Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [288]
And in northern California that Sunday afternoon, Maya Angelou was chatting on the telephone with her girlfriend Ivonne. Angelou recalled that there “was no cheer in [Ivonne’s] voice” when she said, “These Negroes are crazy here. I mean, really crazy. Otherwise why would they have just killed that man in New York?” In disbelief, Angelou managed to place the phone receiver down on a table. She walked into a bedroom and locked the door behind her. “I didn’t have to ask,” she remembered. “I knew ‘that man in New York’ was Malcolm X and that someone had just killed him.” The next morning in bed, her first thought was that she “had returned from Africa to give my energies and wit to the OAAU, and Malcolm was dead.”
CHAPTER 16
Life After Death
The shattered remains of Malcolm Little were in the hands of Dr. Milton Helpern on the morning of Monday, February 22, 1965. A veteran medical examiner, Helpern had previously directed more than twelve thousand autopsies and had participated in fifty thousand others. As stenographer Frank Smith transcribed Helpern’s forensic remarks, the autopsy examination proceeded: “The body is that of an adult colored male, six foot three inches tall, scale weight 178 lbs. There is slight frontal baldness. There is a wide mustache brown in color, also a goatee of brown hair with a few gray hairs.” Physically, Malcolm had been in good condition: slender, but muscular. “The hands are well developed. The fingernails are neatly trimmed.” Examining the head, Helpern determined that there were no hemorrhages to the scalp. Malcolm’s brain was “heavy, weighs 1700 grams.” A brain section was taken, which revealed “no abnormalities.”
Helpern surveyed the evidence provided from the multiple gunshot wounds. Much of the damage had been caused by the initial shotgun blast, including two wounds on the right forearm, two more in the right hand. The full force of the blast perforated the chest, cutting into “the thoracic cavity, the left lung, pericardium, heart, aorta, right lung.” Handgun bullet wounds pockmarked the rest of the body: several in the left leg, a slug shattering the left index and middle fingers, a slug fragment embedded into the right side of his chin, a “bullet wound of [the] left thigh” that extended “through the innominate bone into the peritoneal cavity, penetrating the intestines and the mesentery and aorta.” Helpern methodically counted twenty-one separate wounds, ten of which had been from the initial blast. The forensic evidence indicated that three different guns had been used—a sawed-off shotgun, a 9mm automatic, and a .45 caliber handgun, probably a Luger. Helpern set aside a number of slugs and bullets for further testing by the NYPD’s ballistics bureau.
The NYPD’s narrative about Malcolm’s murder was simple. The slaying was the culmination of an almost yearlong feud between two black hate groups. The NYPD had two priorities in conducting its investigation: first, to protect the identities of its undercover police officers and informants, like Gene Roberts; and second, to make successful cases against NOI members with histories of violence. Its hasty and haphazard treatment of forensic evidence at the crime scene suggested that it had little interest in solving the actual homicide.
From the outset, the NYPD focused its attention on Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson, the two NOI lieutenants they believed had participated in the shooting of Benjamin Brown in the Bronx. The department’s hypothesis in the Malcolm killing was that Butler was the second gunman along with Hayer. Johnson was supposedly the shotgun