Detectives nevertheless believed he was good for it, as good as anyone. It was a familiar narrative to Mississippi law enforcement. A vulnerable white woman savaged by a Black man, a convict. And to the Lowndes County detectives, Howard’s persistent denials lacked a vociferousness equal to the gravity of the accusation, and Howard did say something about having a “temper” and that that was why “this had happened.” Although Howard also theorized that there were multiple perpetrators, as many as five or six, and detectives should continue to investigate.

Ignoring Howard’s three alibi witnesses, detectives abandoned the search for alternative suspects and focused on building a case against him. Kemp’s body remained the best hope to find what they were looking for. On the evening of February 6, detectives arrived at the Rankin County morgue in Pearl, Mississippi, to confer with Steven Hayne. There was a problem. Kemp had already been autopsied, thoroughly. And the remnants of her body had been buried three days earlier, decomposing for seventy-two hours before Howard had even been arrested.

Something passed between Hayne and the investigators inside the morgue that night. Maybe a wink, a nod, a file shown, a name dropped; no one else knows exactly what was said or intimated. Hayne later testified that it was simply decided “[t]here was some question that … there could be injuries inflicted by teeth” that compelled further investigation. Kemp’s remains were disinterred, and forensic odontologist Michael West began making his way north from Hattiesburg toward the Rankin County morgue. Eddie Lee Howard, meanwhile, was brought to a local dentist to have a mold taken of his teeth.

West arrived at the morgue at 7:30 p.m. on February 7, five days after the murder, four days after the autopsy. According to West’s forensic report, Detective David Turner, who had arrested Howard, provided West with “dental study models of one Eddie Lee Howard Jr.,” and also told him that Howard was a “thirty-eight-year-old black male” suspected of murdering “an eighty-four-year-old white female,” and that there were “possible patterned wounds” on the remains of the body.

What little remained of the victim’s body was spread out on an autopsy slab for West to examine. He got his cameras, lenses, UV lights, and yellow goggles out of the trunk of his car and went to work. Hayne disappears from the record at that point, apparently leaving West alone in the morgue with Howard’s teeth and his camera equipment. Hours passed. By 1:30 a.m., West was prepared to render his opinion. The black magic of UV light had revealed three human bite marks on Kemp’s remains, injuries that Hayne had not photographed or otherwise documented in his autopsy report.

According to West, there was a bite mark on Kemp’s right breast (which had been removed from her chest cavity during autopsy), one on her neck (which had been dissected during autopsy), and one on the back of her right arm. Once he identified the “bite marks,” West dipped the mold of Howard’s teeth in black ink and “gently pressed” it on the remains of the breast tissue to “replicate the biting action.” It was a match, “indeed and without doubt, inflicted by one Eddie Lee Howard.” West’s signature conclusion.

The Mississippi dentist remitted a bill for nine hundred dollars, packed up his equipment, and headed back to Hattiesburg under the cover of darkness. No one ever saw the photographs of the “bite marks” he still insists he took. All that remains as evidence from that night in the morgue is a two-page forensic report. On a diagram included in the report there are some pencil markings scratched out in West’s hand indicating where he “discovered” the “bite marks” on Kemp’s remains.

The poorest of poor people science. Eddie Lee Howard was charged with capital murder the next day. [He would be convicted and spend twenty-six years on death row before finally being exonerated.]