DEAD MEN DO TELL TALES
by
Michael Browning & William R. Maples

DOUBLEDAY New York
London Toronto Sydney Auckland

A MAIN STREET Book

PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc  1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

Main STREET Books, Doubleday, and the portrayal of a building with a
tree are trademarks of Doubleday, a division Of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc Dead Men Do Tell Tales was originally published
in hardcover by Doubleday in 1994  The Main Street Books edition is
published by arrangement with Doubleday
Unless otherwise noted, all photos appear courtesy of William R
Maples

Book Design by Gretc@ Achilles

The Library of Congress has Cataloged the Doubleday hardcover edition
as follows:

Maples, William R
Dead Ymn do tell tales / by William R Maples and Michael Browning
p cin
Includes index
1 Maples, William R 2 Anthropologists-United StatesBiography  3
Forensic anthropology-United states base studies  L Browning, Michael
II  Title
GN506M3cA3 1994
614'1@20

ISBN 0-385-47968-9

Copy,ight C 1994 by William R Maples

All Rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Main
Street Books Edition October 1995

The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of
the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley, which was full of
bones, and caused me to pass by them roundabout: and behold there were
very many in the open valley; and lo they were very dry  And he said
to me, Son of mine, can these bones live?
And I answered, O Lord God, Thou knowest

-Ezekiel 371-3

 To Margaret, Lisa and Cynthia, who never complained about the long
hours I spent in the laboratory, or the bizarre stories I brought home

-WRM
To Allison, Matthew and Noah, who know that the sun shines east, and
the sun shines west
-MCB

 Table of Contents

1 Every Day Is Halloween
2 Talkative Skulls
3 "Bolts of Bones
4 "The Enfolding Earth
5 Flotsam and jetsam
6 "When the Sickness Is Your Soul
7 Outpacing the Field
Unnatural Nature
9 "A Sunless Place
10 Flames and Urns
"Death in 10,000 Fragments
12 Lost Legions
13 The Misplaced Conquistador
14 Arsenic and "Old Rough and Ready
15 The Tsar of All the Russias
16 "These Rough Notes and Our Dead Bodies
Acknowledgments
Index

DEAD MEN DO TELL TALES

Every Day Is Halloween I obtained leave to go down into the valley of
death and gratify a reprehensible curiosity     Death had put his
sickle into this thicket and fire had gleaned the field     The
bodies [lay] half-buried in ashes; some in the unlovely looseness of
attitude denoting sudden death by the bullet, but by far the greater
number in postures of agony that told of the tormenting flame  Their
clothing was half burnt away-their hair and beard entirely; the rain
had come too late to save their nails  Some were swollen to double
girth; others shriveled to manikins
According to degree of exposure, their faces were bloated and black or
yellow and shrunken  The contraction of muscles which had given them
claws for hands had cursed each countenance with a hideous grin  Faugh
   !
-Ambrose Bierce, What I Saw of Shilo
I seldom have nightmares  When I do, they are usually flitting images
of the everyday things I see on the job: crushed and perforated skulls,
lopped-off limbs and severed heads, roasted and dissolving corpses,
hanks of human hair and heaps of white bones-all in a days work at my
office, the C A Pound Human Identification Laboratory of the Florida
Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida  Recently I
dreamed I was in a faraway country, trying on shoes, and the leather in
the shoes was so improperly prepared that the laces and uppers were
crawling with maggots  But there was a simple, ordinary explanation
for this phantasm: one of my graduate students was raising maggots as
part of a research project
I have gazed on the face of death innumerable times, witnessed it in
all its grim manifestations  Death has no power to freeze my heart,
jangle my nerves or sway my reason  Death to me is no terror of the
night but a dayht companion, a familiar condition, a process obedient
to scientific laws and answerable to scientific inquiry
For me, every day is Halloween  When you think of all the horror
movies you have seen in your entire life, you are visualizing only a
dim, dull fraction of what I have seen in actual fact  Our laboratory
is primarily devoted to teaching physical anthropology to graduate
students at the University of Florida, and is part of the Florida
Museum of Natural History  Yet, thanks to the wording of the 1917 law
establishing the museum, we often find ourselves investigating wrongful
death, attempting to dispel the shadows surrounding murder and suicide
All too often in the past, under the old coroner system, the innocent
have died unavenged, and malefactors have escaped unpunished, because
investigators lacked the stomach, the knowledge, the experience and the
perseverance to reach with both hands into the rotting remnants of some
dreadful crime, rummage through the bones and grasp the pure gleaming
nugget of truth that lies at the center of it all
Truth is discoverable  Truth wants to be discovered  The men who
murdered the Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his family and servants in
1918 imagined that their crime would remain hidden for all eternity,
but scarce sixty years passed before these martyred bones rose up again
into the light of day and bore witness against their Bolshevik
assassins  I have seen the tiny, wisp-thin bones of a murdered infant
stand up in court and crush a bold, hardened, adult killer, send him
pale and penitent to the electric chair  A small fragment of a woman's
skullcap, gnawed by alligators and found by accident at the bottom of a
river, furnished enough evidence for me to help convict a hatchet
murderer, two years after the fact
The science of forensic anthropology, properly vn'elded, can resolve
historical riddles and chase away bugbears that have bedeviled scholars
for centuries  Reluctantly but carefully, I examined the skeletal
remains of President Zachary Taylor, who died in 1850, and helped lay
to rest persistent suspicions that he was the first of our presidents
to be assassinated  The sword-nicked skull of the butchered Spanish
conquistador, Francisco Pizarro, came within my field of  inquiry, and
I have held in my hands the bony orb that once enclosed vast dreams of
gold, blood and empire  The gargoyle-like skull and skeleton of the
Victorian-era "Elephant Man," Joseph Merrick, furnished me with
pictures and impressions so poignant and vivid that I almost seemed to
be conversing with the man himself But I do not seek out the
illustrious dead to pay them court or borrow their fame  To me, the
human skeleton unnamed and unfleshed is matter enough for marvel  The
most fascinating case I ever had involved a modern, love-struck couple
with very ordinary names: Meek and Jennings  It fell to me to
extricate their bones, burned and crushed and commingled in thousands
of fragments, from a single body bag, and I put them back together
again as best I could  When I was finished, after a year and a halfs
work, what I had was what lies deepest within all of us, at our center;
that which is the last of us ever to be cut, burned, disassembled or
dissolved; that which is strongest, hardest and least destructible
about us; our firmest ally, our most trustworthy companion, our longest
surviving remnant after we die: our skeleton
I have often wondered whether I have a character flaw, to be so drawn
to deathly things  I have always wanted to see the true facts of human
existence, no matter how ugly  From a very early age I wanted to see
life as it really was, not through the smudged windowpane of a
newspaper or by means of the flickering picture of a movie newsreel
I wanted an uncensored view of reality  I did not want to know death
from a neatly typed autopsy report, or from the body banked with flowers
and surmounted by a stainless steel coffin lid at a funeral parlor
All my life I have been curious about death as it is, as it happens
I was born in Dallas, Texas, on August 7, 1937  One of MY grandfathers
was a Methodist preacher, the other a saddle maker
My father was a banker who died when he was only forty, of cancer
I was just eleven  He was a man of strict morals who set a high
premium on education  I grew up in a house filledwith books and
magazines such as Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post  The
dictionary was one of the most used books in our library and reading
was nearly as natural as breathing to me  I knew nine months before my
father died that he was not going to recover, that the end was
inevitable  This was a great sorrow to me; but in his last days my
father said something that filled me with pride  He was giving some
final instructions to my mother  He urged her to make sure that my
brother, who was a splendid athlete, went to college  He did not
mention me

"What about Billy?"  my mother asked him
"Don't worry about Billy  He'll be all right," my father replied; and
his deathbed faith in me has heartened me all my life
One formative childhood event sticks out in my mind  It involved the
great 1930s woman outlaw, Bonnie Parker, of Bonnie and Clyde fame  She
crossed my path twice, even though she died before I was born  Bonnie
was from Dallas and she first met Clyde Barrow, a native of Waco, in
"Cement City," a rough part of Dallas near the Trinity River Bottoms,
where she was working as a waitress
The pair went on to blaze their way across Texas and the Midwest and
their legend was still fresh in Dallas when I was a boy  Our house was
right across the street from the home of the chief deputy of the Dallas
County Sheriffs Department
One night this deputy, who was a-friend of my father's, brought over
the autopsy photographs of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow  I was
allowed to see them  They were the first autopsy photographs I had
ever seen and they fascinated me  I was only about ten or eleven years
old at the time  Far from being horrified, I was enthralled
Years later, I happened to be wandering in a part of the cemetery where
members of my family are buried in Dallas  I
came upon a tombstone with this inscription:

AS THE FLOWERS ARE ALL MADE SWEETER BY THE SUNSHINE AND THE DEW, SO
THIS OLD WORLD IS MADE BRIGHTER BY THE LIVES OF FOLKS LIKE YOU Above
this poem were the words:

BONNIE PARKER

Oct  1, 1910-May 23, 1934

I was astonished  The poem might have described a child or a
sweetheart, instead of a cigar-smoking murderess who perished in a hail
of bullets
I later photographed this headstone and show the poem part in some of
my lectures  The next slide shows the full epitaph, with the
superscripted name: Bonnie Parker  In that moment in a Dallas
graveyard it came to me that every person, from the most depraved
serial killer to the most seraphic innocent, was likely loved by
someone when each was alive  Victims and murderers alike are people
They may have followed their paths helplessly or of their own free
will, but the paths led equally to the grave  All these people demand
and deserve a dispassionate and caring analysis from investigators like
myself  We can never forget that what we are doing is not just for the
courts or for the general public  What we see on the table will have
to be related to the families of victims and to the relatives of
loners  Flowers and dew may seem far away from the microscopes and
autopsy saws we employ, but they are still part of the picture
My wife's parents, my maternal grandparents and my father are all
buried in that cemetery, in the same ground where Bonnie Parker lies
I was brought up unrehgiou'sly, but with a set of hard, clear-cut moral
values  laes and laziness repel me more than the most putrefied
corpse  If you wish to ponder the existence of the human soul or weigh
whether there is life after death, you will have to seek elsewhere than
in these pages  While I have seen consummate evil and its effects, I
have never been overawed by it or attracted by the sleazy runways and
approaches to it  The underside of life holds no personal fascination
for me; nor have I ever been tempted to crawl into the gutter or stare
through the sewer grate at the sordid practices of the living  I am
not attracted to bars or nightclubs or bordellos, though I have hauled
away and handled and examined the dead bodies of those who frequented
them
When people ask me how I ended up in forensic anthropology, I tell them
it was a combination of good luck and bad character  I took my first
anthropology course as an entering freshman at the University of Texas,
purely by accident  Registration hours were nearly up
We freshmen always received the last appointments of the day  All the
sections for introductory biology were filled up  My adviser suggested
anthropology as an alternative
"Fine  What's that?"  I asked him
"Try it  You maylike it," he answered  So I found myself taking
physical anthropology  I majored in English and minored in
anthropology all through college and then, with just one semester left
before graduation, switched my major to anthropology  One course
required for the major was advanced physical anthropology, taught by a
newcomer to the University of Texas, a man named Tom McKern
It was McKern who, more than any other man save only my father, shaped
and directed my life  McKern was simply McKern  He was unique, a born
teacher, a brilliant lecturer and a very charismatic personality  I
soon learned that he had been born in Tonga, the son of an
archaeologist, and had wide experience of foreign lands and far shores
He had worked at a laboratory in Tokyo, identifying the remains of
American GIs killed at two jima in World War II, and later in Korea
Among the skeletons submitted to him for identification from the two
jima battlefield was that of one of his closest friends, a man who had
been best man at McKern's own wedding  McKern had seen extraordinary
things, and there was a kind of glow about him  He fascinated and
impressed every student who came into contact with him  He was what I
would become: a forensic anthropologist
That first day, McKern simply called the roll and dismissed the class
A few of us hung around afterward and chatted with him  He explained
what forensic anthropology was, what it involved  He told us about
testifying at trials, working with homicide cases  He said you could
earn as much as a hundred dollars a day doing this extraordinarily
fascinating work, if you testified in court  We were agog at this vast
sum!  The conversation lasted half an hour at most; but at the end of
that half hour, when I walked out of that classroom, I knew what I
wanted to do with my life
Ever since I had turned eighteen I had been practically selfsupporting
I paid my college expenses by working at a succession of odd jobs-very
odd jobs  I was an attendant in a private sanitarium and had sometimes
to restrain violent or delirious patients  I rode shotgun in an
ambulance that belonged to a funeral home, and became proficient at
throwing sheets with our home's name on them over the dead, mangled
corpses of accident victims  The competition between rival funeral
parlors for new business was fierce, and it made our work resemble some
macabre rodeo, where the first cowboy who gets his rope over the steer
wins, except that we were using sheets, not ropes, and we were flinging
them over corpses, not steers
Those were wild days, full of high-speed chases under Texas starlight
We would fly like bats from hell to the scene of an accident, risking
our lives to pluck dead men off the asphalt first, ahead of the
competition  We often took more chances getting there than the
deceased took to die there  Our ambulance had a top speed of 105 mph,
but we had a low-speed transmission  Our competitor's ambulance could
do 110 mph but had a high-speed transmission  The difference in
transmissions meant that our competitor could dust us on-the flat
straightaways out in open country, but we could show him our taillights
in town
We drove around at these breakneck speeds in the days before seat
belts, and nothing we told the funeral parlor owner could persuade him
to shell out for these safety restraints  This old man was a
character  I remember him unfolding a whole set of membership cards
for every conceivable organization in town  He belonged to all of
them  As the cards riffled down to the tabletop he grinned  "See
these?"  he said smugly  "Every one of them's a funeral!"
Then one night the owner happened to be riding in the ambulance himself
and witnessed a particularly ghastly accident  A gravel truck had hit
the rear fender of a car, spinning the car around and ejecting the
seat-beltless driver like a child from a playground whirligig  The
driver landed in the path of the truck, whose front wheels pulped his
head  The sight of this atrociously mangled corpse softened even my
boss's hard heart, and he equipped our ambulance with seat belts soon
afterward
I had been to funerals, but it was in those days that I saw my first
dead body outside of a coffin  It happened my first night on the job
We were called to a house in Austin, where a woman was having severe
chest pains  We found her wedged between her bed and the wall, wearing
next to nothing  We hauled her out as gently as we could  She was
still alive  We got her on a stretcher, put her aboard the ambulance
and gave her oxygen on the way to the hospital  I was reassuring her
all the way  Then, a few minutes after she was taken into the
emergency room, as I looked on, she died
Old judge Watson-I have forgotten his first name-was called in to cer*
the death  The vertebrae in the judge's neck were fused together and
he could no longer Turn his head  So he would swivel his whole body,
shoulders, head and all  He came in, looked down at the body, swiveled
back and forth like a lighthouse for about half a minute, then croaked
two words: "Heart attack!"
That was all  The verdict was rendered  The authorities were finished
with this woman  it was as though she had sunk beneath the surface of
a dark sea  The stiff-necked old judge stumped out of the room,
leaving us with the silent cadaver  Those two words were all the
epitaph she got that night, and the sudden finality of it all impressed
me greatly
Certain scenes are engraved on my memory from those days  I remember
the night we were called to the scene of a domestic dispute  A
crippled husband had beaten his wife, using his crutch and the brass
post from a four-poster bed  I remember another case in which a man
got in a fight during which he was hit over the head with a large
ketchup bottle  When we arrived the whole scene seemed to be weltering
in red gore  I can stand the sight of blood, but the smell of it
repels me  I did not think a human body could contain so much blood
In fact, it can't  A part of the sea of red was ketchup  The man
survived and probably went on to other fights  I remember picking up a
young man from an overturned car  He had a broken arm and moaned at
me, asking where we were taking him "The hospital," I said  Suddenly
he began flailing away at me with both arms, broken and whole, trying
to escape  It was all I could do to hold him down  It turned out he
had stolen the car
I saw terrible things during those nights, but I could not blink or
Turn away  My job depended on it  After a while it became a test of
strength for me, to gaze unflinchingly at the dreafful aftermaths of
accidents  Emergency room personnel deal with the same situations, but
I would, submit that the ER technicians see people after we ambulance
men have tidied them up considerably  When we arrived at the scene, we
were plunged into pure chaos  It was dark  Cars were overturned or on
fire  Crowds were screaming  Police were yelling  Glass was broken
Smells of spilled fuel and roasted flesh were fresh  There is far more
drama at the scene of an accident than there is in the emergency room
afterward  At the hospital there are no shadows  Everything is clean
and well lit and deodorized  Clean sheets and shiny instruments convey
an atmosphere of relative calm and control  Already the horror is
receding
I saw my first autopsy when I was eighteen years old  Most of the
autopsies in those days in Austin were done at the funeral

homes, as they still are in many places
Pathologists would come in and do the cutting, weighing and
photographing  Some of these specialists were very friendly and kind
to us young laymen  They would let us stay and ask questions during
the procedure  Gradually, I began to be exposed to decomposed bodies
and severe trauma
our funeral home had the contract to handle the remains of servicemen
killed in military plane crashes  I saw bodies burned nearly to
cinders  I saw the white, bloated bodies of young airmen recovered
from the Gulf of Mexico  Many nights I had the eerie experience of
sleeping in a room with burned bodies in bags all piled up and clearly
visible just outside the screened door  It was at this period that I
gradually developed my ability to work with bodies and manage to eat
food  I remember having a chili-and-cheese hamburger in the autopsy
room after an autopsy, looking at the burger carefully, then taking a
bite, and then another, and another
I saw tough policemen smoke cigars to keep the odors out of their
nostrils  I remember the pathologist cutting through some
medium-cooked soft tissue in a burned corpse while, saying waggishly:
'Well, I guess we don't want barbecued ribs for lunch today'-and seeing
the police run from the room, green with nausea
My life took on a strange, jekyll-and-Hyde quality  By day, as an
English literature undergraduate, I would contemplate the glories of
Dickens, Troflope and Shakespeare  By night I would voyage into a
world of dreadful pain and cruel misfortune, of flames and twisted
steel, of braisings, brealdngs and bleedings  I studied sonnets and
suicides  I saw tragedies printed on paper and scrawled on asphalt  I
@ssected immortal poems from England and witnessed'dead men and women
cut carefully to pieces in Texas, under lamplight on stainless steel
tables
Then I was graduated  Margaret and I married one month before I took
my BA at the University of Texas in January 1959
McKern encouraged me to go straight on to a PhD in anthropology,
skipping the master's degree  The University of Texas had no PhD
program in anthropology but McKern told me I could take courses
elsewhere and he would supervise my progress personally  I decided,
however, to work first for my master's degree
It was useless  I flailed about in graduate school for a while, trying
to make ends meet by moonlighting as a laboratory technician and
grading exam papers  One summer I worked two jobs totaling forty-four
hours a week, one of them as an athletic director in a school for
retarded children, the other as a hospital orderly  At the same time I
was attempting to take a full graduate course load  I was drained,
exhausted after a year and a half  I was getting nowhere, it seemed
So as soon as Margaret won her degree in education I left school, went
to Dallas and got a job with the Hartford Insurance Company as an
investigator
An old pathologist once told me: 'when in doubt, think dirty
You'll be right ninety percent of the time"  It was good advice, and I
had many occasions to put it to good use while investigating insurance
claims  Although I came to detest this job and the human vermin it
brought me into contact with, in retrospect it was the best possible
training for my later career as a forensic anthropologist  If any
young man would care to find out in a hurry just how low his fellow
human beings can sink, let him become an insurance claims adjuster
Whatever tender blossoms of altruism flowered in his innocent soul,
these will be ripped out by the roots in six months flat; I guarantee
it  At the same time, he will come face to face with some of the
most vivid, brilliant, highly plausible fictions ever spun by human
ingenuity  I know I did
I shall not dwell on the tangled lies I had to unravel in those years
I learned to spot the people who specialize in falling down in front of
vehicles  I learned about the "quick stop artists" who can brake their
cars on a dime and cause rear-end collisions any time they like  I
learned about physicians and chiropractors and the imaginative reports
they would write about whiplash cases  I learned how reports were
written charging that victims had suffered "permanent injury," even
though there was not the slightest trace of any injuries and the
doctors admitted as much  How could they then diagnose "permanent
injury"?  Easily: there might not be any permanent injuries now; but,
they assured us, many "permanent injuries" develop later as a result of
such accidents!
I had surreal talks with shyster attorneys, conversations that involved
a complete suspension of belief on both sides  I would be talking to an
attorney and would know he was lying and would know he knew I knew he
was lying-and yet we had to talk on, grave-faced and sober, speaking in
all seriousness, liketwo characters in a farce, fully cognizant of the
fraud that choked the room like an invisible fog
Nor was all the fault on the side of the victims  I saw insurance
companies that wouldn't pay even though they were liable for accidents,
because alert claims adjusters had swooped in early, beating the
lawyers to the scene, and had obtained a statement from the victims
that there were no injuries
In those shabby days my esteem for the human race waned considerably
Toward  the end, alarm bells would go off in my brain at the mere
sound of those quavering, plaintive words: 'I just want what's due me"
All the lies and rigamarole instilled in me a real thirst for the
truth, a realization that the truth is a valuable and rare commodity
The skepticism of those days has stayed with me all my life and has
made me a shrewder investigator than I might be otherwise
Some years later I caught a graduate student falsifying field notes in
primate research in Africa  After I found he could not have been in
the field, given his receipts and gasoline mileage, I fired him and
sent him home  He said to me ruefully- as I handed him his airplane
ticket: "You've always had a penchant for investigation"
At the time, however, I was miserable  I told Margaret that I wanted
to go back to the ivory tower, back to the university  I wanted to get
away from all the endless strife, controversy and dishonesty of the
insurance business  I wrote my old teacher, Tom McKern, and asked if he
thought I had the potential to become a forensic anthropologist, to
make a career of it
McKern wrote back and said, in essence: "Come"  I went  In short order
I earned my master's degree, put together my thesis on Caddoan Indian
skeletons and had someone Turn it in for me  By the time I learned I
had won my master's degree, I was in Kenya, trapping baboons as part of
a research project  I was an anthropologist, twenty-four years old
No primate makes a good pet  That includes humans  We and our
cousins-the gorillas, the chimpanzees, the monkeys, including the
baboons-are a rather uncivilized lot, fiercely proud and independent,
but at the same time treacherous, greedy, aggressive and cruel  I
carry a deep scar on my right arm, where an old baboon bit me,
lacerating my ulnar artery and coming very near to costing me a limb
I hold no grudge  It was a fair fight  In the eyes of the baboon I
was certainly in the wrong  I had jabbed him with, a tranquilizer in
an effort to capture him alive in Kenya, to ship him to a research
laboratory in America  In his position, I would have tried to kill me
too
My days in Africa marked me far more deeply than this hollow old wound
in my arm shows  I caught malaria twice  I had to face down angry
Masai tribesmen carrying spears  Wobble-kneed and drunk on pure
adrenaline, I confronted charging Cape buffalo bent on trampling me to
muddy paste, and shot them seconds before their horns got intimately
acquainted with my chest  For sheer terror I recommend the Cape
buffalo; no departmental chairperson or budget committee can begin to
compare with this shaggy mass of bone, muscle and rage
Kenya is forever glorious in my memory  In those magical times, thirty
years ago, my wife and I were still discovering each other, truly
building something together, amid, the most exotic and beautiful
surroundings imaginable  Both of our daughters were born in Nairobi
My years in Kenya confirmed me in the path I had chosen
Africa poured forth gifts that I have always treasured, made me a
better teacher, gave me a perspective that broadened and deepened my
research  There is no greater living laboratory for anthropology on
earth than the immensity of Africa, with its startling displays of
nature, "red in tooth and claw," yet profoundly beautiful for all their
savagery  What had been theoretical in my mind suddenly came to life
before my eyes  I keep an articulated baboon skeleton on a shelf in my
office, and it brings back memories of the Kenya and Tanzania I knew
then: Kimana, where Hemingway camped and gazed at Kilimanjaro's snows;
the blue Chyulu Hills, the Tsavo National Park, Lake Manyara where the
lions he lazily up in the trees, paws dangling from limbs; the
magnificent Serengeti Plain, lake Magadi, Lake Natron, the Ngunimani
Escarpment
I have tried to incorporate scenes from Africa into my lectures on
anthropology and I think it has made them more interesting and
down-to-earth  I can tell my students with eyewitness certainty that a
lion will eat this but not that  I can set them straight about
baboons, which are described in many textbooks as strict vegetarians,
but which I have seen with my own eyes devouring hunks of freshly
slaughtered baby antelope, chickens and other birds  Such lessons
can't be learned in books  Africa tided me over during some very lean
years in Academe, furnished me with ideas for research projects that
ultimately helped me win tenure
And it was all so magnificent: we breakfasted on mangoes and papayas
We saw plains of leaping oryxes, wildebeest and zebras, plains that
scrolled out forever toward horizons of dust and rainstorms under
purplish-blue skies  By night myriad stars shone, and in the limpid
heavens the moonlight could be bright enough to read by  We had our
clothes torn by "wait-a-bit" thorns, as they are called locally, and we
roasted steaks of fresh-killed lesser kudu and impala at our campfires
At night the "bush babies," a wide-eyed species of lower primate also
known as the galago, used to bounce on the tops of our tents, as if
they were trampolines, jumping up to catch bugs lured by the light of
our encampment
In those adventurous days I fought and fled from bush fires  I learned
to fly, and piloted a plane over the Great Rift Valley, a vast
geological feature that slices its way through East Africa  We
traveled through the Ngorongoro Crater, a tremendous, extinct volcano
whose rim encloses a tremendous ecosystem many hundreds of square miles
in area, as green and gorgeous as some lost Eden
I took my wife and infant daughter for a visit to the mysterious
Olduvai Gorge, and there we descended into the very deeps of time,
where some of the earliest traces of man on earth have been found
The legendary Dr Louis Bakey, who dug there for over thirty years and
won a world-wide reputation as one of the giants of anthropology,
hospitably treated us to lunch and tossed the salad with his own hands
I still have an old 8 men home movie of the event, in which Bakey
climbs the side of the gorge, scratching his bottom unselfconsciously,
as any of the australopithecine protohumans might have done, in this
same gorge, several million years earlier
I owed my sojourn in Africa, which began in 1962, to the good offices
of my teacher, Tom McKern  In those days an outfit called the
Southwest Foundation for Research and Education, based in San Antonio,
was interested in acquiring baboons  Baboons, it had been learned,
have a peculiarity shared with humans: they can get atherosclerosis, or
clogged arteries, from eating a normal diet  Any animal can get
atherosclerosis if you force-feed it gobs of cholesterol, but the
baboon can apparently get it eating the same things we do  This made
baboons a valuable research animal, and the foundation was interested
in acquiring specimens
I served two tours at the foundation's primate research center in Kenya
between 1962 and 1966  Altogether, we trapped and shipped hundreds of
baboons back to America and their descendants are still in this
country  It would not surprise me to learn that the baboon whose heart
was transplanted into "Baby Fay' in a controversial and unsuccessful
operation in 1992 in California was descended from baboon grandparents
I trapped in Kenya
I had seen baboons only in books and zoos before  Now I had to learn
about them in the wild  I soon acquired the basics  Baboons run in
troops numbering from about thirty to as many as two hundred
individuals  There is considerable sexual dimorphism in baboons
Males and females differ markedly in size  Males weigh from about
forty to sixty-five pounds  Females are much smaller and weigh from
twenty to thirty pounds  Baboons are aggressive, but in most
situations they are not a threat to humans unless they are trapped or
if a young baboon is being threatened by a human within sight of its
parents  They are fiercely protective of their young
We trapped the animals with a variety of techniques  The most common
type of trap was a cylinder of strong wire mesh, about five feet high,
with more mesh welded to the top and bottom  This cylinder was fitted
with a thirty-inch sliding door that could be raised and lowered in
metal runners
Inside the cylindrical trap we placed a small board shelf on two
sticks, high up-too high for the baboon to stand outside and reach with
his arm  On these shelves we placed our bait: maize  Baboons love
maize  I have seen them running through maize fields in an orgy of
gluttony, sticking an ear of maize under each arm, grabbing more ears,
letting the first ears drop, replacing them with more ears, which fag
when the next two ears are stolen  At the end of a row the baboon
emerges with two ears of maize-and a whole trail of fallen and
abandoned ears  They are the most improvident of thieves, forever
stealing more than they can carry  I've known people who behaved in
the same way, but that is another story
Luring the baboons into the traps was a long task, requiring patience
and cunning  First we scattered maize on the bare earth in a suitable
clearing  Then we brought the traps in, set them up, and scattered
maize around them  Then we scattered maize inside the traps, with
the doors wired open  Then we put an ear of corn on the sfielf, with
the door still wired open  Finally, after the baboons were completely
lulled into complacency by this glorious, never ending bounty of, free
food, we tied one end of a thread to the ear of maize and tied the
other end to the falling door of the trap
Bang!  As soon as the baboon grabbed the ear of maize, the treacherous
thread would break and down slammed the sliding door
When we arrived on the scene, there would be some very angry baboons
gibbering and screaming and baring their fangs at us from inside the
wire mesh traps  Amazing to relate, the creatures seldom had the wits
to lift the door and escape  And they always ate the ear of maize
clean, making the most of their time in captivity
Now they were within our power, and now came the ticklish part: getting
the baboons out of the traps and back to camp  We used a syringe
crudely fitted to a hollow pipe to inject them with a tranquilizer  I
later learned that this tranquilizer was an experimental drug,
phencyclidine, now wide recognized as the main ingredient IY in the
illicit drug known as "angel dust"  It worked very well on the animals
every time they had to be moved; but we noticed that after two or three
doses they became violent and hard to handle whenever they saw us
approaching with the pipe-syringe full of phencyclidine  I can only
imagine that they did not have sweet dreams when under the influence of
this drug  Certainly they came to hate it
Our usual method was to hold the needle ready and approach the trap
Usually the caged baboon would jump away from the door and we would
seize the instant to jab them in the thigh with the needle and push the
plunger  The doses were done by rough guesstimate  We would look at a
baboon and gauge the weight by visual inspection  In a few moments
after the needle sank in, the beasts would get groggy  Then they would
sway, totter and collapse on the cage of the floor  We waited a bit,
then locked the side of the cage to see if there was any reaction
Then came the moment of truth  I would open the door, grab the inert
baboon firmly by the scruff of the neck and the base of the tail and
haul the creature out of the trap  It is essential to act quickly and
decisively: grab, grab, yank and hoist  If you move quickly and get
the proper grip, it is very hard for the animal to Turn its head and
bite you
All this I knew  All this I had done dozens of times  It was routine
to me, second nature  Then one day, when I was hauling an old male
baboon out of a trap, everything went horribly wrong  I had him by the
neck and tail, there was no problem, everything was going according to
plan  When I swung him up over the side of the pickup truck bed, his
head swiveled around, so limply that it seemed to be lolling that way,
merely because of gravity
But in the next instant the cunning old fellow came to life and sank a
razor-sharp canine tooth into my arm, a fangseveral inches long and
sharp-edged along its inner curve  It went through my flesh like a
stiletto  I was too astonished to feel much pain  I immediately fell
to the ground on top of the animal and held his head as immobile as I
could  If he managed to push my arm away with his powerful limbs, the
tooth would rip clear through my arm muscles and arteries  I knew from
experience that this is how a baboon fights, sinking its teeth into its
enemy, then pushing the enemy away and letting the tooth tear through
the flesh
As I pinned the beaslt to the ground with the pierced arm, I beat him
with my left fist on his zygomatic arch-the part of the skull near the
cheekbone  It was some time before I could persuade him to open his
mouth  I carefully unsheathed the long, bloody canine from my arm and
disengaged it  The dripping-jawed old baboon was groggy enough to lie
still on the ground now  I drove back to camp, -the blood welling up
from my wound in warm throbs  The ulnar artery had been nicked  I
reached camp, leaped from the truck, ran for the first-aid kit and
poured a surgical solution into the deep wound  It was appronimately
as soothing as napalm  I applied a pressure dressing to the wound and
began dosing myself with erythromycin to fight infection  The nearest
hospital was in Nairobi, a hundred and forty miles away, but before I
could set out I had to wire all the trap doors open, in keeping with
Kenyan game laws, so that no baboons could be caught in them and starve
while we were away  I also had to give the old baboon who had wounded
me another shot of Phencyclidine  This time I erred on the side of
caution, when it came to estimating the dosage
I drove to' Nairobi in a fog of pain  Every bump in the road
reawakened my wounded arm  When I staggered into the hospital
emergency room, the first thing the attendants said was: "Look at his
color  He's in shock"  And I remember thinking blurrily: "My God, I'm
in shock"  My arm looked as if it belonged to Popeye the Sailor, it
was so puffed up with blood from the leaking ulnar artery
And so began an uncomfortable convalescence  Despite the equiromycine
I'd administered back at the camp, E coli bacteria spread and
proliferated in the wound  The swollen arm stank so much it seemed to
belong not to me but to a corpse  I slept with the limb outstretched,
trying to get as far from it as I could  For a while the arm looked as
if it might have to be amputated  But with time, and many soakings in
Epsom salts, the swelling gradually abated and the wound was purged
clean  It was a near-run thing
Far from being soured on Kenya because of my wound, I became fonder of
it than ever, as if the country had entered my heart through a hole in
my arm  Phrases and fragments of Swahili recur to my mind at odd
moments and, even though they are tattered now with the passage of
time, the bits I remember still have a beautiful, vital ring in my
ears  I remember how a can opener was called a tinikata, a wagon a
gati, and a train a "smoke wagon," a gall la nwshi  I still use some
Swahili phrases today because they are wonderfully descriptive  A
barbarian, an uncivilized person, is a shenzi
An utter fiasco is a shauri  One of the medical examiners in Florida
also lived in Kenya for a time and it is a great pleasure to greet him
with a hearty 'Jambo, bwana [Good day, sir]!"-and to hear the same in
return
Isaac Newton once complimented his forerunners in science, whose
research enabled him to formulate the first laws of physics
"If I have seen further," Newton said, "it is because I have stood upon
the shoulders of giants"  In my case, it has been the shoulders of
baboons, but I am nonetheless grateful

Talkative Skulls

People begin to see that something more goes into the composition of a
fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed knife-a gun-and a
dark lane  Design, gents, grouping, light and shade, poetry,
sentiment, are now deeiwd indispensable to attempts of this nature

-Thomas De Quincey, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts One of
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most amusing short stories, "Crabbe's
Practice," deals with the desperate attempts of a young doctor to set
himself up in the world and acquire patients  Hoping to burnish his
academic reputation, he publishes a deep and erudite paper in a medical
journal, with the bizarre title, "Culious Development of a Discopherous
Bone in the Stomach of a Duck"  Later he confesses to a friend that
the paper was a fraud  While dining on roast duck, the young doctor
discovered that the fowl had swallowed an ivory domino, and he had
turned the experience into a research paper  "Discopherous" is just a
Greek term for "circle-bearing," and refers to the circular dots on a
domino
Conan Doyle was a doctor himself and knew whereof he spoke
Anyone who works in science knows the dull desperation and sharp
anxiety of the early days in one's career  Few of us do not look
back on those pinched, scraping times without a secret shudder,
followed by a pang of relief that they are past  The miserable pay and
financial woes; the long nights of study and the baffles against sleep;
the frightful hurdles of examinations; the climactic defense of one's
doctoral dissertation; the hissing, malignant envy that is the curse of
university life at all times and in all places; the constant struggle
to get published, to win tenure, to carve out a niche and be recognized
in one's field-all these torments are well known in Academe, and have
been known to drive some people mad, even to suicide  Some people
Not me
My early experiences riding shotgun in the funeral parlor's ambulance
in Texas had shown me a side of life no book could teach
These dreadful sights gave me a certain balance, along with reserves of
strength that I call on in the ordinary trials of LIFE at the
university  When you have seen bodies burned to cinders in fires, or
pummeled to jelly under a trucldoad of bricks, or reduced to empty
skins whose bones have been squeezed from them by the terrific force of
plane crashes, then the bumps and bogies of academic life hold few
terrors for you  "It could be worse," you tell yourself, and when
worse is the thing you saw lying dead in a highway culvert scarcely
twelve hours earlier, you know you are telling the truth
The first time I was asked for my considered opinion about a skull came
when I was still in graduate school, still working under Tom McKern in
his laboratory  It was - a watershed moment for me, because for the
first time McKern was treating me-I will not say as an equal, but very
nearly as a colleague whose independent opinion he valued
On that morning when I came into the laboratory McKern presented me
with a cranium, a skull without the lower jaw  It had been found in
Lake Travis near Austin with a fishing line tied around the zygomatic
arch, the cheekbone  The other end of the fishing line was tied to a
large rock
As I handled the still damp cranium, my attention was drawn to the
palate  More than anything else, the shape of that palate struck me
It stood out, to my eyes, in, a very unusual way  Looking at it, I was
racked by doubts  I felt very insecure because obviously McKern was
going to judge me on my response  More than that, I was insecure
because I was about to give him an answer I felt was intrinsically
improbable  At last I summoned up my courage and spoke:

"I think it's Mongoloid, probably Japanese," I said  McKern looked at
me for a long moment  Then at last he said: "That's what I think,too"
Whatever pride I felt was immediately dampened by McKern, who went on to
point out all the other things I had missed  With the sure touch of a
true master of forensic anthropology, he demonstrated one detail after
another, details which I had seen but had not observed  At such times
McKern was truly dazzling and I shall never forget those lucid, decisive
moments in which he practically made that old skull speak
I had not observed that some of the teeth had been glued into their
sockets  I had not observed the scorching on the outer cranial vault
I had not observed the very simple fact that the skull had been
attached to a fishing line tightly tied to its zygomatic arch, which
meant that it was dry, unfleshed bone to start with, when it was
plunged into the lake
After McKern had pointed'out all these things, the answer became clear
The skull before us was almost certainly a World War II trophy skull
that some serviceman brought back from the Pacific Theater  The
scorching had occurred during battle, perhaps by the action of
flamethrowers or as the result of a fiery plane crash  The teeth had
fallen out as the skull driedaut and had been glued back in  Finally,
either the serviceman himself had sickened of his gruesome relic, or he
had died and his heirs wanted to get rid of the thing  But how to
dispose of it?  If they put it in the garbage it might be found
Burning it was too much trouble  Burying it would be bothersome and
might leave traces  Best to throw it in the lake!  Tie a rock to it
for good measure!  And so the skull went overboard, bubbling down into
the depths of the Travis, only to be found again by the purest chance
I am certain that, somewhere in japan today, there is a family
wondering what became of an uncle, a father, a long-lost relative who
marched off to war more than half a century ago  They will never know
And the Japanese man whose skull this was, how could he have dreamed
that, after great and fiery battles in the middle of the vast Pacific,
the bony vessel enclosing his dreaming brain was destined to end up
tied to a rock and drowned in a cool American lake, then fished up onto
a bright laboratory table at the University of Texas?
The television show "Quincy' has caused me no end of vexation and
amusement  When people learn that I am a forensic anthropologist, the
first thing they usually say is: "Oh, like Quincy?"  Quincy was a
medical examiner whose whole career was one long string of dramatic
successes  Born under a lucky star, Quincy solved his cases within
hours or days  If Quincy had a problem, he telephoned his brilliant
assistant, Sam, back at the lab, and Sam had the answer for him in
seconds  Sam!  How I envied Quincy his faithful and unerring Sam!  Any
one of us could shine like the morning star if we only had a Sam
working for us  In one episode Quincy and Sam actually determined the
hair color of a skeleton by examining its femur-a complete scientific
impossibility  A bunch of us forensic anthropologists later cornered
the technical advisor of this episode at the annual convention of the
American Academy of Forensic Scientists
Up against the wall, needled and jabbed by our merciless questions over
this hair-color episode, he finally admitted that he had taken
"dramatic license" to "move the plot forward"
I am not Quincy  The difference between forensic pathologists and
forensic anthropologists is quite simple  Pathologists have
medicaldegrees  They are doctors who have received residency training
in pathology  If they are fortunate, they also have some training in
courtroom procedures  All the medical examiners in the state of da are
forensic pathologists with medical degrees  In some states they may
also serve as county coroners, legally determining the cause of death
But in others, the coroner may have no medical background at all; he
may simply be a local person with a reputation for shrewdness and
honesty  I have known coroners who were filling station owners or funeral
parlor directors, or even furniture salesen  Why furniture salesmen?
Because in the old days these merchants stocked coffins in their shops
A forensic anthropologist is not a medical doctor, though he has a PhD
and has studied anthropplogy in college  We specialize in the human
skeletal system, its changes through LIFE, its changes in many
lifetimes, and its variations around the world  We are art of the
larger field of physical anthropology, or biological anthroas it is
known today, which is concerned overall with the man body and all its
variations  My specialty, physical anthropolgy, is distinct from other
fields, such as cultural anthropology and archaeology  The cultural
anthropologists are the ones who go out and study the exotic tribes, the
"guttered folk and wild," as the poet dyard Kipling called them  The
archaeologists look for tools and or evidence of ancient and recent man
in the folds and hollows of asia, Africa and Europe
My field of expertise is the human skeleton  Though some pathologists insist
on doing their own skeletal examinations along with autopsies, I can
confidently say that there are very few cases in which a forensic
anthropologist-someone like me-could not add a deal of useful
information to what a pathologist can discover  I have had pathologists
exclaim frankly in my hearing, when confronted with a skeleton: "Gee, I'm not
used to looking at these without the meat on them!"
But long and lean were the years from the time I entered graduate school,
in 1959, to the time I got my first case, in 1972  There a spot of
work from time to time in McKern's lab  There were formal examinations
of skeletons in Africa  But apart from these cases, the annals of my
professional life in this period are rather parched and poor
When I open my filing cabinets the gaunt memories of those starting
years come back to me vividly  In 1972 I had but a single case  In
1973 hope blazed up like a bonfire: a scatter of buried bodies was
found less than a quarter of a mile away from where I live in
Gainesville
These remains turned up when new utility lines were being laid, and for
a while it was feared that we were dealing with the grisly spoils left
by a serial killer  The farmer owner of the house in whose backyard
these bodies came to light was an attorney who had committed suicide
years earlier  All sorts of wild theories were floating about
The police asked me and three university archaeologists to investigate
We all piled into a van and drove to the site  Within a few hours we
had turned up casket hardware, nails, screws, etc that indicated we
were dealing with nothing more sinister than an early twentieth-century
graveyard  The whole thing was a fiasco, a false alarm
In 1974, I had two cases  In 1975, two more cases; in 1976, two cases;
in 1977, three cases; in 1978-twelve cases!  And from then on things
began to snowball
When the Florida Museum of Natural History was endowed by the state
legislature in 1917 as the Florida State Museum, one of its functions,
as spelled out in the original wording of the law, was that the museum
would provide assistance to the state in "identifying specimens"  i
doubt the original framers of the law imagined that among those
"specimens" would be human remains, still less that those remains would
be the ghastly leavings of murderers and maniacs  But over the years I
have tried to do my part to repay the generosity and vision of those
state legislators of long ago  My first opportunity to do so-my first
case-came in April 1972, when a Washington County sheriffs deputy
brought me a peat-encrusted skeleton that had been found in the woods
and asked me to analyze it
The skeleton had been found in a swamp near Chipley  There was no
name, no identifying information accompanying it at all  I took the
skeleton down to- the steam tables at the end of my laboratory in the
basement of the anthropology department and started
cleaning away the vegetable matter  Meanwhile a class nearby broke for
coffee and the professor brought his pupils over to see what I was
doing  This professor was a bit of a twit  He said to the students,
very jocularly: "You see, science has its uses in the real world"  I
was irritated at his condescension but concealed it  I invited the
students to have a look at the skeleton  They crowded over
"Here are his socks," I said  "And you can see the feet are still in
the socks"
At that point the twit vanished from the scene and so did most of his
fainthearted students  I learned the power of cold reality, how it
acts like a fly whisk to chase idle minds away; and I admired those
students who stayed behind
You always have a fondness for your first cases, and I found this
skeleton very interesting  Under analysis, it turned out to be that of
a toothless elderly man with a lot of union or fusion of bones in his
back, due to old age  The really fascinating thing was that he had a
large opening where one ear would have been on the skull  It was all
hollowed out and eaten away  Obviously he had been a: in t lat ear
But there was more: a penetration from this area up through the thin
bones above, which meant that this perforation went into the cranial
vault, the brain case  Finally, along the inner surface of that brain
case you could see pitting, where an infection had eroded the bone
during life
I went to the University of Florida Medical School library, researched
the problem and found abundant literature that described the condition
It was a middle ear infection  Such an infection, if not treated, will
cause hearing loss and excavation of the bony surfa@ in the area
Sometimes this infection, will penetrate the brain case, leading to
infection that would cause disorientation, nerve problems and death
In its earlier stages the infection produces a chipping exudation from
the ear that would be foul-smelling
Armed with this information, I asked the sheriff if there were any
local people who fit this description  It turned out there was a man,
a retired farm laborer living on Social Security, who was well known in
the vicinity and who had been missing for two years  His name-there is
no need to give his name; he was subsequently identified beyond doubt
Toward the end of his life a foul odor hung about him, so oppressive
that people shunned him  From his tottering gait, he also seemed to
have motor nerve problems  People thought he had suffered a stroke and
was partially paralyzed  Neighbors and acquaintances confirmed that he
seemed increasingly disoriented toward the end of his days  Finally he
wandered off and disappeared, not to be seen again until the skeleton
was retrieved from the swamp
But the skeletal remains that had moldered for two years in the wild
could still speak to me  The perforated skull with the pitted brain
case yielded up information that agreed very well with reports of the
man in life  It could even describe to me the last hours of the
unfortunate farmhand, shunned and alone, stumbling into the swamp in
pain, his brain swarming with infectious invaders that gnawed away at
his balance, his reason and the very bone that encased his brain
I handed the skeleton back over to the sheriff's office, together with
my findings  Once, long afterward, I was traveling through Chipley and
stopped in at the sheriff's office to ask about the final disposition
of the case  The deputies told me that the coroner had ruled the
farmhand had been clearly identified and had died a natural death
In 1974, almost in desperation, an investigator with the Eighth
judicial Circuit of the state attorneys office brought me a portion of
a cranium just a few days before a trial was going to begin  This
skullcap had been found by scuba divers near a bridge over the Santa Fe
River, the northern boundary of Alachua County, on September 1, 1974,
about seventy yards away from a spot where, nearly two years
previously, the remains of a headless, handless female body had been
found  This headless trunk was identified by certain surgical scars,
which were still visible on the torso, as belonging to a Union County
woman who had been abducted on August 23, just nine days earlier  At
the same time she vanished, a farm laborer named Raymond Stone also
disappeared  Stone was later captured in Missouri and, under
questioning by police, confessed to killing the woman
Later, however, he retracted his confession
There was no evidence of trauma or foul play to be found on the woman's
torso  The local medical examiner looked at the body and concluded
that the head had been gnawed off and carried away by alligators after
the woman's death  Then the divers found the skullcap
This medical examiner-there is no need to name him-was an extremely
arrogant individual, supremely self-assured, who airily told the
sheriff's investigators, when the skullcap was found, that there was
"nothing you could tell from an old, dry bone"  He refused to do any
analysis at all
Almost, apologetically, the state attorney's investigators approached
me with the skull fragment and asked me if I could tell them anything
about it  I analyzed the remains and, working against the clock
because the trial was imminent, made a report in just seventy-two
hours  I said this skullcap belonged to an adult white female  She
was mature but had not yet reached middle age  The shape of the upper
margins of the orbits (eye openings), the smooth, high forehead and the
muscle attachment markings were all consistent with a female  Age
could only be deduced from the cranial sutures, the "stitches" where
the various plates of our skull are joined  This is a notoriously
unreliable technique, but in this case it was all I had to go by;
therefore my age estimate was care fully vague
I told the deputies that the woman had been struck at least twice by a
weapon that had a hammerlike aspect to it  One of the fractures was a
round penetration of the frontal bone, which clearly showed the
circular mark of the hammer  A small portion of bone was broken at the
edge but hinged downward, indicating that the bone was fresh and
elastic when the injury took place  Fracture lines radiated out from
this penetration  There was another, second injury, that consisted of
a depressed skull fracture of the outer layer of the ,cranial vault
Here the outer layer had been mashed down, but again you could see
clearly the flat, circular striking surface of the hammer head  A
depressed skull fracture of this type is also an indication that the
bone was still fresh and elastic when the blows were struck
The skull resembles an eggshell that has been cracked but not quite
broken through
When the investigators first came to me they told me in strictest
confidence that they had a suspect who was already in custody; that
this suspect had confessed to murdering the woman whose headless body
had been found in the Santa Fe River in 1972; but that this same
suspect had later retracted his confession  The suspect, they told me,
had confessed that he had used a hatchet to commit the murder-a
hatchet, not a hammer
The trial took place at Lake Butler, Union County  I remember waiting
for hours to testify, sitting on a wooden staircase, which was the only
available place for witnesses to wait  It was the first time I
testified as an expert witness in a murder case, and it went
awkwardly  The prosecutor tried to ask me very controlled,
step-by-step questions, instead of simply asking me: "What did you
find?""  For my part, I tried to treat the jury as if they were a
class of undergraduates, to testify as if I were teaching, and that is
a mistake too  I even made an attempt at humor, the way a teacher does
when he is trying to keep the class's attention  Whatever the jest
was, it fell terribly flat and in that embarrassing instant there was
seared into me a lesson I have never forgotten since: a courtroom is
not a classroom
The great riddle of the trial, the harnmerhke blows that had apparently
been made by a hatchet, was eventually solved  I was just one of many
witnesses called, and I was not privy to the other evidence in the case
until after the trial  Then I learned that the hatchet the defendant
had used was a carpenter's hatchet, with a blade on one side of the
head and a hammer on the other  Even so, I was puzzled: why would he
use the hammer side and not the hatchet side to kill?  I have learned
the answer since  Hammer blows do not spatter blood as much as ax
blows do  It is a question of economy and neatness
I shall never forget Raymond Stone's appearance when I first laid eyes
on him in court  He was a very, very small, thin man who was going
bald  He wore a light blue cardigan sweater-I have since learned it is
an old courtroom ploy to dress defendants in loose fitting, bagg
clothes  It makes them look smaller and less threatening  I remember
thinking that Stone looked like my barber in Gainesville  How could
someone so meek and kindly-looking do what Stone was accused of doing?
How could he have bludgeoned an innocent woman to death and flung her
body from a bridge?
At the trial it came out that, at the time of the murder in 1972, Stone
had been working as a hired hand on a farm owned by the victim and her
husband  The murder probably had something to do with a spurned sexual
advance on Stone's part  He had propositioned his boss's wife and
been refused; enraged, he had killed her
Stone was convicted and judge John J Crews sentenced him to death  At
his sentencing, Stone threatened to "raise hell" and tried to spit on
the judge  But this frail-looking, malignant man is still alive as I
write these lines, and on February 7, 1994, his death sentence was
commuted to life imprisonment  Stone's lawyers were able to win a
resentencing for him because evidence about his background and unhappy
childhood was not heard by the jury at his original trial
Stone grew up in a Missouri  dump, sleeping in an abandoned
truck  His father murdered Stone's mother when the boy was nine, and
allegedly beat the b and sexually abused him  Stone had already spent
much of his life in jails and mental hospitals  A higher court ruled
that the jury ought to have been told all this before it recommended
the death penalty in Stone's case
Despite the resentencing, it is thought unlikely Stone will ever be
paroled  He has survived three heart attacks and has undergone bypass
surgery in prison  I have also since learned from prison officials
that Stone is something of a pariah in prison  Even when he was on
Death Row, the other condemned men regarded him as a human rattlesnake
The skullcap in the Stone case was a victory, not so much for me as for
the science of forensic anthropology in Florida  It was the last link
in the chain of evidence that connected Stone with his victim
The sutures and shape established the age and sex of the owner; the
trauma marks established the shape and type of the weapon  I was able
to join the skullcap to the body that had been found two years earlier,
and the skullcap was the most eloquent, damning piece of evidence in
the case  This victory was owed to good luck, hard work and the mercy
of the alligators who gnawed the victim's head away from her body  In
the end, it was the alligators of the Santa Fe River who left this
crucial fragment of bone to be retrieved by the scuba divers and to
tell its tale in court
The Stone case had an unexpected sequel about three years ago when the
daughters of the deceased woman asked to see the records of the trial,
in order to learn more about the death of their mother
The young ladies were received- with courtesy at the Lake Butler
courthouse, but when the filing cabinet was opened a ghastly sight
awaited them: there, still in the drawer, was their mother's bludgeoned
skullcap!
The two were understandably upset and begged that the fragment be
released to them immediately for proper burial  It was a ticklish
question, since Stone was still alive and going through the endless
appeal process that accompanies any death sentence  The current
Alachua County medical examiner and I discussed the case and concluded,
since we had abundant photographs that could be used' in the event of
any retrial, that there was no impediment to the skullcap's release
So the two daughters bore away the last bit of their unhappy mother's
head and buried it

Bolts Of Bones

O Who shall, from this Dungeon, raise A Soul enslaved so many ways?
With bolts of Bones, that fettered stands In Feet; and manacled in
Hands Here blinded with an Eye; and there Deaf with the drumming of an
Ear
A Soul hung up, as 'twere in Chains Of Netues, and Atteties and Veins
Tortur'd besides each other part in a vain Head and double Heart    

