The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist

by Radley Balko

  Brooks knew almost all of them, if not as a friend at least by face. He began most nights at the door—a garrulous, welcoming presence as customers lined up to pay the cover charge. Over the course of the night, he’d move to monitor the dance floor or the parking lot. At the end of the night—his favorite time—he’d put on his chef’s hat and cook up a feast of fried, artery-clogging food for patrons who stuck around. He’d sometimes sell fish and chicken sandwiches until two or three in the morning.

  Eager to get to work that evening, Brooks stepped out of the trailer, skipped down the small set of porch steps two at a time, and trotted toward the truck. Just as Brooks hopped up to get in, one of the brothers gunned the engine on the late-model, cream-and-brown Silverado, leaving the fashionable and effervescent Levon Brooks lying face down in his own front yard.

  The McCoys howled with laughter. Brooks took the prank in stride. He bounced up, dramatically slowed up for a moment, and postured for his friends. He could take a joke. He then broke into a jog, hit the rolling truck on a run, and climbed inside.

  The Santa Barbara provided the three men a variety of marketable skills and a semi-steady income. On that particular evening, the job Brooks loved so much should have provided one other benefit—a rock-solid alibi. But he’d soon cross paths with Steven Hayne and Michael West. Even an alibi wouldn’t save him.

  Back in the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration described Brooksville, Mississippi, as “a quiet old prairie town of old-fashioned homes softened by an even spread of shade.” Shops lined both sides of the main street back then. There was a grand hotel in town—the three-story Jackson—complete with an ornate lobby and a fancy restaurant. The Mobile and Ohio Railroad ran through town. Residents could take the train seventy-five miles north to Tupelo to shop or, on fall weekends, travel a few miles up the line to West Point and from there take a spur line to Starkville to watch the Mississippi State Bulldogs play football.

  Today, what’s left of Brooksville sits disconsolate and mostly abandoned. The hotel is long gone, as are nearly all of the old homes and stores. The streets, including Main Street, are bordered by empty storefronts. Appropriately, a lonely Confederate statue stands guard over the railroad tracks that segregate the town. Cross the tracks, and the road fans out into a series of unpaved, graveled lanes that lead to Brooksville’s black neighborhoods. Most of the homes are single-story with one or two bedrooms, sometimes clustered several to a lot. Often a single extended family will occupy multiple homes on the same lot. Locals refer to this as “the back of Brooksville.” In one of those houses, a single-story blue-clapboard cottage, three-year-old Courtney Smith lived with her mother, grandmother, two sisters, and four uncles.

  Courtney and her sister Ashley had spent most of that Saturday with their grandmother Ruby and their great-grandmother Viola. At about seven in the evening, after a supper of hot dogs, watermelon, and rice with tomatoes, they walked back to their house on Phillip’s Loop Road. As the evening darkened to night, Sonya Smith bathed her three daughters. She dried Courtney off and dressed her in a faded T-shirt with a duck on the front and the word “Mississippi” scrawled across the top.

  Afterward, Sonya went out for the evening, leaving the girls with her mother, Ruby, and her own brother Tony. As the girls fell asleep, Ruby sat out on the porch for a couple of hours, chatting with friends as they passed by. Tony had been working construction all day and had fallen asleep on the couch while watching football. Eventually, a man Ruby had been dating dropped by with some friends and invited her out. She agreed. On her way, she stopped by a neighbor’s house where her other son, William, twenty-two, was playing cards. She told him Tony was asleep and asked him to come back to the house in case one of the girls woke up. William agreed but played several more hands of cards before returning home.

  As Ruby left at around eleven, Tony was the only adult now at the house, still fast asleep on the couch. He wouldn’t wake up until late the following morning. The girls slept in the adjacent bedroom. The only light in the house flickered from the television.

  The demons were whispering to Justin Johnson again. It was a late summer evening in Brooksville—warm, sticky, and calm. Johnson typically drank and smoked when he’d start to hear the voices. He usually smoked pot, but also crack if he could find it. Sometimes it helped keep the voices at bay. Sometimes it only made them louder.

  Johnson would later tell state investigators that he had always known something wasn’t quite right about himself. At the age of five, he had walked into the kitchen and saw his little brother grabbing for a pot of boiling water. Johnson reached out for his brother’s arm, but it slipped through his fingertips. Johnson’s brother fell into the stove. The pot tipped over, covering him in scalding-hot water. Johnson watched as the boy’s skin blistered and separated from his body. The little boy held on for a month before passing away. The incident was Johnson’s most salient early memory. He would later say it felt as if he had watched it all happen from a distance, like watching a movie. He’d replay it countless times in his head in the years that followed.

  Those around Johnson described him much the way he saw himself—he was slightly off. He was a tad under six feet tall and heavyset. He was usually called by his nickname, Joe Kitty. Neighbors and acquaintances would say he had strange eyes. Even when he was standing in front of you, they’d say, he never seemed to be present. He always seemed to be in the background. He was tolerated—never really invited, but often around, hovering on the periphery. It would be another twenty years before a prison doctor would diagnose him with schizophrenia and mild mental retardation.

