She hadn't imagined that when she pulled up in front of the neat brick place on Dayton Street for the final time, she'd be looking for clues. She couldn't have imagined she'd find so many, either.
She drove to the central Phoenix house on a Monday in the spring of 1990, when Rob Roemhildt had been dead four days. On Saturday, she had heard about his death from his stepmother, who had heard it from the police. Alerted by a neighbor who hadn't seen him in a while, the police had found Roemhildt's decaying, nude body lying on his futon.
Caymen had called the police herself on Sunday and been told by a detective that Roemhildt had probably committed suicide. Like nearly everything else the police would say to her before the investigation of Roemhildt's death abruptly ended, this explanation hadn't made any sense to her.
"We were soul partners; we could talk about anything," she says of her relationship with Roemhildt. "I could tell when he was not feeling well or happy, and he felt fine." She had spent several hours with him on the Monday before his death and had found him to be, as usual, optimistic and filled with plans--for the purchase of a new washer, for planting more flowers in the yard, for a visit with a friend who was coming to town for the weekend. He had been a man living for the future.
On Sunday, she also learned something far more confusing and chilling than that the police suspected suicide: Rob's doctor, Ken Fisher, informed her that when Roemhildt was discovered dead, his penis was missing. The police had told Fisher that Roemhildt's dog, a miniature dachshund named Max, had eaten the penis when left alone for two days, without food, in a house with a dead man.
Fisher didn't (and doesn't) buy it. Although it's not uncommon for hungry pets to devour body parts when locked up with corpses, Fisher had never heard of a case where only the penis was gnawed off, as though it were a delicacy, and not a single other wound or a chew mark appeared on the body. He had said so to Caymen.
And he thought he knew that Roemhildt had not died of natural causes related to AIDS, either: He treats many AIDS patients and told Caymen that they don't die suddenly. Instead, they usually contract a secondary infection to which the AIDS virus has made them vulnerable--pneumonia, cancer, an infection of the heart muscle--that sets them on a course of slow, miserable decline. This wasn't yet the case for the 35-year-old Roemhildt, who was in Fisher's office for blood work only two days before he died and was found to be in fine shape--not suffering from secondary infections and the possessor of normal blood pressure, kidney function and electrolyte counts. In light of all that, Fisher even doubted that his patient had died suddenly from a heart attack or kidney failure. "Three days before that I was dancing with him, and he was outdancing everybody on the floor," says Fisher. "He was very healthy."
Fisher believed that Roemhildt, who was gay, had been killed and his penis taken as a trophy. He refused to sign the death certificate for the police, and requested an autopsy from the medical examiner's office. He had classified Roemhildt's death as a murder for the insurance company.
And although Fisher's theory filled Caymen with horror as she listened to it on the telephone, she wasn't able to discount it, because of even more bizarre details that she couldn't make fit.
When Roemhildt was found, his television was turned on and a pornographic tape was languishing in the VCR. Beside his bed was a tube labeled "Foreplay Sensual Lubricant." Two bottles of "rush," an inhalant that intensifies orgasm, were also by his bedside, and a third was inside a nightstand drawer. (Says Fisher, "One person cannot use two bottles of rush.")
Neither Caymen nor Fisher could make heads or tails of these facts. They thought they knew that Roemhildt, not wishing to infect anybody, had been deliberately celibate for five years. They thought they knew that he eschewed all drugs religiously, having adopted an intensely healthy lifestyle upon learning he had AIDS.
Roemhildt had even volunteered specifically to Fisher that he didn't use rush, since there was some belief that it worsened Kaposi's sarcoma, the cancerous skin lesions of AIDS that Roemhildt particularly feared. Caymen, a nurse by profession who had cared for Roemhildt at his home following a recent surgery, who had pawed through his medicine cabinet for his AZT and put his dishes away, thought she would have known if Roemhildt had been lying about his lack of drug use and instead had rush bottles stashed around.
Where had the rush come from, she asked herself as she drove to his house for the last time. Had someone been with Rob when he died? Had he been masturbating, or was he having sex with someone? And after five celibate years, with whom?
Caymen just couldn't bring the pieces of the puzzle into alignment. As she pulled up in front of Roemhildt's flower-bedecked front yard, she stared at the house with a frank fear of the unknown terrors she'd find inside.
