DR. WHO
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appear, let’s say it was a strangulation. I’d go read the chapter on
strangulation, then I’d do the autopsy. If I didn’t see what I thought
I was supposed to see from reading the book, I’d get on the phone
and call the author of that chapter. So, I was in direct contact with
the people who wrote the damn book while I was training.”
I could. The bodies were all in the same building, they were just
being examined by different corporate entities. I was working with
the same people and equipment. There was just a different sign on
each table.”
He next went across the river to Cincinnati for a fellowship in
forensic pathology. “I probably did 500 autopsies that first year in
Cincinnati and spent a huge amount of time going to crime scenes.” In 1991, a media circus came to Louisville as the body of President
Zachary Taylor was exhumed to confirm his cause of death. Some
suspected poison, but the exhumation would determine no poison
was used. Still, the media was prepared to get every minute of
coverage they could.
Upon completion of his fellowship, the Kentucky Medical
Examiner’s Office was established, and Dr. Nichols was hired by
Governor Julian Carroll to be Chief Medical Examiner. Tragedies
don’t wait for board certification however, and his training was put
to the test immediately. “I’m on the phone with a guy who used to work with me. ‘Hi
Phil, nice to talk to you. Let me guess: whatever it is, its buried or
alleged to be buried in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Who is
it?’ He said, ‘Zachary Taylor.’ I said, and I quote, ‘Fuck.’ Because I
knew it was going to be a circus.”
“That Memorial Day was the Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire in
the Cincinnati suburbs on the Kentucky side. I got a call from the
governor’s office while in my girlfriend’s bed. I still have no idea
how they got that number. They said, ‘We have a problem. Can you
come up here?’ That’s how I spent Memorial Day 1977. 163 dead.” Not that the examination itself was that troublesome; President
Taylor had been mummified and therefore had not significantly
decomposed in the 140 years between his death and his exhumation.
The trouble instead came from the interference by everyone else.
In the case of a mass casualty event such as this one, the process
of examination is to take selected cases and use them as a sample. A
forensic pathologist doesn’t examine all 163 bodies. They examine
10 or 12.
“I knew people from Cincinnati, having just finished fellowship
there, and I pulled some residents from UofL to come and help. I
worked directly with a man named David Jones. By trade, he was a
funeral director but in the old days, all the ambulances were owned
by funeral directors, so he was an early EMS guy as well. He was
hired to become the first director of the Medical Examiner’s Office,
and he worked with me for a gazillion years.”
Beginning with that Cincinnati Supper Club Fire, Dr. Nichols’
career was off and running. The pace would remain constant and
relentless for more than 20 years. “I was on call 24/7 for the entire
state, from Paducah to Pikeville. When I look back on it, it was
an incredibly stressful time simply because of the demands of the
telephone,” Dr. Nichols said.
The Standard Gravure Printing Company Shooting took place on
September 14, 1989. Nine died, including the gunman. Dr. Nichols
was in western Kentucky at the time, taking care of a coal mine
disaster from the previous day when he got the call.
“The very next day, a private plane crashed. I’d later give a
presentation to the National Association of Medical Examiners
entitled ‘Lightning Strikes Thrice’ about the events of that weekend,”
Dr. Nichols said. “If you manage a relatively large jurisdiction like
I did, you have to be very nimble to respond to multiple disasters
simultaneously. You learn how to drive fast, and you come to rely
on anyone who’s available.”
In addition to his role as Chief Medical Examiner for the
Commonwealth, Dr. Nichols also held the title of Medical Director
of Laboratories for four different organizations simultaneously.
“Forensic pathology is the only career I know where you take more
education to make less money. So, I moonlit to make cash where
“The cemetery is right down the road, and it’s a little place.
There must have been a couple thousand people standing in it.
The producer for the Today Show was in my office and said, ‘We
want you at the cemetery at 6 o’clock.’ I said, ‘It’s my day to get the
kids from daycare. My wife’s at the hospital.’ He said, ‘How about if
we get somebody to pick them up for you?’ I said, ‘You’re kidding,
right? Get out.’
Before we proceed, we must mention how Dr. Nichols met his
wife of 37 years, Dr. Janell Seeger.
“We met over a dead body,” he laughed. “This patient was kept in
an un-airconditioned room during a heat wave. He collapsed, was
put in a car and dropped at the back door of the old General Hospital.
He was hyperthermic and had kidney failure. The admitting resident
was Dr. Seeger. She stayed with him for 72 hours trying to keep him
alive as best she could.”
“The patient had lots of bed sores, some in places I’d never seen
before including his scrotum, some infested with maggots. It’s not
all that bad, but it looks bad. In those days, to kill maggots, we
would pour ether on them to asphyxiate them. The problem is that
ether is highly volatile. It causes an exothermic reaction, so your
skin gets burnt from the extreme cold. You really don’t want that.”
“This guy finally dies, and the county coroner won’t deal with
him. Dr. Seeger is pissed off and eventually calls me. I look at the
medical record which shows a tall skinny lady doctor, whom I’d
seen in the hospital and was very pretty, is barehandedly squishing
maggots to death off this guy’s scrotum. I figure, if she’s nice enough
not to pour ether on that old man’s scrotum, she’s probably nice
enough to put up with me. That’s absolutely how we met,” Dr.
Nichols swore. “Then she fell asleep on our first two dates. On our
third, we flew to the Bahamas.”
The couple now has three children and three grandchildren.
They survived 20 plus years of grueling medical work. “My wife, as
a breast oncologist, took a much more stressful job than me. None
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