homicides. If the challenge to forensic science was so intriguing that I thought it valuable to proceed, I would do so. But I couldn’t, of course, accommodate most of the requests, because I was working long hours on a full-time basis as a chief medical examiner. And there were more than enough mysterious homicides right there in Los Angeles.

  JUST A HUNCH

  The pretty young blonde lay stretched on the floor beside her bed, a small bullet hole in the center of her forehead oozing blood. Detectives investigating the crime asked neighbors in the apartment house if they had heard shots. The answer was no.
/>   It seemed like a typical Hollywood tragedy. The blonde was an actress just starting out on her career. LAPD detectives knew from experience how vulnerable these young women were to sharpsters, con men and criminals. Desperate to make a breakthrough in the motion picture industry, they often fell prey to Hollywood sharks—and violence.

  But the case was to prove far from typical. My deputy, who performed the autopsy, called me to the table upon which the young actress lay. “It’s strange,” he said. “The police say she was shot, but there’s no bullet in her brain—and no exit wound through which it escaped.”

  I was stumped. I checked with the investigator who had spoken to the homicide detectives. He said that no weapons had been recovered at the scene and no one had heard any shots. But there was the bullet hole in her forehead, identical to thousands I had seen, down to the typical ring of abrasion with the skin scraped in around the edges of the wound.

  I told the deputy to store the decedent’s body until we did further investigating, because—as was plain—the manner and cause of death were unknown. And when I told homicide detectives of the mystery, they were surprised and frustrated. “How can we find the creep who did this if we don’t even know how she was killed?”

  The case haunted me until it became almost an obsession. Still, no explanation came to me, and, as the days passed, the case of the young actress receded into the backlog of other homicide investigations, destined, it seemed, to be stamped forever “Cause of Death Undetermined.”

  Then one brisk December day in downtown Los Angeles, I was shopping for Christmas gifts during my lunch hour and stopped in front of a boutique. A few other shoppers looked into the window beside me, for there were beautiful stylish clothes on display. I remember it was a green blouse that had caught my attention. It would look good on my wife.