Murder of Kathy Mabry
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To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, check us out at patreon.com/forensictales. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. Wrongful convictions. The process of convicting an innocent person. To us, it's a mistake in our justice system. Mistakes happen. But what if it happened to you?

And what if you discovered the mistake wasn't a mistake? A judge uttering those two words, wrongful conviction, would mean much more. Your life, your innocence, your freedom, everything. This is Forensic Tales, episode number 86, The Murder of Kathy Mabry. ♪♪

Thank you.

Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell. Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.

If you're interested in supporting the show, getting early access to weekly episodes, bonus material, ad-free episodes, merchandise, and much more, consider visiting our Patreon page at patreon.com slash forensic tales.

Another great way you can help support Forensic Tales is by leaving us a positive rating with a review or telling friends and family who love true crime about us. Now, let's jump right into this week's case. Judy Mae Wilson from Isola, Mississippi, last saw her adult daughter, Kathy Mabry, just after 7 p.m. on Saturday, March 22, 1997.

Judy watched as Kathy cooked dinner for her two young sons before heading out the front door. Kathy turned to her mom and told her that she would be back in about an hour, except she never came home. Isla, Mississippi is a tiny town that sits in Humphreys County with less than 900 people.

The city was once a place known for its cotton. Now it's a town known for catfish. Raising catfish, processing it, shipping it, and of course, eating it. Judy Wilson and her husband raised eight children in Isola, including Kathy. Everyone in town knew the Wilson family as being quiet but well-respected, never once to cause any trouble.

Seven out of the eight Wilson children grew up and moved out of Mississippi. Most of them settled into Chicago and had families of their own, but not Kathy. She stayed in Mississippi. After high school graduation, Kathy attended a little bit of college, but after about a year, she dropped out and she picked up a crack addiction.

Kathy's drug addiction led her down a path that could only be described as a roller coaster. One minute, she would kick her drug habit. The next, she was back to using. She stopped using and met a man with whom she married and had two sons with. But when the crack came back into her life, her marriage fell apart.

After the marriage, Kathy was in and out of abusive relationships with different men, men who physically and emotionally abused her. Eventually, with nowhere else to go, Kathy moved back in with her mom, Judy, in Mississippi.

Judy was worried when her daughter Kathy left her house on Saturday, March 22, 1997, and didn't return home that night. It wasn't like her daughter not to keep her word to her own mother, and it wasn't like her to just leave her two young sons behind. She told her mom that she would be back home in an hour when she left the house. Topps.

Now, the first thing that came to Judy's mind was that her daughter was back on drugs. Even though it had been several months since she had last used, she's still worried she might have relapsed. Maybe she left the house, got high somewhere, and isn't coming home for the night. By Sunday morning, Kathy still hadn't returned home. And by this point, Judy was really, really worried.

Then Sunday turned into Monday and still no sign of Kathy. By Monday morning, Judy decided to call Kathy's then boyfriend, James Earl Gates. Judy didn't like Gates, who was 48 years old at the time. She didn't like him because he was just another one of the men in her daughter's life who was physically and emotionally abusive towards her.

But after not having any contact with Kathy in almost two full days, she decided to give him a call to see if maybe he knew something. When James answers the phone, he tells Judy that he had no idea where Kathy was. And not only did he not know where she was, he told her that he'd been calling Kathy all weekend long, but she hadn't returned any of his phone calls.

After the phone call with Kathy's boyfriend, Judy is panicked. Her worst fears as a mother are starting to come true, and she's starting to think that something bad may have happened to her daughter. So after speaking with Gates, the boyfriend, she decides, well, now it's time I need to pick up the phone and I need to call the police.

So the police send out a patrol car around the town to see if they can find any sign of Kathy. Remember, this is a tiny, tiny town. Fewer than 900 people live here. So if you can picture this, instead of a dozen cop cars going out to search for Kathy, they only have one.

But after this one patrol car went out and spoke to several people in the area, the police learn that no one in town has seen her. Around 5.30 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday, March 25th, Junior Mitchell, a truck driver, pulled up his big rig up to his house in Belzoni, Mississippi, the next town over from Isola.

