The Coroner Series

by Thomas T. Noguchi

  The blouse was on a mannequin, and I couldn’t see a price tag. But as I looked for it on the floor at the mannequin’s feet all thoughts of the blouse vanished forever. In an instant I changed from a civilian shopper into a medical examiner. And what I was looking at now was not a gift but a possible murder weapon.

  Or was I being ridiculous? The “weapon” I saw was a woman’s spike-heeled shoe. Could such a shoe have made the wound in the young actress’s forehead that we thought was a bullet hole?

  Inside the store I inspected a similar shoe while a woman sales clerk stared at me quizzically. For instead of admiring the shoe itself I examined only the tip of its heel. It may be fantastic, I thought, but that heel will fit.

  It was just a hunch. In fact, before calling an LAPD detective, I delayed for some hours after returning to my office. “It may seem foolish to you,” I said tentatively, “but I saw something that might possibly have caused the wound.”

  “What?”

  “A woman’s spiked-heeled shoe.”

  Silence. Then the detective said, “Dr. Noguchi, you’re kidding us.”

  “It’s just an idea, and maybe I’m pressing,” I said. “But why don’t you search the neighborhood for a spike-heeled shoe? You have nothing to lose.”

  I believe the detective thought I had lost my mind, although he didn’t say it. But the tone of amusement in his voice when he reluctantly agreed to make the “fantasy” search told it all.

  A few hours later, the detective called me back. In an empty lot a block away from the scene, detectives had found a woman’s spike-heeled shoe with dried blood on its heel. When we tested the blood, we discovered that it matched the victim’s type. And the metal tip of the heel, under microscopic examination, exactly matched the entrance wound in her forehead.

  We had found the weapon. And we were even able to discover a clue to the possible identity of the murderer, if the killer was the person who had worn the shoe. Chemical substances known as antigens, to which the blood develops antibodies, enable forensic scientists to determine whether the blood type is A, B, AB or O. Other body fluids, such as saliva, urine and perspiration, can also be analyzed for blood typing by the presence of antigens. In this case, sweat absorbed into the leather of the spike-heeled shoe told us the blood type—but not the identity—of the probable murderer.

  Who would kill a person by striking her with a woman’s shoe? The police pondered the question. Assuming that a man would be unlikely to use such a shoe—and a woman normally wouldn’t have the strength to kill someone with it—the LAPD came up with a possible answer to the mystery. A transvestite or a man who had undergone a sex-change operation could have murdered the victim. Such a person would have had the strength—and many such people had fetishes, so the police postulated, about high-heeled shoes.

  Those were assumptions I was unwilling to make without further evidence of the killer’s identity. But if the LAPD was right, this “typical” Hollywood tragedy took on an entirely different complexion, especially after the police came up with a hot suspect who was a transvestite. Nor did the case have a typical Hollywood ending, in which justice is done. Police searched for the transvestite for weeks, but were never able to find him. We had discovered “the manner and cause of death” of the young actress, but not who had killed her.

  THE CASE OF THE BARKING DOG

  One day I received an unusual telephone call about a possible murder. It did not come from my friends at the homicide division or from the DA’s Office. Instead, it came from the Humane Society, which takes care of pets. It seems they had freed a dog locked in an abandoned house, and they suspected foul play unrelated to pets. I went to the house, which was in Hollywood, and found the LAPD also on hand. When I entered the house I saw why. There were bloodstains on the walls and floor of the bathroom.

  The LAPD had been told by neighbors that two men lived in the house together, but neither had been seen for days. And there were no personal effects or clothing in the house, which had apparently been abandoned. The barking of the dog left inside had caused neighbors to call the Humane Society.

  While the LAPD searched for other clues to the identity of the two men, I looked around the bathroom. There was an unusual pungent smell in that room. I examined the tub and saw that its interior was yellow-stained. And at that moment I felt a little chill of horror as I realized the possible significance of the smell coupled with that stain. I ordered the whole bathroom dug up.

