10 Postmortem Surprises

Copyright 2016 by Gary L. Pullman

We think we know others, but do we really? In some cases, we may spend years with someone else, only to learn he or she kept a lifelong secret. Other times, causes of death come under suspicion. Secrets of the past are revealed. Unknown facts about prominent people come to light. Postmortem events, whether autopsies, examinations, embalming, testimony, research, or psychological investigation, are often full of surprises. Here are 10 such cases.

10 Billy Tipton (1914-1989)

Jazz musician Billy Tipton kept a secret all his life. Married, he adopted three sons. His oldest, Scott Miller, said his father, after refusing to see a doctor, died “tired and broke.” Funeral director Donald Ball broke the news about Tipton to his family to prevent their learning it from his death certificate. Jon Clark, said, “He'll always be Dad,” despite Tipton's having been born a female. His last wife, Kitty Oakes, surmised Tipton masqueraded as a man to better his chance of success in the male-dominated music business.

Born Dorothy Lucille Tipton, she moved in with her aunt in Kansas City, Missouri, after her parents divorced. In high school, she started playing the saxophone and the piano, calling herself “Tippy.” In 1934, she started dressing as a man, eventually adopting the persona of Billy Lee Tipton. Tipton claimed, over the years, to have been married to five women.

Drummer Dick O'Neil, said some fans commented on Tipton's appearance and high-pitched voice, suggesting he was too womanly to be a man. However, O'Neil said he himself “never suspected” the truth. If not to the grave, Tipton carried his secret as far, at least, as to the funeral home.

9 Junior Seau (1969-2012)

Famed San Diego Chargers linebacker Junior Seau's 2013 suicide shocked the world. Loved by many, Seau suffered from “mood swings, depression, forgetfulness, insomnia and detachment” prior to his death. His temper also sometimes got the better of him. Those closest to him were concerned, but they had no idea what caused his behavior to change.

In studying Seau's scarred brain, government and independent researchers reached the same verdict. “Neurofibrillary tangles” had effectively strangled his “brain cells.” Seau's family said the injuries were caused by “a lot of head-to-head collisions over the course of 20 years in the NFL.”

Seau's chronic traumatic encephalopathy, “a neurodegenerative disease,” could have caused the “dementia, memory loss and depression” he suffered from and may have played a role in his suicide. 

8 Kendrick Johnson (1996-2013)

Seventeen-year-old high school student Kendrick Johnson supposedly dove into a rolled-up wrestling mat “to retrieve a shoe.” His death was attributed to “positional asphyxiation,” implying he “suffocated as a result of being trapped upside-down in "the . . . mat.” Leery of these findings, his parents ordered their son's body exhumed, and a doctor they hired, Bill Anderson, found Kendrick's internal organs missing, replaced by newspapers. The organs were there, insisted the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), when their personnel conducted the “first autopsy.” Not so, said the funeral home that embalmed Kendrick's body: The organs were “destroyed through some natural process” before being “discarded” by the GBI. Possibly, the funeral home packed the body with newspaper for “display” purposes. The county sheriff refuses to reopen the case, although Anderson determined Kendrick died from blunt force trauma and “the manner of death was not accidental.”

7 Colonial Jamestown Girl (c. 1596-1610)

The winter of 1609-1610 was a hard one. Settlers in the colony of Jamestown, Virginia, were starving. Eighty percent died. To survive, some resorted to cannibalism. That's what the skull of a 14-year-old girl indicates, concluded Douglas Owsley, a forensic anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institute. The girl's “bone fragments” show a clumsy attempt was made “to dismember the body” and “remove the brain and flesh from the face for consumption.” Historians long suspected the colonists may have restored to cannibalism to survive the severe winter. The girl's remains prove their hypothesis. She was believed to have died prior to the other colonists' attempts to cannibalize her.

6 Zona Heaster Shue (1876-1897)

Partly on the basis of a ghost's testimony, Zona Heaster Shue's husband, Edward Stribbling “Trout” Shue, was convicted of killing her. The 1897 trial, conducted in West Virginia's Greenbrier Circuit Court, was the only time postmortem evidence was delivered by the dead victim herself. On the witness stand, Zona's mother, Mary Jane Shue, insisted God sent Zona to tell her what happened to her, and Zona appeared to her in a vision, wearing the same dress she'd worn when her husband strangled her and broke her neck, the fracture occurring between the first and second cervical vertebrae. Zona's ghost told Mary that Trout and she had argued the night he'd killed her.

