Former Conn. chief medical examiner H. Wayne Carver II

Hartford — Dr. H. Wayne Carver II, the former Connecticut chief medical examiner whose office examined the bodies of victims of the state’s most infamous homicides, including the children and educators killed at Sandy Hook

Elementary School, has died. He was 67.

Carver died Thursday at Middlesex Hospital in Middletown, said Dr. James Gill, current chief medical examiner. Carver’s death was natural, he said.

Carver, a portly man known for his dark sense of humor, joined the medical examiner’s office in 1983 and headed the office from 1989 until his retirement in 2013.

His most difficult day, he said, was the massacre at Sandy Hook in Newtown on Dec. 14, 2012, when 20 children and six adults were gunned down.

Carver, who lived in Old Saybrook, also was a key investigator in the case of serial killer Michael Ross, who killed six women in Connecticut and two in New York in the 1980s and was executed in 2005.