Note: This is the first of a three-part series on the wrongful conviction of Jimmie “Chris” Duncan. Some of this story appeared in The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, the book I co-wrote with Tucker Carrington. Some is material that was cut from the book for length. All of it draws from my own work over the past 20 years, including new reporting.
This series includes descriptions of alleged sexual abuse of a toddler as well as images that some readers may find disturbing, including post-mortem photos and video. I’m publishing this material because it is critical to the story.
If you’d like to contribute to help Duncan rebuild his life, you can give to his GoFundMe here.
1
“Nobody has ever bailed out from death row before,” Chris Duncan told me last December. We were talking at his aunt’s home in Pineville, Louisiana. He’d been staying there since he got out of prison a few weeks earlier, on the day before Thanksgiving.
“So they were like, ‘Goddamn. We’ve never had to do this before. We don’t even have a process for this.’”
In April 2025, Louisiana District Court Judge Alvin Sharp declared Duncan innocent of the crime for which he’d been convicted and sentenced to death nearly 30 years earlier. It would take another seven months before he was finally released from the Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola.
Since then, Duncan had been hustling to build a life. “He got his birth certificate, his state ID. He opened a bank account,” says Elaine Whiteside, the aunt who had taken him in — “Aunt Lainey” to those who know her. “We’ve just been running around all over. Shopping, getting him what he needs, taking care of one thing at a time.”
“I’m getting a lot of help,” Duncan said. “I’ve got the family support. And I’ve got people from the prison ministry.”
He has now been out of prison for nine months. He recently got his own apartment and, after getting a job stocking shelves at Walmart, has been promoted to a manager position. When we met in December, Duncan had just turned 57 and looked healthier than many people who spend decades at a place like Angola. “I just had bloodwork done and everything looks good,” he said. “I just need to get my Medicare figured out.”
As he talked from an overstuffed leather couch in his aunt’s living room, Duncan poked around on a laptop a relative had given him. “There’s a house up the street for sale,” he said. “I’m hoping to put together some money to buy it and renovate it.”
“I’m going to embarrass him, but I have to tell you this,” Aunt Lainey said. “He’s been sleeping on that couch since he arrived, even though I made up a bed for him in the back. So I asked him, is the bed uncomfortable? And he says, ‘No, I’ve got the couch just the way I like it. Nobody’s getting through that door and getting past me.’ And I realized, that’s his instinct kicking in — you know, that instinct to protect the home. I just thought that was so sweet. I mean nobody’s going to break in here. This is a quiet little street. But I — I was just touched that the man in him thought he needed to protect his aunt.”
Facing the couch, a tall wooden bookshelf showed off dozens of photos of relatives — aunts, uncles, cousins various times removed. It was the first thing Duncan saw when he opened his eyes in the morning. “I just wanted him to see how much love and support he has,” Aunt Lainey said. “When he got out, we drove straight to my sister’s house for a big family Thanksgiving. My family from Arkansas drove down. Everyone was there to greet him. It was really super great.”
Duncan was arrested in 1993 for raping and murdering Haley Oliveaux, the 23-month-old daughter of his girlfriend. The three lived together in West Monroe, Louisiana, the smaller sister city of Monroe, known for its antique stores and as the home of the Duck Dynasty clan.
Duncan was convicted of murder in 1998. He was never charged with rape, but the allegation was an aggravating factor presented at trial by state prosecutors, who successfully urged the jury to sentence him to death.
Duncan had no history of sex offenses or abusing children. He was convicted primarily because of testimony from Steven Hayne — a now-disgraced medical examiner who performed the vast majority of autopsies in Mississippi for two decades — and his sidekick Michael West, a notorious forensics fraud best known for finding “bite marks” and matching them to alleged perpetrators. Duncan is the ninth person to be exonerated after being convicted with testimony from Hayne, West, or both.
I first learned about Duncan’s case in 2007, while working at Reason Magazine. I had just published my first investigation into Hayne, who had been accused of running an autopsy assembly line. My reporting found that Hayne had also given testimony in criminal trials that ranged from scientifically dubious to straight-up preposterous.
About a month after that story was published, I received an email from an investigator with the Capital Post-Conviction office in New Orleans. “We currently represent a client who is on death row here in Louisiana and regrettably, Dr. Hayne was the coroner,” he wrote. “Please contact me at your earliest convenience as a man’s life hangs in the balance.”
I called the office, and spoke with Kathy Kelly, the attorney handling Duncan’s case. I talked to my editor and made plans to go to Louisiana in April 2008. A month before my trip, two men were exonerated in Noxubee County, Mississippi. Both had been wrongly accused of raping and murdering two little girls in two separate cases — and both had been convicted because of testimony from Steven Hayne and Michael West.
Duncan had been charged around the same time as both of the exonerated men. The three cases came out of an era when Hayne and West had dominated death investigations in Mississippi and were seeking to expand into Louisiana. West — a brash and arrogant man who managed to be both ambitious and lazy — touted himself as a forensics savant. He compared his gifts to the musical skill of Itzhak Perlman, and estimated his error rate to be “something less than that of my lord and savior Jesus Christ.”
It was also at about this time that Hayne and West started filming their forensic “examinations” to use in presentations at conferences and in their pitches to law enforcement. I mentioned this to Kelly’s team while I was in New Orleans — that there was a decent chance they had recorded their work in Duncan’s case too.
Three months later, Kelly sent me an email. “You won’t believe the videotape we have of Hayne and West,” she wrote. “Bordering on criminal.” She had found the video of West’s examination of Haley Oliveaux.
In the video, West jammed, prodded, and dragged a plaster cast of Duncan’s teeth into and over the child’s skin more than 50 times. This was the “bitemark” evidence used to convict Duncan and send him to death row. The footage was never shown at Duncan’s trial. It also hadn’t been used in his direct appeal.
“The Mississippi system was run by that Triumvirate for years. Imagine that. A pathologist, a small town dentist, and a funeral director. And the state provided an audience of adoring idiots.”
