The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist

by Radley Balko

  But Faye Spruill was up for the challenge. A fiery, often combative medical examiner, she had previously worked in Kentucky and in the modern medical examiner’s office in Dallas. She had also overseen the conversion of the St. Louis coroner system into one run by a medical examiner. Mississippi governor Cliff Finch offered Spruill the job in 1979. She accepted, becoming one of the first women in the country to be named an official state medical examiner.

  But Mississippi’s hiring a woman as its first official state medical examiner was less about shattering a glass ceiling and more a matter of Spruill being one of only a few willing and qualified to take the job. From Spruill’s perspective, it was an opportunity to obtain a promotion in title, if not necessarily in salary, and to hold a position few other women were likely to get. At the time she accepted the job, she was the only certified forensic pathologist in Mississippi, man or woman.

  Spruill immediately began to agitate for change. Echoing Richard Childs’s rhetoric, she told anyone who would listen that “our problem is that you can come into Mississippi and commit murder—and get away with it.” She found an ally in Edgar Little and his new state coroners’ association. The two managed to attract some attention. They proclaimed that the coroner system was a “ludicrous joke.” They peppered their points with colorful anecdotes—about the coroner, for example, who had recently been caught mining names off of tombstones, then filling out fake death certificates to collect the $20 fee.

  Some of the state’s media outlets joined the cause. Columnist James Dickerson wrote in the Jackson Daily News, referring to county coroners, “Year after year, Mississippi voters have elected men and women to the office, whom, if the truth were to be known, they probably would not have allowed into their homes.” In a staff editorial published in March 1980, the same paper warned that because the coroner was the only public official with the power to arrest the sheriff, the state’s more corruptible sheriffs had been “buying off” or even threatening coroners to ward off any possibility of an investigation.

  As for autopsies, the state had evolved an ad hoc system whereby some county coroners, frequently with input from the district attorney, sheriff, or police chief, would send bodies to a private doctor for autopsy. Few if any of these physicians were trained or certified as forensic pathologists. This was the procedure that had been in place basically since Reconstruction and that would more or less endure until the late 2000s.

  By the early 1980s, there were at least a few states that could be considered models for modernizing death investigations. In Maryland, each county had its own medical examiner (except for the city of Baltimore, which had four), and each was nominated by local physicians and confirmed by a committee of police officials, state and local public health departments, and the medical profession. Maryland had long boasted the first statewide medical examiner system in the country, established in 1939. For much of its early history it was severely underfunded or not funded at all, but by the 1980s it had become a model for the country.

  Florida had also moved to a medical examiner system, but a less centralized model than Maryland’s. Under a law passed in 1970, Florida used a committee of law enforcement officials, attorneys, physicians, and funeral directors to appoint a “deputy medical examiner” for each of several regional districts.

  Maryland and Florida stood as examples of how to modernize in ways uniquely suited to distinct demographics, geography, and political structure. Florida—a more geographically, demographically, and politically diverse state than Maryland—allowed for more local control. Maryland, a much smaller state, sent most of its autopsies to its largest city, which was well equipped for the task. Most importantly, in both states autopsies were performed by qualified forensic pathologists appointed by professionally diverse committees, which kept them comparatively insulated from political pressure and corrupting influences.

  Back in Mississippi, Spruill sought a mixture of the two systems. The state was too large in geographic area to send all of the bodies to the medical examiner’s office in Jackson. But many of the state’s counties were too poor and too sparsely populated to hire and occupy a full-time medical examiner. Spruill proposed breaking up the state into regions of roughly equal population, each with its own medical examiner and forensic pathologist. In 1980 the state legislature considered a bill adopting Spruill’s proposals, but the bill failed.

  In early 1981, Spruill tried again with a three-tiered system. Her office would be positioned at the top, with oversight responsibility for all state death investigations. Immediately beneath would be three regional districts, each headed by a certified forensic pathologist. But the coroners would still oversee death investigations at the county level and decide when an autopsy was needed. The proposal reflected some political realities, as well as the lessons Spruill had learned from her earlier, failed attempt at reform. She hoped that with trained medical examiners looking over their shoulders, the coroners would take their jobs more seriously.

  The new proposal was supported by the state’s medical professionals and public health advocates. But there was still formidable opposition. Many coroners were opposed, as was the state’s insurance industry. Law enforcement was a mixed bag. While the most prominent prosecutors and police officials supported the idea as a way to help solve murders, some opposed it from behind the scenes. The most likely reason: while the current system wasn’t great at solving murders, it was also pretty bad at discovering them. A system run by qualified doctors insulated from political pressure might help solve some homicides, but it would also likely cause a rise in reported murders. That could open the local sheriff or prosecutor up to criticism. The current system was a compromise many of them could live with.

