Blood On The Table Page 11
Around him, Gonzales had amassed a formidable team of scientists and pathologists. There was Gettler, of course, who headed up the chemical and toxicology lab, and Dr. Alexander E. Wiener, a specialist in serology. Dr. Charles Umberger took care of spectrography and microscopy. The pathology side was equally distinguished. Dr. Morgan Vance was the Deputy CME in charge of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Richmond. In Brooklyn and Queens, it was Gonzales’s longtime colleague, Dr. M. Edward Marten, who held sway. Responsibility for the city morgue in Manhattan resided in the more than capable hands of Dr. Milton Helpern.
It had been thirty years since the OCME was founded, and in that time it had grown enormously in size, skill, and influence to become the preeminent forensic facility in the world. Just about the only factor that hadn’t kept pace was the age-old problem of funding. Gonzales was expected to run the OCME, with its seventy-seven-strong staff, all on an annual budget of just $321,165.
And there were other concerns. In 1948 Gonzales reached the age of seventy, the mandatory retirement age for his position. A special dispensation from the mayor, William O’Dwyer, had granted him a two-year extension, and in 1950 that extension had been renewed. When the favor was repeated for a third time in 1952, inevitably it triggered a certain restlessness among some of the younger staff. Complaints, whispered at first, then much louder, began to circulate that it was time for Gonzales to step aside. Coincidentally it was around this time that inflammatory articles began appearing in the press, alleging mismanagement and even fraud at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
The problems came to light following the death of ten-year-old Roy Behanan at Kew Gardens General Hospital in Queens following a routine minor operation on April 4, 1952. Cause of death was attributed to an adverse reaction to the anesthetic used, sodium pentothal. This didn’t satisfy Roy’s father, K. T. Behanan, an Indian employee at the UN secretariat, who demanded access to the hospital records. What he found led to two doctors being charged with manslaughter (they were eventually cleared). More disturbingly for the OCME, in delving through the records, Behanan discovered that the assistant ME for Queens, Dr. Jacob Werne, appeared, literally, to have developed a split personality. According to simultaneous reports signed by Werne, he had performed autopsies at two different hospitals at the same date and time.
When Gonzales called in Werne and asked for an explanation, the veteran assistant shamefacedly admitted that owing to pressure of work, he had taken to signing death certificates without actually conducting an autopsy. Werne’s wife, Dr. Irene Garrow, also a pathologist who had acted as assisting CME, tried to fend off media hostility by saying that her husband had performed the “crucial” parts of the autopsies at both hospitals but that he had delegated the “routine” beginning or end of the autopsy to other, junior pathologists.
Although Gonzales had some sympathy for Werne—he realized the crushing burden that each of his assistants was expected to bear—he could not countenance or tolerate such grave dereliction of duty. He issued a final warning. Werne had reached the apex of his career when he gave evidence at the 1950 trial of the notorious “Lonely Hearts” killers, Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, but since that time he had begun cutting corners. The press wouldn’t let go. They ran stories that as many as fourteen other cases that Werne had signed off on were being investigated for impropriety. On November 5, 1953, Gonzales decided to pull the plug; he summoned Werne and demanded his resignation. Werne, a man of immense integrity who had temporarily buckled under pressure of work, cleared his desk and left.
This incident had hit Gonzales hard. He was now seventy-six years old and already had received three two-year extensions over the mandatory retirement age. The murmurings from those below had become too loud to ignore. In February 1954, he called a press conference and announced his retirement, saying, “I think that’s enough.”
The following month, a Queens grand jury delivered what should have been the last word on the Werne affair. It found that Werne had “consistently and flagrantly disregarded legal requirements for the conduct of autopsies, despite warnings from Dr. Gonzales.” Werne might have been slipshod, the grand jury decided, but in the absence of unlawful intent, it decided that remedial rather than criminal action was required. So far as Werne was concerned, the verdict came as scant relief. After leaving the OCME he had signed on as a lieutenant colonel at the medical laboratory of the Army’s Chemical Corps Arsenal at Edgewood, Maryland, and at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal at Denver, Colorado, where he directed research on gases and diseases. But everywhere he went, the black dog of depression was his constant and unwelcome companion. On April 14, 1955, while on leave from the army, he took the cord from a bathroom robe, tied it to the hinge of the bedroom door at his home in Jamaica, Queens, and hanged himself. He was age forty-nine.