-Andrew Marvell, A Dialogue Between the Souland Body The unwary visitor
to the C A Pound Human- Identification Laboratory might be pardoned
an involuntary gasp of shock  Inside this unobtrusive building, hidden
in a grove of thick bamboo off Radio Road in Gainesville, death grins
at you from every angle, massed, multiplied and compressed with
terrific force within a very narrow compass  My laboratory room itself
is not large, perhaps the size of two living rooms; but on its tables,
in its shelved boxes, in its labeled specimen jars and phials, are the
full and partial skeletons of a silent throng of people, all awaiting
identification, or their day in court, at the trials of their killers
It is a fleshless village of the dead, dry and silent save for the soft
whirr of a dehumidifier under a table
But this finality is an illusion  just as in the book of Ezekiel, the
dry bones knit themselves back together, are covered anew with flesh,
draw breath and at last stand forth as a living host of human beings,
so the remains in this room have begun a second life, a life after
death  They are speaking secrets to me and to my students, yielding up
hidden information, furnishing ideas and evidence to the world of the
living  The truth is germinating in them, sprouting up vividly
Remains such as these have established innocence or guilt
They have pointed the way to the electric chair
Here lie bones burned and boiled, drowned and desiccated; bones that
once lay buried, long forgotten, are now summoned back suddenly into
the light of day; bones of martyred innocents, and bones of double-dyed
murderers, all lying side by side, equal and silent beneath the
impartial eye of science  We have few living visitors, and those who
are admitted must show they have good reason to enter  But the dead
are welcomed, and we show them every courtesy  As you stare about, you
may see some cranial vaults showing clear bullet holes, dark circles
where death entered and overtook the owners, extinguishing LIFE as a
puff of air blows out a candle
Against a far wall there hangs a translucent death mask, silhouetted on
film against the milky-bright shine of an x-ray light table  It is the
radiograph of a broken skull, showing a spangling of lead particles
shining like lethal dew, sprinkled throughout the braincase  It
belongs to a gunshot victim
On most days the air in my laboratory is cool, chak, cleansmelling,
with a hint of fresh, wet earth  On those days, no reek of decay
pollutes the atmosphere  In one corner you may see a young graduate
student tweezering his way slowly through a heap of clay clods,
separating out the tumbled teeth and vertebrae of an apparent suicide,
years old  Hanks of human hair from plane crash victims are nearby,
shampooed and -shiny, with warm highlights that serve as poignant
reminders of lives foreshortened  We use cork collars to prop up
skulls we are working on, so they will not roll and fall off the
tables
Skeletons in every phase of articulation are housed here, some lying
full length on tables, some tucked away in fragments in boxes
A fetal skeleton, seven months developed and stiubom, stands in a beg
jar, frail and pearly white, resembling a little monkey with its
curiously bulbous skull, eggshell-thin, almost translucent  jaws
without teeth and teeth without jaws grin in ivory scatters  The dark,
eyeless shadows of orbital sockets gaze calmly up at the ceiling or
over at you  Bones creamy white, butterscotch yellow, dirty gray,
sooty black, tangled and tumbled, boxed and loose, articulated and
arrayed: a whole community of skeletons is kept here under lock and
key, entrusted by chance and the state of Florida to my care
This laboratory is my realm  It was built in 1991, by my design  I
oversaw every detail: the 48-inch tube lights that can be clicked on
and off in symmetrical pairs to vary room brightness; the twin,
independent ventilation systems; the security locks which seal off the
laboratory proper from the administrative area, every door, window and
drain  The walls within the laboratory go all the way up to the roof,
not just to the drop ceiling, for purposes of security as well as to
isolate unpleasant odors
Security is adamantine  There are burglar alarms strewn throughout the
building, including motion detectors  The laboratory doors are fitted
with Keso locks manufactured by the Sargent Lock Co The keys do not
have serrated edges, as normal keys have  Instead they are pocked with
a unique pattern of depressions  The lock company will issue a
duplicate key only upon receipt and verification of my signature  No
one outside my staff possesses a key to the laboratory, not the college
administration, not even the campus police  The laboratory is locked
at night  Maintenance staff cannot enter it unless I am there
Why this stern isolation?  The contents of the laboratory, the bones
and the equipment, are not so very valuable in terms of money  But
some of them are legally irreplaceable: they represent potential
evidence in court cases and must not be tampered with  A determined
cracksman could doubtless cut his way in through the wall with the
proper tools, but he would set off alarms'and would leave a telltale
hole, instantly communicating the fact that the precious bones were no
longer inviolate, that the chain of evidence had been broken
In one corner of the laboratory is a safety shower fitted with special
nozzles  It sprays water in a powerful yet gentle stream, Soft enough
to point at your eye and wash it out, if you should happen to be hit
with a spurt of formalin, acid or alcohol, all irritating chemicals
familiar to those who deal with corpses in the laboratory
Nearby are three "odor hoods," clear, ventilated enclosures, each large
enough to accommodate a body on their stainless steel trays inside
The sinks came -from photo supply stores and were meant to be used to
develop pictures  Easy to flush clean, they are ideal for holding
human remains that still have old flesh on them
The clear plastic hoods isolate odors and fans carry the corpse stench
outdoors when the trays are occupied  Soft tissue removed from the
bodies is placed in heat-sealed plastic bags and put in a freezer to
one side  I and my students use sleeves of tubular plastic stock,
supplied by the KAPAK Co and made of 3M plastic  These can be cut
and sealed to any length  Odors never penetrate the 45-mil thickness
of the plastic  KAPAK heat-sealable pouches are used for smaller bits
of flesh  These sturdy packets are, as their label proclaims,
"FREEZABLE BOILABLE MICROWAVABLE AIRTIGHT"  A portable impulse sealer
looks like a paper cutter and is kept in a leather briefcase  Plug it
in, lever down the arm and with a single stroke the plastic container
is sealed hermetically
There are times when you might walk into this room and know right away
we've been working on something fresh  Sometimes the odors are
ghastly  Sometimes, believe it or not, they are appetizing
Strange to say, when I was in my old laboratory in the Florida Museum
of Natural History, people would come in and say: "What's cooking?"  or
"That sure smells good"  When they found out it was a freshly burned
human body they would go green and rush out
"'How long will a man lie in the earth ere he rot?"' Prince Hamlet asks
the gravedigger in the first scene of the fifth act of Shakespeare's
great tragedy"  'Faith,"' the gravedigger replies, " 'if he be not
rotten before he die,-as we have- many pocky corpses nowadays, that
will scarce hold the laying-he will -last you some eight year or nine
year   -   " Shakespeare was an unequaled observer of human
nature, but decomposition depends on many variables  A buried corpse
may last nearly forever in icy ground  Peat and moisture may also
retard decay
In dry sand bodies will mummify to durable parchment  In mineral-rich
earth they may be impregnated with salts and metals
But above the earth, especially in warm weather, the interval to
skeletonization can be shockingly rapid  The minimum time of total
skeletonization is not nine years, nor yet nine months, nor even nine
weeks: it may occur in nine days or thereabouts  Dr T D Stewart in
his Essentials of Forensic Anthropology cites the case of a
twelve-year-old girl who had been missing for ten days in Mississippi,
following a hurricane  Her remains were - found under a discarded,
vinyl-covered sofa in the warm months of late summer, so the conditions
for dissolution were almost optimal  It was as if she had been placed
in a bug incubator  The bugs flourished, the remains diminished and in
just over ten days the body had been very nearly skeletonized, with
only a few small tabs of cartilage left
In the late 1970s my colleague Bill Bass set up the Anthropological
Research Facility (ARF) at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville
He began deliberately exposing bodies donated b y the local medical
examiner's office as unidentified or unclaimed to a carefully monitored
process of natural corruption  It was a "decay rate facility," or, as
my colleague Dr Douglas Ubelaker calls it in his book, Bones, an
"alfresco mortuary"
In this open-air morgue, thirty to forty bodies continue to be
processed each year, along with a handful of dogs  The corpses are
placed on concrete slabs or on the bare earth, or are wrapped in
plastic or buried in shallow pits  Everything is photographed
regularly, to monitor the process of dissolution  The buried bodies
are exhumed at intervals, photographed, and reinterred
It's all for science, but local wags have added Bass's name to the
acronym, renaming the facility "BARF"
Corpse reek is something you simply have to get used to in my
profession  It is one thing to tell yourself that you are smelling
butric acid, methane gas and other organic compounds that are all quite
common in nature  But it is quite another to see a clear and present
horror lying upon the examining table, laughing mfith fleshless mouth,
gazing with jellied eyes, a soul-flown shell, unstrung, inert,
exanimate and ruined  I suppose there is a psychological element in
the horror it excites in us, far beyond the actual, physical smell  It
shouts "Death!"  to our brains at some elemental level, and it takes
experience and willpower to overcome the impulse to shrink away and
flee  But I never put Mentholatum on my upper lip during an autopsy,
the way the FBI agents did in the movie Silence of the Lambs  Nobody I
know does  After a while you just think around it, think it away
I have seen policemen, lawyers, x-ray technicians and others become ill
and flee the room where such corpses he, but I am proud to say not a
single one of my students has ever flunked this stern trial of nerves
The only times I see my students bothered by such sights occur not when
they see the decomposing skull with the remains of the eyes still
glistening in place and tatters of flesh and cartilage adhering to
bones; rather, it is the fresh bodies that tend to unsettle them
Upon the table they see a homicide victim scarcely cold, who climbed
from bed just as they did that day for the start of another busy day,
who dressed and left her apartment, not knowing that in a few hours she
was going to be murdered and would finish the day on the cold metal
table in the pathologist's facility  These are the truly dreadful
cases, in my students' eyes  There is the tendency for the student to
look down and see not the victim, but themselves; to identify with the
victim  and that can be one of the most emotionally wrenching
experiences imaginable  It's easy not to identify with a
skeleton or a grotesquely decomposing mass, or even a burned
body, with its limbs contorted into the pose of a boxer as the roasted
muscles have contracted amid the flames  Such miserable remains aren't
"human" anymore  But the fresh body on the table can convey a terror
beyond that of the most liquefied corpse
There is no horrible, hidden mystery involved in decomposition
Basically there are two well-mapped processes involved: autolysis and
putrefaction
Autolysis occurs after death when digestive juices, which in life
dissolve only food, begin to digest the gastrointestinal tract  Within
a few hours of death, these stomach acids will gnaw through the stomach
or esophagus which they have patiently and obediently served through
every moment of LIFE  It is like some little French Revolution of the
guts, in which the servants suddenly become the masters and run amok
At the same time tyrosine crystals may form in the liver as proteins
there break down after death
Putrefaction occurs as a result of bacterial activity throughout the
body  Putrefaction is a much greater component of the decomposition
process than autolysis, and it sweeps through the body like a silent
fire  Blood is a fertile sea in which bacteria swarm and multiply
Gas is released within the blood vessels and tissues  The body swells,
becomes distended with methane gas  The body can actually swell to two
or three times its normal size in twelve to eighteen hours  A
colleague of mine, who shall remain nameless, sometimes demonstrates
this phenomenon for visitors by darkening his laboratory, lighting a
match and thrusting a needle into the swollen set of remains  There is
a great blue jet of flame and onlookers gasp
As we dissolve, our skin color may change from green to purpleto black
Dislodged by the pressure of the accumulating methane, our organs may
bloom out from our lower orifices, and foul-smelling fluid may exude or
spurt from these openings  The smell is largely composed of butric
acids-this is the stench of death that is so repellent to our nostrils
The skin slips from its moorings, so much that the skin of the hands
can sometimes be removed completely, like a glove, though the nails
fall away  Fingerprints can still be taken from these slipped-off
"gloves"  To do this, the technician must insert his own gloved hand
into the dead bag of skin, ink the dead fingertips and carefully roll
the prints onto a blank card
It is a myth that fingernails and hair continue to grow after death
What really happens is that the skin may retract around them, making
the hair and nails prickle up and jut out more prominently
Erich Maria Remarque, in his novel, All Quiet on the Western Front,
imagines a dead friend's nails growing in weird, subterranean
corkscrews after his burial  it is a powerful, disturbing image, but
it is pure moonshine  No such thing occurs
Dreadful as all these processes may seem, they are only the resolution
of certain carbon-based compounds into certain other carbon-based
compounds  Carbon is the element of life and death  We share it with
diamonds and dandelions, with kerosene and kelp
While we may wrinkle our noses at some of its manifestations, we ought
also to remember that this element comes to us from the stars, which
wheel over us forever in silent, glittering array, pure fires obeying
celestial laws
Against another wall of my laboratory is my workbench, fitted with a
drill press, a small anvil, saws, screwdrivers, wrenches and other
tools  These implements are not for working with human remains, though
their abstract shapes sometimes come in handy in unexpected ways  I
use them to design frames and supports and other furniture for the
laboratory  I am rather handy with tools, and it is satisfying to do
this work myself
My familiarity with tools often enables me to reach gum conclusions
when I am working with the remains of murder and suicide victims
Sometimes I can tell exactly what sort of tool was used to kill
someone  The cross section and the size will match up perfectly  I
had a case recently in which a rubber mallet was used, just like the
one on my toolbench wall  Another skull I examined was perforated with
a pattern that perfectly matched the one on this pry bar  I often go
to Sears and look at the tools there to see if any match up to the
holes in the skulls that come to this laboratory  When the salesman
asks: "Can I help you, sir?"  I tell him, "No, you wouldn't understand
I'll know what I'm looking for when I see it"
Nearby you will see some machine grinders, used to grind down bones for
samples; diamond-blade saws used to cut thin sections from bones and
teeth so that they can be examined under a microscope; and the
vibrating Stryker saw used in autopsies, a tool whose circular blade
does not spin, but instead oscillates back and forth at high speed so
that it will not cut skin, but only bone  The Stryker saw is used to
cut the top of the skull off so that the brain can be removed  Garden
tools such as branch cutters can be used to cut through ribs  Long
knives are useful in removing the brain which, if fresh, leaves the
skull reluctantly, with a sucking sound  But brain matter is quick to
deliquesce and soon turns to a dark pudding
A valuable array of photographic equipment is kept in the laboratory to
take pictures of remains and bones  I only use High 8 Metal P
videotape in my lab videocamera; it gives you videotapes of near studio
quality  I also use a $5,000 Bronica camera with closeup accessories,
similar to a Hasselblad but a bit cheaper, to take still pictures-very
still pictures  The laboratory also has its own miniature x-ray
machine, a Hewlett-Packard Faxitron 43805N and an x-ray duplicator,
which can copy x-rays like a Xerox machine
More than any other of my colleagues I use x-rays  Since we are not
worried about harming the patient, we can leave the machine on for
exposures of up to fifteen minutes, ending up with radiographs that
shine through and through like gossamer membranes, not bone -at all
There is no danger of overexposure  You cannot harm a dead skull with
excessive x-rays, after all  That is our advantage  I prefer to use
the same type of x-ray film that is used for mammography, as it is
extremely sensitive and capable of showing extremely fine detail
I'm always on the lookout for cheap equipment and I fancy I have rather
a keen eye for a bargain: my twenty x-ray viewers were government
surplus, bought from VA hospitals  They are so durable that I have not
had to replace a single bulb in them yet  One particularly useful
piece of equipment is a "hot spot" lamp, bought for ten dollars at a
warehouse auction and capable of projecting a beam of light through the
murkiest predeath x-ray films, illumining details that remain lost in
shadows when exposed on an ordinary light table
These antemortem x-rays tend to be very dark and opaque because they
are taken with extremely low levels of radiation, so as not to harm the
living flesh  The "hot spot" pierces them, searches through their
darkest shadows and blackest corners  It was the "hot spot" that
enabled me to recognize a vital piece of evidence in my most vexing
case, a crucial bit of rib from the Meek-Jennings murdersuicide case
My students have to take a series of hepatitis B inoculations before
they are permitted to work in the lab  We go through incredible
numbers of disposable gloves, protective sleeves, shoe covers and
smocks  Often, when working with especially ripe remains, two sets of
gloves will be worn  Disposable plastic goggles are necessary when
working with saws, and full plastic visors guard our faces against
unexpected spurts and geysers of fluids too foul to describe, expelled
by the pent-UP gases of corruption  The laboratory has portable metal
detectors, surveying equipment, shovels, rakes and archaeologists'
trowels, to be used on field digs
I greatly fear that anatomical expertise among medical doctors is on
the decline, because of the crushing load of the modern medical
curriculum and the shortage of skeletons  The former sources of
skeletons, India and Bangladesh, have now prohibited their export, as
an affront to national dignity  When I was a student myself, a
firstclass skeleton, with twenty-eight of thirty-two teeth still in
place, with no damaged bones, articulated completely, mounted on a
stand, with its muscle attachments painted in red and blue, all
carefully labeled, would go for $600  Today such a skeleton, if you
could find one for sale, would cost $3,000-5,000  Plastic
reproductions are readily available, but the fine detail and texture
are simply lacking from the plastic models  They are useless for all
but the most rudimentary anatomical training  Current catalogs list
plastic skeletons at $65995  A first-class human skull, of real bone,
not plastic, lists for $359  Whenever your self-esteem flags or fails,
you can reflect that you are walking around with several thousand
dollars' worth of bones encased within you, and that your skeleton is
getting,more valuable every year
All of my students take what they call "the bone course," human
osteology, in their junior or senior year  As they progress, I give
them spot examinations  I begin by handin' them ten large fragments of
bone and allowing them a minute and a half to identify each one, to
tell whether it is human, what bone it is, and whether or not it is the
right or left bone  Then, as the semester progresses, the intervals of
time get shorter and shorter, and the bits of bone get smaller and
smaller  By the end of the term all ten samples can-fit in a small
matchbox
Bones can riddle us devilishly  Often I try to fool my students by
including fetal bones or bones from a bear's paw, which can look
astonishingly human  I've been called out on two cases where "human
hands" turned out to be bear paws  I have seen forensic pathologists
identify lost bones in skulls as penetrating injuries by weapons
I've seen the bones of a blue heron gravely identified as human  I
have seen specialists who should know better identify with great
confidence the sex of a teenager incorrectly  I have seen sheep's ribs
identified as human ribs  Turtle shells can cause terrible confusion,
and gopher tortoises and snapping turtles are awful tricksters  Pieces
of their shells look very like fragments of human skullcaps  Only
recently I was called out to investigate some suspicious bone fragments
found near a spot where a body had been found earlier  The police
asked me if a serial killer were using this area as his dumping ground
I was able to reassure them immediately: the fresh "skull" was a
crushed turtle shell
It is one thing when we are fooled by nature's mimicry; It is quite
another when a cunning skeletal hoax is put before the scientific
community and passed off as a revolutionary discovery  Perhaps the
most famous fraud ever attempted along these lines was the renowned
skull of "Piltdown Man," which was "unearthed" early in this century
I have held this extraordinary relic in my own two hands
Piltdown Man was exposed as a manufactured pastiche in 1953
Even today it is remembered as a remarkable example of science gone
awry, a bizarre plot excogitated by a pair of doctors for reasons that
rerhain obscure  Harvard biologist Stephen jay Gould has made a
convincing case that the great Jesuit scientist and mystic, Teilhard de
Chardin, very likely connived at the deception  Today we know nearly
the full story: how the jaw of an ape, with its teeth carefully filed
down, was joined to the skull fragments of a human; how it was buried
secretly near a stately English mansion; how it was "unearthed" in 1911
near Piltdown and presented to the world as,Piltdown Man, a unique
specimen allegedly  melding man with the apes
Nowadays such a fraud would be spotted almost instantly  The
filed-down teeth would stand out like a sore thumb under microscopic
analysis, and fluorine tests would clearly show the skull and jaw were
not of the same age  Fossils absorb fluorine from the earth at a
steady rate and the wide discrepancy would have proved the jaw and
skull fragments didn't match
But in its heyday the skull of Piltdown Man was kept in a carefully
guarded vault in the British Museum of Natural History as a national
treasure, and only in the rarest circumstances was permission granted
to study it  most scholars had to content themselves with looking at a
cast  Piltdown Man's skull was too precious to be touched or handled
by the vulgar mob of ordinary researchers!
In 1966, when I was returning from Africa to begin my first teaching
job in this country, I dropped in at the British Museum of Natural
History to examine some baboon skulls there, some of which had been
collected by L S B @akey in the 1920s  While I was at the museum I
had a notion to ring up Dr Kenneth Oakley, who had been instrumental
in exposing the Piltdown Man hoax  Oakley very kindly invited me up to
the collection area, where we had a friendly chat about Piltdown Man's
skull and its strange history
"Care to see it?"  Oakley asked me off handedly  How could I pass up a
chance to see this remarkable fake, which had exercised" the ingenuity
of some of the greatest anthropologists of all time?  I agreed eagerly
To my utter amazement, Oakley turned, opened an ordinary filing
cabinet, fished around in its depths and came up with the skull of
Piltdown Man!  As I handled the venerable, caramelcolored old fraud
with its well-honed teeth, I could not help reflecting how low it had
tumbled from its exalted rung on the ladder of evolution
There are three women in particular who have had to deal with my
extraordinary job more than any others: my wife Margaret and my two
daughters, Lisa and Cynthia  I freely admit my job can make
extraordinary demands on my marriage  Sometimes my wife made me take
my clothes off and leave them on the washing machine before coming
indoors  I can't argue with that  My daughters, especially Lisa,
sometimes urged me to discuss my latest case over the dinner table, and
my wife usually interposed a stern veto
Once I convinced my wife to go with me in her car to pick up a
decomposed body in Fort Myers  This was no small concession on her
part, because this was her new car we'd be using, a Cadillac Cimarron
The body was very far gone and I disarticulated it at the office of the
medical examiner, putting the portions into one very long bag, several
feet long  Unfortunately one of the bones was broken and at some point
when it was placed in the car, or soon afterward, the sharp bone
punctured the bag and the contents leaked into the trunk  Bones can be
very sharp  The bone in our Cadillac's trunk that day certainly was
We began to notice an odor inside the car and found that it was
better to drive with the windows down rather than using the air
conditioning  By the time we got to Tampa the odor was very strong and
we decided to stop for an early lunch 'at a Steak & Ale restaurant
We were fortunate to get a parking space near the front door and had
our lunch  As we came from the restaurant and opened the front door,
the odor from our car was extremely strong  I was surprised we hadn't
been paged by the restaurant manager or that there were no police
around
We resumed our journey north  I happened to see vultures overhead  To
this day I don't know if that was Coincidental  Cadillac includes a
rubber pad beneath the trunk liner, so it was possible to wash away
most of the odor, but my wife could never look at that car again
without remembering the episode  She traded in the car soon afterward,
and she no longer allows me to use her car to pick up bodies
Some gallows humor is inevitable when dealing with the dead, if only to
deflect the sheer dread of what lies upon the examining table  I have
seen this irreverent humor many times, but I do not permit it inside
the C A Pound Human Identification Laboratory  I do not allow my
students to dress up a skeleton, to put hats on skeletons, or to put
cigarettes in their mouths  I do not allow them to give the skeletons
humorous names, like Roscoe or Alphonse or anything of that nature
Once when I was testifying in court a glib prosecutor tried to crack a
joke about a mounted skeleton that had been introduced as a
demonstrative model
"What do you call this skeleton?"  he asked me  "Do you have a pet
name for him?"
"The skeleton," I answered  "I call him the skeleton"  The courtroom
spectators cracked up and the prosecutor was left very redfaced  But
it is my belief that every set of remains deserves a certain minimum of
respect  We owe them that

 "The Enfolding Earth"

Romeo: "Courage, men; the huff cannot be much"
Mercutio: "No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a
church-door, but 'tis enough, 'twill serve: Ask for me tomorrow and you
shall find me a grave man

-Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene I

A friend of mine, Dr Michael Baden, the former-chief medical examiner
for New York City, is fond of saying that no burial is forever  Burial
is only long-term storage  Newtonian physics teaches us that what goes
up must come down, but where corpses are concerned, very often what
goes down can come up again, and the sight can be passing strange
"Rest in Peace," we carve on our tombstones, hoavy slabs of marble that
are almost certainly destined to be
scattered like chaff, long before the Last judgment  When we consider
that scarcely an active cemetery on the planet is more than a few
hundred years old, we realize how short our undisturbed subterranean
sleep can be
I "There is no antidote against the Opium of time," writes Sir Thomas,
Browne in his "Hydriotaphia"
"Our Fathers findeth their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell
us how we may be buried in our Survivors  Grave-stones tell truth
scarce fourty years: Generations passe while some trees stand, and old
Families last not three Oaks
I have assisted in many exhumations  I never cease to be amazed at the
extraordinary things people do with dead bodies, the crazy, senseless
methods they adopt to dispose of a corpse  In one of my cases a fellow
buried his murdered girlfriend on the beach but left one of her legs
sticking out of the sand so that she would be found and given a decent
burial  In another, a murderer took three days to cremate a body in
his backywd, tending the fire carefully until the cremation was as
complete as it possibly could get-and then he turned himself in to the
police  Perhaps he hoped to escape punishment by making the body
unidentifiable  If so, he was sadly mistaken  I have a great deal of
experience working with "cremains," and I identified it conclusively
The burial container is terribly important  Sealed containers
protecting the body from the environment, be they a sealed steel casket
costing thousands of dollars or a cheap container made of plastic or
Styrofoam, will result in an amazing degree of preservation, even over
long periods of time  I've seen a well-embalmed bod@an autopsied body,
which makes embalming very difficult-last inside a sealed casket within
a burial vault for twenty-seven years, looking as if death, had taken
place only a day or so before, with perfectly natural features and only
small areas of skin slipping from the hands and feet  I have seen
other bodies buried in wooden caskets that soon disintegrated, leaving
the bones badly damaged, with virtually no remaining soft tissue  I
had a case in which a newborn infant was wrapped in textiles, enclosed
in a plastic bag, shut up in a vinyl suitcase and buried in sandy soil
for ten years  When we excavated the remains we still found soft
tissue preserved, keeping those tiny, delicate bones in their
respective positions, preserving them as well as if they had belonged
to a fresh body buried only a few weeks earlier
Even unshielded by any container, a body will last longer underground
The general rule of thumb, for the rate of decomposition is:

one week in the open air equals two weeks in water, equals eight weeks
underground  The horrific picture of "worms" devouring a buried corpse
is false  Flies will lay eggs on a body even before it is dead, and
their wriggling, wormlike larvae, known as maggots, will hatch out in
just under twenty-four hours  The cycle is so regular that it can
sometimes be used to establish the time of death  But maggots cannot
live underground  My colleague, Doug Ubelaker of the Smithsonian
Institution, investigated an ancient Ankara Indian burial site in South
Dakota and found that fly pupal cases were present in 164 percent to
383 percent of the burials at five sites, even though the burials were
over two feet deep  How did they get   there?  Flies and beetles do
not burrow more than a few inches below the ground  The answer is, the
insects found their way to the corpse before it was buried, and were
buried alive with it  When we examined the remains of Zachary Taylor,
we found fly pupal cases among the bones  The industrious flies of
Washington, Dc had been at work on Taylor's body as it lay in state
They are no respecters of rank
Maggots are tough, resourceful creatures  They have been known to
feast on the remains of cyanide-poisoning victims and happily thrive on
them  They have a coveting of ibhitin that is almost impervious to
everything but flamethrowers  They have evolved so as to live out
their lives amid surroundings that would make most people faint with
nausiea; yet for them our corpses are delightful, a fragrant Elysium
dripping with nectar and ambrosia  I have seen exultant maggots
hopping like popcorn over the decaying remains of a human body,
seething in glad myriads, leaping as high as eighteen inches in the
air, falling on the floor with a soft, paltering noise, like gentle
rainfall  They attack not at random but in concert, like shoals of
hungry piranhas  I have known maggots to attack a body so zestfully
that, over the space of a few hours, their combined jostling can shove
the false teeth out of a dead man's mouth
But let us leave our hungry little bugs and return underground
When all is said and done, burial is the most common means of disposing
of a body, the method preferred by killers as well as innocent,
ordinary citizens  A buried body can be devilishly
difficult to find  In fact, except for the rare accident, buried
bodies are seldom found, unless someone confesses to their whereabouts
Even then, it may prove extraordinarily difficult to locate the actual
grave, because of changes in vegetation or terrain, or the confused
state of mind of the individual who did the digging  "It was dark  I
couldn't really see  I think it was around here somewhere"-these are
the vague directions you most often hear  But if no one talks, and the
burial remains secret, and the grave ages a bit, then finding a buried
body is in truth the rarest of accidents  The killer who kills and
buries the body without anyone's knowledge is safest from recovery of
the remains
The more people present when the body was buried, the more likely it is
to be found
One of the strangest cases in my experience involved a body that had
been buried by a multitude of people, nearly all of whom later helped
us search for it, eagerly but without success  Over and over again
those who witnessed the burial tried to lead police to the makeshift
grave, in vain  It took a year to find the spot, even though police
knew within a few weeks exactly who was in the grave and how he had
come to be shot  He died, of all places, at a birthday party
The victim had been an unfortunate young man, discharged from the
military because of emotional problems  He had attacked his drill
sergeant, and anyone who has served in the Army knows what a feeldess
deed that is  Some time after his discharge he attended a birthday
party for a friend who was a parolee from a Florida prison  When the
presents were unwrapped, one gift in particular caught the victim's
eye: a holster for a 357 magnum revolver, given to the birthday boy by
his girlfriend- The recipient proudly strapped on the holster and put
the gun in it, wearing both while dancing at the party  For some
reason, this gun and holster excited the keenest jealousy in the mind
of the victim, who complained loudly that the guest of honor had such a
beautiful gun, while he had none  Laughing, the birthday boy unbucided
the gun and holster, handed them to the victim and invited him to-wear
them  Greedily the victim snatched the revolver and holster, strapped
them on and went outside  After a minute or two, the parolee followed
him, perhaps because he was worried about losing his gun  A few
seconds later a shot rang, out
Pale and distraught, the guest of honor rushed back into the house and
announced that the victim had shot himself  The other guests rushed
out and found the victim in a sitting position against the base of a
tree, dead, dripping blood from a massive head injury, with the gun on
the ground next to his limp hand
Whether their wits were fogged by alcohol, or whether they were simply
stupid I cannot tell; but instead of reporting the shooting to the
police, the partygoers decided to place the body in a sleeping bag and
transport it to the edge of the county, where they all helped bury it
in the dark of night  It didn't take long for the story of the
shooting to leak out-the parolee was charged with possession of a
firearm by a convicted felon, failure to report a death and
transporting a body from the scene of a death  He was sent back to
prison and for a time it seemed he might be charged with murder
The shooting occurred in late 1979, but the body was not unearthed
until November 1980  It took the police over a year of tramping up and
down in the woods before they found the grave  all this while, the
penitent partygoers were racking their brains, trying to remember where
they had mislaid the corpse  When it was finally unearthed, the skull
of the victim was found to be reduced to approximately eighty fragments
by the terrific explosive force of the 357 magnum slug, and it
required extensive reconstruction at the C A Pound Human
Identification laboratory  Eventually I located The entrance wound and
the well-defined and externally beveled exit wound  The trajectory of
the bullet, which entered in the right temporal bone of the skull, was
upward and shghdy forward, consistent with the story of a
self-inflicted gunshot wound
If I had not been able to reconstruct that skull, very likely the
birthday boy would have been charged with murder  As matters stood, he
was sentenced to 186 days in jail and immediately released, with time
served  He was relieved  At his sentencing he told the judge: "It's
been riding me since 1979  I've had no comfort"  To my knowledge, no
other charges were ever filed against the partygoers, despite the
macabre and unorthodox circumstances of their nocturnal trip to the
woods
In 1981 a sordid tale of brutality and child abuse was cut short by a
well-aimed bullet from a 22-caliber rifle, leaving me with the buried
body of a man in his forties, recovered from a shallow grave in central
Florida  My analysis of the skull would help decide the fate of a
seventeen-year-old girl who had confessed to shooting him
The girl told police that she had been living in a hellish nightmare
for eight years  She was the stepdaughter of the dead man and said he
had been sexually abusing her since she was nine years old
She had an infant daughter, who was the child of this protracted,
brutal union
One night, the teenager told police, she was getting out of bed after
being forced to submit to sex yet again, when her stepfather giggled
oafishly: "I'm glad you had a daughter so I can break her in right"
Something inside the girl snapped when she heard these words  She said
she picked up a 22 rifle propped nearby, brought it up to her hip and
shot her stepfather while he was standing a few feet away  Fearful she
would be charged with murder, the girl persuaded her mother to help her
tie up the wrists of the naked body, load it onto the back of their
pickup truck, drive to a secluded spot and drag it about 185 yards into
the woods, where they buried it
A year passed  Finally the mother and daughter confessed to the crime
and led police to the unmarked grave in the woods  We verified that
the decomposed corpse was indeed that of the stepfather by a comparison
of x-rays taken of him some years before his death with those taken of
the recovered remains  I was asked to check the direction of the
gunshot wound to see if it was consistent with the girl's story  I
found a small-caliber gunshot wound perfectly centered between the eyes
which then entered the braincase at a point that gave us the
trajectory  It matched the girl's story with extraordinary exactitude
If he had been lying down, sitting down, standing to one side of her,
or in any other position than the one she described, the bullet would
almost certainly not have followed the path it did  She was telling
the truth  We were able to determine that the bullet had traveled in a
decidedly upward direction and that the victim had been directly facing
the shooter
I confess I had some difficulty dredging up any pity for the deceased
in this case  The world lost little when he was murdered
Rather, my sympathies were entirely with the accused  It was a neat
shot, to drill a man through the forehead with a rifle fired from the
hip, and 22-caliber bullets are often too small to, kill, even when
fired at the head  The victim often ends up paralyzed, not dead  It
was indeed a lucky piece of marksmanship
After I submitted my findings to the authorities, the girl was charged
as a youthful offender and placed in a juvenile facility, where she
would receive counseling
One of the most revolting, yet instructive, cases in my experience
involved a terrible old man who lived in Miami and who finally died,
aged ninety-five, a few years ago  This man was in the habit of
threatening his neighbors with all sorts of dark menaces, telling
anyone who would listen that he had murdered his son-in-law and
disposed of the body in a septic tank, and he would do the same to
anyone who crossed him
No one took the old devil seriously, and he finally died  His house
was sold, and the new owner opened the septic tank in the backyard, in
order to clean it  The tank was a huge affair, ten feet long, with
three concrete slabs over its inlet-and inside its dark, malodorous
depths was found the half-skeletonized remains of a middle-aged man,
with a 22-caliber bullet hole drilled neatly through the center of his
forehead, right between the eyes  The old man had not been idly
boasting: he really had murdered his son-inlaw
Septic tanks are common in Florida, where many neighborhoods still lack
sewer lines  Few people have the stomach to look inside them, but they
are interesting places, containing several widely dispuate
microenvironments  You would have to go to Hawaii to find the
extraordinary range of atmospheric conditions that you encounter in a
common septic tank, with its extremes of aridity and moisture, which in
Turn create conditions equally favorable to extraordinary preservation
and extraordinary decay
Within the average septic tank there is a large mass of dry material,
which floats like a matted crust over the fluid below  The active
decomposition takes place within the fluid, and on the underside of the
mat  But above the mat all is quite dry, and beneath the fluid, at the
very bottom of the tank, there is usually a very compact mass of clay
and sand, devoid of oxygen  This dark world has its own peculiar
fauna: very often, millions of cockroaches will scuttle and seethe in
vast colonies above the mat, sometimes crawling up the drainpipes and
back into the house above them
The murdered son-in-law had been cast into the tank still clad in his
shirt and trousers  There he had floated for years, face down, his
hands and feet dangling down into the liquid  As the flesh on his
limbs decomposed, the various bones gently fell away from the trunk and
descended to the bottom of the tank, where they were embedded in the
clay and sand, and in this oxygenless environment they were preserved
from further decay  The skull, too, finally fell away as the neck
vertebrae came loose and drifted down into the silt at the tank bottom
But the rest of the body, which remained trapped in' and above the mat
for fifteen years, was badly damaged and almost unrecognizable  The
cockroaches had nibbled at the upper surfaces, and the bacteria-rich
fluid had gnawed away at the lower surfaces  They presented a scene of
almost total dissolution
 But the preserved bones of the hands and feet, together with the
skull, had survived and from these the unfortunate young man was
finally and unequivocally identified  He had been missing for a decade
and a half, and his homicidal father-in-law had been a spry old eighty
years of age when he killed the younger man, singlehandedly lifted the
concrete slab at the entrance to the septic tank, and stuffed the body
in  The aged murderer was beyond earthly justice, but the case of his
missing son-in-law could finally be closed
North Florida is rich in Indian burial mounds, and beautiful flint
arrowheads and precious pottery centuries old can be found here in
abundance  Unfortunately these ancient treasure troves are tempting
targets for scavengers  My colleagues in The anthropology department
at the Florida Museum of Natural History have no love for pot hunters,
those destroyers of history who dig into archaeological sites in their
unsystematic and destructive lust to recover Indian artifacts and
historic relics for private collections  But one day in 1980 two pot
hunters made a rare discovery indeed, one that aroused my interest: a
recently buried body
The pot hunters were digging in an area of Dwe County that had been
previously combed through by hundreds of other amateur treasure
seekers  It looked like a World War I battlefield, cratered and
crisscrossed with trenches  This particular pair of pot hunters, not
being very imaginative, were digging in a filled-in trench previously
excavated by their predecessors-not exactly a promising place to find
artifacts!  Their search was rewarded anyway  They found a human
corpse  Being the alert and astute observers that they were, they
quickly realized that a buried Indian would not have a blond ponytail
or be buried in a plastic garbage bag
The pair hotfooted it back to their pickup truck and held a hasty
conference on the tailgate  What should they do?  Retrieve the body?
Rebury the body?  Go to the police?  Say nothing?  Have a beer?  They
opted for the beer
Soothed and fortified by the foaming brew, they collected their
thoughts  Then, suddenly, one pot hunter had a dreadful notion: what
if the person who did this were watching them right that minute from
the woods?  Flinging down their beer cans in panic, they beat a hasty
retreat to the sheriffs office  Better confess to illegal pot hunting
than connive at concealing a murder!
The sheriff's office called the Florida Department of Law Enforcement
and the FDLE called me, asking that I cooperate
in the excavation of remains  A curious scene ensued  The pot hunters
were allowed by the sheriff to watch us while we excavated the mound,
and they frequently pointed out bits of Indian chert or flint that I
had uncovered  Watching me carefully work with my Marshautown trowel,
the trowel of choice for most professional archaeologists, one turned
to the other and said: "Look!  They use the same tools we do!"
At last came the grim task of examining the remains  The body was that
of a female and the plastic garbage bag had preserved her soft tissues
Facial recognition even of a fresh body is difficult because of
postmortem changes That's the reason garbage bags are so helpful
to us  They enclose the remains in a sealed, watertight environment,
so the soft tissues last longer  The tissues are not beautiful, nor do
they delight the nose, but they are recognizable, We got a good
description from the remains of the deceased and good evidence of the
injuries she received at the time of her death
Even so, we had some difficulty learning her name  The body was still
clad in a T-shirt with the words "piggley wiggley stenciled on it
Piggly Wiggly stores are popular supermarkets in many parts of the
South  Now, the only Piggly Wiggly store within a hundred miles of the
old Indian mound was in a nearby town  Police visited the store, spoke
with the manager, asked when the shirt was sold, how many were sold
They did not think to ask if any employee had worn such a shirt, or if
any of the staff was missing  Then they gave up
So a specialist in artistic reconstruction of the face was called in
She came to my laboratory and got the information she needed
Facial reconstructions are not a new technique; people have been
attempting to do them since the very early years of the nineteenth
century  Today they are still a hotly debated procedure, nearly always
a last resort  Some forensic anthropologists do them, some don't  As
a rule, I don't  But in rare cases, when all other avenues have been
explored without success, and when there are absolutely no more names
of possible victims to investigate, then a reconstruction of the
deceased's face can be of some value  If it is published in the
newspaper, people may come forward and suggest one or more names of
people they knew, who might have resembled the published image  A
dead-ended investigation can thus be strung out a bit further, with a
few more names to investigate, a few more persons to check out, a few
more sets of records to compare to the remains  Sometimes it works
This was one of those times
The reconstruction was published in a newspaper complete with a
description that I provided and the fact that she was weaning a Piggly
Wiggly T-shirt  The grandmother of a young woman phoned and reported
that the image looked like her granddaughter  She was right  The body
was, in fact, that of her granddaughter, who had worked at that Piggly
Wiggly when she disappeared  We were able to match the granddaughter's
dental x-rays with those of the remains
Unfortunately no one was ever brought to justice for this murder
There was a very likely suspect, but there never was enough evidence
for an arrest  At one level the case was solved  At another, it will
never be solved  We have had no choice but to release the skeletal
remains for burial, since it appears no trial will ever be held
The macabre case of the @ Belle drug murders was one of the most
chilling ever to come to my attention  It occurred in 1981 and was one
of the first illicit burials I investigated, but the grim details of
the killings, which emerged little by little as the corpses were
excavated over the course of a week, comprised a steadily unfolding
tableau of horror '
My involvement began when I received a phone call from Dr Wally
Graves, the district medical examiner in Fort Myers  Wally told me the
police had located the grave site of three buried bodies  A team from
the FDLE had already been assisting in the investigation  He told me
that this was a drug case, in which three Northeastern businessmen had
come down to Florida to negotiate with some local drugsmuglers  As
often happens in these sordid cases, negotiations broke down
The three Northeasterners were kidnapped from their hotel in Fort Myers
and eventually shot and buried  All this had been learned from an
informant who had turned state's evi Dead Men Do Tell Tales dence  The
corpses would have to be disinterred very carefully if a case were to
be made against their murderers  The details of the crime would have
to be reconstructed from the stratigraphic evidence of the scene  The
three individuals had been placed in a hole one at a time, shot, and
then buried  The three corpses had lain in the grave pit for three
years, one atop the other, like the levels of an ancient city
The whole excavation process turned out to be amazingly complex
Moreover, it had to be carried out in strictest secrecy
Everybody concerned fervently hoped that word of our activities
wouldn't leak out, not only for the sake of the informant's safety, but
for our own a's well
I had the happy thought of suggesting that I bring along a professional
archaeologist to supervise the excavation  Wally and the FDLE agreed,
and Dr Brenda Sigier-Eisenberg of the Florida Museum of Natural
History accompanied me
Every morning I would check our car for disturbances of the hood and
check beneath it for any sign of tampering  It did not escape me that
we were staying at the same hotel from which the three drug dealers had
been kidnapped
To get to the site we had to drive through a golf course  When we
arrived we found the local sheriff on hand, along with a number of
investigators from the state attorney's office, several of whom guarded
the dig site around the clock, armed with assault rifles
Investigators from FDLE and the FDLE crime scene analysts were also
present and we soon settled into a workmanlike routine of digging and
photographing and diagraming the hole and its grisly contents  We had
the local fire chief there with a pumper truck to provide a water
source to wash the gummy soil through screens so that we could recover
all evidence, no matter how small
The skull of the first body had been located before we got there
A shovel had shaved along the very top surface of the dry bone and we
could see about a three-inch circular patch of exposed cranium
We began the excavation downward from there after establishing our ground
system and our depth controls  The district medical examiner and one
of his senior staff members pitched in, carrying buckets of dirt,
washing the material through the screens, wearing oversized rubber
boots  At first there was a rigid division of labor, but pretty soon
everybody pitched in and we made good progress
As the pit was slowly excavated over the next few days we began to see
grim things  The uppermost body was that of a man whose hands were
tied tightly behind his back  His body was arched like a bow' since
the other end of the rope was tied to his ankles  The head was
encircled with duct tape around the mouth and showed clear evidence of
a shotgun wound, from a gun fired at close range  Some skin remained
on -some of the lower parts of the body  It was eerie to watch as the
color of the skin visibly changed to a darkening red as it was
exposed to the sun and air, as if the long-decayed flesh were returning
to a mocking semblance of life
The body beneath him was face down  A rope was tied to one hand but
did not secure the other limbs  He too had duct tape around his mouth
He had been shot in the upper right chest, from the front, and then had
fallen downward over the third body  His arm was flung over the third
body, which lay lowest in the grave
In those days I was having some beck trouble  I found it excruciating
to stoop over these corpses for hours on end  I compromised by
crawling down into the hole and lying alongside the bodies, digging
them out while lying next to them, face to face  My unorthodox methods
amused many of the investigators, as well as the medical examiner, who
delighted in photographing me, lying alongside corpses, holding a
trowel in one hand and a can of Dr Pepper soda in the other
We found that our clothes were quickly becoming soiled and malodorous
from working in the grave  We had to buy new clothes and have the
hotel launder the ones we had been wearing  The hotel staff were
extremely reluctant to handle our clothes at first, but after we
explained to them the need they were very understanding  So we were
able to wear fresh, clean clothes every day
As time stretched on the investigators grew increasingly restless
At one point Dr Sigier-Eisenberg announced that we needed some
teaspoons so that we could clean away the soil around the bodies even
more carefully  I thought we were going to have a full-scale revolt on
our hands!
Dr Sigier-Eisenberg's zeal impressed us all  She insisted on working
straight through and not stopping for lunch even though we had
sandwiches brought out to the site each day  Only later did I discover
that she was too nauseated to eat
While we were digging one day we heard that word of our activities had
leaked out to the drug lords in Miami  Three carloads of them were
said to be heading our way  I wondered what we would do if three
carloads of men armed with automatic weapons drove onto the site  My
first inclination would have been to jump into the hole with the three
bodies, but then I realized that the most logical thing for the killers
to do would be to throw explosives into the grave to destroy the
evidence  Fortunately I never did have to decide what the best course
of action might be  I suppose it would have been to run into the
nearby palmettos to join the rattlesnakes  The third body, which lay
beneath the other two, was fairly well preserved  His organs could be
discerned at the subsequent autopsy
As a rule, the deeper a body lies in the earth, the better the
preservation  During the excavation we found small plastic wrappers
that had encircled buckshot in shotgun shells  By the location of
these wrappers, on top of the bodies and between them, we were able to
establish the sequence of events
The body buried deepest had been'shot last, not first  Our conclusion
was later corroborated by the informant, who later testified in court
that the man who lay bottom most in the grave was actually the last'to
die  After the men were kidnapped from their hotel, they realized
their situation was hopeless, that they were all going to die
Contemplating his fate, knowing that there was no escape, the third man
had begged to be executed first, so that he would not have to watch the
other two murders  In an exquisite refinement of cruelty,
historrnentors threw him into the hole face up first, alive, shot his
two colleagues so they would fall on him, and only then did they shoot
him through the V of his open-necked shirt  He was the first to be
buried, but the last to expire  His state of mind, as he was flung
into the pit alive, as he heard the shots ring out, as he felt the
bodies of his comrades fall on him, twitching and bleeding, I leave to
your conjecture
As a result of our excavation, whose results were reinforced by the
informant's testimony in court, close to twenty people went to jail for
various offenses related to drug trafficking and murder  I well
relieved to see them there  The actual trigger man was a thug named
Larry Ferguson (though the use of the,word "thug" to describe this case
is an insult to the memory of the bold, strangling assassins who
practiced thuggee in India in the early nineteenth century)  Ferguson
went to trial, was found guilty of second-degree murder and received a
prison sentence of twenty-one years
all this lay in the future  When we finished our work in the murder
pit and the bodies were taken away, one of the investigators from the
state attorney's office shot a wild hog  We barbecued it near the
excavation and feasted that evening on a somewhat tough but tasty
barbecued pig, with baked beans and swamp cabbage  Dr
Sigler-Eisenberg seemed to regain her appetite at last

Flotsam and Jetsam

Tin woodman: "What happened to you?"
scarecrow: "They tore my legs off and they threw them over there!  Then
they took my chest out and they threw it over there!"
Tin woodman: "Well, that's you all over"
cowardly Lion: "they sure knocked the stuffings out of you, didn't
they?"
ScareCrow: "Don't stand there talking!  Put me together!"

-The Wizard of Oz, 1939 MGM screenplay by Noel Langley, Florence
Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf To profane a dead body by cutting  it to
pieces has always seemed, at least to our Western eyes, an act of
bestial brutality  it is one thing to do murder  It is quite another
to destroy the murder victim's identity, and this is the effect of
dlismemberynent  The Roman poet Vergil moves us to pity with his
description of the death and decapitation of King Priam, after the fall
of Troy, in the second book of the Aeneid  The king has lost his life
but, what is worse, he has lost his selfhood

 Flotsam and Jetsam

He, who was once lord of so many tribes and lands, the monarch of
Asia-he lies a huge trunk upon the shore, his head severed from his
shoulders, a corpse without a name!
I see about four or five dismemberment cases a year, and they are among
the most challenging and frustrating crimes in my expedience  I am not
counting the accidental cases, which are caused by car crashes or other
mishaps involving machinery  I mean murder victims who have been
coldly, deliberately cut,to pieces, whose fragmented bodies show the
work of human malevolence-and hard work at that  Taking apart a fresh
human body is no mean task  You will work up a sweat doing it  I have
seen every tool imaginable used for this grisly purpose, from the
ancient stone choppers used by early man millions of years ago in the
Olduvai Gorge in Kenya to the Rambo knives, hacksaws and chain saws of
today  It is a bloody, messy, dangerous business  Saws and knives can
slip and wound you while you are using them  Bone itself can be quite
sharp; I have been cut by broken bones while working with remains  The
disease of AIDS has made us all far more careful in the autopsy room;
and AIDS has created a new wrinkle in dismemberment cases  If the saw
blade were to slip and cut a murderer while he was cutting up a victim
afflicted with AIDS, he could qtfite possibly catch the disease
In this case, the victim would be revenged on his killer, even after
death!
Alas, it must be admitted from the outset that dismemberment is an
extremely effective means of concealing a victim's identity  In this
chapter, I warn the reader fairly and beforehand, the addles will
outnumber the solutions, and the scattered remnants of many of these
victims must await the Last judgment, to'be reunited and speak the
truth about their final hours
Dismemberment cases are often fit with a baleful, lurid light in my
mind  In most of my cases I have to place myself in the role of the
victim, to see what happened at the time of death  I imagine the gun
firing at me, or the knife, or the hammer, or the ax, rising and
falling, sinking into my body  The victim and I, we are trying to
defend ourselves  We throw our forearms up, we grapple with our
fingers, we turn our heads aside, clinging to life  In such cases I
relive the crime from the victim's standpoint, and the victim is very
personified and individualized
But in dismemberment cases the victim is already dead, and I must place
myself inside the brain of the murderer, who has slain his victim and
who is now cutting him to pieces  I become the dismemberer, imagining
the scene, the tools, the strokes that hack the body asunder  "Why did
you cut there?"  I ask myself  "What implement did you use to do this?
Did you pause to catch your breath?
Were,you in a hurry?  Did you fling down one tool in disgust and seize
another?"
I Many dismemberments are done in bathtubs-more things come out of
bathtubs than bathtub gin, I assure you!-and most of MY cases seem to
involve motorcycle gang members or people involved in the drug trade
The cases seem to cluster along the 1-95 corridor in Florida, and if
the state has a Dismemberment Capital, it is probably Daytona Beach
Interstate highways are the veins and arteries by which crime
circulates in America  Serial killers seem to float through them like
blood cells, sometimes fast, sometimes slow' Crimes committed along
interstate highways ought to be considered extraterritorially, apart
from the normal rules of geography, and separate from a state's good
name  These huge highways form a kind of fifty-first state of their
own, a state whose flower is the deadly nightshade and whose state bird
is the vulture
When I first got into forensic anthropology people tended to use
hacksaws to dismember bodies  They were the tool of choice for killers
because they are easily available, easily disposable, and their fine,
serrated blades cut very efficiently through bone  It is a lot easier
to saw through a human bone with a hacksaw than with a wood saw  I
have verified this myself
On the other hand, hacksaws are a great help to us who investigate such
dismemberments  Very often a new hacksaw blade will leave a smear of
paint on the bone surfaces-gray, orange, blue, yellow
Such smears can be analyzed chemically and very often matched up to a
specific brand of saw blade
In recent years, however, hacksaws have been supplanted by chain saws
Chain saws have certain advantages: the killer saves time and effort
with a chain saw  But of course the disadvantage is that chain saws
are incredibly loud and messy  They sling sprays of blood and debris
in all directions  Chain saws, too, yield evidence  to the eye of the
experienced investigator  Often their cuts are quite individualized,
differing noticeably from one model to the next  Sometimes we can
even recover chain-saw oil from the bone surfaces which can be
chemically analyzed  Although I have not heard of it done yet, there
will undoubtedly come a day when the debris left over by a chain saw
after a dismemberment, or even minute traces of flesh, bone and blood
on the chain-saw blade itself, wig be analyzed for their DNA content
and matched up with the DNA of the victim
In the collection of the C A Pound Human Identification Laboratory is
a special set of cow bones which is very precious to me  As my
experience with dismemberments increased, I decided it would be useful
to have a catalog of saw marks as a sort of reference library  I
therefore asked a technician at the Florida Museum of Natural History
to do me a favor  I took him a box of fresh soup bones and asked him
to saw through them with every type of saw we could think of  kitchen
saws   , table saws, wood saws, band saws, hacksaws, crosscut saws,
pruning saws, chain saws, even anatomical Stryker saws, whose
oscillating blade is designed to cut through bone, but not flesh
Under microscopic analysis every different kind of saw will make a
different kind of tooth pattern in bone  A Stryker saw, for example,
produces circular arcs of short radius, with some overlapping  A band
saw's cut is very smooth  It leaves few tooth marks and those it does
leave tend to be straight, fine and seldom overlapping  Hacksaw blade
marks often overlap, because the person doing the sawing will change
the angle of attack as he cuts through the bone  They look like a
tiny, skewed tic-tac-toe board with thousands of squares  Chain-saw
marks go straight through bone
A table saw with a rotating eight-inch blade, the kind a handyman might
have mounted en his worktable, produces parallel curves
We labeled and photographed all these cut-patterns carefully  The
collection is a valuable resource, though by now I carry most of the
patterns in my head
Anyone who has carved a chicken or a turkey knows that it is much
easier to cut through the joint than through the solid bone
But you would be amazed how few dismemberers actually remove the legs
at the hip  Most of them saw through at crotch level, leaving a stump
of thighbone still attached to the pelvis, usually several inches long
This stump is a godsend to the investigator  It is here that we
look for our saw marks  This, upper leg bone, the femur, has vely
thick walls at this point and these walls often furnish very clear
evidence of the implement used to cut through them  Thin-walled bones
aren't nearly as good for this purpose  Even if a knife is used to
disarticulate' the joints, it will leave telltale gashes as,well  My
point is, there is no way to cut a body up and leave no traces of the
tools you use  Hew at them though you may, bones yet will have their
say
In 1981, I was called to a medical examiner's office in @esburg, in
central Florida's Lake County  There I heard an extraordinary tale
It seems someone had observed a furry white dog, of a poodle-like breed,
eating something on the side of the road  It developed that the dog
was nibbling on the lower portion of a left human leg, very fresh  The
dog had been him , and most of the muscle tissue "  was already
devoured  A week later the lower portion of a right leg was found near
Daytona, in Volusia County, over a hundred miles away
When I compared these legs I found that they were very consistent with
one another and almost certainly came from the same body  One of the
most telling signs appeared on the knees: the skin below the knees
showed a matching pair of calluses, of the type commonly seen on the
knees of surfers  The legs had been chopped off an inch or so above
the knee joint, the cuts passing through the lower kneebones at the
same height on both legs  Microscopic analysis of the cut bone
surfaces showed the fine straight marks of teeth that overlapped one
another, as if the angle of attack had changed during manual sawing
This was a classic hacksaw dismemberment

,Alas, the surfer's legs were all of him that ever turned,up- We never
did find any other portion of that body, nor were we ever able to match
a name to the remains  The route of the car could be ascertained
fairly easily from the pattern of highways between the two far-flung
legs  I made sure every sheriff s office along the way was notified of
the case and asked them to be on the lookout for more remains  But
none was ever found
Many of these slayings were drug-related, and organized crime has more
murder experience than any other segment of society
They know how to kill, and they know how to cover their tracks
So it was in the case of the torso with the Grim Reaper tattoo  In
1987, I was invited to examine a headless, armless, legless trunk, upon
whose shoulder was tattooed a large, detailed and horrific picture of
the Grim Reaper, wielding his scythe, his bony jaws open in laughter
Neither the head nor the limbs were ever found, but we had high hopes
that the tattoo would identify the torso  Tattoos are visible for long
periods after death, almost as long as any skin remains on the body
Indeed, when the outer layer of skin, the epidermis, slips off in early
decomposition, the underlying layers of skin, where the tattoo ink
actually is, are exposed, making the colors much brighter and more
vivid than during life  Many medical examiners actually keep photo
libraries of tattoos taken from dead bodies to aid them in identifying
remains, and this tattoo certodnly belonged in a museum  It I stood
forth in blazing Technicolor  It was wonderfully distinctive  The
police showed photographs of it around at all the bars frequented by
bikers and their hangers-on  But no one remembered seeing it-or at
least no one would admit to having seen it
The body was never identified  The Grim Reaper mocked us all with his
fleshless jaws
Left unattended, our defunct bodies quickly become part of the food
chain  On land, flies, beetles, cockroaches, rats dogs, cats, pigs,
raccoons, bears and any number of animals rush in and feast whenever
death rings the dinner gong  In water, alligators, fish, crabs and
sharks are no less hungry  In such cases, the investigator practically
has to elbow his way through a crowd of famished banqueters before he
can salvage and examine what is left
One case that gave ;me some difficulty was a body found in two pieces,
washed ashore in different locations in the Florida Keys  The head and
portions of the neck were found in one spot and nearly all the rest-the
torso, with legs attached and feet cut partly away-in another  It
appeared that sharks had bitten at, but not quite through, the neck
There were clear marks of sharks' teeth on the remains
But there were also very fine marks on the neck vertebrae still
visible, which showed that the head had been sawed off  When I looked
at the top vertebra protruding from the torso I saw similar marks which
left no'doubt: the body had been dismembered before it was thrown into
the water  We were dealing with a murder, perhaps committed aboard a
ship, and not a shark attack in the open sea
I concluded that in this case a saw, probably a hacksaw, was used to
dismember the body into three pieces, only two of which were ever
found  Since both these fragments showed shark damage, I believe a
shark got the rest of the corpse  Neither the victim nor his murderer
was ever identified in this case, but at least we knew the killer was
another human being, not a shark
The shark, incidentally, is one of the true scavengers of the sea, and
from time to time portions of human remains are found in sharks'
bellies, but only if the shark is caught and cut open soon after
swallowing them  The stomach acid of the shark's digestive system is
extremely corrosive  It dissolves bone so quickly that the window of
opportunity to find remains inside a shark is very small  A tibia I
once examined, which had been taken from a shark's stomach, was reduced
to a paper-thin cylinder of bone, with a greatly reduced diameter  It
was so eaten away that investigators originally believed
it was an ulna, a bone from the arm  I was able to set them straight:
it was a tibia, a leg bone, dissolved to a shadow of itself by acid
Of all sharks, tiger sharks are fondest of human flesh  They are the
species whose entrails most often yield up human remains
In March 1990, I was called back in on a case involving a severed head
that had been found in October 1987, in a closed vinyl bucket on the
east coast of Florida, in Palm Beach County  For three years the head
had been kept at the Palm Beach County medical examiner's office,
awaiting identification or a lucky break in the case  The medical
examiner's patience was finally rewarded  He learned that in 1983,
four years before the head came to light, a headless trunk had been
found clear across the Florida peninsula, propped against a pasture
fence in a field belonging to a former county sheriff  A chain saw had
been used to cut the head from the body
Even though the two pieces were separated by many miles and several
years, this case nevertheless resulted in one of the neatest match-ups
of any dismemberment in my experience  The head had been cut off just
below the hyoid bone, or Adam's apple  The neck ended just above the
thyroid cartilage  By superimposing old x-rays, taken of the torso
four years earlier, and new ones taken of the head (which had been very
well preserved in its sealed vinyl bucket), we were able to prove they
belonged together  The victim was identified as a Jamaican who had
reportedly been involved in drug smuggling
In this case we were able to come up with a name for the victim and to
take the head and body off the police's books  But his murderer
escaped unpunished  No one was ever charged with this death
The following month I received a complete body in two portions in the
small and large suitcases of a set of matching luggage bought at Sears
The suitcases in this case were of the Hercules brand and were found in
two different counties, miles apart: West Palm Beach in Palm Beach
County and Fort Pierce in Martin County
The body was cut in two through the lower back, at the top  of the
fifth lumbar vertebra  This was a somewhat unusual but not entirely
unknown method of dismemberment  It all depends how many portions you
want  If you are going to be frugal and make only one cut, the lower
back is obviously the place you would choose
In this particular case, however, the lower portion of The body had
been further dismembered through the thighs  The dismemberment was
probably done with -a fine-toothed saw, such as a hacksaw
The torso of the upper portion of the body was wearing a T-shirt
advertising the Boot Hill Saloon, a bar in Daytona popular with
motorcycle enthusiasts  The victim was identified as a biker, but
again no one was ever charged with his murder  Obviously he was 'the
victim of gang justice, and his killers scattered his remains after
cutting him to pieces and packing him up into the twin suitcases for
his final trip
By now the reader will perhaps share some of my frustration over these
dismemberment cases  Over and over again I have acted the part of "all
the king,s horses and all the king's men" in the old Mother Goose
rhyme, trying to reassemble some poor HumptyDumpty of a murder victim,
who didn't fall off a wall, but who was most likely shot or stabbed to
death, then laboriously sawed to pieces by his killer  Xt great pains,
and against long odds, I have sometimes succeeded in reuniting pieces
of bodies that seemed impossibly far-flung  Sometimes I can even make
out the personality of the murderer and the circumstances of the crime
I can see a mental picture of the corpse cutter at work, panting and
sweating, his teeth 9]itted, removing the head and limbs, one after
another, with tools I can clearly identify  But all this is not
enough  The pieces remain, the culprit goes uncaptured and unpunished
The real victory in these dismemberment cases is often scientific and
intellectual, rather than moral  More and more today, dismemberment
cases are being treated with the attention they deserve
Under the old coroner system, nobody would look twice at a
dismemberment  They were too puzzling and horrible to contemplate for
long  A finding of "Body Taken Apart" would be entered, the remains
would be buried and that would be the end of it  Now we am studying
these appalling cases more and more closely, with a clearer knowledge
of anatomy and with improved scientific techniques  As I have shown,
we are sometimes able to piece together bodies that have been scattered
practically to the four winds, across hundreds of miles; bodies lost
for many years  it is not every day that we have the satisfaction -of
seeing a murderer and corpse cutter convicted and led away in handcuffs
as a result of our work, but we are making progress
One of the ghastliest cases of dismemberment I ever encountered way
imaginable, with a dramatic tered ended in the most satisfying plea of
guilty within minutes of my testimony  I call it "The Case of the
Pale-Faced Indian"  It happened this way:

In 1981, right after I'd finished helping dig up the bodies of the
three drug smugglers down in La BeHe, I was called in to identify a
buried, dismembered body  The body belonged to a Gainesvdle man who
owned land in a rural area  On this lot stood an unused house trailer
A Vietnam veteran named Tim Burgess, a desperate-looking man with long
dark hair and flowing muttonchop whiskers, had asked permission to camp
on the man's property  The landowner agreed, but Burgess soon took
advantage of his hospitality and moved into the vacant trailer  When
the landowner finally asked him to leave, Burgess refused The landowner
learned that Burgess had a criminal record and had been paroled from
prison  He had been arrested several times
Once, while walking a pet Doberman in front of the White House in
Washington, DC his dog had lunged at a passerby and Burgess's coat had
flapped open, revealing 45-caliber automatics and several hundred
rounds of ammunition
In short, Burgess was a creepy customer, a man with a violent past
whose very sanity was open to question  Not wanting to confront him
face to face, his reluctant landlord wrote a letter to Burgess's
probation officer  He complained that not only was Burgess squatting
on his property without permission but he was also growing marijuana in
the woods
I have long since ceased to be amazed at the extraordinary quirks of
our criminal justice system  The probation officer, a softhearted
sort, did nothing more than write Burgess a letter revealing that his
landlord had complained about him  In the same letter was a stern
warning to Burgess-to destroy his marijuana crop
This letter was the unfortunate landowner's death warrant
Completely unaware that Burgess was furious with him for tattling to
his probation officer, the exasperated landowner went out to confront
his trespassing tenant and have it out with him once and for all  He
took his pet dog with him  Neither he nor the dog was ever seen again
When the landowner was reported missing a few days later,
deputies went out to the property  There they found the victim's
pickup truck and his dead dog  As they searched the property, an
investigator tripped over what appeared to be a stick protruding up at
an odd angle from the ground  Closer inspection revealed it was no
stick but the severed eild of a human thighbone, with the flesh rotted,
dried and retracted from it
(An odd sidelight: a few months later, when the same investigator
stepped into another patch of woods to relieve his bladder, he happened
to discover another body  He had been searching for it for months, in
a completely unrelated case  You would be amazed how many bodies Turn
up during these errands of nature; the body of the baby son of the
famous aviator, Charles Lindbergh, was found by a truck driver in
similar circumstances after the child was kidnapped in 1932)

