Harry 3

The speaker discusses their experience working in the morgue at a hospital in New Orleans. They explain how they arrived in New Orleans with little money and sought shelter from their uncle. With their uncle's help, they secured a job at a newly built hospital where they worked various roles, including as a morgue tech. They describe the hospital as a learning environment where they were able to observe and absorb knowledge from different departments. They also mention that the hospital's morgue was brand new and served as a temporary facility for the Jefferson Parish morgue, which was not functioning properly. The speaker highlights the high volume of autopsies conducted at the hospital and the constant flow of bodies in and out of the morgue. Well, one of my favorite topics in the world we're going to dive into now, and of course that's the world of the morgue and kind of how I got introduced into it. And it's kind of an intriguing story, I think. You know, when I started working in the morgue, that actually parallels almost exactly my arrival in New Orleans to be with my family that was down there. Now, you have to understand that when I got there, I was, I had just turned, no wait, I got there, I was, I had just turned 21, I believe that's accurate. I would have arrived, well, technically, I'm sorry, let me back up. Actually I arrived prior to turning 21, I was 20. I would turn 21 in July of 1985. And I showed up down there with not a nickel to my name, hardly at all. I had a really old car that got me down there. I was attending college in Alabama and had reached the end of my rope, I didn't have anybody to turn to. And, you know, New Orleans kind of called me home, I think. My family all lived down there, most of them, my mother and my stepfather were up in Georgia. And I had, just out of necessity, I had to leave them behind. I couldn't bear another moment with that person, that man in my life at all. And so I happened to call my uncle, who was, you know, at the DA's office in Jefferson Parish at the time, and I said, Uncle Marion, I said, look, I said, I got nothing. And I said, I just, I just need a place to come and go to school and work. I'm not asking you for anything at all, other than just give me shelter, just until I can get on my feet. And he said, you got enough money to get down here? And I was like, yes, sir, I do. I said, I think I've got just enough. So I packed up the belongings that I had into a 1970 Forrest Green Monte Carlo, which, absolutely loved that car. Brakes were bad on it, didn't have enough money to really get them repaired. So I took my time, traveled down I-20, and then took the big turn south, heading through Laurel and Hattiesburg, and finally rolled in into New Orleans, and I could feel it as soon as I got there. I knew, I just knew that everything was going to be okay. Even though at that point in time, I couldn't have foreseen the horror that I would subject myself to, and those things that I would see, just within a couple of months of arriving, it felt like home, as it always did, when I'd go down to see them. So pretty quickly, I knew that I had to get into school, and I didn't want to lose momentum in that area. So much had been lost already. And I knew I had to put a roof over my head, and I've never been one to depend on anybody for anything. I like to make my own way, and my uncle, you know, he's the first assistant DA. He's very plugged in, politically, as you can imagine, just like your daddy, you know. And so anything that I could have wanted would probably, I'm not going to say it would have materialized right before my eyes, but I had a leg up on everybody. But I really wanted to do this on my own, so I said, look, I said, if there's any place that you can kind of help me get a job, I said, that'd be great. Well, at the time, they had just finished building what was then known as St. Jude Medical Center, which is out in Kenner. You might be familiar with it, I'm not sure, but it's now, I think, Kenner Medical Center or something like that. I was literally one of the first employees at this place, and it was brand new, man. I mean, it still had that new hospital smell. It was quite remarkable, you know, it had every modern amenity that you can imagine for that time, for the mid-'80s, and it was run by, it's actually AMC, I think it's called American Medical Corporation, big, big company. And it was run on behalf of two brothers named the Liltonbergs, who owned, I think it was Crown Drugs, been around in New Orleans for years and years. And they, you don't need all this history, but it was always fascinating to me. The senior Liltonberg had been a fighter pilot during World War II, and he promised God that if he made it home safely, at the conclusion, if he could make it through the war, that he would dedicate a hospital to the honor of St. Jude, and, you know, as you might well know, St. Jude is the patron saint of police officers, also the patron saint of lost causes. And so, here I was, and I, at that point in time, I felt like I was a lost cause, I was kind of singular in the world, and, you know, I'd come through a really tough childhood. And so, anything that I would be subjected to, I thought, I had really kind of steeled my soul against it, you know, in my mind, that I was going to do that thing that would be hard, that I would do that thing that I could prove to everybody how bright I knew I was, but I'd always been told I was stupid. And in the back of my mind, I had a stepfather that was always telling me, you're never going to be any better than your father was, you're just going to be just as worthless as he ever was, and that you'll never make a mark at all. And of course, that was, I could allow myself to be punched in the face by that every single day when I woke up and be defeated, but I took it almost like a challenge. So my uncle did facilitate me getting a job, and it was not a grand job, it was actually working, wearing multiple hats at this newly formed hospital, and I was like an orderly. I worked as a security guard, I worked as a patient transport person that would move patients between, you know, the x-ray room and, you know, in the ER, or from the floor, you know, somebody's on the floor, they would be brought down for x-rays or some kind of other surgical procedure. And I worked as a psych tech in the hospital, because I was a big guy back then, and, you know, I think they saw me as somebody that could wrestle with acutely psychotic patients, which I did. And I also worked as a morgue tech, and really to say I was a morgue tech is not accurate. In the beginning, it was essentially kind of a security function where I held the keys to the morgue, and I would let bodies come and go, and I worked as much as I could, Harry, I would take extra shifts, and just be in the hospital, and the thing about being in a hospital is this, and this is what's so fascinating to me, is that when you're in a hospital, it's almost like, let's see, how can I kind of lay this out in terms that you could really sink your teeth into? Okay. This is what I think. Being in a hospital is like, and again, I'd never been around hospitals, it would be around, it would be like a fledgling musician where you go to work every day, and it's not just you and