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

by Colin Evans

  The Donna Lee Bakery killings achieved notoriety as the worst mass murder in Connecticut’s history. Tragically, it was a short-lived reign. In the summer of 1977, Gross was once again called on to investigate a crime that left Constitution State residents stunned and sick to their stomachs, unable to fathom the kind of horrors that were unfolding on their own doorstep.

  Frederick Beaudoin was working the nightshift at the Pratt & Whitney Aircraft plant in North Haven when he got the call. His house in nearby Prospect, a suburb of Waterbury, had burned down. When firefighters were finally able to enter the smoke-blackened shell, they stumbled across a scene of almost unbelievable heartbreak. There were bodies everywhere. Frederick’s twenty-nine-year-old wife, Cheryl, all seven of their children, ages four to twelve, and a visiting six-year-old niece had died in the inferno.

  It was midmorning when Gross reached the charred redshingled house on the corner of Union City Road and Cedar Hill Drive. Arson investigators were already working on the assumption that this had been no accidental tragedy. A nose-wrinkling stink of gasoline hanging in the air and the fire’s suspicious path through the house made it highly likely that the blaze had been deliberately set. After gleaning what he could from the crime scene and making his preliminary examinations, Gross supervised the removal of the bodies. Neighbors lowered their heads respectfully as the procession of nine dark green canvas body bags made its way to the waiting vehicles. Afterward, Gross spoke to reporters on the front lawn. “It was a scene of great conflagration,” he said. “At the present I would classify them as highly suspicious deaths.”

  Autopsies performed the next day on three of the children confirmed Gross’s suspicions. A boy had died of head injuries, while two of the girls were killed by “multiple head injuries and inhalation of smoke.”

  Another twenty-four hours later and Gross had almost completed his grim task (the autopsy of the niece, Jennifer Santoro, was performed later). The victims, he said, had all been bludgeoned about the head, in a measured and quite calculated attack. Presumably the killer had then attempted to cover his tracks by setting the blaze. Although some of the children’s wrists had been tied with bootlaces, Gross quashed rumors that the victims had either been gagged or had received gunshot wounds. By the end of the second day, even before Gross could file his report, detectives had a suspect in custody.

  Lorne Acquin, aged twenty-seven, had been born on an Indian reservation in Canada and had spent most of his formative years in foster care. Being shunted from one home to another was a hard life, one that left profound psychological scars. Then he met Frederick Beaudoin. For the first time in his life, Acquin found someone who wanted him as a real friend. Beaudoin treated him like a brother and for several years made him welcome at his home. It got to the point where Acquin stayed so often that the Beaudoin children called him “Uncle Lorie.” (On the evening before the fire, he had even taken the kids berry picking.) The Beaudoins were the one small oasis of stability in Acquin’s otherwise turbulent life. Acquaintances traced his bad behavior back to another fire, fourteen years earlier, at the house where he was then living. It had destroyed all the family possessions. Following this dislocation, Acquin had begun stealing from neighbors. This led to two short prison terms.

  Now, though, he was facing nine counts of murder. The main thrust of the prosecution lay in a confession made by Acquin after fifteen hours of interrogation. In it, he described suddenly going berserk, attacking Cheryl with a lug wrench when she turned to the refrigerator to get him a beer. Then he had methodically and murderously worked his way through the one-story house, battering the children as they either lay in their beds or stood crying in their cribs. He admitted sexually molesting one of the children. When he heard groans coming from the kitchen, he went back and finished off Cheryl by stabbing her. Then he fetched a five-gallon can of gasoline from the basement and torched the house.

