`A Witness For The Dead' -- Medical Examiner Retiring After 25 Years

He is lurking behind every controversial death, every corpse left by the Green River killer, every Wah Mee massacre, every murder disguised as a suicide, every traffic death and every death that is not so obvious.

Donald Reay got the call when a homeless man was stabbed to death with a Bic pen. Ted Bundy? Reay saw some of the victims. He went to the triple slaying in Snoqualmie in March, and to the triple slaying in Mount Baker earlier this month.

So after personally conducting 5,000 autopsies and countless more investigations, it's understandable that Dr. Donald Reay is tired. This month, he's retiring after 25 years in the Medical Examiner's Office, 23 as the chief medical examiner. His friends are throwing him a big bash tonight.

The dead are his patients. He feels that, maybe, he is the last person they will talk to - with their drugs, their wounds, their genes. They speak from their hearts and their brains and their lungs.

"I'm not a witness for the defense or for the prosecution," says Reay, 62. "I am a witness for the dead. I'm the one person who can say anything about that person's last minutes on Earth." The Medical Examiner's Office handles all questionable and suspicious deaths. Its goals are lofty: The innocent shall be exonerated. Murder shall be recognized. Accurate medical evidence shall be given to courts. Public-health hazards shall be revealed.

Reay helped turn his fledgling Medical Examiner's Office into one that's attracted national respect. It was one of the first in the country to use genetic fingerprinting to identify a slaying victim. Reay helped push for a limit on choke holds in King County detention centers. He once turned down a chance to be the medical examiner of New York City.

Reay, who now makes $128,322 a year, has trained almost every medical examiner working in the state. He's held many positions at the National Association of Medical Examiners. Everyone knows him.

"He trained a lot of people," says Dr. George Lindholm, the medical examiner in Spokane County. "There're certain little clones of Don everywhere. Most of us, we're still trying to work up to the level he reaches on a daily basis."

But Reay will not mention his achievements, because he is also modest. He will say, in all seriousness, that the pathology is the fun part of the job. It's the paperwork and personnel issues that bog him down.

Reay is a bear of a guy, not that large, but with big features, a wide smile, a wide nose. He's got a shock of graying hair. He chews Juicy Fruit like he needs it.

In some ways, he is a throwback. His tinted bifocals look like they could be from 1973, the year he started in the Medical Examiner's Office. He doesn't like to wear all the protection that he's supposed to. He says it's like being dressed in Saran wrap.

"He's very traditional," says Dr. Richard Harruff, the associate medical examiner, one of two people vying for Reay's job. "He's one of the good-old guys. To watch him work - you see pretty graphically how our attitudes toward biohazards have changed in the last couple of decades. The newer people being trained - they put on a spacesuit before they come near a dead body, it seems."

Reay has set up a system for investigating deaths that tries to prevent the sort of blunders that have plagued places such as Los Angeles. Autopsies, performed in the basement of Harborview Medical Center, are just one tool. Police reports are examined. In King County, a forensic pathologist goes to every police death scene.

With every death, Reay questions the obvious. He helped convict a former Longview city councilman of killing his wife, even though police insisted she died when her motor home went over a cliff.

Reay helped free an Everett man charged with killing someone who really died of natural causes. The U.S. Attorney's Office credited Reay for uncovering that an elderly woman was killed on a cargo ship off the Washington Coast. The ship's crew thought she died naturally. But the freighter's chief mate killed her.

He was one of the forensic experts asked to review the death of White House counsel Vincent Foster.

Reay is a coal miner's son, and he grew up in Wyoming and Utah. He worked three summers in the mines, and he thought there had to be more to life. The company's doctor struck him as a decent fellow.

He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Notre Dame, and he went to medical school at the University of Utah.

He didn't like autopsies at first but grew to love pathology and the process of disease. He eventually became a lead pathologist for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and for the Air Force Academy Hospital.

Although he spends a lot of hours at his job, there is more to Reay than autopsies. He plays a mean game of handball. He'll fish whenever he can. His boat is named "Quincy II," after the medical examiner made famous by a TV show. Every day for the past five weeks, Reay has carried out one tiny white bag with him, filled with stuff. He is convinced this will make packing up easier. He still needs to take the bumper sticker that reads, "People kill people . . . w/handguns." And the Notre Dame sign that reads, "Play like a champion today." After reviewing six bodies last Saturday, and getting up at 2 a.m. Monday to go where a man had been stabbed, Reay walked into his office and yanked off his tie.

He won't miss the late nights and early mornings. He won't miss being on call, because he's certain he gets called out on more death scenes than any one else in the office. Others in the office laugh at this.

"Things are stacked against me," he says. "That's all right. I'm young, and I'm used to it, right?"