I showed the video to several forensic specialists. They were floored. Not only did it reveal West desecrating a toddler’s corpse, it showed him manufacturing evidence in a death penalty case. Two of these experts would later submit affidavits for Duncan’s defense.
My story on Duncan’s case was published in February 2009. It was about his trial and conviction, but also about West’s long history of forensic quackery, now epitomized by the video from Duncan’s case. Gannett newspapers then picked up the story, as did local TV outlets in Louisiana. Yet it would take nearly another 17 years for Duncan to be set free.
Duncan’s case always had the trappings of a wrongful conviction. He had two overworked, underfunded court-appointed attorneys who made critical mistakes throughout his trial. Some defense lawyers in Louisiana even nicknamed one of them the “Angel of Death” because so many of his clients were sentenced to die. Duncan was also convicted with testimony from a jailhouse informant, who claimed Duncan confessed to him — only to later recant his statement. And one of the police officers who persuaded that informant to implicate Duncan has since been exposed as a bad cop who extracted numerous false confessions.
In July 2025, three months after Duncan was declared innocent, I returned to Louisiana for a bail hearing. The state had appealed the innocence finding and a judge would decide whether Duncan should be released in the meantime. In the years since I published my 2009 story, my own life and career had moved on. I had worked for three different publications. I had written two books, including one about Hayne and West. I had moved to a new city, bought a house, and gotten married.
I often thought about Duncan over the years and periodically tried to check in with his changing legal teams about the status of his case. But it wasn’t until I returned to Monroe that I was struck by how much time had passed. I returned to this story as a different person, with two decades of life experiences, and as someone who could put this case aside to move on to other things. In that time, Chris Duncan had never seen the outside of a prison.
The families haunted by this case haven’t been able to move on, either. They are, at least in part, perpetually stuck in 1993. Haley’s death, Duncan’s trial and conviction, his appeal, the shocking video showing West’s desecration of Haley’s body, the judge declaring him innocent — all these revelations just seem to reboot the trauma. “You can barely start to heal before something comes along to rip the scabs off again,” Haley’s mother told me last year.
The 30-year saga has also compounded mental health struggles across three families. It has torn relationships apart and contributed to suicides and overdose deaths. After years believing that Duncan raped and murdered Haley, the girl’s mother and other relatives now believe that Duncan is innocent.
But it still isn’t over. Sharp eventually granted Duncan bail, prompting his release from Angola last fall. But from the moment Judge Sharp declared Duncan innocent, the state has fought to get his ruling overturned. Michael Ruddick, part of the team that prosecuted Duncan, came out of retirement specifically to defend his conviction. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill has also fought to keep Duncan in prison.
So on the morning of April 28, 2026, Duncan walked into the Louisiana Supreme Court for the oral arguments in the state’s appeal of Sharp’s innocent finding. Behind him, his supporters filled the first two rows of the gallery. His Aunt Lainey and her sister had woken up at 4:30 am to make the trip to New Orleans. Haley Oliveaux’s mother was there too, joined by Jennifer Berry — Haley’s paternal aunt — and her family. Duncan wore a borrowed gray sport coat, black slacks, and a blue tie. Aunt Lainey texted me a photo. “He looks so handsome,” she wrote.
Duncan’s legal team was confident in their case, but cautious. The Louisiana Supreme Court is extremely conservative, and though the state leads the country in its rate of death row exonerations, it isn’t known for its deference to the condemned. It would be unusual to overturn an innocence finding and send a freed man back to death row. But it also wouldn’t be unprecedented.
I watched the proceedings on a livestream. In the case before Duncan’s, a high-ranking lawyer from the attorney general’s office bantered with the justices about how often he appeared before them — and his impressive record. He would represent the state in Duncan’s case.
That ominous start aside, the arguments went well for Duncan. The justices seemed skeptical of the state’s case, and acknowledged that Michael West had manufactured the bitemark evidence that played such a critical role in Duncan’s conviction.
Still, after having covered the case for so long, I was struck by how reductive the proceedings were. Duncan’s ordeal is a profound and damning indictment of a fundamentally broken system. Yet there was no sense of urgency from the justices. Their questions focused on a narrow set of legal issues: the scientific validity of bitemark analysis; whether a jury would have found Duncan guilty even without such evidence; and whether Judge Sharp abused his discretion in declaring Duncan innocent.
This, of course, is how our legal system operates. It’s how appellate courts hear and litigate cases. But it felt woefully insufficient. Duncan had appealed to this same Louisiana Supreme Court back in 2001. He was summarily dismissed. Even then, West was widely known as a fraud. The current justices were sympathetic this time, but seemed uncurious about how such transparently bullshit expert testimony had been allowed into a capital trial in the first place. There was no inquiry into why the West video was never shown at Duncan’s trial. There was little acknowledgment that the state had spent the last three decades trying to execute a man they now understood to be innocent.
In July of this year, the court ruled unanimously in Duncan’s favor. They upheld the innocence finding and agreed that he had been convicted with scientifically unreliable evidence proffered by dubious expert witnesses. The majority opinion was the most thorough repudiation of Hayne and West yet from an appeals court.
Yet, again, there was no inquiry into how the courts could have allowed such fraudulent testimony in the first place — or whether there were sufficient safeguards in place to prevent it from happening today. There was no reckoning over how that same evidence could have previously been upheld by the state’s appellate courts. There was no anger or indignation from the justices over the fact that an innocent man had languished on death row for nearly 30 years.
And Duncan still isn’t in the clear. Since the state supreme court ruling, Robert Tew, the current DA for Ouachita Parish, has vowed to charge and try Duncan again. It’s hard to see how he could possibly win a conviction. Steven Hayne has died. The courts have declared Duncan factually innocent on the existing evidence — and even if he were guilty, the odds of finding new evidence in a 33-year-old case are slim.
