Morgue (13 page)

Remember the Noe family that defense lawyer Cahill held up as an example of multiple crib deaths in a family? In 1998, seventy-year-old Marie Noe was arrested in her Philadelphia home and charged with deliberately smothering eight of her natural-born children between 1949 and 1968.

All were born healthy but died from unexplained causes at home. None lived longer than fourteen months. In each case, they were alone with their mother.

Marie confessed to killing four of her children but claimed she couldn't remember what happened to the others. Marie didn't pay the same price as Martha Woods: She got only twenty years of probation, five of which were spent under house arrest. (The extraordinarily light sentence came in a 1999 plea deal. Since no direct physical evidence linked Noe to the deaths, and the case rested solely on insufficient autopsies and her confession about decades-old events, prosecutors feared she'd walk. The deal might have served more as closure than justice.)

Then there was Marybeth Tinning. Her nine healthy children died suddenly between 1972 and 1985 before they turned five. All died at home in Schenectady, New York … all while alone with their mother. In 1987, Tinning was convicted of smothering her three-month-old infant daughter and sentenced to twenty years to life in prison. At this writing, she was still incarcerated but coming up every two years for parole.

At first I didn't grasp the scope of Martha Woods's case, but over time I got angry for three reasons. First, if the FBI hadn't been involved, no local police agency would have spent the time and money to unearth Martha Woods's sordid past. She would have continued killing kids.

Second, she could have been stopped sooner with adequate forensic investigation and autopsies, but the medicolegal systems in many parts of the country are junk, especially where coroners are elected by popular votes and might have no real forensic training.

And finally, I am angry that I still don't know her true death toll. There are huge gaps in her history. Years. We have no idea how many children she killed or injured. Just the dozen or so cases we found made me sick.

Were there other victims? Probably. The FBI's investigation of Martha's past was efficient, not deep. The bureau was overwhelmed in the early 1970s with antiwar and racial unrest, domestic terror, political chicanery, and fear of more assassinations. A frumpy housewife wasn't a high priority. To have found more of Martha's victims might have answered some other families' questions, but it might have taken another year or more. Did we want Martha Woods walking free during that time? Regrettably for any other possible victims, the government had to go with what it had.

*   *   *

Today, nobody who ever cradled Paul James Wood, who remembers him laughing or crying, who saw him smile, is still alive. In his very short life—only seven months—he landed in the care of nobody who valued him enough to tend his memory, much less his health. His birth mother gave him up to a woman who wanted only to kill him and a system that failed him.

A few of us knew him only in death, which is not a fair way to be remembered, even if his death brought Martha Woods's crimes to light. And we're forgetting that, too.

The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Maryland has filed Paul's autopsy file under a different name, and the cemetery where he was buried has lost all records of him. So Paul James Woods's entire memory is now contained in a heart-shaped bronze grave marker and four seldom-seen cardboard boxes in a cavernous federal warehouse, where the sketchy records of Martha Woods's murder trial are stored.

Maybe we were destined to someday forget him entirely, but it feels way too soon. If he had lived, he'd be a man in his mid-forties today, not much older than Martha Woods when she was convicted of smothering him. God knows what he might have become. I'll admit that I rarely think about him. I rarely ponder lives unlived, not because I am apathetic and cold, but because I would be overwhelmed.

Still, I wonder what became of Judy Woods. Does she know she was rescued from almost certain murder? I'm told she continued to contact Harry Woods from time to time until his death in 2013, and that he might have helped her out with money now and then. After Harry's funeral, she called the mortuary to ask if he'd left her anything in his will, but they didn't know.

No matter how Judy's life turned out, she was a lucky one.

Of all the doomed children who lived under Martha Woods's roof or were entrusted to her care, at least Judy got out alive.

 

‹ FOUR ›

Bombed Beyond Recognition

What would you die for?