a piano or a guitar with a teacher. It's you walking into a room with an orchestra, and that everybody has an assigned role, and you might not master every instrument, obviously, in the orchestra, but you're going to kind of learn what they do, and for me, that was the beauty part of working in a hospital in a very lowly position. I literally got to see everything that was going on, everything from, you know, the kitchen to what it's like being around a brain surgeon. Can you imagine that as a young kid? And that's the world that I was in, and it was the best school in the world for me, because I was just absorbing things everywhere I went, and I tried to keep my mouth shut all the time and listen, listen to what these people had to say. It was almost like robbery, intellectual robbery on my part where I wouldn't have to pay tuition. But I found as though that for everything that I did in there, I would pick up some little piece of knowledge along the way, and interestingly enough, that morgue at that hospital out in Kenner, Louisiana, as I said, was brand new. As a matter of fact, I was physically in the room when the first autopsy ever performed in the hospital was conducted. They had a brand new huge bank of instruments that had never been utilized, saws, the coolers still smelled clean. You know, it was so perfect. And that was for a hospital autopsy, and there's a big difference, because you can have a hospital pathologist that will do an autopsy when a patient dies, and they're just trying to further understand the initial diagnosis that they had made, and they have forensic autopsies that are done by a forensic pathologist. Well, as luck would have it, the Jefferson Parish morgue was not functioning, and we'll get to that in a bit more detail in just a moment, but just suffice it to say for the context here is that those bodies from that morgue that would normally have handled all of the homicides in Jefferson Parish, all the suicides, motor vehicle accidents, decomposed bodies that were pulled out of a canal or from the lake or from the river or anywhere else, they came to this beautiful pristine structure. And of course, along with those came the staff from the coroner's office, and there had been an arrangement that had been struck up between the politicians. And the coroner at the time, Dr. Charles Odom, who is a fascinating character, he was actually George Patton's personal physician during World War II. Dr. Charles Odom made an arrangement so that we could take advantage of this new facility until I think it was the refrigerator was fixed in the old morgue, and it took a long time to get this done because it was so ancient. And so there was this time I would come into work at St. Jude functioning as a hospital employee, but yet learning the personnel from the coroner's office who had to inhabit that space as well because they had such a high volume of cases that had to be done. I mean, we're talking about a constant flow of bodies in and out of that morgue because on average, Jefferson Parish back then was doing probably about 900 autopsies, 950 autopsies per year. And you begin to break that down numerically, I mean, it's pretty easy to do. You're almost outpacing, you're almost above a pace of three per day. And some days it'd be lighter, some days it'd be much heavier. And so there was this huge number of cases that were coming through, and they would have to manage these. And I just happened to be in that space. And so I could almost guarantee that even when I was not officially working at the hospital during my normal course of daily activities I was scheduled to be a part of, there would be something going on in the morgue relative to activities of the coroner. And I would just show up because, first off, I developed a grand friendship with a guy named Bill Donovan, God rest his soul, who's now passed on. And he truly became my mentor and teacher. But there was just something about him that we clicked. And I was willing to listen to him and take instruction from him. And one of the first instructions was, you're not just going to sit there and take up space. You got to work. If you're going to be in here, you got to work. And that was probably one of the greatest blessings because it compelled me not just to sit there and be part as an observer, but it compelled me to do the small things. And the small things were big things to them because they were so busy. So if it meant cleaning up the floor where blood had poured out, which always happens at autopsies, you'll get blood all over the floor, you slip in it, which happens. I've actually pulled a groin muscle twice in my career simply doing a split in blood. It's that way. And it's painful. But it's the reality of the world, of being in that place. So you always have to go in and do cleanings in between the various cases because once you get one body off the table, you store it away and you pull out the next body and then you just kind of go through it. And each case is different. Each case is either less or more complicated than the one before. And so there's a constant opportunity to mine for knowledge. I think that's the biggest thing. And so I would show up every day. They weren't paying me a dime. Unless you regard knowledge as currency, and I've got to tell you, I do. Matter of fact, it's a coin of the realm in my occupation. Because without knowledge and without understanding, you're lost. You're bumped around blind without a cane. So I would just drink deeply from these opportunities that I was fortunate enough to have. So here we are. We're in this space and I'm showing up daily. And I understand the nature of the instruments and there's a whole tray of instruments that sit there. And each instrument has a specific purpose for what you're doing at autopsy. You'll have multiple scalpels that come in numbers, they're numbered. My preference had always been a number 23 scalpel, or I'm sorry, number 22 scalpel. I learned how to change blades out on scalpel, which again, on scalpels, which seems kind of a pedestrian thing, but it's critical. So that you don't slice your hand off or slice your fingers off. You have various different types of scissors that are utilized. You have coronary scissors, where you're dissecting out the vessels of the heart. You have bowel scissors, where literally you run the entire length of the bowel to look for any kind of pathology inside the intestines. You have a variety of different types of probes that you have to use at autopsy. You have pickups, which is just a fancy term for tweezers or forceps. They come in different sizes. You have dissecting knives, which are different than scalpels. Just imagine a gigantic butcher knife that's being used. And those all have to remain, you have to all keep those sharp. And then you have the saws with all the various attachments that you can do bone work with, open skull primarily, but they're used for other things. And then there's things that are like household items that are in there that you don't commonly associate with the world of forensic science. We call them balers, for instance. But balers were actually big scoops, like you'd see, like a ladle, okay, almost. No holes in it, but like a scoop, like you would scoop a punch with, okay, of a big bowl. And