Junior Mitchell parks his big rig truck and begins filling it up with gas in the front yard. Mitchell no longer lives in the home because he had moved in with his girlfriend a couple months earlier. So at the time on March 25th, no one was living in the house. It was completely empty. So as Junior Mitchell continues to fill up his truck with gas, he spots something on the house's carport that catches his attention.

he noticed that someone had kicked out a wall panel on the garage door. Mitchell's first thought after seeing this was that maybe some drug dealers had broken into the house and maybe they were squatters. Now, I know this might sound odd, but this actually wasn't the first time that this very incident has happened on his property since he's moved out and moved in with his girlfriend.

So Mitchell put the gas pump back and decided, well, I need to go check this out. So he decides to go walk up to his house. As he's walking up to the house, he fully expects to find one, maybe two, maybe three drug addicts inside. Basically, he's going to get inside and tell them to go away. This isn't their property. But when he approached his front door to go inside, he

he saw something else that caught his attention. This time, it was blood. Right there at his front door, Junior Mitchell sees a trail of blood coming from the front door. He opens the door to discover the bloody body of an adult female victim lying on the floor. Kathy Mabry was no longer missing. She was dead.

Kathy Mabry's murder shocked everyone in Humphreys County. Although Humphreys is the seventh poorest county in the United States' poorest state, Mississippi, it was a very close-knit community. The poverty rate in Humphreys sits at around 40% of its roughly 9,000 residents.

Although the vast majority of the population is considered to live below the poverty line, violent crime just didn't happen in Humphreys. And when I say that violent crime didn't happen, I mean that back in 2012, the county saw one murder, one single homicide. That's it.

So when the word spread about Kathy's murder and how her body had been dumped in a vacant, empty house, it was shocking. Stephen Hain performed Kathy's autopsy. Even though Stephen Hain was not a board-certified forensic pathologist and he didn't hold a medical license, he had been in charge of many of the autopsies performed in this part of Mississippi.

Now, there's a common misconception that anyone who performs an autopsy, well, must be a doctor. They must have gone to medical school, passed their boards, took their exams, completed their residencies. But that's not always the case in the United States. Autopsies that are ordered by the state can be performed by a county coroner who might not necessarily be a doctor.

However, the term medical examiner refers to someone who is a doctor and therefore went to medical school. But to be a county coroner and perform state-ordered autopsies, that individual is not required to be a doctor or attend medical school. Now, this isn't to say at all that county coroners are no less skilled at performing their duties. Not at all.

I think it's just a common misconception, and many people use terms like county coroner, medical examiner, forensic pathologist. They use these terms interchangeably without really understanding the difference.

So back in the 90s into the 2000s, in this part of the state of Mississippi, most, if not all, of the autopsies were being performed by Stephen Haynes, a county coroner. In the days following Kathy's autopsy, Stephen Haynes noted that she was found in a pool of her own blood. She suffered a traumatic death.

Not only she had been brutally murdered, but she was also raped. Her throat was slashed. She had slashes across her entire face and head, and she was left to bleed to death in an empty house where presumably no one would find her body for days, if not weeks, and if not months.

The police interviewed dozens of people who were seen around the vacant home in the days leading up to Kathy's murder. They were all questioned about what they saw or what they knew about her murder. And the police also needed to clear many of these people as being possible suspects in the case.

But after a dozen or so of these interviews, one name kept popping up that shifted the police's attention in the investigation. And the name was Douglas Myers. The police learned that Douglas Myers, a drug addict himself, had recently visited the vacant home. When the police caught up to him, he had a scratch that ran across his entire face, which

suggesting that he had been in a recent physical altercation with someone or the type of scratch someone would leave behind on the person attacking them. Police first asked Douglas Myers, how did you get that scratch on your face? Now, this seems like it would be a pretty straightforward question to answer. But according to Douglas Myers, it wasn't.

Every time the police asked him about this scratch, he kept changing his story over and over again. But Douglas Myers wasn't the only possible suspect that the police had their eyes on. They also looked into Kathy's abusive older boyfriend, James Gates.

