Associated Press
PITTSBURGH — Dr. Cyril Wecht, a pathologist and lawyer whose biting cynicism and controversial stances on high-profile deaths such as the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy attracted the attention of prosecutors and television viewers, died Monday . He was 93 years old.
Wecht’s death was announced by the Administrative Office of the Pennsylvania Courts, which did not release the cause or location of death, saying only that he “died peacefully.”
Wecht’s almost meteoric rise to fame began in 1964, three years after he returned to civilian life after serving a brief stint at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. At the time, Wecht was an assistant district attorney in Allegheny County and a pathologist at a Pittsburgh hospital.
The request came from a group of forensic scientists: Consider the Warren Commission report which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, assassinated Kennedy. And that’s exactly what Wecht, with his usual thoroughness, did — the beginning of what became a lifelong obsession with proving his theory that more than one shooter was involved in the murder.
After reviewing autopsy documents, discovering that the president’s brain was missing, and viewing amateur video of the assassination, Wecht concluded that the commission’s findings that there was a single bullet involved in the attack that killed Kennedy and injured Texas Governor John Connally was “absolute nonsense.”
Wecht’s lecture circuit demonstration detailing his theory that there was no way a bullet could cause the damage it did that November day in Dallas was made into the Oliver Stone film “JFK” after the director consulted it. This became the famous courtroom scene showing the path of the “magic bullet”.
Attorney F. Lee Bailey called Wecht “the most important spearhead of the challenge” to the Warren report. Wecht’s verbal brawl with committee staffer Sen. Arlen Specter also became well known, culminating in an accusation in his book “Cause of Death” that the politician’s support for the single-bullet theory was “a stupid, pseudo-scientific sham at best.”
Yet somehow, Wecht and Specter overcame their differences and developed a friendship of sorts, with the senator coming to the pathologist’s defense during a grueling five-year legal battle that cost him a large part of his savings and which ended in 2009.
Ultimately, Wecht emerged victorious from this situation, also when a series of legal maneuvers and court rulings forced prosecutors to drop all fraud and theft charges against him in a case that revolved around accusations that he had used his public office as Allegheny County physician. examiner to grow his multi-million dollar private practice.
Wecht’s outspokenness on the Kennedy assassination and the publicity it generated later made him a go-to pathologist on dozens of other high-profile cases ranging from Elvis Presley to JonBenet Ramsey, the child queen beauty whose death remains unsolved.
At the homicide trial of school principal Jean Harris, charged with the murder of Dr. Herman Tarnower of the “Scarsdale Regime,” Wecht testified unsuccessfully for the defense. His testimony at the trial of Claus von Bulow may have helped acquit Von Bulow of charges that he attempted to kill his heiress, Sunny.
After studying Elvis’ autopsy report, Wecht concluded, and shared his findings on national television, that the King of Rock likely died of an overdose and not heart disease. His findings prompted Tennessee authorities to reopen the case in 1994, although ultimately the official cause of death remained unchanged.
In the months leading up to the 1994 OJ Simpson homicide trial, Wecht was a frequent guest on talk shows, speculating on the “Today” and “Good Morning America” shows about the importance of blood samples and other evidence.
When Michael Jackson died in 2009, Wecht once again returned to the airwaves to discuss the deadly mix of drugs and sedatives that killed the King of Pop.
Despite spending more than five decades confronting death almost daily, Wecht managed to remain generally upbeat, his hearty laugh resonating from deep in his gut, often joking himself with his own jokes, sometimes insulting and caustic.
Yet in a series of interviews with The Associated Press in 2009, Wecht was circumspect, dwelling on the possibility of his own death. His greatest fear, he noted at the time, was suffering or becoming dependent on others, friends and family.
“I want to be alive when I die. Think about it,” Wecht said. “I mean, OK, what is life?”
It is essential, he says, to die recognizing those you love, because when you die, they will no longer be there.
“I will be separated from my wife, my children, my grandchildren and, one day, my great-grandchildren. That’s what death means to me,” Wecht said.
“I wish this would last forever.”
However, ever the realist, Wecht took the time to detail many of his cases in six books. In “Cause of Death” — a book written by Wecht, his son Benjamin and Mark Curriden, a former writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Dallas Morning News — attorney Alan Dershowitz hailed the pathologist as the “Sherlock Holmes of forensic science.” .”
The son of a grocer, Wecht attended undergraduate school at the University of Pittsburgh and later earned medical and law degrees from the same school. He served two terms as Allegheny County coroner, finishing his second term in 2006, when he resigned after being indicted for fraud and theft.
His first term, from 1970 to 1980, was equally busy. Then he was also accused of using county morgue facilities for his private forensic cases while he was coroner. He paid $200,000 in restitution following a lengthy legal battle. He also served a four-year term as an Allegheny County commissioner.
The U.S. Senate bid against John Heinz III in 1982 ended in failure.
Survivors include his wife, Sigrid, and their four children, David, a justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court; Daniel, clinical professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center; Benjamin, independent writer and teacher; Ingrid, doctor specializing in obstetrics and gynecology; and 11 grandchildren.
California Daily Newspapers
