The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist

by Radley Balko

  To be fair, Pittman was on the court as Hayne became ingrained in the state’s criminal justice system, and he retired before there had been much public criticism of Hayne. Defendants had only challenged Hayne’s testimony in a few of the cases Pittman heard while he was on the bench. Still, Pittman himself relied on Hayne while he was attorney general. He defended convictions that had been won based on Hayne’s testimony. He now says he wishes that he and his colleagues had been more skeptical: “There could be a herd mentality on the court—there was always a strong majority of justices that were just always accepting of prosecutors and expert testimony.”

  “At the time,” he says, “Mississippi had no state medical examiner, so there was no one backing up, verifying the work Hayne and West were doing. All the DAs believed in Hayne. We probably had more confidence and trust in the DAs than we should have—more than I do now.”

  After retiring, Pittman grew increasingly alarmed as additional information came out about Hayne’s record—and Mississippi officials’ reaction to the revelations. His thoughtfulness and willingness to speak out are as courageous as they are rare. “What ultimately shocked me were the numbers of autopsies that Hayne was doing. When you see those kinds of numbers, you realize that they’re impossible.” He adds that Hayne’s personality is probably why he was able to elude criticism longer than West.

  Pittman bears more responsibility for his role in enabling West. The feisty dentist was directly challenged several times while Pittman was on the court. In fact, Pittman heard eight cases involving West’s testimony. Only two other justices heard more.

  Pittman upheld West’s testimony in all but one of those cases, and in that case (the Bologna Sandwich Case), he voted with the majority, who faulted West not for claiming he could “exclude” or “include” people as sources of the bites in the partially eaten sandwich, but for destroying the evidence. Pittman most regrets his 1997 majority opinion in the Levon Brooks case, which upheld West’s testimony, Brooks’s conviction, and the life sentence. “Looking back, I can’t believe that I bought into all of that—that I believed West’s ‘science’ was really science. I wish I had voted differently.”

  Pittman says there was a strong pro–death penalty culture on the court in the 1990s. Part of that culture was driven by ideology. “There was a sense that if a death penalty case came to us, that that was the jury’s decision, and it ought not be interfered with,” he says. Since then, he has learned how bias can limit how authorities view those cases. “Experience eventually taught me that it really began with the DA. Once the DA decided he was going to seek the death penalty, it was really all downhill from there.”

  Pittman recalls a couple of DAs who were careful about when they sought death for a murder suspect. But others sought death in nearly every murder case. The death penalty wasn’t being applied based on the merits of the case or the seriousness of the crime, but on the politics and aggressiveness of the local prosecutor.

  Five years after retiring from the court, Pittman, now a lawyer, filed a post-conviction petition on behalf of a man who had been convicted partly as a result of questionable testimony from Steven Hayne. In the brief, Pittman made the same arguments many others had before him. Pittman’s former colleagues unanimously rejected the petition.

  “I’m not a finance person,” Steven Hayne once said in a deposition. “I’m a physician and I never paid that much attention, you know, to the finances.”

  If Hayne was doing around 80 percent of Mississippi’s public autopsies over the span of fifteen to twenty years, he grossed well over $10 million from taxpayers during that span. To complicate matters, in 2014 Hayne’s former business partner Cecil McCrory was indicted for a bribery and kickback scheme involving officials at the state’s Department of Corrections. McCrory has held a number of public offices in Mississippi, including state representative, county commissioner, sheriff’s department investigator, school board chairman, and local justice court judge. Hayne wasn’t implicated in the investigation that ultimately sent McCrory to prison, but his longtime partnership with a man now serving time, their unusual business arrangement, their opaqueness about the business, and McCrory’s contacts in state government raise some legitimate public interest questions.

