The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist

by Radley Balko

  The man was released several years later. Soon after he got out, he came back just to see Brooks. “So he came back to visit me,” Brooks says. “He had… he had tears in his eyes. Said he just wanted to come back and thank me.

  “I didn’t know what he was talking about. I asked him, ‘What’d I do?’ And he said to me, ‘You gave me extra food. I never forgot that.’”

  Brooks gets choked up himself as he tells the story, so he stops and collects himself. “No matter what color you are, we all serve one God,” he says. “Like I said, you just have to humble yourself. You just have to keep your humanity.”

  In 2000, well after Michael West had been widely criticized in both the media and the forensic world, Dunn Lampton, a long-time district attorney in central Mississippi, sought West’s help in his prosecution of Leigh Stubbs. The story begins in March 2000, just after Stubbs had successfully completed rehab at a drug addiction center in Columbus, Mississippi. She checked out of the facility with Tammy Vance, a friend she met in rehab, and Kim Williams, the woman Stubbs and Vance would later be accused of assaulting.

  The three women first drove to the home of Dickie Ervin, whom Williams had been dating. Vance and Stubbs left and later met back up with Williams, who by then had stolen some of Ervin’s oxycontin. Vance and Williams began drinking and taking the oxycontin while Stubbs stayed sober and drove them around. The three eventually ended up at a Comfort Inn in the town of Brookhaven. By evening, Vance and Williams had passed out. Stubbs checked the three of them into the hotel. According to the motel clerk’s trial testimony, Stubbs didn’t seem drunk, high, or otherwise intoxicated—only tired. (She would pass a drug test the next day.)

  By Stubbs’s account, she then helped the other two women into the room, and the three went to sleep. The next day, Stubbs and Vance went to get some food, leaving Williams in the room, still sleeping. Later that afternoon, Stubbs and Vance noticed that Williams still hadn’t woken up and was having trouble breathing. They called an ambulance. Williams had suffered a drug overdose and had fallen into a coma.

  At the hospital, doctors found a number of injuries on Williams, including swollen breasts, a swollen and bruised vagina, and some marks across her buttocks. The attending physician estimated the injuries to be two to four days old. A rape kit was inconclusive. Another doctor later found an additional injury to Williams’s head. The police opened an investigation. A few days later, Lampton called in Michael West to examine Williams’s injuries. (Williams, who ultimately recovered, was never able to remember the event.)

  West initially didn’t find any bites on Williams. It was only five days later that he claimed to have found a mark on her hip. During that exam, West also claimed to have found injuries to Williams’s vagina that he described to be consistent with “sucking.” He deduced that these injuries had been inflicted during “severe oral sex.”

  West then compared the alleged bite mark on Williams’s hip to dental molds that had been taken from Stubbs, Vance, and two other suspects. That took a few days. By the time the plaster impressions arrived, Williams’s alleged wounds had faded. So West performed his analysis based on photographs he had taken of his findings several days earlier. He would later testify that he had determined it was a “probability” that the bite mark he claimed to have found on Williams’s hip had been inflicted by Stubbs. (In a rare display of humility, West did concede that he wasn’t “100 percent” certain of the match—only that it was likely.) Stubbs and Vance were arrested and charged with assaulting Williams.

  At trial, West showed the jury a photo of the alleged injury to Williams’s hip and told them, “I must admit to a novice, this may not appear to be a bite mark by any means.” But he assured them—it was in fact a human bite mark.

  But West didn’t stop with bite mark analysis. He had a lot more to say. On the night of the alleged attack, the Comfort Inn had a security camera trained on the parking lot. Lampton had obtained a VHS tape with grainy footage from that night and sent it to the FBI for analysis. The agency found nothing incriminating in the footage. In fact, the FBI report repeatedly pointed out that the quality of the recording was too low to even say for certain how many people are depicted in the video, much less determine their identities or what sort of clothing they’re wearing.

