225BatonRouge.com

For former coroner Dr. Louis Cataldie, driving through parts of Baton Rouge sparks weird trips down memory lane. At Airline Highway and Sherwood Forest Boulevard, he’s reminded of a man hanging from a hotel shower curtain rod, his death the result of autoeroticism gone bad. The 1100 block of North Boulevard, where the Dynasty Lounge once was, makes him think of the humiliated body of a woman found strangled. It was the first of the “black prostitute murders.”

And when he drives across Whiskey Bay, the exposed, discarded bodies of Pam Kinamore and Carrie Yoder, victims of serial killer Derrick Todd Lee, flash through his mind.

“It doesn’t just go away,” says Cataldie, “there’s an emotional toll that comes with it.” Cataldie reveals his experience as East Baton Rouge Parish coroner and now as state medical examiner in charge of Katrina victims in his new memoir, Coroner’s Journal, Stalking Death in Louisiana.

Coroner’s Journal chronicles the surreal nature of such work—from ferreting out causes of death to the agonizing process of describing the final hours of life to families. But woven in the descriptions of grim crime scenes is also the story of a man’s need to do right by victims. Cataldie writes about spending hours with each body, carefully teasing out details, silently asking victims questions and ensuring an aura of respect for the dead, no matter the perceived cause of death. Even a witchcraft practicing drug addict who appears to have died from a drug overdose gets a full forensic work-up, including toxicology and rape tests. Cataldie wanted to make sure no one shot her up.

Late in the book, Cataldie discusses a memorial rally at the Capitol organized by the families of serial killer Lee’s victims in 2003. During the event, a bell was rung for all women in Baton Rouge whose murders remained unsolved. “When the bell tolled for a victim whose murder occurred on my watch,” writes Cataldie, “a vivid visual image of the dead woman flooded my brain…I felt like it was Judgment Day, and I was being held accountable by these images of the cases I had worked. Did I do my best?”

Coroner’s Journal is drawn from the personal journal Cataldie kept to “stay sane,” during some of East Baton Rouge Parish’s most violent years. Three serial killers were at work during his tenure, as were predators such as rapist-murderer Gerald “Jimmy” Bordelon and snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, who murdered a woman in Baton Rouge.

The book was nearing publication when Katrina hit, so publication was delayed as Cataldie waded through the process of identifying bodies recovered after the storm as the state’s medical examiner. Despite his years on the job as a coroner, the experience was shocking.

“I wasn’t prepared for that. Eleven hundred people went to bed thinking they were going to wake up the next day.”

Worse, the recovery process was often log-jammed by bureaucrats who couldn’t agree on who was responsible for removing bodies.

“We didn’t have time for that,” he says. “It was just really irritating.”

Cataldie’s current job is to identify the last of the remains, find missing persons and process more than 1,200 caskets disinterred throughout the state during flooding. Of the remains, only about 60 have yet to be identified, but Cataldie says there is still an astounding number, more than 860, who have been reported missing.

In the first chapter, “Katrina,” added last fall, he describes a sign hung in the temporary morgue in St. Gabriel that read Mortui vivis praecipant, Latin for “Let the dead teach the living.” For him, Cataldie says the phrase has meant understanding life is short and is to be appreciated. It’s also meant something practical: learning all possible details of a case in order to get justice.

“When you cross that yellow tape,” he says, “there’s a tremendous amount of responsibility that goes with it.”