  In 1991 McCrory started a company called Investigative Research. McCrory himself had been certified in fire investigations (another area of forensics heavily criticized in recent years as it has been subjected to scientific scrutiny), and most of his early clients were insurance companies that hired him to investigate claims for possible arson. At the same time, he was serving as a state legislator and was chairman of PEER, the legislature’s oversight committee structure that investigated official corruption. It was also the committee that issued reports critical of the state’s death investigation system in 1988 and again in 2008, reports that urged the state to stop contracting autopsies out to private doctors—though neither report was published while McCrory was on the committee.

  When Hayne joined Investigative Research around 1995, the company started taking on pathology consultations as well. (The word “company” might give the wrong impression—the staff usually consisted of McCrory, Hayne, and perhaps an administrative assistant or two.) McCrory processed the money Hayne made from consulting in civil cases. Once the arrangement had been set up, when opposing counsel would ask Hayne questions about his income in such cases, he’d often simply defer to McCrory. In criminal cases in particular, defense attorneys rarely had the time or the inclination to follow up by subpoenaing McCrory or his records.

  After losing his seat in the legislature in 1996, McCrory also began lobbying his former colleagues on behalf of both the coroners’ association and the sheriffs’ association—two groups whose members had enormous influence over the assigning of autopsies, and thus would have been of particular interest to Hayne.

  It’s difficult to ascertain the exact nature of Hayne and McCrory’s business relationship, except to say that it was odd. According to sworn testimony from both men, McCrory handled all the money, did all the paperwork, and kept all the records from Hayne’s consultations in private cases. He then deposited the money from Hayne’s clients into a slush fund, from which he wrote checks at Hayne’s request. While the money was Hayne’s to do with as he pleased, according to McCrory, Hayne never had access to the account himself. He always had to go through McCrory. According to McCrory, at any given time, the account balance would be around $50,000 to $60,000.

  It also isn’t clear what position Hayne held at IR. For most of the 1990s, Hayne testified that he was a partner at the firm. In 2001 he testified that McCrory owned 100 percent of the company—meaning that his testimony in who knows how many cases until that point had been mistaken. In 2003, Hayne went back again. When asked who owned the company, he replied, “Technically, Cecil McCrory and myself.” McCrory testified in 2012 that Hayne didn’t own—and had never owned—a stake in the company.

  According to McCrory, during Hayne’s most lucrative years in the early 2000s, he was bringing in $250,000 per year for Investigative Research, although in a 2005 deposition Hayne claimed he was billing half that much.

  Yet McCrory and Hayne have insisted in sworn testimony that Hayne made almost no money from his civil cases. Testifying at a deposition, for example, Hayne claimed that “zero percent” of his income came from civil cases. (Odder still, he said in the same deposition that just “5, 7, 8 percent” of his income came from criminal cases.) Hayne repeatedly made similar claims. He has often said that he made no money from IR, save for $1,000 every five years. He has claimed his accountant told him the IRS requires this minimum amount so that his consulting isn’t classified as a hobby. It isn’t clear what Hayne meant by that. When McCrory was asked about this alleged IRS rule in a 2012 deposition, he replied, “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

  Despite Hayne’s claims, McCrory at times paid him sums much larger than $1,000. When asked about a $25,000 check he received from t
he company in the 1990s, Hayne said it was reimbursement for a conference room that a local hospital had been letting him use. But McCrory also cut him four more checks of $25,000 to $34,000 in 2007 and 2008. Hayne has never been asked about those. When McCrory was asked under oath, he replied, “I don’t have a vague recollection of why I did that.” Hayne has testified that he left Investigative Research in the “early part of two thousand.” McCrory has testified that Hayne left in 2008.

  When asked where all of the money went, if not to him, Hayne has repeatedly testified that he gave it all away—to pay for office equipment and salaries, to students, and to various charities. But when asked to produce records of all of these transactions, he has claimed that they’ve been destroyed or that he entrusted all his record keeping to McCrory, to his accountant, or to his ex-wife.