they have a distinct size that, you know, ounces or milliliters or whatever it is. And for instance, you'd have a chest full of blood where you'd have to what was called bale it out. You'd have to measure the amount of blood on both sides of the chest. That'll give you an idea of how much blood the subject lost internally. So you have those items. And then probably the thing that gets most people is limb shears. And yes, I'm saying that correctly. There's limb shears. The gigantic limb shears, my wife, Kim, calls them loppers, like you cut branches off with. You have those in there. And those are used actually to take off the breastplate. And there's a very specific way that you do that. So, you know, you'd have all those sorts of things and not to mention other evidence collecting tools. There's a whole litany of these things that you have to learn, these tools that you have at your disposal and how to appropriately use them. And so while I would go in every day, I would see the utility for all of these things and kind of watch as they move about the table. And it's a very quiet environment other than the sound of metal on metal, because this is not like a surgery suite, you know, where you have a padded table. You're talking about an all stainless steel table with metal tools. So if anything drops, you hear it. It echoes, you know, in the room. And you kind of get used to it, but there's always banging that goes around in that sense of the metal scraping the metal. You don't do a lot of talking. It's almost like going to, after you get the hang of it, it's almost like watching, you know, one of these dance competitions on television, you know, where the women wear those fancy, you know, dresses like the flamingo style dresses and the guys have their, you know, they both have their hair slicked back, the ballroom dancing, I guess is what it's called. And you get into a rhythm and a rattle and a hum and you're there as the diener for the forensic pathologist. And diener is an interesting word, it's actually derived from the German and it means servant of the dead. And so if you're a diener, it's another term for autopsy assistant, but for years, the position has been referred to as a diener. And so you, as the diener, you learn what the pathologist or prosector, as they're called many times, has need of, and you go about your own job. And it's not like surgery where the doctor does all of the work in surgery. You know, you have nurses that are there and the nurses might be asked to, here, hold this and retract, retract the stomach or retract the bowel or anything like that. No, that's not the way it works. In the autopsy suite, you are removing the organs either on block, which is like in one big piece, and I can talk to you about that some other time if you wish, or you do it organ by organ. Well, the diener's doing all of that and you're looking for pathology as it goes along, you're looking for trauma, and you're literally handing the organs off to the pathologist or you're putting them up into this big scale that hangs above the table. And to tell you what scale looks like, it looks, if you go to the grocery store, all right, next time you go to the grocery store and you're walking through the pro-do section and you see the big scale, stainless steel scale there, hanging there, it's got the needle that goes around and tells you what the weight of the vegetables are, it's the same thing in the morgue. And you have to weigh each organ individually because, you know, anatomically, organs have to be, meet certain parameters in order to be deemed healthy versus not, and that's just from a weight perspective. So I'm being exposed to all of this all along, and at first, you know, I wasn't allowed to touch any instrument in order to use as a method to dissecting the body. I was asked to clean instruments, which I would at the end, you know, soak them and wash them and then reload scalpel blades and get ready for either the next case or the next day. But one of the cool things I got to do before I ever actually did anything with a body, as I was sitting on a stool in there while I was waiting to clean up, I would actually become the forensic pathologist scribe, you know, just like, you know, you think a scribe, you know, like an ancient monk or somebody in Egypt, you know, that's writing something down. Because the pathologist would be completely covered in blood, right, they can't take their gloves off to write. And the old theatrical thing where they've got the microphone hanging from the ceiling and all that, it's confusing and it's, I've been in those environments and it's horrible, they don't work. So you need a scribe. And of course, my hand shot up immediately, you know, I was, I loved doing scribe. Because the, I would, I would, the thoughts of the pathologist would become audible, okay. So if they're standing there and they're looking at, say, a gunshot wound that traverses through, let's say it goes through the lower lobe of the right lung or passes in between, say, the fifth and sixth rib laterally on the right side of the body and then clips the lower lobe and then goes through the top of the liver and exits out inferior to the left kidney. Well, suddenly I'm writing that data down and just merely by osmosis, I'm learning about trajectory of bullet wounds. I'm not sitting in class doing this, I'm actually seeing this played out in real time. And that applies to everything that I was asked to write down. Even if it's a non-trauma case, maybe you've got a case involving some kind of unique pathology. I used to have a photo and I don't know what became of it, and this is going to be really disgusting to you, but there was a photo that I had taken, or I had a deputy sheriff, a camera person that took this. And I was so fascinated. It was the first time that I'd ever seen what's referred to as a horseshoe kidney. And it looked like, in development, the kidney never, the poles of the kidneys never separated. So they were always bound together. It had two separate ureters that would come off of it, but at the very top of the kidney, they were still attached, just like they had been this person's entire life. And this was an adult, they still functioned, but it was just such an anomaly, I'd never seen that. I said, here, I took a picture of me holding this thing and I held it up, not to my face, but in front of my face, so it looked like I had a gigantic handlebar mustache hanging down. And you know, as grotesque as that might be, it was fascinating to me, because that's the thing about autopsies, Harry, when you open up a body, you're actually seeing a space with your own two eyes that has never been viewed by another human being. In this person's existence, you're literally going into inner space at that point in time, where it's, these things are forever covered unless an autopsy is performed, and in some cases, maybe a surgery in life, but for the most part, most people are going to go through surgeries. But in this autopsy, you look inside the wonder of the human body, and you are the first one to behold what's contained therein. Now, you know, people will say, well, a body is a body is a body, no, it's not. We're all uniquely created, and you're documenting a life lived through the pathology or the lack