The Suspicious Death of Kasha Blount (Massachusetts)

On a Saturday morning in 1990, the body of a teenager was found on a dead-end street in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. The scene raised immediate concerns, but the autopsy did not answer the question everyone needed answered most. How did Kasha Blunt die? Police waited on the medical examiner, the medical examiner waited on police, and Kasha's mother pushed for answers while a reporter started asking questions. Finally, the investigation turned toward Kasha's final plans, the boyfriend she expected to meet, and the belongings missing when she was found. The case would reach a jury, but the question at the center of it all never went away. I'm Kaililo, and this is the case of Kasha Blunt, on Dark Down East. Just after 730, on the morning of Saturday, February 17, 1990, Boston Police and EMS were sent to Bernard Street in Dorchester across from St. Mary's Cemetery. The call brought them to the end of a dead-end street, where a young woman was lying on her back, wrapped in a blanket. By the time police and an ambulance reached her, she had no signs of life. Her extremities and jaw were stiff and cold. A Department of Health in Hospitals report notes frozen blood and fluid coming from her nose, an apparent cut on her forehead and possible bruises to her face. Under suspected diagnosis, someone circled cardiac arrest, simply meaning her heart had stopped. It didn't explain why. There was no identification to give this person a name. She was a young, black female, visibly pregnant. She was wearing a cream-colored knit sweater pulled halfway up her torso, a black shirt, partially unzipped gray pants, black shoes, white socks, white underwear, round gold bracelets on her left wrist, and a white hair tie. Two responding Boston police officers also wrote in their report that the woman was bleeding from the nose and mouth area and had a bruise on her head. They, too, noted that her pants zipper was down and her underwear was exposed. A preliminary field report from the Suffolk County District Attorney's homicide division described the scene in even sharper terms. It said the victim was found with apparent, multiple trauma to face. The report also noted that the area was known for sex work and that spent condoms were recovered nearby, about 30 feet from the body. Investigators didn't know what or who they were dealing with yet. Meanwhile, across the city, the person who knew her best was just beginning to realize that something was wrong. The last time Phyllis Johnson heard her daughter Kasha Blunt's voice was the morning before the body was found. In a written statement provided to Boston police, Phyllis said she woke up around 7.30 on Friday, February 16, 1990 and heard the kids downstairs. Her two nephews, one a teenager, one younger, who she raised as her own, and her daughter, Kasha. On 7.45 or 8th that morning, Kasha came into her bedroom to borrow some perfume. Phyllis didn't see her, but she heard Kasha say she was going to work. Phyllis got home from work at 10.30 that night. Her nephews were there, but the older one, Michael, said Kasha wasn't, and he hadn't heard from her either. Kasha was 19. She worked. She had friends. Phyllis assumed she would call, so she went to bed around midnight. When Phyllis woke up Saturday morning, Kasha still wasn't home, but because Kasha usually worked from 10 to 5, Phyllis thought she might have already left for work. The day passed, and still Kasha did not come home. By Sunday, the worry set in. Around noon that day, Phyllis called Kasha's workplace. She was a sales clerk at Cherry Web in Terrain, or CWT, a clothing store in Dedem, about an hour away from home by public transportation. The CWT employee, Phyllis spoke to, said Kasha wasn't there yet. When Phyllis called back later, Kasha still hadn't arrived. Then the employee told Phyllis that this was the second day Kasha missed work without an explanation. Phyllis tried to reason through it. Maybe there had been a delay on the bus or train. Maybe something had held her up. Phyllis called Kasha's father in New York. He was supposed to be having a party, and Phyllis wanted to know if Kasha decided to attend. She hadn't. By Monday morning, February 19, Phyllis went to see Kasha's on-again, off-again boyfriend, 19-year-old Lennox David James Jr., who went by David. According to Phyllis' written statement, David said he hadn't seen Kasha in two months, and had last talked to her about a week and a half earlier. After checking with area hospitals to see if Kasha had been admitted and not finding her there, either, Phyllis reported her daughter missing. The next morning, Phyllis met with a Boston detective who suggested that maybe Kasha was with a friend, or boyfriend, and didn't want to call. But Phyllis rejected that. Kasha always let her know where she was, and she was more than five months pregnant. She wouldn't just go off-grade without telling anyone. While Phyllis was still at the police station, an officer told her they'd located a person who matched Kasha's description. Phyllis went to the morgue and viewed an image of the person on a television screen and at first, she didn't think it was Kasha. But back at the police station, she was shown a polaroid of the same person. That was when she realized she was looking at her daughter. Kasha's full name was Kasha letitcha Kita Michelle Blunt. Phyllis told Alice McQuillan of the Boston