These suspicions grew like weeds. The whole case was taking on a perverse life of its own, a life after death in which skeletons rose up and scampered away on miraculously healed legs; adult jaws shrank to the size of children’s; teeth flew out of mouths, and a prominent gold filling somehow evaporated to atoms. To this day, I imagine, there are people in New Hampshire who believe Glyde Earl Meek committed the perfect triple murder and is cavorting around the country as you read these lines, laughing at the law.
These proceedings filled me with chagrin. At the same time I purposed, not without some anger, to get to the bottom of this endlessly mocking case, no matter how long it might take me.
It took me and my students another full year. I doubt if, within the whole history of forensic anthropology, a pair of skeletons has been puzzled over and put back together with such painstaking slowness, such infinite care, as the remains from the burned shack in High Springs. Whenever I had a spare moment in 1985 and 1986, I would return to these two skeletons, cautiously matching up fragments, one by one, bit by bit. Today these remains are kept in two cardboard boxes in the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory, numbered 1C85 and 1D85.
In those days I was still occupying rooms at the Florida Museum of Natural History. At that time in my lab we didn’t have huge tables to work on. The expansion of other activities in the museum was cramping me. So I used two counter tops, manufactured at a Florida state prison with convict labor, each one thirty inches deep by eight feet long. One counter top I used for unsorted material. The other I divided into two areas: “His” and “Hers.”
Very quickly we could confirm that we had two individuals, no more. Furthermore we could rely on those beautiful, enormous, detailed crime scene photographs taken by the Alachua County sheriff’s office, which pretty well indicated that we were dealing with two individuals lying side by side. The dog and squirrel bones presented no great problems. We were able to winnow them out fairly early on. Some types of dog teeth do indeed resemble human “canine” teeth at first glance, but there are distinctive ridges that mark dog teeth clearly and no forensic anthropologist could long be deceived by them.
It was also clear that we were dealing with bones that had burned inside of bodies because of the tremendous twisting and warping and checkering and very characteristic breakage of the bones.
I ask the reader’s patience for taking up again a subject I have touched on earlier, that is, the idiosyncrasies of burned bones. But it is essential that you have a clear picture of this process if you are to accompany me in the investigation that follows. Naked bones that are burned in a fire look much different from bones that are enclosed and burned inside a body. Bones burned as bones, and not as part of a body, react differently under fire than do bones encased in tissue with high fat content and other fluids. In some ways it may be considered as the difference between frying a joint of meat in a pan of bacon grease, as opposed to cooking a naked bone in a hot dry oven. Bones burned naked, without the surrounding flesh, go through the same color changes as bones in fresh bodies. They blacken, gray and whiten. They will shrink, but often not as much, and they don’t warp and distort themselves as much; nor do the bone surfaces change and degrade in the manner we see in bones burned inside bodies.
When bones inside bodies are burned they change color, as the surrounding flesh sizzles and melts away. These transformations happen quickest around the joints, where the skin, soft tissue and muscles are thinner. Here the transformation begins earliest, but eventually it will overtake the whole skeleton if the fire is allowed to burn.
The bone begins to change from its normal color, a creamy white-yellow, to a darker yellow as fats from the surrounding tissue are baked in. Then, as the fire continues to burn, this dark yellow gradually yields to black. The black represents the organic substances of the bone, which have been carbonized. Finally, if these black, carbonized bones remain amid the flames, even the last organic residues are burned away. In these final stages, the color of the bone gradually fades from black to very dark gray, to gray, to light gray and finally to white. When all of the organic constituents of the bone have been burned away completely, leaving only the inorganic portions—calcium carbonate and other salts of organic material—the bones are pure white. Such are the “calcined bones” you encounter in Gothic novels. My point is, fire and bone interact in very predictable ways, going through a clearly visible series of changes, changes which can be pinpointed by color and texture.
As the fire reaches the bone, definite changes occur. Each bone seems to react differently, according to the thickness of the compact bone composing it. Some surfaces begin to “checker” and break into tiny cubes which may or may not separate from one another.