of pathology that you might see there before you. So it was always fascinating, it put a real deep hook in me, that part of the exploration, and to be able to sit there as a scribe and listen to this man, who, by the way, was like an associate, in addition to being a forensic pathologist, he was also an associate professor of pathology at LSU Medical School downtown, so I'm sitting at this guy's feet, metaphorically, of course, and I'm listening to him, and I'm taking notes. Now, you know, I hadn't even completed an undergraduate degree, but yet all of this data is coming in to me, and it's like, it's like an open fire hydrant. You know, you see those images of those kids out on the street in New York, you know, where they'll uncap on those fire hoses, or fire hydrants, and the kids are playing around in it. Just imagine knowledge shooting out of there, and, you know, hitting this kid in the face that, you know, didn't have this kind of background. I was always told I didn't have this kind of aptitude, and I thank God that I came to my knowledge in this manner, Harry, because if I tried to jump through the hoops of academia to get to that point where I could be seated in the morgue doing this, there's a high probability I could have failed, that I would not have achieved this goal. So, like much of my career, it was kind of reverse engineered, and everything that I did became, I became a better death investigator, as every step that I took, every tiny movement down that continuum in time, I became better at what I did. Every bit of knowledge that I gleaned, and, you know, even before I went to work for the coroner full time, I spent every dime I had on text. I would ask the pathologist, what book do I need? Just tell me. And he would never say, you know, go out and buy, you know, an intro to human anatomy and physiology textbook. No. He would point me to Gray's Anatomy. You got to have a copy of Gray's Anatomy. And there's also a British text that's out there. You need to buy that, you know, and you need to get Spitz and Fisher, which is the ultimate forensic textbook that someone could purchase, and you need to read, and you need to buy Tabor's medical dictionary, and you need to read that and create a word list. And he's teaching me as if I'm a medical student, you know, even though I wasn't. And so I came into that, in this world, with people, I think, first off, they were short staffed. They didn't have anybody to turn to. And I was there. I was a willing volunteer. And here I am in this big, beautiful place, this brand new hospital that looks so pristine and so glorious. And every day was like a new adventure when I would walk in. You know, for them that had been doing it for so many years prior to my arrival, it was rote, you know, for them. It was a J-O-B. But for me, I just, it was glorious. You know, it truly was. I had an opportunity to figure out puzzles where other people, you know, they might have to solve problems in their life, but they're not having to solve the problems of the dead. And here I was, this 21-year-old kid that was there doing this. You know, so I think probably by August of 1985, I'm pretty sure I'd been attending autopsies all along. And I'd proven to them that I wasn't going away. I was a good hospital employee. And so I was there. And I remember Bill looking at me and saying, they're done with the case. And they're saying, do you want to close? And I was like, yeah, I want to close. So the first, you know, the first sensation, there's two things that happen to you when you do an autopsy. First off, the first time you pick up this needle, and it's not like a regular needle like you might see if, you know, you're having sutures done. You know, it's like a little fishhook thing that they've got. And there's a suture string that's attached to it. It comes prepackaged. And they kind of whip stitch this thing along, you know. It's not like that. It's this, I guess, probably, I'll send you a picture of one so you can see what I'm talking about. They call it an S-needle. It's shaped like the letter S. And one end has an eyelet. And the other end is very sharp. And it's curved like an S so that you can grip this thing. It's specifically made for this purpose. And they're rather large. And so you, Bill asked me, he said, do you want to close? And I don't know if it's that he, at that particular time, if it was that he wanted to teach me or if he wanted to go take a smoke break. But he got me started. And he knew that it would take me a while to do because I'd go so slowly, you know. And so he got me started. You know, he showed me how to tie it off at the beginning. You always start, well, I always started down near the pubic region where the initial incision begins. Remember, we use these big Y incisions to open the body. So the apex of both shoulders come down, meet in the middle of your chest, of your breastbone, okay, right on the sternum. And that forms kind of the invert, kind of, that forms the V portion of a Y. And then where those two points meet in the center of your sternum, you go all the way down to the pubis with the incision, and it creates a giant Y, okay. And so you always, I would always start down at the bottom and work my way up. And these stitches are actually called baseball stitches. And it's kind of wind, wind the string through it, okay. And so it creates almost like a puckered appearance, you know, as the skin is being, you know, kind of whipped back together, if you will, you know, and sutured. And another thing that folks are not aware of is that when we sew bodies up in the morgue, we don't use some kind of fancy, you know, surgical sutures. We use kite string. And, yes, you heard me correctly. It's kite string. And it's kite string that is nylon. It's very resilient. So if you do it right, it's not going to break open until the body gets to the mortuary where they're going to cut everything that you've done and, you know, redo it themselves. They use glue and all kinds of other stuff that's really more morbid to me than working in the morgue. But that's a tale for another time. But the idea of having to suture up this body and, you know, the thing I had to get past, if I remember correctly, was the idea of that initial puncture of another human's flesh with this ghastly needle. And then drawing it through to the other side and then pulling that string all the way through the body because it was a great length of string. And then going back and tying it off in that initial anchor, that anchor knot down near the pubis. And then you just go from there and just kind of stitch up. Now, people ask, you know, well, what do you do with all those organs that have been dissected because they have been chopped to bits, essentially. Well, the organs are actually placed back into the body. But they're placed back into the body inside of a plastic bag. Actually, a garbage bag. And they're stuffed down into the abdomen. And, by the way, this includes the brain as well. So everything's kind of commingled in there. And you want to make sure that you're doing the right thing. You want to make sure that you're doing the right thing. You want to make sure that you're doing the right thing. And once you get the organs placed back in the body, that's when you can begin to