CRIME Advocate for the Innocent

“jUST1CE IS N0T ALWAYS DONE,” admonishes Dr. Linda Norton as she rummages around her desktop, “The truth does not always emerge.”

The Dallas forensic pathologist may be best known for her key roles in such highprofile cases as the re-autopsy of Lee Harvey Oswald and the investigation of Waneta Hoyt, the upstate New York mother who suffocated five of her children. But Dr. Norton also inhabits a dark and often distorted world in which, she argues, the innocent-often children-routinely suffer while the guilty go free. That’s why she’s combing through the stacks of manila files in her North Dallas office, searching out the one case that troubles her like no other.

“Here it is,” she says at last, hefting the thick record. Then in a voice filled with anger and sadness, Norton recounts why she believes 12-year-old Lacresha Murray of Austin has been wrongly convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison for murdering 2-year-old Jayla Belton.

Travis County prosecutors argued that Murray dropped Jayla, whom she was babysitting at her grandmother’s residence, then kicked the toddler, causing internal injuries that ted to her death.

Norton, appearing for the defense, testified that many of Jayla’s 30 bruises preceded her death by days. Other injuries, she said, appeared to have been inflicted by a broom handle and a belt. Norton also testified that the child was appallingly malnourished and most likely had fallen into shock even before Jayla was brought to Murray by her mother’s live-in fiance.

Furthermore, Norton told Murray’s jurors, the toddler’s sweating, nausea, and lethargy, observed by several witnesses, were consistent with severe damage done to her liver sometime before the morning of her death.

The jury, however, believed Norton’s trial adversary, Travis County medical examiner Dr. Robert Bayardo, who testified Jayla Belton had suffered the fatal blows just minutes before her death.

“Lacresha Murray did not kill that child,” Dr, Norton says with characteristic directness. “She had nothing to do with that little girl’s death. It was a gross miscarriage of justice. Dr. Bayardo is not a malicious person, but that doesn’t make his opinion any less a mistake. He was testifying out of pure ignorance.”

The personal pain of the Murray verdict is burned into Dr. Norton’s psyche far more certainly than any lingering afterglow of her triumphs in court.

“I’ve had a terrible time dealing with that verdict,” she concedes. “At the time I was crushed. Even now, not a day goes by that I don’t find myself thinking about it, wondering what I could have done that would have made a difference.”

Ironically, it was the desire to avoid such anguish that led Linda Norton to pathology in the first place.

Like most of her fellow residents at Duke University Medical School in the early 1970s, Norton says, “I wanted to be a healer for the living”-what she now laughingly refers to as a “live doctor.”

Then came a sobering dose of what being a “live doctor” can entail.

Norton conducted a battery of tests, which determined that a young female patient was suffering from a rare, deadly form of leukemia. She sought out the woman’s physician, assuming that he would break the awful news himself. She was wrong.

“By the time I’d said what I had to say, the patient and her family were comforting me,” Norton remembers. “I was bawling and carrying on worse than anyone else in the room.”

Hoping to avoid further emotional devastation of that sort, Norton began to consider a career in pathology. She visualized herself in a lab, leaning over a microscope, testing cultures, conducting research- certainly not standing in some morgue, probing dead bodies.

“I was convinced that forensic pathology was gross, the lowest form of medical practice,” she says, “and I had absolutely no intention of going into it.”

But fate intervened in the form of a divorce, and the suddenly single mother of two began wondering how the bills might get paid.

As Norton frantically searched fora fellowship, she learned from another resident that one of the few remaining opportunities was in forensic pathology. Most importantly, it paid 520,000 for a year’s study. “That was twice what I was making,” she remembers. “I decided that I could do anything for a year if it would keep my daughters and me afloat.”

The fellowship went into effect on July 1, 1974, Four days later Dr. Linda Norton autopsied her first “crispy critter,” or badly burned body. A few days later came her first “Maggoty Ann.”

“I would cut a little, gag, cut some more, then gag again,” she says.

By mid-September 1974, the young pathologist-in-training was looking forward to her first day off, eager to shop for some badly needed new clothes. Her hand was on the front door when the phone rang.

