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Debra Mackey Part 2: The Criminal Pathologist · Gone Cold - Texas True Crime

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Quincy Emmy was a popular television show that ran for eight seasons from nineteen
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seventy six to nineteen eighty three, starring Jack Klugman in the title role.
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In the show, Quincy was the medical examiner for the Los Angeles County Coroner's
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Office and worked with police, often contentiously investigating and solving homicides. Doctor Ralph
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Erdman in nineteen eighty became something of the Texas Panhandle's Quincy and of the entire
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West Texas region when he retired from the United States Army and settled in the
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area. By his retirement from the military, Erdman was a decorated soldier by
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the branch in which he served, the German Army, and even before entering
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the service, Erdman's studies kept him on the move. His interest in the
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medical field began early in life, and he began his studies at the University
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of Mexico, where he pursued a degree in veterinary medicine. When Erdman moved
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to study at the University of Michigan, however, a professor there took a
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special interest in him, it's no wonder really. Aside from English, Erdmann
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spoke both Spanish and German fluently, since he was the son of German immigrants
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and had grown up on both a South Texas cattle ranch and one in Tampico,
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Mexico. Ralph Erdman was no doubt an interesting and intelligent individual. The
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professor, who took a liking to him, began inviting him to autopsies of
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human bodies, introducing the man to the practice of pathology. Erdman was fascinated
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and moved to Dallas, Texas to study at Southwestern Medical School there before joining
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the Army and finally obtaining his master's degree in pathology from George Washington University.
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The pathologist retired from the Army because he said his family was tired of moving
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around. When doctor Erdman, his wife and daughter finally planted roots in Childress,
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Texas, law enforcement in area towns and cities were relieved to finally have
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someone of his ilk to provide medical investigative insight. He vowed to never leave
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his new home. By nineteen eighty two, after only being in the area
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for two years, doctor Erdman had already performed nearly one hundred and fifty autopsies
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in that region. His large children's home served as his temporary base of operations,
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where he performed at least three autopsies a week. But Erdman was supervising
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the construction of a state of the art pathology lab at Wayland Baptist College in
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Plainview, where he'd eventually operate from and where investigators could attend lectured autopsies to
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learn more about pathology's role in homicide investigations. Doctor Erdman wanted the law enforcement
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officers he'd be working with to know what to look for at a murder scene,
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he said, to make his determinations easier and help provide more accurate information
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that in turn would make the investigator's job easier. Erdman wanted to work alongside
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detectives, much like doctor Quincy did on television, a practice that hadn't yet
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caught on in the Panhandle Hell and many small jurisdictions there. A justice of
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the peace was still called in to crime scenes to determine exactly what had happened,
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but real medical science caught on in a big way when doctor Ralph Erdmann
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came to town and law enforcement from Amarillo to Lubbock to the Rio Grande utilized
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the pathologist in their investigations. After over a decade of being the region's premier
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medical investigator, however, a controversy exploded, calling into question the good doctor's
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methods and ethics. Nearly every case Doctor Ralph Erdman had his hands on,
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in fact, became the target of a reinvestigation by authorities, including the FBI.
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Many convictions, it turned out, were based on rushed, haphazardly conducted
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autopsies, at best, completely falsified autopsies, followed by worthless testimony in court.
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While making a name for himself and enjoying the monetary benefits of being the
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go to pathologist for a large collection of counties, Erdmann's ego and greed became
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overinflated. Among the cases the doctor botched was that of Plainview Jane Doe,
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and in far more ways than one, leading her perhaps to go unidentified for
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decades. When a cranium was found in Maricopa County, Arizona, in October
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of nineteen eighty two, it was determined by experts there to match a mandible
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found several months earlier in February of nineteen eighty two. The complete skull was
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determined to belong to a white woman, young with a small frame and dark
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hair. Subsequently, the Maricopa County Sheriff's office asked a reconstruction artist for the
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state's Department of Public Safety to create a rendition of what the person might have
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looked like out of clay. The police artist sculpted over the skull and a
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composite was made. Not all police worthy discoveries in the state of Arizona got
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this particular treatment, and it feels odd to say the discovery of this skull
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was not necessarily an unusual occurrence in the state. On February fourteenth, nineteen
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eighty two, in Tucson, about a week after a headless body was found
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six hundred and forty five miles northeast in Plainview, Texas, and ten days
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before a jawbone would be found by hikers up near Scottsdale, one hundred and
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fifteen miles away, a youth riding his dirt bike through a wash in the
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desert found one with several pieces of vertebrae nearby. Several months later, on
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September fifth, nineteen eighty two, a family taking a leisurely walk through the
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Tucson desert stumbled upon a skull with a bullet hole through it. The skull
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of another victim of a gunshot to the head was found a few months later.
