Kentucky's first medical examiner, Dr. George Nichols, dies at 77

Editor's note: This story has been edited to include more details about George Nichols' life and to correct the suffix on his name.

Dr. George Nichols, who built Kentucky’s medical examiner’s program from the ground up and ran it for 20 years, died Wednesday in Louisville. He was 77.

Over two and a half decades as a deputy coroner in Hamilton County, Ohio, and then as the Kentucky’s chief medical examiner, Nichols witnessed the aftermath of some of the state’s largest tragedies — from mine disasters to a supper club fire that killed 165 people to a bus crash that left 27 people dead.

He estimated that he conducted more than 10,000 autopsies during his career and said once that he could complete a simple one in the time it takes to walk a mile.

“The bitter truth is I can do an examination of a young, otherwise healthy male with a single medium- to small-caliber gunshot wound in his body … start to finish, slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am in 18 minutes, with my brain on park and the emergency brake set. I’ve seen thousands of them,” he told the Courier Journal in 1996.

Testifying against child sex abusers

In the early 1990s, his office branched out and began examining the victims of child sex abuse and testifying against their abusers because so few doctors in Kentucky were trained to spot the signs of such trauma and didn’t like appearing in court.

He was straightforward to the point of being blunt and was always a good quote.

After former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin pardoned someone convicted of raping a child because he said the victim’s hymen wasn’t penetrated, Nichols ripped him. “He not only doesn’t know the law, in my humble opinion, he clearly doesn’t know medicine and anatomy.”

Retired from state government, at that point, he went on to say that in his career he had worked for six governors “and fortunately, I didn’t have to report to that a--hole.”

He sometimes answered to the nickname “Dr. Death” — that is until Michigan doctor Jack Kevorkian, who was known for assisting suicides, was branded with the nickname and, according to Nichols, “screwed it up.”

He had a sardonic wit, a love for boating and a boat he named “Floater,” a term sometimes used to reference drowning victims.

Nichols enjoyed skiing, scuba diving and cooking and was known to read cook books from cover to cover.

George Riley Nichols II was born Nov. 22, 1946, in Louisville, the son of Dr. George Riley Nichols Sr., a general practitioner with a small family practice on Dixie Highway. His mother, Jackie (Anderson) Nichols was an elementary school teacher.

He attended Atherton High School, where he wrote for the school’s literary magazine and played trumpet and sang backup in a local rock band called “The Louisville Falcons.”

A doctor who didn't like 'being around dying people'

Nichols graduated from the University of Louisville with honors with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1968. He had planned to become a history professor, but graduate history students couldn’t keep deferments from the Vietnam War draft — so he went to medical school instead.

“There are a whole bunch of draft dodgers in the class of ’72,” he once told the Courier Journal.

He became a pathologist instead of a “regular doctor” because he said he didn’t like “being around dying people.”

Nichols was hired as the state’s first medical examiner in 1977 and went about building a brand-new professional organization. Before Nichols was hired, death investigations were done by county coroners — elected officials who were often the local undertakers with no medical education.

By the time he retired 20 years later, he had built an office with nine medical examiners in four counties who performed 2,200 autopsies a year.

As chief medical examiner, he pushed to require coroners in Kentucky to receive training from certified medical examiners.

Carroll County bus crash and Standard Gravure shootings

As Kentucky’s chief medical examiner, he oversaw the investigations of the Carroll County bus crash that killed 27 and the Standard Gravure shooting that left eight victims and the shooter dead.

(Before he came home to Kentucky to head the medical examiner's office, as a deputy coroner in Cincinnati, Nichols was sent to Kentucky to work the investigations of Letcher County’s Scotia mine explosion that killed 26 and the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire that killed 165.)

In 1991, he was in charge of testing the remains of former President Zachary Taylor after a Florida author suggested he might have been poisoned with arsenic. Taylor was exhumed in what turned into a media circus not unlike the opening of Al Capone’s vault.

Nichols reported that Taylor had only small amounts of arsenic in his body, which he said was “consistent with being a human being on the planet Earth.”

After he retired from the state in 1997, he formed a legal medical consulting firm, where he worked for 28 years, his family said.

Nichols was on the faculty of the U of L School of Medicine from 1972 to 2006 and was named the school’s alumnus of the year in 1997 and 2006, according to his family. He was named a School of Medicine Fellow at U of L in 2020, and he was given the David Jones Legacy Award by the Kentucky Coroner’s Association in 2023.

He is survived by his wife of 41 years, Janell Seeger, an oncologist, and their three sons: Ian, Dillon and Jordan, and five grandsons. He’s also survived by a brother, Thomas Nichols.

Joseph Gerth can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at [email protected].

This story was updated to add a video.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Kentucky's Dr. Death: George Nichols, first state medical examiner, dies