The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum Read Free Book Online Page B

the past.
     
     
    BY APRIL, Norris was happily harassing other city departments. He complained to the district attorney’s office that his men were kept standing about in the courtroom halls for hours, waiting to be called for testimony. He complained to the police department that the stations weren’t stocked with soap and towels for the medical examiners to use before and after handling bodies.
    “I wish to call to your attention the delay of the police precincts in their notification of homicides to the office of the Chief Medical Examiner,” he wrote to the police commissioner. For example, he’d been notified of a shooting on the Upper West Side some two hours after the police had reached the crime scene. It was the second time this had happened since Norris had taken office. In this case no real harm had been done, but “in many cases, I can conceive very well that non-attendance on the part of the Chief Medical Examiner or his assistants might be detrimental to the criminal investigation of a case.” He asked that desk lieutenants in police precincts be instructed to automatically call his office whenever a homicide or suspicious death occurred.
    He wrote to the Bronx district attorney, reporting that certain police officers seemed to be taking bribes to conceal murders. In one case, they’d asked him to declare a suicide; when he’d refused, they’d tried to get an independent doctor to issue the death certificate. “It is entirely out of the question, in my opinion, to even consider the possibility of a suicide on account of the number and situation of the bullet wounds. There were four bullet wounds sprayed across the corpse.” How, Norris asked, could the man have accomplished shooting himself in the heart, the shoulder, the leg, and the arm? That might have been the old way of issuing death certificates, but those times were over, and he wanted everyone to know it.
    He wrote to hospitals asking them to be quicker in getting bodies to the morgue for examination—one woman’s body arrived eight hours after she died. Norris called that completely unacceptable. He insisted that hospitals fill out forms issued by his office for every suspicious death, every detail according to his careful direction. “Your peremptory order,” began one response from a ruffled hospital director.
    He was even tougher, though, on assistant medical examiners who failed to follow his instructions. He wanted key organs removed at autopsy for chemical analysis—the stomach, for instance, in a suspected poison case—had to be put in a sterile glass jar, labeled, dated, and placed in a sanitary fiber bag. All such evidence would go directly to the chemistry laboratory at Bellevue’s pathology building.
    Norris wrote to the Brooklyn office demanding meticulous and thorough work in every detail. An assistant medical examiner there had declared a man dead of kidney damage due to use of a salve containing mercury. He’d done so based on a discussion with the man’s doctors, but without removing the kidneys for analysis or gathering any other evidence. “Did you make any efforts to procure the salve in order to determine that there was mercury?” Norris wrote angrily. When the doctor in question didn’t improve fast enough to suit him, Norris fired him.
    He chastised personnel in the Bronx office with equal vigor. Norris was particularly exasperated by a report that loosely blamed a man’s death on wood alcohol. The document stated that the victim had been drinking heavily in the hours before his collapse. He’d also been stricken with sudden blindness (a classic symptom of wood alcohol poisoning) several hours before lapsing into a coma. The death certificate listed wood alcohol poisoning as a “more than probable” cause.
    But “more than probable” was hardly a professional opinion, Norris said. The doctors should have removed liver and brain and preserved them for testing so that the diagnosis could be confirmed.