Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist

by Maples, William R.

  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 carefully 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 hammerlike 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, baggy 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 garbage dump, sleeping in an abandoned truck. His father murdered Stone’s mother when the boy was nine, and allegedly beat the boy and sexually abused him. Stone had 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.

  3

  “Bolts of Bones”

  O Who shall, from this Dungeon, raise

  A Soul enslav’d so many wayes?

  With bolts of Bones, that fetter’d 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 Nerves, and Artenes and Veins

  Tortura besides each other part

  In a vain Head and double Heart …

  —Andrew Marvell,

  A Dialogue Between the

  Soul and Body

  The unwary visitor t
o 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, chalky, clean-smelling, 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 stillborn, stands in a bell 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 4.5-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 i’ 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 by 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 “al fresco 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 butyric 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 with 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 lie, 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 in the grotesque, “Halloween” cases, where you 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.