What she didn't understand was that, as agitated as she was, she was more at peace about Rob Roemhildt at that moment than she would ever be again. She still believed that she'd know one day what had happened to him, that the police and the medical examiner would one day explain to her how he died.
She didn't know that a murder investigation as such would never be conducted, and that a Maricopa County medical examiner, Dr. Fred Walker, would choose not to perform an autopsy, either. Walker would not comment on the Roemhildt case for this article, but his supervisor, chief medical examiner Dr. Heinz Karnitschnig, says that the pathologists in his office avoid performing autopsies on cadavers known to be HIV-positive. "Occasionally we have to, but we try not to," he says.
This policy is at odds with the policies of other medical examiners and coroners, including those in New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Although the rate of HIV infection is highest in these cities, and although the coroners there are most at risk, coroners and spokesmen in all three medical examiners' offices say that they perform autopsies, when the cause of death is unknown, whether a body is HIV-positive or not.
As Brenda Caymen began to pore suspiciously over the house and yard, she thought that anything she could figure out might help the police solve the mystery. She was that far off in her belief about the future.
The first thing she noticed was that Roemhildt's gardening tools were still lying in the yard and that blowing around on the veranda were some thin, greasy tissues of the type used to wrap meat at a deli. Also on the veranda, shriveling in a plastic container, was a half-eaten salad.
Before she had even unlocked the front door, Caymen figured that Roemhildt's last day hadn't been an uneventful one. "He kept everything neat and tidy, and when Rob started a project, he would always finish it," she explains. She found it unthinkable that he'd have left things lying around without a good reason, particularly the garden tools: "He would have taken care of those because he had problems with neighbors who picked his flowers, took hoses, helped themselves," she says. "He was even considering putting a fence around his front yard."
"He was interrupted," she says. "Something diverted his attention."
Once inside the house, her conviction grew.
She knew she wasn't looking at anything so obvious as a reckless murder scene. There were no toppled chairs and tables, no blood sprayed on the walls, and the police had even found Roemhildt's money and valuables hidden in the freezer, where he'd left them. But there were small things awry in the house that day, things that could only have been noticed by someone who knew Roemhildt very well.
For one thing, the house was messy, too. Caymen could not imagine that Rob would have left his clothes--even his shoes--lying in the bathroom sink. She did not remember seeing him strew magazines across the floor of his bedroom before. She found his diamond-stud earring lying on the floor near the bed, and thought that if he'd removed it himself the back wouldn't have been missing.
She was also awfully disturbed by the bed. Caymen knew from the police that Roemhildt had been found on the left side, lying almost along the edge of the king-size futon. Still covered with a single sheet, Roemhildt's final resting place was now stained heavily on the left, toward the top, with what she knew to be mucus and the other head fluids that drain out of a dead body. She also knew, however, that her friend had always slept on the right.
And she didn't know how to explain the bloodstain, either. She knew from Fisher that Roemhildt hadn't bled when his penis was amputated--that the organ was removed sometime after death--and yet there was bright red blood on the sheet, about the length and width of a pencil. A police detective would later tell Caymen he thought it was the result of a nose bleed, and yet the vivid stain was much lower than the one caused by head fluids. Had Roemhildt been wounded in some way before he died? Was this his blood at all? Why hadn't the police taken the sheet with them, for analyzing?
She was very startled to see the dog food--a five-pound bag of pellets open all across the top, propped near Max's regular feeding area in the room adjoining the bedroom through an open archway, next to the dog's water bowl. Why would Max have gone after Rob's penis when he could have far more easily chewed through the bag toward his normal food, or just tipped it over, Caymen wondered.
And what about Rob's private life? What about the man who wanted to be his lover and grew angry when Rob refused? What about the other acquaintance who just slightly earlier in the year had placed livid telephone calls to Rob for a period of about two months? Would those men have wanted to hurt Rob?
She finished her inspection and made mental notes of questions to ask the police, so that they could calm her fears. More than a year later, she is amazed to find that her fears are as fresh as ever, that the questions she asks herself are as haunting as though Roemhildt had died just a few days ago.
Why, she wonders, did police detectives never follow through on the two names she gave them of men who weren't on good terms with Rob?
Why does the police report say that no one was seen leaving Roemhildt's house on the day of his death, when the next-door neighbor, Harold Gilkes, had seen a white van drive away with three men in it?