But to return to the bone protruding from the dirt: together with my
archaeologist colleague, Dr Sigier-Eisenberg, we set about digging up
the remains  Both thighbones had been cut through and the legs placed
alongside the torso in the grave  There was one rather shocking
detail: the victim had been scalped, with the hair and soft tissue cut
away from the entire top of the head  The body also showed evidence of
shotgun wounds to the buttocks, the abdomen and the neck  He had been
killed with three separate blasts
Burgess had fled, but not far  He was reportedly seen going into the
woods with a 357 magnum revolver a mile away from the spot where we
were excavating  Immediately all the investigators rushed pell-mell
from the scene, eager to catch the prime suspect  As the last of them
faded from view, Dr Sigier-Eisenberg and I looked at each other  We
both realized that we were defenseless, alone at the scene of a
terrible murder, with the probable murderer roaming in the woods
nearby!  We waited in some suspense until the officers returned a short
time later@nly to make themselves scarce again when it came time to
hoist the rotting remnants into our vehicle  It is amazing how burly
policemen can dwindle and disappear when there is dirty work like this
to be done!
Burgess's capture was a bit anticlimactic  While the search was still
under way, he telephoned a neighbor who was a deputy sheriff and
arranged to surrender to him personally
The method of dismemberment in this case was unorthodox
Marks on one femur indicated that a knife was used to cut through the
skin and muscle; then the knife was used to hack on the bones  If you
have ever tried to use a large pocket knife or hunting knife to hack
through a tree limb, you'll find that at first it appears you are
making great progress, but after a while your arm is tired and you are
still no more than halfway through  The same thing seems to have
happened here  Weary and frustrated, the iller then went for an ax and
finished the amputation with a single ax blow  Having served his
apprenticeship on one leg, he then proceeded with the ax to the second
leg, which he also severed
But the grotesque multiple methods used to chop up the corpse paled in
comparison with the grotesque theories Burgess's defense attorney
raised at the trial  I have never seen a trapped man vaiggle more
artfully in court than Burgess did, through his lawyer  He pleaded not
guilty to the charge of murder  He claimed he had acted in
self-defense
Burgess, his lawyer explained, believed he was an American Indian  The
fact that he had scalped his victim proved that he had killed his
opponent in self-defense, for Indians do not scalp helpless, unarmed
people but only those whom they have slain in baffle after a fair
fight!  I have never heard a more astonishing and original defense
The prosecutor actually arranged to call an ethnologist to the witness
stand, to testify that this was absurd, that Indians had often taken
scalps indiscriminately, even from victims they had not themselves
killed, even from victims who remained alive after the scalping
Then came my Turn to testify  More than most others, dismemberment
cases are an ordeal to testify about in court  I have to reveal in
excruciating and grisly detail what exactly it is that I have learned
from a set of human remains  As I speak, the court is hearing terrible
things  The judge hears, the jury hears, the defendant hears-and
oftentimes the mother, or father, or some other near, dear relative of
the victim is listening to my testimony too, listening with tears
trickling down their cheeks  At such times I cannot bear to think
about the families  I shut them out from my'mind  I focus on the
remains, only the remains  They, not the living, are my sole concern
When a conviction does occur, it comes too late for the victim and is
often scant comfort to the bereaved families  But it does help the
future, potential victims of the killer, whose-lives would be forfeit
if he were not caught and punished
But this time the dreadful recital of details had an astonishing
result  I demonstrated to the jury with a folding hunting knife found
in Burgess's possession exactly how he would have had to hold the very
end of the handle to get sufficient leverage to hack at the bones and
cause the damage I had observed  My testimony was sharply challenged
by the defense, so I had to go over it again and again, with much
repetition, and explanations, and repeated demonstrations
All this while, Burgess was fidgeting in his chair  After I finished
my testimony, and the medical examiner was beginning his, the accused
motioned to his attorney- A whispered conference ensued  At the end of
it, Burgess's attorney asked to approach the bench
Burgess wished to change his plea to "guilty"  His attorney explained
that Burgess found the demonstrations of the death and dismemberment of
his former landlord so true to life, so evocative of the real event,
that it was recalling memories too horrible for him to bear
Hearing this, I confess I felt a thrill of vindication  It's always
damnably frustrating, at a trial, to know that the person in the
courtroom most able to confirm your testimony about a crime, the person
who knows every single detail about it, is very likely the person on
trial  He is sitting a few feet away from you, often staring right at
you -but his lips are sealed forever  This case made up for many of
the puzzling dismemberments which ended, aliter so much work on my
part, in perplexity and addles  This time at least, like the heavy
clang and click of a prison door slamming shut, there was the
satisfying sense of absolute certainty
"When the Sickness Is Your Soul" If it chance your eye offend you,
Pluck it out, lad, and be sound: '7kqU hurt, but there are salves to
friend you, And many a balsam grows on ground
And if your hand or foot offend you, Cut it Off, lad, and be whole; But
play the man, stand up and end you, When the sickness is your soul

-A  E Housman, A Shropshire Lad, xlv

The notion of suicide is invested with an awful grandeur in most
people's minds  The sheer irrevocability of the act, the final plunge
that tumbles the self-murderer into that shadowy realm "from which no
traveler returns,", strikes our hearts with gloomy solemnity  In
Western culture the approaches to suicide are guarded with grim
religious anathemas and barred by the threat of perpetual curses and
soul-blasting bolts of spiritual lightning  Dante consigns suicides to
the seventh circle of his Inferno, where their shades are transformed
to trees in a dark forest whose bleeding branches are forever torn by
demonic birds  Strict Christian dogma forbids the self-slain body to

 "When the Sickness Is Your Soul"

rest in hallowed ground  The monks who bury Ophelia, Hamlet's drowned
sweetheart in Shakespeare's tragedy, allow her coffin into the
churchyard only reluctantly, at the "great command" of the king
Otherwise, "she should in ground unsanctified have lodg'd, till the
last trumpet"
Suicide has the power to unsettle us all, to make even the durest brain
philosophize for a few minutes about the meaning of life  It seems we
alone of earth's creatures know we shall die  "Man has an angel's
brain, and sees the grave from the first," writes the poet Edgar Lee
Masters  From seeing the ax, to grasping the ax, to wielding the ax is
a process that can occupy less than  a minute, and there are actually
cases, within the   range of my experience, of wretches who chopped
themselves to death with axes
History is filled with heroic suicides: Cato the Younger falling on his
sword at Utica, in North Africa, in 46BC after having lost the last
battle to save Rome's democracy, spending the whole night reading
Plato's Phaedo, the dialogue on the immortality of the soul; the boy
who "stood on the burning deck" of the French flagship L'Orient, at the
baffle of Abouldr Bay in 1798, and perished rather than abandon the
body of the admiral, his father; the Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc,
who immolated himself with gasoline fn Saigon in 1963, to protest the
corrupt regime of South Vietnam
These noble deaths resonate in human memory like a grand sculpture
gallery of the mind  In our own days I have known of altruistic
suicides, men who killed themselves out of kindness to others, in hopes
of getting insurance settlements for their relatives, or as a means of
liquidating debts  Nor is our own profession proof against the
cumulative weight of doubt and pain that leads to self-murder
The renowned British forensic pathologist, Sin Bernard Spilsbury
(1877-1947), took his own life after careful forethought  Having
suffered several strokes, keenly aware that his mental acuity was
impaired and that his professional usefulness was nearly at an end,
Spilsbuxy made a significant gesture  He requisitioned only a hundred
autopsy forms, instead of his usual five hundred  Day by day, the dead
passed through his office, each case ticking off his self
allotted time  When the hundredth form was filled out,
Spilsbury dined at his club, rettimed to his laboratory and gassed
himself by placing his head in an oven
Alas, my own experiences with suicides have usually taken me to
ignobler places  What I see tends to be either rotten, or ridiculous,
or simply sad  I am speaking here primarily of young people who commit
suicide  I firmly believe that, if more would-be young suicides knew
what cold jokes policemen will make about them, how unlovely a picture
they win present to the technicians who must drag them away, autopsy
them and compose their remains for burial, much of the imagined flash
and glamour of the act of self-annihilation would evaporate  In most
cases I have dealt with, suicide has proved to be a hasty, profligate,
wasteful and ill-considered solution to a doubtful problem-a love
thwarted, a reputation besmirched, a bank account overdrawn, a sudden
temper tantrum or a drug-darkened depression  I do not include among
these spur-of-the-moment extinctions the self-inflicted deaths of the
terminally ill, for whom life has become a bitter and unsupportable
burden  Loneliness, old age, incurable and painftd illnesses, these
are sometimes sufficient reasons for suicide  In such cases we ought
to take a step backward, suspend judgment, and look with mercy upon
those for whom death was a mercy
Gallows humor and graveyard whistling are normal human reactions in the
face of death  How many times have I heard police investigators, when
confronted with a body that has four or five gunshot wounds to the
head, or with its skull horribly crushed, or wrapped thickly with
chains in a sunken, stove-in boat, say with mock solemnity:, "Must be
suicide, eh, Doc?"
And one cannot be too quick to disagree!  Often suicides present the
most bizarre injuries  When I was a graduate student, moonlighting in
a hospital in Austin, I saw a truly extraordinary case: an attorney had
committed suicide by shooting himself five times in the head with a 38
special at his desk, while his frantic secretary hammered at the locked
door of his office!  The door had been locked from the inside; there
was no suspicion of the secretarys complicity in his death  The lawyer
had acted entirely alone  When the police came to the room and took
the gun from his hand, the wounded man was-still very much alive, still
able to look at them, follow them with his eyes
The shooting occurred late in the afternoon and it was my duty at the
hospital to remain with him, during a painfully slow death watch, until
he died at last, sometime after midnight  The investigation revealed
that the unfortunate attorney had put the barrel of the gun in his
mouth and fired five times  Two bullets had exited from the side of
his face, two more exited his cranial vault near the top of the skull,
and the fifth bullet remained lodged in his brain  It is not unusual
for autopsies to disclose multiple gunshot wounds in suicide victims,
although these occur most commonly in wounds of the torso  For a man
to shoot himself five times in the head, and live as long as this
lawyer did, was rare indeed
Most suicides are far better thought out than most pregnancies
A tremendous deliberation, a dreadful persistence mark some of the
self-inflicted deaths I have seen  In such cases the win to die can be
as strong-even far stronger-than the will to live  Some suicide
victims are willing to pass through hellish torments in order to attain
the surcease from sorrow they crave  There is one case in the
scientific literature in which a man managed to cut himself in two at
the waist with a table saw  In old japan, most cases of suicide
committed by courtiers, called seppuku, involved slitting the stomach
open with a sharp knife, after which the agony would be cut short by a
friend who would step up and slit the dying man's throat  But there
are other examples, notably that of the famous Marshal Maresuke Nogi in
1912, in which no accomplice was used, no coup de Oce was given  The
victim quietly and stoically bled to death from the selfinflicted belly
wound  One terrible case, published in the literature of our
discipline, involved a man who wedged a large knife into an old
radiator inside a church, then charged the knife repeatedly, butting
the point with his head, until at last the blade pierced his skull and
he died  Other documented cases have involved men who have killed
themselves by raisin the hydraulic tailgates of semi trucks, or
lowering the raised beds of dump trucks, onto their necks and heads,
like slow, blunt guillotines  In these cases the force of the
machine-driven tailgate all but cuts the neck in two, mashing it to the
consistency of a flattened noodle  There are also documented suicides
by people who used chain saws on themselves, or purposely permitted
themselves to be bitten to death by poisonous snakes
There is a second type of suicide, which may be called the fastidious  suicide,
involving a person who wishes to look beautiful in death, to die
tidily, or to cause as little trouble as possible to the investigators
afterward  One case I recall involved a man who shot himself in the
stomach twice, but was careful to position the barrel of the gun the
second time so that the bullet entered exactly the same hole made by
the first bullet  For some reason he did not want two entrance wounds
in his stomach
Women will often put on a pretty nightgown and apply makeup before
killing themselves  One remarkable case in Ohio involved an
eighteen-year-old girl who managed to shoot herself in the back by
holding the revolver behind herself and pulling the trigger with her
thumb  Her body revealed a single gunshot wound in the middle of her
shoulder blades and at first glance the death looked like murder
But the angle of the limbs, the trajectory of the bullet and the fact
-that it took place in a room locked from the inside led police to
realize it was suicide  Apparently the young woman was anxious to
avoid disfiguring herself with a gunshot wound, so she would look nice
in her casket
Something similar occurred in a case of mine involving a dead man found
in the Ocala National Forest  The corpse was found about fifty yards
off the road, in the woods  all that remained when the body was
located was a skeleton  judging from the position of the skeleton, the
man had apparently been seated, his back propped against a tree
Nearby was found a toiletries kit, including a can of pump-"
toothpaste, aftershave, a container of Right Guard deodorant, nail
clippers and razor blades, all contained neatly in an Adidas bag  The
skeleton wore Adidas shoes and Dockers trousers  A ballpoint pen was
found near his hand, but if he had written a note with it, the paper
had long since disappeared  A bullet had pierced the skull, from one
side to the other
Everything about this solitary, seated skeleton in that lonely wood
seemed to point to suicide except for the fact that there was no gun!
A zippered gun case was found right next to the body, but it was empty
and the weapon was nowhere in sight  It stretched belief to imagine
that a killer would shoot someone, take the murder weapon with him and
leave the gun case behind  Where was the gun?
We searched for the better part of two days, using metal detectors,
rakes and other tools, all around the tree where the skeleton had been
found  just before dusk on the second day, as I was moving
leaves under a low bush with my trowel, I heard the clink of metal on
metal: there, hidden by fallen leaves, was a 38-caliber snubnosed
revolver, about ten feet from the body  It was clearly the weapon used
in the shooting
But how did the gun get over there?  Did someone come along, pick it
up, see that it had begun to rust and then pitch it away?  Was it
dragged away by an animal eating part of the hand during decomposition?
Such are the baffling questions that confront the forensic
anthropologist  Nor was the young man ever identified  Somewhere in
this country there may be parents who are still wondering about the
fate of a perhaps troubled man in his early twenties, who went to
Florida, walked into a deep forest and never walked out again  In a
heroic effort to identify the remains, the police even investigated the
manufacturing dates of the pump toothpaste, but to no avail  The gun
used was a 38 Special made by Charter Firearms, and the police traced
it to San Francisco, where it had been sold five years earlier  but the
paper trail of the gun ended at that point
Another interesting, meticulously planned suicide happened here in
Gainesville a few years ago  It involved an instructor at the
University of Florida who carefully taped a beet can opener and another
metal object to his arm, wrapped the two frayed, bare ends of an
electrical cord around these, plugged the cord into an appliance timer
and set the timer to go off at 4 Am The man
then took a large dose of sleeping pills, washed them down with whiskey
and went calmly to bed  He slept soundly and never awakened  The
appliance timer, electronically precise, completed its circuit at
precisely 4
Am and electrocuted him, just as he had planned
Another please-don't-fuss-over-me suicide in Gainesvi involved a man
who was found dead and decomposing in the front seat of his car, a hose
leading from the exhaust through the cracked window on the driver's
side  The car was out of gas, but the key in the ignition was switched
to the running position  This was a straightforward case of carbon
monoxide poisoning  The deceased left no note, but placed neatly
alongside his body, on the seat of the car, was a business card
belonging  to Pete Zeller, the investigator in ourlocal medical
examiner's office  Pete was shocked to learn of this detail, and even
more shocked to realize that he knew the dead man
He was an old acquaintance whom Pete had -seen a couple of months
earlier  The man had seemed in good spirits  Pete told the man he was
now retired from the police and was working for the medical examiner's
office  The man seemed fascinated by this information  He asked Pete
casually what the best way of committing suicide might be  just as
casually, Pete answered that he believed carbon monoxide poisoning was
relatively painless
As the man said good-bye, Pete gave him one of his business cards,
never dreaming of the use it would be put to  The man killed himself
shortly afterward  He left Pete's card on the front seat as a kind of
forwarding address, to make sure his remains would be properly taken
care of  Pete had to endure some ribbing from his coworkers  "Pete,"
they said, "next time tell your suicidal friends to park their cars
right outside the medical examiner's office  That way it saves using
gasoline"
Many people, of course, kill themselves without meaning to
Accidental and natural deaths are often confused with suicides and
murders  Very often an elderly person will fall, either down a flight
of stairs, or in a bathroom, or someplace else, and the fall will
produce lacerations and hemorrhages so severe that a careless observer
might conclude the deceased had been bludgeoned to death  Such cases
call for all the forensic pathologist's skill
I know of one remarkable case in which a young man killed himself
utterly by accident after he dressed himself up as a vampire, to go to
a Halloween party  He wore a shirt stained with fake bloodstains, and
beneath the shirt he had placed the end panel of a wooden apple crate,
made of soft pine  As a final touch, for gory effect, he planned to
appear at the party with a "stake" driven into his own heart  The
stake would be transfixed in the soft pine panel underneath his shirt
Unfortunately, things did not work out as planned  The youth opted to
use a sharp-pointed knife in lieu of a stake, and to tap the knife into
the pine panel with a hammer  Obviously he believed the hidden wooden
crate panel would shield him from harm  It didn't  The soft wood
split easily beneath the hammerdriven knife point, and the blade
plunged deep into the young man's heart  His last words, as he
staggered out of his room, were a gasp of disbelief  "I really did
it!"  Then he toppled forward, dead  This was no true suicide, but
instead an absurd and tragic accident
But accidental self-inflicted deaths can spring from darker roots
In these deaths a certain type of aberrant sexual behavior reaches a,
different climax than that expected  I am referring to autoerotic
asphyxiation
This practice is very old, and very dangerous  In his perverse 1791
novel, Justine, the Marquis De Sade desipribes a French nobleman Who is
in the habit of hanging himself nearly to death, to enhance the
intensity of orgasm during masturbation by restricting the flow of
oxygen to his brain  By slow degrees, over a period of months, the
-nobleman increases the duration of the torture and the tightness of
the noose, until at last he kills himself  Sade was a keen and
clinical observer of aberrant behavior-not least his own d people would
do well to heed this cautionary tale  Sad to relate, this bizarre
practice still flourishes today and is a well-recognized pattern of
deviant behavior, one that often leads to disastrous results
Whether this self-torture "works," whether there really is an
intensification of sexual sensation in an oxygen-starved brain, or
whether it is merely a ritualistic reenactment of execution fantasies
gr other sadomasochistic acts, I leave to the pathologists and the
psychiatrists  What I do know, and what all of us who see these cases
know, is that such behavior, once begun, goes from peak to peak and
becomes increasingly dangerous the more it is practiced  And the
strangulation ritual tends to be repeated, over and over again, over
considerable periods of time  We know this because the beam, or pipe,
or other solid object used to attach the other end of the rope is often
found worn into a groove by long repetition of this activity
Typically, the victim will knot a rope over a wooden beam, or a pipe in
the basement, or a tree limb  He will then tie the other end of the
rope around his neck, usually padding the neck with a towel or other
materials to avoid rope burns or chafes  The hands may also be tied,
usually with some sort of fast-release slipknot  Very often the victim
is cross-dressed with panty hose and other items of women's attire
Often, too, explicit photographic pornographic mateHal will be found on
the floornear the victim
Those who indulge in these perilous high jinks are courting death
They believe they can stop at any moment, but what they do not realize
is that the imbibition of oxygen to the brain can cause the loss of
consciousness at any second, without any warning  No one sends the man
in the noose a telegram saying: "Your brain is about to shut down And
so they suddenly slump, inert, and then the constriction is
intensified  Suffocation, asphixiation without regaining
consciousness, occurs in a matter of seconds  The victim will be found
dead, in circumstances that would be excruciatingly emharmassing to
him, if he were yet alive to see himself
In the past, before this aberrant behavior was well documented, many of
these cases were treated as homicides and suicides, instead of
accidents  But came marches on: murderers have learned this obscure
wrinkle in human behavior and now attempt to set up false autoerotic
asphyxiation scenes to throw investigators off the scent  In such
cases, the presence or absence of the repetitive groove in the overhead
beam can be all-important  Investigators win take note, too, of the
fact that almost all practitioners of autoerotic asphyxiation are white
males  No one knows why, but this is a statistical fact
Nor are these deaths unusual  There is probably an average of one a
month in my state, Florida  Occasionally we see some truly bizarre
cases  Some men, literally afraid to risk their necks, have wrapped
chains around their waists to cut off their breathing  This method of
constriction is also effective in depriving the brain of oxygen  The
victims then haul themselves aloft with chain hoistsfrom which they are
later found dangling and dead  One wretch apparently enjoyed having
his volkswagen Beetle pull him slowly around with a chain wrapped about
his waist  Unfortunately the chain got wrapped around a wheel and the
car reeled him in, thrashing like a giant marlin, until he was crushed
Another poor soul, for whom pain and pleasure were obviously closely
akin, attached an electric train transformer to his penis with
alligator clips and was in the habit of administering mild shocks to
his genitals  Regrettably, on one occasion-the last!-the transformer
shorted out, and he received the full 110-volt household electrical
charge  He was instantly and ignominiously electrocuted
This case, when presented at one of our meetings, was interesting
because the parents of the deceased had removed all evidence of the
transformer before the police investigators showed up  They were
understandably horrified and chagrined to discover their son dead under
such sordid circumstances and did their best to conceal the manner of
his death  But alligator clips leave very characteristic marks and
these were plainly visible at the autopsy  After a few shrewd,
discreet questions on the part of investigators, the unhappy, parents
broke down and revealed the full, shabby truth of the matter  The
death was ruled accidental
Milton Helprin, longtime chief medical examiner in New York City, used
to tell the story of a young Irishman seen standing on the far reaches
of a subway platform by several witnesses  At a certain point he
suddenly and silently pitched forward right in front of an oncoming
train  He was found dead beneath the wheels, horribly mangled  But
his family was Catholic and did not readily accept the initial
conclusion of suicide  They were quite certain their son had no reason
to commit suicide, and in the end they were proved right
Helprin reexamined the mangled body and noticed tiny burn marks on the
right thumb, index finger and the tip of the penis  He was able to
reassure the family their son had died accidentally  He had been
urinating on the subway tracks, and the stream had accidentally reached
the third rail  The arc of falling water, rich with salts favoring
conduction, instantly became an arc of lethal electricity
The lad was probably dead before he hit the tracks
Of all the deaths I am called upon to investigate, suicides are among
the most frustrating  Bones are my province, and most methods of
suicide leave no evidence upon the skeleton  When we find a skeleton
in the woods, fallen apart or disarticulated, I immediately look UP,
scanning the tree limbs above the skeleton, searching for some
long-forgotten noose  As decomposition takes place in a hanging
victim, the neck begins to stretch, until it may be several feet long
Finally the drying, mummifying skin will tear, head and trunk part
company, and all falls down to earth, sundered in twain  The noose,
however, may survive and point its hempen finger down at the truth
Many of the skeletons that come to my laboratory belong to suicide
victims who behaved like shy hermits in their final hours
Usually they are found in remote, out-of-the-way places  People often
go to some hidden place to kill themselves, whether from a desire to
act alone and unhindered, or because they wish simply to disappear in
solitude, spending their last moments in reflective silence  In any
event, by the time many of these bodies are found they are badly
decomposed, perhaps only skeletons  It's UP to us, the
anthropologists, the pathologists, the investigators, to try to
establish how these people came to die in such a secluded, pathless
place
Inevitably these suicides get confused with straightforward murder
victims who have been dumped in hidden locations  Another possibility
is accidental death-the skeleton may belong to someone who took a drug
overdose by mistake
In cases involving poison or drugs, we always look for the pili bottles
or the containers  Of course, many skeletons in the woods have a
bottle with them-but it most likely contains a few remaining drops of
Mad Dog 20-20, a potent, cheap wine  Such cases do indeed involve
poisoning, the long slow poisoning of alcohol; but these deaths are not
defined by law as suicidal
But what if the victim took the drugs or the poison before going to the
death scene?  What if the poison was contained in a single capsule?  In
these cases, obviously, there won't be any evidence at the scene
Sometimes it happens that the victim flings the bottle away in horror
or disgust after swallowing its contents  Such bottles are awfully
difficult to find  In fact, I had one startling case involving a body
found in the woods  In this case the police did a scene investigation
and did not notice two other decomposing bodies fifty feet away  If
you can miss a rotting corpse, imagine how easy it is to overlook a
tiny pig bottle!  The initial body was ruled not a suicide
One would think that, when guns are involved in a suicide, the
investigation would be a fairly straightforward matter  There's a hole
in the head, a gun lying alongside the remains  Get the deceased
identified, find a history of despondency-case closed!  But in fact it
doesn't work that way  The gun may be gone  A lot of people,
happening on a body in the woods with a gun nearby, take the gun and
leave the body unreported  Guns are valuable  And so the suicide,
minus its gun, masquerades as murder and causes us no end of bother
I have never encountered a note with the skeleton of a suicide
After remains have spent weeks or months in the wild, we count
ourselves lucky indeed to find anything decipherable left on paper or
plastic in these cases  Occasionally we'll get, a telephone number on
a matchbook cover or some other tiny clue, but not very often  The
enormous Meek-Jennings suicide note, quoted elsewhere in this book, was
the longest and most complex document of its kind ever to come before
my eyes
Euthanasia is legal in the Netherlands, and I can certainly understand
suicide in the context of a terminal, incurable illness, when pain is
great and insupportable or medibal bills are accumulating ruinously
Butmost of the suicides I see seem to involve a lashing out, a last
infliction of pain upon on'e's loved ones or family  All too often
it's a boyfriend or girlfriend who blows his or her brains out in front
of the person who has rejected them  These are hot-tempered acts of
vengeance in which one's own death becomes a weapon meant to wound
forever  Such cases often follow a curious etiquette, as though death
were a last fling, a chance to go shopping
Sometimes we find the receipt from the gun store, where the weapon was
bought a few days or hours earlier, even though it is quite rare for
people to buy guns specifically to commit immediate suicide  Some of
these weapons are extremely expensive, and the ammunition used is
costly and sophisticated  And very often this last, lethal
extravagance will be paid for with a credit card, because the new owner
knows he won't be around to settle the bill  Charles Whitman, the mass
murderer who killed sixteen people from his perch atop the famous tower
at the University of Texas in 1966, used a rubber check to buy one of
his weapons at Davis Hardware in Austin  The other he paid for with
his Sears credit card
The state of Florida has an inordinate number of suicides, particularly
of the elderly  Over and over again, the same scenario unfolds: Mom
and Pop, up in the Midwest, decide it is time to retire and go live the
good LIFE in sunny Florida  They little realize what pain awaits them!
A year or two after moving into the trailer or condominium, Pop suffers
a heart attack and Mom is left alone, or vice versa  Every living soul
the survivor knows is back home in the Midwest  To return or stay?
Somehow going back seems harder than going forward  The survivor hangs
on in Florida, but the sands of life are ebbing away
Gradually there is a sinking, a submersion into a sea of strangers
The long, sunny days become painful and tedious; all seems overbright
and irritating in these hot latitudes  Suicide becomes a soothing way
out of a painful, empty existence
I sometimes wish, as Florida fills up with refugees from the northern
United States, that we could put brutally honest signs up at the state
borders  "SENIORS!  WELCOME TO FLORIDA!"  they would say
BE ADVISED YOU ARE NOT JUST LEAVING THE SNOWS BEHIND; YOU ARE LEAVING
YOUR FRIENDS BEHIND"  People who come to Florida all too often do not
realize how painful our peculiar rootlessnewness can be
Naples, Fort Myers, St Petersburg, Miami Beach-these communities sit
atop invisible cliffs, overlooking abysses of self-extinction for the
elderly
One such case, memorable to me chiefly because of the dead man's teeth,
involved a skeletonized set of remains found in Polk County, near
Disney World, in 1987  He had a bullet hole in the center of his skull
and a gun lying beside him  He also had a perfect set of teeth, not
particularly worn with no riflings and not a single cavity  His teeth
were as- unmarred as a child's, but fully grown and in the mouth of an
adult  The medical examiner called me from his district in central
Florida and wantedto know the age of the remains  He estimated the
deceased was in his forties, primarily because of these flawless teeth
I looked at the skeleton, especially at the spinal column, and said the
man was older than sixty-five years of age, probably older than
seventy
I think the medical examiner concealed a polite snide at the apparent
absurdity of my findings  But I stuck to my findings  I can't always
be right but I have to say what I have concluded  Without much
confidence, he passed on my findings to the police, who began to
investigate further  Almost immediately they verified that the very
gun found with the body had been sold to an eighty-year-old man who had
been missing for several months  When the man's dental records were
checked, those extraordinary, perfect teeth shone forth intact from the
x-ray light table  For a lucky handful of people in this world there
is no such thing as tooth decay  Their teeth naturally resist all
cavities, and normal wearing away is replaced by upwellings of dentin,
the inner material of the tooth, using and replacing the worn enamel
like tiny fountains of youth  This old gentleman was among these happy
few, but he was unhappy nonetheless  Neighbors confirmed that he had
been acting despondent before he disappeared  The rest of the puzzle
pieces fell into place easily  Age was all, in this case  When the
police began looking for an eighty-year-old instead of a
forty-year-old, the matter was quickly solved
After exercising our wits to their utmost, we investigators sometimes
have to confess failure  Killing is killing, whether it be directed
against oneself or another, and in some cases it is simply impossible
to decide whether a victim died by his own hand or someone else's
you killed him and then made it look like suicide!"  is more than a
hackneyed line from the movies  Sometimes it comes true
I remember a notorious crack house that burned down in jacksonville
some years ago  The incinerated remains of a young woman were found in
the smoldering ruins  At first she was thought by police to have
perished in the fire  When I examined her closely, however, I saw
there were burned maggots on the body-clear evidence she had been dead
and decomposing at least forty-eight to seventy-two hours before the
fire
Was she a homicide victim?  Had she died of a drug overdose?  Had she
committed suicide?  I cannot tell  No one can tell  The nameless
burned woman remains one of the many enigmas in my career  I wish that
every case had an answer, but it seems that questions always outnumber
answers in my world

 Outpacing the Fiend

Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And
having, once turned round, walks on, And turns no more his head,
Because he knows afrightful@ Doth close behind him tread    

-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rinse of the Ancient Manner We forensic
anthropologists owe a dark debt to murderers  From the beginning, our
science has walked almost abreast of homicide, trying to outpace the
"frightful fiend" who commits it  Sometimes we are scarcely half a
step ahead; sometimes we are several steps behind  In all such cases
our instructors are assassins  It is our task to solve-or at least try
to solve-terrible problems put before us by men who have slain their
fellow men  Over the years, these brutal teachers have,brought out the
best in us, stimulated us, put us on our mettle  By challenging us to
unravel seemingly impossible knots of malevolence, the killers have
ultimately helped us in the advancement of science and the spread of
knowledge  It is a singular fact

that some of the most dazzling pieces of
detective work in our profession have come about as a direct result of
some extraordinarily depraved murder  The darker the crime, the
brighter shines the solution
Ours is a remarkably new science  Accurate bone measurement began only
in 1755, when Jean Joseph Sue (1710-92), an anatomy professor at the
Louvre, published the complete measurements of four bodies and the
maximum lengths of many of the bones of fourteen cadavers ranging in
age from a six-week-old fetus to an adult of twenty-five years  From
these late beginnings, and from a handful of interesting cases, a broad
field of forensic investigation has come into being, so wide, so
active, so thriving today that we hold annual conventions at which
hundreds of forensic scientists meet to delve into a panoply of cases,
old and new  It is a field in which Americans can claim noteworthy
achievements-both in crime and in its subsequent investigation
Here in America the science of forensic anthropology can trace its
origins directly to a celebrated murder, that of Dr George Parkman,
killed in 1849 by a Harvard professor who owed him money
Parkman's murder was investigated by another Harvard professor, Oliver
Wendell Holmes  Both men had sons who would be more famous than their
fathers  Parkman's was Francis Parkman, who became one of America's
greatest historians, and whose Oregon Trail has become a classic
Holmes's son would later serve with distinction in the Civil War, in
which he was thrice wounded, and would go on to become one of America's
greatest Supreme Court justices, dying only in 1935
At the time of the murder the elder Holmes held the Parkman
professorship of anatomy, endowed by and named after George Parkman
himself  So in a way Parkman reached out from the grave and helped
bring his own murderer to justice
Parkman was a wealthy Boston physician and landlord who donated the
land where Harvard Medical School now stands  Vain, a notorious
skinflint, he ordered new dentures to wear at the groundbreaking
ceremony for the medical school and told his dentist, Dr
Nathan Keep, that if the new false teeth couldn't be finished in time
for the ceremony he wouldn't pay a cent for them  Working frenziedly,
Dr Keep just managed to finish the dentures in time, and luckily kept
the mold of Parkman's jaw, which he had used to model the teeth
In the meantime the avaricious Parkman had lent a sum of money to a
Harvard anatomy professor named John Webster  When Parkman dunned
Webster for the repayment of this loan, Webster murdered him,
dismembered his body and hid pieces of it among other remains in his
anatomy laboratory, where it was unlikely to arouse suspicion  The
rest of the corpse Webster concealed in his indoor privy, where the
pieces were found by a suspicious janitor, who broke through a wall to
discover them  Other bits of the doctor's body, including his lower
jaw, were found burned in an assayer's furnace nearby
The police at first detained the janitor, believinghe had committed
the murder  Close scrutiny of Parkman's scattered remains in the
laboratory by Holmes and his colleague, anatomist Jeffries Wyman,
revealed that the remains in question were not anatomical lab
specimens-they had not been treated with any preserving chemicals
They all came from the same body, apd that body belonged to a man fifty
to sixty years old who stood about five feet ten inches tall (Parkman
was fifty and stood five-ten)  Finally, the false teeth retrieved from
the bed of the assaying furnace perfectly fit the model of Parkrnan's
jaw that Keep had kept
Confronted with this evidence, the guilty Webster finally broke down
and confessed that he had killed Parkman "in a fit of rage"
Webster was tried, convicted and hanged for the murder in 1850
The Parkman case received tremendous publicity at the time and probably
influenced young Thomas Dwight (1843-1911), then only a boy of seven,
to devote his career to the study of anatomy
Today Dwight us honored as the father of American forensic
anthropology  A Bostonian, Dwight spent nearly forty years as an
investigator and teacher of anatomy, and during the last twenty-eight
years of his career he held the Parlanan professorship of anatomy at
Harvard  Throughout his life Dwight published papers on skeletons,
their identification and differentiation by sex, age and height  An
essay of his in 1878 was the first of its kind in this field
Dwight's most famous pupil was George A Dorsey (1868-1931), a
multitalented man who was interested in ethnology, photography and,
almost as a sideline, the human skeleton  Dorsey's career, too, was
given a huge boost by a notorious murder that he helped solve, the
gruesome case of the Chicago sausage maker, Adolph Luetgert
Luetgert murdered his wife Louisa in 1897  Since he ran a sausage
factory, he was in a unique position to make her body disappear
Louisa Luetgert was murdered at home, but her husband transported her
body in a carriage by night to his five-story factory at the corner of
Diversey and Hermitage streets in Chicago  There he plunged it into a
huge vat filled with a caustic solution containipg 375 pounds of
potash
Evidence later brought out at his trial indicated that Luetgert sat
beside the vat stirring the grisly mixture all through the night  In
the morning he was found sleeping in his office, with the vat
overflowing and a greasy substance all over the floor  The acidic
potash had leached- out most of the calcium from Louisa Luetgert's
bones, gradually reducing them to jelly  This was the "grease" noticed
the next morning on the floor
Luetgert reported his wife,missing, but after a few days her brother
began to suspect foul play  A search of the factory by police yielded
Louisa Luetgert's ling and four tiny pieces of human bone in congealed
sediment in the vat, which had by then been drained
Luetgert was charged with his wife's murder  His defense was bold and
straightforward: there was no corpus delicti  Louisa Luetgert's body
had been dissolved
But in one of the most brilliant courtroom displays of forensic
anthropology ever witnessed, George Dorsey was able to prove that the
four tiny fragments of bone, so small that all four of them togather
would fit on a silver quarter dollar, were parts of a human skeleton
The bones introduced in evidence were: the end of a metacarpal from the
hand, a head of a rib, a portion of a phalanx, or toebone, and a
sesamoid bone from the foot  These minuscule fragments,
together with Louisa Luetgert's ring, were enough to
convict Adolph Luetgert and send him to prison for life  Even though
Luetgert had not attempted to convert his wife to sausage, the memory
of the case gave the factory such a bad name that it was soon forced to
shut down for lack of business  Dorsey in 1898 published a landmark
paper, "The Skeleton in Medico-Legal Anatomy," based on his research in
the Luetgert case
After this extraordinary coup, however, Dorsey gave up anatomy and
devoted himself to the study and photography of North American Indians
He later became the US naval attache in Spain  In those days
forensic anthropology was not recognized as a science but only as a
subbranch of anatomy that could occasionally furnish interesting
information to the police
One of the rarest and most interesting books in my library is a black
and gold volume called Medico-anatomical Aspects of the Ruxton Case,
published in 1937  Written by John Glaister, MD and James Couper
Brash, MD this remarkable book examines, with amazing detail and
thoroughness, one of the most grisly and notorious double murders
committed in this century  These murders, moreover, were carried out
by a doctor with a good knowledge of anatomy, who was determined to
destroy all evidence of his crime  The Ruxton case  is probably the
single most quoted murder discussed in modern forensic textbooks
This weird and grisly double killing has a rich, period flavor of
England about it  British society in the mid-1930s emerges from
Glaister and Brash's account as so remarkable, cohesive and tightly
interdependent that one wonders how anybody ever got away with murder
at all
Witnesses abound in the Ruxton case  People knock at his door all day
long while the murderer is about his gruesome task of dismembering the
bodies  Charwomen later recall horrible odors and strange stains  A
bandage on the doctor's finger arouses a neighbor's suspicion  The
killer rents a car to dispose of the bodies and promptly collides with
a bicyclist, who calls the police, who make a full report  The entire
British press is in full cry against the criminal
Brilliant specialists step forward to reconstruct the remains in
detail, matching their reconstructions with known photographs of the
victims  The hapless murderer is arrested, pleads he is innocent-in
vilin  Surrounded by eyes that see all, ears that hear the least
whisper, memories that let nothing slip, pursued by vigilant constables
on bicycles and by sober cleaning ladies, the culprit is overwhelmed by
the evidence, found guilty, and hanged  The majesty of British law
triumphs absolutely  It is interesting to speculate what effect the
Ruxton case may have had upon the young film director, Alfred
Hitchcock, who was just then coming into his own in Great Britain
In Hitchcock's movies, murder will out, always  No one escapes
punishment  The police are omnipotent and omniscient figures of dread
Dr Buck Ruxton was born in 1899 in India  He was a Parsee whose real
name was Bikhtyar Rostomji Ratanji Hakim ("Hakim" means "doctor"), and
he took his Bachelor of Medicine degrees at Bombay and London
universities  After settling in England, Ruxton took a mistress,
Isabella Van Ess, whom he described to neighbors as his wife  The
couple arrived in lancaster and had a stormy relationship  "We were
the kind of people who could not live with each other and could not
live without each other," Ruxton later told police  The pair fought
frequently and twice Mrs  Ruxton sought police protection
On September 7, 1935, Ruxton accused his wife of having an affair with
the Lancaster town clerk  Soon after this she disappeared
Isabella was last seen alive on Saturday, September 14, at 11:30 AM
On Sunday the doctor paid a visit to his charwoman, Agnes Oxley, who
was scheduled to come clean the house on Monday morning at
seven-fifteen  He asked Oxley not to come Monday, but instead on
Tuesday  He explained that his wife was away on a holiday to
Edinburgh
On Monday, September 16, several tradesmen and one patient called at
Ruxton's house at 2 Dalton Square  They were all turned away  Ruxton
explained that he was busy redoing the carpets in the house and showed
the would-be patients his hands: "Look how dirty they are," he said
To one of these visitors Ruxton said that his wife's personal maid,
Mary Rogerson, had gone with her to Scotland on the same holiday
At 11:30 Am that same day Ruxton took his children to a friend's
house, asking him to look after them  The friend noticed Ruxton's
finger was cut and bandaged  Ruxton explained he had cut it that
morning, opening a can of peaches  One can only speculate about what
he was really opening  Dismembering a human body is a very tricky
procedure  I have had to do it myself, and, though I have never cut
myself with a scalpel, I was once cut by another doctor's knife,  when
he lost control of it  I have also been cut by the sharp end of a
broken bone that was floating around loose inside the torso of a plane
crash victim
Dr Ruxton later went over to the maid's house and explained to her
parents, the Rogersons, that their daughter was on vacation with his
wife in Scotland and would not be back for a week or two
That Monday afternoon Ruxton asked a patient of his, a Mrs Hampshire,
to come over to his house and scrub down the staircase
Mrs Hampshire agreed  When she went into the bathroom, she noticed
the tub was stained yellow and even a vigorous scouting with Vim
cleanser could not remove the discoloration  Ruxton gave Mrs
Hampshire one of his suits, badly stained, as a present  "He said I
could have it cleaned," she told police later  The next day Ruxton
apparently changed his mind and asked for the suit back  When Mrs
Hampshire tried to clean the carpets, the scrubbing water turned
blood-red
On this same busy Monday, Ruxton rented a car and on Tuesday, September
17, he was involved in a slight collision with a cyclist, at Kendal, in
the Lake District  To a policeman investaging the accident, Ruxton
said he was returning from a business trip in Carlisle
The charwoman came as scheduled on September 17, letting herself into
the empty house  Two other charwomen were brought in to clean the
house as well, up to the day of September 20  All later complained of
bad stains and odors in the house  Ruxton sent one of them to buy eau
de Cologne and a sprayer, and the house was sprayed and fumigated
On September 29 the dismembered remains of two women were found in a
ravine near Moffat, Scotland  -The bodies were so mutilated and
decomposed that at first it was supposed that one of them belonged to a
man  Ruxton, upon seeing the news in the newspaper, remarked to Mrs
Oxley: "So you see     it is not our two"
On October 9, Mary Rogerson's mother informed police that her daughter
was missing  The next day Ruxton himself went to the police and asked
that "discreet inquiries" be made "with a view to finding my wife"
A blouse and a pair of children's rompers belonging to Ruxton's
children were found with the remains at Moffat (the rompers had been
used to wrap one of the severed heads)  The newspapers speculated
openly about Ruxton's involvement and the doctor complained to the
police that the publicity was "ruining my practice"
On October 13, Ruxton was charged with the murder of Mary Rogerson and
on November 5 with that of Isabella  The police said Ruxton had
murdered his wife and then killed the maid because she saw the murder
or its immediate aftermath  The doctor pleaded not guilty and called
the charges "absolute bunkum, with a capital B"
The remains found in the Scottish ravine consisted of two skulls, two
torsos, seventeen parts of limbs and forty-three portions of soft
tissue  All identifying characteristics had been carefully removed
from the remains  One set of hands, later found to belong to Isabella
Van Ess, was found with the fingertips cut off, to prevent
fingerprinting  The other pair was left intact, presumably because the
killer believed no fingerprints of Mary Rogerson were on file with the
police  On the other hand, Mary Rogerson had had a squint in one eye,
and the eyes from one skull had been carefully removed  By the same
token, Mrs Ruxton's legs had been noticeably fat and untapering down
to the ankle-and the soft tissue from the legs of one body had been
sliced away  Even a distinguishing bunion had been hacked off a
severed foot  Both bodies had been dismembered and drained of blood
after death
Almost every conceivable point of scientific attack, every
distinguishing characteristic that might have identified either of the
two corpses, was foreseen, seized upon and obliterated by the murderer
with diabolical thoroughness
Yet in the end the bodies were identified beyond all question, in a
brilliant process of forensic detection that is still a landmark today
Glaister and Brash reconstructed the bodies in the Ruxton affair, took
photographs of the mutilated remains, posed them at certain angles, and
compared them to photos of the two murder victims in life, taken at the
selfsame anglesThe resulting photographs are not for the faint of
heart  In the final superimpositions, the mutilated skulls were
ghosted into photographs of the victims taken when alive, and shine
through them like'silvery death's heads  This photographic evidence
was devastating  The disfigured skulls agreed with the living
portraits in every detail
Dr Buck Ruxton was tried, found guilty, sentenced to death and hanged
at Strangeways jail, Manchester, on May 21, 1936
I was born the year after Ruxton was hanged  It often strikes me how
relatively young our science of forensic anthropology is  With the
exception of a handful of great, departed pioneers, I have seen and
known personally many of the principal figures of our field
Indeed, many of them are stih,alive today
Our discipline is so new fledged that even in the 1930s the recently
founded FBI had to take its cases across the street to the -Smithsonian
Institution for analysis, There the Division of Physical Anthropology
was led by a brilliant anatomist whose picture later appeared on a
Czechoslovakian postage stamp: Aleg HrdhVka (pronounced
"Hued-LICH-ka")  Hrdhgka had come to the Smithsonian in 1903  He was
a remarkable, eccentric man, very slender, bald, mustached and proper
He invariably wore a high, starched collar and he was very
tight-listed
Colleagues still tell stories of how, on business trips, he would step
up to the front desk of a hotel with a papek bag full of skulls and
bones in one hand-the bones would be sticking out of the top of the
bag-and a small valise in the other
Then he would loudly request a room without a bath, to save money,
Hrdhgka became founding editor of the American journal of Physical
Anthropology and is responsible for beginning the Smithsonian's vast
collection of human skeletons, which today numbers over 33,000
specimens
But Hrdhipka never published any of his cases  I suspect his greatest
successes lie buried deep in FBI archives  He left pupils, admirers,
colleagues who had learned much from M-)ut not a word to posterity
The science of forensic anthropology had to wait until 1939 for the
appearance of a paper that summed up everything about the human
skeleton known up to that time  This was Wilton Marion Krogman's Guide
to the Identification'of Human Skeletal Material, which was originally
published not by any university or scholarly press but by the FBI  In
1958, Krogman published an expanded version of his paper in book form:
The Human Skeleton in Forensic Medicine, which appeared just at the
time I elected to enter the field  Krogman himself worked at the
University of Pennsylvania and lived to be ninety-nine years old  He
was active to the end, though he used to complain, just shy of a
century, that his eyesight was failing!
One of my most distinguished colleagues, Dr Ellis R Kerley,
propagated our discipline far and wide among other forensic scientists
I first met Ellis when I interviewed at the University of Kansas,
around 1971  After I joined the American Academy of Forensic Sciences
in 1974, I came to know him better  Ellis has been a mentor for many
of us in the field, a very lovable man, the only forensic
anthropologist ever to have served as president of the academy, and the
man who pioneered the organization of our section within the academy
In a sense, we all rode in on Ellis's coattails  Ellis also worked
with Dr Lowell Levine and Clyde Snow on the identification of the
remains of Dr Josef Mengele, the Nazi "Angel of Death," who eluded
justice after the war and finally drowned in Brazil in 1979  DNA
samples from Mengele's surviving family members in Germany proved
conclusively that the bones in a certain grave were his  EHis was also
called in to examine the remains of the astronauts who died in the
Challenger space shuffle disaster in 1986
Because of the terrific force of the explosion and the subsequent long
fall to the ocean, the remains were very fragmentary and immense pains
were taken to ensure proper identification  Details of the condition
of these remains have never been made public, but Ellis's reputation is
so great that no one has ever dreamed of questioning them
Krogman's brief Guide became the Bible of the new science, both for the
FBI and for the United States Army, which soon had to deal with
thousands of skeletonized dead American soldiers, sailors and airmen in
World War II  The furious island baffles in the Pacific Theater, and
the back-and-forth fighting later on in Korea, resulted in many remains
being left on the field to be retrieved later  Those without dogtags
could only be gathered up by the Army Quartermaster Corps and taken to
sundry mortuaries for identification  Often the skeletons of
Japanese and Koreans were mixed in with the American remains, and it
became a matter of some importance to separate our dead from these
other bones of Asiatic origin  (Korea was the last American war in
which large numbers of American dead were abandoned or buried on the
battlefield  By the time of the Vietnam War, advances in mobility and
transport enabled most American soldiers to be evacuated immediately
from combat zones, whether they were wounded or dead) Partly because
of the United States campaigns in the Pacific, the Central
Identification Laboratory in Hawaii (CILHI) was set up in 1947
Charles E Snow (1910-67) was the first physical anthropologist to
serve there  Mildred Trotter, who is still with us today, was another
Trotter has won an extraordinary reputation in our field for her great
contributions to anatomy and osteology: My own teacher, Tom McKern
(1920-74), worked on these war dead in 1948-49
McKern collaborated with another well-known anthropologist, T
Dale Stewart in identifying and measuring the remains of 450 skeletons
of men killed in the Korean War
Dale Stewart was a devoted disciple of Hrdhgka's  He admired the old
man so much that he painted a portrait of him and hung it in his
office; and Hrdligka's ashes are in an urn next to the portrait
Dale himself was an extremely active, fit man who broke his hip while
in his eighties and used to demonstrate how well it had healed by doing
jumping jacks for anyone who cared to watch  He used to get into
terrific scholarly arguments with another legendary figure in our
field, Larry Angel  Larry was a Harvard-educated anthropologist, bald,
with muttonchop whiskers and a brdhant, restless mind  I never heard
Larry talk about anything but his work  It was a sight to behold, to
see these two giants-Oants in intellect,but men of very small physical
stature-Stewart and Angel, quarreling loudly with each other at the
Smithsonian over pubic symphyses (the pubic symphysis is a part of the
skeleton which changes-throughout LIFE and can be crucial in
determining age)  @ was an extraor(inmy c aracter in his own right, a
dazzling teacher who used to astonish police and FBI agents by tasting
bone samples placed in front of him  it looked shocking enough, but
there was a reason why Larry did what he did  Small fragments of bones
often get mixed up with rocks, and it can be difficult to tell the two
apart
But you can decide immediately whether a small lump of material is bone
or rock by touching it to your tongue  Bone will stick to your tongue
because of its porous nature  Rock will not  It is a trick I use
myself, from time to time
But it does cause talk
For us forensic anthropologists, 1973 is the year we came of age as a
discipline  It was in that year that the new section of physical
anthropology was established within the A:American Academy of Forensic
Sciences, with fourteen members  This is our own section and we meet
once a;year at the academy's convention  Our work is published in the
Journal of Forensic Sciences, and within its pages are articles with
such titles as: "Injuries to Cadavers Resulting from Experimental Rear
Impact" an article for which six corpses were strapped into automobiles
and test-crashed to see what postmortem trauma would look like); "The
Effect of Severe Bedsores on Bone"; "The Individuality of Human
Footprints"; and "The Mummified Heart"
I have not missed an academy convention since 1974, the year I
joined, and I look forward to every reunion with intense anticipation
I love these meetings because they represent the only chance I get to
see many of my colleagues-and many of my colleagues are extremely
colorful people  The extraordinary Clyde Snow can be relied upon to
tell hair-raising stories, in his Southwestern drawl, of the latest
bodies he's examined in war zones in Bosnia, Afghanistan or Guatemala
Papers are presented on new, research and techniques
The former New York City medical examiner, Dr Michael Baden, hosts
a "Bring Your Own Slides" evening, at which some truly astounding
images are presented
One of the highlights of our meetings is the proceedings of the Last
Word Society, in which each participant will present a paper on some
vexing historical problem  Among the riddles we have debated are
these: Was Vincent Van Gogh's color imagery and style the result of
digitalis poisoning?  Did Charles Darwin suffer from nicotine toxins?
Who was jack the Ripper?  Did King Richard III really order the murder
of the two princes in the Tower of London?  What was the final body
count in the legendary crash that killed Notre Dame football coach
Knute Rockne?  What was the final body count in the legendary feud
between the Hatfields and McCoys?
One comes away from the AAFS convention with renewed energy to try
something new, do something differently  Perhaps we will exchange
notes, reprints or case reports with each other  Perhaps we will feel
encouraged to check an unidentified skeleton to see if it matches a
missing person we've heard described during a meeting
Sometimes we bring specimens to the conventions, not to fool each other
but in honest perplexity  We are baffled, so we solicit one another's
opinions  Often the advice we get is invaluable  These annual
meetings are a splendid opportunity for u's to trade ideas, to scrape
away the rust of academic isolation
During these annual proceedings applicants who wish to become
diplomates of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology are examined
Involved are two days of rigorous examination, a day of written tests,
followed by a day of on-the-spot identification of skeletal specimens
The second dayes exams obviously require the presence of the dead as
well as the living, and some of us have to bring specimens of bones to
the convention
This requires some explanation, particularly at airports  I always
make a point of telling the airline ticket agent just how many skulls I
have with me in my baggage-not to shock her, but to make sure that, in
case the plane crashes, investigators wig know why there were more
skulls than passengers aboard  This is mere professional courtesy to
my colleagues, who will have to pick through my remains in the event of
an accident
Once, I recall, we were using the skeletal collections of a major
museum for exam purposes  This museum had some very interesting
specimens, including many samples of gunshot victims from the Texas
Revolution in the early part of the nineteenth century  But the most
fascinating skeleton in the bunch wasn't a victim of war, or murder, or
any violent death  It was the skeleton of one of the curators of the
museum, who had bequeathed his bones to the collection, where they had
remained for many years  These bones stood out, not for any deep
scientific reason, but because they had bits of tinsel still sticking
to them
Tinsel!  We were told that this curator's skeleton had been "invited"
to many Christmas parties at the museum in the years after his death
We also heard that his bones had been bedecked with Christmas
decorations-and the evidence of the tinsel was sparkling, conclusive
proof that the rumors were true  I am usually against lighthearted
treatment of human remains, but in this case I suspended judgment  The
man in LIFE was loved  He left his bones to the museum where he had
spent his happiest days  It was no very great wrong, I think, for his
successors to take his bones to Christmas parties he would himself have
enjoyed, alive  And if they saluted his mernoxy with festive cups of
eggnog, and decked his bones math tinsel and ornaments, they did so out
of sincere respect and affection for a departed scientist  That is
true camaraderie!

