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To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, please visit 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. Two three-year-old girls from Nuxiby County, Mississippi are found murdered under very similar circumstances. They were both abducted from their homes, sexually assaulted and killed.
Their killers also left behind a strange piece of forensic evidence, a bite mark. But despite their similarities suggesting the same person was responsible for both crimes, two separate men were arrested largely based on the controversial subfield of forensic science known as bite mark analysis. This is Forensic Tales, episode number 221, The Murders of Courtney Smith and Christina Jackson.
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola.
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. As a one-woman show, your support helps me find new compelling cases and
conduct in-depth fact-based research, and produce and edit this weekly show. You can support my work in two simple ways. Become a valued patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales and leave a positive review. Now, let's get to this week's episode. Most of us who follow true crime know about DNA and fingerprints being used to help solve crimes.
DNA or a fingerprint is found at a crime scene, and law enforcement uses it to track down a suspect. The case closed. But not everyone is as familiar with bite marks when it comes to criminal investigations. In the late 1940s, the city of London was completely rocked by mysterious disappearances.
It wasn't until investigators studied bite marks found on one of the victims that they finally arrested John George Hay, a.k.a. the acid bath murderer. He had inadvertently left a bite mark on one of his victims, and that bite mark was what led detectives right to his front doorstep. Since then, hundreds, if not thousands, of criminal investigations have used bite mark analysis to make an arrest.
It's even been given a name, forensic odontology, or sometimes called forensic dentistry. Like DNA and fingerprints, bite marks can be introduced in court as evidence. Prosecutors can call forensic dentists as experts to come testify for them.
In that case, the expert will most likely tell a jury that a bite mark impression found on a victim belongs to the defendant, just like any other DNA expert would testify if they found blood. But are bite marks the same as DNA or fingerprints? Are they completely unique to us, like fingerprints and DNA? Are there risks with this type of evidence?
And if there are, what happens if we get it wrong and the wrong person goes to prison? On September 15, 1990, three-year-old Courtney Smith from Brooksville, Mississippi, went to bed next to her sisters, who were six and one. Courtney and her family lived in a small house, so all three of the girls shared a bed.
That night, Courtney's 26-year-old uncle watched the girls and went to sleep in the next room while Courtney's mom went out with a couple friends. But sometime during the night when everyone was asleep, Courtney was abducted from her bed. And it was when Courtney's mom returned home early the next morning that anyone realized she was gone. Courtney's disappearance instantly caused chaos in the small town of Brooksville.
It was everyone's worst nightmare, especially for the Smith family. A young girl, just three years old, has been kidnapped from her very own bed while sleeping next to her sisters, and as her uncle slept in the room right next door. So naturally, the one question on everyone's mind was, did someone close or near the family do this? There weren't any signs of a break-in, and Courtney was taken from her bed without her uncle hearing anything.
So it seemed like someone close to the Smith family had to have done it. Courtney's family, the police, and the community all came together to help search for her. But the search didn't last long. Just two days after she disappeared, three-year-old Courtney's body was found floating in a pond just 80 yards away from her mom's house. When her body was taken out of the pond, it was immediately sent to the medical examiner's office for an autopsy to be done. And the results were just as bad.
On top of being kidnapped and murdered, Courtney had been sexually assaulted, and the medical examiner found what he described as defensive wounds all over her little body. Despite being just three, she tried to fight back. But the biggest thing that stood out from the autopsy wasn't the sexual assault. It wasn't the defensive wounds or how she was killed. It was a bite mark.
Shortly after the medical examiner found what he thought was a bite mark on Courtney's body, he called Dr. Michael West, a forensic odontologist, to come look at it. And according to Dr. Michael West, the mark definitely came from teeth. There was no question that Courtney's kidnapper and killer also bit her and left an impression of his teeth on her.
According to him, the bite marks were, quote, the results of animalistic behavior from a man engaged in an aggressive, violent sexual attack, end quote. So not only are the police looking for a child sexual predator, but they're also looking for an extremely violent one who felt compelled to bite a little three-year-old girl after sexually assaulting her. That is a very specific type of monster they're searching for.
