The Art of Political Murder (19 page)

At this point, only the San Francisco attorney and private investigator Jack Palladino—fresh from a controversy raised by the independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr and congressional Republicans over his role in “opposition research” for President Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign—who had arrived in the judge's quarters before the three PM deadline on Wednesday, could participate, and even Palladino could participate only as a “forensic photographer.” Standing by in the courtyard were Dr. Robert Bux and Dr. Norman Sperber. Bux was the deputy chief medical examiner of Bexar County, Texas, which includes the city of San Antonio; he was a veteran of over 1,200 autopsies of homicide victims and of two separate clandestine exhumations from mass graves in Bosnia, and the author of a not irrelevant article published in the December 1992 issue of the
American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology
, “Death Due to Attack from Chow Dog.” Norman Sperber was the chief forensic dentist for California's San Diego and Imperial counties, with 2,000 forensic examinations behind him and criminal investigations of
more than 500 bite cases, including fourteen involving dogs. Sperber had developed the Dental Division of the FBI's National Crime Information Center, and had been an expert witness in high-profile homicide cases in the United States, including the trials of serial murderers Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer. Jack Palladino's clients included not only President Clinton but the hip-hop entrepreneur Suge Knight, the cofounder of Death Row records, who in 1998 was in prison for parole violations. Among the murders Palladino had investigated were the People's Temple case, the murder-suicide of more than 900 members of a religious cult in Jonestown, Guyana; and the notorious murder of the Hollywood entertainment company executive José Menendez and his wife by their two sons.

Thursday morning the American specialists huddled with their Guatemalan counterparts, Dr. Guerra of the Judicial Morgue, who had performed the original autopsy, and Helen Mack's friend Doctor Mario Iraheta, who would be ODHA's forensics specialist at this second autopsy. They talked quietly, speculating on the likely condition of Bishop Gerardi's corpse, and on how dry conditions might be in the crypt and inside the coffin.

I spoke to Dr. Reverte Coma in an office off the courtyard. He was seventy-nine years old, bald, and had a white mustache, bushy white eyebrows, brilliant blue eyes, and pale skin that seemed nearly translucent. Leaning back in his chair with arms folded across his chest—a characteristic posture, it turned out—he began telling me of his long history in Central America, particularly in Panama. When the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio “Tacho” Somoza (the elder) was mortally wounded by an assassin's bullet in 1956, he was flown to the Canal Zone on orders of the White House, and there, Reverte Coma told me, he had participated in the failed surgery to save Somoza's life. In 1992, he was the Spanish delegate to an exhumation sponsored by the UN in El Mozote, El Salvador, where more than 1,200 peasants had been massacred by the Salvadoran Army.

Suddenly our conversation was cut off by a hulking man in a beige suit, demanding to know if I was a journalist. He was a bodyguard from Safari, a private security company. A little later, in the courtyard, I stood next to a pair of Safari's young security agents, outfitted like commandos in full battle gear, as they ostentatiously scrutinized the red-tiled rooftops for signs of a sniper willing to resort to a last-second assassination in order to prevent Dr. Reverte Coma from proving his theory about the dog bites.

Bishops in their dark suits and red caps; prosecutors, including Otto Ardón; people from ODHA and the Church; lawyers and Guatemalan forensics experts representing all parties in the case; the mortician who had originally embalmed Bishop Gerardi; and of course the ubiquitous observers from MINUGUA, including Rafael Guillamón, were gathered around Judge Figueroa and Ronalth Ochaeta—probably the two shortest men present—as they faced off like a pair of fighting roosters in the middle of the courtyard to resolve the issue of the American experts' participation. Judge Figueroa had privately told Ronalth that if he would agree to expel MINUGUA's observers from the proceedings, on the grounds that they would leak information to the press, he would allow ODHA's foreign experts to participate. But Ronalth had rejected any such deal, thinking that MINUGUA's presence would ensure that whatever happened at the exhumation might not be publicly misrepresented later. (I was the only journalist present.)

“We all want the truth,” Ronalth said. “This should be between scientists, not lawyers.” He pointed out that not letting ODHA's experts take part would damage the legitimacy of the proceedings. The atmosphere couldn't have been more grimly tense as Judge Figueroa nervously began polling those assembled around him. Only Ardón voted to ban the Americans. Figueroa was perspiring, and his resolve was obviously wilting. Suddenly he exploded at Ronalth Ochaeta, “What are you smiling at!”

“Not at
you
, Judge,” Ronalth retorted.

They argued back and forth for a moment. Then the judge reversed himself, but only partially. He said the American experts could be present at the exhumation and autopsy, but only as observers. They could not participate alongside the Spanish expert and the others at the autopsy table.

Led by Bishop Ríos Montt, the assembly filed through a door into the cathedral, passed behind the nave into a corridor of the sacristy, went down a stairway into another courtyard ringed by priests' and seminarians' residences, and then through a door into the subterranean crypts. Some of those in attendance put on surgical masks. Jack Palladino later recalled that a chair was brought for Dr. Reverte Coma, as if to assign him a special status. Everyone else stood for the fifteen minutes it took two masons with hammers and chisels to work through the whitewashed plaster and crumbling brick of the crypt wall. Then workers from a funeral parlor—they were wearing white gloves—pulled out the long red-lacquered coffin, with handles that Palladino later compared to those of a Porsche briefcase. The coffin was placed on a stand and wiped off with a cloth, and the part of the lid at the end, the part over Bishop Gerardi's head, was pulled open. Bishop Ríos said an Our Father. He leaned over the coffin to peer through the glass window, and the others pressed in around him.

