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

by Colin Evans

  The task was immense. At a conservative estimate, on the night in question more than one thousand people had access to the backstage area at the Met, and that excluded the one hundred-plus members of the Berlin Ballet entourage. Although the evidence suggested that Helen had been the victim of a random killer, detectives were leaving nothing to chance. As in most homicides, the inquiries started with those closest to the victim and then radiated outward.

  The daughter of Finnish immigrant parents, Helen Hagnes was the youngest of three sisters and had been raised on a poultry farm in the tiny community of Aldergrove, British Columbia. Even before her third birthday, it was obvious that Helen had exceptional musical talent. She could hear songs on the radio and play them almost note for note on the parlor piano. Her parents, eager to encourage this unusual gift, scrimped and scraped to pay for music lessons. Their dedication and self-sacrifice paid off when at age eleven Helen won a thousand-dollar prize in a Vancouver violin contest and two years later undertook her first professional engagement. Unlike many child prodigies she didn’t burn out, and in her late teens she enrolled at the Juilliard School of Music in Manhattan, where she earned a bachelor’s and later a master’s degree in 1976. That same year she married Janis, whom she had met while working as a counselor at a summer camp outside Montreal. They agreed that for professional purposes it made sense for her to retain her single name. Away from the rigid formality of the concert hall, Helen was happiest in T-shirts and jeans, cooking meals for a small circle of friends. Her chosen career path might have been one riddled with insecurity, but underpinning everything was one unshakable foundation: her love for Janis, and his for her. Their mutual devotion was a thing of wonderment to all who knew them. In most murder investigations, hard-boiled detectives usually fix their steeliest gaze on the surviving partner; here, they barely gave Janis a second glance. There was no faking that level of grief; besides, he didn’t fit the traditional template of means, motive, and opportunity. Within hours, detectives had scrubbed Helen’s heartbroken husband off the list of potential suspects.

  Which meant that the killer might still be prowling the Met’s red-carpeted corridors. A bizarre rumor that the murder had been carried out by someone driven into a frenzy by the ballet’s tempestuous music received a suitably frosty reception from the investigators. They were more concerned with trying to fathom out how the killer managed to lure Helen up to the roof. Enticement was only an option if she knew her killer, and even then friends considered this most improbable. Helen was so guarded in any social setting that the notion of her willingly accompanying a male to such a lonely spot at night smacked of fantasy. Much the likeliest scenario involved some kind of force. For this reason, it was imperative that detectives attempted, as much as possible, to retrace Helen’s final movements.

  After leaving her seat in the orchestra pit, she would have stepped down a flight of wooden stairs that led into a narrow forty-foot-long cinder-block hallway on A level, one floor below the stage or street level. Overhead, ventilation pipes ran the hallway’s length, while the concrete floor was lined with large crates, candy and juice vending machines, and a water fountain. After turning a corner she had entered a basement locker room labeled ORCHESTRA WOMEN ONLY. Inside this small carpeted room, Helen had relaxed on a sofa for a few minutes, chatting with another orchestra member. At around 9:30 P.M. she had left the locker room, saying she was going to keep an appointment for an “artistic discussion” with one of the stars of the show, Valery Panov, in his dressing room. Her motivation for this intended visit was wholly innocuous; she was simply trying to rustle up some work for her husband. Janis, besides being a sculptor, had done set design work and was eager to widen his experience in this field. Helen hoped that if she could talk to Panov, then maybe he would be able to pull some strings. A word in the right ear from someone of Panov’s stature could open all sorts of doors.

  When queried about this supposed appointment, Panov professed utter bemusement. He told detectives that he had neither expected nor did he see Helen that night, and a check on his movements seemed to corroborate this claim. At the time Helen went missing, Panov was not in his dressing room at all but was sitting in the stalls watching his wife, Galina, performing onstage. With that kind of alibi, Panov was also removed from the list of potential suspects.

  Investigators, working on the premise that Helen would have been unaware of Panov’s absence from his dressing room, questioned Met staff as to how she would have made her way from the basement locker room to Panov’s dressing room on the stage level. Three routes were possible: in one, she would have taken an elevator up one floor and then walked around the rear of the stage; the second, involving a little-known stairway used mostly by conductors, led directly to the principal artists’ dressing rooms; the third would have taken her down a long corridor under the stage, up a flight of stairs, down another corridor, past a chorus dressing room and across a loading dock. Most agreed that, of the three routes, Helen would have plumped for option one. This was the most commonly used and, during performances, would have been well trafficked. The second route was generally reserved for headliners and usually off-limits to musicians or cast members; the subterranean, circuitous route was known only to a handful of people, and it was doubtful that Helen would have been among their number.

  Desperate to diffuse as much heat as possible from what had been an unmitigated PR disaster, the Met made a highly visible point of beefing up its security for that night’s performance. Extra staff were drafted, and unbeknownst to the tuxedo-clad audience, among their number, suitably attired, were ten detectives, on hand in case the so-called Phantom of the Opera decided to strike again. To no one’s surprise, the performance, while hugely emotional for everyone concerned, passed off uneventfully.

