The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist

by Radley Balko

  In an incredibly ghoulish act, West then returned to the funeral home and removed the dead man’s fingernails from his corpse. He then mounted them on sticks. West returned to the jail with the sticks and claimed that the victim’s fingernails “did indeed and without a doubt” create the scratches on Mark Oppie’s skin.

  West later admitted that he failed to produce test marks with the mounted fingernails, thus making his procedure impossible for another analyst to reproduce. No one could verify or discredit West’s conclusions. Not that the entire episode needed much discrediting—it was transparently ridiculous. And yet the local authorities bought it. After West’s positive identification, prosecutors charged Oppie with capital murder and promised to seek the death penalty. Oppie would later plead guilty to manslaughter.

  But West was just getting started. On September 7, 1990, less than a week before Courtney Smith’s murder, three elderly people were stabbed to death in the rural, unincorporated community of Daleville, Mississippi. The bodies were first brought to Hayne, who performed the autopsies and then consulted with West.

  The police suspected a man named Larry Maxwell, who was related to all three victims. They first attempted to arrest Maxwell without probable cause just after midnight on September 8, but backed off when Maxwell threatened to sue. Later that evening, Maxwell was arrested for being drunk and disorderly, though his court briefings suggest the charge was manufactured. Indeed, after the arrest, the police admitted to searching Maxwell’s truck for a knife or bloody clothing, but found nothing incriminating.

  Maxwell had a solid alibi. He had been working in the kitchen at the Naval Air Station in nearby Meridian at the time of the murder. His alibi was backed by several witnesses at the base. That didn’t appear to matter. During their investigation, the police found a knife in a home where Maxwell sometimes stayed. Other than that, there was no particular reason to think the knife was the murder weapon. There was no blood or other biological material on it. Nevertheless, the police handed the knife over to West, who then confirmed their suspicions. He concluded based only on eyeballing the knife next to the stab wounds of one of the victims that the wounds “were indeed and without doubt produced by the butcher knife in question.”

  Unless a piece of the knife somehow broke off and fell into the body, there’s just no way to say one knife was used to create a specific stab wound, to the exclusion of all others. Human skin simply can’t record the details of a knife blade in that way. In an affidavit for Maxwell’s defense, Chicago forensic pathologist Robert Kirschner called West’s conclusions “highly speculative” and “not based on the scientific method.” He added, “The fields of forensic science and pathology do not generally accept as scientifically reliable conclusions that a particular knife blade produced a particular knife wound.” Another forensic specialist, Michael Bowers, wrote in an affidavit, “I am unaware of any known forensic examination technique involving matching a knife to a wound which would allow a finding that this particular knife and no other was used in the murders.”

  But West’s dubious conclusion merely established the knife as the murder weapon. Because the knife was not found in Maxwell’s possession, the police still needed to connect the knife to Maxwell. And so West did. In the first official application of his ultraviolet light wizardry, West claimed to have identified impressions and bruises on Maxwell’s hands that were invisible to the naked eye. The knife had a unique handle: it was broken on one side, leaving two exposed metal rivets. West claimed that the rivets made the impressions and bruises he found on Maxwell’s hand as he attacked the victims. “The knife in question did indeed and without a doubt make the patterns found on the hands of one Larry Maxwell,” West wrote in his letter to local law enforcement. “The patterns on his hands were produced by holding the knife and striking an object or objects several times with each hand. The blows would have been of great intensity.”

  At a hearing, West then claimed that he had accidentally overexposed the photos he took of Maxwell’s hands while examining them under ultraviolet light. The overexposure obscured the very bruises and indentations that only he had observed. This was the only physical evidence implicating Maxwell. West testified that by the time he realized his mistake, Maxwell’s hands had healed and no longer exhibited the invisible, inculpatory marks.

  Undeterred, West improvised. He made photocopies of Maxwell’s hands and then drew in the alleged telltale indentations with a marker, relying only on his memory. Based on this groundbreaking procedure, West declared that “indeed and without a doubt” Larry Maxwell had used the butcher knife to commit the murders.

  Maxwell was held in jail for two years before the trial court held a hearing on West’s findings. When presented with criticism of his technique by Kirschner and others, West named three other forensic specialists who he claimed had used the same methods. All three subsequently submitted affidavits denying that. One of those specialists was Thomas Krauss, the Kansas dentist who West once claimed inspired his development of the technique. Krauss wrote that West had “no basic understanding” of the tissue he was examining, “nor does he provide an adequate explanation of the ‘West Phenomenon.’” He added that West’s “only publication on the novel technique has been in a regional police circular,” not a peer-reviewed journal.

  In the first of just a handful of times a judge would rule against West over the course of his career, Kemper County circuit judge Larry Roberts wrote that West’s methods were of “little value, scientifically unproven, and not yet validated or accepted by most of his peers.” John Holdridge, who represented Maxwell and had been a persistent and vocal critic of West back then, had hoped the ruling would end West’s career. “It just became increasingly clear to me that West was a fraud,” he says.