Dr. William Anderson, who had encouraged her to apply for the fellowship, was on (he other end, reporting the crash of a commercial airliner. The two of them were to be at the crash site as soon as possible.

On a rugged, muddy hillside, wandering among the carnage, wearing a pair of torn tennis shoes and a medical jumpsuit so large that she looked as if she had been wrapped in a giant blue baggie, Linda Norton found her calling.

Four days and 69 crash-victim autopsies later, she finally returned home.

“Two things occurred to me then,” she says. “First, in just a matter of days I’d gained more experience than some doctors get in years. Second, I realized that there would be no way I could spend the rest of my life looking through a microscope at pathology specimens or operating lab equipment.”

By 1976 she had joined the staff of the Dallas Institute of Forensic Science. For the next five years she would work under the watchful eye of acclaimed Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Charles Petty.

Norton began developing a specialty. “In North Carolina,” she says, “most of the staff pathologists found dealing with child abuse cases unpleasant. So guess who all the dead babies got shuffled off to? Me.

“The first child autopsy I ever conducted had a great effect on me because at the time, one of my daughters was the same age as the little girl I was working on. This poor child still had pills in her stomach that were forced on her by her parents. It was by far the most difficult autopsy I’d ever done, but I was determined to finish it.”

Norton soon gained a reputation as an expert in child abuse deaths. But it would be an altogether different kind of investi-galion that brought her national attention.

British journalist Michael Eddowes had published a book suggesting that a Soviet agent was buried in the grave of accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Eddowes stirred such controversy that Oswald’s widow, Marina, consented to an exhumation to test Eddowes’ theory. Norton was asked to perform the autopsy.

She was not prepared for the news carnival that ensued. “In truth,” she says, “if I ’d had the slightest indication that we were going to find the body of someone other than Lee Oswald, or maybe no body at all, I’d never have agreed to get involved.”

Norton found, of course, that Oswald was buried in his own grave. End of Eddowes. Yet the simple examination catapulted her into the spotlight, a pivotal career event that would exile her to her profession’s dimly lit margins.

Soon after the Oswald autopsy, Norton left Dallas for an Alabama coroner’s office, a move prompted by a falling-out with Dr. Petty.

Neither pathologist will discuss the issue, but people close to the Dallas M.E.’s office at the time say that Petty was jealous of the attention Norton received as a result of the Oswald autopsy. She also provoked Petty’s ire by repeatedly refusing to follow his long-standing policy of not providing defense lawyers with copies of autopsy reports.

Norton returned to Texas after her short stay in Alabama, working for a year and a half in the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s office. During that time, she began to consider establishing a private practice, offering her services as a consultant to lawyers and law enforcement, medical personnel, and case workers.

The idea came to fruition in 1983 in Dallas, where she opened for business and enjoyed immediate success. Prosecutors, and even the occasional defense attorney, eagerly sought her expertise. Few blinked at her fees: $250 per hour to evaluate a case, $2,000 per day for trial testimony.

“In effect,” says Norton’s old schoolmate, William Anderson, “Linda pioneered a new field, offering a badly needed service which no governmental agency had funds or personnel to provide. But, while the need was there, what made her an instant success was her knowledge and absolute dedication to the truth.”

That dedication has led her to champion some less-than-popular causes in recent years. One is the innocence of Michael Blair.

In 1993, Blair was arrested and charged with the kidnapping and murder of Ashley Estell, a young Piano girl. When Blair’s attorney contacted Dr. Norton, asking if she would review forensic evidence in the case, her first inclination was to say no.

“I’d read about the crime and seen these scuzzy pictures of Blair in the paper,” she says. “Still, I agreed to look at the case, certain that I would tell the lawyer that he was going to have big problems defending the guy.” Instead, Dr. Norton found serious reason to doubt that Blair was the man who had abducted and murdered 7-year-old Ashley. The pathologist testified accordingly at Blair’s 1994 trial.

“Michael Blair is a real scumbag,” she says. “But he’s not the scumbag who killed Ashley Estell.”

The evidence used to convict Blair, who faces the death penalty, included two strands of hair recovered from his car that prosecutors suggested had come from the little girl. Last January, DNA tests indicated that was not the case. Blair’s attorney, Roy Greenwood of Austin, has petitioned to have the verdict set aside.

