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  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  CHAPTER 01

  First Blush

  CHAPTER 02

  Baptism by Fire

  CHAPTER 03

  The Barbecue Murders

  CHAPTER 04

  14K3, 10-49, 10-55

  CHAPTER 05

  At the Scene

  CHAPTER 06

  The Overdose That Wasn’t

  CHAPTER 07

  Investigating Homicides

  CHAPTER 08

  The Trailside Killer

  CHAPTER 09

  Inside San Quentin

  CHAPTER 10

  An Unnecessary Death

  CHAPTER 11

  Investigating Suicides

  CHAPTER 12

  The Bridge

  CHAPTER 13

  The German Tourist

  CHAPTER 14

  Investigating the Unusual

  CHAPTER 15

  Bones and a Frozen Infant

  CHAPTER 16

  Investigating Abuse

  CHAPTER 17

  Remembrances of October

  CHAPTER 18

  Cases in the News

  CHAPTER 19

  The Mitchell Brothers

  CHAPTER 20

  Notes and Notifications

  CHAPTER 21

  Power Struggles

  CHAPTER 22

  A Supervisor’s Wrath

  CHAPTER 23

  Ending and Beginning

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  To Suzan, as always

  PROLOGUE

  Ana Valiente was twenty-three and working as a housekeeper at a senior center in San Rafael, California, when she disappeared. Originally from El Salvador, where her family still lived, she was hardworking, upbeat, and dependable. After she failed to show up for her job on December 6, 2006, coworkers reported her missing.

  Two weeks later, she was still missing. Police had zeroed in on a suspect, though, thirty-nine-year-old Gregorio Mendez-Deleon. He was born in Guatemala, married with three children, and worked as a driver at the Marin County Sanitary District’s recycling center. According to other people at the center, he was in a sexual relationship with Ana, who had become pregnant.

  The recycling center had a camera that filmed cars as they drove in and out, and Mendez-Deleon’s car, with Ana visible in the passenger seat, was captured leaving the center on Tuesday, December 5, at 4:30 P.M. That made Mendez-Deleon the last person to be seen with her. Later, a backhoe operator at the center, knowing that Ana had disappeared and Mendez-Deleon was considered a “person of interest,” came forward and told police that he had dug a hole one night at Mendez-Deleon’s request in a remote area of the recycling center grounds.

  “That was when things started to get interesting,” Ken Holmes tells me.

  Holmes was the coroner of Marin County. He had been in the job eight years at that point, but had worked in the coroner’s office nearly thirty years altogether, first as an investigator, then as the assistant coroner. By 2006 he had handled hundreds of homicides and thousands of other deaths.

  Police brought Mendez-Deleon in for questioning, and in short order induced a confession. Mendez-Deleon said that he and Ana were sitting in his Toyota sedan after dark on December 5 in front of a Wendy’s restaurant in downtown San Rafael. They had an argument, then Mendez-Deleon took out a pocketknife and started stabbing Ana in the neck. She was a big woman, more than two hundred pounds, and wedged into the small car. She couldn’t get away, and Mendez-Deleon continued to attack her. Within minutes she was dead.

  Holmes pauses, shakes his head, then says, “As often happens in cases like this, one problem quickly became two. The first problem was what to do with Ana’s body. Her killer knew that he had to get rid of it, but how? The second problem was what to do with his car. The interior, especially on the passenger side, was drenched with her blood. It became even bloodier when he decided to cut off her legs. She was too big for him to move otherwise.”

  The recycling center wasn’t far away, and Mendez-Deleon decided to go there. Although it was after hours, the backhoe operator was still around and Mendez-Deleon convinced him to dig a hole at the rear of the property. The backhoe operator didn’t know what the hole was for, but he was willing to do Mendez-Deleon a favor. After he left, Mendez-Deleon put Ana’s legs in one plastic bag and the rest of her in another bag, maneuvered both bags into the hole, and pushed all of the dirt back into place to cover up everything. Then he got a truck and drove it over the site several times to compact the soil, after which he erased the tire marks.

  Now he just needed to get rid of his car. That was relatively easy; he took it to a friend’s wrecking yard and had it crushed. He told the friend that he couldn’t get it smogged, so rather than pay a junkyard to come and get it, he wanted it flattened, then he would borrow a pickup truck and take his flattened car to a metal scrapper.

  In his confession, Mendez-Deleon indicated the general area where Ana’s body had been buried. It was dark at the time, though, and he didn’t know the exact location. The backhoe operator didn’t know, either, or how deep the hole was. He thought it was about five feet, but he wasn’t really sure.

  That was when the coroner’s office was summoned. Holmes was briefed by police, then he and his staff went to work.

  “We knew we were going to have to go digging,” he says, “and we were going to have to do an archaeological dig. If you know that there’s a body, you have to be forensically perfect from the get-go, which means using small paintbrushes and soup spoons and small garden trowels because we don’t know how deep it is to the body.”

