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

by Maples, William R.

  Furthermore, the urn in the niche yielded a dental post that had been used to attach an artificial crown. It had been altered on both ends by the dentist who inserted it. The alterations on the ends of the post were very distinctive because they were irregular. We had five views of this dental post in the deceased woman’s x-rays. I was able to put the tooth we recovered from the cremains under one video camera, then put each computer-enhanced dental x-ray on the other video camera, and superimpose them. We came down, thread by thread, lining up every single screw thread on the post, to prove this tiny piece of metal was a unique specimen.

  The results of our investigation were clear and unequivocal: we proved that the woman was in the urn, and in the niche, right where she was supposed to be. We proved that the cremains on the freeway weren’t hers. After the very first member of our team gave a deposition under oath, the plaintiffs hastily settled out of court for what I gather was a vastly reduced sum. Settlements are always kept secret, so I don’t know what the figure was, but the attorneys we were working for were glowing like sunbeams and seemed extravagantly grateful. I gather millions of dollars were saved.

  Why, the reader may ask, if our case was so airtight, did the cemetery pay out even a nickel? I am no lawyer, but I imagine that the universal fear of the unpredictability of the American jury had something to do with it. A box containing cremains was found on the freeway, and the box had the woman’s name on it. There was always the possibility that a jury might stubbornly conclude, in the face of all scientific evidence to the contrary, that the box, the name and the cremains were all the proof it needed to find for the plaintiff.

  Soon afterward I was called in on another case, and when I quoted my rates the new attorneys were taken aback. They called the lawyers who knew about the freeway case. “Isn’t he a bit steep?” they asked, as I later learned. And the lawyer from the freeway case said: “Pay it. He’s worth whatever he asks.” It is always gratifying to receive these little tokens of esteem. The money isn’t unpleasant either.

  Whose, then, were the remains in the box left on the freeway? They were never identified. We were able to demonstrate that they were the remains of several people scrambled together, and their volume was rather small. This led me to investigate the interior of a crematory retort chamber myself, as I have described above. Within, scattered in the corners and amid the crevices of the firebrick walls, was a small quantity of bone fragments and ashes left over from previous cremations.

  I suspect, therefore, that a disgruntled employee from the crematorium surreptitiously gathered up these remnants, or others like them, and placed them in the box beside the freeway to cause grief to the funeral home. He certainly succeeded.

  But in the end, the dreams of wealth or revenge, the loud legal cries of injury and outrage, the hypothetical millions of dollars demanded to redress this imagined wrong—all of these were reduced to ashes and smoke. All that remains today is a cool, silent urn in a distant columbarium.

  11

  Death in 10,000 Fragments

  You will say that reality does not have the slightest obligation to be interesting. I reply that even if reality can escape the necessity of being interesting, hypotheses never can.

  —Jorge Luis Borges, Death and the Compass

  There is a stretch of I–75 about twenty miles north of Gainesville along which the great highway passes through a green and smiling landscape, all rolling fields and thick forests of pine and live oak. I can never travel this particular portion of the interstate without glancing over at a beautiful pasture that appears just south of the exit for High Springs, via County Road 236. This pasture has a solitary oak tree at its edge, then a dense stand of forest just to the west.

  Sheltered under the eaves of this forest are the ruins of an old burned shack. Within those charred ruins, on January 28, 1985, were found the remains of two calcined human skeletons, so badly burned that they were almost reduced to powder. Next to one of the skeletons, welded shut by the fury of the fire that consumed the shack and its occupants, was an Ithaca Model 37 12-gauge shotgun whose stock had been completely reduced to ashes.

  Today when anyone asks me which was the most difficult, the most fascinating and perplexing case I have ever encountered, I answer without an instant’s hesitation: the Meek-Jennings case. I have examined human remains, ancient and modern, famous and obscure, in Asia, Africa, Europe and South America, as well as all over the United States; but I had only to travel twenty miles from my front doorstep to encounter the most baffling and complex problem in forensic anthropology that has ever occupied my mind or challenged the resources of the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory.

