18 Tiny Deaths, page 16
Lee’s friend Ludvig Hektoen invited Moritz to give a lecture to the Institute of Medicine of Chicago—his first talk outside the Boston area. The University of Chicago wanted Moritz to speak to their students too. Lee had one piece of business advice for Moritz: if you want to be taken seriously, make them pay. “I am firmly convinced that you should ask for or accept an honorarium for your lecture,” she told Moritz. “In my opinion it is poor policy to give anything free and the way you start is the way you will have to finish. Don’t hold yourself or your information and experience too cheap!”35
Lee also suggested that Moritz consider writing an article about legal medicine for the Chicago newspapers, with the rationale that it would be a good idea to inform the public about medical examiners and what their purpose was.36
In January 1940, Moritz approached Lee with an unusual proposal. Would she accept the editorship of the American Journal of Medical Jurisprudence? It would be advantageous to have the journal associated with the Department of Legal Medicine and control over its editorial policy, but Moritz did not have the time to commit to the work. “I know of no equally competent person in the country for this task,” Moritz said, adding that Lee would have a free hand over editorial policy.37
The mere notion of Lee as editor of a professional journal is astounding. To be sure, she had unparalleled knowledge of the medicolegal literature, but she didn’t have a college degree. Editorships were reserved for the leaders of a profession. Lee’s only official credential was honorary membership of the Massachusetts Medico-Legal Society and a founding membership in the New Hampshire Medico-Legal Society. A lay person, however sophisticated, at the helm of a journal was highly unusual to say the least—particularly a woman.
Although flattered by the suggestion, Lee declined the assignment. She said she was too old to put that much work into editing a journal.
A short time later, in February 1940, the Department of Legal Medicine became operational. Harvard honored Lee befittingly on the occasion of the opening of the department’s laboratory, with an afternoon tea on February 9. The guest list for the afternoon tea included department heads from Harvard, deans from the schools of law and medicine, the university president and trustees, deans and department heads from Tufts and Boston University, Attorney General Paul Dever, and Governor Saltonstall.38
A few days later, Lee wrote Burwell a thank-you note of appreciation. “I’m still thinking of our grand party of last Friday and still wishing to say a nicer thank you for it,” she said. “It was a lucky day for legal medicine, for Alan Moritz and for me when you became Dean of Harvard Medical.”39
The department was funded by the proceeds from Lee’s endowment, which generated an income of about $15,000 a year in dividends. This sum covered the salaries of Moritz, assistants, and support staff. The Rockefeller Foundation provided $5,000 for two three-year fellowships to train doctors for careers as medical examiners. Harvard contributed $10,000 for remodeling the departmental quarters and $5,000 for equipment.40
Two young pathologists, both of whom planned on careers in legal medicine, were selected as the department’s first fellows—Dr. Herbert Lund, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and Dr. Edwin Hill, who received a degree in chemical engineering from MIT and his medical education at Tufts Medical College.41
One persistent problem still to resolve was the need for a steady supply of “clinical material”—dead bodies. Lee’s plan for a medical examiner’s office near Harvard wasn’t going to materialize anytime soon.
“I can see one absolutely essential requirement for the development of any real department at Harvard and that is some active responsibility for medical legal work,” Moritz wrote to Burwell. “I would as well contemplate teaching surgery without a surgical practice or obstetrics without delivering a baby as to think of developing a university department of legal medicine without an inflow of clinical material.”42
Despite his appointment as an instructor in legal medicine, Dr. Timothy Leary, one of the Suffolk County medical examiners, was territorial about his office. Leary had been medical examiner for thirty years before Moritz arrived on the scene and was reluctant to allow outsiders, including Lee, whom he saw as a wealthy grandmother with no formal education despite her close relationship with his former colleague, Magrath, to usurp the authority of his office. Lee and Burwell persuaded Governor Saltonstall to appoint Moritz as an assistant to Leary, leaving the veteran medical examiner explicitly in charge.
Moritz was also appointed medicolegal consultant to the Massachusetts State Police. Medical examiners and district attorneys were notified that Moritz would respond to any part of the state to consult or assist with forensic autopsies at no cost to the county.
The calls did not come.
It soon became clear that Moritz and his team of investigators at Harvard were unwanted. Local police didn’t appreciate outsider college boys telling them what to do. When Moritz arrived uninvited at one crime scene, he found a man busy washing blood off the walls. The local sheriff said he didn’t want his men to get blood on their uniforms. At that point, cleaning up evidence made little difference, since the residence where the death happened was packed with dozens of curious locals, contaminating the scene and leaving their fingerprints everywhere. When Moritz complained about the contaminated crime scene, the sheriff told him to shut up or leave.43
For two years, the department had few deaths to investigate. Then, on the afternoon of July 31, 1940, Moritz received a teletype message from the state police headquarters: “DR. ROSEN, MEDICAL EXAMINER, NEW BEDFORD. REQUESTS ASSISTANCE OF DR. MORITZ IN EXAMINATION OF BODY OF UNIDENTIFIED PERSON FOUND IN DARTMOUTH.”44
Five Works Progress Administration workers picking blueberries on their lunch break had discovered an extensively decomposed body hidden in brush beneath a tree on a local lover’s lane. The body appeared to be that of a young woman, fully clothed, bound with rope at the ankles and wrists. There were no visible signs of trauma. Beneath the body, they found a small flying red horse pin, a souvenir of the Mobil Oil Company. Moritz brought the remains and a sample of the foliage that had been under the body back to Harvard. Three weeks later, after careful study of all the evidence, Moritz was able to tell the New Bedford police the name and address of the decedent, how, when, and why she was murdered, and who did it.