  A few hours later the tub had been removed and part of the bathroom floor was gone, replaced by a trench six feet deep. I stood on the edge of it, keeping clear of the flying dirt from the shovels of the workmen beneath.

  As I watched, the workmen uncovered the drainpipe and opened the trap. “Just a moment,” I said. They stopped and looked up. “Can you give me a hand?” I asked. They assisted me down into the trench, where I went to the drain trap and crouched beside it.

  There I observed a tiny object, covered with silt, caught in the trap. I recovered it for closer examination, cleaned it off—and saw it was a human tooth.

  Examining the rest of the drain trap closely, I found a second tooth. And with the two teeth in the palm of my hand, I knew that the ghoulish suspicion I had had when I first saw the yellowish stain in the tub was correct. A human body had been dissolved in acid in the tub and then washed down the drain.

  By late afternoon, the LAPD had discovered the identities of the two men who had lived in the house. Both were missing. I told them to trace the men’s dentists to try to match the two teeth I had found in the drain trap. “But for a faster route,” I said, “see if you can find which of the two men had access to sulfuric acid.”

  The LAPD did that, and discovered that one of the men worked as an accountant in an industrial plant which utilized sulfuric acid in its manufacturing process. A few days later, acting on a tip, they found and confronted the man. He told the police a chilling story. He and his roommate had had an argument over rent money, a fight erupted, and the roommate was accidentally killed when he fell and cracked his head against the tub.

  Fearing he would be accused of murder, the man decided to dispose of the body, and he knew just how to do it. First he chopped the body into small pieces. Then he went to the plant where he worked and appropriated gallons of sulfuric acid. He brought them to the house and, crouching by the tub, patiently dissolved each and every piece of his roommate’s body in the tub, then washed the remains down the drain.

  That done, he felt he was safe forever. No one could accuse him of murder if there was no body. But he had made stupid mistakes. After all the long and painstaking effort to get rid of the body, he left the house in such a hurry that he didn’t even wash the bloodstains off the bathroom walls and floor. He also left inside the house a noisy little dog whose barking would eventually bring the police.

  And, most significant of all, he was unaware that two teeth in a drain trap six feet below the house would prove to be the corpus delicti.

  THE WRONG KNIFE

  I was performing an autopsy on a young Mexican in his twenties who had been stabbed to death. An LAPD homicide detective entered the room, carrying a brown paper bag which held the fatal weapon. “Do you want to take a look at it?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “I’ll tell you exactly what it looks like.”

  I wasn’t showing off. It was an opportunity to demonstrate an important forensic technique to the pathology residents who were observing the autopsy. The traditional method of measuring a knife was to pour barium sulfate into the wound and X-ray it. I thought I had found a better way.

  I lit a little Bunsen burner and melted some Wood’s metal over it, while the detective and the residents watched. Then I selected a wound in the victim’s chest above the location of the liver and poured the liquid metal into it. The metal slid down through the wound into the punctured liver. And when it cooled, I removed an exact mold of the tip of the murder weapon. I added the length of this tip to the distance between
the liver and the skin surface of the chest. Then I said to the homicide detective, “It’s a knife five and a half inches long, one inch wide and one sixteenth of an inch thick.”

  He smiled and reached into his bag. “Sorry, Dr. Noguchi.” He pulled out a much smaller pocketknife, only about three inches in length.

  “That’s the wrong knife,” I said at once.

  “Oh, now, come on,” the detective said. “We found the knife that killed him right at the scene.”

  “You don’t have the murder weapon,” I insisted.

  He didn’t believe me. But two days later police found a bloodstained knife in a trashcan two blocks from the scene of the crime. That weapon was exactly five and a half inches long, one inch wide and one sixteenth of an inch thick. And the blood on its blade matched the victim’s.

  It turned out to be the murder weapon. The pocket-knife the police discovered at the scene had been used by the victim in self-defense. And two knives indicated a knife fight. Was it part of a gang war? The police investigated and found out that the victim was a member of a mini-gang which was at war with another gang. And through the interrogation of the members of the rival gang, they eventually identified a Mexican teenager as the murderer.

