It was 11 P.M. when Vittor left Calvi’s room, which, as it developed, was the last time he saw Calvi alive. He said that he met Carboni in the lobby and the two men went to a restaurant where the apparently ever lively Kleinszig sisters were waiting. Later Carboni went off with the girls to move from the Hilton to the Sheraton Hotel near Heathrow Airport, while Vittor returned to Calvi’s room at 1:30 A.M. He claimed that he found the room empty, and the banker gone. When Calvi didn’t return, Vittor said he spent a sleepless night, fearful for his own life, then fled the next morning to Austria. Meanwhile Carboni, alerted by Vittor, also fled, but by a circuitous (and later controversial) route. He flew to Edinburgh for a day, then, using a private plane owned by a “friend,” jetted to Switzerland, where he went into hiding.
So the two men who had brought Calvi to London disappeared at once, one with an immediate side trip to Edinburgh that aroused suspicion. In the worldwide tumult after Calvi’s body was found, both Carboni and Vittor were eventually tracked down and questioned. They claimed complete innocence, and said they had disappeared only because they had helped Calvi and were now afraid for their own lives.
But, of course, the two men were prime suspects if murder had indeed been done. Not only did they have underworld connections, but Carboni, during the last week of Calvi’s life, had made trips to cities all over Europe. Was it in connection with secret bank accounts in which the missing hundreds of millions of dollars were stashed? Had Carboni and his associates decided to grab all the money by killing Calvi?
Carboni and Vittor were not the only suspects. Ominously, it was noted that Roberto Calvi’s briefcase had disappeared. According to his wife, this briefcase was “always at his side.” The press asked the question, Were there secret documents in that briefcase that the sinister P-2 or the Mafia, or even the Vatican, did not want to be revealed? Did someone in these organizations feel Calvi was about to crack and silence him before he did so?
Few in the press in both England and Italy seemed to doubt that the death was the result of murder, even though the hanging appeared to be a suicide. Reporters went to the scene, and told their readers that an iron ladder from the embankment parapet along the road stood about two feet to the left of the scaffolding of thin pipes. To commit suicide, the paunchy sixtyish banker would have had to climb over the parapet, clamber down the ladder in the night, “acrobatically” swing over to the scaffolding, make his perilous way along slippery iron rungs to its far edge above the river, then tie a rope around the scaffolding and his throat. All this with heavy stones in his pockets and a brick in the front of his trousers.
Further, they asked, why did Calvi walk four miles to Blackfriars Bridge to commit suicide in the first place? Why not jump out of a window right at the hotel, or take sleeping pills, if he wanted to die? A long trip to the bridge was not the action a suicidal man would take. In fact, there were bridges closer to his hotel if for some reason he wanted to hang himself before the world. But such a suicide was completely out of character, anyway, for the reclusive banker who had always avoided public exposure in any form.
But what fascinated reporters most of all in this bizarre death was the P-2 connection. Stones on the body, feet under water, the name of the bridge, Blackfriars, were all said to be integral parts of the Masonic ritual associated with P-2. Witchcraft on the Thames!
Surprisingly to the press, however, the police apparently had other ideas about Calvi’s death. It wasn’t a murder at all, they said. At a stormy press conference at the Snow Hill police station, Commander Hugh Moore, the officer in charge of the Calvi case, announced, “There are no indications at this stage that it was not suicide.” In the zeal of the press to find bizarre trails and characters in a murder, Moore said, reporters were ignoring all the facts that supported a theory of suicide. For one thing, if ever there was a night that Calvi would have chosen to commit suicide, it was June 17, 1982. Already on the run, hunted by police, his career in disgrace, Calvi had the following news to absorb that very day:
At a meeting in Milan, the board of Banca Ambrosiana had stripped him of his powers as chairman, and the management of the bank had been transferred to the Bank of Italy, in effect ending Ambrosiana’s career as one of Italy’s leading banks.
Worse, Graziella Corrocher, Calvi’s secretary for many years, had jumped out of an office window in Milan that same day, leaving a suicide note which included the words: “[Calvi] should be twice damned for the damage he did to the group, and to all of us, who were at one time so proud of it.”
