Blood Beneath My Feet: The Journey of a Southern Death Investigator Page 5

  Bill was the glue that held this confederacy together as we traveled up I-10 to the game. Bill Donovan was a proud Irish-Catholic American who, though originally from the north, had integrated himself into Southern society quite well, having graduated from Ole Miss along with the judge’s son. Judge Mitchell, Lance, and Bill were also fraternally bound members of the DKE fraternity.

  I was elected to drive and found myself seated next to the judge in his Lincoln Town Car. We barreled down the road, everyone imbibing his choice of libation, with the South Louisiana marshland as our backdrop. The judge tugged on a flask of Crown Royal, and the smell of bourbon hung in the air of the car.

  The judge had been cordial to me as I drove but not really engaging me, opting instead to tell stories over his shoulder to the guys in the back seat. Then he suddenly shouted at me, “Bill tells me that you’re a Southern Baptist!” He began referring to me as his “Southern Baptist brother,” explaining that he had grown up in the same fashion. His Catholic wife, he said, would be “running the beads” on him tonight, for his safety and salvation at the game, and that we were stuck with two other bead runners and a “Hebrew” in the backseat.

  “Joe, what’s your favorite hymn?”

  I couldn’t really say. I was partly ashamed of the fact that everyone in the back seat was now aware of my religious upbringing, and I was being asked by a slightly inebriated federal judge appointed by Lyndon Johnson himself to sing church songs. I sat there staring straight ahead. The right side of my face tingled as I felt his eyes on me, waiting for a response.

  “Let me entertain these heathens in back,” he boomed and started up a spirited repertoire of Southern Baptist classics. First was “I Surrender All.” Then he progressed through “Softly and Tenderly” and “Just as I Am” (which he sung exceptionally loudly), and finished with “Amazing Grace”—even the Catholics knew that one.

  He took another tug from his flask and declared, “Joey, we’ll get these boys saved yet!” Of course this drew great laughter from every heathen in the rear.

  By the time we arrived on campus, I had decided I was in the presence of greatness. And I don’t mean the greatness of the Tiger-faithful. I mean the judge. Both young and old flocked to him when he stepped out of the Town Car, and a lawn chair was set up for him on the parking lot tarmac. As it turned out he was one of the most renowned LSU law graduates of all time. Judge Mitchell, having been a Johnson appointee, was behind some of the most telling judicial decisions of his federal district in South Louisiana. He was also despised by both the Black Panthers and the Klan and had had his life and the lives of his family threatened by both groups.

  As I looked on, I noticed something else. His son loved him. Lance sat to the side of the crowd while the judge shared stories with those he’d last been intoxicated with the year before. And Lance was the judge’s pride and joy. As I watched the two speak to each other and the crowd gather around the judge with admiration and respect, I thought about my drunk, angry father beating the shit out of me.

  After that game and over the subsequent months, I grew closer to both the judge and Lance. The judge was kind enough to allow Bill and me and our respective families and friends free access to his getaway home on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, complete with an adjacent golf course and dinners at the private restaurant, all paid for by the judge.

  Bill had married the judge’s niece. She had grown up without parents and was like the daughter Judge Mitchell and his wife had never had. In retrospect, not only were Bill and Lance conjoined by their collegiate fraternal association but also in a familial sense that ran deeper than I could fully appreciate.

  Bill and I worked together as investigators, plus Bill had trained me as an autopsy assistant. Unlike other metropolitan medicolegal organizations, our office gave the investigators the opportunity to make extra money by assisting at autopsies. This allowed an investigator to follow a case from beginning to end, though it was gruesome work. You are essentially gutting another human being, from their brain to their testicles.

  There is no way to effectively describe what it’s like to dismantle a human body. It’s nothing like surgery. It’s more like an intellectualized version of what goes on in a slaughterhouse, and everyone with a sharp object has a graduate degree. The sights of mangled bodies, the texture of fractured bones, and the smell of bone dust generated from the Stryker saw as the skull is opened are all impressions that will remain with me for the rest of my life. However, after a while you grow numb to the assaults on your senses, simply out of a need for mental preservation. It becomes like an assembly—or more appropriately a disassembly—line.

