To estimate age, I looked at several features of the skull. First, I studied the teeth. As people approach adulthood, their third molars, or wisdom teeth, generally erupt around age eighteen years, although some people (more and more of us, in modern humans) lack third molars altogether. The mandible, or lower jaw, of 05-01 contained no third molars, but both of her upper third molars had erupted. That meant she was probably at least eighteen—information that was helpful, but not as specific as I needed. To narrow the age range, I looked next at the cranial sutures, the joints where the bones of the skull fuse together. At birth the cranial vault consists of seven separate bones, loosely joined to allow the head to grow easily. By age five the seven bones begin fusing at the sutures, zigzagging joints that interlock rather like the teeth of zippers. Around age thirty the sutures generally begin to ossify—to fill in with bone and smooth out—and eventually the sutures may become completely invisible, or obliterated. Cranial sutures don’t allow age estimates to be made with pinpoint accuracy by any means, but they can often narrow the range to within a decade or so, which can help investigators considerably: It’s much easier to search records for missing females aged forty to fifty than for females aged twenty to eighty.
The first of the cranial sutures to close—beginning around age twenty—is the basilor suture, located at the base of the skull, between the occipital bone and the sphenoid. Holding the skull from the coffin upside-down in my hand, I showed the family the basilor suture. “It’s fully closed,” I told them, explaining that meant she was at least twenty-five. Next I studied the sutures along the top and sides of the skull—the coronal, sagittal, and lambdoidal sutures—and saw that they were nearly obliterated. The zigzag lines that appear so stark in skulls of twenty-five-year-olds were only faintly discernible in this skull; in fact, they looked almost as if they’d been filled with spackling compound and then sanded smooth.
Mentally comparing these sutures to the thousands of others I’d studied over the decades, I estimated the woman’s age to be at least forty. I didn’t think she could be elderly, though, because she lacked the signs of skeletal wear and tear that characterize old people. For one thing, she still had all of her teeth—quite an accomplishment for someone growing up in the 1930s and ’40s, especially in the hills of East Tennessee! For another, she showed few signs of osteoarthritic lipping, the buildup of jagged ridges of bony material along the edges of vertebrae and other joint surfaces. Think of lipping as the skeleton’s version of the mineral deposits that gradually build up and clog a house’s water lines; not surprisingly, the bony fringe is a major contributor to the aching joints that plague the elderly. Whenever I show slides of severe osteoarthritic lipping, someone always asks if there’s any way to prevent it. “Of course there is,” I exclaim. “Die young!” Well, this woman hadn’t died young, but she did seem to have died in middle age, rather than old age.
But when I took a closer look at her teeth, I was surprised to see how worn they were, at least on their occlusal surfaces—the edges that do the work of biting food and fingernails and pencils. When I fitted the mandible into its normal position beneath the skull, I saw why. Rather than having a slight overbite, as most white people do, this woman had an edge-to-edge bite; her top and bottom teeth lined up and made contact all the way around the arch of her mouth. During decades of chewing, those occlusal surfaces had done more than just tear meat and grind corn; they had also ground away at each other, wearing down the enamel a tiny bit each year. Native Americans tend to have edge-to-edge bites, so I asked the family members whether they knew if Leoma had any Indian ancestors. Yes, someone told me, she was supposedly part Cherokee—one-quarter or one-eighth. The edge-to-edge bite and occlusal wear also, therefore, suggested that this was indeed Leoma.
But one other feature of the skull seemed to contradict that notion. The feature—or was it a non-feature?—was skull trauma, which was notably absent. Jimmy Ray Maggard had told investigators that he’d killed Leoma with a tire iron, yet this skull was intact and undamaged. In most cases, killing a person with a tire iron leaves a skull fracture so sharp and recognizable that it’s considered a “signature fracture.” Other implements that leave signature fractures include claw hammers and golf putters. (I know this about putters thanks to a skull in our forensic collection: a skull into which a neat rectangular hole has been punched—a hole that the broken putter recovered from the crime scene fits into as precisely as a key fits a lock.) Still, there was a possible explanation for the inconsistency. According to several family members, Jimmy Ray Maggard had a tendency to tell outlandish lies, so it was possible that the tire iron was an after-the-fact embellishment.
