by Colin Evans
Just a few short months later, the United States was at war. Two events stood out for Helpern during this period: In 1943 he was promoted to deputy chief medical examiner; then, as part of the war effort, he was posted to England to act as a civilian consultant to the Royal Air Force. Apparently his biggest concern about this posting, which was in the depths of winter, was a worry over how to keep warm in that notoriously cold country. Consultation with a fellow forensic scientist, Dr. Sydney Kaye, led to Helpern being kitted out in long johns and heavyweight military khakis.
The New York that Helpern returned to at war’s end was confident and bursting with triumph, but the battles on its own streets were just as bloody as before, and just as peculiar. Probably the most bizarre case that Helpern ever investigated—he called it “one of the most unusual in medical history”—began on a hot August night in 1946, when Raul Alvarez, a twenty-two-year-old factory worker, stormed into a bar and grill on Lexington Avenue, determined to settle a long-running feud once and for all. The object of his ire was the bartender, Basilio Guadalupe. Word had reached Alvarez that Guadalupe had been sneaking dates with his girl behind his back. Once inside the bar, Alvarez squared up to his rival, turning the air blue with a long string of insults. What happened next was always in dispute. According to Guadalupe, the enraged Alvarez pulled a knife and lunged forward. Guadalupe, fearing for his life, grabbed an ice pick from behind the bar. A single swipe with the ice pick caught Alvarez in the back. He drew away, more startled than hurt, but the incident did bring him to his senses. He scoffed at the wound, insisting it was nothing more than a scratch and, as if to demonstrate his toughness, swaggered from the bar.
The next day he went to work. And the day after that. In fact, Alvarez carried on working, right through Thanksgiving, the Christmas holiday, and into the new year. Only in February 1947 did he begin to suffer any serious discomfort in his back. Finally, the pain became so severe that he went to Harlem Hospital. An X-ray revealed the problem: The ice pick wound had been three inches deep and had passed through the spine, to penetrate the heart and mitral valve. Once there, a fragment from the ice pick tip had broken off and lodged in the heart. It was this fragment that was causing the pain. To make matters worse, an infection had now set in. When Alvarez’s condition suddenly deteriorated in early April, he underwent an emergency operation to remove the ice pick tip from his heart. Sadly, the operation failed. On April 3, 1947, eight months after the barroom brawl, Alvarez died.
Helpern had never seen anything like it. As he told the court, when Guadalupe stood accused of fatally stabbing Alvarez, the dead man had been living on “borrowed time” for eight months. If the tip had been discovered any earlier, and an attempt made to remove it, he said, the outcome would have been exactly the same, for the point had actually sealed the wound’s opening. Once the tip was removed, death was inevitable. The court didn’t really know what to make of all this. Was Guadalupe guilty of murder or not? After much judicial head shaking, Guadalupe’s uncorroborated insistence that he had acted in self-defense, combined with the extraordinary medical circumstances, resulted in the bartender receiving a prison sentence of five to ten years for manslaughter.
The postwar boom that America enjoyed brought many modern conveniences to the average household, but there were dangers as well. When Mrs. Mercedes Gomez de Barry contacted her building superintendent on Saturday, November 18, 1950, and told him her gas refrigerator was not working properly, he immediately called an independent company to fix it. It was Monday morning before the service engineer arrived at the apartment at 310 East Fifty-fifth Street. Tragically, the thirty-nine-year-old Mrs. de Barry lay dead on the floor. Helpern rushed to the scene. Her pinkish skin and the bright cherry color of her blood left no doubt as to the cause of death: Mrs. de Barry had been poisoned by carbon monoxide leaking from her defective gas refrigerator. Helpern was incandescent; this was the seventeenth such death investigated by the OCME this year alone. Most of the deaths had occurred in colder weather, when users were reluctant to leave windows open to provide the recommended and essential level of ventilation. Helpern wanted the service company charged with criminal negligence. That didn’t happen, and it would take another decade of vociferous campaigning on Helpern’s part before the city’s Board of Health issued restrictions on these potentially lethal devices. (As recently as 1998, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission was warning consumers to stop using gas refrigerators manufactured between 1933 and 1957, owing to the risk of carbon monoxide leakage in deadly quantities.)
