No Witnesses To Nothing

Welcome to the first of a series on an actual death which I investigated; probably the most interesting of my career. What makes this case so intriguing is the wide variety of forensic and investigative methods that were used and the incredible challenge in mandating the Coroner’s duty of establishing:

Who was the deceased?

When did they die?

Where did they die?

What was the cause of death?

By what means did they die?

In Kenny’s case I had none of these answers… to start with. Let me set the scene.

One hot summer morning, on beautiful Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, a cyclist was coasting downhill through a curved, thick, wooded stretch on a rural road when she caught the overpowering whiff of decaying organic matter. Stopping to investigate, she peered over a steep bank, seeing a blackened mass crawling with insects one hundred feet below. Thinking it was a deer that’d been hit by a car, she was about to leave when it occurred that deer don’t wear running shoes.

She punched her cell and, in fifteen minutes, the place was swarming with cops.

I arrived within the hour to examine the corpse. The police had the scene secured, photographed, GPS’d, and were doing perimeter grid searches with a service dog. As required by law, no one had interfered with the position nor condition of the body. The first thing that struck me was the cadaver’s bizarre condition.

Post mortem mechanisms of body breakdown are fairly predictable and uniform. There is a long recognized scientific process of ‘Mortis’ or changes in composition. It starts with ‘Palor Mortis’ which is a color difference once oxygenated blood stops flowing. ‘Algor Mortis’ comes next – the cooling of temperature which heads towards an equilibrium of the surroundings. ‘Rigor Mortis’ occurs within a few hours. It’s the stiffening of muscle tissue caused by an enzyme change. ‘Livor Mortis’, or lividity, is the gravitational settling of blood which creates a distinctive pattern on the lower sections and pressure points. ‘Putrefaction’ is the breaking down of tissue and the gassing off which creates the horrible smell associated with rotting meat. ‘Decompositon’ is lengthier and leads to the finality of ‘Skeletonization’ or ‘Mummification’.

In Kenny’s case, everything was going on here. He was supine, or lying on his back, with his left arm folded across his chest and his right positioned under his torso. Both legs were outstretched with his buttocks lodged against a large stump, preventing him from descending further down the hillside. Kenny’s face was gone, exposing a grotesque sneer like something from Pirates Of The Carribean, but the back of his scalp was intact holding a long mess of light brown hair. His only clothes were a baggy T-shirt, athletic shorts, and a pair of brand-new, unlaced Nike runners.

Kenny was The Body-Farm’s poster boy. His skull was a combination of skeletonization and putrefaction. His anterior (front) torso was in decomposition, but his posterior (rear) still showed lividity with minor rigor present in the neck and shoulders. Algor was at scene temperature and palor was all over the place. Curiously, his left arm and hand had mummified, right ones were decomposing, his exposed legs – from thighs to ankles – were only bones, but his feet were perfectly preserved inside the rubber shoes. To compound matters, Kenney was a mess of maggots and a swirl of flies.

There was one clear culprit at work. Heat.

But a variance in heat.

Kenny was lying on a north downslope, positioned parallel to the summer sun’s high east-to-west path. There were rows of evergreens between Kenny and the openness of the upper road which created a picket-fence effect, letting direct sun exposure at different times on different body parts. Full sun had been most prevalent on his center which mummified the arm/hand, but the shield of his shirt trapped in torso moisture, allowing a normal decomposition. His pelvis had been semi-shaded, though his legs had full sun, resulting in skeletonized bone. Kenny’s face was also obliterated by sun exposure and the quicker breakdown of the sun-beaten areas was exacerbated by insects who found the softer tissue easier to feed on.

So all I had was an apparent male found deceased in a very suspicious manner, as if killed somewhere else and dumped off this roadside. But who was he? When did he die? Where did he die? What caused his death? What were the means? Was the classification a homicide? An accident? Suicide? Natural cause? It was also apparent he’d been there for a considerable time. How long?

Time would tell.

This was the start of a long, complex investigation before I found out what happened to Kenny.

