The Coroner Series

by Thomas T. Noguchi

  Finally, we obtain the blood type in this way: We place the blood in two tiny wells of a tray. Then we take serum from a rabbit which has been injected with human blood A, and serum from a second rabbit injected with human blood B. We add Serum A to the blood in one well, and B to the blood in the other well to obtain the following results:

  If the blood in the first well agglutinates (clots) and the blood in the second does not, we know the blood is Type A.

  If the blood agglutinating is that in the second well, we know it is Type B.

  If both agglutinate, it is Type AB. And if neither agglutinates, it is Type O.

  This sounds simple and clear, so why have I repeatedly said that blood typing is “treacherous"? First of all, because the benzidine and similar tests used to discover whether a stain is blood can give false reactions. In response to the defense attorney’s questions, I testified that there were a number of food and chemical substances, including citrus fruits and, of course, meats which contain animal blood, that can result in what we call a false-positive reaction. I also testified that bacterial contamination and the presence of body fluids like saliva or even sweat can confuse the determination of blood types. In effect, I was forced to impeach myself as an expert witness, as Jacobsen’s attorney sought to prove that no one could be sure that the bloodstains found in Margarite’s apartment were not of Tupper’s type.

  But I had better news, as far as Jacobsen’s defense was concerned, about the sledgehammer. From examining the description of the two blows to Tupper’s head contained in the autopsy report, I believed that the sledgehammer had not been used to kill Tupper. On direct examination I testified that the hammer was too heavy to have caused the injuries to the skull as described in the autopsy report. I pointed out that the sides of the skull where the injuries had occurred are thin, and would have been crushed. They hadn’t been. And to demonstrate my point I picked up the weapon to show how heavy it was. A massive instrument like this, I said, would have caused not only deeper holes but other fracturing of the skull, called eggshell fractures.

  The next day on cross-examination I faced a husky prosecuting attorney, William Hrabsky. His voice dripped with sarcasm as he said:

  Q. Now, when you said heavy weapon, you were saying this is a heavy weapon to you, is that correct, Doctor?

  A. Yes.

  Q. And, you don’t work on construction, do you, Doctor Noguchi?

  A. No, I don’t.

  Q. How are your wrists, by the way, do you play golf?

  A. Just a little bit, yes.

  Q. Not too good yet, all right. So, to your mind, this is a heavy weapon, isn’t that so?

  A. Yes.

  To further emphasize my physical frailties in this cat-and-mouse game, Hrabsky suddenly picked up the sledgehammer like a feather. His big hand hefted it easily and swung it back and forth in front of me. But, having established that the hammer was not heavy, at least in his hands, he knew he still had a problem. To a jury the hammer would still look too massive to have caused slight impressions in Tupper’s skull. So Hrabsky turned from muscle-man to legal tactitian. He pointed out that it was true that if the victim was lying down the hammer would crush his skull “down to nothing. But if the victim was standing up, and dodging, it would produce only a glancing blow and thus slighter injuries.”

  That was piling one hypothesis on top of another, I thought. One, that the victim was standing, and, two, that he was nimbly dodging the hammer blows. But such, I knew, was not the case. I told Hrabsky that the lack of blood found in the cranial cavity beneath the wound indicated that the victim was “in the dying stage” and couldn’t have dodged anything. If he was alive, his blood would have poured into that cavity and filled it up. In short, the sledgehammer was not the murder weapon.

  The defense attorney, on redirect, asked me whether the wounds to the skull could have been caused by a gun butt instead of a sledgehammer, but his question was cut off by a storm of objections. I can say now that I believe Tupper’s heads wounds could very well have been caused by something like a gun butt, which would fit with Buddy Jacobsen’s theory of a dope rubout, and not a melee in his own apartment in which a construction man was involved.

