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NOGUCHI Thomas$

Thomas Tsunetomi Noguchi.

Date of birth : January 4, 1927, in Japan.

 

Portrait ,,;,,,

 

Profession  Chief Medical-Examiner-Coroner for the Los Angeles County from 1967 to 1982.

He led the autopsy of many personalities, among them Robert Kennedy, Sharon Tate (,

), Natalie Wood (), James Belushi, Janis Joplin, William Holden.

Story 

Graduated from Tokyo's Nippon Medical School in 1951, he interned at the University of Tokyo School of Medicine Hospital.
Shortly after, he emigrated to the USA ().
He served a second internship at Orange County General Hospital, and a series of residencies at Loma Linda University School of Medicine, and Barlow Sanatorium in Los Angeles.

He was appointed a deputy coroner for Los Angeles County in 1961.

In 1967, he became Chief Medical Examiner for the county, replacing his mentor Theodore Curphey 

().

Supporting committee, June 5, 1969

He developed a high profile and was often accused of speaking too freely to the media, particularly following the November 1981 deaths of both William Holden and Natalie Wood.

Management audits in 1976 and 1982, along with an independant audit by the Grand Jury in 1982, showed he failed to pass muster; his lacks of managerial skills and administrative ability to run the coroner's office led him to be demoted from coroner to physician specialist in 1982.

He was later appointed Chief of Pathology at the University of Southern California () and then as Administrative Pathologist for Anatomic Pathology services at the USC Medical Center.

He was appointed Professor by both the University of Southern California and UCLA.
He is the past president of the American National Association of Medical Examiners.

In 1999, he was honored by the Emperor of Japan who awarded him the Order of the Sacred Treasure, for "outstanding contribution to Japan in the area of forensic science". He retired the same year.

He is currently the President of World Association for Medical Law, which is a medical body founded in 1967 to encourage the study of health law, legal medicine and bioethics.

Link with Marilyn 

He was the forensic scientist on duty at the morgue of Los Angeles, on Sunday, August 5, 1962, in the morning, when Marilyn's body was brought.
 

He thought that the most probable cause of Marilyn's death was a suicide .

 

For the partisans of the murder thesis, the explanation given for the Nembutal concentration, more important in the liver, isn't satisfying. This fact would indicate that those products had been ingested much earlier, and that they were about to be metabolized.

An injection would have left a mark or a bruise, would have led a quick death and would have left more important barbiturate traces in the blood.

So it was supposed that the lethal dose had been given by an enema. Indeed, the autopsy has revealed that "the colon shows marked congestion and purplish discoloration".

He was accused of having neglected the analysis of Marilyn's intestines content for searching drugs residues.

In his biography, Anthony Summers claims having asked to the toxicologist R.J.Abernethy to do those analysis. This last one answered that the samples had been destroyed. 

In 1985 Noguchi told about a bruise that Marilyn had down below her back and which presence, according his own words, "hasn't really been clarified". 

Bibliography

"Coroner". 1983. New York : Simon and Schuster.

"Conversation With Dr Thomas Noguchi", interview of Donald Carroll for Oui magazine, February 1976.

 

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