DRAGOVIC PROFILE

Jump forward to September 6. The Fletcher trial has been over for two months and a verdict rendered. A reporter looking for background has called Dragovic's office, expecting a secretary to take a message. Instead, the doctor had answered himself, looked at his appointment book and told the reporter to come out for a two-hour block of time, with a caveat: things get hectic here, said the doctor, so be prepared to put up with some distractions.

Sure enough, at the appointed time, something has come up that requires a staff meeting. Dragovic ushers the visitor into his office, first taking him by a small kitchen to let the reporter grab a newspaper, bagel, cream cheese and coffee and leaves him. A glance around the new, spacious office of Dr. Ljubisa

J. Dragovic is revealing.

Consider: On one wall is a framed saying, "Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall inherit the earth"; a framed, 18-by-12-inch diagram of all the parts of a Smith & Wesson revolver, the same gun, coincidentally, that shot Leann Fletcher; a staff photo from 1991, early on in his stint as ME of Oakland County, with all but one of the 16 staff members wearing Groucho Marx mustaches in imitation of him; and a variety of framed posters and maps of Europe—Saint Tropez, French Wine Country, Musée Picasso Antibes, Galeries des Papes, Monaco Yacht Show.

It has been a busy few weeks since his appearance at the Mick Fletcher trial. He testified in another hugely controversial high-profile local case immediately afterward, this time on behalf of the defense, saying that a black security guard at a suburban shopping mall did not cause the death of a black shoplifter in a scuffle, testimony that led to the judge setting him free despite protests and picket lines outside the court. A glowing profile in the fine city magazine, Hour Detroit, has just come out and is hitting the coffee tables of the affluent throughout the region. Jack Klugman's been calling, needing some information on a case he wants to use for an upcoming made-for-TV Quincy, M.E. movie. And a TV crew from Ivanhoe Productions, which films and distributes segments

of medical-related news to some 300 TV stations around the country, is setting up for an interview later this morning on the Matt Smith case, which is a primer in how Dragovic approaches his job.

In March of 2000, Matt Smith was a healthy-seeming 14-year-old who was skateboarding in his aunt's basement when he collapsed and died. No one could figure out why. The fall hadn't killed him, certainly, as there were no broken bones and he hadn't hit his head.

And so in came Dragovic to solve the mystery, to pull a big answer out of tiny clues. Or as Jack Lessenberry, Hour magazine's fine contributing editor, put it in his profile of the good doctor:

He's smelled things we don't even want to imagine, seen things we'd give years of our lives not to see. He's looked into tens of thousands of eyes that can't look back, and stood in the hot Wyoming sun to exhume the mummified remains of a man who just might have been the Oakland County child killer.

Sometimes, finding out why they died isn't very hard; large bullet holes are dead giveaways. So is the bitter almond smell of cyanide, or lungs filled with water. Matthew's case had no such easy answers. Nor is it ever easy for him to take lightly the death of a child, even when you see more bodies in the course of a year than most people see invoices. Especially not when you have seven children of your own.

Quickly, Dragovic determined the young boy had died of a heart attack. But why? That was the rub, and the reason Klugman and Ivanhoe Productions would come calling. Dragovic found perplexing changes in the blood vessels leading to Smith's heart, the kind of microscopic changes you associate with years of cocaine or amphetamine use. Or, in this case, he would rule, the controversial drug Ritalin, a stimulant that acts the opposite in hyperactive children.

Smith was hyperactive, and he'd been taking Ritalin for years.

Dragovic ruled that the Ritalin had caused the boy's death. It was controversial, especially within a medical community that dispenses prescriptions for Ritalin the way it used to tell folks to take an aspirin and call back in the morning. Pediatricians went nuts, writing to local papers or calling in to talk radio. To Dragovic, it was simply doing what one of his literary heroes— Sherlock Holmes—does best: eliminating the impossible until there's just one

thing left, no matter how controversial.

Dragovic likes to paraphrase Arthur Conan Doyle. "The number 1 rule for everybody is one spelled out by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle through the mouth of Sherlock Holmes," he tells a visitor here to inquire about the Fletcher case. "'You cannot advance theories before knowing facts.' If you create a theory, you fall in the trap of trying to fit the facts to your theory." (Dragovic and Legghio's star witness, Dr. Herbert McDonell, had disagreed in court on a variety of forensics; later, with the trial over, Dragovic will criticize McDonell's theory of how Leann could have been shot as fitting fact to theory: "This was a means that was at fault for the same reason Arthur Conan Doyle explained originally," he'll say.)

He likes to quote proverbs, too, first in their original Latin, then in his heavily accented English. "The worst truth is better than the sweetest lie," he'll say, which is a central professional philosophy.

There's a co-equal central thought to his work. "Minutiae are not trivial," he says, repeating it in caps: "MINUTIAE ARE NOT TRIVIAL. You cannot say, 'Okay, just because they are little things, they do not mean truth.' Actually, it is the little things that give you the critical sentinel positions of the jigsaw puzzle you want to piece together."

