According to my mother, Leo was her favorite uncle; a little rough around the edges, but beneath the rough exterior, he had a kind heart. One of her fondest memories is from when she was a little girl, playing in the sand dunes—while watching her uncle dissect a cadaver. You see, Uncle Leo was training to be a medical doctor, and in those days there didn’t seem to be a lot of regulations about such things. Leo had a wicked sense of humor, and he found it great fun to chase his sister around the house with a cadaver arm, all the while pulling on the tendons to make the fingers wiggle. Even more alarming, was when he tricked a toll worker on the bridge into taking a coin from a cold dead hand, while hanging the cadaver arm out the window of his car. Like I said, regulations were pretty loose in those days—especially for young doctors.

Leo Butler was definitely not the squeamish type, and eventually, his rough exterior served him well as a lieutenant colonel in the US Army, during the German occupation in WWII. He was among the first group of doctors to inspect the concentration camps—and later, he would testify at the Nuremberg trials. According to my mother, he was never quite the same after that.

When the war ended, Uncle Leo returned home to San Francisco and built a successful medical practice as an orthopedic surgeon. He married and had a son—but for some reason, the family rarely saw his wife and child. His wife died in 1963, and no one ever knew what became of the son. Just two years later, Uncle Leo married again—this time to a nurse, but unfortunately, the marriage didn’t go well, and they divorced in 1972.

It was in 1973, when my mother received an upsetting phone call from my grandmother. It was about Uncle Leo. Apparently, he was involved in a nasty fight with his ex-wife, and in the end, he threatened her with a gun. He then tried to take his own life by ingesting pills, however, the police managed to find him just in time. But still, there were serious charges filed against him, and there would definitely be a trial. He couldn’t bear the thought of putting his beloved family through such an ordeal—and a few months later, while awaiting his trial date, Dr. Leo Joseph Butler succeeded in taking his own life.

Despite this tragic ending, my mother never remembered her favorite uncle this way. Instead, she remembered him sitting beside her hospital bed, just before her tonsillectomy at five years old—and of course, she also recalled the sand dunes, playfully recounting the story of how, as a little girl, she would sit with her favorite uncle, while watching him carve up cadavers in the sand.