Tennis umpire wrongfully accused of murder asks for correction in husband's death certificate

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- A tennis umpire once charged with her husband's murder spoke out again Friday in an effort to clear her name.

It's an ordeal 76-year-old Lois Goodman laid out for the jury. She blames the suffering she went through on faulty findings by a veteran Los Angeles County coroner - Yulai Wang.

He made his first public statement.

"I'm not anxious, but I think for people, they need to know the whole story. Not just one side of the story," he said.

Goodman recalled the shock of coming home April 17, 2012, and finding her husband Alan unresponsive.

She is suing Wang, claiming that his final autopsy finding was malicious. He had initially noted the cause of death as pending, then changed it to homicide without noting why.

Veteran forensic pathologist Frank Sheridan was called to testify for Goodman. He said a coroner must have a strong degree of certainty in cause of death.

He also said that the location of Alan Goodman's injuries was consistent with falling, not a homicide, and that the coroner should have explained his reasoning. But the biggest problem with the autopsy was, Sheridan said, that it did not note a lesion in Alan Goodman's mouth.

The defense countered those claims with a forensic dentist who showed Wang did in fact note the lesion in a diagram. The deputy district attorney testified that although the murder charge against Goodman was dropped, there had been ample probable cause to arrest her.

Goodman said she is $100,000 in debt and so desperate for employment she even tried to be an Uber driver. Yet, she and her legal team said there is more at stake than money.

"You walk over right now to the county registrar. You look up Alan Goodman (and) where it says cause of death it says homicide. We want that changed," Goodman's attorney said.

She added she wants an apology.

"I need an apology from them and I need them to change the death certificate where it reads how he died...it was an accident," she said.