Chapter 7
The Italian Doctor Agnoli, where Bacigalupi himself took Mrs. Lewis on December 31, 1891 to have her examined, diagnosed “a slight mitral insufficiency”. In her letter to her friend Catherine written on the same date, she does not show much concern about her health. That is to say, there is one day between these symptoms and the illness, which would be very slight and insignificant since they allowed her to attend the gathering that lasted until dawn.
The poisoning, then, could not have been in California, nor could it have been carried out by Captain Lewis, because the poison would not have taken a month, seven days and some hours to produce its deadly effect without first causing at least one acute symptom that Mrs. Lewis did not suffer from.
If any lapse of time for symptoms to show is to be considered, since there were none in the moments immediately prior to her death, it has to be from the moment she felt the pain in her heart which prompted Bacigalupi to consult with Doctor Agnoli.
The lack of symptoms removed the suspicions of all those who were obliged to institute legal action. The police doctor’s information had been verbal, and his excuse for requesting the certificate, based on the fact that Mrs. Lewis had seen a doctor, gave the event a normal character.
But these irregularities were not enough to make suspicions disappear, and the crime, however mysterious the way it is carried out, rises like vapors from the earth. The efforts used to hide it are almost always ineffective, because it is revealed eventually. There are times when this revelation appears supernatural, but in reality it is not. When phenomena that give it that appearance are well studied, they are explained in ideas or patterns of human thought.
Thus, not long ago, a crime committed so many years ago was discovered in one of the valleys of northern Peru. The case deserves to be remembered now in order to demonstrate what we have said. A foreigner arrived at an estate and was housed by the administrator of the estate in the only room available. The room he considered suited to the distinguished condition of the traveler. As soon as he began to fall asleep, he was awakened by vague noises and he thought he perceived in the room the reflection of a woman.
Of course, he did not sleep during the night and the next day he referred to what had happened as natural, adding the description of the one that had appeared. Those who listened to him hesitated between doubt and astonishment at the story, and presented him with an album of portraits in which were those of the former owners of the estate.
Looking through one of them, the foreigner was surprised to find in it the picture of the same woman that he thought he saw during the night. It belonged to the wife of the former owner of the estate, who had been murdered by him some time earlier. But the authorities had not known of the crime because it had been carried out without witnesses, nor had it left the slightest trace. Only a few people observed the disappearance of the victim without being able to explain the reasons for it.
Jorge Isaacs refers to another crime committed in Colombia by a judge who recognized a skull separated from the place where bodies were buried and which gave rise to a famous trial.
A series of cases could be referred to in which the supernatural or the implausible appears, guiding a private individual or one invested with authority towards an invisible crime.
At other times, as in the present, the same facts prepare the work for the judicial procedures. In fact, although the request made by Bacigalupi to the doctors for a certificate to collect the insurance policy, and before that, to Mr. Dawson for him to grant the license to bury Mrs. Lewis in the Protestant cemetery in Bellavista, did not mention a poisoning, but rather gave the cause of death as a severe and sudden heart attack.
The first statements he and his friends, Taylor and Dockendorff, made about her death were different than those and statements made by others. In these statements, the impression is that a crime has been committed.
Witnesses who entered the hotel room declare that it was in disorder as if a violent search had been carried out. There is a small bottle of toxic substance that Bacigalupi collects and stores in its iron box. One perceives the acrid emanations that announce the existence of prussic acid.
Dockendorff enters his warehouse upset, and tells Mr. Gepp “his well-founded suspicions that Mrs. Lewis had died of poisoning”. Mrs. Mártin sees behind the windows an unknown gentleman, “remarkably moved, denoting fright” by what was happening. Taylor enters Bacigalupi’s warehouse with the news, “very frightened”. Everyone declares at that moment that Mrs. Lewis has died of poisoning and the rumors fly until they reach the ears of Mr. Mateos, a dentist. This is how the Police Chief finds out eleven months later that a homicide had been committed.
Up to this point, police investigations had sketched out the crime. It appears with all the evidence, and the corresponding proof, the moment it passes from the police to the judicial authority. It requires procedures indicated by the law of criminal procedure and the medical-legal examination required by the nature of the crime in question.
In fact, after the Judge of the crime, Dr. Arias, received, in the month of November 1892, information from the Chief that the corpse of Mrs. Isabel Lewis had been buried in the Protestant cemetery of Bellavista, letter F, number 36, barracks number 2, jurisdiction of Callao, he ordered its immediate exhumation to the local Judge
The judge, Dr. Nicomedes Porras, entrusted the operation to the local police doctors, Dr. Rodriguez and Dr. Cardenas. Once the identity of the corpse was verified, they proceeded to conduct the autopsy, extract the viscera and deposit them in a jar so that the chemical analysis could be verified.
These are operations that require the greatest precision and accuracy, because the entire success of the judicial process depends on them. They will serve as a starting point for further proceedings of the utmost importance as they will constitute the basis of the trial. The same chemical analysis will depend on the way in which these physicians proceed and, finally, it will separate the action coming from the medication provided by Dr. Agnoli, from the one that has its origin in the voluntary poisoning. It can be said that here is the legal knot of the process
We know that Dr. Agnoli had diagnosed mitral insufficiency and, according to this diagnosis, prescribed caffeine to Isabel. That disease consists of the insufficiency of the mitral valve that hinders the normal functions of the heart. So this treatment is the one perceived as the safest and with most effective results. In this sense, the doctor will have proceeded correctly and his moral responsibility will be safe even from the slightest suspicion.
But it happens that there is another condition that is commonly confused with it, which is aortic insufficiency (of the aorta, the mother artery that comes from the left ventricle of the heart), whose diagnosis is easily confused with mitral insufficiency but requires a completely different treatment. And so much so, that precisely the caffeine that was prescribed to Mrs. Lewis could produce a diametrically opposite effect and cause the death of the patient.
A misdiagnosis would have produced this unfortunate result. Only if the poisoning had been proven would the judgment against the doctor have changed. Then, the medical error, like the judicial error committed in the unjust sentences of innocents, will change. Mrs. Lewis would not have been the victim of a crime, but of one of those professional errors that are consumed in silence by the legal exercise of a “priesthood” to which society surrenders with the fullest trust. Police doctors of Callao were entrusted with such serious responsibility incumbent on them.
At first sight it is discovered that here it is necessary to save Mrs. Lewis’ heart at all costs, to save it intact. In order to deduce in the medical-legal examination if there was insufficiency of the mitral valve and then be able to make sure that the caffeine treatment was correctly prescribed. Because if there was no such condition but an insufficiency was aortic, the treatment was wrong and caffeine had been deadly.
The police doctors, Doctors Cardenas and Rodriguez, gave the judge the jars in which were the fragments of viscera extracted from the corpse and the substances found in the stomach, indicating that they could not make the chemical analysis and find out if the death had been produced by a toxic substance or not. They had destroyed the heart, and turned it into fragments. They made it impossible to confirm or refute the diagnosis, brutally or unconsciously destroying one of the most powerful sources of evidence.
Moreover, contrary to the principles established by science, those remains had been placed in a liquid whose nature and chemical state of purity were not indicated. Thus making it seem as if they were intentionally destroying evidence rather than, in obedience to a sacred duty, to achieve justice. Nor did the certificate state whether disinfectant substances had been used for exhumation and autopsy. Thus, that first phase of the judicial procedure in which legal medicine plays such a important role, leaves the Lewis case devoid of its most fundamental and essential requirement.
The Judge of Lima realized from the moment he held the certificate in his hands by its defects and insufficiency that the aforementioned doctors were unscrupulous in this operation,