And the Sea Will Tell

by Vincent Bugliosi

  “Could the fractures have occurred antemortem—prior to death?” asked Enoki. In other words, could the trauma have been sustained in a nonhomicidal context, like a fall or some other accident?

  “In my opinion, they could not. The pain of the fractured tips of the roots of the molars would be so severe, so intolerable, that the subject would immediately want to seek the services of a dentist. And the fracture to the jawbone was of such a nature as eventually to cause death unless the person sought out a physician for treatment.”

  The jury knew that Mac could always call for medical or dental help on his radio or sail the Sea Wind to Fanning or some other island for assistance.

  Enoki asked the dental expert what degree of force would have been necessary to cause these fractures. To split the jawbone from the skull, the expert said, and fracture the roots of teeth, which are “deeply embedded in bone,” would require “extreme force. It’s not characteristic of an automobile accident. It would be more characteristic of a sledgehammer, a ballpeen hammer, or some other heavy round object.” Multiple blows were involved, Dr. Harris added.

  One juror bowed her head…another stared directly at Buck Walker. The others seemed to retain their focus on the expert, who had assumed the affectless monotone of a dispassionate observer inured to testifying about such matters.

  On cross-examination, Partington asked if anything in the marine environment or any other natural phenomenon could have caused the “blunt trauma” to the teeth and jawbone.

  “I know of nothing in the marine environment that could cause fractures like that.”

  The curator of anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., was called to the stand next. Douglas Uberlaker was the FBI’s sole consultant in forensic anthropology since 1977.

  The tall, professorial Uberlaker, dressed like a Princeton faculty member in tweed jacket, wool slacks, and Weejuns, stated that he had examined the skull, jawbone, and other skeletal remains at the request of the Government. “The skeleton was not complete, as there were a few missing parts,” he explained. “So, it was not possible to put it all completely back together.” But the find was sufficient, he asserted, to conclude with confidence that the skeletal remains derived from one individual, “a Caucasian woman approximately five feet four inches tall.”

  Enoki read into the record a stipulation that the remains were those of Eleanor Graham.

  “There appears to be a whitish area on the top portion of the skull. Do you see that?” the prosecutor asked.

  Uberlaker owlishly regarded the skull he held in his hands. “Yes. There is a white area, what we call calcination, on the upper left part of the skull that extends more or less from the eye area back over the left top of the skull, and then back down to about the center [of the rear] of the skull.”

  “Did you reach a conclusion as to what caused that area to be white?”

  “Yes. Given the extreme whiteness of that area, the best causal factor I would attach to that is extreme heat applied to that very localized area over a period of time.”

  “Could this intense heat be caused by direct sunlight?”

  “I don’t think so. You might get that extent of bleaching from the sun with years of exposure, but you would also get a type of erosion that we don’t see here. That suggests to me that the heat source was something more intense than the sun.”

  “Greater than a fire?” Enoki asked.

  “It would not be a bonfire or a wood-burning fire, but some sort of heat source that could generate extreme temperatures.”

  “Would an acetylene torch have that kind of heat capacity?”

  “Yes.”

  Another horror.

  Partington objected that Enoki was leading the witness. With a shrug, the judge gave the prosecutor a perfunctory warning. But the image was indelible: an acetylene torch. There was now scientific testimony which indicated that Muff’s beloved husband’s own implements had probably been used on her by her murderer. The horror was cruelly refined.

  Their thinking clearly legible in their unguarded expressions, jurors could not resist studying Buck Walker, stoically unmoved at the defense table. Was this rather ordinary-looking fellow capable of such savagery toward Muff? And had he done the same to Mac?

  Enoki’s direct examination of the anthropologist proceeded implacably with the cadence of a slow march. The witness briskly ignored the sensational nature of his testimony, as if giving the basics to undergraduates in an anatomy class rather than revealing dramatic evidence at a major murder trial.

  “Were you able to determine when this heat was applied to the skull in relation to death or decomposition?”

  Uberlaker sat back in the hard wooden witness chair and crossed his long legs, as if dying to retrieve a meerschaum pipe from his pocket, clamp it between his teeth, and strike a match while pondering further. This man clearly enjoyed supplying the missing pieces of a forensic puzzle, but stingily, one at a time.

  “Well, it’s difficult to say exactly,” Uberlaker answered cautiously. “The borders of the calcination area suggest that something had to have been present to protect the nonaffected bone from also getting that extreme heat. In other cases that I have seen like this, that has always been flesh.”

  Could the whitening have been caused by fossilization, Enoki asked, seeking to eliminate all possible natural causes. The answer was no. Fossilization, Uberlaker explained, is a “very long-term process.”

  “Did you note any wear or erosion by some other source on the skull?”

  “Yes. On the front left side of the skull, across the face, are five very flat abraded areas that we term “coffin wear.” There also appear to be several smaller areas on the right side of the face. If a skeleton has been in a coffin for many years, the slow movements caused by gyrations of the earth could cause abrasion of the bone against the flat surface that it’s lying against.”

