The Cold Case of Mr. Harrington

"All she'd have had to do was inject Mr. Harrington in the arm or butt and he wouldn't have been able to move a muscle. Then she could have injected him with anything she wanted. The paralysis doesn't last very long, but once she'd shot him full of Atenolol, he'd probably have had trouble doing anything except starting to die.

"I looked at the blood tests and the hospital didn't find any drugs in Mr. Harrington's system other than Atenolol, but suxamethonium chloride quickly degrades until it takes a specific lab test to detect what it degrades to in order to find it. Without any indication that his death was caused by anything other than Atenolol, they wouldn't have checked for anything else. That's why we need an autopsy."

Rochelle was doing what she always does when we work on a cold case. She'd put together a theory of how Mr. Harrington had been killed and was looking for a way to prove her theory. My method is the opposite. I put together a theory and then start looking for facts that disprove that theory. The difference is why Rochelle and I work together so well.

It actually was a good theory. Even the emergency room doctor had told Harry he didn't think Mr. Harrington had taken the pills willingly. He was positive about the cause of death though, so Harry had assumed Mrs. Harrington had somehow given them to him. Harry's best guess was she'd crushed the tablets into powder and then mixed the powder into Mr. Harrington's food. Of course, any evidence of that was long gone. The only way of proving that was to find Mrs. Harrington and get her to admit doing it.

"So you're theory is that Mrs. Harrington injected this stuff into Mr. Harrington and once he couldn't move she shot him full of Atenolol? If he wouldn't let her shoot him up with Atenolol, what makes you think he'd let her give him a shot of anything else? Besides, It's been twenty years. You think after twenty years Ron will be able to find this suxameth stuff?"

"I don't know, but right now, we don't have anything else, do we?"

We went to bed after that, but Rochelle didn't want to go to sleep. We made love until we both gasped out our orgasms. Then, Rochelle pulled me down on top of her and put her arms around my back. She was kissing me when I felt her slap my ass really hard. I rolled off Rochelle and said, "What the hell was that for?"

Rochelle giggled.

"I just injected your butt with suxamethonium chloride. In about twenty-five more seconds you won't be able to move and you'll be that way for the next ten minutes. Now, where did I put that big syringe full of Atenolol I brought home from work?"

"OK, you've convinced me it would have been easy for Mrs. Harrington to stop him from struggling. I don't know how I'd prove that to a judge though. All I can do is try and see what a judge says."

The next morning, I typed out a request to exhume Mr. Harrington's body. My reasons were two.

One - while the emergency room doctor had identified the cause of Mr. Harrington's death, he hadn't determined the method by which the drug got into his system in such a high concentration. I needed to know that method if I was going to solve the case. An autopsy might reveal that.

Two - both the emergency room doctor and Harry thought this was probably either a suicide or a murder. Since the doctor had found an assignable cause of death, he hadn't really examined the body for anything that might have been a contributing factor. While the overdose of Atenolol would certainly have caused Mr. Harrington's death, there might have been other injuries such as marks cause by restraints to enable him to be either force-fed the drug tablets or injected with the injectable version. Such marks would serve to differentiate between a suicide and a homicide.

I took the request to the Captain and explained my reasoning. I also told him about Rochelle's theory. He leaned back in his chair then.

"Looks like your exhumation request is really looking for a way to prove Rochelle's theory."

"Well, in some ways it is, but what she thinks is entirely probable in my opinion. Mr. Harrington wouldn't have willingly taken that many pills unless it was intentional on his part. The fact that Mrs. Harrington didn't even come to the burial told Harry she probably killed him and tells me the same thing. I need the autopsy to prove how she did it. Rochelle's theory of her method is just one of probably many possible methods Mrs. Harrington might have used.

"Rochelle thinks Mrs. Harrington had to have had help and I believe that. According to her driver's license, she was a lot smaller than Mr. Harrington. It's hard to believe she talked him into taking all those pills. I think it's more likely that someone else held him down while she stuffed them down his throat. Either way, the only way to figure that out is to have Ron do a formal autopsy."

