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by Shiya Ribowsky


  Bodies can also mummify if they are freeze-dried. Recently the surprisingly well-preserved body of a World War II aviator was discovered in a northern glacier where the icy environment had mummified it. So perfectly can mummification preserve a body that in R. Dale Guthrie’s 1990 book Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe, the professor emeritus at the University of Alaska describes several colleagues’ and his experience dining on a stew made from the meat of “Blue Babe,” a 36,000-year-old bison carcass that had been found frozen in the tundra. Guthrie wrote of the experience, “The meat was well aged but still a little tough,” while another of the diners described the meal as “agreeable.”

  When a once-frozen body—whether a human corpse or a frozen piece of meat from an ordinary kitchen refrigerator—thaws, it decomposes much faster then a body that was never frozen. This happens because ice crystals form inside the cells during freezing and the crystals disrupt the integrity of cell walls, making it easier for putrefaction to occur.

  Mostly though, when people think of mummies, it’s not the icy kind that they picture. Rather they think of the Mediterranean variety that inhabit Hollywood films—linen-wrapped monsters who rush about trying to eat living people. Let me assure you that nothing is less likely to attack a human being than a dead body, particularly one that’s been dead and buried in a pyramid for three thousand years. As for that, the ancient Egyptians’ secret for making their dead into mummies was not wrapping the bodies in linen, or pulling the brain out of the nose with a long metal hook. Nor was it stuffing the abdominal cavity with flowers and garlic, though the evisceration was helpful to mummification because it prevented putrefaction. The secret lay in Egypt’s geography, which then as now abutted an enormous desert featuring almost zero humidity and temperatures that can climb above 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Anthropologists speculate that early Egyptians, traveling through the desert, came across the bodies of animals that had died and had naturally mummified in the extreme environment. Obsessed with the afterlife, these travelers would have been fascinated by the relatively lifelike appearance of a dead animal that had been preserved by mummification. It is easy to imagine those early embalmers—for that is essentially what they were—experimenting with this preservation technique and incorporating it into their religious practice.

  Whichever path you travel on, be it putrefaction or mummification, the ultimate destination for all of us is the same: ashes to ashes, dust to dust; like it or not, we all rot.

  FIVE

  ON COUNTLESS TELEVISION crime shows and in just as many crime novels, the pop-up ME magically appears at every crime scene, does a cursory examination, and immediately tells the hero/detective, “This guy died at 11:27 yesterday morning.”

  Sorry, wrong number—way too precise!

  One of the most basic tasks for an MLI at a death scene is pinning down the approximate time of death. The first step in doing so is to establish the “postmortem interval” (PMI). This is the range of time between when the person was last absolutely known to be alive and when the person was found dead. Thus the PMI is not a fancy way of saying “how long has this person been dead?” but a device that we use to identify a clear window of time during which the decedent must have changed from being alive to being dead. Despite what television crime dramas would have you believe about “time of death,” it is often impossible to discern the exact moment during the PMI when someone expired. And because a mistake can have such grave consequences, I am always careful when giving a time of death to let families or detectives know that what I am providing them with is “approximate.” Too many cops, as well as too many families of victims, have seen too many TV crime shows.

  Establishing the PMI and an approximate time of death is absolutely critical if the death is suspected of being anything other than from natural causes. In a homicide, if we can determine that interval with good accuracy, the police can then question suspects as to their whereabouts at the presumed time of death. If a suspect can’t provide a good alibi, then there is strong circumstantial evidence that he or she is connected to the crime.

  Here are the facts about what it is possible for us to do in regard to estimating the time of death within the PMI. In the first twenty-four hours after a body is dead, we are pretty good at pinpointing the time, and can do it generally within a four-hour block. If the body has been dead less than twelve hours, we can do even better, coming up with as little as a two-hour block in which the death occurred. However, once the body has been dead longer than twenty-four hours, the task becomes more difficult. If the body has lain undetected from between twenty-four and forty-eight hours, we’ll be able to locate the time of death within a six- to eight-hour block. If it has been dead for forty-eight to seventy-two hours, which is three days, we can usually offer the detectives a twelve-hour block as the approximate time of death. But beyond seventy-two hours? Frankly, if the body has lain undetected for more than three days, we’ll be guessing in twenty-four-hour blocks when we approximate the time of death.

