Blood on the Table_Greatest Cases of New York City's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner

by Colin Evans

  The interrogating officers noted every word, as the questioning dragged on deep into the night and the next morning. By 6:00 A.M., van Rie was exhausted and at his wits’ end. Finally, he caved in and blurted out what those present later described as a confession. What had started life as a pleasant tropical diversion, he said, had assumed matrimonial proportions in Lynn’s eyes. For his part, van Rie was ready to move on and had made it plain that New York would mark the end of the affair. But Lynn wasn’t about to relinquish her dreams of permanently capturing the handsome naval officer. In his statement, van Rie said that about seven o’clock on the evening that Lynn vanished, he went to her cabin to ask why she was sick.

  “Are you pregnant?” he asked.

  “What would you care if I were?” she is supposed to have replied.

  Listening to van Rie’s story made Fallon’s blood boil. For more than a week, he’d been lied to, deceived, and given the runaround by everyone on board the Utrecht. Now it was payback time. He turned viciously on the young Dutchman, yelling that he’d tried to dump Lynn, then started hitting her when she wouldn’t go quietly. Van Rie reeled under the onslaught. He said only that Lynn had become very angry and had started swinging punches at him. To defend himself, he had lashed out in return.

  Fallon was having none of it. He bored in like an enraged bull. And then you beat her unconscious and pushed her body out through the porthole. Isn’t that what happened?

  No! No! No! Van Rie protested. When he’d left the cabin—at a few minutes before 7:00 P.M.—Lynn had been deeply upset but very much alive. What happened thereafter was a mystery to him. All he could imagine was that in a fit of remorse or depression she had taken her own life. He swore that he had no knowledge of how she came to be in the water.

  As damaging as these remarks may sound, it is important to note that we only have the interviewing officers’ assurances that they were ever spoken. At no time did van Rie sign a statement admitting that he had beaten Lynn, and he retracted his alleged oral admission at the first opportunity, protesting that he had been bullied and tricked into making statements that weren’t true. He claimed, rather weakly, that he had been victimized because his uniform had been in Lynn’s cabin, because of discrepancies in the ship’s log that recorded his attendance in the radio room at a time when he was actually absent, and because his weather report to the bridge had been late on the evening that Lynn vanished. One point in van Rie’s favor was the prominently displayed photograph of his wife that stood in his cabin. This put a big dent in Fallon’s suspicion that van Rie had duped Lynn into bed by claiming he was unmarried.

  The deeper that Fallon dug, the more furious he became. It transpired that the supposedly clandestine affair had been anything but: the captain knew, Mrs. Spector knew, the purser knew, as did just about everyone on board the claustrophobic little freighter. How much lighter Fallon’s investigative burden might have been had everyone come clean right at the outset. There can be little doubt that this collective reticence served only to harden attitudes to the handsome officer from Holland.

  Even so, van Rie’s earlier lack of candor was hugely damaging, and the district attorney’s office now went gunning for him with both barrels. It became an article of faith with them that in order to get rid of an unwanted and troublesome lover, he had beaten Lynn senseless, then shoved her body out through a cabin porthole, leaving her to drown in the ship’s wake.

  Curiously enough, a remarkably similar incident had happened on a ship sailing from South Africa to England twelve years previously. In a case widely covered by the American press, an English room steward named James Camb had been charged with murdering Eileen “Gay” Gibson, an actress, in her cabin. Camb claimed that while he and Gay were engaged in sexual intercourse she had suffered some kind of fit and died. Panic stricken, he lost his head and pushed her lifeless body out through the porthole. The jury preferred the prosecution’s version: this had Camb forcing his attentions on Gay, becoming enraged when she refused him, then raping and strangling her. In March 1948 Camb was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. He avoided the gallows by the skin of his teeth. At the time, a heated debate regarding the abolition of capital punishment was exercising the politicians of the land, and in the circumstance it was thought proper to reprieve Camb. He served a life sentence instead.

