Long Island’s real-life version of the grizzled, long-serving medical examiner who has seen it all, Leslie Lukash, died Thursday at 86. The Nassau County medical examiner’s office, where Lukash served as chief for 43 years until retiring in 2000, said it has no plans to investigate the death, which the family announced was from lymphoma.

More suspicious exits were a Lukash specialty, and over the years he searched for clues as he oversaw more than 40,000 autopsies. There were child murders, overdoses, mercy killings, the 1990 Avianca airline crash in Cove Neck that killed 73, and a binging model-actress whose stomach literally exploded. There was a woman who was killed by her fireman husband, who torched their home and then arrived on a ladder truck to extinguish the blaze. Lukash realized the death was suspicious when he found no soot in her nose — indicating that she was already dead when the fire started.

At the invitation of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, Lukash led the American delegation of pathologists to Brazil, where an international committee identified the body of Nazi archfiend Josef Mengele, in 1985.

Lukash’s favorite case, he often said, was the 1975 murder of Sophie Friedgood, wife of a prominent Kensington physician. Suspicions were aroused when she died suddenly and her husband, Charles Friedgood, signed the death certificate himself after having her body transported to Pennsylvania for burial shortly after her death. After wangling tissue samples from the Pennsylvania coroner and exhuming the body, Lukash showed that an overdose of Demerol killed Sophie Friedgood. Her husband was arrested while fleeing America on a flight to Denmark, clutching a satchel of her securities and jewels. He was last denied parole in 2005.

“Shootings, stabbing, bludgeonings — these are simple to handle,” Lukash told the New York Daily News in 2000. “It’s the other cases, where you find a guy dead in bed in a motel. These cases strain the brain.”

Other times, there was no corpse at all, as in the case of the 1976 murder of Florence Busacca of Baldwin, N.Y. An investigation of her home found no body, but blood was splashed on walls and the ceiling, and a trail led to her husband’s car. What helped seal the case were teeth marks Lukash discovered near the front door. Her husband died in prison.

Lukash set out in life to become a doctor to the living. He was raised in the Bronx, where his parents were garment workers. He received his medical degree from the Tulane University School of Medicine in 1944 and went into the Army. In 1952, he joined the Nassau County medical examiner’s office and began his career as what he liked to call “a diagnostician of the dead.”

He was appointed chief medical examiner in 1957 and became involved in a campaign for national standards in his profession that culminated in the founding of the National Association of Medical Examiners. As his national reputation grew, he was called upon to help reorganize medical examiner offices in Connecticut and in Los Angeles, where he was an expert witness in the evaluation of county coroner Thomas Noguchi, who was demoted in 1982. In 1984, Lukash went to Argentina, where he helped examine the bodies of thousands who had been kidnapped by the military junta.

An on-the-job smoker of fine cigars until his stockpile of pre-revolutionary Cuban smokes ran out, Lukash was also known for shocking newcomers with gruesome autopsies and then inviting them out to lunch. Yet, nearing retirement in 1999, he told Newsday that he still cried at funerals.

“Death does not immunize you against death,” he said. “It does not immunize you against suffering and human pain.”

Leslie Lukash

Born October 25, 1920, in the Bronx; died August 16 at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset of lymphoma; survived by his wife of 62 years, Gladys, their children, Frederick, Barbara, and Dianne, and five grandchildren.