Mistaken bodies, missed murders: Did medical examiner err again in Kentucky inmate's case?
As Tennessee’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Charles Harlan had a disturbing record of negligence, incompetence and deceit.
According to a 2005 order revoking his Tennessee medical license: Harlan misidentified the bodies of two inmates killed in a car crash and sent their remains, still shackled, to the wrong families. He concluded that two babies died of SIDS when actually they had been murdered by one of their parents. He determined that a man had been fatally stabbed when in fact he fell on a glass table that shattered and impaled him. And two years after he incorrectly identified a burned corpse, the man was pulled over by police very much alive.
After evaluating one of Harlan’s cases from 1995, according to the Tennessean, then-Kentucky Chief Medical Examiner Dr. George Nichols told the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, "If this line of irrational thinking has been applied to other cases in the state of Tennessee, then God help you and the rest of the citizens of Tennessee."
And when Harlan wasn’t getting cases wrong, he was exhibiting bizarre behavior.
When a family asked him to send proof that their loved one had died to a bank, first he wrote “M.L is dead” on a plain piece of paper. When they said that was inadequate, he faxed a letter to the bank saying, “She is green and has maggots crawling on her."
Harlan died in 2013 but his impact lingers in the Kentucky case of Commonwealth v. Bowles.
Edward Ted Bowles, 72, is serving a life sentence for murder for a 1996 conviction that was based in part on testimony from Harlan that victim Jackie Renee Leavell was strangled or suffocated.
But when his attorney hired Nichols to review Harlan’s autopsy report, the Kentucky pathologist discovered Harlan had no evidence to support either as a cause of death – and no evidence that Leavell was even murdered.
“Dr. Harlan was full of crap,” Nichols told The Courier Journal.
Related: Tennessee man's murder sentence vacated over disgraced medical examiner's testimony
Bowles asked for his sentence to be vacated, citing newly discovered evidence. But on March 24, the Kentucky Court of Appeals ruled 3-0 against him, saying there was enough other evidence to convict him apart from Harlan’s report and testimony.
Bowles’ attorney, Assistant Public Advocate Jacquelyn “Jaye” Bryant-Hayes, said she will ask the Kentucky Supreme Court to hear the case.
What happened to Jackie Renee Leavell?
It began on Sept. 13, 1994, when Bowles, his brother James Bowles and Leavell partied at her house in Christian County, sharing crack cocaine and sex, according to court records.
According to the commonwealth’s witnesses, Edward Bowles accused James Bowles and Leavell of stealing $100 from him and poked Leavell with a butcher’s knife to scare her. Then the two began to struggle.
Testifying two years later at his brother’s trial, James Bowles said he left the house and when he returned, Leavell was dead on the floor.
He also testified that his brother told him: "I can do somebody with my hands. I don't have to shoot them or stab them. I've choked her out."
James Bowles, who was offered a lesser sentence in exchange for his testimony, said he and his brother loaded Leavell's body into a car and dumped it off Interstate 24 near Clarksville, Tennessee – in Harlan’s jurisdiction.
In his autopsy report, in which Harlan oddly described Leavell as an “uncircumcised” female, he said she died of asphyxiation – the deprivation of oxygen – but couldn’t determine if it was strangled or suffocated strangulation because of decomposition of the body.
But Nichols said in his report there was no evidence of injuries to Leavell’s throat or mouth consistent with strangulation or suffocation.
Asked in an interview why Harlan would have listed asphyxiation as the cause of death, Nichols said, “The cops told him that so that is what he wrote and signed.”
Bryant-Hayes said that was possible, given that Harlan did not sign the autopsy until nearly three weeks after Edward Bowles was charged.
The commonwealth’s case
Opposing Bowles’ motion, Assistant Attorney General Bryant Morrow said the Harlan testimony did not figure prominently in his trial. Harlan’s direct examination lasted “a whopping seven minutes,” Morrow said. And the prosecution didn’t even mention Harlan’s testimony or report in his 15-minute opening statement or 45-minute closing argument.
