The Coroner Series

by Thomas T. Noguchi

  The police had cleared a way to the body, but I surprised some of them when I didn’t go directly to it. Others of the LAPD in that room, who had seen me work before, knew my pattern, the first act of what they jokingly called the “Noguchi Show.” Instead of crouching to examine the body, I looked up to examine the ceiling.

  It is a system of observation at the scene which I’ve tried to teach young investigators over the years. Don’t worry about the body; the body will stay there. (If it gets up, that’s another story.) First, examine the room in a systematic, preplanned way, beginning with the ceiling. Clues may be up there: bullet holes, bloodstains, chipped plaster.

  Then I began a systematic observation of the walls and the furniture in the room. The ceiling had yielded no clues, but the furniture contained the first bit of evidence. On the nightstand next to the bed I saw a green leafy substance and cigarette paper. Marijuana had been smoked in that room, by either Belushi or others.

  But marijuana doesn’t kill. I looked elsewhere and saw something unusual on the other side of the room. A little white powder had spilled down the front of the dresser. I walked over to the dresser, a plainclothes police lieutenant following me. Examining the powder, I thought it was cocaine, but I wouldn’t know for certain until the laboratory tested it.

  In response to my questions, the lieutenant told me that no syringe or drug apparatus had been found in the room, and the medics said there were no needle marks on the body. That’s why the police had ruled out drugs as the cause of death.

  There was a commotion at the door as my staff, including the chief of the forensic-medicine division, Dr. Ronald Kornblum, arrived. I waited while our photographer snapped pictures of the body from various angles and our investigator took measurements. Then I went to the body and crouched to examine it. Dr. Kornblum and the lieutenant joined me. I saw a little bit of discoloration slightly above the inside of the right elbow. After a moment of thought, I stood up and said, “I believe we have a drug overdose here. Belushi used cocaine—and probably heroin too.”

  A chorus of voices rose in disagreement, and the lieutenant reminded me that not only had no heroin been found, but no syringe or other drug paraphernalia.

  “Then the drug apparatus must have been removed,” I said.

  “But there aren’t any needle marks,” one of my staff said.

  “We’ll have to wait until the autopsy to find out if there are needle tracks,” another staff member commented.

  “Not necessarily,” I said, to the surprise of my staff—and the police. “We may be able to tell right now.”

  Crouching again beside the body, I gripped Belushi’s upper right arm with both of my hands, then squeezed.

  Nothing happened.

  Again I pressured the upper arm while everyone watched. Suddenly a tiny drop of blood appeared at the inner elbow. A murmur went around the room. There had been a puncture in the skin, additional confirmation of my theory that very probably Belushi’s death was drug-related.

  I repeated the squeezing process on the left arm, and again a tiny drop of blood emerged. Now I knew there was no question. Belushi had overdosed, probably with a speedball, a combination of cocaine and heroin.

  But the very fact that the fresh punctures had been so difficult to discover worried me. Apparently a tiny medically clean needle had been used, and the injections had been made right into the vein, so that only drops of blood revealed them. Belushi was obviously not a routine drug addict with a scarred arm. I thought it possible that he might have been injected by someone else.

  “The real question in this case isn’t whether Belushi overdosed,” I said to the police lieutenant, “but whether someone else injected the drugs into him.”

  I could not yet be certain, of course, but I knew that my question would create a dilemma for the police. If someone else had injected Belushi, that act could be legally defined as murder. But it was the most difficult of all crimes for which to gain a conviction. And when the drug and its apparatus were absent, as they were in this case, conviction was even more difficult. In fact, even if the apparatus was returned later, such tests as fingerprint identification would be hampered because it had been handled after the crime. So it appeared that if my theory was correct there would be no tangible evidence to prove it.

  Almost everyone believes it is impossible to determine whether a person has injected himself or whether someone else has inserted the needle into the veins of his arms. I believe that a forensic expert can discern the difference.

  My theory begins with the fact that the human body, forensically speaking, is a skeleton with hinges. For example, in the arm there is a hinge at the elbow and another at the wrist. These hinges are not universal joints. They can move only certain ways. So if one administers an injection to himself, holding a syringe with the thumb and the index and middle fingers, a certain type of puncture will be made. It is called a “signature,” and it involves not only the location of the injection but also its direction.

  Such a signature is something that cannot be copied easily by anyone else, because one finger may be a fraction of an inch longer or shorter, one skeletal hinge smaller or larger. Also, the muscles in the index and middle fingers are characteristic of the person making the signature. That’s why each injection is unique.

  Forensic scientists can thus compare fresh puncture wounds with old ones to see whether they reveal a different signature from the subject’s normal pattern of punctures, again not only in location but, more important, in the direction of the injection. To illustrate, if you hold out your left arm and pretend you are injecting it with a syringe held in your right hand, you’ll observe that the needle will enter the vein at an angle from the right side. But if another person injects the needle into your left arm, he will almost always do so straight up the vein, not from a right angle.

  About an hour after my staff and I left Bungalow 3 at the Chateau-Marmont, a car pulled up to the scene and a young woman named Cathy Smith got out. She gave the police a syringe and a bent spoon with a scorched underside and said it was the drug apparatus that had been used the night before, which she had taken with her when she left the bungalow.