  Attempting to fix a position in time is not really all that different from attempting to fix a physical location in space. The more points of reference you can gather about the location you are attempting to verify, the greater your accuracy will be. That’s why cross streets are so helpful when getting driving directions, and why navigators on ships of old used a sextant to “shoot” the position of three stars, which allowed them to more exactly locate their longitude and latitude. Similarly, locating an unknown particular point in time, such as when a person died, requires using as many indicators as possible to narrow the interval and produce the safest guess possible.

  We start by using three early postmortem changes, one of which, rigor mortis, I’ve already described. The other two are algor mortis (temperature of death) and livor mortis (color of death). Each of these three changes develops in a dead body along a well-documented timeline that we can utilize in determining the time of death in some cases.

  Rigor mortis’s timeline is one of the first things taught to MLIs. As I described earlier, it takes about twelve hours after death for a body to reach full rigor; then full rigor persists from twelve to twenty-four hours after which point the body enters the third period as rigor gradually relaxes over the next twelve hours. Part of becoming an experienced MLI is learning how to recognize which phase of rigor a body might be in. We learn how to determine if the decedent is going into or coming out of rigor. One variable you always have to take into account at a scene, in this regard, is the ambient environment. Rigor is biochemical, and like all such processes, it is subject to temperature fluctuations. Very cold temperatures will slow down the onset of rigor, while exposure to heat or even great physical exertion before death will accelerate its arrival. At first, it’s not so easy to figure out where exactly in the timeline a body might be, but the ability to make a better-educated guess can be learned; one way to raise the level of your guess is to combine rigor clues with clues from algor and livor.

  Algor mortis, or the “temperature of death,” is also a good measure of time passing. The first step in obtaining this information is to ascertain the core temperature, or the body’s inner temperature. Another urban legend has it that the ME punches a hole in the body with a meat-locker thermometer, piercing the liver in order to take that temperature—and in the process, leaving a big hole for the mortician to repair. This is one legend that has a basis in fact. While there used to be a practice of going for the liver, this is no longer considered necessary. Today we use a good, old-fashioned, albeit a rather long rectal thermometer to obtain the core temperature, which works just as well—even though the use of such a thermometer usually raises some eyebrows among the rookie cops.

  After a while, I had the routine down pat and rather enjoyed the cop’s predictable discomfort. I would do it slowly and right in front of the rookie so that he or she could follow my every move. I’d take out a condom and roll it down over a rectal thermometer before inserting that thermometer into the decedent’s a
nus. The explanation for employing the condom, of course, is that we do plan to reuse such thermometers, and the condom keeps them clean. We do dispose of the used condoms after a single use.

  Once obtained, the core temperature also helps us to estimate the time of death within the PMI. After the first few hours following death, the dead body loses a degree to a degree-and-a-half per hour, until it reaches equilibrium with its surroundings. So if the ambient temperature (the temperature in the room where the body is lying) is 70 degrees and the core body temperature has dropped from 98.6 degrees to 70 degrees, we are able to figure that the person has been dead at least 28 hours.

  Here again, environmental factors play a role, and you must always be on guard not to glibly state an approximate time of death without taking those factors into consideration. A body will lose its warmth much quicker in very cold places—a homicide victim stuffed into a freezer—than a body lying on a hot roof baking under a summer sun. I was once called to a scene of a young woman who was sunbathing at “Tar Beach,” which is what New Yorkers call their roofs during the summer. Sunbathing alone, she had gotten drunk on margaritas while lying on a canvas lounger. She was found dead late in the afternoon by a neighbor, and when I arrived and took her temperature, it was 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Here temperature helped us understand the cause of death but was not much use in establishing the approximate time of death.

