01x04 - The Mystery of the Haunted Crossing

[bunniefuu]

[OMINOUS MUSIC]

[THEME MUSIC]

NARRATOR A grisly discovery at a railroad crossing

marks the beginning of a mystery that

will go unsolved for years.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA All I had is some decomposed muscle.

It was pretty much all skeletonized.

NARRATOR Ghost stories, witchcraft, and a little girl

crying m*rder muddy the waters in a case

where even the most basic questions are puzzles.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA We didn't see a penis.

We didn't see a vag*na.

There was no internal organs.

You couldn't see the sex.

NARRATOR Can Dr. G find the evidence needed

to put a k*ller behind bars?

Then Henry Clark drops dead moments after coming home

from the store.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA The groceries

were still in the plastic bag.

He never put them away.

NARRATOR Were warning signs overlooked?

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA We've got some funny marks

here that look like a needle puncture marks in his left arm.

NARRATOR And could his death have been prevented?

Altered lives, baffling medical mysteries,

shocking revelations, these are the everyday cases

of "Dr. G, Medical Examiner."

When Dr. G begins work on an autopsy,

she's often driven by a sense of responsibility to the living.

Again, I'm so sorry.

NARRATOR But medical examiners must also use their expertise

to help the deceased themselves, to right a wrong,

to bring a k*ller to justice.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA The core function of medical examiner's

to always be suspicious that there's not

foul play involved in the death, that a homicide

isn't being missed.

That's going to be our core function.

But it's really kind of why we exist.

I mean, honestly, if it was just to diagnose

heart disease in the community, we probably wouldn't be funded.

I mean the bottom line.

NARRATOR That is precisely the service Dr. G was called on

to perform in while she was serving as a medical examiner

in Bear County, Texas.

The investigation launched that summer became known as The Case

of the Haunted Rail Crossing.

In August of that year at a rural San

Antonio railway crossing, a dog picks up a scent.

Investigating, it finds a pile of bones, human bones.

Under the searing heat of the Texas sun,

the skeleton is almost completely decomposed.

THERESE HUNTZINGER A dog had actually

picked up one of the skeletal bones

and brought it to the owner of the property up on the porch.

NARRATOR Realizing what his dog has brought home,

the owner immediately calls the police.

The body, or what's left of it, is carefully

collected by the field investigators

of the Bear County morgue.

Taking care to photograph the exact position of the bones

and then duplicating that placement in the body bag,

they are then brought to Dr. G, and they

come with a strange story.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA Initially we got

a call of a partially skeletonized body

out by the railroad tracks.

This is a very special area in that this railroad track

area was felt to be haunted.

NARRATOR Of course, a local superstition

doesn't concern Dr. G. The scarcity of remains do.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA I do some initial examination when all I

have is some decomposed muscle.

It was pretty much all skeletonized.

It starts very oddly in an oversized man's t-shirt,

I think some knit shorts of some type.

NARRATOR Dr. G's first order of business

is to try to identify the corpse's age and sex

and then match those facts to reports of missing persons.

As a person ages, the plates that make up

certain skeletal structures like the pelvis

and the humerus fuse.

By looking at the thickness of the fused areas,

Dr. G makes an educated guess at the age of the remains.

Relatively young.

I knew that, around years old,

but the sex was very difficult possibly

because they were so young.

NARRATOR Dr. G hopes that more physical remains are waiting

to be found, remains that could help determine the sex

and ID the partial body lying in her morgue.

She herself heads out to the supposedly haunted tracks.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA So I actually

went back out to the scene.

It's kind of like "Deliverance."

There was a kind of-- you know, on the porch

with these big dogs.

And it was actually the big dogs that discovered this body

because they brought the bones back to the guy on the porch
[ … ]

that one day.

So I'm in the car of my investigator,

and the dogs surround us.

And I'm thinking, oh, boy they've already

test tasted human flesh.

I'm not coming out.

So finally the guy from the porch

pulls the dogs away from the car.

