StarTalk Radio
True Crime & Forensic Pathology with Patricia Cornwell & Dr. Jonathan Hayes
13 Mar 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, Star Talkians, Neil here. You're about to listen to an episode specially drawn from our archives to serve your cosmic curiosities. The archives run deep. If you enjoy this, take a peek at the full catalog on your favorite podcast platform. There's a lot there to tickle your geek underbelly. Check it out. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.
StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And today, we're going to talk about forensic pathology, not only the real thing, but what happens when it becomes novelized and becomes fictionalized storytelling. Chuck, always good to have you. Always good to be here, alive, alive. I think on this topic, we're going to need some serious levity.
Nothing like, I mean, yeah. And what do you call it when it's already done? Now, gallows humor is when you're about to die. What do you call it when you're already dead? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if I want to know. So we have a fascinating pair of guests on this episode. First, we have Patricia Cornwell, and we've actually had her on before.
And she has another novel she's going to tell us about. And she not only talks about dead people and the science behind death, the crimes that are involved, she also took that to space. Wow. And so that's why we've got her on this show. But she's a novelist, and she came to the subject as a journalist.
But now we have a novelist who started writing novels because he was actually a medical examiner, all right? This is his guy's expertise, Jonathan Hayes. Dr. Jonathan Hayes, welcome to StarTalk. Thanks, Neil. Hey, Chuck. Yeah, it's a pleasure. Wow. Now, so you came to the writing profession having started as a sort of professional writer. Of dead people.
What is your official sort of title other than sort of, you work in the medical examiner's office, but what does someone call you as a profession, as a scientific profession? My scientific title is, I'm a forensic pathologist. And a pathologist is a physician who makes diagnoses by examining samples taken from patients.
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Chapter 2: How does forensic pathology differ from traditional medicine?
And that may be a blood sample, or if you have a weird mold, you'll do a biopsy. A pathologist who looks at it under a microscope. examination of the body after death, and it's carried out in order to get as much information as possible about the cause and the circumstances of that death. It starts by looking at the outside of the body.
The body is examined for scars or tattoos or identifying marks and for evidence of disease or injury. Then the body is opened and examined internally. We'll examine all the organs. We'll place the remains of the organs back in the body, and we may do some additional If there are any injuries internally, we'll document those too. And then we'll prepare an autopsy report.
So that's basically what a pathologist does. Now, I'm a forensic pathologist, and that's a subspecialty of pathology. docs are going to just be examining you to try and save your life. They're not going to interpret the wounds. They may have guesses at what's an entrance wound and what's an exit wound. But that's the area of expertise of the pathologist, the forensic pathologist.
And so on a daily basis, I'm looking at wounds and trying to interpret. Now, how often, Doctor, do you examine someone who has been felled by gunshot and your determination is, oh, they didn't die of a gunshot wound? That has yet to happen. Gunshot wounds tend to be fairly lethal. Gunshot wounds are far more likely to be lethal than most Wow. Look at that.
Okay, but so that brings to... That puts on the table the very question. Let's say it's not a gunshot wound, where you have sort of the easy statistics on that. If two people just sort of got into a fight and then one person ultimately dies, is it important that you find out the actual thing that killed the person? Or...
Does that even matter if the person's dead and they have multiple injuries that sort of lead up to it? It's critically important that we find out exactly why the person is dead. That's our raison d'ĆŖtre. We have to know exactly why the person died.
Because you would be surprised at the complexities of the questions that arise, the legal questions and the medical questions, when someone dies, particularly in an altercation or a fight. So... And we'd have endless debates about the exact wording of the death certificate. And is what you do filmed? No, we document our findings photographically.
I mean, occasionally you'll find video documentation of a crime scene. There'll be a video walkthrough. But the autopsy itself is not filmed. Why not? Because I really don't know. I'm sure there'll be a lot of extreme. It's just tradition. Tradition. I'm sure there'll be a lot of extraneous information. An autopsy can be long.
For example, a typical autopsy, say you have a 40-year-old man who's jogging on a treadmill at his gym and collapses. That autopsy is something straightforward like heart disease, which is the most likely cause of death there. That ought to still take about an hour. But if you have a complex case, like a child abuse case, So it's a long period of time.
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Chapter 3: What does an autopsy entail and how is it performed?
He would eat sandwiches. LAUGHTER He sandwiches during the autopsy. The guy was great, man. I enjoy a good sandwich, but, you know, no one eats in the autopsy room. It's not the sort of place you sit down and go, oh, this is an appetizing place to enjoy it. So what of this training and your life experience did you feel compelled to put into your novel? Do I have Precious Blood, A Hard Death?
Precious Blood was the first one, and A Hard Death was the second. And the first is, like I think in most novelists, it's very semi-autobiographical, I should say. It's set in New York City after 9-11. It's a serial killer story. But I used a lot of my day-to-day experiences. We don't really talk about our cases in its matter of medical privacy, but I of that into the book.