Early on in the investigation, one of the biggest witnesses was Courtney's older sister, six-year-old Ashley Smith. Besides their younger sister, who was only one, Ashley was the only other one in the same bedroom when Courtney was abducted. But could a six-year-old little girl be a very good witness? The Brooksville, Mississippi police brought in a special investigator to sit down and interview Ashley shortly after Courtney's body was found.
Well, he wasn't actually an investigator. His name was Robert Williams, and he was someone who worked for the police department every once in a while to create forensic sketches. He was a sketch artist, but he also worked with young children on a local television show that featured him drawing different animals in front of kids. His nickname on the TV show was Uncle Bunky.
So the police decided they would bring this guy in to speak with Ashley and try to get a sketch of what the person looked like, since he was both a sketch artist and someone who worked with kids her age. According to what Ashley told Robert Williams, a.k.a. Uncle Bunky, she saw someone come into the bedroom who was wearing what she described as a quarter in his ear. Uncle Bunky asked her if she meant he was wearing an earring.
And she said it might have been, but she kept saying it was a quarter, not an earring. Ashley said that it was really dark in the bedroom, but the light from the TV coming from the next room helped her see the man. However, throughout this entire interview, Ashley is all over the place. It's pretty much what you would expect if you sat down and tried to interview a six-year-old about what she saw.
She changed her story multiple times. She made stuff up. She agreed with everything Uncle Bunky, a.k.a. Robert Williams, suggested, even though he had no idea because he wasn't there. She cracked jokes and laughed about things.
At one point, she even said the kidnapper took her sister Courtney away in an airplane before getting into a spaceship. And on his way out, he kept saying, na-na-na-na-na-na, I've got your sister. Now, she was just being a typical six-year-old girl who didn't quite understand the gravity of the situation. However, despite the widely inconsistent details of her story and what she claimed to have seen,
The police thought she provided enough information to identify their first suspect, LaVon Brooks. When the police asked Ashley if she had the name of the person she thought kidnapped her sister, she said something like Trayvon. And from that, investigators basically cherry-picked what the truth from Ashley's statements were to what was fiction.
They decided that the quarter she described seeing in his ear was actually an earring, and the name Trayvon was actually LaVon Brooks. Not only did LaVon Brooks closely match the forensic sketch that Robert Williams created, but he also had a strong connection to the Smith family. He had once dated Courtney's mother, Sonia Smith.
He also just so happened to wear an earring in one of his ears or a quarter like six-year-old Ashley Smith described. So that was it. LaVon Brooks became the prime suspect in Courtney's murder. LaVon Brooks' photograph was put in a photo lineup and shown to Courtney's sister, Ashley. And she was asked, was this the guy who kidnapped your sister? And Ashley said, yes, it was. So that meant the police also had a positive identification.
But before the police could go in and make an arrest on Brooks, they needed one more piece of evidence to match, the bite mark. So right after Brooks was brought down to the police station, they had him provide a sample of his bite mark. He was asked to bite down on a mold so that an impression could be made of his teeth.
Once they had that, they turned it over to Dr. Michael West, the same forensic odontologist who reviewed the bite mark on Courtney Smith's body at the autopsy. Now, here's where things start to go really badly for LaVon Brooks. According to Dr. West, after comparing his teeth impressions with the bite marks found on Courtney's body, he reported, quote,
The dental structures of one LaVon Brooks did indeed, and without a doubt, inflict the bite mark found on the body of Courtney Smith. End quote. He wasn't saying the impressions were similar or that it could have been Brooks. Dr. West said that he was 100% certain Brooks' teeth matched the teeth impression found on the body.
And beyond any reasonable doubt, Brooks was the guy simply based on the bite mark. That was it. That was everything the Mississippi police needed to finally arrest Brooks and charge him with sexual assault and murder. Despite Brooks adamantly denying doing anything wrong, he was arrested and thrown in jail.
