Following my discovery that the Houston police caused the misidentification of Michael Baulch—an error the Medical Examiner’s office suppresses to this day—I reviewed the case files of the only four 1973 misidentifications ever publicly admitted: David Hilligiest, Malley Winkle, and brothers Donald and Jerry Waldrop. While Dr. Joe publicly blamed a grieving father for these mistakes, my analysis of the autopsy and police reports proves that both HPD and the Medical Examiner were directly responsible.
Evidence Withheld
According to a police report, identification cards bearing the names and Heights address of the Waldrop boys were recovered from grave number 8 inside the boatshed. Detectives phoned Mr. Everett Waldrop in Georgia and confirmed the cards belonged to his missing sons.
That information alone should have made their identification the easiest of all twenty-seven victims, but Houston police apparently didn’t share it with Dr. Joe. Instead, the medical examiner released the wrong bodies from grave number 5 and publicly blamed Mr. Waldrop for the mistake.
Police Silence
The public battle that broke out between Dr. Joe and the grief-stricken father, while police remained silent, left a permanent, uncorrected injustice—especially since police and autopsy reports prove the father was telling the truth.
Dr. Joe told the press he released the bodies based on clothing, dental work, and stature described by Mr. Waldrop. The father was perplexed and outraged because he was told by police the ID cards were found in the clothing of his sons. He never actually saw the bodies.
What the medical examiner—who was also a licensed attorney—did not disclose to the press was that the clothing identified by the father had been furnished by Houston police with the wrong bodies from grave number 5. HPD’s report completely omits this itemized list of clothing.
The Photos
The two green snapshots in the posted image document the nature of the unsupervised boatshed dig, capturing a newspaper photographer taking pictures of a lower jawbone that had been completely singled out from the remains. While it is unknown if the jawbone was ever returned to the correct body, the autopsy report suggests it was not.
To find out exactly how Donald Waldrop’s clothing and jawbone from grave 8 wound up commingled with the wrong remains in grave 5, and how these errors impacted all nine victims recovered on August 9, 1973, read Houston Mass Murders: A Serial Investigation - Serial 2.