On May 1, 1992, 21-year-old Kennedy Brewer came to the home of Gloria Jackson in Brooksville, Mississippi. Jackson lived there with her four children, 5-year-old Christopher, 3-year-old Christine, 22-month-old Keithshawn, and 13-month-old Nicole. Brewer was the father of Keithshawn and Nicole. At the time, Christopher was not there, so when Jackson said she was going out to party with her sister on the night of May 2, Brewer was left to care for the three youngest children.
Before she left at about 8 p.m., Jackson and Brewer quarreled. He had found a piece of paper with suspicious telephone numbers in Jackson’s vehicle. Brewer accused her of infidelity. Jackson denied the accusation and left.
She returned about 12:30 a.m. on May 3. She would later testify that the house was dark and Brewer refused to let her turn on any lights. She and Brewer went to the bedroom and she could barely see on the floor next to the bed a bundle that Jackson thought was Christine, because Christine regularly slept there. Jackson could not see Christine’s arms, head, or legs, protruding from the pallet at the foot of the bed, but Jackson assumed that Christine was there.
Across from the bed and Christine was a window to the outside. This window was broken and covered with a blanket. Jackson wanted to check on Christine, but did not because she and Brewer had sex. When they finished, Brewer required Jackson to sleep against the wall, away from the side next to Christine. Jackson fell asleep and awoke around 7 a.m. Brewer left the room to get a diaper and a bottle for one of the children.
Around 7:30 A.M., Jackson noticed that Christine was not on her pallet, and that her blanket was spread out. Jackson frantically searched for Christine. Not finding her in the house, Jackson summoned neighbors to help her search. Brewer, Jackson later said, stood around without providing much help.
The police were called and at around 9:30 a.m. that same morning, Noxubee County Sheriff’s Deputy Bud Permenter arrived. He would later testify that he heard Jackson shouting at Brewer, demanding to know what he had done with her daughter. In order to avoid an escalation of the argument, Permenter arrested both Jackson and Brewer.
Dewayne Graham, Jackson’s first cousin, and Graham’s friend, Leshone Williams, told police they had visited the house twice during Jackson’s absence. Williams said that he saw all of the children, including Christine, playing in the house during both visits. Graham and Williams left Brewer alone with the children around 11:50 p.m., about 40 minutes before Jackson came home.
The following day, May 4, 1992, Sheriff’s Investigator Ernest Eichelberger searched Jackson’s home. There was no evidence of forced entry. He did not find any blood.
On May 5, 1992, using trained sniffer dogs and some articles of Brewer’s clothing containing Brewer’s scent, deputies were led to a creek about 500 yards behind the house. The creek was lined with dense vegetation, which the investigators could not penetrate. Later, Permenter would say that the vegetation was 25 or 30 yards deep and “just about as thick with snakes as it was with brush.”
Using a helicopter, investigators flew over the creek and noticed something in the water. As the helicopter hovered over the creek, Christine’s body floated to the surface. When her body was recovered, the police noticed a footprint near the body on the side of the creek bank nearest the house. The footprint was in too poor a condition to take a cast.
Dr. Steven Timothy Hayne, a pathologist who performed autopsies for the state, concluded in his autopsy report that Christine had been raped and strangled. Hayne also noted multiple imprints on the surfaces of the body, “suggestive of bite marks.” Hayne then requested the assistance of Dr. Michael H. West, a forensic odontologist.
The autopsy report stated that Hayne performed biopsies on three of the marks on the body, although Hayne would later testify that he did not recall performing any biopsies.
On May 6, 1992, although Brewer had no scrapes, scratches, or other marks that he would have incurred had he walked through the brush to put Christine’s body into the creek, he was charged with Christine’s murder.
On May 8, 1992, West obtained dental impressions of Brewer, Jackson, Graham, and Williams. West said he had found 19 human bite marks which he said were made by Brewer. The alleged bite marks, however, only represented the upper set of teeth.
On September 15, 1992, a Noxubee County grand jury indicted Brewer for abduction, rape, and murder of Christine.
The case was moved to Lowndes County, where, on March 20, 1995, Brewer went to trial in Lowndes County Circuit Court. The prosecution contended that Brewer had raped and murdered Christine in Jackson’s home and then carried her body to the creek.
A forensic analyst for the Mississippi State crime laboratory testified that a semen sample was recovered from Christine’s body, but it was insufficient for testing. The defense sought permission to conduct DNA testing, but the trial judge denied that request.
Hayne testified that the child had been raped and died by strangulation. He also testified that he called in West after finding several marks on the child’s body that he believed to be bitemarks.
West testified that 19 marks found on Christine’s were “indeed and without a doubt inflected [sic] by Kennedy Brewer.” West said that all 19 marks were from Brewer’s top two teeth and that somehow the bottom teeth had made no impression. Although West’s bitemark analysis had been discredited in other cases by the time of Brewer’s trial, the trial court allowed him to testify. West had been suspended from the American Board of Forensic Odontology and had resigned from the American Academy of Forensic Science and the International Association of Identification, pending expulsion.
The prosecution also presented Brewer’s clothing from the night Christine disappeared that contained small blood spots, a stain consistent with feces on a dress near where Christine slept, and a blood stain on a blanket found next to where the child slept. However, the state’s forensic analyst testified that he was unable to identify the blood group through serological testing to try to determine the source.
The defense said that West’s theory about the failure of Brewer’s lower teeth to leave any impression was physically impossible. The defense noted that the alleged bitemarks lacked hemorrhaging under the surface of the skin, suggesting that the marks were inflicted at or around the time of death, when the blood stopped flowing.