 - ----Unnatural Nature In nature, there's no blemish but the mind;
None can be called defonnd, but the unkind

-Shakespeare, Tweed@h Night, Act III, Scene 4

I have spent most of my life exploring the extraordinary properties of
human bone and the close-knit harmony of the human skeleton  From the
pale, translucent, pearly luster of the fetal skeleton, so delicate and
wraithlike, to the ghastly, disfiguring eruptions and outbubblings that
seethe up like scorched milk from the extraordinary bones of Joseph
Merrick, the renowned "Elephant Man" of the 1880s, the mortal frame
of the human body-the skeleton-is to me an object of inexhaustible
wonder, a book I shall never finish reading
If there is one thing I have sought to impress on my students, it is
that they must not think of bones as solid and unchanging  The
astonishing hardness and durability of human bone can deceive the
untaught into thinking that bone is something rocklike and changeless
Nothing could be further from the truth  Our skeletons are constantly
'in flux, constantly reshaping themselves  While we live, our bones
are alive, fanned of a swarm of living cells embedded and
surrounded in the matrix of the bone wall, basking in the warmth of the
blood cells they create in their inmost marrow  The covering of the
bone, the periosteum, is constantly spinning forth new bone cells,
destroying old ones  Throughout our lives our bones change from one
hour to the next  As we age, they begin slowly to fuse together, to
remodel themselves, to grow stiffer, more brittle and less elastic
Nor am I exempted from this process simply because I have studied it in
some detail: inside my own body, across autumns and winters, I sense
the slow approach of age by the gradual, ineluctable stiffening of my
joints  With each passing year, my movements are slightly more
circumscribed  I am my skeleton's mask and puppet, as you are yours
We keep no secrets from our bones  We blurt out everything shamelessly
to these silent, obedient servants of our days  Within the archives of
our skeletons are written down the intimate diaries of our lives: our
ancestry, our illnesses, our injuries and infirmities, the patterns of
our labor and exercise, sometimes even our most secret sins and
blush-worthy abuses  All we have been, or nearly, is inscribed and
enclosed in our skeletons, to be revealed at last when they stand forth
naked, the flesh having fallen away from them  To read all of these
things-that is the art of forensic anthropology
Of what does this remarkable structure consist?  The great English
stylist and polymath, Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82), marveled that so
little should be left of a man, after cremation:

How the bulk of a man should sink into so few pounds of bones and
ashes, nmy seem strange unto any who considers not its constitution  
  Even bones the?welves reduced to ashes do abate a notable
proportion  And consisting much of a volatile salt, when that isfired
out, make a light kind of cinders    
Brovme was a shrewd observer  Fire does indeed resolve bone into its
two essential components: one that is inorganic and made up of minerals
such, as calcium carbonate, and the other consisting of more complex
organic chemicals
These organic portions of the bone include a material called
collagen-you may know it from shampoo commercials on television
Collagen is a marvelous substance that gives bone its elasticity,
adding to its strength and preventing breakage  It gives the bone the
ability to bend and flex within tolerable limits  We would shatter at
every fall, like china dolls, were it not for collagen  It is possible
to leach the calcium and other inorganic chemicals out of a fresh bone
by soaking it in a dilute solution of acid, such as hydrochloric acid
What remains after this acid bath is a specimen of what appears to be
hard rubber  So elastic is the bone at this point that a fibula-the
long thin bone from the lower portion of the leg-can sometimes
carefully be tied into an overhand knot
The disease osteomalacia-"bone-softness" in Greek-is characterized by a
superabundance of collagen, disproportionate to the inorganic bone
matrix  The victims of this disease are able to tie their legs in
knots and perform other amazing and shocking contortions  Such
prodigies formerly inhabited circus sideshows and were advertised as
"The India-Rubber Man" or "The Boneless Wonder"
The latter was mentioned by Winston Churchill in a famous parliamentary
speech lampooning Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald in 1931  As a youth,
Churchill said, he had longed to see the Boneless Wonder in P T
Barnum's circus, but he was forbidden to do so by his parents, "who
judged that the spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing for
my youthful eyes
"I have waited fifty years," Churchill said scathingly, while ttiming
to face Ramsay MacDonald, "to see the Boneless Wonder sitting on the
Treasury bench"
The other, inorganic component of bone is what remains after, a fire or
long action by the sun  All the organic compounds are volatized away
and what is left is a chalky residue: "calcined bones"
Here is bone at its driest, purged of all its organic compounds by
heat  But diseases, too, can rob a bone of collagen and, when collagen
departs, elasticity departs as well  Osteoporosis, hyperparathyroidism
and osteogenesis imperfecta-all these conditions are essentially
imbalances in bone chemistry, rendering bones brittle as twigs
Sometimes children with these disorders are brought to hospital
emergency rooms with one or more broken bones and are diagnosed as
victims of child abuse  They aren't  Their bones, not their parents,
are to blame
One particularly horrific disease, leontiasis ossea, which is
mercifully rare, causes huge foamy eruptions a'nd effusions of bone,
jutting up from the skull, forming horrid crowns and bubbles of bone
The skulls of the victims of this disease seem to start up in waves and
combs, resembling a lion's shaggy mane
All of us have seen the brain teaser in newspapers: how many bones are
there in the human body?  The answer is usually upward of two hundred,
but the question is terribly unscientific  The number of bones in your
body strictly depends on the time in your life you are talking about
Even after maturity it varies  The bones of the coccyx, the tailbone,
will fuse together  In the bones of some adults the breastbone will be
a single bone, but in others it is still two or three bones  In some
older individuals you may find only a few dozen separate elements,
because so many bones have fused together  There are even cases on
record of skeletons being totally fused into a single solid mass  In
such an extreme case, the individual must choose whether he wishes to
spend the brief remainder of his LIFE in a sitting or standing
position
The pangs of childbirth, the Bible says, are fleeting and immediately
repaid by the joys of new motherhood  But women should know that a
record of those days is etched permanently in the surface of their
pelvises as "parturition scars"  These scars begin to form in about
the fourth month of pregnancy, when a hormone that softens the tendons
that knit the pelvic bones together is released
To use a bit of shop talk, these telltale signs of childbirth appear on
the dorsal side of the pubic symphysis near the margins of the
articular surfaces and in the preauxicular grooves or sulci of the
ilia  In plain English, this means that women often carve notches in
their pelvises after every childbirth, the way gunfighters in the
American West carved notches in their pistol butts after every death
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I believe a case might be
made that female skeletons are more beautiful than their male
counterparts  There are actual scientific terms to distinguish the
aesthetic impression a female skeleton makes, as opposed to a male
Such terms are aids to identification, or "sexing the skeleton," as we
call it  A typical female set of bones is said to be
gracilis-smoother, less knobbly, with edges gracefully planed or
beveled, as if by an invisible adze  A typical male is robustus  His
bones are thick, pitted and bumped with rough irregularities where the
muscles and tendons were attached  These qualities of robustness and
gracefulness are used in determining the sex of skeletons that are
incomplete or immature, and they are often very subjective  There are
bits of skeletons, especially those of children and adolescents, in
which the sex distinction is obviously very blurry  Female body
builders are creating knotty lumps on their bones where their hard-won
new muscles are anchored, so their bones look more robust  Transsexual
men who take estrogen are going in the opposite direction, moving from
robustus to gracilis, making their skeletons smoother and more
equivocal
Certain it is that the female skull is visibly more polished and
even-surfaced than the male skull, as if it had been turned on some
invisible potter's wheel  We men are rough creatures, even in our
inmost core  The male skull has a square jaw and heavy brows  We
sport craggy bumps and knots and projections where our muscles are
anchored
Our skulls often look as though they were sculpted of rough clay  The
same is true of male arm and leg bones  Males have big knobby joints
if you don't believe it, go to the beach and look at the knees  The
length of a person's hair may deceive you, but the knees-never!
One of the most puzzling cases I ever handled occurred over in
Jacksonville some years ago  A completely dry and fleshless skeleton
was found next to a rusted 22 rifle  The bones were still clothed in
a very soiled running suit  Decomposition of the flesh had thoroughly
soaked the running suit and left it in a dry, hard, crumpled mass
There was a 22-caliber gunshot wound in the forehead of the skull
The police brought me the body and the clothing and asked me for an
analysis
It was a small skeleton, a very graceful individual  I briefly examined
the running suit and put it aside and turned to the bones
After a/ while I phoned the medical examiner's office and said: "I
believe the individual is a male, probably from Asia and in his late
twenties and of short stature"  They thanked me and said they would
check the missing persons reports
A few days later they called back and said: 'Ve've got some missing
Asiatic females but no males"
I said I'd take another look at the skeleton  I called back and said
that the pelvis showed some female characteristics, but overall I
thought it was a male  They pleaded with me: "Can't you tell us
anything more?"
So I went back and looked at the skeleton a third time  I pried open
the hardened mass of the running suit and found a pocket concealed on
the inside of the trousers  I removed several objects and called the
medical examiner's office  After all this work I felt a smug
satisfaction in having solved the mystery by very obvious methods
"I can't tell you his name," I said innocently, "but would his address
and driver's license number help you at all?"
Among the objects in the knitted-together pocket was a disintegrating
driver's license that identified the owner as a twenty-eight-year-old
male from the Philippines, who had been arrested a couple of years
before for attacks on male children  He had escaped from custody
during transport, hitched a ride in a pickup truck and leaped out of
the truck with a 22 rifle stolen from a rack on the rear window
After that, he had vanished  Desperate, a fugitive, he had apparently
decided to kill himself using the stolen rifle
On February 17, 1818, a large tomb was found on the grounds of
Dunfermhne Abbey in Scotland  Sandstone slabs concealed a shallow
vault, barely eighteen inches deep  Fragments of oak and nails and
tatters of gold cloth were found around the form of a tall man, encased
in lead  Immediately speculation arose that this was the long-lost
grave of King Robert the Bruce, a hero of the Scottish wars of
independence, the man who, according to legend, learned patience from a
spider spinning its web at his cell window, the man who forced the
English to relinquish their claim on Scotland in 1328 with the Treaty
of Northampton  Yet King Robert's death had always remained a mystery
He died only a year after this personal triumph, shut away from the
world, apparently in the grip of a mysterious wasting disease
He breathed his last, aged fifty-five, on June 7, 1329, and was buried
in Dunfen-nline Abbey, his heart enshrined separately at Melrose Abbey
The rediscovered grave was hastily closed up again and remained locked
and barred until it was officially reopened on November 5, 1819  A
large crowd of notables and scientists were on hand to witness the
event  The lead was peeled back from the limbs and sawed away from the
skull of the skeleton, which belonged to a man who in life had stood
about five feet eleven inches tall  The breastbone was split, as if
the heart had been forcibly removed after death
The teeth of the lower jaw survived, but the upper incisors were
missing from the mala, or upper jaw, and the maxilla itself looked
curiously eroded and worn away  The body was examined and an exact
cast was made of the skull, which still reposes in the Anatomical
Museum of the Medical School of the University of Edinburgh
A copy of the cast is kept in Dunfermline Abbey' and another in the
Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in London
The skeleton was then reburied with great pomp and ceremony, and a copy
of John Barbour's 1375 epic poem on the life of Robert, The Brus,
was,interred with the bones  For the skeleton almost certainly
belonged to the greatest of Scotland's kings, Robert the Bruce
But the story did not end with the reburial  The unexpected revelation
of the skull enabled investigators to settle once and for all a rumor
about King Robert, put forward in 1327 by the French chronicler, jean @
Bel  Le Bel said King Robert died of la grosse die, a medieval
euphemism for leprosy  Today leprosy can be treated and arrested with
such drugs as dapsone and rifamprin, but in the Middle Ages the
visitation of the disease sentenced the sufferer to lifelong banishment
and a lonely, lingering death  The disease germ, Mycobacterium leprae,
hates heat and heads for the cooler areas of the body: the buttocks,
the nose, the extremities of the limbs and, in males, the testicles
Here it multiplies and gnaws away at nerve endings and skin and
cartilage tissue  As the nasal cartilage and the palate are destroyed,
the patient's features undergo a kind of collapse, resulting in the
classic "leonine" or lionhke face characteristic of leprosy  But
because leprosy can mimic almost any skin disease, it is often very
difficult to tell whether the "lepers" or the Bible or the Middle Ages
really had the malady
Enter Vflhelm Moller-Christensen  This Danish doctor, endowed with
superhuman patience, had made a hobby of examining medieval skeletons
in Denmark since the 1930s  In 1944, while working at Aebelholt Abbey
in Denmark, he had unearthed the skeleton of a young woman whose bones
were terribly deformed  He suspected leprosy, but to ver* his thesis
years of patient work were needed  He learned that medieval leper
hospitals were usually dedicated to St George (known as St jorgen
in Danish), and that there had been thirty-one such hospitals in
medieval Denmark  On the property of a farm near Naestved, known as
St jorgen's Farm, long and patient digging revealed the most
extensive medieval graveyard for leprosy victims ever discovered  Over
a twenty-year period Moller-Christensen unearthed, cleaned and
preserved 'More than 650 skeletons  Many had their upper incisors
missing and their maxfllae eroded, a deformity Moller-Christensen
called facies lep rosa, the "leprous face"
In 1968 the Danish doctor was finally able to examine the cast of the
skull of King Robert  He needed only a few minutes' inspection to
reach a conclusion  The ravages offacies leproma were unmistakable
"The matter finally lay beyond dispute," wrote Michael Howell and Peter
Ford in their engaging 1985 book, The Ghost Disease  "A great man had
been brought low by a terrible affliction  Robert the Bruce, King of
Scots and a hero of his country, ended his days as a leper"
Perhaps the single most eloquent and affecting skeleton I have ever
examined belonged to Joseph Merrick, the so-called "Elephant Man,"
whose story has reached a modern audience thanks to a popular play and
motion picture
For me, the Elephant Man is no artistic stage prop, nor a distant,
historical footnote, but a deeply moving reality  I have carefully
studied his bones, and these extraordinary relics made an indelible
impression on me,  I who have seen thousands of skeletons in every
conceivable state of wholeness and decay
I had two reasons for requesting to examine these remarkable remains
I wanted to look closely at Merrick's skeleton because it seemed to me
that photographs and drawings of him in life showed distortions that
did not particularly match the photographs of the skeleton  And since
the-skeleton and the body cast of Joseph Merrick were prepared
immediately after his death and are both kept at the Royal London
College of Medicine Museum, it was possible to use modern
superimposition techniques to overlay one image upon another, the
external body cast and the inner bones, matching them up  After an
examination that lasted several days, we discovered that, to a
surprising extent, Merxick's deformities belonged to his skin, not to
his skeleton
But there was another reason I felt it important to do this project
The museum's curators told me that at that time, in 1988 the American
pop star Michael Jackson had made a startling offer to buy the Elephant
Man's skeleton for a million dollars  The museum quite properly
rejected his offer, but as soon as word of it got out, long-lost
Merrick relatives came scampering out of the woodwork, eager to
"rescue" the skeleton from the museum's collection  One' may speculate
as to their motives  I felt that, in the face of such demands to
release this unique, famous and quite irreplaceable skeleton, it would
be helpful to demonstrate that the bones of the Elephant Man could
still contribute something to science  Human
remains should not remain idle in museum collections  Medical museums
are not attics in which to store things merely for culiosity's sake
Their contents should serve some ongoing scientific purpose  If the
remains of Joseph Merrick were to stay in the collection, it was
necessary to prove they belonged there  I hoped I was helping to "hold
the fort," together with the museum's curators, against people who
wished to traffic with Merrick's bones
Nor was this a makework project  The diagnosis of the genetic disorder
that Joseph Merrick suffered from has lately been called into question
Dr Frederick Treves, who discovered the Elephant Man and wrote the
original monograph on him, diagnosed Merrick as suffering from multiple
neurofibromatosis  But recent articles have suggested that it might be
Proteus syndrome, a newly discovered and rather obscure disorder
Not being a pathologist myself, I didn't want to jump into that
controversy, but I did want to make sure that the evidence of the
skeleton and body cast was thoroughly used and would remain available
to those pathologists interested in the question
The Royal London College of Medicine Museum is a fascinatin old
building  Pacing the corridors of its upper floors, one feels the
atmosphere of Victorian medical schools  I was there at Christmastime,
1988, and the building was like an icebox inside  I would come away
from the hospital in the gloomy evenings, my breath fuming in damp
dark, yet breathing the air of Charles Dickens, partaking of the spirit
of some of the characters from A Christmas Carol or The Old Curiosity
Shop  London is my favorite city, a veritable time machine, allowin
you to slip back easily into bygone epochs simply by turning a
corner, stepping into a narrow alley or shadowy byway
Besides Merric's bones, the hospital has a rich and macabre collection
of odchties, including evidence of the famous 1911 "Siege of Sidney
Street," in which police baffled a gang of anarchists  There is a
specimen in a jar-a bit of tissue with a bullet wound in it-ttaken from
the body of one of the police constables killed by t anarchists
To reach the floor where Merrick's skeleton was laid out for me, i
climbed two flights of a back stairway  just before the stairs, the
walls were hung with the names and photographs of past medical staff
members  There I saw honored Francis Camps, the famous forensic
pathologist; Watson Jones, one of the premier orthopedic surgeons of
his time; and Grafton Elliot Smith, whose magnificent study of Egyptian
mummies remains one of the best ever done
The Merrick skeleton normally resides in a large room in the museum
But for my examination it was moved to a small workroom, which
contained among other things a large tank of tropical fish and a window
looking down at the narrow street alongside the hospital
This view must have been very similar to the one once glimpsed by
Joseph Merrick himself, for he spent his last years in two rooms of
this hospital  The room we finally entered had an old-fashioned warded
lock with a single plate coming down at the end, with a keyhole-shaped
keyhole, which opened to a large old-fashioned heavy iron key
There, facing us on a low platform, stood the famous skeleton
I was surprised to see how small it was  Merrick had been a short man
in LIFE, and his stature had been shortened further by scoliosis, or
curvature of the spine  I was also struck immediately by the great
differences between the left and light sides of the skeleton  The bon
y defects were not at all symmetrical  Merrick's infirmity had
invaded his right side utterly but spared parts,of his left  The right
side of his skeleton showed vastly greater enlargement and bony growth,
while the left side was mostly lacking these defects  Even in the
skull, the light side of the braincase displayed massive nodules of
bone; but the left side was smooth and unaltered, except by one small
rectangular window through which Merrick's brain had been removed
during the postmortem preparation  This little window was closed with
metal latches
i measured the body cast, then the skull, from various directions
I prepared numerous video and photographic images, so that we could
actually decide where his flesh met his bone, the exact thickness of
Merrick's skin tissue  Thus we were able to establish exactly how much
of the abnormal growth was the result of soft-tissue tumors and how
much was owed to bone changes  As I have said, we found that most of
the changes in Merrick's head were due to softtissue abnormalities and
not skeletal deformities
Gradually, however, the cold light of science yielded to a host of
human emotions  By passing my hand, very lightly, close to the surface
of the massive body cast of Merrick's features, made after his death, I
experienced a ghostly sensation: I could actually feel Merrick's hairs,
stuck in the plaster after all these years, yanked out of his dead
body when the plaster was removed after his death on April 11, 1890
These hairs may one day furnish absolute proof, by means of the DNA
they still contain, of the exact nature of Merrick's malady
There may soon come a day when geneticists will be able to determine
with certainty the genetic basis of Joseph Merrick's profound infirmity
Ironically the bones themselves are probably devoid of DNA; they were
boiled after Merrick's death, prior to being mounted
Other parts of his body were also preserved, including large areas of
his skin with the - major soft-tissue growths represented
Unfortunately the museum lies near the London Docks, a section of the
city heavily bombed during World War II  During the Blitz, the alcohol
in those old specimen jars evaporated and the skin specimens dried
out and were lost  They would have been an ideal source of DNA
Another small oddity: Dr Frederick Treves, the famous surgeon who
discovered and cared for Merrick, changed the Elephant Man's name to
'John Merrick"  No one knows why, and the error has crept into all the
literature about Merrick, even the Blue Guide to London  But if one
examines Treves's original notes, as I did, one sees that the doctor
mysteriously scratched out the word "Joseph" and wrote "John"
Merrick's birth certificate is also at the museum, and on this document
he is clearly identified as Joseph
This renowned and unique skeleton makes an almost physical impact upon
your eye and heart  Perhaps it's because we have read so much about
the man who owned it, and we possess such poignant descriptions of
Joseph Merrick, his sad life as a circus freak, his remarkable rescue
from misery at the hands of Dr Treves, and his ennobling struggle to
realize his human potential  For my part, I can only declare that this
skeleton, perhaps more than any other I have ever beheld, talks to-you
in very simple, powerful, human terms  It transfers emotions to you in
a physical sense, with a directness and immediacy unequaled by any
other skeleton I have ever seen  As I looked at Merrick's hips-that
oversized right hip, side by side with the undersized left hip-I seemed
to behold poor Merrick himself, limping along with his slowly tapping
cane; his outsize cap perched atop the great, swaying hood that
curtained off his enormous head from mocking eyes; his shabby,
concealing, ragged cloak: Merrick the man, as he was in LIFE, making
his way haltingly through the dark streets of Whitechapel at night,
burdened with his terrible body
This image, I say, came to me with the vivid force of a vision, and it
remains a haunting personal memory  As I beheld his hands, his
delicate and almost perfectly formed left hand, and the huge, clublike
right hand, I could see the two halves of Joseph Merrick, soul and
body: the delicate, intelligent person caged within, who impressed all
who came in contact with him with his essential humanity, his
gentleness, patience and joy-and the dreadful, gnarled, outward facade
of swollen bone and tissue run hot, which acted as a prison house to
his spirit and made of him, to ignorant eyes, a monster
Both these truths were written unmistakably in that extraordinary
skeleton, and reconfirmed my faith in the veracity and expressiveness
of the human frame  Stretched to its uttem-iost, deformed beyond
deformity, bone never lisps, stutters or falls dumb  It proclaims its
truths the more loudly, the more it is taxed and twisted by unnatural
nature and misfortune  Patient and silent while we live, our skeletons
shout to heaven and posterity after we die
The logo of the C A Pound Human Identification Laborato The tombstone
of outlaw Bonnie Parker  Every criminal was likely loved by someone in
life

A healed hole in a skull (trepanning), drilled to relieve pressure
after a head injury
An artificial hip taken from a skeleton
"A Sonless Place
Methought I saw over space: And, at herfootptint, but a byegone pace,
The ocean-past, which, with increasing wave, S d her steps like a
pursuing grave
So lay they gammted in torpid light, Under the pall of a transparent
night, Like solemn apparitions killed sublime To evening rest, mind with
them Time Slept, as he sleeps upon the surface Of a dark dial in a
sunless place

-Thomas Hood, The Sea of Death

Hell is not a place, some theologians declare, but a state of being
Evil has no independent existence, St Augustine wrote, but is merely
the absence or negation of good
Such subtleties lie beyond my competence  I am a scientist, not a
clergyman  I do not know whence evil arises; but I have seen where it
falls to earth, extinguishing life and disfiguring limb  I have
examined carefully the aftermaths of evil, in that too late hour when it
has already triumphed over the meek, the weak and the innocent
On my laboratory table I have read its atrocious language of wounds and
outrages, the sight of which would wring the hardest heart
And I have been present, too, at the autopsies of evildoers after they
have been executed by law  I have seen the black scorch marks left by
the electric chair on their shaved heads and legs; seen their brains
and viscera laid bare by the knife and the Stryker saw, the tops of
their heads popped off with a twist of the Virchow skuubreaker, a tool
shaped like a large, shiny skate key with flanges on its bore  I have
seen their organs lifted out one by one, set aside, weighed and
photographed  Afterward, the autopsy room is thoroughly cleaned and
disinfected with diluted bleach; but if you look closely, you can see
that the bits of chalk used to scrawl the organ weights on the
blackboard are maculated with old human blood
On such occasions, we clearly do not expect demons to swarm gibbering
from the opened braincase and flitter like black bats around the
autopsy room  Nevertheless, it is impossible to regard a murderer's
brain without an involuntary tingle of curiosity: what lay deep within
the coralline gray whorls of this small, silenced kingdom?  What
happened along its intricate hallways, within the fine cerebral webwork
of axons and dendrites, whose tiny, myriad sparkrings are the physical
basis of thought?  Before it was shocked to death itself, what shoeldng
poisons did this unique lump of flesh clistffl, to so subvert the mind
of its owner and warp his will to evil?
I cannot say  Over the years my work has brought me into contact with
abysses of evil: the most depraved murders, and the most unregenerate
murderers  But even after long, enforced communion with the foulest
recesses of human nature, I cannot trace this dark river to its source,
nor can I suggest a way to dam or divert it  From what I have seen,
the impulse to evil is something deep within an individual from his very
earliest years, if not from birth  At the center of the -labyrinth of
certain human personalities there lurks a Minotaur that feeds on human
flesh, and we have not yet found the thread to help us map this maze
and slay the beast
The instruments of murder are as manifold as the unlimited human
imagination  Apart from the obvious-shotguns, rifles, pistols, knives,
hatchets and axes'-I have seen meat cleavers, machetes, ice picks,
bayonets, hammers, wrenches, screwdrivers, crowbars, pry bars,
two-by-fours, tree limbs, jack handles (which are not "tire irons";
nobody carries tire irons anymore), building blocks, crutches,
artificial legs, brass bedposts, pipes, backs, belts, neckties,
pantyhose, ropes, bootlaces, towels and chains-all these things and
more, used by human beings to dispatch their fellow human beings into
eternity  I have never seen a butler use a candelabrum  I have never
seen anyone use a candelabrum!  Such recherche elegance is apparently
confined to England  I did see a pair of sneakers used to kill a
woman, and they left distinctive tread marks where the murderer stepped
on her throat and crushed the life from her  I have not seen an icicle
used to stab someone, though it is said to be the perfect weapon,
because it melts afterward  But I do know of a case in which a man was
bludgeoned to death with a frozen ham
Murderers generally do not enjoy heavy lifting-though of course they
end up doing quite a bit of it after the fact, when it is necessary to
dispose of the body-so the weapons they use tend to be light and
maneuverable  You would be surprised how frequently glass bottles are
used to beat people to death  Unlike the "candyglass" props used in
the movies, real glass bottles stand up very well to blows
Long-necked beer baffles, along with the heavy old CocaCola and Pepsi
bottles, make formidable weapons, powerful enough to leave a dent in a
wooden two-by-four without breaking  I recall one case in which a
woman was beaten to death with a Pepsi bottle, and the distinctive
spiral fluting of the bottle was still visible on the broken margins of
her skull  The proverbial "lead pipe" is a thing of the past, as a
murder weapon  lead is no longer used to make pipes
Whoever wishes to plumb the depths of man's inhumanity to man need only
scan the textbook, the Medicolegal Investigation of Death, edited by
two pathologists, Werner U Spitz and Russell S
Fisher, one of the standard texts in our field  It is a , 623-page
tome filled with photographs that will sear the eyeballs of the
uninitiated, though it holds no terrors for me and my colleagues
In it are shown men, women and children in every stage of death and
decay  Every refinement of murder and torture, every bizarre accident
of fate and fortune, is laid out within these pages in dispassionate
detail  Here are bodies shot, stabbed, hanged, bludgeoned, poisoned,
mangled, decapitated, dismembered, flayed, drowned, strangled,
stretched, crushed, burned, dried, mummified and plankstiff with rigor
mortis  Here are bodies that have been gnawed by dogs and rats, fish
and alligators, beetles and I roaches; bodies that are corrupt and
frothing with fly eggs and maggots  And here, too, are bodies
preserved with wondrous purity and freshness, enfolded soon after death
in a bright crystalline coverlet of snow and ice, cradled by cold and
seemingly immortal in their mortality
But in-many ways the most dreadful chapter in this Black Museum is
Chapter Eighteen, which deals with the investigation of wrongful deaths
in childhood  Its frontispiece is the body of a newborn infant,
stabbed to death many times  One of the collaborators on this chapter,
Dr James T Weston, calls child murder and child torture "man's
inhumanity to man in its most extreme form," and he notes that this
darkest of deeds has been "rationalized by virtually every
justification known to man, including religious beliefs and practices,
discipline and education and, to a large degree, economic gain"
Children are so defenseless and so innocent that these crimes seem
particularly horrendous  "Whoso shall offend one of these little ones
which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were
hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depths of the
sea," warned Jesus Christ in Matthew 18:6  A millstone seems a very
light punishment, in my eyes!  Some of the cases and photographs in
this chapter can break your heart  There is the child who was choked to
death by pepper, which its parents forced it to inhale for punishment
There is the child parboiled over half its body by immersion in hot
water  There is the child -whose frenulum, the stringy halter '
connecting the upper lip to the gum, is torn because he has been hit in
the mouth so often (a lacerated frenulum is a common finding in
physically abused children)  There is the baby beaten to death by a
drunken father because its crying interrupted a
TV football game  There are the looped weals on the back and buttocks
of a child beaten with an electrical extension cord-dozens and dozens
of angry weals on a child's small back  There is a terrible photograph
showing blackened necrosis of the fingertips of a child "sustained in
an effort to protect himself when repeatedly beaten on the head"
I do not recite these horrors for low effect  I have two Children
myself, both girls, now grown, with sons and daughters of their own
I can feel keenly the pain a normal father feels in his imagination at
the mere thought of such brutal injuries  It costs me an effort, in my
professional capacity, to put aside the outrage any human being must
experience when brought into contact with these depravities
Yet put it aside I must, if I am to reach clear and dispassionate
conclusions in my investigations
The more we know about these affairs, the more alert we will be to
their telltale signs  I hopesincerely that a day will come when the
brutal parent or adult will stay his or her hand, if only through fear
of being found out; from the certain foreknowledge that the old
excuses-"She fell"; "I turned my back for a minute, and it happened";
"He's always so clumsy - - "-Will no longer hold water, but instead
lead to swift intervention, prosecution and stern punisbment
I have had several cases invo   lying young children and they have
always remained vivid in my memory  One of the most disturbing of
these involved the remains of a five-year-old girl which were brought
to me for analysis  They were found in a cloth bag that had been
thrown into a pond  Her mother and her mother's boyfriend were accused
of murder  There was evidence that they punished the child by forcing
her to stand in the corner of the bedroom for approximately ten days
without food or water or other fluids  She was not allowed to lie down
and, whenever she collapsed, she was forced to stand up again  In a
diabolical refinement of cruelty, a note was sent to her school
informing her teacher that her medications required at she receive no
food or water during the day  The teacher, knowing no better, complied
with the strange request, becoming an unwitting accomplice in the poor
child's torments  Fortunately, she kept the note, and this telltale
piece of paper was later used as evidence in the investigation of the
little girl's murder
For murdered she had been  An indictment had been secured which
charged that the girl had died of a penetrating wound to the skull  My
part of this terrible case lay in the interpretation of injuries and,
after a careful exan-Anation of the remains, I decided that the
death-by-head-injury scenario was false  The hole in the little girl's
skull was natural  A small bone had simply fallen away from the
decomposing skull, under water
After I discussed my findings with the medical examiner, he returned to
the district attorney and indicated to him the true cause of death:
starvation compounded with possible blunt trauma caused I gs by beaten
on the abdomen  A new indictment was obtained, one that excluded the
penetrating injuries  At the trial it came out that the little girl
was forced to eat soap and recite the alphabet endlessly  She was
whipped mercilessly with a belt whenever she wet her pants  She was
forbidden to sleep, but instead had to stand nightlong in a half-packed
suitcase  The mother's boyfriend, a sadistic lout named Don
MacDougall, was the child's chief tormentor
The mother herself plea-bargained with the district attorney in return
for a fifteen-year sentence  She has served her nine, with time off
for good behavior, and is already free  Macdougall was tried in early
1983 and was sent to prison  He was due to be released from the
Madison County Correctional Institute in North Florida on New Year's
Eve 1992  Under the old penal regulations, MacDougau had managed to
shorten his sentence by a certain number of days, for good behavior
behind bars  But when it was learfied he was to be let loose, there
was such an outcry from the community that the Florida attorney
general, Bob Butterworth, intervened personally and rescinded the early
release date in MacDougall's case  As of this writing, he is still
behind bars, and as one who has seen the pitiable remains of his
victim, I cannot feel sorry for him
Sometimes it takes a long time to conclude a case  In 1983 a medical
examiner from Naples, Florida, sent me the skull of another
five-year-old girl  He wanted to know what idnd of weapon had damaged
the skull  As I examined the skull carefully, I found that something
had struck,the little girl in the center of the forehead and crushed
her fragile bones through the inner halves of both eyes, then passed
through her frontal bone, producing a defect that extended from the
base of her nose sloping upward and backward almost to the center of
the top of her head  It was a terrible injury, caused by terrific
force  It must have killed her instantly
After taking some measurements and looking at sharp angles formed by
the crushed bone, I reported that the weapon had a flat surface, two
sharp angles and parallel sides  it appeared as if she had been struck
by the narrow edge of a two-by-four piece of lumber, or something
very similar in shape and dimensions  That was all I could determine
Years passed  Then, in 1992, almost ten years after her death, an
investigator told me he had interviewed a pedophile already in prison,
who had admitted that he had killed the girl  We had to exhume the
rest of her body from the cemetery to gather additional evidence, but
the confession of the murderer agreed very closely with my original
findings  He told police he had used, not a two by-four, but a piece
of building block about an inch and a half thick
Its sharp angles and straight, parallel sides matched the injury to the
little girl's skull exactly  Eventually he pleaded guilty to the crime
and the case was finally closed  The little girl's skull, which had
been separated from her body as evidence, has been finally buried with
her
Our first impressions are always the strongest  One case in particular
has haunted me for years because of the powerful impression it made on
me at the time, and because it was one of the first such cases I
encountered  It involved the dismemberment of a young girl, just
thirteen years old, and it occurred in 1978
Her, skull was found inside a paint can only a couple of weeks after
the bhild herself disappeared from a school bus stop on the east coast
of Florida  The skull was clean when it was found in the paint can and
the paint can itself was rusty and had probably rusted before the death
of the child  This detail was of some importance, as you will see
The rest of the child's body was never found
My analysis disclosed that the cartilage covering the occipital
condyle, the bone that supports the skull on the neck, had been cut -on
its forward surface and bent backward, while the cartilage was still
fresh  Now when I first saw this skull, after the police brought it to
me, this tab of cartilage had dried, blackened and hardened, but a
microscopic analysis showed that the cuts had been made before this
drying and hardening took place
The conclusion was obvious and grisly: a knife had been used to remove
the head from the bones of the neck immediately after death
Additional cuts were found in various places on the skull, some in
Places deep within it, places where even a knife used in the most
ferocious assault could not reach  I concluded that a knife had been
used to deflesh the remains after death
There was a fracture of the upper jaw which probably resulted from a
blow under the chin  So blunt trauma had taken place; the young girl
had been hit hard, perhaps hard enough to kill her, almost certainly
hard enough to knock her unconscious
Rusty scratches parallel to one another were found on the top of the
cranial vault  Now, since the police investigators had carefully cut
the paint can apart and spread it open to remove the skull, we could
surmise that these scratches occurred when the skull was forced through
the rusty rim of the can by the murderer  That meant that there was no
soft tissue on the skull when it was forced into the can  It must have
been boiled, to have been rendered so clean in so short a length of
time
Bone during life is covered with a very tough fibrous material called
pericisteum  Pardon the illustration, but when you eat barbecued ribs,
the tough fibrous material that makes the meat adhere to the ribs is
the deceased pig's periosteum  In the case before me, I concluded
that, even if -shreds of periosteum had been left on the skull when it
went into that paint can, those rusty scratches could not have been
made on the surface of the bone  Therefore all the periosteum had been
carefully and thoroughly removed by the killer
Gradually a terrible picture emerged  Abducted, beaten, murdered,
decapitated, her skull scraped clean with a knife and then boiled and
jammed into a rusty paint container-the lite girl had met a cruel and
terrible fate  Though her identity was established, and the time of
her abduction was pinned down, no arrests were made
Often in the years that followed I thought about that small,
pathetic,skull  Some years later I asked to see it again, hoping that
with experience and hard-won expertise I might spot something I had
missed in my first analysis-in vain  I had learned all I could esigned
to the fact that not all murders can be solved and that this lite girl
was among those innocents whose deaths go unavenged  The only bitter
consolation in this case was that the girl's parents knew what
happened, and that their daughter was dead beyond a doubt  SO many
cases of missing children are never resolved; and the parents remain in
agonies of uncertainty for the rest of their lives, always clinging to
the faint hope that the child may still be alive somewhere  In such
cases the lives of the parents are often wrecked forever
Then, in the early part of 1994, as this chapter was being written, a
man was arrested in New England in connection with the murders of
several twelve- and thirteen-year-old children  I learned that he
lived in the same county as the decapitated thirteen-year-old whose
skull I had examined so carefully  At the same time, another
twelve-year-old girl was murdered in an adjoining county, in a case I
had also investigated at the time  I have passed the case numbers on
to investigators  I hope that a demonstrable link can be found  I
hope that the law has caught up with a monster
Sometimes we get confirmation of our findings from the murderer's own
lips  In 1990 a man named Michael Durocher, who was on Death Row at the
Florida State Prison in Starke for another learn from it  I was almost
crime, and who saw his appointment with the electric chair draw ever
nearer, decided to get certain matters off his conscience
Durocher told investigators where he had buried his girlfriend, Grace
Reed, her five-year-old daughter, Candice, and his own sixmonth-old
son, Joshua, all of whom he had murdered some ten years earlier
Durocher was under a death sentence for the 1986 shotgun slaying of a
Jacksonville store clerk, whom he robbed of forty dollars and a car
He had also been convicted of fatally beating a roommate in
Jacksonville in 1988, and received a life sentence for that crime
Now, in 1990, following Durocher's directions, a team from the Florida
Department of law Enforcement (FDLE) located the bodies of the
children, Candice and Joshua, as well as that of Grace Reed, in hidden
graves in Green Cove Springs  Durocher admitted that he shot the
mother and daughter with a shotgun, but when investigators asked how
the baby died-this baby was his own sonhe suddenly fell silent  Then,
with a grim smile, he said cryptically: "That's for you to find out"
Indeed, forensic analysis clearly showed that the woman was shot in the
back of the head with a shotgun and the jacket and bones of the little
girl showed that a shotgun blast hit her in the back near her right
armpit and tore through near her breastbone
But the bones of baby Joshua had not a single mark on them
Clearly he was not killed with a shotgun  Was he stabbed?  Smothered?
Choked?  Or had he been buried alive?  "That's for you to find out,"
Durocher had said  I took him at his word and accepted the challenge
with infinite care, I bent my attention to the tiny, mostly
skeletonized remains before me which belonged to an infant murdered ten
years earlier
The ribs were not in good condition, but @ far as I could see there
were no nicks on them  They were clean  In cases of stabbing murders
involving adults, the stabbing implement will not strike any bone about
fifty percent of the time  In children, the probability is obviously
much higher, because children's bones, especially their ribs, are much
closer together  But in this case there was no sign of bone dammage
The baby was still dressed in overall rompers with a bib going up to
straps across his shoulders  The legs opened on their inner seams so
that his diapers could be changed  Under the bib of the overalls was a
T-shirt with hearts and balloons on it and over the clothing of the
upper body was a jacket with a hood  All the snaps on the rompers were
closed  The straps at the top of the bib were fastened, the shirt was
in place under the straps and bib  The top snap of the jacket was
closed, but the lower two snaps were opened
We photographed the clothing still in place and could see no
perforation in the back, in the front, or anywhere  But then I
discovered that, if I raised the lower corner of the unsnapped-jacket
and peeled it bac% there was a perforation in the bib  When I examined
the T-shirt beneath the bib, I found another'perforation, with the same
tilt of its axis, in the same location as the one in the bib  Under
the microscope the synthetic threads could be seen to have a sharp,
slanted cut at their ends
I reported my conclusions to the prosecutor and the defense attorney:
that in my opinion the child had been carefully stabbed to death, by a
murderer who was fastidious enough to lift the corner of the baby's
jacket, slip the knife in through the two layers of clothing
underneath, and then carefully replace the jacket over the dying infant's
fatal wound
I was quite confident of my conclusions, but apparently the prosecutor
was not  Later, however, Durocher broke down and pleaded guilty to
first-degree murder in these three deaths and was given three more
death sentences, After his conviction, the text of an interview he had
had with a prison psychiatrist was made available to the court  The
prosecutor telephoned me, excitement tingling in her voice, and told
me that I had been right  Durocher had confessed to stabbing the baby
in the left chest, underneath its jacket, just as I had said, I told
the prosecutor I was not surprised, that I had been confident I was
right all along, and that she ought to have trusted me more  Was I
arrogant?
I hope not
Durocher went to the electric chair in the fall of 1993  At the end he
behaved stoically, refusing to beg for clemency, or to pursue
legal appeals, or even to seek a stay of execution  To Florida
Governor Lawton Chiles he wrote forthrightly that he believed in
capital punishment and added: "I respectfully request that justice now
be served"  It was  Michael Durocher is no longer among us
Unfortunately, neither are the five other people he senselessly
murdered, including his own infant son
Because of my connection with the case, I was invited to be present at
Durocher's autopsy but had to decline, because I was to be in Hawaii
that day, working with some Vietnam War remains  In Florida, executed
criminals are not autopsied in prison  After being electrocuted and
pronounced dead, they are loaded into a funeral coach and taken to the
District 8 medical examiner's office in Gainesville
When one is present at such autopsies, one's thoughts naturally revert
to the question of capital punishment  I suppose I have an idealistic,
humanistic admiration for countries like Great Britain that have
abolished the death penalty altogether'; but when I return to my work
in the United States I conclude reluctantly that we Americans may not
yet be sufficiently advanced to take that sublime step  I have seen
cases-too many cases--of people who have served time for one murder
killing again after being released  I have seen the bodies of
prisoners murdered in jail by killers who are still serving time  I
once saw the mutilated corpse of a prisoner who had been handcuffed,
stabbed through the eyes and in other parts of his body, then thrown
off a third-floor balcony inside the prison
Capital punishment is a kind of "scorched earth policy," a last,
desperate resort  We create a kind of sterile dead zone around a
murderer and his deeds, a sort of "blasted heath" like that in
shakespeare's Macheth, where nothing lives, except for evil fogs and
ghostly warnings  The murderer is gone, his victims are gone, and all
that remains is a frightful memory, together with the grim certainty
that the dead man will never torture, taunt or M again  The families
of his victims, however, inherit lifelong grief, never to be consoled
As for the various methods used to inflict capital punishment, I
believe some of them are needlessly cruel  Hanging can be anything
from a merciful narcosis, to an excruciating agony of strangulation,
minutes long, to outright decapitation, if the condemned person falls
too far  There is a classic article on hanging, published in 1913 in
the British medical journal, The Lancet  Ideally, hanging dislocates
the neck between the first and second cervical vertebrae, producing a
fracture of the odontoid process of the second vertebra, which extends
up,into the arch of thy first  This severs the spinal cord and
prevents further respiratory function, as does the rope itself, which
constricts the airways
But it is almost certain that the brain survives conscious for some
seconds, maybe even half a minute, after the drop  In some botched
hangings, like that of mary Surratt, who was alleged to have conspired
to fkill Abraham lancoln, the body may twitch horribly for several
minutes  This is how long it takes for the brain to exhaust the oxygen
that was sent to it during the last instants of life  I know that many
hangmen in their autobiographies have boasted of their skill, asserting
that "the body never moved after the drop"  This means nothing  With
the spinal cord severed, the nervous system has been truncated, and no
messages can be sent to the lower limbs  But the brain most likely
still lives yet a little while longer, in agony, inside the "command
module" of the separated skull  Neither does the guillotine
extinguish life in an instant  Grisly experiments involving signals
sent by means of eye blinking have verified that brain activity
continues for twenty to thirty seconds after death, in a guillotined
head  Our brains continue to operate as long as they have oxygen, and
when oxygen is lacking, they shut down  A guillotine merely cuts the
windpipe and blood supply and nerve endings, but it takes a few seconds
for the brain to feel the effects of the sudden deprivation of oxygen
and blood  The condamned man, his heart beating wildly with fear, his
lungs pumping furiously, is involuntarily prolonging his own agony,
richly supplying his brain with blood and oxygen, which mill enable it
to -retain consciousness for several more painful seconds than it would
otherwise, after the knife- falls  I imagine guillotining must be
apocalyptically painful  There is certainly a huge shock, related to
the terrific trauma of the vascular and nervous systems
Nor is the gas chamber any more, humane, in my opinion  Hydrogen
cyanide gas doesn't have the instantaneous effect in all individuals
that is commonly supposed  There are numerous descriptions of
prolonged gasping in some executions  This particular form of
execution is unique in that, unlike any other method of capital
punishment, it involves the cooperation of the condemned man  He has
to take the fatal breath on his own, usually at a sign from the warden
or executioner  There have been instances of breath holding on the
part of the condemned man, in a desperate attempt to prolong life by a
few more seconds  The final, involuntary gasping makes gassing almost
a participatory, voluntary act  There is something vaguely obscene
about forcing someone to kill himself
We in Florida carry out death sentences by electrocution, which is
supposed to be painless and instantaneous  I hold no brief for
electrocution, but I believe it may be the least cruel of all methods
of capital punishment, save one  When I was a college student working
at a mental hospital in Texas, I was often called upon to take care of
psychiatric patients before and immediately after they were given
electric shock treatments  This involves a relatively small, nonlethal
amount of electricity being sent through the brain  Without exception,
I saw them lose consciousness instantly and never complain afterward of
any pain, upon reviving  Indeed, not a single one of them could even
remember the jolt  Therefore I believe the tremendous charge of
electricity sent into the human brain during electrocution must pretty
well scramble the nervous system, making it impossible to sense any
pain
If it were up to me, I should prefer that capital punishment be meted
out exclusively by lethal injection  Unfortunately those opposed to
the death penalty-and I readily grant they are acting from pure and
humane motives-have raised all sorts of legal obstacles in the way of
this much-needed reform
During the administration of a lethal injection, a cocktail of
chemicals is injected into a vein of the condemned criminal  This
cocktail paralizes the respiratory functions, stops the heart by the
action of potassium chloride and closes down the brain quietly and
painlessly by means of barbiturates  There have been many cases of
suicides involving similar barbiturates, which are used to put animals
to sleep  In most of these cases, the needle is found still sticking
in the arm of the dead victim and usually the plunger is not even fully
depressed-it is  that quick
Obviously, the only painful aspect of lethal injections is the
occasional difficulty of finding a vein  Getting the needle into the
circulatory system of individuals who have been drug abusers for years
can be next to impossible  Physicians, too, balk at administering this
final, deadly viaticum, because it violates their Hippocratic oath to,
"first, do no harm"  Paramedics perform the task instead  These
qualms are nothing new  If you recall, in Plato,s phaedo, a doctor
does not administer the hemlock to Socrates  Instead, a prison
attendant brings in the cup, gives a few instructions and leaves the
cell
Socrates drinks down the lethal potion himself
I suppose the most infamous man I ever saw autopsied was the serial
killer, Ted Bundy, who was electrocuted on January 24, 1989, after many
appeals, for murdering at least thirty-six young women
Bundys body was brought to Gainesville under tight security and
autopsied at the medical exmniner's office  I remember there were a
number of young men dressed up in green scrub suits, trying to get past
the hospital security men by telling them they were doctors in
their-residencies there  They weren't, of course; they were
journalists  None succeeded, though a photograph of Bundy's autopsied
remains was later snapped, after the body had left the ME"s office,
and published in a supermarket tabloid
Several things surprised me about Bundy when I saw him for the first
time in the flesh  First, he was a much larger man than I had
imagined  Somehow, looking at photos of him during the trials, I had
received the impression he was slight, of medium height  But he was a
tall, powerftUy built individual  He had put on weight in prison
He obviously had been exercising well  Another interesting detail
was his tan, Bundy exhibited no prison pallor, and one of the personal
effects taken from his cell-after his execution was a bottle of suntan
lotion, the kind that works even without the sun  I believe there was
a cunning reason for this  Right up until the end, Bundy had been
negotiating frantically with the authorities, offering to go out west
with them and show them where he had disposed of the bodies of his
victims, in return for a stay of execution  Buqdy had already escaped
from custody twice, and I believe he was hoping to do it a third time
Tanned and fit, he hoped in his heart of hearts to give the police the
slip and blend in with the population outside prison  If so, he was
deluded  He died here in Florida
The third thing that surprised me was Bundy's age  You could see it in
his face  He had aged extraordinarily  He looked a lot older than he
did during his trial
As with all electrocuted criminals, there was a halo-shaped burn on
Bundy's scalp, and a burn on the side of one leg  When the cranial
vault was opened, there was the usual large mass of congealed blood on
top of the brain that is common in men who have perished under these
dismal circumstances
An enormous amount of investigation has gone into examining physical
brain structure, in an attempt to determine how the brain of a genius
might differ from the brain of a depraved criminal  -We all remember
the scene in the 1935 movie, Frankenstein, when the bumbling assistant
breaks the jar containing the "normal brain" and takes instead the
brain of a criminal to be fitted into Dr  Frankenstein's monster
There is a brilliant and evocative passage in Carl Sagan's 1974 book,
Broca's Brain, in which Sagan examines the cerebrum of the renowned
scientist, Paul Broca, as it floats in a jar of preservative fluid
Sagan wonders if memories of evenings on the Quai Voltaire and the Pont
Royal, of dinners with Victor Hugo, of passionate debates with other
scientists, were still contained within the dead 'neurons of the
floating brain before him
But, as so many behavioral scientists have demonstrated, the physical
structure of the brain doesn't give us the answers to the problem of
good and evil  In deficient brains, you get obvious anatomical
changes, and in degenerative diseases of the brain,
such as -syphilis, you get microscopic and even gross changes  But in
general appearance the brain of a genius, a madman, and an imbecile may
show no differences at all  Size has no bearing on intelligence  Some
of histoxys most remarkable individuals had brains far below average in
size  The brains of males are on average larger than those of females,
but this means nothing, as I am ur s e m y women will an attest  The
brains of modern humans are, on an average, smaller than the brain of
an average Neanderthal
No  If evil is to be found in the brain, then it is probably there
from the very'earliest years Of life, and involves something very basic
in the individual's personality
When it finally was removed and examined, Ted Bundy's brain looked like
anyone else's

 Flames and Urns

The shades are no fable: death'is not the end of all, and the pale
ghost esrapes the raked-overfuneral PYre cynthia a eared to vw,
seeming to bend Over my rouch's head
pp I when she was borne to the Her hair, her eyes were the same as and
the fire gralve: her raiment was charred against her @, had eaten away
the beryl ring her finger wore SPirit and voice yet lived, but the
thus-bones rattled on her battle hands
--False heattl" she cued Now let others possess thee!  Soon
shalt thou be mine alone; thou shalt thou be, and I shall grind -my
bones against thine, commingled!"

-propertius, Elegies, IV, vii

TO behold a human body, soul-sped and committed to the flames, slowly
being combusted within the retort of a crematorium is to witness a
spectacle at once solemn and strikingly colorful
This is the ultimate bonfire of the vanities, in which all that we wore
in life is brightly, brisldy swept away like dross, leaving only the
durable, solid bones beneath  if the door of the oven be opened during
cremation, one can peer in and see the devouring fire PlaYing over the
image of mortality, which lies statue-still and stoic beneath the
nearly colorless jets of faint blue burning gas  The slow reduction of
the body is a very eerie sight, and as the skeleton emerges the flames
Turn different colors, when various salts and chemicals within us are
caught and volatilized  Warm yellows and oranges predominate, with
here and there a twinkle of blue-green fire from burning copper, and a
flicker of purple from potassium  Finally the bare bone peeps through,
blackens as the carbon compounds in it are consumed, then fades from
dark gray, to light gray, and at last to ashen white  The bones may
twist and split, but usually the pelvis remains articulated, and the
skull, though cracked open slightly by the fire, is nonetheless left
largely intact and unexploded  Afterward its sightless eye hollows
gaze darkly upward at the firebrick ceiling and the chimney flue,
through which so much of what we were in LIFE has fled in a plume of
fine smoke
I have been inside such an oven, called a "retort" by those who operate
them, and have investigated closely the process of cremation and the
remains that it leaves behind, in connection with a macabre lawsuit
that I will come to later  The bricks were still warm from the sojourn
of the last occupant, and I had to duck-walk along the V-shaped floor
with its central groove, to avoid getting ash all over my trouser
knees  I was careful to hold my elbows close, to safeguard a tweed
jacket of which I am fond  Bits of calcined bone lay in the corners of
the oven and I measured them carefully-I might be called upon to
testify about them later  The burning-chamber was cramped, dark,
odorless and devoid of soot, but it did not lack a certain powerful,
dismal atmosphere  I had to use a flashlight to peer into its farthest
recesses, and the beam of the light revealed the black, sunken holes
hiding the gas nozzles, which normally provide all the light and warmth
this gloomy recess ever receives  When I later telephoned Margaret and
told her where I had been, she took it very well, all things
considered  She knows, by now, that my work leads me into some odd
nooks
Flame does interesting things to bones, and part of my job is to
examine human skeletal remains after they have been burned  You might
think that the process of combustion would leave lime to study, and
that ashes would yield few secrets about the living being so fierily
diminished after death  But you would be wrong  Flames can create,
and urns can hold, some very lively stories
Crematories are usually housed in separate buildings, standing apart
from the funeral homes that operate them  Each one is different, and
there is a wide range in the quality of the work they do and the pains
they take in combusting and urning human remains
Most crematories have a sort of factory atmosphere about them
There are usually exposed air conditioning pipes overhead, a lot of
metal duct work for the exhaust  Floors are usually of bare concrete
Machinery stands roundabout, used in processing the burned remains and
putting them into proper containers  One very elaborate crematory I
visited had a retort that was open at both ends, with doors at either
extremity  One end opened onto a nicely furnished room finished with
wood paneling and drapes and a chapel-like atmosphere, and the doors to
the retort were faced with wood  The remains, encased in a casket,
would be pushed in through these handsome portals, which would then be
closed gently by the funeral director  The relatives, if they chose,
could sit in this chapel-like room and wait for the cremation to be
completed  The other set of doors opened onto the bare-floored
processing room, where the ashes and bones would be winnowed through,
crushed and poured into their final container by businesslike
attendants  Most families elect not to stay, as the cremation process
takes several hours
There are considerable variations in the procedure and the equiprhent
used, but what I am describing now is more or less typical of what
happens during the process of cremation
Bodies come to the crematorium, most often delivered by a funeral home
or by a service that picks up the remains at the nursing home or
hospital or wherever death took place"Some remains may come from a
funeral ceremony and arrive idly clothed  The remains may still be
wearing articles of jewelry  If the owner wore false teeth in life,
these may still be in the mouth  Some corpses even wear eyeglasses,
though obviously these are not of much use to them anymore
Most crematories refuse to cremate remains enclosed in caskets, though
a few still do  The most common containerused is a large cardboard
box, casket-sized, glued or stapled at the corners where it has been
folded into shape from flat storage, with a shallow lid  The
appearance is not unlike that of an oversized shoebox  Enclosed in
such a container, the remains are rolled on a wheeled table like a
hospital gurney up to the door of the retort, or cremation chamber
This retort is lined with firebrick and has a very rough interior
Usually the mortar is cracked and flaking from the heat of the flames
Retorts are constantly being repaired and remortared, because of the
damage caused by heat within them  This rough, pitted surface has its
drawbacks  Ash lodges on the surface of the bricks and cannot be
entirely recovered  But metal cannot be used to line the retort, as
heat causes it to corrode rapidly  Only firebrick will stand up to
fire over time
There is usually a groove running down the center of the floor, to
trap the combusted remains and make them easier to recover
Natural gas is used to burn the remains and the temperature inside the
retort reaches about 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit  A cheap crematory can
be bought for a few thousand dollars, an elaborate one for hundreds of
thousands  Some of the better ones are made in England nce and have
modern convenie s such as timesets,  where a computer monitors the
temperature and other variables and controls the cooling
After the gas jets are ignited, cremation takes varying periods of
time, depending on the heat and the individual characteristics of the
body  But usually several hours are necessary  Fat bodies tend to
burn more quickly than thin, muscular ones, and I even know of a case
in which a plump corpse burned so fiercely that the inside of the
retort caught fire and was damaged
When cremation is complete, all the organic components of the skeleton
have been destroyed, first by charring, then later by complete
combustion  They are burned away  The bones go from their natural
color to black, as the organic material is carbonized  Then, as these
Organic compounds are combusted, the black fades to dark gray, to gray,
to light gray and finally to white  When the bones are

