by Radley Balko
Keko had an alibi, although not a great one. His girlfriend said he had been with her on the night of the murder. There were other reasons to suspect someone other than Keko. The crime scene showed signs of a fight and a vicious struggle. When Keko was arrested, he had no injuries—no scratches, scrapes, or bruises. The police were also unable to find any of his hair, blood, or skin or any other biological material at the crime scene.
More than a year after the crime, a new sheriff took office after explicitly campaigning on a promise to solve Louise Keko’s murder. The new sheriff brought in Steven Hayne and Michael West to help. In October 1992, Louise Keko’s body was exhumed. She had been buried for fourteen months. Using his blue light and yellow goggles, West claimed to find a bite mark on Louise Keko’s shoulder. He claimed he could also tell that it had been inflicted near the time she was killed. West then compared a mold of Anthony Keko’s teeth to the mark and declared that the mark on Louise Keko’s shoulder was from a bite, and the bite had “indeed and without a doubt” been caused by the teeth of Tony Keko.
Unfortunately, West and Hayne then failed to properly preserve the skin they excised from Louise Keko’s shoulder. According to West, they put the tissue sample in a solution to keep it intact but had apparently chosen the wrong preservative. Two weeks later, West said the sample had been destroyed. Everyone would just have to trust him.
And they did. Anthony Keko was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. One juror would say later, referring to West’s light-and-goggles method, “Well, he impressed all of us. He said it brought the teeth marks out on her where he had bit her at.” Another defense attorney who had faced off with West later tried to explain to Newsweek how West could charm a jury into agreeing with him, despite obstacles like a body that had been exhumed after fourteen months, or that his own incompetence had destroyed the evidence. “It’s like you’re in his living room and he’s saying, ‘Who would ever disagree with me, because I’m so smart and such a nice guy?’”
Two years later, a judge ordered a new trial. As it turned out, at the time West testified at Keko’s trial, he was still under suspension by the American Board of Forensic Pathology. That fact was never disclosed. After another two years, and on the eve of Keko’s second trial, the judge called a hearing to determine whether West’s testimony should be admitted.
In a strange turn of events, one of the detectives who had worked the original case flipped and testified for the defense. He told the judge that he and other detectives had implicated Keko to West. They had told West about the previous murder charge and that the couple had been going through a nasty divorce. And though the police originally had thirteen suspects, they only told West about Keko. His was the only dental mold West analyzed. The judge ruled in Keko’s favor, finding that the police had biased West against Keko. Again, it was one of just a handful of times a judge refused to allow West’s testimony into evidence. The ruling left the state with very little evidence. In December 1994 the charges against Keko were dropped, and he was freed. Louise Keko’s murder remains unsolved.
The Keko case put West back in the national headlines, but this time the coverage was skeptical at best and often critical. The case and West’s role in it were mentioned in Newsweek, the American Bar Association (ABA) Journal, the National Law Journal, the BBC, and a John Stossel special on ABC News. Yet none of it had much effect on West’s ability to get new referrals or to testify in court. The ABA Journal, for example, talked to the Louisiana prosecutor for whom West had helped win a conviction by matching abdominal bruises to a pair of hiking boots. Would the fallout from the Keko matter deter him from using West again? “I’m quite confident in the guy,” the prosecutor answered. “I have a lot of faith in him. And I think he makes one heck of a witness.” In that article, West dismissed his critics as jealous colleagues and “ACLU types.”
In a 1994 article in the National Law Journal, West blustered that the groups that had disciplined him were a “joke” and those who voted to sanction him were “vastly ignorant.” But he then made a striking admission: he conceded that his testimony in the Larry Maxwell case was “unscientific.” Oddly, he excused himself by explaining that this was the first time he had used the West Phenomenon in a criminal case. He assured the reporter that he had since perfected the technique. That West admitted that he had implicated a man for murder based solely on the results of a procedure he had never performed before, hadn’t tested, and now knew was “unscientific” seemed to go completely unnoticed. Another Louisiana assistant district attorney told the publication that he still believed in West. “He testifies well and he came with a curriculum vitae that was out of this world. I was sold on his technique. To me he was ahead of his time.”
