by Audrey Dutton

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Clayton Strong pulled up to a tiny hospital in Idaho, walked through the emergency room doors and told a clerk that his wife’s body was outside in their SUV.

A sheriff’s deputy was at the hospital talking to Strong by the time the coroner arrived. This was an “unattended” death: one where no doctor could attest to a medical reason for the person’s demise. That made it the coroner’s job to determine how and why she died.

Strong, a stocky man with white hair and bushy eyebrows, explained that he and his wife lived in an RV park on the edge of the woods nearby. He said his wife had been bedridden for years with Parkinson’s disease. That morning she’d woken up and asked for peanut butter and water, Strong told the deputy. He found her dead some time later.

The coroner looked over Betty Strong’s body. It was thin and frail. He didn’t see a reason to suspect anything other than a natural death for this 75-year-old woman. The sheriff’s deputy seemed to be satisfied with the explanation too. So, the coroner ruled that Betty Strong died around 8:40 a.m. on Dec. 14, 2016, from complications of Parkinson’s, and he signed off on allowing cremation of her body.

Less than five years later, Clayton Strong’s next wife turned up dead, too: shot in the chest in Texas.

It turns out that both marriages had a history of domestic unrest, with visits from police who documented threats to each woman’s safety.

It’s impossible to know whether a different approach to investigating Betty Strong’s death would have uncovered foul play. What is certain is that clues and evidence in the case were lost forever — and Idaho’s system for death investigation let it happen.

Family members of both women believe a more thorough investigation of the death in Idaho might have saved the life of Clayton Strong’s next wife in Texas.

“Someone shows up with a dead body and just says they died of natural causes,” said Amy Belanger, one of Betty Strong’s children. “I mean, really, do you just take their word for it?”

The answer is no, according to five of six national death investigation experts ProPublica consulted. They said the coroner should have obtained medical records to confirm Betty Strong was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, examined the trailer where her husband said she died, or both.

“You can think of all sorts of scenarios — criminal, accidental or natural — that could have occurred there,” said Jennifer Snippen, a death investigator, educator and consultant in Oregon. “But my argument is, if you don’t go to the scene and you don’t look at the medical records, you just don’t know.”

Most of the county coroners in Idaho are part-time elected officials with tiny budgets and no oversight or state funding to support their work. The national experts said that kind of system is more prone to cursory investigations like the one into Betty Strong’s death.

The failure to reform death investigations in Idaho has raised alarms for more than 70 years, according to current and former Idaho coroners and previous ProPublica reporting.

A national magazine called Idaho “the best place in the nation for a criminal to ‘get away with murder’ in the literal sense” because of the state’s “antiquated county coroner’s system,” the Idaho Statesman newspaper reported in 1951.

Asked whether murderers have escaped prosecution in Idaho’s coroner system, Rich Riffle, coroner for the county that includes Boise, said, “My humble opinion? Yes.”

That almost happened in 2019 when one inexperienced Idaho coroner decided to take the word of Chad Daybell that his wife, Tammy Daybell, had died in her sleep after chronic health problems, vomiting and a cough. Her body was later exhumed after his next wife’s children went missing. An autopsy by the Utah medical examiner’s office found what medical records would have shown, had the Idaho coroner requested them: Tammy Daybell was healthy. A jury convicted Chad Daybell of murdering her by asphyxiation and of killing his next wife’s two youngest children. The case is under appeal.

At trial, coroner Brenda Dye said she had regrets. Her voice shaking, Dye told the court she would have ordered an autopsy if she’d known better, but “at that time, with my limited training and being new, I did the best I could.” She declined ProPublica’s interview request, citing the case’s effect on her mental health.

Idaho isn’t the only place where death investigations fall short. Because there is no uniform federal system, the rigor with which your death is investigated depends on where you die. Other states lack enough forensic pathologists to do autopsies. And many local systems like Idaho County’s are squeezed for money.

But even among its short-staffed, underfunded peers, Idaho stands out. One measure is the state’s autopsy rate: third-lowest for autopsies in all deaths, last in the nation for autopsies in known cases of homicide.

Gov. Brad Little said in January that he would support more state resources to help Idaho’s coroners do their jobs. But he never got the chance; coroner-related bills passed by the Idaho Legislature this year contained no funding or other assistance for coroners and death investigations.

So for now, each of Idaho’s 44 coroners will bear costs that other states help cover: driving a body hundreds of miles to an autopsy; paying for some of those autopsies; or trying to recruit one more person to join Idaho’s statewide forensic pathology workforce of three.

“If you don’t care enough about how death investigations are done in your jurisdiction to invest in the people doing it, to provide them with the resources or to have high enough standards for the people that you hire to do this, you’re going to get what you get, what you accept,” said Snippen. “You’re going to get what you allow to happen.”

Betty Brock was a mother of seven who enjoyed singing and art, long bicycle rides, organizing family photos and researching her ancestry.

She was caring for her terminally ill husband in 2010 when Clayton Strong befriended her on the internet, according to Belanger, her daughter. Strong claimed to be “basically destitute and living in his car,” a backstory that appealed to a woman with a soft spot for taking in “wounded people” and trying to heal them with love, Belanger said.

Strong drove hundreds of miles from Southwest Florida and showed up at the Brocks’ property in the Florida panhandle. They agreed he could sleep in his car there as long as he helped with caregiving and housework. Soon he was sleeping in an outbuilding on the property, then in the........

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