Coroner’s Sleuth Bids Farewell to Storied Career

Through all the tumult of the past three decades in Los Angeles, Bob Dambacher has been right there with the best and worst of them--the movie stars and gangsters, the politicians and serial killers’ victims, and the regular folk caught up in the vortex of history.

They’ve all been dead by the time Dambacher got to them.

Dambacher is a sleuth, a special investigator for the Los Angeles County coroner-medical examiner’s office, as well as the department spokesman.

By investigating and publicizing their deaths, and how they came to pass, Dambacher has helped create many Hollywood legends.

He’s also helped shatter some of the myths that glorified or plagued some of Los Angeles’ larger than life characters.

Marilyn Monroe and Robert F. Kennedy. Janis Joplin and Natalie Wood. John Belushi and Sharon Tate. The Hillside Strangler and the Skid Row Slasher.

For 34 years, Dambacher has been there to claim the body and to make sense out of the often grisly details of the cause and manner of death. When disaster strikes, whether man-made or by the hand of Mother Nature, he has been there too, to comb through the wreckage in search of the living as well as the dead. Plane crashes and earthquakes, floods, fires and riots--he’s seen them all, from a proximity that would make all but the most strong of stomach swoon.

Now, at the age of 59, Dambacher is saying goodby. He’ll retire next month, a year earlier than expected, as part of a buy-out effort aimed at reducing the county payroll. Although he initially contended that he was being forced out because of the budget crunch, he now says the disagreement has been patched up.

He’ll probably stay in his Van Nuys residence just long enough, he said, to make plans for those trips he and his wife have always wanted to take, to faraway places they’ve never been to. And he’ll have more time to spend with his growing collection of pre-Columbian artifacts, some of which decorate his desk at the sprawling coroner complex at 1102 Mission Road.

“I won’t miss the homicides, and I won’t miss the slaughter occurring in this county,” Dambacher said. “I’ve seen enough over the years.”

“But I’ll certainly miss this place,” he continued, looking around the long corridors of the complex. “The best years of my life so far have been spent with this department.”

Indeed, Dambacher has seen a lot of the worst of human nature in his long and storied career, he said, but he’s also seen a lot of the best.

“We’ve had turmoil from without and within, but we’ve all done a helluva job,” Dambacher said. “Whether it’s floods, riots or plane crashes, the job still has to get done. People don’t stop dying.”

Before the retires, however, there is much work to do, including a possible reopening of one of Dambacher’s most famous cases at the request of the County Board of Supervisors--the apparent suicide of Marilyn Monroe. Because of his experience and his responsibilities as special investigator for the office, Dambacher would play an important role in an investigation into her death. But he said all the rumors that she was killed, possibly by agents of the Kennedy family, are just that--rumors.

Work in the office has been overwhelming in recent years. As homicide tolls mounted, staff members grew ever more overworked and occasional controversies swirled around the politically sensitive department. Recently, the department was without a chief medical examiner for more than a year, and efforts to hire a new one twice failed.

Meanwhile, the business of processing the dead has been relentless. When he started, Dambacher said, the county averaged one homicide a day. Now it’s up to five. There are 50 cases to process a day, “one every 30 minutes,” he sighed. And he has borne witness to the rise of drug overdoses and the emergence of gang warfare.

On one recent day, Dambacher already had spent hours on the phone dispensing information to the media--and it wasn’t even noon yet. This time, they all wanted to know about the 45 homicide victims in the county’s bloodiest weekend ever.

Through it all, Dambacher has never lost his ability to keep the tragedy inherent in his job in perspective. Perhaps that’s why he has so many photographs of the living--his wife, son and daughter and new grandson--filling up his wood-paneled office. And it is why, he said, he has never lost his much-needed sense of humor.

Dambacher is a wiry, bespectacled man with a bushy gray mustache streaked with patches of white, much like his hair. He says he’s 5 feet, 11 inches tall “and shrinking, just like my dad did.” He no longer wears the white lab coat or khaki coroner uniform, sticking instead to sport coats and ties in muted grays and blues.

