The Coroner Series

by Thomas T. Noguchi

  Our investigator who went to the scene obviously had some difficulty with his report on this particular victim. The report began well enough: “Body found hanging in funhouse at Nu-Pike Amusement Park, Long Beach, mummified.” But almost all the items on the investigator’s checklist, such as “birthplace,” “name and birthplace of father,” “street address,” etc., had to be marked “unknown.” “Sex” was marked “M” but “color or race” received a “?” Weight of the corpse was estimated at only fifty pounds, and height at sixty-three inches. I particularly liked the investigator’s response to the question of the body’s condition: “Fair, mummified.”

  Dr. Joseph Choi, one of my best pathologists, performed the autopsy on the mummified corpse. He found that all of the body’s major internal organs, from the heart to the liver, were present, although “hard as a rock” from arsenic embalming. In addition, he found that the unknown man had been killed by a “gunshot wound through the chest to the abdomen.” And furthermore, Dr. Choi recovered the copper jacket of the bullet that had killed him from “the muscle of the left pelvic area.”

  It was about then I heard from Fred Olds, whose Oklahoma Territorial Museum celebrates the badmen in the state’s past as part of its colorful Wild West heritage. Olds wondered if the corpse could be that of Elmer J. McCurdy, a notorious railroad bandit who had been killed in a gunfight with an Oklahoma sheriff’s posse in 1911.

  “Tell me why you think it’s McCurdy,” I said, and Olds described the colorful story of McCurdy’s life and death.

  “He was a hard drinker and a loner,” he said. “He robbed trains, cracked safes and used his six-shooter to kill a man in Colorado.”

  But McCurdy never had much luck as a lawbreaker, Olds told me. For instance, he always seemed to hold up the wrong train. In 1911 he was waiting for a train carrying several thousand dollars to be paid to the Osage Indians. But, as usual, the train he robbed was the wrong one, just ahead of the money train. All he got for his trouble was $46 cash, two jugs of whiskey—and a sheriff’s posse hot on his trail.

  The posse tracked McCurdy to a barn. There he fought it out in true Wild West style, sniping at the sheriff’s men while they pegged bullets at him from every direction. Finally the shooting ended, and the lawmen found McCurdy dead. But he was to prove just as unlucky in death as he had been in life. He was taken to nearby Pawhuska and embalmed with arsenic in a funeral home. But no relatives ever showed up to claim the body.

  In those days it was common practice for the mummified bodies of famous badmen like Jesse James and the Dalton Brothers to be exhibited in carnival sideshows that toured the country. To their credit, the mortuary owners refused all such offers for McCurdy—until four years later when two “cousins” from California showed up and said they wanted to give their relative a decent burial in California.

  The fraudulent cousins then proceeded to exhibit McCurdy for years until his notoriety was exhausted and the body vanished from sight, stored in a warehouse with dummies. Later some of these dummies were sent off to an amusement park, and apparently McCurdy’s body accidentally went with them, eventually ending up in the gallows display as a prop. Or so Olds believed. But how could we prove the body really was McCurdy’s?

  Oddly, McCurdy had never been fingerprinted, but Olds said he had a set of documents and photographs that could be helpful. When the railroad bandit had been embalmed in 1911, his body had been not only measured by the mortuary, but photographed for record collection purposes.

  I thought, Shades of Alphonse Bertillon, who decades ago invented anthropometry, the photographing and measuring of criminals as a means of later identification. Years after anthropometry had fallen into disfavor I would be using it again—but with modern techniques too. In fact, McCurdy could be a test case for an identification technique I had been thinking of which I called “medial superimposition.”

  I ordered radiographs taken of McCurdy’s head and superimposed them on the 1911 photographs of McCurdy’s face. I then superimposed the negatives of the 1911 photos on the actual head. The bone configurations matched identically in both comparisons, and the measurements of the body did, too. For while bodies “shrink” in death, the bones remain the same, and provide measurements of the body’s height, as well as the length of arms and legs.

  The final clue was also derived from the documents made by that funeral home decades ago. A scar was said to be present on McCurdy’s right wrist. This scar was not easy to find under coats of paint, but we did so, and the identification was complete.