stitch up the body. I know this is really morbid. But, hey, we're talking about death, right, Bubba? It's almost like stuffing a turkey. It really is. I mean, you're stuffing the body, the organs, back into their non-anatomical configuration because the idea is to get the organs out of there and have them transported with the body back to the funeral home so that they can do what they wish to do. You put the breastplate back on. You sew it up. And I remember feeling a real sense of pride after the first time I did it. And it didn't really get to start. It didn't start to get easy for me until probably about two weeks of doing it. And it just becomes mechanical after a bit. The tough thing was being given a loaded scalpel with a very sharp blade on it and being asked if I'd like to open. When you go to open the body, it's that touching of the flesh with that sharp edge. How much pressure do I apply? How deep do I go? Do I use the leading end of this thing that's got a real sharp point? Or do I drag the entire length of the blade surface across the skin? How do I know when I've gotten sufficiently deep enough so that we can kind of peel back everything to get a view anatomically? First off, I remember being very terrified I was going to cut myself. And you should respect it. It's like, well, you're handling a very sharp instrument. As a matter of fact, it's the sharpest thing potentially that I'd ever held in my life up until that point. And for good reason. These are surgical scalpels that could be used in a doctor's office or perhaps in surgery to conduct procedures with. And so, yeah, you can cut yourself. And I've cut myself many times. I've stabbed myself with needles many times in the morgue. Because either it was so busy that you just kind of, you kind of go about the routine and you're trying to go fast. And of course, as you know, it's like if you sit down to play a piece, Harry, and again, I would never presume to know you in this manner. I watch you and I appreciate you and I see the skill with which your hands move. Let's say you're given a complicated piece. I cannot imagine that even at your skill level, something you've never played before, that you just blast right through it. It's one of those things where you have to take your time. And you kind of learn everything and where your fingers go. And the same with autopsy. You have to understand the position of your hand and how to leverage the body. You can be doing an autopsy on a 90-pound woman, but the next case you're going to have to do might very well be a 300-pound man. And that's a completely different autopsy because it's so much more dense. There's a huge layer of fat that you have to contend with. Generally, it's much bloody, much more bloodier. There's even, as horrible as this is, the fat creates like a grease as well. You have this kind of contact that's all over the place. And it leeches onto you. And you have their blood on you anyway because you're in this space with them. It's very tactile. It's one of these things where you're experiencing this in a weird sort of way. And when I was very young and I started doing autopsies, I've always been kind of a— I guess I've always taken a philosophical view of life many times. And I would begin to think about, I don't know, just some of the—I don't know. I'd have these esoteric thoughts that would come to mind about the connection between life and death and about me bridging this world between trying to understand what death had taken from this person and being involved, completely and totally involved in the sum total of all that remained of these people, literally. And it might be somebody that died and their body is fully pristine. Or it could be a decomp, which are horrible to do. Or it could be a burn victim, which are probably even worse to me. But you're having to tell the tale. But in order to understand the tale, you have to open the book. And so opening the book is opening their body. So it's more than just the mechanics of physically opening a body as you get into this area with them. It's the idea of not screwing up to the point where if there's evidence there, you're not going to destroy it by virtue of what you do with that blade or what you do with your bare hands if you're doing a blunt dissection. Because sometimes you can't use the blade. You have to pull and tug with your bare hands or your gloved hands and free up adhesions and do all those sorts of things. How much pressure do I apply? And you've opened up the rib cage because you've had to use the big shears. And you always have a fear because the shears leave jagged edges on the ribs and you're always afraid that you're going to brush your arm up against one of those jagged ribs and you're going to cut yourself with the decedent's bone. That has happened. It's happened to me on many occasions over the course of my career. These things that you have to account for all along the way. So it's almost like you're in the cockpit of a plane and you see those guys do what they do in those environments, which has always been amazing to me. They're flipping switches and turning knobs and all this stuff. But in my own little way, I've done that in the morgue as have other people that have worked in the morgue. You have to understand how everything is kind of laid out. The difference for me though is that I didn't do it in some kind of safe science laboratory at UNO or Delgado or Tulane or Loyola. I did it I did it on the fly. I did it in a high pressure environment where you're trying to collect evidence and make discoveries and all this stuff. You're learning as you go. I had to take that to heart. My friend Bill, going back, I'm just recalling a term that he taught me. He and the pathologist I was working with, who was a product of, unfortunately, when Charity was still there and around, they pushed through so many great medical scholars over the years. When you work in a place like Charity, these doctors that come through there, they have this kind of there's this motto that they apply. It says, see one, do one, teach one. You see the autopsy, then you do the autopsy and then you teach the next person. That applies in clinical medicine too. You're in an emergency room on a Friday night in downtown New Orleans and you've got people that are torn to hell and back and they're coming in. There's not a lot of time for you to sit around and ask questions or to think deep thoughts about it. You're there and you're having to do it, man. You're thrown into the fire. That kind of carried over for me because everybody that I learned from was a product of Charity. Everybody. Whether they were a Tulane doctor or they were an LSU doctor, everybody had passed through that crucible of Charity in downtown. That's what made it such a grand experience for me. I got to sit at these people's feet, Harry, that had seen all manner of things that had come either across the autopsy table or through a surgery suite or through the emergency room and that's what makes New Orleans so unique is that because life is so varied down there, you have this world that inhabits the middle class, I think, and it extends to the rich and the poor as well, but kind of like you're zoned in on people where they're going about their everyday lives and they have these