Pothologist's Report

The cardbinieri dragging the bottom of Lake Orta on the Swiss-Italian border in June 1950 were looking for the body of a man who had been dead six years. It seemed unlikely that they would succeed. But from the lake's cold, glacier-fed depths came a corpse in what looked like surprisingly good repair. Legal delays prevented its examination for four days, and in those days it suffered more visible change than it had during its long immersion. Even so, the U.S. Army's Pathologist Walter Lentino was able to make some positive identifications:

P: Sex: external organs missing, but absence of internal female organs and presence of a piece of stubble-bearded skin on the neck clinched it as male.

P: Height: 6 ft. 2 in. Race: white (from the hair).

P: Age: from bone formations and skull sutures, middle or early 40s.

P: Length of immersion: more than one year, because the flesh had undergone saponification, i.e., turned soft and soaplike, a process that takes twelve to 18 months.

P: Conclusive identification: a funnel-chest deformity, analysis of teeth and fillings.

P: Criminal evidence: two bullets in the skull.

Thanks to these findings, the body was identified as that of Major William V. Holohan, 40, the OSS agent who had mysteriously disappeared during a mission far behind the enemy lines in December 1944.* What fascinated Pathologist Lentino, as he now reports in the A.M.A. Journal, was the amazing state of preservation of the internal organs. As his trained eye looked at the organs, though they were six years dead, it was simple for him to identify instantly the stomach and heart, liver and spleen. But when he took specimens of them for laboratory examination, the microscope showed that the tissues (normally complex and distinctive) had disintegrated. There was no way to tell, from a microscopic examination of the tissues alone, what had been heart or what had been liver.

Dr. Lentino's conclusion: more crimes might be solved if doctors studied how long it takes for different tissues to disintegrate in water and made up a timetable, to show how long a body has been immersed. A major problem is that few of the world's waters are as cold and pure as Lake Orta's.

*Three Italians were tried for murder but released by Italian courts; two U.S. Armymen, Aldo Icardi and Carl LoDolce, were convicted by Italy in absentia but cannot be extradited for punishment, nor can they be tried for the crime in the U.S.

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