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

by Maples, William R.

  Shall hale the sullen slaves along,

  Before this fire of sense decay,

  This smoke of thought blow clean away,

  And leave with ancient night alone

  The stedfast and enduring bone.

  —A. E. Housman,

  The Immortal Part

  As I write these lines, it is a windy, bright spring day in early March in Gainesville. The live oaks have cast their leaves, and the dogwoods and azaleas are beginning to bloom. Eager young students are bicycling across campus, browsing in Goering’s bookstore, studying their textbooks on sunlit lawns near dormitories.

  But I am not thinking of them. I am thinking of ghosts.

  I am recalling five young students, four from the University of Florida, one from nearby Santa Fe Community College, who were tortured, mutilated and murdered with demonic cruelty in August 1990. In all, the five victims suffered sixty-one stab wounds, cuts or other disfigurements. One was beheaded, and her head was placed at eye level on a bookshelf near the door of her apartment. Four of the victims were female: Sonja Larson, eighteen, of Deerfield Beach; Christi Powell, seventeen, of Jacksonville; Christa Hoyt, eighteen, of Gainesville; and Tracy Paules, twenty-three, of Miami. One was male: Manny Taboada, twenty-three, of Miami. The horror these murders aroused at the time was so keen that thousands of students literally fled Gainesville, in fear of their lives.

  Today, in early March, immured in a lamplit courtroom within the Alachua County Courthouse, a jury has finished staring at pictures of these five young people, taken after their bodies were discovered. Black tape was placed over parts of the pictures considered so grisly they would have been prejudicial to the jury’s reaching an impartial verdict. I can well understand these selective blackouts. In my long career I have seldom seen crime-scene photographs possessed of such sheer depravity.

  In the same room with the jury, as they pondered these ghastly photographs, was the author of these terrors: the self-confessed murderer himself, Danny Harold Rolling, a drifter from Shreveport, Louisiana. Rolling claimed he was driven to kill because of abuse suffered as a child—it is a common excuse nowadays. He was arrested almost immediately on another charge after the quintuple murders (which were all committed within forty-eight hours), and only became a suspect in this case two months later, on November 2, 1990. As the prosecutor waved the horrible photographs before the jury, Rolling turned pale and appeared ill. “I’ve got to get out of here,” he whispered at one point.

  The jury was tasked with deciding his punishment: life in prison or death in the electric chair. It deliberated through one afternoon, into the evening, and reconvened the next morning, before reaching a verdict. The jury recommended death for Danny Rolling.

  I remember how, in the years following his arrest, Rolling toyed with the investigators from prison, admitting nothing. He thought he had been too clever for the police. He thought he had removed all traces of his guilt from the crime scenes. He gathered up all but one piece of the duct tape he used to bind his victims. He washed two of their bodies with detergent after they were dead. He posed the bodies of the slaughtered young women in various lewd positions. Unfortunately for him, he left traces of his semen at the scene, and this identified him by means of DNA “fingerprinting.”

  Because of my background with weapons and wounds to bone, I was asked to be present at the autopsies, which were conducted by Dr. William Hamilton, the District 8 medical examiner. Hamilton is a quiet man of supreme competence. Unlike some of his brethren, he rigorously shuns the media limelight and works in silence. We have known each other for years, but from the first Hamilton struck me as remarkable and rare: a man who prefers to seek out the truth and to serve the people of his state with deeds of value, rather than chase the will-o’-the-wisp of fame. It is largely because of Hamilton’s meticulous work that a close-meshed net of scientific evidence was drawn about Rolling. My own role in this case was minor. But I like to think that, wherever Rolling goes, I gave him one small nudge toward punishment and perdition.

  My work centered around the murder weapon, and I was assisted by one of my best students, Dana Austin-Smith. Bones can reveal more about a murder weapon than skin and soft tissue, because they are not as elastic. Skin can stretch, distort, relax and finally deliquesce during decomposition. Bones, though more elastic than you might suppose, nevertheless can take and hold an impression from a murder weapon far longer, and far more accurately. By now I need not tell you that the pattern of the human skeleton is as familiar to me as the rooms of my house.