Helpern’s headline-making campaign against the dangers of gas refrigerators, allied to his commanding presence on the witness stand, ensured that his name remained firmly in the public eye. He also made giant strides on the academic front, adding a lectureship at Cornell Medical College to the one he already held at New York University. By the early 1950s his reputation also began to spread abroad, and as Gonzales edged ever nearer retirement, it became obvious that Helpern’s name would figure prominently in any contest when the top job became vacant. But nobody was prepared for what came next.
Astonishingly, and in flagrant violation of the legislation that established the OCME, on April 15, 1954, Mayor Robert F. Wagner announced that Helpern would take over from Gonzales. There would be no Civil Service examination, no open competition, just the rubber-stamped recommendation of City Administrator Dr. Luther Gulick, who said that leading authorities in the field of forensic science agreed that Helpern was the best qualified man for the post. Although no one seriously disputed Gulick’s choice on a professional level—Helpern stood head and shoulders above all his rivals—the unilateral and arbitrary nature of his decision making harked back to the bad old days of cronyism and favors.
The department that Helpern took over was racked by turmoil. The press had been subjecting the OCME to death by a thousand cuts, and first on the new boss’s agenda was a honeymoon period with the fourth estate. Helpern was shrewd. Like Norris, he understood the importance of the media and had seen the way they toppled his predecessor. Determined to get the press on his side, Helpern launched a compelling charm offensive. Newspaper readers soon became used to his craggy face, with its shock of iron-gray hair, accompanying a string of complimentary articles about his department. They learned that being a good medical examiner wasn’t just about microscopes and test tubes, sometimes a good ME needed to follow his intuition. There was the time, for instance, when Helpern had been called to a crime scene and, after studying the body closely for a while, suddenly turned it over and ran his hands down the back. Police officers present gaped in open amazement as Helpern, after asking if anyone had a nail file, then made a little X in the skin, and out popped a small bullet. Experience, chuckled Helpern; so far as the astonished onlookers (and the readers) were concerned, it looked more like magic.
Less than a year after taking office, Helpern married for the second time. (His first wife, Ruth, had died of a rheumatic heart condition in January 1953.) This time around Helpern got more than just a spouse. Beatrice Helpern would become his personal secretary at the OCME and remain by his side for the duration of his tenure. “Often secretaries take a job to marry the boss,” Helpern joked. “My wife married the boss to become his secretary.” Only once, though, did Beatrice’s fascination for the job extend to actually accompanying her husband on a field trip to examine a newly found body. It was especially gruesome and delivered the kind of sensory overload that her husband coped with on a daily basis. For Beatrice it was one stomach-churning spectacle too far, and thereafter she resolutely refused to leave the relative comfort and safety of the office.
And finally it was beginning to look as if that office was on the verge of getting a whole lot better. For decades the OCME had lobbied for its own dedicated facility. The promises from City Hall had been lavish, the reality notably barren. But in August 1956, when Helpern put in a request for $2,850,000 for work to begin on a new office building, morgue and laboratory adjacent to Bellevue
Hospital, he did so with a newfound air of confidence that this time the department would not be denied.
Before that could come to fruition, however, Helpern received a nasty reminder of the need for constant vigilance on his own watch. Dr. Alfred L. Shapiro had first started doing work for the OCME in 1952, and like many of the more peripheral staff members, the Brooklyn assistant ME had supplemented his meager city income by means of a private practice. Helpern had no quibble with this; so long as the OCME job was done properly, then a spot of moonlighting was perfectly acceptable. But in 1957, whispers began to filter through that Shapiro was shading the system. Reportedly, in April of that year, while on sick leave from the city, the assistant ME had been treating patients privately. When the abuse was repeated in mid-June, Helpern exploded. Shapiro, forced on the defensive, claimed that he had suffered a relapse of hepatitis after working seventy-two hours straight from June 14 to 17. Helpern checked the claim and found that during this period Shapiro had handled twenty-seven cases, mostly by phone, and only two entailed much work. On June 22 Shapiro produced a letter from his doctor advising him “to rest as much as possible.” Coincidentally, this letter was dated one day after Helpern had filed charges against Shapiro, alleging failure to respond promptly to three deaths, two counts of having failed to complete autopsy reports, and failure to answer subpoenas to testify in criminal cases. For the first time in its history, a member of the OCME was charged with misconduct.
