The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist

by Radley Balko

  Two years after graduating from dental school, West leveraged the publicity he received from the Pan Am crash to start a business, Dental Disaster Squad, which aimed to provide rapid-response dental identification in the event of a plane crash, fire, or other tragedy. In 1984, he received his certification in forensic odontology from the American Board of Forensic Odontology. A year later, he was named “coroner pro tem” for Forrest County, Mississippi. As West has testified, he was offered the position because at the time, the elected coroner for Forrest County “had a problem with drinking.” When the coroner’s drinking began to interfere with his ability to conduct death investigations, the local district attorney and other law enforcement officials approached West and asked him to take over the job—but informally, behind the scenes. West has said that law enforcement came to him specifically because he was “known to the court and the DA as an individual in forensics.”

  Over the years, West has also claimed to have been appointed “deputy coroner ranger,” “deputy coroner medical examiner investigator,” “chief deputy coroner,” and “coroner medical examiner investigator”—all titles that describe what is essentially the same position. He was an assistant coroner.

  Early on, West won some fawning profiles in the local media. The first was a 1983 piece in the Hattiesburg American on the biting experiments he had conducted with Wallace. It ran under the headline, “Taking a Bite out of Crime.” In 1988, the same paper ran a big photo of West holding an ultraviolet camera he was given after presenting a paper about identifying wound patterns. That article began, “Most people probably don’t think of Hattiesburg as a hotbed of scientific research.” The same year, West’s hometown paper featured him again, this time in a front-page story about how West and another local researcher had used “video enhancement” to prove that President John F. Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman.

  According to his curriculum vitae, between 1989 and 1999, Michael West published fifty-one articles, made fifty presentations, and gave eighty-four lectures. By 1995, he claimed to have given lectures on a tour of China, at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, and to the detectives at Scotland Yard in England. He has also claimed his research was “monitored by” the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, “Israeli Intelligence,” and police agencies all over the world.

  West has published articles on a wide array of topics. A sampling of titles from his curriculum vitae include “A New Method for Trace Metal Verification,” “A Study of Surface Topography of Footwear and Automobile Pedals,” “Serial Mass Murders: A Study of Mass Violence,” “Confirmation of the Single Bullet Theory in the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” “A Second Look at Wax,” “The Hidden Danger of Scalding,” and “Peanut Butter Aspiration Deaths Among the Mentally Retarded.” He and Steven Hayne collaborated on dozens of articles and presentations, often working on them together at the local Waffle House after their nighttime autopsy sessions.

  By 2006, West’s CV stood at twenty-seven pages. He had testified more than eighty times and claimed to have “investigated 5,800 deaths.” (In a deposition just six years later, he put the figure at 16,000.) The vast majority of those cases were in Mississippi, but he has also testified in at least nine other state courts and two federal district courts. West has been permitted to influence juries on a wide range of topics, including bite mark analysis, gunshot reconstruction, wound pattern analysis, pathophysiology, blood stain analysis, gunshot residue, fingernail scratch reconstruction, trace metal analysis, video enhancement, pour pattern analysis, tool mark analysis, and photo enhancement. In civil cases he has offered his analysis about cigarette burns on a nursing home patient and the marks left on a child’s arm that had been struck by a ruler. On his CV, he has also claimed to have advised law enforcement officials on the theory of Shaken Baby Syndrome, on child abuse and the sexual abuse of children, and on the detection of accelerants in arson investigations.

  Few if any of West’s articles and presentations were subjected to robust peer review. Most appeared in law enforcement or forensic publications, not in academic journals. And most were in areas for which he had very little formal training or education. Michael West is either a master bullshit artist or an autodidact for the ages.

  In August 1990, serial killer Danny Rolling murdered five college students in Gainesville, Florida. The gruesome manner in which he killed them—they had been bound, tortured, and forced into macabre poses—earned him the nickname the “Gainesville Ripper.” He’d later say he had committed the murders because he craved the fame and renown of fellow Florida serial killer Ted Bundy.

  The murders certainly attracted national attention. They also attracted Michael West. By the time of the Gainesville murders, the “little ol’ dentist from Hattiesburg,” as West likes to call himself, had spun his biting experiments into what he called a revolutionary new method of inspecting corpses. By using yellow-tinted goggles and a particular band of fluorescent light, West claimed he could find bites, scrapes, indentations, and other injuries that are invisible to the naked eye. Despite once telling his hometown paper that he first learned of the technique at a presentation by a dentist from Kansas, West would later provide a more exotic origin story. While visiting China, he was told a three-thousand-year-old tale about a Chinese doctor who noticed that flesh wounds looked different when viewed under the light that passed through the panel of a silk tent. According to West, he realized that he could apply the same concept to modern times, and with modern technology. Despite his work with both Wallace and Barsley, he named his procedure “the West Phenomenon.”

