KNOXVILLE, Tenn. -- The widow of a former district attorney whose death 16 years ago was blamed on trampling by cattle has been charged with his murder.The case is the second time Raynella Dossett Leath has been charged for the murder of one of her husbands.A Knox County grand jury presentment Thursday charged Leath with first-degree premeditated murder in the death of Knox County District Attorney General Ed Dossett in 1992. She is free after posting $25,000 bond.Her lawyer, James A.H. Bell, could not immediately be reached for comment.She faces a September trial date for premeditated first-degree murder in connection with the death of her second husband, West Knoxville barber David Leath.Dossett, 44, was terminally ill with cancer and taking morphine for pain when he died in July 1992, still holding office. The death was ruled an "agricultural accident," the result of being trampled by cattle at his farm.About six months after Ed Dossett died, his widow married David Leath, who had been Ed Dossett's lifelong friend. The new couple made their home on the Dossett farm property until March 2003, when David Leath, 57, was shot to death in a bedroom there. In 2006, the widow was indicted and charged with premeditated murder.The second investigation into Dossett's death grew out of the David Leath case. Special prosecutors in the Leath case tried unsuccessfully to obtain a court order to have Dossett's body exhumed for a second autopsy earlier this year.The lead investigator in the David Leath murder, Detective Perry Moyers of the Knox County Sheriff's Office, is on that agency's cold case squad and the lead investigator in the Ed Dossett death probe, said Richard Fisher, the special prosecutor assigned to the Leath case."He and others in the Sheriff's Office have really been active in (the Dossett) case, and we offered the assistance of our office and our criminal investigator," Fisher said Thursday. "They pulled together the case that was submitted to the grand jury."Fisher declined to discuss what evidence was presented to the grand jury in the Dossett case.But he said the effort to exhume Dosset's body will be renewed. Fisher and his team originally planned to take that issue to an appeals court, but will now resubmit it in Criminal Court."We expect (a second autopsy) would prove evidence that would be of some significance to the prosecution," he said.Leath's autopsy was conducted by Dr. Darinka Mileusnic-Polchan, who was a deputy Knox County medical examiner at the time. At the request of the special prosecutors, she reviewed Dossett's autopsy and available medical records, and what she found led the prosecutors to seek a court order for Dossett's body to be exhumed.At a hearing on that issue, Mileusnic-Polchan testified that the level of morphine in Dossett's body was "more than double" the expected therapeutic level and that it appears far more likely he died from a morphine overdose than from being trampled by cattle.The injuries to Dossett's body, she added, were "not sufficient to be the cause of death. ... I would lean towards this cause of death being related to intoxication of morphine."She also acknowledged, however, that a second autopsy might show a morphine level lower than that reported in the first, and that she could not say what new information might be obtained because much would depend on how well Dossett was embalmed and what condition his body is in.(Contact Jim Baloch of The Knoxville News Sentinel in Tennessee at XX(at)xxx.com.)
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