If it does not pain you too much to imagine your leg on fire, I will tell you that, once your flesh is consumed, the surfaces of your tibia—your shinbone—will begin to split into a crisscross checkerboard pattern. This is because the surface of your tibia is relatively thin.
Now if you don’t mind, let the fire move up and consume your thigh. The thighbone is called the femur and here the burn pattern of the surface is completely different, because the outer layer of the femur is thicker. Instead of checkerboards, your thighbone will crackle up into little crescent moons as the fire makes its way through the flesh and begins to gnaw at the bone. Bits may fall off, but they can often be glued back on in the laboratory because of their shape: curved, not right-angled. It’s all very distinctive. So the fragments of a burned tibia look very different from the fragments of a burned femur. In my laboratory I was able to divide many small bits of burned bone into checkerboards and crescent moons, and gradually fit these pieces back together into tibias and femurs. In this particular case I was able to reconstruct a large portion of the burned female’s tibia out of thirty-six small fragments.
I cannot hope to convey the immense, fatiguing and yet fascinating task of reassembling those fragments. We used Duco cement—model airplane glue—to put the bones back together because it does not expand when subjected to moisture, and because you can always dissolve it with acetone if you make a mistake. I challenged my students to attack these bones and carefully monitored their reconstructions. When I agreed, the reconstruction stood. When I disagreed—out poured the acetone.
Often the fragments were so frail that they had to be splinted after they were glued together. The female’s reconstructed tibia is a very twisty thing now: it has a curled flake coming off it like a bean sprout; but when it was part of the living bone, this wild curl lay flat and straight and matched up very nicely with the cavity beneath it. Blame the fire for splitting it and blistering it up. Such are the idiosyncrasies of burned bones.
To sum up a year and a half’s work in a single paragraph: We looked for fragments that could be identified as coming from particular bones. We carefully gauged the thickness of the bone walls. We closely measured the curvature of fragments, which indicated the circumference of a certain bone shaft. We looked carefully at the size of the cavity within the shaft as opposed to the thickness of the walls of the shaft. We scrutinized the shapes of joint surfaces and kept an eye out for the special protuberances that indicated muscle attachment. Color was our ally. We always looked at color, the shades of color a bone goes through as it is burning: cream, dark yellow, black, dark gray, gray, light gray, white. Neighboring colors and neighboring textures helped us figure out the coherence of neighboring bones and fragments, what went next to what.
You must not imagine that at the end of our labors we had anything resembling a pair of fully articulated skeletons. Rather, we were trying to reconstruct certain large, significant, verifiable bones that would correspond to x-rays taken of Page Jennings and Glyde Earl Meek before death.
One by one the baffling difficulties and discrepancies yielded to patient endeavor. The first riddle, the tiny female palate, so small it seemed to belong to a midget, was proved to be an adult palate shrunken by fire. I was able to demonstrate that fire s
hrinks and compresses bones by a factor of twenty to twenty-five percent. The teeth in this palate matched Page Jennings’s dental x-rays. It was her palate.
Then came the unscarred tibia. If Page Jennings had undergone radical knee surgery at age seventeen, why didn’t the female kneebone show traces of it? When I went back to the New Hampshire surgeon and asked her—very diplomatically of course—to give me copies of her surgical records relating to Page Jennings, I found that she had not used the bone-cutting Hauser procedure, at all, but instead a gentler method known as the Goldthwait procedure, which did not involve cutting into the bone. The surgeon had simply forgotten which type of surgical procedure she had used, but her case records were clear and unequivocal: Goldthwait, not Hauser. This regrettable lapse of memory had cost us months of desperate groping. Now, with the surgical records before me, this riddle was solved. Page Jennings didn’t have surgical scars on her tibia because the surgeon had never cut into the tibia. The surgeon finally agreed with my identification.