Our world isn't made up of good guys and bad guys, like cops and robbers. We're just bewildered humans, prone to misunderstandings and fears, steeped in hatred, aroused by our self-interest, doing what we feel is best for ourselves and our own. The world is a messy place. And we're all part of it, sometimes doing the right things for the wrong reasons.

Or the wrong things for the right reasons.

So maybe the question should be: What would you kill for?

BEL AIR, MARYLAND. MONDAY, MARCH 9, 1970.

As the least senior guy in the barracks, barely a year out of the academy, Maryland state trooper Rick Lastner drew the short straw: He was the only state cop on ordinary patrol duty in the graveyard shift. Everybody else had a bigger assignment.

All was quiet, one of those cold March nights in Maryland, where darkness fell early and drained the color from Bel Air. Toward midnight, only lampposts, porch lights, and the occasional passing car illuminated the silent streets. Between the sliver of a moon and the relative quiet of a Monday night, this farming town was a black-and-white hush.

But the dark had eyes. A big trial started the next day. Notorious black militant H. Rap Brown, who'd seized control of the once-peaceful Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and declared “We're gonna burn America down,” was to face a jury for inciting violent race riots that nearly gutted the nearby town of Cambridge, Maryland.

Rumors swirled through town that there was more violence ahead for Bel Air, where Brown's high-profile trial was moved. As it drew closer and raucous protesters whipped the town into a frenzy, the governor had deployed the National Guard, volunteers were hastily deputized, and local cops went on high alert, all fearing a firestorm. Bel Air was on edge.

Tonight, sitting in the side-street shadows, a sheriff's deputy watched a dirty white 1964 Dodge Dart slowly circle the redbrick antebellum courthouse a couple times, then vanish back into the night. He thought he saw two figures in the front seat, maybe men, but it was too dark to make out any details, including the license plate. Maybe nothing, he thought. Nobody followed.

Out on Route 1, trooper Lastner rolled through Bel Air toward Baltimore, which glowed faintly in the clear night sky a half hour south. It was too quiet, he thought.
Damn radio's probably gone out again.
The older radios' tubes burned out occasionally. He might be cut off from everybody else.

Lastner wasn't the kind of guy who lost his cool. He grew up in the inner city and joined the Marine Corps right out of high school. Before he was twenty, he'd been shipped to Vietnam. He served in the hottest zone, I Corps, which the grunts nicknamed Indian Country. Before he was wounded himself, he'd seen things nobody should see. Other kids his age were in college, but he was carrying the remains of his dead comrades in ponchos, watching them bleed out in the jungle. Now he was the oldest twenty-five-year-old he knew. His training kept him cool; his memories kept him wary.

To test his radio, Lastner knew to click the microphone and relay a test sequence back to dispatch. There was only one car on the road ahead of him, so he cruised around it. He glanced casually at it as he passed. A white Dodge Dart. A couple of guys, both in front. Not speeding or swerving. Except for the time of night, nothing else seemed amiss. No reason to be suspicious. It barely registered with him. He just wanted to get someplace to test his radio.

The trooper accelerated. When he was safely more than a block ahead, he picked up his radio microphone to test it.

As he keyed up his mic, the night erupted behind him in a massive orange fireball.

The Dodge Dart vaporized.

Stunned by the explosion, Lastner slammed on his brakes and whirled his cruiser around as the twisted front end of the disintegrated, driverless car rolled past him. He squinted back into the snarled wreckage. A smoking crater a foot deep in the middle of the highway marked the epicenter of the blast. Heaps of twisted metal lay scattered for a hundred yards in all directions. Wisps of foam and cotton batting from the Dart's demolished upholstery floated down like snow.

He leaped from his car and stepped on something soft. It was a steak-sized slab of human flesh. The air reeked with the coppery stench of a burning flare, but there were no fires and no sounds. Dead quiet.

Nothing that resembled a car remained, much less the two humans inside.

Lastner saw two mangled bodies on the asphalt—really just the bigger remnants of two bodies—steaming in the cold night. They'd been thrown almost a hundred feet in the detonation. One was just a torso with stumps where his limbs and head should be. The other was shredded but at least still looked vaguely human.