  Such were the legal gymnastics over the admissibility or otherwise of Acquin’s alleged confession that by the time his trial had been concluded, one of the chief prosecution witnesses, Connecticut’s chief medical examiner Dr. Elliot Gross, had already left Connecticut and returned to his hometown.*

  The news that Baden had been kicked out of office sent shock waves through the medico-legal community. So, too, did the lightning speed of Gross’s appointment. On August 9, Koch announced that Gross would be taking over as CME from September 15, and yes, there would be that tantalizing one-year probationary period. For Gross, this was the fulfillment of a dream; all his life he had yearned to fill the post once held by his great friend, Milton Helpern. He was even prepared to take a sixty-four-hundred-dollar-a-year pay cut—to fifty thousand dollars—in order to follow in his mentor’s footsteps. The responsibilities were enormous. In Connecticut, his office had handled eight thousand investigations a year, with a staff of just three full-time medical examiners. Now he would have to deal with almost thirty thousand deaths per annum and an often hard-to-handle staff that numbered in the hundreds. Understandably, the press baited him on the sensational departure of his predecessor. Gross, canny down to his bootstraps, neatly sidestepped the controversy by professing himself to be unfamiliar with Baden’s work in the past nine years. At the same time, he had nothing but praise for Baden during the time they had worked together in the sixties.

  Deep down, though, Gross sensed that Baden wouldn’t surrender without a fight. Passive acceptance of a public slight just wasn’t his style. Sure enough, one week after being kicked downstairs, Baden called a press conference to announce that he was suing Koch on grounds that he had been denied the due process of a hearing under Civil Service requirements. Also named in the suit were S. Michael Nadel, director of the city’s Department of Personnel—and Dr. Elliot Gross.

  It wasn’t the most auspicious of beginnings. But it did set the tone for Gross’s tenure at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, most of which was spent either looking over his shoulder or else fending off suspiciously well-informed reporters. The assault began immediately. Over the next few months a steady drip of rumors, innuendoes, and half-truths—none complimentary—found their way into the metro pages. According to the whispers, morale at the OCME had plunged to rock bottom; threats of resignation hung in the air; and an unbridgeable schism had divided the staff, with the pro-Gross faction complaining that the Badenites were constantly striving to undermine them and vice versa. When, on October 12, 1979, Gross married the late chief’s daughter, Alice Helpern, some even chuckled that the ghost of Milton Helpern, from beyond the grave, was contributing a Jacob Marley–like piquancy to Baden’s discomfort.

  As the juggernaut of complaints rumbled on, Gross acted decisively to crush any possible rebellion. On February 8, 1980, he announced that Baden was being transferred to the Queens office. Another vocal critic of Gross’s methods, Dr. Yong-Myun Rho, was shifted from Manhattan to the Bronx. To strengthen his hand, Gross imported Dr. Millard Hyland from Queens to head up the all-important Manhattan office.

  Banishing Baden to Queens provided only temporary relief for Gross. There was still that lawsuit hovering overhead like a black cloud. The storm broke in May 1980 when federal judge Charles S. Haight Jr., ruled that Baden had been dismissed illegally and ordered that he be reinstated with back pay. Haight found that when Baden had been dismissed on July 31, 1979, he had already attained tenure and that under state Civil Service law he was entitled to a hearing on the charges against him. The judge wrote: “No mayor may change the rules in the middle of the game and suddenly confront an unsuspecting Chief Medical Examiner with substantially different procedures.” The murkiness of this whole sorry episode was made more Stygian still by Nadel’s admission in a sworn deposition that an entry summarizing Baden’s work experience had been altered—after Baden was dismissed—so that it read “to serve probation.” Because the Corporation Counsel announced its attention to appeal the ruling, Judge Straight stayed the order.

  Gross was trapped in no-man’s-land. If the a
ppeals court upheld Straight’s ruling, he would be out of the top job and most likely out of the OCME as well. Until that mess was resolved, he was still expected to run his department as if everything was hunky-dory. For the past year the OCME had been making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Gross was desperate for an opportunity to demonstrate that the office, for all its self-flagellating masochism, was still on top of the forensic game. His chance came in the summer of 1980.

  CASE FILE:

  Craig Crimmins (1980)

  Covering an area of 16.3 acres, the Lincoln Center complex in Manhattan is the world’s largest performing arts center. Its seven major halls and theaters are home to no fewer than twelve resident arts organizations, but the undoubted jewel in the architectural crown is the glistening glass and marbled magnificence of the Metropolitan Opera House. Since moving to its present home in 1966, the “Big House,” as it is known to opera buffs, has strengthened its role as one of the world’s most acclaimed music venues, to rival La Scala in Milan and the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow.

