A high profile murder case is coming back to light now that the suspect has died, and his former lawyer is speaking out. Time Warner Cable News reporter Tara Grimes explains why this attorney believes his client did kill his wife.
ROCHESTER, N.Y. -- Twenty-six years ago the community was gripped by the case of a well-known doctor, Dr. Maurice Heath, accused of killing his wife of 44 years by injecting her with a high dose of morphine.
“He was from the Bible belt and he lived his life as an esteemed doctor,” said Heath’s former lawyer John Parrinello. “He was the old-fashioned doctor that went on house calls with his little black bag and so his world collapsed.”
While Heath claimed his wife had been suffering from heart pain, others suspected he killed her to be with Shirley Davidson, his mistress from his office. But the case didn’t even finish trial since his attorney John Parrinello was able to get the key piece of evidence, Jean Heath’s blood sample, thrown out.
“In this case, the vial of blood traveled throughout the hospital,” Parrinello said. “They must have called 20 witnesses to try to track the vial, which they were unable to do because it’s a fungible item. In other words, it’s subject to change or it’s subject to somebody tampering with it.”
Now that Heath has died however, Parrinello is giving an inside look at the man he represented.
“Because Dr. Heath is deceased I feel at liberty to disclose what everybody knew or believed,” Parrinello said. “But in the final analysis, yes, Dr. Heath had injected his wife with a fatal dose of morphine. It was a tragedy for everybody and the entire family, but it is what it is.”
While representing him, Parrinello said he gave Heath a polygraph, in which Heath failed. The next day he said Heath tried to commit suicide. Parrinello said he confronted his client in the hospital afterward.
“I walked into his room privately and I looked down at him and I said ‘Maurice you promised me you were okay’ and he lifted his mask and said ‘I lied,’” Parrinello said. “Which that showed the intensity of this man of why he did what he did to his wife, why he tried to commit suicide.”
The last time Parrinello said he saw Heath was the day he walked out of the courthouse. Heath moved to Texas with his new wife Shirley Davidson. While Parrinello said it depends on the case whether or not he asks his client the truth, in this case, with the polygraph, the results, and the conversations he had with Heath, he said he just knew.
“Sometimes you have to know the answer, sometimes you don’t have to know the answers, but in this case I knew with that blood sample that he would have spent the rest of his life in jail,” Parrinello said.
Parrinello said it does not bother him that Heath walked away a free man because the burden of proof is on the prosecutor.