  The Meek-Jennings case began with a hellish fire, and from the first moment it was possessed of a hellish complexity. That fire, and those skeletons, would occupy me and my students for the next year and a half. Many times during my inquiry a vital piece of evidence would dangle just out of reach, then, when grasped, would slip away or reverse its meaning. I had to unravel a set of remains that occupied only a few square feet, but whose tangled history reached from Alaska to Florida, across thousands of miles and a dozen years.

  Everything about this case seemed to defy a simple solution. Things seemed to reduplicate themselves, multiply themselves, fragment themselves. At times we seemed to be gazing through a kaleidoscope instead of a magnifying glass.

  At first we thought we were dealing with one fire; it turned out there were two. We imagined we were investigating two deaths; later we found out there were four. The deaths occurred in pairs, in two states, widely separated. There were two suicide notes, both of which looked fake. There were dozens and dozens of antemortem and postmortem x-rays to compare, some of them of very poor quality. Other x-rays, which would have solved the case in an instant, had been destroyed. A slip of memory on the part of a surgeon plunged us into difficulties that seemed insoluble. A crucial gold tooth inlay eluded us for months, while another tooth, found hundreds of miles away, cast the gravest doubt on our findings at that point. At various stages in our inquiry it seemed possible that the bones in the burned cabin were a macabre jest, deliberately put there to make fools of us, by a murderer gifted with almost superhuman cunning, a man so ruthless he would pull his own teeth and fling them into the flames, to throw us off the track.

  “We are to go together so our ashes cannot be separated,” boasted a suicide note found a few hundred feet from the fire. It was my task to prove this prophecy false.

  Besides the skeletal remains of two individuals recovered from the fire scene, there were the burned remains of a dog, as well as the previously cremated ashes of a second dog, all mixed together. Before it burned, the old cabin had been an abandoned farmhouse, which meant that all sorts of flotsam and jetsam were found mixed among the ashes. Generations of animals, wild and tame, had died and left their bones for years and years beneath the house. Mixed in with the fragments was an accumulation of old bullets and cartridges, shoe eyelets, molten buttons and even an ancient Chinese coin.

  If only I had been called in just two days sooner! The Alachua County Sheriff’s Department thought I was out of the country, in Peru, and unreachable; in fact I had just returned to the United States the morning before the remains were discovered. I could easily have gone out to the burned shack and seen the remains in situ. Instead an investigator from the medical examiners office carefully gathered up every single bone fragment she could find, placed them in a single body bag and carried them back to the medical examiner’s laboratory. By the time they arrived they could not have been more jumbled if they had been run through a cement mixer.

  When I finally opened the vinyl bag I was overwhelmed. Inside, totally commingled and crushed, were approximately ten thousand bone fragments, not counting bone that had been reduced to ash and particles of sand. In my entire career I have never seen such an impossible chaos of fragments, some broken by the fire to begin with, some broken even further by careless handling, all tumbled together
in a hopeless, brittle welter of dust, cinders, calcined bone, stray teeth and sand. If the bones had simply been cut into ten thousand fragments it would have been easier. As matters stood, the remains had been jumbled twice, once by the fire and again by the evidence technician.

  The deaths in High Springs, as it turned out, were linked with a particularly shocking and heinous double murder in New Hampshire that had occurred a few days earlier. Because of the notoriety of the New Hampshire victims there was a blaze of media attention. Newspapers in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Florida followed the case closely. We here in Gainesville were being pressured by politicians and law enforcement officers from another state. The New Hampshire authorities made it plain they considered us incompetent rubes and hicks who, to hide our abysmal ignorance, were desperately trying to sweep the whole matter under the rug. In view of the fact that I spent a year and a half painstakingly reassembling those skeletons, I consider that a bit of an insult. Long after we submitted our conclusions and proof the New Hampshire state attorney pointedly disregarded them and kept the case open. He went on to become governor of the state, so I suppose you have to hand it to him: he knew how to strike a popular pose in the public eye.