But there’s no statute of limitations on murder. So Tew’s threat is, in a very real way, its own punishment. It makes sure that Duncan doesn’t get too comfortable with his freedom. It denies him, his family, and Haley’s family any sense of peace or closure.
Michael West’s testimony put hundreds of people in prison. For Steven Hayne, the number is well into the thousands. Yet, despite abundant evidence that the two men spent two decades ravaging the justice systems of two states, it has been left to pro bono defense attorneys, overworked public defenders, and nonprofit groups like the Innocence Project to take on these cases, one court at a time. And they do it in the face of onerous legal barriers that make it nearly impossible to reopen old convictions.
This is the story of what ought to be one of the biggest criminal justice scandals of the last 50 years. Wrongly convicted prisoners like Duncan still sit in cells across the South. And while some courts have ruled that Hayne and West aren’t credible experts, the two men never faced any real accountability. Neither did the prosecutors who continued to use them well after they were exposed. There have been no state audits or reviews of the countless cases potentially tainted by Hayne and West.
For those still in prison, the best they can hope for is that someone might reopen their file one day — and even then, it may be too late.
2
Chris Duncan was born in November 1968 in Ouachita Parish in Northeast Louisiana. Though he now goes by Chris, for much of his life he was known as Jimmie.
He had a difficult childhood. Duncan has never known who his biological father was. His mother Barbara got pregnant with him while living with her boyfriend in New Orleans. According to court records, Barbara’s then-boyfriend wasn’t the father, and beat her in an effort to make her miscarry. Barbara escaped to Monroe and, shortly after Duncan was born, married Bennie Duncan. Bennie adopted Chris, and remained a regular presence in his life.
Barbara battled substance abuse for most of her life. When Chris was three, Barbara’s 17-year-old sister visited her in Monroe. While there, she was abducted from a shopping mall and murdered. The murder sent Barbara spiraling. She and Bennie split up two years later, but because Bennie was his adopted father, Duncan divided his time living with the two of them.
Duncan didn’t enjoy the visits with his mother. Barbara married seven times over the course of her life and had numerous boyfriends, many of whom were abusive toward Duncan and his siblings. They would later reconcile, but Barbara died in 2007 while Duncan was in prison.
Bennie’s parents — Duncan’s adoptive grandparents — did much of the work of raising him, but Bennie remained an important part of Duncan’s life. They often went fishing and hunting together. Bennie was a firefighter, and like many boys, Duncan aspired to be one too. Those who knew him describe him in court records as a funny, energetic kid, in spite of his ongoing family strife.
But substance abuse ran rampant in his family, and Duncan began drinking and smoking pot as a teenager. He eventually moved to harder drugs. In court records, those who knew him in his late teens described him as depressed and run-down from drug use, but never violent or abusive. He got into light scrapes with the law, mostly for drunken behavior or drug possession.
In his early 20s, Duncan applied to the local fire department, hoping to follow in Bennie’s footsteps. He was hired, but then let go when he failed a drug test. That would serve as a wakeup call. “I had been partying since I turned 14 or 15,” he says. “I could always quit alcohol or pot when I needed to. But cocaine had gotten a hold on me, and I realized I needed help.” Duncan checked himself into an inpatient rehab facility in Nebraska.
Duncan returned to Monroe clean, and got a job with a soft drink distributor. The job paid well and came with good benefits, but it involved a lot of physical labor, and he had to quit when he threw out his back. He then went into auto parts and repair. He had been working at an AutoZone when a loan officer named Allison Statham caught his eye.
Statham and Duncan had known of each other since they were kids — Monroe can be small that way. But they had never really talked. In the summer of 1992 they locked eyes while in the adjoining lanes of a bank drive-through.
“I was with my friend and Chris was driving the car next to us,” Statham says. “I saw him noticing me. I told my friend, ‘You know, I think that guy is looking at me.’ So we pulled over to talk to each other. Next thing I know we were dating.”
“She gave me that look,” Duncan says. “You know how it is. You’re a young guy and a girl gives you those cat eyes.”
Statham was smitten. “He was kind and soft-spoken,” she says. “When I fall, I fall hard. We just connected right away.” Duncan was smitten too. He says he was drawn in by Statham’s fiery personality, but came to find a sadness lurking beneath it. Duncan was 24 at the time, Statham 23.
Both had a child from a previous relationship, but Statham had already married and divorced. She and her ex-husband Donnie Oliveaux were high school sweethearts who married young. Haley came along in 1991. After the birth, Statham had severe postpartum depression. She says her doctors treated her with Xanax, and she quickly became addicted.
Statham and her family adored Donnie, but her depression and addiction were hard on the young couple. They grew apart and eventually split up, but remained close. “Even after we split up, he would call me every week,” she says. “And after Haley died, we’d visit her grave together.”
The divorce hit Statham’s parents hard. “They really loved Donnie,” she says. “He was a good man. I hate that I broke his heart. But I was battling my own demons. And I don’t think my family fully understood that.”
“Micheal West was always hanging out at sheriffs conferences and events. He’d buy everyone drinks, tell dirty jokes, slap a lot of backs.”
Statham’s parents didn’t approve of Duncan. They saw him as a hoodlum. Statham says class played a role, too. Her father was a successful insurance salesman, and she had a middle class upbringing. Duncan’s family was less well-off. “They didn’t like Chris at all,” she says. “I think they blamed him for my addiction. That wasn’t fair. We smoked some pot from time to time, but he wasn’t why I got addicted to Xanax. That was the depression. He had nothing to do with that.”
Though Duncan had kicked harder drugs by then, the two drank and partied when they first started dating. “I could tell that she was running from something,” he says. They’d been dating for a few weeks before she even mentioned that she had a daughter. He says he was surprised, but not angry. “I don’t think even she understood what she was going through,” he says. “I definitely didn’t. Postpartum depression wasn’t really accepted where we were. So people treated her with this stigma. Allison thought her depression made her a bad mother, so Haley usually stayed at her aunt’s or grandmother’s those first several weeks. I remember people thinking less of Allison for that. It was like, ‘You should be able to take care of your own baby.’ She felt singled out and alone. So I’d take her out and try to help her forget about it all for a while.”