  The jury didn’t have to be told that the “coffin wear” was from the container.

  Still seeking to negate a defense argument in support of accidental death, Enoki asked: “And did you see any evidence of a shark attack or bite on the skeletal remains that you examined?”

  “No.”

  “Would you have expected to see such evidence if a shark had attacked this individual?”

  “Yes. Sharks will attack with a tremendous amount of force. They will rip and remove large sections of flesh and even bone, leaving behind very chiseled-like imprints of their teeth.”

  To conclude, Enoki asked the anthropologist if he had reached a conclusion as to what caused the hole in Muff’s left temple.

  “No. It’s in a part of the skull that’s very thin and is one of the most easily damaged areas.”

  During cross-examination by Partington, Uberlaker admitted he hadn’t been at all surprised to find a hole in the skull, or fractures to some of the other bones—the long bones of the skeleton. “There are natural phenomena, such as abrasion, that can produce a hole in the skull and…I can think of a lot of natural circumstances that would produce breakage of bone that don’t involve foul play or criminal activity.”

  A new mystery surfaced without warning on cross-examination. Uberlaker testified that he had observed “several blackish deposits on the top of the skull” which appeared to be “remnants of burn material.”

  Partington eagerly asked, “Didn’t you express the opinion to me when I spoke to you at the Smithsonian that the burning which caused the black deposits, as opposed to the whitening, had taken place years after death?”

  “Yes,” the anthropologist answered casually just before stepping down.

  But the implications were not casual. Was it possible that someone had set fire to Muff’s remains years after she was murdered? If so, who? And why?

  A pasty-skinned man with thick glasses and unruly hair sticking up like bulrushes hurried forward to the stand. He was the man who in every homicide case is supposed to tell the jury with scientific precision how the victi
m died. But Dr. Boyd Stephens, chief medical examiner and coroner for the City and County of San Francisco, testified that on examining the skeletal remains at the request of the Government on April 16, 1985, he found “no recognizable cause of death.”

  Enoki asked the witness if he had made any “findings” in regard to the damage to the skeletal remains.

  “Yes. The radius and ulna—the forearm bones—on the left forearm have transverse fractures, meaning they are broken across. Both the right and left tibia—the lower leg bones—have a twisting fracture.”

  “What amount of force is required for a twisting type of fracture?”

  “A considerable amount of force in a living individual. It’s usually a rotational force, frequently seen in skiing accidents. It usually implies that some part of the extremity is fixed or restrained while the body is rotated around it, or the body is fixed while the extremity is rotated.”

  As this latest expert continued on, I realized that all of us—the jurors, the attorneys, the judge, and the spectators—were anxiously hanging on every word of what, for the most part, amounted to nothing more than sophisticated, argot-ladened speculation. I gazed hard at Buck Walker. Through it all, there he sat, taciturn and still, the only person on the face of the planet, in my view, who knew exactly what had happened. Yet he sat there like the rest of us, giving the impression he was being educated or tantalized along with everyone else. I wondered whether he could be thinking, What stupid jerks all of them are. That’s not how I did it. Or was he thinking how very lucky he was to be living in the United States of America, where authorities who knew he had committed the murder had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and sink years of investigation into the effort to prove his guilt to a jury? (Of course, the same authorities were equally certain that my client was involved in the murder.)

  In addition to the various fractures, Dr. Stephens testified that the five flat areas on the skull near the left eye and left cheek were flattened to the extent “that a ruler can be placed” across them.

  Asked by Enoki if, in his expert opinion, the abrading surface could have been the container, Stephens replied that indeed the inside walls of the container were “consistent” with the abraded areas on the skull.

  Dr. Stephens confirmed that there was evidence the skull had been exposed to heat. “This is not the type of heat we see from sun exposure,” he said, obviously getting into it with relish. “We are talking about an accelerant or a gas that is burning. To burn something like that, you would need about eleven hundred degrees Fahrenheit or higher.” Stephens was more categorical on the next important point than Uberlaker had been: “This burning took place while there was tissue on the skull. The tissue and moisture protection are the explanation for the irregular margins. The burning, I believe, happened at or near the time of death.”

  Enoki: “Is there enough gas given off by a human body’s decomposition to float a container the size of Government exhibit 28?”

  “Yes,” Stephens answered. He explained that the most common gases given off by decomposing human remains are methane, hydrogen sulfide, and carbon dioxide. As they displaced the water inside the box, they would “literally make the body a lifting force. We have had cases here in San Francisco Bay where a human body floated to the surface with as much as two hundred pounds of weight attached to the body.”

  “Those weren’t in concrete boots, were they?” Judge King asked.

  Soft chuckling filled the courtroom.

  “Various types of weights were added to the body,” Dr. Stephens responded with a smile, “for reasons other than good health. The average body in San Francisco Bay will float in about ten days. Obviously, if the weight is added, it takes a longer time.”

  Enoki, tenacious as a terrier, returned to the possibility that the hole in the skull might have been caused by a bullet. Again, Dr. Stephens was more accommodating than the previous witness.