The coffin's surface and the condition of the crypt had seemed promisingly dry. But now they saw that the bishop had grown a beard of dark green mold; his skin had turned black, but his face was covered with white mold—“like the white makeup in a Kabuki play,” Jack Palladino said—and patches of fungus, due to the high level of moisture inside the coffin during those first five months of death. The corpse was in a state of serious deterioration, and beetles, maggots, and other insects crawled all over it.

T
HE BODY OF THE BISHOP
was taken from the cathedral to the San Juan de Dios Hospital, where special-forces police wearing riot-shield helmets at first barred ODHA's representatives and the
American experts from entering. But Mynor Melgar, who had retained his affiliation with the Public Ministry, led the team around to a front entrance and through hospital corridors and finally into the room where X rays were being taken of the bishop's skull and hands. Jack Palladino described the scene to me later. “Reverte was making pronouncements,” he said. “He would say, there's a fracture, and then he pointed to the wrong finger. Iraheta got his notes out from the original autopsy and started explaining to him where the injuries were, and at that point I realized, This guy is just not competent.”

Later that day, the corpse was transferred to the Judicial Morgue. The leathery, desiccated skin on the bishop's face and skull had already been badly eroded. Both Dr. Bux and Dr. Sperber thought it unlikely that much reliable forensic information could be obtained at this point. No effort had been made to properly clean the head, and the Americans were shocked to see Dr. Reverte Coma use a scalpel to scrape away fungus and debris from the bishop's face. “This is a very poor practice as use of such a harsh mechanical procedure is likely to disturb or destroy any remaining forensic evidence on the skin,” Palladino wrote in an affidavit he filed on the exhumation. Prohibited from participating in the autopsy, Bux and Sperber could only protest Reverte Coma's actions through their interpreter, to Dr. Iraheta.

Even as observers, by studying the X rays and photographs, the American experts were able to confirm much that the original autopsy had revealed: the cause of death was blunt trauma wounds to the head, most consistent with the chunk of concrete paving stone or some other hard object. But they also found that a fracture across the bridge of the nose had been caused by a hard, cylindrical object, like a pipe—supporting the theory that there were at least two assailants. Another blow had shattered the bishop's jaw, unhinged it, and driven it back into his trachea. That might easily have caused him to drown in his own blood if the other blows hadn't already killed him. Robert Bux said that
there had been a complete crushing of the bishop's facial bones. “He was struck in the face first, to incapacitate him and get him down, and then dragged, and struck again.”

The forensics specialist who had presided at the first autopsy, Mario Guerra, had noticed, and Dr. Sperber and Jack Palladino confirmed, that the photograph of the bishop's head used by Dr. Reverte Coma to match the cast of Baloo's teeth had been blown up by 25 percent. In any case, according to Dr. Sperber, the marks didn't have the rhomboid shape of dog bites; nor were there any traces of frenzied tearing. The lesions weren't even alike and could easily have been caused by the irregular edges of the concrete chunk. Nor, as Mario Domingo had first observed, was there any credible evidence of an impression made by the lower jaw, which would have to be present for a bite mark to have been made with the top teeth too. The other contested wounds at the back of the head “were not dog bites,” according to the American experts, “but the very common stellate wounds typical of blunt trauma.” The wounds on the bishop's hands and thumbs were “found to be consistent with defensive wounds but not to be dog bites.”

At the autopsy table, Dr. Reverte Coma insisted that lesions caused by bites were still visible in the badly decomposed skin. Sperber asked him to indicate, with steel pointers, the area where this was true. Reverte Coma's Guatemalan assistant kept pointing to a place where no mark at all was visible. “He was literally making this up!” Palladino said to me.

Decisive evidence of a bite would have been marks of penetration in the skull. The dog's two upper canines, each an inch long, were much longer than his very short incisor teeth. For four teeth to have left any mark at all on the skin, the two canines would have had to penetrate the layer of fatty flesh into the skull. A mere peeling back of the skin was enough to prove—at least to the satisfaction of Bux and Sperber—that the bone area in question was completely smooth.

I
WAS IN
ODHA'
S OFFICE
later that afternoon when Palladino, in a billowing black suit, clutching his big, black Pentax 6x7 camera, burst in and cried, “Reverte Coma wants to cut off the head and boil it.” The Spaniard had kept a large industrial pot at a constant boil on a hot plate during the autopsy. “He wants to get down to what he knows, which is bones,” Palladino explained. Bishop Ríos Montt decided that Gerardi's body had already been desecrated enough and adamantly forbade it.

The next day Palladino was astonished when a member of Reverte Coma's team approached him, carrying the bishop's thumb. Palladino raised his camera, thinking the man wanted a photograph, but instead he lifted the lid from the roiling pot and dropped the thumb inside. Nobody seemed to notice that the thumb was missing until the autopsy was over and the corpse had been returned to the coffin. It was Bishop Ríos Montt who asked, loudly, “Where is Monseñor's thumb!” Palladino had seen one of Reverte's assistants take the now skeletal thumb out of the pot and place it in a little transparent vial. He had assumed it was for a forensic procedure.

The prosecution team was gathered in a corner of the room, pretending not to know anything, but finally, with a guilty expression, Gustavo Soria produced a jar filled with alcohol in which scraps of Bishop Gerardi's robes had been preserved. Bishop Ríos Montt was in a fury about the thumb by now, and someone from the prosecution team finally, rather sheepishly, handed over the vial containing the pilfered thumb, and it was laid in the coffin. Apparently—there seemed no other explanation—Dr. Reverte Coma had wanted the sacred scraps of cloth and the historic thumb to take back to Madrid to display in the Professor Reverte Coma Museum of Anthropological Forensics, Paleopathology, and Criminology. As described in a résumé of the Spaniard's many accomplishments handed out to the press by the
Public Ministry, the museum collection included: “historic craniums,” “murder weapons,” “the skulls of murder victims,” and “historic mummies.”