In contrast, Bryant-Hayes says Harlan’s testimony was a “central piece of the Commonwealth’s case” and that without his “unprofessional, dishonorable, and dishonest” assertions “it is reasonably certain that Mr. Bowles’ case would have had a different outcome.”
Under Kentucky law, an offender may challenge his conviction based on newly discovered evidence but in most circumstances, that must be done within a reasonable period of time.
Morrow says Bowles waited too long – more than two decades – to ask for his conviction to be vacated.
And in a brief, Morrow says Harlan wasn’t stripped of his medical license until nine years after Bowles’ trial and conviction.
But Bryant-Hayes notes her client, who remains incarcerated, didn’t learn of Harlan’s Tennessee troubles until another inmate told him about them in 2017.
And she said the complaints against Harlan stretch back to the year before Bowles’ conviction.
Harlan was suspended without pay as an assistant Davidson County medical examiner in 1994. In 1995 his contract as state medical examiner was terminated and he was barred from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation's lab for exhibiting bizarre behavior and making offensive statements.
Bowles' attempts to have conviction vacated
Bowles first tried to persuade Christian Circuit Judge Andrew Self to vacate his conviction.
Nichols testified at a 2020 hearing but Morrow argued that his findings were just another opinion – not “newly discovered evidence.”
“There would be no finality to a verdict if the facts upon which it was based were perpetually subject to whatever reanalysis might be conceived in the mind of an expert witness,” Morrow said, borrowing language from a U.S. Supreme Court opinion.
Refusing to vacate the conviction, Self agreed, saying Nichols’ opinion could have been “fodder for impeachment” of Harlan’s credibility at trial but that it was not new evidence that could be the basis for a new trial.
In fact, Bowles’ trial lawyer, Joel "Robinson" Embry, did not challenge Harlan’s opinion or bother to hire an expert.
Citing the defense attorney’s drug use and ineffective counsel, Bowles was one of about 30 defendants who challenged their convictions, according to the Kentucky New Era in Hopkinsville. Embry was eventually disbarred and the Court of Appeals vacated Bowles’ conviction based on Embry’s performance, but the state Supreme Court reinstated it.
Bowles appealed Self’s ruling to the Court of Appeals, which in its opinion last month said that “there is no question that findings of the (Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners) against Dr. Harlan were extremely disturbing.”
The Tennessee board's final order cited at least 22 “often horrific” cases containing “acts or omissions" that would constitute unprofessional misconduct, the Court of Appeals noted.
But writing for the court, Judge J. Christopher O’Neill said that to vacate a conviction based on false testimony, an offender must show that it must be reasonably certain the testimony was false and the conviction probably would not have resulted had the truth been known.
O’Neill said that while Nichols later disagreed with Harlan’s conclusion regarding the cause of death, his testimony “does not automatically render Dr. Harlan’s testimony false.”
O'Neill also said there was “other substantial evidence introduced at trial in support of Bowles’ guilt.”
Bryant-Hayes said she doesn’t know whether the Kentucky Supreme Court will take Bowles’ case. But in an email, she said, “I do think it is manifestly unjust that someone has spent 30 years in prison (while maintaining his innocence) largely due to this discredited testimony.”
If the state Supreme Court declines to hear Bowles’ appeal or rules against him, his only hope for relief is from the Kentucky Parole Board, which is scheduled to hear his case Sept. 1.
But it already has turned him down three times, most recently in 2018, when it ordered him to serve five more years before he would be considered again. (People sentenced to life for crimes between 1980 and 2007 in Kentucky are eligible for parole after serving 12 years.)
James Bowles pleaded guilty to facilitation to murder, for helping dispose of the victim's body and was given a sentence enhanced to 10 years because he was a persistent felon.
Bowles is serving his time at the Kentucky State Reformatory in La Grange.
Leavell, who was originally from Columbus, Ohio, was 25 when she died. She is buried in Cave Springs Cemetery in Hopkinsville.