Forty-One Readers Told Us A Death Was Suspicious. We Ordered Forty-One Certificates.
This desk spent $2,940 on certificates, coroners' findings and police reports. Thirty-six arrived, three jurisdictions refused a stranger, and two of the subjects turned out to be alive. One of them answered his own telephone.
A regular column. The views expressed are the writer's own.
LONDON, United Kingdom — In the twelve months to 14 August 2026 this desk received forty-one unsolicited claims that a person who had appeared in this newspaper was killed to keep them quiet.
Answering them one at a time is what I have done since 2003. It persuades nobody, including me.
So we ordered the paperwork. Every death certificate, coroner's finding and police report we could lawfully obtain, for all forty-one names.
Thirty-nine applications. Twenty-two jurisdictions. Eleven months. Two thousand nine hundred and forty dollars.
What it cost
Thirty-nine certificate applications at fees between $9 and $115: $1,911. Six coroners' findings: $438. Nine police reports: $305. Courier, certified copies and one notarised affidavit demanded by an Ohio registry: $286.
Every fee schedule is published with this column. The objection that a newspaper spent money to reassure itself is fair, and readers should see what it bought.
What came back
Thirty-six certificates.
Twelve heart and circulatory disease, four of them entered as "heart failure". Nine cancer. Four stroke. Four pneumonia, two following a fracture. Three falls, each with a coroner's finding. Two road collisions, each with a police report naming a driver, a road and a weather condition. One sepsis after surgery, at 88.
And one open verdict from 1998.
Dr. Solveig Amankwa-Pettifer was sent the age and sex profile of the thirty-six, told nothing about what it was for, and asked what distribution she would expect. She sent hers before she saw ours. The two differ by less than the sampling error on thirty-six people, which is to say they do not differ.
That is the whole of the finding, and it is what this desk expected, because it is what mortality looks like. People who get written about in newspapers are mostly old, and old people die of hearts.
Two of them are alive
Two of the forty-one had never appeared in the obituary column. They had appeared in this newspaper as sources, and readers supplied the rest.
Aurelio Baxendale-Ngoma, 81, of Toledo, Ohio, answered his own telephone on the second ring. He said he had been in the garden, and that he was sorry to disappoint anybody.
The second living subject asked not to be named, and that is the end of what this newspaper will print about him. Establishing that both were alive took eleven minutes and cost nothing.
Three we could not get
Two American states and one Canadian province decline to release a death certificate to an applicant with no familial or legal interest. We do not have one and did not claim to.
Those three sit in the chart as refusals. They do not sit in it as nothing. We do not know what they say.
The one that is still open
Rowland Pitcairn-Voss was found in the River Aire below Leeds on 4 February 1998. He was 51. The inquest sat in September and returned an open verdict, which means the coroner could not choose between the available conclusions on the evidence he had.
The file has not been reopened. We asked for the inquest bundle, the depositions and the police file, and were refused all three, correctly.
Callum Ekwueme-Barr, a coroner's officer for twenty-nine years, says open verdicts ran at about four per cent of conclusions in that area that year, that one in a sample of six tells you nothing whatever, and that this cuts both ways.
I cannot explain the death of Rowland Pitcairn-Voss. Thirty-five ordinary certificates do not explain it, and this column will not hand you the total as though it were an answer. It is one, it is open, and it stays open.
The forty-first letter
Two of the forty-one letters came from the same reader. Her reply is at the foot of this page and it is the best thing on it.
One came from Desmond Prydderch, whose brother Ellis died of pneumonia in March, aged 74, eleven days after breaking a hip. He was not making an allegation. He says so in his first sentence, before anything else.
That sentence was read back to him by telephone in June and he agreed to it, and asked that his brother's trade appear alongside his name. Ellis Prydderch was a plasterer for forty-one years and could tell, his brother says, whether a wall was true by looking at it from the doorway.
What this desk takes from it
The arithmetic cost $2,940 and will not persuade the person best qualified to doubt it. A certificate records what a doctor wrote, not what happened, and Mrs Achterberg-Muir is right about that below, and four entries in our tallest bar make her point rather than ours.