We go out, look for some more teeth--

I was able to find those--

and hair and brought those back.

NARRATOR But even with the new evidence,

the secret of these bones stay secret.

Dr. G can't be sure how the person died.

We clean the bonds up then look very carefully for trauma.

We X-ray and couldn't find any trauma at the bones either.

NARRATOR Very little can be certain

with such partial remains even the body's sex.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA They just didn't have a lot

of good sexual characteristics.

This facial features were somewhat ambiguous.

No genitalia, that had been decomposed.

We didn't see a penis.

We didn't see a vag*na.

There is no internal organs.

You couldn't see the sex.

But we thought the DNA would be a good way to go.

Initial examination looked like it was a female to me,

so the autopsy report said--

and it is read as-- the skeleton looks female,

but DNA revealed that it was a male.

NARRATOR Based on skull structure,

an artist's sketch hints at what the male victim

may have looked like.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA I actually tried

to compare it to some other people who were missing.

Some people came in and said, oh,

looks like this person or that person, and none of those

panned out.

We don't like it to be any more damaged.

So I just sat in our office for a long time.

We didn't identify it.

We didn't know who it was.

NARRATOR But some miles away,

a -year-old girl in a state youth center

thinks she knows who it is.

The girl is Sandra Rodriguez, recently

removed from an abusive home.

One night she sees a television news story about the discovery

of a dead body.

Sandra turns to her roommate casually and reportedly says--

Oh, I bet that's my sister Christie.

My mother m*rder*d her.

NARRATOR Sandra then begins to tell authorities in the shelter

a tale of neglect and abuse that begins over miles southwest

of San Antonio in Texas, where she lived with her older sister

Christie, her mother Elsie, and six

other adults in a house owned by her mother's cousin Linda.

RUBEN NOLASCO There's about nine people living there.

You're looking at about a -, -square foot home.

No doors.

You have curtains that are used for doors.

That house in my opinion needed cleaning from top to bottom.

It needed to be sanitized including

the people living there.

THERESE HUNTZINGER Sandra and Christie simply

had no life as young girls.

I think abused and neglected for much of their life.

No support.

No love at all.

EMMET HARRIS I know that from time to time

the children would be so hungry, they'd

have to go down and rummage around the dumpster.

And the children did a lot of the shopping for the home,

and by that I mean the cousin would give them

the list of what she wanted and they

were ordered to go steal it.

NARRATOR According to their mother's attorney,

it was a dysfunctional household.

What's more, according to the authorities,

Sandra suggested that her mother Elsie had been under the thumb

of her cousin Linda, who Sandra says

had sadistic ideas about disciplining the children.

EMMET HARRIS If a child ate something or drank something

they weren't supposed to do without this cousin's

permission, cousin would make the child consume

so many jalapeno peppers that the child would regurgitate

would throw up, vomit.

And then the cousin would make the child consume the vomit.

If Elsie committed some sin according to the cause,

she would be the subject of similar treatment.

THERESE HUNTZINGER The physical abuse was immense.

It involved everything from burning,

boiling water, scalding burns, just very torturous things,

and which included the use of a staple g*n.

NARRATOR Sandra tells the authorities that she suffered

deeply from the abuse, but it was her older sister Christie

who always got the worst of it.

MIGUEL HERNANDEZ There was another deal

I think where Christie was picked up by a EMS.
[ … ]

She'd been beat in the face, the head,

and she was left out in the street in the nude.

And she was hospitalized for some time.

She was black and blue.

Her entire torso was black and blue.

NARRATOR At the time, Elsie claimed

that her -year-old daughter Christie had

been beaten up by a boyfriend.

Now Sandra, telling her version of the event,

says Christie was in fact beaten by their mother.

Then in the final part of the girl's epic tale,

she tells authorities that it was

after another violent incident when her mother beat

her sister with a hammer that Christie fell unconscious

and died.

Sandra claims she herself was enlisted to help

dispose of her sister's body.

