Pubdate: Tue, 03 Nov 1998 Source: Vancouver Sun (Canada) Contact: http://www.vancouversun.com/ Copyright: The Vancouver Sun 1998 Author: Ian Smith, Vancouver Sun B.C.'S TOP CORONER HAS DA VINCI OVERTONES Tuesday afternoon was dank and bleak, sodden with a foretaste of winter rains -- an altogether awful day to die. Not that there are good days to die. And not that it matters here in the morgue at Vancouver General Hospital, where the clientele are beyond caring about the ruthless efficiency of the decor. There are no windows. No warmth from the stark fluorescent lights, the stainless steel, the red concrete floor, the drip of drains, the instruments that cut, collect and expose the last secrets of a life lived. Most of the dead have names. Out of 18 years of habit, Larry Campbell, B.C.'s chief coroner, checks the board posted beside the giant cooler. Details and case numbers are written in erasable marker in a kind of corner's shorthand. A recent arrival is listed "U/K Male." Unknown male. There could be any number of reasons for this. Maybe he went for a walk without his wallet and never came home. Maybe he had no home. Maybe the only people who give a damn are in this room. He rests for the moment on a gurney, zipped into a white plastic body bag. He will be photographed, finger-printed and autopsied. If necessary, clues from his clothing or from dental x-rays will be run down. Eventually, he may be wheeled under a video camera affixed to the morgue ceiling while a friend or relative is led into a smaller, warmer, less intimidating place where death can be viewed on a television screen. Or the fingerprints will register on a police computer. He will not leave this earth an Unknown Male, or Campbell and the 37 others in the provincial corner's service, will have failed in their duty to the dead. "I refuse to accept that anybody in our society is a throw- away," he says. There is an edge to his voice. The words could as easily have come from CBC's new television series, Da Vinci's Inquest, about a fictional Vancouver coroner with an appetite for chaos, a taste for alcohol and a relentless, redeeming, respect for the dead. There is some of 50-year-old Campbell in the fictional Dominic Da Vinci. How much is open to debate, but enough for Campbell to have co-written two of the scripts and to have vetted most of the others. But this is a real morgue. Larry Campbell, once a member of the RCMP drug squad, patrols the constituency of the dead. He speaks for them. He met his wife, pathologist Enid Edwards, over an autopsy table. "Sort of like a bad vampire book," she says, laughing. The dead have much to offer. They can advise the living how to stay that way a little longer. They point to the structural flaws in society, be they drugs or poverty, an unsafe workplace or a badly engineered stretch of highway. A question unanswered in death is an unlearned lesson. Of these, an unknown name is the most fundamental of failures. "These are the people I think we're really working for. They have nobody. Those who die lonely and without a whole lot of people looking out for them," he says. "The very least we can do in death is make sure their death is investigated, the same as anybody else's. That they're identified and they have a proper burial." There are myths about coroners: that they are all doctors, that they perform autopsies, that they spend their days solving murders. Ombudsman for the dead is a more apt description. In B.C., unlike many jurisdictions, no medical degree is required. Campbell, who was appointed to a three-year term as chief coroner in 1996, supervises 20 coroners in eight provincial districts and about 20 part-time "fee for service" coroners in every region of the province. They are tied to their pagers. Campbell, who attended thousands of death scenes since joining the coroner's service in 1981, now plays a largely administrative role, although he pulls on-call duty some 20 or 30 days a year, and presides at at least one inquest annually. In B.C., a coroner is summoned 10,000 times a year, virtually any time a person dies "suddenly and unexpectedly" of mysterious illness, accident, suicide, murder or "unfair means." Says Campbell: "It doesn't matter to me whether you're 90 years old, or you're two years old. If [death] is sudden and unexpected, I'm going to investigate it, and I'm going to investigate it until I find out what the cause of death was." About 30 or 40 inquests are called each year: in all cases where prison inmates die in custody, where witnesses won't co-operate, where there are issues to which coroners want to draw attention. These range from the tragic consequences of the brake failure of a tractor trailer in North Vancouver, the murder-suicide of nine family members in Vernon by an estranged husband, a child's death by malnutrition. Coroners offer more than 2,000 recommendations a year, aimed at finding "reasonable and practical" ways to prevent similar deaths. A coroner can't force compliance, but Campbell estimates 75 per cent of