 Flames and Urn

white, they are said to be calcined  They are now extremely brittle,
but they still appear more or less normal  Bones may shrink under the
action of fire, sometimes by as much as twenty-five percent
They may warp and twist and  sometimes fragment into small little
checkerboard designs, the way a safety-glass windshield shatters into
little cubes  Very often the checking pattern does not completely
penetrate the surface of the bone but only the outer aspects
This shrinking and warpage and checking does not occur until the body
is approaching the naked bone phase  If you look at bones under a
microscope at various stages of their combustion, you will see
interesting changes  Before burning, a section of bone will show all
its interior structures clearly  After burning, the structures can
still be seen, though canals will be closed off and shrunken  But in
the mid-phase of burning, all is black and choked by carbon residue,
and very little of the bone's structure can be observed
There seems to be only a very loose correlation between the weight of
the body and its overall mass on the one hand, and the volume of the
recovered "cremains," as cremated remains are sometimes called for
short, on the other  For most adults the cremains weigh about 22 to
88 pounds  It has nothing to do with what you weighed in life, but is
probably related to what your bones weighed
A small, osteoporotic woman would produce a small amount of cremains
but a large robust male with a heavy frame would produce more  The
proportion of  ash versus bone fragments in cremains is about
fifty-fifty
When the body comes out of the retort in this calcined condition, a
trained osteologist can stand a few feet away, glance at the remains as
they emerge, and tell the crematory employees the race, ri the sex and
approximate age of the deceased  In other words the identifying
characteristics are still there  Fire does not destroy them  But what
happens next is devastating
The remains are removed from the retort, sometimes by sliding a tray
out, but more often by the use of a large, hoelike scraper and a
similarly shaped brush  The hoe rather reminds one of the croupier's
rake used to haul in betting chips at a gaming table  The bones and
ashes are swept into the groove in the center of the floor, then
scraped down the groove into a waiting container  This metal container
is then taken over to a place where a large magnet is set up
This magnet is similar in size and shape to an extra-heavy clothes
iron  It is not an electromagnet, but it works almost like one  It
has a key handle that, when turned, neutralizes or activates the
polarity of powerful magnets inside the iron  Turn the key one way and
the magnet attracts  Turn it the other and all the attracted bits of
metal fall off instantly
During this process the heavy magnetic iron is used to crush the
fragile calcined bone, like a hammering pestle  At this time, any
large debris is removed from the cremains, including such things as hip
prostheses, orthopedic plates, bridgework, any hardware from cremation
containers, cardiac pacemakers and the'like-although pacemakers are not
supposed to be cremated, because their batteries explode  Crematorium
workers look carefully for the wire leads that betray the presence of a
pacemaker in the chest, and if one is spotted, it will be removed
before cremation  But the leads are small, and it is difficult to spot
them every time  These fragments of nonferrous metals are separated
out and usually thrown into a garbage can: they are not considered an
integral part of the body, and they seldom find their way into the urn
Silicone breast implants are a funeral director's nightmare, as they
tend to pop open and melt messily all over the inside of the retort
Hence, no effort is spared to detect and remove them before the rest of
the body is burned  If they are not subjected to fire, these bags of
silicon are wonderfully indestructible and will long outlast their
owners  I have found breast implants around scattered skeletons that
have decomposed in the open  We had a case in central Florida in which
we were examining a female skeleton and its personal effects  One of
my female graduate students, who had led a sheltered life, was watching
while I found and poked a breast augmentation implant  it jiggled like
a jelly-filled bag  "I don't understand," the student said innocently
"What's a jellyfish doing this far inland?"  it took her a long time to
live that error down!
To return to the cremation process: the crudely sorted remains are next
placed into a "pressor,, which is a euphemism for a grinder  The
grinders work in various fashions, but the most common grind the
remains until the particle size is small enough to pass through holes
in a curved sievehke plate at the base of the processor  This is
called the screen  The holes are about five millimeters in diameter, a
bit smaller than a kernel of corn- The processing is now complete  The
cremains, after passing through the perforated plate, now consist of
ash and various particles up to the size of the openings in the screen
they now are Poured into the urn or whatever temporary shipping
container the family has arranged  Sometimes they exceed in volume the
size of the urn and the family has to be asked if they want to buy a
bigger urn  if they don't, it is the duty of the funeral
director to tell them that the excess ashes will be disposed of
according to law- In practice, they used to be dumped in a common pit
near the crematory
Nowadays, they are usually sent to a cemetery, to be poured into a
common grave set aside for this purpose  One very important step needs
to be mentioned: before cremation, most crematories place a nonferrous
metal tag or disk sed with with an Identifying number with the body
This is a five- or six-digit number that is used one time, and one time
only,
to identify this particular set of remains  if the disk is made of
aluminum, it has to be removed from the remains before burning, and put
back in with the ashes  If it is made of brass, it can stay with the
body in the retort, as brass melts at 1,810 degrees Fahrenheit
This tag is usually recovered when the retort is cleaned and the
remains are swept out before the crushing phase  It will then be
separated from the remains and dropped into the urn with the
processed cremains  The number of this tag is logged in the records of
the funeral home
The purpose is obvious: to assure that a certain set of remains ends up
in the proper urn- make sure they won't be mixed up
It is all rather reminiscent of the bracelets given to
newborn babies at hospitals, who can look very much alike
Newborn or newly burned, we ofte s before creSome crematories remove
jwehy from the remain motion and then place the uncremated jewelry in
the urn  Others go ahead and cremate jewelry with the remains, remove
it during the examination for metal prior to grinding, and then place
it in the urn with the ground remains  Most jewels, incidentally,
stand up very well to fire, as they were formed originally deep within
the earth at temperatures significantly higher than a gas fire
Artificial rubies, for example, can be synthesized synthetically by gem
makers using an apparatus called a Vemeuil furnace, but only at 2,000
degrees Centigrade  Synthetic diamonds can only be crystallized at a
pressure of 200,000 atmospheres, at a temperature of 2,600 degrees
Centigrade
Real gems are formed at even higher temperatures and pressures, and the
burning jet of natural gas in the retort is powerless to dissolve them
As for dental work, the porcelain crowns on teeth will slump, but not
melt, in a crematorium retort; and dental gold and silver will not melt
at all  Sterling silver begins to melt at 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit
Gold melts at about 1,945 degrees Fahrenheit  Dental gold has an even
higher melting point because it is an alloy, not pure gold
Amalgam tooth fillings or dental restorations win not usually survive
the flames  They aren't found afterward  A strange material called
cremation slag," consisting of small luihps of grayish shapeless
material, is often found  This slag takes the form of little beads
When broken open they reveal hollow interiors that appear to be made of
glass, like tiny geodes  There are various explanations for how this
slag forms: cremated hair, sand producing melted silicates, or
chemicals from the bones producing a silicate-like debris  But it is
almost always present
Standard procedure does not permit more than one individual to be
cremated at the same time in the same retort  Obviously the families
expect that the cremains they receive in the urn will be those of their
loved one and no one else's
But in actual practice it is very difficult in a firebrick-lined retort
to clean it out perfectly of all traces of previous occupants  Most
crematories are very responsible  They attempt to do a professional
job and adhere to the ethics of their profession  Occasionally, how 
Flames and Urns ever, things go astray  When that happens, or when
someone perceives that it happened, lawsuits fly; and this is when I
may be called on to step in and investigate
The claims raised in these lawsuits are varied: that the wrong cremains
have been returned to the family, that cremains ended up in an
unauthorized location, such as on the freeway, that infants were
cremated along with adults, or that some trespassing stranger is
kibitzing in the same urn with Uncle Frank  Vast sums of money are at
stake  These lawsuits commonly demand millions of dollars in damages,
and this is when I become involved
Were you asked to make sense of this pulverized mass of burned
infinitesimals, this tiny heap of ashes and calcined bone flakes, you
would probably despair  How is it possible to reach back through the
fire, to map and recreate what the fire destroyed?  I tell you it can
be done  I have done it
When we are presented with these cases and we have to determine whether
there has indeed been a switch or some other mistake, we have to look
for far different evidence than we would with a complete skeleton  As
you can imagine, the crushing removes most of the evidence of race and
sex  Age may occasionally still be seen by arthritic upping or
outgrowths along a fragment of a joint, or a vertebra, or by dental
structures, but such bone survivals are rare in the urn and usually so
tiny they are extremely difficult to read
In the case of immature individuals, such as infants, fetuses or small
children, the immature bones may be extremely distinctive
-Sometimes a very precise age estimate is possible  I well recall one
case of cremated fetal remains in which I was able to determine the age
of the fetus within a couple of weeks with great confidence, because of
a tiny bone that survived the flames intact
In most cases, however, what is really important, what tells the tale,
isn't the remains of the individual, but the baggage they had with
them  If you reflect a little you win see what I mean  Most of us
carry around a surprising load of extraneous, artificial baggage inside
our bodies, mainly because of advances in medical and dental science
Surgical procedures leave all kinds of inner footprints  After surgery
to remove aPIal-l bladder or a kidney, after bypass surgery, after a
mastectomy, the blood vessels are clamped off with small metal clips
Because these clips are supposed to remain behind in the body, they are
made of tough, rare metals that will resist corrosion  They may be
simple stainless steel of very high quality, or they may be extremely
unusual metals such as tantalum  These little clips can be
cross-checked against surgical records at the hospital where the
surgery was performed, and against the purchasing records of the
hospital  These tiny clips, which will survive the flames of the
retort, elude the pestle magnet because they are nonferrous, and will
often make their way into the urn  They can be spotted amid the ashes
often by the naked eye, more often (and more accurately) by x-rays  We
can then have nondestructive chemical tests performed to assay
accurately their exact composition
Dental devices can also be helpful in identifying a cremated
individual
Even though dental crowns seldom end up in the urn, dental posts, made
of stainless steel or titanium, which are used to affix artificial
crowns onto small tooth stumps, can be extremely importent  Not only
do they vary considerably in chemical composition, in size and in shape
(each brand looks very different), but they are often altered by
grinding the ends when the dentist inserts them into the tooth  These
altered tips can be compared with dental radiographs or dental x-rays
and be identified absolutely individually
They will show up in de;ital x-rays before death, and again in x-rays
taken of the cremated remains  They can be as unique as fingerpants,
because the dentist has shaped them to fit a particular tooth
We also sift the ashes for stainless steel sutures used during
surgery-heart surgery involves splitting the breastbone and wiring it
back tog@there-as well as various metal catheter devices used around
pacemakers, screws in bones and a multitude of other things
If dentures are still in the jaws of the mouth when cremation takes
place, the greater portion of them will be destroyed, but porcelain
teeth, complete with their little metal pins used to affix them to the
dentures, will survive
What else do we find in urns?  Sometimes the staples from the cardboard
cremation containers, although the pestle magnet usually catches these
There may be the occasional screw from a pair of eyeglasses  Fibers
and hair may show up under microscopic analysis, but these are most
likely contaminants introduced after the cremation
They do not belong to the deceased but to crematory attendants who
handled or examined the remains after the burning
The examination of cremains requires the patience of a Swiss
watchmaker  You need a microscope, tweezers, x-ray machines and boxes
with grids so you can locate any minute metal fragments defined by the
x-rays  If you x-ray a box of cremains and then try to sift the ashes,
searching for that tiny little fragment that showed up on the
radiograph, it is like looking for the proverbial needle in the
haystack  But if you supbrimpose a grid over the outpoured cremains,
then take an x-ray and study the grid, you can quickly localize the
object
Everything has to be carefully documented: weights, volumes and so
forth  A lot of photographs have to be taken, and this can be
painstaking, jeweler's work involving ultra-closeups or
microphotography  One is always amazed at what can be found, as well
as what isn't found  just imagine, in a set of cremains, finding an
ossicle, the tiny bone from the inner ear of an infant, intact!  It
takes a very solid knowledge of bone anatomy and variation and often a
very vivid reconstructive imagination to identify these minuscule
fragments of bone and metal
Who pays me to do this sort of work?  Attorneys, usually  They may be
attorneys for the plaintiffs (Uncle Frank's near and dear ones), or
attorneys for the defense (the River Styx Funeral Home), but they have
this in common: they are at daggers drawn, deeply involved in a
lawsuit  The greatest problem we have in these cases probably isn't
the condition of the cremains  It's that someone is trying to save
money and do an investigation on the cheap  These examinations take
time, and time is money when you hire an expert
Minutes Turn into hours, days, weeks  It has been my experience that
the attorneys for the plaintiffs attempt to limit the time of the
examination by their experts  By doing so, they are being penny wise,
pound foolish  The less time spent sifting the ashes, the less useful
material will be found
By contrast the experts working for the funeral home are usually given
adequate time to document everything fully  It is very embarrassing if
you, the expert, fail to find something because someone said: "You have
to do this in six hours," while experts for the other side are given
six days to look at the same set of cremains
You would be amazed how high the passions run in these cases
What I am about to reveal must be couched in careful terms, even though
the case in question has long since been settled  I can give no names
I cannot even disclose which state this case occurred in
A certain woman, much beloved of her'family, died after a long and
painful fight with cancer  She had'had surgery when the malignancy was
first found and then more than a year later it was found that the
cancer had metastasized  During her final illness she had received
very good medical  care, with frequent x-rays and scans  She was
cremated in the city where she died, and her'crernains were shipped to
a large cemetery in a nearby state  There, a set of remains thought to
be hers was transferred from the cardboard shipping container to an
urn, which was placed in a niche in the cemetery columbarium, where
they were to rest in perpetuity
That evening, someone found the temporary shipping container, with her
name on it, on a freeway  Inside were cremains
The family was tracked down and the box returned to them
They were outraged  They immediately retained attorneys and filed a
$10 million lawsuit against the cemetery  Defense attorneys hired by
the insurance company representing the cemetery interviewed forensic
scientists from all over the country, searching for someone to put
together a team of experts  The field of forensic anthropology is not
crowded  My name inevitably came up
I remember flying there for the interview, which was conducted in a
suite of an airport hotel  I was surrounded by a phalanx of eight or
more attorneys, who questioned me closely about what I would do, what
should be done, what shouldn't be done and so forth  A short time
after, I was told that I had been selected to put together a team of
experts, the choice of whom would be left to me  The team assembled
included Clyde Snow, who had worked with the Mengele remains in Brazil;
Doug Ubelaker from the Smithsonian; Lowell Levine, one of this
country's foremost forensic dentists, who testified at the trial of
serial killer Ted Bundy; Bob Kirschner, a deputy chief medical examiner
from Chicago; and Dr Robert Fitzpatrick, this country's top forensic
radiologist  One of the country's foremost microscopy labs was
retained to do all the microscopic and chemical procedures
By this point in the lawsuit the plaintiffs had been offered a very
handsome sum to settle out of court  They refused  So we were told
this would have to go all the way to trial  Our examination left no
stone unturned  We lavished hours and hours upon our examination of
the cremains  As our expenses mounted, the insurance company howled to
the cemetery operators: "We promised you a Cadillac defense!  No one
said anything about Rolls-Royces!"
The medical records on the deceased woman stacked up eighteen inches
high  The x-rays numbered in the dozens  We also had good dental
x-rays  One of the important factors centered on the surgical procedure
performed on the woman; the surgeon had used vascular clips to close
off,blood vessels  In the radiographs made before her death, I could
count at least twenty-nine of these clips
Her surgical record indicated that the surgeon had closed off the blood
vessels using Hemaclips, a special brand  Hemachps are tiny things,
about a quarter of an inch long  Hospital purchasing records showed
that the hospital was using Hemachps made of tantalum, although
Hemaclips are sometimes made of other materials as well
From the cremains in the urn in the niche, we recovered intact or in
halves the remains of at least eighteen hemaclips  The other eleven
had been pulverized in the cremation and grinding process and were
scattered uniformly throughout the ashes and cremains
These little specks could nevertheless be spotted by x-rays and
chemically analyzed  Every single sample of cremains in the niche
showed tiny fragments of tantalum  The cremains found in the box
abandoned on the freeway did not show these flecks and indeed had no
tantalum fragments at all  So they could not have come from the woman
whose name was on the box
Furthermore, the urn in the niche yielded a dental post that had been
used to attach an artificial crown  It had been altered on both ends
by the dentist who inserted it  The alterations on the ends of the
post were very distinctive because they were irregular  We had five
views of this dental post in the deceased woman's x-rays  I was able
to put the tooth we recovered from the cremains under one video camera,
then put each computer-enhanced dental x-ray on the other video camera,
and superimpose them  We came down, thread by thread, lining up every
single screw thread on the post, to prove this tiny piece of metal was
a unique specimen
The results of our investigation were clear and unequivocal: we proved
that the woman was in the urn, and in the niche, right where she was
supposed to be  We proved that the cremains on the freeway weren't
hers  After the very first member of our team gave a deposition under
oath, the plaintiffs hastily settled out of court for what I gather was
a vastly reduced sum  Settlements are always kept secret, so I don't
know what the figure was, but the attorneys we were working for were
glowing like sunbeams and seemed extravagantly grateful  I gather
millions of dollars were saved
Why, the reader may ask, if our case was so airtight, did the cemetery
pay out even a nickel?  I ain no lawyer, but I imagine that the
universal fear of the unpredictability of the American jury had
something to' do with it  A box containing cremains was found on the
freeway, and the box had the woman's name on it  There was always the
possibility that a jury might stubbornly conclude, in the face of all
scientific evidence to the contrary, that the box, the name and the
cremains were all the proof it needed to find for the plaintiff
Soon afterward I was called in on another case, and when I quoted my
rates the new attorneys were taken aback  They called the lawyers who
knew'about the freeway case  "Isn't he a bit steep?"
they asked, as I later learned  And the lawyer from the freeway case
said: "Pay it  He's worth whatever he asks"  It is always &nratifying
to receive these little tokens of esteem  The money isn't unpleasant
either
Whose, then, were the remains in the box left on the freeway?
They were never identified  We were able to demonstrate that they
were the remains of several people scrambled together, and their
volume was rather small  This led me to investigate the interior of a
crematory retort chamber myself, as I have described above  Within,
scattered in the corners and amid the crevices of the firebrick walls,
was a small quantity of bone fragments and ashes left over from
previous cremeitions
I suspect, therefore, that a disgruntled employee from the crematorium
surreptitiously gathered up these remnants, or others like them, and
placed them in the box beside the freeway to cause grief to the fimeral
home  He certainly succeeded
But in the end, the dreams of wealth or revenge, the loud legal cries
of injury and outrage, the hypothetical millions of dollars demanded to
redress this imagined wrong-all of these were reduced to ashes and
smoke  All that remains today is a cool, silent urn in a distant
columbarium

Death in 10,000 Fragments

You will say that reality does not have the slights obligation to
be interesting  I reply that even if reality can escape the necessity
of being interesting, hypotheses never can

-Jorge Luis Borges, Death and the compass There is a stretch of I-75
about twenty miles north of Gainesville along which the great highway
passes through a green and smiling landscape, all rolling fields and
thick forests of pine and live oak  I can never travel this particular
portion of the interstate without glancing over at a pasture that
appears just south of the exit for High Springs, via County Road 236
This pasture has a solitary oak tree at its edge, then a dense stand of
forest just to the right
Sheltered under the eaves of this forest are the remains of an old
shack  Within those charred rains, on January 28, 1985, were found the
remains of two calcined human skeletons, so badly burned that they were
almost reduced to powder  Next to one of the skeletons, welded shut by
the fury of the fire that consumed the shack and its Occupants, was an
ithaca Model 37 12-gauge shotgun whose stock had been completely
reduced to ashes
Today when anyone asks me which was the most difficult, the most
fascinating and perplexing case I have ever encountered, I
answer without an instant's hesitation: the Meek-Jennings case
I have examined human remains, ancient and modern, famous and obscure, in
Asia, Africa, Europe and South America, as well as all over the United
States; but I had only to travel twenty miles from my front doorstep to
encounter the most baffling and complex problem in forensic
anthropology that has ever occupied my mind or challenged the resources
of the C A Pound Human Identification Laboratory
The Meek-Jennings case began with a hellish fire, and from the first
moment it was possessed of a hellish complexity  That fire, and those
skeletons, would occupy me and my students for the next year and a
half  Many times during my inquiry a vital piece of evidence would
dangle just out of reach, then, when grasped, would slip away or
reverse its meaning  I had to unravel a set of remains that occupied
only a few square feet, but whose tangled history reached from Alaska
to Florida, across thousands of miles and a dozen years
Everything about this case seemed to defy a simple solution
Things seemed to reduplicate themselves, multiply themselves, fragment
themselves  At times we seemed to be gazing through a kaleidoscope
instead of a magafying glass
At first we thought we were dealing with one fire; it turned out there
were two  We imagined we were investigating two deaths; later we found
out there were four  The deaths occurred in pairs, in two states,
widely separated  There were two suicide notes, both of which looked
fake  There were dozens and dozens of antemortem and postmortem x-rays
to compare, some of them of very poor quality  Other x-rays, which
would have solved the case in an instant, had been destroyed- A slip of
memory on the part of a surgeon plunged us into special difficulties
that seemed insoluble  A gold tooth inlay eluded us for months,
while another tooth, found hundreds of miles away, cast the gravest
doubt on our findings at that point  At various stages in our inquiry
it seemed possible that the bones in the burned cabin were a macabre
jest, deliberately put there to make fools of us, by a murderer gifted
with almost superhuman cunning, a man so ruthless he would pull his own
teeth and fling them into the flames, to throw us off the track
"We are to go together so our ashes cannot be separated," boasted a
suicide note found a few hundred feet from the fire  It was task to
prove this prophecy false
MY Besides the skeletal remains of two individuals recovered from the
fire scene, there were the burned remains of a dog, as well as the
previously cremated ashes of a second dog, all mixed together  Before
it burned, the old cabin had been an abandoned farmhouse, which meant
that all sorts of flotsam and jetsam were found mixed among the ashes
Cenerations of animals, wild and tame, had died and left their bones
for years and years beneath the house  Mixed in with the fragments was
an accumulation of old bullets and cartjidges, shoe eyelets, molten
buttons and even an ancient Chinese coin
If only I had been called in just two days sooner!  The Alachua County
Sheriffs Department thought I was out of the country, in Peru, and
unreachable; in fact I had just returned to the United States the
morning-before the remains were discovered  I could easily have gone
out to the burned shack and seen the remains on site  Instead an
investigator from the medical examiner's office carefully gathered up
every single bone fragment she could find, placed them in a single
body bag and carried them back to the medical examiner's laboratory
By the time they arrived they could not have been more jumbled if they
had been run through a cement mixer
When I finally opened the vinyl bag I was overwhelmed  Inside, totally
commingled and crushed, were approximately ten thousand bone fragments,
not counting bone that had been reduced to ash and particles of sand
In my entire career I have never seen such an impossible chaos of
fragments, some broken by the fire to begin with, some broken even
further by careless handling, all tumbled together in a hopeless,
brittle welter of dust, cinders, calcined bone, stray teeth and sand
If the bones had simply been cut into ten thousand fragments it would
have been easier  As matters stood, the remains had been jumbled wice,
once by the fire and again by the evidence technician
The deaths in High Springs, as it turned out, were linked with a
particularly shocking and heinous double murder in New Hampshire that
had occurred a few days earlier  Because of the notoriety of the New
Hampshire victims there was a blaze of media attention  Newspapers in
Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Florida followed the case closely  We
here in Gainesville were being pressured by politicians and law
enforcement officers from another state  The New Hampshire authorities
made it plain they considered us incompetent rubes and hicks who, to
hide our abysmal ignorance, were desperately trying to sweep the whole
matter under the rug  In view of the fact that I spent a year and a
half painstakingly reassembling those skeletons, I consider that a bit
of an insult  Long after we submitted our conclusions and proof the
New Hampshire state attorney pointedly disregarded them and kept the
case open  He went on to become governor of the state, so I suppose
you have to hand it to him: he knew how to strike a popular pose in the
public eye
But one of the most fascinating aspects of the Meek-Jennings case was
the personality of the murderer  To a degree unparalleled in most of my
investigations, the mind of the murderer seemed to taunt us and puzzle
us, beyond death, beyond the dissolving fires that, destroyed the old
cabin and its occupants  In this case, contrary to all common sense,
love and death were mixed in equal proportions
The Meek-Jennings affair was one involving both passion and
premeditation  Here were present the deepest, tenderest sentiments of
,romanticism, side by side with a depraved, homicidal rage  Here the
fires of love were nearly all-consuming  They almost consumed the
truth
To this day I cannot fathom why nobody spotted the burning cabin when
it caught fire  There was a Shell filling station on a hill at the
County Road 236 eidt of Interstate 75, hardly a mile and a half away
To me it seems incredible that no one saw the smoke or reported the
blaze, unless it happened at dusk, or at night  But even then we are
left with the astounding fact that the ruins of the cabin were only
discovered on January 28, fully ten days after the fire
When sheriff's deputies arrived at the scene everything had long since
cooled  The masonry of the cabin fireplace was cold  All the
galvanized tin roofing had collapsed on top of the ashes and the metal
was cool to the touch  There was not a wisp of smoke  Trees upwind of
the cabin were scarcely scorched at all, but those downwind, to the
west, were blackened and charred fully forty feet up their trunks
This was dramatic proof of how hot the fire had been and suggests that
there was a strong wind fanning the flames in a westerly direction
When the investigators arrived, the collapsed corrugated metal sheets
from the roof covered everything completely  Only when they began to
remove the fallen roofing did they begin to see bones
They found the bones side by side, with the burned sawed-off Ithaca
12-gauge shotgun at the feet of one set of remains  The shotgun had
been welded shut by the fire, and its stock was wholly burned away
The position of the bone fragments seemed to indicate that two bodies,
lying side by side, had been consumed by the flames  The second set of
remains was closer to the door  Several Coleman gasoline cans were
found in the ashes, missing their lids and showing no signs of having
exploded  They must have been emptied out before the fire  The two
sets- of bones were scattered atop and beneath a wire mesh that seems
to have been part of an old gate  Even though some bone fragments had
fallen through the mesh, there were a few still on top of it, which
demonstrated that the bodies must have been lying above this mesh when
the fire started  Under the wire mesh there was something
extraordinary: charcoal briquets, burned to ashes but still
recognizable by their shape  Whoever had started the fire had placed a
considerable quantity of charcoal beneath the bodies, to make sure they
would be consumed,as completely as possible
Right away the investigators were confronted with an oddity: a single
fragment of a female fibula-that is the long thin splint bone that
backs up the main leg bone, the tibia-was found outside the cabin, near
its entrance, some feet away from the rest of the female remains
This fragment was not as badly burned as the other remains, though it
was broken off and charred at one end  How had it come to be outside
the cabin, away from the other remains?  We racked our brains over this
and in the end could only theorize that it was flung there by the
explosive force of the fire, before it had a chance to burn completely
The cabin was built of "fat lighter pine," which is full of resin and
burns explosively  In such a fire, rafters would fall, sharp-edged
sections of tin roof would come hurtling down, and fierce convection
currents would be swirling from all directions  In fact the ashes of a
fallen roof hewn were found near the leg portions of the female
remains  It's my belief that this bone was somehow broken during the
fire and flipped free of the rest of the skeleton at some point  This
fibula would later play a significant part in my investigation
Several hundred feet away from these charred ruins a blue Fiat was
parked in the middle of the field  In the trunk of the Fiat were found
clothing and personal effects that identified their owners as Glyde
Earl Meek, a forty-nine-year-old white male, and Page Jennings, a
twenty-one-year-old white female  Meek's and Jennings's clothing was
in the trunk of the car  There were his expensive-looking cowboy boots
with their intricately tooled uppers and polished toes, his shirt, his
blue jeans, a ked windbreaker and his underpants, all folded up  Next
to these garments, in a separate pile, were Page Jennings's white
Reebok sneakers  One of the sneakers had a pair of sunglasses thrust
into it and a bloodstain on the side  A baseball cap from the Stacks
restaurant at the Gainesville downtown Holiday Inn, where Jennings
worked as a waitress, was also in the trunk  Her flesh-colored bra and
floral print panties were also neatly folded on top of the pile of her
clothes, which included a white pullover'sweatshirt and a green plaid
shirt
If the skeletons within the cabin were those of Meek and Jennings, then
it seems likely they embraced the flames naked
In the rear seat well of the blue Fiat were found tools, a jack handle
and a set of electrical connectors used to hot-Wire the vehicle
Atop the back seat was an emergency first aid kit, a plastic coffee cup
and a towel  The cloth car seats were split open with wear and tear
On the front seat was a very long and very strangely worded suicide
note, written neatly in longhand on four sheets of yellow legal paper,
front and back  Counting front and back pages, the note was actually
eight pages long, an exceptionally long message as suicide notes go
The spelling was generally correct, except for the words "separate,"
"supporting" and "appalling," which were spelled 11 separate,"
"suporting" and "apauhng"  The vocabulary showed an above-average
range, a good command of English  occasionally the writer would add
"(sic)" in parentheses, as if he were not sure of a certain spelling
Each page was carefully numbered: "#l of 4," "#2 of 4," and so on
This note proved to be one of the most vexing and ambiguous elements of
the whole case  Here is what it said:

january 18 1985
Friday 12:45
Hilton Inn Gainesville We have made all our arrangements and now are
ready to do what Page thinks, and I, is the only way we can be together
for all time
The constant interfering with our lives by outsiders is over
We know that to go on like we have in the past would only eventually
Turn our love into hate for each other and cause us to eventually
separate  That thought alone is what neither of us can bear to think
about  The love we have had and always had since our eyes first met in
Alaska has been so strong that in just 19 months we both have proven it
more than most people show in a lifetime
Problems we have had surely but very few of our own-instead raused by
meddling others  The pain Page has gone through because of her family
is what makes all we have done in the past week bearable to me  She was
rejected by her family when she came back from Alaska because she loved
someone her family didn't approve of  Instead of supporting her and
saying we don't mind but are with you-they told her to get rid of me or
get out  We went to Texas  Still the interferring (sic) from them and
on her father's birthday she was sent money to go house but not to
return  They were under the impression that we had broken up and were
not together, so when she got off the plane her mother took her
shopping in Portland, Me  On the way back to Jackson, N,H she told her
mother we were together still  Her mother turned the car around and
took all the presents back to the stores
When she finally got to Jackson her father told her to get out and
never come back  Her brother told her to get fucked in the ass" and
never wanted to see or hear from her again  she called me in Texas
and told me what happened and was getting back to Portland and told me
to pick her up in Houston  When she got back @ I spent least four
hours with her in my lap talking her through what she was put through
Then we went to Alaska again and worked in the worst possible place for
a lonely girl with all these thoughts she never really told me about
until that week  The letter fun her brother helps to explain what I am
writing about
Pressure, wed0n, pressure, castigation, pressure and then what took
PI" several weeks ago and more pressure Her brother who was "helping",
her got to pressuring her thoughts into telling me to leave forever
She couldn't tell him to hurt him or me to hurt me- She kept it all
inside and it became too much for her  The final straw for Page came
when her brother said we had to get out "by 5:00 Pm tonight " or he
would "pull the plug"  He left a note telling her to take "the milk,
half an onion, cheese, Beck's beer, soup, etc"  Which said to Page get
everything that will remind me of you and get out of my life  AGAIN
All our letters to one another have been burned so no one can touch them
All our pictures likewise  She made me promise to burn the home in NH
to make sure there were no memtos left she wants to just
disappear so as for anyone to have It so that if never to have been
on earth
In the past week we have talked over plans that were brought up many
times when ever she was depressed  At first we would go together and
"make them pay"  Then it finally came to me going while she waited for
me to get back and we'd die together by cremation
Why?because I love her so very much-the only reason I can think of
More than my own life itself  Said, as I drove up and back, I think
she thought I would get up there, do what we wanted and get caught
coming back all that law and distance  Only one road out and a fire
would attract immediate attention so would be reported quickly  just a
feeling I guess from our meeting on Thursday at noon at her brother's
house  She hasn't said much to me since, only that she is ready and
was meditating the days I was gone  Spiritually she is ready
You are thinking this guy is crazy-No I am not  I have functioned like
a rational person in every way since we made our plans such as getting
shells, eating, drinking, selling things in Hartford, buying the shot
gun in the event I got stopped on the way back I would use it on myself
and not hurt any other innocent person  Page will jump from the bay in
jacksonville with a car battery tied to her if we couldn't go on
together as we had planned
But yes crazy @ line and rating for this lady to want to forever be
with her at @ mind spirit, and ashes  We are to go together so our
ashes cannot be separated only our bones can be put in two different
places as her brother would do  Page says if we died whole he would
separate us by two graves and this way it is impossible
As I sit here contemplating what is ahead for me is apauling
[appalling] (sic) but I have given my word and that is and always has
been my bond
Nobody can say about me that once I say I will do something that I've
ever not done it  Page knows this and maybe used it  I am not
regretting what's been done because if we ever would have called it
quits permanently I would have taken all their lives anyway  But now I
have to take Page's life with my hands and kill the only love I have
left  Page says she needs it that way-her meditation times directed her
She knows that I will do it and isn't worried that I'll "wimp out" on
myself" By not joining her  My word, and she believes in me that much
Her brother won't be harmed so that he can live with everything for the
rest of his life  A pay back for rejecting her and writing that she
was "insane" in his journal  Personally I would like to wait around
and do him but she has made me promise not to give him the easy way out
but to think about it every day  I have promised to go with her and so
we shall
The place we picked out was found by driving around many miles and it
was high, on top of a hill and seemed to be just right to her  we
had two "picnics" there - and that is where we made our plans and
promises to one another  She is waiting now and I must do what I can't
believe I'm going to do but I must do for me and her
Here a line is skipped in the note  The last two lines above,
beginning with "She is waiting now are written in a more hurried and
slantwise script, as if dashed off in haste  Several blank lines
follow  The note then resumes:

Maybe I am crazy at least now for I have taken the life of the only
lady I feel I've ever really been in love with  And I don't want to
die but will just to see if we can be together again as Page seems to
think  It was the most terrible thing, but I feel her love more than
ever now it seems
The next five words are crossed out, but plainly legible:

@k hor- it% my The note then continues:

First I should tell that as we built our cremation it was the happiest
I've seen her in many weeks  She kept talking and had such an air
about her afterwards we talked for, about two hours andjust enjoyed
each other and hugged and repeated our wedding vows to one another and
hope we are doing what's right for us
When we were ready I took her in my arms and said "Page I love you"
The answer was, "Mike it has always been only you and I want it to
always be that I'm you're venj kd line"    She sat in front of me
with me sitting behind and put a choke hold on and held itfor at least
two minutes  She never once seemed to struggle and when I thought she
had expired I released and lowered my hand to hug her  Damn, she
started to move and I COuldn't do anything else but start rubbing her
shoulders and talking to her and in about twenty minutes she was crying
in my arms and hoamely started talking to me and crying too  She said
"Mike you promised, you promised"-But I just felt I couldn't anymore
We talked for a little while and then the tery last words she said were
"Mike I love only you forevee' and this times I kept the hold on her
until nlY arrm, finger and body cramped  Lay her down on the blanket
and she was still and turning blue  I readied the wood under the place
and she started to jerk a little  I looked at her with the flashlight
and this time she wouldn't come back but I couldn't stand to see her
twitch so hit her with a large stone  That's why her head may be
crushed on the tight @
I have decided to rope myself down before I use the shotgun in case I
might do the same and fall from our place
if ffn That's the only reason why there may be rope marks on me if they
don't burn Off or something  The little brown bag are the ashes from
her puppy that died in Te=s @ year  We had it crem&ed in San Antone
and she wanted the ashes splinkled with US and the present puppy,
Chelshea, are the bones with us  I brought her back with me from New
Hampshire
It's tinwfor "w to go back up there andfinish and be twth my lovefor
all times  Page was the most beautiful lady in the world but at times
a devil  Ifeeljust because she had so many things working against her
pressure that finally made us do this @ step  If I nan spend the rest
of my times with her somewhere is all that I can hope for  I loved her
Good bye D Mike Daniels for Page Jennings Daniels I'm going to start
the fire with 21 $100-00 bills for she is just 21 + 16 days
This extraordinary note, with its proxy signature of Page Jennings
Duels and its dark references to other murders in New

Hampshire ("she made ffw promise to burn the home in N H

'We would go together and make them pay     " "if we ever would have
called it quits permanently I would have taken all their lives anyway
instantly focused police scrutiny on a ghastly double murder that had
occurred twelve days earlier in Pinkham Notch, New Hampshire
Here, summoned to a fire at an old ski lodge called the Dana Inn in the
early morning hours of January 16, authorities had found the bodies of
Page Jennings's parents, Malcolm Jennings, fifty-four, and his  wife,
Elizabeth B Jennings, forty-nine  The couple were discovered dead of
multiple stab wounds, tied up with nylon cord in separate bedrooms,
gagged before they died  Whoever murdered them had set fire to the inn
afterward, hoping to destroy the bodies  As things turned out,
however, the corpses suffered only minor smoke damage and were easily
identifiable
As a forensic anthropologist, my work is necessarily focused on the
dead more than on the living  I seldom occupy myself professionally
with the quirks and foibles of human beings as long as they are alive
When LIFE is extinguished, and the flesh falls away, and the hard
frame-of the skeleton lies exposed on the laboratory table-that is my
hour  But in this case, more than in most others, I was forced to take
account of the personalities of the deceased to a far greater degree
than is usual for me  Because of the glare of publicity that
accompanied this case, the individuals involved stood forth in stark
relief, in scores of newspaper articles and television news reports
One man in particular haunted the case  Almost against my will I
became acquainted with the LIFE and times of Glyde Earl Meek
Police had lime trouble establishing the true identity of "D
Mike Daniels," the man who signed the suicide note found in the Fiat
near the burned cabin  His real name was Glyde Earl Meek, a powerfully
built, red-haired Washington State man with a string of arrests
forburglary and a prison record  He was an exceptionally athletic
specimen, who had captained his college wrestling team at Washington
State University  He weighed only 185 pounds in later life, just five
pounds more than he had weighed in high school  He was known as a
"second-story man" for his burgling feats: he would climb walls and
slip into a building through the roof or an upperstory window  His
upper arms were exceptionally powerful and his agility was remarkable
Meek "had a crazy body, like a gorilla," a classmate would later
recall
Meek was born in Pasco, Washington, on July 22, 1935, the second of
three boys, to Pearl and Joe Meek  Joe Meek, a lineman who worked for
several power companies near' Seattle, was an abusive husband and beat
his wife frequently, according to relatives interviewed by the Boston
Herald after the murders  "He was a good-for-nothing brute," said
Thelma Cole, then seventy-two, Pearl's sister-in-law
Meek's parents finally divorced  While their mother worked, Glyde Earl
and his older brother Alfred and his younger brother Michael were
raised by their aunt, Thelma Cole  Cousin Roger Cole said Meek was a
scoundrel even as a child  "He was a thief from four, five, six," Cole
told reporters from Boston after the murders in New Hampshire  "He had
a million-dollar personality and a real gift with folks  It's just
that there was a missing link somewhere"  Another high school
classmate, Ron Jackson, told the New Hampshire Sunday News that Meek
was "a guy that couldn't live by society's rules  He had a lot of
talent but he just couldn't keep it within the system"
Meek entered Pasco High School in the early 1950s, studied there two
years and then transferred to Walla Walla High  He was described as
"an honor student without effort," who excelled in sports, especially
football and wrestling  Once, while skylarking in front of his
classmates, he climbed to the top of the Bonneville Power
Administration transmission tower in Sacajawea Park, jumped
off,grabbed the insulators and swung on them "like a monkey," as one
astonished eyewitness put it  Then he swung back to safety as easily
as he had swung out  "I thought sure he was grabbing hot wires," said
a classmate, Scotty Getchell  "But he did things like that
He was always out for thrills"
Another classmate, Tony Hapler, said Meek "could scale the side of a
building, and I saw him do it"  It was Hapler who likened Meek to a
gorilla  Hapler told the Manchester Union Leader that Meek never
graduated from college because he was caught stealing a car
Meek's days at Walla Walla High School were the high-water mark of his
success  He rose to become vice-president of the student body  Upon
graduation he entered Washington State University on an athletic
scholarship but never finished college  He married in 1959, divorced
in 1964, leaving his wife with two sons  Meek made no attempt to
contact his sons and to this clay they do not know they are descended
from him
Meek turned to burglary in the early 1960s, using his strength and
agility to break into buildings through the roof  He was caught in
1962 by Art Eggers, Walla WaUa's newly appointed chief prosecutor
"Five or six establishments had been burglarized in Walla Walla and also
a J C Penney Store in Seattle  He used to go in through the tops of
stores  He was,a hell of a roof burglar," Eggers told reporters

'when we caught him he had a U-Haul full of about $10,000 in stolen
goods@lothing, liquor-from Salt Lake City stores  If you met him in a
pub instead of on the battlefield, you'd say he's one of the nicest
guys around  I've been at this job a long time and he's about my
favorite crook"
Convicted, Meek was sent to Walla Walla State Penitentiary, where he
became inmate No  212104  At first he seemed a model prisoner,
starring on the prison football team, but after an unsuccessful escape
attempt his prison term was lengthened; he was finally paroled in 1970
The golden middle of his life was nearly over and he had spent eight of
his best years in jail  He was now five
Meek remarried and started a successful sign business, the Alpine Sign
Co In 1972 Meek's mother, Pearl, committed suicide  She had become
an alcoholic and was depressed, relatives said  She drove her Mustang
to a ballpark, parked, and left the engine running  Carbon monoxide
fumes killed her  At her funeral Meek "wept and wept," friends
remembered
Fred Mielke met Meek, ni@knained "Shorty," as part of a prison
volunteer group that helped parolees adjust to LIFE outside  "Shorty
was a likable, hard-working guy  If your car had trouble and was on
the side of the road, he would be the first person to pull over to
help," Mielke said
When Meek's second marriage fell apart "everything went to hell,"
Mielke said  A second arrest for burglary followed and Meek was given
a one-year sentence  He was paroled in the late 1970s  He then met a
woman named Debby Alderfer, from Penn Ivania

Sy

Shortly afterward he was arrested while attempting to shoplift a
seven-dollar pair of pants  Fearful of being sent back  to jail, he
fled Spokane, taking Alderfer with him, and went to Tucson, Arizona,
where he founded another sign business
At about this time Meek began using the alias that would appear on the
High Springs suicide note: Daniel Mikel Daniels  It was one of about
ten false names he used at various times  Meek was a possessive
husband who forbade Alderfer to call her parents, ever
For eight years she obeyed him  "I loved him," Alderfer told the
Boston Herald later  "I felt my life with him was worth it  He had me
convinced that if I called [my parents] the line would be traced and he
would be sent back to jail"  many doctors and pathologists tend to
look askance at chiropractors, as practicing a profession on the
fringes of serious medicine
My own opinion-has no place in this narrative  But I have oftentimes
blessed the impulse that drove Glyde Earl Meek to visit a chiropractor
in Arizona in the early 1980s
This,small, chance event would have a crucial bearing on the case, for
the chiropractor who treated Meek at the Waldschmitt Clinic in Tucson
took six x-rays of Meek's back  These x-rays became the only
antemortem pictures of Glyde Earl Meek's living skeleton in existence
As such they were of inestimable value to me  One of the x-ray films
showed Meek's upper rib cage  Another, shot rather high, revealed a
gold tooth filling  This filling also showed up on dental x-rays of
Meek  This small nugget of gold would later prove a crucial piece of
evidence
In 1983 the couple moved to Alaska with the vain hope of panning for
gold there  Meek became the caretaker of a vacation lodge at Seal Bay
It was here he met young Page Jennings  It was an encounter that would
have the most dreadful consequences for the entire Jennings family
Page Jennings was a beaudh girl with pale skin and elfin features  she
had a quick mind, liked reading and was an expressive writer with a
keen sense of humor  Her parents were wealthy and she enjoyed all the
advantages of an excellent education and a comfortable upbringing  She
seemed destined for a life of happiness and ease
At the 1,100-student Kennett High School in Conway, New Hampshire, Page
Jennings made the National Honor Society and served on the student
council, was a homeroom representative, a delegate to the New Hampshire
Youth and Government Council
She overcame two knee injuries to throw the javelin for the girls'
track team her senior year  These injuries were  severe enough to
require surgery, and this would later have a crucial bearing  on the
case  The precise details of the surgical procedure would send me on a
wild goose chase that lasted for months and nearly brought me to my
wits' end
Until now life had smiled on Page Jennings  But in her first year at
Simmons College 'm Boston she became acquainted with bitter failure
She studied physical therapy there but did poorly  She failed a
difficult but required course in organic chemistry and this failure
seems to have shaken her resolve  Page decided to take a year off from
school, strike out on her own  She landed a job as a cook at the Seal
Bay resort in Alaska where, in June 1983, she met Glyde Earl Meek
Meek, who was working as a caretaker at the lodge, was instantly
smitten with Page Jennings, at least to judge from the wording of the
suicide note found near the cabin: "The love we have had and always had
since our eyes first met in Alaska has been so strong that in just
19 months we both have proven it more than most people show in a
lifetime"
Meek's third wife, Debby Alderfer, took a dimmer view of the
relationship  She later told the Boston Herald that Page "had a lot of
problems," and that Meek "seemed to want to help her out, protect her
He became obsessed with her"
Page seemed to enjoy the attentions of the older man  Meek took her on
nature trips and, much later, she rapturously described seeing an
American bald eagle for the first time in Alaska, on a trip with a
friend she called "Mike," who was obviously Meek
"W ien one in o bald eagle, visions of thun- 'l   cs ie encan dering,
snowcapp ed mountains and rushing rivers in Canada, Alaska and the
northern states invade the mind," Page wrote  "Keep your eyes skyward
and your ears open  Maybe one day you'll see the magnificent bird
overhead"
In the fall of 1983 the unlikely trio left Alaska together' Eventually
an unhappy Debby Alderfer saw she was no longer wanted and bowed out
"I'm not bitter now," she told reporters later  "I was hoping he would
find some kind of happiness, but I guess he didn't"
In October 1983, Page took Meek to visit her parents in Jackson, New
Hampshire  The visit was an unmitigated disaster  The whole family
was shocked and repelled by the vagabond, middle-aged, uncouth man
their daughter had fallen in love with  To the jenningses, Meek
appeared a creature from another world, a man whose past was as murky
as his future was dim  Page's older brother, Chris Jennings, was
openly disgusted by Meek and did nothing to hide his contempt
"This guy had no history, no ambition  She could have done a lot
better," Christopher Jennings later said to reporters'
Determined to stay together, the couple headed south in the last months
of 1983, moving into a modern duplex in Palm Harbor, Texas, near the
town of Rockport  Page landed a job as a sportswriter at a local
weekly paper, the Rockport Pilot, where she worked from December 1983
to April 1984  A coworker, Bobbie Drennon, recalled that at least once
Page Jennings came to work with
bruises on her face  Page admitted she had had a fight with Meek
"Page was the most beautiful lady in the world but at times a devil,"
Meek later wrote in the suicide note
She stayed in touch with her parents, who made it clear they still
loved her but despised Meek  In the spring of 1984 she and Meek
decided to return to Alaska  Page left a good-bye note for her
coworkers, using a quote from D H Lawrence

Dear Pilot friends:

I leave you with these words of wisdom  There is no point in work
unless it absorbs you like an absorbing game  If it doesn't absorb
you, it isn't fun, don't do it  "All that we have while we live is
life
If you don't live during your life, all you are is a piece of dung"
Fare ye well, Page
But the relationship was beginning to erode and crumble  Fewer than
six months after returning to Alaska, Meek and Jennings headed south
again  They broke up in Seattle and Page returned to Rockport, Texas,
in September 1984, then went back to New England  She visited a
psychiatrist, then decided to accompany her brother Christopher to
Gainesville, Florida, where he had landed a job with the Gainesville
Sun
Page Jennings got a job as a waitress at the Stacks restaurant in the
Gainesville downtown Holiday Inn  Soon afterward, around December 4,
1984, Glyde Earl Meek appeared and persuaded Page to let him move in
with her, sharing her bedroom in the apartment where she was living
with her brother Chris
Chris Jennings was disgusted and infuriated  Not only was the
loathsome Meek back in his sister's life again, he was squatting under
the selfsame roof now  Chris was on the threshold of a new career and
was trying to help his sister get her life straightened out
But Meek wouldn't let go, and Page seemed unable to find the backbone
to break up with him  Life in the little apartment became unendurable
for all three  Page found herself vacillating hopelessly between two
men who detested each other
It always seemed like, when there was a conflict, Page ended up getting
hurt  I was trying to find a way to make him feel hurt  I didn't like
him because he was pulling Page one way and my parents were pulling her
another," Chris Jennings said later

'Her brother who was 'helping' her got to pressuring her thoughts into
telling me to leave forever  She couldn't tell him to hurt him or me
to hurt me  She kept it all inside and it became too much for her,"
Meek had written in the longer suicide note
"She was a real nice girl but she had a lot of problems," a waiter
named John Hughes told reporters after the deaths  "I think she wanted
to get away from the guy, but she didn't know how and was scared to"
Another worker at the Stacks restaurant, Kenneth Denman, recounted
afterward how he saw Meek several times when he came to pick up Page
after her shift at the Holiday Inn  He described Meek as
"rough-looking"  He remembered how Meek would sit in a booth and drink
coffee, wearing a red and white baseball hat with the word "Page"
stenciled across the bill
Throughout late December and early January, Meek came and went on
mysterious business trips  Police have traced his movements to
Louisiana, Texas and Jacksonville, Florida where he bought the blue
Fiat later found in the field beside the burned cabin  He seems to
have stolen another Fiat, this one painted silver, in Corpus Christi,
Texas, on January 5
Page decided not to go home for Christmas 1984  Her parents were
bitterly disappointed  This decision may have played a part in the
tragic denouement, now only days away
On January 5, 1985, after an ugly three-way quarrel, Page Jennings and
Glyde Earl Meek moved out of the apartment she shared with her brother
Chris  Chris told her she would have to leave unless she renounced
Meek, in which case she would be welcome to stay
Page chose Meek  The couple took a room at the Gator Court Motel in
Gainesville  Meek rented a storage space in a mini-warehouse named
Atkins Storage  On January 11, Page went
back to collect her half of the apartment deposit  It was the last
time her brother saw her alive
Now Meek headed north alone, on an errand of murder  On January 12 he
booked a room at a motel in Braffleboro, North Carolina  The next
night he checked into the Bridgeport Motor Inn in Connecticut
On January 14, Meek was seen in Hartford, Connecticut, attempting to
pawn some jewelry  The pawnbroker recalled that Meek had said the
jewelry belonged to his daughter, who had died in a sking accident
later in the same conversation he switched stories, saying his daughter
had died in a car accident
Matters now moved to mortal conclusions  On January 16, in New
Hampshire, Malcolm and Betty Jennings were found murdered in their
blazing hotel  They had been tied up with nylon rope in separate
bedrooms before being stabbed to death  Their son Chris was notified
by police and left for New Hampshire immediately
This act of filial piety probably saved his life, because police later
found a second suicide note, also dated January 18 and signed by Meek,
in Chris Jennings's apartment
In his first suicide note, found near the scene, Meek seemed to
describe the anxieties of traveling up to New Hampshire to murder
Page's parents and setting fire to their inn
In the past week we have talked over plans that were brought up many
times when ever she was depressed  At first we would go together and
"make them pay"  It finally came to me going while she waited for me
to get back and we'd die together by cremation
 Sometimes, as I drove up and back, I thipk she thought I would get
up there, do what we wanted and get caught coming back all that law
and distance  Only one road out and a fire would attract immediate
attention so would be reported quickly    
Later, after the burned cabin and the skeletons were discovered near
High Springs, police visited Chris Jennings's apartment seeking
evidence  They found a desperate message from Chris to Page taped to
the door of the apartment  Written moments after Chris had been
notified of the murders of his parents and was enroute to New
Hampshire, the note gave Page three emergency telephone numbers to
call  The rest of the message read:

PAGE:

I REALLY NEED you!  LOVE, CHRIS But there was a heavy scrawl in another
hand defacing this note
The "you!"  at the end of the first line had been crossed out and a
huge NO!  had been scrawled over it and underlined many times
Inside the apartment, on two sheets of Cainesville Sun stationery in
the same handwriting as that used in the long suicide note found in the
Fiat, Meek had written his last, angry message to Chris Jennings  This
note spoke clearly of the New Hampshire murders, referring to the older
jenningses as "Mal" and "Betty":

Friday 18 Jan 1985

This and the note telling Page to take the "eggs, milk, flour, onions,
cheese-that did it Bucko  We are together now always and forever  Mike
"Right will prevail" as you wrote in your scheeming letter to Page in
Alaska about taking the bus, orflying, or riding down to Seattle or
riding down to Texas and then pretending to go home for a couple weeks
You bastard-!
"Daniels is a dead man if he comes here, you wrote
You live with it all now, Bucko-Mal, Betty and us  Meddling too Is
Page is so bitter that this is the only way she can see how we can be
together forever  Cremation
Call the police-they have some letters and information for you or
what-ever
This second note is unsigned, save for the name "Mike," after the first
paragraph, presumably derived from Meek's alias, Daniel Mikel Daniels,
the same name he used in the second, longer suicide note
Both suicide notes are dated January 18 and it appears the old
abandoned cabin was set on fire that day  The jenningses were buried
in New Hampshire on January 19, and Chris Jennings spoke the eulogy
He still believed his sister was alive  "I'm sure she's just off
playing and will be devastated when she hears the news," he said to
reporters
On January 28 the fire-wasted cabin and the calcined skeletons were
discovered near High Springs  Two days later the remains were
'delivered over to me for examination
My feelings upon seeing the thousands of commingled bone fragments pour
out of the vinyl body bag in a chalky cascade are impossible to convey
Nothing in the entire range of my professional experience approached
the daunting complexities of this problem
These bones  had not merely been broken; they had been ground up as if
by some grim apothecary's pestle  How could I hope to make sense of
them?
Although the powdery and jumbled condition of the remains before me
looked hopeless, there were some encouraging aspects of the case
True, the medical examiner's investigator had collected all the bones
in a single bag, but before this happened Alachua County Sheriff's
Department investigators had taken good, clear photographs of the crime
scene  The department provided me with large, clear blowups of these
photographs, nearly three feet high and very detailed  In them the
disposition of the remains, precisely as they were found, could be seen
with considerable clarity
There'was the wire mesh, there was the shotgun barrel, there were the
bone fragments, lying in distinct little heaps, just as they had been
found, untouched  Some of the larger pieces before me could be assigned
to one or the other of the two piles
It soon became clear that we were dealing with a pair of adult human
remains, one male, one female, both Caucasoid  The female was very
likely between the ages of twenty and twenty-five years  The male was
probably between forty-five and sixty years of age
The brainpan of the male skeleton had several lumps of heavy buckshot,
molten and fused to the inner lining of the skull  There were minute
traces of lead on the male lower jaw  Clearly a shotgun barrel had
been inserted into the mouth of the male and the weapon had been fired
before the fire consumed both his body and the wooden parts of the gun
that killed him  I have already mentioned how the Ithaca shotgun
barrel, with its breech welded shut by the fire, was found near the
feet of the male remains
In the days before x-rays, the means of identifying unknown dead bodies
were few and fallible  Confronted with a badly decomposed body or some
skeletal remains, you could only identify the deceased by his or her
possessions: clothes, jewelry, personal effects
The clothing of Glyde Earl Meek dnd Page Jennings had been found in the
trunk of the Fiat parked nearby  Not a shred of fabric, apart from a
small swatch of old, charred burlap unrelated to the skeletons, was
found in the ruins of the cabin  Nor were any personal effects found
amid the skeletal remains
The long, rambling suicide notes found in the Fiat and in Chris
Jennings's apartment in Gainesville had an air of the theatrical about
them  Their extraordinary length was unusual  The fact that they were
signed only by Meek/Daniels was odd-why hadn't Paige Jennings
contributed to the notes, or at least signed them?  The fervent
protestations of undying love that she supposedly made to Meek just
before he 'choked her sounded false, coming from, a girl who was deeply
soul-divided between her lover and her family  Her supposed joy at
beholding her funeral pyre seemed too ridiculous for words
There was no record of Meek's ever having checked into the Gainesville
Hilton Hotel, where he allegedly wrote one note  The bungled
strangling, followed by the brutal braining with a rock, jarred sharply
with the tender sentiments of romance Meek insists he shared with Page
My study is of bones, not souls  Suicide notes lie outside my purview
Even today I am bound to say that I do not attach the psychological
importance to this note that others have  But I freely confess it is a
very strange thing
Others were piqued more strongly by the note  Dr Curtis Mertz, a
well-known forensic dentist working on the case, went so far as to ask
several experts to study it: a forensic psychiatrist, an experienced
psychologist and a graphologist, or handwriting expert, with a
psychological background  All three believed the note was false
"Artificial," "not believable fishy," "too theatrical," were some
of their comments  One asked openly the question that bothered us all:
'Why didn't Page Jennings write the note?"
Here are some of the psychological conclusions that emerged from the
note:

The male has a narcissistic histrionic personality, illusions of
grandeur and great self-importance, very self-centered with unrealistic
goals, is in love with himself, has a fantasy of IDEAL- LOVE, shows
increased confusion as the letter progresses and may have had a major
depression in the past
The female: has a passive aggressive personality, lacks self confidence
and is dependent on others, has a separation anxiety
She wants to get back with her family  I THINK THIS IS A FAKE
SUICIDE NOTE
The graphologist agreed, with some reservations:

The male is a person able to he and deceive, is threatened by his
insecurities, tends to put off things  His ego climes through like a
club  Has a clever demeanor  He is bluffing in the last page about
the fire  It is possible, but not likely, that this is a real suicide
note
Thus were planted the seeds of doubt  What if the skeletons in the
cabin were not those of Glyde Earl Meek and Page Jennings?
What if the pair were alive and the murder-suicide pact were staged,
with two substitute bodies?  More sinister still, what if Page Jennings
had indeed been murdered by a jealous lover fearful of losing her?
What if Meek had covered his tracks by substituting another male corpse
to lie beside her body in the burning shack?  Was all the purple passion
about wanting to be with her forever, mingling his ashes with hers for
all eternity-were all those sighs the clever counterfeitings of a
cunning murderer?  Whose bones were these that lay upon my table?
More mischief was to come  A forensic anthropologist can usually find
a firm footing in the study of the remains themselves, their careful
analysis and comparison  Bones may riddle us, but they never lie  Yet
in the Meek-Jennings case even this calm, clear haven of physical
evidence became treacherous ground, swept by ambushes and betrayals
The first of these I call "Meek's Last joke"  This accident, more than
anything else, turned what should have been a straightforward case of
identification into a Machiavellian hall of mirrors, an ingemoils plot
to mislead the investigators  It revolved around a single tooth  Meek
would have laughed, to know what misery it caused Dr  Mertz and me
When the police were searching for medical records and tracing the
movements, not only of Page Jennings but especially of Glyde Earl Meek,
they found a car that had belonged to him in the care of one of his
former girlfriends  She allowed investigators to search the car and in
the car they found a matchbox  In the matchbox was a healthy nominal
tooth belonging to Glyde Earl Meek  In the tooth was a filling that
clearly identified the tooth as Meek's, when compared with his dental
x-rays
Another loose tooth had been found among' the ashes of the cabin and
clearly identified as Meek's  So the fear took shape that Meek had
pulled his own teeth to salt a death scene with identifiable evidence
from his own mouth  This second tooth, found in a match box hundreds
of miles away, was the germ from which a plague of doubt would spread
From this point onward there gradually took shape a blind, irrational
mistrust of anything found among the ashes that could be identified as
Meek's  Such objects, it was reasoned, proved nothing  Meek could
have put them there to deceive us
Meek would do anything to throw us off the scent  He would yank out
his own teeth and cast them into the flames
What wasn't found was almost as important as what was  Meek's dental
x-rays showed a prominent gold filling in his lower jaw  Dental gold
has a high melting point  Even though the cabin had burned like a
torch, the heat would have been insufficient to melt this gold filling
Yet the gold filling was nowhere to be found  The earth had been
sifted through 1/8-inch mesh screens and it had not turned up
Thus we were being whipsawed from two directions: the tooth that was
found after the fire proved nothing; the filling that was lost proved
everything
But these difficulties paled by comparison with the examination of the
female's upper jaw  Here we had a very badly burned, calcined,
chalk-white palate with many of the teeth still attached
Unfortunately it was so small that it seemed to belong to a midget
If you measure a normal palate in a small, unburned female skull, you
will find it is about 49-50 millimeters across, something in that
neighborhood  This tiny, burned palate was only 43 millimeters wide
-fifteen percent smaller than normal  How could we reconcile this
miniature palate with Page Jennings, a fully grown twenty-one-year-old
woman?  Dr  Mertz told me what I already knew: we had a problem
The third doubt that bedeviled us' was the female tibia  Page
Jennings, you may recall, had injured a knee at age seventeen, throwing
the javelin in high school  She underwent surgery to repair this
injury  The surgeon no longer had the relevant x-rays, but she assured
me that she had made two incisions in the surface of the tibia and
attached the tendon through them  This is called a Hauser procedure, '
and it leaves definite and characteristic marks: the bone is cut
throughin two small parallel rectangles and these rectangles remain
visible, even after they have healed over, for the rest of the
patient's life
I had the New Hampshire surgeon sketch the rectangles in pencil on a
sample @bia I took up to her  I still have it today  She drew two
rectangles on it in pencil at the precise spots where, she insisted,
she had cut into Page Jennings's kneebone  Seeing them, I was deeply
perplexed  I knew very well that, on the burned and painstakingly
reconstructed portion of female tibia that was lying on a table at the
C A Pound Human Identification laboratory in Gainesville, there was
absolutely no trace of these surgical scars  I had carefully
reassembled this five-inch portion of tibia from thirty-six separate
fragments of bone, x-rayed it and pored over it for days  And the
scars should have been there, if indeed the burned bone belonged to
Page Jennings
These doubts 'were incorporated in our report to the New Hampshire
state attorney general's office in 1985  To my vast annoyance,
Attorney General Stephen Merrill released all the doubtful points to the
press immediately, and the media had a field day  The skeletons in the
shack were bogus!  Glyde Earl Meek was still alive!
Page Jennings couldn't be identified with the female remains in the
shack!  A murderer and his love-struck girlfriend were still on the
loose!  Meek was placed on the FBI"S "10 Most Wanted" list and his
photograph was circulated to law enforcement agencies all over America
These suspicions grew like weeds  The whole case was taking on a
perverse life of its own, a life after death in which skeletons rose up
and scampered away on miraculously healed legs; adult jaws shrank to
the size of children's; teeth flew out of mouths, and a prominent gold
filling somehow evaporated to atoms  To this day, I imagine, there are
people in New Hampshire who believe Glyde Earl Meek committed the
perfect triple murder and is cavorting around the country as you read
these lines, laughing at the law
These proceedings filled me with chagrin  At the same time I purposed,
not without some anger, to get to the bottom of this endlessly mocking
case, no matter how long it might take me
It took me and my students another full year  I doubt if, within the
whole history of forensic anthropology, -a pair of skeletons has been
puzzled over and put back together with such painstaking slowness, such
infinite care, as the remains from the burned shack in High Springs
Whenever I had a spare moment in 1985 and 1986, I would return to these
two skeletons, cautiously matching up fragments, one by one, bit by
bit  Today these remains are kept in two cardboard boxes in the C A
Pound Human Identification laboratory, numbered lC85 and lD85
In those days I was still occupying rooms at the Florida Museum of
Natural History  At that time in my lab we didn't have huge tables to
work on  The expansion of other activities in the museum was cramping
me  So I used two counter tops, manufactured at a Florida state prison
with convict labor, each one thirty inches deep by eight feet long
One counter top I used for unsorted material  The other I divided into
two areas: "His" and "Hers"
Very quickly we could confirm that we had two individuals, no more
Furthermore we could rely on those beeiutiful, enormous, detailed crime
scene photographs taken by the Alachua County sheriff s office, which
pretty well indicated that we were dealing with two individuals lying
side by side  The dog and squirrel bones presented no great problems
We were able to winnow them out fairly early on  Some types of dog
teeth do indeed resemble human "canine" teeth at first glance, but
there are distinctive ridges that mark dog teeth clearly and no
forensic anthropologist could long be deceived by them
It was also clear that we were dealing with bones that had burned
inside of bodies because of the tremendous twisting and warping and
checkering and very characteristic breakage of the bones
I ask the reader's patience for taking up again a subject I have
touched on earlier, that is, the idiosyncrasies of burned bones  But
it is essential that you have a clear picture of this process if you
are to accompany me in the investigation that follows  Naked bones
that are burned in a fire look much different from bones that are
enclosed and burned inside a body  Bones burned as bones, and not as
part of a body, react differently under fire than do bones encased in
tissue with high fat content and other fluids  In some ways it may be
considered as the difference between frying a joint of meat in a pan of
bacon grease, as opposed to cooking a naked bone in a hot dry oven
Bones burned naked, without the surrounding flesh, go through the same
color changes as bones in fresh bodies  They blackibn, gray and
whiten  They will shrink, but often not as much, and they don't warp
and distort themselves as much; nor do the bone surfaces change and
degrade in the manner we see in bones burned inside bodies
When bones inside bodies are burned they change color, as the
surrounding flesh sizzles and melts away  These transformations happen
quickest around the joints, where the skin, soft tissue and muscles are
thinner  Here the transformation begins earliest, but eventually it
will overtake the whole skeleton if the fire is allowed to burn
The bone begins to change from its normal color, a creamy white-yellow,
to a darker yellow as fats from the surrounding tissue are baked in
Then, as the fire continues to burn, this dark yellow gradually yields
to black  The black represents the organic substances of the bone,
which have been carbonized  Finally, if these black, carbonized bones
remain amid the flames, even the last organic residues are burned away
In these final stages, the color of the bone gradually fades from black
to very dark gray, to gray, to light gray and finally to white  When
all of the organic constituents of the bone have been burned away
completely, leaving only the inorganic portions@alcium carbonate and
other salts of organic materialthe bones a re pure white  Such are
the "calcined bones" you encounter in Gothic novels  My point is, fire
and bone interact in very predictable ways, going through a clearly
visible series of changes, changes which can be pinpointed by color and
texture
As the fire reaches the bone, definite changes occur  Each bone seems
to react differently, according to the thickness of the compact bone
composing it  Some surfaces begin to "checker" and break into tiny
cubes which may or may not separate from one another
If it does not pain you too much to imagine your leg on fire, I wig
tell you that, once your flesh is consumed, the surfaces of your
tibia-your shinbone-will begin to split into a crisscross checkerboard
pattern  This is because the surface of your tibia is relatively thin
Now if you don't mind, let the fire move up and consume your thigh
The thighbone is called the femur and here the burn pattern of the
surface is completely different, because the outer layer of the femur
is thicker  Instead of checkerboards, your thighbone will crackle up
into lime crescent moons as,the fire makes its way through the flesh
and begins to gnaw at the bone  Bits may fall off, but they can often
be glued back on in the laboratory because of their shape: curved, not
right-angled  It's all very distinctive  So the fragments of a burned
tibia look very different from the fragments of a burned femur  In ipy
laboratory I was able to divide many small bits of burned bone into
checkerboards and crescent moons, and gradually fit these pieces back
together into tibias and femurs  In this particular case I was able to
reconstruct a large portion of the burned female's tibia out of
thirty-six small fragments, I cannot hope to convey the immense,
fatiguing and yet fasc'mating task of reassembling those fragments  We
used Duco cementmodel airplane glue-to put the bones back together
because it does not expand when subjected to moisture, and because you
can always dissolve it with acetone if you make a mistake  I
challenged my students to attack these bones and carefully monitored
their reconstructions  When I agreed, the reconstruction stood  When
I disagreed-out poured the acetone
Often the fragments were so small that they had to be splinted after
they were glued together  The female's reconstructed tibia is a very
twisty thing now: it has a curled flake coming off it like a bean
sprout; but when it was part of the living bone, this wild curl lay
flat and straight and matched up very nicely with the cavity beneath
it
Blame the fire for splitting it and blistering it, up  Such are the
ichosyncrasi'es of burned bones
To sum up a year and a halfs work in a single paragraph: We looked for
fragments that could be identified as coming from particular bones  We
carefully gauged the thickness of the bone walls  We closely measured
the curvature of fragments, which indicated the circumference of a
certain bone shard We looked carefully at the size of the cavity within
the shaft as opposed to the thickness of the walls of the shaft  We
scrutinized the shapes of joint surfaces and kept an eye out for the
special protuberances that indicated muscle attachment
Color was our ally  We always looked at color, the shades of color a
bone goes through as it is burning: cream, dark yellow, black, dark
gray, gray, light gray, white  Neighboring colors and neighboring
textures helped us figure out the coherence of neighboring bones and
fragments, what went next to what
You must not imagine that at the end of our labors we had anything
resembling a pair of fully articulated skeletons  Rather, we were
trying to reconstruct certain large, significant, verifiable bones that
would correspond to x-rays taken of Page Jennings and Glyde Earl Meek
before death
One by one the baffling difficulties and discrepancies yielded to
patient endeavor  The first riddle, the tiny female palate, so small
it seemed to belong to a midget, was proved to be an adult palate
shrunken by fire  I was able to demonstrate that fire shrinks and
compresses bones by a factor of twenty to twenty-five percent  The
teeth in this palate matched Page Jennings's dental x-rays  It was her
palate
Then came the unscarred tibia  If Page Jennings had undergone radical
knee surgery at age seventeen, why didn't the female kneebone show
traces of it?  When I went back to the New Hampshire surgeon and asked
her-very diplomatically of course-to give me copies of her surgical
records relating to Page Jennings, I found that she had not used -the
bone-cutting Hauser procedure, at all, but instead a gentler method
known as the Goldthwait procedure, which did not involve cutting into
the bone  The surgeon had simply forgotten which type of surgical
procedure she had used, but her case records were clear and
unequivocal: Goldthwait, not Hauser  This regrettable lapse of memory
had cost us months of desperate groping  Now, with the surgical
records before me, this riddle was solved
Page Jennings didn't have surgical scars on her tibia because the
surgeon had never cut into the tibia  The surgeon finally agreed with
my identification
With these discrepancies overcome, the rest of the female bones fell
into place rather neatly  Her left humerus, or upper-arm bone, closely
matched predeath x-rays of Page Jennings's arm, right down to a tiny
bone bubble that looked like a capital letter A with two crossbars
There was also a distinctive dome-shaped formation, as well as areas of
density, that were recognizable and congruentalmost mathematically so
Page Jennings's deltoid tuberosi@a bump or area of roughened bone where
the deltoid muscle attaches to the humerus-was identical in the female
humerus found at the burned shack  The maverick fragment of fibula
that had somersaulted out of the fire and was only charred at one tip
matched up perfectly with x-rays of Page Jennings's left fibula  It
became one of our most conclusive pieces of evidence
To those who, from mischief, fantasy or fond hope, imagine that Page
Jennings somehow walked away from that terrible fire, I can only reply:
if she did, then she managed to walk away without a major bone in her
left leg, her upper left arm, and her palate  That may sound harsh,
but in this case the truth had to be used as a blunt instrument  That
fibula, that humerus and that palate are today in the C A Pound Human
Identification Laboratory, and they are all incontestably hers
Now Meek: from the outset Meek's powerful, stop-at-nod-ting personality
had animated this case diabolically  Page Jennings was merely his
plaything and possession  By his own admission in the suicide note, he
had murdered her parents in New Hampshire and set the inn on fire  He
had then strangled Page, not once but twice, and crushed her skull with
a rock  If the evidence in this case were false, it was Meek who had
falsified it  If the bones in the shack were not his, he had
nevertheless put them there  If this dismal tale were ever to have an
ending it rested with me to determine whether the male skeleton
retrieved from the burned cabin belonged to Glyde