  A large knife had been used in the murders. Its hilt left an imprint on one victim’s back, and the point exited her chest on the opposite side, a distance of eight inches, during which the knife was fully sheathed, its entire length buried in the unfortunate girl’s body. But allowing for compression of the rib cage from the force and fury of the blow, the blade length might have been somewhat shorter: say seven to eight inches, to be safe.

  After preparing specimens of the damaged bones, I began to examine the knife marks under a low-power stereo-microscope. I found sharp cuts from the blade, marks both sharp and dull from the back of the blade, a point mark from the knife sunk in the body of a vertebra, and an array of bone wounds that gave me the width of the blade itself, from its cutting edge to its back.

  I summarized the characteristics. Length: 7–8 inches. Width: 1.25–1.5 inches. A sharp, smooth, nonserrated cutting edge. A false edge resulting from the back of the blade being sharpened behind the tip. A certain shape of hilt where the blade joined the handle. A blade whose cross-section resembled an elongated pentagon. All in all, I concluded, this was a sturdy knife, like a military weapon. It was not a thin blade like a kitchen knife. This formidable weapon had cut through thick bone without any evidence of “blade chattering,” a technical term describing the distinctive cutting pattern, which a thin blade makes when it jumps slightly from side to side during use.

  On the afternoon of September 7, 1990, I was at the state attorney’s office in Orlando on another case. I received a telephone call, asking me to join Dr. Hamilton and the leaders of the Gainesville Homicide Task Force for a meeting. It was a fast, hundred-mile drive for me, but I arrived around 4 P.M.

  We were asked about the murder weapon. Could it have been an Air Force survival knife? I said no. That knife has a sawlike, ripping design on the back of the blade, which is only five inches long—far too short to match the weapon used in these murders. Then someone asked if it might be a Marine Corps utility knife, known as a Ka-Bar. I replied that it very well might.

  After the meeting I pondered the question further. I knew the general shape of the Ka-Bar but wanted to be absolutely sure. That weekend I visited a knife shop in a nearby mall, where Ka-Bars were sold. I carefully examined one, measuring it with the one-meter tape measure I always carry with me. It fit exactly the dimensions of the wounds! The clerk regarded me with some curiosity. Why, he asked finally, was I making so many measurements? I made a vague reply, but as Margaret and I were walking back to the car, I told her what I thought. The weapon used in these ghastly murders had almost certainly been a Ka-Bar.

  As I have said earlier, Rolling was in custody on an unrelated charge at this point. He had not yet been focused on as a suspect in the Gainesville murders. Over three years would pass before I learned that Rolling had indeed purchased a Ka-Bar at an Army-Navy store in Tallahassee on July 17, 1990, some weeks before the killings.

  The police scanned many likely areas with metal detectors, but the actual murder weapon has not surfaced to this day. On the Thursday before Rolling was scheduled to go to trial, there was a crucial evidentiary hearing, one that changed the complexion of the case completely.

  State Attorney Rod Smith won the court’s approval to introduce into evidence a “replica weapon,” a duplicate of the lost Ka-Bar we believed had been used to commit the crimes. Not only that: the actual skeletal remains of the victims, taken from their bodies during the autopsies, and bearing th
e atrocious nicks, slashes, scorings and gougings, which the knife had caused, and which had enabled me to measure its deadly dimensions with such exactitude, were going to be allowed into evidence as well. Thus, not only the blade, but the bones themselves would be placed before the jury’s gaze.

  “On the Thursday prior to the beginning of the trial,” a court memorandum I have before me reads, “in closed discussions before the judge, part of the discussion was about the replica knife and the accurate work which Dr. Maples had done with the knife wounds. Also discussed were the skeletal remnants …”

  The judge ruled that all these things would be allowed into evidence. The memorandum continues:

  “It was obvious that Rolling didn’t want to face the photographs, let alone the remnants … That was the evening the defense came to Mr. Smith and offered the first of a series of plea deals.”

  The murderer’s resolve was crumbling in the face of these fearful resurrections. The knife he imagined was hidden forever was coming back to haunt him in court. The bones of his victims were ready to return from beyond death, to rise up and smite him. The trial would begin in ninety-six hours.