Did the police check Roemhildt's house for fingerprints, take fiber samples, ever check out the blood on the sheet, she wonders. Did they ever treat Rob's death as a murder, if only to eliminate the possibility?
Most important of all, why has the Maricopa County medical examiner's office instituted a policy of not performing autopsies on HIV-positive bodies--a policy that made it possible for the cause of a mysterious death to remain mysterious, and may make a similar situation possible again?
In a city where the gay community has long suspected the police department and other public officials of homophobia and discrimination, Dr. Fisher thinks he knows the answer to at least some of Caymen's questions. "If some blue-haired lady had been found on Camelback Mountain with her genitals missing, it would have been all over the news, and they would have been combing the woods for a suspect," he says. "But Rob was a gay boy with AIDS. The police generally feel that if it is a gay-community crime, it's not something to bother with."
It's a charge that's been made in Phoenix before--by victims of gay-bashing who've felt discounted by the police; by lawyers who defend the men arrested for public sexual indecency and wonder why the vast majority of them are homosexuals; by an ordinary Phoenix citizen who discovered in 1988 that he was listed as AIDS-infected on computerized lists kept by the police. (He didn't have AIDS.) One ex-cop and Phoenix attorney who frequently represents gay men hauled up on sexual-indecency charges, Neil Bassett, says that the police simply aren't fairer in their judgments than anyone else. "Cops are just a reflection of society, and most of society thinks it is okay to criticize homosexuals," he says. "When a cop sees a lovers' lane situation and it is a guy and a girl, they give them the high sign or shine their flashlight. If it is a couple of guys, they go to jail immediately. Discrimination toward homosexuals is expected today."
This is a newly unsettling reality in the light cast by serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, whose Milwaukee apartment was found in July to be filled with bodies he had literally hacked apart. With his arrest came the revelation that the Milwaukee police had once returned to Dahmer, as though returning some silverware that was stolen, a nude 14-year-old boy who was found wandering in a drugged daze after escaping from the killer's apartment. The police thought the boy was Dahmer's lover, and they laughed off the incident among themselves as a quarrel between homosexuals. That boy became Dahmer's next dismembered victim.
Unlike that dead boy's family, Brenda Caymen does not lay Roemhildt's fate--whatever it was--directly at the feet of the police, but she does wonder whether they took less interest in the case because her friend was gay. She figures the police officers who found him realized instantly that he had AIDS, because of the well-known medicines for slowing the disease that they found in the house, and she knows that they soon confirmed Roemhildt's illness by telephoning Fisher. "Did they just say, `He was going to die anyway?'" she asks.
She can't help wondering: If you want to get away with murder, should you kill someone with AIDS?
BRENDA CAYMEN had known Roemhildt for six years when he died, and she says she's never had a closer friend. Not only was he that rare person with whom she could share everything, but he was the source of constant laughs and good times. When Rob told a story repeatedly, it became increasingly funny, she says, sometimes because he would switch around between accents, being Jewish in one version and German in the next.
Before he learned he had AIDS in 1989, it had looked as if Roemhildt's life was finally settling down. His was a history of financial ups and down, of checkered employment and incidents of living in his van, but in 1987 he was finally doing well enough as a designer of silk flowers to buy a place of his own. He had known a lot of pleasure and pain in the little house on Dayton. It was there that he operated his business, Ferns 'n Feathers, and entertained his friends with gourmet meals that he loved to prepare. He maintained the house with a conscientiousness that could have rivaled Aunt Bee of Mayberry, forever sprucing up the interior and prettifying the garden with new flower beds.
The pain he'd experienced had to do not only with his illness, but with the isolation caused by it. Caymen remembers that a favorite sister, Jean, was planning a visit from Minnesota last year, but canceled at the last minute because her husband didn't want her staying with Roemhildt. She remembers the energetic way Roemhildt had painted the spare room in anticipation, remembers that he'd hung new curtains, and she remembers his deflation after the final call. Caymen telephoned Jean herself to try to reason with her, to tell her that AIDS can't be caught easily, but she, too, was rebuffed. "I just can't deal with AIDS," is the thing she says Jean told her.
On the whole, though, Roemhildt's friends and family found him to be upbeat, once he'd adjusted to his situation. After his diagnosis, according to his sister Rita Wunderlich, "He went through denial and anger and then he got over it, and was determined to do anything he could, anything the doctor suggested." When he died, he'd been taking AZT--the AIDS drug that prolongs life--for about a year, and he was waiting to start another drug that was experimental.
