Blood Beneath My Feet: The Journey of a Southern Death Investigator Read online

  Plus, his old chair reminded me of the ways I had fallen short. When Papaw had died in Louisiana in 1983, I had been living in Georgia, a senior in high school. Out of hatred for my biological father’s family, my stepfather had forbidden me to attend Papaw’s funeral. His chair accused me every time I glanced at it. If it had been me who had died, Papaw would have found a way to come, even if by horseback.

  For all the men I encountered in my younger years, Papaw influenced me the most. From him, I learned that life was hard and that hard work didn’t necessarily guarantee a big paycheck, just more hard work the next day. Instead, his reward was at home, where he could be the kind of man the twentieth century prohibited him from being—independent, respected, powerful in his own right.

  Papaw’s time away from work more than likely involved more work. Whether in his four-acre garden or tending to his horses or mules, he always labored. He was much more at home in a saddle or cracking a plow line than he was sitting in front of a television set. The man was the last of his friends to abandon the mule and turn to a tractor. He always smelled of sweat and Prince Albert tobacco.

  I lost an understanding of his way of life when I reached adulthood. I abandoned the memories of my grandfather’s horse stables and the joys of sitting with him as he spoke of noodling for catfish. Papaw had achieved equilibrium within his world, whether it was with the horses he loved or the other men he horse-traded with, but I dismissed it all as provincial and out of step with what should define me as a man. Instead, I turned my eyes toward the forensic pathologists I served in my work. I sat in their presence daily, perhaps expecting their words to act as my own burning bush.

  At first, I reveled in their eccentricities. Anyone both this bizarre and this intelligent had to have a wealth of valuable advice. That and they had to have a deep comfort level with life and how to navigate its troubled waters. Of course my assumptions were utterly wrong. For everything my Papaw was, they were not. The physicians I encountered never attained symbiosis. They constantly remained in conflict throughout their careers. The value they attributed to themselves and their work was in direct disagreement with how others perceived them.

  Yes, Howard Morgan was backward and uneducated, but he had an understanding of his own life that never translated well when compared to the broader world. Despite my grandfather’s ignorance, he had achieved what most forensic pathologists obtain only weakly after years of education—an innate surety about himself. It was not a trait contrived through higher education or international recognition, but something only a few men embody. Physicians, I found, attempted to wear that same coat of self-assurance but it translated instead as arrogance. They believed the world should bend at their command, that I—one of the common folk—should happily defer to their worldview, no matter how skewed it might be.

  Consider a large handful of people who are bright enough to make high undergraduate grades and good enough to get into medical school. They toil away for four years, learning techniques and studying books, absorbing more and more as they progress. Some of them may begin to perceive themselves as different from those who have not mastered their same knowledge. They, instead, believe themselves to be greater and others lesser. When those few emerge with an MD, eight years out of high school, someone hangs a doctoral hood around their neck and confirms their self-assessment, proclaiming them greater. They are suddenly gods who think they know what others only wish they knew.

  This is one benchmark on a longer journey. Further along the way, a certain few of these MDs discover something about themselves. They hate their patients. They have little tolerance for endless questions or complaints and no talent for bedside manner. So they opt for another universe. They become pathologists.

  Their residency will be where they can safely learn about disease while seated behind a microscope. But still there are those damn irritating humans. No, not the nurses, the orderlies, or the sick, but the peons who occupy the medical labs with them, the technicians, those who have a different list of questions for them or require their signature on a form.

  This particular brand of pathologist—now more eccentric and isolated than ever—can never escape far enough. Yet they still expect to be continually lauded and appreciated. So, in the end, these wispy, rancorous spirits find the morgue. Here, they are not required to say, “You’re going to feel some pressure here,” or “Sir, your tests don’t look good.” Here, all they have to do is field dress bodies and render opinions. Here, they simply hand down decisions without risk of liability.

  I recall a statement one forensic pathologist made to me when he was changing into his work clothes for a day of autopsies: “Well, let’s go make some human canoes.” This is a direct reference to the methods employed during an autopsy. In the chest, the breastbone is removed either with an agitating saw or limb shears. Then the body is divested of all of its contents, leaving nothing but a hollow shell. A body after this procedure, more than anything I can think of, is emblematic of forensic pathologists. It is both grotesque and alluring as well as now a gaping void.

  For me, the best classroom was always an autopsy suite. There, I began to appreciate the form and function of the human body. The secrets of diseases are revealed and the impact of trauma can be more fully understood. But it is in this environment that forensic pathologists reign.

  When I began my career, it was mandated that any coroner investigator also work in the morgue as an autopsy assistant, otherwise known as a diener. This word came to represent for me all that was wrong with forensic pathology. The term has been in use for decades, if not centuries. Its origins are German and when it’s uttered from the lips of a pathologist, it is meant to put you in your place, for the word literally translates as servant.

