The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist

by Radley Balko

  How did Haley Oliveaux get abrasions on her cheek that weren’t there the day before? “Dr. West created them,” Bowers said. “It was intentional. He’s creating artificial abrasions in that video, and he’s tampering with the evidence. It’s criminal.… You never jam a plaster cast into a possible bite mark like that. It distorts the evidence.” West would later call Bowers’s accusations “a damn lie.”

  After watching the video, Bowers offered to submit an affidavit for Jimmie Duncan’s defense. Several other specialists, including a forensic pathologist and the former president of the American Board of Forensic Odontology, submitted affidavits in Duncan’s defense after viewing the tape. Others, like the celebrated forensic pathologist Michael Baden, suggested that the marks may have been caused by the removal of medical tape from Oliveaux’s cheek, but still insisted they weren’t human bites.

  Duncan’s post-conviction attorneys found the video in late 2008. It was never shown at his trial. That’s in part because West himself didn’t testify, either. The years between his examination of Oliveaux in 1993 and Duncan’s trial in 1998 were the years during which West had been exposed in media reports and disciplined by three different forensics organizations. By 1995, Duncan’s prosecutors concluded that West came with too much baggage. They dropped him from the case and began looking for another bite mark analyst to replace him.

  Because even the prosecution had conceded that West had credibility issues, Duncan’s attorneys requested that Oliveaux be exhumed so that their own expert wouldn’t need to rely on notes from Hayne and West. They were denied. Any expert for Duncan’s defense would have to testify based only on the notes of the two Mississippi experts.

  Duncan was tried in 1998. Incredibly, the video of West’s examination was never shown at trial. Even Duncan’s own expert witness never saw it. The state at first had trouble finding a bite mark analyst who would testify from West’s work, but eventually brought on Neal Riesner, a dentist from Scarsdale, New York. Using only the photographs West took after his examination of Oliveaux, Riesner concluded that the marks on the girl’s cheek were indeed bite marks and that “to a reasonable medical dental certainty,” he could say they were made by Duncan. He also said that the marks on the girl’s ear and elbow were “consistent” with Duncan’s dentition, even though again, according to Duncan’s attorneys, hospital records indicated that particular injury was weeks old.

  Duncan’s defense opted to go after West personally rather than attack the credibility of bite mark evidence in general. They put on the stand Richard Souviron, a well-known bite mark analyst and an evangelist for the field. In recent years, he had also become one of Michael West’s most vocal critics. Souviron, who hadn’t seen the examination video, testified that the mark West claimed to have found on Oliveaux’s cheek wasn’t a bite mark at all.

  The state also put on a jailhouse informant who claimed Duncan had confessed to him while the two shared a cell. Years later, other inmates would contradict the informant, giving sworn statements that Duncan had always maintained his innocence. By the time he retired, the police officer who solicited that informant’s testimony had solicited five murder confessions from three suspects, all of which turned out to be false.

  But the jailhouse informant, the anal injuries, and the bite marks were enough to convince the jury of Jimmie Duncan’s guilt. In 1998 he was convicted and sentenced to death.

  After the video was reported in the press in 2009, West declared that the forensic experts who sharply criticized his work in the case were part of a conspiracy against him. “I’m a little old dentist from Hattiesburg, and I’ve got the top lawyers in the country coming after me,” he told the Clarion-Ledger. Oddly, he claimed he was merely following a protocol developed by Bowers himself. (When asked about this, Bowers laughed and said, “Oh, my. That’s absurd. That guy is crazy.”) “She was raped and sodomized and held under water by this son of a bitch,” West told the paper. “Now I’m the bad guy because this guy raped a 2-year-old.… I’m tired of being beaten up because of the death penalty.”

  There were additional problems with Hayne’s role in Duncan’s case. As he had in other cases, Hayne didn’t turn over the slides he had made of the wounds he found around Oliveaux’s rectum to Duncan’s post-conviction attorneys. He claimed he no longer possessed them. The slides were critical to determine whether or not those wounds were from sexual abuse or, as the defense suspected, Stevens-Johnson syndrome, a condition brought on by anti-seizure medications that can cause blistering and lesions on mucous membranes, including the anus. At trial, Hayne testified that the wounds were consistent with sexual abuse and had been inflicted near the time of death. Since Duncan was the only one alone with Oliveaux before she died, that testimony was damning.

  But there was no other evidence of sexual abuse—no semen, pubic hair, or blood from Duncan was found on or in the girl. Hayne should also have kept either the paraffin blocks from which duplicate slides could be made, or at minimum his written record of what the slides showed. He never sent either.

  Duncan’s post-conviction attorneys also asked Hayne for records related to any other autopsies he had performed that day. Hayne responded that he was under no legal obligation to respond to an out-of-state subpoena—a strange claim, given that Hayne had actively promoted himself to Louisiana’s justice system and agreed to participate in Duncan’s prosecution. When the attorneys got a Mississippi judge to compel Hayne to turn them over, Hayne said the records had been destroyed. As of this writing, Jimmie Duncan still sits on death row at Angola prison.

