The indictment charging Dr. Bill Sybers with murder alleges that he injected his wife with "an unknown substance." Though Shorstein now says he believes authorities could have built a strong circumstantial case - a case strong enough to convict the doctor - he says prosecutors pushed to identify the substance they believed had been injected into Kay Sybers' arm.

At first, even before Shorstein joined the case, investigators suspected that the doctor had used potassium chloride, a chemical often used in the lethal cocktails administered in the nation's prison death chambers. Although he now says he never thought much of the theory, Shorstein says it was a likely candidate, adding that it can occur naturally in the body and is often almost undetectable in a post mortem.

"My predecessor," the state attorney who served briefly before Shorstein was appointed to the case, "was sure it was potassium chloride," Shorstein said. And his reasoning was, "if they don't find it within six minutes, they'll never find it." Even Cumberland, who had conducted the autopsy, acknowledged, according to court documents, that no one who might have studied the results of his examination "could perform a meaningful post-mortem potassium evaluation."

Dr. Frederick Reiders

 

All the same, authorities believed that they had evidence that indicated that it might have been used. Precisely how that evidence came into play is interesting. According to court documents, authorities referred the case to Dr. Frederick Reiders, a Pennsylvania forensic toxicologist, who, in the words of the court record, "is known for pioneering new methods of detecting and measuring toxic substances."

The court later found that from the beginning Reiders may have been working under some false assumptions about the case. The court concluded that Reiders "labored under the [mistaken] belief that [another medical examiner who had been called in to review parts of Cumberland's work] had earlier found evidence of possible potassium poisoning."

The problem, in the court's view, was that no such evidence had ever been found. "The potassium poison theory had, in fact, merely come out of the investigatory discussions; it had no scientific basis when proposed."

Reiders later tested a mixture of blood and embalming fluid drawn from the lower chamber of Kay Sybers' heart, and he tested it using a novel but largely untried technique that included, among other things, calculations which tripled the amount of potassium in the fluid to account for the presence of the embalming fluid.

Not surprisingly, Reiders concluded, according to the court records, that a "lethal dose of potassium had been administered to Kay Sybers, causing her death."

To the investigators, the findings were tantalizing but they were not conclusive. The way Shorstein understood them, Reiders' conclusions showed what appeared to be a concentration of potassium chloride in the area between the needle marks on Kay Sybers' arm and her heart. To prove conclusively that the puncture marks were mortal wounds, and not simply the after-effects of sloppy syringe work by her husband in a clumsy effort to draw blood, prosecutors decided they needed to exhume Kay Sybers' body.

A pathologist, working on behalf of the prosecution at the time, "just thought there was an unacceptable amount [of potassium chloride] between the injection site and the heart," Shorstein said. "He wanted to go in there, dig up the body and get the other arm [to determine] if he could see a distinguishable difference."

Initially, they succeeded in persuading the courts in Kay Sybers' home state and final resting place in Iowa of the wisdom of their proposed course of action. The court agreed to allow the Florida authorities to dig up Kay Sybers' body and perform a second autopsy.

But they had run into opposition from what might be considered an unexpected quarter. Kay Sybers' relatives including the dead woman's own mother -- "vehemently opposed disinterment,' according to the records of an appeal courts battle that later reversed the lower court ruling.

Bill Sybers Jr. testifies

    

Bill Sybers Jr., the dead woman's oldest son, told the court that he was speaking "for everyone in my family and all my mother's friends as well," when he said "we oppose the proposed exhumation of her body with every possible ounce of strength that we have," adding "we are offended by the very notion and infuriated and frustrated."

"Speaking for myself," the son added, "[I] believe that my mother's body has been violated against her wishes, and I believe that her memory has been violated as well, and it's our greatest wish as a family and this is my father's wish most of all that my mother be allowed to rest in peace and that my family finally be allowed to live in peace."

There was more, of course. Kay's brother, Bruce Cornell, a respected attorney and a magistrate in Fort Dodge, Iowa, "elaborated at length on his sister's lifelong neglect of her health," according to the court records, an allegation that echoed Dr. Bill Sybers' oft-stated claim that his wife was not only unhealthy but that she had a deep-seated mistrust of doctors. Cornell also suggested that prosecutors in Florida had misled him regarding the strength of the evidence culled from the first autopsy.

But the most damaging blow to the case presented by the prosecutors from Florida was the testimony of other "highly qualified experts [who] sharply criticized Dr. Reiders' conclusions and the State of Florida's reliance on them."

According to the findings of the Iowa appeals court, "These experts essentially concurred in the belief," that because, after death, blood vessels routinely rupture, releasing potassium chloride into the bloodstream, no accurate conclusions could be drawn from the blood or tissue of a dead person, let alone a person who had been dead for six years as Kay Sybers had by that time.

In a decision that, perhaps, foreshadowed things to come, the Iowa appeals court, relying as much on science as on any other factor, barred Florida officials from disinterring Kay Sybers' body.

Not long afterward, Shorstein and his team were dealt a further setback when a Florida court also rejected the evidence of potassium poisoning.

Shorstein, who had, according to Dershowitz, told family members before the Iowa case that he could not proceed with the prosecution of Dr. William Sybers without conducting a second autopsy, was back to square one.

But he was far from finished.