  Cathy Smith would later tell a National Enquirer reporter that she had administered the coup de grâce to Belushi. Later still, she would deny the story and threaten to sue the newspaper.

  Belushi’s death was ruled accidental, but his widow, Judith Jacklin, would launch a battle to have a grand jury investigate the circumstances. The jury would indict Cathy Smith for second-degree homicide.

  However, the very day after Belushi died I was once more embroiled in my own life-and-death career struggle. Dr. Kornblum performed the autopsy, which confirmed my theory that he had died of a drug overdose. But because of my legal problems I wasn’t able to follow up on my scientific theories involving the “signature” of the injections that had killed him. I’ve had no connection with the case since and don’t know what role the Medical Examiner’s Office played in the indictment of Cathy Smith.

  14

  * * *

  Coroner on Trial

  On the evening of November 12, 1982, in Newport Beach, flares in the garden of the Newporter Inn burned on brass poles with reflectors that created little pools of heat which warmed the crowd gathered there. Medical examiners were assembled from the four corners of the United States for their annual convention. We were attending the cocktail party that preceded the banquet at which I would be installed as president of the National Association of Medical Examiners.

  It had been quite a week for me. On Wednesday I stood in a courtroom listening to my attorney make his closing remarks in my Civil Service battle to retain my job. The very next day I was in Newport Beach participating in the convention whose climax would be my installment as its head.

  As I moved through the crowd greeting friends, my whole life seemed to flash before my eyes like a speeded-up film. For there was Dr. Bill Eckert, large and genial, whose wisdom I had requested
in the Robert Kennedy case. There was Dr. Robert Litman, the psychiatrist on the suicide panel in the Marilyn Monroe case. There was Dr. Joseph Choi, who had performed the autopsy in the Natalie Wood case. And all around were medical examiners who had flown to Los Angeles earlier that fall at their own expense to testify for me at my hearing—Drs. Bill Sturner of Rhode Island, George Gantner of St. Louis, Ali Hamili of Wilmington, Delaware, and others from all over the country.

  Had their efforts been in vain?

  My current ordeal had begun when, two days after Christmas 1981, the Los Angeles Times published the series of articles critical of my office and of me. In an interview, I had told Times reporter Laurie Beckland that I graded myself only a seven on a scale of ten as a manager, a modest assessment, I thought. But the title of her story reporting the interview read: “Noguchi’s Ego Seen as Single Flaw,” and her first paragraph prefaced a discussion of my managerial “problems” with these words: “If you could get two people to agree on anything about the controversial Dr. Thomas T. Noguchi, who is often called ‘Coroner to the Stars,’ it might be that he is a dedicated, imaginative scientist with a single flaw.” And that flaw was “variously described as ‘ego,’ ‘ambition’ and ‘the need always to be the big cheese.’”

  Dr. Noguchi, the story went on, “contends he has channeled his ego into a ‘driving force that makes this department distinguished from others.’” But Beck-land found ex-employees such as Dr. Ahmed Eid, a toxicologist, who said, “Dr. Noguchi is OK as a coroner when he puts his head to it. But he’s worried about political stuff, to be on TV, to be well-known, to be famous. And everything in his office is directed to that.”

  I could not deny the ego charge, because I was proud of my accomplishments. It had been difficult to come to this country, hardly understanding the language, and rise to a position of scientific prominence. But “fame” had come to me, not because I sought it, but because the victims who died in my jurisdiction were world famous and the press subjected me and my office to close scrutiny in those cases.

  Perhaps because of my Japanese heritage, I do have a sense of ceremony—and in America that’s called “showmanship.” I admit it’s an aura which seems to surround me, no matter what I do.

  But Beckland’s charges had not stopped there. Once again, I was accused of talking too much about the Holden and Wood cases. And, far worse, her story stated that I mismanaged my office, that police evidence and decedents’ property were routinely lost or misplaced, that bodies were “stacked” on gurneys. In short, she claimed I had created a chamber of horrors in the Los Angeles County Forensic Science Center.

  The public was stunned—justifiably, if those charges were true. And the Board of Supervisors had moved quickly to appoint an investigating panel to audit my management of the office—to find out, as Supervisor Michael Antonovich would later state, whether the Times charges were “fact or fiction.” As part of the audit, Leslie Lukash, M.D., Chief Medical Examiner of Nassau County, New York, was added to the panel by the Supervisors to head an impartial forensic investigation of my office. When it was completed, Lukash stated as his official conclusion: “Dr. Noguchi and his staff are doing an excellent job in operating the medical examiner’s office after recognition is given to the resources available to him at the present time.”

  There, I thought, the matter would end. But, contradicting its own impartial experts, the Board of Supervisors asked for my resignation. When I refused, I was demoted out of the department, and I prepared, once again, to battle for reinstatement.

  In the fall of 1982, at a Civil Service hearing presided over by Sara T. Adler, Godfrey Isaac, my never-say-die attorney, handled my defense along with his partner, Rosalind Marks. As in 1969, the case made front-page headlines and the hearing room was crowded with reporters and curious spectators. But Isaac had warned me that the outcome might not be as favorable as in 1969. For the real source of most of the charges against me was invisible and could never be called to testify. The ghost of Proposition 13 haunted that hearing room.