  Emily Ward had made it clear that she wanted to be consulted in controversial cases, particularly high-profile murders, jail and prison deaths, and deaths in police custody. That just wasn’t going to happen. Ward quickly learned what Lloyd White had learned. When prosecutors didn’t like what she or one of her staff had concluded after an autopsy, they’d simply take the body to a private doctor, usually Hayne, for an alternate opinion. More likely, they just didn’t take the chance, and like Coahoma County coroner Charles Scott, went around her from the start. Ward was barely in office a year before the Clarion-Ledger ran an article with the subheadline “State medical examiner often ignored in probes.” In fact, the coroners most likely to do an end run around Ward were those near Jackson, right in her backyard—mostly because that also happened to be Hayne’s as well.

  Ward’s efforts to have autopsies done more objectively didn’t sit well with the state’s old guard. “She is at present undermining death investigations and prosecutions in Mississippi,” said John T. Kitchens, the district attorney in Steven Hayne’s home county of Rankin. District Attorney Ed Peters added that he had “confidence” in Hayne and another private pathologist he used, and that he found them “reliable.” Another district attorney asked, “Why should I forsake him?” referring to Hayne. “I think you ought to dance with the girl who brought you.”

  In one case, Ward was approached by defense attorneys about her work. As she was ethically obligated to do as both a forensic pathologist and the state medical examiner, she told them what she had found.

  This was unthinkable in Mississippi. So in March 1994 the state’s old guard brought out the knives. Kitchens was the first to send a letter of complaint to Ward’s boss, Public Safety Commissioner Jim Ingram. “It has recently come to my attention that on more than one occasion our State Medical Examiner has unnecessarily rendered aid to the defense of criminal defendants.” Kitchens found this unacceptable.

  Kitchens argued that the job of the state medical examiner was to assist law enforcement. In a claim that must have come as quite a shock to the state’s indigent defense bar—one of the most underpaid and underresourced in the country—Kitchens complained, improbably, that the deck was already stacked against prosecutors. “The list goes on and on where examples can be made of the defendant’s advantages,” he wrote.

  Kitchens argued that defendants were free to hire their own experts, either with their own mone
y or with court funding. He finally insisted that Ingram order Ward not to discuss any case with a criminal defense attorney unless she either was answering questions under oath or had explicit permission from the district attorney whose office was prosecuting the case. On the same day Kitchens wrote his letter, Ed Peters, the district attorney for Hinds County also sent Ingram a similar letter.

  Kitchens was either posturing or badly informed. First, most criminal defendants in the state were indigent and had no way of hiring their own experts. And it was far from certain that the state’s courts would give defendants funding for it. They often didn’t.

  Second, Mississippi didn’t and still doesn’t have a statewide public defender system. It mostly relies on local attorneys appointed by the courts on a case-by-case basis. Over the years, national watchdog groups have issued stinging rebukes of the state’s public defender system. The idea that defendants in the state had every advantage was laughable.

  More importantly, Kitchens had misstated the proper role of a state medical examiner. State-employed forensic pathologists are independent fact seekers, not members of the prosecution or law enforcement team. The guidelines from the National Association of Medical Examiners, for example, instruct doctors to “work cooperatively with, but independent from, law enforcement and prosecutors.” The renowned medical examiner Vincent Di Maio stated it more succinctly in a 2010 interview with PBS’s Frontline. “It’s not supposed to be for the police or against the police or for a family or against a family. You’re supposed to be impartial and tell the truth.… When I was practicing as a medical examiner, I was glad to talk to the defense. I had absolutely no problem talking to the defense.”

  Ingram passed the letters on to the DPS legal counsel for analysis. The agency’s lawyers pointed out that Kitchens was a big defender of Hayne, and that Hayne and Ward had been sparring over control. But the counsel did agree with Kitchens on an important point. The office argued that the state medical examiner should never consult with defense attorneys without prior authorization from prosecutors. Again, that was not only contrary to the very concept of an independent medical examiner but also inconsistent with Mississippi law, which authorized the state medical examiner to take control of any death investigation in the state in which she deemed it was necessary.

  The tension between Ward and the old guard continued to escalate. Hinds County coroner Robert Martin, who had praised Ward’s hiring the previous year, now complained to the Clarion-Ledger that Ward was “undermining” coroners and prosecutors. Ward reasonably responded that her job wasn’t to help either side win a case but to offer opinions based on reasonable medical certainty, regardless of who was requesting them. “If I didn’t,” she said, “I would be contributing to the obstruction of justice.”

  Ward did have at least some defenders. The Alcorn County coroner said he used her for all his autopsies and that she was the best and most professional medical examiner with whom he had ever worked. But it was a funeral director in Jackson who came closest to getting at the root of the problem: “For every [state] medical examiner, there’s always been a problem with one of them—at least that’s what the coroners say. I just can’t believe there is something wrong with every state medical examiner that is appointed by the state.”

