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

  Bruce’s behavior became increasingly bizarre. He would sit in the yard for hours on an old sofa cushion, pulling weeds and listening to tapes of sermons. Though an avid football fan, he would periodically have the cable service disconnected because television was a tool of the devil. He even showed up early at church one Sunday morning with our TV in the back of our station wagon and placed it on the church lawn with a sign that read GARBAGE, to the glee of our fellow churchgoers, who proclaimed him a true man of God. That happened in the spring, but by fall we had a new television and the cable service reconnected, just in time for college football season.

  In sixth grade, in the boys’ room at my elementary school, I showed the stripes of his lashings to one of my friends. Within the month, Social Services had contacted Bruce and explained there had been a child-abuse complaint lodged against him. He hired an attorney and the complaint disappeared. The beatings did not. The forsythia bush always taunted me from across the street.

  There was nowhere to hide and, even if I had tried to get away, I knew the eyes of God would always see me. To disobey, to not submit to parental authority, was apostasy, our Bob Jones University pastor told us. I still held out hope for Jesus, while our fellow church members cheered Bruce’s piety.

  By the time I turned fourteen I was a whipped dog. Bruce had graduated to buckling a belt about my waist to hold on to while he swung. This way he would save money on my underwear, since it would always tear when I struggled against him. All the while he would say to me in his flat tone, “You have to be like Jesus.”

  Bruce had also taken to staring at me for long periods of time before commencing his punishments, even asking questions about my penis, but he never touched me with anything except the forsythia.

  Once, sometime nearer the end of the physical abuse, Bruce discovered that I had not let him know about a failing grade at school. This action was, of course, akin to blasphemy. He related that God hated a liar and he would administer the forsythia daily until I heard the voice of God and came to my spiritual senses. My grandfather—my mother’s father—was scheduled to visit us soon, though. The day prior to his arrival, I was lashed once more and, as I lay bleeding and crying on my bed, Bruce advised me that he would cease his proselytizing of me while my grandfather was in town, but that I had better not say anything. Grandpa trumped Jesus, I guess. For the moment, anyway.

  Me at eighteen. Thought I was the next Dick Butkus, but turned out to be just another face in the crowd surrounded by truly great Southern high school football players such as my high school teammate future NFL Hall of Famer Jesse Tuggle.

  Daddy had left my mother and me with very little, yet prior to his departure, he had gone to the home of an old black man and bought a Mossberg 20-gauge shotgun for me. It was beautiful. The stock was cherry and had almost a red glow to it. Polished by age and smelling of 3-in-One oil, it had clearly been well cared for. I always imagined the man who’d owned it before me stalking through a large sunflower field next to his home, killing rabbits with it over the years.

  The only time I had ever been allowed to shoot it was with my father, before he’d left. When Mama remarried, it stayed in my closet, leaning in the corner, along with a green box of Remington birdshot. Elaborate fantasies developed in my mind, though. It wouldn’t be hard. Instead of lying there crying and wondering why God had abandoned me, I could impose my own judgment. Anything would have been better than the constant humiliation. Besides, I was a Morgan. It was expected of me. People would just say, “Yeah, that’s Howard’s boy. That apple didn’t fall very far from the tree.”

  I never knew why Bruce let me keep the gun, but he’d gambled with Jesus and it paid off. I was convinced I would go to hell if I even chambered a shell.

  Why is it that God attracts psychotics? Do they seek him out for healing, or do they perhaps believe themselves to be his equal? Does the notion of ultimate power attract them? Or is it that sociopaths can spot the easy marks among the flock?

  When I first went to work for the coroner in New Orleans, we dealt with the body of a mother who had been killed by her psychotic son. One of the investigators on the case told me, “Ya’ know, crazy people are only as crazy as we allow them to be.” He may have been right. Many are indulged, few are held accountable.

  In June of 1990 a dentist with a long-standing practice was killed. He was considered a pious man, a man of God. After he was shot in the head, his equally devout wife was shot in the head and bludgeoned in a clear fit of rage. To top it off, their daughter, a thirty-four-year-old virgin, was blasted as well, destroying the beauty she had supposedly preserved only for God. The dentist’s son had executed them, but their Jesus had bestowed no mercy.

  The son was found in the front seat of his car in the parking lot of the family’s church. He had dispatched himself with a .45 caliber. Brain matter had showered the interior of the car, staining old fast-food containers and a multitude of other weapons he had brought with him. Maybe on consecrated ground he’d felt safe from the licking fires of hell.

  The next morning the family lay united once again in the morgue. The parents were conservatively dressed, neat in appearance, but splattered with their own blood and brains. The son was dressed in camouflage fatigues, and even in death he appeared dark and foreboding. But the most remarkable member of the family was the daughter. Her skin was white like the feathers of a dove. Her hair and eyes were as black as coal. Unlike the others, she seemed further removed from these vile morgue surroundings. Even with droplets of bright red blood dotting her head, neck, and shoulders.

