Mother calls for man exonerated of raping and murdering her child to go free ...Middle East

Prosecutors fighting the release of death row inmate Jimmie Duncan after a judge found him “factually innocent” of raping and murdering 23-month-old Haley Oliveaux are “not speaking for Haley’s family,” her mother says.

Speaking publicly for the first time, Allison Layton Statham called for Duncan to go free in a July 22 bail hearing. “This innocent man is on death row,” she told Mississippi Today. “Justice needs to be done.”

In April, a judge threw out Duncan’s conviction, questioning their conclusions and citing the failures of his court-appointed counsel.

Prosecutors have appealed the judge’s decision and are fighting his release on bail, saying Duncan poses both a flight risk and “a safety risk to not only the victim’s family, but also the general public.”

Statham disagreed and said she wants all of the evidence, including a sealed video of a bite-mark expert examining her child’s body, made available so that everyone can know the truth. “Authorities are still wanting to bury the truth,” she said. “What they did was railroad him.”

READ MORE: A March 2025 Verite News and ProPublica investigation into the Jimmie Duncan conviction

For a long time, Haley’s paternal aunt, Jennifer Berry, awaited word of Duncan’s execution, she said. “We’ve mourned quite a few people in our family, and we have never mourned like we mourned when that child died.”

Since talking with a documentary filmmaker in February and digging into the case, she believes he should go free. “I’ve been in turmoil since realizing this,” she said. “He’s a young man who was falsely accused of a crime he didn’t commit.”

She has petitioned prosecutors, the attorney general and the governor for a meeting but has yet to receive a reply.

The judge’s dismissal marks at least 10 wrongful convictions involving pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne, who has since died, or bite-mark expert Michael West, who once claimed he matched a suspect’s teeth to a half-eaten bologna sandwich. Eight of these wrongful convictions happened in Mississippi.

In 1994, the American Board of Forensic Odontology suspended West for a year for overstating credentials and misidentifying bite marks, and a dozen years later, he was forced to resign from the American Board of Forensic Pathology.

In 2008, the state of Mississippi barred Hayne from doing autopsies. He once wrote in his autopsy report about removing and examining a victim’s ovaries. The problem? The victim was male.

That same year, Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer were exonerated after spending a combined 30 years in prison. West’s bite-mark testimony helped convict Brooks of the rape-murder of a 3-year-old girl in Noxubee County. When another 3-year-old girl was raped and killed, West gave bite-mark testimony that helped lead to a death sentence for Brewer.

DNA discovered the truth: a serial killer had raped and murdered both girls. He confessed to his crimes, and Brooks and Brewer were freed.

It remains unknown how many other wrongful convictions these experts may have played a role in. Hayne once said he conducted up to 30,000 autopsies in Mississippi. West has said he analyzed more than 300 bite marks and investigated more than 5,000 deaths. He no longer believes bite marks should be used in court and did not respond to requests for comment on the dismissal of Duncan’s conviction.

Berry felt compelled to come forward now and call for a review of each case in Louisiana and Mississippi involving these discredited experts, she said. “Every case they put their fingers on needs to be reopened and examined.”

‘I wasn’t going to lie for them’

On the morning of Dec. 18, 1993, Statham said as she left for work Oliveaux was bouncing on her bed, tossing her “moo cow” in the air. She said she left her daughter in the care of the 25-year-old Duncan, whom she loved and had been living with for several months.

Duncan, who has maintained his innocence for more than three decades, told police he made Oliveaux oatmeal for breakfast and put her in the bathtub, where the water measured less than 3.5 inches. While doing dishes, he said he heard a noise and found her face down in the water. He said he grabbed her out of the tub and ran next door. The neighbors, paramedics and doctors were unable to save the life of Oliveaux, who had suffered recent seizures.

When Statham said she arrived at the emergency room, Duncan was distraught, apologizing over and over. Police charged Duncan with negligent homicide.

At the hospital, when West Monroe Police Detective Chris Sasser examined the body and saw the girl’s anus dilated and “laying open,” he concluded she “had been sodomized,” according to the police report. “It was a horrible sight.”

Rather than use a nearby pathologist, then-District Attorney Jerry Jones had the girl’s body transported two hours away to Mississippi for Hayne to do the autopsy. After the pathologist examined Oliveaux, he called in West to examine suspected bite marks.

Video captures West’s initial examination, starting at 9:35 p.m. He mentions a bruise on her left elbow, possible abrasions and contusions, and visible diaper rash. No mark can be seen on her cheek, and West makes no mention of one.

