Benton and I politely declined. Gerde was a young forensic pathologist with dark hair and startling blue eyes. He had rotated through my office three years earlier, and was still new enough at his profession to rarely have his status as an expert witness stipulated in court. But he was humble and meticulous, and those attributes were far more valuable to me than experience, especially in this instance. Unless Gerde had changed dramatically, it was unlikely he had touched the body after learning I was coming.
‘Tell me where we are in this,’ I said as we walked down a wide, polished gray hallway.
‘I had her weighed, measured and was doing the external exam when the coroner called. As soon as he said ATF was involved and you were on the way, I stopped the presses.’
Lehigh County had an elected coroner who decided which cases would be autopsied and then determined the manner of death. Fortunately for Gerde, the coroner was a former police officer who did not interfere with the forensic pathologists and usually deferred to the decisions they made. But this was not true in other states or other counties in Pennsylvania, where autopsies were sometimes performed on embalming tables in funeral homes, and some coroners were consummate politicians who did not know an entrance from an exit wound, or care.
Our footsteps echoed in the stairwell, and at the bottom, Gerde pushed through double doors and we found ourselves in a warehouse stacked with collapsed cardboard boxes and busy with people in hard hats. We passed through to a different part of the building and followed another hallway to the morgue. It was small, with a pink tile floor and two stationary stainless steel tables. Gerde opened a cabinet and handed us sterile single-use surgical gowns, plastic aprons, and full coverage disposable boots. We pulled these over our clothes and shoes and then donned latex gloves and masks.
The dead woman had been identified as Kellie Shephard, a thirty-two-year-old black female who had worked as a nurse at the very hospital where she was now being stored with the dead. She was inside a black pouch on top of a gurney inside a small walk-in refrigerator that held no other guests this day except bright orange packages of surgical specimens and stillborn infants awaiting cremation. We rolled the dead woman into the autopsy room and unzipped the pouch.
‘Have you X-rayed her?’ I asked Gerde.
‘Yes, and we’ve gotten her fingerprints. The dentist charted her teeth yesterday, as well, and matched them with premortem records.’
Gerde and I unzipped the pouch and opened it, and we unwrapped bloody sheets, exposing the mutilated body to the harsh glare of surgical lamps. She was rigid and cold, her blind eyes half open in a gory face. Gerde had not washed her yet, and her skin was crusty with blackish-red blood, her hair stiff with it like a Brillo pad. Her wounds were so numerous and violent that they radiated an aura of rage. I could feel the killer’s fury and hate, and I began to envision her fierce struggle with him.
The fingers and palms of both hands had been cut to the bone when she had tried to protect herself by grabbing the knife blade. She had deep cuts to the backs of her forearms and wrists, again from trying to shield herself, and slashes to her legs that most likely were from her being down on the floor and trying to kick the swings of the knife away. Stab wounds were clustered in a savage constellation over her breasts, abdomen, and shoulders, and also on her buttocks and back.
Many of the wounds were large and irregular, and caused by the knife twisting as the victim moved or from the blade being withdrawn. The pattern of the individual wound configurations suggested a single-edged knife with a guard that had left squared-off abrasions. A somewhat superficial cut ran from her right jaw up to her cheek, and her throat had been laid open in a direction that began below the right ear and went downward, and then across the midline of the neck.
‘Consistent with her throat being cut from behind,’ I said as Benton looked on silently and took notes. ‘Head pulled back, throat exposed.’