  On the evening of Wednesday, July 23, 1980, the thirty-seven-hundred-seat auditorium was about three-fourths full for a performance by the Berlin Ballet. All eyes were on the principal dancers, Valery and Galina Panov. The couple’s highly publicized struggle to immigrate to Israel from their native Soviet Union, culminating in their daring 1974 defection, had caught the attention of the Western media and made them headliners wherever they performed. On this particular night, the Panovs were presenting extracts from four ballets. First up was Stravinsky’s Firebird, then came the pas de deux from Don Quixote, with music by Leon Minkus.

  Down in the orchestra pit, violinist Helen Hagnes concentrated hard. Like everyone else around her, this thirty-one-year-old native of British Columbia, Canada, was a freelance musician, hired by a contractor for the Berlin Ballet’s eleven-day run at the Met. With positions in the established sitting orchestras at a premium, this was how most classical musicians in New York made a living. Helen, a graduate of Juilliard and the winner of numerous awards and competitions, was top notch, a “first-call” musician in the parlance of the freelance circuit—which meant that if, say, twenty orchestra seats needed to be filled, she would be in the first ten called—and tonight she glided effortlessly through the complex scores. At the conclusion of the short Don Quixote piece, which ended at 9:29 P.M., she put down her violin and discreetly edged out of the orchestra pit, her blond hair vividly accentuated by the black outfit that she wore. For the next forty-five minutes she and the rest of the orchestra were on a break, as the third ballet, Five Tangos, by the Argentinean composer Astor Piazzolla, was being danced to prerecorded tapes. As Helen descended deep into the bowels of the Met, she did so in the knowledge that she was due back in her seat at 10:19 P.M. for the night’s final ballet, Miss Julie, a modern piece based on the music of little-known Swedish composer Ture Rangström.

  At around 10:15 P.M., the orchestra members began slipping back into their seats. Except that Helen Hagnes was nowhere to be seen. The other musicians were baffled. Normally, Helen was the embodiment of professionalism, a stickler for timekeeping; it was unthinkable that she would miss her cue. Perhaps she was unwell? Yet no one could recall her complaining of feeling ill. Her nonappearance was a real mystery. Then the conductor tapped his baton and all other thoughts were set aside as the orchestra struck up the first chord.

  While the dancers pirouetted and twirled and the orchestra played, security staff scoured the backstage area for Helen. Still, there was no sign of the missing violinist. An hour passed. At 11:15 P.M., just as the final curtain was being taken and the musicians packed away their instruments, the management decided to call the police.

  At about the same time, outside Lincoln Center a slim, sandy-haired thirty-six-year-old man with a beard was waiting patiently at the prearranged meeting place. It was a warm evening, with temperatures in the seventies, and Janis Mintiks wasn’t overly concerned at first when his wife failed to appear on schedule. It had been almost four years since he and Helen had married, and in that time the tall sculptor and the pocket-sized musician had become utterly devoted to each other. Each night when Helen finished playing at the Met, Janis would be waiting for her after the final curtain call, and together the couple would walk the half mile to their West Side apartment.

  Tonight, though, was different. Helen was nowhere to be seen. Gradually, Jan’s initial insouciance gave way, first to edginess, then to open anxiety. Perhaps their wires had somehow become crossed and she’d made her own way home? He hurried off to find a phone. After calling and getting no answer, and still with no sign of Helen outside the Met, a gnawing apprehension grabbed hold and he rushed back to their apartment. It was empty. At 12:10 A.M. friends from the orchestra knocked at the door. In their hands they carried Helen’s violin. Janis fretted for another twenty minutes, digesting their news and agonizing horribly, before he finally surrendered to his fears and phoned the police.

  They were already ahead of him. Officers had been at the Met since midnight, trying to unravel the mystery of the vanishing violinist. Four possibilities emerged: (1) Helen had disappeared voluntarily (tantamount to committing professional suicide in the middle of a performance), (2) she had suffered an accident (somehow, in some untenanted part of the building, Helen had become incapacitated), (3) she had been abducted, or—and this was the possibility that no one wanted to countenance—(4) she had been added to Manhattan’s bulging homicide count and her body had not yet been found.