Gates made for a pretty easy suspect. He was the boyfriend. He had a long history of being abusive towards Kathy. Of course, the police are going to look at him for the murder.

When Gates is brought in for questioning, he seems devastated by Kathy's murder. He didn't get defensive with the police officers. He answered all of their questions about when was the last time he saw Kathy or when was the last time he spoke to her, where he was on the Saturday night when she disappeared. He seemed to have an answer for everything without getting defensive and not really acting like someone who was guilty for it.

So, without any solid evidence against him, Gates was free to go that night. But that was all about to change. A couple of days after the autopsy, Stephen Hain provided the police with his official report. In his report, Hain made one important note besides the obvious cuts to Kathy's neck, face, and head.

He reported that Kathy had several bite marks across her body. Whoever slit her throat also bit her. In this same autopsy report, Stephen Haynes said that he consulted with Michael West, a former dentist and bite mark analysis expert.

Hayne called on Michael West to report on his findings of the bite marks found on Kathy's body because West was, at least according to himself, an expert on the science of bite mark analysis.

He even claimed to have created a new method that used ultraviolet light to match bite marks on the skin to the person who left the mark based on their unique dental impressions, something that he claimed no one else in the industry could do, or at the very least, they didn't conduct this type of ultraviolet light test.

So after studying the bite marks on Kathy's body and comparing them to her boyfriend James Gates' teeth and his dental impressions, he concluded they were a match. It was Gates who left the bite marks and therefore had to be her killer, right?

A couple of days after the coroner released his autopsy report, including the bite mark findings, James Gates was arrested for his girlfriend Kathy's murder on April 1st, 1997 and booked into the Humphreys County Jail. Gates' arrest at the time came as a relief to Kathy's family, especially her mom, Judy Wilson.

Judy had witnessed time and time again just how abusive Gates was towards her daughter. She saw him hit her on several occasions. So when he was arrested for her brutal murder, it didn't really come as a surprise. This was completely expected. His arrest provided some sort of relief for Kathy's family that the person responsible for her murder was now in jail.

While James Gates sat in county jail awaiting trial, his defense attorney started doing his due diligence by reviewing all of the state's evidence against him. He knew that this was going to be an uphill battle trying to get an acquittal, so he needed to find something in the evidence file that could help his defense.

And the first thing he did was turn to Michael West's bite mark report. Right from the get-go, his report screamed with red flags. The first red flag was the method. Michael West claimed to be a pioneer in this new bite mark analysis involving ultraviolet light and yellow glasses, a method...

not used by anyone else in the forensic science community. And West also claimed to be the only person in the country who could perform this exclusive and unique method. Again, another red flag. In a court hearing in October 1997, Gates' defense attorney brought his concerns about the bite mark analysis to Humphrey County's circuit court judge, Janie Lewis.

He asked the judge to suppress all of the bite mark evidence, arguing that the report isn't credible and it's not reliable. Therefore, if it's not credible and it's not reliable under the law, this evidence should not be admissible in court.

At the time of the hearing, Judge Lewis disagreed with the defense attorney. He didn't believe there was any issue about the report and instead allowed the defense to hire its own expert to provide testimony on the bite mark analysis.

Over the recent years, bite mark analysis in criminal cases has often been referred to as, quote, junk science. In fact, many experts in the field of forensic science have pushed for bite mark analysis reports to be inadmissible in criminal court altogether. Those who argue that bite mark analysis is junk science point to the inconsistencies in this type of analysis.

These people argue that you just can't compare bite marks like you can compare DNA or any other type of forensic evidence. It's just not as reliable. In fact, in 2016, just a couple years ago, the Texas Forensic Science Commission came out and recommended that bite mark analysis shouldn't be admissible in court until there's enough research on its validity.

They argue that there needs to be a lot more scientific proof and a lot more scientific data to support bite mark analysis findings. So after the state of Texas put out their opinion, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology declared that bite mark analysis has no validity in the scientific community.

