Red Mist ks-19 Page 11

  Between 1989 and 1996, Barrie Lou Rivers poisoned seventeen people, nine of them fatally, with arsenic she got from a pesticide company, all of her victims regular patrons of the deli she managed in an Atlanta skyscraper occupied by multiple companies and firms. Day after day, unsuspecting innocents lined up in the atrium at her deli counter for the tuna-fish special, which was quite the deal: sandwich, chips, a pickle, and a soda for $2.99. When her sadistic crimes were finally discovered, she told police she was tired of people “griping about their food and decided to give them something to gripe about, all right.” She was sick and tired of “shitholes bossing me around like I’m Aunt Jemima.”

  “There are other nuances,” Jaime Berger is saying as I read. “Unfortunately, of a personal nature. Some of what I was asked by the FBI agents who showed up at my door was most inappropriate. It was obvious they’d talked to Farbman first, and you can imagine his favorite point was about me. That you and I were almost family.”

  I scan the chain-of-custody form that accompanied the execution drugs scheduled for Barrie Lou Rivers, DOC #121195. The prescription was filled at three-twenty p.m. on the first day of March 2009. Kathleen Lawler told me that Barrie Lou Rivers choked on a tuna-fish sandwich in her cell. If that’s true, she must have choked to death at some point after three-twenty p.m. on the day of her execution. The prescription for what was to be her lethal cocktail was filled but never administered, because she died before prison officials could strap her to the gurney. It occurs to me that her last meal may have been the same thing she served to her victims.

  “You’ve been back and forth to the GPFW, interviewing Lola Daggette, whose appeals have run out,” I say to Jaime. “I assume she’s talking to you about something important or you wouldn’t have transplanted yourself to Savannah. Your problems in New York aren’t why you’re here, I don’t imagine.”

  “She’s not been helpful,” Jaime says. “You’d think she would be, but she’s not as afraid of the needle as she is of Payback.The person she claims killed the Jordan family.”

  “Has she said she knows who Paybackis?” I inquire.

  “ Paybackis the devil,” Jaime says. “Some evil ghost that planted bloody clothes in Lola’s room.”

  “Her execution is set for this fall, and she’s still saying such things?”

  “October thirty-first. Halloween,” Jaime says. “I suspect the judge who delayed her execution and then reset it is letting everyone know what he really thinks of Lola Daggette, wants to make sure she’s given a trick, not a treat, four months from now. Emotions still run high about that case. A lot of people are eager for her to get what they perceive she deserves. They want her to die as painfully as possible. You know, wait just a little too long after administering the sodium pentothal. Forget to expel air from the line. Hope it gets clogged.”

  Marino places a stack of color printouts on the table, autopsy photographs, and I pick them up.

  “Sodium thiopental is fast-acting and can wear off just as quickly, as I’m sure you know,” Jaime continues. “If you screw up the timing when injecting the remaining drugs, and what we’re really talking about is the intramuscular blocking agent pancuronium bromide? If you wait too long? The sodium thiopental, the anesthesia, begins to wear off. A blocked line and prison officials have to put in a new one, and the efficacy of the sodium thiopental has dissipated by the time all that’s been done.

  “You may look asleep, but your brain has come to,” she says. “You can’t open your eyes, talk, or make a sound as you lie on the gurney with restraints holding you down, but you’re conscious and aware that you can’t breathe. The long-acting pancuronium bromide has paralyzed the muscles in your chest, and you asphyxiate. No one watching has any idea that you’re anything but peacefully asleep as your face turns blue and you suffocate. One minute, two minutes, three minutes, maybe longer, as you die a silent, agonizing death.”

  The autopsy of Barrie Lou Rivers was performed by Colin Dengate, and I have a good idea how he might feel about someone who poisoned innocent victims by lacing their deli sandwiches with arsenic.