  I came to understand that this term was not just paying homage to the past but a definition of the hierarchy within the filthy walls of an autopsy room. Once, a co-worker and I were forced to work with a particular forensic pathologist who had burned so many bridges in other ME offices throughout the country that he had ended up with us; his father just happened to be our coroner. Working with him was like walking barefoot on broken lightbulbs. Each of our utterances had to be carefully crafted in order not to be misunderstood and, therefore, cause an argument. The staff was so beset by this man that he was allowed to communicate only by pointing and grunting. This went on for months at a time until he might suddenly decide to bless the staff with a single voiced command.

  His simian-like speech was just one example of how arrogantly above the fray I think many forensic pathologists place themselves. There are better examples in the profession, but unfortunately over the years I’ve found a greater number to forever bias me not in their favor.

  Why are they allowed to get away with so much? I heard one threaten to wipe out an entire office staff with gunfire, a statement considered even more dangerous because many in these offices carry weapons. I’ve actually heard two forensic pathologists arguing over the usefulness of the data gleaned during human experiments performed by Nazi scientists and that this data should be released for modern scientific consideration. And you have not lived until you’ve had a forensic pathologist throw a bloody scalpel at you because its blade was dull.

  At first, my impulsive young man’s wisdom decided these were the examples in my profession I should emulate. Not all the time I spent in their presence was wasted, and it was never dull. Plus, I met a few famous and highly respected forensic pathologists along the way.

  The most notable for me was Dr. William Eckert. He came from New York, where he had played football at New York University before serving in the army during World War II. Bill Eckert was old school. He had worked at the New Orleans coroner’s office after his time in the army and after graduating from Tulane University’s medical school. He had consulted on the Bobby Kennedy assassination and had revisited the Jack the Ripper killings. When I was in his presence, I felt certain he deserved every ounce of respect I could muster.

 
; I had come to know Dr. Eckert through a colleague of mine at the coroner’s office in New Orleans. In his later years, he stepped in to cover cases at our office when the usual staff pathologists were vacationing. So, during those brief appearances, I had the opportunity to work with this giant of forensic science.

  I had acted as diener for other forensic pathologists, but Dr. Eckert was a bit different. Instead of wearing a traditional scrub outfit, he would strip down to his bare chest with his trousers rolled up at their cuffs. He would then don a simple plastic apron and a pair of surgical gloves, and stand alongside the body until I opened it up and eviscerated the organs.

  The first time I worked with Dr. Eckert, I noted something about him that was distinct from any other forensic pathologist I had worked with. As part of his standard array of tools, Dr. Eckert equipped himself for every autopsy with a McDonald’s chocolate milkshake. He would stand there slowly slurping it through a straw, awaiting my extraction of the organs, and when I was finished, he would move over to our scale and an adjacent cork cutting board, where he weighed each organ and performed its subsequent dissection.

  Autopsies, of course, are very bloody affairs. You cut and pull and tug to free up an organ that has been with its owner since birth. Blood is bound to get slung about. It’s on the floor, the table, the instruments, your face, but mostly it’s all over your hands. Anything you touch automatically bears the evidence of contact.

  Slice, slurp. Slice, slurp. Slice, slurp. The milkshake sat right next to his hand on the dissecting table, the McDonald’s logo on the cup covered in Dr. Eckert’s bloody fingerprints. When he finished with an organ, he would pause long enough to take another long tug from the straw then ask me for the next organ in his thick New York accent until the job was completed.

  The first time I saw this ritual, I was repulsed. But after a while I grew numb to it, like so many of the other quirks of forensic pathologists. It’s part of who they are—the ridiculous and the absurd are their norm. I adapted to them because they would not adapt to me.

  After my grandfather died, my grandmother lived alone in that same ramshackle house in Monroe, Louisiana. Papaw’s pasture was overgrown and his horses had all been sold. The barn sat propped there behind the house, even more dilapidated than when Papaw had been alive. I lived in New Orleans then and periodically I made the four-hour trip north to see Granny Pearl and spend a weekend with her.

  It was on one of these weekend visits that I received a page from a colleague. When I called in, the voice on the other end of the line said, “Joe, you are in Monroe right now, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “Actually, Dr. Eckert is in Monroe too and he needs help with an examination. You want to chip in?”

  I put up an argument. I hadn’t had time off in days and I’d set this time aside for my grandmother.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. “But this is Dr. Eckert.” As if not assisting him would violate some sacred church tenet.

  I weighed the price. My elderly grandmother, in the kitchen frying chicken for me, knew nothing of these people. I seldom saw her anymore and she had been looking forward to this visit for a month, which was all that mattered.

  But I agreed. I would be paid seventy-five dollars and have the chance to serve the Great Dr. Eckert. I became a Judas to the woman who had taken care of me as a babe, and she didn’t even know it. At that point in my life, I placed no value on time. I valued instead my work in death investigation and everything it symbolized. Little did I know then that this was the last time I would see my granny frying chicken.

  I tried to explain it to Pearl after I hung up. She didn’t completely understand. “Now why are you going to the colored funeral home?”

  My explanation fell short, of course. To my shame, I had sold a piece of what little time I had left with my grandmother in order to spend time with yet another dead body, whose death meant absolutely nothing to me, and a man who saw me as nothing more than an accessory. To make matters worse, I had to go pick Dr. Eckert up at the airport myself.

