A murdered maid in Singapore, the suicide of White House counsel Vincent Foster and the victims of Ted Bundy all have something in common:
Utah native Dr. Donald Reay.Reay, chief of the King County Medical Examiner's Office, is one of the nation's top forensic pathologists. It's not surprising to hear that Seattle's lead medical detective has been called to the scene of some high-profile, politically sensitive death investigation elsewhere in the nation and around the world.
That he wasn't called in to consult on the forensic work done in the O.J. Simpson case is a great relief to Reay.
"What a mess," he said.
Given his obsessive (and military-honed) demand for standards and meticulous routine, Reay often is astonished at how other medical examiners and coroners investigate a death. For one thing, the failure of the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office to perform a routine sexual examination on the bodies of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman astounded him.
The Los Angeles deputy medical examiner also acknowledged that the coroner's office had not preserved the contents of Nicole Simpson's stomach - which could aid in estimating time of death - before the defense had a chance to analyze them. Body temperature readings, also helpful for determining time of death, were taken more than 10 hours after the police arrived on the scene.
Investigators also admitted failing to collect crucial blood samples and storing some samples in a way that caused the blood to degrade before it was tested.
Reay's reputation for accuracy in forensics wins praise from almost all local prosecutors and defense attorneys.
"Having Don Reay in King County is like having Michael Jordan on your basketball team," said Norm Maleng, King County prosecutor. "He's simply the finest medical examiner in the country."
John Henry Browne, a leading Seattle defense attorney and frequent nemesis of all things prosecutorial, agrees with Maleng on that point.
"Don Reay is one of my heroes," Browne said. "He's extremely honest and independent. He's exactly what a forensic pathologist should be - a scientist and not an advocate."
Reay's reputation for independence likely was the reason he was chosen to help conduct an autopsy in a murder case that had strained relations between two countries. Foreign ministries of Singapore and the Philippines chose him and two other American pathologists to conduct an autopsy last spring in the hope of resolving an international dispute over the execution of a Filipina maid, Flor Contemplacion, convicted of killing another Filipina maid, Delia Maga. Many Filipinos believe Contemplacion was framed and that officials ignored evidence that might have implicated the Singapore employer of both maids.
Despite the intensity of the dispute and pins-and-needles nervousness among U.S. State Department officials, Reay shrugged off this high-visibility case as just part of the job and simply reported that his examination found no evidence to support the Filipino community's claims.
"I don't like traveling," Reay said. "I don't seek out these notorious cases . . . I guess I've just been around a long time."
Long enough to become so highly regarded in his field that Reay was asked last year to review the medical evidence regarding the 1993 shooting death of White House counsel Vincent Foster. Reay and the others on the panel confirmed it was a suicide.
But as implied by the praise from defense attorney Browne, who has represented such clients as serial killer Ted Bundy, Reay's independence does not always sit well with official establishment and law enforcement types.
In the early 1980s, Reay published studies showing that the common use of a neck choke hold by police put suspects at high risk for accidental death. Those findings and subsequent studies have caused many police departments to abandon the choke hold as a method of restraint.
"It's accepted now that the choke hold is inherently dangerous," Reay said. "But I was not very popular with police officers for a while there."
In the 1993 death of Antonio Jackson, a shoplifting suspect who died while held in a neck choke hold by an employee of Safeway, he ruled Jackson's death a homicide by asphyxiation. But Reay also said it was unclear if it was the choke hold, the fact that people sat on Jackson's back or a combination of these forms of restraint that killed the man.
The jury ruled that "reasonable force" was used. A civil rights lawsuit filed by Jackson's family opened in federal court in Seattle.
Reay, who grew up in the small town of Price, Utah, came to forensic pathology at the University of Utah by way of avoiding combat when drafted for the Vietnam War. He came to Seattle in 1973.