Coroner's Journal Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  ONE - Katrina

  TWO - Coroner

  THREE - Forensics 101

  FOUR - What Are the Odds?

  FIVE - Too Young to Die

  SIX - Head Cases

  SEVEN - Final Exit

  EIGHT - Thou Shalt Not Kill

  NINE - Headhunter

  TEN - Monster on the Loose

  ELEVEN - Unsolved Mysteries

  TWELVE - In the Sights of a Sniper

  THIRTEEN - A Killer Strikes Again

  FOURTEEN - To Catch a Killer

  FIFTEEN - Conclusion

  Acknowledgements

  “Louis Cataldie is one of the most honorable people I have ever met. And one of the most compassionate. . . . His book is more a journey than a journal. It is a ticket to an inaccessible and unimaginable world, and your guide is a man who is simply remarkable.”

  —Patricia Cornwell

  “I’ve kept a personal journal, starting in the coroner’s office of East Baton Rouge Parish in 1993. I wrote whenever it struck me, jotting notes in the field and later sketching images on a small pad as I remembered them. I wrote in my journal mostly at night, usually after a particularly troublesome autopsy or a visit to an unsettling crime scene. . . . The journal is about how the lives—and untimely deaths—of the people I investigated crossed my path, and how I tried to bring order and integrity to the aftermath.”

  —Louis Calaldie, M.D.

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  Copyright © 2006 by Louis Cataldie, M.D.

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  eISBN : 978-1-440-67954-4

  Cataldie, Louis.

  Coroner’s journal : forensics and the art of stalking death / Louis Cataldie.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-67954-4

  1. Cataldie, Louis. 2. Coroners--Louisiana--Baton Rouge—Biography. 3. Medical examiners

  (Law)—Louisiana—Baton Rouge—Biography. 4. Forensic pathology—Louisiana—Baton Rouge—

  Case studies. I. Title.

  RA1025.C38A

  614’.092—dc22

  [B]

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

  The events described in this book are the real experiences of real people. However, in some cases, the author has altered their identities and, in some instances, created composite characters. Any resemblance between a character in this book and a real person therefore is entirely accidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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  To my son, Michael

  FOREWORD

  I first met Louis Cataldie in the summer of 2002. While doing research at Harvard University for the book I was writing about the infamous serial murderer Jack the Ripper, I came across a newspaper article about similarly vicious multiple murders then occurring in the Baton Rouge area of Louisiana. Already DNA had linked the cases of three women who had been raped and murdered. In time, more victims would be discovered.

  The Baton Rouge case—now solved, the killer on death row—would prove to be one of the most difficult and disturbing such cases we had seen in a long while. I suggested to ABC that we do a story on it for Primetime Live, hoping that the most important person in the story—East Baton Rouge Parish coroner Louis Cataldie—would agree to tell the truth about what was really happening in his small, violent parish. At the outset it was apparent that scarcely anyone wanted to talk about the murders, including the Baton Rouge police. Not even in the investigation of Princess Diana’s death had I encountered such a hostile news blackout. The Baton Rouge authorities seemed to have no interest in disseminating accurate and helpful information about their latest serial killer (they’ve had more than one), and I began to fear that Dr. Cataldie wouldn’t be any different. But he was. He was open. He didn’t mince words. He was boldly honest.

  In the course of doing that story, I saw firsthand how Louis made himself accessible to the devastated family members and friends of the victims, and how he became for them the family doctor they never—not even in their darkest nightmares—would have imagined they might someday need. Throughout a tragedy I began to think would never end, Louis consoled the bereaved and faithfully tended to his dead patients in a morgue fashioned from a trailer and equipped with hand-me-downs from funeral homes and restaurants. All the while having to work with officials who seemed hell-bent on gagging him, even running him out of office.

  Three years later, two hurricanes—Katrina and Rita—have ripped through the corner of the world Louis loves so much. The scale of this tragedy—so many victims and such utter devastation for the survivors—would defeat most of us. But not Louis Cataldie. Sometimes sleeping no more than three hours at a time for days, he oversees the identification of the bodies of victims, counsels the suffering survivors, and copes with politicians and bureaucrats who get in his way.

  In his native Louisiana, Louis Cataldie is a hero. He is, I think, nothing less than a national hero.

  This book is the chronicle of a life spent doing work most of us would find depressing and grim. It is Louis’s account of his passion for his agenda: dignity for the dead. It is told with both compassion and color, in a manner that is sometimes irreverent and never swollen with self-importance, by one of the most honorable people I have ever met.