The Captain signed my request so my next appointment was to a judge. I'd worked with Judge Sandra Marks a few times before to get warrants that didn't have a great deal of supporting evidence. I hoped she'd be as accommodating this time too.

It took me an hour of talking, but she did sign an exhumation order. I contacted the cemetery and set up the time for seven the next night. At that time of day, the cemetery was closed to visitors but it would still be daylight.

Once I had a time and date, I contacted Ron, the coroner, and asked him to gather everything he'd need to exhume the body, open the casket, and do the autopsy. My warrant only allowed me to keep Mr. Harrington's body in the coroner's lab for twenty-four hours. He was to be placed back in his grave at seven the night after the exhumation.

This was the first exhumation for me, so I didn't know quite what to expect when I got to the cemetery. I'd expected a backhoe and some curtains around the grave. I'd also arranged for four patrol officers to keep any bystanders away although I didn't think there would be any that late at night. Rochelle wanted to go with me, but I told her that by law, only law enforcement, Crime Lab technicians, and the cemetery workers could be present.

I didn't expect to see Ron and his two Crime Lab techs in hazmat suits. When I asked him about that, he said that usually caskets leak enough to vent any gasses caused by the decomposing body and those gasses would have filled the vault. Then he showed me a small wrench or key in his hand.

"This is so I can open the casket and vent it to make sure I don't take any of those gasses back to my lab. You might want to stand back a ways. The smell could be pretty bad."

Everything went about like I thought it would. One of Ron's Crime Lab techs took pictures as the backhoe operator dug down carefully until his bucket scraped the top of the vault. Once he'd uncovered the top of the vault, he then used a chain with a special hook on each end that was draped over his bucket. The hooks went into grooves in each end of the vault cover. He lifted the vault cover and set it to one side.

The smell hit me then so I backed up about twenty feet and didn't see what Ron and his technicians did next. I assumed they helped put slings around the casket because the next thing I saw was when the backhoe backed away from the grave. The casket was suspended on two nylon slings latched to rings on the backhoe bucket. The backhoe operator sat the casket on the heavy gurney Ron had brought along and then lowered his bucket to loosen the slings. One of Ron's techs unhooked one end of each sling, pulled it from under the casket, and dropped it in the bucket of the backhoe. The backhoe operator then drove away to the truck and trailer parked a ways from the gravesite.

Ron and his techs walked up to the casket and I saw Ron wasn't using his tool on the lid. He just opened the lid. It was then I decided I wasn't far enough away.

About five minutes later, Ron started walking in my direction. When he got to me, he took off the hood of his hazmat suit and I could see that he had a worried frown on his face.

"Rich, I think you better go back to that judge and ask for an extension to your exhumation order. We've got a hell of a problem here, and there's no way I'm going to be able to figure it out in twenty-four hours."

I nodded.

"OK, I can try, but what's the problem?"

"The casket wasn't locked because it couldn't be. There are two bodies in that casket and the lid wouldn't close enough to lock it. One of the bodies wasn't embalmed so it's a goddamned mess in there. It was a cheap ass casket so it wasn't very deep and it's half full of liquid from the unembalmed body and the rain water that leaked into the vault.

"It'll take me and my techs a day just to separate them without destroying any evidence that might be there. It'll take at least another day to get enough information to start to identify the second body. I'm thinking at least a week if the TBI has DNA on file. If they don't, we might never figure out who it is."

I didn't have any problem getting the exhumation order extended indefinitely once I explained to Judge Marks what we'd found. It was still almost five before she signed the new order because she was in court until four.

Rochelle was waiting for me when I got home that night. As soon as I walked in the door, she asked if everything had gone all right. I frowned.

"Well, yes and no. We got Mr. Harrington's casket out of the vault pretty easily. It was when Ron opened the casket to vent it that there was a problem. There were two bodies in the same casket."

"Two? How in the world could that happen?"

"That's not the worst. One of them wasn't embalmed so you can imagine what it was like inside the casket.

"The only thing Ron and I can figure out is someone put the second body in the casket after Mr. Harrington was embalmed and readied for the burial. Tomorrow, Ron is going to start work on the bodies and I'm going to talk with the funeral home who handled the burial and see what they have to say."