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In January of nineteen eighty three in the Maricopa County desert just north of
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Phoenix. A Sheriff's office searchposse discovered the body of this man a few days
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later. These are only a few of many examples to point out only the
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oddity of the many findings of skulls or pieces thereof in Arizona, however,
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is a disservice. Texas was also home to many such discoveries around that time.
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In June of nineteen eighty two, the skull of a female aged eighteen
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to twenty was found just outside Edinburgh, Texas, not far from the Mexico
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border. A hole in the cranium Hidalgo County Sheriff's Office investigator A. J.
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Rodriguez said seemed to indicate she was the victim of foul play. An
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off duty policeman dumping trash at a Midland landfill discovered human remains there two feet,
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a hand and a skull in July of nineteen eighty three, but the
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discovery of the mandible, and then the cranium near Scottsdale, Arizona. Was
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different from all these other discoveries in a few ways. Namely, it was
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a close enough match to the headless body found in Plainview, Texas, that
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doctor Ralph Erdmann had determined was a teenaged white girl or young white woman.
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It not only allowed for the pathologist to flex his muscle as a sort of
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famous forensic medical investigator who could resolve issues relatively quickly, it also made for
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a story that was sure to become legendary, a legacy he could leave behind,
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perhaps in the history books or medical texts. None of it, however,
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was any more real than the confessions of Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Elwood.
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Tool to this unidentified woman's murder and beheading. Lay Them to Rest Out
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This October from Hachette Book Group vividly opens up the world of forensic science.
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Lay Them to Rest brings readers to crime scenes, labs, and law enforcement
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offices, all in the name of identifying John and Jane Doe victims. It's
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written by a season cold case researcher who also hosts the popular podcasts One Strange
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Thing and The Fall Line. Readers and lay them to rest. Will even
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follow along as a victim is identified for the first time in her family decades
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later, finally get some answers, heartbreaking, hopeful, and insightful. Lay
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them to rest will show you how far we've come in solving the cases of
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the unidentified dead, and how far we have yet to go. Pre order,
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lay them to rest now wherever you get books. Though law enforcement officials
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had trust issues with doctor Ralph Erdman for years, they apparently kept them to
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themselves. They were clearing cases off the books, after all, so they
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seemed to have a little desire to expose Erdman. There are clear indications that
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a number of people in law enforcement considered him weird and questioned his competence because
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he regularly messed up evidence and he did strange things like handing people organs to
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hold. Special Prosecutor Tommy Turner later said, but no one blew the whistle.
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Erdman's fantasy to beat the Quincy of Texas led him down a dark and
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unforgivable path. According to Special Prosecutor Turner, Erdman's fantasy of playing a pivotal
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role in investigations caused him to fabricate information in his reports to quote follow along
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with a police theory of a case. Everything came crashing down on doctor Ralph
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Erdman in nineteen ninety one when he was indicted for falsifying an autopsy in the
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death case of Craig Newman. At Newman's home where his body was found,
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Erdman overheard a responding officer comment that he met drugs were involved in the death.
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Doctor Erdman's autopsy findings ruled Craig Newman's cause of death as cocaine overdose,
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which angered the man's family. They said Newman never touched drugs. When the
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family of the man was given the autopsy report later, they found where the
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spleen had been weighed, and that weight noted. But there was a problem.
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Craig Newman's spleen had been removed years before he died. His body was
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subsequently exhumed, and there were no incision marks to suggest that an autopsy had
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ever even taken place. An independent pathologist performed an autopsy and found that Craig
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Newman had died of a heart attack, not any kind of drug overdose.
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When it was all said and done, Special Prosecutor Turner called Erdman a liar.
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And one of epic proportions. He said there were likely hundreds of purposefully
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bad or unperformed autopsies. Doctor Ralph Erdman was responsible for the botched autopsies that
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he's been and died it on so far are just a small sample. Turner
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said, we started digging up bodies, and when we were seven for seven,
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we decided that in the interests of judicial economy, we didn't have to
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go further to prove that this guy was a liar. Capital murder convictions in
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which doctor Ralph Erdman performed the victim's autopsies and testified at trial were being appealed
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with vigor. When his misconduct was discovered on September twenty first, nineteen ninety
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two. Erdeman pleaded no contest to a total of seven felony counts of falsifying
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autopsies and several counties, though he refused to admit that he'd made the mistakes
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intentionally. Doctor Erdman didn't spend any time in prison, and instead was given
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ten years probation, fined seventeen thousand dollars, and his medical license taken away.
