There really isn’t an easy way to get in touch with North Carolina’s last remaining elected coroner. The office isn’t listed on the Yadkin County government website. The official phone number, buried in old PDFs, no longer works. The person who picked up the phone in the county manager’s office paused for a moment before stating “I do not have a number for him,” then referred me to the EMS department. There, the on-duty officer gave me a long “Let me see…. Let me seeeeeeeeeeee…” before finding a number that he thought might work.

After all of that, James “Slim” Collins picked up the phone, and was able to confirm that yes, he’s the last of his kind. “According to the North Carolina Sheriff’s Association, I am,” he said.

Here’s another way to confirm that. The North Carolina Board of Elections has a spreadsheet that lists every single candidate for office across all of the state’s 100 counties. Out of the thousands of names and offices, only one coroner candidate is listed: Slim. On Tuesday, he won. Again. He was unopposed. In fact, he’s never had an opponent during the 20 years he’d held the office, and sounds bewildered that the office even exists. “I’m really surprised they haven’t gotten rid of it,” he says.

So, why does it exist? And why does Slim keep running for it? And in an era where medical examiners handle all of the cases of people who die in suspicious or unexplained ways, what does the last remaining coroner in North Carolina actually … do?

“The present coroner system as an institution of government is wholly unsuited to the needs of the present day,” reads a summary of an article in the North Carolina Law Review.

It was written in 1947.

The position of coroner dates back to England in 1194, and was originally held by knights and clerks who were called “keepers of the pleas of the crown” (Coronae is Latin for “crown,” which is the base of the word "coroner"). They had some law enforcement duties, one of which was to hold inquests over dead bodies. If someone died suspiciously or suddenly, it was up to the coroner to rule on the cause.

The office made its way to the colonies and stuck around after the founding of the United States. North Carolina’s first constitution, adopted in 1776, mandates that each county have a sheriff and at least one coroner, and the office remained as an elected position in the post-Civil War constitution of 1868. A coroner had a bunch of other duties that have been doled out to others over the years (among them: You no longer have to notify the local coroner if you discover a shipwreck or a treasure trove, although that’s still the case in England!), but the ability to investigate suspicious deaths remained, along with the duty to be able to serve papers on—or arrest—the county sheriff, and to serve as sheriff in case he or she died, resigned, or was forced out.

Many coroners were doctors or morticians, but there were no requirements to be elected or to serve. Meaning: It was very possible to get the cause of death wrong if you were a coroner! A paper critical of Texas’s coroner system in 1941 pointed out that poisonings were really hard to identify if you were a layperson and not a doctor, and that other coroners had missed really important clues like, um, bullet holes. A coroner who ruled on cause of death could also say who was responsible even though, again, the coroner could have zero legal training or experience in law enforcement. Plus, you could conceivably use your strange coroner powers to frame someone for murder, or to help them get away with one. Hence, as the 1947 North Carolina Law Review article states: “There are few of the coroner's official acts which do not have to be done over again.” Its recommendation: A system of qualified and trained medical examiners who would not only do the job better, but would also be more efficient. The author concluded that a change needed to be made immediately.

It took nearly two decades.

In the mid-1960s, counties finally started appointing doctors as county medical examiners and getting rid of their county coroner offices. And in 1967, lawmakers created the State Office of the Chief Medical Examiner to look into suspicious deaths. During that era, a lot of coroners transitioned over to being medical examiners, and no longer had to be elected. By 1972, every county had a qualified medical examiner. Even so, the state didn’t uniformly eliminate county coroner’s offices, so in a lot of places, they just kept on electing a person to the job, even though someone else had been hired to do the actual work.

It was back in 1963 when a guy named Grady Mackie, a World War II veteran and mortician who’d just become a co-owner of a funeral home in Yadkinville, was appointed as the Yadkin County Coroner. During that decade, he did normal coroner stuff, mostly ruling on causes of death. Every four years, he’d win re-election, although the last time he’s listed in the newspaper as having determined a cause of death was 1970. The county hired a medical examiner in 1971, and as a result, stopped paying the coroner. That said, nobody actually abolished the office, so in 1974 Mackie filed for re-election and won, unopposed. After the election, Mackie got to experience the other side of a coroner’s role. The losing candidate in the sheriff’s race accused “unauthorized people” of counting certain ballots, and the appeals process held up the certification of the election. The outgoing sheriff had already left town to take another job and so, by statute, the coroner became sheriff. “It’s been real nice,” Mackie told the Winston-Salem Journal, noting that he really didn’t have to do anything since the deputies had everything handled. “I’ve been coroner for a number of years, and people have said the next thing I could do was become sheriff. So now I have.”