  If found guilty, van Rie could expect no similar mercy. On October 5, 1959, a grand jury, after digesting the explicit contents of Lynn’s diary and listening to the prosecution’s case, returned an indictment of first-degree murder against van Rie, and in Massachusetts that could mean the electric chair.* The next day a warrant was delivered to New York, where van Rie had been held on a technical charge of being a fugitive from Massachusetts’ justice, and he was returned to Boston.

  Like all shipping lines, Royal Rotterdam Lloyd, the company that operated the Utrecht, was sharply attuned to any whiff of bad publicity, not to mention the specter of an expensive civil suit should van Rie be found guilty. Desperate to put the very best face possible on events, the company hired a solid defense team for its employee. On October 7, van Rie’s lawyers filed a motion for permission to view the dead body, only to be told that on the very day that the defendant was being returned to Boston Lynn Kauffman had been cremated. It seemed a curious accident of timing. When defense attorney Samuel Silverman complained that the body had been “rushed to cremation,” he was told that approximately fifty color photographs had been taken of the body and that these, plus the medical examiner’s autopsy report, would be made available to the defense. Because Luongo showed no signs of altering his view that Lynn had been murdered, the defense team went hunting for an expert of their own. Their search began and ended with Milton Helpern.

  Since the death of the legendary Sir Bernard Spilsbury in London just over a decade earlier, Helpern had assumed the mantle of the best-known pathologist in the world. A great internationalist, he traveled the world, attending conferences, lecturing, and spreading the gospel of science-led crime investigation wherever he went. Because New York City had more murders per square mile than any other stretch of real estate on earth, Helpern’s views on what did or did not constitute homicide were always worth canvasing. When contacted by counsel for Royal Rotterdam, he agreed to review the case notes and photographs.

  He did so with a considerable sense of foreboding. As the crow flies, Boston might only be a couple of hundred miles or so from Manhattan, but to Helpern’s way of thinking, when it came to justice, the difference between New York and New England could be measured in centuries, not miles. In 1944 he had traveled to Boston to testify at the trial of John Franklin Noxon, a forty-eight-year-old lawyer charged with murdering his mentally subnormal son. The infant had been electrocuted by a frayed extension cord. Helpern thought it nothing more than a ghastly accident—even the state’s medical examiner, Dr. Alan Moritz, was by no means convinced that murder had been done—but that didn’t prevent the state prosecutors from pursuing Noxon with a Salem-like ferocity that appalled Helpern. He could scarcely believe the splenetic level of animosity directed at the defendant and the stuffy, moralistic tone that pervaded the proceedings. Despite this, Helpern was still utterly incredulous when the jury came back with a guilty verdict.* The trial/witch hunt left a bad taste in his mouth that lingered for the rest of his life, as did his contempt for what he sourly termed “New England justice!” So, perhaps partly motivated by an unconscious desire to settle an old score, Helpern agreed to testify for the defense.

  He knew Luongo by reputation only but held him in the highest regard. Just the previous year, the Suffolk County Medical Examiner had been one of the first medico-legal experts to be board certified in forensic pathology when it became recognized as a separate medical specialty. And certainly Helpern could find nothing to fault in Luongo’s autopsy. It was thorough and exhaustive and there were undisputed signs of drowning as the cause of death. So far, so good. It was the bruising that worried Helpern. There was a subarachno
id hemorrhage—bleeding between the middle membrane covering the brain and the brain itself—but Helpern had no idea whether this occurred ante-or post-mortem. The photographs showed superficial abrasions and bruises from head to toe, virtually all of which were confined to the left side. Helpern could see contusions on the left forehead, left cheek, and chin. This bruising continued onto the left shoulder, chest, inner and outer left thigh, as well as the shin.

  When Helpern set the photographs to one side, he was frankly puzzled. Given the kind of frenzied attack—with its punching and kicking—that Luongo had advanced, he found it hard to imagine all the injuries being restricted to just one side of the body. In his experience, Lynn Kauffman would have been black and blue from top to bottom. On the other hand, this distinctive pattern of bruising was exactly what Helpern would expect to find if someone had fallen from a great height and landed on one side. No one disputed that Lynn had either jumped or was thrown into the water from a ship steaming along at sixteen knots. That meant that from a height of forty feet she would have been traveling at almost 35 mph when she hit the water. At that speed, water can be as hard as rock.