  As the Gainesville murders drew national attention, West headed down to Florida with his specialized equipment to work as a freelance investigator. West touted his ability to use ultraviolet light not only to find marks on the victims, but blood, hair, or fingerprints overlooked by investigators at the crime scene. But his cutting-edge technology didn’t do much good in Florida. West generated no leads.

  That didn’t stop him from offering opinions. West appears to have played the Gainesville murders for maximum exposure. He was quoted often in the newspapers, usually accompanied by glowing descriptions of him as a trailblazing forensics wonder. Ted Bundy’s trial in the 1970s had drawn national attention to bite mark analysis and brought acclaim to the specialists who testified for the state, most notably Richard Souviron and New York dentist Lowell Levine. If this killer was the next Ted Bundy, perhaps West could be the next Lowell Levine.

  In his media interviews, West recounted his experience in crime scene investigations. He also hyped up the murders, which not only drew more attention to himself but had the unfortunate effect of giving Rolling the renown he craved. West portrayed the then-unknown killer as an evil genius. “I thought I’d seen everything,” West proclaimed in the Gainesville Sun. But when the full details of the crimes were finally released, he promised, “you’ll be shocked and amazed.”

  Portraying the killer as a brilliant butcher served a purpose for West. If his own technology was as revolutionary as he claimed, he might have picked up some previously undetected evidence when he visited the crime scenes. After all, West claimed he could find clues no one else could.

  But the giveaway that West’s forensic expertise was dubious is that for all the times he was retained, he was almost always of use to law enforcement officials only after a suspect had been identified. West never really generated legitimate leads himself. Once the police had a suspect for whom they already had some incriminating evidence—or even just a hunch—West could swoop in, find telltale marks on the body that others had overlooked, and then find a way to match those marks to the suspect. As an American Bar Association (ABA) Journal article noted after interviewing Mississippi defense attorney Armstrong Walters, “No district attorney in the Deep South stands a chance of re-election if a murder occurs in his or her jurisdiction and somebody does not wind up in prison for it.” According to Walters, “West confirms whatever suspicions the police have.”

/>   While West was in Gainesville, the police had no strong suspect for the killings, and so West and his alleged cutting-edge technology were useless. Instead, he just praised the killer’s methods to the media, telling the Associated Press that he’d never seen such a clean crime scene in all his thirteen years investigating murders.

  West’s work on the Gainesville Ripper was later mentioned in national publications such as Vanity Fair. When The Phil Donahue Show came to Florida to cover the killings, West was one of the guests. His contribution: he suggested that Gainesville residents arm themselves. But otherwise, West contributed little to solving the Gainesville murders. However, the whole episode did provide quite a boost to his career. He received adoring press attention, which he’d include on his CV and which undoubtedly earned him favor back in Mississippi. The list of media coverage included, as West put it, “My favorite: Playboy.” He’d later cite the case in court testimony as one of his “most notable” investigations.

  More than a year after West left Florida, Danny Rolling was finally captured and charged. He was executed by lethal injection in 2006.

  Steven Hayne and Michael West have given conflicting testimony about when they met and began working together. It was likely sometime in the late 1980s, because by 1990 Hayne and West, operating in Jimmy Roberts’s morgue, worked on their first case that ultimately resulted in a wrongful conviction—the Levon Brooks case.

  As personally and professionally close as Hayne and West are, they have contrasting personalities. They operated in very different ways but often complemented one another. West can be loud, outgoing, and obnoxious. Hayne is quiet and reserved, but with a hair-trigger temper. On the witness stand, West was cocksure to the point of careless. As one former county coroner put it, West “would always say what he said according to who paid him the most to say it.” In the past, West compared his forensics genius to the musical acuity of violinist-conductor Itzhak Perlman and described his error rate as “something less than my savior, Jesus Christ.” Hayne was a confident and sometimes arrogant expert witness. He was gifted at giving prosecutors just enough to make their case to a jury without giving testimony that was obviously false. He chose his words carefully. He would often tell juries that a victim’s injuries were “consistent with” the prosecutor’s theory. Even if that theory was wholly improbable, so long as the victim’s injuries were consistent with it, Hayne’s testimony wasn’t, by definition, completely wrong.

  West wrote boastful reports larded with certainty. He used words and phrases like “astronomical,” “without question,” and his trademark, “indeed and without a doubt.” He often claimed to be the best in the country at what he did, and that few others were capable of his forensic wizardry. Hayne, on the other hand, typically wrote vague, malleable autopsy reports. His lack of interest in detail may have been due in part to the sheer volume of autopsies he was performing. But keeping specifics out of his initial reports also had the advantage of allowing him to massage his conclusions in court. Defense attorneys who have opposed him over the years say the vagueness of his reports made it difficult to prepare for questioning him. “He can’t be nailed down on his opinions,” said André de Gruy in a 2007 interview. “Hayne gives prosecutors leeway to say whatever they want. But he maintains plausible deniability.”

