The Coroner Series

by Thomas T. Noguchi

  The next morning Colleen McGovern and Oster’s fiancée, Brenda, hid the liquor from Dennis, while Oster suggested a healthy form of endeavor: rowing. But Dennis searched the boat until he found the hidden bottles and had a drink before going out rowing. They returned at noon, had turkey sandwiches, and somehow, by the end of lunch, Dennis had consumed three quarters of a fifth of vodka. Then, high on alcohol, he began diving into the slip next to the Emerald.

  According to Oster, “He kept diving down, scrounging around, bringing up junk.”

  The water was a cold fifty-eight degrees. After twenty minutes of diving, Dennis was shivering, his teeth chattering.

  So he took another drink, and started diving again.

  It soon became apparent to Oster what “junk” Dennis was diving for. He was coming to the surface with objects that had once been on his own boat, one of them a silver frame that had held a picture of himself and Karen Camm, an ex-wife whom he had married twice.

  Back on board, Dennis resumed his drinking, finishing the vodka and then starting on wine. Then he made one more dive. Oster, standing on the pier watching, believed he saw Dennis come up to within two feet of the surface, then swim behind the rowboat out of sight. He even thought he heard him take a breath of air.

  Oster then said he saw Dennis go straight down and back out of sight. He waited for him to surface. Nothing happened. He remembered smoking a few cigarettes on the run on the pier, becoming more and more nervous as Dennis failed to reappear. Then a harbor patrol boat passed by and he hailed it.

  In the words of Coroner’s investigator Laverne Butler in her report:

  Decedent was observed by the patrol at the bottom of the pier, in twelve feet of water. He was placed on the dock at 1745 hours by Jim Hazelwood of the harbor patrol; death was pronounced at 1748 hours by Hazelwood.

  Mr. Oster states he and the decedent had been drinking alcohol since 1100 hours this date; he states the decedent was diving with a mask only, no snorkel. He watched the decedent dive into the water from the pier.

  Decedent was observed in a supine position on the dock…. He was not wearing a mask. He was clad in a pair of cut-off jeans, his left eye appeared blue, a small laceration on the bridge of his nose and his forehead.

  Dr. J. Lawrence Cogan performed the autopsy on Wilson’s body. In his report, he stated that there was a bruise in the forehead area:

  … a rectangular shaped area of abrasion and contusion. It measures 1 × 2 inches. It is associated with subcutaneous hemorrhage. The scalp beneath is free of fracture and there are no contusions of the brain noted. The skin about the area has a yellowish-greenish tinge. In the center of this area there is a small rectangular shaped abraded area measuring approximately ¼ inch. This appears recent. Over the left eye…. are areas of contusion. They roughly cover an area of 2 × 3 inches…. There is noted a small superficial abrasion over the bridge of the nose measuring less than ¼ inch in greatest dimension.

  Bruises were also found “over the left side of the face over the outer prominence, a small abrasion over the chin area, and a small amount of hemorrhage in the subcutaneous tissue in the left temporal muscle.”

  The near-impossibility of suddenly drowning in twelve feet of water, plus the bruises and the Manson connection, worried police. But their investigation revealed that two nights before the drowning Wilson had been involved in a barroom fight at the Santa Monica Bay Inn, and the bruises had most likely occurred there. As for the Manson connection, a murder underwater would have required a killer with a snorkel—too fanciful a concept to be considered seriously. But if the strange “accident” was not a murder, after all, what was the reason for drowning in such shallow water?

  Because Los Angeles is situated along the ocean, I became very interested in underwater deaths early in my career as Chief Medical Examiner, and sponsored many studies of such tragedies. For that reason, I followed the newspaper accounts of Wilson’s death closely. And when the toxicology report released on January 14, 1984, revealed that Wilson at the time of his death had a blood alcohol level of 0.26—more than twice the legal impairment limit for driving—I believe I found the scientific explanation of the probable cause of his drowning.

