Body exhumed to investigate murder

BEDFORD -- The body of an 82-year-old woman who died last fall at a Bedford hospital has been exhumed, six months after a routine autopsy concluded she was murdered.\nBedford and Lawrence County authorities exhumed Erma Prince's body Wednesday from Beech Grove Cemetery in Bedford, in the hopes of finding more evidence in her murder.\nPathologists took tissue and bone samples from the body, samples that Lawrence County Coroner John Sherrill said Friday will be tested for the presence of the drug that killed Prince.\nThose results will be the last pieces of evidence in a six-month investigation into her September death at Bedford's Dunn Memorial Hospital of a medication overdose.\nSherrill said hospital employees have been ruled out as suspects. But he expects charges to be filed in Prince's death.\nAuthorities began investigating Prince's death after routine toxicology reports from her autopsy showed a fatal level of a prescription medication in her system, Sherrill said.\nBy the time those reports came back, Prince had already been buried.\n"We didn't know we were working a homicide," Sherrill said. "We thought we were working the medical death of an elderly lady."\nHer body was exhumed Wednesday, taken to the hospital for a second autopsy, then re-interred at the cemetery.\nSherrill said the tissue samples taken are necessary to the investigation because authorities never got to see if trace levels of the drug were anywhere on Prince's skin, or to investigate how the drug had been administered.\nPrince was admitted to Dunn Memorial on Sept. 14 after she fell at her Bedford home, Sherrill said. She had a pin inserted into her hip, and was recovering at the hospital when she died at 4:47 a.m. on Sept. 16.\nSherrill said the drug, which had not been prescribed to Prince, had to have been administered within hours of her death.