  A BONE OF CONTENTION

  Torrential rains struck California, rivers and streams overflowed and flooded the canyons. An old rusting Volkswagen which had been invisible in the underbrush in one of those canyons was lifted and deposited in plain sight near a road.

  When the LAPD investigated the car, the door on the driver’s side was hanging open and nobody was found inside. But the license plate quickly identified the owner of the car: a man who had been missing for years and presumed dead.

  The LAPD did not know what to believe. Was it a legitimate fatal accident, with the remains of the owner’s body lost in the flood? Or was it perhaps a hoax to establish a fictitious death for insurance or other purposes, with the owner assuming a new identity?

  Excavation was begun in the canyon, but all that was found was one small piece of bone. The LAPD brought it to our office, where we immediately identified it as a part of a human collarbone, so someone had died in the vicinity.

  But how to prove, from a small piece of collarbone, that it was indeed the owner of the Volkswagen who had died?

  I had a thought: chest X rays. Such X rays, taken to examine the heart or the lungs of a patient, always include the collarbone in the frame of the shot. We asked the owner’s wife if her husband had ever been given a chest X ray. She said yes, and soon the X ray was on our desk.

  I called in a consultant, forensic radiologist Isaac Sanders, M.D., to examine the bone fragment and the X ray. Was it possible to take new X rays of the bone fragment that could be compared to the owner’s X ray and thus prove that he was indeed dead? We discussed the fact that the tension of the muscle and the tissue in the human shoulder must somehow be duplicated if we were to obtain an image of the fragment precise enough for such a comparison.

  Dr. Sanders was puzzled about how to do this, until he came up with the idea of placing a water bag on top of the bone fragment to try to simulate soft tissue on the body. When he did that, the X ray of the bone fragment exactly matched the X ray of a segment of the owner’s collarbone. From a tiny piece of bone, Dr. Sanders had identified the man.

  That forensic feat confirmed the death of the owner of the Volkswagen. And it also resolved any problem the widow may have had with insurance companies which might have suspected a hoax when her husband’s body was not found in the car.

  THE INVISIBLE MURDER

  One of the most ingenious murderers who ever lived was a man who not only planned his homicides elaborately but killed his victims in such a way that there was absolutely no trace of foul play—no weapons, no poison, no marks on the body and, most remarkably, no evidence in the organs and the blood.

  Act One of this crime began with a car accident in Long Beach stage-managed by the killer. His nephew, who was riding with him in the car, was thrown against the windshield, suffering chest injuries and cuts in the head. The murderer was uninjured. And the “accident” occurred within a few blocks of a hospital, for that too was part of the murderer’s scheme.

  Act Two took place in a hospital room, with the unsuspecting nephew bandaged and lying in bed, and his dutiful uncle sitting nearby, consoling him. The nurse who moved in and out of the room saw nothing out of the ordinary. She merely noted that the uncle looked distraught at the pain his nephew was suffering.

  The climax of the drama occurred in Act Three, hours after the uncle had left the hospital. A nurse, checking on the nephew, found that he had fallen into a coma. It was incredible. His injuries weren’t serious. His X rays had shown there was nothing remarkable. Rushing him to the operating room, doctors made a “burr hole” in his skull. There was no blood in the subdural space between the skull and the brain, which meant there had been no brain injury. Frantic efforts to save his life finally failed. And the bereaved uncle, summoned back to the hospital, broke down and cried.

  The following day, a homicide sergeant called my office. “We’ve got a funny one here, Dr. Noguchi.”

  “What is it?”

  “Well, we don’t even know if it’s a murder. But we’ve been told the uncle is going to collect insurance on the death of his nephew.”

  The sergeant explained the circumstances of the case, then told me the hospital physicians believed strongly that, since brain surgery had revealed no brain trauma, the nephew could not have slipped into a coma without outside help. They suspected that the uncle had injected him with some drug, but they could find no fresh needle marks on his body.