More and more judges were allowing West to testify, even as his testimony moved further and further from anything resembling science. Prosecutors and police still wanted him. The courts still let him testify. And juries still believed in him.
Mississippi officials have often claimed in the years since then that Hayne and West merely filled a yawning gap in the state’s criminal justice system. If a coroner needed an autopsy done, there was really no other place to turn. There’s certainly some truth to that. The state did suffer (and still suffers) a perennial shortage of certified and credible medical examiners, as did (and still does) much of the rest of the country.
But Hayne and West also aggressively marketed themselves. They wrote articles advertising their methods and then touted their many publications to establish their expertise. Between 1989 and 1994 alone, they published various versions of the same article about using ultraviolet light to observe wound patterns in eight different law enforcement publications. The articles were often unapologetically partisan, touting how their novel technology could be used to secure convictions. At least one article—“Alternative Light Sources for Trace Evidence Can Lead to Higher Conviction Rates”—featured head shots of both Hayne and West and closed with a direct appeal: “If you’d like to find out more about the practical uses of alternative light source detection, or to ask how you could put it to work in your department, contact Dr. Michael H. West,” followed by West’s address and phone number.
West did most of the in-person promotions. “West was always hanging out at sheriffs’ conferences and events,” says Tommy Ferrell, the Adams County sheriff from 1988 to 2004. (Adams County, home to Natchez, sits on the Louisiana border in southwest Mississippi.) “He’d buy everyone drinks, tell dirty jokes, slap a lot of backs.” “He was likable. Friendly. Seemed real knowledgeable about what he did. At first I found him trustworthy too, in the sense that he seemed pro-law enforcement.”
Ferrell was first referred to West in the early 1990s by a local pathologist, but he says he inevitably would have run into the dentist anyway. “By—I don’t know—the early ’90s or so, if you called the state crime lab to report a body, West would show up to take it to the morgue in Rankin County. If you sent a body to the state crime lab, West would show up there, too. He was just everywhere. You couldn’t avoid him.”
Ferrell eventually grew wary of West but says he understands why some officials kept using him. “You have to understand the position we were in,” he says. “We’re not experts. The state said these guys were the experts. They were the only people available. So we just went with what the state told us.”
Lloyd White had seen what happened to his predecessors, Faye Spruill and Thomas Bennett. So when he took over in 1989, he emphasized diplomacy. He went out of his way to avoid public fights. But he did try to improve the death investigation system from behind the scenes, with new rules that required annual minimal competency tests and more thorough continuing education for county coroners. Instead of relying on the legislature, he filed his reforms as regulations with the secretary of state, which allowed him to improve the system without pushback from the coroners. Many of the changes he made are officially still part of the state regulatory code, although in the twenty-five or so years since he
implemented them, they have often gone unenforced.
Still, White was concerned about the cozy relationships Hayne and West had developed with coroners, cops, and district attorneys. In interviews, he recalls a typical example: White had just performed an autopsy on a woman found dead in her bathtub. He couldn’t immediately determine a cause of death. He suspected the victim had been strangled, but he couldn’t yet be certain. He’d need to wait for results from toxicology and microscopic tests. When he told this to District Attorney Forrest Allgood, the DA evidently wasn’t satisfied. According to White, Allgood wanted an immediate diagnosis that would allow him to charge his suspect.
The next day, White received a phone call from Steven Hayne. As White tells it, Hayne told him that the previous night, the body had been taken to Jimmy Roberts’s morgue in Pearl, where Hayne performed a second autopsy. No one had asked White’s permission, and White wasn’t present for Hayne’s autopsy. Afterward, the body was quickly embalmed and buried.
