Twenty-four

In retrospect, Reiber’s autopsy report on Ashley Barron only focused the most difficult questions about the Barron case.

For, if Reiber could assert that in his judgement, homicidal violence could not be excluded as a cause of Ashley’s death—and given that he’d already told the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department in late August that he believed Irene had been murdered too—why did he not, at that point, then reopen Irene’s file and come to the same conclusion?

After all, now that Reiber had concluded that it was possible that little Ashley had been murdered, what was to prevent him from saying the same, officially, about Irene? And what effect would that have had on the by-now notoriously reluctant Sheriff’s Department to commence its own investigation?

More to the point, the medical evidence about Irene’s death was far more significant than that of Ashley. In examining Ashley’s remains after her death, Reiber found not one single petechial hemorrhage, not one single burst blood vessel in the lungs or brain, or a single bruise in the throat. To every inspection and test, little Ashley’s body was as perfect as the day she had been born.

In contrast, Irene had multiple hemorrhaging, along with very suggestive bruising—far more evidence of murder than in the case of Ashley.

So why did Reiber conclude that “homicidal violence cannot be excluded” in Ashley’s case, and tell the Sheriff’s Department that it looked to him that murder had been committed in Irene’s case, yet do nothing more?

Why didn’t he argue that Irene’s case should be reopened, that a new look should be undertaken of the far more powerful evidence of murder involving Irene?

Years later, that question was propounded to Reiber; and it is a measure of Dr. Reiber’s honesty that he confronted the issue directly.

“This is part science, part art,” Reiber said of the business of forensic pathology. “It’s really a matter of interpretation.” When he examined the remains of Ashley Barron and found the possibility of murder, Reiber said, he was the beneficiary of a number of facts not known to Schmunk: about the Sundays, and the sevens, and the reality that two other Barrons had already died. It was Reiber’s gut instinct that the situation was ripe for further investigation.

But as for Schmunk’s earlier assessment of Irene’s death, Reiber in the fall of 1994 felt no compulsion to intensively reexamine his former colleague’s findings, even if he indicated his disagreement with them in the meeting of August 22, 1994. In the absence of definitive medical data—demonstrable facts like wounds or crashed larynxes or detected poisons—one had to conclude that Schmunk had done his best and had made his own interpretation, Reiber said later.

What’s lost here, of course, is the concept of urgency. If Ashley was dead from homicidal violence, and if a pathologist argued for an interpretation asserting that her mother, Irene, was similarly dead of homicidal violence, the chances seem pretty strong that Jeremy might be dead of homicidal violence. All of this ought to have forced, but did not, some anxiety on the part of the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department that, if three were now dead, who was soon to follow?