  Though both Hayne and McCrory have claimed that Hayne was enormously generous, both say he also gave away his money in ways that didn’t create a paper trail. Hayne frequently claimed to give lots of money to charity, but he rarely named any specific charitable organizations. Instead, he has said that he engaged in more individualized charity, the kind that leaves no public record. According to McCrory, about “90 percent” of the “charitable donations” Hayne made were to “kids going to college.” How did Hayne find these kids? “They seemed to find him. Once somebody tells that they got a contribution or donations for books… word gets around. He had more requests than he had money.”

  In 2012, Hayne and McCrory claimed that Hayne sometimes even paid these students’ full tuition. Both claimed that Hayne once bought a student a car and sent another to Europe. McCrory testified that Hayne also often gave money to someone simply because McCrory requested it. “I actually have asked him to donate to some people who I would come across who just, you know, were—didn’t have any food or whatever in the house. And he—he never questioned it. He was always supportive of that,” McCrory said.

  All of this certainly seems extraordinarily kind. Yet between them, Hayne and McCrory couldn’t remember the names of a single recipient of such generosity. When asked in 2012, Hayne had vague recollections of his connections to at least two students he had helped, but couldn’t recall their names. And yet some have said he has an incredibly precise, almost photographic memory.

  Hayne did remember that he always made checks out to the students themselves, not the educational institutions. He said the reason for this was that he didn’t want the students to think he didn’t trust them. That also meant that the college or university would have no record of his check. When asked in 2012 to name the last time he had made such a gift to a college student, Hayne hesitated, then said it was probably in the late 1990s. He was later shown a 2004 deposition in which he claimed that at that time he was putting a student through college.

  Hayne also periodically paid West to work for him, sometimes at Jimmy Roberts’s morgue, sometimes at Investigative Research. Hayne at one time loaned West a lot of money, apparently to help pay off a tax bill, and may have asked West to work it off by assisting him with his autopsies. Over the years, Hayne has often claimed he netted very little money from his autopsies, citing his obligation to pay for administrative staff and supplies. But when challenged on exactly who paid those expenses on his behalf, he has said he isn’t sure. He isn’t even sure who sent his staff their tax forms.

  One former coroner said he didn’t know what “the fiduciary deal was between Hayne, West, and Roberts,” but “Mike West was always around when Hayne did autopsies.… Once, Hayne brought West over when he did an autopsy for me here. Then I got a bill from West for consulting. I refused to pay it, and I told Steve never to let that happen again.” Another coroner says he refused to work with Hayne so long as West was present at Hayne’s autopsies. “I was always pretty sure that West was hiding in the back room at Mississippi Mortuary.… I knew he was there even if you couldn’t see him.”

  Hayne has often testified that for most of his career, he didn’t worry about money because his wife handled all of their financial affairs—personal and business. “My wife, Ann, was a meticulous person with all the finances,” he said in 2012. “She could tell me how many socks I bought each month for the last 15 years.”

  When Ann Hayne herself was asked about her ex-husband’s finances by a private investigator for the Innocence Project in 2012, she said that while she was certain that Hayne, West, and Roberts had some sort of financial partnership, “you won’t find it in writing. I looked.”

  By his own testimony and that of his business associates, then, Hayne made little to no effort to track who owed him money, how much money he made, whom he paid to help him (and how much), and to whom he lent and gave money. All of his financial affairs were apparently handled by either his wife, Ann (until they divorced), Cecil McCrory, Jimmy Roberts (though both deny they ever had a business relationship), or his accountant. But all of those people to varying degrees have disagreed with both Hayne and one another on the specifics of how Hayne’s finances were handled.

  Figuring out Hayne’s total income over the years can also be a difficult task. But it’s possible to at least make some estimates based on his testimony. Hayne has testified that he made about $170,000 per year from his position at the renal lab, and that his compensation for his work at Rankin Medical Center ranged from $140,000 a year when he started to $200,000 a year when he left. He was also bringing in $150,000 to $300,000 per year from his consulting work on private cases. Of course, the bulk of Hayne’s income came from state autopsies and the work associated with them, and at the height of his career he was grossing well over $1 million per year from those. Taken together, Hayne’s work grossed in the neighborhood of $1.5 million to $2 million per year, not including what he made for serving on various boards and holding various titles at hospitals, medical research facilities, and start-ups.

