How did Charles Augustine die?

Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2006 | 7:31 a.m.

Two men in black suits with cigarettes were stationed outside the Davis Funeral Home and Memorial cemetery Tuesday morning, directing television crews to a far corner of the grounds and positioning a golf cart to block the main entrance from gawkers.

The men, mortuary personnel, had set their alarms for 3 a.m. in preparation for the exhumation of Charles Augustine, the third husband of slain state Controller Kathy Augustine. By 5 a.m., the men were leading perky television anchors toward a media observation area set up 10 yards from Charles Augustine's gravesite.

By the time Clark County Coroner Michael Murphy arrived, eight television cameras were trained on Augustine's marble headstone, where a dirt mover was stationed and a handful of cemetery groundskeepers in hard hats milled about, holding shovels. Murphy, who had never before exhumed a body for an audience, wore a dark blue pinstripe suit, a yellow pocket kerchief, a striped yellow tie and a pair of latex gloves.

"It's not opened on the scene, by the way," Murphy said in explaining the process beforehand.

Nonetheless, reporters craned their necks to make out what they could from the upset earth, which revealed little about a death that's lured local, and now national, press with the promise of a complicated true crime story.

Augustine, who died in 2003 shortly after having a stroke, was exhumed and will now be autopsied to determine whether he was poisoned in a similar manner as his wife, who died in July after she was administered a fatal dose of the powerful paralytic drug succinylcholine. Chaz Higgs, Kathy Augustine's husband at the time she died, was arrested in September and charged with her murder.

Questions abound about the nature of Charles Augustine's death. Murphy will send specimens to an outside lab for toxicology testing, but doesn't expect a solid answer about the presence of succinylcholine for at least two months.

"This is probably one of the biggest things that's going on in the state of Nevada right now," he said. "And everybody wants to know."

By 7 a.m., three cemetery groundskeepers had lifted the gray box out of the earth, and Murphy was running his hands across the top of the gray-blue casket, seemingly collecting soil samples and storing them in a plastic bag.

Murphy refused to discuss specifics of the investigation afterward and thanked the reporters for their sensitivity. With exhumations, he said, "there are always tense moments."

A gardener, observing from a tool shed across the cemetery, shrugged most of it off. Strange, he said, but no stranger than anything else cemetery staff learn to adjust themselves to.

"On Friday, we get gypsies slaughtering chickens over their families' graves," he said. "Everyone handles death in his own way. You die, but it still goes on."

By 8 a.m., Murphy, the police and the crime scene investigators and most of the two dozen reporters and cameramen were gone. Groundskeepers, alone at the grave, paused for a second to put planks over the five-foot trench and reflect. The coffin, they said, was oversized, built for a larger adult. And the vault that held it? Pure cement, about 2,000 pounds. And with only three or four inches of clearance on either side of the vault, putting the big gray box into the earth is just as complicated as taking it out.

"It's all the same. Here we're just dealing with boxes, not bodies," one groundskeeper said. "It's all wrapped up. Now we get to eat lunch."