And when he started his medical career in 1940, forensic medicine had far fewer tools than today. They had fingerprinting, blood typing, dental comparison, X-rays, and comparatively primitive toxicology. The best tools were a scalpel, a microscope, and a doctor’s own eyes.
Dad started working part-time for the Chief Medical Examiner of New York in 1950, and was hired full-time in 1957 to be the deputy ME for Brooklyn, the most populous of the boroughs and therefore the morgue’s busiest division.
My father dragged me and my three younger sisters to hospitals and morgues at a young age. He didn’t want us to be afraid of death. It was partly because he just assumed that we’d all be doctors someday, but also because his own relationship with death was casual. He wanted us to respect the tragedy of dying, but be drawn to its mystery, too. He considered his grim work a lifesaving pursuit, an early warning system against epidemics, killers, and the simple human tendency to snap to judgment without the benefit of facts.
He needn’t have worried about us. We kids often stole clandestine glances at Dad’s gruesome crime scene and morgue photos, which he kept in files in his closet. We ransacked his bookshelves for surreptitious glimpses of corpses and fatal wounds. More than once, we were told to stay in the car when he was called to inspect a fresh body, and we strained mightily to see it.
To me, it was just life. It was a sad side of reality, but it was reality.
I recall a picnic on Staten Island when I was ten. At the time, my father was the deputy medical examiner for the largely rural borough south of Manhattan, and in those days his morgue was surrounded by open fields and undeveloped land. On weekends, the whole family often took the ferry to Staten Island—the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge hadn’t yet been built—so my energetic father could squeeze in just a little more work. Afterward, we’d park in some shady spot behind his morgue, open the car windows, and listen to the radio while we ate lunch and played in what seemed to me, a Brooklyn kid, to be a vast wilderness.
On this particular day, we parked behind the morgue and piled out for another glorious outing. My father opened the trunk to retrieve the picnic basket and sitting right beside it, like some ordinary piece of luggage, was an open box containing a human skeleton.
He thought nothing of it. But more important, the little boy standing next to him—me—thought nothing of it either.
* * *
By the time he became New York City’s fourth-ever Chief Medical Examiner in 1974, my father had a special phone under his bed for emergency calls. Cops would show up at the front door at all hours to take him to the latest killing floor.
Every night, he walked through the deepest, darkest hallways of the morgue to roust intruders who frequently sneaked in for macabre thrills. He even rooted out a secret call-girl and gambling ring that was operating out of the ME’s office at night. And even though he managed the world’s biggest and most political morgue, he still performed more than occasional autopsies alongside his 129 medical examiners, morgue assistants, investigators, drivers, and secretaries. All for just $43,000 a year, which was low even in those days, especially for the top forensic detective in a city that never sleeps and never stops dying. (As Deputy Chief Medical Examiner in Dallas at the time, I earned significantly more than my father.)
New York was broke, and the ME’s office was slowly decaying. It was underfunded, understaffed, and inbred. My father was undeterred. Death didn’t take a holiday.
Still going a mile a minute, he taught classes in medicolegal investigation at Brooklyn Law School, has staff privileges at several local hospitals, and lectured at St. John’s University.
Through it all, his compassion and his coolness under fire remained intact. Not many people knew that whenever he got a new overcoat or pair of shoes, he didn’t throw out the old ones. He took them down to “The Basement” and gave them to the low-paid dieners, the morgue attendants and autopsy assistants—diener being a term derived from the German word Leichendiener, which means “corpse servant”—who did the dirtiest work for the least reward.
My father didn’t play political games well. In fact, he hardly played at all. He didn’t back down from a fight, but he didn’t pick them. And he didn’t run to the New York Times with every high-profile death.
And there was death. Always death. Plenty of it. My father played a role in some of the biggest death cases in New York City history. Ironically, many of his cases would echo in my own career decades later.