Herald that she gave Kasha so many names because she was her only child at the time. The mother and daughter were extremely close. When Phyllis went on vacation, Kasha slept in her mother's bed because she missed her so much. She also loved talking on the phone and called her mother several times a day, every day, even while at work, just to say hello. Kasha was an honor roll student at St. Gregory's High School when she graduated in 1988. She was also co-captain of the cheerleading squad and played on the volleyball team. She wanted a lot out of her life, and she intended to get it. Her mother insisted that she didn't drink, she didn't use substances, and she didn't party, especially not well pregnant. Kasha had been seeing her boyfriend David on and off for about five years. According to multiple witness statements contained in the case file documents I have, Kasha identified David as the father of her child. She was very excited to become a mother. She kept up with her prenatal care, and at her last appointment on February 3rd she had a normal blood pressure and heartbeat. Witnesses told police that she also had a shopping trip planned to pick out clothes and toys and maybe a stroller. On the night she was last seen alive. According to the case file documents I received from the Suffolk County District Attorney's office, Kasha's case was treated as a sudden death, not a homicide, until evidence suggested otherwise. However, a report from detectives Paul McDonough and Donald Brown notes that while the medical examiner's rolling was still pending, detectives were interviewing people who might be helpful if the medical examiner later classified Kasha's death as a homicide. Phyllis told a detective that one of Kasha's friends told her, Kasha talked about going shopping with David after work that Friday to buy things for the baby. Detectives spoke to the friend of Kasha's directly, and she said she saw Kasha around 1.30 or 2pm on Friday, February 16th while Kasha was working at CWT, and that Kasha said she was going shopping with David after her shift. Kasha said she would call the friend when she got home, but that call never came. On or around February 28th, detectives interviewed Kasha's co-workers. One co-worker said that sometime before noon on February 16th, Kasha received a phone call at work. The co-worker initially answered it before handing the phone to Kasha and said the voice on the line was male. After Kasha hung up, she told the co-worker it was David, and that he was going to meet her after work so they could go to child world to buy things for the baby. The same co-worker said that sometime around 5.15, Kasha finished work and left the store, but came back just a few minutes later saying she had forgotten her check. According to the report, co-workers asked if Kasha would miss her bus, but Kasha said that David was outside waiting for her. At the time, she was wearing light gray checked pants, a cream colored sweater, a blue-and-white scarf, and a black ankle length leather coat. Now, Phyllis had also told police that when Kasha left her work on Friday morning, she was wearing a long black leather coat, boots, and a black and brown purse. Phyllis hadn't actually seen Kasha leave that morning though. She later said she heard what sounded like Kasha's leather coat hitting the stairs as she walked down them. The black leather coat and purse were not among the items found with Kasha's body. This story repeated itself across other witness interviews documented in the case file. Witnesses kept saying Kasha was meeting up with David, and more than one witness said she was wearing her full-length black leather coat that day. A February 26th report contained in the files I received from the District Attorney's Office shows detectives were trying to reach David in the earliest days of the case, too. The report notes that further investigation was being conducted, including, quote, "attempts on making contact with victims' boyfriend David James," end quote. In the records I have though, it doesn't look like those early attempts were successful. Meanwhile, the scene back at Bernard Street had its own set of leads. A witness told police that on the night of February 16th, the night Kasha was lasting alive, there was a 1978 or 1979 Plymouth or Dodge van on Bernard Street, sometime between 1030 and 1130 pm. Newspaper reporting later described what seems to be a similar lead. The operator of a towing company near St. Mary Cemetery reportedly saw a 78 or 79 van with a lot of bodywork primer pulled up along Bernard Street in the early morning hours of February 17th. He thought whoever was inside might be dumping garbage so he followed the van for about a mile before losing it. At some point, police took that witness to look at a van that may have matched the description. According to the tow truck operator, it was not the same van though. The records available to me so far do not establish whether the van had anything to do with Kasha. Another lead came from a nearby service station. A man who worked there told police that a tall, light-skinned black man, about 30 to 40 years old, wearing a red baseball cap and a stone-wash jacket, had come into the station and said he'd been looking for cans when he noticed a woman's body on Bernard Street. The man then walked up Talbot Avenue toward Codman Square. The service station worker said the man was with an unknown woman. He described her as black