horrible things that happen to them that they never saw coming, that translates into death investigation because it's so unique down there how everybody lives. Years later, after I left New Orleans and came to Atlanta, Atlanta was so vanilla. It was so boring compared to anything I'd seen in New Orleans, but I digress. Sorry, I kind of went afield with that, but I was in for a real shock because they stayed for, I guess the coroner stayed for about a year at St. Jude. I was still obviously working there. I was going to school at Delgado. That's all I could afford, and I'm proud of that, you know, the time that I spent there. Went to City Park Campus while I was still working full time, and then when the coroner personnel left, I'd become such friends with Bill, I would go to his house, and he and his wife, Susie, they lived uptown. They lived up on Palmer, which I don't know if you know where Palmer is. It runs right off of St. Charles. It's like, let's see, how far is it? It's actually before you get to the big synagogue. It's on the same side of St. Charles as Loyola and Tulane are, but right before you get to the synagogue, it's right off campus from Loyola. It's like two blocks before that, so Palmer runs kind of parallel, and they had this cool old shotgun double house with a screen in front porch, and I'd go up to their house at night, and Bill's big thing, and it's always stuck with me, he created a real love in my heart for Van Morrison, and we would, the three of us, myself and Susie and Bill, we'd sit around and talk and drink wine and just hang out, and Bill would always ask me what my plans were, what my plans were, and I'd say, well, I'd really like to come to work for you guys, and he's like, well, I can't give you a job at this time, but he said, if you want to volunteer to come out on scenes, I'll take you under my wing, and you can come and begin to learn what it's like out in the field, so it's not just, you're not just in the morgue. Well, keep in mind, I was, you know, you work at a place like St. Jude, again, I can't overemphasize the fact that it's so pristine and new that when you're, you start to go out on the scenes, and I'm going out volunteering, this probably would have been in winter, well, it would have been in the 80s. I think I'd actually gone out on scenes before they left. Matter of fact, I know I did before they left to do autopsies back at the regular parish morgue. I would still, I would go out to scenes with them with Bill in particular and kind of learn the ropes, and you see the bodies in this very clinical environment, but Harry, it's when you're learning the ropes and you start to go out into the field with these seasoned coroner investigators, and that's when you really begin to see the horror of everything, because there's a phrase that I've coined along the way, and I use it all the time. In medical legal death investigation, you're always having to see the abnormal in the context of the normal. You imagine the, I don't know, just think about Thanksgiving. You think about how wonderful your mom's kitchen is on Thanksgiving, and the smells, and the turkey, and the dressing. Maybe you're helping cut up celery or onion to go into the dressing, or think about my granny's oyster dressing. You're thinking about all this stuff, but yet you go into this home where life has been lived, and in their kitchen space, you see it just covered with blood, and somebody's been slaughtered in there. It's like something you would see on a battlefield, not in the kitchen, or not on the bed where maybe as a husband and wife, you've created life. It puts a whole new spin on it. You combine my first experience in the clinical hospital environment with volunteering to go out on scenes with a coroner investigator, and it's a true, they are polar opposites. They truly are. But the big balance for me, the big balancing act is when I finally went to the parish morgue for the first time. I didn't really realize what I was stepping into, because the parish morgue was a tiny room. It really was. To give you an idea, I've got to track down a picture to send this to you, because most people do not believe it when I say it, but all I've got is my good word. The morgue itself was part of the parish prison. When you show up in the morning to do autopsies, we generally try to get there about 7, 730. There's a lot of chatting back and forth beforehand, because you've got to get everything scheduled. In Jefferson Parish, there might be, let's say you have five cases that you've got to do that day. Well, you might have a case that the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office is involved in, but then again, you might have another one that the Harahan police are involved in. Then you might have another one that Gretna is involved in, or maybe, just maybe, Grand Isle police are involved in. You have to coordinate these things. It's like land and planes. You've got these bodies stacked. The cooler, let's start with the cooler that's inside this place. After you've passed through all of the security, which you have to, because it's inside the security perimeter of the jail, once you've passed through all of the security to open the door to get in the thing, the cooler is, just imagine, it's a stainless steel box. It's kind of stuck into the wall. It's big. It's really big. There's a refrigerator unit on top of it. It's stainless steel, but it's been around so long that it's stained. It's stained with fingerprints all over it that every now and then you'll find traces of bloody fingerprints on it and not bloody fingerprints from the sense of somebody had a gloved hand in blood and they touched the surface. You'll find remnant of that all over the place. It always had an appearance that there was grease on the outside of it. That's no lie. Bone dust would settle on the thing because you're creating dust with the bone saws and agitating bone saws like if you've ever seen a cast saw. A cast saw creates a cloud. It kind of floats and that stuff lights everywhere. The cooler itself only held four bodies there. But we would have so many cases that we would literally have to stack bodies on top of one another inside of these little bitty crypts that were in there. As you can imagine, the more bodies you have in there, the harder this thing has to work in order to cool. All it takes is if you get, say, seven bodies into a four-person cooler, it becomes problematic. Then on top of it, there's so many poor people in south Louisiana and down in the New Orleans area. A lot of these people are indigent. So what are you going to do with a body? You've got to hold on to it. So you'll have bodies that were in that cooler that may have been in there for months, months and months and no one has collected them. The family didn't have money or you don't know who they are. You're having to deal with all of these things just with the cooler and then moving the bodies around and getting them out and getting them up onto the single table that was in this place. So just dealing with body storage alone was this monumental task and it was always ongoing. It was always problematic. The morgue was in no way modern. The morgue itself, my understanding is the morgue had been built back in the 20s and the parish prison