  Unsatisfied, prosecutors sent the video to Michael West. The Copernicus of forensics then morphed into a “video enhancement expert,” and claimed that by using off-the-shelf Adobe software he’d bought for his computer, he was able to enhance the video and capture still photos from those enhancements that implicated Leigh Stubbs and Tammy Vance in Williams’s injuries. Though obligated by law to do so, state prosecutors never turned over the FBI report or the correspondence with West to Stubbs’s defense attorney.

  The ability to enhance security camera footage beyond its original resolution is a fictional Hollywood trope so common that mocking it has become a running internet meme. Yet where the FBI determined that the video was too grainy to even make out how many people were in the frame, West confidently told the jury there were two. He claimed he could also tell that one of the people was wearing shorts and the other blue jeans—two details that matched neatly with police reports of what Stubbs and Vance had worn that night. Where the FBI could only determine that someone had removed an object—possibly a bag or suitcase—from a toolbox in the truck bed, West claimed he could make out hair, legs, and another pair of jeans, leading him to conclude that the object was obviously a body. “She takes a body out of this toolbox,” West conclusively told the jury. “That’s what I see.”

  He didn’t stop there. West also claimed he could actually read the body language of one figure in the footage. He said he could tell that the figure appeared “anxious” and was exhibiting the sort of adrenaline-fueled “fight or flight” response one shows after having committed a crime.

  The video showed none of these things. It was grainy, flickery, and dark. At best, a viewer might make out a truck, and perhaps the vague form of a few other cars. It’s possible to make out human figures walking out to and back from the truck, but they have all the detail of an eight-bit video game, only in black and white, and with the brightness turned to low.

  West apparently knew that the jury wouldn’t be able to see any of this, so he conditioned them to unquestionably accept his expertise. “What I see isn’t what everybody else sees,” he said. “There are interpretations.” As for the bite mark, West again used his “direct comparison” method, and just as in the Kennedy Brewer and Jimmie Duncan cases, forensic specialists who have reviewed the case say West likely created it himself. A video of his “examination” surfaced years later on the blog of forensic experts and bite mark analysis critics Michael Bowers and David Averill. The video depicts West repeatedly jamming the mold of Stubbs’s teeth into Williams’s thigh, just as he’d done in other cases. The alleged bite mark doesn’t appear until after West does so. (In this case, West’s subject was alive but comatose.) On the blog, Bowers—a longtime West critic—writes, “West then proceeds to tamper with the evidence by actually imbedding a stone cast of Leigh Stubbs’ teeth into the comatose victim’s hip resulting in a fabricated bite mark on the skin of the victim.” In a 2011 interview, Bowers offered this opinion: “The tampering with the evidence on the skin is likely a crime. But to create those marks on a woman who was comatose, and who hadn’t given consent, is also an assault,” he said.

  Still not finished, West then donned his “tool mark expert” cap and claimed to have found marks on Williams’s head and thigh that “matched” the shape of the latches on the tool box in the truck bed. He added, “those two latches are 37 inches apart. And if you look at Kimberly [Williams], from the head injuries to the thigh injury is 37 inches.” West elided the fact that the distance between Williams’s head and thigh would vary a great deal depending on how she was positioned. Even if she had been put into the tool box, there’s no way West could have known her positioning, much less have replicated it,
to the inch, while she lay unconscious in a hospital bed.

  Police investigators also found no biological material from Williams in the tool chest. No blood, no hair, no skin cells. West explained that biological material can be wiped away with a good scrub and some chlorine. But there was a problem there too. Investigators did find some hair, but it didn’t belong to Williams.

  For his final act, West transformed himself into a behavioral psychologist—or perhaps just a bigot. After hinting that Stubbs may have been a lesbian, Lampton asked if one might be especially likely to find bite marks in an assault perpetrated by a homosexual. West, who was no more credentialed to be giving jurors an expert opinion on how lesbians quarrel than he was on “severe oral sex,” replied that “it wouldn’t be unusual.” Lampton pushed further, asking West if bite marks after an altercation between homosexuals “would almost be expected.”

