442: Controversial celebrity coroner Thomas Noguchi elevated forensics for better or worse

Thomas Noguchi was 13 years old when an autopsy—a rare medical novelty at the time—exonerated his father from a medical malpractice accusation. A bereaved family accused his father of leaving a cotton swab in the deceased patient’s throat that caused a fatal suffocation, but the autopsy disproved that by revealing the patient died from an undetected allergy to iodine.

Born Noguchi Tsunetomi in 1927 in Japan’s Fukuoka Prefecture, Noguchi recounted this story in his 1983 memoir, Coroner, as a catalyst for rejecting inheriting his father’s practice in order to pursue forensic pathology, the medical process that helps determine a person’s cause of death. His peers warned him of the low salary for this career path, but for Noguchi, to investigate how someone died was to carve new paths to living better. 

He graduated from Tokyo’s Nippon Medical School in 1951, immigrating to California the next year to complete his residency in pathology at Orange County General Hospital. In 1961, he became deputy medical examiner for Los Angeles County, a hotspot for Hollywood deaths.

On Aug. 5, 1962, when Noguchi slowly pulled back the white sheet, he was astonished to find himself performing the autopsy of Marilyn Monroe. To his chagrin, the office closed the case before he could push the toxicologist to test every organ other than her liver for drug contents, but as junior staff at the time, “I didn't feel I could challenge the department heads on procedures,” he admitted in his memoir. Noguchi suspected closing the case so quickly further stimulated the untamable public imagination, considering that forensics can yield approximate conclusions subject to professional disputes and public disbelief. Factions of the public doubted chief coroner Theodore Curphey’s ruling Monroe’s death as probable suicide, fueling speculation of foul play. Noguchi tasted his first firestorm as the “Coroner to the Stars.”

First term as chief medical examiner-coroner

With the advocacy of the Japanese American community, Noguchi was appointed as chief medical examiner-coroner of Los Angeles County in 1967.

He felt the scrutiny during his probationary first six months, during which he performed the autopsy of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy following his assassination (the only time in his career where he requested a person’s face be covered, so as to be “unshaken by (his) feelings for Kennedy”). As he examined Kennedy’s body, Noguchi repeated to himself, “No Dallas this time,” a mantra to avoid the reported mistakes of President John F. Kennedy’s autopsy, as the pathologist establishment considered the late president’s body mishandled. Noguchi’s autopsy on Robert F. Kennedy garnered praise among pathologists, but the coroner himself noted in his memoir an inescapable paradox: “The very thoroughness of my tests served only to give credence to a conspiracy theory.”

Noguchi concluded the fatal shot was fired into the back of Kennedy’s head three inches from the gun, contradicting the consensus of eyewitness reports stating that assassin Sirhan Sirhan shot from further away. Because Noguchi never officially ruled that Sirhan fired the fatal shot, conspiracy theories that a second gunman remained uncaught bubbled up. Per his memoir, Noguchi’s professional instincts believed Sirhan acted alone, but his forensics evaluation indicates a different possibility.

An attempted firing

Noguchi surmised that the coroner department, then stationed in the Hall of Justice basement without its own forensic science building, required more budget and staff to improve the quality of death investigations, which led to him making a political enemy of Los Angeles County’s chief administrative officer Lindon S. Hollinger. When Hollinger refused Noguchi’s request for a funding increase, the coroner went behind Hollinger’s back–which Noguchi’s memoir referred to the “cardinal sin of bureaucracy”–to reach out to the board of supervisors, Los Angeles County’s governing body, to request said funding and publicized the issue of underfunding death investigations. 

Humiliated by Noguchi’s maneuvers, Hollinger pressured him to resign over the charge of mishandling Kennedy’s autopsy, wanting Noguchi to submit a resignation in exchange for a lesser pathologist job or be fired.

Noguchi’s Los Angeles-born microbiologist wife Hisako Nishihara (1922-2014)—who endured the illegal and unconstitutional incarceration of Japanese Americans in U.S. concentration camps during World War II—detected racism in her husband’s case and penned fierce letters to the board, newspapers, and politicians. She wrote, “There is nothing equal about this equal opportunity business if a minority group member has to have ten times more education to successfully compete against a member of the Caucasian race.”

Noguchi withdrew his resignation, which was countered by an official firing. Japanese American activists rallied for his reinstatement and formed the Japanese United in the Search for Truth (J.U.S.T), their movement supported by significant Black allies such as the L.A. branch of Congress for Racial Equality (C.O.R.E). In historian Anna Choi Lee’s biography on Noguchi, L.A. Coroner, it notes that Japanese American activist Jeffrey Matsui disliked Noguchi due to the postwar immigrant’s “proclivity for self-aggrandizement and his barely disguised contempt for many Nisei,” a reputation felt by many members of the Japanese American community. Still, Matsui persuaded activists that fighting for Noguchi–one of the few men of color in a high civil service office–was a cause for the Japanese American community against an anti-Asian atmosphere thwarting their upward mobility, especially after the U.S. concentration camps. An Asian American-centered Gidra newspaper commentary, dated April 1969, lauded that Noguchi’s public resolve “show[ed] that yellow people do not always roll over and play dead,” an aspirational visibility to quash Japanese American stereotypes of passivity.

The Civil Service Commission hearing presented allegations of Noguchi’s incompetency (refuted by Hollinger offering Noguchi another job), insensitivity (claims that he gleefully danced when Kennedy was dying and prayed for aircraft crashes), drug addiction (a later psychological examination ruled out Noguchi having a drug psychosis) and anti-Black racist treatment of staff (disputed by the defense’s testimonies, which included that of Noguchi’s Black staff members).

The dropped charges and Noguchi’s reinstatement heralded a critical juncture in Japanese American activism, which rippled into the fight for reparations for the concentration camps. In the early 1970s, as thanks to the community, Noguchi used his chief coroner position to sponsor a—albiet unsuccessful—resolution to request medical assistance for the American hibakusha, survivors of the American atomic bomb.