Investigator for Coroner Learns to Live With Death

The call to the coroner’s office comes at 11:16 a.m.

A man’s body has been found in a deep ravine in Little Tujunga Canyon, north of San Fernando.

By 12:30 p.m., county coroner’s investigator Edward Weissburd arrives at the scene.

The body lies crumpled, 15 feet from the side of a county road. Weissburd climbs down the embankment, pulls aside the man’s leather jacket and notices a series of puncture wounds in the upper torso.

“Too many funny looking holes,” Weissburd mutters. “Looks like a homicide.” He plucks out strands of hair from the man’s chest, mustache, arms and eyebrows. Then, he takes fingertip scrappings and cuts slivers from the man’s fingernails.

Finally, Weissburd plunges a metal thermometer into the stomach to check liver temperature and determine the time of death.

The wind picks up, and the sky turns gray. “What I’m worried about is the rain,” he says. “I’d prefer not . . . to haul that body up in rain. It could be messy.”

7,500 Corpses Handled

The scene is typical for Weissburd, for whom death is a way of life. Over the past 10 years, the 54-year-old Granada Hills resident has poked, probed, dragged or lifted more than 7,500 corpses--enough people to fill a small town.

The coroner’s office receives about 40 calls a day--from police, hospitals, nursing homes, mortuaries--reporting a death. Weissburd or one of his 24 colleagues is then sent out to examine the body. By state law, a coroner’s representative must examine a corpse if the person had not been seen by a physician in the preceding 20 days or if there are signs of physical trauma.

After a body is taken to the coroner’s office, authorities determine if an autopsy should be performed. An average of 535 autopsies a month are performed by 18 deputy medical examiners, all forensic pathologists.

The 25 coroner’s investigators, four of whom are women, respond and review about 1,100 cases a month and occasionally are called to testify in criminal court proceedings. Weissburd’s cases have ranged from Skid Row derelicts to celebrities and politicians, including Sen. Robert Kennedy and actors David Janssen and Sal Mineo.

He has notified hundreds of wives and husbands of their spouses’ deaths. Some have told him their spouse deserved to die. Others have fainted in his arms or cried on his shoulder. One wife was so grief-stricken she refused to let go of him.

Reactions to His Job

When Weissburd tells strangers what he does for a living, “they get this strange look in their eyes,” he says. “They don’t even want to shake my hand.”

There are many incidents, especially those involving decapitations, traffic accidents and drownings, that Weissburd says he would just as soon forget.

He confesses that his job might not be the most alluring. “I wish I had a nickel for everyone who’s told me, ‘How can you possibly do this?’ But someone has to do it.”

Through the years, Weissburd says, he has dealt with some unusual cases.

One involved a 380-pound man found dead in the attic of his La Puente home. There was no way Weissburd could get the body down the stairway in the house, so he rigged up a pulley and harness and lowered the body through a window.

In another, he was called to a fleabag hotel where he found a dead wino, lying on an unmade bed. Next to the body was a cigar box with $70,000 in it.

Everywhere Weissburd goes on assignment, he carries a small, battered black briefcase. In it are tools of the trade for a coroner’s investigator: liver thermometer, scalpel, forceps, scissors, evidence kits, Polaroid camera, measuring tape, flashlight.

Weissburd, who lives with his wife and 15-year-old daughter, had no formal training before becoming a coroner’s investigator.

He grew up in Chicago and came to Los Angeles in 1951 at age 19. He enrolled in optometry school, but after his father died, he quit school and started working for the county, first as a probate court clerk, later as a coroner’s aide manning the switchboard.

2-Year Apprenticeship

He served as an apprentice coroner’s investigator for two years and a decade ago started in his current position, which pays an annual salary of $31,200

He is indeed an investigator. As soon as he arrives at the scene of a death, Weissburd begins looking for clues. Coroner’s authorities are the only public officials empowered to move a corpse from the scene of death.

If the death appears to be a suicide, Weissburd looks for pill bottles or any weapons at the scene, which are turned over to police. If the death is by gunshot, he performs a powder test to determine if residue remains on the victim’s fingers.

