A heartfelt tribute to Havis Hester
During his long tenure in office, Havis Hester became such a regular figure in the newsroom that a new hire could be forgiven for thinking him a stringer instead of by his actual title: Jefferson County coroner.
A gentle, soft-spoken man, Havis did not act like an elected official, perhaps because he held an office almost nobody else wanted, and most people didn’t even want to think about. — Grandma didn’t get up today? Call Havis.
— A deadly knife fight at a backwoods juke joint? Call Havis. — A fisherman fell off his boat and didn’t resurface? Call Havis (and the divers).
— A head-on collision out on the highway? Call Havis.
— Some fool tried to race a train and lost? Havis, to be sure. His was a thankless job, dealing with death day in and day out. Always on call, day or night. It’s a wonder the man ever found any time to sleep.
Yet Havis filled that job, with compassion for grieving relatives who’d lost loved ones, and looking for answers where there was little more than another puzzle of how or why. He did it daily, for that is what the job required, and he was a man dedicated to his job.
After the fiber of his chosen profession had grown threadbare, he finally decided to retire. When a reporter asked him what had been the most memorable case of his career, his answer was quick and sure: the mummy.
A couple of kids on the west side of town had been passing an abandoned house when they noticed a really bad smell. They told a parent, who called authorities, and a cop was sent to check it out. Inside the vacant house, he found mummified remains on a bed.
The cop called it in; dispatch told him to secure the scene and wait for Havis.
What the coroner found was simple enough: a dead man lying in his bed. That was the only simple thing about it, though, and piecing together the backstory required some sleuthing on par with anything from “CSI.”
Working with detectives and available resources, they eventually deduced the most likely chain of events: The man had been mowing his lawn on a hot summer day. Hot and tired, he shut off the mower and went to lay on his bed, with two electric fans trained on him to cool him off. He never got up.
The fans did their job, though, and dried the sweat, then kept blowing, night and day, weeks on end, as they dried any secretions, and kept all insects at bay.
After a few months, with utility bills long overdue, a worker was sent to shut off power, and the fans finally stopped. Summer had ended, though, and cooler temperatures had set in to hinder decay, which they did until spring. Warm weather reinvigorated bacterial action, which led to the stench that finally brought to attention the old man’s fate.
Puzzle solved, the coroner could finally release the body to a funeral home for a long delayed burial, with no need to embalm.
This was the case that would shine brightest in Havis’s memories of his long career, and one that would cinch his place in our city’s history.
D.H. Ridgway, a former copydesk editor for the Pine Bluff Commercial, lives in Pine Bluff.