CINCINNATI — The Hamilton County prosecutor and the attorneys for Elwood Jones are calling for Hamilton County Coroner Lakshmi Kode Sammarco to issue a retraction and public apology after Sammarco announced that she found a laboratory report indicating the victim in Jones's murder case did not have Hepatitis B — contradicting the autopsy that was used to "exclude" Jones as a suspect.
Sammarco announced Monday, weeks after Hamilton County Prosecutor Connie Pillich announced her office's decision to dismiss the case against Jones, that in reviewing Rhoda Nathan's case, she found a report that indicated Nathan tested negative for Hepatitis B, despite her autopsy saying otherwise.
Watch: The coroner said a file shows Nathan Rhoda did not have Hepatitis B. Elwood Jones's attorneys say the coroner is wrong.
Nathan was brutally beaten inside her hotel room at the Embassy Suites in Blue Ash in 1994. Jones was convicted in the case, sitting 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.
The Ohio 1st District Court of Appeals denied the prosecutor's office's request to appeal Cross's decision to grant Jones a new trial. However, the Ohio Supreme Court in December ruled the Court of Appeals to reconsider the request to challenge the decision.
But Pillich announced that in reviewing the information previously litigated, she found multiple issues — including that modern-day medical testing "excludes" Jones as a suspect. That information was based on Nathan's autopsy, which said she had Hepatitis B, a highly transmissible infection, at the time of her murder. The state tested Jones, who did not have Hepatitis B despite having been accused of beating Nathan with his bare hands.
Sammarco's announcement appeared to refute that piece of evidence. However, Pillich and Jones's attorneys say Sammarco read the wrong report.
"The coroner did NOT uncover new information about the victim’s medical history," Pillich's office said in a release on Tueday. "She reviewed a laboratory report belonging to Elwood Jones and mistakenly attributed Mr. Jones’s negative Hepatitis B test result to the victim. This was a misreading of a test done through the coroner’s office, not a correction of any prior diagnosis involving the victim and not newly discovered evidence."
Jones's attorneys attached the lab reports they received, which they say include Nathan's and Jones's Hepatitis B tests. The two tests were done more than a week apart from each other. While neither has a name on it, one has an ID number and a homicide case number that matches Nathan's other files. The other, taken later, has a different number.
Below is Jones's attorney's copy of Nathan's report, followed by the report Sammarco provided:
"The document that you contend you discovered as new evidence demonstrating Ms. Nathan’s negative test is, in fact, the result from Elwood Jones’s lab testing; we’ve attached that document as well even though you obviously have a copy. As you will see, the specimen date—more than a week after Ms. Nathan’s autopsy—matches the date that Mr. Jones voluntarily appeared for DNA and blood sampling," wrote Jones's attorney, Dave Hine of Vorys, Sater Seymour and Pease LLP.
When we reached out to Sammarco about the allegation that she read the wrong report, she told us in a statement 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.
Jones's attorneys are now calling on her to issue a full retraction and public apology, saying, "Without such a response, we will likely need to involve the courts."
"Yesterday, you apparently decided that it would be a good idea to insert yourself into a thirty-year-old case with which you admitted you had no familiarity," Hine wrote. "And even though Elwood Jones has spent decades literally fighting for his life and trying to clear his name, you — just a week after he was finally declared a free man — offered the public inaccurate facts and baselessly called his innocence into question yet again. What you did was reckless, unprofessional, and dangerous."
His attorneys said that "multiple board-certified physicians" also reviewed Sammarco's comments and said that her conclusion that a lack of inflammation in Nathan's liver supported the fact that the positive test was likely human error shows "a shocking misunderstanding of Hepatitis B and how it manifests."
"You are using evidence of Elwood Jones’s innocence to put his life in jeopardy. And your conduct has called into question the qualifications of an elected official who — unlike you — only acted after she and her team engaged in a thorough and honest evaluation of the evidence, even though it was your egregious professional inadequacies — not Prosecutor Pillich’s — that led to yesterday’s confusion and media maelstrom," the letter says.
Pillich's office said the prosecutor was "surprised the coroner would rush to a judgment before having a conversation with the prosecutor's office."
"We do not take this matter lightly," Pillich said in a statement. "A man’s life is at stake. And a victim and her family are still without justice. There is no excuse to get the facts wrong, as happened here. I and my team spent months reviewing this case. I am confident we came to the right conclusion."
