By Terri Yablonsky Stat, MA
From the first time she stepped inside the Cuyahoga County (Ohio) Coroner’s Office as a medical resident, Marcella F. Fierro, MD, FASCP, was captivated by forensic pathology. For her, it was a chance to see classic natural disease unaltered by medical treatment. Fierro went on to become one of the country’s first female medical examiners and a leader in forensic pathology, volunteering her time to ASCP and serving as a consultant to best-selling mystery/crime writer Patricia Cornwell. Fierro retired in January 2008 as Chief Medical Examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia and as Professor of Legal Medicine at the Medical College of Virginia. In her 32 years as a forensic pathologist, she served as a model for the profession by bringing visibility to the field and paving the way for other female medical examiners.
By serving as consultant to Cornwell, Fierro helped raise national awareness of forensic pathology and its contribution to the public health and criminal justice systems. She advised Cornwell on the technical and scientific aspects of her books, which feature the fictional female forensic pathologist Dr. Kay Scarpetta.
Fierro and Cornwell met in the 1980s, when the latter was working as a crime reporter ready to try her hand at writing crime novels. “I wanted to meet a real medical examiner and was referred to Dr. Fierro by a local doctor,” said Cornwell. “Had I not met her, I would not have been interested in forensic medicine. Dr. Fierro is so enthusiastic and quite brilliant. She brought in this aura of energy that completely woke me up. I spent three hours with her and learned what a medical examiner does. She gave me a tour of the morgue and discussed technology that was down the road, like DNA.”
Cornwell’s fascination with forensic medicine and science was just taking hold when she asked Fierro to let her see an autopsy. Fierro told her, “It’s not a spectator sport.”
“I told her I needed to see it to write about it,” said Cornwell. “She told me to become a volunteer police officer so she could explain my presence at an autopsy. She thought she’d gotten rid of me, but when I showed up a week later in my police uniform, she finally let me watch.”
That was the beginning of a working relationship that has lasted 20 years. Cornwell began working as a technical writer in the medical examiner’s office while writing novels at night. “I followed Dr. Fierro every day like a puppy dog and took notes because forensics is a very difficult world for a nonscientist,” the writer said.
In turn, Fierro credits Cornwell with bringing twentieth century technology to her office. “Patricia had experience with word processing as a reporter and was elected amongst our employees to set up our word processing system and the first database for the office that allowed us to search our records,” she explained. “I used to keep a notebook of interesting cases, but with the database we were able to conduct searches. We could pull up all the fire deaths and then do some serious epidemiology. We could take all this death data and use it for things like prevention. From a public health point of view, it was extremely important to set that up.”
Fierro continued to champion Cornwell’s writing pursuits. “My first four novels were rejected by publishers,” Cornwell explains. “Marcella always was encouraging. She’d say, ‘Get over it—just do it.’ She always believed in me.” Eventually, Postmortem was published in 1987 with great success. Cornwell quit her day job, and other best sellers followed. Fierro continues to offer technical advice on Cornwell’s books.
“She is incredibly inspiring and eloquent and a brilliant witness in court,” said Cornwell. “Whenever she testified in court, she made you see and feel what happened to that person, and that had an effect on jurors because she took abstraction and made it real. She thinks beyond where the average person would go. She made connections that completely changed the outcome of a case.”
Despite Fierro’s retirement, Cornwell can’t see her slowing down. “A mind like hers won’t stop,” Cornwell said. “She’s brought about more justice to those who can’t speak for themselves than anyone on this planet. She always looked at everybody as a human being and gave them her best—whether a drug dealer on the street or child who had been abused.”
Fierro has been an active member of ASCP, having joined in 1975. She served on the Forensic Pathology Council and taught frequent workshops. “Part of being a pathologist is being a teacher,” she said. “I enjoyed it. It allowed me to do indepth work on various topics that I had an interest in. It was an opportunity to do additional research and put it together in a meaningful way to be instructional.”
Fierro is gratified to see increasing numbers of women entering forensic pathology. “Today almost a quarter of forensic pathologists are women,” she said. “That’s quite astounding from when I joined and there were three or four of us. When we became forensic pathologists in the 1970s, we would have lunch whenever we attended the National Association of Medical Examiners conference. We called it the Femme Fatale Luncheon. The boys had their network and the ladies needed one, too.”
Today, Fierro lives in Richmond, VA, with her husband, Robert, a gynecologist. They have two adult children. She plans to fill her days teaching for the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine and for Virginia Commonwealth University, putting in a new kitchen, and sorting through some of the boxes she labeled “When I retire.” Terri Yablonsky Stat is a freelance health writer in Northbrook, IL.