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Garry Rodgers has lived the life that he writes about. Now retired as a Royal Canadian Mounted Police homicide detective and forensic coroner, Garry also served as a sniper with British SAS–trained Emergency Response Teams and is a recognized expert-witness in firearms. A believer in ‘What Goes Around, Comes Around’ Garry provides free services in helping writers throughhis crime and forensic expertise. Garry’s new supernatural thriller No Witnesses To Nothing is based on a true crime story where many believe that paranormal intervention occurred. An Amazon Top 10 Bestseller, it’s available on Kindle and print on demand. You can connect with Garry via his Website: www.dyingwords.net

Most living people never visit the morgue.

Most never speak of the morgue, except during shows like CSI, Bones, or Hawaii 5-0. The popularity of forensic TV series, however, is social proof that there’s hidden interest in finding out just what goes on behind the autopsy suite’s closed door.

The word autopsymeans ‘to examine for yourself’. It’s a medical procedure that sounds simple in principle – taking a look at the outside and inside of a cadaver to establish cause of death. In practice, a post mortem (PM) examination can be highly complicated and time consuming; employing leading-edge scientific expertise.

There are three types of PM’s. A hospital autopsy is a non-legal process where the cause of death is known, but the caring physician wants to confirm a specific issue – such as a cancer tumor. A routine autopsy is conducted when the cause of death is not known, but foul play is not suspected. Then there’s a forensic autopsy – the one that’s going to be torn apart in a murder trial.

All autopsies follow a standard protocol. It’s the nature of the investigation that determines just how in-depth the procedure gets. The deceased arrives at the morgue and is catalogued with personal details and a registration number. Yes, they really do use toe-tags. The body is then placed in a refrigeration unit and waits its turn for examination. In a busy morgue this can take several days.

Usually two people conduct the autopsy. The pathologist, or medical doctor who is trained in the study of death and disease, is assisted by the deiner (German word for helper). Often there’s observers present; police officers, students, or technicians who come and go. The length of time varies – fifteen minutes to confirm a tumor, two hours routinely, and up to eight for a complicated forensic ordeal.

External observation can take a good portion. The body is removed from its shipping shroud, stripped, photographed, X-Rayed, weighed, measured, and identifiers such as race, age, hair and eye color, markings, abnormalities, as well as evidence of trauma or medical intervention is recorded. In homicide cases, the bulk of the evidence can be recovered in the external exam – clothing perforations, gunshot residue, lacerations, abrasions, hair, fiber, DNA, chemical contamination, or foreign objects. The observations are recorded on notes, diagrams, photos, and verbal dictations.

The corpse is placed supine, on its back, on the examining table which is an angled stainless steel tray draining fluids to a disposal sink. A plastic block is placed under the back to elevate the chest and recline the head and arms, making internal operations practical. A Y-incision is sliced from the tip of each shoulder, horizontally to the center of the chest, then vertically down to the pubic area. The skin is scalpeled back in a butterfly pattern accessing the thorax and abdomen, then the ribcage is removed exposing the upper and lower organs.

The major ones are removed, weighed, and cross-sectioned – lungs, heart, liver, kidneys, spleen, stomach, and intestines. Tissue sections are exscinded and fluids are extracted – blood, urine, vitreous humor, and digestive contents. These can be of immediate visual interest, or may tell later tales in toxicology and microscopic processing.

Cranial examination is the part that most newbies find difficult. The neck is now propped to elevate the head and the scalp is cut from ear to ear, peeled over the face and down the neck, then the skull cap is severed with a vibrating saw. The brain extracts easily and is often preserved in formalin to gel for later sectioning.

Completion involves returning the organs to the central cavity and sewing the incisions before releasing the body to a funeral home. Tissue and liquids are retained for histology and toxicology. In forensic cases, exhibits such as bullets, trace evidence, DNA standards, and clothing are transferred to the crime lab.

Often the cause of death is conclusive at autopsy. Occasionally nothing is known until the lab results come in. And sometimes… it’s never determined just why the subject died.

Our scientific understanding of life and death is extensive, but it’s far from perfect.

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