Meanwhile a quiet man in a coroner’s office tried to find the answer to it all. Professor Keith Simpson, the most respected forensic pathologist in England, and of great reputation throughout the world, prepared to perform the autopsy on Roberto Calvi.
He began by looking for telltale bruises on Calvi’s body which would signify violence, and for needle marks which would reveal the injection of drugs, both indications of murder. Then he examined the neck closely to determine whether Calvi had really hanged himself, or whether he had been strangled beforehand, then strung up on the scaffold to make his death appear a suicide.
Later Simpson issued his official autopsy report, which described his findings. These were, in part:
Deep impression of a noose around the neck and upper thyroid level in front and on the left side, rising to a suspension point behind the right ear, a single ropeline weave pattern, with “asphyxia petechiae” above this level, and internally in the heart and lungs…. No other injury to arouse suspicion. No injection marks on the body…. No head injury, or bruising….
A murder by strangling, as forensic scientists know, almost always produces an impression of the rope in a complete circle around the neck. Deliberate suspension (suicide by hanging), on the other hand, leaves an impression of a rope most deeply in the front of the throat (“upper thyroid level”) and also leaves the mark of the knot. In this autopsy report, that mark is called the “suspension point beyond the right ear.” On the basis of his autopsy, Simpson concluded that the impressions he found on Calvi’s throat were “those of deliberate suspension and give no cause for suspicion of foul play.”
4
Her Majesty’s Coroner for London, Dr. David Paul, is an old friend from various international forensic conventions we attend. He’s a tall, urbane man with a quick intelligence and a vivid style of speech. The latter talent caused him some trouble at the inquest he conducted into the death of Robert Calvi. In England, unlike America, coroners are part of the judiciary and preside at hearings to determine the cause of death.
More than forty witnesses were heard at that inquest, ranging from police constables and detectives to Odette Morris, a young woman who had accompanied Flavio Carboni on the trip to Edinburgh immediately after Calvi’s death. Carboni and Silvano Vittor testified through depositions at the inquest, which was eagerly attended by reporters hoping to hear testimony about Calvi’s connections with P-2, the Vatican or the Mafia.
But the most important witness at the inquest was from none of these groups; instead he was Dr. Simpson, who, to the disappointment of the press, confirmed his autopsy findings which had showed that Calvi had not been murdered. The evidence of the rope mark around his neck, and the absence of bruises elsewhere on the body, he said, precluded either an earlier strangling or external violence of any kind.
The other witnesses added nothing about P-2 or the Mafia. Odette Morris indicated that the trip to Edinburgh was just a lark. Police believed that Edinburgh was an unlikely place to go for such a lark, but had no evidence to refute her. The testimony of all of the witnesses did not end until after 7 P.M. Then, after an adjournment, Dr. Paul made his summation.
Paul agreed that it might have been awkward for Calvi to hang himself from that scaffold, but said it would have been equally difficult to murder him there. How, Paul asked, could a man of Calvi’s weight have been carried down that ladder, then across the gap to the scaffolding, then hanged, without “sustaining some marks
upon his body of that carriage across that rather awkward scaffolding?”
As for the possibility that Calvi might have been brought to the bridge by boat, Paul noted that the Thames River current was swift at that point, and asked, “Could a boat be handled with sufficient skill so that it could maintain its position beneath the scaffolding while a heavy man such as Mr. Calvi was supported upright and then suspended from a rope…?”
Finally, Paul explained to the members of the jury the three verdicts they could reach: suicide, murder or an open verdict. And it was here that his vivid phrase-making created trouble. “The open verdict may seem like a super open door to scuttle through if you are in any difficulty about returning another verdict,” he said. “Let me tell you that this was not, never has been, and I hope will never be a convenient, comfortable way out.”
At ten o’clock that same night, the jury foreman stood up in the small coroner’s court and announced, “By a majority verdict the jury has decided that the deceased killed himself.”