In the meantime, he was wringing as much joy from every day as he could. It was his way to embrace life, but even if he'd been a sour fellow, Caymen might have forced him to enjoy himself. Aware that time was running out on them, she and her husband, John, made a point of getting together often with their buddy during the last year. The Caymens and Rob partook of hayrides, of wild jeep rides in the mountains, of the Renaissance Fair, racking up souvenirs and memories that for Brenda will be eternally sweet. At Christmastime, Roemhildt's mother and a sister did visit and he threw a five-course bash for his family and friends, concocting brandied pates and making apple pies from scratch.
The happy times didn't mean that, except for AIDS, Roemhildt's life was a cycle of song, however. He had one insistent friend who drank heavily and pressured him for sex, to the point that Roemhildt had confided to Brenda that he was considering terminating the friendship. "This guy would imbibe and get pretty out of control," Brenda remembers.
There was another unpleasantness in his life as well: Early in the spring, he had offered an acquaintance a place to stay, only to have the man deliberately overdose on the medications Roemhildt kept around to combat the symptoms of AIDS. When Roemhildt summoned the police to the scene, the man was committed to Camelback Hospital, from where he telephoned Rob frequently and blamed him for his incarceration. The angry telephone calls went on for about two months.
All in all, though, Roemhildt seemed peaceful, which is why the thought of murder was such a shock to Caymen. In the days following the death, she and the family members who'd flown out to Phoenix from Minnesota sat tight, waiting for the investigation or the autopsy to uncover something.
Rita Wunderlich says, as does Caymen, that those Roemhildt left behind believed absolutely that a murder investigation and autopsy were being performed. She says they were shocked to learn otherwise, and didn't learn it until Roemhildt had already been cremated.
Caymen remembers that she was assured by a Detective Yost that the investigation of Roemhildt's death would be thorough. He also told her, though, that he was "100 percent sure" that the pet dachshund had eaten Roemhildt's penis.
When Caymen reminded him of Max's dog food sitting open in the house, a bag he could have ripped into or pushed over if he was hungry enough, she says that Yost dismissed the idea, saying, "Let me put it to you this way. If you had a cat and you had a bowl of dried cat food and a fresh bowl of tuna, which one would the cat eat? It will be the tuna because it's the freshest, and they go after meat." She says she remembers the comment very clearly, because she thought it was so insensitive.
(A veterinarian, multiple veterans of homicide investigations, and even chief medical examiner Dr. Heinz Karnitschnig himself, all of whom were contacted for this article, say that dogs and cats do not eat their owners' body parts if other food is available to them. Through police spokesman Kevin Robinson, Detective Jeffrey Yost now says that the bag of dog food Caymen recalls was much larger than she says--was a 25-pounder--and he believes there was "no way" little Max could have tipped it over.)
Caymen also remembers that, in the days before the results of Roemhildt's toxicology report were in--the report that showed no drugs in his system beyond the equivalent of a single drink, and that therefore proved he hadn't committed suicide by overdosing--Yost told her that Roemhildt had killed himself. He said unequivocally that no foul play was suspected, but Caymen says she expressed her fears anyway and gave him the names of the two men she believed were angry with Rob.
As for the autopsy, she believed it was mandatory in light of Dr. Ken Fisher's request for one. She was wrong: The medical examiner exercises sole discretion in performing autopsies in Maricopa County, and Dr. Fred Walker elected not to. In retrospect, his supervisor, Dr. Karnitschnig, backs his associate up, saying he "might have done the MDRVsame thing."
The medical examiner's report that Walker signed classified Roemhildt's death as "natural." "It appeared that his dog, which was running loose into and out of the house, had bitten off the man's penis after his death," reads the report, but there is no indication that Walker tried to verify how Roemhildt's penis was removed.
"They just lifted the sheet and looked at him and said, `Yeah, he's dead,'" says Fisher.
Wunderlich and Caymen knew there'd been no autopsy only when they were handed a death certificate following Roemhildt's cremation. They couldn't believe their eyes, and couldn't believe, either, that no one had offered them the option of having a private autopsy performed. "I know we would have had an autopsy done," says Wunderlich.