The whirlwind romance evolved into a full-blown relationship, and the couple moved in together in late 1992. They partied less and started to settle in. As both earned raises and promotions at their jobs, they upgraded to a nicer apartment in West Monroe. Haley still spent a lot of time with her aunt and grandparents, but as Statham began to get better, the little girl spent more time with her and Duncan.
Statham’s job required her to keep traditional work hours. Duncan worked in retail and was sometimes off during the day. On those days he’d take care of Haley. “She was a clingy baby,” Statham says. “She loved her momma. But Chris cooked for her and watched after her. He was gentle with her.”
The couple got their first shock in the summer of 1993, when Haley had a seizure. “Her whole body turned cold, and her lips turned purple,” Statham says. “We didn’t know what was going on. We really thought she was dying.”
“We thought she was choking on something at first,” Duncan says. “We were just completely blindsided. We’d never seen anything like that before.”
Haley suffered more seizures in the weeks that followed. Two particularly severe episodes led to trips to the emergency room. “They couldn’t tell us what was wrong with her,” Statham says. “They had all these theories, but nothing definite. You feel helpless. Your baby is thrashing around like that and you don’t know why. And there’s nothing you can do.”
After the second trip to the emergency room, one ER doctor made a note in Haley’s file that would be tragically overlooked. If it had been noticed earlier, it might have prevented a lot of the horror that would follow. The doctor wrote that Haley had a condition called Stevens-Johnson’s syndrome.
Then, in November 1993, the couple brought Haley to the ER a third time, for a different reason. According to Duncan and Statham, the toddler had stepped into the open bottom drawer of a chest of drawers, causing the entire bureau to tip over on top of her. She suffered multiple skull fractures and bruises, and spent four days in intensive care.
Haley’s doctors worried that her injuries and pain medication could trigger more seizures, so they gave Statham a set of instructions to follow. They included an explicit warning not to leave Haley alone in the bath since a seizure could cause her to drown. According to Statham, Duncan wasn’t present when the doctors gave her that warning.
Because of the frequent ER visits, the bruising caused by the seizures, and the chest of drawers incident, Statham’s parents understandably began to worry that the girl was being abused. They suspected Duncan.
Statham’s father called Child Protective Services. A babysitter would later say that she also called the agency after noticing the bruises on Haley. The office opened an investigation but found no evidence that Haley had been abused. Both CPS investigators and medical personnel concluded that the girl’s injuries were consistent with the explanations the couple had given to doctors at the ER.
Statham says her father’s concerns came from a good place, but insists that he was wrong. “We were young parents,” she says. “I can’t say we didn’t make mistakes. But nobody ever abused Haley. I wouldn’t have tolerated it. We were just trying to live our lives. We were trying to figure out what was making my little girl sick.”
On the night of December 17, 1993, Statham picked up Haley from her parents’ home, where she’d stayed the last several nights. She brought the girl to the West Monroe apartment where she and Duncan were hanging out with friends. Haley said hi to everyone before Statham put her to bed. The friends then smoked some pot and watched a movie.
The next day, Statham left for work around 8:45 am. She left Haley in Duncan’s care. It was the last time she’d see her daughter alive.
Duncan’s account of what happened that morning has remained almost entirely consistent for the past 33 years.
According to Duncan, he made Haley some oatmeal for breakfast shortly after Statham left. He then put her on the toilet while he drew her a bath. She urinated and he praised her — they were potty training her at the time. He then put Haley in the bath, where she had a small bowel movement. He plucked her out of the water, put her back on the toilet, cleaned and drained the tub, and drew a fresh bath. As he did, he noticed that Haley was struggling to pass more stool. After some straining, she produced what he called a “pebble.” He praised her, wiped her bottom, and put her back in the tub. He then left her in the bath while he took a shower and did some dishes.
Duncan says that when he returned to check on Haley, she was face down in the water. He threw a towel around her and rushed to the house next door. The neighbors called 911 and attempted CPR. In subsequent interviews, neighbors, paramedics, and police told investigators that Duncan was “hysterical” and “sobbing.”
Haley arrived at the hospital at 10:51 am. She wasn’t breathing and had no heartbeat. She was pronounced dead an hour later.
As Haley’s family gathered at the hospital, Statham’s parents were furious with Duncan. Their granddaughter had just died in his care and, by his own account, he had left her alone in the bath.
There was also one discrepancy in Duncan’s story that raised suspicions. The next door neighbor who performed CPR on Haley told police that he had seen Duncan walk to the convenience store across the street shortly after Statham left for work. That meant that Duncan had left Haley alone in the house. It would only have been for a few minutes. But Duncan hadn’t told police about it.
“I just didn’t think about it at the time,” he says. “I wasn’t trying to leave anything out. But she was fine when I got back. It was after I took a shower and did dishes that I found her like that.”
Statham says she was angry when she learned that Duncan had left Haley alone. “But that’s a far cry from what they said he did.”
Duncan was arrested later that evening. He was initially charged with negligent homicide. But Haley’s grandparents, still suspicious that Duncan had been abusing the girl, pushed for more serious charges. Just two days later, District Attorney Jerry Jones changed the charge from negligent homicide to capital murder. Duncan’s possible punishment escalated from several years in prison to death by lethal injection. And where previously there had been no evidence of murder, 48 hours later the evidence seemed overwhelming.
That was because Michael West had manufactured it.
3
Prior to 1993, Ouachita Parish sent its criminal autopsies to a forensic pathologist in Shreveport named George McCormick, who would either do them himself or assign them to one of the certified pathologists in his office.
But in Haley’s case, Jones, the DA, decided to send the girl’s body two hours east, across the state line to Steven Hayne in Pearl, Mississippi. Hayne wasn’t licensed in Louisiana. He also wasn’t certified by the American Board of Pathology, long recognized as the gold standard for certifying medical examiners. Hayne had taken the certification exam and failed it. He’d later claim he walked out on the test because he found it “ridiculous.”
