The Question Nobody Asked Fortis Hospital

But first we need to look at the mystery of why the body went from the hospital to the hotel. This question has been nagging at me since I read that Cotten's body left Fortis not to be delivered to a mortician for embalming but to the hotel where he and his wife, Jennifer, had been staying. The answer to this question may hold the key to the true circumstances of the death.  

Various scenarios have been discussed including Jennifer getting a member of the hospital staff to help her spirit the body out of a side door into a waiting cab or limo that drove her and the body to the hotel. It's been suggested that Jennifer demanded release of the body into her custody due to extreme grief. While these are possible explanations, they are not easy to believe.  

Since there doesn't seem to be a satisfactory theory that fits a situation that doesn't involve foul play, I have a theory that assumes up front that there was a nefarious reason for this odd handling of the corpse.  

Imagine you are the administrator of the Fortis hospital where Cotten died. You have a very unfortunate event that could involve liability. A 30 year old wealthy Westerner, CEO of Canada's oldest Bitcoin exchange, is admitted to your institution and 24 hours later he is dead, despite the best treatment your hospital had to offer. After all, statistics show that Crohn's is rarely fatal, especially at such a young age. Wouldn't you be worried that the wife or the man's family could potentially sue the hospital? So what do you do? As a precaution, you tell the doctor to order an autopsy which would include a detailed blood toxicology screening.  

Since there is no obvious sign of foul play and the local police are not involved, you need the wife's permission to perform an autopsy on the body. She refuses and is so concerned about avoiding the autopsy that she demands they release the body to her on the spot which they do (why not since it will make a law suit against them quite difficult) and Jennifer, not having any alternate plan in place, takes the body back to the hotel with her.  

And thus begins the chain of events that start with locating an embalmer that will take the body from the hotel to the embalmed and cremated remains of (purportedly) Gerald Cotten being safely stashed away beyond testing in the cold earth of a Halifax cemetery several days later.  

In between, we learned that the grieving widow flew back to Halifax ahead of the body and arranged for a funeral home with crematory services to receive the body, cremate it and bury it all within a week of the death.  

This explanation of why the body went to the hotel is of course speculation but it does make sense as a fundamental part of a death that was not a result of natural causes. It also works as a necessary (no autopsy) element in a fake death, provided no one in the family except Jennifer had a chance to see the body prior to cremation in Halifax.  

Someone needs to put Fortis Hospital on the spot and ask them why they didn't order an autopsy of Cotten's body.