by Travis Mateer
On May 13th the famous medical examiner who called bullshit on magic bullet theory passed away. He was 93 years old. Here’s some details from a local report:
Dr. Cyril Wecht, a pathologist and attorney whose biting cynicism and controversial positions on high-profile deaths such as President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination caught the attention of prosecutors and TV viewers alike, died Monday. He was 93.
Wecht’s death was announced by the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts, which did not disclose a cause or place of death, saying only that he “passed away peacefully.”
Wecht’s almost meteoric rise to fame began in 1964, three years after he reentered civilian life after serving a brief stint at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. At the time, Wecht was serving as an assistant district attorney in Allegheny County and a pathologist in a Pittsburgh hospital.
The connection Wecht has to Missoula was highlighted at this blog last September after I called up Cyril on the phone while exploring Pittsburgh. Why did I call a famous medical examiner on the phone? I called because I wanted his expert opinion on whether or not a rear naked chokehold could produce bruising ALL OVER a victim’s body. His quick and professional response? No, a rear naked chokehold can NOT bruise a person’s entire body.
The case my question stems from involves the murder of Sean Stevenson here in Missoula at the homeless shelter where I used to work, the Poverello Center. Since Sean’s death I have become quite close to his family, and Sean’s family has known Cyril Wecht for many years. Sean was born in Pittsburgh, after all, and it was his father’s church in Pittsburgh where scenes from the movie Dogma were filmed. That’s how this picture came to be:
While America was expected to believe that a single bullet could make an insane, zig-zagging path around John F. Kennedy, Missoula was expected to believe that Sean’s assault was the result of just ONE person’s violence, Johnny Lee Perry, a young black man who was conveniently shot and killed by the Sheriff’s Office on August 29th, 2021.
After watching the Coroner’s Inquest into Johnny’s death, I wrote an article with the following provocative title:
If I Wanted To Kill Johnny Lee Perry, Here Is How I Would Set Up His State-Sanctioned Execution (April 29th, 2022)
After meeting the family in person last year, I was able to see a small portion of the documentation they have regarding Sean’s death, including the autopsy pictures that show the extensive bruising and a strange mark that might be from a taser.
Before the Sheriff’s Office killed Johnny, I spoke with him near the Poverello Center. This was four months before Johnny was shot. When I told Johnny about the bruising, and how it seemed improbable that he had caused it, Johnny said he was told by the police that Sean’s body had fallen off the gurney while he was being loaded into the ambulance. When I ran this by a retired firefighter source of mine, he said that scenario was virtually impossible.
I listened to an interview this morning that William Ramsey did with Cyril Wecht and some new data points emerged that I find fascinating, like how Wecht tried to win a Senate seat Pennsylvania against John Heinz in 1982. For anyone interested in the strange phenomenon of synchronicities, this interview with Michael Wann has some very interesting and esoteric connections between the death of John Heinz and the death of Kobe Bryant.
Wecht never stopped working, providing his expertise on cases like the Jon Benet Ramsey case, and at least one of the deaths ascribed to the Smiley Face pattern of killings, a pattern I’ve been investigating myself, and which led to me having an interesting falling out with William Ramsey, covered in this article I wrote last February: Is The Smiley Face Theory A Distraction To Protect A Sub-Culture?
Wecht also inserted himself into the George Floyd case because, apparently, when black men are choked to death OUTSIDE of Missoula, it’s a big deal.
From the link:
I have been involved with other cases involving positional asphyxiation, compression asphyxiation. You’ll recall Jonny Gammage here in Pittsburgh and Charles Dixon, also in Pittsburgh, an African American male (who, in 2003, was smothered by police officers who had posed him face down and applied pressure while arresting him). And I’ve had probably over the years now a dozen cases like this, of different kinds. I truly mean, without engaging in hyperbole, that this was the most egregious, savage, barbaric. It was absolutely atrocious.
What this Derek Chauvin is doing is going on for about nine minutes. For approximately, two minutes and 53 seconds – and these are the official records – George Floyd has gone completely limp, is not uttering a sound, let alone a word, and for almost three minutes Chauvin continues to apply that pressure. He looks at people, he knows he’s being videoed, he knows other officers are there. I think what he is saying is “screw you” to the world, to the African Americans – and there are white people there too – who are screaming and yelling and trying to get him off, and he is saying “screw you.”
I know this is going to make me even MORE unpopular in this little mountain town I’ve called home for the last 24 years, but how is Missoula’s attitude any different than the SCREW YOU attitude displayed by Chauvin? I’ve spent the last FOUR FUCKING YEARS saying black men in Missoula can be euthanized and executed by law enforcement, and because this town thinks of itself as liberal and inclusive, and because our media is absolutely fucking terrible, no one seems to care enough to do anything about it, and that’s IF they even know these deaths happened in the first place.
Instead, the influencers in this town are going into overdrive to assassinate my character and neutralize my ability to report on what’s happening, or NOT happening, as the case may be, and if this town truly doesn’t care about what I’ve uncovered, then the influencers could be successful in shutting me down.
If you appreciate what one intrepid journalist can accomplish against nefarious narrative controllers, then consider donating to Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF). Any little bit helps. And stay tuned, because later this week I’ll be writing about my first few days of homelessness, but that article will be appearing exclusively at Western Montana News.
Thanks for reading!
