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.”