  Some data uncovered by the Clarion-Ledger supported the reformers’ cause. In 1977, the most recent year for which state data was available, nearly half of reported deaths in the state were attributed to “unknown causes.” This meant that each year between one thousand and five thousand suspicious deaths in the state weren’t being investigated. Failure to find a cause of death also meant that the state was unable to compile and study statistics on accidents, disease, industrial poisoning, and other matters of public health. As of early 1981, a majority of the state’s coroners were funeral directors. All but two worked part-time. Three were doctors, and none were forensic pathologists. Four Mississippi counties had no coroner at all.

  Hinds County, the state’s most populous, was a good example of the problem. The coroner there was Robert Martin, a former mortician elected in 1979. In his first year on the job, Martin single-handedly oversaw 552 death investigations. Even in the state’s wealthiest, most populous county, one man with no medical training or experience in law enforcement was in charge of investigating all suspicious deaths—about 1.5 per day. He told the paper that he handled those investigations with no office, no desk, and no expense account.

  In February 1981, a grisly crime brought more support for reformers. Two adolescent girls were found murdered in a field in Lawrence County. Under state law, Spruill couldn’t aid in the investigation unless officially requested. No one asked. As days passed and the murders remained unsolved, the case brought new scrutiny to the coroner system. Within weeks the legislature passed Spruill’s proposal into law.

  Unfortunately for Spruill, persuading lawmakers to approve a new system was a far cry from persuading them to fund it. Here, Spruill faced continued resistance. Legislators balked at giving Spruill any money at all, claiming they couldn’t fund a new program while existing agencies were being asked to slash their budgets. By the end of the session, the legislature had refused to appropriate any funds at all for the new death investigation system it had just approved.

  In 1982, Spruill pled her case to the Senate Appropriations Committee. She highlighted the virtues of a modern medical examiner system, from solving murders to monitoring public health. But her exchanges with committee members grew contentious. Previously, she had clashed on several occasions
with state senator Robert Crook, one of the state’s more powerful lawmakers.

  Crook had been around a long time, long enough to have defeated civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer when she ran for the seat in 1971 and to have worked closely with former sheriff and state senator Henry Strider. Strider was sheriff of Tallahatchie County during the Emmett Till murder and trial. He’d made a name for himself in the national media by walking into court each morning during the Till trial and greeting members of the black press the same way each day: “Hello, niggers.” In 1966, in response to a tough agricultural market, Crook and Strider cosponsored a bill that would have relocated black farmers from Mississippi to other states in order to free up jobs for white farmers.

  This was the man Spruill kept butting up against, the main opposition to her plan. Spruill threatened to resign unless she got the funding she needed to both do her job properly and implement the new system the legislature had already approved. Dr. Lloyd White, who himself would be appointed Mississippi state medical examiner several years later, attended the hearing. He and Crook weren’t friends but did have a cordial professional relationship. According to White, Crook approached him after the hearing to vent about Spruill. He seemed enraged that she had taken such a tone with the esteemed appropriations committee—and he seemed particularly offended to have been challenged by a woman. “Well, I’ll tell you what we did,” Crook told White. “We just cut her tits off. She won’t be coming here trying to tell us what to do anymore.”

  Crook made good on his vow. He wasn’t about to let a woman push him around. By the summer of 1982, not only had the legislature still not funded the new system, it had cut off all funding to Spruill’s office, including her salary. Calls to Spruill’s state office phone reached a recording indicating that the number had been disconnected.

  Though she had no office, staff, phone, or salary, Spruill was still the state medical examiner. She continued her oversight of the coroners and continued lobbying for funding to restore her office and implement her reforms. Incredibly, she stayed on the job for another thirteen months with no pay. She finally resigned in July 1983, after the state legislature once again refused to fund her office. Asked for comment on Spruill’s resignation, state officials said they were “surprised and shocked,” despite the fact that she had worked for more than a year without a paycheck or a phone.

  Within weeks of Spruill’s resignation, the state had returned to the status quo. Law enforcement officials complained that they had to go out of state to find competent forensic pathologists. Clinical pathologists wanted no part of conducting autopsies or testifying in murder cases. Coroners remained untrained, underpaid, and incapable of leading a modern death investigation. And state media went back to describing Mississippi as a sanctuary for murderers. At the time of Spruill’s resignation, eleven of the state’s eighty-two coroners still couldn’t read or write.

  The following year, the state legislature passed a bill that placed the medical examiner’s office under the authority of the state crime lab, which itself worked under the Department of Public Safety (DPS). The department would have to fund the position from its existing budget. DPS scraped together $150,000. It wasn’t nearly enough to fund what the state needed—a qualified forensic pathologist, an assistant or two, and an operational office. But it was something. And it was desperately needed. A study of Mississippi death investigations from 1981 through 1984 showed staggeringly high rates of deaths classified as “undetermined causes.” In DeSoto County, for example, the rate was 53 percent. In Benton County, it was 70 percent. The average across the country is around 3 percent.

  In spite of all these challenges, in April 1985 Mississippi hired its second state medical examiner. Dr. Thomas Bennett—young, earnest, and mustachioed—had been the state medical examiner in Iowa. His salary would be $67,000, modest for the position. And Bennett began with an office budget of $147,000—a fraction of what well-funded medical examiner offices in other states were allocated.

