Dr. Abrahams began by telling me how she carries out these examinations.

Well, I mean, the process for examining tissue and arriving at a diagnosis when we're doing the autopsy is the same as for when a patient is actually sitting in front of you in the clinic.

So you need a history.

Um, in this case you can't get it from the patient, so you get it from the medical records, from the police, or from relatives if they're available, and then you examine the body, physically, externally, looking for any signs of disease or trauma.

And then we actually look inside the body, so we examine all the organs.

Sometimes we need to take samples, tissue, we take blood, we take urine.

We can do toxicological analysis and all thatAnd then we put our findings together.

In Charmaine's case, she was taking the history from what the police told her.