Pork Rib Bone

Prior to her disappearance, Janet Kovacich was documented making statements to two people about Fuzz’s health prior to his death:   Dr. Jan Hershenhouse, DVM; and, Karen Meredith, her friend.

• On August 22, 1982, Janet told the veterinarian, Dr. Hershenhouse, that Fuzz had been less interested in his food, was possibly in pain the day before he died, and seemed to have a fever at bedtime. The family thought it might be symptoms of a diagnosed hip issue, so they gave Fuzz aspirin before they went to bed, but could not wake him in the morning. 

• Dr. Hershenhouse’s examination found the dog’s gum coloring and symptoms to be consistent with poisoning, and she searched the Kovacich house and yard for a possible source. 

• The only thing of note she reported to Auburn PD was that a woodpile against the fence was knocked over—indicating that perhaps a stranger had come over that fence, into the backyard, and fed Fuzz the poison. 

• A few weeks later, Dr. Hershenhouse was told by a PCSO deputy that Jean Gregoire had reported a possible “kicking” incident. The veterinarian was clear that her examination of the dog was inconsistent with that diagnosis, and that Janet had made no mention of anything other than a possible illness.

• Shortly after Fuzz’s death, Janet told her friend, Karen Meredith, that Fuzz had died after being sick, and that they had been giving him aspirin, but it hadn’t helped.

• Although Jean Gregoire claimed that Janet had told her that Paul killed Fuzz, the statement was made in the context of trying to convince Auburn PD to remove Kristi and John from their home, and bring them directly to Jean. Her story was the sole accusation of Paul showing violence, or having a temper:

Jean Gregoire's personal, typed notes; Dated & Initialed  10/17/1982

• When Auburn PD refused to act, Jean made a report to Placer Child Welfare. When her report was investigated and deemed unfounded, she then filed a lawsuit against Paul for custody in Placer Superior Court. The Kovacich children were interviewed alone by experts multiple times over several years, and they were found to be forthright and truthful. Jean Gregorie’s accusations were taken seriously, found to be untrue, and the court ruled that contact between Jean and the children would be harmful to them. 

• The fact that investigations by Auburn PD, PCSO, Placer Child Welfare, court-appointed child psychologist Dr. Fair, and the Superior Court all found Jean’s statements to be lies killed any chance of using her as a witness to support criminal charges against Paul in Janet’s disappearance. She simply was not credible. 

• Additionally, Janet and Paul had not wanted Jean prosecuted in 1978 when she falsely reported to PCSO that Paul was parked at home during his patrol shift. The purpose of that lie had been to get Paul fired so that Janet would leave him. Nothing Jean said about Paul could be believed as true.

• That all changed in 2004 with Jean’s death. She could no longer be cross examined or impeached, and Auburn PD Reserve Officer Johnson revived her original statement through old police reports. To overcome Dr. Hershenhouse’s initial findings of poisoning, Johnson convinced the FBI to help him obtain a warrant to excavate Fuzz’s remains. 

• The FBI sent an evidence response team to the home of Paul’s parents on March 1, 2005.

• This rib bone was of particular interest to FBI Hopkins (as noted in his report) because it was in the bag with Fuzz, but one end had been cut with a saw—indicating that it was not one of the dog’s own rib bones. 

• At the scene, FBI Hopkins took custody of the bones recovered from Fuzz’s grave, and sent them to the Human Identification Lab (HIL) at Chico State University for examination. Normally, Hopkins would have submitted the remains to a lab more expert in trauma injuries to dogs. However, the director of the HIL, Dr. Patrick Willey was a friend-- he had previously worked with Chris Hopkins at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

• Possible criminal charges relied entirely upon Jean Gregoire’s discredited 1982 statement that Paul killed Fuzz. FBI Hopkins and Auburn PD were hoping that Dr. Hershenhouse and the prior investigations were wrong, and that the HIL examination would conclude that Fuzz died with broken bones, thereby proving that Jean’s statement had been true. Auburn PD Chief Valerie Harris explained it to the Sacramento Bee on March 12, 2005:

• On March 30th, Dr. Willey informed Auburn PD that his lab’s examination of Fuzz’s remains did not support or confirm Jean Gregoire’s 1982 claim—there was no sign that Fuzz had any broken bones or healing injuries at the time of his death:

•On May 19th, HIL’s written report confirmed the findings stated in Dr. Willey’s prior email—there were no healing fractures, or fresh fractures found. All damage to the bones was caused by soil and weather during the 23 years of burial. Again, Jean Gregoire’s statement was proven false:

•FBI Hopkins was unhappy with the HIL’s scientific conclusions, so he had Fuzz’s remains sent to forensic anthropologist, Dr. Steven Symes. 