The hearing was held on August 28, 1957, in Helpern’s office at the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene at 125 Worth Street, with Helpern presiding. Shapiro tried to turn the tables on Helpern by making him the target of the inquiry. It had been Helpern’s brutal insensitivity, claimed Shapiro, that sparked this crisis. When he had gone to Helpern and requested sick leave, Helpern had turned him down flat. Despite being laid low by a debilitating illness, Shapiro had bravely soldiered on, fulfilling his duties to the best of his ability. It was the kind of performance that impressed no one save the teller. A decided frostiness filled the room. Shapiro could sense it hadn’t gone well. In his desperation to regain the initiative, even before the commission announced its finding, he filed a twenty-five-thousand-dollar suit against the city and Helpern for having caused his illness. When the inevitable happened and Shapiro was axed, he began a long, protracted appeal process that dragged on until October 1958, at which time his petition to be reinstated was thrown out by the courts. The lawsuit was also dismissed.
Two rather happier departures from the OCME were announced on January 1, 1959. Dr. Alexander O. Gettler, the city toxicologist, and Dr. Benjamin Vance were both age seventy-five, and between them they had notched-up eighty years of service to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Gettler had been there right at the beginning in 1918 and had progressed to become, arguably, the foremost forensic chemist in the world, featuring in many of the nation’s most spectacular poison murder cases. Vance was less well known to the newspaper-reading public, but since joining the OCME in 1920, he had become one of its foremost academics, coauthoring with Gonzales and Helpern Legal Medicine and Toxicology. His particular expertise was in hair and fibers, and at the time of retirement he was the deputy chief medical examiner. Both were badly missed by Helpern, who said they had brought “great esteem and praise to this office [OCME].”
By this stage of his career, although Helpern was virtually unassailable in the New York courtroom, peering over his Benjamin Franklin half-moon spectacles, delivering opinions in a rich, creamy voice as avuncular as it was authoritative, there was one criticism he could not shake off: the snide accusation that he was “a prosecution man.” Critics who complained that Helpern rarely testified for the defense were usually missing half the picture. What they failed to realize was that most of Helpern’s “defense work” was done behind the scenes. As one district attorney put it, if, after studying the evidence, Helpern decided there was no homicide, only a fool would dare take the case to court.
A prime example of Helpern’s independence and supreme authority came one time when a man called the police and confessed to killing the woman with whom he lived. When the police arrived, they found the man blind drunk and a woman dead in bed. Racked by remorse and almost incoherent with grief, the man described how they had been drinking heavily, then started fighting. It had ended with him wrapping his hands around her throat and squeezing. The case seemed open and shut. The man was charged with murder and arraigned in court the next morning. That afternoon, Helpern got to see the body. He immediately reached for the phone. The woman had died of natural causes, he told incredulous detectives, cirrhosis of the liver, there was absolutely no sign of strangulation. Helpern’s intervention led to the case being thrown out. Despite this, the man continued to insist that he was a murderer. He never got over the grief. Two weeks later, he killed himself.
Because of the reasons stated, Helpern’s appearances for the defense were rare events. For the most part they occurred outside of New York. The most controversial of these came in 1959, when defense lawyers in Boston asked him to review the medico-legal findings in a sensational headline-making case that had locals agog. What Helpern found as he delved through the papers offended every fiber of decency and justice in his body. But that didn’t surprise him. He’d been down this particular road before.
