As far as the world knows, whatever covering-up may have been involved was unknown, because both were announced by that same Medical Examiner (ME) in her final report, which came out about month after the crash.
But it gets worse instead of better.
At the end of the autopsy session, the Cause of Death (COD) was declared by the ME to be drowning, pending toxicology reports. A drowning determination as a COD is implicitly a positive result based on physical evidence, not a logical elimination of some number of other possible CsOD. To make a drowning determination, there must have been evidence of the inhalation of ocean water (in this case) accompanied by consequent oxygen-starvation of the brain (of an actual person) to make that assertion.
That positive determination, once declared to have been made, should have overridden all other CsOD, unless there was further positive evidence in the toxicological results or while possibly noticing further evidence from viewing the body during the autopsy. If toxicology results were to have been returned with physical evidence of drugs, alcohol or poison, for example, such results might have overridden a less complex drowning COD determination, but without such further evidence, the positive drowning determination would remain and could not simply disappear from the autopsy report, even if an examiner were willing to allow himself or herself to be overridden by a COD based on third-party report.
To allow a declared COD of drowning awaiting toxicology reports to be vacated in favor of arrhythmia as the COD is implicitly to recognize the original drowning COD claim was false. But what could have happened in the hours, days or weeks before an ME vacates his or her previous drowning determination to ultimately favor a third-party-influenced determination?
Since an arrhythmia leaves no physical signs of its having occurred, and since the death in question was not contemporaneously witnessed by any competent medical professional, it should not be possible to have sufficient confidence in any other determination that would be unaccompanied by physical evidence so as to override completely and vacate an evidence-based drowning determination that the medical examiner implicitly said she had made by the end of the hands-on, eyes-on autopsy.
Allowing inferences based on second-hand reports from untrained lay-persons that manifest no physical evidence to override an albeit-tentative COD, but one nonetheless based on tangible evidence seems to imply the examiner has been swayed by one or more factors beyond the stated evidence, which was not claimed to be any physical evidence observed while viewing the body or on lab tests. If a medical examiner were somehow convinced of the validity of one or more lay-persons’ second-hand report(s) in such a case, one might conceivably (to stretch that word very thin) be led to say an inferred arrhythmia may well have caused or led to the drowning, but not that the concomitant drowning did not happen!
In this case, the arrhythmia as the COD took the place of drowning with drowning no longer being even mentioned. --FAIL!
Well, I guess it’s pretty difficult to convince anyone she drowned while wearing a life vest and while someone is holding her hand. So the jacket had to be too small, she had to be too fat, she had to have an unreported/untreated heart condition...and anything else that can be dreamt up. Everything but the obvious:
She got out of the aircraft, was seen alive and not in any distress, and then suddenly she’s dead, from three different causes. She just drifted away with the tide...
All that fancy legal language aside. And how darn convenient. Just what did Fuddy find out?
As I recall there were five cod’s including one of drowning in which the case was closed and then re-opened in about an hour,is that pretty close rx?