  Underwater pressure causes nitrogen to be absorbed into the blood, which results in euphoria—that strange, carefree feeling familiar to all deep-sea divers due to nitrogen narcosis. The deeper you go, the graver the danger. Wilson went down only twelve feet, but unfortunately there was another biological factor in his system encouraging euphoria: alcohol. Therefore he stayed down much longer than he would have if he had been sober. He was poking around happily on the sea bed looking for objects from his former boat, unaware of his danger, when, suddenly, his breath ran out and he ingested water into his lungs. He couldn’t make it back to the surface and safety.

  The lesson of Dennis Wilson’s death is clear: Stay out of the water if you have had anything at all to drink. Thus the man who created the first rock song about fun in the ocean, “Surfin’,” may have served his ocean-loving fans one more time, not by music but by his own sad, and unnecessary, death.

  PRESCRIPTION FOR DEATH

  The Case of Elvis Presley

  1

  Elvis Presley was a phenomenon without equal in the entertainment world. He created and symbolized a musical style, rock and roll, in the fifties, which has lasted into the eighties. New York Times music critic John Rockwell wrote:

  For most people Elvis Presley was rock-and-roll. And they were right. Bill Haley may have made the first massive rock hit, and people such as Chuck Berry and Little Richard may have had an equally important creative impact on this raucous new American art form. But it was Elvis who defined the style and gave it an indelible image.

  In his lifetime Presley sold over hundreds of millions of records—but there was more than music in his appeal. There was sex. When, early in his climb to fame, he appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show on CBS Television, he was photographed only from the waist up. CBS censors had decreed that America could not see the wildly gyrating hips that galvanized his young female fans at live concerts.

  Elvis Presley had it all. Ruggedly handsome, with black hair cascading over his forehead, and eyes brooding as he swiveled, stomped and gyrated to pounding rhythms, he possessed a sex appeal that guaranteed success. But fate had given him yet another blessing: real musical talent.

  That combination made him millions of dollars. He was idolized by his fans, and applauded by critics. He had his own private plane, dozens of luxurious cars (he gave Cadillacs as gifts to strangers) and a host of friends. But on August 16, 1977, it came to an end suddenly and prematurely. With sad irony, Elvis Presley’s death at forty-two offered his adoring fans perhaps their first real glimpse into his frenetic lifestyle.

  For one thing, Elvis and his fiancée, lovely Ginger Alden, twenty, had gone to the dentist at midnight. The reason for treatment at that strange hour was to avoid being mobbed by Elvis’s fans, who were always on a vigil outside his house. Ginger had her teeth X-rayed; Elvis had a cavity filled.

  When they returned to Graceland, the elaborate twenty-two-room mansion which Elvis had bought when the deluge of money began, they discussed plans for their upcoming wedding, deciding to make the announcement at Christmas. Then they went in to see Lisa Marie, Elvis’s nine-year-old daughter born to his first wife, Priscilla, who had divorced him in 1973. Lisa Marie was there on a visit. By then it was 5 A.M., and what did Elvis want to do at that early hour in the morning? Play racquetball. He and Ginger roused two visiting cousins, and the four of them trooped outside and played racquetball on a lighted court until 7 A.M.

  After the game Presley was still not sleepy. He dressed in a pair of blue pajamas and told Ginger he was “going to the bathroom to read a book.”

  Ginger went to sleep and, not surprisingly after the long night’s activity, did not awaken until two the next afternoon. Elvis wasn’t in bed. She went to the bathroom door and called his name. Later, she told a reporter
for the Memphis Commerical Appeal what happened next.

  He didn’t answer so I opened his bathroom door and that’s when I saw him in there. I thought at first he might have hit his head because he had fallen…. and his face was buried in the carpet. I slapped him a few times and it was like he breathed once when I turned his head. I raised one of his eyes and it was just blood red. But I couldn’t move him.

  She rushed out and called Elvis’s bodyguards. The two men beat on Elvis’s chest and tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but it was too late.

  The King of Rock and Roll was dead.

  2

  Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, on January 8, 1935, the son of a poor farmer. When he was fourteen, the family moved to Memphis and lived in a public housing project. But his poverty-blighted childhood had one luminous aspect: music. His father, Vernon, and mother, Gladys, taught Elvis to sing, and the trio entertained at rural revivals and camp meetings in the area.

