The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist

by Radley Balko

  Recall that through all of this Hayne was also working a job at a kidney research lab and another at a local hospital, each of which paid him over $100,000 per year.

  Not surprisingly, Hayne made some particularly egregious mistakes during this period. One Mississippi attorney, for example, recalls a murder case in which Hayne noted in his report that he had removed and examined the decedent’s ovaries and uterus. The problem? The victim was male. (The defendant in that case still pleaded guilty.)

  In 2007, Mississippi Department of Corrections inmate Randy Cheney was exhibiting signs of sepsis. He had been complaining about a worsening infection but had instead been given medication for an irregular heartbeat. When his condition worsened, he was transported to Parchman Hospital at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, and then to Greenwood Leflore Hospital. He died of septic shock the following day.

  When Hayne performed the autopsy on Cheney, he determined that Cheney had died of hypertensive heart disease and coronary artery disease, and ruled the manner of death to be natural. In his autopsy report, Hayne indicated that he had weighed Cheney’s spleen and that it was within the normal range of an adult man. Hayne added that after removing and examining it, he found the spleen capsule “intact,” with no contusions. It could perhaps be dismissed as a careless but forgivable oversight by a busy medical examiner if Hayne had merely failed to note that Cheney’s spleen was diseased as he removed it, weighed it, dissected it, and commented on its appearance. What actually happened is far less forgivable: Cheney’s spleen had been removed four years earlier. This wasn’t a frivolous oversight—a diseased, compromised, or missing spleen can increase the risk of sepsis.

  Then there’s the sad case of Hattie Douglas. In August 2006, Douglas, a resident of Camden, Mississippi, fell asleep with her eleven-month-old son, Kadarrius, asleep on her chest. When she woke the next morning, Kadarrius was unresponsive. He died before he got to the hospital. Hayne’s original autopsy report on the boy indicated no signs of alcohol poisoning. He then sent blood samples off to a Texas-based lab called ExperTox for testing. When the tests came back, it showed Kadarrius had an off-the-charts blood-alcohol level of 0.4. A child of Kadarrius’s size would have had to ingest five to six ounces of pure alcohol to reach that level. Based on the toxicology results, the local coroner concluded that Kadarrius died of ethyl-alcohol intoxication.

  Hattie Douglas was arrested, charged with murder, and held without bond. She faced a possible sentence of life in prison. Her remaining five children were taken from her, and local law enforcement officials pilloried her in the press. Douglas and her family had maintained from the start that the child had been sick and she had given him only cough medicine. She had even taken him to a medical clinic three days earlier for coughing and congestion.

  In July 2007, Douglas’s attorney asked former Alabama state medical examiner Leroy Roddick to review Hayne’s autopsy and the toxicology reports. Riddick found that Hayne had ignored or overlooked evidence in his autopsy that clearly conflicted with elevated alcohol reading. For one, with such a high level of intoxication, Hayne should have noted a strong stench of alcohol during the autopsy. He hadn’t. There were no other signs of intoxication, either. Just the lab report. Moreover, ExperTox had actually run several tests on the sample from Kadarrius Douglas. One test showed a concentration as low as .02—about what one would expect after a dose of cough medicine. The alcohol concentration then increased with ensuing tests. Hayne and the authorities ran with the highest one.

  Hayne and local officials blamed ExperTox. But a spokeswoman for the company told the Clarion-Ledger that the results were likely because someone in Mississippi had stored the sample at the wrong temperature. Another tube of the child’s blood had been contaminated. In fact, the company had actually stopped taking lab samples from Mississippi in 2006. “We didn’t feel as comfortable with samples coming from that state as we did from other states,” a company official said.

  But even if the faulty test were solely the responsibility of ExperTox, a conscientious medical examiner should have noticed such an abnormally high result and consulted his autopsy notes before agreeing to change his conclusions to support a murder charge. Hayne didn’t, and an innocent woman who had just suffered the loss of her son then lost custody of her four other children and spent eighteen months in jail.