  The judge barred West from testifying. And without West, the state had no case. Maxwell was released from jail. By then the case had gone cold. No one has ever been convicted for the murders. In the following years Holdridge would represent several more people implicated by West’s magic touch. After the Maxwell case, he began asking forensic experts around the country about some of West’s claims. Like Kirschner, who had called West’s claims “highly speculative,” others gave Holdridge similar opinions.

  Maxwell eventually filed a lawsuit against West. A federal district court judge threw out the suit, in part because despite affidavits from Kirschner, Bowers, and other forensic specialists that his theories about the knife and Maxwell’s hands were outside the bounds of science, West was able to procure an affidavit of his own from a medical examiner who stated his “confidence that the knife which Dr. West identified as the murder weapon was in fact the murder weapon.” The medical examiner added, “I believe that the methods and techniques used… was [sic] sound and his opinion was accurate.”

  Because of that affidavit, the judge ruled, West’s conclusions weren’t so transparently absurd as to make him liable for Maxwell’s wrongful arrest. Instead, it showed that West’s conclusions and those who criticized them amounted to a mere “difference of opinion among experts.”

  That one medical examiner willing to sign an affidavit in support of West’s claims: Steven Hayne.

  In April 1989, Lloyd White became the fourth doctor in six years to be named Mississippi’s state medical examiner. Within a few years, he’d also become the fourth to leave the office in frustration.

  White, forty-four at the time, was running a private pathology practice in Texas when he was offered the job, which had been vacant for over a year. He immediately struck a diplomatic note, explaining that his hiring didn’t mean he’d be assuming responsibility for all of the state’s autopsies himself. “As a general rule of thumb, around 300 or 400 autopsies annually is about the maximum one individual can handle to do them effectively,” White said.

  An editorial in the Meridian, Mississippi, newspaper welcomed White’s hiring but feared he was in for a fight. The paper explained that without major changes to the job, White would suff
er the same fate as Spruill and Bennett. “The problem is that a single pathologist cannot conduct hundreds of autopsies and, at the same time, make preparations for and give testimony in scores of criminal trials,” the editors wrote. “It simply is not physically possible.”

  Eager to make a good first impression, White tried to relax any fears that major changes were coming. “I want to avoid any suggestions that I’m some sort of reformer who is going to come and fix something that is broken,” he said at the time. Asked about that statement in an interview sixteen years later, White said, “I guess I couldn’t have been much more wrong than that, could I?”

  In 1988 Jimmy Roberts obtained a business license to open Mississippi Mortuary Service (MMS) off Highway 80 in the town of Pearl, just down the road from the funeral home where he was general manager. Soon after MMS opened its doors, Hayne began doing his autopsies, forensic and otherwise, in that building. Within a few years, he’d start to get autopsy referrals from coroners, DAs, and police officials from all over the state.

  Roberts then persuaded Rankin County officials to designate his business the Rankin County morgue, an act that lent the entire operation the credibility that comes with designation as an official government building, though it was nothing of the sort.

  But at least on paper, Central Mississippi now had an “official” morgue. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement: Roberts could help Hayne get autopsy referrals from other coroners, and every autopsy referral earned Roberts a rental fee for his morgue, body transportation fees, plus first crack at pitching his embalming and funeral services to the family of the deceased. Their partnership became more and more lucrative.

  The careers of Steven Hayne and Michael West boomed in the early 1990s. With help from West and Roberts, Hayne commandeered the vast majority of autopsy referrals across the state. Few people bothered to ask how a single doctor could do so many. But those who visited Hayne’s operation at MMS off Highway 80 got to see the answer for themselves: Hayne was turning out bodies like the state’s chicken plants turned out fryers.

  “Hayne was constantly looking for any way to cut corners,” says one former high-ranking official in state government. “It looked like an autopsy factory. There were no safety precautions.” One former police official who butted heads with Hayne referred to the facility as a “sausage factory.”

  Ken Winter was director of the Mississippi crime lab from 2000 through 2004. “I had to deal with the aftermath of Steven Hayne’s shortcuts,” he says. “Evidence was frequently improperly labeled. Evidence was tainted because it was improperly packaged and preserved. I once had a case where a woman was raped and murdered in which Hayne had packed all of her undergarments in the same bag. That’s a pretty basic thing you never do. When I confronted him, he just shrugged and said, ‘Everybody makes mistakes.’”

  Winter, who went on to become head of the Mississippi Association of Chiefs of Police, says Hayne’s autopsy operation also may have put Hayne and his staff at risk. “They didn’t take safety precautions with chemicals or biological materials. Exposure to formaldehyde and other chemicals used with that job can be toxic. I remember one of Hayne’s assistants would come by the lab and his hands would be swollen from all the exposure. He could barely bend his fingers.”

  In depositions, Hayne has angrily refuted such descriptions. “The bodies were treated with respect,” he said in a 2012 deposition. “It was not a sausage factory, a sushi shop, no, a slaughterhouse, no. I think that is just outrageous.”