  In 1989, Bill and I were working alternate weeks in the morgue. We were the only two assistants. Memorial Day rolled around and it was Bill’s week to cover autopsies, though we still covered our regular on-call shifts as investigators. Bill invited me, along with Lance and his fiancée, over to his home for Memorial Day hot dogs and beer by his backyard pool, and we spent a wonderful afternoon, soaking up the sun and good conversation.

  Three nights later I was on call when my answering service got in touch with me. They informed me I needed to phone the East Jefferson emergency room regarding a death. I was put on hold while the charge nurse could be found. She and I exchanged names then I asked my standard question, “What do you have?” She had a double-ejection fatality. The name of the driver was Lance Mitchell Jr.

  The room spun. Bile rose into my throat. I sat down in my oak desk chair and considered the devastation I was about to inflict upon my Southern Baptist brother and my best friend.

  I can still remember my hand dialing the familiar phone numbers. I had dialed them countless times before for advice, to make dinner plans, or to share a great case. For me, that single phone call marked forever a shift in my awareness of my own mortality and the finite nature of the world around me. Though I had been a death investigator for some time by that point and had given bad news to many people, it would never be that difficult or that personal again. I felt like an executioner.

  My Great-Grandmother Gussie Morgan with grandchildren. She was mother to the Morgan brothers, and it was said it was because of her that they were all so ornery. My father can be seen at far right in hat and white T-shirt. Gussie was born of a Choctaw mother and a Confederate veteran father who had survived all four years of the War Between the States.

  Bill answered the phone in a sleepy haze. I swallowed hard. As has always been my practice, I told him straight out, “Lance is dead.”

  After a long pause, Bill asked, “How do you know?”

  I told him I had been to the emergency room myself and seen both Lance and his fiancée. What I did not tell Bill was how it had felt seeing them, two mangled, lifeless forms lying in that emergency room. These were not some drug dealers killed in a drive-by or some mentally ill individuals who had been threatening suicide for years until finally they had ventilated their skulls with a Smith and Wesson. These were people I knew. Friends. With whom I had laughed and broken bread.

  Bill quietly agreed to go to the judge’s home and be the one to tell him. Knowing now what I did not know then, this was the best thing that could have happened, because what I was about to be asked to do would haunt me the rest my life.

  At 5 a.m. another call came in. It was Bill and I could tell he had been crying, which never happened.

  “There’s no way I can do it,” he began.

  I thought maybe the combination of crushing grief and Chivas had gotten the best of him. “What?”

  “Can you do it for me?”

  I had no idea then that I was incapable of fulfilling his request while still keeping my sanity intact. But of course I agreed. I could not deny him. I would assist the pathologist with the autopsies on Lance and his girlfriend.

  There is a certain component of a Southern man that demands we take care of those we love, even at our own personal expense. Maybe all true friendships are anchored in this principle, but the So
uthern male has an especially prideful way of setting his face like flint and going forward into any maelstrom when it concerns his family. My genetics would not allow me to say no. I thought that some spiritual force was driving me that night. Certainly there must have been. How else could the confluence of all these events be explained?

  I had the transport service move the bodies to the morgue. Three hours later I stood staring at the broad stainless-steel doors of the cooler and felt as if I were staring into an abyss. What the abyss held for me, I could not guess, but I knew it would be transforming.

  I opened the doors. On separate stainless-steel gurneys lay the bodies of my friends. I pulled them out one by one and pushed them up to metal drain sinks. Only a few days earlier I had been drinking beer and eating hot dogs with them. I stared at them as the door behind me opened and the pathologist joined me.

  “Are you ready for this?”

  I assume my gaze and posture did not escape his notice. Eighteen years after the fact, I wish I had replied, “No, I am not,” and turned and run from that place. But my feet were as heavy as boat anchors.

