CINCINNATI — 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, according to a new release from the Hamilton County Coroner's Office.
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 announced 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 found 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 to 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.
We have reached out to Pillich's office for their response to the coroner's newest report.
