New Management Shuns Spotlight Once Enjoyed by Coroner’s Office

The spotlights that lit his desk like a throne are dark these days. Gone is the brace of television sets that allowed him to watch coverage of his own news conferences.

In fact, the news conferences themselves are also history, as is “the coroner to the stars,” as Dr. Thomas T. Noguchi referred to himself.

“That’s not a professional image,” said Noguchi’s successor, Los Angeles County Coroner Ronald N. Kornblum. “We’re physicians. . . . We have an important job to do, and we should do that with professionalism and with dignity and not make a big show out of it.”

Kornblum was referring to his controversial former boss who was demoted by the Board of Supervisors in 1982 amid charges of mismanagement.

Cleared the Way

On Noguchi’s departure, Kornblum took over the office as acting coroner, a title he did not shed until the state Supreme Court refused to hear Noguchi’s plea to get his job back. The court’s decision cleared the path for Kornblum to officially assume the $103,000-a-year coroner’s post, which he did last spring.

The supervisors, who are responsible for the coroner’s office, are pleased with Kornblum.

In Kornblum, the politicians have someone who, by almost all accounts, is a top pathologist and who runs a tight ship as an administrator.

Most important, from the supervisors’ point of view, Kornblum can be counted on to keep his mouth shut.

“Department heads are to be seen, not heard,” Supervisor Ed Edelman said recently when asked about the contrast in styles of Kornblum and Noguchi. “Let the supervisors be heard.”

Few could fit that description better than the bespectacled, 53-year-old Kornblum, a Pasadena resident who more often than not wears a white doctor’s smock around his Spartan office, where his taste for antiques is quietly revealed in two ancient burial urns sitting on a window ledge.

“Kornblum’s like a clam,” quipped nationally known forensic expert William Eckert of Wichita, Kan., a longtime Noguchi supporter.

Takes His Time

“He thinks five times before he opens his mouth to say something,” said the Wayne County (Detroit), Mich., coroner, Dr. Werner Spitz, a longtime Kornblum acquaintance.

Kornblum’s reluctance to be more outspoken can also be explained in the increasing scrutiny that big city coroners have come under for their ability to solve homicides, provide insights into social problems such as drug addiction and display expertise in walking a straight line between the interests of the police and the public. The latter issue has been a historically troublesome one in Los Angeles.

Noguchi’s downfall stemmed from a variety of charges, including allegations of loose evidence controls and that his private consulting work interfered with his job performance.

However, the controversy over Noguchi was hardly unique--controversy comes with the job.

Last year, New York City’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Elliot M. Gross, was fired for alleged mismanagement of the nation’s busiest coroner’s operation, including charges that his office produced misleading autopsy reports.

More recently, the Alameda County Grand Jury opened an investigation into the coroner’s office stemming from charges by a former employee that coroner’s deputies stole from the dead and used drugs at work. The county’s chief deputy coroner, Ray Young, who confirmed the grand jury probe, said the charges were untrue.

Natural Outgrowth

None of this is lost on Kornblum, a native of the Chicago area and graduate of the UC San Francisco Medical Center. Many who know him say Kornblum believes that controversy is a natural outgrowth of publicity.

So, they say, Kornblum goes to the same lengths to shun publicity as Noguchi did to seek news coverage.

“I don’t like talking to the press,” Kornblum declared in his first interview since being named acting coroner almost six years ago.

Although not a close friend of Noguchi, Kornblum underscored that he believes journalists hounded his predecessor from the coroner’s office.

Noguchi, on advice of his attorney, Godfrey Isaac, declined to be interviewed for this story.

Noguchi still does some work for the coroner’s office at County-USC Medical Center, where he works as an autopsy physician, well out of the public spotlight and drawing an annual salary of about $89,000--about $20,000 more a year than when he was coroner.

Kornblum said his perception of the Noguchi episode has left him “leery” of reporters.

“I just remember what happened to Noguchi, and that scares the hell out of me,” Kornblum said. “This is the trouble I’m having with you. What’s going to happen next. Am I going to be looking for a job in a couple of weeks?”

