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The Martha's Vineyard Times is a weekly publication.
August 18 - 24, 2005 Edition
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At Large Couple of things August 18, 2005 By Doug Cabral You don’t look so well After dinner in Chilmark late one evening early this spring, the guests remained in their seats around the table and questioned Dr. Michael Baden about death and dead bodies. Dr. Baden is the former chief medical examiner for New York City and currently the chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police, and the host of the HBO series “Autopsy.” He has been a medical examiner for 45 years, during which time he has performed 20,000 medico-legal autopsies. Despite all that, he is an affable fellow with a wry sense of humor. Doesn’t it get you down, someone asked, the violence and disease and the sad ends people come to? No, he said, because after all, his patients are dead; the sadness and horror is over for them. You can get a close-up feeling for forensic pathology by joining Dr. Jake Rosen, the New York City medical examiner, on an autopsy date with Philomena “Manny” Manfreda, the fierce, fashionable, and gorgeous civil rights lawyer. Dr. Rosen delves into the remains of his dead mentor’s housekeeper and finds she’s been poisoned. Manny wavers at his side, watching the grisly business and falling for the sawbones. A story that begins with the discovery of human bones at the site of a shopping mall development in an upstate New York town leads Dr. Rosen and Manny to a trail of multiple murders and ultimately to the horrifying tale of an upstate mental institution whose physicians abused their patients in the interest of Cold War security. Along the way, Manny and Dr. Rosen become a team, in both the sleuthing and amorous senses, as they stay a step ahead of a killer who has the two of them in his homicidal sights. Politics, love, environmental protection, psychotic physicians preying upon patients, a mounting toll of dead bodies: who could want more in a pulse quickening, page-turning mystery? “Remains Silent” (Knopf, New York, 2005) is a fast moving murder mystery and a Cliffs Notes primer in the necrotic arts. Dr. Baden and his wife, lawyer Linda Kenney, summer visitors to the Vineyard, are the writers, and there’s nothing about legal investigation or forensic pathology that they don’t know, or withhold from the reader. Most of us learn about others while they are alive, by talking with them, watching them, hearing about them. Dr. Baden deduces what there is to know about people by taking them apart, holding their parts in his hands, and analyzing their bodily fluids. In this fashion, he learns a lot, and I wondered if he ever brought his long experience with the dead to bear on the living, say, the ones at the table that evening. When he looks at a living someone, does he see things that enable him to see into the future, to conceive of the end in store for you before the end comes, to imagine you on his table, as the scalpel is poised to begin the Y incision? Do you think about all that when you meet someone, I asked. Yes, indeed, Dr. Baden said. Trash talk Carol Beggy and Mark Shanahan of the Boston Globe interviewed Gazette publisher Richard Reston about the connections between the newspaper and William Graham, the Mohu property owner who has appealed to the state claiming the West Tisbury assessors overvalued his land. The Gazette has covered the appellant’s presentation of its case before the Appellate Tax Board extensively. The town’s defense has just begun. The fruits of the Globe interview appeared in the August 13 edition. The Globe was following a Nelson Sigelman report on, among other things, the nature of those Reston-Graham links. “… But on an island full of ultra-rich folk unhappy about their assessments,” reporters Beggy and Shanahan write, “why does the Graham matter merit so much attention? That’s where the Martha’s Vineyard Times comes in. The Gazette’s competitor on the two-newspaper playground says there are a few things the Gazette hasn’t reported. One would be the relationship between Gazette publisher Richard Reston and the Graham family. Reston’s dad, the legendary New York Times scribe James Reston, happened to be a dear friend of Graham’s father and mother, former Washington Post editor and publisher Philip Graham and Katharine Graham. The other tidbit left out of all the Gazette’s stories about Graham is that the editor, Julia Wells, lives in a cottage on the Graham estate. She wouldn’t talk to us yesterday, but Reston would. ‘This has nothing to do with family or friendships,’ he roared over the phone. ‘This happens to be a news story with rather important implications for the property tax structure of these communities.’ As for not disclosing where Wells lives, Reston said it’s irrelevant since he, not Wells, is editing the stories about Graham.” Hold it a second, but isn’t it Dick whose family has the close connection with the Graham family? Anyhow, according to Beggy and Shanahan, Dick closed by saying, “It’s a throwaway paper. And this isn’t something worth dealing with.” I’m sure the Globe doesn’t regard itself as a throwaway paper, no matter who’s roaring, and neither does The Times. In this two-newspaper playground, when The Times readership is growing and the Gazette’s is shrinking, roaring may be the sound the wounded make.

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