When he finally radioed that he had an explosion with two fatalities on Route 1, the dispatcher was at first incredulous, then chided him for broadcasting fatalities without the 10 code.

But they were unquestionably dead.

Soon sirens wailed in the distance. Lastner just stood in the midst of the dark, silent, fetid havoc and waited for the cavalry to arrive.

It was Vietnam all over again.

*   *   *

I heard the news on my car radio as I drove to work the next morning

I was just a few months short of finishing my one-year fellowship in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Maryland. In July, I'd literally start my next tour of duty—as almost all doctors did at the time—as a major in the Army Medical Corps. My first assignment was to head the Medico-Legal Section of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, DC. The following year, I was assigned to the Wound Ballistics Section, where I'd finally get a chance to see, up close and on a massive scale, the ruinous effects guns and bullets have on the human body.

But at the moment, the two corpses on our tables—or more precisely, the pieces of two corpses—were not killed by bullets or missiles. They died in an explosion, likely a bomb, less than twelve hours earlier. I didn't know too much more that next morning when I saw their shattered remains for the first time.

Deputy chief medical examiner Werner Spitz assigned my colleague Dr. Irvin Sopher and me to autopsy our two unidentified corpses. But our usual mission—who were they and how did they die?—was suddenly more urgent than ever.

Before all their unfortunate pieces had been collected from the scene, rumors were already circulating that one of them was H. Rap Brown himself, and that he'd been assassinated by a bomb thrown into the car or planted beneath it. Within an hour of the blast, still in the wee hours, the FBI was demanding answers, fast.

The American landscape was already on fire with antiwar and racial unrest. In the fourteen months before the Bel Air explosion, more than 4,300 bombs had been set off by militant groups like the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground, and another 1,000 were disarmed, failed, or went off prematurely. Thousands of bomb threats every day closed government buildings, oil companies' offices, big factories, draft offices, and skyscrapers across a skittish America.

If the militant Brown had been assassinated, federal agents feared his violent followers might unleash a hellish backlash. An already festering America might rupture into a race war. It'd make the riots in Watts and the nationwide anarchy after the King assassination look like prayer vigils.

Less than twenty-four hours after the Bel Air explosion, even as we worked to identify the victims, a dynamite bomb in a ladies' restroom blew a thirty-foot hole in the Dorchester County Courthouse, where H. Rap Brown's trial had originally been scheduled before it was moved to Bel Air. A white woman was seen hurrying away and was never caught.

The clock was ticking. And every minute seemed to be marked by a deafening roar.

Our task was a grim one, but we had to be right and we had to be fast. Nobody had to remind us about the consequences of failure.

Dr. Sopher had the easy job.

On his table lay a reasonably intact black man around thirty years old, his face still recognizable. A neatly trimmed mustache and goatee framed his mouth. Fully dressed in shredded slacks and shirt, he was stiff with rigor mortis.

He'd been found lying on the roadway beside a curb eighty feet from the blast crater, thrown to the driver's side of the car. He still smelled strongly of unburned gasoline, burned flesh, and smoldering hair.

He carried a wallet and driver's license, but investigators had found charred identification papers for several people in the debris. We couldn't be sure that the name on the driver's license was in fact the dead man lying before us, even though there was a resemblance to this picture.

When his ragged clothes were removed, Dr. Sopher noticed a single deliberate scar over his left nipple: a two-by-two-inch diamond around the letter K—similar to the logo of Kappa Alpha Psi, a traditionally black college fraternity. He'd been branded.

His injuries were confined to the right side of his body. The bones of his mutilated right leg had been shattered into little pieces, dislocated completely at the knee, the skin and muscles shredded. The skin of his lower left leg and what little remained on his right leg was burned and black with soot.

The bones of his right forearm and hand, like his right leg, were smashed to bits, held together only by his charred skin.