  We undressed her body and found something else. A vast number of tiny medals were safety-pinned over the surface of her beige bra. They were images of St. Joseph, over sixty of them. I knew Joseph was the earthly father of Jesus, but not being Catholic, I wanted to know his significance. I found out that I was the namesake of the patron saint of the church, but interestingly Joseph was also the patron saint for a happy death. A happy death? How does one happily die? And what did that say about me, another Joseph, who had chosen to work with the dead?

  My grandmother used to say, “I ain’t home till I get to heaven.” For many years I had asked myself (as opposed to asking God) whether I would be happy in heaven when God had abandoned me to the likes of Bruce? I wondered that day in the morgue whether this young woman was now happy to be with God. Had she been happy that her own brother had exploded her skull with a large-caliber bullet? Was God happy that she was with him? Was God happy that I was standing over her?

  Further investigation revealed much more about the family. They had lived in an upscale neighborhood in a rambling 1950s-style ranch with an indoor pool, though its surface was found covered with green algae. An ornate altar dominated the heart of their home and was surrounded by kneeling benches for daily prayers. Atop the altar, a thick family Bible had been kept.

  Religious imagery and icons were everywhere inside their house. I stared a long time at a crucifix hanging on the wall and the Son of God stared back at me. My life had intersected with the lives of this family. I’ve heard so many religious people say that they are striving every day to be more like Christ, but I don’t know what that means. Had Bruce ultimately been too afraid of being more like Christ and had chosen me instead as his proxy? Had the dentist’s son chosen to end his family’s journey, while I had chosen to continue my own?

  I remembered all the evangelists and preachers throughout my life who had told me I was going to hell. “You must have Jesus,” they claimed. I remembered all the churches Bruce dragged us to, where preachers with angry voices preached against men with long hair, music with a backbeat, and women wearing pants. “You must have the Lord!”

  In a Southerner’s world, which revolves around enduring hyper-religiosity, I know now the question is not “Do you have Jesus?” The real question is “Does He have you?”

  GAINFUL EMPLOYMENT

  MY GRANDMOTHER bought me large picture books about the Civil War when I was a ch
ild. I pored over them, staring into the eyes of the two-dimensional men looking back at me. I had a natural child’s fascination with death, like many of us do, and the images of Mathew Brady, which were so controversial in their day, gripped me much as they had gripped the general public when they first went on display in the 1850s. I would wonder at the swollen, rotting corpses and what twist of fate had led them to this point. Did they die an agonizing death? Did their families ever discover what became of them? Little did I know that years later I would be asking these same questions about the bodies lying at my own feet.

  When I first started my career in New Orleans, Miami Vice was all the rage. Guys tried to mimic the styles by wearing loud outfits with accompanying mullet hairdos. We males had images of Crockett and Tubbs jetting along over the Miami thoroughfares in a sleek black Ferrari to the strains of Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight.”

  Back then I worked from home for forty-eight straight hours then had Mondays off. I remember those on-duty nights with vivid clarity. I remember my first weekend, my first scene. I got the call and drove my newly issued Blue Crown Victoria westbound on I-10 to a motor vehicle death, my sweaty hands gripping the steering wheel. I listened to the police radio, but I had also turned on 99.5 FM WRNO, “We’re the Rock of New Orleans.” Almost as soon as I had turned on my headlights, “In the Air Tonight” had come on. Phil Collins’ shrill, effeminate voice ran through the stanzas, and I thought that I had a date with destiny.

  As excited as I was about my first scene, I soon became acutely aware of just how untrained and uneducated I was. Thoughts of being viewed as the Crescent City’s version of Don Johnson evaporated, to be replaced by images of Dom DeLuise attempting to justify himself to a discerning audience.

  I did the best I could to convince anyone who was watching at the scene that I knew what I was doing. I exited my car stone-faced and, as robotically as possible, with notepad and gloves in hand, I walked toward the cop who appeared to be in charge and flipped out my ID. I kept my mouth shut and listened, while stepping over the debris scattered all over the westbound lanes of the interstate. The victim was mashed into her car’s dashboard. She was young, her golden blonde hair soaked with blood from large lacerations in her scalp. My guts were trembling. I made notes. There were no great mysteries, no whodunit elements to this case—a girl had simply driven head-on into another car. But this was where my professional life began.

  Over the years I acquired finer skills. I learned along the way. However, the most convincing tool I picked up was this: When all others are fleeing the stench or crying on each other’s shoulders over what they have witnessed, I had to run forward and embrace the situation. My reputation grew as others witnessed the things I did, things they wouldn’t dare to even consider doing themselves. Yet, after all the parlor tricks and jokes had been used up and I had embedded myself in this world of death, I sensed that I existed alone on a deserted island with no hope of rescue. And I asked myself, What in the hell had I gotten myself into?

  Soon after this first night, the thrill of telling people what I did for a living began to wear thin. In the end, all I was left with were the eccentrics who worked in the field, a bunch of dead bodies, and a whole lot of upset families. And the nightmares.

  Like the clues I searched out at a death scene, evidence began to appear in the people I worked with. Their views were influenced by the horrors they regularly witnessed and compounded by whatever vice they used to numb themselves against these horrors. There were three investigators in my office and I was one of them. This office was responsible for all the death investigations in suburban New Orleans, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. My other two colleagues were stone-cold alcoholics, and it was a crapshoot as to which one would ask me to cover his shift or whether the answering service would call me in because the on-call investigator could not be reached, or the guy was too unintelligible on the other end of the line to be of much use.