A couple of months later, while Gates is still sitting in jail, the state prosecutor sent out scraping samples taken from underneath Kathy's fingernails for DNA testing. They wanted to find out if they could recover a DNA profile from the fingernail scrapings. At the time, which is the mid to late 1990s, DNA testing was just starting to ramp up.

Police departments all across the country now had crime labs that could test for DNA profiles. But this type of testing was pretty limited. The DNA testing we had back in the 90s is nowhere near as sophisticated as it is now in 2021.

But back in 1997, the prosecutor sent out the scraping samples and sent them out for DNA testing in Jackson. The test results came back about one month later. The lab did recover DNA from underneath Kathy's fingernails, which meant that she did fight for her life and that during this fight, she scratched her attacker at least once.

And we know that she scratched him hard enough so that he left behind a full DNA profile underneath her fingernails. But the DNA sample didn't match her boyfriend James Gates. It wasn't his DNA.

In fact, the unknown male DNA profile didn't match anyone known to the police, including Douglas Myers, the local drug addict who the police questioned early on with the scratch across his face. This finding during the investigation was shocking.

Everyone who followed the case and everyone who was involved in the case expected that the DNA profile from the fingernail scrapings would match James Earl, the boyfriend, the guy that was sitting in jail for all of this. He was, of course, behind bars.

So when the test results and the DNA test results came back to the prosecutor's office, the defense quickly filed a motion to put Gates' case back on the court's calendar so that they could conduct a hearing. On January 21st, 1998, nearly 10 months after Kathy's murder, all criminal charges were dropped against James Gates and he was released from the county jail.

Although the bite mark analysis report pointed towards Gates, the DNA evidence didn't, and he was free to go. After the charges against Gates were dropped, the police were now back at square one in their investigation to try and find Kathy's real killer. They knew that they had to...

tread lightly with the situation when it came to accusing another person of the murder after Gates had already spent almost a year behind bars and DNA evidence proved that he was innocent.

So the police at this point, they were in a little bit of a struggle. They wanted to go out there and find Kathy's real killer. But at the same time, they knew that they couldn't make that mistake again. Now, because the fingernail

DNA scrapings didn't match anyone who the police interviewed in the case so far. This meant that authorities needed to start from square one. They needed to start over in this investigation. And unfortunately, by this point, starting over in the investigation meant that they were now almost one year behind.

Without any solid leads or tips in the case, Kathy's murder turned cold, and the police were forced to turn their attention to other cases. And it wouldn't be until several years later that anyone opened Kathy's case again. Are you searching for a new psychological thriller book that you just can't put down?

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Download and start reading your copy of Crazy Is As Crazy Does, The Life of a Serial Killer today on Amazon or on Kindle. That's Crazy Is As Crazy Does, The Life of a Serial Killer by John H. Mudgett. In 2007, 10 years after Kathy's murder, an attorney and law professor named Tucker Carrington moved from Washington, D.C. to Mississippi.

He moved to Mississippi with one mission in mind, to open and start the Mississippi Innocence Project. One of the first things Tucker Carrington and the Mississippi Innocence Project did was look at cases throughout the state involving Stephen Hain, Humphrey County's medical examiner, and Michael West, the bite mark analysis expert who worked on Kathy's case.

The Mississippi Innocence Project became aware of several cases involving Hain as well as West after several people were wrongfully convicted and had their convictions overturned.

And all of these cases involved either Stephen Hain as the coroner or involved Michael West providing testimony about bite mark analysis. In other words, either Hain and or West worked on these cases. Most of these wrongful conviction cases involved inaccurate autopsy findings and or faulty bite mark analysis conducted by Michael West.

During the Innocence Project's investigation into Hain and into West, the organization uncovered some pretty disturbing information.

For one, they discovered that Stephen Hain, the coroner who also performed Kathy Mabry's autopsy, had performed almost 90% of the autopsies in Mississippi at that time, which would equal anywhere from 1,500 to 1,800 autopsies each year. Now, just to put those figures into perspective,

According to the National Association of Medical Examiners, the recommended number of autopsies to be performed in a single year by a single medical examiner or coroner should be no more than 250. Stephen Hain performed almost 2,000.

put these numbers and these figures into even more perspective for our conversation, that same organization refuses to certify any crime lab where a coroner or medical examiner performs more than 325 autopsies in a single year, meaning the lab that Hain operated in Mississippi would not have been certified.