  Yes, West replied. “Almost.”

  Years later in a deposition, West would refer to the Stubbs trial as “the case of the two lesbians that bit the girl’s vagina lip off.”

  Once again, the jury bought it. In 2001, Leigh Stubbs and Tammy Vance were both convicted of assaulting Williams and stealing oxycontin and methadone. The only evidence against Stubbs for stealing drugs was that she happened to be with Williams and Vance when the drugs were taken. Stubbs, who had no prior criminal record, was sentenced to forty-four years in prison. In 2003, the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld both the convictions and West’s testimony. The ruling was unanimous. The court had already stated that it had accepted bite mark evidence as scientific and credible—in the Levon Brooks case. As to the various other areas of forensics in which West testified, the court found that either Stubbs’s trial attorney failed to properly object or that they were satisfied that Stubbs had the opportunity to both cross-examine West and to call her own expert witness to challenge him. The court added, “This does not mean that Dr. West can indiscriminately offer so-called expert testimony in other areas in which he not even remotely meets the criteria. We caution prosecutors and defense attorneys, as well as our learned trial judges, to take care that Dr. West’s testimony as an expert is confined to the area of his expertise.” Given the wide-ranging fields in which West testified in the case, it’s hard to imagine what the court could possibly find outside of his expertise.

  By the time the Mississippi Innocence Project took up the case in 2008, even Mississippi prosecutors were no longer using West. Yet while Mississippi attorney general Jim Hood has admitted that West isn’t a credible witness, Hood and his staff have nevertheless continued to fight to preserve convictions won on West’s testimony. Typically, these cases are in post-conviction, which usually means that the defendant at some point has already argued that West should not have been permitted to testify—and almost certainly lost that argument. Instead of arguing for West’s credibility, the state now argues in these cases that the defendants are procedurally prohibited from reraising West’s testimony as an issue.

  Legally, they’re on shaky ground. There has been a sea change surrounding forensic evidence nationally, and bite mark matching has come under particular fire. But morally, it’s reprehensible. If he wanted, Hood could drop the charges in all of these cases—or at least agree to a new trial without testimony from Hayne or West. Instead his office argues about procedure.

  That’s exactly what Hood’s office argued to keep Leigh Stubbs and Tammy Vance in prison. And they were succeeding, until Stubbs’s father tracked down the FBI report on the surveillance video that Lampton never turned over to the defense—along with the correspondence between West and Lampton that referenced the report. He then handed the report over to Stubbs’s new lawyers.

  That finally did the trick. In June 2012, a district court judge threw out the convictions of both Stubbs and Vance, citing the state’s failure to turn over exculpatory evidence. The following year, Hood’s office backed down and offered the women a plea bargain. If they pleaded guilty to the drug charges, the state would dismiss the assault charges, agree to a sentence of time served, and let the women eventually expunge all the charges from their records. The women agreed.

  Dunn Lampton used West and his preposterous testimony well after West’s exploits were well known. In an ideal world, that should have ended his career as a prosecutor. Instead, in 2001, President George W. Bush nominated Lampton to be US attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi. Lampton died in 2011.

  Christopher Plourd was furious about what happened to his client, Ray Krone. And rightly so. Krone had twice been wrongly convicted of murder and was nearly executed. Thanks to bite mark testimony from a local dentist and renowned bite mark analyst Raymond Rawson, Krone was convicted of murdering a cocktail waitress in 1992 and again in 1996.

  Over the strenuous objections of prosecutors, Plourd eventually persuaded a court to allow DNA testing on biological evidence from the crime scene. In 2002, the testing showed that Krone was innocent. It provided a match to a man named Kenneth Phillips, who should have been a suspect from the start. After ten years in prison, including two on death row, Krone was exonerated and released from prison.