RUBEN NOLASCO They dragged the body outside,

and they wash it down with a water hose

and change her clothes, put it in the back seat of the car.

And then that's when they proceed to San Antonio

to dump the body.

To the actual site, I guess you're

looking maybe at two hours.

It's not a coincidence in my opinion

that Elsie chose to dump her body at the location

of the railroad tracks, which had been considered in San

Antonio folklore to have been haunted,

that these were haunted tracks.

I mean, imagine being a -year-old,

having witnessed your mother k*ll your sister

and to put her in the back seat of a car

and go with her miles with the mother to dump the body.

Go back to that same house to live--

the fear that she had to have been experiencing to know

that she couldn't say anything.

NARRATOR Now removed from the house

of horrors for the first time, Sandra is finally talking.

But in a cruel twist, the young girl

who police know from their patrols around the neighborhood

has a hard time being taken seriously.

THERESE HUNTZINGER Then you have a police department

that doesn't believe her statement

because it's too incredible.

It's just-- it's not the kind of thing

you confront or see very often and particularly not

in a small town.

NARRATOR Compounding their suspicion,

Sandra's mother and other adults in the house

tell police that Sandra is lying.

They claim that there was no m*rder

and that Christie has run away with her boyfriend.

Police buy the mother's version of the story.

THERESE HUNTZINGER They believed

that she was lying to cover for her sister Christie.

NARRATOR Then faced with disbelief

and possible retribution from her family, Sandra back pedals.

And I guess about an hour and a half in the interview,

Sandra recanted and said that everything that she had said

was just a lie, and she wanted to get

her mother in trouble for what she had

put her and Christie through.

NARRATOR What's more, police don't contact Dr. G's morgue

because the only body found at the tracks

is male, at least according to the DNA test.

So even with the girl's claims, the box of bones in Dr.

G's morgue sits unidentified.

Is Sandra's recanted claim a call for help?

Will Dr. G be able to tell whether the bones are really

her sister Christie or whether the girl is lying

to get back at her mother?

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA The body was dumped

in that exact location where we found this skeleton,

and she was around .

Well, that's a little coincidental.

NARRATOR And later on "Dr. G, Medical Examiner,"

Henry Clark doesn't show up for work.

Checking his apartment, his horrified friend discovers why.

Can Dr. G tell what happened on Henry's last night?

Nearly two years have passed since Dr. G first

tried to identify the skeletonized remains

of a teenager found at a railroad

crossing said to be haunted.

And for nearly as long, police have

been unable to validate the claim of -year-old Sandra

Rodriguez, who said her sister was m*rder*d and dumped

by those same tracks.

But Sandra now hasn't kept quiet.

Encouraged by an aunt, she begins

repeating her accusations to anyone who will listen.

Ultimately Texas Department of Public Safety

is called in to aid police.

Special juvenile investigator Sergeant Ruben Nolasco

pays another visit to Sandra's family.

[KNOCKING]

RUBEN NOLASCO I remember going to Christie's house,

and I spoke with the aunt there.

And the feeling that I got was really, a really cold feeling.

You know, you expect to see photos of children.

There's not one single picture hanging
[ … ]

on that wall of Christie.

So I asked her if she had any photographs.

And I'll never forget that she went into the kitchen,

and in one of the cabinets, she pulls out a Bible.

And in the Bible, she had a little picture of Christie,

and that's a picture that they gave me.

And it just--

I stop and think about it and just--

you know, why would she have a picture

of Christie there and nothing, you know, in the living room?

NARRATOR While the family members still

claim that Christie simply ran away,

Nolasco starts checking out the details of Sandra's

version of what happened.

When he does, the trail leads right to Dr. G's morgue.

Police called.

They said we have a girl that says her sister was m*rder*d

by the mother and that the body was

brought up to the railroad tracks

where supposedly the spirits live.

I said, yes, we have a case like that brought in from that area.

And he goes, yes, but I hear, you know, you have a male.

