The Case of the Daring Divorcee

Foreword

Some years ago, I dedicated a Perry Mason mystery (The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink) with an appropriate foreword to my friend, Dr. Russell Fisher, who, at that time, had just been appointed Chief Medical Examiner of the State of Maryland.

Since that time, I have watched Dr. Fisher’s progress with a feeling of pride in his achievements, and those achievements have been many.

Now, as Chief Medical Examiner of the State of Maryland, he has developed his office so efficiently that in the large urban area of Baltimore, every Medical Examiner’s case is thoroughly investigated and two out of three deaths studied by the Medical Examiner are autopsied. By comparison, in Pittsburgh (Allegheny County, Pennsylvania), a city of similar size, only 6 % of such deaths were autopsied under the coroner system.

Yet Maryland’s medical examiner system cost only seventeen cents in the Baltimore area in contrast to twenty-two per person in the Pittsburgh area.

This is an enviable record and the voters have shown their confidence in Dr. Fisher and the department he has headed by recently approving a bond issue which will be used to build a new central headquarters building for Maryland’s medical examiner system. This building will house the service function and some research activities of the office. Furthermore, it is planned to build one or more additional floors on the building financed by privately donated funds to house a research and teaching institute of forensic medicine. This institute should help greatly in advancing the application of scientific knowledge to the problems of law enforcement.

It is gratifying to note that more and more people are coming to realize the importance of legal medicine and the protection given to the living by a modern, up-to-date medical examiner system.

As Dr. Fisher recently pointed out, eighty-five percent of all murders in the nation are committed among friends and family members; and particularly in cases of poisoning, these murders may well go undetected unless a medical examiner has jurisdiction.

Under the rural coroner system many such poisonings have gone undetected. The exact number of such cases is, of course, unknown yet subsequent exhumations have convinced criminologists that poison murders are far more numerous than the average person suspects.

Because he has made such an excellent record as an administrator, executive and medical examiner, I am dedicating this book to my friend,

RUSSELL S. FISHER, M.D. Chief Medical Examiner of Maryland