  Later that month, perhaps sensing that yet another good medical examiner was slipping away, the Clarion-Ledger ran a strong editorial in support of Ward. The editorial recapped the long and contentious history with the state medical examiner’s office, and it took swipes at Martin and his “flimsy excuses” for going around Ward. “Coroners and prosecutors shouldn’t be farming autopsies out to private pathologists,” the paper opined. “Whatever the reason, whether it’s to help cronies, or ‘the way we’ve always done it,’ or because they believe they can opinion ‘shop’ for favorable interpretations, the practice must end.” The editorial predicted that unless the counties started to get on board, “we’ll be right back where we were, with an empty top slot.”

  The battle in the press continued, with medical examiners from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Louisiana writing letters to the editor in support of Ward. But behind the scenes, the old guard stoked resentment. Scott County coroner Joe C. Bradford complained that Ward “doesn’t seem interested in building up the local coroner’s office as she is in building up her own office.” He added, reiterating the complaints of Kitchens and Peters, “Dr. Ward wants us to turn over our death investigations totally to her office and then allow defense attorneys to work with her rather than the local coroners and I don’t think that’s right.”

  West in particular painted Ward as power-hungry and authoritarian, and peppered his criticism with personal attacks. One longtime former coroner described a Mississippi Coroners Association meeting West called in Hattiesburg in late 1994 to make his case for a united front against Ward. When the former coroner defended the state medical examiner, West accused him of having an affair with her. A former sheriff, citing West, described Ward as a “bull-dyke” whose do-gooderism hampered criminal investigations. Ward’s enemies couldn’t decide if she was a lesbian or a floozy. They just knew they didn’t want to be taking orders from her.

  Jim Ingram was torn. The longtime lawman and former FBI agent had become friendly with Hayne and had vouched for Hayne to be medical examiner before Ward’s appointment. But Ward was also his handpicked selection for state medical examiner and director of the crime lab. Now the two were on a collision course. Publicly, Ingram stood with Ward and encouraged the coroners to work with her. But privately, he sometimes sided with coroners in their disputes with her. His inability to pick a side not only undermined Ward’s authority, it emboldened her critics.

  Finally, in January 1995, Michael West circulated a memo among state coroners that called for Ward’s resignation. The petition laid out a series of “grievances,” including that Ward was “trying to establish a political power base,” was working with defense attorneys, was uncooperative, and was undermining the coroners’ authority.

  Of the state’s eighty-two coroners, forty-two signed West’s petition. West typed a memo before releasing the petition to the press. He told his fellow coroners—apparently without the slightest hint of self-awareness—that of the twenty to twenty-five coroners who supported Ward, many did so because they were “afraid of her, as she has shown how vindictive she can be.” He then urged them to support a new bill in the Mississippi legislature that would “privatize” the state medical examiner’s office. That bill, West wrote, would “remove the politics of the ME’s office and place it in the real world that we all must work and live in.”

  The Clarion-Ledger picked up the story of West’s petition a couple months later. The paper contacted all forty-two signatories and found that a healthy majority of them used Hayne for all or nearly all their autopsies. They all had backing from their district attorneys to sign the petition. Some of the signatories had never actually worked with Ward, they merely repeated hearsay allegations against her. Others admitted that they only signed the petition out of solidarity with fellow coroners. Most said that the petition was the result of a power struggle between Hayne and Ward. (Hayne had the good sense not to speak out about it, at least publicly.)

  West went after Ward with abandon. He told the paper that he had privately complained to Ingram about Ward for months: “He’s never been able to keep this woman under control.” Forrest Allgood also attacked Ward, accusing her of lying on the witness stand during one of his murder trials. (Ward denied the accusation.) Jimmy Roberts told the paper that in encouraging more autopsies at the state lab, Ward was trying to put him out of business, as if Ward had some obligation to pad Jimmy Roberts’s bottom line.

  At least some coroners did object to West’s petition. Susan Cunningham of Jackson County told the paper that the petition was “baseless” and that “it looked like a group of fifth-graders had written it.” L. W. “Bump” Calloway of Warren County, the only coroner in the state who was a
certified crime scene investigator, said West didn’t even bother asking him to sign because he knew Calloway would tell him off. “I have always found Dr. Ward and her staff to be extremely professional, competent, and willing to cooperate.”

  Jim Ingram attributed the petition to the usual coroner politics. “No medical examiner has ever been able to survive the system in Mississippi,” he told the Clarion-Ledger. “Every one has either left the state in disgust or been fired.” He told the reporter he supported Ward. But that wouldn’t last.

  A few days later, the Clarion-Ledger ran another editorial in support of Ward. She was “experiencing firsthand the petty politics of having to deal with the ‘good ol’ boy’ system of Mississippi coroners,” the paper opined. “They resent having someone—especially a woman—overseeing their work,” and the mere fact that the power brokers in that system were attacking her “can be seen as validation that she is doing a good job.”

  Three months later, Emily Ward resigned. A few days after resigning, she fired back in the Clarion-Ledger. She pointed out to the paper that at the same time the state was paying for her office and a state-of-the-art lab, most of the state’s autopsies were being done at Jimmy Roberts’s privately owned morgue in Pearl. “There is a small faction of people who see an opportunity to make very lucrative income off the taxpayers’ dollars,” Ward said. “It is just incredibly frustrating to try to run a death investigation system when you are competing with people who want to make money off the system.”