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

  In Mama’s candy-apple red 1967 Mustang fastback with a Gulf Mosquito coil burning in the ashtray and the drive-in’s weather-beaten speaker hooked on the window, my burly father sat in the front seat with my mother while I tried to ward off sleep in the rear, clad in my Underdog pajamas. Mama’s trademark blonde do was whipped atop her head like a lemon meringue pie, and she would lean back ever-vigilantly to protect my innocence with her cover-my-eyes hand-block.

  Why my father would have chosen this particular film is beyond me. I suspect it had not so much to do with Vietnam but with the recent infamy earned by the Hell’s Angels at Altamont Speedway. My memories, though interrupted now and then by my mother’s diligent hand covering, explode with images of bearded men in German combat helmets flying through the air and dropping grenades down the backs of their enemies. The bikes of Nam’s Angels came to represent for me not something as trite as the modern vernacular of freedom, but at age six, of ultimate power.

  In the peaceful Blue Ridge Mountains community where my family and I now live, we don’t have to worry about wayward bikers looking for something to rebel against. Our motorcycle visitors represent something else. They are both the scourge of the locals as well as a modern gold rush. They drop a lot of money in these here hills, which helps sustain the local economy. But on the weekends, as I weave about the curving, undulating mountain roadways, which are difficult enough for the locals, I’m contending with high-performance crotch rockets regularly whizzing by at dizzying speeds. If I pull into a roadside convenience store, I’ll find the same leather-clad bikers gassing up and stocking up on Doritos. As they blow past me again later, I think (and maybe even shout out), “Damn kids!” But upon closer examination, I realize the rider who just left me in the dust is gray-haired, old enough to draw social security, and driving a $25,000 BMW model. Damn baby boomers.

  When I see a dirt biker dodging through urban sprawl, it seems out of place, just as much as a knuckleheaded Harley driver traversing a cow pasture. Such was the case one sunny spring afternoon in 1990 along the neutral ground of West Esplanade Avenue in Metairie, Louisiana. A young man had been putting on quite a show of his dirt-biking prowess. He had flown past the congested rows of suburban homes along the narrow, grassy area most others in this country call a median—that little strip of ground dividing opposing lanes—and he had soon drawn the attention of the neighborhood children. They had watched in amazement as the daredevil had passed by in a blur.

  The area where he’d been riding his bike is referred to by native New Orleanians as neutral ground because, at the height of ethnic violence at the turn of the twentieth century, the Irish and Italian gangs could pass safely and without incident on these grassy areas separating the local streets. Originally, the French and the Spanish used these areas when they attempted to peacefully do business with each other, but the concept held true later for the gangs too. So this corridor of détente became known as neutral ground. Unfortunately for the group of five children viewing the one-man show that day, the neutral ground became a gruesome reminder of what havoc weed and high speed could generate.

  The young dirt-bike rider had popped wheelie after wheelie, but when his front tire had touched down one final time, a steel support cable for the local electrical lines was there too. He had actually accelerated toward the line, witnesses later said, and had shown no sign of slowing down. When his front tire passed beneath the cable, the driver’s neck had been at an unlucky height and made contact with the cable. His body’s forward motion was temporarily halted, of course, but the cable had sliced his head from his shoulders.

  When I arrived at the scene, the group of children was standing to one side being questioned by police. One child excitedly related what had happened.

  “First, the motorcycle flipped through the air. Then his body, with blood coming from his neck. And then his head was in the air right behind his body.”

  I shuddered.

  After assessing the scene, I noted that the bike, torso, and head were all positioned in the order that the children had stated, all in linear relation, as if they had been neatly placed to underscore that one child’s memory. Surprisingly often, Death possesses a symmetry the living can never imitate. And it always speaks the truth.

  At the time of my arrival, the young man had not yet been identified. After documenting the scene, I searched his clothes and found marijuana and his wallet. The home address on his Louisiana driver’s license was just blocks away from the accident scene, so I gathered up a deputy sheriff and went to inform his family.

  The home was like any typical New Orleans suburban dwelling, with a boat in the driveway and a live oak in the front yard. I knocked on a side door until someone finally came, a middle-aged woman in a housedress. As she stood in the doorway wiping her hands on her apron, I thought about how what I was going to say would forever alter everything for her. I stepped into her home, my badge in hand, and told her that we needed to sit down. She walked backwards toward her family room, begging me to tell her why I was there. When I related the details of her son’s death, she screamed. Her husband appeared on the stairway then and, after hearing the news repeated, he too screamed and collapsed to the floor as if he’d been sucker punched.

  I sat on their sectional sofa reciting what they would need to do next in order to take care of their boy’s body. After years of giving these notifications, I knew what I was saying was bouncing off them like rain on a rooftop. The deputy and I left our business cards, delivering our obligatory speech about if there was anything we could do to help . . . as if anything we could do would erase these moments.

  I never got used to making next-of-kin notifications. During my first weekend as an investigator, I had to make three within forty-eight hours. I stayed drunk on mescal for the next forty-eight hours after that. I am of the belief that every time an investigator makes a notification, he loses a little piece of himself. Think about ripping the heart out of a total stranger every few days of your life. No one can understand what that feels like. After a death, the families of victims move on, one way or another, but I face the next patch of sorrow and leave yet another little piece of myself behind.

