The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist

by Radley Balko

  By that time, Rainey had also been accused of harassing and assaulting other black people in Neshoba County, including an allegation he had stripped a black man naked and whipped him with a belt. Yet even as he terrorized the local black population, the white residents of Neshoba County knew Lawrence Rainey for his Stetson hat, his cowboy boots, and his gregarious nature. In 1963 he got a promotion: he was elected sheriff after running on thinly veiled campaign promises to crack heads in the civil rights movement.

  In January 1964, Michael Schwerner of the Council of Federated Organizations, a conglomerate of civil rights groups, and his wife, Rita, packed up for Meridian, Mississippi. The young couple planned to set up a community center and a library, and to run a Freedom School to teach black residents how to pass the literacy tests that Mississippi required to vote. A talented organizer, Schwerner quickly had the project up and running. He was so effective that within just a few months of setting up shop, he was already well known to area law enforcement and Klansmen (who were often one and the same). They called him “Goatee.” By the spring, Schwerner’s abilities had earned him the notice of local KKK leader Sam Bowers, who hatched a plan to have him murdered.

  The Meridian school had just started operating when Schwerner began plans to open another Freedom School and was scoping nearby Neshoba County for possible sites. He chose the Mount Zion Methodist Church in the black community of Longdale. Word of the plan got back to Rainey, who then put the church under surveillance. The following June, a group of Klansmen raided Mount Zion. They severely beat several parishioners, then burned the church to the ground.

  Schwerner and Chaney were in Ohio at the time to train Freedom Summer volunteers, and had met up with Goodman while they were there. On the morning of June 20, the three men and another activist headed back to Mississippi to check on their friends at the church and to investigate the fire. The following afternoon, Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman left the Meridian office for Longdale. Schwerner told his fellow activists to come looking for them if they hadn’t returned by four p.m. They never came back.

  The men were heading home when they got a flat tire just outside of the town of Philadelphia. Deputy Cecil Price, who had been following them, turned on his cruiser’s lights and pulled up behind them. He arrested Chaney for speeding and held Schwerner and Goodman for “investigation.” All three were taken to the Neshoba County jail.

  The men were released around ten p.m., but Price had already tipped off his fellow Klansmen that he had detained them, and about their likely route back. As they made their way back to Meridian, they were pulled over again. This time they were met by a mob of Klansmen. The mob took them at gunpoint to a rural intersection about ten miles south of Philadelphia and shot them to death. According to witness accounts, Klansman Wayne Roberts shot Schwerner and Goodman in the chest. Chaney was beaten and most likely tortured before he was also shot and killed.

  The bodies were transported to a nearby farm where one of the conspirators, a heavy machinery operator, was waiting with a bulldozer. The corpses were buried in an earthen dam. Someone then took the station wagon they were driving to the Choctaw Indian reservation, abandoned it on the side of the road, and set it aflame.

  When the three activists first went missing, state and local officials echoed the claims made after Emmett Till’s murder nearly ten years earlier—that it was all a hoax to slander Mississippi. For the rest of the month and into July, investigators combed nearby woods, fields, and swamps. Incredibly, while looking for the three activists, law enforcement officials found the remains of eight other black men. Two were identified as Henry Dee and Charles Moore, college students who had been kidnapped, beaten, and murdered near Natchez the previous spring. Another, found on September 10, was identified as Hubert Orsby, a fourteen-year-old boy found floating in the Big Black River near Canton, Mississippi. Orsby was wearing a T-shirt with the logo of a civil rights organization when his body was recovered. A coroner’s jury ruled his death an accidental drowning.

  Federal investigators finally found the bodies they were looking for on August 4, 1964, after acting on an anonymous tip. Under Mississippi law, the Neshoba County coroner should have been in charge of the investigation. But there was concern among federal officials that local authorities might tank the investigation. Eventually, all parties agreed to send the bodies to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson.

  The suspicions about local authorities turned out to be well founded. The victims’ families and the FBI had both requested that doctors from the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) be present to monitor the autopsies. The director of the Mississippi Medical Center also agreed to the monitoring. But when two doctors from the organization showed up at the hospital on the day of the autopsies, they were turned away by officers from the Mississippi Highway Patrol.

  The Neshoba County coroner assigned the autopsies to William Featherstone, a pathologist in Jackson. Featherstone was not a forensic pathologist but a clinical pathologist, trained to perform autopsies to determine deaths from disease, not from homicide. What he missed would prove critical to later attempts to hold the perpetrators accountable.

  Featherstone concluded that the three activists had been shot but had not been beaten or tortured. The victims’ families were suspicious and wanted a second opinion. One of the MCHR doctors then called New York medical examiner David Spain and asked him to perform a second autopsy. Spain was vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard at the time, but readily agreed. He hopped the next plane to Birmingham, then drove to Jackson from the Birmingham airport.

