A Death in Canaan (30 page)

“Yes,” Dr. Izumi said.

“And what was that opinion?”

“The patient had expired,” Dr. Izumi said. He caught himself, and smiled slightly. “The
victim
had expired, and at that time I had pronounced the patient dead.”

At the counsel table, Peter Reilly calmly reached out and took a drink of water from his white styrofoam cup.

Dr. Izumi went on to describe the scene in general. He mentioned the coins and the ironed shirts on hangers on the curtain rods, Barbara's wet jeans and underpants. He said the rug was not wet.

Miss Roraback brought up the spurting of the blood.

“Would the person who inflicted those wounds have blood on him or her?” she asked.

“Not necessarily,” Dr. Izumi replied. “It would depend on the position of the assailant. If the T-shirt were pushed up in this area, the spurting would be decreased.”

When he felt the left pulse, Dr. Izumi said, rigor mortis was not present. “Rigor mortis is a medical term used to describe the stiffness of a body after death,” he said, adding that rigor mortis usually set in about four hours after death. “It depends whether the patient is in good health or in a diseased state,” the doctor said, and on such factors as the temperature, the time of day, the humidity. But in general, it took about four hours.

Then Dr. Izumi talked of livor mortis, which he explained as “the redness, the lividity, the color.” “The blood will drain to these parts, with gravity,” he said. “In a patient lying on her back, the blood would drain and leave the front pale.”

“Did you at any time on September twenty-eight or twenty-nine observe livor mortis on the body of Barbara Gibbons?” John Bianchi asked.

“No, sir,” the doctor said.

John Bianchi asked him to explain further.

“This is because of the deep penetrating wounds cutting the major vessels in the neck,” the doctor said. “These are the main vessels that carry the blood from the heart to the brain. When these are cut, the blood, instead of being pumped to the head and to the brain, is pumped out, so there would be no redness.”

John Bianchi looked thoughtful.

“Is it fair to say that livor mortis does not appear in a body that has lost all the blood that is normally in a human body?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, that is correct,” Dr. Izumi said.

“How much blood does the human body contain?”

“In an average-size male, five quarts,” said Dr. Izumi promptly, obviously prepared for the question. “In an average-size female, four quarts, approximately.” He said that at five feet two, weighing 115 pounds, Barbara Gibbons could be considered average.

John Bianchi then asked how long it would take the heart to pump out four quarts of blood onto the floor.

Dr. Izumi looked at his notes. “They teach this in school: that a heart will pump five quarts of blood in sixty seconds. In one minute, that five quarts of blood can be pumped up.”

Mr. Bianchi looked very serious.

“It would be less than a minute before all of the blood, or the majority of the blood, was pumped out of her body?”

“Yes,” Dr. Izumi said.

“When that happens, Dr. Izumi, is the person dead?”

“No, sir,” the doctor said.

John Bianchi did not look surprised. “Would you explain that?” he asked solemnly.

Dr. Izumi looked at his notes again and explained that there was a short period, four to six minutes, during which mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and cardiac resuscitation might be successfully applied, which is why medical people and ambulance drivers studied those techniques. After that period, though, biological death, real death, would occur. “If blood does not get to that brain within five to six minutes, this patient has died, biologically,” the doctor said.

“Referring back to the body of Barbara Gibbons,” the prosecutor said, “with the cuts that you saw around her throat, and the arteries you know were severed, and the blood that you observed on the floor, would you testify that for a person that size, blood would be pumped out of the body in less than six minutes? How long after receiving such lacerations would be the limit of her actual life?”

“Six minutes,” Dr. Izumi said.

“One thing that was most important to us,” he went on, “was that the gaping abdominal wound which revealed the yellow underlying fat had not oozed any blood out.”

“Did that indicate anything to you?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

“Yes,” said the doctor. “It meant that with those wounds, with very little blood, if any, it meant that the major incisions in the neck had been completely exsanguinated on the blood in the region of the neck.”

