Calling Dr. Joe, Forensics Pioneer

 As a courts and police reporter in the 1970s for The Houston Post, I had the opportunity to write often about one of Texas’ most legendary characters in Dr. Joseph Jachimczyk, who served as Harris County Medical Examiner from 1957 until his retirement in 1995.

Creating Houston’s office from scratch during the salad days of national forensic pathology, Dr. Joe (much easier to spell or pronounce than Jachimczyk) also ranked among the city’s most colorful characters. His frequent court appearances always combined scholarly input with amusing interrogation, particularly whenever aggressive attorneys sought to discredit his findings. Dressed in his signature bow tie and white shoes, Dr. Joe was always capable of sharing a laugh one moment while destroying an accusation the next.

Among my most memorable experiences as a journalist in Houston includes a Dr. Joe autopsy I attended about 1981, as part of research on him as the subject for a magazine feature story. He often allowed journalists to attend autopsies as a way of sharing information about his intriguing profession. And he always began his work with the admonition: “This is not a living person. It cannot feel any pain. Please be comfortable while we learn what this body might have to tell us about the person’s death.”

Dr. Joe died September 7, 2004, at his Houston home from complications of Parkinson’s Disease.

While reporting the monumental highlights of his career, the doctor’s Hearst News Corporation obituary pulled no punches in citing his most controversial case. Noting that Dr. Joe was “not infallible,” the obit cited the 1979 triple slaying in which he ruled that Houston socialite Diana Wanstrath shot her husband and son before killing herself, dubbing it a murder-suicide. A grand jury ultimately reversed that ruling, and three men were sentenced to death for their roles in the triple homicide, memorialized in one of the most interesting true crime books ever written, The Cop Who Wouldn’t Quit—by my former Houston Post colleague Rick Nelson.

It troubled Dr. Joe to apologize for that conclusion, which he always explained as an honest mistake. But he also always fumed when talking about that case and the HPD detective who solved it, Johnny Bonds. In conversations, Dr. Joe always referred sarcastically to Bonds as “Captain America.”

When Dr. Joe retired in 1995, I wrote this article about him, published September 18, 1995, in The National Law Journal.

He Tamed Texas’ Wild Forensics Frontier

The numbers alone are staggering: 250,000 death investigations and more than 125,000 autopsies. But they represent the legacy of a man who serves as this region’s bridge between the dark ages of law enforcement’s past and the modern world of forensics. With a last name too difficult for most to pronounce, he’s been known around Houston since 1957 as simply “Dr. Joe.”

Officially, he was Dr. Joseph A. Jachimczyk. Harris County Medical Examiner, the county’s highest-paid employee. His September 1 retirement concluded an important era in Texas legal history.

In terms of national longevity as a medical examiner, Dr. Jachimczyk, 71, ranked second only to Miami’s Joe Davis, who started his ME career there about a year before Dr. Jachimczyk came to Houston. With Dr. Davis set to retire in January, Dr. Jachimczyk’s departure is the first step of a double loss to the country’s legal medicine community.

“They both have been giants,” said Dr. Boyd Stephens, the chief ME in San Francisco and president of the National Association of Medical Examiners. “They did pioneering work in many areas and trained a lot of people…it’s hard to imagine how communities can find someone to match them.”

One of the first MEs to combine a law degree with his medical credentials, Dr. Jachimczyk also holds a degree in theology. His value to Houston and Harris County law enforcement is evident in his paycheck. Earning $150,000 per year at the end of his reign, he ranked for decades as the county’s highest-paid official, eclipsing the district attorney and the sheriff.

But Dr. Jachimczyk hasn’t been of value only to the prosecutors. It’s hard to find defense attorneys with a complaint against him, either. And Dr. Joe believes that one of the finest compliments he could have.

“His office has always felt it is separate and apart from law enforcement and he has succeeded in that effort,” said Stanley G. Schneider, of Houston’s Schneider & McKinney.

“What scares me now is that the search for a successor may become political,” Mr. Schneider added.

From his outpost on Houston’s bank of the River Styx, Dr. Joe has presided over more than his share of famous deaths. He figured prominently in the investigations, detailed in the best seller Blood and Money, concerning the deaths of Joan Robinson Hill and her husband Dr. John Hill. His office fielded the nation’s first serious mass murder case in 1973, dealing with a body county of 27, and literally wrote the book on how to handle such situations. When Howard Hughes flew home to Houston to die in 1976, Dr. Jachimczyk was there to welcome the billionaire to his morgue.

Texas law gives the medical examiner complete control of a body from the moment it drops until transfer to a funeral home, and Dr. Jachimczyk has been aggressive in his exercise of that power. While he didn’t demand a public autopsy of every death, of course, he did insist on calling the shots. All potential murder cases and VIP deaths came to his table.

