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To Die Upon a Kiss


The Martha Carpenter Story
by MICHAEL M. BADEN, M.D.
Death is never an irrelevant incident.

It is always the end of a story. My job is to read

that story in the corpse.


I am a medical examiner, a forensic pathologist, which means that I am a kind of detective,
a medical detective. But I do not apprehend criminals. My job is to find out what really happened
to people who have died in suspicious circumstances or in obviously unnatural ways. What
killed this person? is the question I address, and the answer is important. Families want to know
what happened to their daughters, their fathers, their grandmothers. The insurance company
wants to know. The police and District Attorney want to know.
I read in corpses the sizes and shapes of the problems that are killing people before their
time. I read stories of drug addiction and child abuse and incompetent medical treatment.
Occasionally, what I read leads directly to the prevention of untimely, unnecessary death. My
colleagues and I are physicians of the dead, but our goal is to make death minister to the living.
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Michael M. Baden, M.D

To Die Upon a Kiss

One of my most important tools is the art of autopsy. The word comes from the Greek,
autopsia, and it means, literally, to see with one's own eyes. So this is one story of what I have
seen in the secret world of the dead. It is a story of investigation and discovery.
All stories end: the happy tale with a feast, but the true tale with death. Yet for me, death
is just the beginning of a story. Although in the tale that follows the principal characters are dead,
in fact, I address myself to life.
******
The death of everyone is important, whether a celebrity or not. The tale of Martha
Carpenter is a perfect example.
Martha Carpenter awoke on such a morning in her room at a once elegant hotel, now a
welfare establishment, located in Manhattan's Upper West Side. She was sixty-nine years old and
like many of the hotel's other residents, an alcoholic. Perhaps on some days she wondered if it
was worth getting up at all but today she must have faced the morning with a sense of anticipation,
for she had begun a new routine. She had a new job, somewhere to go.
The woman straightened the room while the bath water ran. She entered and left the tub
gingerly and afterwards, tried to alleviate the discomfort of a humid morning with a liberal
dusting of bath powder. She coated her face with make-up, filling the grooves and wrinkles. Even
on this hot day, she was fully dressedincluding stockings.
At last, she undid the locks and bolts on the apartment door and opened it, ready to face
the day. What she faced instead was a burly young man. She tried to slam the door but the man
shoved it open, knocking her backward toward the bed. The man came in.
She may have recognized him as Calvin Jackson, another resident of the hotel, often seen
loitering in the dim hallways. As he sexually assaulted her, she made a plaintive request: I gotta

Michael M. Baden, M.D

To Die Upon a Kiss

go to work soon. I don't want to lose my job. Can't you go faster?


It was the wrong thing to say. Calvin Jackson responded with rage. Like some ghastly
caricature of Shakespeare's dark and tormented Othello, he seized a pillow and crushed it against
the frail old woman's face. She undoubtedly kicked and flailed her arms, but she was powerless
against his strength. In a few minutes it was over. He had smothered her.
Afterwards, he got up and poked around the apartment. He opened the refrigerator and
found a cool bottle of beer and took a long swig. He got out some bologna and a jar of
mayonnaise and made himself a sandwich. He sat at the little kitchenette table and ate, gazing at
the body of Martha Carpenter.
When he'd satisfied his hunger, Jackson straightened up Martha's clothing, put away the
beer bottle and brushed the sandwich crumbs away. Then he left the apartment, letting the door
lock itself behind him.
It was June, the hot time of the year, when bodies decompose quickly in a room without
air-conditioning. Within a few days, the neighbors began to complain about the odor. Finally, the
janitor opened the door and then summoned the police. An hour or so after that, the body was on
its way to the morgue.
What happened next was routine, up to a point. The police ambulance brought the body
to the rear of the morgue. Morgue men dressed in surgical uniforms carried the corpse into the
fluorescent-lit basement and placed it in one of the numbered draw-like compartments where
bodies are kept under refrigeration. Martha Carpenter was one of several dozen that came in the
morgue that morning, and she was just one among the thousands of corpses that pass that way
each year.
When I first saw her, that unmistakable odor hit me, not a sharp or acrid smell, nor a scent