had been there prior to that. This was like a little add-on. Let's just think about this. When this thing was built in the 20s, it was built to accommodate the number of deaths that would have occurred in the 1920s. Not the number of deaths that would have occurred in the 1980s. When I first started out here, I still remember the first time I ever saw a rock of crack cocaine. I was physically there when the crack war started down on what they called Electric Avenue. It was literally a road that ran parallel to Harvey Canal and we always had shootings down there all the time. So I was right there in the middle of all this. You're thrown into this fire and you have this space that you're having to examine all these bodies in and it's a never-ending cycle of bodies that are passing through this place. When you see the morgue, this little add-on afterthought that they had created, it looked like an afterthought. The paint was completely peeling in there. The floors were old ceramic tile and they're tiny tiles. They were kind of cracked and the floor would kind of undulate because everything in New Orleans, as you know, the foundation shifts on anything. You get foundational cracks and everything. We're talking about the morgue here. Even after all these years, it was still settling and cracking and all that sort of stuff. The morgue had been flooded a couple of times. Whoever thinks about a morgue flooding, that was just during my tenure in the old morgue. You're in this environment with peeling and cracking paint. You've got limited storage and because I was this young buck, you feel like when you're young and virile like that, you feel like a young man, you feel like you can do anything. I remember one day I had to get a body out of a cooler and I didn't have anybody to help me. I just got fed up because bodies were stacked everywhere. I literally started throwing bodies over my shoulder in bags and just physically walking them over the table and laying them down. Because you're there, I would always get there an hour or two before the forensic pathologist showed up. It was my job to have everything prepared and ready to rock and roll. When I started working at the morgue in Jefferson Parish, the old morgue, it was this weird kind of surreal environment to be in as a young man doing this really intense work in a very shoddy environment that's ancient and then just outside the interior metal door, just outside of that door, you can hear the parish prisoners because that door opens up onto a ramp. It's like a loading dock. Then out the flat area is where their wreck yard was. They'd be out there shooting basketball. I could hear them. They'd come up and bang on the door every now and then, these prisoners would. I'm in this room with all these sharp instruments and all that's separating me from them is like a deadbolt. All it took was me periodically, and we did this kind of as a laugh too, but we'd be covered in blood head to toe. If you ever want to see somebody run, it doesn't matter how stout their constitution might be. You open up the door and that smell rushes out of the morgue and you just show up with the door covered in blood at one point in time and say, yeah, what do you want, like that. As quickly as they can, they're on the other side of the yard, screaming like an eight-year-old little girl. This happened over and over. You would hear them, particularly on days where we had a lot of decomps, because we did get a lot of decomps there because, as you well know, home is very hostile. So bodies break down really quickly, so you do a lot of decomp cases. You would hear them screaming and shouting outside even with the door closed because the smell goes everywhere and they can smell it and they know what's in there. They know what's in there. I did, tragically, I did have one prisoner that came up to the door and we had to call the guards to come and get him. He was banging on the door. I can't remember if it was his brother or his sister had died and had died the night before and they had gotten word to him that his loved one had died and he got out on the yard for rec and he knew that that's where he or she was and he was banging on the door. It sounded like he was going to kick the door in. He was like, I want to see my brother or my sister. It's a weird kind of space to be in, in that environment with the prisoners just outside the door and you're in there locked up with the dead bodies. You're having to do this really delicate work to not just document what actually brought about their death but collect fine, fine evidence that can't be easily appreciated without a hand lens sometimes. You're looking for fiber evidence. You're doing tape lifts. You're doing rape kits. You're doing all of this stuff in this little confined space and there you are locked in there inside of that room and the smells are layered in there, Harry. It's like there's always this funk that kind of permeated this environment that no matter how much you scrubbed or cleaned and I would generally try to break everything down and even mop the walls if you can believe that. I'd do the best that I could just to try to, with bleach, I'd bleach everything down and the best cleaner in the world, believe it or not, it literally does cut through protein, is actually Dawn Dish Detergent. It's amazing what it does and it's because it works really good on organic compounds. Have you ever seen the old TV commercial where a kid would get grass stains on a pair of pants and they'd take Dawn Dish Detergent and you could write the word Dawn on the grass stain and rinse it away and it would be clean underneath where they applied the Dawn to it. It really does work. It cuts through so we would use Dawn and we'd use bleach and I tried to do everything I could but it's you can never fully eradicate the presence of death. It doesn't just vanish like that. There's no way. That world is dictated by that unseen presence of death. When you're around the dead, you're not around death. You're around what death has left behind. We're merely vessels. Death to me has always been a singular personage maybe. I don't know. An entity. I don't know really how to describe it. Death leaves things in its wake. It leaves both the living and the dead in its wake. I think it leaves places in its wake, Harry. I really do, man. One thing that I can't remember if it was in the book or not. I've got to revisit this just to because it's so bloody odd is that the spot where the morgue was actually built in the parish lockup, that spot was where they had the parish gallows. They did back in I think up until like the 1870s in Jefferson Parish and in Orleans Parish, they did public executions just like the Old West. I think the last person had been executed on that spot by hanging in like the 1870s. I don't know if when they built that prison in the 20s because I think there was a structure that was there before that. I don't know if they left that spot open because there was a history there. They didn't want to put anything there. But as time went by, the parish fathers probably said, well, we've got to have a morgue, so let's just put it on the spot of the old gallows. I was always fascinated by that, that we did autopsies on the spot where the old gallows was supposed to have