The following day, a twenty-seven-year-old former aide of Werne’s, named Robert Mincey, was found unconscious by his wife on the kitchen floor of their Queens home, having swallowed a handful of sleeping tablets with all the gas jets on the stove open. Fortunately, he was revived in hospital and later discharged. Mincey’s background was checkered. In 1950, soon after he became a lab assistant to Werne, the State of Georgia sought to extradite him as a fugitive from justice. He had apparently escaped from the Atlanta prison farm after serving part of a one-year sentence for grand larceny. Werne not only stood bail for Mincey, but he also paid for a lawyer, and the extradition attempt failed. Mincey repaid Werne with unswerving loyalty. The Werne tragedy undoubtedly cast a wholly undeserved pall over the OCME in the final years of Gonzales’s stewardship. During his nineteen-year tenure, he had built on the bedrock laid by Norris and made the OCME the technological and scientific envy of the world. Successes such as the Titterton and Almodovar cases are the reason why many refer to this as the Golden Age for forensic science in America. Gonzales had much to be proud of when he officially left office on May 1, 1954, and in his wake, there was none of the bureaucratic shilly-shallying that had marred his own accession. This time the crown prince had already been anointed.
THREE
A TOWERING PRESENCE
“When the recent history of legal medicine comes to be written…the name of Milton Helpern will tower above those of his fellows.” So wrote the celebrated British pathologist Professor Keith Simpson about the man who took over as the chief medical examiner on April 19, 1954. This was no empty platitude. Milton Helpern, a rumpled bear of a man, was a colossus in the field of forensic science. Simpson might have performed more autopsies than anyone else in history—well over one hundred thousand by his own calculation—but he knew that when it came to ferreting out and cataloging homicide in all its infinite variety, the tailor’s son from East Harlem was in a league apart.
Helpern’s origins were as blue collar as it gets. His father, Moses, cut cloth for ten hours a day, six days a week, at a factory in Lower Manhattan’s garment district. It was a tough life, but no tougher than that endured by millions of others at the dawn of the twentieth century, and it allowed Moses and his wife, Bertha, to raise four boys and a girl in a tenement house on 114th Street. This was where Milton, the middle of the five children, was born on April 17, 1902. When asked later about his childhood, he would shrug and say it was nothing out of the ordinary, just a good, solid working-class upbringing. Similarly, at school early on his grades were unremarkable, with nothing to single out the youngster from the pack. But all that changed in his teens. Science was the key that unlocked Helpern’s future. His interest had been kindled in an offbeat way; around age twelve he became fascinated by the activity and habits of fruit flies, and after they died, he often stored them in the family icebox for future study. Hand in hand with this avocation went a love of photography. It became his lifelong passion. He learned how to convert the bathroom into a photographic darkroom and was soon producing his own black-and-white prints. As his grades improved and Helpern neared the end of his time at Townsend High School, he weighed his options. In one respec
t, he was extraordinarily fortunate. Had he been born just a couple of years earlier, he would probably have been shipped off to the killing fields of western Europe where the armies of the world were blowing each other to bits with technological relish. As it was, just a month or so before the Armistice was signed, the sixteen-year-old Helpern entered City College, where he majored in biology. Early on, an unsettling experience while observing an operation at Roosevelt Hospital, with its smells of ether and disinfectant, and the quick, slicing scalpel of the surgeon, proved altogether too much for the young intern and he left hurriedly, convinced he was not cut out for the medical life. (This queasiness was not unique to Helpern. Keith Simpson freely confessed that he had no stomach for the traumas of the living, hence his devotion to forensic pathology). For the remainder of his time at City College, Helpern’s career aspirations were hazy, so much so that when he emerged with a bachelor of science degree tucked under his arm, he more or less drifted back into medicine, gaining a place at the Cornell University Medical College. By day, he hit the books; at night, he taught biology to pay his way through college. It was a tough schedule, but on June 11, 1926, all that study paid off when he graduated as an MD. From there he became an intern at the Cornell Medical Division of Bellevue Hospital. Like Simpson, Helpern too plumped for the causes of illness rather than its treatment. As he put it, from now on it was “pathology all the way.”