  Helpern spotted a further complication. The photographs showed that just below Lynn’s porthole, a folded gangplank protruded from the side of the ship. Maintenance on board ship is an ongoing process. If some rust needs removing from the hull or a spot of paintwork is required, then when the ship is docked crew members will often carry out the necessary work while suspended on a gangplank. When not in use, these gangplanks are lashed to the ship’s side. If Lynn did throw herself from her cabin porthole, she could well have struck this gangplank before plunging into the water. Certainly this would explain why her injuries were overwhelmingly confined to one side of the body. The other, minor marks that Helpern saw might easily have resulted from being buffeted among the rocks on Spectacle Island. So far as Helpern was concerned, the picture was clear: the injuries on Lynn Kauffman’s body were far more consistent with a fall from a great height than with a murderous assault.

  Helpern wasn’t the first person to come up with this theory. Fallon, too, subscribed to this view, and he’d said as much to his superiors. Initially the Boston PD had backed Fallon’s version of events—he was, after all, a highly experienced homicide detective—but Luongo had gone above their heads to the Suffolk County DA’s office. To hear Luongo tell it, Lynn had “died of drowning after violence. She had been so badly kicked and pummeled that she was incapable of moving voluntarily into the water.” The injuries to the left side of her face, said Luongo, had definitely been caused by someone’s fist.

  Helpern thought this was utter nonsense. No one in the world had seen more victims of violent death than himself, and he defied anyone to look at a bruised and battered body and state categorically how those injuries had been sustained. There was no disputing that Lynn had suffered some kind of head injury, and, yes, there were widespread marks down her left side, but Helpern couldn’t see a single scrap of evidence to prove how these injuries had been inflicted. He certainly wasn’t ruling out the possibility that Lynn Kauffman might have been beaten up before being tossed into the water, and if someone had seen van Rie throw Lynn overboard, then that would have been case closed. But without any such witness to the alleged assault, Helpern could scarcely believe this case was going to court.

  And then it got uglier. Word came through to Helpern that Luongo was prepared to testify that the injuries were inflicted in the cabin, that Lynn was assaulted in the cabin, that she was rendered unconscious in the cabin, and that thereafter, she had been pushed, unconscious, through the porthole and into the water. This was staggering. With the Suffolk County D.A.’s office straining at the leash to act on Luongo’s conclusion, once again Helpern was forced to the unsavory conclusion that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was out to “get” the defendant come “hell or high water.”

  They began on February 11, 1960, by giving the trial jury a brief voyage from Commonwealth Pier 5 in Boston Harbor, out to Spectacle Island and back again, a rough and uncomfortable round-trip of approximately eight miles in the gusty prevailing wind. It’s difficult to gauge what purpose this could have served to twelve landlubbers unaccustomed to the vagaries of tides and currents, but it did set the scene nicely for an all-out assault on van Rie’s morals and murderous intentions. He was portrayed as a scheming, heartless lothario who had posed as a single man in order to lure Lynn into his bed, then made a “last and fatal visit” to Lynn’s cabin as the Utrecht was leaving Boston Harbor. Believing Lynn to be pregnant—the autopsy showed that she wasn’t—van Rie had killed her to prevent his duplicity ruining his eighteen-month marriage.

  Quite what Nella van Rie, the defendant’s wife, who had traveled over from the Netherlands and sat in court, made of all this is unknown, but throughout the trial she remained steadfastly loyal to her beleaguered husband as details of his transgressions were paraded before a drooling media. Confirmation that van Rie had conducted a shipboard romance with the dead woman came from Captain de Bruijn, who said that the radio officer had made no secret of the affair; indeed, it was common knowledge on the ship. Far more damaging to the defendant was de Bruijn’s claim that van Rie confessed to having had an argument with Lynn on the night of her disappearance.