At the time of Courtney's murder, Brooks was 31 years old and worked at a small nightclub in Macomb, Mississippi called Larry's Disco. He was the go-to guy and did everything from being the bouncer to the cook to the guy who parked your car at the club. And in 1990, he had just found out that he was going to be a father for the first time. According to Brooks' defense, he was working at the nightclub the night Courtney was abducted and killed.
And after he got off work, he headed straight home. But the police didn't consider this to be an airtight alibi. There was no record of the exact time Brooks got off work and no one could vouch for him at home. So this meant there was plenty of time for him to have committed the murder that night. Plus, he knew the Smith family because he used to date Courtney's mom, Sonia Smith.
And one of the names that Ashley Smith threw out to investigators was Trayvon. LaVon Brooks was now headed to trial facing capital murder charges. If convicted, he faced spending the rest of his life in prison, or even worse, the death penalty. At Brooks' trial in 1992, two years after the murder, the main piece of evidence for the prosecution was, not surprising, the bite mark.
Dr. West testified for the prosecution that, without a doubt, it was Brooks' teeth found on the victim. And that was really all the jury needed to hear. By the time of the trial, Dr. West had become basically a rock star in the world of forensics. He claimed to have developed techniques that only he could perform.
and one of his specialties was bite mark analysis, a relatively new and controversial subfield of forensic science. He said he could identify bite marks on human skin that no one else could. Then he could match those marks to one person, excluding everyone else in the entire world. In one particular case, he claimed he could identify someone based on a bite mark left on a bologna sandwich.
not by the DNA left behind on the bologna sandwich, but just by the teeth impressions on the bread. Throughout his career, Dr. West's testimony helped put a lot of people in prison. Besides bite mark analysis, he was also considered an expert in other areas, like gunshot residue and blood spatter patterns.
So chances are, if Dr. West testified for the prosecution, the defendant was almost always found guilty. One of the people on the jury was actually someone who grew up with LaVon Brooks and considered him a friend. His name was Boss Stevens. Both he and Brooks grew up together, and Brooks' family even worked for the Stevens family at one point.
So Boss Stevens had a really hard time believing that someone he knew so well growing up could have done something like this. The LaVon Brooks he knew wasn't capable of raping and killing a three-year-old little girl. But when he heard the bite mark testimony from Dr. Michael West, he had no choice but to believe the forensic expert. Dr. West was quote-unquote an expert after all.
Brooks's defense team basically had no defense. They didn't have their own expert to refute the bite-mark testimony provided by Dr. West. His alibi from the night of the murder wasn't very good, and he already had a connection to the Smith family. So if anyone could get inside the house without detection, it was probably someone like him. Brooks stuck to his original story. He didn't do it and wasn't anywhere near the Smith house that night.
And it certainly wasn't his bite mark on Courtney's body. He didn't even have a criminal record before this arrest. So according to his defense, why would he go from a seemingly ordinary guy to a violent child sexual predator? Well, none of that was enough to convince the jury. Nothing could refute the bite mark evidence.
So after several days of testimony, Brooks was convicted of murdering Courtney Smith on January 22, 1992, and sentenced to life in prison. He would go to prison still maintaining his innocence. But the crimes against little girls in Nuxiby County, Mississippi, didn't stop just because he was behind bars. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash tails to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash tails. Four months after LaVon Brooks was sentenced to life in prison for allegedly murdering Courtney Smith, another little girl from the same exact Mississippi county was also murdered.
Her name was three-year-old Christina Jackson. Sometime during the early morning hours of May 3, 1992, Christina Jackson was kidnapped from her home. Just like with Courtney Smith, Christina's body was found floating in a pond near her house two days later and had all the same markings. Signs of a sexual assault, defensive wounds, and bite marks all over her body.
