“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.