CHAPTER
8
It was like a nightmarish scene from a Hollywood horror movie, but this was no ghoulish film set. Amazingly, it was really happening just outside Calgary’s city boundary. In the dead of night, lit only by flashlights, furtive figures dug a body out of a grave in a lonely cemetery. And right there, on the grass beside the black hole, a fully qualified forensic pathologist performed the most incredible autopsy ever done in all of Alberta, probably in all of Canada.
You can bet the authorities in Calgary didn’t know what was taking place that night. Only two men knew—the man who ordered the unofficial exhumation and the pathologist who secretly flew in from the United States to carry out this man’s macabre wishes.
The body raised from its resting place that night was that of an 84-year-old woman called Nora. She had died in the Calgary General Hospital on August 20, 1991. Hospital staff attributed her death to natural causes. This wasn’t questioned by the medical authorities, who knew she had heart problems, or by her family members—except for one. Her son Bert, then 54 years old, was convinced some dreadful mistake by the hospital had cost his mother her life, and he insisted an autopsy be carried out. He said it would reveal exactly where the hospital had gone wrong. Autopsies aren’t carried out on people who die of natural causes, so Calgary’s medical examiner’s office investigated every detail with Nora’s physicians and the hospital staff. Convinced everything possible had been done for her, they were satisfied she had died of natural causes and refused to agree to Bert’s demand for an autopsy.
Bert still disagreed. He turned to the courts and applied for a court-ordered autopsy to be undertaken, but the court turned him down as well. All this took time, and Nora’s body still hadn’t been buried. Most people who die naturally are buried in a few days at most. Finally, Calgary’s medical officer of health stepped in and ordered that Nora be buried. On September 11, 1991, more than three weeks after she died, Nora was laid to rest in the Pine Creek Cemetery at De Winton, just outside the city’s southern extremities.
But the medical examiner’s office hadn’t heard the last of Bert. He pressured staff so much that Alberta’s chief medical examiner, Dr. John Butt, contacted Okotoks RCMP. The Pine Creek Cemetery at De Winton was in their area, and Butt gave them an extraordinary warning. “Watch out,” he told them. “There’s a certain man who might go there one night and dig his mother up.”
That’s exactly what took place on the night of the Hollywood horror-movie scene. Nora hadn’t been buried two weeks when Bert carried out his secret plan. He had found a fully qualified forensic pathologist in private practice in Oregon who agreed to perform a midnight autopsy at the graveside for cash.
For $1,800 plus his airfare and a few other expenses, Dr. William Brady agreed to come to Calgary and assist Bert in what he wanted most: to reveal how his mother had really died. The RCMP couldn’t guard the cemetery every night, and on September 24, Bert and Dr. Brady carried out their ghoulish work unseen. Bert arrived complete with a makeshift coffin he knew he’d need later in the night. He even took photographs of the autopsy procedure so he would have evidence with which to confront the hospital.
It was all a great disappointment for him. The American pathologist could only confirm exactly what the hospital staff had said all along. Nora had died of natural causes. Before the sun came up, the two men placed Nora back in her grave for the second time. Bert, a painter and decorator who was skilled in carpentry, buried her this time in his homemade coffin. They then levelled the ground, hoping no one would know they had been there.
The Pine Creek Cemetery lay some distance from the main highway that leads south out of Calgary. This quiet little cemetery had been a serene and peaceful place ever since it was established in the early 1900s. So, what awaited the staff when they arrived at the cemetery the next day came as a terrible shock. As the morning sun rose in the sky, an unbelievable sight met their eyes. When Bert and his pathologist gravedigger had tried to level the ground in the dark they had driven all over other people’s graves and caused serious upheaval and damage.
“It was a dreadful mess,” said Ruth Hamilton, president of the cemetery management committee. Pretty soon the RCMP at Okotoks knew something macabre had taken place in the dead of night in the cemetery, and from Dr. Butt’s warning they had a good idea what it was and who had done it.
There was only one way for them to confirm if their worst fears had been realized. They would have to exhume Nora’s body and have her officially examined by the rightful authorities. This time Nora’s exhumation was carried out with proper decorum and decency by RCMP officers. Then they transported her remains to the medical examiner’s office in Calgary.
When he made his examination, it was obvious to Dr. Butt that what he had warned of had actually taken place. “I am appalled,” he said. “A clandestine, sloppy autopsy was done by a man who has no licence to practice any form of medicine in this province. The whole thing from the start is bizarre. It is a disgrace.”
Finally, after Dr. Butt had finished, and for the third time, Nora’s body was lowered into her grave at the Pine Creek Cemetery, and this time it became her final resting place. But the controversy surrounding the awful indignities inflicted upon her body after she died had hardly started. The scandal reverberated in Canada and the United States after being stoked up yet again by Nora’s son Bert.
No one knows why he did it. Bert chose several of the photographs he had taken that night and sent them to the National Enquirer, a tabloid newspaper in the United States. Worse still, he sent one to his older brother Wallace, who was devastated. “That’s what I’m going to remember the rest of my life,” said Wallace.