  —Patricia Cornwell

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  On August 29, 2005, weeks before Coroner’s Journal was scheduled to go to press, Hurricane K
atrina struck Louisiana and the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Louis Cataldie was asked to assist in the massive evacuation of patients from Louisiana’s State Emergency Operations Center at the New Orleans Superdome, an effort coordinated by Dr. Jimmy Guidry, the state health officer for Louisiana. In addition, Dr. Cataldie helped monitor the setup of field hospitals in and around Baton Rouge, gave medical attention to the injured, and began the arduous process of overseeing that every Katrina-related death was properly investigated. Then Hurricane Rita hit. With a medical system in chaos, and with more than 1,000 deaths associated with the two tragedies, the state appointed him Louisiana Medical Examiner. As of this writing, Dr. Cataldie is heading up the makeshift morgue in St. Gabriel, outside New Orleans, where the processes of identifying the victims and assessing cause of death are expected to take months.

  —October 2005

  ONE

  Katrina

  “LET THE DEAD TEACH THE LIVING”

  St. Gabriel, Louisiana—I am exhausted. I haven’t had the luxury to reflect, or even to think—I’m simply on autopilot. My clothes stink and my head hurts, I haven’t slept for more than three hours at a time for weeks; haven’t seen my wife and my son but twice, and then for only a few precious minutes. My life seems so remote and far away.

  It’s been a month since Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast and tore a deadly path through the state I call home. I had always feared this day would come, as had anybody who lives around New Orleans, a city in a bowl below sea level.

  “What if a cat-five hit N.O.?” De and I talked about it many times. “You don’t want to know,” was usually my answer. Actually, we had been preparing and training for such an event since 2004; that ongoing planning, which we had labeled “Hurricane Pam,” was interrupted by the real thing. We implemented that plan, but the component that dealt with the dead was simply “Call in DMORT.” Little did we know that DMORT, the Disaster Mortuary Operational Recovery Team, was not prepared for such a catastrophe either. Over the next several months, I would become acutely aware of the limitations of the DMORT system. It was a tough lesson for us both.

  And then, on August 29, it happened. Katrina slammed into the coast with 140-mile-per-hour winds, leaving a path of ruin in her wake. A month later, Mother Nature demonstrated her supreme indifference: on September 24, Hurricane Rita crashed into the Texas/Louisiana coast, deluging the area and pushing water back over the levees around New Orleans, which was still 80 percent covered from Katrina. Though Rita did not take the same deadly toll, the damage was incalculable.

  I thought I’d seen everything. But now, as I look here at the remains of the dead and the empty eyes of their survivors, I feel utterly helpless. In the face of the annihilation of whole towns and neighborhoods, I am as lost and confused in this carnage as anyone. But then I ask myself, Who else will account for the dead?

  I am still in the thick of it—more than 900 deaths in Louisiana alone, and I cannot see quitting anytime soon. In all, the storm has already killed 1,130 people in five states.

  I take a reconnaissance helicopter flight over Cameron Parish, a coastal area near the Texas border that, since Rita, does not exist anymore. There is no town of Cameron. The only building left intact is the courthouse. Faint skeletons of what once were homes rise like matchsticks from the water, in a landscape that is desolate and eerie and that stretches as far as the eye can see.

  The first person in charge I meet is Army Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, a fellow native appointed to clean up the Katrina mess and bring order to chaos. “Hi, we need tetanus,” he tells me—that is about the extent of the conversation. The general, who said Cameron Parish was the worst he had seen in his survey, would later use a single military term to describe it: destroyed.

  The only doctor who lives in the parish is Richard Sanders, a coroner and physician. He’s a good guy, and he looks like hell—sweaty, tired, haggard, and going at Mach 2. In addition to no meds, no home, and no office—all just gone—he has more than a hundred open or floating coffins that had emerged from the ground because of rising floodwaters. We are making a plan to retrieve the coffins when we get news that a shrimp boat is coming in with sick folks on board.

  No meds. No vaccine for hepatitis. In New Orleans there were dead bodies floating down the street. And now we have sick people coming our way. Our best defense is raw dedication—you do the best you can.

  I meet an elderly couple whose home was carried about ten miles from its original address; they are on their way to the National Wildlife Refuge, which has become the Emergency Operations Center, to get a tetanus shot. I had just left there, and have to give them the bad news: The Center is out of shots.