I said that's what with the DNA showed,

but it looked like a female.

Certainly bring what you have and let's

see if we can identify it.

NARRATOR But Dr. G faces an enormous challenge.

Christie had never been taken to a dentist,

so even though Dr. G found teeth with the remains,

there is no record to compare them to.

And while Christie had been fingerprinted by police

after being arrested for petty theft,

the remains have no flesh, no fingerprints to check.

Ironically, when the priceless bit of evidence

does finally surface, it comes from the hospital files

started on Christie after an earlier

incident of reported abuse.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA She'd never been to the dentist, which

is the easiest way to identify somebody,

but she had been in the hospital not very long before she died,

several months before she died in the hospital

from being beaten.

And they couldn't find any internal broken bones.

But they did a lot of x-rays looking for them,

and that was to my advantage because they

did a lot of skull X-rays.

Now I had her skull, and one of the things we can do

is match the pattern of the frontal sinuses.

As it turned out, that was the only way we could identify her.

NARRATOR In the human skull, the edging

and shape of the sinus cavities are unique to every individual.

The uniqueness of our sinus that exists

is as unique as is a fingerprint or DNA according to the doctor."], index ,…}

You can make a positive identification

strictly on that.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA So we took a X-ray of our skull

and compared it to the X-ray that was taken of this girl,

and they matched perfectly.

NARRATOR Dr. G has her proof.

She is certain that what was found at the railroad

tracks were the remains of Christie Rodriguez.

But what about the DNA test?

It said the remains are male.

It's a contradiction that could destroy a prosecution's case.

The case sat for a long time because I believe

some of the prosecutors were afraid to go ahead

prosecute because they felt these were

all problems with the case.

NARRATOR For the case to go to trial,

Dr. G would have to explain what went wrong with the DNA test.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA Whether it was a tissue mix up,

whether it was contamination--

NARRATOR And how could the blows of a hammer

have been fatal if there was no evidence

of broken bones or trauma?

Using X-rays of sinus cavity bones,

Dr. G has proven that skeletonized remains found

near a fabled haunted railway crossing

was in fact the body of a missing possibly m*rder*d

girl, Christie Rodriguez.

According to the dead girl's sister,

Sandra, Christie died after a beating

at the hands of her own mother.

Well, this case is always stuck in my mind.

I mean, it was just such a difficult case.

When I heard what the poor girl had to go through in her life,

it was very sad.

I found it appalling that once the poor girl is dead,

they put her in the back seat and drive

her into my jurisdiction to be by those railroad tracks.

NARRATOR Armed with a positive ID

and the accusations from Christie's -year-old sister

Sandra the police arrest Elsie Rivera, Christie's mother.

During the trial, Elsie admits beating

her daughter with a hammer.

But according to her attorney, she was

influenced by her cousin Linda.

The cousin and her mother, according to Elsie,

were spooky.

They dabbled in what some people might refer to as witchcraft.
[ … ]

She was terrified of these people.

She felt powerless to do anything about it.

NARRATOR At trial, Sandra adds details

to the account of parental abuse but paints

a more complex picture of her mother's as*ault on her sister.

EMMET HARRIS Yes, her mother did hit her with a hammer,

and her mother went to sleep.

But Christie was still alive, and Christie

was not screaming or otherwise visibly in distress.

NARRATOR Police officers are ordered

to arrest cousin Linda as well.

But as the investigation proceeds,

the case takes a turn.

Authorities have exhausted their leads

and can find no other support for bringing

a case against Linda.

There was nothing that could be proven against her directly

to show that she either participated in the m*rder

with Elsie or encouraged Elsie to do it.

We simply didn't have that evidence.

NARRATOR Linda would never be charged by police

for any of the alleged abuse.

But prosecutors proceeded with their case against Elsie.

As the case approaches trial, Dr. G turns her attention

to the prosecution attempting to overcome a forensic roadblock.

The DNA test initially done indicated

that the remains were male.

