One Night on the County Death Watch

Dick Slaughter has worked at his county job since 1968, and he has seen a lot of people come and go. Mostly go.

He figures that during his time as an Orange County coroner’s investigator, he has examined more than 6,000 deaths of all kinds.

But ask him which ones stand out in his memory and he mentions only one--a woman who committed suicide in a motel room. Before she took a fatal dose of drugs, she added a word to the doorknob sign and hung it outside. It read, “Do Not Disturb-- Ever!”

Slaughter offered no other memorable cases. It is a sort of defense, he said. “You know, they just kind of all run together. I know that probably sounds strange, but I tell you, when I’m not on the job I don’t think about it. I don’t talk about it or think about it when I’m away.”

At that moment, however, Slaughter was on the job, supervising last Thursday’s swing shift at the coroner’s office in Santa Ana.

He was presiding over the “watch room,” a small, drab room originally intended for storing bodies but converted to the investigators’ office.

The walls were of painted concrete block, and only three things were hung on them: a bulletin board (“Homicides: 77 thru 8-5-85”), an electric clock and a thermostat with a note (“Took 2 years to get this fixed--don’t screw it up!!”).

Along the walls were the old, steel-and-Formica office furniture you associate with government offices. The one exception was a dark wooden counter and drawers that was cheaply constructed perhaps 45 years ago.

Overhead, one of the fluorescent lights was out, and another was flickering. In the corners were portable electric heaters, confirming the cold look of the place.

It is a dreary room that is brought to life by death. If anyone in Orange County dies after being injured, while outside the presence of a doctor who can vouch for the cause of death, while undergoing a medical operation or just generally under suspicious circumstances, the law requires the coroner to investigate. He acts, in effect, as agent for the dead to make sure the facts of the death are known.

Two nights earlier there had been a flood of work--a suicide, a traffic fatality, eight natural deaths and an “in-custody” death (a person who had died in a hospital while under arrest).

This night, the three swing-shift investigators were sitting and waiting. So far, there had been only one routine heart attack.

“If we’re sitting here, it means Orange County isn’t dying,” said Sharon Gibson, one of the senior investigators.

Bruce Lyle from the day shift was joking with the night crew. He was working late to wrap up his murder case of that morning--a woman who had been bludgeoned.

Everyone took a turn looking at the Polaroid photos of the victim and murder scene. To the unaccustomed eye, they were sickening. “Enjoy,” Lyle cracked as someone picked them up.

“We joke and tease in here, but it’s different,” Gibson said. “If families heard some of the things we say, they’d be really mad--and we don’t let them hear us. But they’d have to understand that if you don’t joke, you’d go crazy.

“We’ve gotten people in here we thought were going to be good investigators, but they get, you know, chest pains because they can’t handle what they’re seeing. They don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how I did it. But if you don’t learn it, you wash out.”

She remembers going home in tears when she was new on the job but forcing herself to overcome it. “I don’t know what happened; I just had to come to terms with it. You know, ‘That is not a person, it’s just a medical examination.’ You have to do that.”

But the emotional armor is never without some vulnerable spot, she said. For some, it is babies who die violently or from “crib death.” Others can be upset by the alcoholic, either as victim or as drunk-driving killer.

“Dealing with the family still puts my stomach in knots. I don’t think you can get used to that,” Gibson said. As you approach a house to deliver the news of a death, “you almost pray that there’s no one home. You don’t know, they react so differently. Some will take a swing at you. Some will hug you until you can’t breathe. But if you need to stay with them for a full shift, you do it.”

And even today, every time she goes to the scene of a traffic accident “I have to look at the face to make sure I don’t know the victim. You joke about it. You tell the cop, ‘See you later, but not too soon.’ You release it any way you can.”

The possibility of such an encounter is in the back of every investigator’s mind, Slaughter said.

“It happened to me, as a matter of fact. I went out on a traffic, and it’s the son of a police sergeant that I worked with for 10 years. And here it was, Ernie’s son. But I had to carry on.”

What about the chance of discovering firsthand that the victim is your own son?

“Oh, my God,” he said, “that hasn’t happened here. But it could have. We had one of our investigators off duty, and his young, married son stacked his car up. One of our other investigators went out.”

Slaughter lapsed into silent introspection, then started speaking distractedly, as if the the image was still gripping his attention. He spoke slowly.

“That’s everybody’s nightmare, you know, especially when you got kids running around. That investigator whose son was killed, he finally had to leave the job.

“I’m inclined to think that’s what would happen to me also. Every time you’d go out on a similar situation, you’d be interacting. It would bring it all back.”