  Their son gives me a ride. He has lost his home and his shop. He points to a slab where his office was. The hospital, too, is destroyed. He doesn’t know how many people will rebuild, and he scoffs a little as we drive by a “hurricane-proof house” that has been decimated. It was featured in National Geographic, he tells me—“But that was years ago.” Rita caused no deaths here because people evacuated—in part because they remembered 1957 and Hurricane Audrey. I was nine years old at the time, and I remember that bitch, too. Katrina could have been her twin sister.

  Most of the power lines are lying in the mud, and it will likely take months, if not years, to fix them. “We had to cut some wire just to get down the road—I think that may make them mad,” the son tells me matter-of-factly. He strikes me as the kind of person who does what has to be done. He points yet again to a slab where relatives used to live, and stares there a little too long, giving himself away. I pretend not to notice the small crack in his veneer.

  When we arrive at the courthouse, it is surrounded by military vehicles. The court clerk is there gathering records—he protected many of them before the surge. A surge is the deadliest part of the hurricane. It’s basically a big dome, made by winds from the eye of the storm, that comes ashore as a wall of water. The clerk offers his office as a clinic if we need it. Inside, it’s wet and already moldy, but it is standing and that is testament to the wills of these people. Some of the metal buildings are sheared off at about twenty feet above the ground. The surge must have been of tsunami proportions.

  When I get back to the EOC, I talk to the doc and assure him we will get supplies. I leave with a handwritten list of medications he needs. There is no electricity. Stacks of plastic bottles filled with precious water sit in the sun. Oddly, they remind me of sandbags. The water is tepid if not downright hot, but you are glad to guzzle it down because it is clean. The heat and humidity rob you of your fluids in the merciless sun down here—even in September.

  Dr. Sanders needs those meds now, and part of the reason I came here is so that he could look me in the eye and know who I am and have me as a direct contact. I put a lot of faith in seeing a man one-on-one. That’s why I respect Stewart Simonson, assistant secretary for Public Health Emergency Preparedness at the Department of Health and Human Services, who met me face-to-face and has stayed true to his word. Imagine, someone from D.C. being a straight guy. He has delivered every time—not so with some of these other cover-your-ass feds. It’s disgusting, and disappointing.

  I made the decision to have chaplains go into the field with the recovery teams and say a prayer of thanksgiving for each person recovered. Incredibly, somebody from the ACLU had the audacity to take issue with my mixing church and state. My intent was to assure the dignity of the deceased. No good deed goes unpunished, especially here.

  For many politicians, the point in coming down here isn’t to lend a hand or to see for themselves how bad things are—it’s all about the photo op! Can you imagine? Who in the hell is interested in token souvenirs when we have dead and dying?

  In our makeshift morgue here, about seventy miles west of New Orleans, one of the forensic pathologists has hung a sign that reads: Mortui vivis praecipant. It means, “Let the dead teach the living.”

  RESCUE ME

  During the rescue ph
ase immediately after the first storm, I was transporting a little old lady who was crying because she didn’t know where her grandchildren were. The building she lived in was damaged and the kids were missing. I asked her why they stayed during the storm; she told me there had been so many false alarms before. . . .

  I tried to calm a young EMT who had promised an elderly woman he would go back to retrieve her when he had the right equipment to extract her. Then he lost her and could not get back, and he assumed she drowned. I fear for him: he cannot rejoice in the lives he saved, because he is stuck on the one he may have lost. We in the medical business tend to focus on the losses and not celebrate the wins. . . .

  It’s unspeakably sad to walk into a hospital and see the evidence of trauma and step around and even over dead bodies that lie in the hallways and everywhere else. No lights. No water. No ventilation. Then you have to worry about lead poisoning (as in, getting shot), so I carry my .40-caliber Glock as I wade through the sewer and chemical hazmat of the flood. Most of the lead hazard was eliminated by the police. . . .

  I opened a hospital door and two big dogs jumped out at me. Thank God they were friendly—scared the crap out of me. I tried to catch them, but they ran off. Some dog packs have taken to hunting the only food around. The smells are horrible: death, decomposition, sewage, toxic chemicals, and black mold. I got a lungful of something bad last week during a door-to-door search in an apartment complex for the elderly. I should have been more careful with wearing a mask, but I got tired and careless; it took two days to breathe right. We had to put one guy in a hyberbolic chamber. Hepatitis A is a big worry. When I got my shots, I made the mistake of telling the nurse I was a doc; I think maybe she’d been dumped by a doctor, because she practically did a bone biopsy on me when she gave me my needle. Hurt like hell, but it’s better than yellow eyes.