In 1975, he reopened an investigation into the bizarre suicide of CIA scientist Frank Olson, who experimented with various biological weaponry for the government. In 1953, CIA agents secretly dosed Olson with LSD, and nine days later he plunged to his death from the thirteenth-floor window of his Manhattan hotel. The CIA told police Olson had suffered a nervous breakdown, and in a delusional, paranoid fog, he committed suicide. Based on the police investigation, my father, then only an assistant ME, declared it a suicide. Case closed.
Not quite. When my father learned twenty-two years later about the CIA’s illicit drug experiments, he was angry. The Olson family sued the federal government, and my father took a fresh look at the case, which opened the door to an eventual exhumation in 1994. While no definitive conclusions could be reached forty years after Olson’s death, many forensic experts believe Frank Olson was murdered by shadowy American agents who were never brought to justice.
During the four decades my father worked in the ME’s office, bizarre and violent death was commonplace. The serial killer known as the Son of Sam paralyzed the city. He examined various remains thought to be Jimmy Hoffa (they never were). Mob hits happened with frustrating regularity. Malcolm X was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom. Famed designer-to-the-stars Michael Greer was murdered in his Park Avenue apartment during an anonymous homosexual encounter, a 1976 case that remains unsolved to this day. Then as now, celebrities like gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, poet Dylan Thomas, and troubled actor Montgomery Clift made headlines when they turned up dead in their hotel rooms, brownstones, or Upper East Side apartments. My father worked on many of them.
And he solved some mysteries, too. Take the strange 1954 death of Emanuel Bloch, famed defense attorney for atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, found dead in his Manhattan bathtub at age fifty-two, just a few months after the Rosenbergs were executed. Bloch, the guardian of the late couple’s two young sons, had made his bones defending unpopular figures. So it wasn’t the first or the last of my father’s death cases in which the media and public didn’t wait for evidence before bubbling over with breathless cold war rumor-mongering. While the media cooked up anticommunist conspiracy theories, my father determined that Bloch had died of ordinary cardiac arrest. The headlines stopped quicker than Mr. Bloch’s heart.
In the summer of 1975, the bodies of twin brothers Cyril and Stewart Marcus—both prominent gynecologists, bachelors, and peculiar geniuses who shared a thriving Manhattan practice—were founded dead on the floor of their luxury East Side apartment. They’d been dead for a week. Their inseparable, parallel lives ended just as they had started forty-five years before: together.
With no sign of foul play, detectives guessed it was a double suicide. Some blamed a simultaneous drug overdose, and the media had its own fanciful theories.
But my father revealed the real answer. The Marcus twins were barbiturate addicts, a secret kept by their closest associates. When their twin dependency threatened to leak out, they decided to go “cold turkey,” just quitting one of the world’s most powerful behavior-altering drugs.
Problem is, barbiturate withdrawal is a killer. It’s worse than heroin withdrawal. An addict suffers convulsion and delirium, and his heart literally collapses. That’s how the Marcus twins died. Their story alerted America to the problem of drug-addicted doctors and inspired David Cronenberg’s 1988 movie, Dead Ringers.
Then something happened that for most of us would be unimaginable, but not for my father. It wasn’t caused by a mysterious virus, a nat
ural catastrophe, terrorists, or an especially prolific serial killer, but it thrust my father into the center of unspeakable carnage.
On a stormy June 24, 1975, an Eastern Airlines 727 crashed on its approach to John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens. A mile from the runway, Flight 66 from New Orleans rose unexpectedly on a mammoth updraft, then slammed violently down in a microburst, sheering off its left wing on a row of light poles and falling to pieces in a spectacular disintegration.
One hundred thirteen people died in the fiery crash (although eleven people miraculously survived). It was America’s third worst airline disaster at the time.