  Nearly everyone who has known Hayne also acknowledges his intellect, and in particular his social IQ—his ability to read and react to the people around him. Michael West is a different story. Depending on whom you ask, he’s either a mad genius or a raving idiot. More importantly for an expert witness, West was very good at sounding smart. He threw around bite mark and forensics jargon with ease. He often peppered his testimony with references to art, Latin, classical music, and antiquity. Never mind that those references weren’t always accurate. On occasion, when he wanted to be combative with an attorney, West would throw out a Latin phrase or a reference to some book he’d recently read and then say something like, “Do you know what that means?” or “Should I explain that to you?”

  The two men were remarkably successful at networking, although they went about it in different ways. West would buy rounds at bars frequented by cops and prosecutors. He’d be the life of the party at sheriffs’ association meetings. He was a backslapper, the kind of guy who broke the ice with a raunchy joke, usually before feeling everyone out to be sure all would be comfortable with it. He was the sort who sealed new friendships over rounds of drinks. Hayne also networked, but in starkly different ways. For several years, he threw a swanky annual Christmas party at the University Club in Jackson. Honored guests included state prosecutors, police officials, legislators, and coroners. He also made campaign contributions.

  Both Hayne and West seem to have found little time for personal relationships. Both men have had multiple marriages and gone through contentious divorces. Still: “Everyone liked Hayne,” one former coroner says, before adding that the same couldn’t be said about West.

  By the early 1990s, Hayne, West, and Jimmy Roberts would come to dominate Mississippi’s medicolegal system. “The Mississippi system was run by the triumvirate for years,” says one long-serving former coroner. “Imagine that. A pathologist, a small-town dentist, and a funeral director.… The state provided an audience of adoring idiots.”

  8

  ENTRENCHMENT

  Never think you’ve seen the last of anything.

  —Eudora Welty

  In September 1989, Steven Hayne took a plane to Chicago to take the American Board of Pathology (ABP) certification exam in forensic pathology. His lack of certification had been a factor in his appointment as the interim—as opposed to permanent—state medical examiner in 1987. The ABP is the gold standard in governing organizations. Most states, including Mississippi, require any medical examiner working for the state to be certified in forensic pathology by the organization.

  According to the ABP, Hayne failed the test. According to Hayne, he didn’t—or not exactly, anyway. Hayne has always claimed that he voluntarily walked out of the exam because he found several of the questions insulting to his intelligence. He has told this story countless times in trial testimony and depositions. But when asked to name specific examples, he has only mentioned a single question that offended him. It allegedly asked candidates to rank several colors in the order in which they’re most commonly associated with death.

  For example, Hayne provided this explanation in a 2003 deposition: “The questions became so ludicrous, I finally said enough is enough. They gave five different colors. Red, white, blue, green and black. And they asked, rank them in order of association with death. And that became absurd. And I said that was enough.”

  In a 2001 case, Hayne told the story with a different set of colors. In a 2004 version, he altered the question itself: it no longer asked him to rank the colors but to pick one color most associated with death. In this version, he didn’t just meekly walk out: “I got up, handed my paper to the proctor, and said, ‘I leave, I quit. I’m not going to answer this type of material.’”

  Hayne’s explanation for why he never passed the exam has always seemed implausible. Even if the question really was ridiculous, even if there were other, equally ridiculous questions, he had paid a $950 registration fee and bought a plane ticket to Chicago. It couldn’t have been the first time he had ever seen a poorly worded question, or an exam that was more of a formality than a substantive test of a candidate’s specific area of knowledge. Hayne’s explanation for why he was willing to just walk out—that he is a man of certain unyielding principles who has no time for foolishness—seems a stretch. “I’ve got a temper,” he told the Clarion-Ledger a few years ago. “I don’t put up with crap like that.”

  Nevertheless, every time he was asked about certification in court, Hayne still claimed to be board certified in forensic pathology. He arguably was. It just wasn’t by the ABP, the organization most medical examiners think of when they think of certification. Hayne gave this testimony about both t
he ABP test and his certification for most of his career. It would be twenty years before he’d be confronted with evidence that contradicted his claims about both.

  In June 1990, just a few months before Courtney Smith’s murder, Michael West was contacted by Lieutenant Jim McAnnally of the Pascagoula, Mississippi, police department. McAnnally was investigating the death of John Shumock, who appeared to have been smothered in his own bed. The chief suspect was a man named Mark Oppie. McAnnally wanted to know if West could match Shumock’s fingernails to the marks on Oppie’s body. Thus began one of West’s more gruesome adventures.

  When West got to the Gulf Coast, he was given police photos of Oppie that showed what West believed to be defensive fingernail scratches on Oppie’s neck, arms, and torso. West went to the funeral home where Shumock’s body was being prepared and took impressions of the dead man’s fingernails. West then went to see Oppie in the county jail, where he compared his replica fingernails to the marks on Oppie’s body. After careful examination, West told police that based on his tests “Oppie could not be ruled out” as having been scratched by Shumock’s fingernails, but that he’d need to do some additional tests.