•Again, Hopkins expected Symes to automatically give him the opinion he wanted because, just as with Patrick Willey, they had previously been colleagues at Knoxville. After Hopkins joined the FBI, he and Dr. Symes testified together as forensic experts on several criminal cases (Agent Hopkins was an “expert” in microscopic hair and fiber matching—now discredited as junk science). 

•Surprisingly, Dr. Symes did not produce the findings that FBI Hopkins had been seeking. 

• Dr. Symes not only agreed with the exculpatory findings of HIL—he went even further by excluding the possibility of trauma to Fuzz prior to his death:

Report of Dr. Steven Symes - April 6, 2006

• Prosecutor Gazzaniga convinced the judge that “maybe” Fuzz had died from a beating that did not result in broken bones (only soft tissue injury), and the fact that Dr. Hershenhouse had been unable to prove poisoning (because CalDOJ didn’t test the vomit) left open the possibility that Jean Gregoire had been telling the truth. 

• The judge ruled that the defense could refute Jean Gregoire’s statement, and prove that she had been lying, by presenting evidence about Fuzz’s true cause of death:

• The defense hired Dr. William Spangler, DVM, a veterinarian pathologist who specialized in the death of dogs—especially police K-9s killed in the line of duty. He was given Fuzz’s remains for examination, and agreed with the HIL and Dr. Symes that there was no evidence of trauma. Dr. Spanlger testified that Fuzz’s symptoms and examination by Dr. Hershenhouse were consistent with death from poison, but he could only exclude possible causes, not prove how Fuzz died. 

• In the end, both the jurors and the Court of Appeals used the death of Fuzz to justify Paul’s conviction for 1st Degree Murder. They chose to ignore the lack of broken bones, the original diagnosis of poisoning, and all of the investigations by Auburn PC, PCSO, Placer Child Welfare, the child custody judge that found Jean Gregoire’s statement to be false. 

• The jurors and courts also refused to believe the witness statements and testimony of Kristi and John Kovacich, and called them liars to their faces. They had been interviewed alone by police and child abuse experts multiple times from 1982-84, and they told the truth—Paul had not beaten or “kicked” Fuzz over garbage in the car, and Fuzz had been totally fine for at least a week after that. They saw the veterinarian check Fuzz for injuries, tell Janet that the dog was poisoned, and inspect their yard and home for a source of the poison. Only one version of the story could be true, and the jury chose to believe Jean Gregoire over Janet’s children. 

• In fact, the actual cause of Fuzz’s death was accidentally blurted out by Dr. Steven Symes, but apparently nobody in the courtroom that day understood what he was talking about:

Symes Testimony  -  December 11, 2008

•Nobody at the defense table understood exactly what Dr. Symes had inadvertently disclosed. Symes was prone to telling long, rambling stories, and a lot of his extra explanations were tuned out as boring noise. DDA Gazzaniga had asked Dr. Symes about his examination of Fuzz’s remains, and he launched into a story about work that he did for FBI Special Agent Hopkins that had never been disclosed. Symes testified that he told Hopkins that Fuzz had eaten a cooked pork spare rib, evidenced by the bone that was still in his digestive tract when he died. All that the defense understood from the story at the time was that the rib was not human (Janet).

• California law and the US Constitution (Brady) require that all evidence favorable to the defense be turned over by the DA prior to trial. The reasons for this rule are both practical and strategic. Attorneys and defendants don’t know how to examine, test, and offer an opinion on physical evidence—they need scientific experts to do that work. The evidence might point to a different theory of the case, or a new suspect, and completely change the pre-trial rulings, and trial strategy. 

• If Dr. Symes had told the story about the pork rib bone in front of the trial’s veterinarian experts, Dr. Hershenhouse and Dr. William Spangler, they would have immediately recognized the bone as the likely cause of Fuzz’s death—either through splintering/perforation/infection, blockage, or as a vehicle for ingestion of poison. In 2023, Dr. Spangler confirmed that he had never been told about the rib bone, or Dr. Symes’ digestive findings. Additionally, Dr. Spangler was not given the rib bone for examination when the DA investigator delivered Fuzz's remains to him. 

• Dr. William Spangler was not allowed to examine:  

- the pork rib bone; 

- the written report of Dr. Symes; 

- any of the microscopic photographs or radiographs taken by Symes Mercyhurst; and 

- the information communicated between Dr. Symes and FBI S.A. Hopkins using a Hotmail account. 

