NEW YORK, NY.- Dr. Vincent DiMaio, who as a Texas medical examiner and gunshot expert was called on to investigate high-profile deaths both past and present — confirming that Lee Harvey Oswald and not a Soviet assassin killed President John F. Kennedy, for example, and concluding that Vincent van Gogh did not kill himself but was murdered — died on Sept. 18 at his home in San Antonio. He was 81.

The cause was complications of COVID, his son, Dr. Dominick J. DiMaio, said.

The son of a chief New York City medical examiner, DiMaio (pronounced dih-MY-oh) was an anatomic, clinical and forensic pathologist who served both in public office and as a private consultant. He investigated some 25,000 deaths and performed about 900 autopsies over his career.

Among them was the murder trial of George Zimmerman, the 29-year-old Florida man who in 2012, after a struggle, fatally shot an unarmed Black teenager, Trayvon Martin, whom Zimmerman, as a neighborhood watch volunteer, had considered suspicious. DiMaio testified for the defense that Zimmerman’s injuries were consistent with his version of the confrontation: that he had shot Martin in self-defense. The jury voted to acquit.

Three decades earlier, as the chief medical examiner of Bexar County, which encompasses San Antonio, DiMaio investigated 42 mysterious deaths at a hospital pediatric care unit there and then testified for the prosecution against Genene Jones, a nurse with the unit who came to be called the “Angel of Death.” She was convicted in 1984 of killing a 15-month-old girl, one of as many as 60 infants and toddlers whom she was suspected of murdering with lethal injections.

DiMaio, who had been a medical examiner in Dallas from 1972 to 1981, was later called on to look into allegations that Kennedy’s assassin was not Lee Harvey Oswald but a look-alike whom Soviet officials had trained to assume his identity. Michael Eddowes, a British lawyer and restaurateur, had made the allegations in a 1975 book, “Khrushchev Killed Kennedy,” which he published himself.

After the author persuaded Oswald’s wife, Marina, to have his body exhumed in 1981, DiMaio was recruited to help examine the remains. But his team quickly debunked the theory, confirming through forensic dentistry that the physical characteristics of the man buried as Oswald matched those on Oswald’s passport and his Marine Corps records.

DiMaio was asked to investigate the death of the troubled Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh after authors Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh, in their book “Van Gogh: The Life” (2011), sought to disprove the prevailing wisdom that he committed suicide in 1890. Enlisting DiMaio to prove their hypothesis, the authors insisted in an article in Vanity Fair in 2014 that van Gogh was murdered, perhaps accidentally by bullying teenagers playing with a gun.

In his examination of the case, DiMaio said the evidence suggested that the gun used in van Gogh’s death was fired too far from the body to have been wielded by van Gogh himself. He wrote, “My personal verdict: Vincent van Gogh didn’t shoot himself.”

Vincent Joseph Martin DiMaio, a grandson of Italian immigrants, was born on March 22, 1941, in Brooklyn, New York, to Dr. Dominick DiMaio, who in the 1970s would become New York City’s chief medical examiner, and Violet (de Caprariis) DiMaio, a lawyer.

“Since the 1600s, all the men on my mother’s side, with one exception, were doctors,” Vincent DiMaio recalled in “Morgue: A Life in Death” (2016), a memoir he wrote with Ron Franscell. “The lone black sheep was a magistrate.”

“My earliest memory is of seeing my grandmother Carmela, my mother’s mother, lying dead on the dining room table,” DiMaio wrote in the memoir, which won an Edgar Award for nonfiction. “I was only about five years old, and I didn’t understand death or wakes or funerals or forever. I knew only that I’d never seen my grandmother on top of the table, and never so still. I don’t remember being sad.”

But, he added, “I might have known even then not to cry.”




He attended St. John’s Preparatory School (then in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn) and St. John’s University in Queens. He left college after his junior year to enroll directly in what is now known as the State University of New York Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn, from which he graduated with a medical degree in 1965.

He later trained at Duke University and with Maryland’s chief medical examiner. From 1970 to 1972 he served in the Army Medical Corps, including as chief of the wound ballistics section of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington. He was discharged as a major.

DiMaio and his three sisters, all of whom also became doctors, were casually introduced to death by their pathologist father.

“He didn’t want us to be afraid of death,” he wrote in his memoir. “He considered his grim work a lifesaving pursuit, an early warning system against epidemics, killers and the simple human tendency to snap to judgment without the benefit of facts.”

DiMaio said in a PBS “Frontline” interview in 2010 that in charting his career as a pathologist, he had decided that examining decomposed bodies would be more intellectually stimulating than peering through a microscope all day.

“I’m often asked, ‘How can you work in such a depressing field?’” he wrote. “If you get depressed in my work, then you do not belong.” He added: “I could never work with children dying of cancer, but I have had no difficulty handling disfigured corpses or explaining honestly (and gently) to their grieving families how they died. There is a value in that.”

He was Bexar County’s medical examiner from 1981 until he retired in 2006. In 2018, the county’s Forensic Science Center was named after him.

DiMaio was editor-in-chief of The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology from 1991 to 2017. He also wrote or co-wrote four books related to forensic pathology and was a professor of pathology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio.

DiMaio was an outspoken critic of the widespread dependence on untrained elected coroners, rather than medical examiners certified as pathologists, to investigate suspicious deaths.

He could bring firsthand experience to his expertise in gunshot wounds: He himself had survived being shot four times by his second wife in a fit of anger. They divorced.

In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Theresa (Richberg) DiMaio, who was his first wife before they divorced and later remarried; their daughter, Samantha DiMaio; and three grandchildren.

His daughter was among the Bexar County prosecutors who succeeded in having the imprisoned Genene Jones, the “Angel of Death,” convicted of additional homicide charges in 2020.

DiMaio said that he performed his job much like any other doctor. “What physicians do is they take a history,” he wrote. “They ask you why did you come to the office, what your symptoms are. That’s what the forensic pathologist does, only his patients don’t talk to him.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.