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Hundreds of cases handled by the pathologist would be inspected in the coming years,
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his autopsies called made to order for prosecutors. At least one case didn't
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work out in prosecutor's favor, however, when Erdman misplaced a victim's skull that
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had a bullet wound, causing them to ultimately drop charges against their suspect.
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Early in nineteen ninety two. Erdman's wife, Joan was also found to be
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complicit in his illegal activities, though in a completely different capacity. She was
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selling bodies to a Lubbock company, Alo Materials, who used them for harvesting
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organs and biological materials used for bone graphs. Though the Alo Material's owner originally
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denied he'd paid Joan Erdman for the bodies, he went back on his story
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and added that there was nothing illegal about it. Laws at both the state
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and federal levels, however, prohibited such transactions involving human body parts and allow
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materials. Claims that nothing improper had taken place were never expounded upon. The
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appeals and writs that will result from Ralph Erdman's misconduct, a Randall County District
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Attorney said in nineteen ninety five, will last for the next twenty years.
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Three hundred of Ralph Erdman's autopsies were inspected for ineptitude or malfeasance. In November
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of that year, sixty eight year old Ralph Erdman was sentenced to eight years
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in prison as the result of a probation violation when a stockpile of firearms and
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ammunition were found in the home he'd moved to in Seattle, Washington. Erdmann
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botched things in the case of play Jane Doe as well. When the bones
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were finally returned to the Hale County Sheriff's office, eight years after the woman's
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body was found, Erdmann sent them back with the skull of a fourteen year
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old boy, not the skull found just outside Scottsdale, Arizona, although it
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was certainly under question when the Arizona head was recovered. Plain View Jane Doe
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was laid to rest at plain View Cemetery. It was eleven years after her
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body had been discovered. On Friday, July twenty third, nineteen ninety three,
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a child's casket containing the remains of the unidentified woman was lowered into a
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grave marked only Jane Doe. Nineteen eighty two. A handful of strangers attended
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the service. Authorities were no closer to identifying her than they'd been on day
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one. Remarkably, in a coincidence that I'm still reeling from the date of
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Plainview Jane Doe's burial is also the date of birth of Deborah Denise Mackie,
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discovered to be the same young woman three decades later, but doctor Ralph Erdmann
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hadn't made that discovery easy. The case of Plainview Jane Doe sat for many
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more years after her burial completely cold. In twenty fifteen, a forensic anthropology
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team for the University of Texas exhumed the remains When Texas rangers stumbled upon the
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case while investigating another they said, perhaps meaning the disappearance of Deborah Denise Mackie,
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The DNA DOE Project became involved and began work to identify the victim.
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Many years after the discovery of the headless body of the Jane Doe, doctor
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Ralph Erdmann's determination that the skull found in Scottsdale, Arizona, belonged to the
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body found in Hale County, Texas was proven unequivocally false by DNA, and
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it was also scientifically proven that she was not a white woman, rather,
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she was a black woman. Plain View Jane Doe had never been so close
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to being identified, but there was still plenty of work ahead anyway. These
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weren't the only two major identifying factors that doctor Ralph Erdman, the criminal pathologist
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who botched countless cases, the breadth of which will likely never be fully known,
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got wrong. He'd also determined that the unidentified woman had never been pregnant.
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Eventually, this determination, like the others, would prove to be untrue.