The charred and dismembered dead lay scattered everywhere. Within moments, a special phone rang in my father’s Manhattan office, and he rushed to the scene to supervise the collection and examination of the remains. A slow parade of morgue wagons, packed with pine boxes full of human pieces and parts, filled the ME’s office and a temporary tent-morgue on the crash site to overflowing. Working through the night and into the next day, my father and his team identified the dead, notified the next of kin, and prepared all 113 victims to be transported to their final resting places around the world.
And why wouldn’t it have been unimaginable for my father? It wasn’t his first mass-casualty disaster. It wasn’t even his third or fourth. He’d been on the scene of the 1960 midair collision of two passenger jets over New York that killed 134 people, including six on the ground. He’d also worked with the remains of 95 people killed in the 1959 crash of a Boeing 707 that nose-dived into Jamaica Bay. And the 1950 Kew Gardens train crash that killed 78 commuters. And Eastern Airlines Flight 663, which killed 84 people when it crashed into the sea off Long Island in 1965.
If he hadn’t seen all the ways a human can die, there were very few left for him to see.
One of my father’s most notable cases, however, came after he retired as Chief Medical Examiner in 1978, and ironically didn’t involve a death at all.
Three days before Christmas in 1984, a nebbishy electronics dealer named Bernhard Goetz, who was white, was surrounded by four black teenagers on a Manhattan subway. They wanted money from Goetz, who’d started carrying a concealed five-shot Smith & Wesson .38 after he was violently mugged in the subway a few years before.
Fearing he was about to be robbed by the youths, Goetz stood up, whipped out his handgun, and started shooting. He emptied his gun and wounded all of them. Nineteen-year-old Darrell Cabey took a single shot in his left side, and the bullet severed his spinal cord, paralyzing him as he slumped into a subway seat.
Crime in New York was at an all-time high and race relations were near an all-time low when the media dubbed Goetz the “Subway Vigilante.” Goetz gave the world its seminal “stand your ground” case. One question obsessed the public: Had Goetz fired in self-defense, or was it a deliberate racist act?
It was the same question that echoed in the eerily similar shootings of Trayvon Martin in Florida and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, decades later. And just like those later cases, the nation erupted angrily about Goetz, split mostly down racial lines. Both sides made up their minds before the facts were collected.
At Goetz’s trial for attempted murder, prosecutors argued that Cabey was sitting when he was shot and thus hadn’t been a threat. The defense hired my father to examine Cabey’s wounds and the crime scene, and he delivered a controversial opinion: Cabey had been standing when he was shot. The trajectory of the bullet was lateral and flat, not downward, my father said. Cabey couldn’t have received the wound while sitting unless the six-foot-one Goetz had knelt beside him—which he didn’t.
The jury of seven men and five women, including two African-Americans, was convinced. It acquitted Goetz of murder and assault charges, but convicted him of illegal possession of a weapon. He served just over eight months in prison. Cabey later sued and won a $43 million civil judgment against the bankrupt Goetz (who ran unsuccessfully for New York City mayor in 2005).
To New Yorkers, Goetz had committed another serious crime: He owned a gun. Only cops and criminals owned guns in New York City, and the city fathers deemed everyone else too dumb to be trusted with firearms.
In 1978, my father retired at age sixty-five, but his expertise was still sorely needed, and he still had enormous energy. He continued to consult on many death cases around the nation, and he joined me in writing a 1992 textbook called Forensic Pathology, which has become one of the science’s preeminent references and remains in print today.
On September 11, 2001, Dominick Di Maio was a spry eighty-eight-year-old retiree living on Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights, just across the East River from Manhattan. On ordinary days, he could see the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center soaring over the Financial District, a little more than a mile away. He was a proud lifelong New Yorker, and he’d watched them go up.
On that day, he watched them come down.
In more than thirty years as a medical examiner, he’d never witnessed a murder, much less a mass murder, but here it was happening before his eyes.
He already knew what horrible carnage they’d find. He already knew what horrors man could visit upon his fellow men. He already knew there’d be no mystery about how all those people died.