That could prove to be a foothold for the defense.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA We never figured

out what went wrong with that.

What happened? We don't know.

There are a lot of possibilities,

and I don't have the final answer on that.

Was that a bad test?

We know that test was wrong.

NARRATOR To prove the first test was incorrect,

Dr. G orders another.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA When we did another test later on,

she came out as not having a Y chromosome,

that she was a female, xx.

NARRATOR Mother Elsie goes on trial in June .

The key witness is Sandra, who testified

that she witnessed the fatal as*ault

and helped dispose of the body.

But equally vital on the stand is

Dr. G. Medical examiners have to be

both scientists and teachers.

They must seek out the medical facts

and then explain them in simple terms

to juries of ordinary citizens.

Christie's identity is only part of what

Dr. G must prove to the jury.

According to Sandra, the only witness to the fatal as*ault,

Christie was beaten repeatedly with a hammer.

So why don't the remains have a single broken bone?

It's a fundamental question that could make or break

the prosecution's case.

EMMET HARRIS The skull of Christie had no fracture.

How'd Christie died as a result of the hammer blow

from the mother and not have a fractured skull,

I'm not a doctor.

I can't tell you that.

NARRATOR Without any internal organs,

determining precisely how Christie died

is an impossible question.

But incredibly the same hospital admission

that generated the X-rays used to identify Christie

comes into play again.

That hospital visit months before her m*rder was also

as a result of a severe beating, and it,

too, produced no broken bones.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA And so I had a review very carefully

a previous medical chart to see what kind of injuries she had

and compare that to what we found.

And it was very eerie that neither one any bones

are broken even though she supposedly

is beaten about the head and about the abdomen.

The only thing that they found was this subcapsular

hematoma on the spleen.

NARRATOR The spleen, which sits just below the stomach,

is a fragile organ responsible for cleaning old blood cells

from the circulatory system.

The hematoma found by doctors on Christie's spleen

was a kind of blood blister that resulted

from her first beating.

I certainly don't have any spleen,

but I could opine that another blow to the abdomen

certainly could have caused that spleen to rupture.

NARRATOR This final piece of evidence

is just what the prosecution is looking

for as a ruptured spleen could most certainly

trigger a fatal scenario.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA If you rupture the spleen,

the spleen's going to keep bleeding,

and you can bleed to death internally.

Very common way in some of our car accidents

where people can die.

The spleen gets torn, and you bleed internally.

NARRATOR After Dr. G's testimony,

the jury is left to weigh the medical evidence.
[ … ]

I think the jury understood that you can die from a hammer

without leaving any marks on the bones.

And I was very pleased that I think they understood all that.

NARRATOR The jury understood it well enough to convict

Christie's mother of m*rder.

THERESE HUNTZINGER She was sentenced

to years in prison.

In Texas law, you can either get life or years

is a maximum sentence.

In this instance, I thought was a particularly good number,

and that's how many miles she drove exactly to the location

where she dumped the body.

NARRATOR The end of the long saga brings some comfort,

but the impact of this emotional case

is not lost on those involved.

RUBEN NOLASCO It's a hard lesson,

and unfortunately I had to learn it that way.

But because of that, it made me better at what I do now.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA That case lived with me for a long,

long time until it got resolved, and I'm very thankful

for [INAUDIBLE] that she was--

she had the guts enough to take that on and prosecute it.

NARRATOR Coming up, the sudden death of a father of two.

So we see blood where it's not supposed to be here.

NARRATOR What warning does his cause

of death hold for others, when "Dr. G, Medical Examiner"

continues.

No matter what the circumstances, the end of life

is traumatic.

Homicides make headlines, but sudden death

often starts out as a mystery.

It's AM on a February Monday morning,

and the desk of Henry Clark is still empty.

It is not like him to be late, and his boss

calls Henry at home.

He gets no answer.

Henry Clark is a well-liked car salesman, and the -year-old

divorced father of two.

Like / of American adults, Clark is overweight,

but he's never been diagnosed with a major illness

and has never voiced any serious complaints about his health.