With these discrepancies overcome, the rest of the female bones fell into place rather neatly. Her left humerus, or upper-arm bone, closely matched predeath x-rays of Page Jennings’s arm, right down to a tiny bone bubble that looked like a capital letter A with two crossbars. There was also a distinctive dome-shaped formation, as well as areas of density, that were recognizable and congruent—almost mathematically so. Page Jennings’s deltoid tuberosity—a bump or area of roughened bone where the deltoid muscle attaches to the humerus—was identical in the female humerus found at the burned shack. The maverick fragment of fibula that had somersaulted out of the fire and was only charred at one tip matched up perfectly with x-rays of Page Jennings’s left fibula. It became one of our most conclusive pieces of evidence.
To those who, from mischief, fantasy or fond hope, imagine that Page Jennings somehow walked away from that terrible fire, I can only reply: if she did, then she managed to walk away without a major bone in her left leg, her upper left arm, and her palate. That may sound harsh, but in this case the truth had to be used as a blunt instrument. That fibula, that humerus and that palate are today in the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory, and they are all incontestably hers.
Now Meek: from the outset Meek’s powerful, stop-at-nothing personality had animated this case diabolically. Page Jennings was merely his plaything and possession. By his own admission in the suicide note, he had murdered her parents in New Hampshire and set the inn on fire. He had then strangled Page, not once but twice, and crushed her skull with a rock. If the evidence in this case were false, it was Meek who had falsified it. If the bones in the shack were not his, he had nevertheless put them there. If this dismal tale were ever to have an ending, it rested with me to determine whether the male skeleton retrieved from the burned cabin belonged to Glyde Earl Meek or not. Did that buckshot-spattered, fire-cracked brainpan belong to a self-proclaimed murderer or to a nameless innocent? This was what I had to prove, conclusively enough to satisfy police in Florida and New Hampshire.
There was a perplexing tab of bone from the male skeleton that seemed to float apart from the reconstruction, as it took shape. Composed of several fragments, dark gray and mottled in color, this flattened bone would provide me with a crucial, coinciding piece of evidence. It was the first, topmost rib of a male rib cage, short and stubby. Our ribs progress like harp strings, moving from small, short beginnings down to full, harmonious curves before shrinking again to the last, lowest ribs. This particular rib had a very irregularly shaped, calcified cartilage at the end nearest the breastbone. This nubbin of cartilage, this small irregularity, was extraordinarily distinctive. Under powerful illumination it stood out like a knot on a pine log.
A bright light and an old x-ray proved it was Meek’s. In the early 1980s Meek had visited a chiropractor in Tucson, Arizona. I had not looked deeply into the dark areas of these x-rays, but now I used a special piece of equipment, a “hot spot,” a bright reflecting bulb, to scrutinize the opaque and gloomy edges of these old x-rays. This powerful beam pierces the deepest shadows in x-ray films.
There, captured by the Arizona chiropractor and now illumined by the brilliant “hot spot,” was the selfsame rib. The x-ray I took of the burned rib fragment, superimposed on the old chiropractor’s x-ray, lined up magnificently. Exterior contours, interior irregularities, fell into place like a Euclidean theorem. The male rib from the fire belonged to Glyde Earl Meek. I did not fling up my arms or shout “Eureka!” but I will confess to experiencing a keen, silent elation while gazing at this eloquent bit of bone.
By now I had had a bellyful of New Hampshire state Attorney General Stephen Merrill’s insinuations about the incompetence of Florida law enforcement officials and their dull-witted investigators. As late as June 1986, a year and a half after the murders, Merrill ostentatiously kept the case open and insisted on listing Meek as a living, wanted criminal. For this public and obstinate skepticism he won the huzzahs of the Manchester Union Leader.
Merrill is to be commended for resisting the temptation to try to “close the book” on this sad, salacious controversy by accepting the facile conclusion that Page Jennings and Meek died in a fire in a High Springs, Florida shack on January 28th, 1985 [said an editorial in the Union Leader on June 4].