  But one of the most fascinating aspects of the Meek-Jennings case was the personality of the killer. To a degree unparalleled in most of my investigations, the mind of the murderer seemed to taunt us and puzzle us, beyond death, beyond the dissolving fires that destroyed the old cabin and its occupants. In this case, contrary to all common sense, love and death were mixed in equal proportions. The Meek-Jennings affair was one involving both passion and premeditation. Here were present the deepest, tenderest sentiments of romanticism, side by side with a depraved, homicidal rage. Here the fires of love were nearly all-consuming. They almost consumed the truth.

  To this day I cannot fathom why nobody spotted the burning cabin when it caught fire. There was a Shell filling station on a hill at the County Road 236 exit of Interstate 75, hardly a mile and a half away. To me it seems incredible that no one saw the smoke or reported the blaze, unless it happened at dusk, or at night. But even then we are left with the astounding fact that the ruins of the cabin were only discovered on January 28, fully ten days after the fire.

  When sheriff’s deputies arrived at the scene everything had long since cooled. The masonry of the cabin fireplace was cold. All the galvanized tin roofing had collapsed on top of the ashes and the metal was cool to the touch. There was not a wisp of smoke. Trees upwind of the cabin were scarcely scorched at all, but those downwind, to the west, were blackened and charred fully forty feet up their trunks. This was dramatic proof of how hot the fire had been and suggests that there was a strong wind fanning the flames in a westerly direction.

  When the investigators arrived, the collapsed corrugated metal sheets from the roof covered everything completely. Only when they began to remove the fallen roofing did they begin to see bones.

  They found the bones side by side, with the burned sawed-off Ithaca 12-gauge shotgun at the feet of one set of remains. The shotgun had been welded shut by the fire, and its stock was wholly burned away. The position of the bone fragments seemed to indicate that two bodies, lying side by side, had been consumed by the flames. The second set of remains was closer to the door. Several Coleman gasoline cans were found in the ashes, missing their lids and showing no signs of having exploded. They must have been emptied out before the fire. The two sets of bones were scattered atop and beneath a wire mesh that seems to have been part of an old gate. Even though some bone fragments had fallen through the mesh, there were a few still on top of it, which demonstrated that the bodies must have been lying above this mesh when the fire started. Under the wire mesh there was something extraordinary: charcoal briquets, burned to ashes but still recognizable by their shape. Whoever had started the fire had placed a considerable quantity of charcoal beneath the bodies, to make sure they would be consumed as completely as possible.

  Right away the investigators were confronted with an oddity: a single fragment of a female fibula—that is the long thin splint bone that backs up the main leg bone, the tibia—was found outside the cabin, near its entrance, some feet away from the rest of the female remains. This fragment was not as badly burned as the other remains, though it was broken off and charred at one end. How had it come to be outside the cabin, away from the other remains? We racked our brains over this and in the end could only theorize that it was flung there by the explosive force of the fire, before it had a chance to burn completely. The cabin was built of “fat lighter pine,” which is full of resin and burns explosively. In such a fire, rafters would fall, sharp-edged sections of tin roof would come hurtling down, and fierce convection currents would be swirling from all directions. In fact the ashes of a fallen roof beam were found near the leg portions of the female remains. It’s my belief that this bone was somehow broken during the fire and flipped free of the rest of the skeleton at some point. This fibula would later play a significant part in my investigation.