  Numbing oneself, I discovered early on, is an unfortunate requirement of doing business with death. British sailors a century ago received a daily ration of rum—maybe medicolegal death investigators should be issued regular gift cards for their neighborhood liquor stores.

  Forensic pathologists also need anesthetizing. I can’t count how many times I had to call a forensic pathologist for advice on a case and ended up speaking to someone who closely resembled Otis, the town drunk from Mayberry, only less intelligible. I have worked on a body across from one of these highly educated little gods, all the while breathing in their ethanol-tainted exhalations. Couple this with needing to wield lethally sharp instruments just millimeters away from other hands working in the same body cavity and it makes for one hell of a tense time.

  During my tenure at the Fulton County medical examiner’s office, stories always floated around about an employee who would come into work during the night to perform his autopsies. This is not too terribly unusual, but he would always show up either fully intoxicated or recovering from a drunken stint. This made him unable to perform his job to the standards required. So what did he do? He had the uneducated, partially literate autopsy assistant perform his cases for him.

  In many of these cases, a successful criminal prosecution hangs in the balance, or a payout of life insurance, or necessary advice about inherited or contagious medical conditions. Unfortunately, when I reviewed several of this pathologist’s reports, my hopes of avoiding such low standards were sunk. His case files would often simply consist of a cartoon-like illustration of either a male or female body with various completely unintelligible markings, including unreadable notes in the margins—that was it. No conclusions could be made, except that one well-lubricated moron had written this.

  Being the new guy, I started out welcoming every opportunity to gain more experience, but this soon wore thin. How many crab- and crawfish-covered children’s corpses can you drag out of canals before you start taking a snort of numbing juice too, just to deal with the remembered images?

  Our office had a reputation as being a friend to law enforcement and making do with very little while also producing a superior investigative product. You take the good with the bad. Any number of times the on-call investigator might show up at the scene “all snapped up,” but the police appreciated our work so much that they would call me or another non-alcoholic representative from our office to come and deal with the situation. This was the normal course of business in Louisiana politics.

  Several years later, when I got to Atlanta, I found the situation was not much different. But let me tell you about Robert.

  My favorite subject in high school was literature. I was a voracious reader. Much to the chagrin of my teacher, Dr. Cook, my favorite author was Dickens. Dr. Cook thought Dickens a tedious sentimentalist, but I found him redeeming and a marvelous storyteller. One character that has come to describe what Dickens is all about for me is the character of Joe in The Pickwick Papers. For those not familiar with Joe, he was a fat kid who chronically indulged in food and, when seated too long, fell asleep. The medical community actually has a condition named after this character: the Pickwickian syndrome. If a patient has too much fat around his neck, it will constrict his blood vessels while he’s seated and cause him to fall asleep—this was Robert.

  By the time I had been hired at the Atlanta medical examiner’s office, Robert had been there for decades. When he was not at the ME’s, he was at a local funeral home not too far away, where he lived and embalmed bodies on the side. Robert was a rather large man who rarely bathed. He worked as an autopsy technician, and rumor was that he never washed his hands even after gutting the most foul of decomposed bodies. He was always dressed in the same clothes and it was in these clothes that he would eviscerate a maggot-infested corpse. Then moments later he would sit down to devour a chicken dinner.

  He wasn’t just fat. He was big. His hands were the size of catcher’s mitts. He walked around the morgue wearing double-knit
polyester pants rolled up at the ankles to reveal underlying ashy folds of skin and, as some Southerners like to call it, a dirty wifebeater shirt (a muscle shirt or undershirt, for you Northerners).

  The first time I met Robert was at the morgue behind Grady Hospital. It was a few days after my arrival in the summer of 1992. He was sitting at a circular conference table outside the cold room where the bodies were stored. The table was covered with old copies of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the substantial expanse of Robert’s arms. What caught my eye, as I introduced myself, was a clear plastic gallon container of vanilla ice cream that sat before him on the table. It was the same type my grandmother used to buy at Safeway for family gatherings, when she would serve her cobbler to the entire family. With one arm encircling the container like a bear with a honey pot and an enormous serving spoon clutched in his other hand, Robert was making fast work of the tub’s contents. I stood pondering the amount and realized that the container had a disturbing resemblance to the plastic buckets we had stored brains in back in New Orleans.

  When I introduced myself, Robert drew the bucket even closer into his chest, as if I were about to snatch it away from him. He looked at me through dull eyes with a white ringlet of ice-cream residue around his rather protuberant lips.

  “Do you want some?” was his only response.

  My skin crawled. I stared at the huge serving spoon heaped with ice cream. The spoon was so out of place. It should have been on someone’s table serving dressing on Thanksgiving Day. As politely as I could, I declined his offer.

  My thought, as I walked away, was that if a man would eat ice cream so close to rotting corpses, what might become of my hand if it ever entered his zone of ingestion?