Werner Uri Spitz[1] (August 22, 1926 – April 14, 2024) was a German-American forensic pathologist who worked on a number of high-profile cases, including the investigations of the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
[5] When Spitz was a youth, his father got him a job working in a medical examiner's office, where he was charged with cleaning and other small duties.
[6] Spitz returned to Europe for medical school, where he started studies at Geneva University in Switzerland.
After he had spent four years in Geneva, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem established its Medical School and Spitz transferred there.
Kopechne was presumed to have died from drowning after Kennedy's car swerved off a small bridge and plunged into the water.
Spitz testified that the autopsy was unnecessary, and the available evidence was sufficient to conclude that Kopechne died from drowning.
[13][14] In 1970, while Spitz was the deputy chief medical examiner for Maryland, he determined that Sister Cathy Cesnik, a 26-year-old Catholic nun who disappeared in November 1969, had been murdered by a blow to the head.
[16] In 1975, Spitz was asked to work as an advisor to both the Rockefeller Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
He reviewed the autopsy performed 12 years earlier on president John F. Kennedy by military pathologists.
He attributed the flaws in the investigation to the fact that at that time in the United States, forensic pathology was in its infancy.
He disagreed with the prosecution's medical examiner Jan Garavaglia, who had said that the death could be ruled as a homicide based on the autopsy, and described her work as "shoddy".