and wearing a dark colored or black long coat and that she also said she had seen the body on Bernard Street. There's one more detail from the early investigation that stands out to me, although redactions make it hard to fully interpret. It comes from a report with the date "redacted" for some reason, but based on the details contained in the narrative itself, it was likely written on or around February 28. Detectives wrote that a witness described an encounter on the afternoon of February 21st. According to that witness, a young man, described as a light-skinned black male about 18 to 20 years old, asked whether police could get fingerprints off a blanket. That was a very specific question because Kasha had been found wrapped in a blanket. The report does not make it clear enough for me to say who asked it, why they asked it, or what police made of it at the time, but filed that away for later. By the end of February, police had more than a few loose threats, and in my opinion, plenty of things that needed follow-up. What they did not have was a cause of death. That responsibility fell to the medical examiner's office. Kasha's autopsy was conducted by Suffolk County Medical Examiner Dr. Gerald Feigin. The report itself was withheld from the records I received via public records request, but it's referenced in several places throughout the hundreds of pages I did receive. Now, in the earliest reports, first responders had described blood or fluid coming from Kasha's nose, a possible cut on her forehead, and bruising to her face, and what the DA's preliminary field report called "apparent multiple trauma" to face. There are several documents that note this in the case while I have. However, Dr. Feigin's findings did not line up cleanly with that first impression. Dr. Feigin found no evidence of external trauma on Kasha's body. Internally, he also found no abnormalities, no bone fractures, and no bruising under the skin. He did not find any evidence of trauma inside Kasha's mouth, or in the muscles of her neck, her hands and fingernails were clean, and there was no evidence of a struggle. However, a Boston Globe report based on a copy of the autopsy said the report did note, quote, "a scant amount of blood present over the upper forehead and left temple," end quote. Kasha's lungs were heavy with fluid or moisture. There were also small petitia, tiny pinpoint spots in her eyes, and froth are pulmonary edema fluid from her nose and mouth. In Dr. Feigin's opinion, these findings could fit several different causes of death, heart or kidney failure, a heart attack, suffocation, drowning, or asphyxiation, but they weren't conclusive of anything. A toxicology screen might offer more insight into Kasha's death, so tissue and blood samples were sent for testing. And then Kasha's body was released to her mother for a funeral in cremation. According to reporting at the time, Dr. Stanton Kessler, who was then the head of the Boston Medical Examiner's office, approved the cremation at Phyllis's request before the office had received the toxicology results. Over a month later, on March 29, the toxicology screen came back negative for drugs, alcohol, and poison. Further testing for rare drugs and poisons also found none. Dr. Feigin reportedly planned to send for additional testing related to sickle cell anemia because Phyllis had said Kasha carried the sickle cell trait, but if that testing was ever completed, it's not included in the documents I have access to. According to the autopsy, there was no visible fatal injury, no overdose, no poisoning, and no organ abnormality. The findings could fit a fixation, but Dr. Feigin also believed they could fit another non-criminal cause. By April, the case was caught in a figurative "No Man's Land" between the Boston Police and the Medical Examiner's Office. Police had labeled Kasha's case a sudden death, and were waiting for the Medical Examiner's Office to determine cause and manner of death. The Medical Examiner's Office meanwhile was waiting for police to produce additional evidence that could help explain the autopsy finding. No one had the piece the other side said it needed. Phyllis was left in the middle, grieving her daughter, and trying to understand what had happened. On April 24, 1990, Phyllis' attorney Michael P. Dullin wrote to Assistant District Attorney Frances O'Mara, asking for an update on the investigation. In the letter, Dullin said Phyllis was somewhat confused about what steps had been taken, who was working the case, and what the autopsy had revealed about Kasha's cause of death. After not receiving a response to the April letter, Dullin followed up on May 10. Around that same time, a journalist, just a few months into her job at the Boston Globe, started looking into Kasha's case. Her name is Tony Losi, and her reporting is the reason I know Kasha's name at all. The city editor came up to me and he said that he'd gotten a call from a funeral director in Dorchester, Roxbury. And it was Mr. Williams, you know, and he gave me a phone number. He says, "Call him. He wants to talk about some some case." And I said, "Sure." So I called him, and he told me about Kasha. And I just started looking into it. Pastor Floyd A. Williams, undertaker and director of the Floyd A. Williams funeral home in Dorchester, was concerned that Kasha's body had been released for cremation while the cause of death was still pending. According to Tony's reporting, Williams