Back at her house, the police found no signs of a forced entry besides a broken window near Christina Jackson's bedroom. All the same people who investigated Courtney Smith's murder were also key players in the Christina Jackson case. Detectives from the Nuxiby County Sheriff's Department, District Attorney Forrest Allgood, Dr. Michael West, the bite mark expert,
and the forensic pathologist, Stephen Hain. It was like deja vu. Based on their investigation, they came up with one suspect, Kennedy Brewer, Christina's mother's boyfriend at the time of the murder. Now, despite all the similarities with Courtney Smith's murder, suggesting that the two might have been perpetrated by the same person, the police zeroed in on Kennedy Brewer.
not only because he was the mom's boyfriend, but also because he was inside the house the night that Christina was abducted. He was supposed to be there babysitting Christina and her siblings. And even though there was a broken window right near Christina's bedroom, the police were convinced that Brewer was their guy. The two stories were almost identical. A three-year-old girl is abducted from her house and killed,
They're sexually assaulted and have bite marks all over their bodies, but for some reason, the district attorney's office and the sheriff's department don't see a connection, or they refuse to believe that there could be one. Christina Jackson couldn't have been killed by LaVon Brooks because he was already in prison for allegedly killing Courtney Smith.
And they didn't suspect Kennedy Brewer had anything to do with the Smith case either. So according to them, they had to be two separate crimes. They never even considered the possibility they were connected. Or at least if they did, they never made it public. After Christina Jackson's body was discovered, her case pretty much followed the same pattern that Courtney Smith's did.
Her body was examined by forensic pathologist Stephen Hain, the same person who reviewed Courtney's case. And the bite marks on her body were examined by Dr. Michael West, who, to no one's surprise, found that the bite marks found on Christina's body were, quote, Indeed and without a doubt inflicted by Kennedy Brewer, end quote. Right after that, Brewer was arrested and charged with first-degree murder for allegedly killing Christina Jackson.
Although he denied any involvement, he retained a private attorney and vowed to clear his name. Before the case went to trial, the Nuxibee County District Attorney, Forrest Allgood, offered Brewer a plea deal. If he agreed to plead guilty, he would be spared the death penalty. He could even get a sentence that offered him the possibility of parole someday. But Brewer and his attorneys turned down the plea deal. He didn't want to plead guilty to something that he claimed he didn't do.
especially a case involving a sexual assault of a three-year-old little girl. According to him, if he agreed to that plea deal, he would go to prison marked as a child molester. And there's nothing worse than that when you're in prison. So Brewer turned it down and decided to move forward with a trial. The trial began in March 1995, about three years after the murder.
According to the prosecution, Brewer raped and murdered Christina inside the home while he was babysitting her, and then carried her body out to the pond where it was eventually found. For the trial, Brewer's defense got another bite mark expert, Dr. Richard Savorian, to try to refute Dr. West's testimony.
Like Dr. West, Dr. Savorian was well known in the forensic science community for his work in bite mark analysis. He was also a licensed dentist and the founder of the American Board of Forensic Odontology. When he looked at the impressions, he disagreed with the prosecution and Dr. West. He testified that he thought Dr. West's claims about the certainty of the bite marks were, quote, ridiculous and
mainly because he didn't even think the marks on Christina's body were even from bite marks at all. He felt the marks probably came from insects or some other type of animals living in the pond. He testified that the marks looked nothing like human bite marks and couldn't have come from Kennedy Brewer. According to Dr. Savorian, the marks only had a top mark. They didn't have anything from the bottom.
You can't bite someone using only your top teeth and not your bottom. So in his own words, the prosecution's main piece of evidence against Brewer was, quote, ridiculous. Brewer's defense also had DNA on their side. Semen collected from Christina Jackson's body was deemed insufficient for DNA testing. So although it couldn't officially exclude Brewer like they probably wanted it to, it
it still seemed to point toward his innocence. If the DNA couldn't be tested and compared against Brewer's DNA, it could be taken as a sign of innocence, or at least help the defense establish probable doubt, which is really all that's needed to get an acquittal.
Other physical evidence included various small spots of blood on Brewer's clothing, a stain consistent with feces on a dress near where Christina slept, and a blood stain found on a blanket. But the state's forensic experts were unable to identify the ABO blood group found on all the items to figure out who exactly the DNA belonged to.