  “Did you reach any conclusion as to the hole in the left side of the skull?” the prosecutor asked.

  “No. But I don’t believe it is an abrasion.”

  “Have you ruled out the possibility that this hole was caused by a gunshot?”

  “No, I have not.”

  Primed for damage control, on cross-examination Partington elicited the medical examiner’s admission that he had tried to determine the presence of “foreign material” around the hole by taking X-rays and films. “With lead bullets, when they penetrate a bone, lead is deposited, isn’t that true?” he asked.

  “That is correct.”

  “You found no evidence of lead [around the hole], did you?”

  “No, counsel.” The reply was straightforward, but the tone was acrid.

  The defense attorney then asked if Dr. Stephens, given the Government’s theory that the bones were once inside the container, expected to see the areas of abrasion on the skull he’d testified to. The witness said he could visualize the abrasions to the skull, which would be held “somewhat in position” by the ligaments on the vertebrae, but would have expected to find areas of abrasion “on many of the other bones” as well.

  “Which you did not find?”

  “I did not find.”

  The witness said there had to be “another element in the box that fixed the skull” more firmly, or it would not have worn only on those five specific surfaces. The most likely element “to fix the skull,” Dr. Stephens concluded, was sand.*

  It was an opening Partington hadn’t expected. “You cannot preclude the possibility that this abrading took place while the skull was embedded in sand amidst coral outside the box?” he now asked.

  “I cannot preclude that. It only requires that there be movement, a flat surface, and that the skull be against that flat surface, and change its position five times.” With that answer, Partington had created the theoretical possibility that Muff’s body had never been in the container—again, the key issue, since Walker’s defense was accidental death.

  Obviously, if Muff had been placed in the container, accidental death could not be persuasively argued. The mood at the defense table lightened.

  The next four witnesses were FBI technicians assigned to the Bureau’s laboratory in Washington, D.C. On the stand, they spoke in carefully phrased, precisely articulated sentences, having long ago polished their skills as scientific witnesses. Their purpose was to put Muff’s body securely back in the container.

  A metallurgist, William Tobin, testified that he’d conducted a series of examinations on the container and concluded that there had been intense heat inside, evidently produced with the aid of a hydrocarbon accelerant—“something like gasoline, kerosene, or fuel oils.” The factors upon which he based his opinion, he explained, were traces of sulfur and carbon found inside the container. “They are by-products of hydrocarbon-based fires.”

  In addition, the expert said that when he cut out a section of the container and examined it under a high-powered microscope, he observed “a very abnormal variation in grain size” between the metal on the inside and outside surfaces of the container. The larger grains on the inside showed that the surface “was subjected to elevated temperatures,” while the outside surface “was not simultaneously exposed to the atmosphere, but rather, to a very severe quenching medium.” That medium, in his best judgment, was water.

  Enoki wanted to know if the several corroded holes on the lid and bottom of the container would have prevented it from floating to the surface. No, the witness replied, he had seen “much heavier containers that had human bodies in them, even with chains and weights, and with large triangular holes cut out, rise from the deep ocean and float to the surface.”

  Next, chemist Roger Martz recounted a series of tests—solubility studies, infrared analysis, X-rays, gas chromatography and thermotography—he had conducted on the container. On the inside surface, he’d discovered a “waxlike material, which contained fatty acids, and the calcium salts of those fatty acids. The substance, called adipocere, is the product o
f the natural fats in the body being changed chemically under decomposition. Martz said adipocere forms after death when “the body is taken away from air, such as would occur underwater.”*

  He went on to explain that calcium salts or fatty acids are not unique to human beings. They could also be formed by animals. If so, he said, cholesterol is detectable. But he found no trace of cholesterol.

  During cross-examination, Partington sought to raise the possibility that the calcium salts and fatty acids were residues of plant decay. The chemist doubted that plants have enough fatty tissue to form the kind of deposit he’d found, but admitted that he was no plant expert.

  Agent Chester Blythe, the microscopy expert, testified that he’d conducted a microscopic examination of a small piece of “faded, greenish-color, cotton cloth” found stuck to the bottom of the aluminum container. “The fibers exhibited characteristics which are associated with burning,” he concluded.

  Agent Roy Tubergen, the serologist, or expert in the study of blood, testified to performing a phenolphthalein screening test on residue from the bottom of the container. The test, he explained, was so sensitive it could detect even a single drop of blood in ten thousand parts of water. “I got a positive result on the box,” he said.

  The serologist performed the same test on a swatch of a dark red portion of the cloth found in the container. Result? Again, positive for the presence of blood. But the phenolphthalein test only determines the presence of blood, not whether it’s human or animal. The next test did make that determination. Tubergen performed an Ouchterlony test—taking the swatch of the blood-stained cloth and extracting the blood from it using a saline solution, then placing the extracted blood in a gel on a microscopic slide and subjecting it to various reacting agents—and found the unmistakable presence of human protein in the blood extracted from the fibers of the cloth.