  A third clue to the time of death derives from the livor mortis, or the lividity of the body. Lividity means the “color” of death, and the color in question derives from pooling blood. During life, most of a person’s blood supply inhabits the capillary portion of the circulatory system. Capillaries are the network of tiny vessels that connect your arteries to your veins. After death, with the heart no longer pumping, the blood, subject to gravity, begins to pool in the capillaries instead of flowing through them. Capillaries are very thin walled—only one cell thick. So, very quickly, the pooling blood becomes heavier than the capillary walls can bear, and the walls rupture, spilling blood into the surrounding tissues.

  As with rigor and algor mortis, lividity also progresses in predictable fashion. It is always found along the bottom or “dependent” part of the body (whichever side is touching the ground or nearest to the ground), because that is where gravity will pull the blood. Early on, in a light-skinned person, lividity appears pink and lacy, as the first wisps of blood escape into the tissues and begin to stain the skin. As time passes, the pooling blood will turn the skin darker and darker, from pink to red, to purple, and finally to black.

  Another way of determining early lividity from more advanced staining is to try the “blanch” test. Early lividity is “blanchable,” while very developed lividity will be “fixed,” meaning that it has permanently stained the tissues.

  If a living person pinches his or her own fingertip firmly for five seconds, then lets it go quickly, the color will change. During the pinching, it will blanch, or whiten, because the pressure pushes the blood out and away from the site of the pinch, leaving that part white. But when the pinch is released, the blood returns and colors the finger once again. On a living person, the blood returns because the heart pumps it back. With a dead body, if we press on an early-livid area, it blanches for a moment but then recolors as gravity pulls the blood back. If we pinch or press a site on the body where blood has pooled, and that site no longer blanches, we know the lividity is fixed, more developed. Lividity usually becomes fixed sixteen hours or so after death.

  Further clues to the time of death come from such signs as the degree of clouding in the cornea, from the skin over the abdomen turning a certain greenish color, and from what we call the “drying artifact,” the drying of fingers, toes, lips, tongue, and sclera.

  These clues are just a few that the body can yield. Death scenes offer many more tidbits that can help an MLI pin down just when the body he or she is examining ceased to function. Mail and newspaper delivery, for example, are important items to check. If a person was in the habit of picking up his mail every day, knowing which day he stopped is helpful. How many days of newspapers are piled up outside the front door? That can be a clue as to when the person stopped going out.

  But the mother of all important questions to ask before an MLI does or says anything at a scene regarding time of death is, “Does anyone know the last time this person was seen alive?” Many times, asking that one simple question spared me embarrassment. Which means, of course, that until I learned to ask it—in my first year or so of work—I called more than one detective back to readjust my time-of-death estimate.

  It’s not only rookie cops who can get freaked out by a corpse. While I understood from my training that rigor mortis could not make a dead body suddenly sit up, I have to admit I was entirely unprepared for the sounds that a dead body produces.

  The first time I heard a body groan, the hair stood up on my arms and the back of my neck, and I froze, until I realized what the source must be: a build-up of gas bubbles produced in the course of decomposition. As the bubbles leak out of the lungs, stomach, and rectum, they make dead bodies groan, burp, and fart—sounds that are sometimes also generated when the body is moved.

  I quickly became accustomed to listening to dead people sounding off. But there was another thing I regularly ran into at the scene that I never got used to. It gave me shivers up and down my spine up until my final day at OCME. Every MLI has their “thing,” the uncontrollable fear they dread coming across at death scenes. For some investigators, it’s rats; for others, maggots. Now I never really had a problem with maggots (okay, maybe a little on my first day), and rats are kinda cute, like squirrels without the bushy tails. For me it was something else. And of course the most awful sight that I ever encountered at a scene involved my nemesis.