  Elvis always had to help his parents pay the bills. Attending L. O. Humes High School, he worked as an usher at a movie theater, and after graduation he got a job as a truck driver for thirty-five dollars a week. At the wheel of the truck in 1953, he often passed the Sun Record Company, a recording studio. And one day he had an impulse (in his words, “just an urgin’”) that changed the world of American music forever. He turned off the road into the parking lot of the studio, went inside, and said he wanted to record a song. The owners said fine, but it would cost him one dollar.

  The recorded song, Elvis said later, “sounded like somebody beating on a lid.” But owner Sam Phillips was impressed with his voice, although he still remembered to take Elvis’s dollar. Elvis thought that was the end of it. But Sam Phillips remembered the boy with the mellow voice who recorded his own song. He called Elvis and asked him if he could return to the studio to record a song, “Without You.”

  “Without You” was a ballad, and while Elvis was to break many young girls’ hearts with his renditions of soulful ballads in the future, his first attempt was a failure. Phillips was disappointed, and told him to forget it. But after a coffee break, Elvis, on his own, started to sing a song with a rock-and-roll beat. Phillips and everyone else in the studio stood transfixed. They had never heard or seen anyone like the dynamic young man with a guitar pounding out a song.

  Within days they recorded Elvis singing “That’s All Right, Mama,” and “I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’t Shine,” and had them played on a local radio station, WHBG. The record sold seven thousand copies that first week in Memphis—and word filtered through the South to a man once described as a “country slicker,” “Colonel” Thomas A. Parker, from Madison, Tennessee. Parker drove to Memphis and agreed to manage Elvis Presley.

  Parker, a colorful figure sometimes seen in a ten-gallon hat, apparently was just the type of manager Presley needed, wise to the ways of the South and the appeal of a rawboned young guitarist. For living money, he first sent Elvis touring through the rural areas, billing him as “the Hillbilly Cat” in roadhouses deep in piney woods and very far from the big time. But all the while his records were reaching an ever larger audience. Then in 1956 came Elvis’s first big hit, “Heartbreak Hotel,” described as a “blood-stirring dirge about love and loneliness.” It went “gold,” selling more than two million records.

  Elvis Presley was famous. Other hit records followed, and Elvis embarked on huge, sold-out concert tours and appeared in Las Vegas, Miami and other resort-area hotels and clubs. Then it was on to Hollywood and movie fame. The story of Parker’s contract negotiation for Elvis’s first motion picture role would become part of the Presley legend. The studio, 20th Century—Fox, said to the “country slicker,” about the fee, “Would twenty-five thousand dollars be all right?” Colonel Parker replied, “That’s fine for me. Now how about the boy?”

  Presley would eventually star in dozens of films, each one a money-making hit. In 1966 there came a brief interruption in his career; the U.S. Army called. Presley, uncomplainingly and courteously, served his two years, ending up a sergeant in Germany. Returning to Memphis, he brought with him a fourteen-year-old girl, Priscilla Beaulieu, whom he had met in Europe. They lived at Graceland, soon married and had a child. But gold records, hit movies, sold-out performances were Elvis’s life, and he was on the road almost constantly, living on the fast track night after night. It could not last. Perhaps inevitably, a new phenomenon had emerged in the midsixties, the Beatles, and Elvis’s fame began to decline. Worse, he put on weight and began to look bloated. Somehow he still created electricity on stage and his records still sold millions, but in the 1970s he cut down on his appearances and concert tours, stopped making movies, and began spending more time at home.

  Through it all, ups and downs, Elvis lost his wife but never lost his fanatical following. At forty-two, he could look forward to a long life in luxurious semi-retirement, but in 1977, seemingly robust, he suddenly died. Why? his fans clamored to know. The world press focused on the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office in Memphis, and madness reigned throughout the modest-sized Southern city as tens of thousands of fans poured in to express their grief at the shrine of their idol.

  3

  On the day of Elvis’s death I was in my office in the Forensic Science Center in Los Angeles, when my secretary buzzed me on the telephone. “It’s Dr. Jerry Francisco from Memphis, Dr. Noguchi.”

  Driving to work that morning, I had heard over my car radio about Elvis Presley’s death, and I knew that my friend Dr. Francisco, the Chief Medical Examiner of Shelby County, Tennessee, would be under extreme pressure. Indeed, that’s what Jerry wanted to talk about.