Dr. Richard Souviron, a dentist and a founding member of the American Board of Forensic Odontology, testified for the defense that the marks were insect bites that the body sustained from being left in the water for days. The defense contended Hayne would have discovered this if he had performed the biopsies as he initially claimed he had done.
Souviron also testified that it was all but impossible to leave repeated bitemark impressions with only the top two teeth.
On March 24, 1995, the jury convicted Brewer, who was intellectually disabled, of sexual battery and capital murder. The following day, the jury voted to sentence him to death.
In October 1998, the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld the conviction and sentence. On March 22, 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a defense petition to appeal. On March 22, 1999, the prosecution filed a motion to set an execution date.
On April 1, 1999, defense attorneys filed a request with the state Supreme Court to hold the motion in abeyance so that an attorney could be appointed to file a post-conviction petition. The state’s motion to set an execution date was dismissed, and the case was remanded. Carrie Jourdan was appointed to represent Brewer, and on September 21, 1998, she filed a post-conviction petition seeking DNA testing. The Supreme Court denied the petition on March 23, 2000, but in a footnote, said the decision was “without prejudice to Brewer’s ability to present a claim within a reasonable time based upon actual DNA results which are exculpatory.”
On April 7, 2000, Brewer filed a petition with the Supreme Court for a rehearing claiming that without some remand and direction to the trial court, Brewer had no procedural vehicle for getting funding for DNA testing. The court agreed and, on December 21, 2000, the proceedings were put on hold. The case was remanded to the trial court.
Brewer then filed a post-trial motion with the trial court to test the DNA evidence at the state’s expense. That motion was granted on April 3, 2001.
In May 2001, ReliaGene Technologies, Inc., a DNA testing laboratory in New Orleans, Louisiana conducted testing on a vaginal swab. The tests identified an unidentified male DNA profile. Brewer was excluded as the source of the profile.
On August 13, 2001, Brewer filed a motion seeking an expedited review of his post-conviction motion for relief based on the DNA test results.
On September 5, 2001, Judge Lee Howard vacated Brewer’s convictions based on the DNA test results and ordered a new trial.
The prosecution vowed to retry him. In March 2006, the prosecution said it would not seek the death penalty at the retrial.
The case was still pending on August 31, 2007, when Brewer was released on bail. During preparations for Brewer’s retrial, the Innocence Project asked the Mississippi Attorney General’s office to re-investigate the case. Further DNA testing during this investigation led to the implication of 51-year-old Justin Albert Johnson, who had a history of sexual assaults against girls and women.
On February 5, 2008, Johnson was arrested and charged with the rape and murder of Christine. Johnson, who was then living in Brooksville, near Jackson’s home, was taken to the Chickasaw County Jail.
There, an investigator from the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office interviewed Johnson. The investigator later reported that Johnson said he did not enter Jackson’s house on that night, but rather reached through a window and removed Christine from the house. He remembered that Brewer was asleep on the bed near the child. He reached inside the window and pulled her out.
Johnson said that Christine did not immediately wake up, but that when she did, they walked through the thicket to the creek. He said that voices in his head told him to sexually assault her and kill her. After he raped her, the voices to him to throw the girl into the creek.
Johnson also confessed to a similar crime—the rape and murder of 3-year-old Courtney Smith committed in September 1990 also in Noxubee County. The girl had been dumped into a pond. Johnson said he acted alone in both crimes.
In 1992, the ex-boyfriend of Courtney’s mother, Levon Brooks, had been convicted of Courtney’s rape and murder, in large part, on the strength of bitemark analysis performed by West. Just as in Brewer's case, Hayne, the medical examiner, called in West to analyze “bitemarks” on the child’s wrist. West had testified that the marks were human bitemarks consistent with Brooks’s two top teeth.
At the time of Courtney’s murder, Johnson often visited a house near Courtney’s home. At the time of Christine’s murder, Johnson was staying near the Jackson home.
On February 15, 2008, the prosecution dismissed Brewer’s case. On the same day, the Innocence Project, along with co-counsel from the Mississippi Innocence Project, won Brooks’s release from prison. Brooks was subsequently exonerated in March 2008. Since DNA testing could not be conducted in his case, he was exonerated based on Johnson’s confession.
In 2009, Brewer and Brooks jointly filed a civil-rights lawsuit against West and Hayne for $18 million. That same year, Governor Haley Barbour signed compensation legislation. Under the law, the state agreed to pay Brewer $500,000 in compensation.
In 2011, West testified during a deposition in the case of Leigh Stubbs and Tammy Vance that he no longer believed his own testimony regarding bitemark evidence and that the existing science did not support bitemark identification. “When I testified in this case, I believed in the uniqueness of human bitemarks. I no longer believe in that. And if I was asked to testify in this case again, I would say I don’t believe it’s a system that's reliable enough to be used in court.” Vance and Stubbs were exonerated in 2013.
The lawsuit filed by Brewer and Brooks was dismissed in 2014 after a judge ruled that West and Hayne were immune from damages. The Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal in 2017.
Three other Mississippi men who were convicted in part based on testimony from Hayne also were exonerated: Tyler Edmonds, Eddie Lee Howard Jr., and LeeVester Brown. West also provided erroneous bitemark testimony against Howard.
On August 24, 2021, Sherwood Brown, who had been sentenced to death for a murder in DeSoto County, Mississippi, was exonerated after spending 26 years on death row. He had been convicted based in part on West’s testimony that his teeth left bitemarks on the victim.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 08-29-2011
Last Update Date: 03-30-2026