  Plourd, offended and angry that his client could have been convicted not once, but twice, based on quackery that had been presented in court as science, decided to conduct his own “blind proficiency test” on some unknowing and prominent bite mark expert. By chance, Plourd chose Michael West for his test.

  In October 2001, Plourd and his friend James Rix conceived the plan. Rix called West and introduced himself as “Phil Barnes,” a private investigator who was looking into the unsolved rape and murder of an Idaho college student (the crime was fictitious). He asked if he could send West some crime scene photos and a dental mold of the teeth of his “prime suspect.” West agreed.

  Rix then sent West the photos of the bite mark on Kim Ancona’s breast, the one used to convict Ray Krone. The dental mold was from Rix’s own teeth. He also sent a check for $750—West’s retainer.

  Two months later, West sent back a letter and accompanying twenty-minute video. In the video, West meticulously explains the methodology he used to match bite marks to dental molds. Using the photo of Ancona’s bitten breast and Rix’s dental mold, West walks the viewer through his process, eventually reaching the conclusion Plourd and Rix suspected he would: the mold and the photos were a definite match.

  “Notice as I flex the photograph across these teeth how it conforms to the outline very nicely,” West explains. “The odds of that happening if these weren’t the teeth that created this bite would be almost astronomical.” West adds that the “matching” patterns he found between the photo and the dental mold “could only lead an odontologist to one opinion and that [is] these teeth did create that mark.”

  To watch the video without knowing the context, it’s easy to see how juries found West convincing, at least when it comes to bite marks. He intermingles dental and forensics jargon with ease. He’s confident, as if he’s done it all a hundred times before. (And he had.) He really appears to know what he’s doing. But to watch the video while knowing the story behind it shows how frighteningly easy it was for West to convince juries of things that simply weren’t true.

  Over the next fifteen years, defense attorneys in Mississippi repeatedly tried to bring Plourd’s sting to the attention of Mississippi courts—to persuade them to finally stop certifying West as an expert witness. It still wasn’t enough.

  Kennedy Brewer spent twenty-three of every twenty-four hours isolated in a cell on Mississippi’s death row at Parchman. It gave him plenty of time to worry about his appeal. He had heard nothing from his lawyers or the courts. So he wrote a letter to his attorney. “I just been wondering,” he began, “since I haven’t heard nothing in a while it would be good for me to no if everything the same or have anything change?”

  Brewer’s lawyer wrote him back, but only to tell Brewer that he was no longer handling the case. The trial court had appointed two different lawyers to draft
and file Brewer’s appeal, but neither had been in touch. Several months later, Brewer still had heard nothing from his new appellate attorneys. So he wrote his trial lawyer again to see if he had any information.

  “I hope that I am not worrying you,” Brewer wrote, “it just that sense I been over here a guy almost got executed all because his attorney didn’t file this certain motion in court and… all I want to no is where my case stand because I don’t want that to happen to me.”

  The trial court had appointed Brewer a lawyer to handle his appeal—or at least gone through the formality. The first lawyer the court appointed had never participated in a jury trial, nor had she ever worked an appeal. Shortly after her appointment, she became ill and requested the aid of another attorney. The trial court obliged, this time appointing an attorney who had limited experience practicing criminal law, and after reading the trial transcripts “and considering the severity of this matter and the consequences… if the trial court’s decision was affirmed” asked to be removed from the case. With both of Brewer’s initially appointed appellate attorneys out of their league, the court finally turned to a more senior attorney who had experience in both trying and appealing serious cases: Richard Burdine.

  Burdine’s legacy is a complicated one. He’s a black lawyer from Mississippi who for decades has willingly accepted appointments to represent indigent defendants when few others would. In 2014, the Mississippi legislature publicly commended Burdine. The House commendation was titled, “A Resolution Commending the Historical Legacy, Reputable Iconic Career and Esteemed Service of Mr. Richard Burdine as a Distinguished Member of the State of Mississippi’s Legal Community and One of the State’s Most Illustrious and Oldest African-American Attorneys.”