  “I know what you went through with the press when Senator Kennedy died out there,” he said. “It’s almost as bad down here now. I wanted your advice on how to handle the situation.”

  I told him that because the eyes of the world were on him, he should appoint a panel of distinguished pathologists to assist him with the autopsy. I had done that in the Kennedy autopsy, I said, and it had been useful in assuring the public that the autopsy would be properly performed. Jerry thanked me and, after he hung up, did exactly as I had suggested, appointing a panel of experts to assist at the autopsy. But unfortunately, the findings of that autopsy, instead of quelling public suspicion, aroused a heated controversy which endures to this day.

  In a press conference conducted after the release of the official autopsy report, Francisco told reporters that Elvis Presley’s death was due to “an erratic heartbeat. There was severe cardiovascular disease present.” Francisco went on to say that Presley “had a history of mild hypertension and some coronary artery disease. These two diseases may be responsible for cardiac arrhythmia [irregular heartbeat] but the precise cause was not determined. Basically it was a natural death. The precise cause of death may never be discovered.”

  Rumors of a drug overdose involved in Presley’s death were already circulating, and Francisco dismissed them with the statement that “there was no indication of any drug abuse of any kind.” He said the only evidence of drugs involved those Presley was taking for his physical condition—mild hypertension and a colon problem.

  That was, in fact, an understatement. For Presley had died with an almost unheard-of variety of drugs in his system. Among them were: (1) an antihistimine often used to control hayfever and allergies; (2) codeine, a derivative of opium used to relieve pain; (3) Demerol, a narcotic used as a sedative; (4) several tranquilizers, including Valium; (5) a sedative-hypnotic.

  In sum, there were eight different drugs in his blood, but all were “harmless” prescription drugs. There was no trace of the illegal drugs such as heroin, cocaine or hashish normally found in overdose cases. Furthermore, not one of the prescription drugs was at a toxic level.

  Nevertheless, the presence of all those drugs shifted the spotlight from Francisco to the doctor who had prescribed them, because Presley’s fans wanted to know whether their idol had somehow been “hooked” on drugs by an unscr
upulous physician. Soon an official investigation of Presley’s personal physician, George Nichopoulos, M.D., was begun, and the facts that investigation uncovered were startling—and dismaying to Presley’s idolators.

  The figures were staggering; indeed, incredible. In the seven months before Presley’s death, Nichopoulos had prescribed 5300 stimulants, depressants and painkillers for Presley to take.

  With this new evidence of drug use, Dr. Francisco had to call another press conference in 1979, this time to say, “I am not involved and never have been involved in a cover-up.” And then he made good use of the panel that I had suggested he convene two years before. He said that three pathologists and one toxicologist from the University of Tennessee, and two other toxicologists from other areas, had agreed “there is no evidence the medication present in the body of Elvis Presley caused or made any significant contribution to his death.”

  A third toxicologist, Dr. Francisco said, had noted that the medications were in the therapeutic range and individually did not constitute an overdose. Also, he reemphasized the fact that the drugs were prescription; no illegal drugs had turned up in the autopsy.

  By this time the American public was justifiably confused. Drug-overdose deaths were so common, from urban slums to the glittery palaces of Beverly Hills, that suspicion lingered about Presley’s death. But how could prescription drugs that were not illegal, and not at toxic levels, have caused it?

  That question was answered in September 1979, when ABC-TV’s “20/20” program televised a story on the investigation of Dr. Nichopoulos. Featured was my colleague Dr. Cyril Wecht, a highly respected pathologist, who is extremely articulate—and feisty, to boot. In his vivid way, Wecht explained that prescription drugs at nontoxic levels still can kill. Elvis Presley, he said, “was a walking drugstore.” His death was caused by a condition pathologists call “polypharmacy.” In this condition, it is not the individual drugs that kill, but their reaction with each other to form a fatal combination. “The combined effects of eight different drugs in Presley’s body at the time of death was to depress first the brain and then the heart and lungs,” Wecht said. However, he went on to say that he believed Presley’s death was accidental “with the patient not realizing what the effect would be.”