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Longtime county pathologist Dr. Billy Bauman dies at 80

Mike Miller  —  7/16/2008 3:08 pm

Dr. Billy Bauman, the well-known Madison pathologist who for more than 30 years performed most of the autopsies for the Dane County Coroner's Office, has died at the age of 80.

Bauman died Monday at the Ellen and Peter Johnson HospiceCare residence in Madison. A  gathering of friends and family will take place at the hospice center, 5395 E. Cheryl Parkway in Fitchburg, on Tuesday, July 22 from 5 to 8 p.m.

Born in Arkansas and educated in Indiana, Bauman came to Madison after a three years stint as a chief flight surgeon in the U.S. Air Force. In 1962 he was convinced by Dane County Coroner Clyde "Bud" Chamberlain to become the on-call pathologist for the coroner's office and that agreement led to both a professional and personal friendship that last until Chamberlain was shot and killed in his office in January of 1988, a murder which Bauman and other staff members witnesses.

Asked years later what his most difficult moment was in his work for the coroner's office, Bauman replied quickly, "pronouncing Bud dead." Chamberlain was killed by a single shot fired from a sawed off .22 caliber rifle by Aaron Lindh, of Madison, who also killed County Corporation Counsel secretary Eleanor Townsend that day and wounded Erik Erickson, then working in the state Justice Department, in a shooting in the City County Building in January of 1988.

Bauman continued working for the coroner's office until his retirement in the late 1990s, and since then has appeared sporadically in courtrooms here and in other parts of the state testifying as a consultant in murder cases or other cases involving death.

As a deputy coroner who performed most of the autopsies here, Bauman was a regular figure in murder trials, doing autopsies and then testifying in some of the most sensational murder trials in the county.

Among them was the famous Barbara Hoffman case in which the former Madison massage parlor masseuse was accused of killing Harold Berge, one of her customers from Stoughton.

After an autopsy on Berge's body, Bauman said the cause of death was a severe beating, but then some months later the man who implicated Hoffman in the case, Gerald Davies, was found dead in a bathtub in an apartment in Madison. Davies, it turned out, had died of cyanide poisoning. That led Bauman to re-examine the Berge death and he subsequently found out that he is among the small percentage of humans who do not possess the ability to smell the odor of burned almonds. That is the odor cyanide leaves behind and the highly professional Bauman was not only able to admit his error in ruling Berge had died of a beating, but was able to convince a jury of why he made the mistake.

Hoffman, who was a top notch science student at the University of Wisconsin and the beneficiary of insurance policies for both Berge and Davies, was convicted and to this day is serving a life sentence for the murder.

Bauman's findings played crucial roles for law enforcement in other cases as well, including the strange case of Doris Ann McLeod, 19. Sheriff's deputies found the body of a handless woman in the Goose Lake Wildlife refuge south of I-94 at the eastern end of Dane County in 1990. A pair of hands were subsequently found in a wild area in Walworth County and once Bauman was able to say conclusively that the hands and the body were from the same person, detectives were able to determine the body was that of McLeod, who had been missing from an Illinois home for troubled teens. Joseph White of Milwaukee was later convicted of killing McLeod.

Since his retirement Bauman has been spending winters mostly in Florida and summers mostly in Wisconsin. He was an avid fisherman, a pastime he shared with his longtime friend Chamberlain.

Mike Miller  —  7/16/2008 3:08 pm