White was the state medical examiner. By law, he had ultimate authority over any death investigation in Mississippi. In the real world, that authority meant little. Hayne ended the phone call by telling White that he had officially determined that the woman had been strangled. Hayne then suggested it would be in White’s “best interest” to issue a report agreeing with him. White refused and told Hayne that what he was asking would be a “deliberate falsification of evidence.” Hayne hung up.
“There was a tendency to slant things to favor the people you’re working for,” White says, looking back. “The politics and power could sometimes run roughshod over people’s civil rights.”
By the time White took office, Hayne and West were already up and running at Jimmy Roberts’s place, an operation that White derisively called “McAutopsies.” But White was savvy enough to see that Hayne was already too powerful to take on directly. Disturbed as he was by what he saw, he opted for a more low-key, fight-the-battles-you-can-win approach.
But even that strategy made White enemies. And so as with his predecessors, he didn’t last long. In March 1992, he was put on administrative leave while the Department of Public Safety investigated sexual harassment claims against him. The complaints were never litigated or made public. At the time, White told local press that the suspension was just for a few days and that it was an internal matter. But White was fired the following month. At the time, White vaguely said he was terminated over a disagreement with his superiors. Some sources have speculated that White was set up because he was preparing to take on Hayne, and because some of the state’s more powerful prosecutors wanted Hayne to have White’s job. Charles Tisdale, publisher of the black Jackson newspaper the Advocate, wrote that “Mississippi public officials and employees conspired to discredit… White and banish him from the state.” White himself still hasn’t said exactly why he was fired.
But White went out in a fury. He decided to ditch the diplomacy and raise some hell about what he had seen. He wrote a long letter to Tisdale and the Advocate—a hard-hitting publication that proudly called itself “the most firebombed newspaper in America.” White was particularly concerned about the death investigation system’s impact on civil rights. In the early 1990s, national media outlets began to focus on a series of jailhouse suicides across Mississippi. The stories that got the most attention tended to be about young black men found hanging in their cells, some of whom had been arrested for crimes as petty as traffic violations. A familiar narrative began to emerge: Mississippi was killing black people again.
Steven Hayne had done many of the autopsies in these cases and had determined that nearly all of them were suicides. As the story gained national traction, Hayne emerged as chief debunker of the growing fear that black men were being lynched in Mississippi’s jails. “There is no evidence of murder in any of these cases,” Hayne said in the New York Times. “None.”
White actually agreed with Hayne in most of these cases. He thought the real scandal was that the jails were such decrepit, godforsaken places that people arrested on minor charges could be driven to suicide in the first place. But he was also outraged that Hayne was being entrusted to make the call in such sensitive, high-stakes cases. White noted that Hayne wasn’t board certified by the ABP, and experiences like the one he’d described with Allgood taught him that Hayne couldn’t be trusted. White also argued in his letter that under Mississippi law, the state medical examiner’s office was supposed to perform all autopsies on people who die in state custody. Sending the bodies to Hayne wasn’t just problematic because of Hayne’s credibility issues; it was a violation of state law.
White was also concerned about black people killed by police shootings and beatings. Many of these, he thought, were intentional. He worried that the focus on the jailhouse deaths was detracting from “the real problem, a thoroughly corrupt and inadequate system, in which black people and other minorities are traditionally regarded as something less than human.” He also worried that those intentional killings were being whitewashed by the state’s pliant coroner system. “They want a compliant, easily controllable non-entity who will be subservient to the Highway Patrol, and testify in court the way [DPS Commissioner] Jim Ingram wants him (or her) to,” White wrote.
White’s letter called the state’s death investigation system “a complete sham and a fraud.” He called Hayne out by name, noting that despite his lack of credentials and poor practices, “Hayne continues to autopsy jail and prison deaths, as well as persons killed by police or sheriff’s deputies, and to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal income as a result of his extremely cozy relations with… state employees and officials.” White later made even stronger accusations in an affidavit on behalf of the family of a black man who had died in police custody.