Most of the woman’s postcranial bones—the bones below the skull—were missing, and of the ones that were present, many had been chewed by carnivores. Only two long bones remained, the right humerus (upper arm) and the left femur (thigh), and neither of these was complete. The distal (elbow) end of the humerus had been chewed off, and both ends of the femur were gone—testament to how irresistible dogs find the marrow that lies within the ends of the long bones. Dr. Blake’s crime-scene report had indicated that an intact left humerus had been found at the scene, but his autopsy report didn’t list this bone in his inventory of skeletal elements. I hoped this inconsistency would be resolved by the presence of a left humerus in the coffin, but there was none. Lacking a complete long bone, I would be unable to calculate the woman’s stature.
Fifteen vertebrae were strung on a rotting loop of twine, forming a sort of macabre necklace; it had been created not as ghoulish jewelry but simply as a practical way to keep the vertebrae together. The first four cervical (neck) vertebrae were missing, and so was the twelfth thoracic (chest) vertebra, but eleven of the twelve thoracic vertebrae were present. That didn’t surprise me, as the crime-scene report had indicated that much of the upper torso remained, including much of the right rib cage, which had still been covered with leathery skin at the time the remains were found near the lakeshore. Apart from the lack of osteoarthritic lipping, the vertebrae didn’t give me any significant information.
The ribs showed extensive signs of carnivore activity. Five of the left ribs were missing altogether, and only the head and neck regions—stubs, in other words—remained of the other seven. The right ribs had fared considerably better; surprisingly, in fact, all twelve of them were still there. Two adjacent right ribs—either ribs six and seven, or seven and eight (it’s hard to distinguish between the middle ribs, especially if they’re incomplete) showed signs of trauma that was not caused by carnivores. At midshaft, both ribs exhibited a hinge fracture, suggesting that a blow to the right chest caused these two ribs to fold inward. Could that blow have caused her death? Perhaps, but it seemed unlikely, and without soft tissue, there was no way to know.
Other potential, unknowable causes of death (if she hadn’t been bludgeoned with a tire iron) included shooting, stabbing, and—twice as common in women’s murders as in men’s—strangulation. I had noticed, in reading Dr. Blake’s crime-scene report, that he had recovered the hyoid, and I was looking forward to examining it. The hyoid is a delicate, U-shaped bone from the neck. Free floating—that is, unattached to any other bones—the hyoid supports the muscles of the tongue. I was especially eager to see the hyoid because it’s sometimes a telltale bone: If it’s fractured or crushed, it points strongly to strangulation. I searched the muddy coffin carefully, but to my dismay the hyoid was nowhere to be found. Too bad, I thought, because the other woman Jimmy Ray Maggard had confessed to killing—a Georgia woman—had been strangled.
Still, I wasn’t there to investigate the cause or manner of death; I was there to obtain DNA samples, to help answer the question that had haunted Leoma Patterson’s family all these years: Was this really her?
I had come equipped to take two kinds of samples—teeth, and cross-secti
ons of long bones—to raise the odds that I’d get intact DNA so many years after death. When exposed to the elements, to bacteria, and perhaps to the body’s own decomposition processes and products, DNA gradually degrades. That meant the best places to look for good DNA samples would be within molars or from the shaft of the long bones—the places where there was the most protection against chemicals and microbes. Using a pair of pliers, I carefully extracted two teeth from the jaws: the right first molar from the mandible, and the left second molar from the maxilla. I placed each tooth in a sterile plastic sample vial, which I labeled and gave to Frankie Davis. Frankie, Leoma’s youngest daughter, seemed to be the most sophisticated of Leoma’s children, and she had offered to find a DNA lab to analyze the samples and compare their genetic material with cheek-swab samples from herself and her sister Pearl.
