The only student to excuse himself to be sick was a small-town police chief in the class. All the rest of us police cadets got a kick out of that — the braggart was nothing but a blowhard!
It was the first autopsy I attended, and I was in basic police academy. A drug dealer around 25 years old had been shot in a drug deal gone bad and my class was invited to watch. Having grown up on a small farm where butchering was a routine part of farm life, the idea of cutting into a human corpse was little more than a lesson in comparative anatomy for me. I was fascinated because I was learning more about my own body.
On that occasion, I remember the Medical Examiner slicing the lungs and explaining how he could tell the man was a non-smoker but had lived in a polluted city environment most of his life.
As I progressed in my police career, I made it a point to attend every autopsy I possibly could, especially after I became a detective and was assigned death cases. Whether a murder, a suicide, a natural death, or one under suspicious circumstances, standing next to the Medical Examiner and discussing things related to the death and things not related, never failed to better inform me for writing my reports and testifying.
I remember a man who was as physically fit at age 40 as just about any human alive. A wealthy Dallas businessman, he worked out regularly at the Cooper Aerobic Center under the guidance of a personal trainer. He ran miles every day. He was awoken one night by his doorbell and answered the front door to see two high school boys who had just papered his front yard. In a moment of rage, he took off to chase them and fell over dead before he made it halfway across the front lawn.
At autopsy, I saw that his left descending coronary artery, the “widow maker,” was almost completely occluded with plaque. In other words, undiagnosed and untreated, it was only a matter of time before a heart attack took him down. The two boys might have been the precipitating factor in his death, but they were not, in my opinion, responsible for killing him. As a police investigator, my main concern at that point was ensuring that they got appropriate therapy for their own mental health, more so than punishment for what they did.
In another case, I had been back on the job only a matter of days following a radical prostatectomy for prostate cancer myself when I attended the autopsy of a young man who had stolen a car, evaded arrest in a police chase, and died in a shootout with the pursuing officers after he had wrecked the stolen car. At his autopsy, I learned all about my own prostate and the enormous difficulty in surgery through an incision below the navel, as I had recently undergone.
During the investigation of the brutal rape murder, I insisted on attending the autopsy to recover evidence – handcuffs used to restrain the victim. That also allowed me to conduct an examination for possible latent fingerprints on the victim’s skin before the Medical Examiner washed her body.
I attended scores of other autopsies, both as a police investigator and later as a civilian crime scene investigator, and even as a latent print examiner in the crime lab when our duties also included occasional crime scenes and evidence processing. I always came away better informed about the cause and manner of death.
And I never failed to learn more about my own body, as well.