Sergeant Dennis Caputo, now 69, was one of the first officers to arrive.
Several windows had been left open, but this did little to ease the stench of rotting flesh. The doorstep was cluttered with days' worth of unopened milk bottles as well as a stack of unread Las Vegas Sun newspapers, which investigators would later use to determine the exact day Liston had died. It was well after midnight when the police arrived at the Liston house, which sat in an affluent, largely white, suburb called Paradise Palms. Why he died remains one of sport's most enduring mysteries. Charles "Sonny" Liston was pronounced dead at the scene. When one finally arrived he could do little more than confirm what she already knew. According to a Las Vegas police report, she first called her lawyer and then tried desperately to reach a doctor. She did not ring the police for several hours. Geraldine led the couple's seven-year-old son, Daniel, downstairs and told him to wait there. His body was bloated - he had been dead for at least six days - and there was dried blood streaking from his nose. Once the most feared fighter in America, he was sprawled at the foot of their bed wearing only his underwear. She followed the strange odour to an upstairs bedroom where she found her husband. "But I went in the kitchen and I didn't see anything there." "I thought he must have cooked and left something on the stove," she would say in a rare interview years later. Instead, as she entered their large, split-level, home, she was struck by a sickening smell that hung heavy in the winter air. She hoped to find her husband in one of his usual spots - perhaps playing cards with a friend or watching TV.
The doors were unlocked and the house was in darkness. When her most recent call went unanswered, she apologised to her mother, who she had been visiting in St Louis over Christmas, and rushed back to Las Vegas to check on him. She had been trying to contact her husband - the heavyweight boxer Sonny Liston - for almost two weeks but had failed to get through to him.