Dr. Cyril Wecht Obituary – Nationally renowned forensic pathologist and former Allegheny County Coroner Dr. Cyril Wecht died at 93. Wecht, born in 1931 to immigrant parents in rural Greene County, attended Fifth Avenue High School in McKees Rocks and the Hill District before getting his medical degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1956.
The Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts said he was famous for his work on JonBenet Ramsey, Anna Nicole Smith, and President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
After three years in the Air Force, he earned a law degree from the University of Maryland and embarked on the career in forensic pathology that would shape the rest of his life and involve him in some of the nation’s highest profile criminal cases spanning decades.
Wecht had been allowed to examine the evidence of Kennedy’s assassination held in the National Archives. It was August 1972 and the president’s brain was missing.
A critic of the Warren Commission’s “official” assassination report, Wecht argued it would be difficult to address questions about the president’s Dallas assassination without his preserved brain and microscopic slides of bullet hole tissue. Wecht reported that those were “missing” from the archives, making international news.
He was elected county coroner in 1970 and commissioner in 1980 after serving as deputy coroner since 1965.He consulted on the Manson family and Robert F. Kennedy murders for years.He was reelected coroner in 1995 while testifying and consulting on JonBenet Ramsey’s murder.Rarely, his results made him an iconoclast or defendant.
Only one forensic pathologist would have testified before the House select committee on assassinations if one person alone had killed John F. Kennedy. Dr. Wecht found Pittsburgh police officers guilty of suffocating Charles Dixon, but District Attorney Stephen Zappala did not prosecute them.
Zappala’s medical opinion led to federal charges of using the coroner’s office for personal advantage.After a mistrial, the prosecution was accused of political bias.Wecht is credited by many attorneys with boosting forensic pathology in investigations and trials.
He published twelve novels and led a Las Vegas play about legendary criminals. Wecht married Sigrid Ronsdal in 1961 and had four children, including Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice David Wecht.
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