Cirrhosis Blamed After Man Found In Pool Of Blood

Diane Badcon says she’ll always wonder how her husband really died.

So will Spokane Police homicide Detective Don Giese, who found Steve Badcon lying in a pool of blood in the couple’s tidy downtown apartment a year ago.

The case needed an autopsy, decided the veteran investigator. Badcon, 42, lay near a couch in blue jeans and suspenders, his right eyelid cut and his bottom teeth loose.

Drinking buddy Steven Schavolt offered an explanation: Badcon went on an alcohol binge the day before and fell facedown on a sidewalk. Badcon’s wife was out of town. He made it home only because Schavolt and another man helped him to his South Wall apartment.

Schavolt told police he found Badcon dead the next day when he and another friend, Jessie Batey, stopped by the apartment.

Instinct told Giese not to close the case. Badcon’s apartment door in The Briggs building wasn’t locked when his body was found.

“Anybody could’ve come and gone from the time he was put into his apartment,” Giese said.

Batey suspects someone did. “He had too much blood pouring out of his head,” he said.

But Coroner Dexter Amend twice refused an autopsy, overruling his deputy coroner. Too much money, he told Giese, unless foul play was obvious.

What Amend did next baffled Giese even more. He wrote on the death certificate that Badcon died from intestinal bleeding due to alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver.

“It’s strictly a guess,” Giese said.

“There was no examination to support that.”

Badcon was a heavy drinker, relatives said. Diane Badcon suspects Amend based his diagnosis on a Three Star Vodka bottle on a table.

Other pathologists contacted by the newspaper about the case said they would have ordered an autopsy.

The deputy chief forensic toxicologist at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C., chuckled when told about the diagnosis. “Death by circumstance,” he called it.

“You can’t tell a guy’s got cirrhosis of the liver unless you look at his liver,” said Gary Kunsman. “I don’t know any reputable medical examiners who would do that. It’s just bad practice.”

Even if foul play were ruled out, investigators would suspect the head injury killed him, said Jane Weber, who oversees the Pierce County medical examiner’s office. “He’s only 42. We’d feel uncomfortable not autopsying him.”

Giese still wonders about the case.

“We’ll never know for sure. This person has been cremated and there’s absolutely no chance now.”

, DataTimes