Sybers and others who knew Kay testified that she had often insisted that she did not want to be autopsied after death.

Kay Sybers

 

As Dershowitz put it in a recent interview with the Crime Library, during their 30 years of marriage Kay Sybers had seen her husband bring work home often enough, sometimes carting preserved body parts around in the family car, and that she had on more than occasion told friends "I don't want to end up on Bill's table."

Perhaps, as Dershowitz contends, Sybers was simply trying to honor his dead wife's wishes when he declined to have an autopsy performed. In any case, he relented within a day or so when colleagues persuaded him that it might raise a few eyebrows if the medical examiner for Bay County and the surrounding district didn't religiously follow the accepted local protocol.

The next day, on June 1, Dr. Gary Cumberland, a forensic pathologist from far-away Dade County who had no connection to Sybers, performed an autopsy on Kay Sybers. In a move that prosecutors would later insist was part of an attempt to subvert justice, the body had already been embalmed in preparation for her to be returned to her home state of Iowa for burial.

Nonetheless, by the time Cumberland made his first incision in the cadaver, the suspicion that had already taken root among investigators was becoming more obvious.

According to court records, as Cumberland worked on the body three investigators from the FDLE, who had already told Cumberland of their interest in the case, were looking over the pathologist's shoulder. The court records describe it this way: "Giving due regard to the law enforcement investigation and the fact that the deceased was the spouse of a fellow medical examiner, Dr. Cumberland undertook the autopsy with special care and thoroughness." Substantial toxicological evidence blood, fluid, hair, fingernail, and tissue samples was taken from the body and surrendered to the FDLE.

All the same, according to the court records, the autopsy "failed to reveal a convincing anatomic cause for death."

Cumberland's report to the FDLE, the court document continued, "indicated that 'no toxicological substances of note were recovered'" from Kay Sybers' body. Dr. Cumberland ruled the cause of death as "sudden unexpected death due to undetermined natural causes."

Later, perhaps under pressure from law enforcement officials whose suspicion had begun to blossom into a full-fledged conviction that Sybers had somehow done his wife in, "Dr. Cumberland amended his report to omit the word 'natural' from his conclusion," the court papers concluded.