Werner Spitz

Werner Uri Spitz (born August 22, 1926 in Stargard in Pomerania ) is a German-American forensic pathologist . He gained notoriety through his work in the investigation of the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King as well as through his textbooks, which are standard literature in the subject.

Life

Werner Spitz was born in 1926 as the son of Siegfried and Anna Spitz in Stargard in Pomerania . Because of the growing anti-Semitism, the parents, both doctors, decided to emigrate to Palestine, which at that time was under a League of Nations mandate . Spitz later took on a position in forensic medicine and gained his first experience as an assistant in autopsies . He later studied medicine in Geneva and after four years returned to the medical faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem , where he completed his doctorate at the age of 27. In 1959, Spitz emigrated to America to pursue his passion, forensic pathology. He worked in Baltimore , Maryland and Detroit . He is the father of Daniel Spitz, who is also a pathologist.

Career

Spitz is considered one of the most distinguished forensic pathologists in the USA and has been consulted as an expert on various high-profile cases over the course of his career.

In 1969, Spitz testified on behalf of Joseph and Gwen Kopechne, the parents of Mary Jo Kopechne , who was killed in a car accident in Ted Kennedy's vehicle . Kopechne was believed to have drowned after Kennedy's car drifted off the road from a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island and fell into the water. Kopechne's parents tried to prevent their daughter's body from being exhumed and autopsied. Spitz stated that the autopsy was unnecessary and that the evidence available was sufficient to conclude that Kopechne drowned. Kopechne's parents got it right and the exhumation was rejected by the court.

In 1975, Spitz was asked to provide advice to both the Rockefeller Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations . He checked the autopsy done 12 years earlier by military pathologists on the assassinated President John F. Kennedy . "You botched the autopsy," said Spitz. "They had absolutely no experience in forensic pathology." He attributed the flaws in the investigation to the fact that forensic pathology was still in its infancy in the United States at the time. Despite his conclusion that the original investigation was flawed, he agreed with the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination.

In 1979 he worked for the same commissions investigating the murder of Martin Luther King . Ultimately, the commissions concluded that King was killed by a shot by James Earl Ray .

In 1996, Spitz was interviewed as a forensic expert on the indictment in the civil case against OJ Simpson . The subject of the investigation was the exact circumstances of the death of Ron Goldman, who was murdered as well as Nicole Brown-Simpson, who was divorced from Simpson. Spitz confirmed that Goldman, who was attacked with a knife, must have sustained a serious injury early on and that the fight with his killer could only have lasted a few minutes. This assessment proved important because if the fight lasted longer (up to 20 minutes), as advocated by Simpson's lawyers, Simpson could have been ruled out as a murderer. Ultimately, Simpson was found unanimously guilty by a jury and sentenced to pay more than $ 33 million to the families of the bereaved.

literature

• Werner Spitz: Spitz and Fisher's Medicolegal Investigation of Death: Guidelines for the Application of Pathology to Crime Investigation . 4th edition. 2005, ISBN 978-0-398-07544-6 .