  Often while I sat there listening to the county witnesses testify against me, I thought back to that wonderful day in 1972 when the Forensic Science Center had opened, filled with glistening new equipment and staffed by experts. In those days I had viewed the future as limitless: we could do our job and at the same time expand the frontiers of our fledgling science. What had happened since? The tide of homicides and unexplained deaths in Los Angeles had doubled, tripled, quadrupled. But the staff had not expanded to cope with the work load. And the equipment, new in 1972, was now ten years old and in need of repair or replacement. We couldn’t obtain the money to maintain it efficiently, or to purchase new equipment when our 1972 devices became outmoded.

  It was ironic, I thought, that as soon as I was demoted out of the office the County Board of Supervisors had appropriated new funding of almost one million dollars to the Forensic Science Center and approved the hiring of an approximate fifteen percent increase in personnel. I was never given a chance to run the office with that new funding and personnel.

  Dr. Joseph Choi, a distinguished pathologist who had been promoted to assistant chief of forensic medicine, testified in my behalf and painted a vivid picture of conditions at the center before the infusion of new funds. Wasn’t it true, William Masterson, the private attorney for the county counsel asked him, that there were deficiencies in the Medical Examiner’s Office?

  “We were overworked,” Choi said, “working with crippled equipment, working by hand. We could not give the best service to the county. Our hands were tied.”

  Then, his voice rising sharply in indignation, Choi continued, “I remember times in the bloody autopsy room we did not have paper towels for two or three days. Not even paper towels. Can you imagine that?” He paused, then asked Masterson, “Do you work with bloody hands?”

  “Can we get out of the autopsy room, please?” Masterson said uncomfortably.

  Because of the shortage of staff, we also had storage and filing problems at the center, but Arleigh Macree, head of the LAPD’s firearms and explosives unit, a detective with eighteen years’ experience, responded to the charge that we were careless with items of evidence. As he took the witness stand he startled the hearing with his first words: “I’m the only bomb technician available in the LAPD at this hour, so if my beeper goes off I’m going to have to leave.”

  Macree then informed the hearing that his unit “probably takes more evidence out of the coroner’s office than any other in the LAPD. We have contact almost on a daily basis.” He said that “most homicides are commited with firearms. Around eighty percent. Therefore we’re going to take about eighty percent of the evidence handled by the coroner’s office.”

  And how had Dr. Noguchi’s office done its job?

  “It’s been superb,” Macree said. Then he exploded his own bombshell. “In fifteen years, I’ve never known them to lose one item of evidence.” And he added, “I found the coroner’s records impeccable.”

  Ironically, the charge which had inspired the Times series, my “needless” statements after the deaths of such celebrities as Natalie Wood and William Holden, was hardly touched upon by the prosecution. But Dr. Cyril Wecht, formerly the Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, coroner and a past president of the American Academy of Forensic Science, spoke on the subject of what a medical examiner can or should comment on after deaths. Testifying in my behalf, he said, “Well, I know of no impermissible areas by statute or even by tradition or custom. I can’t think of anybody ever telling me what I could or could not say … I always felt constrained as a coroner to divulge information and to share it with the public through the news media … if I felt there was a legitimate interest and concern.”

  The cause and manner of death, as well as the circumstances surrounding it, he continued, are “matters of public record.” And, concluding, he said, “I think it is the duty and responsibility of the … medical examiner to share information, especially information that might
be of public interest and concern.”

  When the hearing ended, many observers felt I had clearly won my case on the evidence. But I believe I was the only one who thought I had a chance of actually winning the decision. The specter of the Times articles still cast a terrible shadow. And the testimony, in my favor, of such law enforcement officials as Detective Macree, as well as my peers and employees, had received little media attention.

  And so I waited.

  From my apartment in Marina Del Rey, overlooking the ocean, I could see the great waves crashing up and down the beach during the savage storms that, day after day, assaulted the California coastline in the winter of 1983. My career had been like those waves, I thought: an unpredictable succession of highs and lows. The strain had told on my domestic life. After a long separation, Hisako and I were divorced in 1982.

  Yet between the lows my life had been a personally gratifying adventure in science. And as I faced an uncertain future I often pondered the past. I thought most often of the Forensic Science Center, and of the brash predictions I had made to reporters at the time of its dedication over ten years ago. Had any of them come true?

  Yes, they had. The center had long been cooperating with other medical authorities in a program to aid patients who needed organ transplants. And as an essential adjunct to the program, California now had a law that established a precise definition of brain death. Otherwise, for example, a murderer might say, “I shot the man but I didn’t kill him. The doctors killed him when they removed his heart.”

  There was also a law that required, in addition to testing the alcohol level in the blood of deceased drivers, mandatory testing for barbiturates and amphetamines as well. Our office had been instrumental in its passage as part of programs to prevent the abuse of alcohol and drugs. The more evidence of drug involvement in unnecessary deaths, the more pressure can be brought to bear to combat drug abuse.