So again, Brewer couldn't be excluded, but he couldn't be ruled in either. But the jury wasn't swayed by the defense's arguments or their expert. They believed Dr. Michael West's testimony because he seemed much more confident on the stand than Dr. Savorian did. Dr. West had a big personality and it usually went over well with the jury. He was just someone who connected with people easily.
So when it came time to decide on the bite mark testimony, the jury sided with Dr. West and the prosecution. According to him, all 19 marks found on Christina's body came from Brewer's top two teeth. Somehow, his bottom teeth didn't leave any marks. And although Dr. West was facing a lot of scrutiny at the time of Brewer's trial, his testimony was still allowed to be presented.
In fact, at the time of this trial, Dr. West had become the first person ever to be suspended from the American Board of Forensic Odontology because his work was so incredibly controversial and unvalidated. The jury ultimately found Kennedy Brewer guilty of Christina Jackson's murder on March 24th, 1995.
and because he refused the plea deal before the start of the trial, he was given the death penalty. The prosecution asked for it, and the jury agreed that Brewer should be sentenced to death for what he did to Christina. After that, he was sent to death row where he would remain for the next nine years. But this story is far from over. While Kennedy Brewer and LaVon Brooks were locked up for crimes they claimed they didn't commit...
Some people on the outside were under a lot of scrutiny. The first was Dr. Michael West, the prosecution's star bite mark expert in both cases. Not only had he been suspended from the American Board of Forensic Odontology in the mid-1990s, but many of his colleagues in the forensic science community started calling into question the credibility of his testimony in many criminal trials.
And the more we learned about bite mark analysis and testimony, the more troublesome Dr. West's claims became. Remember, in both cases, he testified that the bite marks found on both victims match the accused beyond any reasonable doubt. But is that credible evidence? Does bite mark analysis hold the same credibility as, let's say, DNA does?
Well, if you asked many experts who scrutinized Dr. West's work over the years, they might argue otherwise. The first to appeal his conviction was LaVon Brooks in October 1999. By that point, he had already been in prison for seven years for allegedly killing Courtney Smith. His appeal was heard by the Mississippi State Supreme Court, but it was denied. And for the next nine years, he continued to serve out his life sentence.
Next up was Kennedy Brewer. By 2001, DNA testing had come a long way, and by that point, Brewer's case caught the attention of the Innocence Project. The reason why they became interested in the case was because of the questionable bite mark analysis by Dr. West, and because there was untested DNA.
In 2000, Brewer had written them a letter practically begging them to take on his case because, as he claimed, he was innocent. Not only did the Innocence Project take on Brewer's case, but they also took a look at LaVon Brooks' case because the two murders were almost identical, suggesting that the same person was involved in both.
After taking on the cases, the Innocence Project's first priority was to get the DNA tested in Kennedy Brewer's case. And through advanced testing, they determined two things. One, Brewer could officially be excluded as a possible suspect. His DNA didn't match. And number two, the DNA belonged to an unknown male. On top of that...
YSTR testing also excluded many of Brewer's male family members. Without a doubt, Brewer's DNA wasn't found anywhere at Christina Jackson's crime scene. But even with this DNA testing, that couldn't persuade the district attorney, Forrest Allgood. Despite the DNA evidence pointing toward another unknown male who's not Kennedy Brewer,
they refused to believe that they had the wrong person behind bars. Basically, they remained committed to the fact that Kennedy Brewer was, in their minds, 1,000% guilty. So, for the next seven years, Brewer remained in prison despite what the DNA evidence suggested.
It wasn't until 2007 that either Kennedy Brewer or LaVon Brooks had anything done in their cases. In 2007, the Innocence Project's investigation led them to the person they believed committed both murders, Justin Albert Johnson.
a 51-year-old man with a history of sexual assaults against girls and women and had been living near Courtney Smith and Christina Jackson when they were both kidnapped and murdered. DNA testing conducted by the Innocence Project linked Johnson to both murders. Justin Albert Johnson was the perpetrator, not Kennedy Brewer, and not LaVon Brooks.
