Unfortunately, after the collapse of the Roman Empire, Europe was plunged into the Dark Ages and much of that knowledge was lost. Over the intervening centuries, the subject of death became taboo.
The term autopsy came from the Greek word autopsia, meaning to see for oneself. In 1761, as Europe was emerging from its self-imposed darkness, Italian physician Giovanni Morgagni was the first to catalog autopsy procedures in his classic five-volume work, The Seats and Causes of Diseases Investigated by Anatomy. Murphy had read an English translation. In Morgagni’s day, autopsies were a blood-soaked, messy business. During the last two and a half centuries, they hadn’t changed much.
Still, Murphy was fascinated by them.
No matter how gruesome the autopsy, Murphy had always managed to keep the contents of his stomach down. His partner wasn’t so lucky.
While witnessing his first autopsy as a homicide detective, Gaudet had heaved up his breakfast of scrambled eggs and sausage soaked in ketchup. Although blowing chow at a crime scene or an autopsy was usually enough to get a rookie homicide detective booted out of the unit, that didn’t happen in Gaudet’s case. For one, he was twice the size of most of the other detectives. For another, he was a very likeable guy: funny, tireless, gifted with great street sense, and absolutely fearless.
Murphy didn’t begrudge his partner his weak stomach. After years of working together, they had devised a division of labor that favored each other’s strengths. Murphy covered the autopsies while Gaudet finished at the crime scene or followed up on promising leads. This morning the crime-scene work was done, but Gaudet had still begged off on the autopsies. He claimed he had to go to court, so he went home for a shower and clean clothes.
Murphy hadn’t pressed Gaudet on his court appearance. Witnessing a child autopsy was tough for any detective, even Murphy. Sitting through a pair of them was going to be nearly unbearable.
When Murphy walked into the autopsy room, formerly the funeral parlor’s embalming studio, the dead woman, thirty-six-year-old Carol Sue Spencer, lay on her back on a stainless-steel examination table. The concave surface and rimmed edge of the table were designed to keep blood and other bodily fluids from spilling onto the floor. The table tilted slightly downward toward a drain at the foot. A hose with a spray nozzle was attached to the table and used to wash away the gore.
After each autopsy the medical examiner or an assistant hosed down the table and prepared it for a fresh body. In New Orleans, a city that year after year ranked as one of the deadliest in America, there was never a shortage of bodies.
As Murphy approached the table, he inhaled a putrid blend of blood, bile, and disinfectant. To Murphy, it was the smell of death.
Longtime Orleans Parish coroner Dr. Francis Maynard was handling the autopsy personally. Also in the room was one of his technicians, a thin black woman in green scrubs. Murphy guessed she was in her early twenties. As interesting as Murphy found the whole postmortem process, he couldn’t fathom why anyone would want to do this for a living, especially for a technician’s pay, which he guessed wasn’t much above minimum wage.
Dr. Maynard stood beside the table, near the center. He was in his midsixties, with gray hair and a jowly face that shook like Jell-O when he spoke. He wore a stained white lab coat and a pair of safety glasses to protect against blood splatter. Maynard had been instrumental in identifying hundreds of bodies after Hurricane Katrina.
Since the storm, the doctor looked worn out, Murphy thought.
Maynard started an audio recorder and adjusted the microphone that hung over the table. Then he began removing what little clothing Carol Sue Spencer had been wearing when her body was discovered. The doctor described each article as he removed it-one blue T-shirt with Nike logo, one black sports bra, one pair of blue and white New Balance running shoes, and one pair of white cotton socks. The technician stuffed the clothing into a paper bag and handed it to Murphy.
Maynard measured the body. Carol Sue Spencer had been five feet four inches tall. The examination table had a built-in scale that showed a weight of 132 pounds. The doctor cut the cable tie from around her neck and passed it to Murphy. Beneath the tie, the skin was deep purple. Spencer’s eyes were open and filled with blood. Her tongue was dark and swollen.
Dr. Maynard examined and probed for half an hour.
The rectal wounds were horrific.
“It’s my understanding that you recovered a knife from the scene,” Maynard said.
Murphy nodded. “A butcher’s knife.”
The doctor nodded as he lifted Spencer’s left leg with one hand and used a thin stainless steel rod to probe her shredded rectum. The rod was marked like a ruler.
Murphy looked at his shoes.
“I would say he penetrated the anus at least a dozen times,” Maynard said. “The deepest puncture reaches a good ten inches into the sigmoid colon.”
“Was she alive?”
The doctor nodded. His face was sweating and his safety glasses had slid midway down his nose. “I’d have to say yes. She may not have been conscious when these wounds were inflicted, but she was alive.”
Maynard picked up a scalpel from a side table and prepared to gut Carol Sue Spencer. His first incision ran from shoulder to shoulder across her sternum. Then he sliced down the midline of her torso to the pubic bone. He peeled Spencer’s flesh back from her chest and abdomen and exposed her rib cage.
He laid the bloody scalpel down and picked up a pair of rib cutters. The cutters reminded Murphy of pruning shears. After snapping through each rib, Maynard lifted out the front of Spencer’s rib cage as a single piece, like pulling out the grill on a car.
Maynard and his technician cut out Spencer’s organs, weighed them, then placed them in a pair of organ buckets that stood at the head of the examination table. Each bucket was lined with a red plastic biohazard bag.
The smell was nauseating.
“She was a smoker,” Maynard said. He held up one of Spencer’s lungs for Murphy to see. A light dusting of tiny black pellets covered the tissue. “That’s tar from cigarettes.”
Murphy had seen it before. Maynard was a reformed smoker and he liked to show everyone what smoking did to the lungs. But Spencer’s lung tissue, aside from the scattering of tar, was still a healthy pink. In older, lifelong smokers whom Murphy had seen cut open, the tissue was gray and crusted over with gobs of sticky black tar.
Maynard spent a long time examining Spencer’s colon from the inside of her abdomen. “I don’t think she bled to death,” he finally said. “There is no major arterial damage.”
“So it was strangulation?”
Maynard, whose head was jammed halfway into Spencer’s open torso, nodded. “Preliminary findings only, but I think so.”
Then it was the children’s turn on the table, the little girl first. Maynard took about forty-five minutes with each one. The kids were beyond caring what happened to them, but for Murphy the child autopsies were torture. He stepped back and leaned against the wall, as far from the examination table as he could get.
While Maynard poked, prodded, cut, and peeled, he kept up a running commentary. Everything he saw, the doctor said, was consistent with what the detectives concluded at the crime scene. The little girl had died from suffocation, most likely with her own pillow. The boy died from manual strangulation.
“Due to a lack of blood present in the area of the torn rectal tissue, coupled with the lack of swelling,” Maynard said into the microphone, “I’d say the sexual assault occurred postmortem. The rape kit will confirm, but I did not detect the presence of semen. The faint trace of a latex smell leads me to suspect the perpetrator used a condom.”
Maynard’s mention of a condom reminded Murphy of something. They had found no used condoms or open packages at the crime scene, but there had been condoms in the house. In the master bedroom, downstairs, a two-drawer nightstand had been emptied, the contents dumped on the floor.
Other than the bodies, the nightstand was the only thing that had been disturbed inside the house. Several unopened condoms were lying on the floor next to a small overturned wicker basket.
To Murphy, only one explanation fit the facts. The killer got a hard-on while he strangled the little boy. He ran downstairs into the mother’s bedroom, found a basket of condoms, then rushed back upstairs and raped the boy’s