  Mississippi officials did all they could to prevent Spain from conducting his own examination. They first created a maze of bureaucratic hurdles for the families of the victims. They insisted that Spain could only do the autopsies if the families appeared in person to give permission. When Schwerner’s family tried to grant permission over the phone, state officials refused to honor it. Goodman’s body had already been sent to his family in New York. That left James Chaney’s mother, Fannie Lee, a black woman from the town of Meridian. Despite a barrage of threats, harassment, and intimidation, she agreed to let Spain examine her son’s remains. Three weeks later, her home was firebombed.

  Spain, too, was harassed from the moment he entered the state. Reports from the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission released decades later show that state officials tracked Spain’s arrival in the state, and presumably tipped off Klansmen and their allies as to his whereabouts and lodging.

  Until they could clear all the legal hurdles to permit the autopsy, civil rights groups stationed guards at the doors of the morgue to prevent the theft of Chaney’s body. When Spain eventually completed his autopsy, his report was dramatically different from Featherstone’s. Spain found that Chaney’s jaw had been shattered, his shoulder crushed, and several other bones obliterated. “In my extensive experience of twenty-five years as a pathologist and as a medical examiner,” he wrote, “I have never seen bones so severely shattered, except in tremendously high speed accidents, such as airplane crashes.” He later told the United Press International, “These injuries could only be the result of an extremely severe beating with a blunt instrument or a chain.”

  At trial, Featherstone blamed Chaney’s injuries on the heavy equipment the FBI used to excavate the bodies. But in 2000, Clarion-Ledger reporter Jerry Mitchell obtained access to the full autopsies, along with reports from the Sovereignty Commission. Mitchell also interviewed FBI agent Joseph Sullivan, who was at the scene of the excavation. Sullivan disputed the claim that bulldozers had caused the trauma to Chaney’s body. “Some of the digging was actually done by hand,” he said. “And I’m not talking about shovels. I’m talking about hands.” Based on those reports and his interviews, Mitchell concluded that Chaney had probably broken away from the mob and attempted to flee, an act of self-preservation that likely earned him a thorough beating before he was finally shot. The Sovereignty Commission report also indicated that inste
ad of just one, several people shot at Chaney, and that he was likely struck by bullets fired by more than one gun. But Spain was never able to determine either the number of projectiles that struck Chaney nor their trajectory. By the time he had access to the body, the internal organs had been removed and hadn’t been replaced.

  When Featherstone heard that Spain had done a second autopsy, he was furious. With the assistance of the State Sovereignty Commission, he filed an ethics complaint with the College of American Pathologists. It isn’t clear what ever came of that complaint, but second-opinion autopsies were neither uncommon nor unethical at the time (nor are they now). Featherstone and Mississippi officials claimed that in spite of Chaney’s family’s request, Spain still needed Featherstone’s permission before conducting a second autopsy. That was nonsense. To require the original doctor to give permission for a second opinion would defeat the very purpose of seeking a second opinion.

  A few months after the activists’ bodies were found, the Neshoba County coroner convened an inquest into their deaths. The inquest jury decided that the cause of the men’s deaths couldn’t be determined. Therefore, they couldn’t recommend that the district attorney move ahead with an investigation or indictment. The men who murdered the activists wouldn’t be charged with any crime under Mississippi law. They were later tried in federal court. Most were acquitted. Among the handful who were convicted, none served more than twelve years in prison.

  Soon after the inquest closed, the widow of Michael Schwerner received her husband’s official Mississippi death certificate in the mail. Under cause of death, the coroner wrote “unknown.”

  5

  SETTING THE STAGE FOR THE CADAVER KING

  We just cut her tits off. She won’t be coming here trying to tell us what to do anymore.

  —Former Mississippi state senator Robert Crook, referring to Faye Spruill, Mississippi’s first state medical examiner

  By the mid-1960s, crime was on the rise in Mississippi, as it was in much of the rest of the country. By the end of the decade, political polling would show that crime was Americans’ primary concern. In his 1968 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon leveraged fear of crime (or to be more accurate, white fear of black crime) by tying the crime rate to liberal permissiveness. Of particular importance to Mississippi, the Republican Party would exploit crime as a political issue for a generation as part of an enormously successful long-term strategy to turn the South into a permanent party stronghold.

  In 1966, a report by Richard Childs’s National Municipal League named Mississippi one of the “Best States for a Murder.” Childs, an outspoken advocate for medicolegal reform, was right about the need for change, but the way he framed the issue was unfortunate. Most states weren’t ready for such drastic institutional changes to their coroner systems. Instead, they tended to react to reports like Childs’s with laws that broadened the powers of police and prosecutors, funded more prisons, and expanded the scope of the death penalty. For states with medicolegal systems that acted as little more than a rubber stamp for police and prosecutors, Childs’s framing ended up exacerbating the situation.

  Mississippi’s laws were especially antiquated. For all intents and purposes, the state was still using the system that had been instituted during Reconstruction. Some components of the coroner laws dated back to the late 1700s, when Mississippi was still a territory. The most critical problem was the same as it had always been: authority over death investigations was given almost exclusively to lay coroners.