Twenty minutes later, Hayne telephoned Detective Sasser and said at about the time of the child’s death, she suffered lacerations and penetration to the anus, which the pathologist attributed to sexual assault, as well as multiple contusions to multiple surfaces on the body and lacerations and contusions to the scalp, according to the police report.

Hayne also said there were adult bite marks on the child made at or about the time of death and asked for the suspect’s dental molds.

After receiving this information, Sasser contacted a prosecutor, and the charge was upgraded to first-degree murder, which can carry a death penalty in Louisiana.

After the molds arrived the next day, the video resumed. West can be seen jamming a mold of Duncan’s teeth into the child’s cheek. West identified these as bite marks belonging to the suspect.

Hayne did the autopsy. He concluded that Haley’s death was a homicide, that her injuries suggested she had been sexually assaulted at or about the time of her death and that she had been forcibly drowned.

Other pathologists questioned Hayne’s conclusions. A rape kit came back negative. The Louisiana State Crime Lab tested Duncan’s clothing, the child’s clothing and her bath toys for any seminal fluid. There was none.

In the days following her daughter’s death, Statham said prosecutors called her into their office. She said they asked her if her daughter ever said or implied that Duncan wanted her to suck his penis like a baby bottle.

She told Mississippi Today that her toddler daughter could hardly speak. “She could say, ‘I want burgers,’ or ‘I want M&Ms,’” she said.

After she told them no, she said they replied, “If you don’t tell the truth, you could be implicated.”

She was 21 at the time. “My baby died, and the man I loved had been hauled off,” she said. “It was very intimidating. I was scared. But I wasn’t going to lie for them.”

Months later, police got a statement from jail inmate Michael Cruse. He quoted Duncan as saying the baby pointed at his penis and he said “something about a bottle or bobble.” Cruse later testified that Duncan said he blacked out and when he came to, he was trying to have sex with the baby and killed her because he “couldn’t get the baby to be quiet.”

To demonstrate his innocence, Duncan took a polygraph test. He reportedly showed no deception when he said he didn’t kill the child or hold her head underwater. Jurors never heard this, because polygraphs are inadmissible as evidence.

By the time the trial began in 1998, much of the important physical evidence was gone. The rape kit had been lost. So had Hayne’s autopsy slides. Samples of her blood that no one had tested for toxicology — a standard practice for autopsies — had been destroyed. So had Hayne’s detailed reports on his slides.

All that experts had available to examine were Hayne’s autopsy report and a few photos of the child’s body and injuries.

In his opening remarks at the 1998 murder trial, the district attorney said Duncan “rode that baby like a bull” and “in a sexual frenzy … bit her behind the ear … bit her elbow … She screamed, and she died in a bathtub full of water so bloody you couldn’t see the bottom.”

With West’s credentials now under question, prosecutors relied on another expert, who looked at West’s photos and identified Duncan as the one who made bite marks on the child. That expert didn’t see West’s video. Neither did the defense experts. Neither did the jury.

Hayne backed up the prosecution theory that Duncan drowned the child to cover up his sexual assault. He told jurors the bruise on her head was “consistent with a digit, such as a thumb or finger, pressing down on the back of the head.”

Asked if the child could have suffered a seizure, Hayne said no because “the brain showed no sign of seizure activity.”

Hayne testified that the child wouldn’t have survived her anal injuries, and another doctor told jurors there would have been so much blood, it would be like someone having their head cut off.

But police never found a drop of blood anywhere in the house, never found any evidence of cleaning. The detective later said if there had been any blood or semen at the scene, they would have discovered it.

Hayne testified that fragmented tomato, pickle and onion were in the child’s stomach, but no oatmeal — a detail prosecutors seized on as proof that Duncan concocted this cover story to conceal his horrific crime.

When police arrived, they found oatmeal in the kitchen, in the bathtub and on Duncan’s clothing. The neighbor saw uncooked oatmeal when he cleared Oliveaux’s throat before performing CPR.

The prosecutors told jurors the uncooked oatmeal was proof he planted it.

The jury convicted Duncan and sentenced him to death.

‘Bad medicine, bad science and bad lawyering’

Tucker Carrington, who wrote a book on Hayne and West with journalist Radley Balko, “The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist,” said the Louisiana case bears similarities to the case of Jeffrey Havard, convicted of capital murder for allegedly raping and killing an infant in Natchez in 2002, thanks to Hayne’s testimony.

Havard has said he was bathing his girlfriend’s 6-month-old baby, Chloe Britt, when she slipped from his hands and hit her head on the toilet.