  Still, Mississippi state officials greeted Bennett with a bacchanal of self-congratulation. Police chiefs, prosecutors, and various heads of agencies threw a party when he arrived. Bennett, they declared, was walking, talking evidence that Mississippi was finally upgrading its death investigation system. The elation over such a modest step—filling an office that had been vacant for seven and a half of the nine years it had existed—bordered on parody. Commissioner of Public Safety James Roberts proclaimed, “The potential murderers in Mississippi have been sent a message!”

  And yet odd as it was, Bennett’s warm Mississippi greeting lasted only a matter of hours. The state of Iowa, where Bennett had just come from, had eliminated the office of coroner in 1959. So Mississippi’s coroners viewed Bennett’s hiring as a direct threat to their continued existence. At a luncheon with coroners later that day, the Clarion-Ledger reported that Bennett was greeted with cold stares and blunt talk. Lincoln County coroner Morris Henderson warned Bennett that every death investigation must go through him, and him only. He told the new hire that he was to have no communication with anyone else in the county. “If I hear you told the sheriff anything, that’s it.” Another coroner was blunter still. “We’re going to be hard on you,” he said.

  Despite the uncomfortable welcome, once they were sure he wasn’t going to eliminate the office, the coroners’ association—now headed by Hinds County coroner Robert Martin—warmed to Bennett, at least initially. Martin and Bennett first worked together to persuade the legislature to pass the Mississippi Coroner Reorganization Act of 1986, the first major change to the state’s coroner law in nearly a century. Under the new law, the state medical examiner would determine who could conduct autopsies in the state, or if necessary, perform some autopsies himself. The law also changed the requirements to run for coroner. It bumped the coroner’s pay from $20 per death investigation to $50, and did away with the requirement to round up stray livestock and the requirement that coroners believe in a supreme being. Finally, the law required that the state medical examiner be board certified in forensic pathology. That’s a pretty standard requirement for medical examiners across the country, but it would become the source of a lot of controversy in Mississippi.

  The law was an improvement, but still left a lot of problems. It lacked teeth, and in the years since, many of the requirements haven’t been well enforced. And in not doing away with the office of coroner entirely, the law in some ways reestablished the state’s commitment to coroner-led death investigations. At least one of the state’s coroners understood the problem. When the Clarion-Ledger asked Marion County coroner Ed Laird what he made of the new law, he replied, “Do you think one week’s training is going to make a medical examiner out of anybody?”

  If Bennett’s hiring initially drew the ire of the state’s coroners, his work with Martin on the new law divided them. At one time, the Mississippi State Coroners Association represented over 60 percent of the county coroners. By the end of 1986, the relatively progressive group only represented about a third. Many of the coroners who hadn’t joined didn’t meet the new requirements (although they would still be grandfathered in) and resented the implication that the office needed modernization. They also resented the notion that they needed oversight. Some told Bennett to stay in Jackson rather than visit their crime scenes personally. They didn’t want him looking over their shoulders. Some also fought his attempts to assert his authority when he disagreed with how they were handling an investigation, or went around him when they didn’t like his diagnosis.

  As Bennett settled into office, he began to see firsthand just how bad the system could be. Even the coroners who had supported him could show astonishingly bad judgment. In 1986, Bennett clashed with Martin over the death of a seventeen-year-old girl. Bennett concluded from his autopsy that while he couldn’t rule out death by strangulation, he also couldn’t say for sure that it was the manner of her death. It was the sort of careful, nuanced diagnosis that science sometimes demands, but that police
and prosecutors find unhelpful. Martin and the local sheriff wanted more, so they took the body to a doctor Martin had used for autopsies in the past—a psychiatrist who had a medical degree but wasn’t board certified in forensic pathology. The three men then drove the body to a country road where the doctor performed a bizarre roadside autopsy. According to press reports, after a procedure lasting less than an hour, the doctor told Martin that the woman had definitely been strangled.

  The same year, Bennett got into another public fight with coroner Ed Laird after Laird delivered a severed head to Bennett’s office. When Bennett asked for an explanation, an investigator in the local DA’s office said that he and Laird had decided the body to which the head had once been attached was too smelly and infested with bugs for examination. So Laird simply pulled out a knife and sawed off the head. According to Bennett, Laird had confirmed the story to him over the phone. Appalled, Bennett moved to strip Laird of his position. Publicly, Laird denied the charge and claimed the head had fallen off on its own.

  In a well-staffed, well-equipped office, Bennett might have engaged those and other fights, and more firmly established his office’s authority under state law. But there just wasn’t time for it. He had more than he could handle trying to keep up with the coroners who were cooperating with him. Four months into the job, he was putting in eighty-hour work weeks and had personally performed 104 autopsies. That’s a rate of 312 per year. Lamar Burrows, president of the Mississippi Pathologists Association, remarked in the Clarion-Ledger, “That’s just about more than any one person can handle.” Burrows’s comment is notable: within a decade the state would have a medical examiner performing six times that figure.