As part of his defense team’s effort to have the death penalty taken off the table before his trial in the killing of four University of Idaho students, lawyers for suspect Bryan Kohberger want to bring in a forensics expert with a record of taking a new look at old cases that had previously been considered solved.
Dr. Barbara C. Wolf, a forensic pathologist, played a role in other high-profile cases ranging from the O.J. Simpson murder trial to the identification of victims dumped in mass graves in Croatia and Bosnia. In the Simpson case, she served as a defense expert alongside other prominent forensic pathologists.
She is the medical examiner of Florida’s 5th and 24th districts, which cover Citrus, Hernando, Lake, Marion, Seminole and Sumter counties.
In 1991, she helped reinvestigate the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers, a civil rights leader who was exhumed decades after his death, according to her website. In 1995, she reviewed the deaths of five New York babies believed to have died from sudden infant death syndrome between 1965 and 1971. And her investigation helped lead to the conviction of their mother for suffocating all of them.…