But his partner had a different idea. “Snipers usually operate on busy highways, not way up in the mountains. I think it was premeditated murder. Somebody shot the driver inside the car while it was parked along the road, then got out and pushed the car over the edge.”
I examined the body on the stretcher. “It wasn’t a sniper,” I said. “And I doubt that it was murder. It was suicide.”
The deputies looked astonished. “There are powder burns on the driver’s left temple,” I explained, “which means it was a close-contact wound. That would rule out a sniper shooting from long range.”
“Okay, but it still could have been murder.”
“I doubt it,” I said. “If the murderer was inside the car, he would have to have been a contortionist to shoot the driver through the left temple. Of course, I can’t rule out the possibility that someone shot him from close range through the open window from outside the car. But I believe the driver shot himself. Then, when the car was rolling down the hillside, either he dropped the gun out the window in a recoil action or it was jolted out of his hand.”
Now the deputies were even more skeptical. It seemed unlikely that anyone would be so intent on suicide that he would shoot himself as he was driving his car.
“There’s one way to find out,” I suggested. “Search the hillside along the car’s tire tracks. I think you’ll find the gun.”
Reluctantly, the deputies made the search. They found a pistol lying in the underbrush by the tire tracks, just below the road. The fingerprints on its grip were those of the driver. He had committed suicide.
TIME OF DEATH
A small boy disappeared from his home, and five weeks later his body was found stuffed into a meter box adjacent to a Hollywood freeway. The decomposition of the body indicated that the boy had been dead for a long time. But how long?
The time of death became critically important because the man who was suspected of committing the crime was at home three hours after the time of the boy’s disappearance and was seen continually until the body was found. He even helped search for the boy. But the District Attorney’s Office could not prosecute the man because of insufficient evidence and asked me for my assistance.
In viewing the body, I saw a great number of maggots in different stages of development. Entomology shows us that the blowfly, the species to which these maggots belong, undergoes a complete metamorphosis in its development. Like a butterfly, it changes from the maggot stage, analogous to the caterpillar, into a cocoon, from which it eventually emerges as a fly. I knew, too, that this metamorphosis takes place within a specific length of time, so that I could establish the time of the boy’s death by estimating the time it would take maggots to reach the stage of development in which they had been found on the boy’s body.
For the next several weeks, my associates must have thought I was taking up a new hobby as I experimented with countless generations of blowflies in the laboratory. One, in fact, commented that I had gone “buggy.” But finally I was able to determine, under conditions that duplicated the condition of the boy’s body, the age of the maggots that had been found on it. And from that I was able to establish the time of the boy’s death. It was within three hours of the time of his disappearance. On that evidence, it was therefore possible that the suspect could have committed the crime. The District Attorney’s Office brought the man to trial and secured his conviction.
BLOOD AND SEX
On December 19, 1972, Detective John Rogan of the New York City Police Department and his partner, George Merrihue, viewed a body in an apartment in the Bronx. The victim, Minnie Goldfaden, was lying on the living-room floor with bruise marks on her throat that indicated strangulation.
Edward Goldfaden, her thirty-seven-year-old son, took the detectives to the kitchen and pointed out an area where the linoleum floor covering had been ripped open. “She hid her cash under there,” he said. “Now the money’s gone.”
“Who knew about it?”
“Only me and my brother Leonard.”
The detectives noticed there were triple locks on the apartment door, and there was no sign of the door having been forced. The victim had obviously let the murderer into the apartment. And that murderer had to be either Edward or Leonard Goldfaden, the detectives thought.
They were just about to depart to interrogate Leonard when Rogan saw something on the floor beside the victim’s right foot. He knelt down and picked up a black leather button, which he put into an evidence envelope and took with him.
Leonard Goldfaden was a man in his early thirties. While the detectives talked to him in his apartment, Rogan noticed a black leather coat draped over a couch. A button on its right sleeve was missing.