  Hayne’s lifestyle certainly reflected that sort of income. According to divorce records, when Hayne and his second wife, Tonia, split in 2008, the couple owned several nice automobiles and three properties, including a six-thousand-square-foot house valued at $1 million, and eighty-one acres in Rankin County. Over the course of their short marriage, Hayne spent over $317,000 at the Lee Michaels jewelry store. After his divorce from his first wife, Ann, Hayne began paying her $150,000 per year in alimony.

  And then there are the records themselves. Hayne, West, and McCrory have apparently lost or destroyed most of their financial records, personal records, autopsy records, and correspondence with police and prosecutors over the years. Hayne said in his 2012 Innocence Project deposition that most of his records from civil cases were destroyed when a pipe burst and flooded his home. As for his autopsy records from criminal cases, he said he had transferred all of those to the state crime lab.

  Michael West has had similar problems. When asked in recent depositions to bring all records he still had from all of the cases in which he had consulted or testified, West brought in only his CV. According to West, some of his records were destroyed after he stored them in a friend’s barn and the barn subsequently burned down. Others were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Any that remained had been thrown out by his wife. West also said he kept no backup files of the photographs he took for his cases. He has said he failed to back up any of his data and lost more of his records when each of his three hard drives crashed. Like Hayne, West also dismissed his foggy memory about finances by citing his lack of interest in such matters. When asked a question about Jimmy Roberts’s finances, West replied, “If you look in this CV, you will never see the word accountant.”

  It’s a similar story with Cecil McCrory. When deposed by the Innocence Project in 2012, McCrory said he had only kept documents from Investigative Research going back to 2009, one year after he says Hayne left the company. As for the donations Hayne had made to students and charitable organizations, McCrory said the only record he made of them was in the registry for the checkbook for Hayne’s account, and he had thrown that out years a
go. McCrory also had none of Hayne’s tax returns, nor any of the company’s tax records from the years of Hayne’s employment. He also had no transcripts of Hayne’s trial testimony in the cases for which Investigative Research had been paid for Hayne’s services.

  McCrory was indicted by federal prosecutors in 2014. According to the initial indictments, McCrory had started several new companies, and through them had paid nearly a million dollars in bribes to Mississippi Department of Corrections commissioner Christopher Epps in exchange for Epps awarding no-bid contracts to McCrory’s clients and businesses, including Investigative Research. The indictments later expanded to include more people and allegations of fraud affecting over $800 million in corrections contracts. According to federal officials, Epps and McCrory were the two central figures in the massive scheme. In February 2017, McCrory was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison.

  Hayne wasn’t implicated in any of his former business partner’s shady dealings with the state’s prison system. But he has said that he was personally affected by McCrory’s indictment. “I feel just horrible that this has happened,” he told the Clarion-Ledger. “It makes me sick to my stomach.”

  Hayne may have finally been barred from doing state autopsies in Mississippi, but with just a few exceptions, the state’s public officials seem uninterested in revisiting his old cases. Attorney General Jim Hood has arguably possessed the most power to order a thorough review of Hayne’s previous work. At the very least, Hood could have told his staff to halt pending prosecutions until he could find other medical examiners to review Hayne’s testimony and autopsy reports. Afterall, we now know that two men have been wrongly convicted of rape and murder. One of them was nearly executed. And a little girl died whose death might have been prevented. Perhaps some introspection was in order. Instead, within weeks of the Brooks and Brewer exonerations, Hood took to the press to defend Forrest Allgood. Hood called Allgood a “straight arrow” who “always played it by the rules.” That comment didn’t age well. Two years later, Allgood and Judge James T. Kitchens were upbraided by a federal judge for allowing false testimony in a separate death penalty trial.