  The next morning, Gross began his full autopsy. It would last all day. At its conclusion, he revealed his findings. First, Helen had been alive when hurled down the air shaft. Confounding earlier rumors that she had been strangled, he reported that “the cause of death was multiple fractures of the skull, ribs and bones of the lower extremities…There were also contusions of the lungs. The skull fractures and other fatal injuries were the result of the fall from the roof to the ledge.” After noting that “her hands were bound behind her back and her ankles were bound together,” he refused to identify the items used to bind her. He was also deliberately noncommittal when asked whether Helen had been raped. However, at a separate press conference, Richard Nicastro, the NYPD’s chief of detectives in Manhattan, did reveal that in a private conversation Gross said there was “no evidence of any sexual molestation.”

  By day’s end one of the largest detective forces assembled in living memory for a single Manhattan homicide—more than fifty strong—was scouring every inch of the Met for further clues. All indicators pointed to a killer familiar with the bewildering backstage maze of corridors, tunnels, cul-de-sacs, dressing rooms, offices, storerooms, stairwells, entrances, and elevators.

  One by one, the clues began to reveal themselves. On the third-floor landing of a rear staircase someone found a pen. On the next flight of stairs, just before the fourth floor, there was a hair clip. Both items were identified as belonging to the victim. Beside the pen lay a Marlboro cigarette butt. This, too, was bagged and sent for analysis. The gag used on Helen provided a strong lead. Of the two white napkins used, one was traced to the only bar and restaurant at the Met that stayed open during the summer.

  By midafternoon on July 26, more than 350 persons with access to the backstage area—performers, musicians, stagehands, makeup artists, security guards, and maintenance men—had been interviewed. It was an impressive achievement until one realized that another one thousand employees remained to be seen! Most interviews were conducted at an ad hoc precinct station set up in the atrium at the center. It was a slow, grinding process, checking, cross-checking, and in some cases reinterviewing possible witnesses. Then came a major breakthrough: someone backstage had seen Helen just
after 9:30 P.M., after she had left the locker room. Furthermore, the witness had also seen a man near Helen at the same time.

  The police were unusually coy about divulging details of this witness or the information provided, saying only that she had provided a description of the man sufficiently detailed for a police artist to make a worthwhile sketch. Pointedly, the officers in charge of the investigation refused to release this sketch to the press in case it led to their being buried beneath an avalanche of false leads.

  Gross, meanwhile, was finding out firsthand just how intense being the CME in New York could be. Reporters, spurred on by frantic editors desperate to outdo each other in a circulation war that had broken out over Manhattan’s most notorious homicide in decades, were jumping all over Gross for more autopsy details. Most of their questions centered on the gag and what part—if any—it had played in Helen’s death. Had she been suffocated? Perhaps taking his lead from the police investigators, Gross was notably evasive. “That was a factor,” he said. “But I just don’t want to go into further details on it. This is a complicated case.” This was a strange response, one that troubled some medico-legal experts. Later, and protected by the cloak of anonymity, they shared their concerns with reporters. Suffocation was, by definition, a cause of death, and Gross had already concluded that Helen had died from injuries suffered in the fall. Now he seemed to be hedging his bets. They agreed it was not always possible to determine if a victim had been suffocated, particularly if injuries sufficient to prove fatal were sustained afterward, as only about half of all suffocation cases show the trademark pinpoint hemorrhages in the whites of the eyes and on the face. But Gross definitely seemed to be muddying the waters. The next day brought no respite for Gross. Now the reporters wanted him to nail down the time of death. Gross put it at between 9:30 P.M. and midnight. He based this on the last time she had been seen alive and the condition of food in her digestive system. This indicated that she had eaten no more than six hours before her death, and since she was known to have eaten at 6:00 P.M. this gave him the later figure. Gross also confirmed what hitherto had been widely rumored: laboratory tests had revealed no evidence of rape. Pressed as to whether there was evidence of any other kind of sexual assault, he stressed that the body had been found naked and added, “I’ll leave it at that.” His investigation, he said, was ongoing, and would include blood tests, a search for material under the victim’s fingernails and hair fibers at the scene, and other possibly significant technical matter. Beyond that he wasn’t prepared to commit himself.

  While Gross took the media heat, behind the scenes, away from the cameras, notebooks, and clamoring questions, the forensic investigation moved quietly forward uncovering more clues. On the rear staircase where the pen and clip had been discovered, dark splotches, possibly blood, were found. Samples were taken and sent for analysis.

  It was tough, arduous work and the pressure was remorseless. Some on the detective task force worked the case for three days straight, showering and catnapping at the station house, then back to the Met and the relentless rounds of interviewing. Others had to deal with the inevitable slew of crank letters. One, more imaginative than most and written in two lines similar to a music stave, was duplicated and sent to the Times and the Post. It declared that “to solve the opera murder case go no further than the evil bass” and was signed, “Vibrato the Great.”

