Grand Junction – When Dr. Rob Kurtzman unzipped the body bag delivered by a mortician to the Community Hospital morgue July 5, he knew it wasn’t going to be a run-of-the-mill day.
Kurtzman had received a phone call at 5:30 a.m. advising him a body – a famous body – was headed his way from Aspen.
Kurtzman said that as he and his investigator looked at the body of Ken Lay on a gurney under the giant surgical lamp, he mulled over questions.
Lay had been under the spotlight as the disgraced former Enron Corp. chairman. In May, he had been convicted of fraud in one of the largest corporate scandals in America.
“Is this someone who committed suicide because he was facing incarceration for the rest of his life?” Kurtzman asked. “Or is it a homicide? Many people intensely dislike this man.”
Kurtzman, a forensic pathologist and Mesa County coroner, is known in Western Slope law enforcement circles for his unruffled assessments of high- profile deaths, heinous crimes and tragic accidents.
Lay had apparently died of a heart attack after collapsing at a home near Aspen. Investigators for the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office and medical personnel at Aspen Valley Hospital found nothing amiss.
Kurtzman’s job was to make sure.
Some conspiracy theorists still question whether the body in Kurtzman’s morgue was a double and the real Lay had fled to a foreign country.
Others still believe Lay commit suicide in some sneaky way.
“Ludicrous,” is how Kurtzman characterizes those rumors.
Kurtzman has been doing death investigations for about 20 years.
In that time he has examined a Kennedy, a Vail man whose death became an international incident, and hundreds of murder victims.
He knew what kind of questions would follow Lay.
Kurtzman began his search for answers by examining Lay for signs of a hidden needle prick or other concealed trauma. He found none.
Inside the 64-year-old body, Kurtzman found advanced cardiovascular disease.
Yellow plaque clogged the arteries to Lay’s heart even though he had stents implanted to try to hold them open.
There was damage from two earlier heart attacks and damage from the attack that had stopped his heart about six hours earlier.
Kurtzman weighed and measured every organ. The length of Lay’s gray hair was recorded. What he had eaten for dinner the night before – bacon, tomato and cheese – was noted.
Kurtzman identified the body through witness statements and scientific measures such as dental work, sinus cavity measurements and DNA.
Toxicology tests showed Lay had taken his medication. A full-body CAT scan – not a normal procedure – ruled out other trauma and highlighted the coronary heart disease, as did a radiograph of his arteries.
“I don’t think he would have been alive if (he) hadn’t been taking such good care of himself,” Kurtzman said.
The curious and the doubters are still seeking information.
“All these people watch CSI and think that is the real world,” he says.
A Neil Young tune croons from speakers on his desk. His red motorcycle helmet sits on a file box ready for the ride home to Loma.
Since Kurtzman arrived in 1992 from Detroit, the limelight has landed on his office a number of times.
When Michael Kennedy, son of the late Sen. Robert Kennedy, slammed into a tree on Aspen Mountain in 2001, Kurtzman did the autopsy.
When, in 1994, Chuck Betcher, a well-known Vail-area mountain climber died in a jail in Thailand, Kurtzman performed an autopsy – after congressional and State Department pressure to get Thai authorities to release the body.
Kurtzman determined Betcher probably was killed by a baton strike, and he ruled the death a homicide.
Kurtzman, 50, has been using death to find answers about the human condition since he decided to forego pediatrics for the draw of the morgue.
The goriness of the work was quickly overtaken by scientific curiosity, he said.
He became part of a team in the Detroit medical examiner’s office working under one of the country’s best known forensic pathologists, Dr. Werner Spitz.
Bodies would be lined up on gurneys and brought one by one before the Detroit team. They would confer about each one, then split up for autopsies.
In Detroit they did 3,500 autopsies a year – compared with the average 200 his office does now.
Among the biggest cases Kurtzman worked on in Detroit was a Northwest Airlines crash in 1987 that killed 156.
“You can bring a wealth of information back to the living,” Kurtzman said. “If it was just examining the dead, why bother? It has to be for the greater good.”
Staff writer Nancy Lofholm can be reached at 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com.