  Later I read in a lively book, Bad Dreams, by Anthony Haden-Guest, that Jacobsen had been pleased by my testimony. “That Japanese, he’s great!” he is reputed to have said while dining in a restaurant called Nicolas’s. I don’t know why he thought I had aided his case. My blood-typing tests had not delivered the evidence his defense wished to find. But my sledgehammer testimony might have helped Sal Prainito, the construction worker. He was acquitted.

  Much more useful to the defense was a ballistics expert, Shelly Braverman. An expended bullet had been found in the kitchen sink of Leslie Hammond’s apartment, which was situated between Jacobsen’s and Margarite’s. Furthermore, Braverman found a .32 bullet hole in Margarite’s closet, and upon placing a probe in its entrance hole he saw that the trajectory pointed straight at the sink.

  Braverman also examined two bullet holes in the window of Margarite’s apartment and concluded they were made by .32 bullets. The defense claimed that they were stray bullets from a murder which had commenced inside Margarite’s apartment, not in Jacobsen’s. But, on cross-examination, prosecutor Hrabsky produced a video demonstration which seemed to negate Braverman’s testimony about the bullet holes in the window. He ordered a screen placed in the courtroom, then played for the jury a videotape of the holes in the window as they had been photographed by the police immediately after the murder. The size of the holes as seen on the earlier tape was smaller than it was now. Therefore, in the intervening months, the holes must have been enlarged by someone. And that someone, Hrabsky implied, was Buddy Jacobsen when he was out on bail. Forensic forgery, he said, could also account for the bullet hole in Margarite’s apartment.

  But it was at this time, with his defenses crumbling on all sides, that Buddy Jacobsen had his first stroke of luck. He contacted ballistics expert Herb MacDonell and asked him to inspect the corridor on the seventh floor of his building where he, Melanie and Joe Margarite lived. In its far wall there were indentations that Jacobsen believed might be bullet holes. If they were, it supported his claim that drug dealers had finished killing Tupper in the hall, the bullets that had missed hitting the far wall.

  As MacDonell told me years later, “I wasn’t there to check Melanie Cain’s story, only to look at those supposed bullet holes. Well, after examining them, I didn’t think they were bullet holes—but while I was there, through natural curiosity I noticed something odd.”

  What MacDonell noticed exploded like a bombshell in court. Melanie’s story of that morning’s events had survived a withering cross-examination. Now, for the first time, a flaw in her story was exposed. For MacDonell had placed a string from the peephole in her door, past the corner of the wall which jutted out beside it, and found that her line of vision to her left could have included only the elevator. And yet all of the “cover-up” activities by Jacobsen which she had seen, including cutting up the paint-splotched rug, had taken place far beyond the elevator.

  The prosecution was obviously caught off guard by this blow from an unexpected source—a nosy forensic scientist who, just out of curiosity, had found the first real suggestion that their star witness might, after all, not have her facts straight.

  They tried to counterattack in two ways. One, they found a tenant in the building who said that at the time of the murder all the apartment doors had “fish-eye” peepholes which allowed a larger field of vision. Jacobsen, the tenant said, had subsequently replaced them with old-fashioned tunnel-vision peepholes, with less scope of sight. Secondly, the prosecution now said, Melanie had peeked through a partially opened door as well as through the peephole.

  In the end, the flaw in Melanie Cain’s story was overwhelmed by all of the other evidence, and on April 12, 1980, Buddy Jacobsen was found guilty of murder in the second degree. Spectacular to the end, Jacobsen dramat
ically escaped, but was eventually returned and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.

  5

  In 1984, while conferring with Herb MacDonell on the Jean Harris trial, in which he had been a key witness, I asked him about his experience in the Jacobsen case. Although he had never appeared in court, his extemporaneous forensic test of the peephole had caused the only bad moments in the trial for Melanie Cain.

  In response to my questions, MacDonell went to his files and returned with the report he had prepared for Jacobsen’s attorneys—and two items which fascinated me: personal drawings made by Buddy Jacobsen himself of the seventh-floor apartments and halls, with his personal handwritten notes indicating points of evidence. The two drawings, one apparently for the use of his attorney and the other for his current girlfriend to do her own ad hoc investigation, were almost identical. They graphically revealed Jacobsen’s own theory of the murder: a shooting by drug dealers which culminated in the hall outside Margarite’s apartment.