  On May 9, 2003, Kristi Fulgham, age twenty-six, picked up her half brother, Tyler Edmonds, and brought him to her home in the Longview community in Oktibbeha County, Mississippi. Edmonds, age thirteen, spent every other weekend with Fulgham. On this particular weekend, he thought she was taking him to see their father. Instead, she took him to the house she shared with her husband, Joey.

  Kristi and Joey Fulgham had a volatile marriage. Kristi told her family that Joey sometimes beat her and her three children. But acquaintances also said that Kristi could be manipulative and was seeing other men. She had previously moved out of the house, but then moved back in, believing she was the beneficiary of her husband’s $300,000 life insurance policy.

  Tyler Edmonds adored and idolized his half sister. She often took advantage of that, using him to run interference on the various men in her life. Before she picked him up that weekend, she asked Tyler to bring her an old rifle from his stepfather’s closet so she could shoot a stray dog that had been bothering her and her kids. She had also previously asked a couple of neighbors for a gun, using the same story. But according to her father, Kristi wanted the guns for another reason: she planned to kill her husband to put an end to his abuse, after which she and her kids would live off his life insurance policy.

  On that particular night, a Friday evening, Tyler, Kristi, Joey, and the three children had dinner, watched a movie, and went to sleep. At around four a.m., Kristi woke Tyler and told him she was leaving. She asked him to help her put the three kids in the car. According to Tyler, as he was waiting in the car, he heard a “pop,” but didn’t think much of it at the time. Kristi rushed to the car, carrying a computer and jewelry box. At that point, she told Tyler that they weren’t going to visit their father after all. They were going to Jackson to pick up her boyfriend, and then to Biloxi on the Gulf Coast. They did just that. The five of them spent that Saturday night at Biloxi’s Beau Rivage casino and resort.

  When they returned to Jackson the following afternoon, Joey Fulgham had been found dead, shot once in the head as he slept. According to Tyler, that Sunday evening Kristi confessed to him that she had killed her husband. She also told him that they’d likely give her the death penalty, and that his only chance to continue seeing her and her kids would be for him to take the blame for the crime. She told him to tell the police that it was all an accident—that he had mistakenly shot Joey while playing with the gun. She assured him he wouldn’t go to prison because he was still a juvenile.

  After dropping Tyler back off with his mother, Kristi was interrogated at the Oktibbeha County jail. She blamed her husband’s death on Tyler.

  The police asked Tyler’s mother to bring him in for questioning. While he was still in the presence of his mother and with a camera rolling, the police questioned him for three hours. Tyler repeatedly denied any involvement in Joey Fulgham’s death. He was then separated from his mother and questioned alone. That’s when the police interrogators told Tyler that Kristi had already blamed him for Joey’s death. He didn’t believe them. Then they turned off the camera and brought Kristi into the room. Kristi took Tyler’s hand and told him to tell the truth. As she did, she slipped him a note. The note instructed Tyler to tell the police that he shot Joey by accident. If he didn’t, she wrote, “they want to see me fry.”

  The police then turned the camera back on, and Tyler confessed, but with an odd and contradictory narrative. He claimed he and Kristi had decided to carry out the murder together, by holding the old rifle and pulling the trigger simultaneously as Joey slept. Tyler said he didn’t even think the rifle would work. He said he had closed his eyes before they pulled the trigger, t
hen opened one eye after he heard the shot. He said he saw specks of blood on a pillowcase. (There was no blood at the crime scene.) He said he then confessed to Kristi’s boyfriend while they were in Biloxi. Her boyfriend later denied it.

  Three days later, after talking to his mother and other relatives, Tyler recanted his entire confession. He said he had falsely confessed because he thought that by taking some, but not all, of the blame, he could save his sister from getting the death penalty. Forrest Allgood’s office filed murder charges against both Tyler and Kristi and announced that Tyler would be tried as an adult.