In July 1992, three months after White was fired, DPS commissioner Jim Ingram consulted with Hayne and came up with a plan to reappoint Hayne as the state medical examiner. This time, Hayne would serve with no salary or benefits. Instead, he would simply continue to do autopsies as they were referred to him by coroners, prosecutors, and police—and collect the $500 fee from the counties, plus the hourly rate for testifying in court. Ingram argued that this was just too good a deal for the state to pass up. Mississippi would save $125,000 per year in salary and benefits.
Of course, Hayne still hadn’t passed the ABP exam, so under state law he still wasn’t qualified for the position. State officials were working on a way around that too. They had persuaded state representative Steve Holland, himself the owner of a funeral home, to introduce a bill to do away with the certification requirement.
For Hayne, the arrangement would have been ideal. He’d get the official state title. He’d continue to get paid to do autopsies as a private physician. And there would be no one like Lloyd White trying to impose oversight. He’d be his own oversight. The year before Ingram proposed the idea, Hayne grossed about $500,000 just on state-referred autopsy fees. That didn’t include his fees for preparing and testifying in court, extra money for lab tests, or the money he was making from consulting and doing autopsies in civil cases. The state medical examiner position paid less than $100,000 per year.
But a week later, the Mississippi Ethics Commission nixed the idea, finding that the arrangement would raise “suspicion among the public” and “reflect unfavorably upon the state and local government.” The commission added that it had a “grave concern as to the practicality and propriety in having a pathologist conducting such a large percentage of the state’s autopsies also responsible for the rules and regulations under which he and his professional colleagues perform the public duty.”
That the arrangement presented a massive conflict of interest should have been obvious to everyone involved. That it was even proposed was good evidence that Lloyd White was right: state officials didn’t want a modern, objective death investigation system. They wanted one they could continue to control.
9
THE TRIAL OF LEVON BROOKS
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br /> I am an invisible man… I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
To enter Macon, Mississippi, you have to take a spur off the main highway and follow the signs to town. Though Macon is the Noxubee County seat, the closest highway veers right around it. Macon offers no Lions Club signs or billboards or catchy slogans to welcome motorists, as similarly sized towns often do.
But as you enter the town, there is one feature that is unique to Macon, though it’s much subtler than a boast about a famous son or a clever nickname: the spur itself is lined on both sides with embankments of eroded and striated chalk deposits. It’s left from long ago, after tens of millions of years of Cretaceous life, when this part of Mississippi was under the sea. When the sea receded, the calcified remains from an epoch of aquatic life created an alkaline base ideal for plant growth, giving rise to thick, grassy prairies. Millions of years of seasonal cycles on the prairie then birthed a black, loamy soil.
It’s those piles of dirt that give this part of Mississippi its identity. Today the region is known as the Black Prairie Belt, a crescent of grassland that starts at the Mississippi-Tennessee border, widens as it swoops south to Noxubee County, and then takes a hard turn to the east as it tapers off across south central Alabama. With the exception of a thin tract of piney hills on its western border, all of Noxubee County is prairie. It features more grassland than any other county in the belt.
While the Black Prairie Belt was first named for its geological history, it has also become a colloquial reference to the skin color of the majority of its inhabitants. When the Choctaw Indians left the region in the 1830s after signing a lopsided treaty with the federal government, white settlers quickly moved in and put the rich new land to the plow. Less than two decades later, Mississippi was producing 194 million pounds of cotton per year, nearly all of it pulled from farmland in either the Delta or the Black Prairie Belt. Virtually all of the Mississippi cotton boom was harvested by African slaves. In 1830 Mississippi had a slave population of slightly more than 65,000. By the start of the Civil War three decades later, the number had ballooned to 436,631. Noxubee County’s share at the time was 15,496, almost three times the size of its white population.