  Though advocates continued to pressure the state government to replace the coroner system with a medical examiner system, they found little success. The state legislature had no interest. But rising crime, or at least the rise of crimes against white people, was a different story. So in 1961 the legislature later considered a bill that would have put physicians in charge of death investigations, expanded their investigatory powers, and scrapped the requirement that coroners convene juries to investigate suspicious deaths.

  But a key provision made the proposed changes next to useless: they would only take effect in counties that had elected a physician to the coroner’s office. If the coroner wasn’t a doctor, the old system would remain in place. At the time, just four of Mississippi’s eighty-two county coroners were physicians. Another twenty-three counties hadn’t elected a coroner at all. In Hinds County, seat of the state capitol and the most populous in the state, the current coroner was a used-car salesman who ran because he wanted to get into politics. “You’ve got to start somewhere,” he explained to the Clarion-Ledger. “I could see where I could win the election with very little effort.”

  Doctors still had the same uneasy relationship with coroners that they’d had for decades. They weren’t paid for their time, the criminal justice system undervalued and underappreciated medical expertise, and most doctors didn’t have specialized training in forensic pathology. Save for perhaps an interest in public service, it wasn’t at all clear why they’d want to campaign for a part-time, low-paid office that came with significant additional responsibility.

  In the state’s entire history, only one pathologist had ever been elected coroner in any county. That pathologist, Dr. Lee Scanlon of Natchez, had recently reviewed the coroner system for an article in the Journal of Medicine of the Mississippi State Medical Association. In his article, Scanlon pointed out that at the time, coroners were paid $20 for each death they responded to in their county. They were required to be on call twenty-four hours per day in order to respond quickly—whether it was to claim a new body, or to round up some stray sheep.

  But for a funeral home owner what the post lacked in salary could in certain circumstances be supplemented with other money-making opportunities. The position had come to be dominated by the owners of funeral homes. The funeral home owners collected fees for transporting bodies, fees that were likely more lucrative than what they were paid to conduct investigations. Potentially more profitable still, the position gave them the opportunity to solicit the family of the deceased for embalming and funeral services. Scanlon found all of this to be ample evidence that the system was a corrupt and broken anachronism.

  History indicates that Scanlon’s article was mostly ignored. Several years later, the press was back on the story, this time after a death in the town of McComb once again highlighted the need for improvements. When a man was found dead and fully clothed in his backyard, the Pike County coroner convened a jury to investigate. The coroner’s jury gave the body a once-over and quickly concluded that the man had died of a heart attack. It wasn’t until later, when an undertaker took off the man’s shirt, that someone noticed the bullet hole in his chest. His killer was never identified.

  Mississippi did finally pass a medical examiner law six years later, in 1974, but that law was also fraught with problems. It created a state medical examiner position that could conduct the occasional autopsy but was primarily tasked with overseeing autopsies assigned by coroners. More problematic, the position was to be appointed by the dean of the University of Mississippi Medical Center. The unusual arrangement may at first have seemed to be a welcome move toward professionalization by keeping the office away from the auspices of police or prosecutors. But the more likely motivation was money. If lawmakers could put the state medical examiner under the authority of the state university, they wouldn’t need to fund the position directly.

  Shortly after the law passed, Dr. Joseph C. Hupp, the medical examiner in Corpus Christi, Texas, addressed Mississippi state law enforcement officials and explained why a trained medical examiner was critical to ensuring adequate death investigations. Hupp praised the bones of the new law but warned that without sufficient appropriation, it would become an unfunded mandate. He pointed to West Virginia as an example. That state’s legislature had created a state medical examiner’s office but then refused to fund it, leaving the position vacant for twenty years.

  Hupp’s warning proved prescient. Mississippi’s new office remained vacant for five
years. The state legislature never bothered to appropriate adequate funding. Because the University of Mississippi Medical Center was ambivalent about hosting and administrating the office in the first place, it never seriously lobbied for an appropriation.

  Edgar Little was elected coroner of Harrison County, Mississippi, in 1975. Upon taking office, he couldn’t believe what passed for a system of death investigation in the state. Little told the Clarion-Ledger he had found that in some Mississippi counties, the coroners were functionally illiterate. “I’ve got letters in my files where they put their ‘X’ at the bottom,” he said. The paper reported—once again—that many coroners looked at the position as little more than a chance for some supplemental income. Some had full-time jobs pumping gas. One cleaned septic tanks. Alarmed, Little formed the Mississippi Coroners Association, which he hoped would provide a platform for modernizing the office. It helped, at least for a while. But it would also become a major impediment to reform.

  In 1979, the Mississippi legislature finally set aside some money to hire a state medical examiner. It wasn’t much. At the time there were only 150 certified forensic pathologists in the entire country. Most worked at modern offices in large cities and earned respectable salaries. It would be difficult to lure one of those 150 medical examiners to Mississippi for substantially less pay and to head up an office that would face staunch opposition from an entrenched system of coroners and their allies.