Coroner Stories

The following is an expanded version of Item 4 on my “Top 10 Unique Things I’ve Done�? list:

After one of the heavier rainstorms in recent history, a hunter found a body in a field in a remote part of the county. The body fit the description of an area man whose car was found stuck in the mud less than a mile away from where the body was found. Most of the roads in the area had dirt as a key ingredient which had been turned into mud over the course of the preceding week. A deputy had noticed the car the day before, but assumed that the driver had simply gotten out and went for help.

The lead investigator who reported the discovery informed me that they weren’t exactly sure what they had on their hands. A search of the car earlier in the day produced some drug paraphernalia and a small amount of white crystalline substance. There were no marks indicating that the body had been dragged into the field. Neither the area around the car nor the area around the body showed any signs of a struggle.

Even though the rain had finally moved out of the area, the roads were still in pretty bad shape. Fortunately, they had recovered just enough that I was able to slide my way from the main roads to where the patrol cars were located without too much difficulty. A deputy approached as I got out of my car, wrote my name on his scene log, and pointed me in the direction of a brand new Ford Explorer.

The driver introduced himself as the person I had spoken to on the phone. He then informed me that the body was located a few hundred yards into the field. There was a dirt trail leading in, but it was in worse shape than the roads were, so we’d have to walk the rest of the way. He had no new information to pass on about how the man ended up in the field, but the predominant theory was that he was attempting a shortcut across the field. As long as I would be able to rule out any trauma, the theory would hold for the time being.

Fortunately for everyone involved, I wasn’t able to find any signs of trauma to the body. It was dark and growing colder, and I got the impression that everyone was ready to go home long before I arrived. We bagged the body and dragged it back out along the muddy trail which seemed ten times longer than it had going in. When we finally reached where the vehicles were parked, we learned that the ambulance service that volunteered to transport the body was stuck in the mud just off of the main road. Rather than wait for the ambulance to be rescued, I proposed putting the body on the hood of my car and driving it to where the ambulance was located.

At first, the lead investigator seemed reluctant to go along with my suggestion. I did what I could to ease his mind by pointing out that it was dark and there were no civilians or camera crews around. I finished by politely suggesting the only other option was to put the mud covered body bag into the back of his new Explorer. Within seconds, I had a body on the hood of my car.

The following is an expanded version of Item 5 on my “Top 10 Unique Things I’ve Done�? list:

One evening I was called to a residence where a man apparently shot his wife and child before turning the gun on himself. Witnesses at the house next door were in the garage when the wife returned home. The wife entered the house and within a few moments witnesses reportedly heard shouting followed by two loud noises. A neighbor called 911 after approaching the front door of the house and seeing the husband and wife lying on the floor of the foyer. When police arrived at the scene, they found a 12 gauge shotgun positioned under the man. They also found the body of a 3 year-old face down on a child’s sleeping bag in the floor of the living room with an obvious head wound.

As is usually the case, my role at the scene was to examine the bodies and make sure that my observations were consistent with what investigating officers believed had occurred. Initially investigators believed that all three people were killed by the same gun, so it was my duty to make sure that there were no fatal wounds other than the obvious close contact shotgun wounds. If I had found a semiautomatic or revolver wound with no such weapon in the house, then the officers would have had to rethink the scope of their investigation.

In this particular instance, the investigators were especially interested in any details I could provide that would indicate whether or not the child had been shot before the mother returned home.

If I were a television character, I would have had some sort of infrared camera with the ability to provide accurate body temperatures. Using it, I would have been able to determine that the child’s body temperature had cooled to 95 degrees while the mother’s was still at 98 degrees. I would have used those readings to state conclusively that the man shot the child two hours before he shot the mother. In reality, the location of the child and the mother made their body temperatures virtually irrelevant. The child was located on a carpeted, inner part of the house that was several degrees warmer than the tiled foyer where the mother was located. A child’s smaller body mass also means that the rate of cooling differs from a full grown adult.

After the scene was properly documented, I collected as many skull fragments as I could locate. I was able to offer a few observations, but nothing to help establish sequence. The majority of the fragments were spread over a 360-degree area leading me to believe that the father was standing over the child aiming straight down. The devastation to the cranial vault was so severe that even after some reassembly I could only assume the shotgun was fired at close range based on there being no pellet damage to the neck or back area. I found a few pellets among the tissue that was still present at the head area of the child. Most of the pellets were later recovered from the sleeping bag and carpet under the bag.

Ultimately, investigators relied on eyewitness accounts to help piece together the sequence of events. Based on the two loud sounds that the neighbors heard, they concluded the first shot would have likely occurred before the mother got home. Presumably the house would have still been closed before the mother arrived and the child was shot at a more central location in the house, so the shot would have been more muffled if it was heard at all.

As much as I would have liked to provide physical evidence as to which had been shot first, anything I could have offered would have been a gross misrepresentation of my abilities. In the grand scheme of things, I suppose it didn’t really matter who was shot first. In hindsight it mattered because ultimately a report detailing the most likely sequence of events would be generated. It would certainly matter to family members who would have an interest in what happened.

Looking back, I suspect that the investigators were primarily concerned about whether the mother had watched her child die or vice versa because they were trying to make sense of the whole event—as though understanding exactly what happened was a tangible alternative to understanding why it happened.