They were little things—microscopic changes to blood vessels—that led to a big thing: a nationally renowned forensic pathologist ruling that Ritalin kills kids. The ensuing multi-million-dollar lawsuit against the drug's makers and dispensers has enormous ramifications for the drug and medical communities.

"The use of Ritalin is well known to be extremely safe. We use this so widely … it doesn't seem very likely or plausible," Dr. James Shaya, a pediatrician in upscale Clarkston, north of Detroit, told a reporter for the Oakland Press. Shaya is the co-author of a book: What You Need to Know About Ritalin.

Dragovic is willing to go against the grain if that's where his view of truth takes him; he is one of those rare folks who have acquired reputations as expert witnesses who testify equally for defense and prosecution; and he's not afraid, even though he's often part of the prosecution team in Oakland County, to testify

against prosecutors and police in very high profile cases in nearby counties.

He became Geoffrey Fieger's chief foil in several high-profile cases against Dr. Death, Jack Kevorkian, insisting that Kevorkian's so-called patients had died as a result of homicide, not suicide. Juries kept disagreeing. He was one of the few who held their own verbally against the peripatetic Fieger. Unable to get him to take the verbal bait in their encounters in court, out of court, Fieger played to the press by calling him "Dracula" and "the Transylvanian vampire." (Dragovic's staff and friends call him "Dr. D.")

Typically, Dragovic got the best of the name-calling, too. "I may be a Montenegrin vampire," Dragovic told the delighted press in response. "But I regretfully must correct 'Doctor' Fieger on his geography, as I occasionally must on medicine." He would also say: "I think 'Doctor' Fieger needs humility. If he had humility, he could have been among the very best of the finest people. But there's always hope for everyone."

Also, typically, Dragovic attended a Halloween party afterwards dressed as

—what else?—Dracula. And, now, there sits atop the front corner of his desk, nearest to where visitors sit, a 15-inch-high plastic Dracula with a Don King hairdo, clutching a coffin to his chest as he stands amidst the skeleton and skulls of past victims.

On the other side of things, he testified in opposition to the Wayne County Medical Examiner several years ago in the trials of two Detroit cops accused and eventually convicted of killing a small-time black street character named Malice Green. The Wayne County ME ruled that Green died as a result of a beating by the cops; Dragovic said the death was a direct result of Green's cocaine abuse, which drew the enmity of black activists. The two cops were convicted, won retrials on appeal and were convicted again. (Coincidentally, one of the co- counsels in one of those cases was Marla McCowan, who would later be on the opposing side in the Fletcher trial.)

Though he testified for the prosecution in the Fletcher trial, he makes it clear that even then he didn't see himself as part of the prosecution team. "I don't hide behind the prosecutor's office. A lot of medical examiners do," he says. When Marla McCowan wanted to interview him about the Fletcher case in preparation

for the trial, he opened up his office and his files. He saw it just as much a part of his duties to prepare her and Legghio as it was to prepare Townsend, and in fact he spent far more time with McCowan pre-trial than with Townsend.

One of Dragovic's favorite autopsy stories goes back to his days in Detroit, where bodies came in by the truckload, and no one was encouraged to look too hard or too long for explanations. One apparently routine suicide came in, a young woman who had been drinking with her boyfriend, grabbed his gun and shot herself in the mouth. It was being treated as routine, too, though Dragovic says that such cases should always provoke extreme skepticism. The same skepticism with which he entered the examination room on August 17 to do the autopsy on a young woman named Leann Fletcher, who was killed with her husband's gun.

The examiner in the Detroit case gave the body just a superficial, external going over, pronounced it a suicide and moved on to the next job. "People did not generally maintain a desirable index of suspicion. And I was unhappy about that," says Dragovic. He said to himself, "This is a fishy story."

Dragovic asked his boss if he could do a full-fledged autopsy. "He started calling me paranoid. I wasn't very popular back in that environment. They said I was a paranoid type seeing murders where no one else could see them."

He grabbed the body, anyway, went downstairs and did a full autopsy. He discovered the muzzle had been pushed quite forcefully into the tongue before the trigger was pulled. "Which would require quite a bit of pain. No one that's shooting self will do that. I mean, unnecessary additional infliction of discomfort in your last moment of life, just before the lights went out?"

Dragovic ruled it a homicide, forcing the police to investigate further. "A funny story. I come back and say it's a homicide and they're all upset. The police go back to talk to the boyfriend and they say, 'We know you shot her.' He says 'How do you know?' They say, 'The doctor told us. The doctor who did the autopsy.' 'What autopsy?' he says. 'I called the Coroner's Office a couple of weeks ago and they told me they never did autopsies on suicides."

His statement is proof of premeditation and he is convicted of first-degree murder.

*

Dragovic, quite frankly, is far more colorful than Jack Klugman ever dreamed of being. If you put him at the heart of a TV show purporting to be about forensic pathology and the workings of an ME's office, the part would seem too broad, overwritten.