As he walks the four floors of the coroner complex, it is clear that Dambacher is known--and cherished--by everyone for his die-hard wit and his encyclopedic knowledge of the office and its history. He peppers his remarks with “Hi Sweetie!” and “Hey There,” stopping to chat with nearly everyone.

During a stop outside the coroner “service center,” the off-limits floor where autopsies are done and the corpses stored, Dambacher peeks in and sees a plastic-wrapped body being wheeled out of the main crypt toward the cutting room. He launches into a detailed, and gruesome explanation of the autopsy process and the need to shower and shampoo the corpse afterward to make it presentable.

“We take out things you never ever knew you had,” he deadpans, pointing to his unwitting foil on the gurney.

Then it’s on to the next floor, where the technicians and scientists do the lab work so critical in determining the cause and means of death. His retirement plans have been a well-kept secret, and many employees come rushing over to him to ask if it’s true.

“Leaving? Oh no! Why?” laments one toxicology lab scientist.

“Why? It’s time, that’s why,” Dambacher retorts, smiling broadly.

Like many other employees hearing the news for the first time, the toxicologist appeared forlorn and told Dambacher he would be sorely missed.

Thomas Noguchi, the once-infamous chief coroner who left his top post with the department under a cloud of controversy, has fond memories of working with Dambacher for more than 20 years. “He’s the best investigator and best friend I ever had,” said Noguchi, now chief medical examiner at County-USC Medical Center. “He is a good person, kind and considerate.”

Dambacher never expected to get into the coroner business. He grew up in the tiny farm town of Standard in Tuolumne County, just east of Sonora, population 100. “When I was born,” he quipped, “I increased the population by 1%.”

After serving in the Army, he came to Los Angeles in 1955 to attend the pre-dental school at UCLA and ended up getting a job at a Westside mortuary. He was 23, and he still remembers how his knees shook when he was sent out on his first call, to pick up a dead infant.

“I was very nervous,” he recalled. “But I soon learned to accept it. Not everyone can stay in this business. God knows, it’s a very difficult profession to be in.”

In June, 1958, Dambacher took a job as a morgue attendant at the coroner’s office. At first, he stayed “out of necessity.”

But then he became fascinated with the challenging process of investigating deaths, which he describes as “playing doctor to policemen, and policeman to doctors.”

Police are in charge of investigating the scene of a crime, he explained, but it is the medical examiner who must take charge of the body, and look for clues as to how and when the person died, and why.

Dambacher rose from mortuary attendant and autopsy assistant to investigator in 1965, and then worked up the line to chief of investigations, ultimately becoming special investigator to the department head in 1984. In 1988, he took on the added role of press information officer.

Like snowflakes, he said, no two deaths are ever the same, and neither are the clues that can indicate foul play. Sometimes they can be as subtle as tiny “petechial” hemorrhages in the eyes, a sign the deceased was strangled to death. Dambacher said he missed that clue once, and it taught him to never again dismiss murder as a possibility, no matter how innocent the circumstances.

His detective’s insight has enabled Dambacher to catch things others have missed. It was he who discovered the syringe and heroin that singer Joplin used to inadvertently kill herself in 1970. And it was he who picked through the charred remains of five dead Symbionese Liberation Army radicals after a 1974 shootout and fire, to determine that kidnaped heiress Patty Hearst was not among them.

Dambacher also helped identify many of the 82 people killed in the 1986 crash of a jetliner in Cerritos, even though most of the victims were Mexican nationals with little or no means of identification.

Sometimes, Dambacher concedes, he gets frustrated that a carefully put-together case involving the slaying of--or slaying by--someone famous gets cast aside by the political considerations of prosecutors. He won’t give examples, but says there were many.

Dambacher prefers to dwell on the positive, citing a diversion program in which those convicted of drunk driving are made to attend autopsies of people killed in car wrecks. A similar program will start soon for gang members, and Dambacher hopes some who go through it will change their ways.

“We’ve run 600 drunk drivers through, and have yet to have a repeat offender,” Dambacher said.

“It just goes to show you, the dead have something to teach the living.”