said he asked Dr. Stanton Kessler at the medical examiner's office if he was "sure" Kasha should be cremated. Williams claimed Kessler responded that there was no problem because the test results would probably come back showing drugs in her system anyway. He've convinced me they jumped to her conclusion, and he said there's something not right here. He said they just they just wrote her off. Kessler later told Tony he did not remember making that comment, but said quote, "I might have said that in another case. I talked to him about so many cases," end quote. The medical examiner's office defended releasing Kasha's body for cremation, saying it had preserved the tissue samples needed for testing. Phyllis believed assumptions had been made about her daughter from the beginning. She told Tony she felt police saw Kasha as quote, "just another black child and that all black children are on drugs," end quote. Those fears landed in a city already raw from the Carol Stewart case. Just months earlier, Charles Stewart had falsely claimed that a black man shot him and his pregnant wife Carol. Police accepted that story and turned their attention toward black neighborhoods. What the police did, they went into the Mission Hill area of Boston on horseback into minority neighborhoods. and they were bracing every young black man they saw. And it caused a lot of tension between, it Boston was ready to explode, it really was. When I got there, you could feel the tension, you could feel it. Charles Stewart died by suicide as investigators discovered the truth. He killed Carol. Kasha was found dead less than a month later. Bill is deserved for someone to shake some trees and try to find out what happened to her daughter. Tony zeroed in on the autopsy and possible causes of death. Dr. Fagan told her he had considered possibilities including drowning in a regular heartbeat related to pregnancy, sickle cell trait, and amniotic fluid from the fetus entering Kasha's system. But according to Tony who saw the autopsy report herself, none of those possibilities had been established by the findings. She then sought outside opinions. Dr. Werner Spitz, a forensic pathologist who had once trained Fagan, believed Kasha's death should have been ruled a homicide and that she had probably been strangled. Dr. Fagan disagreed saying strangulation was not obvious from the evidence and calling that conclusion a shot in the dark. Tony also consulted an OB-GYN who did not agree that sickle cell trait, a regular heartbeat, or amniotic fluid embolism explained Kasha's death. Tony's story hadn't even been published yet, but by late May, likely because of her digging into the case, the investigation was showing new signs of life. By the end of May, investigators were finally conducting new interviews, and one of the first people they sat down with was David. The person Kasha had told witnesses was the father of her unborn child. From what I can tell, in all the documents I received from the Suffolk County DA's office, and the records are not comprehensive, this is the first clearly documented police interview or successful contact with David, more than three months after Kasha was found dead. The apparently brief conversation is summarized in a report dated May 30, 1990. By then, detectives had multiple witnesses saying Kasha expected to meet David after work on February 16, but David gave them a different version. When he told police, he had not seen Kasha since around Christmas, that she had only called him a few times from work since then, and that he was not the father of the baby. David told detectives he learned about Kasha's death from someone at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he worked. He said he had heard stories that Kasha had been sexually assaulted, beaten to death, stabbed, and robbed. Now detectives had two versions of Kasha's final plans. Witnesses said she expected to see David after work. David said he hadn't seen her in months, but David's statements only got more complicated. When a witness hand-delivered the items that were missing from Kasha's body when she was found. According to witnesses, Kasha had a long black leather jacket and a black and brown Liz Clayborn pocketbook with her when she left work. But neither item was listed among her belongings when she was found on Bernard Street. On May 31, the day after police interviewed David, a young woman and her mother turned over a blue and brown Liz Clayborn pocketbook, a matching wallet, gold earrings found inside the pocketbook, and a full length black leather coat. From what I've gathered, the young woman was David's girlfriend. She told police that for Valentine's Day, David had given her a teddy bear and balloons but had promised more gifts. She said that sometime around the weekend after Valentine's Day, she found the unwrapped coat and pocketbook on her bed. Inside the pocketbook, she found earrings and a matching wallet. The obvious question here, how did David get Kasha's things if he said he hadn't seen her since Christmas? Tony Loci's story, inquiry questioned in unexplained death, was published in the Boston Globe on June 3, 1990. The next day, police executed a search warrant at the home of Lennox David James Jr. and his parents. The search warrant itself and the return were withheld from the records I received so I don't know every item investigators were looking for, but according to later documents, police searched David's