  Rolling quailed. On February 15, 1994, as jury selection began in his trial, the accused man suddenly pleaded guilty to five counts of murder and three counts of rape.

  “I’ve been running all my life,” he declared. “And there are some things you can’t run from anymore.”

  There began the punishment phase of the case, during which the jury had to decide whether Rolling deserved the death penalty or life in prison. Prosecutor Smith showed the jurors the replica knife, the twin of the Ka-Bar I had identified as the murder weapon. The bones were mercifully withheld from the jurors’ sight. The dark blade danced back and forth before their eyes. Together with the hood Rolling wore, and the photographs of his victims, the knife must have made an overwhelming impression on the panel. Their verdict: Death. Rolling received five death sentences from Judge Stan Morris.

  “Five years! You’re going to go down in five years! You understand that? In less than five years!” screamed Mario Taboada, the brother of the slain Manuel Taboada. He was predicting that Rolling would exhaust all his appeals and be executed by 1999. The judge ordered Taboada ejected from the courtroom. Gradually the din subsided. One of the darkest chapters in Gainesville’s history was closed.

  All in all, the Rolling case was a significant victory for the science of forensic anthropology in Florida, one that saved the taxpayer the immense cost of a full-blown trial, and the victims’ relatives the terrible pain of hearing in a public courtroom exactly how these innocent young people had died. It remains one of the most extraordinary cases in my experience, one that amply demonstrated the sheer power possessed by human bones: the power to bear witness to the truth beyond death; the power to avenge the innocent; the power to terrify the guilty.

  Today, at the side of 34th Street in Gainesville, near the crest of a hill, there is a brilliantly painted section of wall dedicated to student graffiti and free speech. Everyone in Gainesville knows it simply as “The Wall.” It runs beneath a fence draped with kudzu vine at the boundary of the campus golf course, and its shape rather reminds you of a railroad cutting, revealing all sorts of multicolored minerals, some of them precious, some of them fool’s gold.

  Anyone is welcome to paint a message on this wall, which is by now a local landmark and a University of Florida tradition. Most of the messages are cheery, or silly, or affectionate, or whimsical. But amid the valentines, the happy birthday wishes and the pleas to save the rain forest is a single dark panel in the wall at the very top of the hill. It contains the names of the five murder victims, neatly lettered against a black background, accompanied by the single word: REMEMBER. If this panel fades or is accidentally defaced, someone always renews it and repaints the names. I pass it twice a day, and I do indeed remember.

  I have purposely kept this account of the Gainesville murders for last, not because they struck so close to home—Rolling could have killed anywhere, in any town—but because I believe there is a moral to this melancholy tale. It is simply that the lamp of science, properly grasped and directed, can shine its rays into the very heart of darkness. It can seek out and snare the most artful evildoer in a bright, unequivocal beam of truth. It cannot raise the dead, but it can make them speak, accuse and identify the agent of death. With the capture and punishment of the criminal responsible, the families and relatives of those slain can win a small measure of peace amid their infinite sorrow. With each solved case, with every confession, we extend our knowledge of the criminal mind and its methods, and we render the threat of capture and punishment all the more real and credible.

  Yet as I look back on my life, and ahead to the future, I am given pause by the vast amount of work that still needs to be done. Mine is a small field, and it is always going to be a small field; but there is no excuse for its being as small as it is today. Cases now throng in daily to the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory, in such jostling multitudes that I cannot address them all and must focus only on the most serious ones. When the telephone rings, my heartbeat quickens. I know that it is most likely the police, and I know what they will say, for I have heard it hundreds of times now:

  “Doc, we’ve got a problem …”

  And the problem is always a body, or what is left of one. They tell me they’ve set up security around the remains. They tell me police officers are guarding and preserving the scene. They ask: can I come immediately? Because I no longer have an undergraduate class load, I am able to break free more often than not. If I am rescued by a murder from a dull and dismal faculty meeting, so much the better! In the case of the three shotgunned drug dealers found in a pit near La Belle, I enlisted the aid of an archaeologist colleague and we both managed to be in Fort Myers, 230 miles away, by dark. By 8 A.M. the next morning we were in the death pit, hard at work.

