Once Upon a Time in Lubbock: Dr. Ralph Erdmann and The Lubbock Medical Examiner’s Office
There have been a lot of shenanigans going on at the Lubbock County Medical Examiner's Office. Here's a good example from Everything Lubbock.
But this isn't the first black eye that the Lubbock County Medical Examiner's Office has had.
Once upon a time in Lubbock, back in the 1980s and 1990s, a disgraced former pathologist, the late Dr. Ralph Erdmann, was at the center of the bad publicity in the Lubbock ME's Office.
On September 21, 1992, Ralph Erdmann pled no contest to seven felony counts involving false autopsies dating back to the early 1980s.
From The New York Times:
"The botched autopsies he's been indicted on so far are just a small sample," said Tommy Turner, the special prosecutor in a Lubbock court of inquiry that investigated Dr. Erdmann last summer. 'This Guy Was a Liar'
"There are clear indications," Mr. Turner said, "that a number of people in law enforcement considered him weird and questioned his competence because he regularly messed up evidence and he did strange things like handing people organs to hold. But no one blew the whistle."
He was said to have stored organs and other tissue in refrigerators that contained his lunch.
Erdmann regularly messed up, including one case in which he stated that a corpse that was examined had its spleen removed and weighed. The family later stated the deceased had his spleen removed years earlier.
He was also known to have falsified samples in various other cases all around West Texas and the Panhandle.
Even though this was more than 27 years ago, it seems that the echo's of Erdmann's past can be heard with the current situation in the Lubbock County ME's office.
I just wonder how many people they have botched up since Erdmann left.