room and didn't find the items listed in the warrant. But during the search, detectives spoke with David again and the black leather coat came up. David told the detective that he bought the black leather coat in question from another woman, but that story changed about 24 hours later. The day after the search, David called detectives and said he wanted to talk away from his house, so they picked him up. I don't have a transcript of that June 5 interview, but the police report says David told detectives he lied the day before. He said he didn't actually buy the coat from another woman. Instead, he said he'd taken a cab to Kasha's house on Thursday, February 15, because she owed him money. According to the report, David claimed Kasha first offered him a blue cloth coat, then swapped it for the leather coat she was wearing. He also said Kasha had given him the pocket book earlier sometime in January, and that he gave the purse and jacket to his current girlfriend on Friday, February 16. The report says David cried uncontrollably for 20 to 30 minutes during the interview and told detectives he still loved Kasha and missed her, but insisted he did not see her on February 16. A few weeks later, on June 23, David went to the police station again, this time with his mother for a recorded interview. Detectives read him his Miranda rights, and according to the records, he agreed to continue speaking without a lawyer present. In that recorded interview, David again said he went to Kasha's house on February 15, because she owed him money. He said Kasha couldn't pay him back, so she gave him the leather coat instead. He said the pocket book had come from Kasha separately about a week earlier, and he didn't know anything about the earrings found inside it. Detectives pressed him on the timeline. Witnesses said Kasha was wearing a long black leather coat and carrying her pocket book when she left work on Friday, February 16. If Kasha had given David those items before then, how could co-workers have seen her with them the next day? David pushed back. He did not accept the way detectives framed the contradiction. At different points, he seemed to suggest that they were mixing up what people had said, confusing the timing, or wording their questions in a way that made his answers sound inconsistent. He maintained that Kasha could not have been wearing the same coat on Friday if she had already given it to him on Thursday. Detectives also asked whether David knew Kasha was identifying him as the father of her baby. He said he didn't. Then, they brought up something that, in the records I have, first appears in this June 23 interview but had clearly come from earlier in the investigation. A reported three-way phone call involving Kasha, David, and another young woman. Detectives would not have been able to confront David with that call unless someone had already told them about it. And if the account was true, it gave investigators a possible motive that David didn't want his mother to know Kasha was pregnant, or that Kasha was saying the baby was his. The way the detective described it, Kasha supposedly said during this call that if David did not have the gumption to tell his mother, she would do it herself. The detective said David responded that he would quote, "Kick Kasha's if she did that, then hung up." David denied that was true, but he told detectives Kasha would sometimes say the baby was his, then say it wasn't, and that it was all in his words, a good joke. Near the end of the interview, detectives asked about something else that had surfaced earlier, whether David had ever asked if police could get fingerprints off something connected to Kasha's case. Remember I said to file away the blanket fingerprint detail for later? Well, David acknowledged talking about fingerprints one night, but said it was more like, "Is there any fingerprints? Don't they have anything?" End quote. Then the detective asked where David thought the fingerprints would be, the following is verbatim from the transcript. David said on the blanket. The detective asked on the blanket, "What blanket?" David answered, "I don't know. People said she was wrapped in a blanket." Then the detective asked, "Is that what you transported her in?" David denied it. He said, "I don't know how you think I did something. No." By the end of that June 23rd interview, the circumstantial case was getting stronger. But cautious cause and manner of death were still officially undetermined, so investigators and prosecutors turned to a process designed for exactly that kind of uncertainty, an inquest. The inquest was held at Dorchester District Court over three days in October of 1990. Reporter Tony Loci remembers being at the courthouse, but not inside the courtroom because inquests are secret proceedings. Phyllis, however, was allowed to hear the testimony. Phyllis was a nervous wreck, and I worried about how she was going to be able to sit there and listen to that kind of testimony, especially when they were talking about the autopsy. And so I gave her a legal tablet, and I said, Phyllis, I said, I need you to take notes for me, you know, I gave her something to do, you know, and she was all into it. According to Tony Loci's reporting of the inquest, based on Phyllis' notes, three police officers testified that they saw injuries on Cosh's face when her body was found. Those injuries did not appear in Dr. Fagan's autopsy findings in the same