It’s not a question of the competence of the experts; it’s a question of whether that competence is being extended beyond the area of their expertise. Merrill does not challenge the evidence. But, ever mindful of Meek’s reputation as a devious convict, he notes that the teeth are not attached to bone, that in the past (in Arizona) Meek has saved his extracted teeth, and that there is a possibility of a “salting of the site” with phony evidence….
One can only wonder whether the Florida police, who have halted their search for Meek, are being equally precise in their consideration of the essential distinction between what the evidence indicates and what it proves. Merrill … deserves praise for demonstrating a high degree of professionalism in not accepting easy conclusions.
There were no such bouquets for me, toiling patiently in my little laboratory in Gainesville, poring over myriad flakes of reassembled bone. By now I was sure of my identifications, but I wished to “make assurance doubly sure.” I determined to find the telltale gold filling that Meek had worn in life and was so conspicuously absent from his skeleton in death.
To do this I enlisted the services of three University of Florida archaeologists: Michael A. Russo, Charles R. Ewen and Rebecca Saunders. You can still examine our expense account in the files. We claimed for four pairs of leather gloves, ten dust masks and fifty Ziploc plastic bags. Using a tripod-mounted fine screen, with a 1/16-inch mesh, we excavated the complete shack down to sterile soil—in vain. We did not find the gold inlay.
Then I directed that all the rocks, dirt and debris from the original spoil-piles—the material that had earlier been screened through a ⅛-inch mesh—be brought back to the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory and put through another, finer screen. This time we would use a 1/16-inch mesh, about as fine as a window screen.
It was a young graduate student, Heidi Sydow, who found the gold inlay. She was part of a work-study program and she more than earned her pay that day. The crucial filling was caught at last, after infinite pains and disappointments, sifted out in the fine mesh. A single pin was bent, but the whole filling stood forth unmistakably. Now it was captured in my hands, glittering with that imperishable sparkle that has rendered gold so precious for thousands of years. This fleck of gold, that day, was more precious to me than any other.
Pure gold melts at 1,945 degrees Fahrenheit. Dental gold is far stronger. In a really hot structural fire, after eight hours of burning, where the heat is most intense, it gets up to a little over 1,200 degrees Centigrade, or just under 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit. In my experience I have seen aluminum and pot metals melt in house fires, but seldom any metal more durable. To get to 1,945 degrees in a house fire the blaze would have to continue as a rag
ing fire for around three hours. It is absurd to imagine the small shack in High Springs burning for three hours at these terrific temperatures. The galvanized tin roof sections that had collapsed into the fire were unmelted. The Ithaca shotgun’s slide was welded shut, but its barrel was undeformed by the heat.
And in fact this gold filling had not melted either. Its original shape was still clearly recognizable, and it was definitely Meek’s. The New Hampshire authorities clung feebly to their hypothesis—Meek could have flung his gold filling into the fire! But soon after that Dr. Mertz was able to prove that a whole fragment of the male jaw, with teeth attached, corresponded to Meek’s dental x-rays. Obviously he had not flung his jaw into the fire.
After immense doubts and difficulties we had proved what seemed likeliest at the very beginning of the case: Page Jennings and Glyde Earl Meek were dead. Their bones were the bones found in the burned cabin. The long and laborious investigation was closed. Glyde Earl Meek was finally, quietly taken off the “Most Wanted” list, and Stephen Merrill was elected governor of New Hampshire. His successor wrote me a friendly letter, apologizing for the doubts and difficulties stirred up over the Meek-Jennings affair. The most troublesome case I had ever encountered was finally solved.
Mixed with the sense of triumph was a bitter aftertaste of exasperation, because it took so much work to demonstrate beyond doubt what was from the very beginning the most probable solution. There was the feeling of having come round in a gigantic circle, after infinite and exhausting labor, to the simple starting point. “Reality,” as Borges wrote, “has not the slightest obligation to be interesting….”
Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist Page 20