As a Texas medical examiner and gunshot expert, Dr.Vincent DiMaio was called on to investigate high-profile deaths both past and present, and he confirmed that Lee Harvey Oswald and not a Soviet assassin killed President John F. Kennedy. The man was 81.
His son said the cause was Covid's health issues.
Dr. DiMaio was the son of a New York City medical examiner. He investigated thousands of deaths and performed hundreds of autopsies.
The trial of George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed an African American teenager, was one of them. According to the testimony of Dr. DiMaio, Mr. Martin was shot in self-defense. The jury couldn't reach a unanimous decision.
As the chief medical examiner of Bexar County, Dr. DiMaio investigated 42 deaths at the hospital and testified for the prosecution. In 1984 she was found guilty of killing a 15-month-old girl and was sentenced to life in prison.
Dr. DiMaio, who had been a medical examiner in Dallas from 1972 to 1981 was called on to look into allegations that President Kennedy's assassin was not Lee Harvey Oswald but a look-alike. In 1975, Michael Eddowes wrote a book called "Khrushchev Killed Kennedy" which he published himself.
Oswald's body was exhumed in 1981 to be examined by Dr. DiMaio. His team found that the physical characteristics of the man buried as Oswald were similar to those on Oswald's passport and his Marine Corps records.
Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh wrote a book called "Van Gogh: The Life" in which they tried to prove that van Gogh did not commit suicide in 1890. The authors insisted in an article in Vanity Fair that van Gogh was killed by teenagers playing with a gun.
The gun used in van Gogh's death was fired too far from the body to have been used by van Gogh himself, according to Dr. DiMaio. He said thatVincent van Gogh didn't shoot himself.
The grandson of an Italian immigrant was born in Brooklyn in 1941.
In "Morgue: A Life in Death", a memoir he wrote with Ron Franscell, he said that all the men on his mother's side were doctors. There was only one black sheep.
In the memoir, Dr. DiMaio wrote about seeing his grandmother Carmela dead on the dining room table when he was a child. I didn't understand death or wakes when I was five years old I didn't know that my grandmother was on top of the table. I don't recall being sad.
He said that he could have known not to cry.
He was a student at St. John's University in Queens. He graduated with a medical degree from the State University of New York Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn after leaving college.
He worked with Maryland's chief medical examiner. He was the chief of the wound ballistics section of the armed forces institute of pathology in Washington. As a major, he was discharged.
The DiMaio family were introduced to death by their father.
He said in his memoir that he didn't want them to be afraid of death. He considered his work to be a life-saving pursuit, an early warning system against epidemics, killers and the human tendency to snap to judgement without the benefit of facts.
In a PBS "Frontline" interview in 2010, Dr. DiMaio said that he decided to become a Pathologist because he thought it would be more stimulating to look at bodies that were decomposing.
He was asked how he could work in a field that was depressing. You don't belong in my work if you are depressed. I can't work with children dying of cancer, but I have had no difficulty explaining how they died to their families. There is something in that.
The American Journal of forensic medicine and pathology was edited by Dr. DiMaio. He was a professor of pathology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio.
From 1981 to 2006 he was the medical examiner in Bexar County. The forensic science center was named after him.
Dr. DiMaio was against the use of untrained elected coroners to investigate suspicious deaths.
He had survived being shot four times by his second wife in a fit of rage. They parted ways.
He is survived by his wife, Theresa (Richberg) DiMaio, who was his first wife before they divorced and later remarried, as well as his son, his daughter, and three grandsons.
His daughter was one of the prosecutors who succeeded in getting Genene Jones convicted of additional homicides.
According to Dr. DiMaio, he did his job the same as any other doctor. He said that physicians take a history. Why did you go to the office? Only his patients don't talk to him.
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