Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [66]
Meyer decided not to make note of those events in his report. Afterward, he had continued with an internal examination of the body. He had seen no sternal or rib fractures. He noted that he had found some scattered petechial hemorrhages on the surface of each lung and on the front surface of the heart. These suggested death by suffocation. The bladder, he noted, had been contracted and held no urine. The esophagus was empty. The small intestine had contained fragments of a yellow to light-greenish-tan material, apparently remnants of a fruit or vegetable—possibly pineapple.
The next thing Meyer noted in his report was a fracture of the skull that had not been visible before he removed part of the skull. There was subdural hemorrhaging over the surface of the right cerebral hemisphere and a thin film of subarachnoid hemorrhaging over the whole right cerebral hemisphere. In the report, he wrote about an extensive purple bruise, about 8 by 1¾ inches in area, underlying the skull fracture, as well as a bruise at the tip of the right temporal lobe measuring about ¼ inch square. The tip of the left temporal lobe, Meyer noted, showed only very minimal bruising.
After writing about the brain, Meyer moved on to the upper body. Examining the thyroid cartilage, cricoid cartilage, and hyoid bone, he had found no signs of hemorrhages or fractures.
Meyer remembered that shortly before he completed the autopsy, Arndt had called Byfield again to tell him there was a skull fracture and hemorrhaging of the brain, which were consistent with a blow to the head. She had sounded surprised because when the body was lying near the Christmas tree, there had been no external indication that the child had sustained a head injury.
His report nearly finished, the coroner locked it away in his office safe, where it would await the outcome of the legal battle to keep it from the public.
On Friday afternoon, January 10, a few minutes after Meyer gave an interview to CNN to answer some technical questions about the case, a phone message caught his eye: it was from Tom Brokaw.
Brokaw’s producer told Meyer that NBC had an advance copy of the Globe tabloid, which featured photographs from the autopsy and crime scene. Were they authentic?
“I can’t tell you without seeing them,” Meyer replied.
“I’ll fax them to you, “the producer said.
Meyer studied the faxed images and saw that the photographs were genuine. Some of them had been taken by his staff. Minutes later, Meyer was in Sheriff George Epp’s office, one floor above his in the Justice Center. The coroner was shaking.
“George, I’ve got a problem. I need your help.”
Wordlessly, Meyer showed Epp the fax he had just received and his set of original photographs. Then Meyer called Bryan Morgan and told him about the call from NBC and what to expect.
When Meyer left, the sheriff assembled three of his top investigators, Detective Steve Ainsworth, Sgt. George Dunphy, and Lt. Steve Prentup. Step one: interview Meyer and his staff and get them polygraphed. Step two: contact Photo Craft, the lab that had handled the photos, and interview everyone who might have touched either the film or the finished prints. It surprised Detective Ainsworth that the coroner had sent this highly sensitive material to the most ordinary little shop with no special security and no extra precautions. “We take our film to K-Mart to get the two-for-one deal,” Ainsworth said half aloud. “I need to go to school on this one.” That afternoon, one by one, Meyer’s staff was questioned. Everyone agreed to be polygraphed.
It was 9:00 P.M. when Roy McCutcheon, the owner of Photo Craft, told the sheriff’s detectives about Shawn Smith, who ran the minilab and personally