Framed

Autopsy Games#4

A few months passed and life returned to normal in Brooksville.

With the murderer convicted and put away, folks felt safer and began to relax.

But in early May the killer struck again, and in much the same way.

The second murder was so similar to Courtney’s that someone in law enforcement should have asked serious questions.

The victim was Christine Jackson, another three-year-old child who lived not far from Courtney Smith.

She lived with her mother, Gloria, and some siblings in a dilapidated shack on a gravel road in a remote area of the county.

Gloria, not exactly a hands-on mother, was often in trouble with social services because of concerns over the health and welfare of her children.

They were often unfed and neglected.

Boyfriends came and went, but one, Kennedy Brewer, moved in and tried to help with the bills and kids.

He was only nineteen years old and looking for steady employment.

On Saturday night, May 2, 1992, Gloria left the kids with Kennedy and went to the clubs with some friends.

Her first, and favorite, was the Santa Barbara, now minus its longtime floor man, Levon Brooks, who was only three months into his life sentence.

She returned home around 12:30 and found Kennedy and her three children asleep.

She rousted her boyfriend and they had sex in another room, then returned to the bedroom and went to sleep.

Justin Johnson was in the area.

He was living with his parents, about a mile away, and decided to take a long walk in the dark, with no destination in mind.

Years later, when he confessed to both murders, he said he was following voices that led him to a small shack just off the road.

The voices told him to open a broken window, lift it up, reach inside, and gently take a child sleeping on the floor.

This he did without disturbing Gloria and Kennedy and without waking Christine or her siblings.

He carried her into the woods, and when she awoke he put her down and they walked, hand in hand, deeper into the darkness.

They stopped near a creek. The voices returned with a vengeance and told him to “sex molest her, hurt her, and dispose of the body.”

He undressed and raped her, ejaculated, choked her, and then threw her in the creek.

He started crying and jumped in to save her, but she had already been swept downstream.

Cold and wet, he sat on the edge of the creek for a long time and cried and listened to the voices in his head.

At some point he walked back to his parents’ home.

As soon as Gloria realized her daughter was missing on Sunday morning, she began frantically calling friends, neighbors, and family members.

When a deputy arrived, at least two dozen people were searching for Christine.

Gloria and Kennedy told the deputy their versions of what had happened the night before.

They were certain Christine was asleep at the foot of their bed when they fell asleep.

She was gone when they woke up.

There were no signs of forced entry, though none of the doors had locks.

The road to a bad conviction often begins at the crime scene with a misguided hunch.

The deputy evaluated the situation and decided that since no one broke into the house, it had to be an inside job.

The only adults inside the house were Gloria and Kennedy.

Deputy Eichelberger joined the brain trust and quickly agreed with the deputy’s gut reaction.

From that moment forward, Kennedy Brewer was the prime suspect.

There was no hint of a motive.

No evidence.

No dead body at that point.

And no clue as to how he could have eased himself out of bed, taken the child, carried her away, raped her, disposed of her body, then returned to his bed and fallen asleep without disturbing Gloria.

As usually happens, the hunch led to tunnel vision, and the investigators focused on Kennedy.

They had their man.

The search continued with no success until a police helicopter spotted the body on Wednesday, four days after the murder.

It was still in the creek and evidently had just floated to the surface.

The county coroner sent the body to Dr.

Hayne for an autopsy.

The police acknowledged the similarities in the two murders but did not believe they could be related.

And why not? Their rationale was simple.

Levon Brooks could not have killed Christine Jackson because he was incarcerated at Parchman.

As in the Brooks case, the police rounded up the usual suspects and hauled them to the hospital to be examined.

Six men, including Kennedy Brewer and Justin Johnson, voluntarily gave samples of their blood, saliva, and urine, as well as body, scalp, and pubic hair.

Nothing unusual was noticed, except for the scratches all over the arms of Justin Johnson.

He told the nurse they were “self-inflicted.”

This was not significant because the police were hot on the trail of their only real suspect, Kennedy Brewer, who was adamantly claiming to be innocent.

Dr. Hayne concluded that Christine had been strangled and raped.

He collected a sample of semen.

He also found numerous abrasions on her arms and legs and suspected they were bite marks.

Thus, he needed to consult Dr. West.