  The sheer volume of autopsies Hayne admitted to doing also raised questions about how he and a small group of assistants could possibly keep up. Former Columbus, Mississippi, police chief J. D. Sanders said in a 2011 interview with a private investigator, “Often they worked on kind of an assembly line and would have five to eight bodies lined up next to each other. Even my detectives were concerned about cross contamination.”

  Some former officials have also speculated as to whether Hayne did all of the autopsies himself. “I always found it impossible to believe that Steve did all the autopsies he claimed to have done,” one former coroner told an investigator in 2012. “He, even twenty-five years ago, was never in the prime of health. He could not have stood up to the regimen he claims to have followed.”

  The morgue comprised only one half of the building. The other half was a flower shop owned by Jimmy Roberts’s wife. When a body came in that was badly decomposed, Hayne, West, and Roberts would store it in the back of the building. But some bodies were so pungent that they evidently overcame the smell of the flowers—obviously not good for the flower shop business. Those corpses were moved to a separate building. Hayne, West, and the gang called it “the Stinker Room.”

  As had been the case for much of West’s early career, the press was often eager to tout his forensic wizardry. In December 1991, as part of a big series on child abuse in Mississippi, the Clarion-Ledger ran a profile of Hayne and West and how their “groundbreaking” ultraviolet light technology was helping solve murders and catch child abusers. It didn’t quote a single source who was critical of their work. It almost read like an advertisement for their services.

  But attorneys for the people West implicated were increasingly alarmed. In 1992, John Holdridge began filing complaints with several professional organizations. Holdridge’s complaints were mostly based on West’s testimony in the Maxwell case. He had mixed success. In 1993, the International Association for Identification requested that West relinquish one of his certifications. West resigned instead. In March 1994, two years after Holdridge filed his complaint, the American Board of Forensic Odontology found that West had “materially misrepresented” evidence and data, that the West Phenomenon was not “founded on scientific principles,” and that West’s testimony was “outside the field of forensic odontology.” It suspended him for one year. Shortly after, the American Academy of Forensic Sciences found that West had “misrepresented data in order to support his testimony” in the Larry Maxwell case, and that the term “indeed and without doubt” was unsupported by scientific research. West resigned before he could be expelled.

  West’s suspension and resignation were not enough to prevent prosecutors from retaining his services. If anything, it all may have burnished his image as a pioneer who was unfairly set upon by colleagues who were jealous of his success. It also didn’t stop other courts from allowing him to present his findings in their courtrooms. And it certainly didn’t stop West from using the West Phenomenon in criminal cases.

  “That’s what I found most disturbing,” Holdridge says. “The courts were supposed to be the gatekeepers, the entity that kept bad science out of these cases. Instead, these judges would decide that they’d just leave it up to the jurors. But jurors don’t have time to educate themselves on the science. They aren’t equipped to ask these questions and draw these kinds of distinctions.”

  That what West was espousing as expertise wasn’t grounded in science didn’t seem to matter. What mattered was that he was effective with jurors. Judge Roberts’s rebuke in Larry Maxwell’s case proved to be the rare exception, not the rule. West would go on to be certified as a witness dozens of times over the next decade, and his methods and practices were routinely upheld by appellate courts. “My sense is that judges, especially elected judges, find it very difficult to rule on these issues when it’s going to seriously affect the prosecution in a high-profile case,” Holdridge says. “They don’t want to inject themselves into the case. It’s just much easier to let two experts butt heads, and leave it to the jury to decide which one they believe.”

  As West’s business continued to boom, so did the breadth of his alleged forensic abilities. In 1991, he claimed to match an abrasion on a murder victim’s body to the laces on a defendant’s shoes. He then used his new technique to find a pattern on the defendant’s right palm that he claimed “was a match” to the strap on the victim’s purse.

  The same year, West testified that he had matched marks on a ra
pe victim’s vaginal area to the defendant’s teeth. He also testified that while using the West Phenomenon, he detected a pattern on the victim’s hand—viewable only using his ultraviolet light method—that he said was a match to the handle of a screwdriver police believed the attacker used to threaten the victim. As in the Maxwell case, West was claiming to find patterns on these suspects that had been imprinted by something they’d grasped or squeezed days before. He was not only able to find the patterns, he could somehow distinguish them from any other items the suspect might have grasped or squeezed since.

  The following year, West’s bite mark identification led to the arrest of a Mississippi man for the rape and murder of an eighty-year-old woman. The police were so confident in West’s identification that they didn’t bother testing the blood, hair, fingerprints, and skin cells found at the crime scene. The man spent a year and a half behind bars before his attorney demanded the tests, which exonerated his client.

  In 1992, West would make another bite mark identification that would earn him national attention. In the summer of 1991, Louisiana couple Anthony Keko and his wife, Louise, were in the midst of a bitter divorce. The couple owned some extremely profitable oyster beds, which had become a point of contention in the divorce. When Louise Keko’s body was discovered half submerged in her bathtub, beaten, shot, and stabbed, her sixty-two-year-old husband was naturally the prime suspect. Both Kekos were known to be hot tempered, and Anthony in particular had a reputation for violence. He had previously been acquitted of a separate murder (he claimed self-defense), and several witnesses claimed that he had spoken openly about killing his wife.