Framed

Autopsy Games

JOHN GRISHAM

The first recorded autopsy of note was that of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C.

The Roman emperor seriously underestimated the loyalty of his colleagues, and when he brazenly declared himself to be Emperor for Life, they took offense.

They also took up knives and attacked him on the Senate Floor.

A mob of about sixty flailed away at Caesar, who, in addition to being shocked, was also defenseless.

They left him a bloody mess, fled the scene, and, typical for politicians, immediately began denying they were involved or blaming other people.

For reasons that were never clear, someone with authority requested an autopsy, though it was evident what had happened.

Autopsies were nothing new; the Greeks had been dissecting corpses for five hundred years.

As a crowd looked on, a distinguished physician, Antistius, went about the gruesome task and soon confirmed the obvious: Caesar died from a massive loss of blood.

There were twenty-three stab wounds.

In the 1500s, Leonardo da Vinci, in his never-ending thirst for knowledge, collected cadavers and dissected at least thirty of them, not to solve crimes or study diseases, but to understand and illustrate every part of the human body.

His rival, Michelangelo, occasionally put down his chisels and brushes, picked up the scalpel, and conducted his own research.

By the Middle Ages, autopsies were common in Europe and Asia, but they were seldom used in criminal investigations.

In the 1800s, as the United States’ population soared almost as fast as its murder rate, autopsies became useful tools for criminal investigators.

In almost every murder, the best source of evidence is the body.

Pathologists in America gained expertise in sifting for clues through the remains of the victims.

Founded in 1936, the American Board of Pathology (ABP) made the first serious effort to regulate the practice by promulgating standard requirements for certification.

The field continued to grow, as did the crime rate, and by 1940 it was well accepted in American criminal procedure that the doctor who performed the autopsy had to be “board certified”

by the ABP before he or she could testify.

As the need grew, forensic pathologists became more involved in solving crimes and the science was modernized.

More regulations followed.

With time, the National Association of Medical Examiners (NAME) began regulating the certification of pathologists.

NAME also handled complaints against its members, and, as in all fields of medicine, there was never a shortage of bad actors.

In 1992, an infamous Texas pathologist named Ralph Erdmann attracted national attention because of the large number of autopsies he claimed to have performed.

He worked in rural Texas and handled the work for about forty counties that could not afford to hire their own medical examiners—and Erdmann was eager to help.

He even made house calls, driving to the counties and performing wherever necessary.

Most of the counties lacked proper facilities, so Erdmann adapted on the fly.

He dissected corpses in parking lots, garages, and alleys.

He became a darling of the police and prosecutors because he could massage his testimony to support their theories of guilt. He fancied himself the “Quincy of the Texas Panhandle,”

after the TV character made popular by Jack Klugman.

Eventually, his shoddy work caught up with him, as did the complaints from defense lawyers.

When Erdmann was finally investigated, it was determined that in at least one-third of his autopsies he had never opened the corpse.

He averaged 300 autopsies a year and claimed to have peaked at 480, an astonishing number.

NAME recommended that a medical examiner do no more than 250 per year.

If a doctor exceeded 325, NAME would not certify the lab where he worked.

Given that a typical autopsy takes between two and four hours, followed by the preparation of a report and other paperwork, Erdmann’s numbers were extraordinary.

Such numbers, though, were a drop in the bucket for a pathologist who roamed the state of Mississippi in the 1990s.

Nicknamed “The Cadaver King,”

he cornered the market on autopsies and handled 80 percent of the state’s homicides during his reign.

He once boasted of doing 1,000 autopsies a year.

Even 1,500, or more.

At his peak, he claimed to have performed 2,000 autopsies in one year.

—

His name was Dr.

Steven Hayne.

He was born in Los Angeles in 1941, finished medical school at Brown University in 1976, and specialized in pathology.

He worked for various hospitals around the country for a few years before taking a job as the medical director of a laboratory in Rankin County, Mississippi, in 1985.

As a sideline, he began doing autopsies for $400 each.

His timing could not have been better.

Because of the low pay and other issues, Mississippi couldn’t keep a permanent state medical examiner.

If a county coroner suspected foul play in a death, it was his duty to arrange an autopsy.

There was no central state morgue or lab to ship the body to, no state agency or clearinghouse to monitor and regulate autopsies.

