Dr. Leslie Lukash, who, as a self-described “diagnostician of death” helped identify the corpse of Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor, and who oversaw the autopsies of as many as 50,000 bodies in more than four decades as the medical examiner of Nassau County, died on Aug. 16 in Manhasset, N.Y. He was 86.
The cause was lymphoma, said his son, Dr. Frederick Lukash.
Dr. Lukash was one of the youngest county medical examiners in the United States when he was appointed in 1957, and at his retirement in 2000 was believed to be the second longest serving. Having examined unidentified skeletons, poisoned spouses and scores of plane crash victims, he likened his work to solving jigsaw puzzles.
“Dead bodies do tell tales,” he was fond of saying.
Always dressed immaculately and often puffing a big Cuban cigar, Dr. Lukash welcomed the goriest cases but preferred the challenging ones.
“Shootings, stabbings, bludgeonings — those are simple,” he said in an interview in 2000 with The New York Daily News. “It’s the other cases, where you find a guy dead in bed in a motel. These cases strain the brain.”
A founder and president of the National Association of Medical Examiners, Dr. Lukash was credited with helping elevate the profession. He was instrumental in developing an accreditation system and pushed for the quick use of medical breakthroughs to examine the dead.
“He maintained a terrifically high standard for the Nassau County medical examiner’s office,” Dr. Elliot M. Gross, the former medical examiner for Connecticut and New York City, said in an interview.
The 5,000 autopsies Dr. Lukash personally performed included that of a firefighter’s wife whose badly burned body was found in her home, after her husband answered a call there. Dr. Lukash found no carbon dioxide in her lungs and no soot in her nose, which would have been present had she been breathing when the fire started. Under questioning by the police, the firefighter admitted suffocating his wife and setting fire to his own house.
In 1984, Dr. Lukash went to Argentina to help examine the bodies of thousands of people exhumed from mass graves. During that country’s military reign of terror, they had been classified as missing.
The next year, he joined a group of American, Brazilian and West German scientists who examined a skeleton thought to be that of Dr. Josef Mengele, the long-sought Nazi death-camp doctor. Although the European scientists believed that the skeleton was Dr. Mengele’s, Dr. Lukash was part of a contingent from the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies that was more skeptical.
The group of scientists agreed to accept that the remains were Dr. Mengele’s with “reasonable scientific certainty.” Dr. Lukash advocated for the weaker phrase, “reasonable probability.”
Leslie Irving Lukash was born in the Bronx on Oct. 25, 1920. He received his medical degree from Tulane University, where he became interested in pathology, then was drafted into the United States Army. Later, he did his internship and residency at Queens General Hospital in Jamaica, then went into private practice in internal medicine in Hempstead.
In 1950, he applied for the post of Nassau County’s deputy medical examiner and was accepted. He was promoted to medical examiner in 1957.
He said his favorite case was the 1975 murder of the socialite Sophie Friedgood, who was found dead in her bed. Dr. Lukash became suspicious when her husband, Dr. Charles Friedgood, signed the death certificate and sent the body to Pennsylvania for autopsy.
Dr. Lukash obtained tissue samples and determined that Mrs. Friedgood had been poisoned with the painkiller Demerol. After she had been buried three weeks, he received permission to exhume her body. He found needle marks, pointing to foul play. Dr. Friedgood was later convicted of her murder.
In addition to his son, who lives in Great Neck, Dr. Lukash is survived by his wife of 62 years, the former Gladys Howard; his daughters, Dr. Barbara Lukash of Scarsdale, N.Y., and Dianne Ray of Hot Springs, Va.; and five grandchildren.
Dr. Lukash never became hardboiled about death. In an interview with The New York Times in 1999, he said he still remembered going to a home to see a dead man in 1950 and hearing a little girl screaming for daddy.
He cried at funerals.