Earl Meek or not  Did that buckshot-spattered, fire-cracked brainpan
belong to a self-proclaimed murderer or to a nameless innocent?  This
was what I had to prove, conclusively enough to satisfy police in
Florida and New Hampshire
There was a perple@ng tab of bone from the male skeleton that seemed to
float apart from the reconstruction, as it took shape  Composed of
several fragments, dark gray and mottled in color, this flattened bone
would provide me with a crucial, coinciding piece of evidence  It was
the first, topmost rib of a male rib cage, short and stubby  Our ribs
progress like-harp strings, moving from small, short beginnings down to
full, harmonious curves before shrinking again to the last, lowest
ribs  This particular rib had a very irregularly shaped, calcified
cartilage at the end nearest the breastbone
This nubbin of cartilage, this small irregularity, was extraordinarily
distinctive  Under powerful illumination it stood out like a knot on a
pine log
A bright light and an old x-ray proved it was Meek's  In the early
1980s Meek had visited a chiropractor in Tucson, Arizona  I had not
looked deeply into the dark areas of these x-rays, but now I used a
special piece of equipment, a "hot spot," a bright reflecting bulb, to
scrutinize the opaque' and gloomy edges of these old x-rays  This
powerful beam pierces the deepest shadows in x-ray films
There, captured by the Arizona chiropractor and now illumined by the
brilliant "hot spot," was the selfsame rib  The x-ray I took of the
bume,d rib fragment, superimposed on the old chiropractor's x-ray,
filled up magnificently  Exterior contours, interior irregularities,
fell into, place like a Euclidean theorem  The male rib @ from tie
fire belonged to Glyde Earl Meek  I did not fling up my arms or shout
"Eureka!"  but I will confess to expen'encing a keen, silent elation
while gazing at this eloquent bit of bone
By now I had had a bellyful of New Hampshire state Attorney General
Stephen Merrill's insinuations about the incompetence of Florida law
enforcement officials and their dull-witted investigators
-As late as June 1986, a year and a half after the murders, Merrill
ostentatiously kept the case open and insisted on listing Meek as a
living, wanted criminal  For this public and obstinate skepticism he
won the huzzahs of the Manchester Union Leader
Merrill is to be commended for resisting the temptation to try to "close
the book" on this sad, salacious controversy-by accepting the facile
conclusion that Page Jennings and Meek died in a fire in a High
Springs, Florida shack on January 28th, 1985 [said an editorial in the
Union Leader on June 41
It's not a question of the competence of the experts; it's a question
of whether that competence is being e#ended beyond the area of their
expertise  Merrill does not challenge the evidence  But, ever mindful
of Meek's reputation as a devious convict, he notes that the teeth are
not attached to bone, that in the past (in Arizona) Meek has saved his
extracted teeth, and that there is a possibility of a "salting of the
site" with phony evidence    
One can -only wonder whether the Florida police, who have halted their
search for Meek, are being equally precise in their consideration of
the essential distinction between what the evidence indicates and what
it proves  Merrill    deserves praise for demonstrating a
high-degree of professionalism in not accepting easy conclusions
There were no such bouquets for me, toiling patiently in my little
laboratory in Gainesville, poring over myriad flakes of reassembled
bone  By now I was sure of my identifications, but I wished to 1 make
assurance doubly sure"  I determined to find the telltale gold filling
that Meek had worn in LIFE and was so conspicuously absent from his
skeleton in death
To do this I enlisted the services of three University of Florida
archaeologists: Michael A Russo, Charles R Ewen and Rebecca Saunders
You can still examine our expense account in the files  We claimed for
four pairs of leather gloves, ten dust masks and fifty Ziploc plastic
bags  Using a tripod-mounted fine screen, with a I/ir,-inch mesh, we
excavated the complete shack down to sterile soil -in vain  We did not
find the gold inlay
Then I directed that all the rocks, dirt and debris from the original
soil-sampfles-the material that had earlier been screened through a
1/8-inch mesh-be brought back to the C A Pound Human Identification
laboratory and put through another, finer screen  This time we would
use a 1/16-inch mesh, about as fine as a window screen
It was a young graduate student, Heidi Sydow, who found the gold inlay
She was part of a work-study program and she more than earned her pay
that day  The crucial filling was caught at last, after infinite pains
and disappointments, sifted out in the fine mesh  A single pin was
bent, but the whole filling stood forth unmistakably
Now it was captured in my hands, glittering with that imperishable
sparkle that has rendered gold so precious for thousands of years
This fleck of gold, that day, was more precious to me than any other
Pure gold melts at 1,945 degrees Fahrenheit  Dental gold is far
stronger  In a really hot structural fire, after eight hours of
burning, where the heat is most intense, it gets up to a little over
1,200 degrees Centigrade, or just under 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit  In
my experience I have seen aluminum and pot metals melt in house fires,
but seldom any metal more durable  To get to 1,945 degrees in a house
fire the blaze would have to continue as a raging fire for around three
hours  It is absurd to imagine the small shack in High Springs burning
for three hours at these terrific temperatures  The galvanized tin
roof sections that had collapsed into the fire were unmelted  The
Ithaca shotgun's slide was welded shut, but its barrel was undeformed
by the heat
And in fact this gold filling had not,melted either  Its original
shape was still clearly recognizable, and it was definitely Meek's
The New Hampshire authorities clung feebly to their hypothesis-Meek
could have flung his gold filling into the fire!  But soon after that
Dr Mertz was able to prove that a whole fragment of the male jaw,
with teeth attached, corresponded to Meek's dental x-rays  Obviously
he had not flung his jaw into the fire
After immense doubts and difficulties we had proved what seemed
likeliest at the very beginning of the case: Page Jennings and Glyde
Earl Meek were dead  Their bones were the bones found in the burned
cabin  The long and laborious investigation was closed
Glyde Earl Meek was finally, quietly taken off the "Most Wanted" list,
and Stephen Merrill was elected governor of New Hampshire
His successor wrote me a friendly letter, apologizing for the doubts
and difficulties stirred up over the Meek-Jennings affair  The most
troublesome case I had ever encountered was finally solved
Mixed with the sense of triumph was a bitter aftertaste of
exasperation, because it took so much work to demonstrate beyond doubt
what was from the very beginning the most probable solution
There was the feeling of having come round in a gigantic circle, after
infinite and exhausting labor, to the simple starting point
"Reality," as Borges wrote, "has not the slightest obligation to be
interesting    "
But the long suicide note was interesting  What did its absurd,
theatrical tale really mean?  I have my own theories about its nuances
I believe Glyde Earl Meek murdered Page Jennings shortly after she left
her brother's apartment for the last time on January 11  I believe all
the references to her joyous waiting, her deep meditations, her passive
submission to strangulation, her loving acceptance of her death and
cremation-all these are lies, made up by Meek to conceal the fact that
he murdered a young girl and her parents because they daribd to thwart
him, stand in the path of his extravagant and all-encompassing dream of
love and self-admiration  I believe he had every intention of
murdering Chris Jennings too-the hatred for Chris fairly blazes from
the suicide note, and the young man can count himself lucky he was not
in his Gainesville apartment on January 18 when Meek came back from his
homicidal errand in New Hampshire  I believe Meek entered the
apartment bent on murder, using Page's key, only to find it unoccupied
Chlis had gone tohis parents' funeral in New Hampshire  That funeral
saved his life;

What were Meek's thoughts as he traveled south from New Hampshire?
Short on sleep, guilty of two, probably three, murders, nearly out of
his mind, he may have toyed with the idea of substituting Chris
Jennings's body for his own in the cabin  Meek had no idea how precise
postmortem identifications of burned bones can be  He had already
tried to hide the New Hampshire murders with a fire
Did he hope to cheat death and elude justice by placing Chris
Jennings's body next to- his dead sister's?  "I would have taken all
their lives anyway," he wrote in the note found in the meadow
Enraged, exhausted and baffled to find Chris Jennings out of reach,
Meek-gave up, decided to die, and recrafted his suicide note to include
an element of mercy  Chris Jennings, unexpectedly out of harm's way,
would now be allowed to live after all, so that he could suffer endless
pangs of remorse
you live with it all now, Bucko-Mal, Betty and us  Meddling fools,"
Meek wrote in the note left in Jennings's apartment  In the longer,
more detailed note found in the Fiat he said:

Her brother won't be harmed so that he can live with everything for the
rest of his life  A pay back for ivecting her and writing that she was
"'insane" in his journal  Personally I would like to wait around and
do him but she has made me promise not to give him the easy way out but
to think about it every day  I have promised to go with her and so we
shall
Then, a few lines later in the same note:

She is waiting now and I nmst do what I can't believe I'm going to do
but I must do for me and her
"Waiting" indeed!  I believe Page Jennings was dead days before the
fire in the cabin on January 18  Possibly her body was stored in the
mini-warehouse during the hectic period between January 11 and January
18  The account of her strangulation rings true, but I believe it may
very well have occurred long before her body was placed in the cabin to
burn  I am still curious about the blood found on one of her Reebok
sneakers  Where did it come from?  When was it shed?  Blood tests
taken at the time revealed that the blood could have been Page
Jennings's; DNA testing, the kind of testin we can 9 do today, would
leave absolutely no doubt  And I could wish, if that Reebok shoe were
still available, that a careful DNA analysis might be run on that old
blood smear  I believe the results would bear out my hypothesis, that
Page was murdered, completely against her wilt To this day I feel pity
for the bright young high school javelin thrower whose early life had
been filled with such promise  That she would become the murdered
child of murdered parents, that she would be strangled, brained and
combusted to a heap of burned bones amid the ruins of a squalid,
deserted shack a thousand miles from her home was an outcome as
horrific as it was undeserved
The buckshot in Meek's skull, as well as the lead traces on his lower
jaw, make it clear that Meek used the shotgun on himself as the fire
was kindled  If he used ropes to tie himself down, as he proclaimed in
the suicide note, they were unnecessary  The shotgun blast killed him
instantly
Perhaps he hoped for some sort of fiery and final confusion, mingling
his guilt with the innocence of the dead young woman beside him, his
bones with hers  His final thoughts, as he pulled the trigger amid the
crackling flames, remain his alone  We possess only the leaden globules
against the shattered and burned brainpan
Chris Jennings left GainesviRe, returned north and sold the inn his
parents owned  He still sends me a Christmas card every year  It is a
remembrance I appreciate

Lost Legions

O stranger, go tell the Spartans That here we lie, obedient to their
orders

-Simonides, 92D, Epitaph for the 300 Spartans killed at The@ylae The
The question of American soldiers missing in action in Vietnam is an open,
bleeding wound in American politics even today  No matter how many
facts and reasonable arguments are sent into battle against it, no
matter how many congressional and military delegations visit Hanoi, it
seems this lingering doubt cannot be laid to rest
The picture of gaunt, starved, tortured men housed in bamboo cages in
some trackless jungle has been reinforced in popular movies so often
now, that the existence of these poor wraiths has become an article of
faith for thousands of Americans  These soldiers were lost in a lost
war, and this twice-lost state has created an empty, gaping, painful
blank in America's soul
Even though by now the term "MIA" has been superseded by the more
correct expression,  unaccounted for," nevertheless this question has
paralyzed American foreign policy toward Vietnam  It still prevents
full normation of relations nearly two decades after the cessation of
hostilities  While only about 2200 men are still Bsted as unaccounted
for from the Vietnam War, as opposed to 78,750 unaccounted for from
World War II and 8,170 from the Korean War, it is the vanished soldiers
of Vietnam who tug at our hearts and rob many of us of our reason
today, long after the last guns have fallen silent
Extraordinary legends have flourished over the years  There is said to
be a warehouse somewhere in Hanoi, filled to the ceding with the bones
of US servicemen, which are doled out one by one by the Vietnamese
authorities in return for "concessions" on the part of the United
States  There is a widespread and fantastic belief that the United
States Government itself, to cover up its incompetence in failing to
win the release of all American prisoners of war in 1973, has made an
unholy alliance with Vietnam to hide the "truth" from the American
public, ie that there are still Americans alive in prison camps in
Southeast Asia, held hostage to Oriental malice
MIAs have been honored on US postage stamps; during the Reagan and
Bush administrations, the black and white MIA flag flew once a year
over the white House  It still flies today, on thousands of flagpoles
across the country  There have even been video arcade games in which,
for a succession of quarters, you could rescue these trapped Americans
and be a hero  Confidence tricksters have preyed on survivors and
their families, eliciting thousands of dollars in contributions, to pay
for "reconnaissance and rescue missions," which somehow always fail by
a hair's breadth to gave any lost Americans
When a delusion is as widely held and as firmly believed as the MIA
scenario, it is perhaps futile to argue against it  I know nothing
about this issue that is not already broad public knowledge  But I
think if more Americans were aware of the immense concern and deep
respect that is accorded to every single fragment of bone, no matter
how tiny, that has been recovered in the search for these
unaccounted-for men and women, then perhaps some of these widespread
doubts and anxieties might, be allayed
I have firsthand knowledge of these efforts  Twice a year I visit the
laboratory in Hawaii where recommendations for identifications are made
and cases are resolved  I have seen and scrutinized the remains of our
servicemen as they are brought home from Vietnam, in some cases after
more than a quarter of a century  I have painstakingly double-checked
many identifications myself, rejecting those I thought needed
additional work  I continue to make recommendations to the Department
of the Army for the improvement and enhancement of the identification
process, and I can truthfully say that the military accepts most of my
suggestions with a ready will and in a friendly spirit of cooperation
The ceremony for receiving these honored dead in Hawaii is impressive
After a joint forensic review in Hanoi, Vietnamese officials return the
remains in wooden boxes in Hanoi to their American counterparts  The
wooden boxes are then placed in large aluminum cases that measure about
six and a half feet long  The sides and tops of these cases are made
from one piece of aluminum, which can be raised and lifted off the
base  The cases are sealed, put aboard a transport plane in Hanoi,
draped with American flags, and flown to Hickam Air Force Base, where
they are met with full military honors
In Hanoi it is usually US army personnel, who carry the cases
in Hawaii they are carried off the planes by American servicemen in
dress uniform from all of the branches of the service  In Hawaii the
members of the honor guard march up the rear ramp of the C-141
Starlifter aircraft and carry off their dead comrades, one at a time
For ceremonial purposes, one aluminum case is treated as one body, even
though within it there may be the commingled remains of several people
Hickam Field shares runway space with Honolulu International Airport
and sometimes passengers on commercial flights get a glimpse of these
solemn proceedings: the flags, the aluminum cases, the brass and braid
of the honor guards twinkling against the green headlands of Hawaii and
the wide, blue Pacific
They may not realize it, but they are witnessing one of the final
chapters in our country's longest war
I wish that those who suspect a vast conspiracy and cover-up could
spend a few days inside the U S Army Central Identification

Laboratory (Hawaii), known by its acronym as CILHI  They would see one
of the most modern, best-equipped forensic identification laboratories
in the world  Within its walls some of the most searching and
painstaking forensic identification work imaginable is carried out with
every tool available to modern science
The lab is a low structure that is not distinctive at all from the
outside  It is a large affair, with more than 5,000 square feet of
floor space  Inside a large, windowless, well-lit room are about
twenty tables, each thirty inches wide by sixty inches long, arranged
in rows
The remains on these tables are covered with sheets, and some are so
pitifully small that they cause scarcely a ruffle in the clean white
shroud  Every night as work ceases in the laboratory, the sheets are
folded and arranged with military precision to cover the remains again
Signs at the door advise visitors that permission is required to enter,
that no photographs are allowed and all headgear must be removed  This
last injunction is strictly observed and is intended to show respect to
the fallen
At the end of the laboratory, in an L-shaped alcove, there are shelves
built to hold the boxes of remains that have not been identified
There are not hundreds of such boxes, as some may imagine  At any
given time the "unsolved" boxes number slightly over one hundred
Microscopes are on worktables at one end of the room, and -logbooks to
enter receipts of the remains are near the front door
CILHI itself occupies only roughly half of this building  It is
separated from the other half by a solid wall pierced by a single door
that is always locked on both sides  The other half of the budding is
occupied by the military mortuary, which is intended to handle fresh
remains  If there were some great disaster, such  as a plane crash,
both facilities would pitch in with their combined resources to process
and identify the remains
When the aluminum boxes are unsealed and the wooden boxes within
are'opened, the sight that greets the investigator is often
anticlimactic  A miserably tiny scatter of small bones, so few you
could hide them in your fist, may be all that is left of a supposed
unaccounted-for serviceman  I say "supposed" advisedly  Though we
believe the Vietnamese authorities are acting in good faith, it
sometimes happens that the remains of one person may be scattered
throughout several boxes  At the same time, portions of two crew mates
may be commingled in one box  Often animal bones, or bones belonging
to  dead Vietnamese, may be present  The animal bones are carefully
separated out  They are not thrown away but are usually kept in
comparative collections, which are helpful in demonstrating what sort
of animals may be found in the area where human remains Turn up, and
what to watch out for in future
The Asiatic bones, which are classified as "Southeast Asian Mongoloid"
in official terminology, are also winnowed out  These remains are sent
back to Vietnam, although the authorities there are often unwilling to
take them back  Soldiers who fought for the Republic of Vietnam-the
south-during that long war are contemptuously known as linh nguy or
"puppet soldiers" by the victorious North Vietnamese, and their graves
are dishonored and overgrown by weeds  By contrast the North
Vietnamese soldiers who died are called bo doi phuc vien, or "war
veterans of The revolution," and their cemeteries are beautifully
landscaped and festooned with flags every July 27 on Invalids and
Fallen Heroes Day  Agreements formed recently now permit American
anthropologists to inspect the remains before accepting them for
repatriation  This has greatly reduced the number of cases of mistaken
racial identity
This is how these remains are handled: Each new case is assigned to an
anthropologist and, if there are any dental remains, to a forensic
dentist as well  Obviously if the remains consist only of dental
remains-one or several teeth-then there is nothing for an
anthropologist to work on, and only a dentist would be called in  But
in most instances you need both experts  Usually the anthropologist
was present at the actual dig site, when the remains were unearthed
The anthropologist and the dentist work independently of one another,
so their conclusions can be cross-checked against each other  In most
cases the dentist has a great advantage  He is usually privy to
information, in the form of dental records, that the anthropologist
does not have
The dentist prepares a chart based On the dental evidence before him,
and he is careful to show restorations, if the jaw has naturally
missing teeth which fell out or were taken out while the subject was
alive, and so on  After completing that descriptive phase, the dentist
codes the information for entry into a computer  The computer, using
software called Computer Assisted Post Mortem Identification (CAPMI),
compares the entered information with the dental, records stored in its
data banks  More than 2500 dental records are in CAPMI  Now, that
doesn't mean that the dental records of all 2200 unaccounted-for men
are logged in CAPMI  Unfortunately, a few dozen lost soldiers have no
dental records in the existing files today, and some men may have
several files  The list of all unaccounted-for servicemen with dental
records in CAPMI that are compatible with the unknown remains appears
on the screen and can be printed out
To give an example: if all that is present is an upper right first
molar, which is tooth No  3 in the universal system, and this tooth
has an amalgam restoration in the occlusal or biting surface, this is
entered into CAPMI in abbreviated code: "Tooth No  3 has an O-AM," or
an occlusal amalgam restoration  Every individual record in CAPMI with
an O-AM would immediately pop up on the computer screen  But the
program doesn't quit there  It lists every individual who had no
restorations in No  3, according to their latest dental records  Why?
Because there is always a possibility that a filling was added later
and was not recorded
However, a person with a No  3 with a restoration in the occlusal
surface and another restoration in the lingual surface of the tooth
would be excluded by the program and not listed  As we say: "Teeth
don't heal"  In short, people with a tooth with too fetv restorations
could still be considered; but a tooth with too many would be ruled out
by CAPMI
Obviously in this example the fist of possibilities would be very long
indeed  But if more teeth are present, with more variables, the list
shortens considerably  In any case the dentist must go to the actual
dental x-rays and compare them to the postmortem dental x-rays
This may be very time-consuming work requiring great pahence  If a
radiographic match cannot be made, other information is factored in
Where were the remains recovered?  Where were the individuals lost?  If
the plane crash is known from our records, if our team excavated the
site in cooperation with a team from the former belligerent country,
then we concentrate the initial search on those crew members involved
in that incident whose names appear in CAPMI
Let us leave the dentist for the moment  While he is working with
names and records, the anthropologist, who has only the bones before
him, is wholly in the dark as to the possible identification
This is done deliberately, to prevent any preconceptions or foregone
conclusions  He or she must reach conclusions based on the number of
individuals represented, which bones go with which individual, the age,
sex, race, height and-so forth of each individual lying before him  It
would be so rare as to be almost miraculous that an anthropologist
would develop information that itself would lead to the identification
of a particular serviceman  But the anthropologist's independence from
the dentist later becomes vitally important when a dental
identification is made  The anthropologist's findings are extremely
important when the process of cross-checking begins, in order to
establish that the skeletal remains are consistent with the dental
identification
Obviously all this painstaking work is not accomplished over a few
days' time  Indeed, the anthropologist may be interrupted and have to
set the case aside, to return to Southeast Asia for another recovery
effort  But little by little each set of remains is thoroughly
examined  In the end, the laboratory director receives a full report
There is the dental summary from the dentist  There is the
anthropological summary from the anthropologist  There is the incident
information, including maps of locations and other material brought
forth from the records room  There is the search and recovery report
from the search and recovery team  Finally, there is the death
certificate, signed by an army pathologist at Tripler Army Medical
Center after reviewing the findings of the case
The laboratory director- forwards the combined file, with his
recommendation for identification, to the laboratory commander, an army
colonel, who then forwards it to Washington  The office in Washington
sends complete duplicates of these case files, including photographs
and x-rays, to me  Nor am I the sole recipient  There is a pool of
forensic anthropologists and forensic dentists currently under contract
to the Army to double-check these lab findings  All of us are
board-certified by our respective disciplines, and we are considered to
have reached a certain degree of prominence in our fields, so that our
opinions carry the weight of reputation  I've been under contract to
the Army since 1986 and have flown to CILHI in Hawaii many times since
then; and I have examined findings in my laboratory here in Gainesville
oftener still  In fact I was involved in the discussions that led to
the setting up of this process  Over the years nine people have had
contracts at one time or another to provide this consulting service
After I (or another of my colleagues under contract) have meticulously
reviewed the file, we have the option of either flagging it or
approving it  If we flag it, the case will be put on hold until we
have an opportunity to examine the remains ourselves  We may also
recommend that more work be done or additional documents be prepared
But the standards at CILHI are very high now, and in most cases the
reviewer finds that the identification is scientifically valid
He then returns the dossier, together with his written review, to
Washington  This is what happens in most cases
Nowcome s the moment when the family is finally notified  The
branch of service in which the man served sends its mortuary affairs
officer, who is a funeral director, to visit the family and explain the
findings and the reviews  At that time the family has the option of
accepting the findings, or, if they so choose, having their own expert
examine the remains and review the file  This almost never happens
and, on those rare occasions when it has, the outside expert has never
succeeded in finding evidence that would overthrow the recommended
identification
But even now the process isn't quite finished  With the family's
concurrence, the files, with all of the reviews, including that of the
family's consultant (if they decided to hire one), goes to the Aryned
Forces Identification Review Board (AFIRB)  AFIRB consists of officers
in the various branches of service who hold the rank of O-6
(that is, a colonel in the Army or Air Force, a captain in the Navy)
ost of these officers have served in Southeast Asia under the same
conditions as the men who were lost  They understand from their own
experience what conditions were then, and are now, in that theater of
war  If they agree with the recommendation, it then goes to the Graves
Registration Office, for final approval
The remains, which have stayed in the Hawaii laboratory all this time,
are taken in flag-covered transfer cases from CILHI to the adjacent
Hickam Field, where they are loaded onto military aircraft by an honor
guard of the branch in which they served  They are then flown to a
mortuary in the continental United States where they are placed,in a
casket with full uniform and appropriate decorations and insignia  The
remains then go to the national cemetery or to a hometown cemetery,
just as the next of kin wish
We cannot work miracles, however  It is a fact that some remains stay
in the L-shaped room adjacent to the laboratory for years, and a
hanfful may never be identified  Every year additional records are
sifted for comparison  There is always the hope that additional
portions of remains will come in, or that some clue will jog an
investigator's memory, leading to a file on an unaccounted-for
serviceman that turns out to be the correct one  But in these
stubborn, residual cases, where the dental and skeletal evidence is
sparse, the investigators 'face a formidable task  Some of these bones
literally come from nowhere; we do not even have the name of the spot
within Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia where they were unearthed  That
information has been lost  Yet the bones are retained, year after
year, and are often taken down and studied afresh, over and over again
The task of identifying unaccounted-for remains at CILHI is immense and
never ending  Alas, honesty compels me to admit that the laboratory
did not always function as smoothly and professionally as it does
today  As a congressional inquiry later revealed, some identifications
made at CILHI were based on conclusions that were only inadequately
backed up by evidence  I discovered this for myself when I visited
CILHI as an outside expert in 1985  My involvement with the laboratory
stemmed from a plane crash over Laos many years earlier, and from the
persistence of one devoted widow who could not forget the loss of her
husband
Four days before Christmas, on December 21, 1972, an AC130A gunship was
shot down over Laos near a place called Pakse
The AC-130A was on a mission to attack North Vietnamese vehicles moving
south along the Ho Chi Minh trail, which at that point wandered through
supposedly neutral Laotian territory  The AC-130A is a'formidable
gunship, a modified Lockheed Hercules @-130 transport plane, which is
still very much a part of America's aerial armory
It has seen service in Somalia recently  Stuffed with computers and
radar, carrying a crew normally numbering fifteen, bristling with
cannons and machine guns with electronic firing pins, which blast
bullets downward in a well-nigh solid stream of murderous metal, the
craft is a slow-flying dreadnaught capable of immense, accurate
destruction
But on this day the plane was hit by antiaircraft fire from below and
fuel began to flow into the fuselage, soaking the crew and the huge
stores of ammunition aboard  A survivor later spoke of wading through
this highly flammable fuel as it sloshed about inside the doomed
aircraft  The pilot desperately steered his stricken plane toward
Thailand and safety, but soon realized the situation was hopeless
Remaining at the controls, he gallantly ordered the other crew members
to head for the rear, open ramp of the Hercules
That day there were sixteen men aboard the aircraft; the plane was
carrying one extra crewman
The other crew members were on their way aft, ready to parachute to
safety when the plane gave a jolt and spun out of control
In one cataclysmic second the fuel ignited and exploded  Two men were
blown out of the rear of the craft and parachuted safely to the jungle
below  There they were picked up and rescued by search and rescue
aircraft and taken to safety in neighboring Thailand  They were the
only survivors  It is believed that the other fourteen men, including
the navigator, lieutenant Colonel Thomas Trammell Hart in, perished
when the AC-130A plunged into the jungle at a high angle of impact and
burned, its cargo of thousands of rounds of ammunition exploding in the
fire
A day or so later a human arm was found in the jungle by some local
friendly forces and was returned to US military personnel, where it
was identified by fingerprints as one of the members of the crew  His
body was thus accounted for at that time  The rest of the crew members
were officially listed as "missing in action"
In 1985, I received a telephone call from Lieutenant Colonel Hart's
widow  She told me that she was active in, the League of Families, a
support organization trying to resolve cases of relatives missing in
action  Not content with the official account of the crash, this
resolute, plucky woman had visited the crash site in Laos and gone over
the ground herself  Not only that: she had actually picked up bone
fragments from the surface and turned them over to American
authorities
She told me that later a CILHI group had worked jointly with a team
from Laos to excavate the crash site and recover the remains of the
dead personnel, but she confided that she had no faith whatever in the
CILHI laboratory or its personnel  At this point CILHI had not yet
made any identifications of the Pakse remains, but even so Mrs Hart
was skeptical  She was not prepared to accept CILHI's word when it
came to her husband's remains  She wanted independent confirmation
My name had been mentioned to her by a colleague in Colorado, Dr
Michael Chamey, and she asked me for a second opinion  She wanted me
to examine personally the remains said to be those of her husband
I said I would  She asked how, much I would charge  I said I would
not charge anything to assist the family of a lost serviceman
Unfortunately, I had to go to China that summer to give a series of
lectures on the identification of air crash victims  When I returned,
I found out that CILHI had indeed identified one set of remains as
lAeutenant Colonel Hart's  Since I was unavailable, Mrs Hart had
gone to Dr  Charney, who performed the second examination
Chamey made no secret of his disagreement with the official army
identification of Lieutenant Colonel Hart's remains  In interviews
given to the news media he accused CILHI of practicing "voodoo science"
to identify these remains  The Pakse case received such wide attention
that in December 1985 I received another telephone call, this time from
one of the most distinguished figures in forensic anthropology, Dr
Ellis Kerley, a professor at the University of Maryland, whose
reputation was legendary
Kerley asked me if I would be interested in joining a three-man
commission of anthropologists, which the United States Army had asked
him to form, to visit and evaluate CILHI  I agreed but advised Kerley
that, instead of having a third anthropologist, what we really needed
was a forensic dentist  Teeth can be crucial in identifying human
remains  Kerley then invited Dr Lowell Levine, an internationally
known forensic dentist from New York, and we all received invitational
travel orders from the Army to visit the laboratory  Ellis was to
write an unclassified written summary of our findings  And so we flew
to Hawaii
Science can be a cruel discipline sometimes, and the truth can cut
deeply  Ellis Kerley found himself in a terrible position soon after
arriving in Hawaii and entening the CILHI laboratory  He was being
called upon to evaluate the work of one of his oldest friends, Tadao
Furue, an honest and upright Japanese scientist with a remarkable
history  Furue had been chosen as a kamikaze pilot in the closing days
of World War II and only the quick end of the war after the United
States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had prevented him
from climbing into his plane and immolating himself as a human bomb for
his Emperor
After the war Furue went to college in Tokyo and, while yet a student,
was hired by a US military laboratory in japan to assist in the
identification of American soldiers killed in combat  Some of the
greatest names in forensic anthropology were active in this work,
including my teacher, Tom McKern, as well as Mildred Trotter, the famous
anatomist and human osteologist, and T Dale Stewart, the curator of
physical anthropology at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, who
had for years performed the analyses of human remains for the FBI and
other governmental agencies  Kerley, too, had worked at the Tokyo
laboratory during the Korean War  Enroute to japan, aboard ship,
Kerley met his filture wife, mary, who was traveling with the USO
When they were married in japan, Tadao Furue had been Ellis's best man
Furue remained in japan after the U S Army lab closed  From time to
time his services were used by other mortuaries, whenever he was
needed  In those days there was no central identification laboratory
In the early years of the Vietnam War all the identifications of dead
US soldiers were carried out in individual military mortuaries  It
was only as the war wound down that a central identification laboratory
was opened in Thailand  When that laboratory relocated in the 1970s to
Honolulu, Furue was employed for the first time away from japan as the
anthropologist
Now Ellis Kerley found himself in the delicate position of passing
judgment on the work of the man who had stood up for him at
his wedding  Ellis found the situation excruciating  He is one of the
most gentle 'men you could ever hope to meet  I can picture him saying
to a student who flubbed an examination: "Well, Mr Smith, you really
didn't do as well as you might have on this examination and we are
going to have to ask you to take the course over again"
He would never be so brutal as to say: "You flunked"  Ellis is the
soul of discretion, a man who would bend over backward to spare
people's feelings
The laboratory, when we visited it in 1985, was made up of two
buildings  There was the administration building, a two-story
cinderblock affair; and a one-story warehouse-like building next door,
made of a corrugated material, probably asbestos, with a nicely
finished interior  Furue had a large office in one corner that was
separated from the laboratory floor by the x-ray room, whose unshielded
walls housed the dental x-ray machine  This machine was the only
radiographic facility in the laboratory
All of the anthropological instruments in the laboratory were Furue's
The entire reference library-mostly books in Japanese belonged to him
The laboratory's array of photographic equipment was so limited that,
when Furue wanted to document specimens, he used his own camera, bought
his own film and often had the film processed at his omen expense  The
pictures in the laboratory files therefore didn't even legally belong
to the government  They were Furue's own personal property  There
wasn't even a hot-water heater in the building
One  end of the laboratory was divided off into a records room where
all the medical records on the unaccounted for were housed
Also available there were condensed mortuary records on every
serviceman and woman who had been killed in Southeast Asia and identified
at the mortuaries that preceded CILHI
We had only two and a half days in the laboratory so we had to work
quickly  We naturally focused on the Pakse case as a kind of
convenient benchmark, a recent example of the labratory@s methods
This was, after all, the case that had aroused official concern because
of the inquiries by Lieutenant Colonel Hart's widow  As the hours
passed and the three of us sat around the table looking at files and
notebooks, a feeling of dread gradually took hold and spread among us
We were being pushed inexorably toward a painful conclusion: some of
Furue's,identifications of the Pakse remains simply would not hold
water
At the beginning of the summer of 1985, CILHI had announced that every
single one of the thirteen lost men had been identified from the bone
and dental fragments gathered on site in Laos  All these remains would
be returned to their families  The whole crew had been accounted for
Furue told us with pride that approximately 50,000 bone and tooth
fragments had been recovered from the crash site  Those' along with
the fragments Mrs Hart had collected, had been analyzed by him with
the help of his assistants  They had separated out all the fragments
that might be used for identification  As we looked at his
photographs, we began to see that many of the identifications were made
on distressingly little evidence indeed, based on an examination of the
scantiest of remains  Even when more complete skeletal remains were
available, there were still some grave difficulties
Tadao and his assistant had tried to separate out the Pakse remains
into neat piles, by age and size  Unfortunately in this case all of
the crew members were white, all of them were male, and most of them
were young  They ranged in age from nineteen to forty-one  In some
cases, teeth were missing from the sets of remains altogether
The sum total of one set of remains was a single fragment of the
shoulder area  Any identification based on such meager remains, with
no additional evidence such as DNA test results, is bound to be mere
wishful thinking
We said in our report that in only five of the Pakse cases could
identifications be substantiated from dental evidence  This was a far
cry from the thirteen positive identifications Furue and his assistants
had announced
Tadao is dead now, so I can speak of him without wounding his pride;
for he was a man of intense pride, who set himself the impossible goal
of accounting for every single one of the lost servicemen in Vietnam if
at all possible  The phrase, "fullest possible accounting," which is
so often heard from opponents of normalizing relations with Vietnam,
and which is an utter impossibility, became for Tadao Furue a real
goal to be aimed at  Ultimately this unreachable standard of
perfection led to his downfall  He became so obsessed with the
identification process that he would reach conclusions in cases where
no answer was possible  He was a perfect gentleman, rigorously moral
in his personal life, one of the courtliest men I've ever met, but I
think he suffered from the intellectual isolation of being alone in the
laboratory  The very confidential nature of the military
identification process itself inhibits free discussion  Unable to
confer with students and colleagues in the field, working practically
alone in a laboratory thousands of miles from the US mainland, Tadao
was literally and intellectually cut off
It became our painful duty to inform the Defense Department that the
CILHI laboratory needed a serious overhaul  The three of us returned
home and drew up our reports  Ellis, instead of preparing the final
report himself, submitted our three reports separately and
independently  My report was probably the most critical of the three
and, since these documents were not classified, they created quite a
stir when they were released to the media in January 1986
ABC's "20-20" news oumal put together a segment on the CILHI i
laboratory and this created an unpleasant ruckus in the Defense
Department  Blaming the bearer of bad tidings is only human nature
Everyone who has been in uniform knows how unpleasantness tends to roll
downhill in the armed forces
Our immediate reward for being so frank about CILHI was to be subjected
to a loud, private harangue by a member of the White House's national
security advisers-an officer who was one of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver
North's associates, and whose name I have no wish to recall  This
unforgettable, high-decibel tirade occurred well after I thought the
whole CILHI affair had been laid to rest  It lasted four weary hours
one evening and took place in the Executive Office Building next door
to the white House, in a room adjacent to that in which the Iran Contra
papers were so assiduously shredded to long confetti  The officer
loudly protested our findings  We had opened a Pandora's box of
endless mischied I was accused of ruining Tadao's LIFE, of having
robbed him of the will to live, even of causing the liver cancer from
which he now suffered!  I have seen many disturbing sights in the
autopsy room but the spectacle of this enraged colonel, sitting a few
hundred yards from the very pinnacle of power, disturbed me more deeply
than many a ghastly corpse  Were such illogical men really in charge
of our national security?  I emerged shaken and angry from this ordeal
Happily the angry colonel's views were not shared by others in the
military  In early 1986, I was invited to testify at a healing of the
Veterans Affairs Committee at the U S Senate  After my testimony I
was invited by Major General John Crosby, who had also testified on
behalf of the Army, to join him for lunch at the Pentagon  Crosby
was an extraordinary officer, a man who radiated
an air of command and brisk efficiency  I told him frankly that I
believed any problems within CILHI could be corrected if we all worked
together, instead of at cross-purposes  General Crosby agreed with me
and over the months that followed we were gratified to see nearly all
the reforms we had proposed carried out at CILHI
Toward the end of 1986, General Crosby invited us back to the labratory
for a follow-up visit  Soon the three of us found ourselves   ry
under contract to review all identifications recommended by the
laboratory involving Southeast Asian casualties  This review process
continues to this day  Ellis Kerley became chief of the laboratory for
several years but is now retired and living in Houston  Today CILHI
has several civilian consultants  bewell and I are the most active,
but there are others who watch over the laboratory on a less frequent
basis  Tadao Furue was handled gently  He was kept on as senior
anthropologist at the facility, but his role became more and more an
advisory one  He died a few years later
Now I visit CILHI twice a year  Besides reviewing every single case
recommended for identification, my colleagues and I discuss CILHI's
personnel needs, its staff, improvements in equipment and such stuff
Often we huddle over a set of remains and make suggestions as to what
more might be done to identify them  At other times we play devil's
advocates, challenging age estimates and other conclusions  Fresh air
and free debate make every identification more reliable and trustworthy
The search for' unaccounted-for servicemen does not stop at CILHI's
laboratory doors  Year in and year out, you will find teams from CILHI
in the field, actively searching for and recovering the remains of our
lost soldiers  In the rain forests of New Guinea they can be found
investigating the hundreds of plane crashes left over from World War
II  In the mountains and gorges of South Korea they are busy seeking
out the dead from some long-forgotten battle, reclaiming them from the
shallow graves where they were buried by returning villagers  There is
a full-time American-run search office near Hanoi  Expeditions still
comb Vietnam, north and south, as well as Laos and Cambodia  Here the
anthropologists and the army investigators alike wear civilian clothes,
as the Vietnamese do not permit American uniforms to be worn in the
countryside  Their work can be dangerous  Some of the personnel in
the laboratory wear Purple Hearts for wounds received many years ago in
such search and-recover missions  Recently one CILHI team in Cambodia
came under fire from Khmer Rouge guerrillas  Lately the North Koreans
have been turning over sets of US servicemen's remains from that more
than forty-year-old conflict, and these too, must be identified
Unfortunately, the Pakse case ended messily  Doubts over the
unidentified remains persisted and in 1986, after I had done my report
on CILHI but before I signed a contract with the Army to conduct an
ongoing review of the lab, I was asked by Mrs Hart to look again at
the remains of her husband  I agreed
The remains were brought to my laboratory in Gainesville in a
full-sized casket with a military escort  The lid of the great
polished casket was opened-to disclose seven tiny bits of bone  I
thoroughly described each fragment and what conclusions could be drawn
in terms of age, weight, height and so on  The Army then asked Ellis
Kerley to review the Hart case, as well as the independent reports made
by Dr Chamey in Colorado and myself in Florida  Based on this
evidence, Ellis recommended that the identification of Lieutenant
Colonel Hart be rescinded  miter another identification from Pakse was
rescinded as well
Concerning this pair of rescinded identifications, an important point
must be made: the fact that the identifications were rescinded means
that the available evidence, on which the identifications had been
made, was later found to be inadequately proven in the collective
opinion of the reviewing scientists  In other words, the evidence in
these two cases did not meet reasonable levels of scientific certainty
But I want it understood clearly that there were no findings of
misidentifications in these disputed cases, and there is absolutely no
evidence to support any such charge
Mrs  Hart sued the government and won approximately

$500,000; but the government appealed and ultimately won its case
The persistent widow, whose honest doubts had led to a thorough reform
of CILHI, was not able to prove in court that CILHI's overconfident
identification of her husband,- even though it was based on such
limited evidence, was "intentional and malicious," as she had claimed
in her lawsuit  Another family, whose son was also identified after
Pakse, was so incensed that they scorned to accept his alleged remains,
giving them instead to Dr Chamey, who uses them as a lecture exhibit
to demonstrate evidence used to make some military identifications
This bitter aftermath vividly shows how painful and vexatious the whole
question is, how different is the emotional response of each family it
touches  Some want to get the whole thing behind them, and some will
never sleep until they have vengeance  I make it a point to avoid
contact with the families  Their emotions would cloud my objectivity;
and frankly, I do not want to tell them the terrible tales of violence
and suffering told me by those bones  I will say no more here, beyond
what most people already know: that death in combat is not always
quick, clean or painless, and the remains of our soldiers are sometimes
maltreated after death, as we have all seen on television as recently
as October 1993, in the streets of Mogadishu, in Somalia
During my first visit to CILHI-which, for all I knew then, would be my
last-I took a few minutes out to attend to some personal business  My
wife had a roommate in college whose brother had been a pilot in
Vietnam  His jet had crashed, and he had been killed; but his body had
been recovered  Taking advantage of my unique access to the
laboratory, I asked to see the young man's mortuary records just before
I left  To my relief, I found that the young pilot had been identified
by dental records as well as by fingerprints  As I closed the records
I knew that, if my wife's college roommate ever asked me this awful
question, I could reassure her that there was absolutely no mistake
about her brother's identification
What does the future hold for CILHI and the whole process of
identifying our unaccounted-for war dead?  As time goes on, the
recovered bone fragments are growing smaller and smaller, the teeth
scarcer and scarcer  As a result, identifications are obviously
getting harder and harder to make  It is not hard to foresee a day,
not very long distant, when CILHI will have to rely on DNA analysis to
identify these remains, rather than go through the grindingly slow
process of physically examining minuscule bits of skeletal material
By comparing DNA samples recovered from the remains with that of living
relatives, identities could be established beyond all reasonable doubt,
in weeks rather than years
I must hasten to add that CILHI doesn't have the capability to do such
DNA matching right now, at least not on the grand scale needed to close
out the Vietnam files, let alone the even older and more fragmentary
remains that are coming in from South and North Korea  Such a task
lies beyond the combined capacity of all the DNA laboratories in the
United States, at present  I should, therefore like to see CILHI
establish its own DNA lab, devoted exclusively to its own casework on
our unaccounted-for servicemen  It would not be cheap  But the sum
would be small indeed, compared to the mountains of money spent waging
the Vietnam War
I have seen the names ofthe Pakse crew on the famous Vietnam memorial
wall in Washington  For me, as for most visitors, the wall is a deeply
moving experience  But I am touched almost as deeply when I visit
Arlington National Cemetery and see the grave of the Unknown Soldier
from Vietnam  To the end of his life, my friend Tadao Furue lamented
that these remains had been wrested prematurely from his care, taken
from CILHI and buried in Washington
I remember Tadao shaking his head in frustration and telling me: "If
they had only given me more time!  I could have identified him!"
Tadao's spirit was unconquerable  Could he have made this Unknown
Soldier known?  One can only wonder  Heavy slabs of marble now guard
the nameless warrior forever

The Misplaced Conquistador

At length, Pizarro, unable, in the hurry of the moment, to adjust
the fastenings of his cuirass, threw it away, and, enveloping one arm in
his cloak, with the other seized his sword, and sprang to his brother's
assistance  It was too late; for Alcantara was already staggering
under the loss of blood and soon fell to the ground  Pizarro threw
himself on his invaders, like a lion roused in his lair, and dealt his
blows with as much rapidity and force, as if age had no power to
stiffen his limbs
"What ho!"  he cried, "Traitotsf have you come to kia me in my own
house?"