CASE FILE:
Willem van Rie (1959)
During the last ice age, when huge glaciers engulfed New England, a sliver of rock was carved off what is now the Massachusetts coastline and dumped in the ocean, with just its uppermost edge peeking above the icy waters. Archaeological evidence suggests that the tiny island was first inhabited more than one thousand years ago, its settlers drawn by the abundant aquatic life and shellfish. When early European colonists arrived it struck them that the island, which consisted of two glacial drumlins connected by a single spit, resembled a pair of eyeglasses, and before long it became known as Spectacle Island. Standing four miles south of the modern-day Boston dockside and buffeted by constantly swirling tides and currents, Spectacle Island has enjoyed a colorful history. In 1729 it was commandeered as a quarantine station for Irish immigrants, a holding area to see if any exhibited signs of the dreaded smallpox. By the early nineteenth century the immigrants and the pox-watchers were gone and someone had the bright idea of converting the ninety-seven-acre outcrop into a summer resort. Two clapboard hotels appeared almost overnight and were soon catering to regular boatloads of holidaymakers from Boston and the surrounding areas. It’s fair to say that the island’s relative isolation from the mainland did encourage a certain moral laxity among the visitors, one that the hoteliers were quick to capitalize on. For a few years Spectacle Island was wide open, bursting to the seams with illegal gaming tables, cheap plentiful booze, and reputedly the highest concentration of hookers in New England. There was something for every appetite and every pocketbook. The party lasted until 1857, when outraged Bostonians, sick of seeing all that disposable income going offshore, dispatched a squad of police officers to stamp out the illicit revelry. As soon as the hotels shut down, the visitors dried up, and the island resumed a humdrum path. First came a rendering plant for dead horses and cattle, followed by a garbage recycling facility, then a landfill for the city across the bay. This latter use proved so successful that by the time Boston had finished dumping its waste, Spectacle Island had gained an extra eight acres in area, mostly along the spit, so that its resemblance to the eponymous eyewear had all but vanished. The dumping ended in 1959. Coincidentally, that year marked the discovery of yet another kind of detritus on the island’s shoreline.
The young woman’s body was found in the early hours of September 19, 1959, by a passing tugboat captain. She was badly bruised and clad only in gray Bermuda shorts and blue slippers. Judging from her condition, she had not been in the sea for long, as there was none of the grotesque bloating or marine depredation that generally accompanies long immersion in water. Putting a name to the corpse took only a few hour
s. Late the previous evening, local coast guards had received a radio message from the Utrecht, an 8,346-ton freighter en route from Boston to New York, that one of its passengers was missing, feared overboard. From the description, there could be little doubt that Lynn Kauffman had been found.
The twenty-three-year-old had definitely been aboard the Utrecht at 6:15 P.M. the previous evening, when the steamer slipped its moorings at Commonwealth Pier in South Boston, then cleared the harbor, before speeding up to sixteen knots on a course for the Cape Cod Canal. But by 9:00 P.M., it was evident that Lynn Kauffman had vanished.
The Utrecht was not some modern-style cruise ship but rather a working freighter that transported cargo from one part of the globe to another. Like many tramp steamers of the period, it also offered a few cabins to passengers, who got to see the world at an unhurried pace, while receiving a level of personal attention from the crew and stewards that only the most expensive liners could hope to match. For Lynn Kauffman, the voyage had been a glorious opportunity to expand her personal horizons, the well-deserved reward for much hard work. Three years previously she had entered Washington University in St. Louis to study the Far East. One of her tutors was Dr. Stanley Spector, a professor of oriental studies, and he had quickly realized Lynn’s potential (“a brilliant student of the orient,” was his later assessment). A bond grew up between them, with Lynn first becoming his secretary and research assistant, then moving into the family home in a St. Louis suburb called Clayton. It was a great arrangement for everyone concerned. Spector’s wife, Juanita, and their two children, Stephanie and Jon, warmly welcomed Lynn into their family.