way. Dr. Fagan testified that he had narrowed his possible cause of death theories to three, a blow to the back of Cosh's neck, squeezing of her neck just below her jaw, or a chokehold from behind. But those were still possibilities, not a definitive ruling. The inquest also brought the coat and pocketbook to the very center of the case. David's current girlfriend testified that he gave her a coat on February 16th, the same day Cosh had disappeared, and that the coat belonged to Cosh, the same coat Cosh was reportedly wearing when she left work. David himself was also called to testify, but invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The inquest did not solve Cosh's case. It did not explain why she was on Bernard Street, or how David came to have her belongings. But it put the case on a different track. Prosecutors now had to decide whether the circumstantial evidence was strong enough to move forward, without the medical certainty everyone had been waiting for. In May of 1991, more than a year after Cosh's blunt was found on Bernard Street, a Suffolk County grand jury returned two murder indictments against Lennox David James Jr., one for Cosh's death, and one for the death of her unborn child. David turned himself in after the indictment, and pleaded not guilty. But even as the case moved toward trial, the prosecution's theory remained difficult to pin down. In a bill of particulars, the Commonwealth said the offense happened on or about February 16, sometime between 5 p.m. and 7 a.m. the next morning. Prosecutors said the assault happened somewhere in Dorchester, but they could not be more specific. They alleged that David caused Cosh's death by assaulting her with his hands or feet, or with a weapon or other instrument, either alone or in combination with his hands or feet. That uncertainty became the defense's central argument in trying to get the charges dismissed before trial. David's attorneys argued that the Commonwealth had no confession, no murder weapon, no physical evidence placing David on Bernard Street, no medical ruling that Cosh had been murdered, and no determination of cause, manner, or time of death. The Commonwealth argued that an undetermined cause of death did not automatically prevent a murder prosecution, prosecutors could still try to prove through circumstantial evidence that Cosh had died by violence, and that David was criminally responsible. The charges were not dropped pre-trial, but part of the case narrowed. David's attorneys moved to suppress statements he made to police on May 30, June 4, June 5, and June 23 of 1990, so all four of his interviews. And the defense was partially successful. A judge allowed the May 30 statement, but it suppressed the June 4 and June 5 statements because David had not been Mirandaized. The June 23 recorded interview was not suppressed because David had gone to the station with his mother, was given Miranda warnings, and the court found he voluntarily spoke with police. The court also separated the two indictments, ruling that trying both counts together would complicate the case. The murder charge involving Cosh would be tried first. Lennox David James went on trial for Cosh's murder in April of 1992. The Commonwealth had a suspicious timeline, disputed statements a possible motive, and Cosh's belongings in the hands of David's girlfriend. The defense had the problem that had shadowed the case from the beginning. Dr. Feigin still could not say to a reasonable medical certainty how Cosh had died. And if no one could prove that Cosh was murdered, how could the prosecution prove that someone murdered her? It turns out they couldn't. On May 5, 1992, the jury found Lennox David James Jr. not guilty. A Suffolk County District Attorney's Daily Report later summarized the outcome like this, quote, "Medical examiner was unable to determine the cause of death. Evidence indicated that death was consistent with suffocation or strangulation. Strong circumstantial case that defendant killed the victim, however, jurors had a problem with the cause of death." Others may have had questions about David, the belongings, the pregnancy, and the timeline, but questions are not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. I attempted to locate Lennox David James Jr. for this episode. I was not able to track him down directly, though I contacted people who appear to be connected to his family and I didn't receive a response. To be clear, David was acquitted. Luckily, David was found not guilty of Kasha Blunt's murder. I found no record of anyone else being charged or convicted in Kasha Blunt's death. The verdict ended the criminal case against David James, but it did not answer the question Phyllis Johnson had been asking since the day she identified her daughter. What happened to Kasha? Phyllis believed the early handling of the case shaped everything that came after. In 1992, she told a reporter, quote, "If they would have come to my house and talked to me and seen how we live and know that she was not that kind of child, things might have been different." End quote. Dr. Gerald Fagan later said in response to Tony Loci's reporting that he was misquoted and misrepresented. He told Globe Reporter Robert L. Kierstead that he spent more time on Kasha's case than any other because it's what the case needed, and he accused the reporter of trying to turn the case into a, quote, "racial issue," end quote. Tony Loci maintained that she