To fully appreciate Dr. Jachimczyk’s impact on Texas law enforcement requires a look at the situation just before his arrival. In the early 1950s, elected justices of the peace still had the authority to make official rulings on deaths, and they often found themselves at odds with police, attorneys, families and even themselves—indeed, mistakes were common.

As usual with Texas, one prominent scandal prompted a change that would figure in Dr. Jachimczyk’s recruitment. The scandal arose when a dead baby lay on a San Antonio street for 12 hours while two JPs argued over jurisdiction.

A loud public outcry sparked the Legislature to consider a change. Hearings produced incredible tales from police detectives. One told of a drunken JP who came to a funeral home, squinted as a corpse and declared death by heart attack. Later, during funeral preparations, embalmers found knife wounds in the victim’s back.

So in 1955, Texas established it medical examiner system, giving several metropolitan counties the authority to establish legal medicine departments. Houston became the first when, in January 1956, county commissioners appointed a prominent Houston physician named Jared Clarke to create an office there.

A qualified physician, Dr. Clarke nevertheless knew he needed a special assistant to make the office really fulfill its expectations. Traditionally introverted, pathologists had been known for their study of diseases. But the blossoming field of forensic pathology had created a new breed who combined medicine with law and preferred reading Sherlock Holmes to medical texts. Dr. Clarke wanted one of this breed to assist him, and he found one at Harvard University in Dr. Jachimczyk.

The eldest son of parents who had emigrated from Poland during World War I, Dr. Jachimczyk had grown up in Connecticut, where the family ran an ice business. Born September 15, 1923, he helped drive the ice wagon as a youth and served as an altar boy at funerals. As a soldier in World War II, he saw no action. But the GI Bill enabled him to attend college, and he emerged from the University of Tennessee in 1948 with a medical degree. Determined to become a “hotshot” surgeon, he returned to the Northeast for his resident training.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the operating room. He took a course in pathology, and he found himself fascinated with its world of microscopes and cadavers, which he never escaped. By 1956, he had entrenched himself at Harvard’s department of legal medicine and was nearing completion of his law degree at Boston College when Houston called.

Two of Dr. Jachimczyk’s colleagues already had rejected an offer from Dr. Clarke in Houston after touring the primitive facilities established for the new office in the basement of the county’s hospital for indigents. But fierce New England snowstorms prompted Dr. Jachimczyk to take the trip south. He quickly realized the excitement of building a department from the ground up, and he accepted the job.

Before he died a few years ago, veteran Harris County Commissioner E.A. “Squatty” Lyons compared the hiring of Dr. Jachimczyk with the commission’s decision to create the hospital and flood control districts—infrastructures vital to the area.

But Mr. Lyons and his fellow commissioners were not so sure in 1957 when the brash 33-year-old showed up—sporting medical and legal degrees plus a name they couldn’t pronounce—and asked them for $90,000 to modernize the morgue facilities. Commissioners balked until Dr. Joe teamed with a famous Texas Ranger to solve a baffling case and showed them the value of his work.

The Ranger, John Kleavenhagen, was investigating the death of a young veteran in Madisonville, about 100 miles north of Houston. A Veterans Administration doctor had performed an autopsy and had blamed the death on stomach flu. But the Ranger heard that a genuine forensic pathologist had arrived, and he asked Dr. Jachimczyk to review the case. So Dr. Joe called the VA pathologist and asked if he could see some tissue or the slides.

“I got one thing even better,” replied Dr. Ethel Erickson, who would eventually become one of Dr. Jachimczyk’s assistants.

“What do you mean?” Dr. Jachimczyk recalls asking. “You got some frozen blood?”

“No,” she replied, “I’ve got a frozen liver.”

Because her superior at the VA had been studying liver diseases, he had instructed all pathologists to save specimens. With near ghoulish delight, Dr. Jachimczyk collected the organ, thawed it out and ran tests. His investigation produced the state’s first proven case of arsenic poisoning. Confronted with Dr. Jachimczyk’s report, the once-grieving widow confessed she’d been spiking her late husband’s lunches with weed killer.

A dead ringer for the late comedian Sam Levinson, Dr. Jachimczyk—responding to a newspaper reporter—once even selected Mr. Levinson as the actor most likely to portray the doctor in any movies about his life. Although Hollywood hasn’t called—yet—Dr. Jachimczyk received his greatest honor about 10 years ago when the county built a $5 million forensic center and named it after him.

Looking forward to the future, Dr. Jachimczyk predicts such things as bloodless autopsies done by magnetic resonance imaging. As for himself, he’ll be teaching at the University of Texas Medical School as the nation’s first endowed professor of forensic pathology.

Dr. Jachimczyk doesn’t hesitate when asked about the most important thing he’s learned from a life studying the carnage of the human race.

“A belief in the hereafter,” he said. “There’s so much injustice down here that there has to be justice somewhere.”