Case One

Cathy Evelyn Smith (AP)

To be able to prosecute Cathy Smith for contributing to John Belushi's death in 1982 from a drug overdose, it was necessary to establish a fairly precise time of death.  She had fled to Canada and extraditing her for a trial meant using a number of persuasive factors to indicate that she had to have given Belushi the fatal injection.  She denied it, but forensic evidence told a different story.

Belushi and Smith had been on a four-day drug binge around Los Angeles.  On the night of March 4, Belushi threw a drug party in his bungalow.  He closed it down at 3:00 a.m. because he felt cold, and Smith claims she gave him his last injection of cocaine and heroin about half an hour later.  At 6:30, he got up to take a shower.  Around 7:45, she says that she brought him some water as he lay in bed.  She claimed that when she left at 10:15, he was alive.  At 12:30, his exercise instructor came in to discover him dead.  Emergency services arrived at 12:35.

John Belushi (AP)

Cause of death was difficult to determine, but establishing time of death meant factoring in the drug use, which can throw off the typical patterns.  Since Belushi was found at 12:35 with some stiffness to the jaw, it was clear that rigor had set in, which put his death around 10:30 or later.  However, lividity, too was established, although the skin blanched when touched even by 4:37 in the afternoon, which indicated that his death had occurred about six to eight hours earlier, between 8:30 and 10:30 a.m.---earlier than the rigor indicated.  Still, it could have been around 10:30.  Yet at 4:37, his temperature was 95 degrees, which by a typical measure meant that he would have died half an hour after his exercise instructor found him, around 1:00 P.M.  Obviously, this was not a typical death.

Let's look at the complicating variables.  Belushi was heavy, which could have slowed the cooling of his body.  Cocaine also raises the body temperature, so it could have started out higher than normal when he died.  Nevertheless, that still placed death at 10:30 or an hour thereafter.

That meant that a drug injection would have to have been given around 8:30—at which time Smith was still with Belushi.  She claims that around six-thirty he was up and moving, which meant he was not in a drug-induced coma then, nor would he have slipped into one without another injection.  That he had died in a coma was evident from the amount of urine distending his bladder, which would have awakened someone who was merely asleep. 

Medical examiner Michael Baden testified about the medical evidence, showing how the time of death factors implicated Smith, and she was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. 

Case Two

JonBenet Ramsey (AP)

Much more recent was the bungled case of JonBenet Ramsey, the six-year-old beauty queen found murdered in her Boulder, Colorado, home.  Among other blunders, the coroner seemed to have forgotten that one of the most immediate concerns at a crime scene is to establish time of death.  

It was the day after Christmas in 1996, at 5:52 in the morning, when JonBenet's mother, Patsy Ramsey, placed a 911 call.  Her daughter had been kidnapped, she shouted, and there was a ransom note.  She needed help immediately. 

From the moment the police arrived, the crime scene was compromised.  The note was moved and photographed in the wrong place.  Friends were allowed to enter the home and to roam about freely.  A scent dog from the K-9 unit was never used.  Several different people touched crucial evidence.

The deadline for the kidnappers' call came and went.  No one seemed to know quite what to do.  Finally one officer proposed a thorough search of the house.  Since she was alone, she sent John Ramsey to do it.  At 1:00 p.m., he and another man began to go through the house—another error, since they were unqualified for a police investigation.  They started in the basement.  Around 1:20, Ramsey discovered his daughter's body down there in the wine cellar.  She lay on her back, her bound arms over her head, and she was wrapped in a white blanket.  A piece of black duct tape was over her mouth.  Although she was dressed, nearby lay her favorite pink nightgown.

John Ramsey immediately ripped off the duct tape and carried the body upstairs.  The dead child was laid out and covered with a blanket, interfering with both trace evidence and the dropping body temperature.  She was in a state of rigor mortis at the time, although there was no expert around to give a proper assessment of its progress.   

Because of the holiday, the coroner, Dr. John Meyer, did not arrive for over six hours.  At 8:00 that evening, after the crime scene had been thoroughly trampled by numerous people, he examined the body.   At the very least, it had been over fourteen hours since she had died (estimating from when her mother had made the 911 call), and possibly as long as twenty-two.  Meyer spent less than ten minutes examining the wounds and estimating the cause of death, although he did not take the rectal temperature or examine the eye fluid.  He simply pronounced her dead, and had her bundled in bags and stored in a refrigerated drawer at the morgue. 

Meyer did not begin work on her until the morning of December 27.  At that time, he found chunks of pineapple in her upper digestive tract, which meant that investigators had to find out when her last known meal had been and what she had eaten at the time.  It turned out that she had not eaten this for dinner and no one recalled her eating a snack before bed, although there was a bowl of cut pineapple in the kitchen.  How and when she had consumed this remained a mystery, as did the actual time of death.  During the autopsy, Meyer was unable to establish it.

Headstone of JonBenet Ramsey (AP)

When the Ramseys had December 25th chiseled onto JonBenet's gravestone, critics insisted that they knew something they weren't revealing.  Since time of death was never established, and JonBenet might have died at any time of the night of the 25th or early morning of the 26th, no one except the killer would know on which date she had died.  However, John Douglas, who had been called into the case as a criminal consultant, pointed out that this had simply been a personal choice.  "On one level," he suggested, "I believe choosing this date was an attempt to remind people of the presence of evil in the midst of innocence and joy."

If anyone is ever arrested for this crime, the lack of an accurate estimate of time of death may be crucial in getting a conviction, depending on that person's potential alibi. 

 Despite having many different ways to come up with a time of death assessment, mistakes can still be made that make those methods moot.  It is also true that each method is inexact, and even when all are used together, one method may just as easily contradict another as confirm it.  The more work that gets done in this area by such experts as those at the Anthropology Research Facility at UT-K, the more likely it is that time of death estimates will become more exact.  It will then play a more significant role in solving a crime and convicting an offender.