 In 2023, Dr. Spangler, and his son, Dr. Taylor Spangler issued a revised opinion based upon this new evidence:

•However, Dr. Spangler’s expert opinion would not have been necessary because if the truth about the pork rib bone had been disclosed when it was analyzed in June of 2005. There never would have been an indictment, arrest, or trial. In fact, Fuzz would have been the last thing that the DA would have wanted to bring up, because the pork rib bone pointed to what should have always been obvious; a stranger killed Fuzz so he could get into the house and take Janet. The same stranger let Adolph out of the yard the night before Janet disappeared, and broke into the house through the dining room window. This is Criminal Investigation 101—follow the evidence.

• What is completely shocking, unbelievable, illegal, and beyond comprehension is that FBI Special Agent Chris Hopkins learned that Fuzz died from ingesting a possibly poisoned cooked pork rib bone FOUR YEARS before Paul was convicted. Rather than working to identify the stranger that killed Fuzz, and kidnapped Janet, Hopkins lied to other members of law enforcement, the DA, and witnesses about the evidence, and went to great lengths to hide the truth. Hopkins had to have known that he was helping Janet’s killer escape, but he clearly didn’t care. Hopkins pushed for the conviction of an innocent man, and let the real killer remain free just so he wouldn't have to admit that he'd made a mistake.

•FBI Special Agent Hopkins hid the rib bone evidence from the defense by using his <chrishopkins61 @ hotmail.com> account—proving not only his intent to suppress the evidence, but his knowledge that the rib bone might be exculpatory before he sent it to Dr. Symes for examination:

• In late 2023, the defense finally obtained Dr. Symes’ file on his examination of Fuzz’s remains, and on  the first page was a reference to his prior work on the rib bone. All of the other correspondence, and the report done by Symes remains undisclosed because Symes started a new file number, and the Placer DA still refuses to turn that over the original rib bone examination file and report.

• The end of Hopkins’ last sentence, and the rest of the email is unknown because Symes did not put the next page(s) in the Fuzz case file. However, Hopkins clearly states his exact reason for hiding the pork rib bone, and then asking Symes to “find” that Fuzz had broken bones:  “This is a very important aspect to our case. We need to demonstrate to the jury that the suspect has a violent side...”

• As he expressed in his “Hotmail” messages, FBI Hopkins was extremely upset that the HIL report had failed to find evidence of trauma to Fuzz at the time of, or prior to his death. He plainly told Dr. Symes that he wanted him to reach a different conclusion—one that supported Jean Gregoire’s 1982 statement to Auburn PD. 

•Despite the new evidence that a stranger had fed Fuzz a pork spare rib, and the HIL’s finding of no broken bones, Auburn PD Chief Valerie Harris continued with the planned “misinformation” campaign, and lied to the press about the evidence. Again, the lie was necessary because Paul had no history of violence:

•Dr. Symes told FBI Hopkins that Fuzz had no fractured bones at the time of his death. He not only concurred with the HIL findings, he excluded the possibility of green fractures.

•Dr. Symes opinions on the pork rib bone found inside Fuzz, and the lack of fractures proved that Jean Gregoire’s statement was factually false. Jean Gregorie simply had been lying to get custody of the children, just as all of the previous investigations had found. 

•FBI Hopkins needed Dr. Symes to change his report before it was turned over to the defense, so he again turned to his “Hotmail” account:

• Special Agent Hopkins not only hid this email to Dr. Symes, he also intentionally suppressed the detailed responses and additional analysis to his “questions.” In his reply, Dr. Symes went far beyond the conclusions in his report, and eliminated the possibility that Fuzz had soft tissue trauma prior to his death—since those injuries would have been visible on the bones via an accelerated decomposition rate, and those signs were not present on Fuzz. 

•In short, Dr. Symes found the cause of Fuzz’s death via the pork spare rib bone, and conclusively eliminated the possibility of death due to kicking, beating, stomping, or choking. Dr. Symes also explained to Hopkins that poison could not be eliminated as the cause of Fuzz’s death: 

•Today, in 2024, Placer DDA Tellman claims that the defense did not receive the Hopkins “Hotmail” messages, Dr. Symes’ additional findings regarding the pork rib bone, and the additional exculpatory conclusions about Fuzz because FBI Special Agent Hopkins never disclosed the communications or reports to the DA’s office. 

•Tellman told the trial court and the jury that Fuzz’s death was a “mystery” that could never be solved, so they could infer that “maybe” Paul had killed his own K-9—making the inference that he was a monster capable of killing Janet. Did Tellman know the truth, and help Hopkins hide it? FBI Hopkins currently admits that the “Hotmails” are authentic, but he won’t say if he told anyone at the DA’s office about Dr. Symes’ hidden findings. Christopher Hopkins clearly committed both state and federal felonies in the Kovacich case. At this point, the only remaining question is whether or not he acted alone.