The detectives took the coat, and Leonard, to the police station. There the police forensic laboratory put the coat under a microscope—and discovered tiny traces of dried blood on its lapel. The button also had blood on it.
Leonard Goldfaden told the detectives that the blood on his coat had come from a fight in a bar and then would answer no more questions.
He was booked for the murder of his mother, but a few days later the police received a shock. The New York Medical Examiner’s Office reported that the buttons on the coat were similar to the button found at the scene of the murder—but its laboratories were unable to analyze the dried blood on the button to see if it matched the traces of blood on the coat. The court released Leonard Goldfaden on a bond of only five thousand dollars, because of the lack of evidence.
The detectives didn’t quit. Rogan contacted everyone he could think of, including, he later told me, Nobel Prize—winning scientists. Someone, somewhere, he thought, must be able to analyze the blood on the button and match it with the traces of blood on the coat. Then Deputy Bronx District Attorney Nathan Dembin told his deputies that he had read of my experiments to perfect a technique to reconstitute blood from stains and identify it by sex. Dembin contacted me, and I agreed to help. Rogan flew to Los Angeles with the button and the coat. And I went to work in our laboratory.
I first reconstituted the dried blood from both the button and the coat by combining it with a twenty-percent acetic acid solution in a new process developed by Dr. Hideo Ishizu of Okayama University. Then, in a well-established procedure to determine sex from blood samples, in collaboration with Dr. Omar Alfi, a cytogeneticist, I used a fluorescent microscope with ultraviolet light to examine the reconstituted blood, which had been specially dyed to reveal the chromosome composition of the blood cells. Male blood cells contain an XY chromosome; female blood cells contain an XX chromosome. The dye I used adhered to the Y factor present in the male chromosome but not in the female.
Thus I was able to discover that the blood on Leonard Goldfaden’s jacket was the same type as the blood on the button. Even more interestingly, I also found that the blood on both was female and Type O. Leonard Goldfaden had told police that the blood on the lapel of his jacket had come from a fight with a male.
Leonard Goldfaden was brought to trial, and I testified in court that scientific evidence suggested that he was tied in with the murder of a female, his mother. It was the first time such evidence was permitted in a U.S. courtroom. Even though Leonard Goldfaden was convicted, an appellate court later overthrew the verdict because the scientific techniques I had used were too “new.”
But I believe that reconstituting blood from dried stains, and typing it by sex, will eventually be established as another tool in forensic science for the capture and conviction of murderers.
THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME
Albert Dekker was a fine character actor who portrayed the suave European in more than a dozen films. But to horror-film addicts he was best known as Dr. Cyclops, the mad scientist who shrank his victims into little figures three inches high.
One morning I was in my office when the telephone rang and a police detective informed me that Dekker had committed suicide. I immediately drove out to the actor’s Hollywood home, where I found a strange tab
leau in the bathroom. Dekker had hanged himself in a most unusual way. Vulgar words were written in lipstick on the mirror and on his torso. And he was half suspended by a rope that was wound around his throat and body in a figure-eight fashion, then went over a beam above the bathtub and back to his wrists.
A towel beneath the rope around his throat gave me the first clue that this was not a suicide at all, at least not an intentional one. Then I saw that Dekker was supposed to have been in control of his “hanging,” because, although his hands looked as if they were tied, the rope was fixed in such a way that he could release them. What Dekker had created was, in fact, a pulley arrangement with which he could increase the pressure of the rope around his throat and then stop it when he chose. But clearly something had gone wrong.
The actor’s body was taken to the Forensic Science Center, and an autopsy revealed that he had indeed hanged himself. But from the other evidence at the scene I concluded that Dekker had not died by suicide. He had died from accidental suffocation.
What had Dekker been doing? I was pretty certain I knew from similar deaths in the past. But to confirm my theory, I called in a consultant to compile a psychological autopsy. Friends and associates of the actor were interviewed about his lifestyle, because we believed that Dekker had apparently been playing the most dangerous sex game in the world.