  Noxubee County law enforcement officials knew the thirty-three-year-old Johnson as a drug user and a sex offender. In fact, it had been just a few weeks since the last time the voices had told Johnson to hurt someone. On August 29, he broke into the home of an elderly woman named Millie Lee Wilborn and attempted to rape her. Wilborn fended him off long enough to call the police. He fled. But Wilborn’s description left little doubt about who had attacked her. Johnson found himself in the Noxubee County Jail just a few hours later.

  The charges were serious. Mississippi locks up more of its citizens per capita than any state but Louisiana. A sex offense can carry a life sentence. Johnson’s court-appointed lawyer was Robert Prather, a local attorney who tended to get some of the more serious indigent cases. Prather told Johnson he’d work to get him a favorable plea offer, and he came through. The prosecutor agreed to reduce the charge to a misdemeanor on the condition that Johnson consent to counseling. Johnson accepted the offer.

  As he’d later tell it, on that night, the night of September 15, the voices told Johnson to visit another woman he knew on Phillip’s Loop Road. They told him to break into her home and attack her, just as he had tried to attack Millie Wilborn. He tried, but the door was locked. He tried to force it open. He couldn’t get in.

  Johnson looked around. It was night now. He saw a dim, gently bouncing light coming from the small house across the street. He walked over and jiggled the door handle. The door opened, and he went inside. He walked right by a man sleeping on the couch and entered the first bedroom. There, on the floor, he saw three-year-old Courtney Smith, fast asleep. He picked her up, cradled her in his arms, and walked out. It was that easy.

  Johnson carried the girl down a short path between two houses to a hill that overlooked a pond, and laid her on the ground. He would later say that this is when the voices told him to “teach her.” He penetrated her vagina with a finger. Courtney awoke and began to cry. The voices then told him to quiet her.

  In his confession, Johnson claimed he didn’t recall choking the girl, but it seems clear that he did. Courtney Smith’s neck showed clear indications of strangulation.

  The voices finally told him to get rid of her. According to his own recollection some two decades later, Johnson picked her up, took her over a small hill, and threw her into the shallow pond. He then stood and watched as she struggled to stay afloa
t. Soon Courtney’s head slipped under the water, and she disappeared. Johnson then walked back to his car, climbed in, and drove away.

  By the time William Smith came home between two and two thirty a.m., Courtney was already gone. He saw his brother Tony asleep on the couch, in front of a television now broadcasting static. He glanced into the girls’ bedroom and noticed something amiss, but didn’t make much of it. Looking back, he said it probably occurred to him at the time that Courtney was missing, but he added that if that had even registered with him, “I thought she was with her ma—her mamma or something.”

  William flipped the television to one of the few channels still airing programming and collapsed onto the other couch. Soon he was asleep as well. The night moseyed toward morning.

  The McCoy brothers left the Santa Barbara Club before Levon Brooks finished work for the night, so T. C. Phillips, one of the club’s owners, offered to give Brooks a lift home. It was between two thirty and three a.m. when Phillips drove Brooks back south to his house in Macon. At the same time, Justin Johnson headed in the opposite direction to his home in Crawford, a small town a few miles north of Macon. The two cars may well have passed one another that night somewhere along Highway 45. By all rights, that’s as close as Levon Brooks and Justin Johnson should have ever gotten—two men living two very different lives, passing on a rural highway in the early hours of a warm Mississippi morning. Instead, their lives became hopelessly and inextricably entwined.

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 16

  After Sonya Smith left the house Saturday night, she eventually ended up at the Santa Barbara Club, arriving a little before eleven. Brooks, an old boyfriend of hers, was working the door. Sonya stayed for the rest of the night, leaving at around two thirty with a new beau. She saw Brooks in the parking lot as she left.

  When she awoke the next morning, Sonya went to the home of her grandmother, Viola Davis. Sonya’s oldest daughter, Ashley, later came by and told her that Courtney wasn’t at home. But Ashley had a habit of telling stories. “Quit playing,” Sonya admonished. Ashley demurred. “Yeah, she’s at home,” she said. “She’s still asleep.” But she wasn’t.

  Sonya’s mother, Ruby, had also returned home early Sunday morning. When she didn’t see Courtney in the house, she, like Tony, just assumed that the little girl was with Sonya.

  In fact, everyone thought Courtney was with someone else. It wasn’t until seven o’clock on Sunday evening, when Sonya finally returned home, that the family realized for the first time that Courtney wasn’t with any of the family. She was missing. They notified nearby friends and relatives. No one had seen her. Soon they fanned out over the neighborhood, calling out Courtney’s name. About an hour later they alerted police.

  Brooksville police chief Cecil Russell, a white chief in a town that’s 80 percent black, received the first call at around eight that evening. Within a few hours, hundreds of people joined in the search. At around one a.m. on Monday morning, Russell, who had assumed responsibility for the search, asked everyone to go home and get some rest. They’d resume at first light.

  On the night of Courtney Smith’s abduction, Russell never went home. After suspending the search, he continued to look for the girl himself. Exhausted, he eventually returned to his squad car and fell asleep.

