Dr. Ljubisa Dragovic was pumped up Monday morning as he made the long, 50- minute drive from his stately old home in old-monied Grosse Pointe to his office in the Oakland County government complex, rock and roll pumping out of the speakers as he battled rush hour.
He was the chief medical examiner, a colorful, high-profile character who was one of the best pathologists in the world. He was the boss, but he still liked cutting up bodies, too, looking for clues, helping put bad guys away. Today, this morning, there was something to look forward to as he drove in fits and starts through the clogged highways, the air already hot and steamy, the sun beating down. There was a big case starting, and the upcoming autopsy would be at the center of it, an autopsy he had decided to perform himself.
Oakland County has what he would argue is the best medical examiner's facility in the country, a state-of-the-art edifice that had opened the previous March. It was spacious, well lit, with all the modern, computerized amenities, unlike the cramped, dingy quarters he and his staff used to share.
He was alerted to the case the previous afternoon. His office is a moderate walk away from the Prosecutor's Office and the warrants people there had told him to be prepared. First word he'd had was that it appeared to be a suicide. A woman had shot herself. She and her husband were the only ones in the house and he'd been in the bathroom at the time of the shooting.
As always in such cases, Dragovic's inner alarms began clanging. "So many of these weird cases, it's either boyfriend and girlfriend drinking and suddenly girlfriend ends up shooting self using the boyfriend's gun," he would explain later in his thick accent—he is a native of Belgrade—dropping articles here and there. And, upon investigation, the reality is the girlfriend didn't shoot herself at all, the boyfriend did it. "Under those circumstances, you have to turn on all your antennae because after all, you are paid to be suspicious. The taxpayers of this county are paying me to be suspicious."
Dragovic had sent his own investigator to the house on Hazelwood as soon
as he heard about the shooting, a retired Detroit cop named Bob Rossi, who would shoot some pictures, take some notes, size things up.
Rossi had called back. The body had been moved by the husband, turned over, at least. Did the husband have blood on him? Dragovic had asked. "Not really. He doesn't have any," said Rossi. "It was one of the coppers, and he told me he was real clean."
Rossi stayed in touch Monday night, too. The first word was wrong. Suicide was out and never alleged by the husband. He was saying accident, the cops thought otherwise.
Practically whistling, Dragovic got out of his Mercedes and went in to work. Hendricks was waiting for him. He'd stand outside the observation windows and watch the doctor work. Dragovic could talk into a microphone as he worked, with a speaker on the other side of the window letting Hendricks know what was going on.
Leann's body, purpled where gravity had pulled her remaining blood downward, was wheeled in and put on his cutting table. It was 8:30 a.m. He examined the body externally, then had an assistant take photos before any actual work began. At 9:10, he was ready to proceed with the noisy and messy tools of his trade. Unlike movie scenes, Dragovic wouldn't give a running account of the autopsy to be tape-recorded—you can't record much over the sound of a bone saw. He would make some notes as he went along and later fill out what was called an autopsy protocol, which would record some of the more mundane things he would get to later, the reductions of a human life to grams and centimeters and clinical analysis.
He would later remove her brain and measure it at 1,258 grams. Other reductions from flesh and blood, from a loved mother and daughter to statistics would include: liver, 1,168 grams; right lung, 399 grams; left lung, 255 grams; heart, 241 grams; left kidney, 142 grams; right kidney, 111 grams. He would find her stomach contained 1120 milliliters of partially digested food and her bladder 10 milliliters of urine.
She'd even gone from being a name to case number 99-2570, autopsy number 0638.
Dragovic would record that the woman on his table was 5-foot-3, 133 pounds, medium developed, medium nourished, with hair 10 inches in length, red-brown in color and saturated in blood. "The irises are blue, the corneae are clear and the sclereae and conjunctivae are unremarkable. The nostrils contain dry blood. The nasal skeleton is palpably intact. The lips are without evident injury. The oral cavity is without note. The neck and chest are unremarkable. There is a small scar in the upper right quadrant of the belly. The external genitalia show no evidence of trauma. The posterior torso and the anal orifice are without note. The length of arm from the top of the shoulder to the mid-knuckle is 23 inches."
All of that he would write later, after he'd finished with his hands-on work, which would take about an hour and 40 minutes.
Hendricks wouldn't need to wait for a written report. He wouldn't need to wait for the autopsy to be completed. He would be on his way in a few minutes.
Dragovic, as others would be in this case, was certain of what he was looking at right from the start, before he'd cleaned out the wound, before he'd figured- out the angle of entry into the cleaned-out skull cavity, before he'd measured and weighed and recorded.
"The remains were brought in and right then and there it was clear," he would say later. There was a lot of caked blood, but no soot. A self-inflicted wound, one you'd expect to be caused at very close range, deposits soot and he saw none on her.
What he thought was clear got even clearer. He cleaned her up, shaved her hair away from her ear and was immediately able to see what is known as a stippling pattern, a kind of tattooing made by unburned gunpowder as it is exploded out of the front of the gun. The larger the pattern, the farther away the gun was when it discharged.
Tests at a firing range with Fletcher's Smith & Wesson would need to be conducted, but Dragovic was certain: The gun had been 12–18 inches from Leann's ear when it was fired, too far for her to have done it.
"This was not so much ingenuity, like in some other cases where you have to do a lot more to piece the puzzle together," he would say. "In this case, the
pattern of injury was self-defining."
Dragovic told Hendricks to come into the room. "She didn't shoot herself," said Dragovic. "Well, Doc, what are you saying?"
"I'm saying, you've got a homicide," said Dragovic. Hendricks remembers the doctor getting excited then, his accent more pronounced.
"Okay," said Hendricks. He'd expected that, but still it was a jolt to hear it. A homicide!
Dragovic gave him some evidence to take with him—bullet fragments, clippings from her fingernails, a vaginal swab—and he hurried from the building. Dragovic says Hendricks was running. Hendricks says it wasn't running, but as close to it as he gets.
He got in the car and headed south. He called Cleyman, gave him the news. Cleyman told him they requested a second search warrant to go through the two computer systems and two laptops they'd seen in a brief search of the house the night before, items they hadn't included on the original warrant.
Hendricks stopped at the station, filled out the requisite paperwork for the morning's visit to the ME, then delivered the evidence to the state police crime lab.
Dragovic says he wasn't excited at the time of the autopsy, that his work requires a certain distancing and lack of emotion. The excitement came the next day, "when they told me they found the pinpoint droplets of blood on the cuff. That was exciting."
They told the press, too. The shirt was a giveaway, they said, its right sleeve covered with pinpoints of high-velocity bloodmist that would seal Fletcher's fate.