Associated Press
PITTSBURGH-Dr. Cyril Wecht, a pathologist and lawyer whose biting cynicism and controversial positions on high-profile deaths similar to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy captured the eye of prosecutors and tv viewers alike, died Monday. He was 93.
Wecht's death was announced by the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts, which didn’t release the cause or location of death, saying only that he “died peacefully.”
Wecht's near-meteoric rise to fame began in 1964, three years after he re-entered civilian life following a temporary stint at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. At the time, Wecht was working as an assistant district attorney in Allegheny County and as a pathologist at a hospital in Pittsburgh.
The request got here from a bunch of forensic scientists: review the Warren Commission report, which concluded that Lee Harvey single-handedly assassinated Oswald Kennedy. And Wecht did just that along with his usual thoroughness – the start of a lifelong obsession with proving his theory that a couple of shooter was involved within the murder.
After reviewing autopsy documents, noting that the president's brain was missing, and watching amateur video of the assassination, Wecht concluded that a single bullet was involved within the attack, killing Kennedy and the governor of Texas injured. John Connally was “absolute nonsense.”
Wecht's lecture demonstration, during which he detailed his theory that it was inconceivable for a single bullet to cause the damage it did that November day in Dallas, was included in Oliver Stone's film “JFK” after the director consulted with him had. It became the famous court scene that showed the trail of the “miracle ball”.
Attorney F. Lee Bailey called Wecht the “key leader in the challenge” to the Warren report. Wecht's verbal altercation with Senator Arlen Specter, a commission staffer, also became public knowledge, culminating within the accusation in his book “Cause of Death” that the politician's support for the one bullet theory was “a stupid, pseudoscientific fallacy.” preferably.”
But somehow Wecht and Specter overcame their differences and developed something of a friendship, with the senator defending the pathologist during a grueling, five-year legal battle that cost him much of his life savings and ended in 2009.
In the end, Wecht emerged victorious, even as a series of legal maneuvers and court decisions forced prosecutors to drop all fraud and theft charges against him in a case involving allegations that he abdicated his public position as a doctor Allegheny County exploited auditors to expand its multimillion-dollar private practice.
Wecht's openness about Kennedy's assassination and the publicity it generated later made him the go-to pathologist for dozens of other high-profile cases, from Elvis Presley to JonBenet Ramsey, the child beauty queen whose death remains unsolved to this day.
In the murder trial of school principal Jean Harris, who is accused of murdering “Scarsdale Diet” Dr. Herman Tarnower was accused, Wecht testified unsuccessfully for the defense. His testimony in the trial of Claus von Bülow may have helped acquit von Bülow of the charge that he attempted to kill his heiress Sunny.
After studying Elvis' autopsy report, Wecht concluded that the King of Rock likely died of an overdose rather than heart disease and shared his findings on national television. His findings led Tennessee authorities to reopen the case in 1994, but in the end the official cause of death remained unchanged.
In the months leading up to the OJ Simpson murder trial in 1994, Wecht was a frequent guest on talk shows, speculating on the “Today” and “Good Morning America” shows about the significance of blood samples and other evidence.
When Michael Jackson died in 2009, Wecht went on air again and discussed the deadly mix of drugs and tranquilizers that killed the King of Pop.
Although Wecht spent more than five decades dealing with death on an almost daily basis, he managed to remain overall optimistic, his hearty laugh resonated deep in his belly, and he often humored himself with his own, sometimes offensive and biting jokes.
“I want to be alive when I die. Think about it,” Wecht said. “I mean, okay, what is life?”
The key to dying, he said, is acknowledging those you love, because when you die they will no longer be there.
“I will be away from my wife, my children, my grandchildren and one day my great-grandchildren. That’s what death means to me,” Wecht said.
“I want it to go on forever.”
However, Wecht was always a realist and took the time to detail many of his cases in six books. In “Cause of Death” – a book by Wecht, his son Benjamin and Mark Curriden, a former writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Dallas Morning News – attorney Alan Dershowitz praised the pathologist as the “Sherlock Holmes of forensic science.” .”
The son of a grocer, Wecht attended elementary school on the University of Pittsburgh and later earned degrees in medicine and law from the identical school. He served twice as Allegheny County coroner and accomplished his second term in 2006, when he resigned after being accused of fraud and theft.
His first term in office from 1970 to 1980 was also tense. At that point, he was also accused of using county morgues for his private forensic work as a medical expert. After a lengthy legal battle, he paid $200,000 in compensation. He also served a four-year term as an Allegheny County commissioner.
A run for the US Senate against John Heinz III. in 1982 was unsuccessful.
Survivors include his wife, Sigrid, and their 4 children, David, a justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court; Daniel, clinical professor within the Department of Neurosurgery on the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center; Benjamin, freelance author and teacher; Ingrid, a health care provider specializing in obstetrics and gynecology; and 11 grandchildren.
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