From all potential homicide victims, Weissburd plucks out strands of hair from eyebrows and scalp, clips fingernails, and scrapes cells from fingertips in the event the killer has similar material under his fingernails.

Of all the cases Weissburd sees, the most emotionally draining, he says, are from sudden infant death syndrome, in which a healthy baby suddenly dies for no apparent reason.

He often has to contend with parents who do not believe their child is dead.

In 1978, Weissburd went to South Los Angeles to pick up a victim. The mother refused to let him take the infant. “She wouldn’t budge; she held the child close to her chest, and wasn’t about to give it up to me.”

Weissburd resorted to calling a mortician to whom the mother eventually released the body. Outside the house, the mortician gave the body to Weissburd.

Job’s Challenge

While such incidents are trying, they become a challenging part of the job. “All day long, I see grief. I try to turn that grief around to make it as easy as possible on the family. That’s where I get satisfaction.

“You have to be a psychiatrist, a confessor and a cop--all at the same time.”

The relative unknown and unheralded nature of his profession has led to a lack of role models for coroner’s investigators. There are no heroes, no annual conventions, no career associations. Weissburd does not even drive a county car.

Something that has enhanced the image of the profession, however, is the television show “Quincy,” he says.

Although the scriptwriters combined the duties of coroner and investigator into one job for Jack Klugman’s role, the show has had some residual benefits for Weissburd.

“Every so often I’m driving down the freeway and when people see the coroner’s seal on my car, they lower their window and shout out, “Hey, Quincy!’ ”

Despite the occasional trauma and gore, Weissburd says he prefers his job over that of a police detective. “At least, the victims I see every day are dead. They’re harmless. They can’t do anything to me,” he says.

There are several serious hazards, however. One comes from touching dead bodies. While probing a body, the possibility of infection can be great for the inspector if he has a cut on his hand.

Unlike surgery, where contamination of the patient is of critical importance, the situation is reversed in the case of a corpse: It is the investigator who faces danger from contamination by the dead person.

Threat of Infections

Several investigators in the coroner’s officer have developed cases of tuberculosis and infectious hepatitis apparently caused when they cut their fingers while examining corpses. Investigators claim they are also susceptible to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome when touching an infected body.

In addition to possible disease, the job carries other potential dangers. Often, while recovering bodies, investigators are forced to crawl through tunnels full of methane gas, rappel down mountains, wade through toxic spills.

Weissburd has never contracted any disease or injury in the course of his work.

He remembers how repulsed he was when he first stated working as an investigator in 1975. “I remember saying to myself at first, ‘How am I going to do this?’ But you summon forth the inner strength. And it becomes routine after a while.”

Surprises do crop up, though. In 1978, Weissburd was called to a downtown hotel to investigate the death of a man who had died of natural causes.

When he arrived at the hotel and turned the body over, Weissburd realized he was looking at the face of a friend and former boss.

“It was the biggest shock I’d ever had in the job,” he recalls. “Suddenly, it wasn’t just another corpse, but the body of someone I had talked to, eaten lunch with, some one I cared about.”

‘Corpse Is a Corpse’

But in most cases, death is no longer shocking to Weissburd. “I see it every day. A corpse is a corpse. If I couldn’t deal with dead bodies all day long, I’d get out,” he says.

What does surprise him are the events that led up to violent deaths.

“When I see 25 stab wounds in a chest, I realize that someone did this to the poor guy. I can’t imagine how anyone could be so vicious.”

What the job has given Weissburd is a special outlook on life.

‘When you’re alive, you shouldn’t wait to do anything. If you have someone you love at home, hug that person right now. Don’t wait.

“Every day I see people who get into their cars in the morning, and by afternoon, they are bodies on our tables. You’ve got to live life to its fullest. You shouldn’t concern yourself with little insignificant things.

“You don’t know it today, but by tomorrow you might die.”

And if you do, there’s a chance Ed Weissburd will be on the scene.