The county coroners, all eighty-two of them, had to call a pathologist and beg for an autopsy.

Since virtually all pathologists loathed the work, and the small fees, not to mention the unpleasant prospect of testifying in court, there was a perpetual backlog of corpses in need of examination.

Enter Dr.

Hayne.

He sniffed out an opportunity and let it be known that he was open for business.

To him the math was simple: Good money could be made with an assembly-line approach.

He began by doing several autopsies a month, quickly, efficiently, and with the friendly service attitude of a car salesman.

Before long he was doing one per day, and just getting started.

By word of mouth he advertised his services, and the coroners, police, sheriffs, and prosecutors gladly shipped their corpses to him.

He also advertised in police bulletins and newsletters. In 1988 he did 320 autopsies. By 1990, he was doing 1,200 a year.

Not only was Dr.

Hayne an incredible workhorse, he was also a marvelous witness for the prosecution.

Affable, glib, and smart, he wowed juries for years with an effective combination of folksiness and sharp medical knowledge.

He used big words and small ones, and he spoke in a clear voice with no accent.

He didn’t sound like people from Mississippi.

He was from California, and Brown University, and other faraway places.

Lawyers have known for years that the farther an expert travels to get to the courtroom, the more impressed the local folks will be. With constant practice, Hayne played the role perfectly.

When he wasn’t at the autopsy table or in a courtroom, he worked as the director of the Rankin Medical Center lab and directed a kidney care center.

On top of that, he consulted in civil cases and performed private autopsies.

When later questioned about his superhuman workload, he explained: “I normally sleep no more than two or three hours a day.

I also work seven days a week, not five.

I don’t take vacations.

So I work at a much more efficient level and much harder than most people.

I’m blessed with that and cursed with that, but that’s what I carry with me, and I work very, very hard.

I have an ability to work long hours and I don’t make a lot of errors.

I think my record speaks for itself.”

—

But there were errors, and plenty of them.

As Hayne cornered the market on autopsies, dead bodies arrived at his small morgue at an astonishing rate.

It was not unusual for six or seven to be waiting for the knife, and they were often stacked up like cordwood on the holding ramp.

One state official who saw the operation said, “It looked like an autopsy factory.

There were no safety precautions.”

A former state official said, “Hayne was constantly looking for ways to cut corners.

Evidence was frequently improperly labeled.

Evidence was tainted because it was improperly packaged and preserved.

They didn’t take safety precautions with chemicals or biological materials.”

One police officer described the morgue as a “sausage factory.”

A police chief described seeing five corpses lying side by side, all cut open, in various stages of being examined.

He worried about cross-contamination.

One state official questioned whether Hayne was doing all the work himself.

He said, “I’ve always found it impossible to believe that Steve did all the autopsies he claimed to have done.

He was never in the prime of health.

He could not have stood up to the regimen he claimed to have followed.”

Whether he actually did the autopsies or not, Dr.

Hayne was certainly sending bills for them.

Before long he had increased his rate to $1,000 per autopsy, plus $350 an hour to testify in court.

He was taking bodies from all over the state and had become its de facto medical examiner.

Since he billed each county separately, and since there was no centralized recordkeeping, no one but Hayne knew how many autopsies he was actually doing or how much money he was making.

The math, though, was fairly straightforward.

He was grossing over a million dollars a year as an uncertified forensic pathologist.

His apologists considered him a real asset to the State.

He was doing work few other doctors would.

Prosecutors loved him because he was great in court, could convince a jury, and was creative in finding evidence that supported the State’s theory of guilt.

To this day, no one knows how many wrongful convictions began with a scalpel in the hands of Dr.

Steven Hayne.

—

One of the first began on September 15, 1990, with the abduction and murder of a three-year-old girl named Courtney Smith.

She lived with her mother, grandmother, two sisters, and four uncles in a blue clapboard cottage on an unpaved road on “the other side of the tracks”

in the small, dying town of Brooksville, Mississippi.

The neighborhood was a grid of gravel roads running between shotgun houses, all built long before 1990.

Some were well maintained with fresh paint, flower boxes, and grass lawns.

Most were in a perpetual state of disrepair.

A few had been abandoned.

On some of the lots multiple dwellings had been erected and several generations of a family lived clustered together.