I think over the past years,

I've seen many more obese problems coming through.

We're exercising less.

We're eating like we're gonna--

you know, we're saving it for the famine,

and now we're not exercising.

It's just-- you know, it's bound to cause problems.

NARRATOR After his employer calls and gets no response,

Henry's girlfriend lets herself into his apartment.

On the kitchen table, she finds a bag

full of groceries yet unopened.

And then on the floor near the bed,

she sees Henry half undressed and not breathing.

She calls the police.

Henry's pronounced dead on the scene.

Without any explanation as to how Henry Clark died,

the case becomes the business of the Orange

County Medical Examiner's Office, Doctor G's office.

We received a call from the Orlando police department

concerning a young Black male gentleman who collapsed

in his apartment, and they requested

the medical examiner investigator to respond

to his apartment complex.

NARRATOR Doctor G's field investigator

Jack Cuccia is dispatched to the scene

and begins to look for clues with an investigator's trained

eye.

JACK CUCCIA There was nothing that would indicate that we

needed to be concerned of any foul play or anything

of suspicious nature.

We treated the case as an apparent natural.

We just want to make sure that he didn't indulge

in too much alcoholic beverage that perhaps contributed

to his death or any type of recent meal

that possibly would be concerned about an apparent choking

effect pertaining to this case.

Do I smell Vicks?

Oh, you little woosies.

NARRATOR In his investigation, Jack Cuccia

learns that the police have turned up a witness

and an important clue.

A neighbor informs police that on the previous evening,

she encountered Henry struggling up the stairs to his apartment,"], index ,…}

his arms full of groceries.

He was dizzy and distressed and complained of a headache.

JACK CUCCIA She assisted him in the apartment

with the groceries, and she left him alone because he apparently"], index ,…}

stated that he was OK.

NARRATOR Tragically both Henry and his neighbor were wrong.

Henry was in trouble.

But what kind?

Jack Cuccia brings the body to the medical examiner's office

and checks it in for Dr. G. His report, which will help

Dr. G begin her investigation, is mostly a list

of a few details known so far.

So what we have is a -year-old Black male.

He's divorced.

He has a daughter.

He's a non-smoker, non-drinker, no history of drug abuse,
[ … ]

no arrests.

This alone seems like, you know, clean cut guy.

He's already in complete rigor, which

goes along with the muscles in his body have tensed up.

That goes along with that he's probably been

there about at least hours.

NARRATOR Dr. G also determines that Henry

Clark weighs about pounds.

At a body height of foot , that means

Henry is technically obese.

Did his excess weight contribute to Henry's untimely death?

So let's see.

So he's got some nice dress pants on.

NARRATOR Dr. G notes an abrasion on the face.

Little abrasion on his nose.

NARRATOR In addition, lividity, or collected blood in the face,"], index ,…}

shows Dr. G that he died face down.

Just, you know, gives you little hints.

NARRATOR Dr. G's next discovery is

one that's often associated with sudden death, intravenous drug

use.

Well, we've got what looks like three little needle

puncture marks in his left arm.

So that raises, you know, a little bit of suspicion.

What's going on there?

Supposedly no history of illicit drug use.

NARRATOR But according to family and acquaintances,

Henry Clark had no history of drug abuse

and was in normal health.

It looks like there's a good chance Dr. G will have

to let the internal organs tell the tale

of Henry Clark's death.

Well, we just need one of those.

Right.

NARRATOR But just before she begins the internal autopsy,

she notices something about the thickness of Henry's legs

and decides to measure them.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA When I looked at his legs,

they looked asymmetric to me.

They don't look the same size.

So we're now measuring it to see if I'm off or if I'm accurate.

And I'm accurate.

One was ., and this half is .

Now one of the things that could be is that he might have--

does this one also has some edema.

He might have a blood clot in his leg.

And this blood clot might have gone up to his lungs

like a deep vein thrombosis, and that would cause a difference

in the size of this leg.