-William H Prescott, History of the Conquest of Peru, Book 4, Chap  5

Francisco Pizarro died as he lived, by the sword  When the rapiers of
his assassins pricked his gullet, they extinguished a life that was all
strife and struggle  Illegitimate and illiterate, a foundling in
infancy and a swineherd in youth, he made his way to South America and,
by pure'force of will, toppled one of the greatest empires the world
has seen  He enriched himself, his family and the King of Spain beyond
the dreams of avahee- Indomitable in adversity, ruthless in victory,
Pizarro and his followers laid waste utterly to the Inca civilization
whose ruined monuments dazzle us still; whose Cyclopean walls, golden
masks and inscrutable pictographs are so extraordinary they almost seem
not of this earth  But when it came to sharing out,this almost
immeasurable loot, Pizarro and his associates became embroiled in blood
feuds that proved fatal  At the very height of his powers, the warlord
of conquered Peru was assassinated
Thanks to the faithful chroniclers of New Spain, we know nearly as much
about Pizarro's assassination in 1541 as we do about many political
murders in our own century  Because of the extraordinary continuity of
Spanish civilization in the conquered continent, we can follow the
story of his bones almost year by year
 I have held this old sinner's skull in my hands  The trauma marks
still visible on Pizarro's remains bear astonishing witness to the
terrible fury of his attackers  Modern assassins have the tremendous
explosive force of firearms at their disposal  Pizarro's slayers
wielded swords alone; but what sword steel could do to the human skull
and skeletal frame it did to Francisco Pizarro  He died brutally and
painfully, as the multiple nicks and scorings of his bones attest  His
skeleton can stand comparison with several modern murder victims I have
examined, for the atrocity of the wounds it reveals
There is a powerful magic in the past  When we touch a human artifact
from centuries or millennia ago, we seem to behold our brother human
beings from across the deeps of time  If we are not careful, we- fall
into dreams of bygone days and the light of sunsets long extinguished
I have seen cool, analytical, clear-brained oolleagues, especially my
archaeologist friends; practically swooning with admiration over
somesmah potsherd, all but overcome by the mere physical presence of
human antiquity  "Just think!"  they will say in hushed voices  "This
is the very such-and-such that once belonged to so-and-so!"
I envy them this second sight, this gift of imaginative reverie; but I
cannot afford to share the mood  I have been called to far countries
to examine remains of considerable age, and have handled things vested
with exceptional historical significance, but I can't permit myself the
luxury of time travel on these occasions  The clock is ticking  Work
has to be done  Accuracy is all  As Margaret Thatcher admonished
George Bush in the emergency days after Iraq invaded Kuwait: "Now,
George, this is no time to go wobbly!"  On such occasions I am more
likely to worry about electric voltage and adapters, whether our
equipment will work, whether we have brought enough film and
instruments, whether we have sufficient spare parts if something
breaks  I cannot spare time to muse about vanished greatness and
departed glory  I cannot afford to go wobbly
Yet when I look back on the case of the misplaced conquistador,
Francisco Pizarro, I am struck by how,neatly the pieces fell into
position, and how the remains dovetailed exactly with historical
accounts of the man  Pizarro's were the first really famous bones I
handled, and the investigation into his death marked my first foray
into historical forensic anthropology  Together with several
colleagues, I was able to unmask an impostor mummy, which for years had
been displayed and reverenced as the body of the conquistador
At the same time, I was able to help authenticate another set of
skeletal remains as belonging beyond any doubt to the man who conquered
Peru for Spain  A careful reconstruction of facial features, built up
from the true skull, has given us a reasonable portrait of what Pizarro
looked like in life  The verified bones have been put in their
rightful place of honor in Lima's Cathedral of San Agustin, and a case
of mistaken identity has been solved for good
There was a time when every schoolchild knew of the astonishing
exploits of Francisco Pizarro, the self-made soldier of fortune from
Trujillo, Spain, who went to Panama with Vasco Nuflez de Balboa, the
first European discoverer of the Pacific Ocean  At the age of fifty,
an old man by the reckoning of his time, Pizarro embarked on the
conquest of Peru  This climaxed in 1532 with his famous march to
Cajamarca, deep in the Peruvian interior, with sixty-seven horses and a
mere hundred and ten soldiers, not more than twenty of whom were armed,
and these only with crossbows or arquebuses  Atahualpa, the Inca King,
was waiting for him there with an army of 40,000 to 50,000 men, but was
strangely par*wd by indecision  Atahualpa allowed Pizarro to take
possession of the citadel of Caj'amarea and camped with his Inca army
on the plains below  Invited to a parley, the Inca chief entered the
citadel with only a few hundred followers  There he was ambushed and
captured by Pizarro's men, who slaughtered the King's courtiers and
raped his concubines  overnight, almost at a stroke, the empire of the
Incas was laid low, its King taken prisoner
Then comes the famous tale of the Room of Gold  In return for his life
and freedom, Atahualpa offered to fill with gold a room twenty-two feet
long and seventeen feet wide to a height of seven feet  Pizarro agreed
but also demanded that an adjacent room, somewhat smaller, be filled
twice over with silver
Five months later the larger room was still not quite full, even though
a total of 1,326,539 gold pesos had been amassed  One fifth of the
treasure was sent back to Spain and the remainder was divided among
Pizarro and his men  Once the gold was disposed of, Atahualpa'had no
further value to Pizarro  To get rid of him, Pizarro had the Inca
tried on trumped-up charges of insurrection, embezzling funds, adultery
and idol-worshiping  He was found guilty and, two hours after sundown
on July 16, 1533, was led to the stake to be burned  Atahualpa only
avoided this atrocious mode of execution by converting" to
Christianity at the stake, and being bapfimd as "Juan de Atahualpa"
Pizarro then had the Inca chief garroted
The Spaniards proceeded to tear the Inca Empire to shreds and divide
its spoils  A puppet king installed by Pizarro, Toparca, died
mysteriously  Atahualpa's bravest general, Challcuchima, was burned at
the stake  The last Inca army, led by a general named Quizquiz, was
destroyed utterly by Pizarro's bittpr rival, an old, oneeyed veteran
named Diego de Almagro  On November 15, 1533, the Inca capital, Cuzco,
fell  With it came more than half a million pesos' worth of gold  The
victorious conquistadors rampaged across the land, usin The Incas' own
highways to travel, all the while slaughtering flocks, confiscating
crops, despoiling temples and causing farm land
and irrigation systems to fall into ruin  The unrestrained cruelty of
the conquest of Peru still arouses our horror and pity
Deprived of most of the booty by Pizarro and his brothers, Almagro and
his men were understandably outraged  Pizarro offered Almagro the
country of Chile, and the old soldier marched off, hoping to duplicate
Pizarro's success  But Chile held no gold to compare with the riches
of Peru  Almagro and his men endured two years of terrible war and
physical hardship, emerging from Chile emptyhanded and furious with
Pizarro and his brothers, who were now in possession of all the Inca
wealth  After a series of battles and double crosses, Almagro was
defeated at Las Saunas on April 26, 1538, captured and executed by the
garrote, on the orders of Pizarro's brother, Hernando  Pizarro himself
later stripped Almagro's son of his lands, leaving the young man and
his followers penniless and desperate for revenge  Pizarro was now
governor of Peru, ruling from Lima, which he had founded in 1535
The younger Almagro and his supporters spun a plot to kill Pizarro at
mass on Sunday, June 26, 1541  One of the conspirators whispered of
the plot while confessing his sins to a priest, who broke the sacred
and confidential seal of confession and informed Pizarro of the danger
Pizarro seems to have shrugged off the seaming but, as a precaution,
feigned illness and did not attend mass that Sunday
He shared the story with the vice-mayor, Juan Belisquez, who assured
the governor that he was safe as long as the "rod of justice" was in
Belisquez hands  With these assurances, Pizarro sat down to his
Sunday dinner with about twenty guests seated around the table,
including his half brother, Francisco Martin de Alcontara, Belisquez
and other cavaliers
It was the last meal he would ever eat  While he was yet at table, a
tumult was heard outside the governor's palace  The conspirators
charged across the Plaza de Arenas outside the governor's mansion,
shouting their intentions  There is confusion about their number: some
accounts say there were as few as seven, some as many as twenty-five
Pizarro kept his head and calmly ordered the front door of the palace
to be locked  The officer sent to do this, Francisco Hurtado de Hevia,
unwisely chose to negotiate with the aggressors through the half-open
door  They forced their way in with a great clamor  Hearing this
uproar, most of Pizarro's dinner guests promptly deserted him, among
them Belisquez, who climbed down into the garden with his "rod of
justice" firmly grasped in his mouth
Now began Pizarro's last battle  The old conquistador attempted to
buckle on his armor breastplate, but the bulky leather straps would not
fasten in time  Dropping the armor and wrapping a cloak around his
left arm for a shield, he rushed to meet his assailants, who were
already fighting with Alcontara and three or four loyal men
Because several of the conspirators survived to be interrogated under
torture, we know more or less what happened next, blow by blow  By the
time Pizarro joined the fray, most of his defenders were dead or
dying,- including AlcAntara  Finding himself alone, the doughty old
warrior taunted his opponents and killed at least two of them  After
he ran his sword into a third, a man standing behind this conspirator
shoved the transfixed body forward, impaling the dying man further on
Pizarro's weapon  While Pizarro was wrestling with the blade, trying
to pull it free, he received a rapier wound in his throat, which
disabled him  Falling to the floor, bleeding, he was swiftly
surrounded by the remaining conspirators, who plunged their blades into
him  He may have been shot with a crossbow bolt as well  According to
one account, he asked for water as he lay dying, and a soldier named
Barragan broke a water jug over his head, telling him he could have his
next drink in hell
"He fought so long with them that, with very weariness, his sword fell
out of his hands, and then they slew him with a prick of a rapier
through his throat: and when he was fallen to the ground, and his wind
failing him, he cried unto Goci for merciv, and when he had so done, he
made a cross on the ground and kissed it, and then incontinent yielded
up the ghost," wrote a contemporary historian, Garcflaso de la Vega in
his Royal Comnwntaties
Like the assassins who murdered Julius Caesar centuries before, the
victorious conspirators all dipped their swords in Pizarro's blood, to
share in the honor of the deed  Some discussed cutting Pizarro's head
off, but this was finally vetoed  A near riot broke out in Lima
because of the murder, which the clergy attempted to quell by parading
the holy eucharist in procession around the city  That night Dofia
Ines Mufioz, the wife of Alcontara, buried the body of her husband,
together with that of Pizarro, behind the cathedral on the side facing
the Plaza'de Arenas
But Pizarro's remains were not destined to rest in peace  Four years
after his death, in 1545, came the first of many reburials and
relocations: the conqueror's bones and swords were exhumed and
deposited in a wooden box under the main altar of the lima cathedral,
according to a wish expressed in his will  In 1551, Dofia Francisco
Pizarro Yupanqui, the daughter of the conquistador, and Dofia Ines
Yupanqu i Huaylas, another relative, gave five thousand measures of
gold to construct a special chapel in the cathedral for Pizarro's
remains  Money was also donated to assure perpetual care of the
chapel  The bones were placed in a wooden box covered in black velvet
and decorated with the cross of Santiago, church records show
Meanwhile, the cathedral itself underwent a thorough reconstruction and
on July 4, 1606, the remains were moved into the new church, which was
severely damaged by an earthquake in 1609
Sometime between 1623 and 1629 the bones were moved again, inside the
church
In 1661 a verification process took place for the remains of St
Toribio, destined to become Peru's first saint  In the records
connected with St Toribio, church documents mention a wooden box
covered with brown velvet, enclosing a lead box with the inscription:

AQV'L ESTA LA CABEGA DEL SEF40R MARQVGS DON FMNCISCO PIZARO QVE
DESCVBRIO Y CAFJO LOS REYNOS DEL PIRV Y PVSO EN LA REAL CORONA DE
cAsnLLA [Here is the skull of the Marquis Don Francisco Pizarro who
discovered and won Peru and placed it under the crown of Castile]"
More than two centuries later, this inscription would prove to be a
crucial piece of evidence
The cathedral was damaged anew in the earthquake of 1746  By 1778 a
virtually new cathedral had been completed on the same site
In 1891 came the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Pizarro's
death, and for the first time a committee of scientists was appointed
to examine the well-preserved, mummified body from the crypt under the
altar of the cathedral that had been identified by church officials as
that of Pizarro  This mummy, it should be made clear, was a natural
mummy, preserved by the exceptional dryness of the air at Lima's high
altitude; it was not, like an Egyptian mummy, artificially embalmed
The source of the identification is an important detail: it was on the
evidence of these priests and sacristans that the investigators relied
It was thought their testimony was unimpeachable, that they had
carefully preserved Pizano's body and his identification over the
centuries, handing down the evidence in an unbroken chain  Surely they
could not be mistaken!  And so the investigators in 1891 began their
examination with a strong prejudice in favor of the remains before
them
An American anthropologist, W J McGee, was present at the exhumation
and wrote a full account of the proceedings for the American
Anthropologist, Vol  VII, No  1 (January 1894)  The commission
lavished great pains on the desiccated corpse, describing it inside
out, inch by inch  Three pages of measurements are part of McGee's
account
The investigators were much struck by the fact that the mummy had no
hands; that its skull was largely bare and exposed while dried flesh
covered most of the rest of the body; that, even though it was male, it
had no genitals; that there were gaping holes in the soft tissue at
several points; and that, in their opinion, the skull looked like that
of a criminal, with its jutting jaw and heavy-set base  It also seemed
to possess an indented trench, known in those days as the "fossa of
Lombroso," which takes its name from a celebrated Italian
criminologist  Such fanciful terms are no longer accepted today
"In prognathism, in the general conformation of the cranium, in the
breadth and fullness of the basal and occipital regions of the
brain-case, in the fossa of Lombroso, in all other important respects,
the head is that of the typical criminal of to-day," Me wrote
decisively  Interestingly enough, this was viewed as yet another proof
that the skull was indeed Pizarro's  only a brute could have subdued
Peru as bloodily as he did  Or, as McGee put it delicately, "The hero
of history-in earlier centuries is of rugged mold, and the heroism of
the olden time is the crime of our softened le)dcon  So Pizarro may
well be judged as the representative of a class necessary and good in
its age but not adjusted to the higher humanities of the present day"
The missing hands, the lopped-off genitals and the cavities in the soft
tissue were blamed on the assassins  They must have mutilated
Pizarro's dead body after they killed him  Corruption took hold in
places where the skin had been pierced  Pizarro had been stabbed in
the throat  From this wound, decay and maggots must have invaded the
skull and stripped away its skin  The investigators concluded that,
beyond the shadow of any doubt, these remains belonged to Pizarro- The
mummy was blessed and then reverently rebulied, with seals of
authenticity attached to it by cotton cords and copper wires
The dusty innards were carefully collected and placed in a glass
bottle, which was corked and deposited in the coffin  The remains of
clothing surrounding the body were also carefully collected and wrapped
up  Documents were prepared in triplicate, attesting that these were
the true remains of the conquistador  A beautiful, ornate sarcophagus
of glass, marble and bronze was constructed to hold the authenticated
mummy  Over the years hundreds of thousands of people would pass by
it, peer into it, and pay homage to it  On my first visit to Lima I
saw people kneeling before it in silentprayer

@ This'state of affairs might have gone on indefinitely had not four
workmen, who were cleaning the crypt beneath the altar one Friday in
1977, removed some bricks from a large, square, free-standing pilaster
at the center of the crypt  In the exposed recess, they saw a flat,
horizontal row of wooden planks  The workers said nothing to church
officials of their find  Returning the next day, they removed more
bricks and disclosed a second row of planks  Between these two planked
floorings were two wooden boxes rifled with human bones  Besides
bones, one of the boxes held a lead casket on whose lid was an
inscription, incised around the four edges: "AQVI ESTK LA

CABEQA DEL SE&OR MARQ@S DON FRANCISCO PIZARO it began, and the rest of
the inscription was, word for word, identical with that seen and copied
down by church officials in 1661
This was an astonishing find  in the center of the lid of the lead box
was a hexafoil pattern, a six-leafed design that some have taken as a
veiled reference to the Star of David  Rumors had pursued Pizarro, in
life and after death, that he came from a family of conversos, or
forcibly converted Jews  This enigmatic six-leafed flower was a
fascinating footnote to the discovery
The worlanen had hitherto kept sdent about their discovery
One cannot help but suspect that if the casket had been made of silver
it would have been stolen and melted down, and its contents lost
forever  But when, after rubbing the metal, they found it was nothing
more precious than lead, the men decided to inform church officials and
get credit for the discovery  The authorities immediately called on
Dr Hugo Ludefia, a distinguished Peruvian historian, to investigate
the matter  Ludeiia in turn brought in other scholars: Dr Pedro
Weiss, an intemationafly known Peruvian physician and anthropologist
who has a fascinating collection of Inca skulls; and two radiologists,
Dr  Oscar Soto and his wife, Dr  Laths Soto
Ludefia, @iss and the Sotos concurred in their opinion that the skull
in the lead casket belonged to Pizarro, but their findings were, hotly
disputed by other Peruvian scholars, who insisted the mummy in the
glass sarcophagus had to be genuine  Dr Ludefla approached Dr
Robert Benfer, a colleague of mine who teaches anthropology at the
University of Missouri and who has excavated many prehistoric Peruvian
burials, asking him to look at the remains  Bob suggested that I
collaborate because of my forensic experience  I made two trips to
Lima in early 1984 to examine the bones and, on July 4, 1984, we also
participated in the opening of the sarcophagus, the removal of the
mummy and its examination in the cathedral library
Of the two wooden boxes found in the hidden niche, the larger one,
which we called Box A, contained the mixed remains of several
skeletons: among them were the remains of at least two children, an
elderly female, the skull and postcranial remains of an elderly male
and the skull-less, postcranial skeleton of a second elderly male
There were also the rusty remnants of a sword  This box was lined with
tatters of brown velvet and had an outline of a cross upon it
The cross itself was long gone, but the nails to attach it remained,
and these were found to contain the rather rare metal, vanadium
They were probably made of melted-down sword steel  - The second
wooden box, referred to as Box B, was painted light green and its
interior was coated with a kind of red plaster  This, too, contained
human bones, as well as the lead container with the inscription, inside
which was found a human skull  This skull fitted nicely to the
skull-less remains of the elderly male found in the other box  Its
occipital condyles, the part of the skull's base where it joins the
neck, were perfectly congruent with the uppermost vertebrae of the
skeleton in Box A It appeared that the owner of this skull had lost a
good many teeth before he died, including most of his upper molars and
many of the incisors and molars of the lower jaw  This reunited skull
and skeleton belonged to a white male at least sixty years old at the
time of his death, who stood about sixty-five to sixty-nine inches tall
in life, based on the length of his long bones

(Because Pizarro was a foundling, his age at the time of his death is
doubtful  He was variously said to be sixty-three or sixty-five years
old by contemporary historians)

When Bob and I examined the skull and other bones carefully, we began
to see clear traces of terrible wounds  There were no fewer than four
sword thrusts to the neck  In one, a double-edged weapon had entered
the neck from the right side and nicked the first cervical vertebra
The direction of the - sword thrust was clear: it would have pierced
the right vertebral artery  This was a mortal blow  A second sword
thrust, also from the right, was equally devastating: it had cut away
portions of vertebrae and the blade had been pressed home with
tremendous force  A third thrust to the neck nearly split open the
spinal cord  A fourth passed through the right vertebral opening of
another neckbone and would also have cut through the light vertebral
artery
As Bob and I followed the backbone down into the trunk, we saw other
injuries  The sixth thoracic vertebra clearly showed the marks of a
stab wound from a blade thrust downward into the body at an angle of
fifteen degrees  A second thrust pierced the abdomen and nicked the
twelfth thoracic vertebra  The ninth right rib was also nicked, but
the rib cortex was crumbly and we were not able to determine whether
this nick was due to a stab wound  The development of the spine in
general, with characteristic pockmarks and herniations, showed that it
belonged to a man who had lived a long, vigorous life
There were also wounds in the arms and hands of the skeleton, the sort
of injuries we call "defensive wounds," which are suffered when someone
tries to defend himself with his hands  The right humerus, or upper
arm, had been cut cleanly and obliquely by an edged weapon  Probably a
heavy sword, not a rapier, had been used here, in an attempt to disable
the man whose skeleton lay before us
There were two deep nicks on the left first metacarpal bone of the
hand, below the thumb  The right fifth metacarpal bone had been broken
off altogether and was not in the box  It may have been broken off
when Pizarro was disarmed
The right lower armbone, or ulna, showed an old fracture that indicated
the owner had broken his arm as a boy  Greenish stains were found on
some of the heelbones, which agreed with the story that Pizarro had
been buried with a single Moorish spur  The green was probably
verdigris, from copper in the spur  From the relative size of the
bumps on the bones where muscles had been attached, it was clear that
the individual had been right-handed  Many of the joints showed
"upping," which is associated with arthritis  We know Pizarro found it
painful to ride a horse, preferring to walk instead
The size of the bones showed they belonged in life to a well-developed,
robust man
The lower jaw, or mandible, had fallen away from the skull as it
usually does after death  On its lower margin, beneath the chin, were
eleven finely incised marks, clearly made by sharp, doubleedged weapons
pointing in several directions  One of these marks lined up perfectly
with one of the deeper stab wounds found in the neck, thus furnishing
more proof that the skull in the leaden coffer truly belonged with the
set of loose bones in the other box  These telltale nicks indicated
that the deceased had either been stabbed repeatedly through the neck
or, more probably, that one assailant had thrust his sword in, then
sawed the blade back and forth against the jawbone, aiming upward into
the neck and head and scratching the mandible in the process
The skull, too, showed signs of trauma  There was a clean fracture or
cut through the right zygomatic arch of the skull, a kind of slender
badge of bone that runs back from the cheekbone on both sides of our
heads  This may have been caused by a sword thrust
Another thrust had passed through the left eye socket and left a clear
nick in the bone where it exited from the left wall of the orbit
A rapier or dagger had passed into the brain through the neck, up into
the right base of the skull, where it had been twisted and thrust in
again  The sphenoid bone on the left side of the skull base showed
signs of yet another pair of thrusts  Yet in spite of all these
stabbings, the braincase was remarkably intact  The high nasal bridge
showed clear evidence of an old fracture that had healed; the owner of
the skeleton had broken his nose earlier in his violent life
All in all, the skull and skeletal remains before me were unmistakably
those of a man who had suffered a dreadful, violent death
His assailants had stabbed him over and over again, concentrating their
homicidal fury on his head and neck  There were at least eleven stab
wounds made by the points of weapons on the bonespossibly as many as
fourteen  There were as many as fourteen separate cuts made by sharp
edges on the bones and one possible bluntforce fracture of the hand
Interestingly, most of the wounds were on the right side of the body
and neck  This is the side a righthanded swordsman would present to
his opponents  The extraordinary trauma inflicted on the neck agreed
very closely with accounts of Pizarro's murder  The angle of some of
the wounds suggested that they were inflicted as the victim lay on the
floor  The defensive wounds to the hands and arm show that the victim
vainly struggled to push away the plunging swords  His last sight on
earth must have been terrible: flashing steel points, rising and
falling and piercing his body, his head, his throat and -his left eye
Death, when it came at last, must have been a merciful release
It should also be noted that not every stab wound will leave a mark on
the skeleton underneath  In one of my modern cases, the skin of a
murdered man revealed twenty-four separate stab wounds yet only eight
of these left marks on his skeleton  It is very likely that Pizarro
was stabbed many more times than his bones disclose
The other bones found in Box A could not be identified with certainty
The two children may have been Pizarro's sons, Juan and Gonzalo, who
are said to have died at the ages of four and ten respectively  The
dental remains of the older child's skeleton placed his age at between
eight and eleven years  The remains of the younger child showed him to
be about two years old, both dentally and skeletally  We can only
guess about the female remains  Perhaps they are those of Dofia Ines
Munoz, the wife of the faithful Alcintara, who died fighting for his
chief  Perhaps,the remains of the second elderly male are those of
Alcintara himself  We cannot tell
The wounds and the inscription on the lead box containing the skull
made it clear beyond any doubt that we were dealing with the remains of
Pizarro  One question remained: who was the mummy in the glass coffin
upstairs?
Bob and I were shown into the sumptuous cathedral library, with its
beautififfly paneled walls, its gorgeous old leather-bound volumes and
its wealth of silver and gold crucifixes and religious paintings  Amid
this splendor, on a table, lay the leathery old mummy, its skin greasy
to the touch, and with a single dried eyeball lying deep within one
shadowy socket of its fleshless face  Its head had been separated from
its body in 1891 and wired back on
We photographed and measured the mummy carefully  Despite the absence
of genitals, we were able to determine easily that it was a male of
advanced years, who had been 1655 cm (about five feet, five inches)
tall in life  The skeletal morphology was rather effeminate or
"graceful," as we call it: the man had been 'Something of a physical
weakling in-life  The skin of the legs bore the marks of high
stockings which had long since disappeared, and the marks of some cord
used long ago to bind the legs together  The pattern of the velvet
sarcophagus liner was etched into the skin of the back
Every remaining bit of skin on the mummy was minutely examined for
evidence of wounds  There were none  The exposed bones were examined
carefully with various magnifying devices  We found absolutely no
evidence of unhealed fractures, chips, scratches or incised marks  The
bone was in excellent condition and any damage caused by trauma would
have been clearly evident  None could be seen
The conclusion was inescapable: we were dealing with an impostor  The
man who lay before us was no soldier  He had lived a quiet life and
had died a quiet death  Most likely he was a churchman, a scholar or a
petty functionary of the government whose remains had somehow got
confounded with Pizarro's in the earthquake-ridden centuries after the
conquistador's death  It is certainly amusing that the 1891
investigators thought his skull was that of a criminal!  So much for
the "fossa of Lombroso" and all such quackeries!
A careful cast was made of Pizarro's skull by Robert Levy of the
Florida Museum of Natural History, and from it Betty Pat Gatliff of
SKULLpture Inc an Oklahoma firm specialwng in such reconstructions, was
able to build up a clay bust of Francisco Pizarro as he looked in life:
a heavy-set man with a broad, peasant's face  This bust was presented
to the museum of the Convent of La Coria in Pizarro's native city,
Trujillo, Spain, along with a cast of the skull from the lead casket in
Lima
Pizarro's bones were placed where they belonged, inside the
glass-walled sarcophagus in the cathedral chapel, where they can still
be seen today  The impostor mummy, when last I saw him, was lying
ignobly on a piece of plywood propped between two sawhorses in the
cathedral crypt, destined for an anonymous rebuiw in the bow  The
Misplaced Conquistador els of the cathedral  Whoever he was, he cannot
complain  For nearly a hundred years he had basked in the borrowed
glory of Francisco Pizarro  He was knelt before, prayed to and
well-nigh worshiped by thousands of pilgrims  He enjoyed far more
homage than most of us receive after death, and with this flood of
fervent, mistaken devotion his ghost must rest content  Fame is
fleeting even in death

Arsenic and "Old Rough and Ready"

Duncan is in his grave; After life's fitful fever he sleeps
well; Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison, Malice
domestic, foreign levy, nothing, Can touch himfutther

-Shakespeare, Macheth, Act III, Scerw 2

Summers in Washington, DC can be horribly hot, and July 4, 1850, -was
infernal  President Zachary Taylor, hero of the, Battle of Buena Vista
in the MeNican War, had just returned from a ceremony in the blazing
sun, at which he laid the foundation-stone for the Washington Monument
He was tired, hungry and thirsty  He wolfed down a big meal of raw
vegetables, fresh cherries and iced buttermilk  Within a very short
time it became apparent that the food had not agreed with him
The President developed gastroenteritis and acute diarrhea and was
forced to take to his bed  Five days later, on July 9, the man known
to his contemporaries as "Old Rough and Ready" was dead  He was
sixty-six years old and had been President just sixteen months
Taylor's abrupt death came at a crucial point in American history  it
removed from the scene a man whose force of character might have
quelled the storm brewing across America over slaveryor hastened that
storm's breaking  Taylor might have recalled his fellow Southerners to
a sense of the duty they owed to their country; but it is equally
possible that he might have driven them to desperate deeds by opposing
them with naked force  We  can never know  A single ill-digested
meal toppled Taylor into his grave; the rest is guesswork and silence
Some historians have called Zachary Taylor the Dwight Eisenhower of
his day, because of his brilliant military record; but there was an
element of fire, of hot-tempered truculence, in Taylor that was wholly
missing from Ike's serene, controlled disposition  A Southerner who
owned sugar and cotton plantations worked by over four hundred
slaves-his daughter, Knox, was the first wife of the man who would
become president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, and his son,
Richard, served as a general for the South in the Civil War-Taylor
nevertheless campaigned hard to admit California and New Mexico as free
states and threatened to lead an army in person against any Southerners
who would not submit to laws enacted by Congress  When two Southern
legislators, Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs, told Taylor he was
betraying the South, the President exploded, saying he would hang all
"traitors" to the Union with no riiore compunction than he had shown
when hanging spies and deserters in Mexico  In the days immediately
preceding his fatal illness, Taylor ordered the military g@son of Santa
Fe, New Mexico, to be reinforced against possible attacks by proslavery
militiamen from Texas  He was a tough man, singularly unafraid of his
enemies, willing to do battle to keep the United States one nation,
indivisible
His death marked an important crossroads in the crisis over slavery
His successor, Millard Fillmore, was at pains to molly,hfy the angry
Southerners whom Taylor had defied  The new President quietly shelved
New Mexico's application for statehood and lent his support to a
jellified compromise bill that contained all sorts of gops to satisfy
both sides of the slavery question  The outbreak of the Civil War was
postponed for another decade,and in the awful glare of that
cataclysmic passage of arms, the story of Zachary Taylor, his short
presidency and his sudden death, receded into oblivion  Few
schoolchildren today could name the twelfth President of the United
States  The bumbling Millard Fillmore is better known than the
hard-bitten hero of Buena Vista
Yet from time to time Taylor's sudden death would tax the ingenuity of
amateur historians  Aged sixty-six, he was old but not decrepit  His
constitution had been flied and tempered in arduous campaigns in
Mexico, and earlier in Florida against the Seminole Indians  He was no
stranger to heat and thirst  Could raw vegetables and fruit, washed
down with cold milk, kill a man?  Books published in 1928 and again in
1940 raised the possibility that Taylor had been poisoned by proslavery
conspirators  If so, he, not Abraham Lincoln, would have been the
first President in American history- to be assassinated
My mind was far from these theories in 1991, when I received a visit
from Clare Rising in the office I then occupied in the Florida Museum
of Natural History  Rising was one' of our alumnae: she had received
her PhD in English from the University of Florida and was the
prize-winning author of Season of the  Wild Rose, a historical novel
set during the Civil War  It was while researching this novel that she
had come across the Taylor case, and it had fascinated her ever since
She was writing a book about Taylor  She described his
symptoms-vomiting, abdominal spasms, diarrhea and progressive
weakening-which she had gleaned from contemporary accounts of his
death  Was it possible, she asked me, that such symptoms might result
from poisoning?
I told Rising that I wasn't a pathologist but that the symptoms she
had described certainly could have resulted from arsenic poisoning
She said: "Well, could this be proven?"  And I explained that arsenic
and other metallic poisons are quickly deposited in the skeletal system
and hair of poisoning victims, if they live for a few days after the
initial intake of the poison  Such metals would remain in the hair and
bones, even after death
She asked: "How could this be proven?"  I told her it would be a fairly
simple matter, given access to the remains, to have tests done that
would prove the presence or absence of arsenic
I gradually discovered that Rising was an extremely persistent and
single-minded individual  Initially I had scant interest in the Taylor
question, and I tried to steer her toward other people in the field who
I felt were perfectly competent to ndu such tests
So I suggested she contact my colleague, Doug Ubelaker, at the
Smithsonian Institution  I suggested the Armed Forces Institute of
Pathology at Walter Reed Hospital  I suggested the Armed Forces
Medical Museum  I furnished her with names and telephone numbers
In vain  Rising kept returning to me  She had a scholarly obsession
with Zachary Taylor-"my Zachary,"'she called him fondly-and she saw this
inquiry as a way to do justice to a rather neglected figure in American
history  I was less sanguine than she  Moreover the enormity of
exhuming a former President of the United States was somewhat daunting
I had assisted at many exhumations, but never at one of such
extraordinary historical significance  I had no misgivings about the
technical side of the affair  No corpse on earth has the power to
overawe me  Our defunct bodies are all equal before science
Nevertheless, I could dimly foresee how controversial this project
might prove, and what a fanfaronade of media attention might accompany
it  As events were to show, my fears proved justified many times over!
FinaUyl on the latest of her many visits, Rising sat down in a chair
across from my desk and said: Well, just how would we get permission?"
I explained to her something that many people do not know: human
remains are not the property of cemeteries  They don't belong to the
nation, no matter who they were in LIFE  Nor do they belong to the
courts  They belong to the relatives who survive them
From a legal standpoint, dead human bodies are treated exactly the same
as any other personal effects left behind by the deceased  They are
passed on, together with the rest of the estate  You own the remains
of your dead ancestors  They are yours by law
Therefore, I told Rising, if anyone wanted to examine a body, the first
step must be to approach the surviving family members
These in turn can request a funeral director licensed in the state to
open the grave, provided the body is properly reburied upon completion
of the examination  I told her that very often in murder cases we go
through this procedure, with the families' permission  If the family
agrees, we need not go through the courts  This timesaving procedure
is especially useful when we are dealing with murder victims who are
buried in states other than those where the murders took place
Rising was elated  She told me she had tracked down many of the living
relatives and knew from genealogies who the nearest direct descendant
was-and she mentioned a man in Louisiana whose name is familiar to
millions of people
I said: "Well, all you have to do is get that gentleman to sign a
request that the nearest licensed funeral director open the tomb"
I have already said Rising was persistent  But even I was surprised
when she triumphantly telephoned me from Louisiana a few weeks later
and announced that she had won permission to exhume the remains of
Zachary Taylor  Not only that: she had already approached a funeral
director in Louisville, Kentucky, whose firm had moved President Taylor
and his wife from an older mausoleum to a newer aboveground tomb in the
1920s  Rising's enthusiasm was contagious  The funeral director said
that he would,d not only cooperate but would perform the exhumation
without charge
Zachary Taylor, I learned, was entombed in the Zachary Taylor National
Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky, which, like all national cemeteries,
is supervised by the Veterans Administration  The land for that
cemetery had been donated to the federal government by the Taylor
family, but they had retained ownership of a strip of land at the rear
of the cemetery, on both sides of the Taylor mausoleum, as a private
family burial plot  Everything else was under VA stewardship
I did some soul-searching before agreeing to be present at the
exhumation  It is my firm behof that the dead have a right to privacy
and that there must be a good, compelling reason for us to break in
upon the slumber of the grave  In the case of President Taylor, there
was the charge-albeit unproven-of murder, the foulest crime man can
commit  For over a hundred and forty years it had hovered around
Taylor's memory like a miasma  Now we were in a position to decide
once and for all whether or not there was anything to it  The
relatives had given their consent  Their scruples had been satisfied
that this was a legitimate inquiry, and not an exercise in idle
speculation  The local coroner, Dr Richard Greathouse, had agreed to
treat the procedure as an official investigation into the cause of
Taylor's death, and he had enlisted the aid of the state medical
examiner, Dr  George Nichols IV
It was the consent of the relatives, however, that weighed most with
me  If they saw no indignity in exhuming Taylor, then there was none
Rising had written to family members as far away as Rome and Stockholm,
and all had consented to the investigation  The New York Times
editorialized that our inquiry showed "a cavalier contempt for the
dead," but I could not agree  It would be frivolous indeed to exhume a
President to see if he had suffered from a certain disease, or to learn
some small particular about his life and times  But murder is another
thing entirely, and murder was what we aimed to prove or disprove
The team I had put together consisted of myself, Dr Nichols, Dr
William Hamilton, the District 8 medical examiner in Florida, who had
worked for Dr Nichols before coming to Gainesville (and who had
experience in examining the exhumed victims of arsenic poisoning), two
graduate students, Arlene Albert and Dana AustinSmith, who would do the
still photography, and a local retired attorney and historian, Bill
Goza, who would lend us historical assistance and expedite details
Finally, my wife Margaret, a media specialist who is always an
important member of my team, would handle logistics and take care of
videotaping the investigation for scientific purposes
A date was set  We made hotel reservations and rented a van for the
following weekend  Then difficulties began to crop up  Rising
telephoned me, saying that a problem had arisen with the Veterans
Administration  The VA was reluctant to give permission for the
exhumation  When I finally reached a high-level official in the VA, he
said the matter might have to be resolved at "a higher level"
I said: "What do you mean by 'higher'?"
And he said: "Since it involves the remains of a President, the white
House"
By now it was Thursday  The tomb was supposed to be opened the next
Monday  There was no way we could secure presidential permission in
that short interval  Even though the Taylor family owned the mausoleum
and the strip of land adjacent to it, the VA ran the cemetery and had
the key to the Taylor crypt  The Zachary Taylor mausoleum was situated
at the back of the cemetery, and the VA controlled all the land in
front of it  They could simply lock the front gate and there would be
little we could do to oppose -them
With some disappointment-for by now I had become rather interested in
this project-I phoned Rising and said there was no way we could proceed
the following Monday  Perhaps some other time     In the meantime
all our arrangements were canceled
Shortly afterward, Rising called me back and said she'd been in contact
with the coroner, Dr Richard Greathouse  He, I discovered, wasn't
about to be dictated to by the Veterans Administration  He was a man
of extraordinary determination, confidence and a strong sense of
territory  Greathouse told Rising to tell me that whether I came to
Louisville or stayed home was all the same to him  I was welcome to be
on hand if I liked  But with or without me, Zachary Taylor's tomb was
going to be opened that Monday morning and the only way the federal
government could prevent this was by armed force!  So, after
reassembling all our broken travel arrangements, we left for Louisville
on Saturday morning  We arrived Sunday afternoon at the hotel, a
Ramada Inn located right beside the Zachary Taylor National Cemetery
As we pulled into the parking lot we were horrified to see a host of
satellite dishes, mounted on large vehicles, surrounding the hotel
When I checked into the hotel I learned to my chagrin that I had
telephone messages waiting for me from the "Today' show, "Good Morning
America," CNN and various other news organizations
Rising met us at the hotel and told us the VA desired a meeting with us
right away
The VA was worried about publicity and I didn't blame them: the whole
Taylor exhumation was fast becoming a media circus  The VA was no
longer opposed to exhuming Taylor, but it was adamantly opposed to
taking pictures of the remains  "No photos," the two representatives
told us firmly
I explained that as forensic scientists we were obligated to document
what we did and that we couldn't proceed without photographs
The VA official said: "How do we know these photographs won't show up
in the National Enquirer?"
"Easy," I answered him  "Show me one photograph I've ever taken that
has appeared in any newspaper or magazine or publication such as the
National Enquirer"  I explained that the photos would be used in
scientific books, publications and scientific articles
This appeared to satisfy him
That Sunday evening was one of the most interesting and atmospheric of
my life  We went to a reception and dinner at Zachary Taylor's old
home, which is located not far behind the cemetery  It is a splendid
old dwelhiig and its owners are devoted to the President's memory
They have delved into every aspect of his life with extraordinary zeal
Other members of the Taylor family were there, including the
President's two great-great-great-great-granddaughters, a beautiful and
vivacious pair of young women who charmed everyone with their lively,
sparkling manner  I was amazed to hear that, had the VA forbidden us
access, the Taylor family had made arrangements
with neighbors whose property abutted the rear of the cemetery, to
climb over the wall and enter the mausoleum directly from behind!  I
was silently relieved matters had not gone so far
Dinner was served in a gorgeous dining room overhung by magnificent
chandeliers  Portraits of Zachary Taylor hung everywhere, and
the'elegant meal was concluded by a dessert of pecan pie that was said
to be an old fanifly recipe, a favorite of the President's
Margaret's health was toasted-it was her birthday-and we both learned
wonderful bits of Taylor family lore and heard many fascinating
anecdotes about "Old Rough and Ready" from the', lips of all those to
whom he was no remote textbook figure, but a beloved and
well-remembered ancestor  Seldom has history come so agreeably to life
as it did for me that evening
Yet at the back of everyone's mind was the dark and fascinating
prospect of the next day  We were about to resurrect a dead man, yet
the mood was lively, convivial, even festive  There was an indefinable
air of keen anticipation: tomorrow morning the President whose likeness
hung upon the walls of this dining room, Zachary Taylor himself, would
reenter the world of the living  He would step back onto the stage of
American history he had suddenly vacated a hundred and forty-one years
earlier
The next morning, whatever hopes we had that the investigation in the
cemetery would be conducted quietly and decorously were dashed  When
we arrived at the entrance to the cemetery at 9 AM we found the fire
department at the front gate, directing traffic
Police were everywhere  The main avenue of the cemetery was lined with
hundreds of people  Media camera units were positioned in cheny-picker
cranes overhead  We were let through a police barrier and parked on
the curved drive just in' front of the Taylor tomb
Watched by thousands of inquisitive eyes, we unloaded our equipment and
proceeded to document the area
The local funeral director had secured services of some volunteers from
a memorial vault company to assist in the delicate task of moving the
massive slab of Tennessee marble that sealed the vault containing the
coffins of President and Mrs Taylor  This enormous vault was inside
the tomb, with only a couple of feet of clearance on three sides
When the slab was lifted, a badly rotted wooden casket was seen to be
lying within the vault  Inside this casket was a lead liner, all the
seams of which had been soldered shut  Under closer examination, we
saw a rectangular soldered plate near the head of the liner  Beneath
this plate was a cracked glass window  The apparent purpose of this
glass window was to allow the dead President to be viewed while lying
in state in his coffin at the White House
We had not expected to find this sealed box of lead and had no tools
with which to open it  In any case the mausoleum was so small that
there was no room to work or maneuver, and the milling crowds outside
were oppressive  We decided to take the lead liner and the enclosed
remains to the office of the state medical examiner and to open it
there
Now we were alone at last, and now the true investigation could begin
At the office of the medical examiner, we changed to scrub suits and
discussed how the lead liner could best be opened  It looked solid,
but we now saw it was pocked with several perforations  Historical
records said Taylor had not been embalmed-his wife had forbidden it
Instead, his body had been packed in ice for the lying in state  As
his body decomposed within the lead box, the resultant butric acids had
eaten through the metal in several places
So these holes were an important piece of evidence  Because they
showed Taylor had not been embalmed, and because arsenic was part of
the nineteenth-century embalming process, we could be sure the remains
had not been contaminated by an undertaker
But how to open the box?  Initially it was decided to use a small
blowtorch  A worker from the maintenance department of the county
coroner's office was summoned to the room and, using a small torch
attached to a miniature propane tank, he began carefully to melt the
solder joints of the casket  Suddenly I had a homing thought  Peering
through the opened portion of the seam, I could see that the box was
lined with cloth!  If this cloth liner should catch fire from the flame
of the blowtorch, our proposed examination of Zachary Taylor might end
with his unexpected cremation!  The blowtorch was extinguished
instantly and sent back to the basement
We considered awhile and then fell back on a trusty Stryker saw, the
oscillating bladed tool that is used to cut bone in autopsies  This
saw went through the lead liner like cheese, and the top popped off as
neatly as if we had used a can opener
The lid was moved out of the way and all of us peered down into the
depths of the container  There lay all that remained of President
Zachary Taylor
The former President had been totally skeletonized  Abundant hair
could be seen adhering to the skull  The deceased President's bushy
eyebrows were still visible, clinging to the supraorbital ridges above
his skull's eye sockets  The hair was dark, flecked with gray
For the rest, he presented an austere picture of simple mortality: a
skeleton, clad in his funeral attire, his skull pillowed on a bunch of
straw stuffed beneath the casket liner  He had one missing tooth and
one collapsed crown, but otherwise his teeth were still magnificent
Taylor must have had a brilliant, winning smile in life
The deceased President was dressed in an unusual one-piece suit that
consisted of a pleated shirtlike top with buttoned sleeves, and plain
trousers below  I suppose it was the nineteenth-century equivalent of
a jumpsuit, all of one piece and probably chosen for convenience's
sake  He wore no shoes or stockings, but his bony hands were sheathed
in fine cloth gloves  Under his fallen lower jaw there was a very
large cloth bow tie knotted butterfly fashion around his neck, a
beautiful and curiously soft-looking thing, almost the sort of
adornment a girl might wear
All of the clothing and gloves must have been white originally, but now
they were yellowed with age and stained by the decomposition process to
a tobacco-like brown  As I have already mentioned, the lead liner
itself had a cloth lining which was a faint beige color, falling down
in several places  The darkness of the hair may have been due to
decomposition  Apart from a few lumps of adiPOcere, a waxy substance
that forms when body fats combine with moisture, the remains were
entirely skeletal
Then we went to work  Photographs were taken  A forensic dentist
examined the teeth  With a pair of scissors I carefully cut the back
of the gloves down each finger and removed all ten fingernails
I gently collected sufficient samples of hair from the President's head
and his body  In the area of the feet I found several fallen toenails,
including both of the nails from the great toes  We also sampled a
small  portion of bone from the breastbone or sternum, took a small
piece of the adipocere and collected samples of the textiles from under
the body that had soaked up fluids from the decomposing remains  If
arsenic had been used to kill Taylor, arsenic would be present in all
these things
All the samples were placed in envelopes  Everything was
divided-fingernails, hair, adipocere, bone, fabrics-so that we had two
identical sets of samples  One set of specimens went to the Oak Ridge
National Laboratory for analysis and the other to the Kentucky
laboratory that routinely performs toxicology work for the state
medical examiner
By now it was around 4 Pm The examination was nearly complete  The
coroner's office was telephoning around Louisville to find a specialist
in soldering lead  At length a man who worked with lead roofs was
located and agreed to come to the office and solder the lead box shut
again
Before he arrived, Taylor's two
great-great-great-great-granddaughters asked to see their ancestor
This was a delicate situation  I have already described the skeletal
state of the remains  Gently we described the contents of the lead box
to' them and asked again: were they quite sure they wanted to look?
They insisted they did, they assured us they could stand the sight  So
at length the two young women were allowed to come into the room and
peer into the casket containing their renowned forebear  They were
enthralled, not in the least upset  I still have a photograph of them
in the room, gesturing with animation and smiling excitedly
Clare Rising, who had devoted so much time to explicating the Taylor
riddle, was also permitted to come in and have a brief glimpse of the
deceased President  She approached the casket with considerable
hesitation and no lite awe  I fixed my eyes on her and I could sense
that, at that moment, she wasn't looking at a mere mass of dead bones
She was gazing on the legendary figure of history: Zachary Taylor
The container was closed, returned to the cemetery with an American
flag draped around it  It was replaced in the vault and the heavy
marble lid was rep laced  This time the marble was sealed with epoxy
that would guarantee the Taylors' privacy and repose  After this, we
all went home to await the results of the laboratory analysis
Shortly after I returned to Gainesville, the results were released by
Dr Nichols's office  They were clear and unequivocal  The amounts
of arsenic found in all samples were consistent throughout
They showed that President Taylor had in his remains only the levels of
arsenic consistent with any person who lived in the nineteenth century
The levels were in every case minuscule  They could never have
produced death, or even illness
Arsenic is a remarkable and powerful poison that can kill quickly or
slowly, depending on the dosage  A sudden, massive dose of arsenic
could kill within hours and, if this occurs, no trace of the poison
will be deposited in the hair or nads or bones of the deceased
But if the victim lives for twenty-eight to thirty hours after
ingesting the arsenic, minute traces of the poison will be deposited in
the hair and bones  As we all know, Zachary Taylor lived for five days
after the onset of his symptoms  There was ample time for arsenic to
be deposited in his system, if he had been poisoned  Our investigation
demonstrated, once and for all, that he hadn't
It is remotely possible that another poison might have been used to
kill Taylor, but only arsenic would have produced the symptoms he
showed before dying, and arsenic was by now conclusively out of the
question  The verdict of history must be that Zachary Taylor died of
natural causes  Indeed, he may have been unwittingly killed by his
doctors
In those days, cathartics and laxatives were Prescribed for diarrhea,
and fluids were often deliberately withheld, on the advice of doctors
A strong case might be made that the President had a fairly routine
case of intestinal infection  Perhaps the vegetables and cherries he
devoured had not been washed, or had been washed in contaminated water
The heat of July would have afforded a fertile breeding ground for E
coli germs and these, massed in millions in his gut, may have formed an
army the old general could not defeat  One minor note: we also found in
the coffin several pupa cases of flies that were attracted to the dead
President in that hot summer so long ago  These bold insects had paid
a price for their temerity: their offspring had been buried alive with
the illustrious man their parents had presumed to light upon
The aftermath was all very anticlimactic- I learned, if I did not
already know, how fickle was the fancy of the American media
Zachary Taylor the Murder Victim was news  Zachary Taylor the
President who died a natural death was history, and ancient history at
that  The satellite dishes were stowed, the camera lenses were capped,
the generators were unplugged, the notebooks snapped shut  No more did
the networks jangle my phone, wooing me with their blandishments  "Old
Rough and Ready resumed his interrupted sleep, and I returned to my
modern murders unmolested
Like hoarfrost at noon, the media simply evanesced
Clare Rising finished her book on Zachary Taylor, but as far as I
know it remains unpublished, despite her past literary success  She
clung to her poisoning theory and did extensive additional research in
the medical literature, trying to explain why, even though Taylor might
have been poisoned, no poison would show up in a chemical analysis
But to my mind the death of President Taylor has been settled now, and
Clare Rising is entitled to some of the credit whether she agrees or
not  Without her extraordinary efforts, the mystery might have
lingered indefinitely  Now it is resolved
Zachary Taylor can take his proper place in history, as a military
commander who fought hard for his country and as a President who did
not shrink from his duty  His last hours may have been uncomfortable,
but they were not unnatural  He was not assassinated  And, like the
big soft bow tie he wore in his coffin, the old President did have a
gentler side
It was Zachary Taylor who coined the term "First Lady"  He used these
words to describe Dolly Madison at her funeral in 1849: "She will never
be forgotten, because she was truly our first lady for a half century"
This sincere piece of gallantry is among his smaller monuments  It
came from Zachary Taylor's own heart-a heart that was gone, together
with the storm and strife it struggled to master, long before the old
President and I met

 The Tsar of All the Russias

"The world will never know what we did with them

-peter Voikov, soviet ambassador to Poland, 1935

It was a sunny day on the edge of Siberia when I climbed the stairs to
the second floor of the Forensic-Medical Examination Bureau, where the
skeletons were kept  The bureau was located in Ekaterinburg, eight
hundred miles from Moscow, deep in the Ural Mountains  A city of
dreadful fame Ekaterinburg is the Golgotha of Soviet Communism
Here, in the basement of a house that has since been destroyed, was
carried out one of the most fateful mass executions in this century
In Ekaterinburg, on the night of July 16-17, 1918, Tsar Nicholas ii,
the last of the Romanovs, was summoned downstairs with his whole family
to a basement room in the so-called "House of Special Designation," a
mansion requisitioned from an engineer named Ipatiev  Waiting for him
was a Bolshevik death squad led by Commender Jacob Yurovsky
Near midnight a decree of execution was read out to the amazed royal
family and their servants: Tsar Nicholas, the Tsarina Alexandra, their
frail hemophiliac son Alexei, their four daughters, Olga, Tatiana,
Marie and Anastasia, the family doctor, Sergei Botkin, a cook named
Khaiitonov, a footman named Trupp and a maid named Anna Demidova@leven
people in all
Yurovsky had not finished speaking when the first shots exploded in the
narrow room  Thrown backward by the force of bullets, the Tsar spun
around and fell dead  His family and retainers fell with him, in a
blizzard of lead  The roar of a Fiat truck engine, running loudly
outside the back door, helped mask the homicidal racket
Twenty minutes later the corpses were carried out into the summer
night, where they vanished, seemingly forever
"The world will never know what we did with them," boasted Peter
Voikov, a Bolshevik official at Ekaterinburg who was ambassador to
Poland when he uttered these words, seventeen years later
On July 19 the local Ural Worker newspaper announced that the Tsar was
dead:

EXECUTION OF NICHOLAS, THE BLOODY CROWNED

MURDERER SHOT WRMOUT BOURGEOIS FORMALITIES BUT IN ACCORDANCE WITH OUR
NEW DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLES
But no mention was made of his family, and for nearly three quarters of
a century the exact details of the massacre remained a Soviet secret
Despite the most zealous searches by pro-Tsarist investigators
immediately after the shootings, the corpses of the Tsar and his family
were not unearthed  Only a single finger, apparently belonging to a
woman, together with scattered burned and molten personal effects,
turned up in the recesses of an abandoned mine twelve miles outside of
the city
Now, unexpectedly, from a bog on the outskirts of Ekaterinburg nine
more or,less complete skeletons had come to light in a shallow grave,
along with fourteen bullets, bits of rope and a shattered jar that once
contained sulfuric acid  Could these be the remains of the Romanovs?
I and my colleagues had been invited by the Russians to come halfway
around the world to try to answer this question
Up a flight of stairs, down a long corridor-there was the entrance to
the makeshift morgue  I recall the layout clearly  At the end of a
long hallway on the second floor there is a wrought-iron gate  Behind
this lies a metal door with some very impressive locks and wax seals
The room is behind this door
Then our Russian hosts opened the door and said to us cheerfully: "Go
to it"
We were let into a square room with two windows and a cluster of
three desks at the center  Along all four walls at the edge of the
room were long tables, about thirty inches wide, covered with white
sheets
On the sheets, lying head to toe around the room, were nine skeletons
For me, these remains possessed a special fascination  I had first
read of the Romanov murders forty-four years previously, as an
eleven-year-old boy, in Seven League Boots, a 1935 book by the
globetrotting journalist Richard Halliburton  Halliburton recounted
how he - had gone to Sverdlovsk, as Ekaterinburg was renamed by the
Bolsheviks, and tracked down one of the Tsar's assassins, Peter
Zacharevitch Ermakov, a brutal man known as "Comrade Mauser"
Coughing, spitting up blood, apparenoy dying of throat cancer, Ermakov
told Halliburton a blood-freezing tale of wholesale murder:

"It was on July 12 that we had our final meeting and got our orders
We set the night of July 16th for the shooting-four days later,"
En-nakov said  "I had to make all the plans myself for the destruction
of the bodies  We wanted to do the thing as quietly as possible, to be
sure the Romanoffs didn't suspect in advance  And I wanted to make
doubly sure that the bodies would be thoroughly destroyed  I didn't
want the Whites to find a single bone"  In July 1918 the White
Russians were besieging Ekaterinburg and its fall was expected at any
moment
Ermakov said he spent the fourteenth reconnoitering the territory
around Ekaterinburg for a suitable disposal site for the bodies
He settled, on an abandoned mineshaft about twelve miles outside of
town  His commander, Jacob YurovsW, approved the site, Errnakov said
"Next morning, we took an army truck and carried several big tins of
gasoline out to one of the deepest mines  I also sent along' two big
buckets of sulphuric acid and a truckload of firewood  One of my
soldiers stood guard over these supplies to frighten off any curious
peasants who might be wandering around"
A driver was ordered to park his truck in front of the back door of the
Ipatiev house and leave the engine running at full throttle
The noise of the engine, it was -hoped, would drown the crack of
gunshots
"Vaganof was always with me  He was a good Bolshevik who hated the
Tsar as much as I did  We could count on him to shoot straight!
" Yurovsky had a Nagant repeater  Vaganof and I had Mousers
We each carried twenty extra rounds of ammunition     There were to
be just we three executioners
"That afternoon, we looked all over the house for a good place to do
the shooting, and decided on the basement guard room  Being below
ground, the shots wouldn't sound so loud  It was the right size
too-about 18 feet long and 12 wide
"If there were more than three of us, we'd be in each other's way
At about midnight Yurovsky knocked on the Tsar's door and told him he
and his family were to be evacuated because fighting had broken out on
the outskirts of Ekaterinburg  The Tsar and his family took about an
hour to prepare themselves
"The door opened and the Tsar came,out carrying Alexei  They both had
on military caps and jackets  The family followed behind
The Tsarina and the girls were all dressed in white and carrying
pillows     Yurovsky must have told them to carry pillows to sit on
in the automobile  Anna, the Tsarina's maid, came out with two c
pillows
"Behind her came Dr  botkin, the cook, the valet," Errnakov recalled
"Nobody seemed excited  I'm sure  they didn't suspect"
Orders were given to the driver to start his engine
Yurovsky then read the death sentence, practically shouting so as to be
heard over the roar of the truck engine just outside the door
"You think the Whites are going to rescue you-but they aren't," Ermakov
recalled Yurovsky saying  "You think you're going away to England and
be a Tsar again-well, you're not  The Soviet of the Urals sentences
you and your family to death for your crimes against the Russian
people"
The Tsar seemed not to understand  "What?  What?"  he shouted back
over the roar of the engine  "Aren't we going to get out of here after
all?"
"Yurovsws reply was to fire his pistol straight into the Tsar's face,"
Ermakov recounted
"The bullet went right through his brain
"The Tsar spun to the floor and never moved
"I fired my Mauser at the Tsarina-only six feet away uldn't miss  Got
her in the mouth  In two seconds she was dead
"I fired next at Dr botkin  He'd thrown up his hands and turned his
face half away  The bullet went through his neck  He fell over
backwards
"Yurovsky had shot the Tsarevich out of his chair, and he lay on the
floor groaning
"The cook was crouching in the corner  I got him in the body and then
in the head  The valet went down  I don't know who shot him
"Vaganof made a clean sweep of the girls  They were in a heap on the
floor, moaning and dying  He kept pouring bullets into Olga and
Tatiana
"The two younger girls-Maria and Anastasia@had fallen beside Dr
botkin
"I don't think any of us hit Anna, the maid  She had slid down in her
corner and hidden behind her two pillows  We found afterward that the
pillows were crammed with jewels-maybe the jewel cases turned the
bullets away  But one of the guards got her through the throat with
his bayonet     We had called in our Cheka [secret police]
executioners from the corridor to help finish off the job and they were
clubbing and bayoneting everybody
"The Tsarevich wasn't dead     still groaning and twisting on the
floor  Yurovsky shot him twice more in the head  That finished him
"Anastasia was still alive too  A guard pushed her over on her back
She shrieked-he beat her to death with his rifle butt"
Ermakov said the dead bodies were then gathered up and put on the truck
outside  The room was a shambles: "There was blood everywhere and
slippers and pillows and handbags and odds and ends swimming around in
a red lake"  Ermakov told Halliburton that a total of thirty-eight
shots were fired
It took two hours to cover the twelve miles to the mine  Dawn was
breaking by the time the truck arrived  It was too late to burn the
bodies by the time they arrived, so Ermakov posted guards around the
remains
During the day of the seventeenth, the Tsar's personal effects were
gathered up to be shipped to Moscow
At 10 Pm that evening Ermakov was back at the mine  "By the light of
the lamps, we stripped the corpses of their clothes  Found a, lot of
diamonds sewn in the Tsarina's bodice-and more necklaces, gold crosses
and a lot of other such things on the girls  These were sent to Moscow
along with everything else"  The clothes were burned separately  The
bodies were taken to the entrance of a mine two kilometers off the
highroad
"Here in the mouth of this mine we built a funeral pyre of cut logs big
enough to hold the bodies, two layers deep  We poured five tins of
gasoline over the corpses and two buckets of sulphuric acid and set the
logs afire  The gasoline made everything burn rapidly
But I stood by to see that not one fingernail or fragment of bone
remained unconsumed- Anything of that sort the Whites found I knew they
would use as a holy relic  I kept pushing back into the flames
whatever pieces were left, and building more fire and pouring on more
gasoline  We had to keep the fire burning a long time to burn up the
skulls  But I wasn't satisfied till our pyre and everything upon it
was reduced to powder"
Ermakov said he collected the ashes, put them in tins and pitched the
powdery, imperial remains into the air
"The wind caught them like dust and carried them out over the woods and
fields     and it rained the next clay     soifanybody says he
has seen a Romanoff or a piece of a dead gne-tell him about the
ashes-and the wind-and the rain"
So perished the last Tsar and his family, Ermakov declared: shot by
three executioners, their bodies corroded by acid, then burned to
powder and scattered over Siberia  I ask the reader's pardon for
having quoted this testimony at such length, but it contains'several
nuggets of truth  Unfortunately these nuggets are buried deep in the
rubbish heap of a braggart's lies
Immediately, one runs up against a contradiction in ermakov's account
Why bring along both sulfuric acid and gasoline to destroy the corpses?
That is, if the bodies were to be cremated, why bother to disfigure
their features with acid first?  Clearly the acid would be useful only
if the bodies were to be buried, not burned  In itself, this
contradiction is not decisive  As I have said earlier in this book,
people often do funny, irrational things with bodies  But this
contradiction is enough to make us suspicious of Ermakovs reliability
as a witness
Eight days after the murders, White Russian armies under Admiral
Alexander Koichak reconquered Ekaterinburg  The first troops to reach
the Ipatiev house found a chaos of broken furniture, empty rooms and
debris  The semibasement room where the executions had taken place
looked freshly scrubbed, but there were bullet holes and bayonet gouges
in the walls
Rumors led the White Army investigators to an abandoned mine, twelve
feet deep, about twelve miles outside the city at a place called Kopp,
near four lonely pine trees named "The Four Brothers"
In and around the mine shaft a total of sixty-five half-combusted
relics were found amid the ashes of two bonfires  Among them were what
army investigators concluded were the Tsar's belt buckle, the
Tsarevich's belt buckle, an emerald cross, topaz beads, a pearl
earring, an'lllm Cross (a tsarist military decoration), an eyeglass
lens, three small icons, the Empress's spectacles case, buttons and
hooks that seemed to belong to women's corsets, fragments of military
caps worn by Nicholas and Alexei, shoe buckles belonging to the Grand
Duchesses, and Dr  botkin's upper denture plate
A single, severed human finger belonging to a middle-aged woman was
also found  It was the sole human fragment unearthed
The remains of a small dog were also found
The white Army was driven back from Ekaterinburg, but eventually the
results of the investigations were assembled and published  The
investigators were not able to solve the riddle of the missing corpses
Ekaterinbu'rg was renamed Sverdlovsk, after Yakov Sverdlov, the member
of the Bolshevik Central Committee who ordered the executions from
Moscow, almost certainly with Lenin's approval
Sverdlovsk itself became a munitions manufacturing city, off limits to
all foreigners and to most Russian citizens  Soviet T-31 tanks were
built there during World War II  American U-2 pilot Francis Gary
Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk in 1962 while attempting to
photograph its military secrets
Subsequent political crosscurrents in Russia further obscure the story
Some of the participants in the slaughter were supporters of Josef
Stalin's rival, Leon Trotsky- After Trots@s purge and assassination,
these protagonists in the Tsar's murder officially ceased to exist
Everything they did, including their role in killing the Tsar, was
blotted out from Soviet history books
By 1935 the Ipatiev house, where the shootings had taken place, was a
museum celebrating the death of the II crowned hangman," as Nicholas
was called by the Bolsheviks  Halliburton toured it and saw excerpts
from the Tsar's diaries on display there  By 1959, however, the house
had become a state archives off limits to the public  In

1977 it was bulldozed, because local Communist authorities were alarmed
that the house was gradually becoming a goal of pilgrims from all over
Russia, who were coming here to pay homage to the memory of the Tsar
Our hosts told us that the local Communist Party boss who ordered its
destruction was none other than Boris Yeltsin, who has since risen
tothe very pinnacle of power in the Russian government
Today he is President of Russia
in the decades that passed, a cloak of silence descended over the
murders  Initially extolled as an act of revolutionary justice, the
wholesale massacre of the Tsar and his family horrified the rest of the
world and gradually became an embarrassment to the new Soviet regime
As the newspaper headline quoted earlier attests, the Bolsheviks never
spoke of the fate of the Tsar's family and'entourage, only of the
Tsar's execution  People began to wonder if, by some miracle or,
mischance, some or even all of the Tsar's family might have survived
the bloodbath at the Ipatiev house  This official silence, complicated
by subsequent contradictions, has given rise to a host of claimants to
the crown of the Romanovs  There have been multiple Anastasias, nearly
as many Alexeis, no shortage of Alexandras, Olgas, Tatianas and Manes
Some even insist the Tsar himself escaped his firing squad and left the
country to live quietly in Poland  I myself receive letters from time
to time, from a woman who lives in a trailer park in Hialeah, near
Miami, who believes herself to be Anastasia  She illustrates the
letters with weird ideograms: weeping eyes, shining crucifixes,
mysterious question marks  The Romanovs cast a long shadow, even
today
The most famous of these claimants was a woman who surfaced in 1920 in
Berlin after a suicide attempt  The woman had total amnesia but bore a
striking resemblance to Anastasia, the Tsar's youngest daughter  She
could not speak Russian but seemed to recall remarkable details of
court protocol and Romanov family history, enough to convince some
people that she was truly Anastasia
Known as Anna Anderson, this woman spent her whole life trying to prove
her identity  She died in 1984 in Virginia, aged eighty-two, and her
remains were cremated  Locks of her cut hair survive but, as we shall
see, these may be of doubtful value in weighing her claim to royal
blood
In the 1980s the Soviet Union embarked on a new period of openness" and
"restructuring" advocated by the new President and Communist Party
chairman, Mikhall Gorbachev  Suddenly thousands of secret documents
were dclassified
A Soviet playwright, Edward Radzinsky, had been quietly researching the
death of the Tsar for nearly twenty-five years  When the archives of
Moscow,s museum of the October Revolution were finally opened to
scholars in the late 1980s, Radzinsky found a treasure trove of old
receipts, diaries and dossiers, including the fiftyvolume diary of Tsar
Nicholas II himself, and signed eyewitness reports written by his
assassins, Yurovsky and Ermakov  There was even a 1964 tape recording
by Grigori Nikulin, YurovsWs lieutenant, who participated in the
killings
The most important of these documents was the so-called Yurovsky Note,"
an after-action report written by the chief assassin, in which he
refers, to himself as "the commandant"  Gradually a fairly complete
picture of the murders emerged  It was a brutal thing of blood,
deceit, boasting, drunkenness and ghoulish bungling  A synOpSis is
contained in RadzinsWs 1992 book, The Last Tsar
According to the Yurovsky Note, twelve men were in the firing squad:
six unidentified Latvian guards, Yurovsky, Ermakov, Yurovsky's
right-hand man Grigori Nikulin and a deserter from the Tsar's late
Guards named Alexei KabanOv, as well as two secret policemen named
Pavel Medvedev and Mikhall Medvedev-Kudrin
The royal family had gone to bed at 10:30 Pm Shortly before midnight
they were awakened and told to go downstairs  Ostensibly they were
being transferred to a jail nearer the center of the city, which was
besieged by White Russian armies
Once assembled in the semibasement room at the rear of the house, the
Tsar and his entourage were arranged in two rows  They were persuaded
to group themselves quietly by means of a simple ruse: Yurovsky told
them they were going to have their pictures taken in order to disprove
rumors that they were dead  Obediently, Nicholas and the others took
their places  To lend credence to this cruel hoax, two chairs were
brought in: one for the invalid heir