Authorities in Canada and the United States immediately began investigations to see if either Bert or Dr. Brady had broken any laws in either country. They wanted to know if action could be taken against them. Dr. Butt wanted something done, if only to prevent such a ghoulish thing from happening again. “This man came here on a fly-in fly-out job that kept him here one night. Does this mean anyone can go to a cemetery and dig up a body and slice it up?” he asked.
Canadian medical authorities led the battle. The fundamental rule in the Medical Professions Act of Alberta is that only doctors licensed in the province can perform medical acts, and that includes autopsies. Alberta’s College of Physicians and Surgeons said Dr. Brady had no such licence and had clearly broken the code. They pointed out that any investigation that might lead to charges being laid must be carried out by the attorney general’s office and the RCMP. They put the matter into the attorney general’s hands right away. If Dr. Brady was found guilty of practising medicine without a licence, he could face a $1,000 fine or three months in prison.
With authorities gunning for him, Dr. Brady was quick to present his side of the story, explaining that he considered he’d done nothing wrong. He claimed he hadn’t performed the autopsy just for the cash, as some had suggested, but for an honourable reason. A relative had approached him saying Canadian authorities had refused the family’s wishes to have an autopsy. He had been “totally amazed” that a family in Canada could be denied an autopsy on a loved one if they sincerely wanted it. He had simply provided a service that he felt the family should never have been denied in the first place. He disagreed his work was “sloppy,” saying he’d been thorough and careful and felt badly if Canadian pathologists were concerned about the standard of his autopsy.
Dr. Brady had a ready answer to the major criticism, which was that he didn’t have a medical licence to perform the clandestine dissection. When he had crossed the border to enter Canada, he had told the border guards why he was going to Calgary. They granted him a work permit for a day. In his eyes, the Canadians knew he was there to perform an autopsy and had granted him a permit to do it. “To the best of my knowledge it was a procedure approved by the authorities,” he said.
His American medical superiors watched every development very closely. In the United States, Dr. Brady was accountable to the Oregon Board of Medical Examiners. Their chief investigator had made his own inquiries in Alberta to see if their man could be accused of “unethical or unprofessional conduct.” After all, they said, if a Canadian pathologist came to Oregon in the middle of the night with no licence and no paperwork, dug up an American and did an autopsy alongside the grave, there would be total outrage.
They had good cause to be intensely interested. Dr. Brady had a history. Six years earlier, in 1985, he had been fired from his post as state medical examiner in Oregon after accusations that he was selling body parts. Medical authorities alleged Dr. Brady had been selling skin samples and pituitary glands to research agencies. They said he’d been salting the money away in a bank account designated for office holiday parties, and for buying furniture, copying machines and other supplies. Dr. Brady didn’t think he’d done anything wrong that time either. He said the samples came from victims of aircraft crashes or car wrecks, or from bodies that were going to be cremated anyway. He claimed that all the money was used to provide improved facilities in his office. A report into his activities also alleged he’d been profiting by carrying out private autopsies during his normal office hours.
Dr. Brady had been suspended while a special prosecutor launched a full-scale criminal investigation into what he’d been doing. The attorney general’s department eventually decided that what he did may have been ethically wrong, but it was nothing criminal. It was wrong, they said, for the money to have gone into better office amenities, but there was no evidence to show Dr. Brady had used the money for himself. There was nothing to support a criminal prosecution.
Oregon’s Ethics Commission then looked at Dr. Brady’s activities, but decided it wouldn’t fine him because he had already paid back more than $17,000 in restitution to the state. Nevertheless, they did fire him. His bosses considered that he had “knowingly violated public trust and confidence” for his activities over the previous 16 years, and they wanted him gone. But Dr. Brady had the last word. He sued for $300,000 damages, claiming he’d been fired without proper legal hearings into his case, and he won. A federal jury ruled his constitutional rights had been denied when he was fired. Later, when Oregon officials took the case to the United States Supreme Court, it ruled in favour of Dr. Brady as well.
Back in Canada, the attorney general’s department had given the case of Nora’s clandestine autopsy to the Okotoks RCMP for investigation. When their report arrived, the way forward was clear. There would be no criminal charges against Dr. Brady in Alberta either. It didn’t matter whether he had a medical licence or not. He had been granted a visa to enter Canada, and on the visa he clearly stated his purpose was to carry out an autopsy. Case closed.
One question remained. If the good doctor hadn’t done anything wrong in law, what about Bert? Had he broken any laws? His brother Wallace and the rest of the family tried to have Bert charged with desecrating their mother’s gravesite, which was a criminal offence, but the attorney general’s office ruled against such a charge being laid. It was the lawyers’ opinion that there was no criminal intent in Bert’s mind when he organized the autopsy. There was no evidence that he had intended an “unlawful indignity” to his mother’s remains.
On March 5, 1992, Bert was committed for psychiatric assessment to Calgary General Hospital under a mental health warrant. This was a result of his inexplicable actions in taking those distressing photographs of the autopsy and then sending them to his brother and the media. Wallace was left distraught by the whole amazing sequence of events. His beloved mother had been dug up from her grave twice, buried three times, money had changed hands, yet no charges were ever laid against the two men responsible for the bizarre incidents.