Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #4. Arthur Conan Doyle
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in the same dismissive tone of voice one might hear when uttering the phrase “theatrical agent.”
Over mutton chops and ale at Keens Chophouse late one Wednesday night in February, I came to learn just how seriously Marina takes her devotion to the great detective. The night was cold, the fireplace at Keens was roaring, and the candlelight shone rosy on the fluted glassware of Marina’s cosmopolitan. (I was drinking ale, but that struck me as much too mundane for her.)
Marina Stajic is an elegant woman of Yugoslavian/Jewish descent—although she is a longtime smoker, she looks much younger than her chronological age. Her voice is smoky, with throaty Eastern European vowels. Her impressive credentials as a scientist lend a kind of authority to her admittedly intense involvement with all things Sherlockian. As Marina herself puts it, “Never mind devout Catholics—Sherlockians are serious.”
She is also a great storyteller.
Marina Stajic was born in Novi Sad, a town in Serbia on the Danube River, fifty miles north of Belgrade. It was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of World War I, and she points out that there was a cultural difference between her hometown and the Turkish influence in Serbia proper. She liked chemistry as a child; her first chemistry class was in the fifth grade in Yugoslavia. She still remembers thinking, “Chemistry will be really neat—physics will suck.” Her interest was spurred on by wonderful chemistry teachers in grade school and high school, who influenced her to major in chemistry. (When pressed, she admits that her grandfather was a butcher in Yugoslavia, but insists that had little influence on her interest in forensics.) Her interest in crime, though, predated her interest in science. She liked crime fiction, and read translations in Yugoslavia.
Her first contact with Sherlock Holmes came in the summer of her thirteenth year. She was at a summer boarding school in Switzerland, and her best friend at school was from Afghanistan. Her friend’s father was a military attaché in Moscow, and the two girls communicated in Russian, the only language they had in common.
One day, in a paddleboat on Lake Geneva, her friend told her the story of The Hound of the Baskervilles. She was captivated. As it happened, the movie version with Peter Cushing as Holmes and Christopher Lee as Henry Baskerville was playing at the time in the cinema, but the girls couldn’t go because of the minimum age limit of seventeen! It’s hard to imagine anyone censoring that, movies being what they are these days, but Marina had to wait until her seventeenth birthday to see the film.
However, that didn’t stop her. She went home to Yugoslavia and went to the library and read every one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, starting with “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” followed by “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” Her parents thought it was trash, and urged her to read Heidi, instead!
“You know, I feel there’s actually a connection between Heidi and Holmes,” she comments, leaning back in her chair as we order a second round of drinks. “They must have met in Switzerland around the time of the Reichenbach Falls adventure. They’re about the same age.” Not only that: Marina is convinced that they had an affair and that Heidi gave Holmes the idea of using the Baker Street Irregulars!
She also admires Agatha Christie, and points out that Christie’s knowledge and use of poisons is better than Doyle’s. “After all,” Marina remarks, “she worked in the dispensary in World War I—all of her poison stories are very good.”
Marina’s first experience of the United States came at the age of fourteen, when she and her mother crossed the country by bus—99 days for $99 on Continental Trailways. They boarded the bus in New York City, and went nonstop straight to Phoenix, Arizona, and then onto Los Angeles. They returned the same way: it took them three days and nights going, and three days and three nights returning. They had breakfast at a diner, and were served the rest of their meals on the bus. It sounded grueling to me, but being from Yugoslavia, Marina says, the bus seemed to her like a luxurious way to travel—it actually had a toilet!
She eventually came to America for good, moving to Baltimore in 1972, where her brother was a Medical Examiner. Forensic toxicology was a developing field in those days, with very few women in it, and she immediately saw that it offered career possibilities. Other chemistry related fields were more saturated, so she settled on toxicology. She earned her PhD at the University of Maryland in Baltimore in forensic toxicology. In those days Baltimore was a rough town. “It became a better city after I left,” she comments, “much as NYC became a better city after I moved here.”
Her graduate school was close to “The Block” in downtown Baltimore known for all the strip joints—Belle Star even ran a place there. Edgar Allan Poe’s grave was also only a couple of blocks away. Her school was in the downtown Baltimore campus of the University of Maryland, the main campus being in College Park, Md. The University of Maryland, she points out, has more campuses than any other university in the world.
After a stint working as a toxicologist in Virginia, in a suburb of Washington, D.C., she moved to New York City on April 1, 1986—“the year the Statue of Liberty was one hundred years old,” she adds proudly. “In New York City I felt like I finally came home.” She joined the Office of Chief Medical Examiner as Director of the Forensic Toxicology Laboratory, a position she still holds today.
When the subject of belief comes up, she shrugs. She’s not an atheist or agnostic; she’s a self-proclaimed “nothing.” She simply isn’t interested in the question. She claims to know what happens after you die, because it will be on Yogi Berra’s tombstone: “It’s over.”
The closest thing she can think of to church is Yankee Stadium. “If I say I went to church, my friends say, ‘Oh, yes, she went to the stadium.’” When the subject of Nero Wolfe comes up, she complains that the problem with Archie Goodwin is that he’s not a Yankees fan. She points out that Conan Doyle actually went to a Yankees game against the Philly A’s when he was in New York.
She smiles. “If there is a heaven I will be just one of the Yankee Stadium ghosts.”
When asked about interesting cases in her past, she tells the story of the only truly Christie-like poisoning she worked on. It was in Virginia. She points out, murder by poison is not as common as it used to be (“because it’s much easier to shoot someone.”) Also, poisons are more controlled than they used to be.
It involved the death of an eighty-year-old man, who began feeling bad one day. He went to the hospital, where he subsequently died. The old gentleman was a widower and had been living with a woman who was thirty years his junior—in fact, he had children her age by his first wife. They lived on a farm outside of Washington, DC, and he had left the farm to her in his will.
His children by his first wife claimed it was murder, and that their ‘stepmother’ had killed him. Everyone doubted them, but they insisted, calling the pathologist who did the autopsy, claiming that their father was poisoned with rat poison. However, there was no indication of the presence of the usual suspects—anti-coagulants or cardiac glycosides—so poison had initially been ruled out. He didn’t have bleeding, which would have been expected if anticoagulants were used and he had been in the hospital under observation for a whole week.
Finally, the pathologist agreed to further toxicology testing, “just to calm them down.” He realized that the children were thinking of arsenic—which he considered highly unlikely—but he ordered the tests anyway. It turned out that the old gentleman was loaded with arsenic. The conclusion was that he had died from an overdose of rat poison. Fortunately, the police still had a garbage can with his vomit in it, as well as a bottle of Scotch from the house. They were both loaded with arsenic, an ingredient found only in older forms of rat poison.
When they confronted the “widow”with the toxicology results, she confessed at once. She admitted she didn’t want to wait any longer to inherit the farm, and so had poisoned her common law husband. It seems that since it was an old farm, she had managed to get tins of old rat poison—hence the presence of arsenic. They got a conviction and she went to jail.
Marina also cited another interesting case in which a man poisoned his two year old child with benadryl. He claimed that the little girl got the drug from the medicine