The strange ritual is known to psychologists as autoerotic asphyxia. And basically it involves hanging yourself for the “ultimate sexual thrill.” But the ritualists do not intend to die. Instead they hope to achieve what they believe to be the most sublime sexual experience possible: obtaining orgasm by risking death. Almost always they handcuff themselves, or bind their hands as Dekker had done, and sometimes they wear blindfolds or hoods. Some don transvestite clothes.
Dr. Joe Rupp, Chief Medical Examiner in Corpus Christi, Texas, is an expert on sex-related deaths. In various textbook articles he has discussed autoerotic asphyxia at great length, and he has cited this excerpt from Justine, written by the Marquis de Sade in 1791, to show how long the ritual has been practiced:
We take our stations; Roland is stimulated by a few of his usual caresses; he climbs upon the stool, I put the halter round his neck… . Heaven, he himself gives me the sign to remove the stool, I obey; would you believe it, Madame? Nothing more true than what Roland had conjectured; nothing but symptoms of pleasure ornament his countenance… . I rush to cut him down, he falls, unconscious, but thanks to my ministrations he quickly recovers his senses.
“Oh Therese!” he exclaims upon opening his eyes. “Oh, those sensations are not to be described; they transcend all one can possibly say; let them now do what they wish with me, I stand unflinching before Themis’ sword!”
Dr. Rupp has also stated that autoerotic asphyxia is astonishingly widespread, “carried on by thousands of individuals who arrive at this practice independently of one another. It represents an as yet unexplored, almost unknown aspect of human behavior.”
From all appearances, Albert Dekker lost his life playing that dangerous game. Ordinarily, I am reluctant to discuss such sex-related “curiosity” cases. But because in Los Angeles County alone some twenty to thirty deaths occur from autoerotic asphyxia every year, and because the practice still seems to be virtually unknown, I believe the public must be made aware of its danger. The truly sad thing is that, unlike the episode described in Justine, the ritual is practiced in secret and alone. And if an unexpected accident occurs, death, not the “ultimate sexual thrill,” may be the result.
WHEN THE DEAD ROSE OUT OF THEIR GRAVES
Rain pounded the cemetery on a hill overlooking populous Verdugo Hills one morning. A storm had been going on for days, with water pouring into holes made by groundhogs and spreading through their underground network of tunnels beneath the light topsoil until, suddenly, the entire hillside with its cargo of bodies shifted and a mudslide began.
Down toward the city streets slid rotting caskets containing more than a hundred bodies borne on the lip of the mudslide. Within minutes caskets and corpses engulfed the area, plunging through windows into the living rooms of houses, into stores, and lodging against walls. One body ended up wedged in the doorway of a supermarket.
And no one knew what to do. While Verdugo Hills citizens were confronted by more than a hundred ghoulish corpses, Los Angeles bureaucracies fought over which agency should take responsibility (and spend the funds) to redeem the situation.
I heard about the incident a few hours after it occurred and was just as puzzled by the jurisdictional problem. Certainly nothing in the law establishing our office commanded us to take care of bodies that had been buried for years. We were supposed to discover why people died, not why they rose out of their graves. But when another hour passed and I heard that the bodies were still in the houses and streets of Verdugo Hills, I decided to take action and then worry about the legalities.
I drove with my staff to Verdugo Hills. And what I saw there was a scene I’ll never forget. Mud had swept the corpses everywhere, some of them now standing grotesquely upright. Meanwhile the pounding rain continued, with water flowing like a river off the hill. But even though I was told that a further mudslide might occur at any moment, endangering our staff, we set to work collecting the corpses.
By that time, other city agencies had decided that if the Medical Examiner’s Office had acted without legal basis, they could do so, too. And soon a building in which to store the corpses was found, and we began the process of identification. Most of them, even some buried for decades, were not skeletons, as most people would expect. The skin was gone, but not the muscle and the tissue. And, in a process called adipocere formation, the fat on the corpses had changed td a soap-like texture when the bodies picked up sodium and moisture underground, and their color had become a grayish-white.
