Suspicion is contagious, and within a few weeks of Kay Sybers' death, it had reached epidemic proportions in the Florida panhandle, despite the fact that no smoking gun had been found in the blood and tissue samples taken from Kay Sybers' body.

The local media had taken an interest in the case. It was understandable. Ever since Kay Sybers' death, rumors had been flying and as Shorstein later put it, the case "has it all," each of the tantalizing elements of a crime novel. Here was a wealthy doctor, who had, before accepting the post as chief medical examiner in Panama City, amassed a fortune estimated at $6 million. What's more, though he at first denied it, he was having an affair with a younger woman. Now, the former medical examiner was suddenly a suspect in a possible murder case.

It was heady stuff, says Dershowitz. Even the fact that the local prosecutor, State Attorney Jim Appleman, became the first of three prosecutors who declined to prosecute Sybers - he argued later that he did not feel there was sufficient cause to bring a case - did nothing to still the rumor mill.

Lawton Chiles

 

In fact, according to published reports at the time, there was a growing sense of unease among the public with the way the case had been handled. Perhaps that was one of the reasons why, later in 1991, then-Gov. Lawton Chiles took the almost-unprecedented action of appointing a special prosecutor to look into the case.

It was, Shorstein said, an unusual step. Under Florida law, a prosecutor can ask to be relieved of a case anytime he feels he might have a potential conflict. "Say if, God forbid, my chief of detectives has a DUI and I can't prosecute we can always ask the governor to appoint a special prosecutor," Shorstein said.

In the Sybers case, however, Appleman never requested a special prosecutor. He had asked a state attorney from a neighboring county to review his findings and that prosecutor expressed some of the same reservations Appleman had about the strength of the case, but he never asked the governor to intervene.

But it happened anyway. "What is very rare, and may not have been done before, was for the governor to do it on his own," Shorstein said. "In this case the Florida Division of Law Enforcement went to the governor and the governor essentially relieved Appleman of his responsibility and authority in the case."

But even then, the state was slow to build a case against Sybers. In fact, it wasn't until 1997 that Shorstein, who by now had assumed the reins of the investigation after yet another prosecutor had dropped out of the case was able to persuade a grand jury to indict the medical examiner who had since left his job on charges of murder.

The indictment alleged that Sybers, who, prosecutors claimed, had spent months preparing friends and colleagues by describing in detail his wife's apparent heart problems so that no one would be suspicious when she finally died, had, on the night before her death, injected her once, perhaps twice, with a deadly chemical.

Just what that chemical might have been, however, prosecutors did not know.