DIAGNOSTIC DISCREPANCIES IN AUTOPSIES
When a diagnostic discrepancy occurs in an autopsy, it is twice as likely to be due to something missed than something found, or, as Hill & Anderson say, "...significant underdiagnosis occurs more often than overdiagnosis by a factor of almost 2:1."(41). This fact conforms with the Cobain case, where the massive level of blood morphine was mistakenly deemed irrelevant and thus "underdiagnosed." Table 8, above, summarizes a study including over 6,000 autopsies, and provides statistics which show that it is far more likely that the Cobain case involved a serious "major" diagnostic discrepancy (a likelihood of at least 11.7% to 33.8%) than any other scenario put forth officially. Burgess wrote, in Understanding the Autopsy, that "There are many jurisdictions in this country where you would not have to be half-smart to get away with murder, quite literally...the fact remains that, in all too many places, the investigation of possible murder is undertaken only after pressure is brought by relatives or other interested parties, and when such investigation is instituted, it is done so incompetently that murder after murder goes unsolved and unpunished." (8).

7.) CONCLUSION: HOMICIDE

"The question whether a fatal injury was homicidal, suicidal, or accidental is as common in real life as it is in detective fiction. ...It is natural for a murderer to try to escape detection by making his crime look like suicide or accident, and such attempts have doubtless been going on for a long time. One cannot say how long, for one never hears about them when they succeed. However, records of failures take us quite far back." Smith, Sir Sydney (87).

HOMICIDE AN OBVIOUS ASSUMPTION Wecht, in the forward to an article by Winek (97), stated that "One of the most useful and relatively new areas of toxicology has to do with the significance and practical importance of drug and chemical blood levels. Identification and more importantly, quantitation, of blood levels is essential in many civil and criminal actions involving drugs. Without such information, the cases become matters of pure speculation and are predicated on circumstantial evidence (which may or may not prove to be correct ultimately)."(97). Winek's article, "Drug and chemical blood levels," mentions the following amazing case: "A lethal level of a drug or chemical found in an individual's blood does not by itself establish the cause of death. For example, a known narcotic addict was shot to death. Analyses of various body tissues (brain, bile, blood, etc.) revealed levels of morphine that have been found in other deaths attributed to overdose with heroin or morphine. However, in this case the cause of death was due to the bullet wounds!" (97). The indication is that a morphine overdose simultaneous with a gun shot wound is an overwhelmingly rare phenomenon at most, and that in the only such incident reported, the most obvious conclusion was homicide.