  Later that same year, on one cool autumn evening—that is, as cool as any evening can be in New Orleans when it rains—I was summoned to the Alamo Motel on Airline Highway. An off-duty deputy sheriff from an adjacent jurisdiction had barricaded himself in his motel room. When I arrived, I found the usual group of investigators and city officials crowded onto the outside landing of the motel. The room’s door had been kicked in. The bed’s mattress had been propped up against the window as a barricade. Just prior to the police forcing their way into the room, the deputy had shot himself.

  Our investigation revealed that the decedent had been involved in the illicit use of steroids, and the pathologist would later postulate that they may have impaired his judgment and possibly contributed to him taking his own life. There were no prior indications in his record that he would have been inclined to do something like this, but he’d managed it with his own Beretta 9mm service weapon.

  Since this was a law-enforcement official, we took extra care in processing the scene, but our final task was to find his family. As I dug through his personal effects, I came across his black leather badge case, much like my own, which contained his driver’s license.

  New Orleans, prior to Katrina, had been a big city. As I drove through the dark, with rain peppering my windshield, I thought about what I would say. I commonly performed this set of mental stretching exercises, but as I moved through the neighborhoods nearer his home address, I realized my exercises would be unnecessary. I saw the same boat in the driveway, the same live oak in the front yard. I felt the bile rise in my throat.

  I parked my car and got out, but my feet felt as if they were screwed to the ground. Early in my career, when I had been particularly disheartened about the emotional weight of my occupation, I had asked my grandmother Pearl for advice. Having dealt with
death many times in her life, she had suggested that I “pretend it’s not happening.” As I balanced on the threshold of this family’s home, I thought for once my grandmother had been wrong about something. This was really happening. There was no use in pretending. My guts were too twisted and my nerves were too raw to imagine otherwise. I had no other choice but to go ahead and complete the process of destroying these people once more. Like a wrecking ball crashing down on a tilting structure, I knew I would obliterate them.

  I felt Death there alongside me, laughing. I knocked on the door and quickly drew the illumination of outdoor spotlights. The mother stood before me in the doorway. The terror that crept across her face made me feel like some horrible beast from Greek mythology. Immediately she began to scream and cry out, “NO, NO, NO, NO!” Her husband appeared behind his wife and looked at me as if I had just physically assaulted her. I felt as if I had. Again, I produced my badge and said that I needed to talk to them. I don’t believe they heard a single word I said as I robotically related the circumstances of their only remaining son’s death.

  As I slammed my car into drive with tears streaming down my face, the only thing I could think about was the absurd odds of this, that within a five-month span of time I would have to go to the same home in a city of a million people to deliver the same kind of news. Two more people now were aching inside their home, cursing such random, hapless fate. What are the odds . . . ?

  THE EARACHE

  IN THE SOUTH, men don’t have mothers. We have Mamas. This may conjure up scenes of men unable to let go of the apron strings, but for boys living below the Mason-Dixon line, the moniker holds a totally different meaning. Just the tone of voice a Southern male uses when speaking to his mother or referring to that lady as Mama, relates something few others can grasp.

  Southern ladies are to be respected. That is what many of us are taught from the moment we come screaming out of the womb. Our families are, by their nature, matriarchal. I believe that if the Yankees had understood this familial structure, the War of Northern Aggression would have been shortened by half and the North would have handed over half its own territory to boot. A Southern female can offer up a look, or even a fading glance, and we Southern men sit at their feet like big clumsy puppies just longing for a scratch.

  I am sure many of my Southern brethren would say, “My Mama is beautiful.” I too make that assertion, only I have independent third parties to back me up. People have always said my mother was a looker. The soft tender white skin of an English milkmaid, striking eyes the color of the sky on a clear day, and of course the hair . . . My mother used to have what my grandmother referred to as Holy Roller hair. It stood about two feet above the level of her scalp and was big enough to house a small family of squirrels. Her hair, which to this day has never had a single ounce of chemical coloring added to it, was truly golden blonde. Slight in build, she brings to mind what many people think of when Southern belles are mentioned. Couple her appearance with her demure nature and Faulkner could have written chapters about her.

  At age sixteen my mama had been set adrift when her own mother had passed. She had played the piano well enough to set her sights on Juilliard, but she fell under the spell of my delinquent father, who had convinced her to marry him before either of them had finished high school. He presented her with nothing except abuse, violence, and a baby within their first year together—me.

  As it turned out, Mama’s sole flaw was her sufferance of two major afflictions: her first husband and her second husband. The first was soon gone, mired in a war, and since the second was as yet over a far-distant horizon, when I was young, Mama had to fight the battle of parenthood alone. It was just her and me in a rocking chair on many nights, while I tugged at my ears in agony and cried. This same sequence played out repeatedly in my early life, and the only solution was the cold steel of a pediatrician.