  I conducted the forensic investigation, including an autopsy, on the nephew, looking carefully for fresh punctures. His body was unmarked, just as the sergeant had said. And the report from the toxicology laboratory showed absolutely no trace of poison or drugs. So if it was murder, I thought, how had the uncle accomplished it? It was a complete mystery to me.

  Meanwhile, the LAPD had asked assistance from the FBI—and discovered from the FBI’s files that another insured relative of the uncle, in another state, had died in identical circumstances: first a car crash, then the hospital visit, and finally the coma. Police were now certain the man was a murderer. But how could they prove it when there was absolutely no trace of evidence?

  To find out, in what would perhaps be a futile effort, I decided to try to re-create the exact scene in the nephew’s hospital room at the time of his uncle’s visit. Since the police suspected foul play, nothing had been touched or removed from that room, including the medical equipment that had been used to treat the nephew. When the doctor and the nurses who were on duty at the time were assembled in the room, I said to one of my staff members, “You’re the nephew. Lie down on the bed, please.” Then I said to the doctor, “You’re the uncle. Where did he sit?”

  When the doctor moved a chair to the right side of the bed and sat down, I immediately observed that the uncle’s access to his nephew’s body would have been blocked by the medical equipment that had been used to feed him intravenously. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, to inject him from that location. I was nonplussed. My re-creation of the scene only made the uncle look more innocent.

  But then I stepped back to the doorway of the room to survey the scene from a larger angle—and mental lightning struck. Of course, that was it! “He didn’t inject the nephew,” I said. “He injected the tubing of the intravenous-fluid bottle.”

  We took the tubing back to our laboratories and examined it under a microscope. There was a fresh puncture in its side.

  A needle had made that hole. So now we knew how the uncle had injected the nephew. But since no poison or drug had been in the nephew’s body, we still did not know what had killed him. It wasn’t until police found that the uncle had once worked in a psychiatric hospital in Los Angeles, giving doses of insulin to patients, that we knew what to look for.

  Human insul
in is a chemical found naturally in the body and is the substance that regulates blood sugar. The type of “artificial” insulin injected into humans, chiefly in the treatment of diabetes, is obtained from a hog’s pancreas. But once it is inside the body, it is impossible to differentiate it from human insulin.

  However, there are ways to detect its presence. A low sugar content in the spinal fluid is a presumptive sign of an excessive amount of insulin in the body. So I first made a spinal tap on the nephew’s body, analyzed the spinal fluid and found a 10-milligram sugar count compared to the 80- to 100-milligram count which is normal.

  Then a radio immune assay test which had been developed by a professor at a local university was performed. In this process hog insulin is injected into a rabbit, which then develops antibodies in its blood. A serum containing these antibodies is “tagged” with radioactive isotopes, and when it is introduced into human blood the antibodies combine with the insulin, thus enabling us to detect its presence. Results of the test performed on the nephew revealed, as I recall, the presence of over eight hundred units of insulin in his blood and body tissue—again well above normal.

  That was enough evidence to try and convict the uncle for murder. At his trial, however, only evidence of the murder of his nephew was admitted. But during the penalty phase the District Attorney was able to introduce evidence of no fewer than six other murders the uncle had committed around the country. He made a mistake when he committed his seventh in Los Angeles.

  WHO SHOT THE DRIVER?

  One night a car careened off a road in the San Gabriel Mountains, out of control, bounced down a hillside, glanced off one tree and then crashed to a halt against another. In the moonlight, the driver’s head could be seen through the open car window, tilted forward over the wheel. A bullet hole in his left temple oozed a trickle of blood.

  I arrived at the scene just as the body was being placed on a stretcher ready for transfer to the forensic center. “It must have been a sniper,” a sheriff’s deputy told me. “We’re getting more and more of those loonies around here, taking potshots at passing cars.”