Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stephen D. Cohle, MD (Grand Rapids, MI), a nationally recognized figure in the community of forensic medicine, is the chief medical examiner for Kent County, Michigan, and a forensic pathologist for Laboratory Pathologists, PC. He is the author (with R. Byard) of Sudden Death in Infancy, Childhood, and Adolescence.
Tobin T. Buhk (Grand Rapids, MI) is a high school teacher and freelance writer. In preparation for writing this book, he observed and assisted Dr. Cohle and his forensic team in more than thirty autopsies.>.

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CAUSE OF DEATH

Prometheus Books

Contents

Introduction: Scenes................................................71. Decompression....................................................21Thorns!.............................................................272. Contrasts........................................................49Safe Sex?...........................................................563. What Killed Harry Freiburg?......................................73The Perfect Murder..................................................77Bugs!...............................................................874. Red Sky in the Morning...........................................101The Oxford Lake Death Penalty Case..................................105The Rough Sex Case..................................................1225. Skeletons in the Closet..........................................1316. Accidents........................................................153The Shortest Chapter................................................1547. 15 Seconds.......................................................169The Museum of Tattoos...............................................1738. Blue Highway.....................................................189Cyanotic............................................................1989. Broken Hearts....................................................207Broken Hearts.......................................................21610. Of Zebras and Horses............................................227David versus Goliath................................................23011. Endings.........................................................243The Hand of God.....................................................25012. Horseplay.......................................................261Bad Medicine........................................................26413. The Last Chapter: Life..........................................283Message in a Bottle.................................................288Conclusion: Morgue Poetry and Wintergreen Mints.....................307Acknowledgments.....................................................313Notes and Sources...................................................315Index...............................................................327

Chapter One

Late Spring 2004 Spectrum Health, Blodgett Campus East Grand Rapids, Michigan

I use the word decompression when referring to an outsider's first foray into the morgue, that moment when the living come in contact with the dead. The word seems appropriate for the experience. Divers decompress to remove noxious gases that can make them sick. In this chapter, Tobin will enter the morgue for the first time; he will decompress. He will begin a one-year tour of duty in the Kent County Morgue to learn about the world of the forensic pathologist from the inside. His exploration began with a telephone call last night.

* * *

Last night, fate had cooperated with our project, and somewhere in Kent County an accident or a homicide has provided a subject.

"We have a body," I inform Tobin, deciding to leave the details for the morning, to let the possibilities linger in his mind; I couldn't resist the temptation to raise the drama.

"Great," Tobin responds, his voice flat, devoid of inflection, a tone that belies the delight inherent in his word choice, "great," as if the news has stunned him. "Ah, I don't mean to say I'm glad someone died," he adds to temper what appears his misplaced enthusiasm. He doesn't want to sound too enthusiastic, like some morbid death-junkie, but I know he's thrilled he will see an autopsy. It is an awkward emotion he will experience many times in the next eight months.

"Have you ever had hepatitis shots?" I ask.

"No." A long pause ensues, pregnant with the anxiety I can sense building. I can almost hear him breathing.

No immunization for hepatitis. Today, just about every parent has his/her child immunized against hepatitis B, but these immunizations did not become common medical practice until relatively recently.

"Is this a problem?" he asks.

"Doesn't matter. We use maximum precautions."

"The nervousness bordering on panic feels like a kidney stone rolling in my stomach, Doc."

"When my assistant opens the skull," I explain, trying to calm his fears, "you'll stand in the corner. Hepatitis may become briefly aerosolized with the dust when sawing through the skull."

"Are you sure this won't be a problem?" Tobin asks. The prospect of leaving the morgue with anything other than memories terrifies him.

"There's always a risk." My response doesn't make him feel much better. "But I'm not sure that one can even catch hepatitis this way. I never got hepatitis shots."

Perhaps now he feels better, much better, at least until I finish the story. "I have the antibodies for hepatitis B, so I must have contacted it at one point, but I don't know how. I must have cut myself with an infected knife."

Now his fears become intensified; the stone has begun to pitch in the acids washing against his stomach like waves crashing against a beach. Nonetheless, he's determined, but I imagine he won't sleep much tonight.

We agree to meet in the hospital lobby at eight the next morning.

* * *

It is a rainy morning in mid-May; a light drizzle falls from the sky, covering everything with a bright sheen. A heavy blanket of clouds that look like steel wool covers the sky. Symbolic weather, a device so effectively used by authors and Hollywood directors to indicate the psychology of characters or to foreshadow events. Edgar Allen Poe used storms to parallel the mental decay of Roderick Usher in a short story familiar to most school kids, "The Fall of the House of Usher." Shakespeare used stormy weather to great effect in Macbeth-the stormy weather always presages and in most cases directly precedes a death. A thunderstorm accompanies the murder of King Duncan, for instance.

For a week now, rain has bombarded Grand Rapids like the eighth plague, swelling the Grand River to a near-record-high 19.5 feet above its normal level. Today, the tapping of the rain eerily provides mood music for Tobin's first journey into the underworld.

Just beyond the parking ramp, the postmodern architecture of Spectrum Health, Blodgett Campus, looms. Formerly, it was Blodgett Memorial Medical Center until it merged with Butterworth Hospital in downtown Grand Rapids to form Spectrum Health. The structure is nestled in the middle of the area's most prestigious suburb, called East Grand Rapids, the home of former president Gerald R. Ford.

The old and new wings coexist, a common juxtaposition that never ceases to impress; the old, red brick a remnant of the days when the Model T was cutting-edge technology, the burnished, brown stainlesssteel skin of the modern wing, draped over a poured concrete skeleton, a visual symbol of the space-age technology that grew up with it. Today, the faade looks like a mausoleum. Why did the architects choose such a cold, clinical look? Certainly not to create a becalming effect in visitors and patients. This scenery seems fitting for the drama that will develop this morning; Tobin has come here to research the everyday...