  The procedure was always the same. When I developed an earache, we’d first try the drops the doctor had prescribed, which always came in an opaque brown dropper bottle. My mother warmed the bottle on the stove in a boiling pot of water then let it cool closer to body temperature. While I kicked and screamed, she coaxed me into lying on my side and applied the drops with the hope that this would provide relief. Most of the time it didn’t.

  The next morning, I would find myself in a bleached-white waiting room with copies of Bible stories and issues of Boys’ Life. My mother, in a vain attempt to soothe me, would try reading to me but to no avail. For children of the 1960s, visits to a doctor were not moments to be relished. Unlike today, with pediatric waiting rooms containing all manner of aquariums, toys, and game systems to distract and entertain, all we had were images hanging on the wall of Emmett Kelly either smiling or frowning at us through his creepy clown makeup.

  The physicians back then were different too. There wasn’t a wide choice of antibiotics available. And a doctor’s approach was more aggressive. If something ailed you, the doctor usually removed it. Since doctors could not excise my ears, the next best solution for an ear infection was the lance.

  When we were eventually and inevitably summoned into the doctor’s inner domain, the staff knew what was to come. They knew I was a fighter. When a dentist had tried to cap my teeth in his office when I was four (as a result of cracking all of my upper incisors), I bit him. I’d had to be admitted to the hospital in order to complete the capping procedure. So, at the pediatrician’s office, the staff came in force.

  Momma at eighteen years old. She had been kicked in the stomach by my father while pregnant with me, yet we both survived. Between surgical lancings, she would soothe my chronic earaches by singing “Down In The Valley” until I finally fell asleep.

  Dr. Funderburke was an older man with stark white hair. He would enter the room and command his nurses and my mother to hold me on my side. The lance looked like a dental tool, only straight. With my head pressed to the table by the meaty hands of a nurse, the doctor would first visually examine my ear to find his target, then guide the tool into the small canal to pierce the pustule that had encased my eardrum. To me, it would sound like cannon fire. I always remember screaming. But I also remember the subsequent caressing my mother administered to my forehead. Relief.

  With no more pressure and most of the pain gone, all else would be soothed away in the arms of my mother, back in our old rocking chair at home. Mama would gently sing “Down in the Valley” and my fitful body would find sleep. Fortunately for my mother, she never had to witness my body absent from her care and love, lying dead and alone in a courtyard of some dirty housing project.

  Death and the process of death can be full of irony. As I hurdled through my days, I could never tell what might be waiting for me around the next bend. This became somewhat of a survival technique for me. I never said, “Gee, I can’t wait for the next axe murder,” or “Oh boy, a mass fatality!” However, I confess I got a tremendous adrenaline rush from the prospect of going out on a case, especially at the beginning of my career. Friends asked me how I could take any joy in the ultimate pain of another or their families, but I never reveled in another’s pain. It was merely that I was a scientist. I was curious how things worked. I viewed myself as fortunate to have been a witness to important, albeit tragic, milestones.

  One night we were working a drive-by shooting in the heart of the projects, in one of the worst areas in all of suburban New Orleans. The local patrol officers had named the area Electric Avenue due to the amount of drug traffic traveling through the area. The scene was pretty much standard: a black male lay dead on the bare dirt courtyard of a public housing unit. Don’t ask me why, but a homicide in the projects for some people is better than cable TV. It must be, because every person residing there will show up and surround the perimeter of a crime scene. And when you turn on the television news cameras, everyone comes running.

  What’s really amazing is that no matter what time of day it is, there is always a crowd. Early on I asked myself, don’t these people
have jobs or hobbies? Then I would shake myself back to reality and remember where I was. It was not uncommon to have a mother with children as young as two years of age out at four in the morning, playing just outside the perimeter. I actually had one young mother at a scene in Atlanta one night hand me a spent shell casing her child had been playing with. I took it from her without saying a word.

  The part I tend to like the most is when an inebriated crackhead is shouting advice to you about how to process a scene. He’s watched episodes of CSI and the like, which portray not only inaccurate forensic methodologies but also deprive the viewer of the sober reality. Death scenes are never safe or antiseptic. They are an odd mix of higher scientific reasoning combined with indescribable sorrow.

  Then there is the ever-present reverend of some unidentifiable denomination—you can spot him because he is always wearing some kind of clerical collar or a T-shirt that actually says CLERGY. This man will be shouting very loudly and in close proximity about how they are sick and tired of their young men being taken from them. Then there is the obligatory chorus of rotund women waving fans and accenting his shouts with “Preach!” “Uh-huh,” and “Amen.” The more responses the reverend receives, the louder his interjections become. I’ve come to understand that this is most probably the only opportunity a man like him ever has to speak to a congregation.

  Further out, beyond all of these, are the groups hovering along the margins—clowns, I call them. And as they say in Pentecostal circles, the spirit is apparently all over them. They will be yelling things like, “Naw, naw, naw, dat my boo!” or “Dat my brother!” or the ever-popular “Dat my baby’s daddy!” Soon after that, the scene tends to escalate into someone clutching their stomach or their head or screaming at anyone who tries to help them, “Get yo’ fuckin’ hands offa me!” or “Lawd help me, I gonna kill me a motherfucker tonight.”