My standing rule is to record the manner of death and to decline to draw an inference from it. Forty-one readers have now asked me to bend it. I ordered the paperwork instead, and the paperwork says: hearts, tumours, lungs, one bathroom floor, one wet road in November, and one February morning in Leeds that nobody has ever accounted for.
Thirty-five of these are answers. Three are refusals. Two were never questions.
One is not finished, and I am not going to round it down.
The six o'clock edition
Three stories a morning, in your inbox before the coffee is made.
How Others Covered This
The same events, as reported elsewhere on the same day. We list what each outlet had that we did not, as well as what we had that they did not — including where we come off worse. Why we print this.
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The Meridian TelegraphTHE FORTY-ONE: A NEWSPAPER COUNTS ITS OWN DEAD, AND ONE FILE WILL NOT CLOSE
Took our figure as a body count and led on the 1998 open verdict, which it reached before we did.
Had that we did not
The open verdict, accurately, and the coroner's exact wording, which they printed and we nearly did not.
Left out
The two subjects who are alive, one of whom their reporter could have telephoned in less time than the headline took.
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The Hollow PostWhy Did It Cost $2,940 To Ask A Question A Registrar Answers For Nine Dollars?
Read the exercise as an institution auditing itself and clearing itself, and asked who checks the checkers.
Had that we did not
A fair objection about who paid, and the full fee schedule, which they set out better than we did.
Left out
That three jurisdictions refused us outright, which is the opposite of an institution being waved through, and that we published the refusal letters.
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They Buriedthis newspaperForty-One Readers Told Us A Death Was Suspicious. We Ordered Forty-One Certificates.
Ordered every document we could lawfully obtain and printed the causes of death of thirty-six people to answer a question about none of them.
Had that we did not
The refusals, the two living men, the open verdict, and the four certificates that say 'heart failure' and therefore say nothing.
Left out
We wrote a bereaved man's best sentence into a pulled quote and telephoned him for permission afterwards. The order of those two acts is the whole of the difference between asking and taking. — V. Ashcombe-Doyle, standards editor
Right of Reply
They Buried contacted Rosalind Achterberg-Muir, clinical coder, retired by telephone on 9 July 2026, then sent the full column, the chart and the certificate summaries on 31 July with no deadline and an offer to print whatever came back. Replied by email on 15 August 2026 and asked that it run entire, including the last line. Printed unedited.
You have counted me. I would rather you had answered me.
I worked for thirty-four years as a clinical coder. My job was to read what a doctor had written on a certificate and turn it into the code that goes into the national figures — the same national figures your statistician used to tell you that your thirty-six look normal. I know precisely what those figures are made of, because for three decades I was one of the people making them.
Part I(a) of a death certificate is a doctor's opinion of the immediate cause. It is not an observation. It is very often written at the end of a long shift by a junior who met the patient twice, under pressure to produce the form tonight so that a family can go to the registrar in the morning. I queried Part I(a) with signing doctors several thousand times in my career. I was told 'put pneumonia' more times than I can count. Pneumonia is what went into the figures.
So what you have established — and it is worth establishing, and I am not sneering at it — is that in thirty-six cases nobody wrote down anything unusual on a form. You have then set that finding under a headline about whether people were killed. Those are not the same sentence and your own chart knows it, because your tallest bar contains four certificates that say 'heart failure', and heart failure is not a cause of death. It is a description of a heart that has stopped. Everybody's heart stops. That entry is the exact entry I spent thirty years sending back across a desk.
I want to be precise about what I asked you, because your column is not precise about it. I did not use the word murdered. I have never used it in my life. I wrote to you twice, about two men whose notices in your own obituary column said 'died suddenly at home' — and I asked what Part I(a) said. I asked because 'died suddenly at home' is the phrase we all use when nobody knows yet, and your newspaper printed it as though it were information.
You have now told me. One of them is an aortic dissection, and I am satisfied, and I am grateful, and I would not have got that answer anywhere else, and you should say so louder than you have. The other is 'heart failure', and you have answered nothing at all, and you have put me in a chart.
I am seventy-one. I am not frightened of the government. I am a woman who read forms for a living, who noticed that two of yours were vague, and who has now been made one of forty-one people in a paragraph about grief.
Print the aortic dissection. It is the only part of this exercise that answered a question anybody asked.
Published unedited under our right-of-reply guarantee.
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