  Jacobsen’s drawings identified the part of the shooting which took place right outside Margarite’s apartment. They showed the trajectory of a stray bullet through Margarite’s closet and into the sink of Hammond’s apartment, while the other bullets flew straight down the hall, either into Tupper’s body or into the far wall. Examining the drawing, I saw an intriguing detail. Jacobsen had drawn footprints beside that far wall and labeled them “Melanie’s white paint sneaker prints.” The wall, Jacobsen claimed, had been painted to obscure the “bullet holes,” and the note revealed who he thought did the painting.

  I also noticed that in the drawing of his own apartment made for his girlfriend, Jacobsen had made three circles in the living-room area in which he wrote “I loved you here,” “And here,” “And here”—three romantic references intended, I suppose, to inspire his girlfriend to Olympian efforts in her investigation.

  MacDonell said, “As to the bullet holes in the wall, I couldn’t help the defense. “ He handed me his report, which read, in part:

  Due consideration was given to the repainting of the wall…. Without actual test firing into the wall itself, there is no way to determine the similarity of the depressions within this wall and those that might result from impact of a .32 bullet of the same manufacture and fired from the weapon in question. It is my opinion, however, that these depressions were not caused by such impact. Nevertheless, I cannot suggest an alternate as to how they were produced.

  “The paint was no problem,” MacDonell said. “I made a stereoscopic examination sample from the wall and I found no lead or copper. But while I was in the hallway, I kept looking at Melanie Cain’s door—and it didn’t add up. I realized she couldn’t possibly have seen what she said she had from that door. So, just out of decency for the forensic profession—or plain old curiosity—I included this item in the report I sent to Jacobsen’s attorney.”

  I read further in his report: “Geometry of the apartment door and peephole of Cain’s apartment make it impossible for anyone to look out and have vision to any point left of the elevator’s left door casing.”

  “I understand the prosecution went crazy when that information hit them,” MacDonell said.

  “But what about the prosecution’s claim that the peepholes were changed?” I asked. “And also that she peeked from a partially opened door.”

  “That was a phony defense,” MacDonell said. “No matter what kind of peephole, no matter how far the door was open, she couldn’t see down the hall, because her door was recessed. A wall abutted the door, and that wall shut off her vision to the side. To see what she said she saw, she would have to have stepped clear out into the open in the middle of the hall. But that wasn’t what she testified. And, anyway, look at Buddy Jacobsen’s diagram and see where Joe Margarite’s door is.”

  I looked, and observed that Margarite’s door was around the corner from the elevator and down the hall. “She couldn’t have seen Jacobsen enter Margarite’s apartment no matter where she stood,” MacDonell said.

  In sum, if MacDonell’s theory was right, part of Melanie Cain’s testimony was wrong, and, friends of Jacobsen said, if she was wrong on one point, why not others—including some of those visits to Jacobsen’s apartment and the telephone call from an outdoor booth which the defense had found so suspicious, because they were so convenient for the prosecution?

  A month later a friend of mine met a man named Thomas Baratta and relayed his remarks to me. Baratta manages a popular restaurant in Manhattan called Marylou’s, but before that he was a hairdresser employed by television-commercial producers. He said that he and his wife were “best friends” with Melanie. Indeed, two days before the murder, while doing a Breck shampoo commercial, Melanie had told them of her fears about the Buddy Jacobsen situation. Nevertheless, Baratta had a surprising comment. He thought Buddy might be innocent. Why? “Because the murder was so dumb from beginning to end. And whatever you think of Buddy, he was not stupid.”