  Over the years, Holmes had worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation on numerous cases, and maintained good relations. FBI agents were involved anytime a death occurred on federal property, or a federal employee was killed, or a crime was committed that crossed state lines. Other times, though, if local agents weren’t busy and Holmes could use help on a case, the FBI provided it. In this instance, Holmes received a call offering the assistance of the FBI’s special response unit—four agents with expertise in archaeological digs. He had never worked with this particular team before, which was based out of the area but accepted immediately.

  The team showed up towing a box trailer that was sixteen to eighteen feet long. When they opened up the back, Holmes stared in amazement.

  “It was like Costco for forensics. There was every conceivable thing you could use or need, including Tyvek suits for all of us, little wire flags in various colors to mark locations, and pop-up tents to hide the dig from news helicopters, which were hovering all around us after reporters got wind of the case.”

  Without knowing the exact location, the FBI team marked off the area in six-foot squares, then used flat shovels to scrape away at the soil, which was full of shale and rocks. Whenever they got deep enough to realize that soil hadn’t been disturbed, they moved on to another square of the grid.

  The dig went on for two days before they found the spot and dug down five feet to the bags. One of Holmes’s investigators, Darrell Harris, was there the first day, and another investigator, Pam Carter, was present the second day. Holmes dro
pped by several times as well. Both days, throughout the process, federal agents deferred to the coroner’s office.

  “It wasn’t like you see on TV,” Holmes says, “where the FBI comes in and pushes everybody out of the way. They didn’t do that; they absolutely didn’t do that. They were our best friends, and loved doing this kind of stuff because they didn’t get to do it very often. It wasn’t their jurisdiction and they knew it; they were just lending their resources and expertise. Someone even came around at lunchtime and took our orders for sandwiches and coffee or soft drinks. They never sent us a bill for anything.”

  While the dig was taking place, police located Mendez-Deleon’s crushed car. Holmes had it taken to a large training center at the Novato Fire Department so that firefighters could open it up.

  “They had never worked on anything so compacted before,” he says, “and considered it great practice. They also weren’t used to participating in a homicide investigation, which added a thrill factor.”

  The Jaws of Life is a big, compressed-air separator. Its hydraulic ram uses pneumatic pressure to pull apart smashed objects piece by piece. In two and a half hours, firefighters separated the door panels, seats, and carpets, all of which were covered with blood.

  Holmes was able to confirm Ana’s identity through a fingerprint check with the Department of Homeland Security. She didn’t have a driver’s license but possessed a valid passport, so her fingerprints were in the DHS database. Holmes also had the blood in Mendez-Deleon’s car analyzed and it matched that of Ana Valiente.

  With that information, Mendez-Deleon was charged with the murder of Ana and also the six-week-old child she was carrying. Since double homicides are subject to the death penalty in California, it was a potential capital punishment case. During legal proceedings, however, the second murder charge was dropped because the unborn child wasn’t far enough along to meet the definition of a fetus, according to state law.

  In his trial, which Holmes testified at, Mendez-Deleon recanted his confession and said that an unidentified third party was to blame. According to his public defender, Mendez-Deleon was afraid that he would be targeted and killed at San Quentin Prison. The prison is in Marin County and is where all male death row inmates in California are incarcerated. Like many prisons, it is controlled by gangs, and Mendez-Deleon would be at their mercy. That was of little concern to the prosecution, however. In a plea bargain, Mendez-Deleon was sentenced to sixteen years.

  Looking back on the case, Holmes says, with a bemused smile, “Just another day at the office,” knowing that it was anything but. Then again, there weren’t many days that were routine.

  CHAPTER 01

  FIRST BLUSH

  I first met Ken Holmes in 2010 when I interviewed him for my book The Final Leap, about suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge. I was executive director of a nationally certified crisis intervention and suicide prevention center in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time, and Ken’s office was responsible for conducting the autopsies of most Golden Gate Bridge jumpers, as well as for notifying their families of the death. After the book came out, I was recruited to serve on the board of the Bridge Rail Foundation, an all-volunteer, nonprofit organization dedicated to ending suicides on the bridge. Ken was on the board also, and we had numerous opportunities to talk further. It didn’t take long for me to realize that his experiences over nearly forty years in the Marin County Coroner’s Office and the cases he’d handled would make a riveting subject for a book.

  I had another reason for writing The Education of a Coroner: I didn’t know much about the workings of a coroner’s office, and wanted to learn more. How do coroners approach a death scene and what do they look for? How are families notified of a death, and what psychological techniques are employed? How has the world of forensic pathology changed with advances in technology?

  The first time Ken and I met to discuss it was in a brew pub in Larkspur, in central Marin County. He had been retired three years by that time, although he still had—and continues to have—frequent contact with many of his former colleagues, and also attends annual conferences of the California State Coroners Association, where he once was president. We had communicated by email before then and I had run my general idea by him. I would review eight hundred case files that he had preselected and copied onto electronic disks, then we would schedule a series of days when we would meet and discuss the cases that I thought were the most interesting. Along the way we also would talk about his background, training, responsibilities, lessons learned, and people he worked with. First, though, I said I needed to get a sense of whether the stories he told were compelling and had universal appeal.