Convinced by the ghost's testimony and alarmed by the confession of Dr. George Knapp, the coroner, that he hadn't performed a thorough autopsy on Zona's body, the prosecutor, John Preston, reopened the case. He discovered Trout had physically abused Zona. Three medical doctors performed a second autopsy, finding Zona had been strangled and her neck had been broken between the first and second cervical vertebrae, just as the ghost had claimed. Trout was sentenced to life in prison but died “three years later.”

5 Edward Archbold (1980-2012)

His 26^th cockroach clinched it. Thirty-two-year-old Edward Archbold won the ivory ball python grand prize, worth about $1,000, in a roach-eating contest sponsored by the Ben Siegel Reptile Store in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Shortly afterward, though, he was pronounced dead on arrival at a local hospital. Parts of the cockroaches he'd consumed, along with a side dish of wriggly worms, blocked his airway, and he succumbed to asphyxia. None of the other contestants had any problems. Authorities ruled his death an “accident.”

4 Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

AlbertEinstein's brain traveled quite a bit after the physicist's demise. As he performed the autopsy on Einstein's remains at Princeton Hospital, pathologist Thomas Harvey cut the genius' brain into 240 chunks, photographing them from various angles. In the 1980s, Harvey gave away chunks of the brain, storing the remainder “in a pair of cookie jars.”

A decade later, Harvey transported the bits and pieces “across the country in a Tupperware container,” presenting them to his granddaughter, who refused them. Harvey returned the chunks to Princeton Hospital, where they've continued to be examined. Their cells have been counted, their dimensions measured, and their shapes recorded. In seeking to fathom the source of Einstein's genius, “every deviation from the purported norm” has been studied. 

Scientists debate whether such examinations can produce any real results. Nevertheless, the postmortem examination of Einstein's brain has shown it “had extra cells called glia,” which are associated with “spatial relations and mathematics.” Others have found “an unusual configuration in the folds and grooves of Einstein's parietal lobes,” “a higher density of neurons” than normal, and an “unusually convoluted” Broca's area. These features may account for Einstein's early and great proficiency in mathematics, physics, and thought.

3 King Tutankhamun  (1341-1322 B. C.)

King Tutankhamun had buck teeth, a club foot, and “a girlish figure,” according to “an international team of researchers” who conducted a “virtual autopsy” based on 2,000 CT scans of his mummified remains. The autopsy disproves the theory Tut met his end in a chariot crash, since his club foot probably made him limp and required him to use a cane.

2 John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)

Problems with the autopsy performed on U. S. President John F. Kennedy cause some to doubt the official account of Lee Harvey Oswald's acting as a lone assassin. The president's body was whisked away, “illegally,” from Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Texas, to Bethesda, Maryland, where less experienced doctors performed the postmortem examination while their superiors looked on. The Bethesda doctors ignored their Parkland peers' advice to “explore the throat for a bullet,” even though a Parkland doctor had identified the throat wound as an entry wound. There was another discrepancy, too. The death certificate mentioned “an entry wound at the president's third thoracic vertebrae.” The Warren Commission later “moved that entry wound . . . 5 to 6 inches up to the base of the neck . . . . to account for a bullet that exited through the throat and caused further damage in the front seat to Texas Gov. John Connally.” Skeptics are convinced there's been a cover up and there was more than a single gunman.

1 Howard Hughes (1905-1976)

Psychologicalautopsies have no standing in court, but they're useful, psychologists believe, in ascertaining the probable cause of death in cases in which it's ambiguous. A panel of mental health experts examine the facts of the case and come to a consensus of opinion.

Such an autopsy showed financier Howard Hughes suffered from the delusion that only germs outside himself could be hazardous to his health. As a result, he obsessed over the cleanliness of others, taking extreme measures to ensure they didn't contaminate him, but he was lax about his own personal hygiene, which may have contributed to his death. His obsession developed, psychologists believe, from his mother's over-zealous concern for his health as a child. Her germophobia seemed to rub off on him.