164: Crime Scene (2000)
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I'm in the office of Dr. L.J. Drake-Vitch, who examines dead bodies for the police in Pontiac, Michigan, and he's running through this carousel of slides, all of the murder victims. There are close-ups 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. It is a novel, and it opens up in every direction. To illustrate, he tells me this story. When he worked for the Wayne County Corners Office back in Detroit, there was a young woman. This story, by the way, might not be suitable for younger children. Anyway, there's this young woman who apparently killed herself by taking her boyfriend's son, putting it in her mouth, and firing. The police, the other medical examiners, everybody thought it was a suicide, but something about the case bothered Dr. Drake-Vitch. The woman didn't have a history of depression. There was no note. My colleagues tease me as being paranoid and seeing things where they were not. I did the examination, and I did the examination of the oral cavity, and in this particular case, the tongue. Showed two holes. This is very strange, Dr. Drake-Vitch explained, because usually, again, this gets a little explicit. Usually, when people shoot themselves in the mouth, they kind of point the gun upward toward the brain. Their tongue does not get injured at all, but here, the tongue must have been all bunched up, pushing hard against the muzzle of the gun. Now, who in this world, trying to end life, will inflict additional pain and discomfort by shoving the muzzle of the gun against the tongue, unless it's another person? In my assessment of this, this was a homicide. 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." They said, "Yes, we know." The doctor told us. They said, "What doctor?" This is the doctor that did the autopsy. They said, "What autopsy?" I called the coroner's office two weeks ago, and they told me they never did auto-season suicides. Of course, why call the coroner's office to ask that question if you're not planning on killing anybody? It did not take very long for the police to get a confession out of this guy. As Dr. Dr. Dr. Vitch says, "Every crime scene is a novel. Today in our radio program, crime scenes, and the stories behind them. For W.B.E.C. Chicago and public radio international, it's this American life. I'm out of glass."
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