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Not long after a few news articles showed up online about the Texas Rangers
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and DNA DOE projects new push to identify plain View Jane Doe came the first
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ever news story about a woman that went missing from Lubbock, Texas, just
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over a month before the discovery of the unidentified woman. The missing person was
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twenty year old Deborah Denise Mackie, who disappeared on New Year's Day nineteen eighty
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two after climbing into the passenger side door of a brown car with apparently an
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unknown driver. The timing of the report seemed purposeful, as if it was
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already suspected that they were one and the same at that point, though we
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could find no actual proof of that either way, It gave Deborah's family a
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voice after more than three and a half decades when she vanished, not so
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much as a single news article describing Deborah Mackey could be found. Nothing to
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indicate she was missing at all, or what she looked like a black female
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with black hair and dark brown eyes who stood five feet tall and weighed one
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hundred to one hundred and ten pounds. Nor was there anything describing what she
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was wearing the last time she was seen, a brown checkered hooded coat over
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a plaid shirt, green pants, brown shoes, and a red and white
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bandana as a hair band. See The cops who took the missing person's report,
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filed six days after she was last seen, didn't feel any sense of
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urgency to find Deborah. She was an adult, they told the family,
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and she'd probably left on her own, walked away from a life that hadn't
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been easy on her, to say the least. Perhaps she even changed her
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name, the police said. But Deborah's family objected to what the Lubbock police
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thought. They the folks who knew Deborah better than anyone, told detectives she'd
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have never left her family for long, never left her little girl, who
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was nine years old, at the time motherless. Still, the case received
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no public pleas for help from the cops through newspapers or television, and by
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every single indication imaginable, not even an investigation. Just a few years after
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the reopening of the plain View Jane Doe case and the Lubbock Police Department's decision
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to finally look into Deborah's disappearance, some answers to both finally came. Though.
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Plain View Jane Doe was identified as Debra Denise Terrell Mackie on November fifteen,
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twenty twenty two, by the DNA Doe Project using forensic genetic genealogy.
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That identification wasn't publicly announced until the Texas Department of Public Safety issued a press
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release on Thursday, June eighth, twenty twenty three. Not much more information
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has been released, and though Deborah Mackey's missing person's case has finally gotten the
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attention it deserves, unfortunately now as a murder case, whether theories or evidence
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of a suspect exists is unknown, but perhaps there is a clue that points
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to a possible theory. Back in twenty eighteen, Lubbock Police Department Metropolitan Special
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Crimes Unit Detective George Madrigau worked with the FBI to solve the case of the
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nineteen ninety three murder of thirty seven year old Lubbock woman Bobby Fields. They
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began investigating a man named Samuel Little, who, much like Henry Lee Lucas
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had a couple decades earlier, was confessing to virtually every unsolved murderer under the
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sun. Investigators did things like match drawings Little had made to murder victims,
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looked for holes in a timeline of the documented whereabouts of the man they called
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the most prolific serial killer in history, and solicited I'm sorry took confessions to
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clear their cases. In October twenty nineteen, it was announced that Samuel Little
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was indicted for the murder of Bobby Fields and Lubbock. He had confessed to
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the murder of a woman somewhere in the area of which it All falls,
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Texas. Now that's pretty far away from Lubbock, about two hundred and eight
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miles, But since no cases existed in the area of which at all falls
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that matched Little's confession, investigators began thinking he meant Bobby's case in Lubbock.
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A check of Little's vehicles showed that he owned a yellow nineteen seventy eight Cadillac
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El Dorado at the time of the murder, the same kind of car,
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apparently Bobby Fields was in the last time she was seen alive. That in
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the confession was pretty much all they had, so it never would have made
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it through a court of law, but Samuel Little pleaded guilty in the case
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was closed. Detective Madre Gal is now working the Deborah Mackey case, and,
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considering Samuel Little's whereabouts during the period of her disappearance are unaccounted for,
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it is within reason to estimate that he's at least been looked at for her
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murder. The murder of Deborah Mackey, if her autopsy report is anywhere near
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accurate, it does not match the modus operandi of Samuel Little, which is
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strangulation. But given doctor Ralph Erdman's many mistakes, is it possible Deborah's head
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was removed and relocated by animal wildlife that will likely remain unknown anyway until the
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case is resolved. Doctor Erdman's many other errors are nearly as egregious, however,
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and it deems this a reasonable theory. There's another important thing to take
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away from this case. Upon the unraveling of the mystery of the skull,
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the confession of Henry Lee Lucas crumbles, but law enforcement said he knew things
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about the case, such as the location of the skull, that only the
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killer of Plainview Jane Doe would know. Obviously, he knew nothing without law
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enforcement's help. The fact that the Arizona skull and brahmcke are not a DNA
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match, not the same person, is a decent piece of evidence that points
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to large scale law enforcement corruption during the Lucas and Tool confession spree. Most
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of those closest to Deborah Mackee will not see her get justice. Her grandparents,
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mother, father, sister, and even her daughter have all died,
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most of them in recent years. But perhaps Texas Rangers and Lubbock officials are
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well on their way to solving Deborah's case. If you have any information about
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the murder of Deborah Denise Mackie, please contact the Lubbock Police Department Crime Line
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at eight zero six seven four one one thousand, or reach out to Metropolitan
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Special Crimes Unit Detective George Madregal at eight zero six seven seven five three zero
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