  The scene: Chinatown. Top floor of a five-story walk-up. In the kitchen, lying on the floor, the mummified body of an elderly, ninety-pound Chinese woman who is long dead. Enter the boyish-looking MLI. I turn her over and it happens—hundreds of cockroaches come pouring out of her mouth, like something out of Freak Show. Today, if I close my eyes, I can still conjure up the details of the sight. I was up on that kitchen table so fast that I broke the Olympic record for the Jewish high jump.

  But as much as I hated roaches, I learned that they and many other insects and their activity are helpful to an MLI in determining the PMI. Because some flies can detect a rotting carcass from a mile away, they maneuver to the putrefying flesh with one goal in mind: laying their eggs. Once flies have laid their eggs in the flesh and those eggs become larva, they are known as maggots. Maggots are anatomically strange creatures: Their nose is in their rear end, alongside their butt. Perhaps this is because they spend most of the day facedown in rotting flesh. From the larval stage, they then reach the pupal stage, the cocoon, which hatches the mature fly. The length of time that it takes for each stage to develop is known and helps us calculate how long a body has been lying dead. Another clue is in the number of stages that we can count on the body. If, for example, it displays pupae as well as maggots, then we know that the body has lain there for more than one full insect-growth cycle.

  Despite the emphasis placed on the ME determining the time of death on television shows and in novels, in reality PMI/time of death is just one of many conclusions along with cause and manner of death and verifying the identity of the deceased that we need to make in a scene investigation. Each MLI has his or her own style of investigating. In terms of the PMI, I developed a style of working backward, from the last known moment that the decedent was seen alive, forward, to the moment when the body was found. To perform that calculation, and to determine the cause and manner of death, I have to first relate the body to the scene. Is the position of the body “sensible”? By sensible I mean, does its placement make sense. If, for example, the body is fully clothed, does it make sense for the body to be lying peacefully on the bed? That could mean the body has been moved; but not necessarily. It could also mean, conversely, that
the person got dressed, then felt ill, and lay down without undressing again. We find many bodies in bathrooms, kitchens, back halls, even inside closets. I discovered one man hunched over in the bottom of his clothes closet; perhaps he had gone there, in the throes of his final illness, because that was where he felt safest.

  And I can’t count the number of dead bodies that I have pulled off toilets. I learned that bodies found on toilets were usually there taking a “terminal crap.” The explanation of the term is, again, logical: when you’re attempting to evacuate your bowel, you push, you bear down, and this process lowers your heart rate. This happens because by bearing down you increase the pressure in your chest and squeeze the vagus nerve, which is a major player of the parasympathetic nervous system. While the sympathetic nervous system acts in the body like a gas pedal in a car, the parasympathetic acts like a brake. Hitting the brake can throw the body into a terminal bradycardia, meaning that the heart slows down to the point where it can stop. Thus the phrase: terminal crap. You bear down, your heart slows and stops, and you die on the bowl. Avoiding this ignominious end might be best done by following my grandmother’s Old World recipe for a long life: eat four stewed prunes a day, and don’t push too hard.

  Similarly, there is a misconception that when you die, you lose control of your anal sphincter and defecate in your pants. Not so. To defecate requires contraction pressure of pelvic muscles and contraction of the smooth muscle in the rectum. You don’t defecate if those muscles are relaxed by death. If there is fecal matter in the very end of the rectum, some might leak out of a relaxed anal sphincter when the body is moved, but there will be no full-fledged active pooping once the body is dead. A related urban legend is that after death, hair and the fingernails of the body continue to grow. This has become a staple of horror movies where the corpse has more hair in death than it did in life, and has fingernails that in the coffin have become like claws. Not true. Death stops the processes of growth in hair, teeth, and fingernails. What does happen, though, is drying. The skin of the fingers dries, and in the drying process, the skin appears to recede, thus revealing more of the underlying nail than you would see on a finger in life. The same is true with the scalp.

 

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