Because of the presence of mortuary records and the remains of caskets with labels, the process of identification was not as difficult as in an airplane crash. We first separated the males from the females, and the newer corpses from the older. Then we checked the records for height and age of the deceased. Artifacts and clothing sometimes aided identification. And by the time the rainstorm had ended we were able to return the bodies to the mortuary for reburial.
Whether the citizens of Verdugo Hills have gotten over the shock of that invasion of corpses I don’t know. Nor, in all candor, can I be certain that everybody was correctly identified and reburied under the right name. But we did the best we could on that day the dead rose out of their graves.
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Medical Examiner’s Case No. 81-14582
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William Holden
The years from 1972 to 1981 were good ones for forensic science. Medical examiners all over the country were growing in prestige and importance, and our work was gaining recognition on several fronts, from the environment to the war on crime.
But slowly and silently a problem was emerging. It began in the late seventies in my state when the citizens of California voted overwhelmingly for Proposition 13, the so-called “taxpayers’ revolt” against the ever-escalating cost of government. From that day on, all government agencies, including mine, found it almost impossible to obtain increases in funding even as unexplained deaths in Los Angeles were multiplying. Each year it became apparent that our office couldn’t cope with the additional work load. And once again I found myself at loggerheads with the County Board of Supervisors. Then William Holden’s death presented a special problem to me.
It appeared at first as if he had been murdered. Found on November 16, 1981, Holden, clad only in a pajama top, lay on the floor beside his bed in his luxurious Santa Monica apartment overlooking the Pacific Ocean, with a deep gash in his forehead. Blood from that wound had literally soaked the bedsheets and the carpet. But the door to his apartment had been locked, and nothing had been stolen. The police were puzzled. They told the press that Holden had died of natural causes, then shipped the body to the For
ensic Science Center for an autopsy.
I supervised his autopsy with sorrow. William Holden had long been one of the motion picture actors I most admired. Born William Franklin Beedle, Jr., on April 17, 1918, in O’Fallon, Illinois, he was the son of a chemist. While he was still young, his family moved to Pasadena, California, where the future actor grew up. At Pasadena Junior College he acted in several radio plays and attracted the attention of a talent scout, who got him a small role in a Hollywood film, Million Dollar Legs. He was only twenty-one. He changed his name to Holden, and only one year later he was a major star. His performance in Clifford Odets’ Golden Boy opposite Barbara Stanwyck won him international fame.
From then on he made more than fifty films. After serving in the war as an enlisted man in the Army Air Force, he returned to Hollywood, to win an Academy Award for his role as an American prisoner of war in Stalag 17 in 1953, and nominations for his performances as Gloria Swanson’s ill-fated lover in Sunset Boulevard and as a television news executive in Network.
The titles of some of his other motion pictures have been described as a roll call of Hollywood history: Our Town, Born Yesterday, The Moon Is Blue, The Country Girl, Picnic. My favorite of his films was The Bridge on the River Kwai, and to me Holden was the actor who most vividly depicted the American male of the World War II generation. It was ironic that I would be accused of denigrating him after death. The truth is, I respected William Holden. But there was a greater truth behind his death which posed the problem.
Several questions formed in my mind as I directed the investigation, including the autopsy on Holden’s body. I measured the gash in this forehead that had caused his death. It was two and a half inches long, penetrating the skull. What had caused such a grave wound? And rigor mortis in the limbs of his body and the body’s condition, including such surrounding data as body temperature and decomposition, cloudy eyes and a greenish abdomen, indicated that he had been dead at least four days before he was found. How could a world-famous actor with so many friends and business associates die without anyone discovering it for four days? Was that, in fact, a clue to why he had died?
The Coroner Series Page 17