  Another acquaintance of Jacobsen agreed. Standing out in the open at a Bronx dump site beside the body of a man he had murdered? Stupid. Killing Tupper on a morning when the police were on their way to question him about Cheryl Corey’s death? Stupid. Murdering Melanie’s lover that morning, when Melanie was banging on his door “every ten minutes”? Stupid.

  Something is wrong, they feel. Buddy Jacobsen was too smart to have done those things.

  My own opinion, after my research, is that there are many questions in this case yet to be answered. The forensic evidence MacDonell discovered that contradicts parts of Melanie Cain’s testimony bothers me, because it raises questions about the rest of her testimony, and the defense in the trial implied that she knew more about the killing than she admitted. On the other hand, she may be responsible only for what Mark Twain used to call a “stretcher” in her testimony about what she saw from her door, and the rest of her story may be accurate. The evidence of violence in Jacobsen’s apartment supports her.

  Joe Margarite, who disappeared the day of Tupper’s murder, finally surfaced in 1982 when he was arrested for allegedly plotting to smuggle Lebanese hashish into the country. Margarite was not considered a suspect in Tupper’s slaying, New York police emphasized, but, as Edward McCarthy, a spokesman for the Bronx District Attorney, said, “We believe he has the information that will cause all the pieces of the puzzle to fit together. He is the only one who could fill in all the holes.” Authorities always believed that four people were involved in the murder, McCarthy added, but had only enough information to link Jacobsen and another man to the crime. It was later revealed that Margarite had provided the weapons used to kill Tupper, but that was the only additional piece of the puzzle to emerge.

  Four people involved in a love-triangle murder? Death weapons provided by a drug dealer? Melanie Cain, according to forensic evidence, caught in an error on the witness stand? To me, it all adds up to a mystery that has yet to be completely solved.

  BREAKTHROUGHS IN FORENSIC SCIENCE

  No one man can lay claim to the distinction of being called “the father of forensic science.” Many men of many nationalities have contributed to this complex profession over the centuries, most of them completely unknown to the public today and, sadly, not even recognized in conventional medical circles. But they were giants who, starting with no precedents or guidelines, possessing only primitive instruments, were able to discover the secrets of the human body, bit by bit, for the use of the law in administering justice, and of physicians in bettering public health.

  All forensic science begins with one man, Alphonse Bertillon, an obscure clerk in the Paris Prefecture of Police. Born in 1853, the son of a distinguished physician, Dr. Louis-Adolphe Bertillon, the young Bertillon was bad-tempered, snobbish and pedantic, just to name a few of his less attractive characteristics. Expelled from several schools, fired from various jobs, he was, in all, an unlikely hero for our profession. But, toiling in a remote and shabby corner of the Prefecture, Bertillon could not help but notice the chaos i
n the police procedures. The central problem was identification of criminals. Because the lawbreakers used aliases and disguises, descriptions and primitive photographs in police card files were worthless. An escaped prisoner could be caught in a new felony, and the police would not even know he was the same man.

  Bertillon was fascinated by the problem—and devised two techniques to solve it. First, he standardized the photographic process, making certain that all pictures of criminals would be taken from exactly the same position and with the same lighting. Thus pictures could be compared with some confidence later. He also insisted on one full-face and one profile photo, so that facial features could be better studied, a process still in use in taking police “mug shots” today.

  But Bertillon’s major contribution to forensic science was what he called anthropometry, and what other scientists soon called “Bertillonage.” Bertillon devised a system to measure criminals from head to toe. More precisely, he measured certain components of their bodies, such as length and breadth of their heads, lengths of their middle fingers, lengths of their left feet and so on—all of which remained constant throughout their adult lives. He calculated that the chance of two persons having the exact measurements of these several components was more than four million to one.

  Soon anthropometrics was adopted by police systems around the world. But, ironically, “Bertillonage” was already on its way out almost as soon as it was installed. For two men, one an Englishman in India, William Herschel, and the other a Scottish physician in Tokyo, Henry Faulds, at almost the same time, happened to notice an oddity: all fingerprints are unique.