Chapter 41
“He had a terrible heart,” I was told, and based on what I reviewed, he did.
But that wasn’t why I was there. I was meeting with Steve Symes, one of the country’s experts on cuts to bone. I told him about the dismembered body in Unnatural Exposure, wanting to know if he could tell whether a saw had been used versus a straight-edge blade or one that was serrated.
The answer was yes, he certainly could. He explained why, offering tips on the best way to deflesh and degrease skeletal remains. Until that’s done it’s not possible to see defects like cutmarks.
“Simmer in ten percent bleach and do it under an exhaust fan,” he advised.
When working at the medical examiner’s office in Richmond it was eerie walking past the anthropology lab while bones rattled in a huge pot that came from a restaurant supply store. That was another unpleasant stench I prefer to forget. The images aren’t something I care to recall either.
Steve had a list of forty-five different types of saws that left varying tool marks he could identify.
We looked at examples under a fiber optic light.
A meat saw leaves a track that’s “rougher looking.” He explained harmonics, the measurement of the distance between saw teeth.
I was surprised to learn that few killers dismember victims by cutting through the joints.
After I’d finished my research for the day, I visited Graceland where Elvis had lived.
It seemed only fitting to learn more about him after reading his autopsy report.
On August 16, 1977, he was found dead on his bathroom floor at the age of forty-two, his pajama bottoms around his ankles.
It’s believed he went into cardiac arrest while using the toilet.
I toured room to room in his mansion, taking in the white furniture, the gilt stair rails, the shag carpet while his music played. Watching videos of him when he was in his prime, I was amazed. I thought back to my start at The Charlotte Observer when I interviewed his stepmother, Dee Presley.
“Elvis was a genetic accident that exploded into a star, or a god, depending on who you ask,” I wrote after touring his mansion. “Marino would be a huge fan. Scarpetta too but she wouldn’t want to admit to it.”
I’d never paid much attention to Elvis, and I thought about the indignity of death.
It’s no respecter of persons, not caring who you are.
How embarrassing to die on the toilet. Not for the dead person but the family, I knew from experience.
Sometimes relatives move a loved one’s body to conceal where the person died. Rarely is the medical examiner fooled.
In one instance, a man had a heart attack during sex, and the family decided to relocate the fully rigorous body, propping it against a chair like a plank of wood.
In another case, the decedent supposedly collapsed in the bedroom.
When the body arrived at the morgue, there was blanching on the buttocks consistent with the ring left by a toilet seat.
On tour in the U.K. in October 1994 was the first time I’d visited Edinburgh since college. I remembered roaming the hilly streets with my roommate Karen White while all I did was think about Charlie.
“I have to wonder where that young woman got lost in all that’s happened since,” I wrote while sitting in my hotel room with its view of Edinburgh Castle. “Maybe we were each other’s fantasy, not each other’s reality, and that’s where we went wrong.”
I relived how excited I was when first arriving in the U.K. that June in 1978. Then days passed and Charlie didn’t write.
“The summer was a cold, relentless rain, and I was in abject despair. I can only thank God I do not know pain like that now and hope to never again.”
I’d changed a lot since those days, evolving into a strange mix of extremely sensitive and flatline stoical.
I learned to confront frightening and tragic situations while registering nothing emotionally.
Unlike the way I was when playing tennis, I can remain calm and logical at a gory crime scene, an autopsy, or while visiting my father on his deathbed as I did in the early spring of 1996.
My half sister Rona informed me that Dad was in intensive care with a severe respiratory illness he couldn’t shake.
He’d been sick for months, and I’d visited him earlier while he was home in bed.
When he got worse and was hospitalized, Jim and I flew to Miami to see him, knowing that it likely would be for the last time.
I asked John to meet us, but he wouldn’t.
He said he’d never known Dad in life and didn’t need to say goodbye.
I sensed John’s deep-seated hurt and anger, explaining that he might regret not seeing Dad.
But John was firm in his convictions, his experiences as a child different from Jim’s and mine.
John was barely four when Mom moved us to Montreat. He has few early memories of Miami.
Despite his claims of “feeling nothing” about our father, I didn’t believe it.
