Note: The Hamilton County Coroner's Office issued a release Tuesday confirming Rhoda Nathan tested positive for Hepatitis B, according to a document provided by attorney David Hine.
A release from the Hamilton County Coroner's Office Monday claimed Rhoda Nathan, the woman brutally beaten inside her hotel room at the Embassy Suites in Blue Ash more than 30 years ago, did not have Hepatitis B. The claim was disputed by attorneys.
Earlier this month, Hamilton County Prosecutor Connie Pillich announced she had dismissed the murder case against Elwood Jones, a man who sat on death row for nearly three decades, before Hamilton County Common Pleas Court Judge Wende Cross in 2022 ruled that evidence withheld from Jones' defense attorneys was significant enough that Jones should have a new trial.
Cross's and Pillich's decisions were based on multiple pieces of information, including that the state had tested Jones in 1994 for Hepatitis B, an infection the coroner's office said Nathan had when she died, which he had tested negative for despite never being immunized. Neither the test nor its results were disclosed during the trial.
Pillich said in her announcement that Jones not having the highly transmissible disease, despite being accused of brutally beating Nathan with his bare hands, "excludes" him as a suspect.
Watch: Why the prosecutor's office said it dismissed Elwood Jones's case
However, on Monday, the coroner's office said a laboratory report indicated Nathan tested negative for Hepatitis B despite her autopsy saying she tested positive.
We spoke with Coroner Lakshmi Kode Sammarco, who told us the prosecutor's office called on Dec. 9 to ask if they had any DNA evidence connected to the Jones case. She said her administrator looked through the case file, which had since been digitized, and informed them there was no DNA evidence because the office did not have DNA capability at that time.
When Pillich's announcement noted the previously reported autopsy information, Sammarco said she wanted to get familiar with the case and decided to review the reports and lab results. When they happened across the infectious disease laboratory results done by an outside lab, they claimed to have found a document saying Nathan was actually listed as negative for Hepatitis B.
Because of that, and a follow-up conversation with Nathan's son, she said a pathologist in the office reviewed the findings detailed in Nathan's autopsy report.
"No inflammation of the liver associated with hepatitis was indicated. Therefore, the information we have reviewed demonstrates that Ms. Nathan did not have Hepatitis B," the coroner's office said in a release. "This is contrary to what is stated in the autopsy report which is most likely secondary to human error in transcription."
Sammarco said they also tried to contact the hospital where Nathan was taken after the beating to see if they had any blood tests, but they were told that medical records are only retained for 10 years.
"There's nothing else that we can corroborate; there's no other evidence to review," Sammarco said.
The coroner's office said the pathologist who performed the autopsy has since died, so they "can only rely on the information present within the case file."
"I'm surprised that in the course of 31 years that at some point along the way, in all the different appeals that have happened, that nobody had done a deeper dive into the information in the file and discovered that laboratory result," Sammarco said.
Jones not having Hepatitis B was one of the biggest pieces of evidence Pillich's office pointed to in explaining the decision to dismiss his case.
Pillich, in her announcement, also pointed to a lack of forensic or physical evidence directly linking Jones to the murder, insufficient follow-ups on witness statements pointing to other possible suspects and failure to provide Jones' attorneys with a large amount of investigatory material before the trial.
In a statement, Nathan's son, Valentine, said he was "outraged and disgusted" by the announcement. Pillich had previously said Nathan's children expressed "serious grief and frustration" that her office dismissed Jones' case.
"Connie is incompetent. Her saying past prosecutors cheated is irresponsible. She’s weak and should have tried the case with what was there. She should step down or be removed," he said. "Judge Cross has her own agenda and should also not be on the bench. Good job you let a killer go."
However, Jones's defense attorneys tell us that Sammarco has the wrong information.
"The coroner is wrong. She is not reading the file correctly," said Jones's attorney, Jay Clark. "What she is relying on in her inaccurate press release is Elwood's negative test Hep. B results. Not Ms. Nathans."
Hear more from Jones' attorney about where he believes the coroner went wrong:
Jones's attorney gave us their copy of what they said was Nathan's lab report, which says she tested positive for Hepatitis B. That report does not feature Nathan's name, but has an ID number that matches the ID number in Nathan's autopsy. Meanwhile, the copy of the report given to us by the coroner's office does not have the same ID number.
"That's how we established the Brady violation. They withheld that," Clark said, speaking of Jones' legal efforts that granted him a new trial before outright dismissal.
"She should've just kept her mouth shut," Clark said of the coroner.
We reached out to Sammarco, who told us in a statement Monday that the document Jones's lawyers provided "is not in the case file" that she went through.
"I never claimed that there was new evidence, just that this report of a negative hepatitis result was discovered in the case file of Rhoda Nathan," she said.
Clark said evidence was destroyed or forgotten over the years.
"It's not in there because they destroyed back in the day, they forgot, and they didn't realize they gave this to one of Elwood's other attorneys," he said.
For Valentine, the dismissal is devastating.
"It's disgusting, devastating," he said. "Do your work the way the prosecutor's office did the first time. You didn't do all of your due diligence. You didn't examine every single avenue."
In a statement Tuesday, Pillich said the information in the coroner's release was incorrect.
"The coroner did NOT uncover new information about the victim’s medical history. She reviewed a laboratory report belonging to Elwood Jones and mistakenly attributed Mr. Jones’s negative Hepatitis B test result to the victim," Pillich's statement says.
Pillich said the coroner's announcement was a "misreading" of a test done through the coroner's office rather than a correction of a prior diagnosis.
Below is the defense's copy, followed by Sammarco's:
Sammarco issued a new release Tuesday, saying she received a document from one of Jones' attorneys, David Hine, titled "Microbiology Reference Laboratory Test Report."
The coroner said that the document included reference numbers that correspond to autopsy and death record numbers.
"The printed results state that the blood specimen was Hepatitis B surface antigen positive," Sammarco's statement said. "Considering the correlation of the numbers on the report with our records, it appears that this is the actual Hepatitis B test result for Rhoda Nathan."
Sammarco thanked Hine for providing the information.