  Detectives learned that security at the Met—just seven or eight guards—was traditionally focused on the front of the house, those areas most frequented by members of the public. Backstage, the security oscillated between minimal and nonexistent. Here, it was busier and more bustling than an Egyptian souk, with hundreds of staff and performers milling up and down forty staircases and the fifteen elevators that connected ten aboveground floors, three underground levels of passageways, tunnels, and garages. Searching every nook and cranny of this concrete rabbit warren would be a daunting task at the best of times; in the middle of the night it was next to impossible. This didn’t prevent the searchers from doing their best. But by daybreak, with still no sign of Helen, it looked odds-on that she was no longer in the building.

  A few minutes past eight o’clock that morning, a maintenance mechanic, Lawrence Lennon, made his way up to the Met’s sixth-floor roof, where many of the controls for the building’s ventilation system were housed. He needed to turn off a cooling fan. As always, the door to the roof was unlocked and opened with a push. The bright sunlight made him squint as he stepped out onto the roof, but gradually his eyes had adjusted to the glare, and when they did so they fixed upon a pair of shoes that lay next to a large pipe. Immediately recognizing the potential significance of such a find, he ran for help. Two detectives went to investigate. This section of the gravel-coated tar roof was at the rear of the building, a secluded area, protected from street views by a thirty-foot-high concrete wall on the west and the granite facade of the opera house to the east. The privacy made it a popular venue for staff members to relax on a break. Bisecting this quasi-recreational area, and running almost the entire width of the building, was a huge air shaft. Inside were six hollow cylinders, each about fifteen feet in diameter and eighty feet in depth, conduits for carrying fresh air into the AC and ventilation systems.

  The shoes lay next to one of these cylinders. As the officers’ flashlights probed the darkness in the airshaft they picked out a terrible sight. About halfway down, between the third and fourth floors, on an orange-colored steel ledge that jutted out, lay a woman’s body. The search for Helen Hagnes had ended.

  Dr. Elliott Gross was immediately summoned to the scene. For him to examine the body in situ, two wooden planks were placed across the gaping air shaft. Using this makeshift platform, Gross went to work. The sight that confronted him was ugly and obscene. Helen’s sightless eyes stared directly up the shaft. She had been stripped naked, boun
d, and gagged. The gag was formed by two napkins, one stuffed into the mouth and the other tied around it. The outer napkin covered the entire lower half of her face, but not the nostrils. Her hands had been tied behind her back with a combination of black jersey cloth—presumably slashed from her clothing—and rope. A similar length of rope, this time reinforced by a pair of shorts, was used to bind the ankles. When Gross examined the knots he noticed that all were tied in a distinctive clove hitch.

  Gross reasoned that the murderer had somehow forced Helen up to the roof, where, after some kind of sexual interference—it wasn’t immediately obvious if rape had occurred, only further examination could determine that—for whatever reason he had decided to kill his diminutive victim. Only an autopsy would be able to reveal if she had been alive when hurled down the shaft. After concluding that the crime scene had given him everything it could, Gross gave orders for the body to be removed.

  Later that day, at the foot of the air shaft, officers found the black blouse and matching skirt that Helen had worn when she gave the last performance of her life. Both items had been slashed several times.

  The murder of Helen Hagnes caused a sensation. Even in the most violent city in America, it was proof that homicide still had the ability to shock. For eighteen years the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts had been the hub of cultural life in Manhattan, a showcase for mankind’s higher cerebral endeavors; now it had hosted a spectacularly sordid and brutal murder. The city could not afford to let this killer get away; the ramifications would be enormous. Already the headlines were screaming MURDER AT THE MET and THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, with some commentators noting that this killing resembled the script for one of those made-for-TV movies—a victim murdered in the nation’s most prestigious concert hall, with literally thousands of suspects to choose from. Little wonder, then, that by the end of day one, a team of forty detectives was poring over blueprints, floor plans, and architectural drawings of the opera house. Even so, the police openly professed themselves baffled. Captain Francis Ward of the Manhattan Detective Area didn’t spare himself or his officers. “We have no suspects,” he told reporters. “We are interviewing every electrician, every prop man, anyone in a situation to see [Helen]…that night.”