  And so, finally, the “Oklahoma Badman” arrived home, and at last had some luck. In an impressive funeral attended by newspaper and television reporters from all over the Southwest, McCurdy was grandly buried in “Boot Hill,” the territorial section of the Guthrie cemetery, close by the graves of the Bill Doolin Gang and other desperados of those frontier days. In one of the great understatements of the day, Ralph McCalmont, representing the city of Guthrie, told reporters at the cemetery, “He probably would have been buried here anyway, but he got sidetracked.”

  Sometime later I found myself riding in an old fire engine in a parade during the annual ’89-er Celebration in Guthrie. Because of my successful efforts in identifying the railroad bandit, I had been invited to the celebration as a special guest. In fact, as soon as I arrived at the airport, I was taken to a “cowboy shop” and fitted with the black hat, black boots and cowboy costume of a frontier doctor, which I wore proudly.

  As I rode along in the parade, I marveled again at the wonders of America, whose citizens delighted so much in their colorful past, including their gun-toting Wild West bandits, and most particularly, on that day, Elmer J. McCurdy, the funhouse corpse.

  FORENSIC PUZZLES OF THE PAST

  Forensic scientists are, by nature, extremely inquisitive, and every year we travel to cities across America and around the world to attend conferences and seminars on various fields of interest to our profession. Many of us belong to a variety of organizations, such as the International Association of Forensic Science, the World Association of Medical Law (of which I am currently vice-president), the National Academy of Forensic Science, and the National Association of Medical Examiners. We meet together often, as professionals and as friends. To laymen, a convention of coroners might appear to be a rather morbid group. But, in fact, our meetings are lively occasions with much humor and banter, and energetic but good-willed debates on many subjects.

  Because crimes and mysterious deaths have occurred for centuries, while forensic science is a relatively new field, we have much to debate. A hundred years after the events that made a certain killer famous, for example, we’re still intrigued about the identity of Jack the Ripper. Other historical questions are equally fascinating to us. Did General Custer and his troops commit mass suicide? Was Napoleon murdered while in exile? Did Adolf Hitler, the archvillain of our century, escape from Berlin in the last days of the war? These are some of the classic historical mysteries which forensic scientists still investigate with often surprising results.

  CUSTER’S LAST STAND

  In 1984 archaeologists armed with metal detectors descended on the legendary site of “Custer’s Last Stand.” There, in the Battle of Little Big Horn in Montana on June 25, 1876, General George Armstrong Custer and 209 troopers of the Seventh Cavalry were surrounded and slaughtered by thousands of Indians on a grassy hilltop above the Little Big Horn River. Paintings of that battle ever since have shown the golden-haired General firing his pistol at the Indian warriors who whirled by on horses, fighting to the end.

  Not for decades was this historical version of the battle challenged. A professor, Dr. Thomas B. Marquis, who in the 1920s wrote a book, Keep the Last Bullet for Yourself, disputing that heroic version of the battle, could not obtain a publisher. Incredibly, it was not until 1976, forty-one years after Dr. Marquis died, that his work was published.

  Marquis had been a physician assigned to the Cheyenne Indian Reservation in the early yea
rs of this century. Survivors of the battle were still alive, and what they told Marquis stunned him. There had been no hilltop battle as described at all. Custer and his troopers were surrounded, but no Indians had charged either on horse or on foot. Instead they had dismounted and hidden in gullies and draws on the hillside, merely sniping at the soldiers on the ridge with a few guns, or launching arrows toward the hill from below.

  Earlier a brave detachment of troopers, few in number, had charged down the hill, attempting to break out of the encirclement, and they had been killed. But the approximately two hundred soldiers on the hilltop were still in fortified positions, and the Indians knew that a frontal attack would be foolhardy. So they waited for dark, but suddenly, to their astonishment, there was a flurry of gunfire on the hill above them. Then silence. An Indian scout crawled up the hill under cover of the bushes and saw an incredible scene. Custer and his men all lay dead.