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 17

  It was Russell who found Courtney’s body a little after dawn on Monday morning. At first, he thought the object a few yards out in the pond was just a trash bag. But as he focused and moved closer, it began to assume the shape of a small child’s body. Russell walked down the embankment and eased himself into the water. He floated Courtney to the edge, pulled her up from the pond, and laid her body on the ground. Another police officer had arrived and stood by. Through the thin stand of trees, the two officers could hear car doors opening, and light chatter as volunteers began gathering to resume the search. Russell asked the officer for his jacket. He knelt down and wrapped it around the girl’s body.

  Deputy Ernest Eichelberger arrived a short time later. Eichelberger, a stocky black officer, had been with the Noxubee County Sheriff’s Office for three years and in law enforcement a little over five. Despite his relative lack of experience, he had recently been promoted to chief deputy. He’d previously been a police chief for the tiny town of Terry (population 1,100). Eichelberger looked at the little girl’s body. Other than the officer’s jacket, she was clad only in the duck T-shirt. She was bleeding from her head and groin. The sheriff’s department would soon take over the investigation.

  Tales of corrupt Southern police and prosecutors from the bigoted, good-ol’-boy mold are plentiful and well documented. Less clichéd but no less damaging are the inept cops—the well-meaning but badly trained and poorly educated rural sheriffs, police chiefs, and their deputies who rise through the ranks because few others want the job. They’re the products of substandard training, they tend to work for departments that are underfunded and neglected by state officials, and they serve poor and vulnerable communities.

  Few who are familiar with the Courtney Smith investigation ever doubted that Eichelberger wanted to solve the girl’s murder—he wanted to get the right man. It just isn’t clear that at this point in his career he had the necessary experience for the assignment. He had only been working at the sheriff’s department for about six months. Down the sides of his reports, he sometimes wrote out acronyms from police training manuals that he used to conduct a proper investigation. On his report for Courtney Smith’s death, he wrote:

  ADAPT:

  Arrest the perpetrator if possible.

  Detail and identify witness at the scene.

  Assess the crime scene.

  Protect the crime scene.

  Take notes.

  Eichelberger began his investigation by getting a positive identification of Courtney Smith’s body from her father, Rocky Allen. He then turned her body over to Noxubee County coroner Willie Willie (his real name). Willie then sent the body to be autopsied by Steven Hayne, the state’s go-to medical examiner. That night, Hayne determined that the girl had been choked, but likely died of freshwater drowning. He found a large bruise on the top of her head. Her hymen had been torn, and she had lacerations on the inside of her vagina, which he’d later say were consistent with penetration from a finger or penis. Hayne found no semen and no pubic hair. The girl had been sexually assaulted, but it was unlikely that her killer had forced intercourse.

  The lack of pubic hair and semen would normally have made it more difficult to definitively identify Courtney Smith’s perpetrator. But Hayne also found a few bruises on the back of Courtney’s right wrist that he suspected, but was not sure, were human bite marks. Later, after the skin had been excised, he examined it under a microscope, and because it showed no signs of bleeding, concluded that the marks were likely made at the time of death or shortly thereafter. He also found some marks on the girl that he thought might be animal bites. Hayne then called in his frequent collaborator Michael West, a Hattiesburg clinical dentist, bite mark expert, and forensic jack-of-all-trades. West drove up the following morning to examine the marks.

  Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell morgue owner Jimmy Roberts and his staff that West was en route, because they embalmed Courtney Smith’s body that same night. Ordinarily, that would have made any sort of bite mark analysis extremely difficult, if not impossible. But Michael West was no ordinary bite mark analyst.

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18

  On Tuesday morning, West conducted a preliminary examination of the girl’s body. He agreed that the marks on her wrist had been made by human teeth. He excised the skin around several of them.

  When a section of skin is cut from the body, it typically retracts and then shrinks as it loses moisture. Because of this, when forensic pathologists excise a section of skin for analysis, they first apply a retainer to preserve the skin’s shape. Bite mark analysts claim they can find intricate details and unique indicators within bite marks that can be used to identify or excl
ude suspects. If the alleged bite mark is distorted when the tissue that contains it is cut away, those indicators will warp, change, or shrivel with the skin on which they’re recorded. Some might disappear entirely. Michael West did not use a retainer when he extracted the skin from Courtney Smith’s wrist. This should have been a red flag.

  The fact that Courtney’s body had already been embalmed when West conducted his examination should have been another one. Autopsies are almost always done before embalming, because the process of pushing blood out of the body and replacing it with embalming fluid causes significant physiological changes. West would later claim at trial that embalming can actually preserve the skin. He was correct, in a manner of speaking. The process forestalls the decaying process for a viewing or a funeral. But it does not preserve the sort of details useful to a forensic examiner—it distorts them. West would suggest that, serendipitously, the embalming “fixed” the tissue, thus retaining the integrity of the bite. There’s just no medical or forensic literature to support the notion that such intricate data could be preserved by the countervailing effects of a happy coincidence.

  After completing his analysis, West concluded that the marks on the wrist were indeed bite marks and that they had been inflicted by a human being. He billed Noxubee County $2,902.12 for his services, and assured Willie Willie that he would make himself available once law enforcement officials had identified a suspect.