The Coroner Series by Thomas T. Noguchi

Author:Thomas T. Noguchi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504049672
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-10-07T04:00:00+00:00

3

When Sunny von Bülow arrived at the hospital, her body temperature was an astonishingly low 81.6 degrees, and her low pulse rate, highly constricted pupils and other symptoms showed that she was deeply comatose. Dr. Gerhard Meier, on duty that day, looked for needle marks but found none. He ordered routine blood tests and then went to speak to Von Bülow about his wife’s medical history. Von Bülow said that she had taken only one Seconal. In the middle of this conversation, a nurse rushed in to say that Sunny had suffered cardiac arrest, and Dr. Meier went to her bedside to resuscitate her. When she was stabilized, he gave her the first of several glucose “pushes,” a routine treatment for unconscious patients to determine if their illness involves low sugar in the blood.

Eventually it would be found that the repeated glucose pushes lowered the blood sugar instead of elevating it as it should have done, an indication that there was an excess of insulin, which “eats” sugar, in Sunny’s blood. It was this finding that would later form the core of the case against Von Bülow, who was charged with attempting to murder his wife by the surreptitious injection of insulin. At the time, however, all the facts seemed to point to Von Bülow’s innocence of any role in her illness.

First, he had had no opportunity to inject her. The family had been together all evening, until Claus went into his study. While he was there, Sunny, in the library with her children, became ill. It was a surprising feature of the case against Von Bülow that the prosecution admitted he had had no opportunity to inject his wife. Instead, it was hypothesized that he injected her with insulin later that night after she had become ill for other reasons.

Secondly, Von Bülow claimed he had promptly called for medical assistance upon finding his wife ill—and thereby saved her life. And thirdly, he had saved his wife’s life once before, just a few weeks prior to this terrible event, by rushing her to a hospital when he found her unconscious from an aspirin overdose.

Why, Von Bülow would ask, would he save his wife’s life and less than three weeks later attempt to kill her? He could have allowed her to expire from the aspirin overdose if he was, indeed, a murderer.

Nevertheless, the state pressed charges, and at his trial a web of circumstantial—and medical—evidence gradually wove around him.

To begin with, Dr. Gerhard Meier testified to the presence of insulin in Sunny’s blood as revealed by the reaction to glucose pushes administered when she arrived at the hospital. But had it been naturally produced or was it artificial insulin that had been injected into her body? Because he was so busy saving the life of his patient and did not suspect murder, the doctor had not immediately ordered the C-peptide test which would have indicated whether the insulin was artificial or natural. That test could have settled the case right there: if the insulin was artificial, it had to have been injected; if natural, Von Bülow was innocent.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.