Published: February 06, 2009 11:45 pm      

At odds over autopsy: Officials split on whether report should be made public

A Bedford County prosecutor said he will fight the release of the autopsy from a 2001 murder, even after the Blair County coroner said the information would be made public because of a recent court ruling.

Bedford County District Attorney Bill Higgins said he will be in court Monday morning asking a judge to seal the Dana Gates autopsy.

He wasn’t sure if he would be doing so in Bedford, where the crime occurred – or Blair, where the victim actually died.

The Tribune-Democrat appeared to have won a seven-year battle Friday when Blair County Coroner Patricia Ross said she would release the autopsy report from the 2001 murder of the Imler-area woman. The newspaper sued the Blair coroner in 2002, attempting to obtain the autopsy report.

Gates, 31, was found naked, caked in blood and mud, outside her home on Nov. 30, 2001. She died of blunt-force trauma en route to Altoona Hospital. Her live-in fiance, Lorin Burket, survived a severe beating.

The wounds were so brutal that police initially thought the two had been shot.

The case is unsolved.

Ross said Friday morning she would make the autopsy available to The Tribune-Democrat soon, in line with a January state Supreme Court ruling that such reports are public information. The court seemed to allow only limited exceptions.

But in the afternoon, Higgins said that he would try to overstep Ross.

“I think it’s her reading that she can’t stop the release, and she might be right,” the DA said. “But I can, and I will. We have separate obligations and duties.”

Even after seven years, Higgins believes keeping the information sealed might allow investigators to solve the case.

“The killer does not know what we know,” he maintained. “We do not intend to keep the information from the public. We intend to keep the investigation moving forward.”

Tribune-Democrat Editor Chip Minemyer was pleased by the Supreme Court’s ruling and disappointed with Higgins’ position.

“Our quest to obtain these records has been carried out in the spirit of providing the public with a full understanding of the crime and investigation surrounding it,” he said.

“This is an unsolved, violent murder – and a killer remains at large,” he said. “It has been our contention from the start that the public deserved to have all of the information about what authorities believe happened that day and what is being done to determine who committed the crime.”

Ross said Friday morning that – while she disagrees with the Supreme Court decision in a lawsuit such as the one that The Tribune-Democrat filed against her – she will comply and release the files.

“I have to follow all the protocols,” Ross said when asked if she would turn over the records Friday. “I’m off today. I’ll have to notify the (Gates) family. I’ll have to notify the DA because that’s an open investigation.”

She said she couldn’t set a precise time to release the records because she didn’t have access to her work calendar and didn’t want to delegate the duty to a deputy.

The Tribune-Democrat initially took Ross to court seeking Gates’ autopsy report in January 2002. The newspaper eventually lost on the Commonwealth Court level in 2005, but did not appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

The newspaper in 2002 was trying to disseminate more information on the murder but was meeting resistance from authorities. Then-Publisher Pam Mayer decided to press the case in court, recalls attorney Michael Sahlaney.

“We needed the Gates records because we were getting stonewalled,” said Sahlaney, who represented the newspaper in the case.

“They sealed the search warrant; there were problems with police records; we couldn’t get the autopsy report,” Sahlaney said. “It’s a major criminal case and we couldn’t get anything. We were getting stonewalled and we couldn’t find out why.”

The criminal case itself has had as many twists and turns as the effort to get the autopsy record.

More than a year after the homicide, in February 2003, a Martinsburg man was charged with killing Gates. Cordell Ebersole had dated her in 1999 and 2000.

The most compelling evidence authorities had was a single hair matching Ebersole’s DNA that was found in the home. Yet since he spent time at Gates’ home socially, that could be expected, a judge ruled in dismissing the charges in 2004.

Ebersole denied any involvement in the crime.

State police Cpl. Rodney Heming, the lead criminal investigator in Bedford County, said Friday of the Gates homicide, “It’s still an open, active investigation.”

He encouraged anyone with information – even if they believe it’s old or has been looked into – to give him a call at 623-6133.

Higgins said of Ebersole: “He’s the only person that’s ever been charged, so you can glean from that.

“It’s not a cold case or anything like that,” Higgins said. “I’m telling you, I review it regularly.”

Higgins said he spoke with the state police crime lab about the case as recently as three months ago.

“We want desperately to solve this,” he said.