When I talk to people about death investigation, I usually don’t go into a lot of detail about things I have done or seen. Their imagination seems to have given them a much more graphic impression about what my job entails. Most everyone assumes the job is stressful simply because of the routine exposure to traumatic and unnatural deaths. I used to assume the same, but I have since learned that one of the most stressful aspects of this job has nothing to do with gore.

When I first started out, one of the most appealing aspects of death investigation was the element of unpredictability. I never knew where and when the next death was going to occur or what the circumstances surrounding the death were going to be.

This aspect also leads to a great deal of variation from day to day. Some days are non-stop and seemingly never ending as I go from one death to the next. Many times I’ve gone all day without a single death being reported, and within minutes of crawling into bed I’ve been called with multiple scenes on opposite sides of the city that have kept me out the rest of the night. Most days I may not have to do anything during my shift. That sounds great—for me and for the public at large—but sitting around essentially waiting for someone to die is an awkwardness that escapes description.

Never knowing what I was in store for on any given day was once the most exciting aspect of this job, but it wasn’t long before the “honeymoon�? was over. Now the most exciting aspect has become the most annoying aspect.

Years later I find myself fantasizing while I’m driving to a self-inflicted shotgun wound at three in the morning. I fantasize about what it must be like to be a normal person with a normal job. The kind of person that goes to sleep after the 11 o’clock news and—bladder notwithstanding—stays asleep until the alarm goes off in the morning. The kind of person that goes to work and comes home from work at the same time everyday. The kind of person that when they get home, they stay home. I even find myself fantasizing about what people with normal jobs fantasize about.

Blood and guts aside, death investigation was—and continues to be—the antithesis of what I consider to be a “normal�? job. The kind of job where a person produces something tangible or at the very least goes to work with established tasks to accomplish. Instead I feel like an auto mechanic that was hired to respond to every car breakdown in the city wherever and whenever one occurs. Like a conventional auto mechanic, I can make diagnostic impressions, but unlike an auto mechanic, every vehicle I look at is beyond repair.

The following is an expanded version of Item 6 on my “Top 10 Unique Things I’ve Done�? list:

I’m often told that I have one of the most unique jobs there is, but it isn’t exempt from a characteristic common to any other job. Even death investigation becomes routine to a certain degree after an extended period of time. Eventually, the only scenes that are really exciting are those where the situation is new or at the very least it’s a variation of a situation already experienced.

It’s necessary to point out that aspect of the job to help explain how excited I was the first time I was called out on a fully suspended hanging. Prior to that call, I had worked two-dozen or so hanging suicides, but in each case the individual had some part of their body in contact with the ground, floor, or other object.

Many people envision a scene from an old western when they picture a hanging—a gallows with a sudden stop at the end of a rope designed to result in immediate death. As a result, most people I have talked to about hangings are surprised to learn that so many bodies are found in a standing, kneeling, or sitting position. Loved ones of the deceased are especially surprised to learn that a hanging rarely involves a broken neck or a collapsed windpipe.

To explain the mechanism of death, I’ll use one of the more common scenarios I have investigated. I’ve worked at least six hangings where the individual committed suicide using a belt ligature fastened to a clothes rod in a closet. In each of these cases, some part of the lower body was in contact with the floor.

Once the ligature was in place, the individual passed out as a result of a lack of oxygenated blood to the brain. At no point was there enough force to result in a fracture of the vertebrae or the hyoid bone nor was there any restriction of the airway.

The point at which the person loses consciousness is no different than in a “sleeper hold.�? The major difference between “choking someone out�? and a hanging is that there is no release of pressure on the neck allowing blood to flow into the head again.

Once the person has passed out and “gone limp,�? the weight of the body continues to hold the neck against the ligature—continuing to occlude the arteries and subsequently to deprive the brain of oxygenated blood. Oftentimes, the lungs are getting plenty of oxygen, but there is no longer a means for transporting it above the ligature. The body begins to convulse with agonal respirations, but eventually brain and cardiac function cease altogether.

In this particular case, two teenagers were walking through a wooded area when they spotted a body hanging six feet above the ground from a tree limb. At first they thought it was a practical joke or perhaps a prop left over from some Halloween “Haunted Forest�? attraction, so they ignored it. One of the boys told his father who was curious enough to see it for himself. He immediately called 911 when he realized it was no fake.

After documenting the scene and obtaining what little information there was to obtain on an unidentified body in the woods, the issue of removing the body came up. Needless to say, volunteers are hard to come by when tree climbing is required. Officers at the scene volunteered to call out the local fire station to help get the body down. Presented with the options of waiting for the fire department to show up with a ladder or climb the tree, I elected to climb the tree. I wanted to reserve calling in a favor from the fire department for when I really need them.

I scrambled up the tree to a point just above the limb on which the rope was tied. I was afraid that adding weight to the same limb that the deceased was suspended from might prove doubly fatal, or at the very least incredibly painful for one of us.

I was a little unnerved at the fact that the officers on the ground where now standing a little further back than they previously had been. I pulled out my trusty “Leatherman�? pocket tool and prepared to cut the rope.

One of the officers—to the poorly masked dismay of the others—asked if I wanted them to catch the body.

I knew the ground would take care of that, so I declined the offer but added, “If you’re going to catch anything, I’d rather it be me.�?