the recommendations are followed. Still, bad stuff happens: assisted by venality, stupidity, tragedy, naivete, any number of forces inhabiting the chasm between reality and a perfect world. "It's really hard," says the coroner, "to bring those two together." It is this void, with all its "rich dramatic territory", that drew television producer Chris Haddock to the ideal of a flawed, crusading coroner. For 10 years, his creative offices in the Downtown Eastside have overlooked Victory Square and the waterfront, the flip side of picture postcard Vancouver. That and his growing friendship with Campbell made the series almost inevitable. "And his name is Dominic Da Vinci," Haddock pronounced to a skeptical Campbell. "OK," snapped the coroner, "but it better be good." Campbell's fear was a remake of the awful American series Quincy. Or worse, as an ex-Mountie, a Due South-version, that reduced the coroner's service to a comedic stereotype. What Haddock delivered was some of what he sees outside his office window. Stories written with heavy dramatic licence from newspaper headlines and coroner's reports. Some of what makes Campbell angry or passionate. The black humour of the morgue. The things that can still make a coroner cry. "Larry has compassion. That's really evident from knowing him. And he doesn't take shit from anybody." Running through the first three episodes of the show was the story of a flop house predator who raped and murdered women by force-feeding them alcohol. The story was loosely based on Gilbert Paul Jordan, a Vancouver barber, eventually convicted of manslaughter. Campbell was among the coroner's team that found, with police, a pattern among the apparently random alcohol deaths of at least 10 women, most of them rootless, vulnerable aboriginal women. In another bleakly ambivalent episode, Da Vinci calls an inquest after a television reporter broadcasts the story of an anonymous woman who may have been smothered with a plastic bag in a case of assisted suicide. Da Vinci narrowly avoids citing the reporter with contempt for refusing to reveal her source. Five years earlier, Campbell called an inquest into the similar death of an unidentified AIDS patient whose story was told in a column in The Province newspaper. Unlike the fictional Da Vinci, Campbell bulled ahead, charging two senior newspaper editors and a Province columnist with contempt of court for refusing to divulge the source. The charges were quashed on appeal. Ah yes, Campbell recalls, "the Unknown female." He hates unknowns. The line between fiction and reality blurs. Outside producer Haddock's offices, as he readies another season of scripts, emergency sirens wail. "Somebody's dropped," he says. "There's a lot of that going around." He and his friend the coroner, the real coroner, share a common belief that the time has come for a limited experiment in decriminalization, where morphine can be administered to heroin addicts in a controlled setting. "Nothing else has worked," says Haddock. By October, the number of drug deaths in the city this year stood at an unprecedented 303. Campbell says there isn't much will or sympathy for bold measures as long as politicians can pretend the epidemic of injectable drug deaths is largely contained in one poor neighborhood on the western fringe of the country. He is torn between two extremes: respecting the privacy of such addicts, and shoving the crisis into the public face. He'd like to think the real-fiction of Da Vinci's Inquest achieves both. It is the day before "Mardi Gras," when the welfare cheques arrive. Campbell looks through a rain-washed car window at the faces of pinched, hungry addicts, clustered in alleys and doorways. "Everybody's lookin'," he sighs. From his own annual report, he knows the number of illicit drug deaths will double the day after welfare Wednesday -- more bodies to be taken down the elevator and wheeled along a red concrete floor to the morgue. The morgue, at the end of the day, is just a place where people work. Comics are pinned to the bulletin board. With the last body sewn up, a technician hoses down floor and table, whistling. Taped to a wall are autographed pictures of the likes of Gillian Anderson of the X-Files, the stars of The Sentinel and Da Vinci's Inquest -- thanking the morgue crew for allowing them to film in such a splendidly atmospheric place. There is nothing ghoulish here. What is awful or morbid or tragic, happens elsewhere, in every unexpected death and unlearned lesson. Here is where they care enough to ask, Why? It's like the old joke about the pathologist, says Enid Edwards. "He has all the answers, but he finds them out too late." And so it is that the chief coroner, at least a few times in a harried week, makes it home in time for dinner with his wife, the pathologist and hospital administrator. Over a meal that he will cook and she will clean up, they will talk about their day with an honesty that would put many people under the table. It's not about death, of course. It's about life. - ---