Nonetheless, prosecutors had come to rely on Hayne. He was a pliable expert witness who would give them the conclusions they needed.
Mississippi used an elected coroner system to oversee death investigations. Coroners are commonly confused with medical examiners, but the latter is a doctor trained in forensic pathology, while the former generally requires no education or training. The elected coroner is a quirky artifact the U.S. inherited from English common law; in Mississippi, the county coroner oversaw death investigations, but was also in charge of rounding up stray livestock. Until the 1990s, the only requirement to run for coroner in the state was a high school diploma and belief in a higher power. There are newspaper accounts of coroners signing death certificates with an X because they couldn’t read or write. But the job tended to go to the owner of the local funeral home, who could use it to get first crack at mortuary services for the families of victims.
After a suspicious death, the coroner would consult with prosecutors and police, then contract the autopsy out to a private doctor. This created some perverse incentives. Prosecutors tended to choose doctors they could trust to give them the results they wanted. That often meant someone whose conclusions would help them win a conviction — but it could also mean exonerating police officers after an in-custody death, or classifying obvious homicides as accidents or deaths by natural causes. This tended to happen when a victim was poor and Black. The coroner system was developed and honed during Jim Crow, an era when elected county coroners were notorious for helping to cover up lynchings and assassinations of civil rights figures.
By the 1980s, state law called for an official, board-certified “state medical examiner” with an office and staff to oversee autopsies — but the legislature rarely funded the office sufficiently. After all, it was up to the counties, not the state, to pay for autopsies. Within a decade, multiple people had resigned the position in frustration.
“They were eating pork sandwiches and smoking cigars while someone was running a bone saw on the skull of a crack prostitute.”
The old system stubbornly defied reform because it served the people in power. Coroners, prosecutors, and police could choose a medical examiner who told them what they wanted to hear.
Prior to Hayne, the go-to man for autopsies in Mississippi was Rodrigo Galvez. He wasn’t a pathologist — he’d been trained as a psychiatrist. In one case, Galvez and a county coroner showed up at a man’s funeral, confiscated the body, then drove it to a secluded area where Galvez performed what was later described as a “roadside autopsy.” He concluded that the man had been strangled, and his death was a homicide.
Galvez also seemed to believe that killers frequently had sex with the corpses of their victims. For prosecutors, this was a convenient aggravating factor that tended to disgust juries, which helped them win death sentences. In one murder case, Galvez digressed — while on the witness stand — into what the Mississippi Supreme Court later called “a free floating lecture on a psychosexual disorder he labeled necrophilia.” There was no evidence the defendant had done anything sexual with the body of the alleged victim, and the court overturned the death sentence. But Galvez made similar allegations in other cases in which the death sentences stood.
Steven Hayne arrived in Mississippi in the mid-1980s. He’d grown up in San Francisco, then went to North Dakota State University for undergrad. He transferred to Brown and later joined the military to help pay for medical school. After working as a pathologist in the military, he lived briefly in Alabama before taking a medical research job in Mississippi in 1985. There, he began introducing himself to county coroners in the hopes of getting autopsy referrals.
Hayne was unquestionably smart and savvy. He saw opportunity in the state’s privatized autopsy system and quickly positioned himself as the new Rodrigo Galvez. He worked cheap, at least when broken down per autopsy, and made up for this with volume. By 1988, he was doing more than 300 autopsies per year, exceeding the recommended maximum of 250 by the National Association of Medical Examiners. Five years later, he’d be doing four times that many.
Hayne’s sidekick was Michael West, a bombastic, self-promoting dentist from Hattiesburg. West first got into forensics after being trained to use dental records to identify human remains. Before long he started pitching himself as a tech-savvy, cutting-edge expert in other areas of forensics. He’d find his calling in bitemark analysis, a specialty made famous in the 1979 trial of serial killer Ted Bundy.
To be clear, bitemark evidence is junk science. There has never been any scientific research to support the idea that bites on human skin can be matched to the teeth of one person, to the exclusion of everyone else. Yet, for five decades, the courts have overwhelmingly signed off on the idea, even as more than two dozen people convicted with bitemark evidence have been exonerated.
But West was a charlatan even within a field of charlatans. In the 1980s, he invented a forensic technique he dubbed “the West Phenomenon,” in which he wore yellow-tinted goggles while examining the skin of alleged victims under a fluorescent light. When speaking with reporters or at conferences, West claimed the inspiration for this technique hit him during a tour of China, when he was told of a battlefield physician who noticed that light filtering through silk tents made soldiers’ injuries appear more vivid than under natural light. According to West, when he asked his Chinese handler if he could meet the doctor, he was told that the doctor “had been dead for 3,000 years.” West, in other words, claimed to have stumbled upon an “ancient Chinese secret.”
But when asked under oath, West said he got the after attending a lecture by a dentist named Thomas Krauss at the 1982 meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. Krauss claimed that ultraviolet photography could reveal bite marks invisible to the naked eye, up to six months after they had been inflicted. West coopted the idea and started doing his own “research” with another dentist and a longtime UPI photographer. The three men recruited volunteers, sedated them with Valium, then paid them to bite one another. They then photographed and documented the resulting injuries. Eventually, West shunned the other two men and took credit for the technique himself.
West’s first case as an expert witness was the 1983 trial of Don Horn, a Black football player for the University of Southern Mississippi who was accused of raping a white woman. The victim hadn’t seen her attacker, but Horn became a suspect because he bagged groceries at the store where she often shopped and was also a patient at the dental office where she worked as a hygienist. West claimed that by dipping a mold of Horn’s teeth into ink, he could create a bite mark identical to a mark found on the victim’s cheek.
