Free The Annals of Unsolved Crime by Edward Jay Epstein Page B

pounds, and Italian lire in his wallet. They also found seven large pieces of masonry stuffed in his pants. Even after he was identified, Scotland Yard, the Italian financial police, and Interpol were all perplexed as to how this banker from Milan came to be dangling at the end of a rope over the Thames in London. Did he commit suicide, or was he murdered? The coroner’s jury rendered a verdict of probable suicide on July 23, 1982, but that verdict was overturned on March 29, 1983, and a second coroner’s jury in London, unable to decide whether it was murder or suicide, rendered an open verdict.
    I was also baffled by the circumstances of the hanging of God’s banker. I had come to London in 1983 on assignment from Vanity Fair to investigate his death, not realizing at the time that the twists and turns in my own investigation would span the next three decades.
    I went to see Professor Frederick Keith Simpson, one of England’s most experienced and brilliant pathologists, who had conduced the autopsy. It had established that there was no river water in Calvi’s lungs, so he had not drowned. The cause of death was asphyxia, or loss of oxygen. There was a V-shaped wound on his neck, consistent with suicide by hanging, and there were no marks on his arms to indicate that he had been restrained, no puncture marks on his body to indicate that he had been injected with a drug, and no traces of suspicious chemicals or drugs in his stomach (other than the residue of a sleeping pill he had taken the previous night). In short, there was no medical evidence of foul play.
    The time of the death was fixed by his Patek Philippe watch, which, though valued at over $100,000, was not waterproof. It stopped at 1:52 a.m. While the watch could have stopped forreasons other than water damage, the water marks on the face of it, when taken together with the dropping level of the tide that night at Blackfriars Bridge, established the latest time at which his body could have been suspended from the scaffolding. After 2:30 a.m., the level of the water in the Thames at Blackfriars Bridge would not have been high enough to have reached Calvi’s wrist, so he must have been hanging before then. But he could not have hanged himself before 1:00 a.m. because the river level then would have been above his mouth, and there was no river water in his body. So, if he committed suicide, it could only have been between 1:00 and 2:30 a.m. Making the problem more vexing, during these hours there was a low tide, and the distance to the water would most likely have broken his neck. Yet the pathologist had determined that Calvi’s neck had not suffered the kind of injury that would have occurred in such a free-fall. In fact, he could have not have dropped more than two feet before his fall was broken by the water. To get that near to the water, after tying the rope, he would have had to climb twelve feet down a nearly vertical iron ladder, and then, with seven pieces of masonry in his clothes, step across a two-and-one-half-foot gap onto the scaffolding’s rusty poles, which were arranged like monkey bars in a children’s playground. Next he would have to tie the rope and shimmy down to the next level of the scaffolding in the darkness. The medical examination had found none of the signs, including splinters, cuts, or abrasions on his hands, or rust and tears in his grey suit, that such a descent would be expected to have produced. Whereas climbing up and down ladders and scaffolding might present no problem for a young man in the peak of health, Calvi was sixty-two years old and overweight, and he suffered from vertigo. Even in the absence of any murder signatures on Calvi’s corpse, I found it difficult to accept that he killed himself without help.
    I next went to Rome to speak to Italian investigators.What was clear from their investigation was that Calvi had co-conspirators in getting to London. Italian authorities had established that he had used three