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At the same time, Giorgi emerged, clutching the arm of her attorney. For reasons unclear to me, she was being allowed to walk herself to jail, which was located half a block away. The reporters swarmed but she didn’t say a word. Her attorney held up a hand, No comment, and the two kept moving. With that, Jerry headed to his car. Steve and I stood and watched as Elaine Giorgi climbed the last few steps that led to the Santa Clara County Jail.

NINE

Exsanguinate

Blood makes noise

It’s a ringing in my ear

And I can’t really hear you

In the thickening of fear

Blood makes noise

—SUZANNE VEGA, 1992

FOR A PERIOD OF SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS UP THROUGH the nineteenth century, the earthly punishment meted out to British criminals sentenced to death did not end with execution. Worse than imagining the tightening of the noose or the plunge of the guillotine’s blade, according to writings of the time, was a felon’s fear of ending up on the wrong side of an anatomist’s knife. The idea of your body being sliced apart piece by piece—regardless that this was done to instruct medical students or in the name of science—could tap into every private horror, whether humiliation or desecration or something grislier. For this, the condemned had England’s Henry VIII to thank. In 1542, by royal decree, the Guild of Barbers and Surgeons—the bloodletting specialists who sidelined in haircuts and minor surgeries—was granted a maximum of four executed “malefactors” per annum for use in public dissections. This was the only legal source of cadavers. By no miracle of accounting did four per year come close to meeting demand, however, and the shortage led to a thriving black market in stolen bodies.

The Reward of Cruelty by William Hogarth, 1751

In 1752 the king’s law was amended to allow a judge to send any executed convict’s body to the Surgeons’ Hall. A felon had just cause to worry. An engraving titled The Reward of Cruelty (1751), by the British artist William Hogarth, depicts a dissection-in-progress at Surgeons’ Hall. The naked body of a freshly executed murderer is splayed in a crowded auditorium of onlookers, and the lead anatomist directs the activity with a long stick: Cut here and gouge there, if you please. One surgeon pries loose an eyeball, another slices open the foot, while a third man seems to have slid his entire hand up into the deceased’s chest cavity, perhaps reaching for the heart. A final man kneels to the side collecting in a bucket the long sausage of the intestines. While Hogarth’s engraving is a work of satire—the noose is still affixed to the felon’s neck, for instance, and a small dog is about to make off with what looks like the liver—it nevertheless captures the graphic nature of the butchering.

More gruesome still were twin dissections performed the following century, as recounted by medical historian Gustav Eckstein in his book The Body Has a Head (1970). Eckstein’s tale is thin on personal details but rich in methodology. Two criminals, sentenced to decapitation, would be used to answer once and for all the nagging question, How much blood does the human body contain? Of course, many times throughout history best guesses had been made, but this latest effort would be as exacting as humanly possible. First, each man had blood drawn—a predetermined amount, which was diluted precisely one hundred times. These samples were set aside to serve later as a color standard. With no further ceremony, the two men were relieved of their heads, and all spillage was collected. The heads and trunks were drained, then squeezed. Once no more color would bleed, the bodies were carved into smaller and smaller pieces, eventually down to human chum, and washed, soaked, and wrung. All excess water added to the process was tallied and saved. Finally, in a process that to me seems fraught with the potential for error, the total liquid remains of each criminal were color-compared to his original sample, dilutions were made until they matched, mathematics were applied,