She is still asking herself what she and the others could have done differently. "The police were not easy to get hold of and they were very careful," she remembers of her family's efforts to pry loose any information about Roemhildt's death. "They acted like we shouldn't be asking. And then we said, `Well, all of us are suspects. That is why they are not giving information out. They are only doing their job.'"
By the time she knew the score, it was too late. "There was no body, and we had already cleaned the house, thinking it had been dusted for prints," she says. "What more do you do? We couldn't pursue it further. But it is really hard for me to believe that he died of natural causes."
The police say today that they investigated Roemhildt's death as thoroughly as was warranted. According to spokesman Kevin Robinson, they did not suspect foul play because the body was found in a locked house and there were no signs of violence. Robinson says officers examined the wound at the former site of Roemhildt's penis "rather closely," and that based on "the way it looked"--jagged--decided the dachshund was the culprit. This impression was reinforced for them by the fact that Max, going in and out of his doggie door while Roemhildt lay dead, had apparently dragged twigs and other debris in from the yard, chewed them thoroughly, and left them scattered on the bed.
According to police reports, the police photographed the death scene but did not dust for fingerprints, take fiber samples or perform other scrutinies that normally accompany death investigations when foul play is suspected.
Did they discount Roemhildt's death as a suicide for too long, only to discover from the clean toxicology report that they were wrong about it, but had already allowed relatives to clean Roemhildt's house and destroy the evidence? It seems a possibility, particularly in light of the omission of the suspicion of suicide from the police report that goes over in great detail many other early impressions about Roemhildt's death. It is almost as though talk of suicide was withheld from the report.
Asked why suicide is never mentioned in the report, despite the fact that Fisher, Caymen, Wunderlich and other family members remember hearing about it from the police, Robinson says, "I have no idea."
Robinson also says that, according to Detective Yost, "nobody contacted" Yost about characters in Roemhildt's life who might have wanted to harm him, despite Caymen's certainty that she did so.
Most peculiarly of all, Yost's police report indicates that next-door neighbor Harold Gilkes, the man who had telephoned authorities when he began to worry about Roemhildt, told them he hadn't seen anyone going in or out of the house on Dayton during the two-day period Roemhildt had been lying dead inside.
Gilkes himself says today that Roemhildt was a friendly man and that people were going in and out of his house all the time. He remembers specifically that on Thursday, the day when it is presumed Roemhildt died, he saw a white van with three men inside it pulling away from Roemhildt's house. He does not remember whether he gave this information to the police.
In the matter of discovering why Roemhildt died, police spokesman Robinson passes the buck to the medical examiner's office, saying it was the mandate of the police only to determine whether Roemhildt was killed. "There was no indication the person died at the hands of another. Why he died, we don't know," he says.
Chief medical examiner Heinz Karnitschnig passes the buck right back, saying he takes his cues for autopsies in part from the police department, and is less inclined to operate on a cadaver if the police don't suspect foul play.
It is not the way that some other police departments would have handled the same case. When contacted for this article, police officers in California said they have never seen a corpse where only the penis was gnawed off by the dog but the rest of the body was left unmarked. They said that on the basis of Roemhildt's missing penis alone, their interest in foul play would have been sparked sufficiently to order an autopsy.
Lieutenant Ray Griffith in Cathedral City, California, went further than the others, pointing out that he entertains a special concern about AIDS-infected corpses: Was it euthanasia? He knows that the terrible nature of death by AIDS is resulting in friends killing friends--poisoning them, smothering them--making autopsies especially critical. The danger of autopsying AIDS-infected bodies would not cause him to be less vigilant, he said. "Our coroners know what they are doing and they know how to protect themselves," he said. "If the information you gave me right now was in front of me on my desk, I would be calling the coroner's office right now, saying, `Let do an autopsy.'"
WHATEVER THE irregularities of the police investigation, the most disturbing questions about Rob Roemhildt's death came to light at the medical examiner's office.
Or rather, they didn't come to light there. It is the responsibility of the medical examiner to determine the cause of death when one isn't known, but it didn't happen for Roemhildt. A "natural" death for a 35-year-old man suggests death from disease, and yet whether Roemhildt died from a disease is the precise thing Walker can't have known without an autopsy.
Walker won't discuss the case, but chief medical examiner Karnitschnig says there are probably a couple of reasons Walker was loath to cut into this particular dead man. Primarily, there was the fact that the police didn't suspect foul play.
