Sleuths in the Morgue

Might not the nature of the injuries reveal something to my medical instincts? . . . The left parietal bone and the left half of the occipital bone had been shattered by a heavy blow from a blunt weapon. I marked the spot on my own head. Clearly such a blow must have been struck from behind . . .

These ruminations of Dr. Watson in the Boscombe Valley Mystery would seem elementary to Dr. Thomas Arthur Gonzales, New York City's chief medical examiner for 17 years. Yet U.S. cities have long ignored what every Sherlock Holmes fan knows: that in fighting crime, the most important clues are often furnished by medicine. When Dr. Gonzales went to work in the newly created office of medical examiner in 1918, it was common enough for crimes of violence to go undetected, and not uncommon for sudden deaths to result in criminal charges against innocent people. The teeming, sprawling city was switching over from the antiquated coroner system* to one requiring that every violent or unexplained death be checked by medical sleuths with modern scientific devices. Pathologist Gonzales helped to build the department from scratch, and in 1937 became its head.

Soil in the Trouser Cuffs. Whenever a body is found after sudden, violent or unexplained death, one of the 24 medical examiners must be on the spot before it is moved. With routine examination of all bodies destined for cremation (to prevent destruction of evidence), this means that 20,000 of the city's annual 100,000 deaths are checked. About 350 involve homicide. Every day, from ten to 20 painstaking autopsies are performed; each body is carefully examined not only for poisons but for hidden signs of wounds, or for internal evidence of strangulation (which may have been committed without the slightest bruise on the neck). Blood groupings studied include not only the familiar A, B, AB and O, but esoteric fractions which give a total of 50,000 or more possible combinations.

One of the new-fangled detective gadgets with which Dr. Gonzales himself pioneered was the spectrograph. In 1942 the husband of a woman found strangled in Central Park had seven witnesses to swear that he had been at a dance at the time of her death. But spectrograph analysis of soil in his trouser cuffs broke his alibi and clinched the case that sent him to the electric chair.

Lipstick on the Pillow. In 1947 a woman in a midtown hotel room appeared to have died in her sleep about 24 hours earlier. Dr. Milton Helpern, deputy chief examiner, noted small hemorrhages on the eyeballs, suggesting suffocation. But she was lying face up. Then he saw that a smear on the pillow matched the lipstick she was wearing. That clinched his suspicion. Detectives tracked down her estranged husband, and he confessed having strangled his wife. If the body had been moved, Dr. Helpern would have missed the telltale clue.

But the examiners are not prosecutors seeking convictions. Dr. Helpern is no less proud of a case in which he exonerated a man who had shot his father. Self-defense, he pleaded. However, in trying to save the old man's life, doctors had operated and obliterated a bullet hole in his stomach. Then they mistook a hole in his back, through which the bullet had left, for its portal of entry. Murder, the state claimed. With powder burns on,clothing, Dr. Helpern showed that the father had been shot from the front at close range. The plea of self-defense was sustained.

Last week the office had a new chief. Dr. Gonzales retired at 76, after 36 years as medical examiner. His successor: Dr. Helpern, 52, promptly named because there was scarcely a qualified rival in the field of forensic medicine. A successful medical examiner, says Dr. Helpern, must be more than a competent physician and a trained pathologist: "He's got to have a hunch about the unusual case if he's going to solve it."

*Under which much of the U.S. still suffers, with politicians seeking the elective coroner's job for petty patronage. In many jurisdictions, they need not be physicians or even call one in unless the element of violence is obvious.

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