High court rejects appeal by dismemberment killer

Thursday, June 25, 1998 | 11:05 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- The Nevada Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected the appeal of a convicted murderer from Las Vegas who apparently drummed up false evidence to show his innocence.

Patrick J. Cavanaugh was convicted and sentenced to death in 1984 for the fatal shooting of Buster Wilson, a former member of the Coasters singing group, whose arms and legs were sawed off at a Las Vegas home in 1980. The body was found several years later in California.

Cavanaugh, according to prosecutors, was afraid Wilson was going to reveal to police that he was involved in a scheme involving phony checks.

After his conviction, Cavanaugh produced medical records indicating that he was being treated for bleeding hemorrhoids at the Martin Luther King Jr. General Hospital in Los Angeles on April 7, 1980, the day of the killing.

Based on that evidence, a district judge granted his petition to be freed because Cavanaugh's attorney had failed to produce that evidence at trial.

Then a hospital worker, Maurica Hawkins, was arrested on charges of altering the medical records to show Cavanaugh had received treatment on that date. Hawkins was a friend with one of Cavanaugh's fellow death-row inmates and agreed to change the records.

The Hawkins case led the district court to reverse its previous ruling that would have freed Cavanaugh. But Cavanaugh appealed, claiming Hawkins' guilty plea to changing the records was insufficient to establish that the records were indeed forged. The Supreme Court rejected that claim.

The high court said Cavanaugh's claim for reversal of his murder conviction rests on fraudulent documents, witnesses with little or no independent memory of the events and his own inconsistent testimony of what he was doing the day of the murder.

The court said Cavanaugh has failed to show there's been a "fundamental miscarriage of justice."