Although Karnitschnig cites it as the primary reason, it is nonetheless only the second one he mentions. The first one is that Roemhildt had AIDS.
"It is very dangerous," he says of the practice of performing autopsies on bodies that are HIV-positive. "We try not to. If somebody [HIV-positive] got strangled and it is clearly a homicide and we have to establish how he was strangled, we will go ahead and dissect the neck to see if there are any finger marks, et cetera. But we do not go all the way."
A spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta will not hazard a guess as to whether the HIV virus survives in the bloodstream for long periods after death, saying that the proper documenting studies haven't been performed. Insiders at mortuaries and in the field of pathology assume the worst, however, and take precautions--such stringent precautions in some cases that it is becoming much more difficult to have private autopsies performed, according to AIDS experts who have watched hospitals across the country turn down requests for autopsies from the family members of the HIV-infected.
One woman in Phoenix, Ruth Groves, says she was unable to fulfill her son's final wishes when he died from complications of AIDS two years ago, because pathologists in the hospital where he died refused to autopsy his body. She says that Jim Groves died in Tulsa after undergoing many experimental drug treatments at the University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson--and after, also, having promised his body to science in the hopes that the new drugs would become better understood. It didn't happen: The Tulsa hospital turned down Groves' doctor's autopsy request.
Unlike hospital pathologists, a coroner's duty is to the public, though, and the brand of caution that shows up as a wholesale hesitancy to autopsy HIV-positive bodies does not appear to be common among them. All the other coroners or medical examiners contacted for this article--in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Arizona's Pima County and elsewhere--say they perform autopsies in all cases of unknown death, whether the bodies in question are HIV-positive or not. They say they worry about the dangers, but that they perform the autopsies anyway. "Whether a body is HIV-positive has no bearing whatsoever [in the decision to autopsy]," says Scott Carrier, a press officer with the Los Angeles County coroner's office. "Our doctors would rather not expose themselves to AIDS, but it's an occupational hazard."
In San Francisco, where AIDS poses the most constant threat to coroners, chief medical examiner Boyd Stephens does sound a cautionary note: He says that his coroners may elect not to perform autopsies on HIV-infected bodies where the cause of death is already "relatively certain," based upon other clinical findings. "It is a very difficult time in medicine right now, because so much is not known about the AIDS virus and autopsies," he says. He adds that there is not a single known case in the country where a coroner or pathologist has become infected, however, and that his office has performed "many hundreds" of complete autopsies on bodies that were HIV-positive.
Upon hearing the details of Rob Roemhildt's death, these coroners, including Stephens, also said they didn't understand why an autopsy wasn't performed. "How did they justify natural death without opening up the body?" asks Lee Snellings, supervisor of the coroner's office in Riverside County, California. "I would never let any of my deputies get away with not autopsying a case like that."
Some of the coroners add that their willingness to autopsy Roemhildt would not have depended on whether foul play was suspected, the point that lay at the heart of the debate over Roemhildt's missing penis. Their decision would have been the same if the man's body had been completely intact, simply because no one knew why Roemhildt had died.
The only coroner who agrees with Walker's choice is Karnitschnig himself.
And so the people who took care of Roemhildt after his death are satisfied, and the ones who cared for him during his life are not. They had thought he would break their hearts by dying, but they hadn't anticipated the larger pain of never knowing for sure whether someone killed him. "Naturally, we were expecting something bad to happen, but this was such a hollow, inconclusive thing," says Don Roemhildt, who was Rob's uncle.
Brenda Caymen scattered her friend's ashes off the Beeline Highway, 4.5 miles from Gilbert Road, on the east side of a mountain. She has tried to quit turning the facts about Roemhildt's death over in her mind. "Finally, I just had to stop," she says. "You can become consumed with this."
Rob was in his doctor's office only two days before he died and was found to be in fine shape.
Brenda didn't know that a murder investigation as such would never be conducted.
What about the man who wanted to be his lover and grew angry when Rob refused?
She can't help wondering: If you want to get away with murder, should you kill someone with AIDS?
"They just lifted the sheet and looked at him and said, `Yeah, he's dead.'"
They couldn't believe that no one had offered them the option of having a private autopsy performed.
"If the information you gave me right now was in front of me on my desk, I would be calling the coroner's office right now, saying, `Let's do an autopsy.'"
"Our doctors would rather not expose themselves to AIDS, but it's an occupational hazard.
