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

by Maples, William R.

  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 body—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 Arikara Indian burial site in South Dakota and found that fly pupal cases were present in 16.4 percent to 38.3 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, D.C., 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 covering of chitin 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 nausea; 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, pattering 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 feckless 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 unbuckled 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 slightly 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 abusin
g 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, burial 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-in-law.

  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 disparate 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, single-handedly 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 Dixie 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 sheriff’s office. Better confess to illegal pot hunting than connive at concealing a murder!

  The sheriff’s office called the Florida Department of Law En forcement 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 Marshalltown 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 “PIGGLY WIGGLY” 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.