653: Crime Scene
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I'm in the office of Dr. L.J. Drakeovich, who examines dead bodies for the police in Pontiac, Michigan, and he's running through this carousel of slides, all of the murder victims. They're closeups of body parts. To say, as you just like flip through these things, this is the grizzliest slide you've ever seen. It's just like every slide is some, there's another story, yes. Every crime scene is a story of its own, is a novel, and it opens up in every direction. To illustrate, he tells me this story. Back when he worked in the Wayne County Coroner's office in Detroit, there was a young woman. The story, by the way, probably is not suitable for younger children. Okay, anyway, there's this young woman, she apparently killed herself. By taking her boyfriend's gun, putting it on her mouth, and firing, it was ruled a suicide. That's what the police thought. That's what the other medical examiners thought. But Dr. Drakeovich wondered, "This woman didn't have a history of depression. There's no note." My colleagues teased me as being paranoid and seeing things where they were not. So he does the examination, including the inside of the woman's mouth. In this particular case, the tongue showed two holes. Two holes, he says, is very strange in this kind of case. Because usually he told me, this gets a little explicit again, usually he says, when people shoot themselves in the mouth to kill themselves, they kind of point the gun upward toward the brain. The tongue doesn't get involved at all, doesn't get injured. The only way this could have happened, he realized, is if the tongue was all bunched up, kind of pushing against the tip of the gun, the muzzle of the gun, when the gun went off. But why would you do that? Why put your tongue there if you were killing yourself? In my assessment of this, this was a homicide. Now, do I know for sure? No, I did not, but that's the logic. So, I told the detectives that that was my finding. They went back to interview the boyfriend. And they said, we know that you shot her. They said, no, I didn't, I said, yes, we know. The doctor told us, he said, what doctor? This is the doctor that did the autopsy. He said, what autopsy? I called the coroner's office two weeks ago, and they told me they never did the autopsies and suicides. Of course, you know, why call the coroner's office to ask that question if you're not planning on killing anybody. It did not take very long after that, he said, for this guy to confess. As Dr. Drakeovich says, every crime scene is a novel. With a day on a radio program, we dive into those crime scenes and the novels that led to them. From W.B.E.C., Chicago, it's This American Life, Myra Glass. And you know, the thing that makes a crime scene such a strange kick-off to any story, any detective's investigation is that the crime scene is filled with details, but it
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