Blood Stain by Peter Lalor

Author:Peter Lalor [Lalor, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2015-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

12

Autopsy

2000

It is not often a corpse’s head arrives in a saucepan, but when John Price’s remains were delivered to the Newcastle Department of Forensic Medicine the packaging spoke volumes about the bizarre nature of his death.

Six days after Price’s death, Bob Wells drove up to visit Dr Tim Lyons, the forensic pathologist at Newcastle just to touch base and clear up a few little details.

The British-trained doctor is the forensic pathologist for the Hunter region and holds an appointment to the Royal Australian Airforce Specialist Reserves as a wing commander with a special interest in aviation pathology. Plane crashes. Lyons is generally not too fussed about whether you use the term ‘corpse’ or ‘body’, but admits that when an airplane makes an unscheduled landing he finds the term ‘human remains’ more appropriate.

He hasn’t always worked with the dead. In a previous career he worked with the dying as an orthopaedic and trauma surgeon in the United Kingdom. At one stage he found himself at the Groot Schuur Hospital in Capetown, South Africa. The place where Dr Christiaan Barnard completed the first heart transplant in 1967, and one of the busiest trauma units in the world. Its emergency ward sees more gunshot wounds than most. The doctor then trained in anatomical pathology in the UK, before moving into forensic pathology and taking up a post in Australia.

Lyons arrived in Tasmania in August 1994, eighteen months before a friendless blonde youth by the name of Martin Bryant walked into the Broad Arrow Cafe at the Port Arthur convict site. By the time Bryant finished shooting, 35 bodies lay scattered around the grounds. The case load for Lyons was so large he had to get help from the mainland just to deal with all the bodies.

Lyons is accustomed to the human form in all manner of disarray and with Port Arthur he experienced it in mind numbing multiples, but John Price’s murder stands out in his mind as the most bizarre he has ever encountered. He was in Sydney the day john Price’s body was discovered and hitched a lift up with the police. Arriving in the afternoon, he examined the scene with Neil Raymond, Peter Muscio, Ross Dellosta and Geoff Maurer, who was shooting a video. He wrote up a report a few weeks later.

The house is a single storey brick build construction. Entry from the street leads into a small cork tiled hallway to the left of which is a lounge area. Access through sliding doors. Through the small doorway and to the back of the house on the left is a kitchen and eating area of [sic] which is a corridor which leads to a bedrooms facing onto the front of the house, a 3rd bedroom facing to the rear of the house and a bathroom and toilet area.

A decapitated and skinned body is situated, lying diagonally through the space from the small entrance hallway into the lounge. The body is lying prone, left leg crossed over the right. There

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