‘Bad Publicity’

Kornblum maintains that Noguchi’s penchant for publicity was his Achilles’ heel. He said he tried to tell Noguchi that “there’s good publicity and there’s bad publicity. . . . He never could make that distinction. . . . I couldn’t get through to him that perhaps he was in danger.

“He was led by himself down the primrose path, so to speak.”

Kornblum is the first to tell a visitor that he is too busy running the nation’s third-busiest coroner’s office to talk with reporters. He had always delegated that authority, he said, to Bill Gold, the veteran coroner’s spokesman who recently died.

The level of activity can best be judged by the office’s caseload, or number of coroner investigations performed in Los Angeles County in 1987--17,591--and by the fact that its 13 doctors performed 5,654 autopsies last year.

The nation’s biggest city, New York, has the busiest office. It handled 36,444 body calls in 1986, while performing 8,001 autopsies, according to the latest available figures. Next was Cook County (Chicago) with 19,927 body calls resulting in 4,229 autopsies.

Complicating the coroner’s job of investigating unnatural deaths is the fact that even a natural death, such as an individual dying from a heart attack on a public street, almost always means work too. This adds up to about one out of every four deaths in Los Angeles County becoming a coroner’s case.

Scene of Deaths

The work of the coroner is coordinated out of a four-story concrete building next door to the County-USC Medical Center complex, housing almost 200 employees. They range from doctors performing autopsies on 10 tables in the basement, to criminalists organizing evidence, to laboratory technicians examining body tissues under an electron microscope in the subbasement, to investigators going the scene of deaths. There are also numerous administrators and support staff.

Among the keys to a successful coroner’s operation are the pathologists, who perform the autopsies, and coroner investigators, who work in the field. They can spell the difference in winning or losing a murder conviction. Police and prosecutors rely heavily on their expertise, a relationship that itself has generated controversy over the years.

Some defense attorneys charge that coroners--here and elsewhere--tip the justice scales in favor of the police. Like Noguchi’s administration, Kornblum’s regime has also been dogged by such allegations, which he heatedly denies.

Much of this controversy grows out of the long association in Los Angeles between the coroner’s office and law enforcement. In fact, until the coroner’s office moved into its current quarters in 1972, it was housed in the downtown Hall of Justice building along with the Sheriff’s Department.

Old friendships die hard, and Kornblum is the first to admit that among his 25 investigators there are old-timers who hang out with the police. But that does not distort their investigations, he contended.

“It’s there,” Kornblum said, when asked about alleged police bias. “It’s not something you can (put) on paper. It’s just there.”

But it is not necessarily wrong, he added.

“I don’t think that anybody here . . . consciously goes out and is going to defend a policeman on a particular case,” he said. “I don’t think that is what we’re talking about.

Other Cases

“What we’re talking about is everybody (in the coroner’s office) knows the police. They’re here frequently on other cases. They’re friendly. And in the old days, I’m sure they went across the street after work (and had a drink). And to a certain extent, it’s still there, particularly among the old-timers. . . .

“But as for going out of our way to change the facts to fit the police case, that’s not true.”

Veteran Los Angeles criminal attorney Gerald Chaleff takes a dimmer view of the relationship:

“The coroner’s office will accentuate or concentrate on those things that support the prosecution’s theory and will ignore or discount those things that support the defense because they feel they are part of the prosecution team.”

A more extreme view is held by a former pathologist on Kornblum’s staff, Dr. Terrence Allen, 37, now a private consultant in Honolulu.

Testifying under oath in federal court last year, Allen said he resigned from Kornblum’s staff after working there for four years “because I no longer had the faith in my superiors to properly investigate cases.”

“I no longer believed in their integrity, and I thought that they had an overwhelming bias in favor of law enforcement,” he said.

What particularly upset Allen was the fact that Kornblum--as do almost all coroners in California--allows police investigators to stand beside a pathologist during an autopsy. In so doing, Allen contended during an interview, police “have an opportunity to influence the autopsy surgeon very dramatically.”

