i wish the coroner had done a better job. i don t know what california standards are, but you would think that california would be closer to the cutting edge. this was far behind the cutting edge. and those responsibilities made it very difficult to show with any certainty to the insurance company or to a court or anyone else exactly what the cause of death here was. what troubled keeney were the photographs taken of donna shortly before her death. they told a story that was much different from the mcginnises account. everywhere you look, it strategy is now business strategy.?
can see. and that s the last photograph taken of her alive. it s almost as if she is in motion then, and the husband s hand is up against donna s shoulder. and the last four pictures were even more unusual. i think those four photos are surveillance pictures. i think that was virginia mcginnis looking through the viewfinder of her camera to make sure nobody saw what they did. they re not photographs a tourist is going to take. and particularly the fact that the sequence, to this day, i don t understand why they would take it. there is a shot looking down the cliff where donna fell. then three panoramic views. one to the left, another to the right, and the last behind them. now, if she has slipped and fallen, then who is taking sightseeing photographs? i mean, who cares about a camera?
professional standards. if i had to object, it would be that it appeared that the possibility that foul play was really not taken into account. so that extra measure perhaps was not done in this case. the doctor who performed the autopsy was not a forensic pathologist, but he did something virtually unheard of at the time. for reasons not entirely clear, he kept a vial of donna s blood in refrigerated storage. and two years after her death, it was sent to the forensic lab for testing. a sample was placed in a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer. which broke the blood down into its chemical components. traces of a common antidepressant known as elavil were clearly present in donna s blood. in someone who had never
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taken the drug before, i believe even one pill could cause them to be very drowsy, dizzy, possibly disoriented. but how did elavil get into her system? the presence of elavil in the victim s body was crucial because she had no prescription for it. mr. mcginnis had prescription for it. moreover, the effects of elavil are evidenced by her behavior as seen in the photographs, dizziness, disorientation, sluggishness. the dose of elavil is determinative. a tiny dose may have little or no effect. a large dose can be so disorienting that you re so drowsy that you might fall asleep standing on your feet. at the very least you won t be alert. investigators discovered donna and the mcginnises had lunch about two hours before she died. the waiter who served them said donna ordered a soft drink. it s anyone s guess, but if i had to speculate, i would say at that point they put the elavil