  So went Dr. Marquis’s tale, as learned from the Indians, a version of the battle outrageous to American patriots. For some of the soldiers had been killed by snipers, according to Marquis, but Custer and the bulk of his troops had committed mass suicide rather than suffer torture at the hands of the Indians.

  Outrageous—but there were some facts that appeared to back up the story. For example, only about a dozen Indians died in the battle, as against the more than two hundred American soldiers who perished. Also, very few expended shells were found on the hilltop, indicating that not much firing had been done by the soldiers.

  In 1982 Navy Commander Jerry Spencer, formerly of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, presented the mass suicide theory at a conference of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. He said that he had requested exhumation of the skeletons for examination. His presentation, reprinted in The Journal of Forensic Sciences, explained why.

  With the techniques of modern forensic science, it would be possible to substantiate the suicide theory of Dr. Marquis if the skeletons could be examined.

  Most individuals who commit suicide with a firearm shoot themselves in the head, with the muzzle of the weapon in contact or loose contact with the head. Besides the bullet, a large quantity of powder residue is driven into the scalp tissue and into the skull, where it will remain indefinitely.

  Sophisticated techniques such as scanning electron microscopy with X-ray diffraction analysis could be used to evaluate the skulls for powder residue. Because of the type of gunpowder used in 1876, however, these techniques would be unnecessary. At that time “black powder,” a mixture of charcoal, sulfur and potassium nitrate, was used as the propellant in both rifle and handgun bullets, rather than the modern “smokeless” gunpowder, or nitrocellulose. Black powder in ignition produces very large quantities of powder residue, much more than smokeless powder.

  Presumably, if most of the skulls revealed evidence of black-powder residue, we would have proof of one of the greatest disgraces in American history, mass suicide in front of the enemy. But permission to exhume the skeletons had been refused by the superintendent of the Custer monument.

  Forensic scientists, like most Americans, are fascinated by Custer’s Last Stand. I remember that once, during a coffee break in a National Medical Examiners meeting in Newport, California, a young female reporter for the Los Angeles Times approached me and asked a different type of question from those I usually hear: “Dr. Noguchi, what do coroners talk about at cocktail parties?”

  I’m afraid I made her laugh when I replied, “Well, last night we spent the whole evening arguing whether General Custer committed suicide.”

  My friend Bill Eckert of Wichita, Kansas, is one of my colleagues most interested in Custer. Because of him I looked into the baffling mystery of the dead troopers myself. And my attention first centered on a second forensic enigma in that battle: the body of General Custer.

  After the soldiers had died, the Indians stripped them of their uniforms and then proceeded to mutilate all the bodies in terrible fashion, chopping off legs, arms and heads, and scalping each and every man. Except General Custer. Alone among the mutilated bodies, he was untouched, though naked. A bullet was in his side, and one in his head.

  There were many witnesses to this fact, because the reserve troops who came to the hill after the Indians had fled all gathered around the fallen General. But their testimony reveals forensic evidence which seems to refute Dr. Marquis’s thesis, at least in Custer’s case. The bullet hole in Custer’s side was bloody; the hole in the head showed little blood. That means the shot that actually killed Custer struck him in the side, not a location which persons use to commit suicide by gun. The bullet in the head was probably a coup de grâce shot fired by an Indian after Custer was dead.

  Why was Custer’s body, alone, untouched and unmutilated? Most Americans over the years have tended to believe it was because the Indians respected their greatest enemy. Not so, it seems. Custer had fought Indians in the Midwest; this was his first campaign in the North. The Northern Indians in the area had never heard of him, as almost all of them told interviewers over the years.

  There was, however, one Indian chief, with the poetic name Rain-in-the-Face, who had fought Custer before. Perhaps he intervened and saved Custer’s body, and his dignity, for history. But an even more romantic idea emerged when historians discovered that a young Indian woman who had been a mistress of General Custer’s was in the Cheyenne Indian village from which the warriors rode to battle. Perhaps she, among the squaws on the hill after the battle, protected Custer’s body.

  My own opinion on the controversy about Custer’s Last Stand is that Custer was a brave man, as he had proved many times in the past. He would never have committed suicide. The forensic evidence of his two bullet wounds shows he was killed by a shot in the side.

