Free Morgue by Dr. Vincent DiMaio Page B

Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward , the National Research Council advocated eliminating the coroner system entirely, an idea that had been bandied about since 1924.
    To date, nothing has been done. What was good for the tenth century is apparently still good for the twenty-first. And even in America today, when we have far more forensic tools than my father had when he became a doctor in 1940, the chances of a smart killer getting away with murder are higher in an elected coroner’s jurisdiction than any jurisdiction with a medical examiner.
    Despite the imperfection and inadequacy of the old coroner system, autopsies had solved thousands of American crimes by 1959, when forensic pathology was first recognized as a distinct discipline by the American Board of Pathology. In a huge moment when forensic pathology was finally legitimized, my father—then the Chief Deputy Medical Examiner for New York City—was among the first eighteen certified forensic pathologists in America.
    That first class of medical detectives comprised some of forensic medicine’s lions.
    Dr. Milton Helpern, my father’s boss in New York City from 1954 to 1973, was only the third medical examiner since the city scrapped its coroner system in 1918. He once said, “There are no perfect crimes. There are only untrained and blundering investigators, slipshod medical examiners.” His name still graces the award given to the highest honor for any medical examiner, the Milton Helpern Laureate Award, which I received in 2006.
    Dr. Russell Fisher was the Chief Medical Examiner for Maryland and built America’s best forensic team and facility in Baltimore. Such was his reputation that in 1968, just before I worked for him in my first job out of medical school, he led the so-called Clark Panel in concluding that the autopsy on the slain John F. Kennedy—the autopsy of the century—was so badly done that it “left doubt where there should only have been absolute certainty.”
    Dr. Angelo Lapi had been Denver’s first medical examiner and then moved to the Kansas City morgue. Blessed with a photographic memory, he was part of an elite team that listened to survivors of Nazi death camps and POW stalags describe wanton slaughter, dug up the decayed bodies, and collected evidence against their killers for the Nuremberg war crimes trials.
    As the chief pathologist for the Cleveland coroner, Dr. Lester Adelson was a key witness against Dr. Sam Sheppard, an osteopath accused of murdering his pregnant wife. Convicted in his first trial and acquitted ten years later in his second, Sheppard’s case was a media phenomenon that inspired countless articles, books, The Fugitive TV show, and several movies. After a thirty-seven-year career and more than eight thousand murder autopsies, Adelson retired to teach and write The Pathology of Homicide , one of the standard texts for forensic pathologists.
    All these men had stories to tell. They’d seen death in all its violent colors. They were the best and brightest in a new discipline.
    But forensic pathology wasn’t then and isn’t now perfect, either.
    My father’s and my career encompass the entire modern era of forensics, from a time when fingerprints and basic blood typing were the most “high-tech” forensic tools available, to today’s DNA profiling and massive computer databases. But I believe with all my heart that if we could magically drop a 1940s medical examiner into a modern morgue with an afternoon’s training on the new science, he’d function quite nicely. Why? Because a good forensic pathologist’s best tools are still his eyes, his brain, and his scalpel. Without those, all the science in the universe doesn’t help.
    Today, there are only about 500 working, board-certified forensic pathologists in the United States—about the same number as twenty years ago. Problem is, we need as