Dragovic speaks passionately and dramatically in a heavy Serbian accent, punctuating his statements with loud laughter and a waving of his hands. He works in Oakland County, an affluent area pockmarked with numerous small lakes and multi-million-dollar homes. New money lives there. A generation ago, it was semi-rural; today, the farms and woods have been replaced by golf courses and huge, gated communities. The county population is 1.2 million and climbing. He, however, lives on the far east side of town, in the old-money capital of Grosse Pointe Farms, whose older mansions and stately homes lie along Lake St. Clair, just north and east of Detroit.

Dragovic isn't old money, though between what he makes and the income of his wife, Jadranka, a doctor herself and director of the cancer-care center at St. Joseph's Mercy Hospital, they can live anywhere they choose. Grosse Pointe Farms, while more blue-blooded, is in some ways less pretentious than Oakland County, with much smaller, easier-to-tend properties and, with a few exceptions, more tasteful houses.

The Dragovics live in an Italianate mansion that has seen better days. It was built for the scion of the Crowley department-store family in the 1920s; in the 1940s, famed World War II pilot Eddie Rickenbacker lived there.

As his walls indicate, Dragovic is something of a man of the world. He has, and hasn't, made his escape from the Balkans. A martial arts student, while in medical school, he brags that "Everyone went in for martial arts. We [from the Balkans] were fierce people, always ready and willing to fight."

Too fierce, as the world keeps learning.

In World War II, Tito's pro-Communist partisans in Yugoslavia were in civil war against royalists like Dragovic's grandfather. They threw him into a mountain crevice. His father, Jovan, fought against the occupying Nazis and

later won a medal for bravery. As a boy, Dragovic knew he wanted to be a doctor—he comes from a family of doctors; though his father went to law school, his aunts, uncles and a sister, now in Australia, are doctors—and he knew he wanted out of Yugoslavia.

When he was 22, he accepted an internship in San Francisco that gave him some coveted time away from his studies at the University of Belgrade. When the internship was over, on the plane home, he heard a young woman saying she was going to the University of Belgrade to become a doctor, and he turned around. If there isn't love at first sight, then this was the nearest thing. They saw each other a few times on campus, turned up at the same dinner party and were soon married. He was 24, she was 20.

Instead of pouring money into landscaping their large house, or on refurbishing it with the latest marbles, Pewabic Pottery or whatever happens to be hot in the tony Grosse Pointe community, where lawn perfection and remodeling are practically required pastimes, the Dragovics spend it on taking all or some of their seven kids (two are in law school) to Washington, or to Italy, or wherever the mood leads.

After medical school and a stint in the Yugoslav military, Dragovic and his growing family headed first to Ontario, Canada, and then into the US on a string of residencies. Eventually he ended up in Detroit as assistant ME to a politically connected boss named Bader Cassin. Dragovic, who refuses to suffer fools and others, privately and not-so-privately referred to his boss as "Master Bader."

"I was a sore thumb there, and constantly criticizing," he admits.

Though he has been working for Oakland County for more than a decade, his kids liked the east side, and he and his wife liked their Italianate mansion. So rather than move, Dragovic decided to commute. At rush hour, it frequently takes an hour or more to drive across town to the Oakland County government complex in Pontiac, a trip he makes in his white C280 Mercedes, old rock and roll cranking out of the speakers.

When he gets there, he oversees a staff of 35. Five of them conduct autopsies, about 1,200 a year—all the suspicious deaths, sudden, unexplained deaths, murders, suicides and traffic fatalities that might later result in criminal

charges. Though he's the head, he still takes a regular turn at cutting and sawing, himself, depending on staff workload, holidays, vacations and whatnot. On a recent busy Sunday, he performed three routine autopsies. Cutting the body open, measuring organs, weighing the brain and the like take 30–35 minutes, with the more detailed work that might be required, depending on the circumstances, taking another hour.

A month after his autopsy findings in the Fletcher case, Dragovic even got to do some Holmesian sleuthing in a Wyoming cemetery. In the 1970s, four Oakland County children were abducted and killed in a 14-month period; all the evidence points to a single killer. As quickly as the serial murders started, they stopped. A pubic hair on one of the victims was one of the few clues. One of the chief suspects in the case moved to Wyoming after questioning and died in a car crash in 1981.

Advances in DNA research led Dragovic and a team of gravediggers to exhume the body. Alas, after a year, tests came back from the FBI's overworked crime lab that the pubic hair found on the dead child was not a match for the long-dead suspect.

One year, in 1988, when Detroit was rightly called the Murder Capital and he worked downtown, Dragovic did 1,200 autopsies, himself. "I think that was probably the world record."

Dragovic is witty, urbane, dapper—and extremely cocky, feisty and self- assured. There's nothing like a tough cross-examination to bring out that cockiness and feistiness. Little did he suspect, though, when he was about to go up against Brian Legghio in that first day of the trial, how poorly his testimony

—or, more accurately, the attitude that went with it—would play for the jury. They—as they later told Townsend in the post-mortem examination of the trial that accompanies such cases—had a visceral dislike for him.