Michael M. Baden, M.D

To Die Upon a Kiss

of formaldehyde, but a rather subtle, a too sweet vapor. This is the smell of death. It no longer
offends me, though it disturbs most visitors and sickens some.
When an airliner crashes, or a mad bomber strikes, or a furnace goes haywire, or a
chemical plant explodes, a morgue becomes clogged with corpses.
Those are all obviously unnatural deaths and all demand complete autopsies. When I fill
out a death certificate for one of those victims, the cause of death is obvious. But thousands of
other bodies come to the morgue looking for all the world as if they had passed away quietly, in
their sleep. They are brought to the morgue only because they have died in a hospital while
undergoing a surgical procedure, or had not seen a physician in the preceding week, or because
they died alone. Martha Carpenter's death fell into the latter category. It seemed natural but, in
fact, she had not died alone in her sleep, but I didn't know that. And the body, instead of
screaming out clues, hid them.
She was in the special mortuary because she had already started to decompose. The body
was bloated, the white skin already turning green and black and sloughing off like old wallpaper.
There are many little things I look for, which help lead me to the cause of death. When the whites
of the eyes impinge on the iris I think of high cholesterol; when the chest is expanded, I suspect
emphysema; small testes in the male suggest liver failure. But with the decomposed body, most
of the small, helpful signs are obscured or have vanished. The eyelids, for instance, are swollen
shut. So what I looked for first in Carpenter were gross indications of an unnatural death: bullet
wounds, knife wounds, broken hyoids. (Hyoids are the bones just on top of the Adams Apple,
and when I find they are broken I can be sure that someone strangled the patient.) I told the
morgueman to turn the body over. Then I looked at the back for signs of trauma. I probed through
Martha Carpenter's hair. I saw nothing unusual.

Michael M. Baden, M.D

To Die Upon a Kiss

The preliminary report that came in with her said She had a history of alcoholism.
Therefore, I made a small incision over the liver and withdrew a small portion of liver and about
10 cc's of bile for laboratory analysis. Peering in, I saw a fatty, degenerated liver. I now had every
reason to make a final diagnosis, pending the lab results on the liver and bile. A couple of weeks
later, the lab report showed that she had died with alcohol in her system but with no other poisons
on board. Cause of death: acute and chronic alcoholism.
However, I did not realize that Martha Carpenter was the second body sent to me from the
same hotel by Calvin Jackson. A year and some 1,000 autopsies earlier, Jackson had sent me a
thirty-nine year old alcoholic named Theresa Jordan. She had been signed out with cause of
death, chronic alcoholism.
In all, eight of Calvin Jackson's victims would be carted through the morgue. One was
stabbed and another had broken hyoids and these were correctly and rather easily identified, as
homicides. A third body had a fractured skull. The doctor on duty assumed that this old woman
had suffered a nasty fall. He assumed that because the police had found nothing unusual in the
circumstances surrounding the case.

Other medical examiners misidentified the five other

homicides from this hotel, not as murder victims, but as cases of heart failure and alcoholism.
Meanwhile, no one, even the police, had thought anything suspicious that in only eighteen
months, eight lonely women had died in a single hotel.
The killings continued until September when Calvin Jackson was nabbed as he slipped out
of a building two doors from the hotel with a TV set in his arms. When the police found the room
where the TV belonged, they also found the dead body of elderly Pauline Spanierman. They took
Jackson to the station house where he placidly intoned his litany of rape and murder. It took him
five hours to confess everything.

Michael M. Baden, M.D

To Die Upon a Kiss

My telephone jangled. The Assistant D.A. had a pressing question: Is this guy lying to
us? A short while later, I was sitting in the sparsely furnished D.A.'s office listening to the voice
of Calvin Jackson on a tape recorder. Even I was appalled. Here was the tale of a 28 year old
man who had been beaten with a poker by his mother, a man who had been subjected to the scorn
of his mistressShe told me I couldn't get no other woman. I had to show her. I heard him
say of Martha Carpenter, She told me she had to go to work and would I hurry up. It made me
angry. Murder seemed to make him hungry. A lot of times, said the voice, I sit down and eat
and look at the body, prepare myself a meal. I be glad. I feel happy.
But strange and eerie though it was, Jackson's psychology wasn't the issue for me. My
problem was finding out not why he'd done it, but how. How had he fooled me? Had he, in fact,
fooled all of us? People confess to murder every day in the United States. A confession isn't
enough. There must be some supporting proof. Listening now, I heard the voice say, out of the
tape recorder, It made me angry. I smothered her with a pillow, I think.
I thought back. When the story of Jackson's confession broke, I pulled out the records of
all the other hotel deaths. I saw that the bodies had been decomposed and to me, that meant that
the doctor on duty could well have missed something.

