Dr. Baden Q & A [2008]
Leave questions for Dr. Baden at the Autopsy Bulletin Boards.
Let's talk about JFK. What did you discover
that wasn't already known about the case?
In 1977 - which was 14 years after his death -
because of the continuing controversy as to
whether or not the Warren Commission got it
right - whether it was Oswald alone who did
the shooting, or a conspiracy of people
involved - the U.S. Congress decided to have a
reinvestigation of the death of President
Kennedy. There was a lot of resistance
because a lot of the Congress said by forming
a commission to look into the death of
Kennedy they were in effect criticizing the
Warren Commission for not doing it right.
And there were also congressmen who wanted
an investigation into the death of Martin
Luther King. So the U.S. Congress created the
Select Committee on Assassinations whose
responsibility was to look into the deaths of
both John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther
King. I was asked to be the chairman of the
forensic pathology panel.
The Warren Commission had determined that
Kennedy and Governor Connolly were struck
with a single bullet. And when I looked at all
of the records and took testimony from all the
doctors who did the autopsies, the people who
were present and saw what happened, I found
that the Warren Commission was right, but
for the wrong reasons. They were right in that
President Kennedy had suffered two gunshot
wounds and only two gunshot wounds, that
struck him from behind, from the area where
Lee Harvey Oswald was seated, as determined
by finger prints and the fact that the shell
casings and the gun was found there but they
got the anatomy wrong, and the gunshot
wounds wrong. We were able to determine
that there were three bullets fired. The first
one misses, the second two hit him.
It's over 40 years ago that President Kennedy
was shot. And our ability to solve murders in
this country was bad then, and it's worse
now. The people who did the autopsies on
President Kennedy were very good hospital
pathologists who had never done an autopsy
in a gunshot wound case before. And they got
the entrance wound, the exit wounds, the
trajectories of the bullets wrong in their
autopsy descriptions.
Even to this day most murders - and there are
perhaps 60 a day in the United States - the
autopsies are going to be done by people, like
with President Kennedy, who are not
competent to do those autopsies in terms of
their training and experience.
There are 850,000 physicians in the United
States, and less than 400 who are forensic
pathologists - that is, physicians trained to do
autopsies and determine the cause of death in
persons who die of violence. Ninety-nine
percent of pathologists are excellent at natural
diseases - heart disease, cancer, stroke. Eight
percent of people however in this country die
of unnatural causes: Accidents, suicides,
homicide. And these autopsies are often done
by doctors who are not trained to do those
autopsies.
Today, having developed DNA and toxicology
and hairs and fibers and all this wonderful
crime scene investigation material, counter-
intuitively, the solve rate of murders in this
country has gone down.
What's the cause of the decrease?
There are many reasons why cases don't get
solved. It may be the unintentional
consequences of all this crime scene and DNA
stuff. The police think it's going to be solved
by DNA, so they're not going to use shoe
leather and knocking on doors and telephone
calls like they would have done before. And it
turns out that in less than 10 or 15 percent of
murders is DNA important.
One of the main reasons that cases don't get
solved, in my opinion, is not because of better
law enforcement and politics but because of
better medicine. Many people who died in the
'60s and '70s would not have died with better
medicine.
That's the same problem we're having now
when people come back from the Iraq War. In
World War II or in Vietnam there were for
every ten seriously injured people on the
battlefield, maybe one or two came back to the
to the U.S. Now, with better battlefield
medicine, it's two out of three who are coming
back. Many people who would have died of
head injuries are now coming back to the VA
hospitals who are totally unprepared for it.
And that's one of the reasons why the VA
hospitals are getting a bad rap, because they
didn't anticipate that with better medical care
there were going to be so many injured people
- seriously injured people - surviving and
coming back. So I think that the interplay
between medicine and homicide still has to be
worked out. We do better medicine, but we're
not prepared to care for the people who are
now permanently injured who survive.
How have things changed in the world of
forensics since the first Autopsy special?
The cases we looked at in the first Autopsy
came from a book I had written in 1989 about
unnatural death and autopsies, and how
forensic science is used. Remember, even
before DNA, there was forensic science. Before
DNA, shoe leather and interviewing people
were the way cases got solved. And to the
extent that detectives are losing those skills is
one of the reasons why less cases are solved
today than were in the early 1990s when we
started.
I think one of the interesting aspects of
forensic science on television is the profound
effect that the autopsy series has had on
stimulating other shows to develop, which is
the reason I got involved in the first place. I
wanted the HBO show to educate the public
as to what forensic science is, and how cases
really are investigated. How does biology and
chemistry and science contribute to helping
solve cases, and how can we use this to teach
young students. And it's had a profound
effect. I get letters every week about how the
HBO series is used in high school classrooms,
in police classrooms, teaching how forensic
science really works, and how a medical
examiner can contribute to the investigation
and how easy it is to make mistakes.
What have you learned about human nature
in all these decades of investigating unnatural
death?
One of the most prominent realizations is that
there's no predictable way that people react
when a loved one dies; that you can't tell if
somebody's grieving or not grieving, or having
a party or not having a party; the relationship
between people. Some people react in
unpredictable ways after a death. And that's
why you can't look at somebody and say, he's
behaving like he's guilty or not guilty. You
can't do that.
|  |