  “Except the warden knows.” Jaime retrieves a bottle of wine and a Diet Coke from the refrigerator and shuts the door with her hip. “The executioner knows. The anonymous doctor in his hood and goggles knows and can damn well see your panic as he monitors your racing heart before you finally flatline. But then, some of these very people presiding over judicial homicides, the death squad, want the condemned to suffer. Their secret mission is to cause as much pain and to terrorize as much as possible without lawyers, judges, the public knowing. This sort of thing has been going on for centuries. The executioner’s ax blade is dull or off the mark and requires a few extra blows. The hanging doesn’t go well because the noose slips and the person strangles slowly, twisting at the end of a rope in front of a jeering crowd.”

  As I listen to what sounds like one of Jaime Berger’s classic opening arguments in court, I know that most people who count in this part of the world, including certain judges and politicians and most of all Colin Dengate, would be unmoved by her. I have a pretty good idea how Colin feels not only about what happened to the Jordan family but about what should happen to Lola Daggette. Yes, emotions run high, especially those of my feisty Irish colleague who heads the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s Coastal Regional Crime Lab in Savannah. Jaime Berger coming down to the Lowcountry wouldn’t impress him and might just feel like an invasion. I suspect he’s not inclined to give her the time of day.

  “As you’re well aware, Kay, I don’t believe that a form of euthanizing begun in Nazi Germany to eliminate undesirables is one we should emulate in the United States. And it shouldn’t be legal,” she says, as she arranges sushi and seaweed salad on a plate. “Doctors are prohibited from playing any role in executions, including pronouncing death, and the lethal-injection drugs are increasingly difficult to obtain. There’s a shortage because of the stigma for U.S. manufacturers to make them, and some states have been forced to import the drugs, making the source and quality of them questionable. The drugs shouldn’t be legally available to prison officials, and none of this stops anything. Doctors participate and pharmacists fill the prescriptions and prisons get their drugs. Regardless of one’s beliefs or moral convictions, Lola didn’t kill the Jordans. She didn’t kill Clarence, Gloria, Josh, and Brenda. In fact, she never met them. She was never inside their house.”

  I glance up at Marino as I study copies of photographs. Last I knew, he was in favor of capital punishment. An eye for an eye. A taste of their own medicine.

  “I think Lola Daggette was a screwed-up person, a drug addict with a temper, but she didn’t kill anyone or help do it,” he says to me. “It’s more likely she was set up by the person she calls Payback.She probably thought it was friggin’ fun.”

  “Who thought it was fun?”

  “The one who really did it. She got her hands on some kid who’s in a halfway house and basically retarded.” Marino looks at Jaime. “IQ’s what? Seventy? I think that’s legally retarded,” he adds.

  “She?”I ask.

  “Lola’s innocent of the crimes she was tried for and convicted of,” Jaime says. “I’m not as clear as I need to be about what happened the early morning of January sixth, 2002, but I do have new evidence to prove it wasn’t Lola who was inside the Jordans’ house. What I can’t know is what went on from a forensic standpoint, because I’m not that kind of expert. The injuries, for example. All inflicted by the same weapon, and if so, what was this weapon? What do the bloodstain patterns really mean? How long had the Jordans been dead when the next-door neighbor went out with his dog and happened to notice the glass was broken in the back door and then no one answered the bell or the phone?”

  “Colin is that kind of expert,” I remark.

  “I have a very nice Oregon pinot,” Jaime says. “If that’s all right with you.”

  She pulls the cork out of the bottle of wine as I study photographs of Barrie Lou Rivers
on the stainless-steel autopsy table, her shoulders propped up by a polypropylene block, her head hanging back, her long gray hair stringy and bloody. The skin of her chest has been reflected up to above the larynx and the vocal cords, and there is nothing lodged in her airway. Close-ups of the small triangular vocal cord opening show it is unobstructed and clear.

  Whether it’s an object as small as a peanut or a grape or a large bolus of meat, nothing can get below the level of the vocal cords when someone is choking, and Colin was appropriately careful to make sure he checked for aspirated food before he did anything else. He also deemed the case important enough to stay late or return to his lab after hours and perform the postmortem examination immediately. The time and date of the autopsy are listed on the protocol as nine-seventeen p.m., March 1.