After three weeks of being sheriff, Mackie went back to his job at the funeral home, and also returned to his role as Yadkin County Coroner, which he mostly (and rightfully) ignored. By 1978, the job was such an afterthought that Mackie forgot to file for re-election, meaning there was nobody on the ballot that November. People wrote him in anyway. The second place finisher was a gas station attendant in Yadkinville who asked his buddies to vote for him “just for the heck of it.” County commissioners discussed getting rid of the coroner position but … didn’t. So the same thing happened again in 1982, when Mackie once again defeated other write-in candidates like Richard Nixon, Boss Hogg, and Willie Nelson. “I’d gladly have turned over the reins,” he said in an interview. “If it’s the voters’ wishes, I’ll serve.”

It would be his last term. Mackie retired from his funeral home and didn’t run again in 1986. He died in 2008. His 23 years of service as coroner weren’t mentioned in his obituary.

The next few Yadkin County coroners had bigger offices in mind. Barry Norman, who was elected in 1986, thought he might go on to become a county commissioner. He didn’t, and served for 12 years before, finally, he had a challenger: One of his friends. David Nance, a rescue squad member and a product manager for Yadkin Valley Telephone, won in 1998, and also said he was running for coroner to get his name out there. “My goal is to run for some other political office,” he said in an interview with the Journal. “I thought it’d be a good idea to get people to realize who I am.”

In 2002, both men faced off again. It wasn’t bruising race. “If David wins, that’s great,” Norman said. David won.

By then, Slim Collins had learned about what a coroner did or… didn’t do. He graduated from high school in June 1988. (He got his nickname in 1984 when he was in 8th grade—a guy playing with him in jazz band “couldn’t remember my name, called me Slim, and it’s been my name ever since,” he says.) After that, he got a job with the county that August working as an emergency dispatcher in an era before the county had 911. He got to see how the rescue squad, emergency services, and the sheriff’s office operated. He eventually worked with David Nance, who had become the chief of the county rescue squad. “We always joked that he was a politician,” Slim told me. “When he chose not to run, I said I’m going to. I did it thinking nobody else will. Nobody else filed, and nobody else has since.”

That was in 2006. Since then, more and more counties have gotten rid of their county coroners. In 2014, a state report said there were only nine left. By 2020, only five remained. One of them, Hoke County Coroner Frank Crumpler, had held the office since 1960, making him the longest continuously-serving elected official in the country (In 2021, at age 87, his role as coroner made him the sheriff for a few days after Hoke County’s elected sheriff died in office).

That summer, a state lawmaker introduced a bill to get rid of the five remaining coroner’s offices. That bill sailed through the house and easily cleared senate committees before heading to the floor. Then, something weird happened. Moments before senators were set to vote, Sen. Vickie Sawyer of Mooresville introduced an amendment that pulled the Yadkin County Coroner out of the bill. That amendment sailed through, and the rest of the bill passed. The coroners in Avery, Bladen, Hoke, and Montgomery counties would serve out the rest of their terms, and then their offices would simply vanish. Only Yadkin’s coroner, thanks to a last minute reprieve, would remain.

Slim doesn’t know why his office was singled out. He’s met Sawyer, but it’s been a long time. I did try to contact Sawyer, through email, a text message, and phone calls to her legislative office and her insurance agency, but haven’t heard back. Audio from senate proceedings sits somewhere at the state legislative library in Raleigh but doesn’t exist online. So at this moment, we don’t know why Yadkin County got to keep its coroner. We only know that it did.

That said, Slim does have some official duties. Anytime someone subpoenas the sheriff, Slim has to serve the papers. He’s done that to every Yadkin County sheriff since 2006. “It takes longer to drive there from home than it does to serve them,” he says. He also provides some light counseling to the people who are able to find his number and contact him, asking for help with things like getting a death certificate. He refers them to the medical examiner. And, in his longtime role with Yadkin County EMS, he’s encountered several dead bodies. But in his official role as coroner, he’s never had to deal with one.

Slim, like others, first ran for coroner for the name recognition. He kept running merely because people kept reminding him to. And now, thanks to his recent election, Slim Collins will be North Carolina’s last remaining coroner at least until 2031, even though the office is little more than an appendix that’s tacked on to the intestines of local government. He might even win a sixth term if someone reminds him to run. That is, unless he decides to give it up, or if he thinks the $5 filing fee is too steep, or if someone gets around to eliminating the office, which the people in charge keep overlooking or forgetting to do.

There is one more possibility. “You put this story out there, and I might have someone running against me in the primary,” Slim says. “But I’m not putting out campaign signs.”