Police-Involved Deaths

Allen alleged that such abuses most often surface in the so-called police-involved death, where the victim was killed by a law officer.

He recalled a 1986 case in which a drug addict had gone berserk and had torn out the plumbing in his hotel room before he was shot with a taser gun by police. Coroner’s investigators found him dead in a shallow pool of water, Allen said.

“The police tried to tell me (the victim) drowned in one inch of water after being shot by a taser,” Allen said. “I’m doing the autopsy and having this argument with the chief investigator from the Sheriff’s Department over whether he drowned, and he was sort of badgering me. I concluded the taser killed him.”

Allen said he resigned last March from the coroner’s office, “voluntarily but under pressure.”

When asked about Allen and his allegations, Kornblum said only, “Dr. Allen is no longer here, and there are good reasons for that.”

As for allowing police and prosecutors to be present during autopsies, Kornblum said they are there “to explain what happened to the pathologist. . . .”

“Between the two of them (the pathologist and the law officer), they’re supposed to come to some kind of conclusion as to what happened,” he said.

California law leaves it up to the coroner to decide who may be present during an autopsy.

In the Minority

San Francisco’s veteran coroner, Dr. Boyd G. Stephens, is in the minority, a chief medical examiner who does not like police or prosecutors looking over his doctors’ shoulders while they are performing autopsies.

Stephens, 47, San Francisco’s coroner for 18 years, underscored that his doctors and investigators work as a team with the police. But he draws the line when it comes to autopsies.

“I don’t want any situation where it encourages (police or prosecutors) to tell (the coroner’s doctors) how it happened,” he said. “A medical examiner has to be free and independent of any kind of outside suggestions of what the findings might be.”

Being a medical examiner was far from Kornblum’s mind when he graduated from UC San Francisco Medical School in 1959. In fact, even the thought of becoming a coroner is repugnant to most medical students, he observed.

“In medical school, who even talks about being a coroner?” he asked rhetorically. “You’re supposed to become a doctor and keep people alive.”

Service in the Navy as a medical officer in 1960-61 left him uncertain of what to do with his medical career, he said.

‘Treating Colds’

Assigned to Saigon, Kornblum, who is a bachelor (he was once briefly married and has no children) recalled spending “most of my time treating colds and VD (venereal disease).”

Four years of residency in pathology--the study of diseases--followed at Santa Clara County Hospital.

“What I liked best,” he said, “was making a diagnosis. That was where the challenge was.”

But after that, Kornblum said, he would often lose interest in actually treating a patient and “was more interested in getting to the next person to find out what was wrong with him.”

“At that point, then, I decided I’d better go into some specialty where I make the diagnosis, and that was pathology,” he said.

The decision was not difficult, he said. Working with the dead rather than the living does not have to be depressing or morbid if one looks upon the work as a scientific challenge, he said.

Kornblum’s philosophic attitude has also helped him to persevere in a field that few physicians find appealing, particularly when he is confronted with the body of someone he knew.

“What’s there, what’s on the table, is obviously not that person,” he said. “I don’t know where he is. I don’t know where he went. I don’t know where that spark is that made this person a person as opposed to another person.

“But whatever it is, is obviously gone. And what you have left is what that person left behind. When that stage comes, then it’s not so morbid, it’s not so depressing anymore.”

Began Moonlighting

While in residency at Santa Clara County Hospital, Kornblum began moonlighting for the Santa Clara County coroner and that, combined with his interest in pathology, led him in 1966 to accept a job in Baltimore under the late Dr. Russell S. Fisher, considered the nation’s dean of forensic pathology and one of its top coroners.

“During those days, (Baltimore) was the best,” Kornblum said.

By 1974, when he resigned to become Ventura County coroner, Kornblum was Fisher’s top assistant, the deputy chief medical examiner for the state of Maryland, which had only one chief coroner for the entire state.

Kornblum arrived in Ventura County as the Board of Supervisors was overhauling the way the office operated.