  I go through more photographs, looking for anything that might verify what Kathleen Lawler told me about Barrie Lou Rivers’s death in custody. I ask Marino for rescue-squad run sheets or statements made by the guards on duty, for the autopsy report, and he shuffles through the file and hands over whatever there is. I get confirmation that Barrie Lou Rivers likely ate a tuna-fish sandwich on rye bread with pickles not long before she died. Her gastric contents are consistent with this: two hundred milliliters of undigested food, what appear to be fishlike particles, pickles, bread, and caraway seeds .

  But there’s nothing to support Kathleen’s claims that Barrie Lou Rivers choked to death. Apparently nobody attempted a Heimlich maneuver, so it doesn’t seem possible that a bolus of sandwich or anything she might have been choking on was ejected, thus explaining why it wasn’t found during the autopsy. There’s no official document that mentions food aspiration or choking, but I know Colin looked for it. I can tell he did by the autopsy photographs.

  Then I read a call sheet that includes handwritten notes he made at eight-oh-seven p.m. The suggestion that choking was the cause of death was made by Tara Grimm. “Barrie Lou seemed to be having a hard time breathing,” the warden apparently said to Colin over the phone while the body was in transit, en route to the morgue. She didn’t witness this herself, she said, but it was reported to her that Barrie Lou “was struggling for breath and seemed distressed.” The guards thought it was anxiety, Tara Grimm told Colin. “It wasn’t too long before she was to be taken into the death chamber and prepped, and Barrie Lou was prone to emotional fits and anxiety. Now I’m wondering if she might have choked on her last meal.”

  Colin wrote these remarks on the call sheet, and he dutifully checked for food aspiration when he made his first incision on Barrie Lou Rivers’s body less than an hour after he was on the phone with the warden, who did not attend the autopsy. Official witnesses listed on the protocol as having been present include a morgue assistant, a death investigator, and a representative from the GPFW, Officer M. P. Macon. The same prison guard who was my escort earlier today.

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  The cause of death listed on the preliminary autopsy report is undetermined and the manner is the same. Undeterminedand Undetermined.In forensic pathology this is a no-hitter, a game tied at zero inning after inning and finally called because of rain or dark or who knows what, but in the end it doesn’t count.

  Every death should count, and I am not a good sport when I can’t find an answer. I know there always is one. But now and then forensic pathologists like Colin Dengate and me are forced to accept we’ve failed. The dead won’t tell us what we need to know, and we have no choice but to come up with what is most plausible medically even if we don’t quite believe it. We release the body and personal effects so those left behind can tidy up legal affairs, collect insurance, arrange funerals, and go on living. Or in the case of Barrie Lou Rivers, she was signed out and buried in a potter’s field because nobody claimed her or gave a damn.

  Eventually Colin amended the autopsy report to a sudden cardiac death due to myocardial infarction with a manner of natural, and this is what is on her death certificate as well. It was a default diagnosis based on an equivocal amount of coronary artery disease. Sixty percent of the left anterior descending artery. Twenty percent of the right at one centimeter from the ostium. The circumflex coronary artery was clear. She was awaiting her execution, and at some point after a last meal of a tuna-fish sandwich on rye, potato chips, and Pepsi cola, witnesses claimed she suffered shortness of breath, sweating, weakness, extreme fatigue — symptoms that were interpreted as a panic attack precipitated by her impending execution. A panic attack is consistent with the undigested food Colin found when he opened the stomach during the autopsy. Extreme stress or fear, and the digestion completely quits.

  By all accounts, it appears she was dead from a massive heart attack at seven-fifteen p.m., or not quite two hours before she was scheduled to die by lethal injection. As I continue to review her case, Jaime talks from the kitchen while she arranges each of our meals on her rental unit’s white plates. She’s talking about the Jordan family. She wants their injuries and any other artifacts and crime scene information interpreted as precisely and as irrefutably as possible. She needs my help.

  “Colin should be able to tell you about their injuries and everything else,” I remind her. “He went to the crime scene and did the autopsies. He’s a very competent forensic pathologist. Have you tried to discuss the cases with him?”