Her name was Irene Perry. She was twenty-two years old and had vanished in June when she left home to get ice cream for her two-year-old son. Among her remains were five small bones; Perry was four months pregnant at the time of her death.45
Near Perry’s body, investigators discovered a knotted loop of rope that appeared to have been used to strangle her. Harvard investigators did an experiment with fifty volunteer girls of the same age and size as Perry to measure the length of rope that would be needed to strangle them. After one hundred tries—none of the volunteers were actually harmed—the average was within a half inch of the noose found with the body. Chemical analysis of the rope revealed that it was a type sold in bulk and used in mills, farms, and industrial shops. A matching piece of rope was found in the basement of Perry’s boyfriend, twenty-five-year-old mill worker Frank Pedro.
How long had Perry been dead? Four groups of carrion insects—those that deposit eggs on decomposing flesh—were found on Perry’s body. Based on an analysis of the developmental ages of the larvae, investigators concluded that she had to have been dead for at least a month and could not have been killed after July 1. The foliage beneath her body included branches of sheep’s laurel and low blueberry plants, which had grown during the current season until covered by the body. Based on the stage of development of the young leaves, the plants were killed on or after June 15. That left a two-week window, which was consistent with the date Perry was last known to be alive, June 29.
Pedro was charged with first-degree murder in Perry’s death. Despite the scientific evidence linking him to the crime and likely to the great frustration of Moritz and Lee, Pedro was acquitted of the charge in court.
A compelling reason for locating a Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard was the potential for collaboration with the university’s prestigious School of Law. A close relationship between the two departments could result in a true medicolegal program, with medical examiners providing lectures about medical evidence to law students and lectures for medical students about legal matters.
The Department of Legal Medicine planned to conduct a series of moot court sessions with medical and law students participating as a practice exercise. Medical doctors were generally ill-equipped for the adversarial arena of the courtroom. The average doctor was no match for an attorney skilled in the rhetorical arts. An unprepared doctor could be led beyond observable facts into speculation or doubt or be made to look like a liar, incompetent, or a quack. The moot court sessions were mock trials, a practice exercise. It was a useful way for medical students to learn how to answer questions, how to separate fact from opinion, and how to testify while under verbal attack.
Lee felt strongly that the Department of Legal Medicine should also begin conducting educational conferences. These meetings of professionals from across the country were important ways to learn the latest methods and procedures. Conferences and seminars were traditional ways groups of professionals kept up with current research and news, heard from leaders in the field, and maintained relationships with colleagues, and Lee pushed to schedule the first one.
May 17, 1940
Lee sent Moritz the outline of a two-day medicolegal conference that could be held once or twice a year. The intended audience was doctors and medical students from Harvard, Tufts, and Boston University, the Massachusetts State Police, Boston city police, undertakers, FBI special agents, and the press. Subjects to be covered during those two days included:46
Causes of death:
Gunshot wounds
Incised and punctured wounds
Burns
–Electrical (lightning, power)
–Chemical (acid, alkali)
–Flames (inhaled, swallowed, external, moderate, or destructive)
–Scalds
–Insolation
Asphyxiation
–Drowning (fresh water, salt water)
–Hanging
–Strangulation
–Suffocation
Poison
–Inhaled
–Injected
–Absorbed
–Swallowed
–Alcohol
–Carbon monoxide
Diseases
–Coronary disease
–Other diseases
Abortion
Conditions of body after death:
Effects of:
–Immersion
–Heat and cold
–Incineration
–Insects or other animals
–Embalming
–Burial
–Agents to destroy body and evidence
–Natural decomposition
–Rigor mortis
–Areas of lividity to determine position of body at death
–Examination of alimentary tract to determine stage of digestion
Procedure in cases of different types:
Accident
Murder
Suicide
Dropping dead
Found dead
Hospital cases
Protection of evidence:
–What to look for
–How to gather up a body
–How and where to look for means of identification
–Care and disposal of effects
–Not too much haste to bury or dispose of body
Each topic would be presented from the viewpoint of those in medicine, law, the insurance industry, and police. Lee’s plan also included a detailed list of potential speakers.
Lee proposed holding the conference in Boston in the fall of 1940. It would include a banquet at the Ritz-Carlton during which the attorneys general from Maine, New Hampshire Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts would speak. For the keynote address, Lee suggested either Governor Saltonstall or Alan Gregg of the Rockefeller Foundation. The exhibits Lee envisioned at the conference included books useful for police and medical examiners, samples of records and reports, displays of photographs, X-rays, shooting targets, powder marks, and body identification by dental records.47
Despite Lee’s enthusiasm and detailed plans, no such conference was held in the fall of 1940. Perhaps it was too soon for the department to undertake a major professional conference. Moritz did not support the idea at the time.
