The Autopsy
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
DR. JOE BARNES HAD NEVER PERFORMED AN AUTOPSY. The years he worked at the Creek County Funeral Home he had helped prepare bodies for burial, but that never involved anything more than washing a corpse, gluing the eyes and mouth closed, and draining body fluids. And that was difficult for him. This was beyond anything Joe had ever imagined—except the discovery and retrieval of the Judge’s body from Halawakee Creek earlier in the day.
He stood over the corpse in the borrowed funeral home. The body—or what remained of it--was covered with a white sheet and laid out on a stainless-steel table under bright lights. Barnes had removed the clothing and made notes of the conditions of the head, limbs, and torso. Bruising, cuts, and swollen tissue indicated the body had been submerged and battered by rocks and tree limbs for some weeks. One eye was missing, leaving a gruesome socket. The jaw broken, the skull exposed. Barnes found no knife or gunshot wounds. The legs, however, were torn or broken off below the knees. He photographed everything, but this part of the body was particularly important, possibly suggesting the cause of death.
The young coroner remembered the evidence bag and retrieved it from his vehicle. In it was the coil of wire attached to a human foot, still wearing a man’s shoe. In actuality, there was quite a length of the leg, with what looked like, on closer inspection, to be baling wire—as would be used on a hay baler—wrapped or coiled around the leg and foot. And the foot was fitted with a cordovan wingtip, an expensive men’s shoe, the kind worn by bankers and lawyers. The coroner made careful notes as he proceeded.
Barnes thought how unusual it would be for such a man to have died so far out in the country, drowned in a creek, wearing his best suit of clothes, apparently by himself. And then it occurred to Joe Barnes: Judge Jim Duffy may have taken his own life! Was this indeed a suicide?
He halted the procedure and returned to his notebook, recording his findings meticulously in the permanent record. Thirty minutes later, he still hadn’t opened the chest cavity or removed any internal organs. Barnes was in no hurry to do so. Besides, the clothing hadn’t been inspected. He retrieved the cardboard box and removed the sodden overcoat. He checked the pockets. Gloves. Next he removed and folded the torn suit pants and placed them in the box labeled “James E. Duffy.” Then he removed the suit coat and noticed a small book in the left coat pocket. It was water-soaked and falling apart. Barnes placed the book on a flat surface under bright light and carefully opened the pages. “To my beloved Husband Jim,” read the inscription, “Sunday, the Fourth of April, in the Year of Our Lord 1948,” and it was signed, “With Love, Martha.” It was a 1928 Book of Common Prayer, often given to a person at Baptism or Confirmation. It was impossible to say, but this Prayer Book appeared to be a constant companion of the Judge.
Dr. Barnes stopped his work and called Sheriff Lasseter.
“Sheriff, if you don’t mind I’d like to ask you a few questions about Judge Duffy.”
His voice was shaking.
“Sure, Dr. Barnes. What’s on your mind?”
“Did you or your men find any evidence of foul play on the Halawakee Bridge?”
“Well, not that I could tell. We did find some dirt residue and a few marks in the bridge timbers where somebody tried to climb out one of the windows.”
“Could a grown man climb out a window and stand there on the overhang?”
“Yeah, I suppose it’s possible. My deputies didn’t think much of it. They said some boys might try that when they’re fishin off the bridge.”
“I’m down here at the funeral home conductin this autopsy on the Judge, and it just occurred to me that he might have jumped off that bridge himself. There’s no sign of foul play, no wounds or gun shots. But it looks like his legs were tied together with baling wire.”
Dr. Barnes paused momentarily for any comment from the Sheriff. Nothing.
“I remember you were the one who pulled that baling wire and the foot out of the creek. Anyway, what do you make of that? I think it’s important evidence. I’m thinking either the Judge killed himself—or somebody murdered him.”
“I see what you’re sayin, but Doc, what woulda kept him down there all that time? Hasn’t that body been underwater for nearly six weeks?”
“That’s why we need the Army back over there for a final answer. Now we know what we’re lookin for. The Judge had to be weighed down with something heavy. Like a concrete block. That means whatever it is would still be there, under the Halawakee Creek Bridge, sixty feet below the surface.”
“Good work, Dr. Barnes. I’ll call Lt. Monoriti and ask him if he can get his team back out there as soon as possible.”
By early morning on Thursday, March 29, the Army search and rescue team was at the Halawakee constructing a floating wooden pier attached to the stout structure undergirding the bridge and secured to pylons on shore. Two motorboats transported divers from shore to the pier. The divers worked in teams of two and lost no time in covering the deep water immediately below the bridge. They used powerful underwater lights to search for materials that could have been used to weigh down the body of Judge Duffy.
Gone were the cold temperatures of February, but the spring rains kept the Halawakee running full and swift. The divers found the work slow and painstaking, as they encountered fallen trees, rocks, and the constant flow of debris.
They found nothing through Thursday and Friday, but on Saturday just before noon, a pair of divers found three harrow disks still wired together with baling wire, wedged tight between the rusted hulk of a car and a tree trunk lying on the rocky bottom. They were large disks, twenty-two inches in diameter, each weighing about twenty pounds, and it took both divers to bring them to the surface.
The divers were strong men, and they cheered as they swam with the harrow disks between them to the floating pier. The soldiers joined in the celebration as they lifted the heavy prize out of the roiling water.
At last they had the victim and the evidence. But how would the new coroner adjudge the death? Murder or suicide? Soon every white and colored person in Creek County would be wanting to know his decision.
Early Hawkins’ Diary