DOUBT
Gates for the murder. “If she had been
choked, or had hit her head, if she’d been
dumped out in a field somewhere, I’d say,
Okay, that makes sense. I could see putting that on Gates. Maybe he’d lost his
temper again. Maybe he got too rough
with her,” Roseman says. “But when a
man who loves a woman, when he’s sleeping with the same woman, he doesn’t do
her body like that. A mean man will hit a
woman he loves, but he won’t cut up her
face. You just don’t see that.”
Roseman also says Gates wasn’t defensive about Mabry’s death. In fact, he
seemed crushed. “He showed real strong
emotion when he heard she’d been killed,”
Roseman says. “He didn’t try to give us an
alibi. We had to ask him where he was. I
don’t think he even considered the possibility that he could have been a suspect.”
He’d soon become the only suspect.
During his autopsy, Hayne claimed to
have found bite marks on Mabry’s body.
As he had done in numerous other cases,
Hayne then called in West, who claimed
to have pioneered a new way of identifying bite marks in human skin, then
matching them to one person, to the exclusion of everyone else on the planet.
He called it the “West Phenomenon.”
Conveniently, West claimed that only
he could perform this method of analysis,
which involved yellow goggles and ultraviolet light. He said his method couldn’t
be tested by anyone else. It couldn’t be
HUFFINGTON
02.03.13
photographed or recorded on video to be
scrutinized by other forensic specialists.
At various points in the 1990s, West and
the prosecutors who used him compared
his bite-mark genius to Itzhak Perlman,
Galileo and Jesus Christ.
The National Academy of Sciences, however, does not consider bite-mark analysis
to be credible as evidence in a trial.
On Thursday, March 27, 1997, West
confirmed that what Hayne had found
were indeed bite marks. He took photos
of them, then drove to Belzoni to make
plaster molds of the suspects’ teeth. Using only the plaster molds and the photos of the bite marks he’d brought with
him, West excluded all of the men then
in custody. For dramatic effect, he used
the same line each time: “Sheriff, this is
not your man.”
The police then escorted West to the
home of James Earl Gates, who also allowed West to make an impression of his
teeth. West then compared Gates’ mold
to the photos. In his report, Jones writes
that West next “pointed out to me the
similarities between the bite marks and
impressions. He informed me that this
was a possible suspect.”
West then drove back to the morgue
to compare the mold of Gates’ teeth directly to the marks on Mabry’s body. At
12:45 a.m., West called Jones. “This is
your man,” West said.
On April 1, 1997, James Earl Gates
was arrested for the rape and murder of
Kathy Mabry and booked at the Humphreys County Jail.