The tag team worked flawlessly because West was already at the morgue helping with the autopsy. Not surprisingly, he, too, was of the opinion that the wounds were bite marks.

Once again, rapists in Mississippi were on a biting binge.

West returned to his clinic in Hattiesburg and met the sheriff of Noxubee County, who had brought with him a collection of suspects.

West took plaster dental imprints from Kennedy Brewer and two other men.

Christine’s mother, Gloria Jackson, was along for the trip and also gave a plaster dental mold.

No one knew why.

As in the first case, there was no suspicion that the mother had taken her daughter from the house, raped, strangled, bit, and killed her, flung her into the creek, then returned to her bed.

Absent from the excursion to West’s clinic was the killer, Justin Johnson.

The police did not ask him to provide a dental mold.

Not that it would have mattered now that Dr.

West was practically running the investigation.

He knew the police strongly suspected Kennedy Brewer and it was his job to close the case.

A week later he came through.

In a letter to the sheriff, he wrote, “The bite marks found on the body of Christine Jackson were indeed and without a doubt inflicted by Kennedy Brewer.”

—

Since the authorities now had samples of Justin Johnson’s blood and saliva, the obvious next step would have been to compare them to the semen taken from Christine’s body.

This did not happen, not at that time anyway.

Sixteen years would pass before the samples were compared.

Meanwhile, Kennedy Brewer would come within days of being executed by lethal injection.

By 1992, the science and technology of DNA testing was still evolving.

It was being used to solve criminal cases but seldom in Mississippi.

What was available at that time was bite mark analysis, and with it came a long and contentious history.

The majority of legitimate scientists and forensic experts believed it was thoroughly unreliable.

It was considered “junk science,”

along with comparisons of hair, boot prints, blood spatter, glass breakage, and other matching “proof.”

However, since it had been used in trials for decades, the courts allowed it.

—

In a 2001 study, twenty-five well-known bite mark experts were given four identical sets of bite marks and asked to compare them with seven sets of dental molds.

The error rate was an astonishing 63.5 percent.

Only one-third accurately “matched”

the marks with the teeth.

Almost all of them continued consulting and testifying in bite mark cases as if the study meant nothing.

The specialty of bite mark analysis is based on three assumptions.

The first is that each person’s teeth are unique and leave prints that are traceable.

The second is that skin, once bitten, has markings that are distinguishable.

The third is that trained experts can study the marks and identify who made them.

None of these assumptions are supported by scientific evidence.

In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) declared that bite mark analysis as a forensic specialty was not based on science.

As recently as 2022, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) found that skin cannot record and preserve the details of a bite, and, further, that analysts do a lousy job of matching teeth marks with whoever did the biting.

In many cases, the findings were so conflicted the analysts could not even agree on what was a bite and what was not.

The NIST and NAS reports fall in line with other studies.

In 2016, the Texas Forensic Science Commission declared bite mark analysis so unfounded that it should no longer be used in criminal trials.

A moratorium was also recommended by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

But, science be damned.

Bite mark analysis is still allowed in most jurisdictions; sought by prosecutors, presented by experts, approved by judges, believed by jurors, and rubber-stamped by appellate courts.

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These later studies were, of course, no benefit to Kennedy Brewer in his trial.

Dr. West, after having been qualified as an expert and identified as one of the leading forensic odontologists in the country, testified for hours.

As in the Brooks trial, he used enlarged photos of the bite marks and molds of Kennedy’s teeth and explained in excruciating detail the preciseness of his analysis.

He explained his “direct comparison”

method of actually taking a mold of the suspect’s teeth and pressing it into the child’s flesh.

The autopsy was recorded by video, though the judge refused to show it to the jury because he found it too prejudicial.

There was music blaring in the background, conversations between Hayne and West and their assistants, and “callous”

behavior by the doctors.

Years later, another bite mark expert studied the video and described it: “Dr.

West placed Kennedy Brewer’s dental molds directly onto Christine Jackson’s body several times, with sufficient force to create visible marks.”

West’s “direct comparison”

method, a procedure he alone pioneered, actually created the bite marks he was using to nail Kennedy Brewer.

On March 24, 1995, after deliberating for only an hour and a half, the jury returned a verdict of guilty.

Two days later, it returned with a sentence of death.

The judge set an execution date two months away and ended the farce of a trial by dramatically saying to Kennedy, “May God have mercy on your soul.”