  The only real evidence against Edmonds was his confession. But he had recanted it. So the prosecution needed jurors to believe the confession over the recantation. That’s where Hayne came in. At trial, the prosecutor in the case, one of Allgood’s assistants, asked Hayne if he had viewed Tyler’s videotaped confession. He said he had. She then asked if in light of that confession he had considered the position of Joey’s body. He said he had. She then asked, “Based on the path of the projectile and everything that was viewed,” if Hayne thought “the defendant’s version of the events is consistent with what you found in Mr. Fulgham?” In other words, she asked, were the wounds in Fulgham’s body consistent with Edmonds’s initial confession, the one in which he and his sister held and fired the gun simultaneously?

  Edmonds’s attorney objected, arguing that to answer that question would require knowledge “outside of anything in his report and also outside of anybody’s expertise.” He requested a Daubert hearing on the scientific bases, if any even existed, to suggest it was possible for a medical examiner to conclude from a victim’s wounds whether there was one or two people holding the gun used to commit the crime. The judge refused to even hold a hearing.

  The prosecutor then asked the question again. Did Hayne find that the crime scene evidence, his autopsy, and the other forensic evidence were consistent with Tyler’s videotaped confession? Hayne answered, “Within a reasonable medical certainty, it’s consistent with the scenario provided to me and would be in compliance with the facts that I saw.”

  The question was absurd, and so was Hayne’s answer. There’s simply no way a medical examiner could have known such a thing. Tyler’s attorneys undoubtedly knew exactly what Hayne had just done. He had found language that allowed the jury to hear an opinion that wasn’t really defensible, while permitting him to avoid stating that indefensible opinion explicitly. So on cross-examination, the defense provoked Hayne to be more explicit. They asked straight up if he believed the evidence suggested that two people fired the shot. He said it did. They then asked if he thought just one person could have fired. He answered, “I could not exclude that; however, I would favor that a second party be involved in that positioning of the weapon.” That answer would prove to be the beginning of the end of Hayne’s stranglehold on Mississippi’s autopsies.

  Later in the trial there was another battle over expert testimony that provided a striking contrast to the debate over Hayne’s two-hands-on-the-gun theory. Edmonds’s defense attorneys had planned to question Allison Redlich, a trained experimental psychologist who has conducted research into false confessions, particularly among children. Redlich was prepared to testify that Edmonds was a prototypical candidate for a false confession. In addition to his being separated from his mother and pressured by his sister, a court-ordered psychological evaluation had found that Edmonds was emotionally and psychologically immature for his age—all common factors among those known to have falsely confessed.

  The state preemptively objected. Despite allowing Hayne’s absurd gun-holding testimony without even so much as a hearing, the trial judge set aside an entire day for a Daubert hearing on whether Redlich’s research was scientifically credible. After the hearing, the judge ruled that it wasn’t. His analysis was a case study in the folly of asking judges to be the gatekeepers of science in the courtroom. For example, one of the judge’s self-selected criteria for determining whether Redlich’s research was valid was how often other courts had permitted expert testimony about false confessions. His own research showed that about half had allowed it, and half hadn’t. This, he decided, meant that Redlich’s opinions hadn’t yet been accepted in the scientific community.

  It was a revealing bit of analysis. Whether other judges had allowed a particular field of research into evidence said little to nothing about whether that field had been accepted in the scientific community. The judge also claimed that the number of researchers in the field of false confessions was too small for the field to be considered scientifically accepted; he claimed only six were doing work similar to Redlich’s. But the actual number was around sixty, and one review of published research on false confessions in 1992—more than a decade before the Edmonds trial—found eight hundred different peer-reviewed studies. Of the three experts the judge did cite who had questioned the frequency of false confessions, one had never published a peer-reviewed study on the topic. Another is a former federal judge, victims’ rights and death penalty advocate, and conservative legal commentator, not a trained psychiatrist or social scientist.

  For nearly twenty years, Mississippi’s courts had permitted the testimony of Michael West without so much as a single Daubert hearing to entertain the possibility that his methods and practices may have lacked scientific merit. For twenty years, they had allowed Steven Hayne to testify despite his lack of certification and absurd workload, and in areas well outside the parameters of forensic pathology, including blood spatter on walls, the positioning of shooters based on bullet trajectories, and tool mark identification. But it was on the subject of false confessions that this particular court suddenly grew skeptical.

