Dr. Werner Spitz, a pathologist who has recounted the harrowing final moments of some of the most sensational American deaths of the past 60 years, mentioned the cases linked to General President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., OJ Simpson, JonBenet Ramsey, Mary Jo Kopechne and many others, died on April 14 in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. He was 97 years old.
His son, Dr. Daniel Spitz, said he died in hospice care after a short illness.
Dr. Spitz’s more than 60-year career dates back to the early days of modern forensic pathology, and his textbook on the subject remains the gold standard in the field. Even after retiring as the chief medical examiner of Macomb County, Michigan, in 2004, he continued to perform autopsies and consult with attorneys, said that he had no interest in spending his final years golfing or fishing. Examining the bodies of murdered victims is the only thing that makes him not bored. he say.
Dr. Spitz used evidence of a small skull fracture, a sample of shirt fibers around a bullet hole or the sticky side of a piece of duct tape to draw conclusions about the violent deaths that weighed heavily on the courtroom fate of murder defendants – or, in the case of President Kennedy and Dr. King, the judgment of history.
Dr. Spitz served as an expert witness for both prosecutors and defense attorneys, saying he never formed an opinion solely because of price but followed what the scientific evidence led to. But he was also thrust into the spotlight during some of the country’s most sensational deaths.
Although he never examined the body of JonBenet Ramsey, the child beauty contestant murdered in Colorado in 1996, Dr. Spitz accused her brother, Burke Ramsey, of the murder two decades later in a television documentary and a radio interview.
“If you really, really used your free time to think about this case, you couldn’t come to a different conclusion,” he told CBS Detroit radio. libel lawsuit for which Mr. Ramsey filed a lawsuit against Dr. Spitz in 2016, seeking $150 million.
The suit calls Dr. Spitz a “publicity seeker” whose “vicious, unsupported attacks” caused “emotional anguish” to Mr. Ramsey, who was cleared by authorities list of suspects. The lawsuit has been resolved.
In the 1970s, while he was health director for Wayne County, Michigan, which includes Detroit, Dr. Spitz was appointed as counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which reviewed back to the murders of President Kennedy and Dr. King. at a time when doubts about the government are growing and conspiracy theories are swirling.
Having access to color photographs of the president’s body, his clothing, and his medical reports, Dr. Spitz was deeply critical of the Navy’s first pathologists from 1963. They botched that autopsy,” he told The Detroit Free Press in 2013. “They have no experience in forensic pathology.”
However, his conclude – along with the opinions of other experts on the House committee – confirmed the 1964 Warren Commission finding that President Kennedy was shot by two bullets fired from behind. The panel found that there was no medical evidence that he was caught in crossfire by a second shooter firing from a lawn, a theory that arose after the filming of the assassination at his home. Abraham Zapruder was released in 1975.
In the assassination of Dr. King, so did Dr. Spitz and two other forensic pathologists. agreed with authorities’ initial assessment that the civil rights leader was killed by a single shot from a high-velocity rifle.
When Sen. Edward M. Kennedy plunged off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, Mass., in 1969, killing Mary Jo Kopechne, his passenger, her family sought to prevent the exhumation of her body to autopsy. Dr. Spitz, then a medical examiner in Baltimore, witness on behalf of her parents that an autopsy could not clarify whether drowning or other injuries caused death and that exhumation would be pointless. The judge agreed.
Werner Uri Spitz was born on August 22, 1926 in Stargard, Germany (now part of Poland), to Siegfried and Anna (Faktor) Spitz, both doctors.
His parents, who were Jewish, escaped the threat of Nazism by moving to Mandatory Palestine (now Israel) before World War II, traveling on a boat filled with Jewish doctors. Thai and their family. Werner attended medical school in Geneva and Jerusalem, graduating from the Hebrew University’s Hadassah Medical School in 1953.
He was attracted to pathology because of its detective element. But for a forensic pathologist – working at the intersection of medicine and crime – Israel offers few opportunities. In seven years, Dr. Spitz later recalled, he investigated only one murder: the stabbing to death of a bagel vendor by a rival bagel manufacturer.
However, after immigrating to the United States in 1959, he was hired as assistant medical examiner for Maryland, based in Baltimore, and found no shortage of murders to investigate.
In 1961, he married Anne Keates, who survives him. In addition to her and her son Daniel, also a pathologist, Dr. Spitz is survived by another son, Dr. Jonathan Spitz, a surgeon; daughter, Rhona Dempsey, a lawyer; and 10 grandchildren. He lives in Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan.
In 1973, Dr. Spitz and collaborator, Russell Fisher, published “Forensic Death Investigation: A Guide to the Application of Pathology to Criminal Investigation,” which identified Dr. Spitz as the founder Modern forensic pathology. Later editions had a new co-author, his son Daniel, who as a boy took his father’s book to the basement to pored over its graphic photographs.
Dr. Spitz’s national reputation has long ensured that he is in demand as an expert witness in some of the country’s most high-profile murder cases.
Afterward OJ Simpson Acquitted in criminal court of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, Dr. Spitz testified in a civil case that small cuts on Mr. Simpson’s left hand were caused by Mrs. Simpson’s fingernails were caused as she fought for her life. . The jury found Mr. Simpson responsible for wrongful death.
In the trial of a Florida woman, Casey Anthony, who was accused of murdering her toddler daughter, Caylee, in 2008, Dr. Spitz was a defense witness, arguing that the girl had drowning. Dr. Spitz undermined a key part of the state’s murder charge by testifying that the duct tape, which prosecutors said was used to suffocate Caylee, was applied after she was already dead. He asserted that if she were alive there would be traces of skin on the sticky side of the tape. Mrs. Anthony was acquitted.
And in a famous 1986 New York City murder case, Dr. Spitz was a key prosecution witness against Robert E. Chambers Jr., whom the tabloids called “the young killer.” years old” Jennifer Levin, 18 years old, has a half-clothed body. found in Central Park. Mr. Chambers told police that he accidentally killed Ms. Levin during consensual sex and went too far.
But Dr. Spitz witness that Mr. Chambers had strangled Miss Levin by twisting her shirt into a noose. The defense attorney, in a cross-examination that turned into a shouting match, accused Dr. Spitz of switching sides, saying he had first told him another theory of death.
After nine days of deliberation in which the jury was unable to reach a verdict, Mr. Chambers pleaded guilty to a lesser charge.
At age 95, two years before his death, Dr. Spitz told Time that he did not shrink from examining human remains, but said that the truth about some deaths has a haunting power.
“It’s really not difficult for me to do it because I’ve done a lot of these cases,” he said. “But then I went home and went to bed and dreamed about it, and it was horrible.”