So . versus , that's pretty significant.

NARRATOR In the swollen veins of the legs,

a blood clot forms.

It can then break free and travel through the bloodstream

to the lungs.

Once the large clot lodges in the lungs,

it blocks blood from flowing into the alveoli,

preventing them from picking up oxygen.

This lethal blockage of the lungs

is called a pulmonary embolism.

We can just kind of think about what

it could be from his history of complaining about the headache.

We've got some asymmetric legs going on down here.

Maybe it's pulmonary embolism.

The headache had nothing to do with it.

Maybe it's just a heart attack.

We don't know.

NARRATOR And the only way for Dr. G to find out

would be with an internal exam.

OK, right now we've already cut open the abdomen.

I don't see anything too remarkable.

We'll look at each individual organ.

NARRATOR First stop, the heart.

Right away Dr. G could see that this heart is abnormal.

This heart is big.

It's over grams.

Normal heart should be in the upper s on him.

Oh, I can tell by just his heart,

it looks like he's got high blood pressure.

So we've got one little piece of evidence going along with that."], index ,…}

NARRATOR Under the stress of high blood pressure,

the human heart must pump harder and harder

to force the blood through the veins

at the proper speed and volume.

For the heart, this is like working out at the gym all day

every day.

As a result, the heart gradually expands just

like a weightlifter's bicep.

But this heart does not hold all the answers.

Although it has gotten pumped up to nearly

twice its normal size, there is no sign of a heart attack.

Yeah, I looked already.

There was none there.

NARRATOR So what k*lled Henry Clark?

When "Dr. G, Medical Examiner" continues,

Henry's case may serve as a wake up call for the living.

It is common, but most of the people make it to the hospital.

[SIRENS WAILING]

NARRATOR -year-old Henry Clark complained of a headache

while climbing the stairs to his apartment

and as far as the evidence shows died only minutes later.
[ … ]

Dr. G has definitively ruled out a heart attack

as the cause of death, but her dissection

of Henry Clark's respiratory system is not yet complete.

She must still examine his lungs.

Given that one of Henry's legs is and / inches thicker

than the other, Dr. G suspects that he may have died

from a pulmonary embolism, a deadly blood

clot that forms in the legs and travels to the lungs.

The fact that Henry Clark is medically obese

is also a risk factor for a pulmonary embolism.

But when Dr. G looks at Henry Clark's lungs closely,

she is surprised to find no signs of trouble.

Well, his pulmonary arteries appear to be fine,

and I don't think the next interesting thing

will be until we get his head.

NARRATOR Henry Clark is becoming a serious puzzle.

He has clear signs of high blood pressure

but no sign of heart attack or a blood clot in the lungs.

And there's just one clear symptom he described--

his headache.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA He was having trouble

getting his groceries up to the second floor

and complained to his neighbor he was having a headache.

I mean, we don't know why he died.

He's just a guy that doesn't look

like he's going to the doctor.

We don't know anything about his medical history.

NARRATOR There's only one place left to look,

and if it doesn't have the answers,

this death may go unsolved.

OK, so he's ready to go for the head.

OK.

NARRATOR Dr. G's assistant, Jeanne Conus,

uses the cranial saw to open the skull.

Dr. G then steps in to remove the brain.

There at last at the base of the brain

is her biggest clue, a pool of blood.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA So we see blood where

it's not supposed to be here.

We're seeing a little bit of blood leaking out,

a hemorrhagic stroke.

NARRATOR Closer examination confirms it,

a hemorrhagic stroke.

An artery leading into Henry Clark's brain

is weakened from the stress of years of high blood pressure.

Eventually a pinpoint rupture leaks,

detouring blood away from its vital mission of carrying

oxygen to the brain.

It produces symptoms similar to a brain aneurysm, which

is a bleed on the outer portion of the brain caused

by a defect in a blood vessel.

OK, I think this case is solved.

He's got-- definitely got hypertensive changes.