  “One perpetrator. Lola Daggette. Case closed,” Marino replies. “That’s what everybody around here’s got to say about it.”

  As Jaime gets out wineglasses I recall Colin’s demeanor during the case presentation he gave at the NAME meeting in Los Angeles years ago. He was personally outraged by the savage deaths of Dr. Clarence Jordan and his wife, Gloria, and visibly upset over their two little children, Brenda and Josh. Colin’s opinion then was that only one person had committed those crimes — the teenage girl who was washing the victims’ blood out of her clothing in a halfway-house bathroom within hours of the homicides. Any subsequent stories and rumors about Lola Daggette’s mysterious accomplice were a defense attorney’s fiction, I remember him saying.

  “I’ve been to his lab only once, several weeks ago,” Jaime says. “He didn’t come out of his office to meet me, and when I went in to speak to him, he didn’t get up from his desk.”

  “You can’t force him to be friendly, but I can’t imagine him deliberately impairing an attorney’s ability to get needed information,” I reply, and what I really want to say is that Jaime is Jaime, and what’s worse, she’s a New Yorker, one of those northern aggressors who comes to a small southern city and assumes everyone is backward, bigoted, dishonest, and somewhat stupid.

  I suspect her attitude is obvious when she deals with Colin, who grew up in these parts and is steeped in local tradition, whether it is participating in Civil War reenactments or Irish parades on Saint Patrick’s Day.

  “He’s bound by statute to give you anything that could be exculpatory,” I add.

  “He didn’t volunteer anything.”

  “He doesn’t have to volunteer anything.”

  “He thinks I’m just looking for someone to support an alternate theory.”

  “He very well might think that, because that’s exactly what you’re doing,” I reply. “You’re doing the same thing any good defense attorney does. What I haven’t been told is how or why it is you’re involved. You left the DA’s office and suddenly you’re in the opposite camp, representing Lola Daggette. And what is your interest in Barrie Lou Rivers?”

  “Cruel and unusual punishment.” Jaime pours wine. “Barrie Lou was so terrified as she awaited her execution in a holding cell, she died of a heart attack. Whose idea was it to serve her a last meal that was identical to what she poisoned her victims with? Was it hers? If so, why? To show remorse, or a contemptuous lack of it?”

  “There’s no forensic analysis that will answer that,” I reply.

  “I seriously doubt she picked the menu,” Jaime makes her point. “I suspect the objective was to taunt her with what awaited her when she was strapped on t
hat gurney, to terrorize her about what the death squad had in store for her and how much they were looking forward to her getting what she deserved. Barrie Lou had a panic attack, all right. She was literally scared to death.”

  “I don’t know if it’s true she was tormented, and I don’t think you can know it, either, unless someone who was involved admits to such a thing. And I’m curious about why you’re suddenly so interested,” I tell her frankly. “I’m puzzled by why you’re suddenly up to your elbows in defending the very sort of people you used to lock up and throw away the key.”

  “Not suddenly. I’ve been having discussions for a while. My troubles with Farbman and just my having my fill … well, it goes back longer than you might think. I alerted Joe at the end of last year that I was looking into other prospects, that I was interested in wrongful convictions.”

  “Good ole Joe Nail ’emNale,” Marino quips, as he flips a page of another report. “I wish I was a fly on the wall when you told him that,” he says to Jaime.

  Joseph Nale is the district attorney of Manhattan, Jaime’s former boss, and not the sort to be favorably inclined toward any individual or organization dedicated to exonerating people wrongfully convicted of crimes. Most prosecutors, if they’re honest about it, aren’t fond of lawyers who make it their mission to fight the injustices caused by other lawyers and those they recruited as experts.

  “I informed him I’d also been talking with some attorneys I know who work with the Innocence Project,” Jaime continues to explain.

  “The one here in Georgia?” I ask.

  “The national organization in New York. But I’m acquainted with Curtis Roberts, and I did ask him to do a favor.”

  “So Leonard Brazzo wouldn’t know you were behind the invitation for me to meet with Kathleen Lawler. So I wouldn’t know,” I presume.