  With crime moving to the forefront of the American domestic political agenda, it would appear likely that investigators such as myself can look forward to busy years and full employment. But against this must be weighed the fact that few universities are willing to underwrite programs like mine, which combine pure academic research with applications in the “real world,” and the fact that few state law enforcement agencies have the money or inclination to avail themselves of the services of a trained forensic anthropologist.

  So we fall between two stools. We are regarded by our fellow academics almost as common laborers with dirty hands, who traffic in mundane, workaday police matters, instead of devoting ourselves to pure research. On the other hand the police tend to regard us as woolgatherers and cloud-dwellers from the ivory tower, with no experience of the dark side of life. When I am visiting a new law enforcement agency for the first time, I often assume the persona of the innocent, fuddy-duddy professor who has to have everything pointed out to him. This role-playing won’t win me any Oscars, but it humors the police, does no harm and gets results far more quickly than would an attitude of haughty, know-it-all, intellectual arrogance.

  Yet sometimes I am prey to doubts. Who will replace me, and others like me? Who will hire the students I train? I cannot say. The need is there. It cries out to heaven. As I compose these lines, there are forty-eight charred corpses left over from the fiery explosion at the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, awaiting identification. My colleague, Clyde Snow, is in Chiapas, Mexico, looking at the bodies of slain Zapatista revolutionaries, to see if they were murdered by the Mexican army after they surrendered. Remains of MI As from the Korean War are being returned to America, and their names are a riddle as yet unsolved. The mass graves in Bosnia shout to the skies for discovery and vengeance. Yet programs in forensic anthropology languish, and well-trained young scholars go begging for work.

  In my lifetime I have seen programs rise and fall like shooting stars. Once upon a time, at the University of Kansas, three of the gods of forensic anthropology—Tom McKern, Ellis Kerley and Bill Bass�
��were all on the faculty at the same time. They attracted and taught scores of students, many of whom are among the leading people in our field today. Then, almost overnight, they were scattered to the four winds. Bass left one year, McKern and Kerley the next. The university hired a human geneticist, rather than anyone in bone. The same melancholy story is about to be repeated at the University of Arizona, where Walt Birkby has built up a fantastic program. Birkby’s students are probably the best-trained of any in the United States. But Walt is retiring in a couple of years, and the university has already announced he will not be replaced. Therefore he has closed admission to his program. He takes no new students.

  Bill Bass has just retired from Tennessee. The university is going to replace him with an assistant professor, but without Bill’s active guidance that program will undoubtedly change. I will retire myself in a few years and, even though University of Florida President John Lombardi has worked miracles in other areas, I seriously doubt whether the C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory will survive my departure.

  If these memoirs have demonstrated anything, I would hope that it is that forensic anthropology is a discipline useful to society. Had I the power to command it, I should decree that each state have at least one forensic anthropologist working in its crime laboratory. Climate and crime rates have to be taken into consideration of course. A forensic anthropologist would probably starve to death in a cold state like Maine or Minnesota—bodies last forever in those arctic regions! He might find little to do in a state like New Hampshire, where there are only a couple of dozen murders in a year. But here in the sunny, homicidal South there are plenty of bodies to go around, and plenty of bugs to feast on them. Decomposition is swift and sure, and nameless skeletons accumulate in thousands, each beseeching us silently for identification.

  Larger states, such as Texas, California, New York, Florida and the like, could easily employ several scientists like me, and none would be idle, I assure you. I know from long experience that I can’t begin to look at all the cases demanding my attention in the state of Florida. A handful of states, those having a single medical examiner with statewide responsibility, have appointed forensic anthropologists to that office, but they are few and far between. As our elected officials bay like bloodhounds over the crime issue, as our state budgets allocate large sums for prisons, police training and equipment, parole officers, boot camps for teenagers and heaven knows what else, they overlook utterly the need to fund research by universities to develop new scientific techniques necessary to apprehend criminals. The Forensic Sciences Foundation has started a small grant program to provide funds, largely supported by donations from members of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists. But none of us is a Croesus or a Rockefeller. Our little fund is growing painfully slowly. It can only provide a few modest grants each year.