Alyson Camus wrote an excellent interview with Dr. Lisa Scheinin of the LA Coroner's office, the person who performed the Elliott Smith autopsy and you can read, just click the link on the doctors name.
Alyson and M. Kriss worked out the questions and besides requesting they stop editorializing, I left them to it.
Dr. Scheinin requested payment of $300 an hour. I have never been requested payment for an interview but decided this is one we should get, so ponied up. Unfortunately, unknown to me me Alyson represented herself as a friend of the Smiths. Schenin's response to a request for follow up question where Alyson told the doctor she wrote for rock nyc was as follows. "When we met, you told me you were clearing things up for “a friend,” and made no mention of any intent to use our meeting as the basis of any articles or interviews. You have misrepresented yourself to me, and on that basis I am declining to answer all further questions. I answered your questions honestly and it is too bad that you chose to be less than honest with me."
She has a point but only so far… if Lisa was so gung ho about who was interviewing and MISREPRESENTING herself, Lisa might have googled Alyson's name. And if she was so worried about being misrepresented she might have insisted upon us using a recorder instead of NOT using a recorder. In other words: blah blah blah to Scheinin but we still shouldn't have done it. rock nyc has had its own problems, we've been writing about Smith for around a year and been unable to get anybody on the record. Call it investigative journalism. We paid for it, we own it, I an not going to be lectured to by some person who is taking money to talk to me.
And when paying for an interview what you get is an interview and not a profile because of strict time limitations and as it happens Lisa seems like an interesting woman.
One of my earliest ideas for a column, I think I offered the concept to the East Village Eye so we are probably talking 1980, was to conduct in depth interviews with civilians. Really grilling them, the way I used to grill rock stars. Nobody thought it was a great idea, but i wouldn't mind doing precisely that to the Doctor and given the time (and if I was the interviewer) I would do that.
I have read a profile of her and this I know.
1. She graduated in 1986.
2. She is married.
3. She doesn't mind blood and guts.
4. She is very inquisitive and considers her job one part forensic detective.
5. She loves roller coaster rides.
6. She loves snakes.
7. She knows Tae Kwon Do
8. She has performed the autopsy for some famous people such as Steve Allen and Brian Keith.
And her passion is discovering the mysteries of death and she is stymied on Elliott Smith.
For the most part this description of Lisa Scheinin seems at odds with the stoic presense, just the facts, Ma'am, cool customer who presented herself to Alyson Camus.
It has been -cmon, how long Gil?, years since Smiths death and in that time she has had to discuss it so often that its unreleased quality seems to have over shadowed her career. The essential momentappears to ovvur as follows:
1. Telling a ready to close the case LAPD that they can't and never shall.
and
2. Answering for that decision for years and years and years.
It is actually sort of brave of her, and I don't mean the brave face we got. I would love to have understood the decision making process, just not at $300 an hour.
There is another secret to Lisa Scheinin. She is a Long Island, New York, chick. I know that breed pretty damn well, they are a feisty lot and that feistiness seems to be simmerring behind the interview. I get the feeling she didn't want to be there and I was wondering why, for a lousy buck fifty (we only spoke for hald an hour) she even bothered.
And then at the end came the dropping of the guard, this is what Alyson wrote: "Still, when leaving the room, she said, relieved, ‘That was easy!’ Alyson was worried it was easy because the questions were softball. They weren't softball at all… then what? Certainly, if she didn't know Alyson was representing us, what was the doctor's easiness crack about? We went in with questions about Elliott and left with questions about Lisa.
Lisa rides roller coasters and can seem a little starstruck, she's married. She likes the mystery, she likes providing the answer.. Instead she is in limboland: "That was easy…"
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