In 1957, the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors appointed the county’s first-ever chief medical examiner–coroner. Trained in medicine and forensic pathology, this appointee—working in a city where celebrities occasionally end up on the slab—was also expected to share brief statements to the press regarding the deaths of public persons. Dr. Thomas Noguchi, a gifted forensic pathologist from Japan, was appointed to the position in 1967.
Noguchi’s appointment coincided with a tumultuous era of American history: Within his first two years as chief coroner, Noguchi conducted autopsies on Robert F. Kennedy and the victims of the Tate-LaBianca murders, including Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring. When speaking to the press, who nicknamed him the Coroner to the Stars, Noguchi would sometimes offer his own theories based on his findings—such as that beloved actor William Holden was intoxicated when he died—sparking accusations from critics that the coroner was using his position to soak up the limelight. Powerful voices in entertainment and city politics, including Frank Sinatra and the Screen Actors Guild, called for his removal in 1982. But it would take more than frustrated heavyweights to remove Noguchi from his post.
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Available for streaming on Apple TV, Amazon, and other digital platforms starting July 14, Coroner to the Stars offers a closer look at Noguchi, following the doctor’s journey from his childhood in Yokosuka to becoming the world’s most recognizable coroner. The documentary features interviews with the now-99-year-old Noguchi, pathologists, and Star Trek’s George Takei—who, along with other members of Los Angeles’s Japanese American community, advocated for the coroner during the peak of his controversy. Using archival footage from the Huntington Library and the personal archives of Dr. Theodore Curphey, Noguchi’s predecessor at the coroner’s department, filmmakers Ben Hethcoat and Keita Ideno capture Noguchi’s difficult task of leading an underfunded organization while navigating bureaucracy and institutional racism during a surge of homicides in Los Angeles. “Famous or not famous, it really does not matter,” Noguchi says in the film. “As long as life begins, life ends by death.”
Noguchi had his first brush with death as a young teenager in the late ’30s, when he saw his father, an otolaryngologist specializing in ear, nose, and throat cases, performing CPR on an adult patient. When the patient died, the city prosecutor for Yokosuka investigated Noguchi’s father for medical negligence. (An autopsy showed that the patient had died from an allergic reaction to a solution used to treat sore throats.) “That impacted me a great deal,” Noguchi says in the documentary. He decided to pursue medicine, enrolling in a program in Japan before applying to internships in the United States. From the over 200 hospitals he applied to, only Johns Hopkins University and Orange County General Hospital accepted him. Noguchi chose California, thinking it might bring him better professional opportunities.
After completing his residency, Noguchi became the deputy medical examiner–coroner of L.A. County in 1961. Under Curphey, he took on tough autopsies, including Marilyn Monroe’s, in 1962. After Noguchi noticed a high concentration of barbiturates in the actor’s stomach lining, Curphey ordered a “psychological autopsy”—an investigation into an individual’s mental state prior to their death. Based on Noguchi’s findings, Monroe’s death was ruled a probable suicide. When Curphey retired several years later, Noguchi was appointed to the top job.
Coroner to the Stars stresses Noguchi’s significant advancements to the field of forensic pathology. When Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968, Noguchi and his team conducted an exhaustive autopsy. The coroners engineered a system that calculated the distance of Sirhan Sirhan’s gun from Kennedy through an exercise that involved the coroners shooting a pig’s ear and then examining the marks on the flesh. The gunshot-residue system proved so effective that it was sold to other departments throughout California to shore up funds for the Los Angeles coroner’s office—which was so underfunded that, as one former coroner under Noguchi notes in the documentary, staff sometimes had to conduct autopsies without gloves. (The profits from the sale eventually went to a L.A. County general fund, not the coroner’s office.)
But Noguchi encountered trouble when he asked the L.A. County chief administrative officer, Lindon S. Hollinger, for more money to buy equipment. Denied, Noguchi went above Hollinger and was given the funds. The furious administrator then filed dozens of charges against Noguchi in 1969, including the claim that the coroner had celebrated the Kennedy case, believing it would make him and the office more famous. After then-mayor Tom Bradley testified in Noguchi’s favor, the charges were dropped.
In the early 1980s, Noguchi conducted the autopsies of several beloved Hollywood icons who’d suddenly died: Holden, actor Natalie Wood, and comedian John Belushi. When Noguchi released Holden’s and Wood’s blood alcohol contents as part of the autopsy reports, stating to the media that both of them had been under the influence when they died, members of the Screen Actors Guild revolted. “His willingness to do his job publicly, and to be blunt, did make him subject to criticism,” says Hethcoat. After the Los Angeles Times published a series of articles about alleged mismanagement at the coroner’s department under Noguchi, calls for him to step down resulted in another civil trial. Following a 5–0 vote from the board of supervisors, Noguchi was suspended from his role in March 1982; a month later, the board demoted him.
Through footage of the trial and scathing letters from Sinatra, the documentary offers a meditation on celebrity and its inherent challenges. In trying to lend a sense of transparency to difficult circumstances—or to “tell it like it is,” as he says—Noguchi became a target for those looking for someone to blame. “He can understand both sides of this situation,” says Hethcoat of Noguchi. “His side—that he had a job to answer to the public for how these individuals came to pass—and then the side of those who were grappling with these deaths.”
The filmmakers say that Noguchi spoke plainly about these past controversies, consulting his decades-old notes so he could discuss the science accurately. It was tougher to get Noguchi to open up about his late wife, Hisako. “He spent his life studying death and searching for the truth behind it, but I think his story taught us something about life,” says Ideno. One detail that didn’t make the final cut: Noguchi’s plans for his own remains. He told the filmmakers that he wants an autopsy so that forensic science can continue to evolve long after his death. •
Paula Mejía is a Colombian American writer and editor from Houston. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, GQ, the Atlantic, Texas Monthly, and other publications. She teaches graduate arts writing at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and lives in Los Angeles.