  “Sure,” he said, and with no further prompting he launched into a thumbnail sketch of one case, then another and another until after only a few minutes my head was spinning. He apologized and said that once he started talking about his work, it was hard for him to stop.

  Holmes is a natural storyteller, and his deep, melodic voice is both authoritative and soothing. A barrel-chested man with sharp eyes—even in his seventies—strong hands from having spent years outdoors, and a handsome face framed by a trimmed gray beard, he is someone who makes friends easily and holds on to them because at the end of the day, and especially at this stage in his life, friends and family are what matter most. He is quick to laugh—especially at himself—and has a range of knowledge that is impressive. Whether it is medicine, politics, hunting, guns, home repair, sports, food, wine, or cars, he can hold his own in a conversation with anyone.

  “Let’s back up,” I said, “and focus on one case for now. You pick.”

  “Okay,” he said, and he proceeded to tell me some of the highlights of the Carol Filipelli case, which is described a little later in this book.

  At the end, all I could say was, “How many more stories do you have like that?”

  He shrugged and said, “Dozens?”

  * * *

  Some of the cases cast Holmes in the national spotlight because of who they involved—rock legend Jerry Garcia, rapper Tupac Shakur, porn kings Jim and Artie Mitchell, and the infamous Trailside Killer. It was the deaths of people who weren’t well known, however, that remain the most vivid and noteworthy in his mind.

  Several cases took nearly a decade to close, two took twenty years, one took thirty, and one took forty-four years. It might seem like a luxury for a coroner to be able to pursue cases so doggedly—certainly that’s not possible in large cities and statewide coroner’s offices. In some respects it was, but Holmes’s belief—then and now—is that family and friends of the deceased deserve to know what happened no matter how long it takes. Coroners deal with death, but their purpose is to find answers for the living.

  If the work of coroners were less dramatic, we wouldn’t have so many TV shows about it. Holmes watches some of them and says that they get most—though not all—of the details right. Even so, inevitably he comes away thinking that real life is more moving than any fictionalized treatment can be. Nothing beats a story that happens to be true.

  It helps to have a glamorous setting, which is why the original CSI TV show was set in Las Vegas and there is now CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, and NCIS: Los Angeles. If the emphasis were on gritty, then we would have CSI: Camden, CSI: Detroit, and NCIS: Compton.

  The setting where Holmes worked is every bit as enthralling as the biggest cities with the brightest lights. I say that not because I was raised in Marin—as an adolescent it didn’t seem all that exciting—but because the county has a national reputation, despite its small size. Part of that is due to its physical beauty. Situated just north of San Francisco, Marin is surrounded by water. The Pacific Ocean lies to the west, and the eastern and southern borders end at San Francisco Bay. Only the northern portion abuts land—the beginning of California’s legendary wine country. Otherwise, access is across the Golden Gate Bridge to the south or the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge to the east.

  There are no large urban centers, processing pla
nts, factories, or notable industries in Marin. Mostly the county consists of coastline, rolling hills, dairy farms, and small towns. Hundreds of thousands of people come every year to visit Point Reyes National Seashore, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Muir Woods, Mount Tamalpais, Stinson Beach, Tomales Bay, and Samuel P. Taylor State Park.

  The other reason why Marin is well known is its affluence. It ranks among the top twenty counties in the United States in terms of household income, and is home to rock stars, movie stars, professional athletes, and wealthy business executives. The median price of homes is just under $1 million, and in many communities it’s considerably more.

  This doesn’t mean that all is rosy, however. In 2014, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation reported that nearly 25 percent of adults in Marin engage in binge drinking during any given month—one of the highest averages in the state. More than thirty residents die per year from drug overdoses, a large number in a small county. In addition, Marin is second to San Francisco when it comes to suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge.

  Marin also has pockets of poverty. In the Canal District of San Rafael, people from dozens of cultures, speaking a multitude of languages, live close together in low-income housing. In Marin City, built during World War II to house shipyard workers and immigrants, local residents—predominately African-American—lived for years in crowded tenements until gentrification started pushing them out, creating new sources of tension.

  Then there is San Quentin Prison, the oldest prison in California and one of the largest penitentiaries in the United States. Built in 1852 on 432 acres of shoreline property in Marin, San Quentin is, almost certainly, the most expensive piece of real estate in America—and perhaps the world—that is devoted to housing convicted felons. In 2009 the land was estimated to be worth $2 billion, and it has only increased in value since then. All of California’s 750 male death row inmates are locked up there, as well as more than four thousand other hardened criminals, male and female. To a motorist approaching Marin County from the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge, the prison looks, at first glance, like a huge sand-colored hotel on the waterfront. As one gets closer, however, one sees the twelve-foot-high concrete walls that are topped by coils of electrified barbed wire, notices that all of the window openings are mere slits even though the view outside them is spectacular, and knows that San Quentin was built with a much different purpose in mind.