Following the DNA discovery that Justin Johnson was the person behind both murders, Kennedy Brewer and LaVaughn Brooks were both released from prison in 2007. Brooks had spent 18 years in prison and Brewer spent 15 years. And both were convicted largely based on bite mark testimony.
By February 2008, all charges against Kennedy Brewer had been dropped and he had been officially exonerated in Christina Jackson's case. LaVon Brooks was also exonerated later that year for his alleged involvement in Courtney Smith's murder. They were both granted $500,000 in statutory compensation from the state of Mississippi.
As far as the actual perpetrator, Justin Albert Johnson, he was arrested in February 2008. And not long after that, he confessed to both murders and told authorities he committed the crimes on his own. He was eventually sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and was spared the death penalty because of his quote-unquote cooperation. Today, he's housed in a Mississippi prison.
But has justice really been served? And how many victims are there? Of course, Christina Jackson and Courtney Smith are victims. They were both cruelly kidnapped, raped, and murdered when they were just three years old. Not even old enough to start school. But what about the men originally accused of the crimes? Are LaVon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer victims also?
Many might argue that they are, including the Innocence Project who represented them. They're victims of faulty forensic evidence and a broken criminal justice system. By the time Brewer and Brooks were released, Dr. Hain and Dr. West had become highly controversial for their work on several criminal investigations and their alleged inappropriate relationship with prosecutors.
including District Attorney Forrest Allgood, who tried both cases. They've also been suspected of providing false medical testimony in numerous criminal trials, not just these two. According to the National Association of Medical Examiners, doctors should perform at most 250 autopsies per year.
Well, Dr. Hain admitted to performing anywhere from 1,200 to 1,800 autopsies each and every single year, numbers astronomically higher than the standard. Dr. West also came under major scrutiny. He's been accused of providing false bite mark testimony in dozens of cases that have led to wrongful convictions. And these aren't just including Brewers and Brooks.
many of the cases he's worked on have been reopened and reinvestigated to see if his testimony has led to any more wrongful convictions. In 2011, West testified during a deposition in the case of Lee Stubbs and Tammy Vance that he no longer believed his own testimony regarding bite mark evidence and that the existing science did not support bite mark identification.
In part, he said, quote, when I testified in the case, I believed in the uniqueness of human bite marks. I no longer believe in that. And if I was asked to testify in this case again, I would say I don't believe it's a system that's reliable enough to be used in court. End quote. Vance and Stubbs were both exonerated in 2013.
According to a Washington Post article, at least five people have been wrongfully convicted over the years, and each case featured Dr. West's testimony. Three other Mississippi men who were convicted in part based on testimony from Dr. Hain were also exonerated. Tyler Edmonds, Eddie Lee Howard Jr., and LeVester Browne.
Dr. West also gave misleading bite mark testimony against Howard. In 2009, Brewer and Brooks jointly filed a civil lawsuit against West and Hain for $18 million. However, the lawsuit was dismissed in 2014 after a judge ruled that they were both immune from damages. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals also upheld the ruling in 2017.
LaVon Brooks passed away in January 2018 after a five-year battle with colon cancer. That means that he only got to spend a few free years after being exonerated. In March of 2020, Kennedy Brewer's mom died and he had a stroke a few days later. Fortunately, he recovered.
And following his exoneration, he's worked various difficult factory jobs, including at a chicken processing plant and doing repairs at a catfish farm. He's done his best to try and move forward with his life after spending 15 years in prison for a crime that he was completely innocent of. So are bite marks the same as DNA or fingerprints? Are they completely unique to us like fingerprints and DNA are?
Are there any risks with this type of evidence? And if there are, what happens if we get it wrong and the wrong person goes to prison? To some, bite marks are the same as DNA and fingerprints. There's enough scientific research to back up that claim, but not everyone agrees with that.
And it's possible a lot more people than just those talked about in this episode have been wrongfully convicted based on unreliable and sometimes faulty forensic evidence. When it comes to bite mark analysis, I'll let you be the judge of its credibility. To share your thoughts on the story, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook.
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Until then, remember, not all stories have happy endings.