Because West wasn’t yet certified in forensic odontology, the prosecutor sent West’s analysis to a more established bitemark expert for confirmation. That analyst said West was wrong. So the prosecutor sent it to a third analyst, Richard Souviron, one of the experts who had achieved national renown for his testimony in the Bundy trial. Souviron agreed with West. Horn was arrested and charged with rape.
Horn’s attorneys challenged the scientific validity of West’s technique in a pretrial hearing, but lost. At trial, West, along with Souviron, testified that the bite mark on the victim was a “dead match” for Horn. It was the only evidence linking Horn to the crime. The case preceded DNA, so tests on semen taken from the victim were inconclusive, and Horn had been excluded as the source of fingerprints found at the crime scene. Horn also had an alibi: His girlfriend testified that he had slept at her house and never left on the night of the rape.
The jury acquitted Horn. But the case upended his life. His once-promising NFL prospects withered. Meanwhile, the local DA seemed thrilled, despite his loss, to have tried the first case in state history to use bitemark analysis. “It’s tantamount to the first time fingerprints or blood type was used,” the prosecutor told a local paper. “As it becomes perfected, it will be very useful.”
The acquittal didn’t slow West down either. The following year he gave a presentation on his technique at the annual AAFS meeting. He also started lecturing at law enforcement agencies. When a serial killer later started stalking the campus of the University of Florida, West headed to Gainesville and began touting his talents to anyone who would listen. West didn’t provide any real help to police, but he did get himself on Donahue. He was also written up in Playboy and the AP, and quoted in newspapers across Florida.
4
Hayne and West have given conflicting accounts of when they met, but it was likely around 1986, when both were acquaintances of influential Rankin County Coroner Jimmy Roberts. West was the “deputy coroner” of Forrest County (one of many titles he’d give himself) and Hayne was gobbling up autopsy referrals from coroners like Roberts. By 1989, the three men were in business together.
They operated out of the morgue Roberts owned in the town of Pearl, about five miles outside Jackson. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Roberts, a mortician and funeral home owner, was head of the state coroners association. He helped Hayne get autopsy referrals across Mississippi, then charged the counties $150 per body for Hayne to use his morgue. Roberts also built a fleet of hearses to transport the bodies, charging the counties another $1.00 to $1.50 per mile. The arrangement also gave Roberts first crack at pitching his embalming and funeral services to families of the deceased. If they opted for another funeral home, he could charge them to transport the body.
Hayne charged $400 to $600 per autopsy. If the case involved bite marks, tool marks, or other impressions on human skin, he’d call in West, who charged his own fee, and the two men would perform their forensic voodoo. One attorney at the time estimated that the operation brought in $2 million per year from Hinds County (Jackson) alone.
Hayne and West also got a boost from local newspapers. Editors couldn’t seem to resist fawning profiles with punny, tooth-related headlines of these local forensic gurus who were solving crimes, protecting children from predators, and putting Mississippi on the map.
West did most of the public relations work. He told reporters that he and Hayne could find otherwise invisible marks on human skin that had been inflicted weeks, months, or even years earlier — foolproof evidence that a victim had been bitten, struck, or even grabbed by the arm and shaken. His research, he said, put Mississippi “at the forefront of forensic photography.”
The glowing profiles stood in stark contrast to the accounts shared with me by people who actually visited Hayne’s operation. They described a macabre, gruesome spectacle.
“Hayne was constantly looking for any way to cut corners,” one former high-ranking official in state government told me. “It looked like an autopsy factory. There were no safety precautions.”
Hayne still had his day job at a kidney research center. He also testified in courts all over the state, sometimes several times per week. Because of those obligations, he typically did his autopsies at night — from 6 or 7 in the evening until the wee hours of the morning. Attorneys, law enforcement, and forensic specialists I’ve interviewed used terms like “sausage factory,” “sushi shop,” and “slaughterhouse.” Former Mississippi state medical examiner Lloyd White called the operation “McAutopsies.” Another former county coroner who tried to raise the alarm about Hayne told me, “There were always bodies being lined up for the next autopsy. It was an assembly-line type of thing.”
One former head of Mississippi’s crime lab offered me a particularly vivid account of one of Hayne’s all-night autopsy sessions. He recalled seeing at least a dozen bodies in the building, with several open at the same time. Hayne and West puffed out plumes of cigar smoke as they shuffled between the corpses. At some point in the evening, they ordered sandwiches.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” the former crime lab director told me. “They handed out the food, and then they were eating pork sandwiches and smoking cigars while someone was running a bone saw on the skull of a crack prostitute.” He explained that when you run a bone saw, a vapor of tiny bone fragments rises into the air. Those fragments then settle back down on everything in the room — including uncovered sandwiches and cigars.
Other sources confirmed to me that Hayne, West, and their assistants often smoked cigars and ate while performing autopsies. Two told me that Hayne sometimes boasted about his ability to hold a cigar and sandwich in one hand while doing an autopsy with the other.
One of Jimmy Roberts’s longtime employees told me that West, mortuary staff, and even Roberts frequently did the autopsies themselves. According to the former employee, Hayne then signed the reports as if he’d performed them, which would be illegal. He said he’d often see six to 12 bodies open at once, with 15 or more in the “cooler” — the morgue refrigerator where bodies were stored.
“There’s also a lot of flies and insects in there,” the former assistant added. “So they would hang up fly strips. You’d frequently see dead flies falling into open bodies.”
Roberts had essentially set up a vertical monopoly on postmortem services — from transporting the body, to the autopsy and embalming, to the funeral and burial. It was a one-stop shop. In one portion of the building where Hayne and West operated, Roberts’s wife had also opened a flower shop, which came in handy. One person familiar with the operation told a private investigator that when a body came in that was badly decomposed, Hayne, West, and Roberts would store it in the the back of the flower shop to mask the odor. Bodies pungent enough to overcome the smell of the flowers were moved to a separate outbuilding that Hayne, West, and Roberts dubbed “the Stinker Room.”