did not misquote anyone at any time and did not intend to make the case a racial issue. In the years after Kasha's death, Dr. Fagan's work and testimony came under scrutiny in other cases. One of the most well-known was the 1997 Louise Woodard case, often called the Boston Nanny case. Dr. Fagan performed the autopsy on eight-month-old Matthew Epen. Woodard was convicted of second-degree murder. But the trial judge later reduced that conviction to involuntary manslaughter. Part of the controversy around Dr. Fagan's testimony in that case involved the amount of force necessary to cause Matthew's skull fracture. According to reporting on the case, Dr. Fagan had previously described the force as equivalent to a fall from a much greater height, but a trial acknowledged that a fall of just a few feet could cause that kind of injury. There was also the case of David McQ, a Massachusetts teacher and counselor who died after being kicked in the head while breaking up a school fight. Dr. Fagan ruled that death a homicide, which supported a murder charge against a 14-year-old boy. But later reporting says an independent pathologist found that Bagan had not performed a standard examination of McQ's heart. After Fagan left the medical examiner's office, Dr. Kessler amended the manner of death from homicide to undetermined, and the murder charge was dropped. None of that proves Dr. Fagan was wrong in Kasha's case. It does not prove bias, it does not prove negligence, but it does show that Kasha's autopsy was not the only case where questions were raised about Dr. Fagan's conclusions, his testimony, or the weight his medical findings carried in a criminal prosecution. I wanted to give Dr. Fagan the opportunity to speak for himself about Kasha's case specifically. When I reached him by phone more than three decades after Kasha's death, he remembered the case almost immediately. The reason I remember it is because he was very frustrating for me professionally. My job is to answer your questions. My job is to tell a family how their loved one died and if need be to represent it in court. And just about every single time I can do it, and when you can't, it's frustrating. That's why I have a very distinct memory. in this case. You know, I thought it might be a homicide, but I could never figure it. There was no trauma on her whatsoever. I asked him about the early reports from Bernard Street, the apparent cut the possible bruising the blood or fluid seen on cautious face. When people are lying on the ground, you're going to be by gravity, you're going to get certain things, but it doesn't mean there's trauma. He also pushed back on the idea that strangulation should have been obvious. I did a full autopsy with neck, and there's no trauma to the neck if I remember correctly. Obviously, it only has a report with me. There's no evidence of strangulation. That's something I'm not going to miss then or now. I asked him directly about the suggestion that Kasha's race could have played a role in how her autopsy was handled. Dr. Fagan strongly denied that. Absolutely not. You know, I teach medical students, and I am so offended by racism of every sort, and I won't go into presidential politics now, but people are all the same on the inside, and the only thing different on the outside is the size of the melanin granules. Yet we make the biggest fuss about it, and I've worn my students that you treat everybody equally because we're all the same, and we all deserve equal treatment. And that repeats at almost every rotation, and I'm offended by even the thought of that. That's the way it is. Everybody's the same. We're all equal. I take government service very seriously, and anybody calls my officer to turn every call as soon as I get into my office. The environment at the time, that being 1990, embossed in, it was a tense time between law enforcement and the black. I'm not law enforcement. I'm a doctor. Not only that, but I'm Jewish, and that's not how I was raised. I'm just really offended by that, because you know, it's not who I am, how I grew up, how I've always been my entire life. I've been raised to treat everybody the same. I treat everybody equally. I don't care about skin color. I don't care about sexual orientation. I don't care about any of that stuff. I mean, I'm heterosexual. My dance teacher is gay. We've competed internationally in same-sex ballroom dance competitions, where I'm the only street male there. And I don't care because we're all people and we're all friends. My job is to answer questions. I work for the people who pay my salary, and that's every taxpayer. And my job is to answer the question, and without fail, I try to do the best I can within science will allow. And just because somebody wants me to do it doesn't mean I can. He's still frustrated by how Tony Loci reported on him and the case. He told me that at the time, he wanted to bring Tony on a TV show designed to let people air their grievances in unique ways. And it used to be a show called Grudge Match, and I tried to go there like there were pies at each other, but they had canceled it because I just annoyed the way she reported it. But the most important thing Dr. Fagan told me was not about Tony Loci, or criticism, or even his own career. It was about the limits of what he believed he could honestly say, and yet going to trial anyway. You don't lie under oath. You raise your right hand, you swear to tell the truth, so you tell the