Coroner to Forsake Days With the Dead : Government: Dr. F. Warren Lovell buys a sailboat to enjoy his retirement after 11 years as county medical examiner. Some prosecutors are glad to see him go.

Dr. F. Warren Lovell cocked an eyebrow at the green nylon Air Force flight suit hanging behind his office door, then at his spreading paunch.

It was a sober, appraising look--the sort that Lovell usually reserves for bodies in the autopsy room where he has worked for 11 years as Ventura County’s medical examiner.

“I want my wife to bury me in it,” Lovell said of the suit, which once fit him. “Of course, they’ll have to slit it up the back.”

He shuddered a bit, then shrugged it off and smiled.

“Aw, I’m gonna live forever anyway. I’m just getting going--I’m only 70,” Lovell said, brightening at the thought of his retirement Tuesday. Dr. Ronald O’Halloran, the assistant medical examiner, will take his place.

Lovell’s tenure as coroner has been marked by praise and controversy.

He took severe criticism from Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury for reaching an inconclusive ruling in the grisly abduction murder of 8-year-old Paul Bailly in the spring of 1990, and some in the district attorney’s office say they are glad that he is retiring.

Yet while the county’s population has increased by more than 25% since Lovell’s appointment in 1981, he has managed to run the medical examiner’s office with the same-size staff and has won salary increases for deputy coroners, who once were the lowest paid in the state.

He also has won deep respect from his colleagues and superiors. “I think he’s served our county well,” said Phillipp K. Wessels, director of the county Health Care Agency, which oversees the coroner’s office.

“He’s a very sensitive person to the feelings and the needs of others,” Wessels said. “He is always very direct in his findings and opinions, and he will render his opinion regardless of what other people may expect.”

Lovell’s autopsies have helped answer grieving relatives’ questions and win convictions in murders.

Lovell’s co-workers praise his skills as an administrator and describe him as a sensitive, good-natured man with a lust for life and mercurial wit who turns somberly professional and intense when working with the dead.

“When you’re in the morgue, he is analyzing a case and . . . looking for the cause of death. It’s a scientific pursuit,” said Dr. Nat Baumer, director of the emergency room at Ventura County Medical Center, the facility that houses the county morgue.

“I had a medical colleague that committed suicide and I wanted to know the cause of death,” Baumer said, recalling the events of last February. “It was a very difficult situation, and he handled it in a very professional manner. . . . He was very sensitive to my needs and my concerns.”

Others praised Lovell’s ability to relate easily with everyone he meets, from mourners and doctors to police and prosecutors.

“He can easily get off his doctor’s throne and relate to the homicide sergeant that’s out there, and discuss things in layman’s terms they can understand,” said Deputy Coroner Jim Wingate.

The coroner’s post is the latest in a long series of extraordinary jobs that Lovell has held.

As an Air Force officer in World War II, he led 64 planes on a bombing raid over southern Japan.

He helped design astronauts’ launch couches and safety harnesses for the Project Mercury space capsules.

He headed a team investigating aircraft crashes for the armed forces in the late 1950s.

He inaugurated the pathology division of a Seattle hospital in 1960.

He raised five children to adulthood.

And several weeks ago, he bought a 37-foot, two-masted sailboat to enjoy in his retirement, satisfied that he has done as much as he can as head of an agency that investigates the deaths of up to 500 county residents a year.

The coroner’s job, he said, “is about a whole bunch of things.

“People think it’s just investigation of homicides and abnormal deaths, but it’s also dealing with people,” Lovell said. “We deal with families of the deceased, law enforcement people, doctors, people all over the world sometimes.”

The final task in many homicide cases and wrongful-death lawsuits is to speak for the dead by testifying in court, he said.

Lovell’s work on homicide cases has proved to be the most controversial of all his duties and the source of some prosecutors’ complaints to Wessels.

Lovell’s differences with Bradbury came to a head in 1990, after Lovell ruled that Paul Bailly, whose gagged, burned body was found in Simi Valley, had either choked on his own vomit or was strangled.

At the time, the district attorney, who was unavailable for comment last week, criticized Lovell publicly as being inconclusive and overly free in commenting to the press on sensitive cases. But Bradbury also praised the coroner’s willingness to walk investigators through an autopsy rather than simply pronounce the cause of death.

Lovell is “a pleasant enough guy,” one veteran homicide prosecutor said last week. “But he’s past his prime. . . . He’s not as careful as he used to be.”

The prosecutor, who asked not to be identified, added, “Generally, his passing and Ron O’Halloran’s stepping into the top spot is regarded with great relief and jubilation” among prosecutors.

Assistant Dist. Atty. Colleen Toy White acknowledged that prosecutors have criticized Lovell’s work, but she said he has never cost the office a case.

Tension is natural when the cause of death as determined by the coroner is not the one that helps prosecutors win a murder case, White said.

“I think he’s a real professional, and he’s always worked with our office to try to resolve problems,” White said. “It’s not like an episode of ‘Quincy.’ We don’t all get a pre-scripted page when we start these cases. . . . He’s always been conscientious and worked hard.”

Lovell accepts the praise and brushes off the criticism.

“There’s nothing worse than saying you’re positive of something you aren’t sure of,” he said.

His friends and colleagues say they will miss Lovell’s bottomless memory and his love of talk.

The coroner is an inveterate storyteller, whose voice almost brims over into a chuckle as he illustrates his points with anecdotes--such as the one about the ill-fated NASA project to launch a pig into orbit.

Project Mercury was preparing to send men into space atop powerful booster rockets, he recalled.

NASA’s scientists knew the astronauts could withstand the force of the rocket, but they needed to ensure that the men would not be injured by the extra force of an escape rocket attached to the capsule in case it had to be jettisoned during the launch.

Pigs were to stand in for astronauts in tests of the capsule’s acceleration couch.

“Pigs die when you get ‘em on their back,” Lovell said with a rueful grin. “It got to the point where we were molding the capsules for the pigs, and every time we’d anesthetize the pigs and turn them over, they’d die. That was the end of the project. Pigs in space.”

Retirement will be relaxing but far from restful for Lovell, who plans to sail, read, write and continue working as a consultant, a volunteer doctor for the Salvation Army’s summer camps and an expert for hire testifying on fatal injuries in civil and criminal trials.

“I can afford the boat, but I can’t afford the moorage if I’m not working,” he said.

He is already planning to review tissue samples and autopsy records in the death of 38-year-old rock drummer Jeff Porcaro, a San Fernando Valley resident.

Porcaro’s widow hired Lovell to review the cause of the musician’s death, which the Los Angeles County coroner’s office partly attributed to cocaine use.

He says he is “scared spitless about retiring” from a job that paid him about $125,000 a year and will leave him on a pension of about $36,000. He will leave office without the “golden handshake” package given to county Sheriff John V. Gillespie and Auditor-Controller Norman R. Hawkes for their early retirement, because he ran an operation so lean that there was no money for the additional retirement benefits.

But Lovell is glad to leave the morgue. “I don’t ever want to do another autopsy,” he said firmly.

“People ask, ‘How can you do that job?”’ Lovell said. He reflects for a minute.

“Training and experience, I guess. A dead body doesn’t bother you when you’re used to it. You can gear yourself to that. But the emotional factors are hard to deal with. The Paul Bailly case, I really lost sleep over that.”