When West’s specialized “expertise” wasn’t needed at the morgue, he traveled around the state to drum up business. “West was always hanging out at sheriffs conferences and events,” Tommy Ferrell, the Adams County sheriff from 1988 to 2004 told me. “He’d buy everyone drinks, tell dirty jokes, slap a lot of backs.”
Ferrell said West had an uncanny ability to pop up around the state shortly after a suspicious death. “It was like he had a radar for dead bodies,” Ferrell said. “If you called the state crime lab to report a body, West would show up out of nowhere 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.”
After a couple bad experiences, Ferrell grew suspicious of the duo. “I found out that we could send autopsies to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington,” he said. “So when it was my call, that’s where I sent them.” But Ferrell was an exception. Most state officials sent bodies to Hayne because that’s what they were told to do. “You have to understand the position we were in,” Ferrell said. “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.”
By the time of Haley Oliveaux’s death in 1993, Hayne had cornered the market on autopsy referrals in Mississippi. Medical examiner Douglas Posey, who had moved to Houston by the time I interviewed him, said that when he lived in Mississippi in the 1990s, he had tried to perform autopsies for coroners and prosecutors. “I remember the Washington County coroner told me that if I wanted to do autopsies in Mississippi, I had to get permission from Steven Hayne first,” Posey said. “I thought that was odd, since Hayne didn’t hold any office.”
Hayne, West, and Roberts dominated autopsies and forensic expertise in the state for more than two decades. “The Mississippi system was run by that Triumvirate for years,” one coroner, who refused to use them, told me. “Imagine that. A pathologist, a small town dentist, and a funeral director. And the state provided an audience of adoring idiots.”
5
In the early 1990s, Hayne and West started branching out into other states, but mostly Louisiana. They marketed their pioneering methods to law enforcement and forensics publications, and pitched local reporters profiles of their work. In the law enforcement journals, they boasted about their ability to “cinch” convictions and close cases. In newspaper interviews, they offered lofty insights on how their use of forensics advanced public safety and the interests of justice.
As more Louisiana officials started sending autopsies to Hayne in Mississippi, George McCormick, the medical examiner based in Shreveport, started to lose business. He had heard from other medical examiners about Hayne’s workload and lack of professionalism and eventually asked his assistant to start keeping a dossier. Years later, I interviewed that assistant, Dawn Young, and obtained a copy.
McCormick and Young found that while Hayne wasn’t certified by the American Board of Pathology, he claimed in court to be certified by various other groups with official-sounding names. Some were well-known to be “certification mills” that required little more than a check. Others didn’t exist.
They also learned that Hayne often failed to create and preserve wet tissue samples from his autopsies. Such samples are critical for toxicology tests and to create slides for microscopic analysis. Without them, it was all but impossible for other medical examiners to verify Hayne’s conclusions. “Most autopsies produce 20 to 30 tissue samples,” one Mississippi attorney who faced Hayne in both civil and criminal cases told me. “I’ve never seen a tissue sample from a Steven Hayne autopsy.”
McCormick found two cases in which Hayne claimed in trial testimony to have examined wet tissue slides prepared by other doctors. Those doctors told McCormick that Hayne had never requested those slides, and they had never sent them.
In a 1995 letter to Young, Kris Sperry, who at the time was the state medical examiner for Georgia, wrote that Hayne was “a rather blatant fraud that is being perpetrated on the people of Mississippi, the forensic community, and the medicolegal system . . . One of these days he will slip up. And then we will have him.”
Meanwhile, West was also aggressively promoting his solo work. ABC News obtained a brochure that he sent to police agencies in the 1990s. For $900, it said, West would come and explain his methods to your department. (Put another way, for $900, West would come and tell you why you should hire him in future cases.) The brochure promised that West could “turn cases that were once unsolved into police convictions.”
If his CV were accurate, West would have to be one of the most accomplished forensic analysts to ever live. He claimed to be an expert in video and photo enhancement, arson investigation, Shaken Baby Syndrome, “trace metal analysis,” deaths in police custody, serial murders, mass murders, scalding and burn patterns, blood spatter, and computer animation. He claimed to have published articles on an astoundingly diverse array of topics, from “A Study of Surface Topography of Footwear and Automobile Pedals,” to “Peanut Butter Aspiration Deaths Among the Mentally Retarded.” Almost none of West’s articles appeared in journals that were peer-reviewed. Most appeared in law enforcement or forensics publications.
For all his boasting on paper, though, West was far more dangerous in the courtroom. Again, there’s no science to back up even the basic claim that bite marks on human skin can be matched to a single person’s teeth. But West took the concept to preposterous new heights. Not only did he claim he could definitively match injuries on victims to the source, he claimed he also could match patterns on a suspect’s skin to objects that person may have held, grasped, or merely touched — sometimes weeks or months after the alleged incident.
In 1991, West testified that the bruises on a boy’s abdomen were “highly consistent” with one of his mother’s hiking shoes. That same year, he claimed to match an abrasion on a murder victim’s body to the laces on the defendant’s shoes. He then used the West Phenomenon to find a pattern on the defendant’s palm that he claimed could only have been caused by grasping one particular strap on one particular purse. Also in 1991, West claimed to match alleged bite marks on a rape victim’s vagina to a defendant’s teeth. He further said that while using the West Phenomenon, he detected a pattern on the defendant’s hand that he said matched the handle of a screwdriver the attacker allegedly held while threatening the victim.
In a separate 1991 case, West and Hayne claimed to match marks on a suspected killer’s hands to a pair of bolt cutters that police believed to be the murder weapon. To make the match, West testified, they enlisted a volunteer employed at Jimmy Roberts’s morgue to swing the bolt cutters like a baseball bat and smack them into either a “pine tree or a telephone pole.” The force of the blow supposedly created a faint pattern of indentations on the volunteer’s hands, which were examined under West’s magic light. According to West, the marks on the volunteer’s hands matched the marks on the suspect’s hands.