He’d heard rumors on the grapevine that Bellevue was on the verge of establishing a new surgical pathology laboratory. It looked like a fantastic opportunity. But then the Great Depression hit. Suddenly funding for the new facility disappeared overnight. Like just about everyone in America at this time, Helpern was forced to sip from a rapidly shrinking pool of career choices. Once again fortune smiled kindly upon him. During his residency at Bellevue, he had brushed shoulders with the forensic medical examiners—since everyone connected with pathology shared the same mortuary facilities on the second floor, they were hard to avoid—and foremost among these was Dr. Charles Norris.
Norris’s colorful personality acted as a magnet for young students. They were particularly partial to his legendary beer-drinking sessions. Two or three nights a week, behind locked doors, favored interns could debate medical questions with the maestro, while sinking gallons of Prohibition-era beer. How much they could remember the next day depended, of course, on their constitution, but Helpern was a regular attendee who always came back for more. The two men hit it off immediately. Although Norris recognized Helpern’s obvious talent, like most at Bellevue he thought the young man was destined for surgical pathology. So did Helpern. But with job opportunities looking bleak and a Civil Service examination for the post of assistant medical examiner in the pipeline, a colleague urged Helpern to apply. It wasn’t a position that held any great appeal—Helpern still harbored dreams that the clinical post would be revived—but when it became quite clear that this had indeed been abandoned, Helpern swallowed his pride and sat the exam. He passed and on April 15, 1931, joined Norris’s staff as assistant medical examiner.
With the ink hardly dry on his contract, Helpern received a body blow. Budget cuts at the OCME led to his starting salary of forty-one hundred dollars being slashed to thirty-eight hundred dollars, and the following year it was cut another two hundred dollars. Like just about everyone else on the staff, he wouldn’t have survived without handouts from Norris.
Helpern repaid his boss’s generosity by throwing himself headlong into a hectic schedule, seven days a week at the pace Norris set for himself. He soon learned that what the job lacked in salary, it more than made up for in variety and surprise. Even before taking this position, he had received firsthand experience of just how quirky the medical life can sometimes be. In the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash, the national suicide rate doubled. Lives ruined became lives lost, as victims of the financial carnage opted for self-immolation. Stepping out of hotel windows was a popular option. On May 7, 1930, a Bronx resident, Charles Mayer, added his name to the tragic roll call. He had checked into a sixteenth-floor room at the Governor Clinton Hotel on Seventh Avenue. After writing a brief note, he opened the window and jumped. His body was discovered by hotel employees as it lay on a fifth-floor extension. The contents of the note gave a contact address for Mayer’s brother. Then came a strange codicil. Mayer requested that if his body was sent to Bellevue Hospital, then he wished for Dr. Milton Helpern, an intern at the time, to be notified. When told this, Helpern just scratched his head. He neither knew nor recognized Charles Mayer. Why Mayer had singled out the rookie intern for this unusual request was a mystery that would baffle Helpern for the rest of his life.
Another mystery that Helpern did solve was the source of a malaria outbreak that suddenly hit New York City a couple of years after he joined the OCME. Surprisingly, malaria has been a recurring problem in the United States throughout most of its history,* but the strain that struck down fourteen people in December 1933 was of a type rarely seen in latitudes as far north as New York. Nine of those victims died and found their way to Helpern’s mortuary table. Judging from the victims’ generally poor physical condition, and the needle tracks on the arms, Helpern suspected that all had been drug addicts. This was confirmed by narcotics officers. They also told him something interesting. In recent weeks the strength of street heroin had declined significantly. For desperate addicts who craved the same high as before, this meant abandoning their pipes and reaching for the hypodermic. Helpern knew he was on to something. Sure enough, all fourteen victims had mainlined from the same needle. From this, Helpern deduced that one of the junkies must have been carrying the malaria parasite, which was then transmitted to the others. Thanks to Helpern, and prompt treatment with quinine, New York’s mysterious malaria outbreak was nipped in the bud.