  I believe that Custer died early in the battle, no doubt astride his horse, showing his bravery to rally the spirit of the troops, when a sniper’s bullet struck him in the side and killed him. Unfortunately, his best junior officers had been assigned to other regiments, and I believe the leaderless troops may have panicked with thousands of Indians surrounding them. That, in my opinion, is why so few shots were fired, and so few Indians died.

  All of the troopers knew that Indians tortured soldiers while they were alive, and perhaps some did commit suicide when all was known to be lost. But most, I’m sure, fought heroically to the end.

  An archaeological dig in 1984 at the site of the Battle of Little Big Horn turned up some shells, and a finger bone encircled by a ring. But to date no more clues have been found to the mystery of Custer’s Last Stand, that savage day on a hill when a few hundred Americans looked out at thousands of hostile Indians on every side—and wondered what to do.

  THE DEATH OF NAPOLEON

  1

  St. Helena is a speck of land in the Atlantic Ocean which lies 1,750 miles from South Africa, 1,800 miles from South America, and, most important to the British, 4,000 miles from England. For there in exile in 1815 was Napoleon Bonaparte, England’s hated rival, whose great armies had ruled Europe for years.

  Exiled once before on an island closer to land, Napoleon had escaped, raised an army, and again terrorized Europe. In one of history’s landmark battles, he was defeated by the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, and this time the English took no chances. St. Helena was about as far from civilization as one could go, a rather pretty little island, green and hilly, but suffering from a terrible climate in which excessively hot spells alternated with blustery periods when an icy wind bent trees to the ground and tore through the thin wooden walls of the island dwellings.

  There the exiled Emperor arrived on October 17, 1815, with a retinue of faithful servants and three former officers of his army, Count Charles-Tristan de Montholon, General Henri-Gratien Bertrand, and Count Emmanuel de Las Cases. Such was the devotion that Napoleon inspired that these three voluntarily chose to spend years in exile on this “godforsaken” island to be close to their imprisoned leader.

  A garrison of three thousa
nd British troops (on an island only six and a half miles wide and ten and a half miles long) was assigned to make certain Napoleon stayed a prisoner. Under the almost paranoiac supervision of Governor Hudson Lowe, they watched Napoleon’s every move, and Lowe constantly kept placing new, and petty, restrictions on his dangerous captive.

  By 1821, Napoleon was ill, and no one knew why. He was only fifty-one years old; he was not losing weight—indeed, he had gained poundage. And yet he complained of weakness and swelling of the ankles. On the fifth of May of that year he was dead. And not until his will was read was it discovered that, two months before he died, he had written the following words: “I am dying before my time, murdered by the English oligarchy and its hired assassin.”

  The autopsy on his body was conducted with the ex-Emperor stretched naked on a billiard table in the house, Longwood, where he had died. Thereafter physicians reported a large benign ulcer in his stomach and an enlarged liver. Neither was the cause of death, although the discovery of the ulcer led people to believe that Napoleon died of cancer. The terrible words included in his will suggested another cause of death—murder.

  But how had murder been done? Poison had not been found in Napoleon’s stomach during the autopsy, and no violence had occurred. In fact, during his illness Napoleon was constantly attended closely by his fanatical followers.

  The answer might never have been known had not Napoleon’s loyal valet, Louis Marchand, shaved off his leader’s hair in order to present locks of it to members of Napoleon’s family and friends from the old days. Those locks of hair were preserved, and, 150 years later, one thin strand of that hair presented, through modern forensic science, a solution to the mystery.

  2

  Sten Forshufvud, a tall, lean blond Swede, was a Napoleon idolater whose house in Göteborg was filled with portraits, busts and statues of the Emperor. In 1955 Forshufvud read the memoirs of Louis Marchand, which recounted in diary fashion Napoleon’s last days. According to Marchand, the diminutive Emperor, in his illness, had alternated between drowsiness and insomnia, his feet had become swollen, and he had been so weak that he complained, “My legs don’t hold me up.” Then during his very last days Napoleon had been administered tartar emetic and calomel, a “heroic” (10 gram) dose of the latter bringing on the final fainting and death.