But as in Duncan’s case, law enforcement officers thought the baby had been sexually assaulted. At trial, a parade of doctors and nurses testified about anal rips and tears they saw, describing the worst anal trauma they had seen, and prosecutors called Havard a monster.

The autopsy report, however, showed no such damage, only anal dilation and a small contusion. The rape kit came back negative.

Despite that, Hayne’s testimony backed the prosecution’s theory of sexual assault, and Havard was sentenced to Mississippi’s death row.

After examining the case, renowned pathologist Dr. Michael Baden concluded that Britt’s injuries were consistent with her being accidentally dropped and that she wasn’t sexually assaulted. “Dilation of the anus occurs normally in children when they die as muscles relax and when seen by a casual observer can be misinterpreted as evidence of perimortem penetration,” he said.

Other pathologists agreed with Baden that the anal dilation had been misread as abuse, and in 2014, Hayne told a reporter he didn’t believe a rape took place. He said the anal contusion could have resulted from a bowel movement.

He originally testified that the baby had died from shaken baby syndrome. Now he said he didn’t believe that was true because science had since determined such conclusions were flawed.

At least 34 people have been exonerated in shaken baby cases after being wrongly imprisoned, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

Havard’s lawyer, Graham Carner of Jackson, said the case is filled with “bad medicine, bad science and, frankly, bad lawyering.”

After a three-day hearing where the defense called Hayne to testify, the trial judge reduced Havard’s sentence from death to life. His appeal for freedom is now pending in U.S. District Court.

“Innocence is different than not guilty, and innocence is different than you didn’t get a fair trial,” Carner said, “but I believed as soon as I dug into Jeffrey’s case that he was an innocent man and I believe that to this day.”

‘Science, like law, evolves over time’

The damage that Hayne and West have done to Mississippi is immense, said former state Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz Jr., and he is stunned the state has never reviewed their cases for possible wrongful convictions.

“They operated in Mississippi for years unchecked,” he said. “Mississippi used Hayne as the state medical examiner, even though he did not meet the statutory qualifications.”

Hayne’s testimony helped convict Tyler Edmonds, who was just 13 when he falsely confessed that he and his half-sister had both killed her husband. He said she had told him she would “fry,” but he would go unpunished.

At trial, Hayne testified that the fatal wound was consistent with two people pulling the trigger, saying, “I can’t exclude one [shooter], but I think that would be less likely.”

The Mississippi Court of Appeals concluded such testimony was scientifically unfounded: “You cannot look at a bullet wound and tell whether it was made by a bullet fired by one person pulling the trigger or by two persons pulling the trigger simultaneously.”

Diaz said Hayne’s testimony prompted him to dig deeper. “Two hands on a trigger? You don’t have to do any research to know that’s ridiculous,” he said. “That’s what led me to look at Hayne closer.”

What he found was disturbing. He didn’t realize Hayne was essentially acting as state medical examiner, but he wasn’t a board-certified pathologist.

Diaz wound up writing a scathing dissent centered on the pathologist that prompted other justices to change their minds, he said. “As science, like the law, evolves over time, one generation’s expert is another’s quack.”

He now regrets the first vote he cast on the high court, a death penalty case that relied on the words of Hayne and West, he said. “Based upon their testimony, my first Supreme Court vote was to execute an innocent man, Kennedy Brewer.”

He and other justices later supported the dismissal of Brewer’s conviction, and his last opinion called for the end of the death penalty. “It’s not a workable system when errors like this can take place,” he said. “No matter how careful we are, we’re going to vote to execute innocent people.”

What the jury never heard

In November 1993, Statham brought her daughter twice to the hospital for seizures after she stopped breathing. One doctor suggested she could be suffering from Stevens-Johnson Syndrome, a potentially life-threatening reaction, often to medication, that can cause lesions in the mouth and the genital area. The disease can also cause seizures.

Nearly three weeks before her death, a chest of drawers fell on Haley, who suffered three skull fractures and a subdural hematoma that caused her to spend six days in the hospital. Duncan and Statham told child social services that she had been climbing to reach her piggy bank.

But the jury never heard about this serious injury because of a deal that Duncan’s original lawyers made with prosecutors.

Pathologists say it’s critical to know everything possible about a person’s medical history before drawing conclusions about a death. Testimony shows police knew Oliveaux’s medical history, but it remains unclear if Hayne knew that history before concluding she had been raped and killed.

In a six-day hearing last September, two pathologists called Hayne’s conclusions unfounded, said they saw no evidence of a rape or homicide, and believed Haley drowned accidentally, perhaps after suffering a seizure.