been. I hesitate using the word haunted, but it almost gives you that feeling that death permeates that environment. At the old morgue, I had an opportunity to spend a lot of time with the dead because the labor was so intense. Physicians are a weird, crowding way. Of course, there are physicians and then there's the rest of us. You know what I'm saying? It's not like I'm working with a group of people who are going to say, yeah, well, hang on. I'll help you close up and I'll help you clean up. That's not the way it works. They would say, okay, all right, I'm done for the day. I've got my notes. I'm heading out. I'll see you back. I'll see you tomorrow morning. They pack their little bag up and they leave. You're left with the dead that you're surrounded by. What do you do with them? How do you handle this? I had a lot of time closed up in that tiny little space with the dead. Many times I would sit there for a while just trying to catch my breath, first off, because it's such a tiring thing. If you can imagine doing this kind of delicate work and staying on your toes, still having to be kind of a brute with moving things around. Then after you're done with all that, now you have to repack and store a body. It was always those quiet moments when I was in there by myself with all that remained of these people that I would become reflective. I remember some days I would sit in a chair and a young man, not being able to fully comprehend maybe what I had borne witness to that day, those things that I had put my hands on. The other thing is that maybe you start off with the most complicated case. It's so grotesque. It's so horrible, maybe what a person went through. You really want to get to that case first because it's going to be the most complicated. Well, that thing that you bore witness to in that first case of the day is that thing that for the normal person, if they saw that, it would affect them for the rest of their life. But you got to do the second case and then the third case, the fourth, the fifth, maybe even the sixth after that on the same day. You don't really recall the details of that first case that were so important at that time. You don't recall that until the dreams start. You don't remember it and then all of a sudden something will just bubble up to the top and you'll have a recall on it. What was that now? What was that thing that I saw? What was that horror that I bore witness to? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember. The guy was stabbed 30 times. Okay. What were the circumstances of it? I don't remember. But then for some reason, it will renew itself and those details will come back to you, probably when you're least expecting it. I'm of the opinion that I started probably experiencing flashbacks in my career probably three years in. I'd have to say that I had. I would begin to see things and remember things that would shock me awake at night. I'd be going down the road, man. I would go out onto another case or I would go out onto a case that might bear similarity to an earlier one and I would flashback to that case. In my analytical mind, I would think, okay, well, I didn't identify it as a flashback. I would identify it as recall. Like, okay, my computer is working here. Computer in my brain. I'm recalling, what did I do on a similar case to this? I don't really think that's what was happening, Boba. I think that probably what was happening is my soul was screaming out, how much longer are you going to subject me to this? Because it never stopped. The other piece to this is when I got fully trained in the morgue time as an investigator, since I was the low man on the totem pole, and there were only three of us, there were only three investigators for all of Jefferson Parish. When I first started, and it was myself and then Bill Donovan, who was my mentor. Then there was Billy Duncan, who was an older guy that had been there for years and years. He didn't work in the morgue. Only Bill and I did. Bill and I would swap weeks. Bill would work in the morgue for one whole week. He would cover autopsies, and then he would work the evening shift as an investigator. For me, I got the overnight shift as the investigator. I would go out all through the night. I think my shift started at 10 o'clock at night and went until 6.30 in the morning. I might be working cases all night long, going from car accidents to suicides to homicides to natural deaths. The week that I was on doing autopsies, I would show up at the morgue at about 7.30 and prepare for that day. I did that for years down there, where I was working all through the night and then doing autopsies during the day. By the way, just so you know, the autopsy gig that I did during the day was extra. Boy, did they ever reward me. I got paid $25 a body. I remember thinking, and they would pay me at the end of the month. The biggest month, I'll have to recalculate that and tell you. I would get $25 a body for doing these autopsies. I know people say, that's 1980s, early 90s money. No, it was not enough. It was not enough if you just boil it down to monetary gain. Again, what I got out of it academically and professionally was far more valuable than that because it helped me. It helped me understand the process of being a death investigator. The problem is that there's no kind of training that really teaches you how to deal with those things that you bear witness to. What kind of price do you put on that? There's no calculus that you can do. There's really no calculus that you can do at all. I found myself working even extra because as much as I loved Bill, I did. I truly cared about that man because he had been so kind to me. He didn't have to be and really took a chance on me. Bill was a horrible alcoholic as was the other fellow, Billy. Here I was with these guys that Bill was probably 10 years older than me and then Billy, I don't know, he was probably 20 years older than me at least. They were both horrible alcoholics. If they had been on a bender, say the night before or whatever, they would call me up being the young guy. They'd say, oh man, I don't feel, and I knew where the conversation was going. Every single time I'd hear it, oh man, I don't feel good this morning. Can you cover my shift for me? Being young and stupid, I'd always say, yeah, sure, I'll cover your shift because I saw it as an opportunity to learn. Then you start to do the calculations on what you're putting on yourself at that period of time and what you're exposing yourself to. I don't know if the knowledge is truly worth it sometimes. I don't know. I think maybe there's still prices being paid even today on my part. Hard to tell. I hope that I've helped you a little bit with understanding. I could talk about this topic for hours and hours, but I'm hoping that this will be enough for you to get an idea about the world that I inhabited down there and the dichotomy between what I actually saw in reality, what my reality was going to be in that old, funky morgue on the west bank of the Mississippi River in Gretna compared to that beautiful, pristine thing that I'd seen early on. Not saying there was buyer's remorse, but it was certainly a cold cup of coffee. I appreciate you, man. Thank you for all you're doing for me. No way I could ever repair you.