But he never spoke a word of it to me.
That was my father. He never wanted to let death know it had touched him, and he never cried.
That stuck, too.
I grew up as strong-willed as he was. After I started medical school and started blazing my own path, we often clashed professionally. Not acrimoniously nor angrily, but vigorously. Our discussions could be epic and maybe a little loud, but I never stopped believing in my father. He set a standard I still aspire to. I still live with his expectations of me.
We carry our childhoods forward, even if we don’t remember them perfectly or even as they truly were. We collect the stuff that sticks and haul it across the bridge of our teenage years into adulthood. When I check my baggage, I find my father’s energy, his sense of justice, his fascination with mystery, his tendency to work away from the limelight, his ability to corral his emotions. I also find my mother’s austerity, her pragmatism, her love of books and history.
And her stoicism.
* * *
When I entered St. John’s College in Queens, New York, in the fall of 1958, I had none of the typical teenager’s angst about where I was going. I’d known my purpose from the start. I was going to be a doctor.
I didn’t find college that hard or stressful. I began as a chemistry major, then switched to biology, but the hardest part of my undergrad years was the traffic between my house and the campus.
Most people don’t know that some medical schools will admit students after their third undergraduate year if they’ve successfully finished their necessary premed classes. So during my junior year at St. John’s, I applied to two New York medical schools. One turned me away, saying it only took college graduates; the other, State University of New York’s Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, less than three miles from where I grew up, left its door slightly open. It was all the encouragement I needed.
So, at nineteen years old, I passed the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), sent in my application, and even went to SUNY for a nervous interview with some administrator in the medical school.
During a blizzard in February 1961, I went out to buy a newspaper for my mother. When I returned, cold and wet, I handed her the paper, and she handed me a letter from SUNY.
I had been accepted to medical school without a college diploma. I was to start that fall.
The first day of med school, the faculty gathered all the new students in a lecture hall for a pep talk. “Don’t sweat about graduating,” they said soothingly as they delivered sobering stats on graduation rates. The more they assured us, the more we worried. Imagine somebody telling you, “It’s completely safe to fly in an airplane; only one in ten of you will die in a fiery crash.” That’s when I knew this wouldn’t be
a walk in the park, but failure wasn’t an option. I couldn’t be anything but a doctor.
Truth be told, I detested medical school. It was four years of Marine boot camp, but not as pleasant.
The first two years involved continuous sleep deprivation. Every day we did about twenty-six hours worth of study—not a misprint—on six hours of sleep. The next two years involved the same sleep deprivation and study but added hands-on procedures. We suddenly found ourselves doing things we never thought we could (or would) do.
Gushes of real-life amniotic fluid ruined my shoes. I went home at night with flecks of blood and vomit on my clothes. I discovered that patients often lie. I saw that it was actually pretty hard to kill somebody. And I learned to sleep standing up, braced against the walls during rounds or with my eyes wide open while a professor lectured. To this day, when I must wait, whether in an airport or in a courtroom hallway, I try to sleep.
But we also learned to stay calm, no matter the situation. I always thought doctors would be good in combat for their coolness under fire.
Everyone who was accepted to SUNY was certainly smart enough to get an MD. Lack of intellect didn’t wash them out. The ones who left just didn’t have the fortitude, the persistence, or the determination to survive the professors’ withering cross fire. It took me a couple of years to realize what they were doing. They were brainwashing us, teaching us to think like doctors. Not lawyers, not accountants, not stockbrokers. Doctors think differently. We were beginning to adopt a certain emotional distance, learning not to get so close to patients that we couldn’t do our work or so far from them that we couldn’t hear what they had to say about their pain and fear.
Not every lesson was in a textbook. We learned to think logically, to not always accept what we were told, and to question what seems obvious. Non-physicians often jump from A to D, but a good doctor goes from A to B to C to D. One must attempt to accumulate all the facts.
Morgue Page 5