DOUBT
HUFFINGTON
02.03.13
“When you take on a case and it
reveals a glaring injustice like this …
you can’t just turn a blind eye to that.”
and check on his property. The place had
been burglarized several times since he
left, and on more than a few occasions he
had shooed off the drug addicts he found
squatting inside. The vacated building
had become a gathering spot for them
over the winter months.
That morning, March 25, Mitchell
noticed that a wall panel under the carport had been kicked out. When he approached the front door to investigate,
he saw a trail of blood. He followed
the trail inside and discovered Kathy
Mabry’s body.
The murder set the entire community
on edge. “You might see someone getting
shot after an argument or something, but
even that is really rare,” says Dim Pyle,
the mayor of Isola. “Nobody had ever
seen anything like this. Because of the
closeness everybody had with Kathy’s
family, the whole town, both towns, well
we were all just devastated.”
Roseman, the county coroner and
John Allen Jones, the Humphreys County
sheriff at the time, arrived at the crime
scene about an hour after Mitchell found
Mabry’s body. Jones called the Missis-
sippi Highway Patrol, who sent an investigator and two inspectors from the state
crime lab. They began interviewing suspects that afternoon.
Mabry’s body was sent to Steven
Hayne for autopsy. Though he held no official state position, and was never board
certified in forensic pathology, between
the early 1990s and the late 2000s,
Hayne performed 80-90 percent of the
autopsies in Mississippi, according to his
own testimony in trials and depositions.
That amounted to an astonishing 1,5001,800 autopsies per year.
The National Association of Medical Examiners recommends that a single
doctor perform no more than 250 autopsies per year. The organization refuses
to certify any lab where doctors perform
more than 325.
Hayne’s workload could result in
some odd autopsy reports. According
to a complaint filed by the Mississippi
Innocence Project, in one case, Hayne
included in his report the weight of a
man’s spleen, and made comments about
its appearance. The problem: The man’s
spleen had been removed four years before he died. In an autopsy on a drowned
infant, Hayne noted the weight of each
of the child’s kidneys, even though one