Dr. Sybers going to court

 

In March 2001, after an unusually contentious trial, Dr. William Sybers was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of his wife. Though there was ample testimony depicting Sybers as a caring and gentle man, both the defense and prosecution agree, the jury seemed to have been affected by the story of Sybers' behavior as his wife apparently lay dying. The jurors may also have given some consideration to the testimony of a woman - a friend of Judy Ray Sybers - who said that Bill Sybers, with his $6 million in assets, and Judy Ray had discussed marriage well before Kay Sybers' death, a hint, at least as far as the prosecution was concerned, of a possible motive for the slaying.

Judy Sybers reacts to verdict

 

An appeals court later ruled that the woman's testimony was hearsay evidence and as such inadmissible, but it was powerful enough that it may have influenced the jury, the appeals court concluded.

But in the end, Dershowitz contends, it seems to have been primarily the science that led the jurors and the alternates to conclude that Bill Sybers had murdered his wife by injecting the almost undetectable drug succinylcholine into her veins, perhaps after plying her with wine and a sleeping pill.

The defense had tried without success to challenge the forensic findings during the trial, arguing among other things that the conditions in Ballard's lab were such that it was possible perhaps even likely that the tissue samples he had studied had been contaminated. What's more, the defense brought in two experts who claimed that they had evaluated tissue taken from Kay Sybers' heart and lungs that in their opinion clearly indicated that she had died as the result of an asthma attack which, they concluded, triggered heart failure.

Bill & Judy Sybers in court

 

In what would become one of the most contentious issues in the case, they based their conclusions on a set of slides taken of specimens from Kay Sybers' lung that were different than those used by the prosecution. There was good reason for that. Although required by law to maintain the specimens after an autopsy, Dr. Cumberland had apparently misplaced the original samples in the years following Kay Sybers' autopsy and had to make new ones from tissue he had retained.

Shorstein now says he was blindsided by the experts' suggestion that Kay Sybers had died as a result of asthma or any other natural cause. In fact, though he did not object to the testimony during the trial claiming that he considered it so outlandish that he didn't bother to on further reflection Shorstein said he was so outraged that he later threatened to prosecute the two experts, though he later decided against it.

But it was primarily the tests involving the evidence of succinylcholine poisoning that Dershowitz attacked when he filed an appeal seeking to overturn the verdict and the 25-year sentence that the court had imposed on Sybers.

And in February 2003, Dershowitz succeeded. The appeals court overturned the conviction and ordered a new trial, declaring that the new science was too new and too untested to be admissible in a Florida courtroom. That ruling seemed almost prescient when, early last summer, scientists working with federal and local prosecutors on the Williams case in Missouri discovered that Ballard's techniques were not just new and largely untested, they were also prone to error. Succinylmoline, the chemical compound found in Kay Sybers' tissue and the same chemical compound found in Williams' alleged victims, could occur naturally, the scientists found, and was not, as Shorstein had supposed, the smoking gun he had been looking for.

But that discovery came too late to help Bill Sybers. After suffering through surgery to remove a cancerous lobe from his lung and after battling bladder cancer and the onset of diabetes, the 70-year-old former medical examiner was physically and mentally exhausted. Perhaps he no longer had the strength or the desire to continue the fight that he had been waging for more than a decade. Perhaps he feared that he might not survive the new trial that the appeals court had ordered. It wasn't, Dershowitz insisted, that Sybers had any doubts about his chances. Sybers had always maintained his innocence and new evidence uncovered by the defense indicating that Kay Sybers, despite her fear of doctors, had obtained prescriptions for two medications linked to similar sudden deaths, could have cleared Sybers once and for all, the lawyer maintains.

Dr. Bill Sybers in court

 

Still, when Shorstein in March offered a deal, Sybers took it.

The way Shorstein tells it, he did not offer Sybers a plea bargain because of any fear about the strength of his own case. Instead, Shorstein argued, he was showing both mercy and good common sense. This goes under the heading of 'no good deed goes unpunished," Shorstein said.

"At the time [Sybers] was convicted he had bladder cancer and then, while he was in prison for a few years at one of our hearings he collapsed and they rushed him to the hospital. Then he had a cancerous growth removed from his lung," Shorstein said. "When you're talking about a first-degree murder case you get good lawyers and they can get it delayed so much, I could see us proceeding to trial in about a year and a half from now and [Sybers] not make it."

Sybers agreed to plead guilty to manslaughter. He was fined more than $500,000 and sentenced to ten years. Although he had spent less than three years behind bars on his original conviction, he was released.