In Italy, the verdict was greeted with derision in the press, but a more concrete challenge emerged from Roberto Calvi’s family. Because three million dollars in insurance money was involved, they appealed the suicide verdict, citing Dr. Paul’s remarks in his summation, which seemed to steer the jury away from an open verdict. They also claimed that the extraordinary length of the inquest meant the jury was no doubt fatigued and that that too had influenced the verdict.
On March 29, 1983, the appeal was granted, a very rare occurrence, and the public prepared for a second round in the fascinating Calvi affair at a new inquest. Dr. Arthur Gordon Davies, the coroner from Southwark, acted as judge at the new hearing. And this time, when Dr. Simpson took the stand, he was severely challenged. In fact, George Carman, the Calvi family’s new attorney, managed to get Simpson to agree that it would indeed have been easier for men in a boat to kill Calvi than for Calvi to hang himself from the scaffold. Carman then suggested a reason for the absence of bruises. Certain drugs like ethyl chloride, which does not leave traces, might have been used to immobilize Calvi. If no injection marks had been found, that might have been because Calvi was injected in hard-to-detect areas, such as under the hair on his head. Simpson thought that speculation was farfetched, but admitted that it was, of course, possible.
During the inquest, Carman made certain the jury knew all about Carboni’s Mafia connections and the mysterious peregrinations of Carboni, Vittor and the Kleinszig sisters, who had checked in and out of various hotels and made unexplained trips to different cities all over Europe before and after Calvi’s death. For example, Carman asked Michaela Kleinszig, “Was it an ordinary week for you—as the mother of a child—to go to Switzerland, Amsterdam and London in three days?”
The proceedings came to a close, and on June 27, 1983, the jury foreman announced the jury’s decision: “We find an open verdict, sir.”
And with those words the mysterious death of a banker hanging under a London bridge in broad daylight was officially declared “unsolved.”
5
In August 1984 I was in Oxford, England, to attend the International Forensic Sciences conference, and while there I arranged to interview Dr. Paul in the Coroner’s office to discuss the Calvi case. The interview proved surprising and revealing.
In the first inquest Paul had seemed to deride the idea of an open verdict. Now, two years later, he said, “I think the open verdict was the right verdict. There was too much evidence on both sides to justify anything else.” His remarks about an open verdict which had caused so much controversy meant only that such a finding would always be “uncomfortable” for a jury, because it would leave the death unsolved.
Then he told me some fascinating details about Calvi’s death which I had never seen published. “His shoes were muddy,” Paul said. “If he committed suicide, how did his shoes get muddy when he allegedly stepped off a city street and onto a ladder to hang himself? Further, and even more important, his suit was wet up to the armpits. If you’re going to hang yourself you don’t jump into deep water up to your shoulders.”
Paul believes he has the answer to both mysteries. Calvi had walked along the foreshore of the river when the tide was low. The water there, Paul said, is very dark and looks deeper than it is. In fact, he said, during his investigation of the scene the next day, one of his policemen had dropped his electronic pager into the water. “A frogman jumped in to retrieve it and almost broke his legs. The water was only knee-high.”
Paul thinks that Calvi, in a suicidal despair, was walking along the shore of the Thames that night, and that that was where he made his shoes muddy. Believing the water was deep, he placed stones in his pockets and jumped into the Thames to drown himself, causing his suit to be wet up to the armpits. When he failed to drown because the water was shallow, he kept walking along the shore, eventually arriving at Blackfriars Bridge. There he saw an orange nylon rope dangling from a scaffold and conceived his idea of suicide by hanging. Paul said boatmen always keep such ropes there, and at other points on the Thames, for use if they need to tie up. Calvi hanged himself with the rope, leaving a damp suit and muddy shoes as clues to a previous attempt at suicide by drowning.
“That’s my theory,” Paul said, “but only if the tide was low at the time. You see, the great trouble in this case is that we don’t know when Calvi died, so we don’t know if the tide was high or low. The body temperature, which usually gives us our main clue, was worthless in this case because, one way or another, the body had been immersed in water during the night.”