“With that in mind,” Mr. Bianchi continued, “do you have an opinion as to whether those other miscellaneous cuts, when they were inflicted, Doctor?”

“Yes,” said Dr. Izumi. “It does mean that these wounds were inflicted after the patient had died.”

At a recess, Marian Battistoni chatted with a neighbor. “I didn't know she was cut up so much,” Marian said. Farn Dupre said she felt a little better, knowing Barbara had already been dead when most of the cutting was done. But I remembered what Mickey had said, as he recalled his own thoughts that night, when he walked into the house and saw Barbara dead on the floor. “She was hurtin' when she died,” Mickey said.

Dr. Izumi's testimony lasted several days—long, wearying days that seemed to merge into one another in a murky, gray blur. Long recesses, often with the jury out, while the lawyers debated the law, dragged on too. Sheriff Battistoni never needed to bring out the smelling salts; the jurors had their own ways of coping. Mr. Collins usually took one quick look at the screen, whenever a slide came on, then looked down, not looking up again until the next picture was announced. The jurors looked numb, or just drained, most of the time. Sometimes one or the other would smile quickly, nervously, but nobody cried, although once Raymond Lind put his arm around Helen Ayre as they left the jury box.

The first days of March dragged on, too. The days were wet and windy. More than once, clinical and biological death was discussed. “Clinical death is described as how an individual or a doctor sees that patient,” Dr. Izumi explained again. “In a period of one minute to five minutes there may be no pulse. It is during that time that the patient has no heartbeat. He appears dead, but he is really not, because it's only the clinical judgment of the observer during this time. It is during the zero to five minutes, when no oxygen is gotten to that brain, that death occurs, because there is cellular and tissue death. The patient is biologically dead at the end of five minutes.”

John Bianchi looked thoughtful.

“So if a layman observed the body during this zero to five minute period, he might think the patient was dead?” he asked.

“Yes,” the doctor said.

They discussed the rest of that night in the little house on Route 63, how they'd put plastic bags around Barbara's hands and rolled her in a sheet, to take her to Sharon Hospital.

“When did you next see that body?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

“At nine-thirty
A.M
.,” Dr. Izumi said, “in the Sharon Hospital morgue, for the autospy.”

Mr. Bianchi coughed slightly. “At this time, may we have the slides?” he asked.

There was another stir in the courtroom. “Oh my God,” murmured Farn Dupre, to no one in particular. “Oh my God.”

So the slides came again, seeming more horrible, somehow, than the first showing.

“What caused breakage of the nose?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

“This is a direct traumatic blow, most likely to occur prior to death because at this time blood was being pumped up to the head, brain, and face. Blood oozes out of the nostrils, as seen here, indicating that this had been done prior to death.”

The first showing had been speedy, just twenty-seven minutes, but this time each gruesome slide was examined and discussed with agonizing slowness. Dr. Izumi asked for the next one, 2.

He described “a very deep wound to the left side of the neck here, extending across the midline of the neck, here where the voice box is, and extending beyond the midline to almost the right lower earlobe. This is a gaping wound,” the doctor said. “In the midline there is the larynx, or the voice box. The deep center wound was brought across the voice box someplace in this vicinity completely separating and opening the voice box so that the vocal cords could be exposed and closely seen.”

“Are they visible in the slide, Doctor?” John Bianchi asked.

“Yes, they are,” the doctor said, but to the spectators watching the jury, the answer was unnecessary. Helen Ayre grimaced at the screen, and Raymond Lind's eyes seem to have sunk deep into his head, as he watched.

“With such cuts, could a person speak before death?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

“No, sir,” the doctor said softly but emphatically. “This victim could neither speak nor scream. There is no mouth, because these openings communicate directly with the outside.”

Dr. Izumi talked about Barbara's hand then, and how he'd opened it so Sergeant Chapman could photograph the defense wound. “As a forensic pathologist, it's your experience that a wound such as that is incurred in defending oneself from an attacker?” “Yes, sir,” Izumi said. Later, at the autopsy, when he took the bags off Barbara's hands, Dr. Izumi found, mixed with the dried clotted blood, four to six hairs. He picked them off her hand with forceps and put them in containers, which were sealed and witnessed.