There are many reasons why medical examiners are limited to the number of autopsies they should perform. I think the most obvious reason here is that by limiting the number of autopsies performed, we can essentially increase the coroner's ability to perform them, number one, accurately, and number two, thoroughly.

In a report obtained by the Mississippi Innocence Project, in one of the autopsies that Stephen Hain performed, he reported his remarks about the appearance of the man's spleen. However, this man's spleen had been previously removed before death. Why would he be reporting on the appearance of the spleen when it wouldn't have been in this man's body at the time of autopsy?

There was another report, very similar report, that Stephen Hain noted the same mistake in a case involving an infant who had drowned. The list of errors found in autopsy reports written by Stephen Hains is endless. Over the years, Hain has been involved in many high-profile cases surrounding his controversial practices and testimony.

The Mississippi Innocence Project also learned that over the years, Hain performed many of his autopsies in the basement of a funeral home, not in a crime lab. But it wasn't just about Stephen Hain. The Mississippi Innocence Project also uncovered some major concerns involving the bite mark expert Michael West.

In 1997, at the same time of Kathy's murder, West was the subject of professional criticism in both the ABA Journal and the National Law Journal for his unethical work on bite mark analysis. The journals regarded him as, quote, a fraud, someone who was not as skilled as he claimed himself to be in the field.

The American Board of Forensic Odontologists also even suspended West for falsely testifying in court about his qualifications. Remember, Michael West was the only one who essentially put Kathy's then-boyfriend behind bars for a year based on his findings.

While the Innocence Project continued to look into cases involving Hayne and Michael West, Innocence Project attorney Will McIntosh started looking into Kathy's case in January of 2011, now 14 years after her murder. Will McIntosh partnered with Sam Howell, the Mississippi State Crime Lab director, to see what evidence they could dig up in Kathy's case.

To their surprise, all of the biological and forensic evidence from Kathy's case was still stored at the crime lab, which meant they could still test it. With the evidence in hand, Sam Howell created a DNA profile from the fingernail scrapings recovered from underneath Kathy's nails.

Once he created the DNA profile, he entered it into CODIS, the national database for DNA in the U.S., and when he entered it into CODIS, it came back with a hit. The DNA profile matched 37-year-old Michael Johnson, a former resident of Balzoni, the town where Kathy was murdered.

This DNA profile confirmed that Michael Johnson was the person responsible for raping and murdering Kathy Mabry all those years earlier. Tracking down and finding Michael Johnson was easy. That's because he was already in prison.

Five years after he raped and murdered Kathy, he was arrested for beating a man to death with a hammer in another part of Mississippi. After nearly 14 years, the true identity of Kathy's killer was finally uncovered. But the path to finding the person responsible wasn't easy. The investigation left one innocent person behind bars for the murder for almost a year.

And it led to the discovery of a decades-long state scandal involving Stephen Hayne, the coroner, and Michael West, a self-proclaimed bite mark expert. Together, Stephen Hayne and Michael West contributed evidence and testimony on several cases that led to wrongful convictions. They even provided testimony in death penalty cases.

It's hard to say exactly how many innocent people have been sent to prison because of their gross negligence over the years in Mississippi. And if it wasn't for the hard work and diligence by the Mississippi Innocence Project and their investigation into their misconduct, that we may have never uncovered the truth.

The aftermath of their misconduct continues. Just in 2012, Lay Stubbs and Tammy Vance were freed from prison after spending 11 years behind bars after Michael West provided testimony about bite marks found on the victim. Both individuals were later found to be wrongfully accused and both had their convictions overturned.

As of today, Stephen Hain no longer performs autopsies in the state of Mississippi, and Michael West no longer claims to be an expert in the field of bite mark analysis. James Gates, Kathy's boyfriend, who spent almost a year in jail for her murder, died from a heart attack several years ago.

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