Alexei, the other for the Tsarina
Outside the Fiat truck engine roared to life, creating an unholy din
Yurovsky read out a decree from the Ural Soviet condemning the Tsar and
his family to death  The noise from the truck was so loud that
Nicholas could not hear what Yurovsky was saying  "What?
What?"  the Tsar, asked  Yurovsky read the decree again, but before he
was finished the shooting began  The Tsar's last words may have been:
"Forgive them, for they know not what they do"  Yurovsky, Ermakov and
Medvedev would later dispute who shot the Tsar first
Years later all three men sent their pistols to the Museum of the
Revolution in Moscow, each claiming his was the weapon that had slain
the Tsar
A double door leading to an adjacent room crashed open and the six
Latvian guards poured their gunfire into the room  The assassins stood
so close together that they gave each other powder burns as they
jostled and fired into the screaming royal family  But a macabre
situation developed  Though Nicholas had died instantly, certain
others of the victims proved harder to kill  Bullets were actually
ricocheting off their bodies, sponging into the walls of the room
"Alexei, three of his sisters, the lady-in-waiting and botkin were
still alive  They had to be finished off," Yurovsky wrote in his
afteraction report  "This amazed the commandant since we had aimed
straight for the heart  It was also surprising that the bullets from
the 'revolvers bounced off for some reason and ricocheted, jumping
around the room like hail"
Yurovsky was puzzled by the "strange vitality" of Alexei and'gave him
the coup de grace by firing two revolver shots into his head at close
range  But the women proved even harder to WI  After exhausting their
magazines, the Latvian guards rushed forward and used their,bayonets to
finish the grisly job  But even these rbughand-ready weapons seemed to
Turn aside against the chests and ton sos of the women
nly later was it discovered that the corsets the women were wearing
were stuffed with diamonds and precious stones  These acted as
bulletproof vests and prolonged their owner's' agony  Yurovsky wrote
that, when the corpses were stripped later, -eighteen pounds of
diamonds were recovered from the corsets
The bodies were then loaded onto the truck and driven to the Four
Brothers Mine, twelve miles away, near the village of Koptyaki
There they were stripped naked and their clothing was rummaged through
and burned  Nikuhn was later given the errand of taking the jewels to
Moscow  The corpses were dumped into the mine shaft, which was only
about eight feet deep, and hand grenades were flung in and exploded
after them to seal the hole

(This would explain the sixty-five charred, scatterd relics found by
the White Russian investigators when they later searched the area near
the Four Brothers Mine  The single human finger had apparently been
blown off a hand of one of the women by the hand grenade explosions and
was overlooked by the assassins later)

But the story did not end here  To his disgust and chagrin, Yurovsky
found that the whereabouts of the II secret" burial site were the talk
of the town  The flamboyant Erinakov, who had apparently been drunk
throughout the assassinations, had enlisted a band of equally drunken
assistants to help with the disposal of the bodies, and these had later
boasted of their deeds
Now, with the White Russian armies closing in, Yurovsky and his
followers had to bury the Tsar and his family all over again  The next
night, with torches, ropes, kerosene and sulfuric acid, Yurovsky
returned to the death pit at the Four Brothers Mine, determined to
dispose of the telltale corpses for good  A Bolshevik sailor named I'm
Vaganov, the "Vaganof" of E akov's account, was sent into the muddy
hole to knot ropes around the bodies, which were then hauled up
The muddy, mutilated bodies were loaded aboard carts, but these
proved too rickety to be serviceable  Yurovsky then sent back to town
for a truck  Daylight came and went  At nightfall on the nineteenth,
nearly three days after the murders, Yurovsky and his band set out with
the hideous, bloated, flyblown remains of "The
Autocrat of All the Russias," as Nicholas II was known in life, his
wife, his children and his servants
It had been a rainy summer and the,truck kept getting stuck in the mud
Yurovsky and his helpers put planks under the wheels over and over
again, but by 4:30 AM the truck slipped into a bog so deep it could
not be moved
There was no more time  The bodies would have to be disposed of on the
spot  Yurovsky burned two of them: Alexei and a female who he at first
thought was the Tsarina Alexandra but later decided must have been her
maid, Anna Demidova  This confusion on Yurovsky's part as to the
identity of the female would lend hope to those who believed Anastasia
had somehow escaped the slaughter
At any rate, Yurovsky seems to have badly underestimated the amount of
time needed to combust fully a human corpse-it is an error many
murderers make  He may also have run out of fuel
Exhausted, disgusted, all out of time, with dawn breaking, the
commandant ordered a pit dug six feet deep and eight feet square
In it, in the midst of a random stretch of bog, near a railroad
crossing, the Tsar and the rest of his entourage were flung and hastily
buried  The hole was so shallow that Yurovsky worried that the corpse
stench would rise through the earth  He decided to kill the smell with
sulfuric acid
"The bodies were doused with sulfuric acid so they couldn't be
recognized and to prevent any stink from them rotting  We scattered it
with dill and lime, put boards on top and rode over it several times-no
trace of the hole remained  The secret was kept-the Whites did not
find this burial site," Yurovsky wrote in his report
Throughout the 1980s, Radzinsky published several articles in a Soviet
periodical about his inquiries into the death of the Tsar  He received
thousands of letters in response, many of them from people who
remembered other details, or who knew the assassins personally
Then, in April 1989, the final breakthropgh cune: a Soviet mystery
writer named Geh Ryabov described in the avant-garde weekly, Moscow
News, how he and Dr Alexander Avdonin, an Ekaterinburg geophysicist,
had located the skeletons of the Tsar and his family in a shallow grave
outside Sverdlovsk in 1979  Not daring to reveal his discovery, Ryabov
had waited a decade to make it public
My colleagues and I first heard of the discovery in 1992, at a
convention of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in New Orleans
We saw press reports about the discovery of the bodies, and in -these
it was said that the U S Secretary of State, James Baker, had been
shown the remains on a visit to Ekaterinburg  The Russians had asked
Baker if the United States might provide technical assistance in
identifying them
The mystery of the Romanovs had fascinated me for more than four
decades- This was a unique opportunity to shine the light of modern
science into the dark recesses of one of the most baffling and
enigmatic mass murders in this century  Few deaths had been so
momentous and mysterious as that of the Tsar and his household
Seventy years of Soviet history had played out since that midnight in
Ekaterinburg, yet the final fate of the Romanovs remained as great a
riddle as ever  The corpse of Lenin had been preserved under glass in
Red Square  Had the bones of the Tsar been preserved under peat and
mud in a Northeast Asian bog?  I immediately bent my thoughts toward
Russia
While still in New Orleans, I asked the armed forces medical examiner
if he had received any official request to help the Russians
I didn't want to intrude on someone else's investigation  He told me
he had heard nothing of this case; therefore his department was not
involved with the Romanovs at all  So the way was clear
I immediately organized an extremely impressive team of experts
Besides myself, there was Dr Lowell Levine; Dr Michael Baden;
Cathryn Oakes, a hair and fiber microscopist with the New York State
Police Department who has since become Mrs Levine; my wife Margaret,
a media specialist who would assist us in documenting and videotaping
the investigation; and William Goza, a retired Gainesville attorney and
historian, who is president of several foundations and possesses
formidable diplomatic skills  On two later trips to Ekaterinburg we
were fortunate to have the help of two outstanding Florida medical
examiners, Dr William Hamilton and Dr Alexander Melamud  Dr
Melamud speaks Russian like a native -as well he should, for he was
born and raised in the Ukraine
What finally opened the door for us was a fax from the president of the
University of Florida, Dr John Lombardi, to Dr Alexander Avdonin,
the Soviet geophysicist who had personally helped unearth the
remains  Some weeks passed  Finally we received an official
invitation jointly signed by Dr Avdonin and Dr Alexander Blokhin,
vice-president for the public health district of Sverdlovsk  We packed
our bags and flew to Russia
We were met at the airport at Ekaterinburg by Dr Avdonin and Dr
Nikolai Nevohn, who heads the state forensic bureau for the district of
Sverdlovsk  The remains were entrusted to his care and were kept at
his institute  The very next morning we were permitted to see them
At last the final door swung open and we were let into the room
containing the rediscovered bones  Immediately we faced a procedural
obstacle  The Russians initially refused to let us photograph the
remains  This was a bitter blow, and we objected strenuously  All our
work would be in vain if we were not able, to document our findings
On their side, the Russians were understandably worried that we would
steal their thunder and make commercial capital out of some of the most
extraordinary human skeletons ever found We reached a temporary
compromise  We would examine the remains for several hours, without
cameras, that morning  Later we would renew our request to take
photographs  I had the feeling that, the Russians were sizing us
up,-trying to tell if we were true experts or just glib dilettantes
I was able to set them straight within the next few hours  By the end
of the morning I managed, on the basis of the unlabeled skeletal
remains before me, to decide the age and sex of all the skeletons and
to assign them tentative identifications  The speed and accuracy of my
initial analysis produced a gra@g response: suddenly, the Russians were
looking at us with unfeigned respect  They-had taken months to make
their identifications, using numerous experts in various fields,
working independently  We had arrived at roughly the same conclusions
in a few hours  I told our hosts we could go no further unless we
could document what we were doing  We went to lunch while discussions
were held about our photographic access
When we got back from lunch, all barriers had been removed  Now we
could begin our examination in earnest
The nine skeletons were identified only by number  Five were female,
four male  Of the five females, three were young women, only recently
grown to maturity  All the faces were badly fractured, every single
one  This fact made reconstruction of facial features risky or
impossible, but it also conformed to the accounts of the
assassinations: that the faces of the victims were smashed in with
rifle butts to render them unrecognizable
All of the female skeletons had dental work  None of the males did,
though we knew from historical records that Dr botkin had a denture
plate in his upper jaw, which was later extricated from the mud of the
Four Brothers Mine by the White Army investigators
Sure enough, one of the males had a few teeth in his lower jaw, no
teeth at all in his upper jaw, and probably wore false teeth in life
The enamel surfaces of the teeth showed the'signs of acid etching  The
outer tables of the cranial vaults were eroded away by acid also  A
single broken jar that had once contained sulfuric acid was also found
among the remains  This, too, agreed with accounts of the killings  A
receipt for 400 pounds of sulfuric acid, requisitioned shortly before
the murders, still exists in Russian archives  I have seen ibopies of
this receipt with my own eyes
In all, fourteen bullets were recovered from the grave, along with
the remains of one hand grenade detonator  All the bullets were 762,
763 or 765mm, about the equivalent of 32-caliber bullets  The
Russians told us they believed nine of the bullets came from Nagants,
four came possibly from a Browning and one from some other gun,
possibly a Mauser  These bullets had almost certainly lodged in the
bodies at the time of death, but twelve of them had gradually come
loose as the remains decomposed  The Russians told us that loose teeth
had also been found in the shallow grave, mixed in among the bones
Three bodies, Numbers 2, 3 and 6, had through-and-through gunshot
wounds to the head  Another body, No  9, had a stab wound in the
breastbone that could have been made by a bayonet  It is important to
remember that not every lethal wound, whether it be a bullet or a knife
thrust, will leave a mark on the skeleton underneath, even when the
ribs and vertebrae are recovered intact, which was certainly not the
case here

- Body No  1 was identified by its pelvis as a fully grown female
The skull was missing its facial bones  There was a gold bridge of
poor workmanship on the mandible-not very expensive dental work  But
the most revealing detail turned up in my examination of the ankle
joints  These showed an extension of the joint surfaces, as if the
woman had spent many hours crouching or kneeling, perhaps while she was
scrubbing floors or doing other menial work  On the basis of these
joints, together with the overall composition of the group, I believe
this skeleton belonged to the Tsarina's maid, Anna Demidova
 Body No  2, alone among the remains, still had its torso intact,
held together by adipocere, a grayish-white waxy substance that forms
when fatty tissue combine with water after death  It was first noticed
and mentioned by Sir Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century essayist,
whose description remains classically true today:

Teeth, bones, and hair, give the most 4qing defiance to corruption  In
an Hydropicall body ten yearn buried in a Church yard, we met with a
fat concretion, where the nitre of the Earth, and salt and lixivious
liquor of the body, had, coagulated large lumps of fat, into the
consistence of the hardest castle-soap
From the adipocere in this body the Russians had recovered one bullet
in the pelvic area and one from a vertebra
The skeleton belonged to a mature man with a very flat, sloping
forehead  I believe it is that of Dr Sergei botkin, the physician
who watched over the young Tsarevich Alexei, who died with the family,
'and whose photograph in life closely matched the shape of this
forehead
The skull had no upper teeth, and Botkin's dental plate had been found
by White Russian investigators over seventy years earlier at the mouth
of the Four Brothers Mine  The skull had a gunshot wound from a bullet
that entered the left frontal bone in the upper left corner of the
forehead and exited through the right temporal area
In 1935, Ermakov told Halh'burton that Dr Botkin "had throvm up his
hands and turned his face half away"  Though Ermakov erroneously
reported that he believed botkin was shot in the throat, the detail of
the doctor partly turning his head away squared very well with the
skull of Body No  2

Body No  3's skeleton belonged to a young adult female with a
bulging forehead, in her early twenties when she died  It has been
tentatively identified as belonging to the young Grand Duchess Olga
The shape of the head agrees extraordinarily closely with lifetime
photographs of Olga  Half of her middle face, the facial bones between
the tops of the eye orbits and the lower jaw was missing
She clearly was completely grown, and the rbots of he; third molars,
her "wisdom teeth," were fully developed  Regrettably the bones of the
legs were not intact; they had been cut into sections after being dug
up but before we arrived on the scene  As a result, they could not be
used for height estimates  Instead we used bones from the arms to
estimate the female's height  Though arm lengths are not as reliable
as leg lengths, we arrived at a height estimate of 649 inches
Dr Lavine found extensive amalgam fillings in her teeth, a trait
shared by the other two young females  It is very likely they were
fond of sweets, in life
In Body No  3, the bullet entered under the left jaw, broke the jaw,
went through the palate behind the nose and exited through the frontal
bone of the skull  Such a trajectory could come from a gun placed
under the chin and fired up, or from firing at a body already lying on
the floor  The exit wound was very neat, drilled in a nearperfect
circle  The top of the sell showed sign's of acid etching
I will pass over Body No  4 for now, and return to it later, for
reasons that will become apparent
- Body No  5 belonged to a woman in her late teens or early twenties
Half of her middle face was missing, a pattern of damage already seen
in Body No  3 Dr Levine and I agreed that she was the youngest of
the five women whose skeletons lay before us  We concluded this from
the fact that the root tips of her third molars were incomplete  Her
sacrum, in the back of her pelvis, was not completely developed  Her
limb bones showed that growth had only recently ended  Her back showed
evidence of immaturity, but it was nevertheless the back of a woman at
least eighteen years old  We estimated her height at 675 inches  The
Russians told us that a bullet had been found in a lump of adipocere
near this body  We believe this skeleton is that of Marie, who was
nineteen years old at the time of the murders

- Body No  6 belonged to a young woman who was nevertheless fully
grown  Her dental and skeletal development fell neatly between that of
Bodies 3 and 5 There was no evidence of recent @owth in her limb
bones  Her sacrum and pelvic rim were mature, which made her at least
eighteen  On the basis of her limb bones, we put her height at 656
inches, right between the other two young females
More important, her collarbone was mature, making her at least twenty
years old  The Grand Duchess Tatiana was twenty-one years and two
months old at the time of the shootings, so this skeleton agreed very
closely with the historical record
Body No  6 had a gunshot entrance wound high on the back left side of
the skull, and an associated exit wound just in front of the right
temple  The minimum diameter of the entrance wound was 88mm, which
would be consistent with the,32-caliber handguns used in the
assassinations  A slug from a 32 is 76men in diameter
This young woman had been shot in the back of the head
So: 3,  5 and 6 were Olga, Marie and Tatiana, in that order
Where was Anastasia?  None of these three young female skeletons was
young enough to be Anastasia, who was seventeen years and one month old
the night of the shootings  Our Russian hosts believed that Body No
6, the midmost of the three young females, was the long-lost Anastasia
Alas!  We had to disagree, based on the growth patterns of the teeth,
pelvises, sacra and long limbs of the three skeletons before us  The
Russians had labored manfully over Body No
6, attempting to restore its facial bones with generous dollops of
glue, stretched across wide gaps  They had been forced to estimate
over and over again, while reassembling these fragments, almost none of
which were touching each other in the reconstruction  It was a
remarkable and ingenious exercise, but it was too fanciful for me to
buy: Anastasia was not in this room
Another piece of evidence was the height of the skeletal remains  This
young woman was roughly the same height as the other two young women
whose remains were discovered in the mass grave  In photographs of
Anastasia taken with her sisters a year before her death, she is
shorter than Olga and noticeably shorter than Tatiana and Marie
There are no photographs of the royal family in the months immediately
preceding the shootings  Could Anastasia have undergone a "growth
spurt" in those months before the shootings?  Could she have suddenly
"caught up" with her sisters in stature?  It is extremely unlikely
In September 1917, only ten months before the shootings, while she was
under house arrest in Tobolsk, the Tsarina Alexandra wrote in her
diary: "Anastasia is very fat, like Marie used to be-big, thickwaisted,
then tiny feet-I hope she grows more (My italics) Though the
quote is rather vague, it seems to indicate clearly that Anastasia was
not yet as tall as her sisters, and might be expected to grow taller
I will pass over Body No  7 for the moment, and return to it
presently

- The skeleton of Body No  8 was very fragmentary and was gn'evously
damaged by acid  It belonged to an adult male in his forties or fifties
The maxilla (upper jaw) of Body No  8 was not recovered
The mandible was'recovered, but it had lost its remaining teeth at
beneath  The area immediately above the eye orbits, where our eye 
brows are in LIFE, was noticeably flat
The owner of this skull, when alive, had a flattened profile  From the
hip and pelvic remains, this skeleton was clearly male  He does not
appear to have been very big
One ulna was fractured and later healed  I believe this to have been
the skeleton of the cook, Ivan Mi@ovich Kharitonov, mainly by a process
of elimination that I will explain later
The skeleton of Body No  9 belonged to a big, heavy-boned man over six
feet tall, who was beginning to show evidence of aging  The back of
the skull was missing  The teeth were worn  There was a stab wound,
probably by a bayonet, through the breastbone from front to back, but I
am convinced this particular breastbone does not belong to this set of
remains  For the rest, the robust size of the skeleton agrees well
with descriptions we have of the footman, Alexei Igorevich Trupp, who
was part of the Tsar's entourage at Ekaterinburg
We have now discussed Bodies 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8 and 9 Let us return to
Bodies 4 and 7, in reverse order

- Body No  7 was in some ways the most important of all that were
found in the pit  It belonged to an older woman whose rib cage may
have been damaged by bayonet thrusts-the bones were not well enough
preserved to allow me to say this with certainty  But it was not these
that commanded our attention  Rather, it was her amazing and exquisite
dental work  My colleague, Dr Levine, initially thought the two
silvery crowns in the lower jaw were aluminum "temporaries"  They
weren't  To his astonishment, hefound they were made of platinum
When we took flash pictures of this skull, the gleaming platinum crowns
coruscated brilliantly in the sudden light  Dr Levine also
discovered beautiful porcelain crowns in this skull's jaws, along with
wonderfully wrought gold fillings  It was stunning dental work,
extremely costly and cunningly contrived
It was this rich dental work, so precious-metaled it was far beyond the
means of all but the richest Russians, that convinced the men who
initially excavated the mass grave that here, at last, were the remains
of the royal family  The Tsarina Alexandra mentions visiting the
dentist several times in her diaries, and it is well that she did
The Bolshevik assassins despoiled the Tsarina of her jewels, but they
could not take her teeth; and these beautiful tooth crowns spoke
eloquently even in death  Taken together with the scattered bullets,
the bits of rope and the smashed jar of sulfuric acid, these teeth were
a powerful signal to the excavators that they were dealing with the
grave of the Tsar and his family
Body No  4 I believe to be the skeleton of Tsar Nicholas ii  it
belonged to a middle-aged man of fairly short stature  The skeleton
possessed a clearly male pelvis  The skull had a very broad, flat
palate that is consistent with the mouth shape of the Tsar in
photographs taken before he grew his beard  It had a jutting brow
line, and so did the Tsar: the curving, protruding supraorbital bones
are consistent with photographs of Nicholas taken during his life  The
hipbones showed the characteristic wear and deformation produced by
many hours on horseback, and we know the Tsar was an ardent horseman
The only jarring note was struck by the extraordinary, rotten condition
of this skeleton's teeth, and the complete absence of dental work
There was not a single filling in any of the remaining teeth
all these were from to gray nubbins- The lower jaw showed clear inroads
of periodontal disease  The owner of these teeth was long overdue for
dentures  Why didn't he get them?  As Tsar, he could surely afford a
good dentist!
I believe Nicholas must have had a horror of dentists and, because he
was Tsar, no one could force him to visit one  Rank has its
privileges, and among them is the liberty -to let your teeth go to rack
and ruin if you desire  Was the Tsar a coward before the dentist's
drill?  Did he have a horror of physical pain?  His jaws seemed to say
so  Is it speculating too far, to glimpse in these rotten, neglected
teeth a vivid, concrete symbol of the Russian royal family in those
final years, falling to pieces, but nevertheless unwilling to take the
necessary, painful steps needed to repair the damage and save
themselves?  Perhaps, perhaps not
I picked up the skull and held it in my hands, staring at it intently
It was a gray thing with a crushed face  A dark void yawned in the
middle of its features, below the eye sockets and above the jaw
Blows of terrific force had shattered its features  I was haunted by
the line in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, a nightmarish view of
the future based partly on the already famous brutality of the Soviet
state: "if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on
a human face-forever    "  The Tsar's skull was grievously
mutilated, the remains perfectly consistent with his fate
He was among the first, and certainly the foremost, victims of
Bolshevik savagery
Yet he had endured  Even his bad teeth had outiasted the outlaw state
that had slain him, then tried to hide him away forever in the nameless
darkness of an unmarked pit  Now Nicholas II, onetime Tsar of All the
Russias, had risen back up into the light of day, accompanied by most
of his family and a handful of his servants
As I mused on these ironies, an eerie thing happened  We were passing
the skull around among ourselves, when we heard something dully
rattling inside the braincase  Training a flashlight on the base of
the skull, peering in through the aperture where the spinal cord would
have been anchored, we described a small, dried, shrunken object about
the size of a small pear, rolling to and fro  It was the desiccated
brain of Tsar Nicholas II
For I am quite convinced this was the Tsar's skull  None of the other
three male skeletons came so close to the profile of Nicholas II in
life as did this set of remains  No  2, Dr botkin, had a very
distinct, flat, sloping forehead and wore dentures, as we know botkin
did in LIFE  No  9 was far too tall and too old to be the Tsar  It
was almost certainly Trupp, the Sixty-one-year-old footman  No  8,
the most fragmentary of the male skeletons, had been heavily doused
with acid and it was initially thought that these remains had been
singled out for special disfigurement, perhaps as a sign of rank  But
the features of the skull in no way agree with the countenance of the
Tsar in LIFE, especially in the unpronounced brow line  These are the
remains of Kharitonov, the cook  They were more damaged by acid, not
because of any especial spite, but because they lay deepest in the pit,
at the, very bottom
Indeed, the more we studied the demography of the group, the more we
were Struck by the congruence of the skeletons with the stories of the
execution of the Tsar and his family  All the skeletons that are
available
propped each other up  Each contributed to the authenticity of the
other  In the end, the ensemble formed a powerful web of
circumstantial evidence, reinforced from within by skeletal remains of
extraordinary singularity  Consider these points:

There is one skeleton to fit everyone known to be in the party, with
the exception of the Tsarevich Alexei and Anastasia, who are missing
If You were to go out at random and try to assemble such a group, to
fit such historical descriptions, you would have to be remarkably lucky
or do incredible physical examinations to make sure everything fits  '
At the time of the shootings, the Tsar was fifty, the Tsarina Alexandra
forty-six  Olga was twenty-two years and nine months old; Tatiana had
just turned twenty-one; Marie's nineteenth birthday had just come five
weeks before; and Anastasia was seventeen years and one month old
Alexei was just two weeks short of his fourteenth  birthday  The maid
Demidova was forty  The footman, Trupp, was sixty-one and the cook,
Kharitonov, was forty-eight
when we compare these ages, and the other things we know of the royal
family and their entourage, with the evidence of the skeletons,
everything aligns nicely  Demidova's skeleton is of the right age and
sex
botkin's skeleton has the right forehead, the right age, the right sex,
the right dental information  The three young women's skeletons, as
well as that of the oldest woman, have features in common that are
often seen in families, suggesting they were related
The three young women all have the same type of dental work in their
mouths, suggesting they all were treated by the same dentist
The remaining older woman's skeleton shares these same features, sg she
is related to them  The oldest woman has the exceptional rich dental
work which is confirmed from numerous mentions in Alexandra's diaries
The Tsar's skeleton is the right age,
the right height, with the right facial features  The skeleton of the
footman, Trupp, shows the worn teeth and age and sex and height we
would expect
That of the cook, Kharitonov, also displays the right age and sex
EverAing about the burial suggests urgent haste and the need for
secrecy, which agrees very well with the historical circumstances
Remember, White Russian armies 'were closing in on Ekaterinburg in
those days  The faces are bludgeonedto render them unrecognizable,
just in case they are found  Sulfuric acid is flung over them, to
complete the disfigurement  The corpses are buried in an unmarked
grave, together with the ropes used to haul them and the jar of acid
used to disfigure them  We know from Ermakov that 32-caliber weapons
were used, and sure enough, 32-caliber bullets are later recovered
from the grave  The receipt for the sulfuric acid is a matter of
record  Everything fits
Or almost everything  None of the nine skeletons could be attributed
to the fourteen-yeolr-old Tsarevich Alexei, and none of them, despite
the Russians' initial hopes, could be identified with a girl seventeen
years and one month old: Anastasia
In his confidential after-action report, Yurovsky described burning two
bodies beside the pit  One was that of the Tsarevich  The other
belonged to a female, who he at first thought was the Tsarina'
Alexandra, but later decided must have been the maid, Demidova
This confusion has given one last straw to grasp at to the
resurrectionists who believe Anastasia escaped the hecatomb that
engulfed her family  How, these stubborn optimists ask, would it be
possible for Yurovsky to confuse the corpse of a seventeen-year-old
girl with that of two other women, one of them forty years old, the
other fifteen  Was "Anna Anderson," who died an'old woman in 1984,
telling the truth?  Was she the last of the Romanovs?
I very much doubt it  I believe I can explain why Yurovsky mixed up
the female corpses  My long experience with decayed human remains has
given me a weary familiarity with the quirks of dissolution
Remember, the Tsar and his party were killed in summertime, in
July 1918, in warm weather  Blood would have soaked the disheveled
hair of the victims, which would have then dried into a dark hard mass
The bodies had decomposed for three days in daytime temperatures
averaging roughly 70 degrees Fahrenheit  Bloating would be pronounced,
and bloating makes it very difficult to guess the original weight or
girth of a set of remains
Furthermore you must remember that all of the bodies, except perhaps
rtedly stripped of all clothing
Clothing would have been an easy means of telling the bodies apart, and
now that indicator was gone  All in all, the nude and bloated torsos
of the females would have taken on a remarkable, balloonish anonymity
Next, flies must be considered  Fries lay their eggs during the first
daylight hours in which they can reach a dead body  Those eggs begin
to hatch a couple of days later in a sudden burst of activity
There were plenty of flies in that area-I observed them myself, during
my visit  These bodies had many wounds- Their faces had been smashed
to bloody pulp  They were left in the open near the shaft of the Four
Brothers Mine all day long after the executions, then thrown into a
mine shaft and hand grenades were flung down on them, further mangling
the remains  Flies would have had ample OPPortunity to lay eggs on the
eyes, nostrils and other apertures, along with the open wounds  These
eggs and the resulting maggots, deposited in a thick, foamy froth over
the mutilated faces, would have further masked the bodies' identities
Then, when word got out that the bodies were at the Four Brothers Mine,
Yurovsky and his henchmen had to exhume the bodies and rebury them
somewhere else  In all, three days passed between the time of the
shootings and the filling of the pit
The bloating, the hard, blood-soaked hair of the women, the absence of
clothing and the encrustation of fly eggs and maggots on their faces,
the enveloping darkness-all these factors would have readered the
remains very hard to identify  It would be quite possible to mistake
one female for another
At any rate this is what I believe happened  Yurovsky burned two
bodies, as he reported  One belonged to the young Tsarevich Alexei;
the other was Anastasia  This explains why the skeletons of the  two
youngest children were not among those on the tables at the forensic
bureau
Is it even remotely possiblethat Anastasia and Alexei survived?
Is it conceivable that some kindhearted Bolshevik 'spirited them away?
Is it thinkable that, despite their wounds, wounds that would have been
doubly injurious to a hemophiliac like Alexei, the missing royal
children lived, recovered their health and escaped to the West?
Of course it is  I merely say it is highly unlikely  My experience
with murder, ancient and modern, makes it hard for me to believe in
these far-fetched mercies
In 1964, Grigori Nikuhn, YurovsWs assistant during the killings, was
persuaded to make a tape of his reminiscences of the event  By this
time most of the original assassins were dead  Yurovsky himself died a
painful death from an ulcer in 1938  The flamboyant En-nakov, who gave
his "deathbed" interview to Halliburton in 1935, outlived the young
journalist by years, dying only in 1952 after recounting his exploits
over and over again to young Soviet Pioneers gathered around campfires
Nikulin was a sober, cold-blooded young killer at the time of the
assassinations  Yurovsky had recruited him personally and was
extremely fond of him, even calling him his "son"  Nikuhn moreover was
a teetotaler  His account of the evening therefore carried far more
weight than the lurid account of the drunken, lying Ermakov
Persuaded with great difficulty to come to the radio studio in 1964,
Nikuhn nonetheless stubbornly refused to discuss details of the
murders
"There's no need to savor it  Let it remain with us  Let it depart
with us , he said tersely
Asked about the tale of the "Anastasia" who had somehow dodged the
bullets and escaped to the West, Nikulin replied briefly, in the flat,
simple diction of one who knew
"They all perished," he said
In 1993 there was a dramatic new development in the story of the royal
bones  DNA tests carried out in Great Britain have matched a blood
sample from the British royal family with the DNA recovered from the
Russian skeletons, with a 985 percent degree of certainty  Dr
Mary-Claire King at the University of California, Berkeley, has worked
on samples we brought back and has confirmed what the British had
reported
DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is the substance that contains the genetic
code that makes each human being unique  There are two types of DNA
present in each living cell, nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA  The
first type, -called nuclear or genomic DNA, is quickly lost during
heating or decomposition in human remains  It will linger longer in a
dried sample of blood, or semen on clothing; but by the time human
remains have begun to decompose, it is virtually impossible to isolate
nuclear DNA anymore  Bacteria swarm in the remains, flies move in and
pollute the body with their DNA, and what is left is a messy hodgepodge
that is useless for nuclear DNA sampling
Fortunately, the second @ of DNA, mitochondrial DNA, lies not in the
nucleus but outside, in the cell itself  This substance is present in
the female ovum and in the tall of the male sperm, but when the sperm
fertilizes the egg at the moment of conception, the tall of the sperm
breaks off  Thus the mitochondrial DNA of the male is lost, and only
that of the female is passed on to each of the offspring  And it is
passed on without variation, from one generation to the next  Every
single child has the mitochondrial DNA of its mother, who has the
mitochondrial DNA of her mother, and so on
Changes in mitochondrial DNA are extremely rare, and happen on the
order of once every three to four thousand years  That is the
wonderful thing about mitochondrial DNA  It stays the same in a family
for generation after generation and is passed on through the female
line  It can endure in our bones for hundreds of years, if they are
not cremated
In the case of the Romanovs, we can easily go back to Queen Victoria,
who has been described as the grandmother of Europe's royal families
Queen Victoria, like any mother, passed her mitochondrial DNA on to her
offspring  And one of her daughters passed that same mitochondrial DNA
on to her offspring, one of whom was Alexandra, the wife of Tsar
Nicholas II  And Alexandra passed her mitochondrial DNA on to all her
children  Similarly Alexandra's sister, Princess Victoria of Hesse,
passed it on to her children, one of whom was the mother of Prince
Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, and his sisters
Therefore the mitochondrial DNA found in the blood of Prince Philip
would be identical to that of Queen Victoria and the Tsarina Alexandra
It only remained to carry out the necessary tests
These were performed in July 1993 near London  Prince Philip submitted
a sample of his blood and its DNA was extracted  At the same time,
Pavel Ivanov, head of the DNA unit at the Russian Academy of Sciences,
brought a sample of the Romanov bones to Great Britain  There, using a
technique called PCR or polymerase chain reaefion, a small sample of
DNA was extracted from the bones and grown in a culture
There are only four nucleotides that make up all mitochondrial DNA:
cytosine, adenine, thymine and guanine, known as CATG for short  In
mitochondrial DNA there are 16,569 base pair's of nucleotides, arranged
in a ring  A computer printout of a DNA sequence looks like a
diabolically complex code, based on just four letters in neat columns,
repeated again and again in slightly varying order for page after page
Lucidly we do not have to scrutinize all 16,569 pairs
We can focus on certain "hyper-variable regions," made up of a total of
just 608 base pairs  Computers are of great help in matching up the
hyper-variable regions  When the results for the hyper-variable
regions in two DNA samples match up at these'crucial checkpoints, you
can be virtually certain they are the same
This is what happened when Prince Philip's blood DNA was matched up
with the Romanovs' bone DNA  Dr Peter Gin of the Forensic Science
Service of the Home Office said the probability that both samples
contained the same DNA was "almost 99 percent"  Taken in conjunction
with the compelling physical skeletal evidence, the results are clear
and unequivocal  Short of the Last judgment, when the dead shall
rise'up and be cloaked anew with flesh, and all our doubts are
scheduled to be resolved in the twinkling of an eye, we may say that
the mystery of the Romanovs is solved as nearly as it is likely to be
Nevertheless we recommended in our report that the site around the pit
be carefully excavated and searched for the remains of the two bodies
Yurovsky said he burned
I believe such a dig might well Turn up the calcined remains of
Anastasia and Alexei
"Anna Anderson" went to her grave in 1984, claiming she was Anastasia
Her body was cremated and this removed the last possibility of
establishing the truth or falsity of her royal pretensions
Cremation destroys utterly all organic components of bone  No known
technique can recover any DNA from cremated remains
There are supposed to be hair samples taken from Anna Anderson but
these are cut hair, not rooted hair  The shafts of human hair are
largely composed of dead material, devoid of significant amounts of
DNA  Only hair plucked by the roots from the scalp can be tested for
DNA with'any real hope of success  There are some tissue samples from
Anna Anderson's body,- in a hospital where she underwent surgery in
life  To date, legal difficulties have prevented testing these samples
for their DNA
A commission in Russia will hear our team's conclusions, and I believe
the British DNA work to be the final word in resolving this old
mystery  it is my understanding that the Romanov remains will be
interred in St Petersburg, which was once, briefly, known as
Leningrad But there is one last footnote to this long, remarkable
history
There is a very good possibility that the bones of the Tsar will be
buried without their proper breastbone or arms!  My examination of the
remains convinced me that the arms and the bayonet-stabbed breastbone
of Body No  9, which has been identified as belonging to Trupp, the
footman, are really those of Body No  4, the Tsar  Body 4 was flung
on top of Body 9 in the burial pit, and over the years the bones
commingled closely with one another  The Russians labored valiantly to
separate them, but I believe the arms and breastbone have been mixed
up  I mentioned this to the Russians, and they appeared to' accept my
conclusion  Some of the other skeletons showed signs of mismatching
and commingling as well  Unfortunately no one seems to have the
authority to take the skeletons apart again and transpose the arms and
breastbones to their proper owners
It therefore seems likely that, when the last Tsar is finally entombed
in St Petersburg, he will be served in death, as he was in life, by
the arms of his faithful footman

"These Rough Notes and Our Dead Bodies    "

"Empty vessel, ga We that wore you long shall last
-Another night, another day"
So my bones within me say
Therefore they shall do my will Today while I am master still, Andflesh
and soul, now both are strong, Shall hale the sullen slaves along,
Before this fire of sense deray, This smoke of thought blow clean away,
And leave with ancient night alone The stedfast and enduring bone

-A  E Housman, The Imnwital Part As I write these lines, it is a
windy, bright spring day in early March in Gainesville  The live oaks
have cast their leaves, and the dogwoods and azaleas are beginning to
bloom  Eager young students are bicycling across campus, browsing in
Goering's bookstore, studying their textbooks on sunlit lawns near
dormitories  
But I am not thinking of them  I am thinking of ghosts
t cast,

 "These Rough Notes and Our Dead Bodies

I am recalling five young students, four from the University of
Florida, one from nearby Santa Fe Community College, who were tortured,
mutilated and murdered with demonic cruelty in August 1990  In all,
the five victims suffered sixty-one stab wounds, cuts or other
disfigurements  One was beheaded, and her head was placed at eye level
on a bookshelf near the door of her apartment  Four of the victims
were female: Sonja Larson, eighteen, of Deerfield Beach; Christi
Powell, seventeen, of Jacksonville; Christa Hoyt, eighteen, of
Gainesville; and Tracy Paules, twenty-three, of Miami
One was male: Manny Taboada, twenty-three, of Miami  The horror these
murders aroused at the time was so keen that thousands of students
literally fled Gainesville, in fear of their lives
Today, in early March, immured in a lampht courtroom within the Alachua
County Courthouse, a jury has finished staring at pictures of these
five young people, taken after their bodies were discovered  Black
tape was placed over parts of the pictures considered so grisly they
would have been prejudicial to the jury's reaching an impartial
verdict
I can well understand these selective blackouts  In my long career I
have seldom seen crime-scene photographs possessed of such sheer
depravity
In the same room with the jury, as they pondered these ghastly
photographs, was the, author of these terrors: the self-confessed
murderer himself, Danny Harold Rolling, a drifter from Shreveport,
Louisiana  Rolling claimed he was driven to kill because of abuse
suffered as a child-it is a common excuse nowadays  He was arrested
almost immediately on another charge after the quintuple murders (which
were all committed within forty-eight hours), and only became a suspect
in this case two months later, on November 2, 1990  As the prosecutor
waved the horrible photographs before the jury, Rolling turned pale and
appeared ill  "I've got to get out of here," he whispered at one
point
The jury was tasked with deciding his punishment: life in prison or
death in the electric chair  It deliberated through one afternoon,
into the evening, and reconvened the next morning, before reaching a
verdict
The jury recommended death for Danny Rolling
I remember how, in the years following his arrest, Rolling toyed with
the investigators from prison, admitting nothing  He thought he had
been too clever for the police  He thought he had removed all traces
of his guilt from the crime scenes  He gathered up all but one piece
of the duct tape he used to bind his victims  He washed two of their
bodies with detergent after they were dead  He posed the bodies of the
slaughtered young women in various lewd positions
Unfortunately for him, he left traces of his semen' at the scene, and
this identified him by means of DNA "fingerprinting"
Because of my background with weapons and wounds to bone, I was asked
to be present at the autopsies, which were conducted by Dr William
Hamilton, the District 8 medical examiner  Hamilton is a quiet man of
supreme competence  Unlike some of his brethren, he rigorously shuns
the media limelight and works in silence  We have known each other for
years, but from the first Hamilton struck me as remarkable and rare: a
man who prefers to seek out the truth and to serve the people of his
state with deeds of value, rather than chase the will-o'-the-wisp of
fame  It is largely because of Hamilton's meticulous work that a
close-meshed net of scientific evidence was drawn about Rolling  My
own role in this case was minor  But I like to think that, wherever
Rolling goes, I gave him one small nudge toward punishment and
perdition
My work centered around the murder weapon, and I was assisted by one of
my best students, Dana Austin-Smith  Bones can reveal more about a
murder weapon than skin and soft tissue, because they are not as
elastic  Skin can stretch, distort, relax and finally deliquesce
during decomposition  Bones, though more elastic than you might suppose,
nevertheless can take and hold an impression from a murder weapon far
longer, and far more accurately  By now I need not tell you that the
pattern of the human skeleton is as familiar to me as the rooms of my
house
A large knife had been used in the murders  Its hilt left an imprint
on one victim's back, and the point eidted her chest on the opposite
side, a distance of eight inches, during which the knife was fully
sheathed, its entire length buried in the unfortunate girl's body
But allowing for compression of the rib cage from the force and fury of
the blow, the blade length might have been somewhat shorter: say seven
to eight inches, to be safe
After preparing specimens of the damaged bones, I began to examine the
knife marks under a low-power stereo-microscope  I found sharp cuts
from the blade, marks both sharp and dull from the back of the blade, a
point mark from the knife sunk in the body of a vertebra, and an array
of bone wounds that gave me the width of the blade itself, from its
cutting edge to its back
I summarized the characteristics  Length: 7-8 inches  Width: 125-15
inches  A sharp, smooth, nonserrated cuttiniz edle  A false edge
resulting from the back of the blade being sharpened behind the tip  A
certain shape of hilt where the blade joined the handle  A blade whose
cross-section resembled an elongated pentagon  All in all, I
concluded, this was a sturdy knife, like a military weapon  It was not
a thin blade like a kitchen knife  This formidable weapon had cut
through thick bone without any evidence of "blade chattering," a
technical term describing the distinctive cutting pattern, which a thin
blade makes when it jumps slightly from side to side during use
On the afternoon of September 7, 1990, I was at the state attorney's
office in Orlando on@another case  I received a telephone call, asking
me to join Dr Hamilton and the leaders of the Gainesville Homicide
Task Force for a meeting  It was a fast, hundred-mile drive for me,
but I arrived around 4 Pm We were asked about the murder weapon
Could it have been an Air Force survival knife?  I said no  That knife
has a sawhke, upping design on the back of the blade, which is only
five inches long-far too short to match the weapon used in these
murders  Then someone asked if it might be a Marine Corps utility
knife, known as a Kay-Bar  I replied that it very well might
After the meeting I pondered the question further  I knew the general
shape of the Kay-Bar but wanted to be absolutely sure  That weekend I
visited a knife shop in a nearby mall, where Kay-Bars were sold  I
carefully examined one, measuring it with the one-meter tape measure I
always carry with me  It fit exactly the dimensions of the wounds!
The clerk regarded me with some curiosity  Why, he asked finally, was
I making so many measurements?  I made a vague reply, but as Margaret
and I were walking back to the car, I told her what I thought  The
weapon used in these ghastly murders had almost certainly been a
Kay-Bar
As I have said earlier, Rolling was in custody on an unrelated charge
at this point  He had not yet been focused on as a suspect in the
Gainesville murders  Over three years would pass before I learned that
Rolling had indeed purchased a Kay-Bar at an ArmyNavy store in
Tallahassee on July 17, 1990, some weeks before the killings
The police'scanned many likely areas with metal detectors, but the
actual murder weapon has not surfaced to this day  On the Thursday
before Rolling was scheduled to go to trial, there was a crucial
evidentiary hearing, one that changed the complexion of the case
completely
State Attorney Rod Smith won the court's approval to introduce into
evidence a "replica weapon," a duplicate of the lost Kay-Bar we
believed had been used to commit the crimes  Not only that: the actual
skeletal renwim of the vicuna, taken from their bodies during the
autopsies, and bearing the atrocious nicks, slashes, scorings and
gougings, which the knife had caused, and which had enabled me to
measure its deadly dimensions with such exactitude, were going to be
allowed into evidence as well  Thus, not only the 90 blade, but the
bones themselves would be placed before the jury's gaze
"On the Thursday prior to the beginning of the trial," a court
memorandum I have before me reads, "in closed discussions before, the
judge, part of the discussion was about the replica knife and the
accurate work which Dr  Maples had done with the knife wounds
Also discussed were the skeletal remnants The judge ruled that all
these things would be allowed into evidence  The memorandum continues:
"It was obvious that Rolling didn't want to face the photographs, let
alone the remnants     That was the evening the defense came to Mr
Smith and offered the first of a series of plea deals"
The murderer's resolve was crumbling in the face of these fearful
resurrections  The knife he imagined was hidden forever was coming
back to haunt him in court  The bones of his victims were ready to
return from beyond death, to rise up and smite him  The trial would
begin in ninety-six hours
Rolling quailed  On February 15, 1994, as jury selection began in his
trial, the accused man suddenly pleaded guilty to five counts of murder
and three counts of rape
"I've been running all my life," he declared  "And there are some
things you can't run from anymore"
There began the punishment phase of the case, during which the jury had
to decide whether Rolling deserved the death penalty or life in prison
Prosecutor Smith showed the jurors the replica knife, the twin of the
Kay-Bar I had identified as the murder weapon
The bones were mercifully withheld from the jurors' sight  The dark
blade danced back and forth before their eyes  Together with the hood
Rolling wore, and the photographs of his victims, the knife must have
made an overwhelming impression on the panel  Their verdict: Death
Rolling received five death sentences from judge Stan Monis
"Five years!, You're going to go down in five years!  You understand
that?  In less than five years!"  screamed Mario Taboada, the brother
of the slain Manuel Taboada  He was predicting that Rolling would
exhaust all his appeals and be executed by 1999  The judge (Mario
Taboada ejected from the courtroom  Gradually the din subsided  One
of the darkest chapters in Gainesville's history was closed
All in all, the Rolling case was a significant victory for the science
of forensic anthropology in Florida, one that saved the taxpayer the
immense cost of a full-blown trial, and the victims' relatives the
terrible pain of hearing in a public courtroom exactly how these
innocent young people had died  It remains one of the most
extraordinary cases in my experience, one that amply demonstrated the
sheer power possessed by human bones: the power to bear witness to the
truth beyond death; the power to avenge the innocent; the power to
terrify the guilty
Today, at the side of 34th Street in Gainesville, near the crest of a
hill, there is a brilliantly painted section of wall dedicated to
student graffiti and free speech  Everyone in Gainesville knows it
simply as "The Wall"  It runs beneath a fence draped with kudzu vine
at the boundary of the campus golf course, and its shape rather reminds
you of a railroad cutting, revealing all sorts of multicolored
minerals, some of them precious, some of them fool's gold
Anyone is welcome to paint a message on this wall, which is by now a
local landmark and a University of Florida tradition  Most of the
messages are cheery, or silly, or affectionate, or whimsical  But amid
the valentines, the happy birthday wishes and the pleas to save the
rain forest is a single dark panel in the wall at the very top of the
hill  It contains the names of the five murder victims, neatly
lettered against a black background, accompanied by the single word:
REMEMBER  If this panel fades or is accidentally defaced, someone
always renews it and repaints the names  I pass it twice a day, and I
do indeed remember
I have purposely kept this account of the Gainesville murders for last,
not because they struck so close to home Rolling could have killed
anywhere, in any town-but because I believe there is a moral to this
melancholy tale  It is simply that the lamp of science, properly
grasped and directed, can shine its rays into the very heart of
darkness  It can seek out and snare the-most artful evildoer in a
bright, unequivocal beam of truth  It cannot raise the dead, but it
can make them speak, accuse and identify the agent of death  With the
capture and punishment of the criminal responsible, the families and
relatives of those slain can win a small measure of peace amid their
infinite sorrow  With each solved case, with every confession, we
extend our knowledge of the criminal mind and its methods, and we
render the threat of capture and punishment all the more real and
credible
Yet as I look back on my life, and ahead to the future, I am given
pause by the vast amount of work that still needs to be done  Mine is
a small field, and it is always going to be a small field; but there is
no excuse for its being as small as it is today  Cases now throng in
daily to the C A Pound Human Identification Laboratory, in such
jostling multitudes that I cannot address them all and must focus only
on the most serious ones  When the telephone rings, my heartbeat
quickens  I know that it is most likely the police, and I know what
they wig say, for I have heard it hundreds of times now: "Doc, we've
got a problem    "
And the problem is always a body, or what is left of one  They tell me
they've set up security around the remains  They tell me police
officers are guarding and preserving the scene  They ask: can I come
immediately?  Because I no longer have an undergraduate class load, I
am able to break free more often than not  If I am rescued by a murder
from a dull and dismal faculty meeting, so much the better!  In the
case of the three shotgunned drug dealers found in a pit near @ Belle, I
enlisted the aid of an archaeologist colleague and we both managed to
be in Fort Myers, 230 miles away, by 8:00 Am the next morning we
were in the death pit, hard at work
With crime moving to the forefront of the American domestic political
agenda, it would appear likely that investigators such as myself can
look forward to busy years and full employment  But against this must
be weighed the fact that few universities are willing to underwrite
programs like mine, which combine pure academic research with
applications in the "real world," and the fact that few state law
enforcement agencies have the money or inclination to avail themselves
of the services of a trained forensic anthropologist
So we fall between two stools  We are regarded by our fellow academics
almost as common laborers with dirty hands, who traffic in mundane,
workaday police matters, instead of devoting ourselves to pure
research  On the other hand the police tend to regard us as
woolgatherers and cloud-dwellers from the ivory tower, with no
experience of the dark side of life  When I am visiting a new law
enforcement agency for the first time, I often assume the persona of
the innocent, fuddy-duddy professor who has to have everything pointed
out to him  This role-playing won't win me any Oscars, but it humors
the police, does no harm and gets results far more quickly than would
an attitude of haughty, know-it-all, intellectual arrogance
Yet sometimes I am prey to doubts  Who will replace me, and others like
me?  Who will hire the students I train?  I cannot say  The need is
there  It cries out to heaven  As I compose these lines, there are
forty-eight charred corpses left over from the fiery explosion at the
Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, awaiting identification  My
colleague, Clyde Snow, is in Chiapas, Mexico, looking at the bodies of
slain Zapatista revolutionaries, to see if they were murdered by the
Mexican army   after they surrendered  Remains of MIAs from the
Korean War are I being returned to America, and their name's are a
nddle as yet unsolved  The mass graves in Bosnia shout to the skies
for discoveryand vengeance  Yet programs in forensic anthropology
languish, and well-trained young scholars go begging for work
In my lifetime I have seen programs rise and fall like shooting stars
Once upon a time, at the University of Kansas, three of the gods of
forensic anthropology-Tom McKern, Ellis Kerley and Bill Bass-were all on
the faculty at the same times  They attracted and taught scores of
students, many of whom are among the leading people in our field today
Then, almost OVERNIGHT, they were scattered to the four winds  Bass
left one year, McKern and Kerley the next  The university hired a human
geneticist, rather than anyone in bone  The same melancholy story is
about to be repeated at the University of Arizona, where Walt Birkby
has built up a fantastic program  Birkbys students are probably the
best-trained of any in the United States  But Walt is retiring in a
couple of years, and the university has already announced he will not
be replaced  Therefore he has closed admission to his program  He
takes no new students
Bill Bass has just retired from Tennessee  The university is going to
replace him with an assistant professor, but without Bill's active
guidance that program will undoubtedly change  I will retire myself in
a few years and, even though University of Florida President John
@mbardi has worked miracles in other areas, I seriously doubt whether
the C A Pound Human identification Laboratory will sun vive my
departure
If these memoirs have demonstrated anything, I would hope that it is
that forensic anthropology is a discipline useful to society
Had I the power to command it, I should decree that each state have at
least one forensic anthropologist working in its crime laboratory
Climate and crime rates have to be taken into consideration of course
A forensic anthropologist would probably starve to death in a cold
state like Maine or Minnesota-bodies last forever in those arctic
regions!  He might find little to do in a state like New Hampshire,
where there are only a couple of dozen murders in a year  But here in
the sunny, homicidal South there are plenty of bodies to go around, and
plenty of bugs to feast on them  Decomposition is swift and sure, and
nameless skeletons accumulate in thousands, each beseeching us silently
for identification
Larger states, such as Texas, California, New York, Florida and the
like, could easily employ several scientists like me, and none would be
idle I assure you  I know from long experience that I can't begin to
look'at all the cases demanding my attention in the state of Florida
A handful of states, those having a single medical examiner with
statewide responsibility, have appointed forensic anthropologists to
that office, but they are few and far between  As our elected
officials bay like bloodhounds over the crime issue, as our state
budgets allocate large sums for prisons, police training and equipment,
parole officers, boot camps for teenagers and heaven knows what else,
they overlook utterly the need to fund research by universities to
develop new scientific techniques necessary to apprehend criminals
The Forensic Sciences Foundation has started a small grant program to
provide funds, largely supported by donations from members of the
American Academy of Forensic Scientists  But hone of us is a Croesus
or a Rockefeller  Our little fund is growing painfully slowly  It can
only provide a few modest grants each year
Seldom does a week go by without my receiving a visit or a telephone
call from some young person eager to go into forensic anthropology
Will I accept him or her as a student?  Alas, I don't have the money to
support large numbers of students, nor the space in which to teach and
train them, nor the time to give them all the attention they deserve
Even if I were to take them in, where would they go when they left me,
having won their doctorates?  Where would they get jobs?  No doubt a
handful of them would, as I did, work their way into a university
system and slowly establish a practice  Most wouldn't  That is the
bitter truth
The murder and suicide rate in the state of Florida could easily
furnish cases for six full-time forensic anthropologists  In my
daydreams I locate them on a mind-map of the state with stickpins:
there would be one in the Panhandle, another in Gainesville, another in
Orlando, one in southwelst Florida and one, perhaps two, in Miami
Miami, as we all know, is a very special place: the deadliest city in
the most crime-ridden state in the Union  Forensic anthropologists
would find plenty to do there  They would be useful to state medical
examiners in skeletonized cases, cases involving burn victims,
decomposed bodies and the like  We could even help identify fresh
bodies belonging to the nameless and the homeless, who are flocking to
Florida-and to Florida's morgues-in ever increasing numbers nowadays
Some medical examiners' offices perform over three thousand autopsies
each year
I can't be everywhere  I have been under as many as four separate
subpoenas, to testify in four separate cities, all on the same day
One prosecutor, joshingly I hope, actually threatened to throw me in jail
if I did not testify for him, rather than in another case scheduled for
that day!  Ours is a very large state  If a decomposed body is found
in the Florida Keys, there is no way I can be on the scene immediately
Sometimes the remains are shipped to me, if I cannot go to them
Federal Express won't transport human remains, including cremains, but
the U S Post Office has
no such qualms, as long as the remains are identified as "evidence" or
"specimens"  But if we had a forensic anthropologist stationed in
Miami, these cases could be attended to on the spot
Such are the thoughts that sometimes visit me at night  But
"sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," as the Bible says
Whenever I am beset by doubts over the future of my discipline, or the
career opportunities for my students, or the fate of my laboratory
after I am gone, I look at the filing cabinets filled with case
reports
Here at least is solid, measurable progress  Here I can claim to have
made a difference
In days when people knew more Latin than they do now, someone composed
a deeply moving inscription that can still be read over the lintel of
the New York City medical examiner's office:

Taceant Colloquia  Effugiat Risus  luc Locus Est Ubi Mors Gaudet
Succurrere Vitae
itue talk be silenced  Let laughter be banished  Here is the place
where Death delights to succour Life]

I have no room over my laboratory door lintel for an engraved
inscription, but if I did I would choose the last words of the
explorer, Robert Falcon Scott, who perished in the frozen wastes of
Antarctica in 1912, of hunger and exposure, in a place that was only a
few miles from food and safety  The last entry in his diary read:

Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood,
endurance and courage of my companions, that would have stirred the
heart of every Englishmen  These rough notes and our dead bodies must
tell the tale
That's how I feel about the skeletons here in my laboratory
They have tales to tell us, even though they are dead  It is up to me,
the forensic anthropologist, to catch their mute cries and whispers,
and to interpret them for the living, as long as I am able

Acknowledgments

This book could not have been written, and the life it describes could
not have been lived, were it not for my wife, Margaret Kelley
Margaret and I are old comrades now  We met in Miss Berry's Spanish
class in my sophomore year at North Dallas High School  At the end of
the year Miss Berry struck a deal with me: she'd give me a C if I would
promise never to take Spanish again  I readily agreed  I never
mastered the language of Cervantes and Calderon, but I won Margaret
We married in 1958 and through all these'years she has been the spark
that has galvanized me to greater effort  It was she who persuaded me
to accept a job offer to work with baboons in Africa, and take her with
me, even though she was five months pregnant  Both of our children,
lisa and Cynthia, were born in Africa  She has always been the more
energetic and adventuresome of us two, and her courage and patience
with the outlandish side of my work has always amazed me  There is
certainly no one more skilled and experienced than she is, when it
comes to removing bloodstains from laundry!  Nor are there many wives
who could sit unflinchingly through a slide presentation -of
time-lapsed photography depicting the action of maggots on the human
face, as Margaret once did at a convention of the American Academy of
Forensic Scientists  Her clarity of intellect and strong heart have
upborne me all my adult life  Without her I might have been a mere,
dull measurer of bones
With her, I have never become unmoored from the lively touch of
humanity

 Acknowledgments

My professional indebtedness to my old teacher, Tom McKern, and to my
colleagues, old and young, such as Clyde Snow, Michael Baden, Lowell
one, Doug Ubelaker, as well as to William Hamilton, the District 8
chief medical examiner, has already been hinted at in these pages, but
I would like to re-echo it here  Without the support of the Florida
medical examiners, especially Wallace Graves and Joe Davis, my story
would have been sparse indeed  Special mention must be made of Curtis
Mertz, of Ashtabula, Ohio, who helped me solve the puzzling
Meek-Jennings case described in Chapter 11  Mertz assembled all the
dental information, the postmortem remains, and the antemortem
radiographs in this labyrinthine affair  We worked very much as a
team, and the final, conclusive dental identifications are owed to his
keen eye
I owe special debts to Bob Benfer, who got me started on historical
cases; to Bill Goza, expeditor and amazing resource; and to the
Wentworth Foundation  The administration of the University of Florida
is gratefully acknowledged
C Addison Pound, jr benefactor of the labratory@ bearing his name and
that of his parents, has given me the freedom to develop my interests
His continued support of the goals of this laboratory is a shining
example of how a private citizen can have an impact on crime and
assisting its victims
Margaret's help was invaluable to me in reading the manuscript and
making many useful suggestions  She took several of the photographs
that appear in this book, and helped me assemble the rest  I -would
like to acknowledge the assistance of Yale's Beinecke Library for a
photograph of Tsar Nichohis's daughters and for access to other
photographic archives  I am grateful for the help, and hospitality of
Dr Alexander Avdonin, who enabled us to view and analyze the
skeletons of the Tsar and his family  An earlier, shorter version of
the account of the Ekaterinburg skeletons appeared in the Miand
Herald's Trop'w magazine, and permission to reuse this material is
herewith gratefully acknowledged  Our literary agent, Esther Newberg,
surpassed Rumpelstiltskin in spinning gold from raw flax  Our editors
at Doubleday, Bill Thomas and Rob Robertson, were enthusiastic,
Argus-eyed and patient, at all the right times

William R Maples, PhD Michael C Browning

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Dr William R Maples is distinguished service professor and
curator-in-charge of the C A Pound Human Identification Laboratory at
the Florida Museum of Natural History  He is a former president of the
American Board of Forensic Anthropology and a fellow of the American
Academy of Forensic Sciences  He lives in Gainesville, Florida
Michael Browning is Southeast regional correspondent for the Miami
Herald and lives in Tallahassee, Florida