Rochelle thought for a second, and then asked if the second body was male or female. I said Ron couldn't be sure.

"Rochelle, from what Ron told me, he won't be able to tell until he gets the second body out of the casket and cleaned up. From what I gather, it was partly decomposed and partly immersed in liquid that kept that part from decomposing all the way. Why?"

"Well, remember that one of my theories was that Mr. Harrington was sleeping with another woman and that's why Mrs. Harrington killed him? If the second body is female, maybe she's Mr. Harrington's lover. Maybe Mrs. Harrington killed them both."

"How would she have gotten the second body into the casket?"

"Remember that I also said she probably had help? Maybe she was also sleeping around and killed Mr. Harrington to get him out of the way. It was her lover who helped her."

"Well, I won't know how the second body could have gotten into that casket until I talk with the funeral home. I think it had to have happened there. There's no other place where the casket would be out of sight. I'm going to have a lot of questions for the funeral home director tomorrow."

Rochelle frowned then.

"This is probably going to sound morbid, but I'm probably going to have trouble going to sleep after hearing all this. Think you could help me do that?"

It took about an hour before Rochelle curled up beside me, kissed me on the cheek, and whispered, "Nighty Night". She was asleep a few minutes later. It took me longer than that.

I'd never had a case like this before. Usually, murders are pretty simple. One person kills another in some way and then either tries to hide or tries to convince me they had nothing to do with it. In this case, I wasn't sure I believed Rochelle's theory that the same person had killed both people in that casket. I was convinced that Mrs. Harrington was responsible for her husband's death. She knew about his medication and most likely knew what would happen if he took an overdose. I just didn't know how she'd gotten that much Atanolol into Mr. Harrington. It didn't seem likely she'd have killed a second person too because she really had no reason to.

If she'd been sleeping around on Mr. Harrington, the safe way would have been to just leave him, find another place to live with her lover, and then start a new life. She might have killed him to make sure he couldn't find her again, but once she'd done that, she'd have been free except for the risk of getting caught.

If it was Mr. Harrington who was being unfaithful, she might have killed him out of anger, but once again, since she was then free to do what she wanted, the most logical course for her would be to just disappear.

I finally fell asleep wondering what Ron was going to find out when he got the second body out of the casket.

I did find out the next morning when I drove into the parking lot. As soon as I got out of my car, I knew where Ron was working. That was because of the smell of decomp coming from the loading dock at the back of his lab. When I walked up on that loading dock, there was Ron and one of his techs both in hazmat suits again. Ron saw me and walked over.

"We're outside to avoid filling the building ventilation system with the smell of decomp. There's enough of a breeze out here that most of the smell is going away pretty fast, but it's still pretty intense up by the casket. The charcoal filters in our hazmat masks do a decent job of filtering it out.

"What I know so far is that unless it was a really skinny guy who liked cross-dressing, the second body is female. We found the elastic from a pair of panties around her waist and what we're pretty certain are the metal loop and hook things that are used to hook the shoulder straps on a bra to the cups and to adjust the length. Either she wasn't wearing anything else or what she had on has rotted away. I won't be able to give you a cause of death until I get her on a table. That's going to take probably another hour."

I went back inside and to my desk to call the funeral home that had picked up Mr. Harrington's body the first time. The director said he was free until four, so I said I'd be over in about an hour.

I drove to the funeral home, but I was also thinking. Maybe Rochelle's theory about Mrs. Harrington's reason for killing her husband was right, except she killed his lover too. I could see that happening if Mrs. Harrington was mad enough at her husband. Sometimes when someone feels wronged, they'll lash out at anybody involved.

The funeral home director wasn't much help. Just like the vet where Mrs. Harrington had worked, the owner of the funeral home at the time of Mr. Harrington's death had passed away six years before and his daughter had sold the business to the current owner. Once I knew that, I explained what we'd found when we exhumed Mr. Harrington. He listened and than frowned.

"Detective Owens, I refuse to believe that could have happened at the funeral home. I knew the prior owner and he would never treat a deceased person like that. He wouldn't have had much of an opportunity in the first place.