  The jury found Edmonds guilty. In October 2003 he was sentenced to life in prison. He was sixteen years old at the time. He wouldn’t be eligible for parole until he turned sixty-five. In a separate trial, Kristi was also convicted. She was sentenced to death.

  Hayne’s preposterous testimony in the Edmonds case was later upheld by the Mississippi Court of Appeals. The majority of that court, along with Hayne’s defenders, pointed to the fact that in his confession, Edmonds said he closed his eyes before shooting. They argued that Hayne wasn’t claiming he could tell there were two hands on the trigger, but merely that if Edmond’s eyes were closed, it would only make sense that Kristi Fulgham’s hand helped guide the gun—otherwise, Edmonds would have missed. That’s certainly one interpretation of his testimony. On its own it seems plausible, if unlikely. But it’s more easily dismissed by the state’s own opening argument, in which the prosecutor explicitly told the jury, “You’re going to hear how Kristi stood behind him and held him and you’re going to hear how they both put their finger on the trigger and you’re going to hear how they both shot and killed Joey Fulgham.”

  In a surprise decision handed down in January 2007, the Mississippi Supreme Court granted Tyler Edmonds a new trial. More surprising, for the first time ever, the court overturned a conviction because of testimony from Steven Hayne. The majority explicitly ruled that Hayne’s two-hands-on-the-gun testimony wasn’t supported by science. The vote was 7 to 1.

  But even in tossing out Hayne’s testimony in the case, the majority went out of its way to emphasize that its criticism of Hayne was limited only to the case at hand. It was not a comment on his general credibility, much less a suggestion that he should no longer testify in court. The majority also upheld the trial judge’s exclusion of the evidence from Allison Redlich about false confessions.

  Two justices would have gone further. Oliver Diaz wrote a concurring opinion, joined by Justice James Graves, in which he explicitly called on his colleagues to pay rigorous attention to experts like Hayne and others when they attempt to testify in Mississippi’s courts. Diaz cited Hayne’s enormous autopsy workload, as well as the fact that he wasn’t properly certified. Diaz also wrote that he would have admitted Redlich’s testimony about false confessions and would not have admitted Edmonds’s taped confession.<
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  Justice Charles Easley, who had defeated Chief Justice Prather in 2000 by accusing her of being soft on crime, was the lone dissenter. He would have upheld Edmonds’s conviction. But even that wasn’t the case at first. It was later revealed that the justices had initially voted in favor of upholding Edmonds’s conviction. Diaz responded with a dissent so blistering and persuasive that several justices reversed their votes.

  Forrest Allgood decided to try Edmonds again. That trial took place in 2008. This time, without Hayne’s two-hands-on-the-gun testimony, the jury quickly acquitted.

  The Edmonds case brought national attention to Mississippi, but nearly all of it focused on the fact that Edmonds was being tried as an adult for a crime he had allegedly committed at the age of thirteen. That was certainly worthy of attention. It seemed like an especially cruel decision. Edmonds had no prior criminal record, and his teachers, relatives, parents of his friends, and his school counselor all testified that he was a gentle and good-natured kid. He was well-behaved and got good grades, and had never been prone to violence. Even if Allgood and his subordinates truly believed Edmonds helped his sister kill her husband, there was every reason to think he had been emotionally manipulated into doing it. At worst, this was a boy who came to the aid of the sociopathic older sister he adored and saw as a maternal figure.

  But as with the jailhouse suicides in the 1990s, despite the national attention from media outlets and various activist groups, the ongoing problems with the state’s death investigation system still escaped much scrutiny, at least in the short term.

  The Mississippi Supreme Court ruling in Edmonds’s case was a different matter. That decision started a chain of events that would ultimately lead to Hayne’s termination as a designated pathologist who could perform autopsies for prosecutors. It not only drew attention to his egregiously awful testimony in that case (which in itself should have spurred a thorough review of all of Hayne’s work) but renewed the suspicions and criticisms of Hayne that had percolated among his critics and colleagues for years. Hayne’s reign was coming to an end.