truth. If the evidence isn't there, you can't lie and make stuff up. It doesn't work that way. I always pushed into testifying in that without a lot of evidence, and that it really bothered me. This is where Cauchy's case still sets in total uncertainty. What's left are the questions. If Cauchy was killed, where did it happen? The commonwealth alleged the assault happened somewhere in Dorchester, but even in the bill of particulars, prosecutors could not be more specific. How did Cauchy get from work in Dedem to wherever she was after work, to Bernard Street? And what about the people connected to the discovery of her body? I can't stop thinking about the man who came into the service station saying there was a woman's body on Bernard Street. He was reportedly with an unknown woman in a long dark colored or black coat who also said she saw the body. A long dark colored or black coat sounds a lot like Cauchy's coat that ended up in the possession of David's girlfriend after Cauchy's death. So who were those people? Were they simply passers-by or did they know more than they said? Of all the theories floated for Cauchy's cause of death, criminal, intentional, or not, there's another that stayed at the edges of the investigation. In an interview with a man who knew David, a Suffolk County DA investigator talked through different kinds of deaths, including murders, manslaughter and accidental deaths. The investigator specifically emphasized deaths between young men and women during quote-unquote "lovers embraces" and the panic that can set in afterward. He also explained that someone who was not involved in the death but helped afterward, for example, by carrying a body, was not necessarily committing a serious crime and that immunity could be granted. If the investigator was hoping that framing would lead the witness to disclose something new, the records don't show that it did. According to the investigator, the witness said he understood, but repeated that he had no knowledge beyond what he had already said. That idea also echoes something detectives pressed David on during his June 23rd interview. A detective suggested that David knew what happened, got scared, and dumped Cauchy's body. David denied that, too. So even while prosecutors ultimately pursued a murder case, another possibility hovered on the periphery. Something could have happened, perhaps accidental, maybe during a sex act, someone panicked, and the truth was never fully exposed. I should note, I don't see anything in the source material I have that references a sexual assault kit or any documented forensic follow-up around possible sexual assault or sexual activity in Cauchy's case. Despite the used condoms reported near the scene, the state of Cauchy's clothing, and the DA's preliminary field report noting that the area near Bernard Street was known for sex work. Because Cauchy's body was cremated, no full re-examination of her body is possible now. The records do show that some tissue samples and slides were preserved. That's not the same as having Cauchy's body available for further examination. It will always bother Tony Losey. They'd blown it. The fact that they had released the body for cremation, and Phyllis didn't know, she didn't know, and she wanted to have the service for her daughter, she wanted to do that as anybody would, but they never explained to her, well maybe we should wait, maybe we should wait until we get those test results back, but nobody said anything to her because they just didn't give it down. To me, that's the heartbreaking part of this story is that they should have done their jobs and they should have done them better. I just wish that we had found out about it before Cauchy had been cremated, and maybe there could have been more evidence they could have been gathered than there was, but by the time we got to it, it was too late. When I think about Cauchy, I keep coming back to one small detail. She had more than 100 stuffed animals in her room. It's such a tender, innocent image, a young woman preparing for motherhood, still surrounded by the childhood things she collected and loved. Cauchy Blunt's story doesn't come up often, if at all, in conversations about unresolved or disputed deaths in Boston, I think part of that is because of where the case ended. There was no conviction to anchor the story in public memory, but there was also no answer that allowed the people who loved her to let it rest. That is why I wanted to bring Cauchy's story forward. Cauchy Blunt should not be left in uncertainty. She was loved. She was expected home. She was preparing for a future she never got to live. More than 35 years later, saying her name with care is one small way to give her back some of what the record never did, attention, dignity, and the reminder that she was never just a question no one could answer. If you have information about Cauchy or her case, email me at [email protected]. Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. You can find all source material for this case at darkdowneast.com. Be sure to follow the show on Instagram at Dark Down East. This platform is for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones and for those who are still searching for answers. I'm not about to let those names or their stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Dark Down East. Dark Down East is a production of Kylie Media and Audio Chuck. I think Chuck would approve. [Squeak]