  “Get some towels and cover their faces,” he said.

  I stood with my green scrubs on, in these days before “universal precautions” were put into practice in all autopsy rooms. The only barriers between the bodies and me were my gloves and a white plastic apron. As I went about my rote tasks, the blood of my friends dripped onto my bare, exposed arms. Their blood speckled my face. I tasted their blood in my mouth. I used my Stryker saw to open Lance’s head, and the smell of the histamine the high-speed saw creates entered my nostrils. I wept as I breathed in the essence of my friends.

  After I finished, I grabbed my cigarettes and went outside to smoke and cry. I sat on the concrete steps of the morgue building sobbing with a wrenching pain in my gut. In the practice of death investigation, it is never a good idea to allow your colleagues to see you get emotional. You are branded a head case and trust evaporates. But I no longer cared what anyone else thought.

  That day I turned a corner as a death investigator and as a man. Soon after that, I began having tremors, which are still with me today, though thankfully to a lesser degree now that I no longer chronicle death daily. But whenever I see an LSU game or hear their band strike up “Hey, Fightin’ Tiger,” I remember my friends. I remember the judge and his booming voice on a hot autumn night at Tiger Stadium, a night frozen in time.

  As for my fishing buddy, Andy, in his twenty-four-foot skiff, I believe what he said to me that day was the blunt expression of a world-weary human being. He simply made an effort to express what many of us who experience death day after day suffer. It wasn’t the people of New Orleans he wanted vaporized by mass destruction, but the horror and anguish that relentlessly held him captive. He merely wanted somehow to be set free.

  THE MUSTACHE

  COMING FROM a long line of hirsute males, it was inevitable that I would inherit the furry gene. As a child, I burrowed into my grandmother’s old cedar chest, filled with all manner of trinkets from my family’s past, and discovered images of ancestors sporting extensive handlebar mustaches. My personal favorite was my grandmother’s great-uncle Steve Dupree’s beard, which was so long it had extended well below his belt line.

  My grandmother loved to tell stories of Confederate veteran Uncle Steve. Each Christmas he would walk over forty miles to her family’s home, bringing with him a sack of oranges, which was the ultimate Christmas gift due to the utter lack of any citrus in the area. My grandmother Pearl always laughed when she told of sitting in his lap as a child and closely examining Uncle Steve’s facial wildlife preserve. She enjoyed tugging on his beard and half-expected some small critter to come crawling out.

  The most hallowed Southern icons are equally hairy: Robert E. Lee, Jeff Davis, and Colonel Sanders. Early on I attempted to cultivate my own facial hairstyle. I had been shaving since late in my sixth-grade year, but in my nuclear family (which now, since my father had left, consisted of me, my mother, and my new religiously obsessed, paranoid stepfather) any attempt I might make at encouraging hair growth was considered heresy.

  My stepfather thought anyone displaying facial hair was in the same league with counterculture Bohemians—anyone from Abbie Hoffman to Leo Tolstoy. He strictly prohibited any such display in my stalwart Southern Baptist home. So when the time came for me to leave his house after high school, I took great pleasure in growing my own cookie duster.

  It was grand, with thick, wiry, red and brown hues. I combed my woolly appendage every morning and maintained it with a special pair of shears I had purchased at a seedy flea market in the French Quarter. Compliments were perpetually given by the less hairy of my friends, who secretly coveted my sub-nasal treasure.

  A mustache says something about a young man. Perhaps it’s a sign of maturity beyond his years. For the beautiful olive-skinned women of South Louisiana I lusted after back then, it was a draw. In time, though, I realized that my gorgeous lip broom drew them not because it made me uniquely sexy but because I looked like someone dear to their hearts, their equally hairy fathers.