I tried to talk John into saying goodbye.
It wasn’t going to happen, and in late March, Jim and I checked into a Miami Beach hotel.
When we arrived at Healthsouth Doctors Hospital in Coral Gables, we were told that we could spend no more than fifteen minutes with Dad because of his condition.
We walked into his room, and he was thin and pale, intubated and unable to talk. He was awake and alert as we pulled up chairs on either side of his bed.
“I won’t ask how you’re doing. Obviously not great or you wouldn’t be here,” I said to him with a smile, trying to keep the mood light.
His response was to reach for Jim’s hand, squeezing it. But he didn’t do the same to me. Picking up the legal pad and pen next to him, he jotted a note to Jim.
“I love you,” it said.
“Love you too, Dad,” Jim replied.
Then Dad wrote a note to me.
“How’s work?”
I felt gut-punched but didn’t let it register.
“Fine,” I replied. “I have a new book coming out in a few months.”
He nodded, writing nothing more as pain and anger seethed inside me. A few minutes later, Jim and I left.
“Can you believe that?” I erupted in the corridor. “How’s work? That’s the last thing he’s going to say to me? He writes that he loves you but can’t tell me the same thing?”
Jim had no explanation.
“Well, I’m glad,” I decided. “He did me a favor. At least he’s consistent to the very end. At least I know that everything I’ve thought about him wasn’t imagined. He has to make me feel bad. Because he knows he can.”
During dinner Jim and I talked about the beautiful art deco hotel we were staying in and how empty it seemed.
We were the only ones in the restaurant.
We decided maybe the hotel was a front for money laundering.
We began spinning sinister scenarios just like we used to do as kids, avoiding the subject of Dad and the past.
Not long after this, on April 4, I was out to dinner in Richmond when Rona paged me. Dad had died. I would find out later that he was autopsied, likely at the hospital. I’m not sure why that was necessary, possibly because it wasn’t clear what type of respiratory illness he’d suffered from.
His cause of death was “respiratory failure due to Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome due to Severe Acquired Community Pneumonia.” When he first became sick, he told me no one was sure what he’d contracted or how. He blamed it on his compromised immune system, and maybe that was true.
I’m glad I went to see him to say goodbye. But I’ll never understand why he couldn’t say he loved me or anything remotely warm or caring.
“How’s work?”
I wish I’d torn out that page in his legal pad and kept it.
“How’s work?”
I’ll forever see those two words in his small, snarled handwriting.
When I got the news of his death, I had no emotional reaction.
I went cold inside. I felt numb as it dawned on me that my life with Dad was ancient history.
He’d left my family more than thirty years ago.
We weren’t part of his world. It wouldn’t be until decades later that I’d learn he was cremated, his ashes scattered by boat at one of his favorite fishing spots.
My brothers and I weren’t informed or invited, but I wouldn’t have gone.
My mother used to say that Dad was an enigma, and she was right. To this day, there’s much about him I don’t understand. His power was to withhold. He knew I wanted information and validation. And he wasn’t going to give it to me on his deathbed any more than he had during his life.
During my last visit with him at his Miami home soon after he’d become ill, I once again brought up our early years in Miami.
I again asked about him walking out on Christmas morning.
I brought up a number of things that had happened, and hoped he might enlighten me about what was going on with him at the time.
“If I understood why, it would be helpful to me,” I explained.
“I don’t think I was much of a father,” was all he said.
“You weren’t.” I was honest about it. “But all of us have reasons for our behaviors. What were yours?”
He didn’t offer an explanation and never would.
A week before Cause of Death was published in early July 1996, I traveled to Hawaii for research at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) Laboratory.
I was in Honolulu only a day when I got a very disturbing phone call from my friend Diane, an FBI firearms instructor.
She informed me that my life was in danger.
Two weeks earlier, on June 23, the estranged husband of FBI agent Margo Bennett had abducted a priest in a church, strapping what appeared to be explosives around his waist before luring Margo there.
Eugene Bennett was a former undercover FBI agent who’d been convicted of fraud three years earlier.
He’d recently been released from prison.