  Exhausted detectives preferred to pin their hopes on more traditional methods. And right now all eyes were on the backstage witness. This approach, though, was generating a whole new set of problems. Laura Cutler, an American-born dancer with the Berlin Ballet, had seen someone; she just wasn’t sure who. At about 9:40 P.M., after dancing the first ballet, she had decided to take elevator 12 down to a basement practice room. As she awaited the elevator’s arrival, two people approached from her left. When shown photographs of the victim, she had no doubts that the woman was Helen Hagnes; her only recollection of the man was that he was nondescript. Once inside the elevator, Helen had turned to her and asked, “Where is Mr. Panov’s dressing room?” Before she could answer, the man interjected, “On three.” Understandably Laura thought no more of it and when the elevator reached her practice room on C level—the lowest of the ten floors—she exited, leaving Helen and the mystery man in the elevator together. The vagueness of the description given by Laura prompted investigators to ask if she would undergo hypnosis to help her recall. She readily agreed.

  With a history rooted in medieval sorcery and magic, hypnosis continues to baffle to this day. Various researchers have put forth differing theories of what hypnosis is and how it could be understood, but there is currently still no generally accepted explanatory theory for the trancelike state. Its scientific use began with Franz Mesmer, a late-eighteenth-century Viennese physician who used it in the treatment of patients. Mesmer’s mistaken belief that it was an occult force, which he termed “animal magnetism,” that flowed through the hypnotist into the subject, led to his being quickly discredited; but “mesmerism,” as it was first called, continued to fascinate medical practitioners. In the middle of the nineteenth century, it was an English physician named James Braid who, after studying the phenomenon, coined the terms hypnotism and hypnosis.

  A couple of decades later, hypnosis began to be accepted by the medical mainstream, especially in France. One visitor to Paris impressed by hypnotism’s possibilities was the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud. On his return to Vienna, he used hypnosis to help neurotics recall disturbing events buried deep in their subconscious that they had apparently forgotten. But he was dissatisfied with the results and soon abandoned hypnosis as a psychiatric tool in favor of free association.

  Despite Freud’s influential rejection of hypnosis, some use was made of the technique in the treatment of soldiers with combat neuroses during the two world wars, and it has subsequently acquired various other limited uses in medicine.

  The use of hypnosis as a crime-fighting tool didn’t gain any kind of serious foothold until the 1970s. Even then it was a struggle. Investigators and courts alike questioned whether it was possible, or even desirable, for witnesses to have their memories “refreshed” by hypnosis. An early proponent of the technique was an NYPD officer, Detective Charles Diggett, and in the late 1970s he won over many skeptics with his intervention in the “Son of Sam” murders. Diggett seemed the obvious choice to hypnotize Laura Cutler. But the best description she could manage was disappointingly vague. She recalled the man in the elevator as being between twenty and thirty years old, slightly taller than herself (five feet seven and a half inches), and that his hair was “not very thick, not very wavy.” As she later put it, “I know only that he was not black. I was certain about that. I really noticed almost nothing about him.” She constantly emphasized these doubts to Diggett, along with her nagging fear that the man she described while under hypnosis may not have been the man she saw on the night in question.

  Despite Laura’s misgivings, a sketch was compiled from her recollections and shown to members of the Met staff. Many felt it looked familiar but few could put a name to the face, and those that did invariably came up with different candidates. In their determination to leave no stone unturned, detectives even flew the sketch down to Washington, D.C., where the Berlin Ballet was continuing its U.S. tour. All they got in return were blank stares. No one recognized the face.

  Treating a working building the size of the Met as a crime scene proved to be a logistical nightmare. But on August 3, eleven days after the murder, the investigators achieved a significant breakthrough. Close to the bottom of a cooling tower, two levels below the backstage area, they discovered two items: a tampon and a paper napkin stained with semen. The napkin was found stuffed in a pipe and the tampon lay nearby on a staircase on B level, a complex of work and rehearsal rooms one floor beneath the orchestra pit. Both items were sent for analysis to Dr. Robert C. Shaler, a biologist who’d recently joined the OCME after having previously worked at the Aerospace Corpo
ration.

  The finding of the tampon was especially significant as Gross’s autopsy showed that at the time of her death Helen had been in a menstrual cycle. Even more excitement surrounded the discovery of the semen-stained napkin. Although Gross had seen no visible evidence of rape—a finding confirmed by Shaler’s declaration that he could find no trace of semen either in or on the body—neither result swayed the police from their conviction that the crime had been sexually motivated. And finding the napkin only seemed to reinforce that suspicion. Nowadays, such a piece of evidence would be hugely, maybe even decisively important, but in 1980 genetic profiling was in its infancy, with the miracle of DNA fingerprinting almost a decade away. The technology of the time restricted scientists to a rudimentary, though still telling, form of analysis that could yield the killer’s blood type, his race, and a whole host of genetic characteristics that would distinguish him from more than 95 percent of the population. All this, of course, was predicated on the presumption that the semen-stained napkin actually came from the killer. There was always the possibility that the napkin might be the legacy of some other sexual encounter or experience.

  As the questioning proceeded, the parameters widened: now, anyone who had been on the Met payroll since January 1, 1980—a total of twenty-six hundred people—was drawn into the interview net.