Many of the people West implicated in these cases were likely guilty. But some weren’t, and some were persuaded to accept plea bargains to avoid more serious charges and longer sentence if they were convicted at trial. In one case, a man named Mark Oppie was suspected of a murder by strangulation in Pascagoula, Mississippi. After viewing photos of alleged defensive scratches on Oppie’s back, West went to the mortuary and removed the victim’s fingernails. He then attached the nails to sticks and created “test scratches” with them on an unspecified surface. West told police that the scratches on Oppie’s back were “indeed and without a doubt” a match to the victim’s nails. Oppie was charged with murder. He eventually pleaded guilty to manslaughter. His attorney told me he believed Oppie was innocent.
Here’s a short video in which West talks about Oppie during a presentation he gave in 1991. “Strap him in a chair and kill him,” West says. “These fingernails made these marks.”
(Video clip of West discussing the Mark Oppie case, courtesy of the documentary Mississippi Innocence, directed by Joe York)
By the early 1990s, West had already implicated several people later proven innocent. The case of Larry Maxwell may be the most egregious of West’s career. Police suspected Maxwell of stabbing three elderly people to death in Daleville, Mississippi. They brought in West to work his magic.
West first claimed that a knife found at the crime scene was the only knife that could have created the stab wounds. Despite Maxwell having an alibi — he was seen by witnesses and on surveillance video at his job at the time of the murders — West then connected him to the knife. Using the West Phenomenon, he claimed to find marks on Maxwell’s hands — invisible to the naked eye — that could only have been created by grasping the knife.
West claimed to have found these marks 10 days after the murders. He would later say that he had accidentally overexposed the photos of the alleged marks, rendering them useless. So he had Maxwell put his hands on a photocopier and drew the marks from memory.
A judge eventually ruled that West’s “technique” lacked scientific merit and refused to let him testify. With no other real evidence, the police let Maxwell go. He had spent two years in jail awaiting trial. Maxwell later tried to sue West, but lost when a federal court ruled that, as a state’s witness, West was protected by qualified immunity.
Two years later, a man named Johnny Bourn was in the Jackson County, Mississippi jail on unrelated charges when a Pascagoula detective thought he resembled a composite sketch of a man suspected of raping and beating an 80-year-old woman. Police found a wealth of biological material, including bodily fluids and scrapings from the victim’s fingernails, but decided not to do any testing. Instead they brought in West, who claimed to find a bite mark on the woman that matched Bourn’s teeth. Based solely on West’s findings, Bourn was arrested and indicted for rape and battery. Bourn’s attorney was eventually able to get the biological evidence tested. None of it was a match to Bourn. The authorities dropped the charges and Bourn was released. He had spent 18 months in jail.
West also made a name for himself in an entirely different realm of forensic analysis: the assassination of John F. Kennedy. West, who was 11 years old when Kennedy was murdered, told a reporter in 1993 that when the principal of West’s Picayune Memorial Junior High announced over the loudspeaker that Kennedy had been killed, the entire school erupted in cheers. “We were told that President Kennedy had sold the South out and brought federal troops into Mississippi,” West said. “We viewed President Kennedy as the enemy.” West had been fascinated by the Kennedy assassination ever since.
Perhaps surprisingly, West positioned himself as an expert debunker of Kennedy conspiracies. This, inadvertently, provided fodder for the conspiracy theorists. After the Oliver Stone movie JFK came out in 1991, West became a resource for historians and media outlets looking to provide a counternarrative. He claimed, for example, to have applied “color enhancement” and other photographic forensic techniques to still frames taken from the famous Abraham Zapruder film to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald was the only gunman to fire at Kennedy’s motorcade. West would later claim he could use similar “enhancement” to identify bodies and suspects from grainy surveillance video.
West’s analysis of the case was later cited in the Journal of the American Medical Association as well as in Gerald Posner’s 1993 book Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK — a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Posner credited West and another analyst for doing “some of the most sophisticated computer-enhancement work” on the Zapruder film.
This all lent an air of credibility and esteem to the “little ol’ dentist from Hattiesburg,” as West often referred to himself. He then leveraged that credibility to get work in criminal cases.
Back in Ouachita Parish, law enforcement officials were growing impatient with George McCormick, the medical examiner they’d used for years. The complaints weren’t about the workload in his Shreveport office, which, at about 800 autopsies per year, was still too high. The concern was that he was too slow. The parish’s chief deputy told the Monroe News-Star in 1993, “Dr. McCormick handles all of North Louisiana, so you can imagine the load he’s got.” The police chief in Monroe agreed. “They’re simply busy over there,” he said.
So in early 1993 — about a year before Haley Oliveaux died — one of District Attorney Jerry Jones’s prosecutors told him he’d heard about this innovative forensics duo in Mississippi who were particularly talented at winning convictions. Jones called some prosecutors in Mississippi. One told him that Hayne in particular was “an excellent witness.”
Haley Oliveaux would be one of the first autopsies Hayne did for Ouachita Parish. Within a year of her death he was performing half of the parish’s autopsies. Two years later, he was doing all of them.
McCormick was furious about Hayne creeping onto his turf. And while it was true that Hayne had snatched up some of his business, McCormick told reporters that local prosecutors’ real problem was that they had no patience for a medical examiner who occasionally told them things they didn’t want to hear. Hayne — who at the time was performing some 50 percent more autopsies himself than the three doctors in McCormick’s office combined — didn’t do that. Hayne also offered Louisiana prosecutors a discount. While McCormick charged $700 per autopsy, Hayne charged just $475.
Two months before Haley Oliveaux died, the Associated Press published a story about how Louisiana prosecutors had been diverting autopsies from McCormick across state lines to the new, in-demand medical examiner in Mississippi. The reporter asked McCormick why he was so bothered by Hayne doing autopsies in his state.
McCormick answered with a warning. “Bad pathology,” he said, “is the worst thing that can happen in the justice system.”
Radley Balko is the conscience of the criminal justice system that gets so much wrong. "The Framing of Chris Duncan" will infuriate you.