There was the slight bruise on the right elbow, where Barbara must have raised her arm to ward off whatever blow she saw coming, and the deep wound in the abdomen, “one inch in length and gaping half an inch or more. It shows the underlying fat and the so-called soft tissue. This shows no oozing or clotted blood present. This occurred
after
death.”

Dr. Izumi said her thighs had been broken after she died, too. He had cut into the leg and gone to the bone. “As I cut in and inserted my finger and brought out pieces of bone, there was absolutely no blood,” he explained.

“If the broken legs had occurred before death, you would have found a large amount of blood?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

“Yes,” Dr. Izumi said.

“And you did not find it?”

“I did not find it.”

“Do you have an opinion as to how those legs could have been broken?”

“No, sir, I do not,” Dr. Izumi said. “Except that we try, as pathologists, to reproduce a fracture, and it would take a large amount of force. A great deal of force.”

There was a whisper, audible, in the courtroom, and Mr. Murdick, one of the sheriffs, whirled around. It was Marian Battistoni, but he frowned slightly at her anyway and put a finger to his lips.

“Can you tell me what you mean by a great deal of force?” Miss Roraback asked, when she cross-examined. “Are you referring to a swinging hit or a large object?”

“In the region of the head, this is a tremendous blow, the force of the blow being an object; I would say a soft object,” Dr. Izumi said.

“Like a person's fist?”

“Yes ma'am.”

“What caused the fracture of the legs?” she asked.

“A very forceful blow.”

“Was there one blow or separate blows?”

“I don't know,” he told her.

“It was a pretty powerful blow that broke those legs, wasn't it?” she asked.

“Yes,” the doctor said.

“Could it have been caused by someone jumping on those legs?” the prosecutor asked.

“Yes, sir, it could,” the doctor said, and even Gary Lewis looked shocked. Edward Ives took off his glasses and nibbled at one end thoughtfully.

There was the abdominal cut again, two to three inches long, one to two inches wide. Paul Travaglin rubbed the side of his head with the palm of his hand as he looked at the screen. Dr. Izumi said it would take some force to cause such a large tear, and that because there was no free or clotted blood around, he felt that that wound, too, had occurred after death.

There were the cut marks on the back, with no discoloration, also “produced after the victim was dead,” and then the disputed slides again.

“Once more we are inside the body cavities,” Dr. Izumi said. “Below and just to the right of the hysterectomy clips is a tear or cut wound. This is inside the pelvic cavity.” He didn't speak with relish, exactly, but with interest and muted enthusiasm, as though he were onto an interesting case and wanted to be sure the class got the benefit of it.

“This is a one-and-a-half- to two-inch tear,” he said. “No liquid or clotted blood, therefore, this occurred after death.

“This is the opening of the vaginal canal on the outside. This depicts cuts. These are a little deeper, a little further in.… This represents the inner portion here, within the pelvic cavity.” He said he had found no male sperm present.

Finally, 0-19, the neck organs hanging outside, completely removed from Barbara's body.

“You testified that she could not talk or scream immediately after the neck cuts,” Mr. Bianchi reminded him. “I would ask whether, during that period of time, would there be any indication of her breathing or gasping or any such activity as that?”

Dr. Izumi spoke carefully. “At the time the windpipe is cut, the air now comes out from these openings. The mouth plays no part in breathing at all. The victim would continue to breathe until the time of death. It would be labored or forced breathing.”

“Would it continue to the time of biological death, Doctor?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

“Yes, sir, it would,” Dr. Izumi said.

“Four to six minutes after this cutting, before the person was biologically dead?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So there would be, during that span, some evidence of breathing, Doctor?”

“Yes, sir,” Dr. Izumi said.

“You said that the biological death is the very, very end?” John Bianchi asked.