Medical breakthroughs such as this did not go unnoticed, and in January 1935 Helpern was invited to join the New York University faculty as lecturer in forensic medicine. That same year he investigated a case that would have resonance for the OCME almost four decades later.* At about 5:00 A.M. on October 29, a twenty-six-year-old meat cutter named Theodore Plona was found sprawled in the hallway at 501 West Fortieth Street, a tenement building, where he lived with his wife, Theresa. An ambulance surgeon called to the scene diagnosed a possible fractured skull, with many other bruises and lacerations. He also thought that Plona had been drinking heavily. When the unconscious man’s trouser pockets were turned inside out, the only possession on his person was the latchkey that let him into the hallway. From this the police concluded that he had been set upon by a gang of hoodlums, beaten and robbed. Plano died at 11:04 A.M. without regaining consciousness. Only when Helpern performed an autopsy did the true cause of death come to light: one small caliber bullet in the victim’s head, another in his back. As we shall see elsewhere, bullet wounds can be extraordinarily tricky to find, especially if the gun used is a low-power weapon that doesn’t leave any exit wound. On this occasion, Helpern had nothing but sympathy for the hard-pressed ambulance surgeon. In all the blood and the chaos, two tiny bullet wounds were easy to miss because they were so well concealed. Helpern’s discovery was the only ray of light in this otherwise murky case. The killer was never caught.
At the other end of the social spectrum, just two weeks later, Helpern became involved in the first major case of his career, when he autopsied Fritz Gebhardt, who had been shot by his lover, Vera Stretz (see chapter 2). When Stretz stood trial for murder the following spring and Helpern took the stand, he gave the jury an early indication of the lucidity and straightforwardness that would impress courtrooms for decades to come. There were no highfalutin medical phrases, no jargon, no self-aggrandizing attempts to impress, just simple easy-to-understand explanations of the issues involved. He also sent a stark and unequivocal message about his independence. One newspaper noted peevishly: “Although called by the State, Doctor Helpern failed to go as far as the prosecution wished.” This single sentence summed up the Helpern credo: a
point-blank refusal to embellish the facts, no matter how important the trial or how great the pressure. Unlike some medical examiners, he didn’t see himself as an arm of the judiciary or a prosecution pawn; he was purely a man of science, there to give his opinion on the evidence as he saw it.
In following this strategy, Helpern was merely echoing the maxims of his new boss. Dr. Thomas Gonzales had no doubts about his young assistant’s ability. Indeed, it was Helpern who provided much of the input—and virtually all of the photographs—for their joint work, Legal Medicine and Toxicology, the epic reference book that Helpern continued to edit right into the 1950s.
And Helpern certainly had no shortage of unusual case material on which to draw. For instance, in 1941, he had to deal with the case of The Man Who Strangled Himself. Mehment Ali Yukselen had been the Turkish consul general in New York City for four years and for most of that time he had suffered from a painful heart condition. As the condition worsened, his depression grew blacker. Around 5:00 A.M. on the morning of September 21, his wife, in an adjacent bedroom, heard him stirring rather noisily but thought no more about it. When Yukselen had not appeared by lunchtime, his wife and a consul employee broke down the door. They found Yukselen lying in bed. Around his neck were two ties, knotted together. With these he had slowly garroted himself to death. On a night table next to the bed lay a note. It gave the address of a priest and said, “Let him bury me in a very simple way with the money which was in the pocket of the suit I wore yesterday.” Detectives found $401 in the pocket. When skeptical reporters quizzed Helpern over the bizarre nature of Yukselen’s demise, he told them it was entirely possible for someone to choke himself to death in such a manner, particularly if he had a weak heart.