Mystery and death
An account of the working life of a Palmerston North pathologist lifts the veil on some of the most horrific and baffling crimes that have rocked the lower North Island. Alister Browne reports on author Cynric Temple-camp’s findings.
When death comes, it comes in ways that are a never-ending surprise. The range and nature of some of these surprises are explored by Cynric Templecamp in a book that tells tales from the past 30 years after the Palmerston North pathologist moved from Zimbabwe to New Zealand.
Right from the start there is a puzzle: On his first day in the job at Palmerston North Hospital he was summoned to the Foxton cemetery to do an exhumation – something he’d never carried out before.
It seems the police thought someone had been unlawfully tampering with a body. To cut a longish story short, it turned out to be nothing more sinister than an issue of vivisepulture, accidental burial of a live person, and taphophobia, a fear of being buried alive, where a man wrongly thought his buried wife wasn’t dead. For Temple-camp, the exhumation was another first as well. It was, he wrote, his first case of forensic psychopathy – that is, dealing with the personalities, as opposed to the study of a sample slide in a laboratory, the more mundane and common preoccupation of a pathologist.
It set Temple-camp on a course that engrossed him throughout the following decades as he pondered a procession of ‘‘suspicious’’ deaths, which challenged but also fascinated him – where ‘‘something looks odd’’. He soon found there was something about such deaths that tested him in a way that no others could. ‘‘You soon learn to expect the unexpected from the dead – and the living,’’ he said. For it’s not just a matter of dealing with the dead – there is also the living who are left behind.
The pathologist, he says – and he means it, for it is a theme of his book – is the last advocate of the dead. ‘‘We sing their song.’’
‘‘I’m intrigued by the behaviour of people. It’s not just the pathology.’’
The book, he says, grew out of this when he got to thinking about the sights he had seen. Aptly, there is often a rural flavour to his cases.
Take the second one in the book, in an attention-grabbing chapter titled The Naked Woman. A woman had been stripped and apparently beaten to death in a paddock close to the control tower at the airport. A frenzied attack, Temple-camp thought. The police, through the redoubtable Detective Sergeant Doug Brew, as he was then, evidently suspected otherwise, but didn’t share their misgivings with Temple-camp. Rather, he was let loose to do some figuring out of his own, prompted by clues from the police, which led to a conclusion that eventually satisfied all parties. It wasn’t a homicide, but it sure was suspicious for a while.
One more from the book, in a chapter called A Touch of Madness: This time it was the death of a recluse in an isolated house near Pongaroa. He had a bullet hole between his eyes. Only, it turned out, it wasn’t, so Templecamp’s examination in search of a cause went on. Sure enough, he got to the bottom of things, and another would-be violent crime morphed into something else.
So it goes on throughout the book, reflecting the trajectory of Temple-camp’s career, from a spontaneous combustion to the proverbial body in a locked room – something for every mystery aficionado.
Temple-camp repeats his main point: The job, he says, is satisfying the needs of the living as well as offering a cause for the death of a loved one. Nothing could be worse, he says, than hearing at the end of the process that a coroner’s verdict of death was from unknown causes.
That was one of the reasons he was pleased to be vindicated in the famous ‘‘speck of brain tissue’’ on Mark Lundy’s shirt at the end of the drawn-out murder trial saga. It was the ‘‘killer blow’’ to the defence case, he wrote.
Another reason it mattered was that the upholding of his identification of the tissue also upheld the critical value of the pathological evidence to the case. As far as he was concerned brain tissue was a basic that a medical student could identify and that was the end of it.
But not until world experts agreed on what the tissue was, conclusions that supported Temple-camp’s findings, was the Lundy case as good as closed.
You get the feeling that Templecamp had to bite his tongue and resist the temptation to interject and holler ‘‘bad science’’ while watching from the public gallery what was being said at the Lundy appeal hearing before the Privy Council in London.
He said some ‘‘bizarre assertions’’ were made by the defence, during which he felt his reputation was being impugned. It was all lawyers and there was no right of cross-examination.
He cites approvingly what murder mystery novelist Val Mcdermid had to say in her one non-fiction work, The Anatomy of Crime: ‘‘If it suits the lawyers’ narrative they will undermine first a scientist’s testimony and then their good name.’’
But when it comes to dealing with bodies, those of children are most likely to breach a pathologist’s emotional defences, Temple-camp says. His book has examples of several such cases, running the gamut of sudden infant death to horrific accident and deliberately inflicted injury.
A pathologist builds up ‘‘a degree of immunisation’’ in such cases, helped sometimes by a dose of black humour, he says. But there is burnout and only in recent years have health and safety regulations come to the aid of pathologists and those who work with them, such as mortuary assistants, with help and support.
Temple-camp says the book was born out of the realisation that compelling stories passed through his hands nearly every week.
It had been done before in New Zealand, once in 1970, but what he first had in mind was a James Herriot-like semi-fictionalised account of some of his cases.
Then a publisher suggested a narrative account and 10 years on, and after ensuring families and loved ones of those named agreed with his intentions, The Cause of Death was completed.
Death really is, like taxes, always with us. But for a pathologist and those who work with him or her, it is more than a constant companion, for it is also a problem to be solved for the sake of the living.
For ‘‘suspicious’’ death, read unexplained. It becomes the pathologist’s task to then explain what happened and why.
Mostly it is a relatively straightforward exercise, but as Temple-camp’s book demonstrates, when it isn’t, almost anything can happen.
Moreover, Temple-camp writes: ‘‘The stories of those who have died must be told, for they will enrich us all, as it is only in death that we find some meaning to our lives.
‘‘By knowing and understanding death, so too may we also come to know and understand ourselves.’’
Ample justification, surely, if such is needed, for this book.
The Cause of Death, Harpercollins, $40. Royalties go to the Palmerston North Helicopter Rescue Trust.
‘‘I’m intrigued by the behaviour of people. It’s not just the pathology.’’