In one sworn statement, former jail inmate Michael Lucas said he heard Duncan tell Cruse that he didn’t kill the toddler. An investigator testified that Cruse now admits he lied at the 1998 trial because he wanted leniency for the felony he was facing.

Duncan’s lawyers told those at the hearing that they planned to show West’s video involving Haley, warning that it was graphic and disturbing. An excerpt of that video had first surfaced in 2009 when the Reason website published it. The video appalled many in the legal and forensic science communities.

The video showed West jamming, dragging and scraping Duncan’s dental mold across the child’s body dozens of times. Some of those in the courtroom gasped, some covered their eyes, and others, including Duncan, wiped away tears.

After seeing the video, Lowell Levine, past president of the American Board of Forensic Odontology, called what West did “fraud.”

In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences concluded there was no basis in science for forensic odontologists to conclude a person is “the biter” to the exclusion of all other suspects. 

Adam Freeman, past president of the American Board of Forensic Odontology, testified that the bite marks identified on Haley weren’t bite marks at all. He called these determinations “junk science” that can’t be defended scientifically.

In 2015, he helped conduct a study on the reliability of bite marks. In all but a few cases, board-certified dentists couldn’t even agree if they were looking at a bite mark. As a result, he resigned from leadership in protest and stopped doing any bite-mark analysis.

Nationwide, at least 34 wrongful convictions have occurred since 1989 because of bite marks, six of them in Mississippi that all involve West, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

Dr. Robert Bux, who served as chief medical examiner for the El Paso County Coroner’s Office in Colorado Springs, questioned how Hayne could say the child’s injuries matched shoving her face underwater.

If that were so, “I’d expect to see injuries on the front part of her body, particularly on her forehead or nose, cheeks, anterior parts of shoulders, anterior parts of the knees,” said Bux, who helped investigate Pat Tillman’s death in Afghanistan.

The autopsy showed lacerations to the anus. Bux said these could have been caused by an infection, a diaper rash, a hard stool or vigorous washing. “There’s no way to know. You have to look at it microscopically, and it wasn’t looked at,” he said.

Up until 2007 or so, people believed anal dilation proved sexual abuse, he said. “A dilated anus means nothing. We saw it all the time in adults and children.”

The lack of blood at the scene suggests something other than a violent assault, he said. “It’s absolutely bloodless. I mean where is the blood in the sink? Where’s the blood on the victim?”

He rejected the claim by Hayne that the child stopped bleeding because she was dead. Blood gives way to gravity, he said. “It’ll come out drip, drip, drip, so, you’re going to see it, and you’re going to see it for hours, and you’re going to see it for days. I don’t think you can just wash that off because it’s going to continue to ooze after she’s dead.”

Her death appears to be “a tragic accident of drowning,” he said. “I don’t see any evidence to me that would support that it was forced.”

She drowned, possibly because she suffered another seizure, he said, “but I can’t prove that because Hayne didn’t do any investigation that would help us on that.”

Hayne’s lack of research and examination prompted Duncan’s lawyers to twice ask for the exhumation of Oliveaux’s body before the 1998 trial. The judge denied the requests.

Her mother said if her daughter’s body needs to be exhumed to answer any questions, she supports that. “It might give us some answers to what happened then,” Statham said.

If prosecutors win their appeal, Duncan would remain on death row and face execution. ProPublica and Verite News reported that Duncan’s bid for freedom has become more urgent with Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry pushing for executions. In March, Louisiana held its first execution in 15 years, using nitrogen oxide to put Jessie Hoffman Jr. to death.

If Duncan faced another trial, jurors would hear a much different story, his lawyers said. “Rather than the State’s sensational story of pure horror — including rape, biting, blackouts, a panicked forcible drowning, and a cover-up involving massive quantities of blood that Mr. Duncan, cold and calculating, cleaned up before seeking help for the child — the jury would instead hear the true story: Haley tragically but accidentally drowned in the bathtub.”

After the 1998 trial, Statham spiraled downward. She could have survived her daughter’s death, but surviving this horror story proved nearly impossible, she said.

Duncan’s conviction didn’t just destroy his life, she said. “All of our families were destroyed by this. We’re still collateral damage in this.”

Catherine Legge is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who lives in Toronto. Formerly executive producer of original video for GEM, she also spent two decades traveling around the world as a documentary director at CBC. Her indie films under her banner Play Nice Productions have been shown in 250+ countries including “The Unsolved Murder of Beverly Lynn Smith,” “Met While Incarcerated/From Prison With Love,” and “Billion Dollar Caribou.” Her current film and podcast “The Murder That Never Happened” takes place on death row in Louisiana.

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