Lee did manage to persuade Leary, the medical examiner for the Southern District of Sussex County, to attend the annual meeting of the National Association of Coroners in Philadelphia, a city where the debate on changing to a medical examiner system was beginning to take shape. It was inconceivable to Lee that Philadelphia—the country’s third-most populous city and the birthplace of medical education in America—was still using the coroner system, although it at least had a decent coroner physician, William “Waddie” Wadsworth. When Wadsworth took the position in 1899, he was one of the few doctors in America employed full-time as a coroner’s physician. A colorful figure who kept a “crime museum” stocked with weapons and other occupational artifacts at the city morgue at Thirteenth and Wood Streets, Wadsworth was well regarded as a knowledgeable expert in the medical investigation of death—a refreshing change from the quacks and politically compromised doctors who often filled the role in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America.
At their 1940 annual meeting, members of the Medical Society of the State of Pennsylvania had passed a resolution recommending the abolition of the coroner system and its replacement with a hierarchy of medical examiners trained in pathology. Although only advisory in nature, the recommendations of medical societies were given serious consideration by lawmakers. Discussion at the next coroners’ association meeting was expected to be lively.48
Dr. J. W. Battershall, the medical examiner in Bristol County and past president of the Massachusetts Medico-Legal Society, received a provocative invitation from P. J. Zisch, executive secretary of the coroners’ group. “I cannot impress upon you too forcibly the advantages that you will secure by coming to Philadelphia to attend our Convention,” Zisch wrote. “I say this in all sincerity.”49
Unable to go to the meeting in Philadelphia, Battershall sent the letter to Lee, who was expecting visitors to The Rocks, where she then lived full time, and could not attend the meeting herself. Neither Moritz nor Alan Gregg were available either. Still, Lee thought somebody from Boston should accept the invitation and attend the meeting.
“It seems to me that possibly the future of the Medical Examiner system may be at stake and that certainly the Medical Examiners should be well represented at this meeting,” she wrote to Burwell. “I think it’s important that the right people be urged to go and speak for the Medical Examiner system.”50
Lee pulled out all the stops to convince Leary to attend the meeting. She resorted to flattery and offered to pay his travel expenses. “Of all men connected with legal medicine, none stands higher than you in the respect and admiration of those who know, and no one could be a better representative not only of the profession, but also of the Massachusetts Medico-Legal Society,” she wrote to the medical examiner.51
Reluctantly, Leary acceded to Lee’s entreaty. “In my opinion efforts to convert that particular group of persons to a belief in the Medical Examiner would be a waste of energy,” he replied to Lee. “However, since I understand that they are going to discuss the Medical Examiner System, and since you feel that we should be represented at the meeting I shall be happy to attend… Though not on the program, and not a member, I hope that I shall be permitted to represent vocally the birthplace of the system.”52
The coroners’ association meeting was uneventful. Leary was correct that no minds were changed. The coroner system was not abolished in Philadelphia at the time. The 1940 debate was one infinitesimally small incremental step in the city’s progress toward the medical examiner system.
After the Philadelphia coroners’ association meeting, Wadsworth wrote to Lee to follow up and make arrangements for visiting the Magrath Library of Legal Medicine, which had doubled in size to two thousand volumes. Wadsworth appears to have made the unfortunate error of misstating the name of the library, apparently referring to it as “Magrath’s library.” Lee was quick to disabuse him of that notion.
“I judge from your letter that you believe the Library of Legal Medicine was formed by Dr. Magrath or the choice of its books, perhaps, guided by him, and I must correct that impression,” she replied by letter. “The Library was formed entirely apart from him and named in his honor.”53 She did not say in her letter to Wadsworth that the library consisted of her books, selected and purchased by her. Why she stopped short is not clear.
In the first year of operation, the Department of Legal Medicine had assembled a teaching faculty that included Moritz, Leary, Brickley, and Dr. Joseph T. Walker, director of the Massachusetts State Police laboratory. Two doctors were in fellowship training, and five others taught on a part-time basis or were involved in research, including an attorney who was a fourth-year medical student.54 The department conducted a course on legal medicine for third-year medical students of Harvard, Tufts, and Boston University that had an average lecture attendance of 200 to 250 students.
During the year, staff members of the department were involved in the investigation of seventy-two deaths in Massachusetts and performed fifty-six autopsies. In sixteen cases, Moritz and his colleagues examined autopsy material that had been sent in to the department from other jurisdictions.
Of the fifty-six autopsies conducted by members of the Department of Legal Medicine, new evidence disclosed during the examinations resulted in a complete change in the criminal status of thirteen cases. Nine cases that were suspected homicides were determined to be accidental, suicide, or natural causes. In four cases, homicides would have gone undetected were it not for the postmortem examination.