More important, though, was the

confession itself. Jackson said he'd smothered the frail women with pillows. It didn't sound like
the kind of detail a person would invent. And it had a special meaning for me, for the pillow is
the softest of weapons. Perhaps that is why Shakespeare had Othello smother Desdemona: it
implies a certain tenderness in this most violent of acts. Shakespeare could not have realized, in
an age before forensic pathology, that nothing is any more lethal or less detectable than the pillow
as a murder weapon. Suffocation leaves no trace in the organs and no unique marks outside the
body. As for Calvin Jackson, he appears to have chosen this most perfect of weapons because it

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To Die Upon a Kiss

was there, on the bed, not because he knew anything about forensics.
I decided to consult the bodies. Martha Carpenter had been cremated but Jordan had been
buried. We medical examiners don't favor the funeral pyre. We prefer burial. To us, it's longterm storage. Theresa Jordan was exhumed.
I spent several hours with this year old corpse and found two things. There was a very
slight amount of hemorrhage in her vagina, which could have been caused by rape. And, there
was a small amount of hemorrhage in the whites of her eyes, petechial hemorrhage so-called, and
this is a possible sign of suffocation. All in all, Jordan's body now seemed to authenticate
Jackson's confession. I concluded his story was true.
But why didn't I read that story in the body, before Jackson confessed this was one of those
cases in which the testimony of the corpse is ambiguous. Any woman of or past child- bearing
age can have more vaginal trauma than Jordan, without having been raped. As for the petechial
hemorrhages, they can mean many things or nothing at all. If a corpse lies face down for an hour,
its eyes will look as bloodshot as Theresa Jordan's. In this case, I was told that a murder had been
committed, before the testimony in the body could become evidence.
Does this mean that a murderer who uses a pillow will always get away with it?
Usually not, but possibly yes.
Unless there is other evidence that attracts the attention of the police and the medical
examiner.
Is there such a thing as a perfect murder?
Hopefully not, but maybe so. A murderer can also push a victim off a building. I usually
can't tell if the victim jumped or was pushed, not unless there was a struggle or an eyewitness.
When I expressed these views, people became disturbed. They don't want to believe that

Michael M. Baden, M.D

To Die Upon a Kiss

the medical examiner could be fooled. How could a man go on killing one helpless woman after
another, all in the same building, and get caught months later only because of a stolen TV set?
Yes, it is frightening and it frightens me too. My art can save lives, but it hadn't been sufficient
to stop Calvin Jackson.
We are the last station for the dead before they are dispatched to their graves. We need to
see with open eyes. We cannot rely on the accidental revelations of murderers. Armed with our
imperfect tools and ignorant of tools yet to be devised, we stand at the entrance to the graveyard
and ask questions of the dead.
In the great poet's play, there is a curious moment when, some time after she has been
smothered by Othello, Desdemona seems to awake and cry outfirst that she has been murdered
and then that Othello isn't really to blame. This is misleading but valuable testimony. Often, we
ourselves, have nothing more to go on than the mute and equivocal testimony of the corpse.

2005 Michael M. Baden, M.D. All Rights Reserved.


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MICHAEL M. BADEN, M.D.


Dr. Michael M. Baden is a Board-certified, forensic pathologist,
former Chief Medical Examiner, NYC.

In addition to

maintaining a private practice, Dr. Baden is the co-director of the


NY State Police Medico-Legal Investigation Unit. Dr. Baden
worked in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in NYC and was the Chief Medical Examiner
from 1978-1979. He was also the Deputy Chief Medical Examiner for Suffolk County and has
held appointments at Albert Einstein Medical School, Albany Medical College, NY Law School
and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Dr. Baden has lectured nationally and internationally.
He was the Chairman of the Forensic Pathology Panel of the US Congress Select Committee on
Assassinations that investigated the deaths of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther
King., Jr. In addition, Dr. Baden has testified before the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary
Department of Justice Oversight: "Funding Forensic Sciences, DNA and Beyond." Dr. Baden
has been involved as an expert in forensic pathology in many cases of international interest,
including examination of the remains of Tsar Nicholas of Russia and his family, the death of John
Belushi, the re-autopsy of Medgar Evers, civil rights leader, the death of Billy Martin, the
re-examination of the Lindberg kidnapping and murder, and autopsies of the victims of TWA

Michael M. Baden, M.D

Author Spotlight

flight 800. He has served as an expert witness in the cases of Claus Von Bulow, Marlon Brando's
son, O.J. Simpson and Kobe Bryant. Dr. Baden has published numerous articles, medical journals
and two non-fiction books for the general public recounting many fascinating cases. His new
novel, co-written with his wife Linda Kenney, is being published by Knopf in August 2005. In
addition, Dr. Baden has been the subject of 10 HBO "Autopsy" specials beginning in 1994 and
continuing through the present.

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Also by MICHAEL M. BADEN, M.D.


Remains Silent
Dead Reckoning: The New Science of Catching Killers
Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner

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