  South Louisiana is dependent upon the sea, and one distinguishing characteristic of the men who make their living on the water is the frequent display of facial hair. Whether they work on a shrimp boat, an oyster boat, or an oil rig, they all seem to keep either a beard or a mustache. I presume this affectation has little to do with how good they may look at the local dance club and has much more to do with protection from the elements. Of course anyone who knows about life on the Gulf knows that the most dreaded climatic manifestation is the hurricane. No matter how much body hair one might possess, it could never be protection enough against an onslaught of those behemoths.

  In September of 1988 sixteen men lost their lives to a hurricane in the Gulf. They were on board what is commonly called a jack-up barge, which is actually a large, floating platform moored alongside an offshore oil rig in order to perform regular rig maintenance. This barge has four posts, one on each corner, that can be several stories tall and each has huge teeth, much like an old-fashioned car jack. When the barge stops alongside the rig, it ties off and plants these posts into the seabed, jacking the barge up so the crew can access various levels of the oil rig. This design does not make for a very stable vessel. When underway, one captain described it as a ship having “four large pendulums with their own momentum in stormy seas.” The sixteen men had not only been at the mercy of Hurricane Florence but they had been forced to entrust their lives to the unstable nature of a jack-up barge. The Coast Guard estimated that, as the barge had made its break for home, it had caught the outer edges of Florence, which had caused the barge to capsize.

  As with many of these cases, since the closest port was in my jurisdiction, the bodies had become my office’s responsibility, regardless of where the deaths had occurred. Two days after the barge had capsized, we received only a couple of the bodies, but recovery efforts intensified so bodies then came in at a rate of two every other day. We discovered that, for some reason, none of the men had any identification on them and almost all of them were clad only in their underwear. They had probably been asleep and had had little or no warning of what was to come.

  As the bodies trickled in, we faced a problem. Due to their exposure to the Gulf’s harsh, late-summer environment, the bodies were in terrible shape. It was impossible to identify each body visually or even through fingerprints. Since DNA testing had not yet been perfected, we were left with the old standby, dental identification.

  A dirty little secret most in the general public are not aware of is that in cases of severe decomposition, the teeth are often completely removed from the mouth. This is not a pleasant process. An agitating saw—the same used to open a skull—is applied to the jawbones as well as the hard palate. Thus, these areas are cut away or disarticulated and subsequently placed into plastic containers filled with preservative. The idea is to leave the teeth in the correct anatomic orientation for la
ter examination by a forensic odontologist.

  At the time of this event, that parish’s morgue was located in its parish jail. Yes, the jail. You haven’t lived until you’ve stepped outside a morgue, covered in blood and stinking of decompositional fluid, to hear the harmonious cat calls of institutionally induced homosexuals clamoring for your attention while playing basketball in an adjacent exercise space. “Hey Blondie! You gots some fries wiff dat shake?”

  One method I employed to deflect the advances of these jailbirds was to simply leave the morgue door open long enough for the smell to reach their nasal passages. Regardless of how many prison gang rapes a man may have participated in to boost his street cred with his fellow inmates, the smell of putrefaction trumps the libido every time.

  The history of this morgue is fascinating. It had stood in the same location alongside the prison since well before World War I. And the morgue was situated on top of the previous location of the parish gallows. Aside from fending off the lust of jailbirds, the most glaring problem we ended up facing in this historically rich workplace was a complete lack of storage space. That was until the kind folks at Piggly Wiggly stepped in. I never looked at a rib roast quite the same after that.

  The local Piggly Wiggly supermarket loaned us a refrigerated truck where we could store the bodies. Day after day I would trudge into the back of this poorly lit food-delivery vehicle and stare at its floor where we had set out all the black plastic body bags. The smell was inescapable. The floor was constantly slick with decomp fluid, and in that foulest of substances both the forensic pathologist and I slipped and fell countless times over the course of those fateful days. Still, we painstakingly hovered over each new bloated, rotten man that came in. We opened each bag with hope that this body would have recoverable fingerprints, but most of the time the fingers as well as much of the face had been gnawed away by marine creatures, which left us with no other choice but to remove the jaw.