Dr. Werner Spitz, a pathologist whose accounts of the tragic closing moments of a number of the most sensational American deaths of the previous 60 years embody President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., OJ Simpson, JonBenét Ramsey, Mary are concerned. Joe Kopechne and a number of other others died on April 14 in St. Clair Shores, Mich., a suburb of Detroit. He was 97.
His son Dr. Daniel Spitz stated he died in hospice care after a short sickness.
Dr. Spitz’s greater than 60-year profession dates again to the early days of contemporary forensic pathology, and his textbook on the topic stays a gold normal within the subject. Even after retiring as Macomb County, Mich.’s chief medical expert in 2004, he continued to carry out autopsies and seek the advice of with attorneys, saying he had little interest in spending his later years {golfing} or fishing. . Analyzing the stays of bloodbath victims was one factor that didn’t bore him. He said.
Dr. Spitz used proof comparable to a small cranium fracture, a sample of blouse fibers round a bullet gap or the sticky aspect of a bit of duct tape to attract conclusions about violent deaths that weighed closely on the courtroom destiny of homicide suspects. – Or, in President Kennedy and Dr. King’s case, on the judgment of historical past.
Dr. Spitz was an knowledgeable witness for each prosecutors and protection attorneys, saying he by no means merely supplied an opinion for a worth however guided scientific proof. However he additionally made headlines for a number of the nation’s most sensational deaths.
Though he by no means examined the physique of JonBenet Ramsey, a toddler magnificence pageant who was killed in Colorado in 1996, Dr. Spitz accused his brother, Burke Ramsey, of the homicide in a tv documentary and a radio interview twenty years later.
“Should you actually, actually use your free time to consider this case, you possibly can’t come to a distinct conclusion,” he advised radio station CBS Detroit, in response to an article included in Defamation suit That Mr. Ramsay in 2016 Dr. filed in opposition to Spitz, looking for $150 million.
Within the declare Dr. Spitz was described as a “propaganda seeker” whose “vicious, unsupported assaults” had prompted “psychological anguish” to Mr Ramsey, who was cleared by authorities as a suspect. The lawsuit was settled.
Within the Nineteen Seventies, when he moved to Wayne County, Mich. was the chief medical expert, together with Detroit, Dr. Spitz was appointed as a marketing consultant to the Home Choose Committee on Assassinations, which examined President Kennedy and Dr. King’s murders had been re-examined. At a time of rising suspicion of the federal government and swirling conspiracy theories.
Given entry to paint pictures of the President’s physique, his garments and medical studies, Dr. Spitz had been deeply essential of the unique Navy pathologists since 1963. “They botched that post-mortem,” He told the Detroit Free Press in 2013. “They’d no expertise in forensic pathology.”
Nonetheless, his Conclusions — together with different consultants on a Home panel — confirmed the Warren Fee’s findings in 1964, that President Kennedy was killed by two bullets fired from behind. The panel discovered that there was no medical proof that he was caught within the crossfire by a second shooter firing a pellet, a principle that arose after the discharge of a house film of the Abraham Zapruder assassination in 1975. was performed
Within the assassination of Dr. King, Dr. Spitz and two different forensic pathologists likewise Agreed With the unique evaluation by officers that the civil rights chief was killed by a single bullet from a high-velocity rifle.
When Senator Edward M. Kennedy moved to Chappaquiddick, Mass. in 1969. maintained a bridge in, killing his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, when her household tried to dam an try to exhume her physique for an post-mortem. Dr. Spitz, then a medical expert in Baltimore, testified on behalf of his mother and father that an post-mortem couldn’t make clear whether or not loss of life was because of drowning or different accidents, and that an exhumation could be pointless. The choose agreed.
Werner Uri Spitz was born on August 22, 1926, in Stargard, Germany (now a part of Poland) to Siegfried and Anna (Issue) Spitz, each physicians.
His mother and father, who had been Jewish, fled the specter of Nazism to Obligatory Palestine (now Israel) earlier than World Struggle II, touring on a ship filled with Jewish docs and their households. Werner attended medical college in Geneva and Jerusalem, graduating from the Hebrew College Hadassah Medical College in 1953.
He drew on pathology for its aspect of detective work. However for a forensic pathologist — working on the intersection of drugs and crime — Israel supplied modest alternatives. In seven years, Dr. Spitz later recalled, he solely investigated one homicide: the stabbing loss of life of a bagel vendor by a rival bagel producer.
After immigrating to the USA in 1959, nonetheless, he was assigned as assistant chief medical expert for Maryland, based mostly in Baltimore, and located no scarcity of homicides to research.
In 1961, he married Annie Keats, who survives him. Moreover him and his son Daniel, who can also be a pathologist, Dr. Spitz has one other son, Dr. Survived by Jonathan Spitz, a surgeon; a daughter, Rhona Dempsey, a lawyer; and 10 grandchildren. He lived in Grosse Pointe Shores, Mich.
In 1973, Dr. Spitz and a colleague, Russell Fisher, revealed “Medicolegal Investigation of Loss of life: Pointers for the Utility of Pathology to Crime Investigation,” which Dr. Established Spitz because the founder of contemporary forensic pathology. Later editions included a brand new co-author, his son Daniel, who as a boy chased his father’s guide into the basement to have a look at its graphic pictures.
Dr. Spitz’s nationwide repute had lengthy ensured that he was in demand as an knowledgeable witness within the nation’s most high-profile homicide circumstances.
After OJ Simpson Acquitted in a prison trial of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her good friend Ronald Goldman, Dr. Spitz testified in a civil case that the small cuts on Mrs. Simpson’s left hand had been attributable to Ms. Simpson’s fingernails as she fought for her life. . A jury discovered Mr. Simpson responsible for wrongful loss of life.
Within the trial of Casey Anthony, a Florida girl accused of murdering her younger daughter, Kelly, in 2008, Dr. Spitz was a witness for the protection, which argued that the lady had drowned. Dr. Spitz undermined a key a part of the state’s manslaughter cost by testifying that the machine that prosecutors stated was used to suffocate Kelly was administered after her loss of life. He stated that if she had been alive, there would have been pores and skin marks on the sticky aspect of the tape. Miss Anthony was acquitted.
And in a high-profile homicide case in New York Metropolis in 1986, Dr. Spitz Robert E. Chambers Jr. was a key trial witness in opposition to what tabloids referred to as the “preppy killer” of Jennifer Levine, 18, whose half-clothed physique. was present in Central Park. Mr Chambers advised police he by chance killed Ms Levine throughout consensual intercourse that went too far.
However Dr. Spitz testified that Mr. Chambers strangled Ms. Levine by twisting her shirt right into a noose. Protection counsel, throughout a cross-examination that changed into a shouting match, requested Dr. accused Spitz of switching sides, saying he had beforehand advised him a distinct principle of loss of life.
After 9 days of deliberations during which the jury couldn’t attain a verdict, Mr. Chambers pleaded responsible to the lesser cost.
On the age of 95, two years earlier than his loss of life, Dr. Spitz advised Time that he didn’t shrink back from inspecting human stays, however stated the details of a number of the deaths had an eerie energy.
“It is truly not troublesome for me to try this, as a result of I’ve performed so many circumstances,” he stated. “However then I’m going house and fall asleep, and I dream about it, and it is horrible.”