  This point was reinforced by Fallon when he gave evidence. Insisting that the interview with van Rie, while lengthy and robust, had been conducted fairly, Fallon was forced to backtrack when he conceded that van Rie had mentioned the fight only after being told that Lynn had committed suicide. The defense seized on this hungrily. After all, if van Rie had murdered Lynn, why mention the fight at all? It didn’t make any sense.

  Then came the prosecution’s star witness, Dr. Michael A. Luongo. Like most veteran expert witnesses, he was comfortable on the stand and gave his evidence with practiced ease. “The cause of death was drowning, following the inflicting of multiple blunt-force injuries,” said the pathologist. He then proceeded to draw a murderous picture for the jury. In this, he had van Rie becoming so enraged by Lynn that he struck her with his fists until she fell to the ground; then he knelt on her chest and continued pummeling her. Unable to control his fury, he then stamped on her and battered her from one side of the cabin to the other. Finally, with Lynn unconscious at his feet, he picked her up and shoved her through a porthole. Being senseless from her wounds she would have drowned in a matter of minutes at most.

  Assistant DA John F. McAuliffe then asked the critical question: “In your opinion was the deceased, Lynn Kauffman, capable of performing a voluntary or purposeful act [after the injuries were sustained]?”

  “No, sir,” said Luongo. “A person would be unconscious and incapable of performing a purposeful act.” The bruises and abrasions, he maintained, were consistent with his theory. All the injuries, he said, were caused before the brain hemorrhages that led to death—a conclusion that Helpern found breathtaking. Throughout his long career, Helpern continually warned his students about the dangers of being led by overzealous advocates. “The law demands more than medicine can honestly give” was one of his favorite aphorisms. He understood the desire of courts, which prefer to deal in absolutes, black and white. But Helpern knew that medicine was made up of an infinite number of shades of gray. Once, in a case where an opposing lawyer was pushing hard for Helpern to add his weight to a previously expressed opinion that Helpern thought was medically unjustifiable, Helpern crushed the attorney by saying, “I refuse to play God. If your doctor wants to assume that role, he is perfectly entitled to attempt it.” Here, Helpern felt Luongo had fallen headlong into that selfsame trap.

  Defense attorney Walter Powers Jr. verbalized Helpern’s skepticism. He asked Luongo if such injuries could have been sustained if the body had fallen forty feet into the water, perhaps striking the ship’s side or a gangplank lashed beneath her porthole. In most cases, Luongo agreed it was possible, but in this instance the severity of the chest and head injuries he saw on Lynn’s body could ha
rdly have resulted from a single fall.

  Right from day one of the trial the prosecution kept dropping heavy hints that Dr. Alan R. Moritz, former professor of pathology at Harvard and now teaching at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, would be flying in to testify in support of Luongo. This was shrewd psychology. The prosecution team was only too aware of the impact that the magic name “Harvard” would have in the Boston area. Moritz’s opinion, they confidently predicted, would be the final word on the death of Lynn Kauffman.

  Such threats didn’t faze Helpern. Twenty-five years of courtroom skirmishes, fencing with lawyers, parrying their blows and feints, had left him battle hardened and tougher than steel. No one in America, not even some fancy Ivy League academic, had Helpern’s breadth of knowledge about how and why human beings take their leave of the mortal coil. He was confident he could counter anything that Moritz might throw at him.

  In the end, Moritz didn’t show. This shouldn’t have come as any surprise to the prosecution had they bothered to read a paper entitled “Classical Mistakes in Forensic Pathology,” published by Moritz just a few years earlier. In this, Moritz questioned the practice of substituting intuition for scientifically defensible interpretation, writing, “He [the pathologist] may be highly esteemed by the police and by prosecuting counsel because he is an emphatic and impressive witness. His prestige, together with exclusive access to original evidence, places him in an exceedingly powerful position in the courtroom.” Moritz concluded by arguing that the stakes in forensic pathology are too high to deal in anything other than cold, hard facts.