Carol Baxter may regret having fought so hard to keep the police from
releasing the suicide note allegedly written by her husband, Cliff Baxter,
the former Enron Vice Chairman. The note was released in spite of her
efforts to keep it secret, and copies were published in papers around the
country. Dan Nagao, who became friends with Baxter when they were students
at Columbia University, saw a copy of the note, and his suspicions about the
cause of death were immediately aroused.
He could not visualize Cliff Baxter printing a note like that entirely in
block letters, including his name at the end. Nagao had received letters
from Baxter at Christmas time every year until last year. He said that all
those letters had been written in longhand. He was not the only one who
found it hard to believe that a graduate of the Columbia University School
of Business Management would block print his handwritten notes and letters.
This may explain why Mrs. Baxter did not want the note made public. The
expensive lawyers she hired to block its release had argued that it
contained "intimate, personal family facts" that should be kept private.
That turned out to be false, leaving the possibility that the note was
forged as a plausible explanation of why anyone would spend a lot of money
to have it suppressed.
After releasing the note, the Sugar Land police closed the Baxter case,
declaring his death a suicide. That means they think Baxter wrote it. If
Baxter customarily wrote notes and letters in cursive, the police should not
have authenticated the suicide note solely by comparing it with a known
sample of Baxter's block letters, which would be easy to copy. His
fingerprints have to be on the note, and good handwriting experts should be
consulted.
The police and the medical examiner who performed the autopsy have
overlooked an even more critical clue than the note. That is the quantity of
Ambien, a hypnotic drug found in Baxter's blood and stomach. Dr. Joye
Carter, the chief medical examiner for Harris County, ruled Baxter's death a
suicide before the toxicology report was completed. Nearly all the news
media began calling Baxter's death a suicide with no evidence to support it.
When the toxicology report was issued on February 1, it didn't get the
attention it deserved.
The police had informed the medical examiner's office that on January 23,
two days before he died, Baxter bought 30 ten-milligram. Ambien tablets. The
prescription was for one a day. Patients are told to go to bed immediately
and warned not to drive a car. If they don't follow those instructions they
may experience a hypnotic trance in which they can be easily controlled by
others. The police found only 25 tablets in the bottle. In 24 to 30 hours
Baxter apparently took five Ambien tablets, three more than the number
prescribed. Dr. Ronald Graeser, a forensic pathologist familiar with Ambien,
says that in that case Baxter would have been so heavily drugged that it
would not have been possible for him to drive his car to the spot where it
was found with his body slumped over the steering wheel.
His body was found at 2:27 a.m. on January 25, probably less than 30 hours
after he took the first tablet. He probably took another tablet on the night
of the 24th and either went to sleep and was later awakened or remained
awake and experienced a hypnotic trance, during which he ingested three
additional tablets, enough "to drug him out of his mind" according to Dr.
Graeser. If he could not drive, the suicide scenario collapses, being based
on the assumption that he drove his car to the location where it was parked.
This hypothesis could be proved or disproved by an analysis of the quantity
of Ambien. found in Baxter's blood. The toxicology report says only that it
was present. The chief toxicologist says it was not calculated. The
toxicology group leader said she thought it was, but she also said that
because the death had been ruled a gunshot suicide (by Dr. Carter, her boss)
it may have been skipped because it was not considered important. When told
that it might prove that the death was a homicide, she said, "That's
probably the reason we didn't quantitate it."
Accuracy in Media has asked the commissioners who oversee the medical
examiner's office to ascertain and disclose how much Ambien was found in
Baxter's blood. They have forwarded our request to the chief medical
examiner, Dr. Joye Carter.
Reed Irvine is chairman of Accuracy in Media