Forensic Fridays: All About Autopsies

Most living people never visit the morgue.




Do Do I Need a Coroner, Medical Examiner or Pathologist?

I’m so excited to have Garry Rodgers join my honored team of medical experts. To be honest, I’ve been looking for someone on the “other side of life” to offer their insights because I do see a fair number of forensic questions and this is not my area of expertise. I try to keep the living from crossing over.

Garry will be here on a regular basis doing Forensic Fridays and I’m so glad to have him. I hope you’ll check out his novel, No Witnesses to Nothing.

Welcome, Garry!










So stick around. I promise to be interesting!



Author Question: Post-Mortem Injuries

Jordyn says:
1. What Crime Scene Insects Reveal About the Victim’s Wounds:
3. Twenty-seven differences between antemortem and postmortem wounds:
4. Medico-legal significance of a bruise:



Medical Question: The Morgue

DV asks: I am writing a thriller right now and need a description of a large city hospital morgue. I haven’t tried to secure a tour yet (do they even allow that?) at a city nearby. All I need is to know how they’re set up. I’ve read they’re usually in the basement near a loading dock, and they’re usually unmarked and secure.
Do they use a wall of refrigerated drawers? If not, what does the room look like? How are the bodies marked? Do they still use toe tags or is it all done electronically? Do they include cause of death? I’m afraid the smaller town I live in wouldn’t have the same kind of morgue as a large city (the book takes place in LA). I’d like to have at least a semblance of reality.
Jordyn says:  DV, thanks for sending me your question.
I’m not familiar with a large city morgue either. Just a hospital morgue. I think you could probably call and set-up a tour. I’m sure you won’t be the first person to ask. Another thing I would recommend would be to take your local police department’s citizens’ police academy. I took one locally last year and it was a wealth of information. Sometimes, through a venue like this, you might get the chance to tour a morgue.
Do a Google search for known medical examiner’s buildings and get photos of the structure via the Internet for the outside look.
Next, go to You Tube and search for “morgue tour”.





Medical Question: 1950’s Coroner

April asks: For a grad assignment, I have to come up with murder mystery plot line.  I have the general plot line down, but I’m wondering how efficient an autopsy in the 1950s would be?
I need the victim to be poisoned, most likely by a relatively common plant–probably a daffodil, yew, or Wild Cherries (those are my top three choices at the moment).  However, I have no idea how much or what kind of poisons would have been detectable by a small-town, 1950’s coroner.
Jordyn says:  First thing, is a medical examiner and coroner are very different. A medical examiner is a trained physician (the one who does the autopsy) and the coroner is an elected official to decide how an investigation should proceed. For instance, if the coroner feels the cause of death does not involve a crime, there may not even be an autopsy.

Yew Plant

The second thing you need to determine is when tests for toxicology/poisons came about: “Screening tests, such as radio immunoassay, enzyme immunoassay and thin-layer chromatography are often very sensitive, but not very specific. Because they are very sensitive, they will very likely detect the chemical/poison if it is, indeed, present in the sample. Unfortunately, because they lack specificity, they are given to false-positives – mistaking a substance with a similar chemical make-up for the suspected poison. Unless the results of these screening tests are confirmed with a reliable testing methodology, such as gas-chromatography/mass-spectrometry, the results of these screening tests do not satisfy the evidentiary standards for admissibility.”

When I did a little searching, some of these tests were not developed until the 1950’s and 1960’s. So, for them to be widely used would take some years. If you want to be very specific in your ms, you need to research when each of these tests were developed for forensic use. For example, google “development of forensic radio immnoassay”. That will give you a timeline for when they may have been able to detect your chosen poisons on autopsy. I did link you to some forensic timelines below— there are a few of these tests mentioned.
I think the easiest route for you would be this: This small town has a coroner who doesn’t suspect anything criminal is going on. This is still very common today because a coroner may have absolutely little or no medical training and probably no forensic training. Then, maybe based on the victim’s symptoms before death, the very smart local doctor begins to think someone is poisoning these people. This sets up conflict which is always a must. I would research the symptoms people have when they ingest the items you have listed. Then, maybe this local doctor can push the coroner into having a fancy, big-town ME do an autopsy.
3. forensic toxicology (poisonings)
Hope this helps and gives you some direction.