Workers’ Grim Task Echoes Other Tragedies

The bodies came Thursday in industrial-strength doses, brought to the San Diego County medical examiner’s office by the truckload, then carried two by two on a forklift to a waiting semi-truck-turned-cooler, its walls sweating under a warm sun.

On the day after the Rancho Santa Fe mass suicide, investigators began the mammoth task of sorting through 39 bodies, laid side by side and wrapped in white sheets, to confirm the identities of apparent cult members and help piece together the macabre scenario that unfolded inside that hillside Southern California mansion.

Taking a collective breath, veteran San Diego officials insisted that their eight medical examiners and 15 investigators could handle the grisly task ahead--the autopsies, the background work, the notification of families.

All they needed were three mortuary attendants and one coroner’s lieutenant from Los Angeles County, along with two $60,000 “multi-decedent recovery transport vehicles”--each with a 14-body capacity--requested late Wednesday from Los Angeles.

At a county morgue that handles an average of eight deaths a day, San Diego investigators said they would go about their jobs as always and try to forget about the rows of bodies before them--the 21 women and 18 men--each labeled by number until it could be confirmed whether they were the people named on the driver’s licenses and passports found in their pockets.

With more than 50 workers on hand--from doctors and secretaries to lab technicians--officials said not all the staff would focus on the cult member autopsies. Others would handle the “bodies of the day,” the crash victims, drive-by casualties and the like.

“We’ve seen death in this city before, lots of death,” said supervising investigator Calvin L. Vine. “We always hope that it happens on somebody else’s shift, somebody else’s county. But we’re ready for this.”

Indeed, sun-jeweled San Diego County has endured death on a mass scale before. Nineteen years ago, 128 passengers and a crew of seven aboard a PSA jetliner died in a crash that rained bodies on downtown neighborhoods. In 1984, a 41-year-old unemployed father of two named James Oliver Huberty opened fire at a McDonald’s restaurant in suburban San Ysidro, killing 21 adults and children in what was then the worst mass slaying in U.S. history.

Such incidents helped craft battle plans for the latest body count, spelled out in bound manuals and practiced in three-times-a-year drills using colleagues as practice bodies, soiled with fake blood.

But all the logistic plans did not prepare even the veterans for the eerie orderliness of what they found in Rancho Sante Fe.

“This one was unusual,” said investigator George Dickason. “There wasn’t the chaos. This one was almost antiseptic.”

Many of his colleagues went to school on death. Dickason has a quarter-century in coroner’s work. Vine, a 51-year-old Montana native, did two tours in Vietnam as a Navy hospital corpsman.

Late Wednesday, as Vine waited behind the medical examiner’s building in Kearny Mesa, 10 miles south of the suicide scene, he smoked a cigarette in the dark and said he knew what to expect. “It’s gonna be a madhouse,” he said, “with the press, the procedures, the calls.”

By 10 p.m. Wednesday, his office had begun receiving calls from bewildered parents who hadn’t seen their sons or daughters in months or years and feared the worst. Vine took a drag of his cigarette and shook his head.

“We couldn’t give them any answers,” he said softly. “Other than that we’re a major city. And things like this happen.”

By Thursday morning, investigators had a bulletin board full of handwritten notes, descriptions of possible cult members given over the phone by mothers and fathers who hoped against hope that a match was not made.

For investigators, answers were slow in coming.

While San Diego Medical Examiner Brian Blackbourne and another doctor arrived at the suicide house before dusk Wednesday, most passed the time at the office’s low-slung headquarters, waiting for San Diego County sheriff’s deputies and hazardous materials crews to inspect the scene.

Then, shortly before midnight, Vine and others got the call from the house and made the 20-minute drive north to Rancho Santa Fe, a wealthy community with eucalyptus-lined streets where terra cotta-roofed mansions glisten behind protective gates.

At the scene, investigators walked among the bodies that were lying face-up on beds and mattresses throughout the sprawling house, taking notes and being careful not to disturb evidence as scores of deputies and others videotaped the odd spectacle of bodies carefully shrouded, their eyeglasses neatly beside them in spare rooms containing desks with unlit computer screens.

“In this job, you’re used to seeing bodies, but not on this scale,” said Dickason, who looked for evidence around the mansion. “You just have to be careful to do your job right. I wasn’t scared, no more than I would be walking on a downtown street at night. But you’re tired, and you want to do things right.”

Just before sunrise, the teams began removing bodies. The first truckload arrived at Kearny Mesa at 6 a.m., followed by two others several hours later.

Each time a truck arrived, the drill was the same.

As television helicopters hovered, workers in red and blue jumpsuits removed bodies on gurneys attached to the inside walls of the vehicle like bunk beds. The bodies were already zipped into vinyl pouches and were covered in white sheets to make carrying them easier. Then they were pulled onto an altar-like forklift bed, it too covered by a white sheet.

Carrying bodies two by two, the forklift spun around and delivered its cargo to a waiting refrigerated area where workers--wearing gloves and surgical masks--dragged them inside, lining them side by side in the larger, semi-sized truck, converted for the occasion into a morgue.

While most had witnessed carnage, investigators admitted that they had never seen anything quite like the bodies arranged neatly where death had visited them, patiently awaiting discovery.

At the San Ysidro McDonald’s, investigators saw the bodies of boys, bullets through their chests, their bikes fallen over their feet. After the 1978 airliner disaster, they waded through the body-strewn trail of a plane that hit the ground at 310 miles per hour and destroyed a dozen houses.

This time, investigator Mark Malamatos, wearing a gold cross around his neck, couldn’t get over the peacefulness of the death scene. “That’s a perfect way to describe it,” he said. “They looked peaceful.”

Dickason said the bodies usually had identification in shirt or pants pockets, “from various part of the U.S.”

“There were IDs on all the bodies I’ve seen and I’ve seen a lot,” he said. “I didn’t see any suicide notes. But their personal effects were in areas that indicated to us that they wanted them to be found.”

Shortly after 9 a.m., the final truckload of bodies arrived, also carrying the backpacks and soft suitcases found near several bodies. Workers carried out other possessions, including a pair of high-topped basketball sneakers, the laces tied together.

By afternoon, the chores included taking fingerprints, heights and weights, and searching each body for personal papers or jewelry. Though the deaths appeared to be a carefully orchestrated suicide, “we’ll look for external force, the condition of the body and try to pinpoint when they died,” Vine said.

But even with expedited toxicology work, it could take weeks to determine the exact cause of death.

For Dickason, the real detective work was only beginning.

Continuing what would be a 35-hour shift, he planned to return to his cluttered desk and begin working the phones, delivering to unlucky parents the unwanted news of their child’s death while trying to elicit information that would help explain the motive behind the mass deaths.

“We’ve had dozens of calls,” he said. “People who haven’t seen their kids in a long while are starting to really worry. This is painful for them.”

Other callers were convinced their children were part of the group, but investigators had yet to confirm their suspicions. “We told them to call us back if they hadn’t heard from us by sundown,” Dickason said.

Back on July 18, 1984--the date of the infamous McDonald’s massacre--Dickason was supposed to be taking a day off, but “they called me in to work the phones,” he recalled. Others on the San Diego team go even farther back, to Sept. 25, 1978--the day PSA Flight 182 clipped a single-engine Cessna and dropped from the sky on its final approach to Lindbergh Field.

Said Vine: “We’ve got a contingency plan we’ve practiced for years for a case just such as this. Now we’re getting the chance to put it into action.”