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

by Maples, William R.

  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 purple to 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 butyric 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 grim 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 murder-suicide 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 first-class 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 $659.95. 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 handing 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 remain 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 linking 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. Leakey 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 offhandedly. 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, caramel-colored 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 red-faced. But it is my belief that every set of remains deserves a certain minimum of respect. We owe them that.

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/>   “The Enfolding Earth”

  Romeo: “Courage, man; the hurt 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 1

  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, heavy 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.

  “There is no antidote against the Opium of time,” writes Sir Thomas Browne in his “Hydriotaphia.” “Our Fathers finde 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 backyard, 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.