If there is a benchmark moment in Norton’s career, it occurred three years ago, when Waneta Hoyt tearfully confessed to suffocating five of her own children, ranging in age from 48 days to 28 months, over a six-year period. The ultimate trial and conviction of Hoyt ended Norton’s decade-long campaign to have the medical and legal professions look more skeptically at the all-too-convenient diagnosis of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).

Particularly disturbing to Norton was Dr. Alfred Steinschneider of Syracuse University, who’d theorized in the prestigious journal Pediatrics that S1DS was a heredity-related phenomenon brought on by sleep apnea. Norton found his research, primarily based on his study of the Hoyt children’s deaths, seriously flawed. She angrily spoke out against his theory.

“I brought it up in lectures, in conversations with other doctors, law enforcement people, anyone who would listen,” she says, “and generally got this ’ who-are-you-to-question-this-highly-regarded-man’s-important-findings?’ reaction.”

One of those to whom she spoke out was a Syracuse, N. Y., assistant district attorney named Bill Fitzpatrick; in 1986, he had hired her to testify against a man on trial for the mysterious death of three of his children. “If you think this case is bad,” Norton told him, “look in your own backyard. You’ve got a worse killer right here.” She was referring to Waneta Hoyt. The odds against five children in the same family all dying of S1DS were astronomical, Norton suggested. That Mrs. Hoyt was always alone with her children when they expired was more than a little troubling.

The suggestion haunted Fitzpatrick until 1992, when he was sworn in as District Attorney of Onondaga County. His first order of business was to investigate Waneta Hoyt, whom Fitzgerald came to believe was a cold-blooded killer. Because the Hoyts lived outside his jurisdiction, Fitzpatrick turned his findings over to the Tioga County district attorney, Robert Simpson.

In September 1995, 24 years after the death of her last child, 49-year-old Waneta Hoyt was sentenced to 75 years in prison. “Had it not been for Dr. Norton’s bringing these incidents to light,” says prosecutor Simpson, “there would never have been an investigation, much less an indictment and conviction.”

Now viewed as a milestone, the Hoyt case has triggered a nationwide re-evaluation of the cause of infant deaths. Officials in Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia recently announced plans to re-investigate a number of cases previously believed to be SIDS-related.

“The tragedy of SIDS death,” says Norton, “is not to be dismissed. It is very real and happens all too often. I can only imagine the overwhelming grief that a parent must suffer in such a situation. But i< is those who hide behind mumbo-jumbo disguised as medical research to kill their babies that make my blood boil."

So, even as Norton attempts to cut back on her caseload, she continues to fight for justice. In an Angleton, Tex., courtroom, she walks confidently to the witness stand to describe how a 2-year-old girl named Renee Goode met her death, Initially, the Harris County Medical Examiner’s office had ruled that the child died of “’undetermined causes.” Only after a lengthy investigation by Alvin homicide detective Sue Dietrich, an exhumation, and a second autopsy was there evidence that postal worker Shane Goode had murdered his daughter to collect on an insurance policy.

Dr. Norton reviewed the initial autopsy report submitted by the Harris County M.E.’s office and judged it incomplete. With the aid of a series of photographs taken during the second autopsy, she called jurors’ attention to blunt trauma marks found beneath the skin of the child’s back.

“In medical terminology,” she says, “the cause of death was compressive asphyxiation. Extreme pressure was applied to the child’s abdomen, and the flow of air was cut off.” To demonstrate her point, Dr. Norton clutched a life-size doll to her chest, dramatically recreating the manner in which Renee Goode was murdered.

“It was her testimony-so heartfelt, so professionally given-that eliminated any doubt the jury might have had that Shane Goode killed his own child.” says Jeri Yenne, who prosecuted the case for Brazoria County.

Shane Goode was sentenced to life in prison.

Sharon Couch, the victim’s grandmother, who had stubbornly urged the investigation along, waited after court to meet Dr. Norton for the first time. Shaking her hand, she said, “I just want to thank you for what you’ve done for Renee-and for so many like her.”