Mobile homes were scattered about haphazardly. Though the neighborhood was poor, there was little serious crime. Many of the residents slept with their doors and windows unlocked, if there were locks at all.

On that Saturday evening, Courtney and her sister Ashley, age five, had dinner with their grandmother and great-grandmother, then walked home, a few minutes away.

It was still summertime, hot and humid, and the neighbors were outdoors, porch-sitting, cooking on the grill, and playing in the streets.

At home, their mother, Sonya Smith, bathed the girls and prepared them for bed.

She dressed Courtney in a T-shirt with a duck on the front and the word Mississippi across the top.

When the girls were asleep, Sonya got dressed herself and went out for the night.

It was, after all, Saturday, and she enjoyed the bar scene in the local honky-tonks.

Her mother, Ruby, said she would babysit the girls. Also in the house was Tony, Sonya’s brother, one of the girls’ three uncles who lived with them.

Ruby, the grandmother, got bored and left with some friends.

Uncle Tony was fast asleep on the sofa.

The girls were asleep in the bedroom.

There was nothing unusual about the tag-team approach to the babysitting.

Aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, and neighbors all pitched in to help with the kids.

Around midnight, a man from the area entered the house through the unlocked front door and walked past the sofa where Tony was asleep.

He looked into the first bedroom, saw two little girls sleeping, picked up Courtney without waking her, and walked out.

He took her down a short path and away from the houses.

Near a pond, he laid her on the ground, uncertain what to do next.

When he penetrated her vagina with a finger, she finally woke up and began crying.

When she wouldn’t stop, he choked her and then tossed her into the pond.

She couldn’t swim and struggled to stay afloat. When her little head dipped underwater for the last time, the killer walked back to his car and drove away.

Sonya Smith spent Sunday morning looking for her daughter, assuming she was with another family.

Initially, there was no panic because children were known to stay with whoever happened to be keeping them.

By late afternoon, though, it was apparent Courtney was indeed missing.

The police were called around 8:00 p.m. , and by then hundreds of people were searching for the girl.

On Monday morning, the town’s police chief saw the partially submerged body of a child in the pond.

He pulled it out and laid it beside the water.

The child, a little girl, was wearing a duck T-shirt with the word Mississippi across the top.

She had bled from wounds to the groin and head.

The chief wrapped the body in another officer’s jacket and waited for the sheriff’s office.

The first to arrive was Deputy Ernest Eichelberger, who, in spite of his uncommon last name, was a burly African American who had been in law enforcement for only five years.

As the deputy chief, he assumed the role of lead investigator.

He knew a child was missing and found Courtney’s father, who made a positive ID.

Eichelberger then turned the body over to the county coroner, who immediately sent it to Dr.

Steven Hayne for an autopsy.

He completed it that night and determined that the child had been choked but most likely died by drowning.

She had been sexually assaulted, but he found no pubic hair or semen and concluded the killer had not forced intercourse.

He found some bruises on her right wrist that he thought might have been caused by human teeth, but wasn’t certain.

He ran some more tests and decided the bruises were made around the time of death.

Some other marks may have been animal bites.

With the human bite mark theory in play, Dr. Hayne and the investigators were in luck.

At that time, Mississippi was home to one of the country’s leading bite mark experts, the phenomenal Dr. Michael West.

As a small-town dentist in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Dr. West had somehow become an expert witness and had launched himself onto center stage in some of the most sensational trials in the state.

Almost overnight, Dr. West became a forensic expert not only with bite marks, but with ballistics, gunshot reconstruction, wound patterns, bruises, tool mark patterns, arson, glass breakage, and fingernail scratches.

In almost every case, his sidekick, Dr. Hayne, performed the autopsy, then called in West to nail down the proof.

When Dr. Hayne finished Courtney’s autopsy, he called Dr. West and asked him to come to the morgue as soon as possible.

They had another murder on their hands and the killer, for some reason, had chosen to bite his victim.

Dr. West did not arrive in time.

Late Monday night, the mortician who owned the morgue decided to proceed with the embalming without notifying anyone.

The following morning, Dr.

West examined the freshly embalmed body, and quickly agreed with his pal that the bite marks on the wrist were from human teeth.

He excised some skin around the wounds, studied their marks, and wrote a short report.

He billed the county almost $3,000 for his labors and informed the coroner that he was ready to provide further assistance as soon as the sheriff had a suspect.