"Most small funeral homes like this one no longer do embalming themselves. The environmental permits require a lot of specialized equipment, take a long time to get, and they're expensive. It was that way even back in 1999.

"What most funeral homes do is contract the embalming to a company whose only business is the embalming of the deceased. They can afford the equipment and permits because of the volume of business they do. Most also offer transportation services by trained and bonded drivers with refrigerated vehicles to transport the deceased from the hospital, morgue, or funeral home to their place of business and then back to the funeral home. They'll also transport the deceased to another location if that's what's required.

"With transportation time, it takes about two days to transport the deceased to their place of business, do the necessary embalming and other preparation, and then to bring it to the funeral home. If there are specific religious standards, the process can be expedited, but that increases the cost significantly.

"After we receive the embalmed body of the deceased, we take care of dressing the body according to the wishes of the next of kin, styling the hair, and applying the makeup required to return the body to a more life-like state and then place it in the casket. Once that's done, we keep the casket locked until the time of a viewing except for the times the casket is unlocked to vent it prior the viewing and prior to the funeral and subsequent burial. With your job, I'm sure you understand the reason why that is a necessary step.

"Any of my employees could open a casket for said venting but they'd immediately see the second body and report it to me. We would then call the police. The prior owner had only himself and his daughter and I doubt either of them would hide a second body from the other. If the casket wouldn't close all the way, one or both would have seen that."

I thanked the director for his information, but it really wasn't information of much use.

When I got back to my desk, I called Ron to see if he'd found out any more. He asked me to come down to his lab. Once I got there, Ron handed me a bottle of Vicks Vaporub.

"Smear some of this under your nose. It'll help with the smell."

I'd seen my share of autopsies and had lost my lunch at a couple, but those were nothing like this. There wasn't much left to see, but what was there was pretty horrible. Ron didn't seem to feel the same way, but then, coroners tend to be a little different.

"Rich, come look and you'll see the cause of her death."

He pointed to the partially dissected throat of the corpse.

"Her hyoid bone's been broken. She was strangled to death. Her fingernails are all broken too, like she was fighting with whoever killed her. We've taken scrapings from under her nails, but I doubt there's anything there. We also took hair samples and samples of what tissues are still intact and sent them for DNA analysis. Until those come back with an ID, she's still a Jane Doe."

I asked him about Mr. Harrington and he frowned.

"All I can tell you about him is that he's pretty well preserved for being buried for twenty years. Once I get everything I can from the woman, I'll start on him. Anything in particular you're looking for?"

I said I was looking for a way the Atenolol could have gotten into Mr. Harrington's system. Ron said he'd see if there was anything in his stomach, but said the embalming process and the time he'd been dead had probably degraded anything that was there.

I told him about Rochelle's theory that Mr. Harrington was rendered helpless by an injection of suxamethonium chloride and then injected with the Atenolol. He stroked his chin for a second, and then frowned.

"Sux would do it. He'd have been out in less than thirty seconds and the hospital wouldn't have found it unless they were specifically looking for it. Any residue that was left would have been flushed out when they embalmed him, but I'll go over his body for any needle marks. After all this time, they'll be hard to find if they're there."

I asked Ron if he'd look for needle marks on Mr. Harringtons ass and he grinned.

"I'm sure you have a reason for asking me to look there, but I'm not gonna ask what that reason is. I don't think I want to know."

It was two days later that Ron called my cell phone. He chuckled when I asked him what he'd found out.

"Rich, I don't know why you thought somebody jabbed Mr. Harrington in the ass, but if they did, I can't find the needle mark.

"I did find a needle mark on the guy and whoever put it there was either a really sick son of a bitch or must have really hated the guy. The needle mark was in the large vein of his penis and it was a large bore needle. I don't know how somebody could stick a needle in his penis while he was still awake and able to fight back, but like I said, somebody wanted him to suffer and suffer a lot and I'm sure he did. At the blood concentration of Atenolol he had and the fact it was injected directly into his blood stream, he'd quickly have become short of breath and probably too short of breath to do much fighting. His heart would have started slowing down too and he'd probably have felt dizzy or fainted."