Pittsburgh – Dr. Cyril Wecht, a nationally renowned medical examiner who consulted in the deaths of Elvis Presley and JonBenet Ramsey and testified last week in the case of a Fort Carson soldier, was indicted Friday on federal charges of using county employees to campaign for him and handle his private lab work.
The indictment also accuses Wecht of trading unclaimed bodies stored by the county coroner’s office, which he headed, to a Pittsburgh university in exchange for use of a laboratory there for his private practice.
Wecht, 74, immediately resigned from his $105,000-a-year post as Allegheny County’s medical examiner after learning of the indictment.
The 84-count indictment accuses him of using county employees to run private errands and do work for his private practice between 1996 and December 2005.
U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan declined to estimate how much Wecht – who earned $4.65 million from his private practice from 1997 to 2004 – might have gained from the alleged abuse.
Wecht did not immediately return calls for comment. He has previously denied doing private work on county time during the decades he worked for the government.
His defense team, including former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, issued a statement Friday denying the charges and blaming local politics.
The attorneys said the investigation began as a result of “fanciful allegations” by the county district attorney, with whom Wecht has feuded.
Wecht gained fame in the 1960s when he criticized the Warren Commission’s findings in the President Kennedy assassination, and he has consulted on notorious cases, including the death of Laci Peterson.
In the months preceding the O.J. Simpson murder trial in 1994, he became a frequent talk-show guest, conjecturing about the significance of blood samples and other evidence.
Last week, Wecht testified for the defense in the Fort Carson court-martial of Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer Jr., who is charged with murder in the death of an Iraqi general in 2003.
Prosecutors say Maj. Gen. Abed Mowhoush died of asphyxiation while placed in a sleeping bag for an interrogation technique, but Wecht countered that Mowhoush died of heart failure from the stress of detention. He died Nov. 26, 2003, at a detention center near Qaim, Iraq.