Up to that time, the county had contracted out its pathology work, which included autopsies, and deputy coroners, who were not doctors, then determined cause of death based on the outside doctor’s analysis. With Kornblum, a physician, running the office, reliance on private medical help was curtailed.

Those who remembered his work in Ventura County gave Kornblum high marks.

“He was extremely thorough,” said Oxnard’s major crime division chief, Police Sgt. Robert Elder. At the same time, he recalled, Kornblum was hard to know.

“He’s rather stoic,” he said. “It took you a while to loosen him up. He’s a very private person.”

Crime Laboratory

The former director of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department crime laboratory, who is now in private practice, Richard Fox, agreed about Kornblum’s expertise. Still, he added, the Ventura job was not without its disappointments.

“He’s one of the best forensic pathologists in the country,” Fox said. “But (Ventura) is a very frustrating place to work. Abominable conditions, working out of a trailer.”

The Ventura County coroner’s office is housed in a mobile home next to the county’s medical complex.

Kornblum, in his low-key way, sloughed off the working environment as “not all that bad . . . no big deal at the time.” But he said he understood when he was hired that the supervisors viewed the trailer as “temporary” and were going to fund a new coroner’s building. It never happened.

Further weighing on him, he said, was that as coroner, he believed that he had reached the top of his field in Ventura and needed to look elsewhere for new challenges.

“I felt I was stagnating,” he summed up, and in 1978, he began looking for another job.

In September, 1980, Kornblum was hired by Noguchi as the Los Angeles County coroner’s chief of forensic medicine.

When he succeeded Noguchi in 1982, Kornblum set about trimming what he believed was dead wood in the coroner’s office.

“I did clean house” is how he characterized it.

Immediately targeted for dismissal by Kornblum were the office’s six part-time doctors, who had been employed for years by the coroner’s office to reduce the permanent staff’s workload.

‘Didn’t Measure Up’

“Frankly,” Kornblum said, “they weren’t qualified, so I got rid of them. They didn’t measure up to my standards.”

One of those fired, a veteran pathologist on the staff of a local hospital who is also a private consultant, said Kornblum handled the dismissals in a ruthless manner.

“I’ll never forget it as long as I live,” said the doctor, who agreed to be interviewed only if his name was not used. “It was done orally. He called us in one at a time. It took about three minutes.

“I said, ‘That’s it?’ He nodded. I started to walk out. And then he hollered at me down the hall: ‘Wait a minute. I guess I should say thank you.’ I thought that was a helluva comment for having worked diligently for over a decade.”

Kornblum’s goal was, in a word, “professionalism.” He uses the word often in describing how he believes he has changed the tone of the office, in contrast to what he suggested was Noguchi’s razzle-dazzle style.

Now coroner’s investigators and pathologists, he said, “are much more professional” in the way they gather and report evidence. For example, in what Kornblum euphemistically described as “the old days,” it was not very unusual to find a “canned”--or at least partially fabricated--autopsy report.

“One pathologist, in particular,” he recalled, “if you read two of his autopsy reports that he did in the same day, or not even the same day, you couldn’t tell the difference.”

Backlog of Bodies

Another example of greater efficiency, he said, involved the backlog of bodies with no next-of-kin that have to be processed. The backlog when he took over as acting coroner, he said, averaged 300 to 400 bodies at any one time. Now, he said, that figure has been halved. This was done, he said, without hiring an army of new people.

“It’s a matter of efficiency,” he said.

Kornblum said he is determined to change the image of the coroner.

“Everyone thinks of a coroner walking with a limp; he’s got a humped back; he’s covered with blood,” he said. “ . . . We’re professional people. We’re not a bunch of ghouls.”

But the “Quincy” television image of the coroner as a Sherlock Holmes-type of hero/investigator also makes Kornblum grimace:

“I think (actor Jack) Klugman did a very good job. But Klugman was medical examiner, investigator, policeman, judge, jury, everybody all rolled up into one. Life isn’t like that.”