And 9-11 was one of the things that disturbed me. My work after that, our work in this office for eight solid months, just trying to identify people. That was the hardest part of my life, I think, absolutely. But I tried to make the description of what forensics is and what it feels like to be in a mall and the smell and the sights of death. I tried to make them realistic.
And I think I did a pretty good job. So let me ask you this. Since you just brought this up, I don't want to get super personal, but you kind of broached the subject here. How do you deal with all this kind of morose, just depressing information that you're absorbing almost daily? Well, the last few years have made it pretty hard to stay positive about anything.
But I think, you know, it's been my experience that human beings do do terrible things to each other. But also, for the most part, when given the opportunity, people do the right thing. And I recognize that the murders I see, they're the exceptions. And though there may be horrible crimes indeed, on a daily basis, most people are trying to do the right thing. Wow. Okay. All right.
It's hope prevails, I think, is how we think about that. So what's interesting, if we contrast, Jonathan, your pathway into writing novels with that of Patricia Cornwall, who has shared with us some of what inspires her when she approaches a novel that needs a bit of forensic pathology to make it run. Let's check it out. What we're really talking about is exploration.
We're exploring, which is exactly why we want to go to the moon and do all those cool things. And if you're going to be an artist, you need to explore and go out and let it tell you what the story is. Let it tell you what the painting is. Like, you know, James McNeil Whistler, he would have this boat when he would take him out in this flat bottom boat in the Thames.
at dusk and he would look, he'd stand there on the filthy Thames in the Victorian era and look at what the light was doing. He'd remember that. And then he would go back and he would paint something evocative because he was there. And you feel he was there. You feel Hemingway was in the places that he's talking about.
And I very much encourage to people, here's my, I have three words for everybody. Just show up. Never know what you might find. So I like that because what you're saying is that to really, not to put words in your mouth, but to infuse a story with a certain authenticity, it can't be just things you've read about or heard about.
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Chapter 4: How does the forensic pathologist determine the cause of death?
So, guys, we've got to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to find out how Patricia ends up putting her crime in space. Apparently, Earth wasn't good enough. Let's put people in space and have them commit crimes there, where you then need some more forensic pathology to figure out what the hell is going on when StarTalk returns. StarTalk.
I'm Ali Khan Hemraj, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. We're talking about forensic pathology with bestselling author Patricia Cornwell. And we have an authentic medical examiner in the house. In the house. We've got Dr. Jonathan. Dr. Jonathan Hayes, who's not only medical examiner for New York City, of all places, but also a novelist in his own right.
Chuck, right before the end of the second segment, it looked like you wanted to slip in a question. What was that? Well, because he talked about how when you write forensic science fiction, that it makes it kind of sexy and it draws people into the field. He didn't say sexy, he said romantic. That's different. I think sexy is right, too. I may have said sexy. Yeah, you know, I'm sorry, Neil.
Excuse me. Unfortunately for me, my romance leads to sexy. But what I'm interested to know is, do you find the same thing in your field of astrophysics? Do you think science fiction causes people to now pursue the science of the cosmos? Yeah, it does. So that's why, even though, just like Jonathan, I'll call out things that are not real or wouldn't have happened that way.
But I say the overall impact is positive. Because what people can do now is they can get interested and then say, I like that. Let me read some more about it. And then the reading some more about it actually brings them into an anchored state of understanding. Whereas the fantasy sort of tickled their interest up front.
And Jonathan, I heard anecdotally that biology and chemistry professors in college found an increase in women taking courses that were sort of pre-forensic, inspired by the... actors who you want to be like them in the series Crime Scene Investigation in CSI. Did you find this as well coming up? Well, I think that increasingly forensics is becoming a matriarchy.
There are a lot of women going into the field. And certainly in my field, my office, I would estimate, is probably more than 50% female when it comes to the medical exam and stuff. And I think that's common in other areas too. But I don't think it's just that they're impressed by the actors. you know, minds that are interested in problem solving and figuring out how to bury a body.
No, but I mean, I grew up at a time when no scientist was portrayed as anything you'd want to be. Like, if you were cool and you saw a movie that had scientists in it, the scientists were not cool. And so there was no draw. There was no pop culture force operating on how you might align your life's ambitions. And CSI, all the actors are beautiful.
The men, the women, the storytelling, what they're wearing. Plus, they're shown with real-life problems, right? They have boyfriends, girlfriends, relationship problems. So they're fully fleshed-out characters. So, Jonathan, are you a fully fleshed-out character? Oh, dear God. That's a difficult question to ask. Hey, how does that work at the bar? And someone said, hey, what do you do?
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Chapter 5: What are the challenges of documenting crime scenes?
and we'll use the dream chaser. I know it's not crude yet, but it probably will be. And they get to this orbiter that's in peril. Well, if you've had anything where you have death inside and a violent death, what's that gonna be like? And how does a medical examiner work that? Yeah, Jonathan, this brings up an interesting question. You are completely trained for Earth-based crimes.