I asked Paul about the fact that Calvi would have needed the skills of an acrobat to commit suicide on that scaffolding. He replied, “People make a lot of the fact that it would have been difficult for Calvi to hang himself from that scaffolding. But it wouldn’t have been extraordinarily difficult. Two feet isn’t that wide a distance between the ladder and the scaffold. So it wasn’t quite as ‘acrobatic’ as the Calvi family’s lawyer kept implying.”
But why, I asked Paul, if he personally seemed to lean toward suicide, did he approve an open verdict? “Well, for one thing,” he said, “there’s Calvi’s mustache.”
This sounded so much like Sherlock Holmes that I smiled, and Paul smiled, too. “Yes, I know, the dog that didn’t bark. In this case, it’s identical. This was the mustache that wasn’t there. Calvi shaved it off the day before the murder. To me, that is evidence of a man who is trying to change his appearance because he’s afraid of violence from someone and therefore is trying to hide his identity, not a man who is about to commit suicide. In fact, the night before he died he wouldn’t enter the Hilton Hotel, because he was afraid he would be recognized. He was definitely frightened for his life.”
Then, Paul added, the “obvious” questions also bothered him. Why walk all the way to Blackfriars Bridge, four miles from his hotel, to commit suicide? Why not jump out of a window at the hotel instead? “We checked the drugs in his room. Of all the medications he had, none would have killed him, so that explains why he didn’t commit suicide with sleeping pills. But he didn’t have to walk four miles to kill himself, either.
“In the final analysis, I don’t think he had any premeditated idea of committing suicide, if, indeed, he did so,” Paul said. “I believe that as he walked along the shore of the river the idea came to him, and he acted on impulse and, no doubt, despair.”
Then he added, “Incidentally, the Italian police have acted rather oddly on this case. I understand a Scotland Yard detective went to Italy twice to interrogate Flavio Carboni, the key witness and chief suspect, and never was allowed to do so. And, equally strange, I also hear that the Italian authorities never released the complete contents of the suicide note that Calvi’s secretary left behind. Are there still secrets of the Calvi affair the Italian authorities are hiding? I don’t know.”
I thanked Dr. Paul and joked with him about the white wig on a shelf behind his desk. As part of the judiciary, coroners in England wear a wig and
a robe at their inquests. I tried on the wig, and the sight would have frightened many Los Angeles bureaucrats—as well as my friends.
But the next day, after my interview with Dr. Paul, my mind still dwelt on this most baffling forensic case. Above all, my mind fastened on the information that when Calvi’s body was found his suit was wet up to the armpits.
I researched the tides of the Thames on the night of June 17–18, 1982. High tide registered at 21.8 feet and occurred at 2:58 A.M. Low tide was six hours later, at 8:30 A.M. At 7:30 A.M., Calvi had been found with his feet dangling under water.
Calvi had last been seen in his hotel at 11:30 P.M., and had disappeared by one, which meant that, unless he delayed his suicide until dawn, the river was “up.” Therefore, Dr. Paul’s theory that Calvi had got his suit wet in an attempt to drown himself at low tide would be tenable only if he did this at daybreak, which would have been an unlikely time for suicide, with Londoners going to work. I believe it was far more likely that the suicide—or murder—had been committed in the middle of the dark night. If so, the Thames was at high tide. And I wonder if that fact might be the long-unfound key to the mystery of Calvi’s bizarre death.
In both inquests, it had been said that the hanging of Calvi by murderers would have been difficult. Carrying his body from a ladder to a scaffold to hang him seemed too awkward and cumbersome to be imagined, and lifting his body from a boat seemed almost equally as difficult.
But not at high tide. Calvi could have been brought to the scaffolding in a boat when the tide was at its crest. With the boat riding near the top of the scaffolding, it would have been simple to attach his body to the pipes, and to place stones in his pockets to make certain that, when he died, he dangled vertically under water, and therefore wouldn’t be seen until the boat with its murderers had cleared the scene and the tide went down. Finally, his shoes had gotten muddy when he was transferred from the shore into the boat.
The Coroner Series Page 39