  It had been a while since I had seen him. He was a much older man by now and he didn’t look well. There were no more milkshakes from Mickey D’s; he had been diagnosed with diabetes. As I’d expected, I received no thanks from him for picking him up or any recognition that I had made a sacrifice that day. He simply said, “Let’s go.”

  The case was an in-custody death. The victim was a twenty-something black male who had died while in the custody of the local police. He’d been high on drugs and the police had beaten him down in order to subdue him. For weeks his body had lain without burial in the largest black funeral home in Monroe. He was neatly dressed in a suit, his hands classically folded across his chest, but his skin was dry, his eyes sunken.

  When I walked through the door of the prep room, the sickly sweet smell of embalming fluid hit me. Embalmed bodies are particularly disgusting—not in the same sense that decomposed bodies are, but in the way they are preserved. We are cheating God of His natural order. A body remains frozen in time and hard to the touch. The tissue feels like vulcanized rubber. The mouths are wired shut, and hard plastic eye covers are inserted beneath the eyelids to disguise the sinking and shriveling of the eyeball. It always struck me as exceptionally ghoulish because, unlike my profession, the process is absent true science. It’s just a bizarre art.

  I lifted the body from the casket and placed it on the prep table while Dr. Eckert pulled small plastic cases for tissue collection from his briefcase. As I undressed the body, Dr. Eckert stripped off his shirt, which struck me that time as funny, the mimicry of it. I paused for a minute and considered us both. I sensed we had each become something other than what we proclaimed to be. We were, in essence, nothing but buzzards hovering over a carcass, doing nothing more than feasting off the remains of others for our livelihood.

  We dissected every inch of this kid’s body, even his back and the soles of his feet, looking for anything the coroner may have missed in his autopsy. All the while Dr. Eckert collected samples. When we were done, we left the body on the table, and Dr. Eckert said, “Don’t worry about closing. He’s going in the ground right away.”

  As we stepped out of the funeral home, I made the mistake of asking Dr. Eckert when his flight departed.

  “Oh, my flight doesn’t leave for four hours,” he replied. “Let’s just go to your grandmother’s house.”

  What could I say? This was the man who had investigated the death of Bobby Kennedy, the man who had reopened Jack the Ripper at the invitation of Scotland Yard.

  When I pulled my car into the backyard of Pearl’s house, I looked out over the barnyard where my grandfather had kept his horses and wondered what my grandmother would think of her uninvited visitor. This man meant nothing to her, though he had come to mean everything to me. All that she and my grandfather had taught me and done for me paled in that moment, in the light of the knowledge of the forensic pathologists I worked with. Now I was bringing one into their home, and not just a run-of-the-mill forensic pathologist, one of the world’s most renowned.

  Looking back now, I clearly see the lie I had bought into. Young, dismissive, and intellectually arrogant, I had shunned the simplicity of my roots and desired to be approved of by these little gods who asked me to push myself into places I would later pay a price for.

  Pearl greeted us at the back door, wearing the face she always wore when meeting a stranger. All I have is yours, that expression said. She welcomed him inside and informed him that she had plenty of food and would make anything for him that he liked. Eckert told her of his four-hour delay and we followed her into her kitchen.

  As she circled her table, Dr. Eckert moved aside. Pearl stood considering the old pathologist as he shuffled toward the head of the table. It happened almost simultaneously. His right hand gripped the back of my grandfather’s chair, which had been leaning empty for almost seven years by now, and my grandmother’s hand met his. For a prolonged moment their e
yes locked—the god-like figure who drank milkshakes over the dead, and the woman who had risen every morning at 4:25 a.m. to worship her king through forty-five years of marriage.

  “This is my husband’s chair,” she said.

  As was her way, Granny Pearl gently showed him to another chair and served him a cup of chicory coffee.

  HE WAS YOUR WHAT?

  MY GRANDMOTHER made the best fried chicken in the South bar none. The reason I know this is because everyone who ever ate her chicken—and there were many—would bring their raw chicken to her and ask her to fix it for them. Notice that in the South we say fix it, not prepare it or fry it. We fix our fowl.

  The secret to her chicken was in the right combination of red pepper, black pepper, salt, and flour. And my grandmother, or Pearl as everyone called her (even me), never dredged her chicken—you know, when you drag it through the mix? Oh, no. Pearl relied on a large brown paper bag. Into it went all the ingredients, along with the yard bird, and then the shakin’ would commence. And just when that shakin’ had reached a fevered pitch, out came the most beautifully coated pieces of chicken you have ever seen.

  Now, my grandmother did not cotton to the ideas of what many would term an “affirmative nutritional lifestyle,” but boy, could she cook! She achieved this culinary nirvana with the aid of her well-worn cast-iron skillet. She used one specifically designated only to fry chicken. It was just smaller than a Dutch oven and had a lid, and no one else in the family was allowed to touch it, for she believed someone might wash it and destroy the unique curing that skillet had acquired over the years. After she used it, she simply poured the leftover grease into her drippings jar and wiped the skillet out.