That is, crimes operating under the laws of physics as they manifest in 1G here on Earth. Can you imagine a future where... If we have colonies on the moon or Mars or beyond or hotels in space, can you imagine a branch, a sub-branch of your field that then has to sort of learn space physics to do your job? Neil, I don't know how much space physics there's going to be involved.
I think the periods of time that man is going to spend in zero gravity are going to be fairly limited. And perhaps not when it comes to things like the space station. But when you're looking at it, larger colonies where people would actually live, which is where I think violence is mostly likely to play out.
I think they'll be at normal gravity and the traditional medical examiner role is going to be pretty much the same. I think it'll be fairly specialised, the cases like Patty was talking about, or zero gravity. And I don't know if that's going to be a frequent enough occurrence that it's going to develop into its own full-fledged specialty. But it's going to be... You'd hope not.
I almost hope not. But that will be a challenge. And when I was thinking about that too, what it could mean, a crime scene in zero gravity, the first thing that struck me was what Patty was talking about was the...
Blood drop and spatter dynamics are going to be different because you've probably seen when you walk along after you've cut yourself, you can see the shape of the blood spatter on your floor or whatever, and you can interpret the way you're moving.
Or if you're standing still, if a person is standing still and dripping blood from, say, a weapon onto the floor, it tends to have a round appearance, whereas when you're moving it tends to have a teardrop appearance. But that's going to be different in microgravity or zero gravity. And so I think there's going to be some interesting science that's probably going to evolve because of that.
But I have to say, I mean, this is a question for you, just how realistic are these? We talk about, you know, colonizing distant planets, but on a large scale, how realistic is it? I mean, we had the Concorde in, what, 1965 or something like that. We had supersonic travel available to, again, the very wealthy man. But it's gone now. And so how realistic are these dreams of colonizing far planets?
Yeah, I think if... I tend to be a little on the skeptical side that any of that is going to happen anytime soon. But that shouldn't prevent people from getting ready for it, either legally or medically or the like. Little things, for example, as I understand it from movies I've seen, if you die while you're seated, then blood collects in your butt and in your feet or something, right?
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Chapter 6: How does crime fiction influence public perception of forensic science?
You call it rigor. Rigor. Yeah, rigor mortis. It's a bit longer. Rigor. Yeah. Okay. I'm not on a first-name basis. I'm sorry. Maybe I'll warm up to that. I hope you never get that. But go on. But you test for rigor by trying to bend joints and fairly small joints like finger joints become stiff first because it takes a lot of muscles to stiffen the hip joint or the knee joint.
So we tested the fingers first, then we tested the jaw and then the arms, et cetera. And so from the amount of rigor that's present in the body, you can get some soft sense of how long the person has been dead to get that degree of stiffness. Now, a lot of it relates to the body temperature at the time of death.
If someone has a seizure at the time they die, if they have a violent seizure, say they're doing cocaine or something like that, they have a seizure and they die, that will raise the body temperature and the person will go into rigor mortis faster. So you have to be very careful. Interpreting the time since death is one of the hardest things we do.
It's part of the science that's closest to an art. So then I heard that rigor mortis eventually goes away. So what happens there? It does. The muscle proteins begin to break down again and the rigor slackens. But now you're starting to get onto the body's beginning. It's about to begin to break down. Typically, you can feel rigor mortis by about six hours after death.
it's generally there by about 12 hours and goes off by about 36 hours oh wow wow okay so that'll that whole expression where someone you refer to a dead body as a stiff that's a temporary condition yeah but i think stiff sounds better than temporarily stiff we don't use that expression you'd actually be surprised i mean it's because we see death the whole time we're not alarmed or surprised there's not an intense emotional reaction
There's not an intense emotional reaction to it unless it's the death of a child or some particularly tragic circumstance there. So we don't say the word cadaver. We don't say corpse. We just call them bodies. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's very politically correct. I'm just going to say, Jonathan, I don't think they'll be offended. That's right. And if they are, who are they going to tell? Yeah.
So how about this? Just before we go to break, if a crime is committed in a distant place, again, I'm thinking space here because Patricia's novel was in space. If a crime happens in space, are you able to talk someone through an investigation of a scene? Let's say they're just generally scientifically literate, but they have no medical background such as what you have.
Can you talk them through it and then have them submit a report on your behalf for having done so? I think I could. I could tell them what to look for. I could tell them how to tell the body and what to check for. I think I could do that. I mean, obviously, I'd want them to document as far as they could, whether with photographs or videos, so I could see for myself. Yeah, exactly.
So you could do this from the beach while they're up there doing the artwork. In theory, but there's no real substitute for seeing with your own eyes. That's actually what autopsy means. Autopsy means own eyes. It says having your own eyes looking at the body and seeing what's going on inside it. Wow, I hadn't thought about that. All right, all right, all right. And another thing.
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