  Several hundred feet away from these charred ruins a blue Fiat was parked in the middle of the field. In the trunk of the Fiat were found clothing and personal effects that identified their owners as Glyde Earl Meek, a forty-nine-year-old white male, and Page Jennings, a twenty-one-year-old white female. Meek’s and Jennings’s clothing was in the trunk of the car. There were his expensive-looking cowboy boots with their intricately tooled uppers and polished toes, his shirt, his blue jeans, a red windbreaker and his underpants, all folded up. Next to these garments, in a separate pile, were Page Jennings’s white Reebok sneakers. One of the sneakers had a pair of sunglasses thrust into it and a bloodstain on the side. A baseball cap from the Stacks restaurant at the Gainesville downtown Holiday Inn, where Jennings worked as a waitress, was also in the trunk. Her flesh-colored bra and floral print panties were also neatly folded on top of the pile of her clothes, which included a white pullover sweatshirt and a green plaid shirt.

  If the skeletons within the cabin were those of Meek and Jennings, then it seems likely they embraced the flames naked.

  In the rear seat well of the blue Fiat were found tools, a jack handle and a set of electrical connectors used to hot-wire the vehicle. Atop the back seat was an emergency first aid kit, a plastic coffee cup and a towel. The cloth car seats were split open with wear and tear.

  On the front seat was a very long and very strangely worded suicide note, written neatly in longhand on four sheets of yellow legal paper, front and back. Counting front and back pages, the note was actually eight pages long, an exceptionally long message as suicide notes go. The spelling was generally correct, except for the words “separate,” “supporting” and “appalling,” which were spelled “seperate,” “suporting” and “apauling.” The vocabulary showed an above-average range, a good command of English. Occasionally the writer would add “(sic)” in parentheses, as if he were not sure of a certain spelling. Each page was carefully numbered: “#1 of 4,” “#2 of 4,” and so on.

  This note proved to be one of the most vexing and ambiguous elements of the whole case. Here is what it said:

  January 18 1985.

  Friday 12:45

  Hilton Inn Gainesville

  We have made all our arrangements and now are ready to do what Page thinks, and I, is the only way we can be together for all time. The constant interfering with our lives by outsiders is over. We know that to go on like we have in the past would only eventually turn our love into hate for each other and cause us to eventually seperate. That thought alone is what neither of us can bear to think about. The love we have had and always had since our eyes first met in Alaska has been so strong that in just 19 months we both have proven it more than most people show in a lifetime. Problems we have had surely but very few of our own—instead caused by meddling others. The pain Page has gone through because of her family is what makes all we have done in the past week bearable to me. She was rejected by her family when she came back from Alaska
because she loved someone her family didn’t approve of. Instead of suporting her and saying we don’t understand but are with you—they told her to get rid of me or get out. We went to Texas. Still the interferring (sic) from them and on her father’s birthday she was sent money to go home but not to bring me. They were under the impression that we had broken up and were not together, so when she got off the plane her mother took her shopping in Fortland, Me. On the way back to Jackson, N.H., she told her mother we were together still. Her mother turned the car around and took all the presents back to the stores. When she finally got to Jackson her father told her to get out and never come back. Her brother told her to get “fucked in the ass” and never wanted to see or hear from her again. She called me in Texas and told me what happened and was getting back to Portland and told me to pick her up in Houston. When she got back home I spent almost four hours with her in my lap talking her through what she was put through. Then we went to Alaska again and worked in the worst possible place for a lonely girl with all these thoughts she never really told me about until last week. The letters from her brother helps to explain what I am writing about. Pressure, rejection, pressure, castigation, pressure and then what took place several weeks ago and more pressure.

  Her brother who was “helping” her got to pressuring her thoughts into telling me to leave forever. She couldn’t tell him to hurt him or me to hurt me. She kept it all inside and it became too much for her. The final straw for Page came when her brother said we had to get out “by 5:00 P.M. tomorrow” or he would “pull the plug.” He left a note telling her to take “the milk, half an onion, cheese, Beck’s beer, soup, etc.” Which said to Page get everything that will remind me of you and get out of my life. AGAIN.

  All our letters to one another have been burned so no one can touch them. All our pictures likewise. She made me promise to burn the home in N.H. to make sure there were no mementos left for anyone to have. It seems that she wants to just disappear so as if never to have been on earth.