Normally, I'll say it's a bleed in the brain

consistent with hypertension.

The bleed is without a doubt his cause of death.

NARRATOR It is a tragically common event

but not always fatal.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA It is common.

It is common, but most of the people make it to the hospital.

They have a loved one that sees them having problems.

What makes this man unusual is that he

had the hemorrhagic stroke, intracerebral

bleed while he's at home.

Nobody saw his symptomatology and didn't

rush him to the hospital.

NARRATOR But there's one left piece to the puzzle.

Drug use can sometimes sharply increase blood pressure.

Could the puncture marks on Henry's arms

that Dr. G found earlier have something

to do with his fatal stroke?

You always have to rule out that he's not on a stimulant

because stimulants like cocaine, amphetamine, methamphetamine

will cause your blood pressure to increase.

And certainly if he was on that type of drug

when he had the bleed, we would have

to have said that that played a role because that would have

increased his blood pressure.

In this case, he tested negative for any type of drug,

so we were very confident that this was a natural death.

NARRATOR Dr. G will never know the origin

of the puncture marks, but with toxicology negative,

she is certain that they are not from drug use.

Sadly Dr. G concludes that Henry's high blood pressure

was a simple health problem most likely made lethal by neglect.

It's not that the mystery of it-- of why he died.

It's how a little bit of health care could have helped-- really

helped this fella.

A little bit health care, a little bit

of high blood pressure medicine, instructions

on losing weight and exercising could

have really helped this fellow.

NARRATOR Now Dr. G can reconstruct the chain of events

leading to Henry Clark's collapse in his bedroom,

events stretching over years.

Earlier in his life, possibly when he was quite young,

Henry Clark developed high blood pressure or hypertension.

Although it is a common ailment, many of its causes

remain a mystery.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA You don't really know what causes it.
[ … ]

It's probably a mix of a lot of things-- genetic

and environmental, environmental meaning things you eat,

your lifestyle.

His weight certainly played a role.

People who are obese will have higher blood pressure.

NARRATOR Year by year, Henry's high blood pressure

erodes the strength of his blood vessels.

Beat by beat, his heart strains against the pressure,

becoming thicker, bigger.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA What happens is over time,

there are chronic changes to your small blood vessels

because of the high blood pressure.

And what they feel happens in the brain is there's probably

some of those vessels inside the brain

have weakened walls because of this chronic high blood

pressure, and eventually weakened walls

or bulge out and bleed.

NARRATOR On the night he returns from the grocery store,

these years of invisible pressure

finally reach their most dangerous point.

Henry Clark doesn't know it as he climbs the stairs,

but his headache is k*lling him.

An artery at the base of his brain

bursts, and blood slowly hemorrhages out,

depriving the brain of oxygen.

While undressing in his bedroom, Henry Clark collapses and never"], index ,…}

regains consciousness.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA High blood pressure is a silent k*ller.

He didn't even know he had it.

And yet all of a sudden, you can have this unbelievably

devastating effect from something

you didn't even know you had.

NARRATOR It is an end that came too soon

for a tragically simple reason.

If there's a lesson to be learned from this case,

it's get your checkup.

Make sure you know what your blood pressure is

because it is a silent k*ller.

NARRATOR For Dr. G, Henry Clark is symbolic of a problem

with health in America.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA Here's the problem with obesity.

With all these really morbidly obese people,

their hearts are huge.

It's a tremendous pressure on your heart

because you've got the heart of a normal person inside of you,

and then all of a sudden there's miles and miles

of extra blood vessels.

NARRATOR It's a problem on which

Dr. G has a unique and chilling perspective.

DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA I've never seen an obese old, old person.

If you're really morbidly obese, you're not

going to make it to old age.

You have a tremendous number of complications

associated with that obesity besides the hypertension--

the elevated cholesterol, the heart disease,

increased risks of all sorts of different kinds of cancer.

They just don't make it to old age.

[THEME MUSIC PLAYING]

Atlas.