Dr. Cyril H. Wecht was a pathologist and lawyer whose professional reputation as the “Godfather of Forensic Medicine” was sometimes overshadowed by his side gig as a television commentator on the suspicious deaths of celebrities, but Warren His salient criticism of the report concluded: Lee Harvey Oswald, who single-handedly carried out the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and played a role as one of the most powerful figures in the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, died Monday at his home in Pittsburgh. He was 93 years old.
His son Benjamin confirmed his death.
Dr. Vecht, who lived nearly all of his life in Pittsburgh, is best known as an expert witness in courtrooms and as a “famous medical examiner” who opines on celebrity deaths, appearing frequently as a guest on TV shows such as “Gerald.” It was well known. And “Larry King Live.”
He was never shy about his opinions, claiming that Elvis Presley most likely died of a drug overdose, and O. The coroner at J. Simpson's murder trial argued: They botched the autopsies of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. His combative personality kept him on speed dial among media bookers.
Dr. Wecht's early fame came from his willingness to challenge the conclusion of a commission led by Chief Justice Earl Warren that Oswald was solely responsible for the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas.
Invited by the American Academy of Forensic Sciences to present a critique of the Warren Report in 1964, Dr. Wecht spent nearly a year combing through the underlying data. In a 1965 presentation, he detailed serious mistakes, including the decision to have two untrained Navy pathologists perform the autopsy.
In 1972, he was the first private citizen allowed to examine government evidence, including autopsy reports, at the National Archives, and the first to discover that the president's brain had disappeared, along with several important specimen slides. revealed.
Dr. Wecht concluded that it was physically impossible for a single bullet from a single rifle to cause so much damage in such a short period of time. Although he was not a conspiracy theorist, he believed there must have been a second gunman.
“Once you eliminate the one-shot theory, it becomes the domain of the two people involved,'' he testified before a House committee in 1978.
Dr. Wecht was more than just a celebrity medical examiner. He was widely regarded as one of the leading forensic pathologists of the last century, and perhaps the person most responsible for modernizing the field and securing its place at the heart of the American justice system. .
When he started working at the coroner's office in Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, in 1965, its facilities were outdated, its staff untrained and its conclusions often useless to law enforcement or the courts.
“They didn't have any equipment to do things other than an old porcelain dissection table, an old embalmer's table actually, and very few dissections were done,” Dr. Wecht said in 1989. He told the Beaver County Times.
With degrees in both medicine and law, and several years in the United States Air Force, he brings professionalism and precision to the workplace. By the mid-1970s, he was considered one of the best hotels in the country.
He aggressively used his position to investigate suspicious deaths and expose police abuses and dangerous conditions in workplaces and nursing homes, often clashing with police departments and district attorneys.
At the time, the position of coroner for Allegheny County was an elected position, so Dr. Vecht necessarily became a politician. He served in this position for two terms, from 1970 to 1980 and from 1996 to 2006.
He was elected to the County Commission in 1980 and ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1982 against incumbent John Heinz. He served as chairman of the Allegheny County Democratic Committee from 1978 until 1982.
Dr. Wecht was a popular, sometimes divisive figure in the Pittsburgh area, where “Vecht” (loosely defined as meaning surly, lively, or intelligent) has virtually become part of the local dialect. was.
His biggest enemy was the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He was known for sending vitriolic letters to public figures, newspaper editors and private citizens, calling the paper's staff “vicious editorial pimps and reporter whores.” Editors in turn criticized his coroner's response and refused to support his political activities.
Dr. Wecht claimed other sworn enemies were behind two charges accusing him of abuse of office, one by Allegheny County in 1979 and again by the Department of Justice in 2006.
Both cases began acrimoniously, with him accused of using the coroner's office to benefit his private pathology practice. In 2006, federal authorities first filed 84 charges against him. However, the charges quickly disappeared.
After years of fighting the 1980 allegations, Dr. Vecht agreed to settle with the county for $200,000. The 2006 case ended in a miscarriage of justice, and the charges were completely dropped in 2009.
Although the second incident left him emotionally and financially exhausted, he remained a Westian.
“Is this how justice is pursued in America?” he said at a subsequent news conference, holding up a framed order ordering the case to be dismissed and lashing out at lead prosecutor Mary Beth Buchanan. Ta. “I think this record says it all. I think it will say it all about her record as well.”
Cyril Harrison Vecht was born in Pittsburgh on March 20, 1931, but spent his first seven years in Bobtown, a mining village on the West Virginia border. Both of his parents were Jewish immigrants, his father, Nathan, from Lithuania and his mother, Fanny (Rubenstein) Vecht, from what is now Ukraine. They ran a grocery store.
The family later moved to Pittsburgh. An only child of a father who excelled in his upbringing, Cyril excelled at high school and college at the University of Pittsburgh, where he was a star student, concertmaster of the campus orchestra, and national officer of his fraternity. He was also president of the school's YMCA chapter, no small feat for a Jewish student in the early 1950s.
He received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1952 and his Medical degree in 1956 from Pittsburgh. Always interested in law, by the time he entered medical school he had decided to pursue forensic pathology, a field that combines the fields of medicine and law.
He spent two years as an officer at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, which is home to a large military hospital. There he met Sigrid Lonsdal, a recent immigrant from Norway who was working as a translator. They married in 1961.
In addition to his son Benjamin, he is survived by his wife, their children David, Daniel, and Ingrid, and 11 grandchildren.
Dr. Wecht completed his medical training in Pittsburgh and Baltimore while pursuing a law degree from the University of Maryland in 1962.
He estimates he has performed more than 17,000 autopsies during his career and thousands more. Still, he said, he has never been desensitized to the work he does.
“Sometimes I just can't adapt,” he told Pittsburgh Quarterly in 2011, adding, “The most important thing is to never forget the fact that I'm dealing with a deceased human being.” Someone, somewhere loved these people. ”