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Then in February 2005 he was charged with assault after he attacked Alicia in a hotel room in Indiana; she had to have hospital treatment. They separated two years later. By then Duerson had lost everything, not just his marriage. Duerson Foods went bust and he went bankrupt. They had to surrender the house. The celebrity lifestyle that the Duersons enjoyed on the back of his NFL days had entirely vaporised. He took that hard. "David was so disappointed in himself," Alicia says. "He was a very proud person, and he couldn't handle the failure of it. We had built this beautiful life together, and he lost it all."
It took McKee about two months to carry out her investigation into Duerson's brain. The process involved taking many slices of crucial areas of his brain and staining them with a fluid that highlights the buildup of abnormal proteins. The slices are then turned into slides for microscopic study.
McKee pulls up photographs of the slides on her laptop. They look like images you might find on Google Earth showing a satellite picture of an island whose coastline is broken up with deep inlets. Much of the coastline and several of the inlets are stained a dark brown.
This indicates the presence of tau, an abnormal protein that forms in the brain as a result of a trauma or injury often caused by a blow to the head. McKee explains, the accumulation of tau in nerve cells clogs them up and eventually kills them, and over the years it can spread to neighbouring cells and shut them down too, progressively destroying the brain's function.
"This amount of damage in a 50-year-old is really profound, it's huge," McKee says, pointing to the brown inlets on Duerson's slide. "To show this degree of degenerative disease at that young age is quite extraordinary."
The areas of Duerson's brain in which she found the accumulations of tau matched perfectly Alicia's description of his deterioration: there was damage visible to the inferior and dorsal frontal lobes that are crucial in regulating impulsive behaviour, and in the amygdala, which controls emotions such as rage. "With this kind of injury I would expect the person to display exaggerated and at times assaultive responses," she says.