Menu
Christina VandePol
  • Bio
  • Blog
  • Book
  • Newsletter
  • Contact
Christina VandePol

Blog

February 22, 2026February 22, 2026

Freezing to Death

On February 12, Brianna Mohr, a healthy and athletic 21-year-old hiker was found on an Adirondack mountain after freezing to death. Officials have released few details about the tragedy other than confirmation of the cause of death — hypothermia — after an autopsy by a forensic pathologist. Here’s a comment someone left online about this…

Read More
December 29, 2025December 28, 2025

AI in Medicolegal Death Investigation

Are coroners and medical examiners already using artificial intelligence (AI) in their medicolegal death investigations? For what purposes? How will AI affect the work of coroners? It’s time to ask these questions. In 2022, a scientific paper claimed that “the traditional way of doing an autopsy and framing an opinion has a lot of limitations…

Read More
December 2, 2025December 6, 2025

Remembering Michael P. Rellahan, our local newspaperman

On November 8, 2018, while I was Chester County (PA)’s Coroner, we held a memorial ceremony, perhaps the first ever, for fifty-two unclaimed persons whose cremains had resided in the coroner’s office for years. I’ve written before about the sad issue of bodies left unclaimed, but on that day in 2018 we celebrated the lives…

Read More
  • Previous
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • …
  • 18
  • Next

Christina VandePol is a writer, physician, and former coroner. Her award-winning memoir/true crime book, Madam Coroner, is forthcoming in early 2027. 

Recent Posts

  • How deadly is measles?
  • Unclaimed Veteran Burial
  • The death investigation of Senator Lindsey Graham
  • Postmortem diagnosis of diabetic ketoacidosis
  • Social Security and the Death Master File

Categories

Archives

Facebook Instagram LinkedIn Bluesky
©2022-2026 Christina VandePol