Extracting the teeth was easy. Getting DNA samples from the long bones was slightly harder. For that, I had brought a Stryker autopsy saw, along with a hundred-foot extension cord. We plugged the cord into the portable generator I had brought, and while Jon steadied the bones—bracing them on the grave’s heart-shaped headstone—I cut thin cross-sections from the shafts of the right humerus and the left femur. I sealed each of these in a sample vial as well and handed them off to Frankie.
As soon as I finished collecting the DNA samples, Kate began taking skull measurements at her makeshift workstation, the tip of the probe darting swiftly from landmark to landmark: the bridge of the nose, the centers of the eye orbits, the tip of the chin, the crown of the head, the outer corners of the cheekbones, and so on. Unlike traditional calipers, which have to be carefully aligned on two points simultaneously to take measurements, the probe can simply be touched at each point individually; somehow (don’t ask me how) the computer assigns relative 3D coordinates to every point the tip contacts. As a result, the software can easily calculate, say, the distance between the eye orbits, or the width and height of the nasal opening, or the degree of prognathism in the mouth structure, and so on. Back when I was a graduate student working at the Smithsonian Institution, taking thousands of skull measurements every week, I could make three to four cranial measurements per minute—provided I had someone with me to record the measurements as I called them out. Because the digitizer’s sharp tip is easier to position than the ends of calipers (which can slide off the skull’s domed surfaces, or prove difficult to fit into small openings), Kate could take a measurement every second—single-handedly, and with greater precision.
There in the cemetery, Kate ran a preliminary analysis of the measurements, which she explained to the family. Like me, ForDisc had a high degree of certainty that the skull was a white woman’s, possibly with a bit of Native American ancestry mixed in. She and I spent a while answering more questions from Leoma Patterson’s descendants. Eventually, though, people ran out of questions. Clambering back into the open grave, I laid the bones back in the coffin, closed the lid, and resealed it. Someone reached down to help me out of the grave, and the backhoe operator fired up the machine and filled the hole. Kate, Jon, and I said our good-byes, and I backed out of the cemetery, eased down the gravel road to the valley floor, and then snaked up and over Redoak Mountain once more, back home to Knoxville.
A few days later I wrote my report. In the summary section, I concluded this: “There is nothing in the skeletal material that I looked at that would not be expected in the skeleton of a fifty-year-old white female with American Indian ancestry.”
FOUR MONTHS PASSED, and the case slipped from the forefront of my mind to the background. Then, in December, Frankie Davis called from Texas to say that she had just received a report from GenQuest, the DNA laboratory to which she’d sent the samples. GenQuest had compared the skeletal material’s DNA to the cheek swabs from Frankie and her sister Pearl. After examining ten different regions of DNA from the various samples, the laboratory concluded that the woman in the grave was unrelated to Frankie and Pearl. I felt sure I’d misunderstood, so I asked her to repeat it, and she did. I had not misunderstood. According to the lab, the woman in the grave was not Frankie’s mother. She was not who the granite headstone proclaimed her to be. In short, she was not, and never had been, Leoma Patterson.
The news stunned me. If that wasn’t Leoma Patterson buried in the family cemetery, then who the hell was it? And where the hell was the real Leoma?
Click here for photos from Chapter 1
Chapter Two
Putting a Face on the Dead
I HAD THOUGHT, when we reburied the coffin beneath the heart-shaped headstone on that hot August afternoon, that my work on case 05-01 was finished. Instead, it turned out, my work was just beginning. On December 2, 2006—fifteen months after my first unnerving journey over Redoak Mountain—I retraced the switchbacks, this time in a Honda minivan I had recently bought. This time I didn’t get lost, and I didn’t get scared. This time the hairpin curves and sharp drop-offs of the road concerned me far less than the baffling turn the case had taken—a case I’d thought would be so simple. Like Leoma Patterson’s family, I was now confused and frustrated. And I was determined to discover the identity of the mysterious woman whose bones had been misidentified a quarter century before and then subsequently buried in a family cemetery—a cemetery where they did not belong.
Once more surrounded by Leoma Patterson’s descendants, I clambered down into the raw, reopened wound in the earth. After a prayer by one of Leoma’s grandsons—a prayer imploring God to right the wrongs that had been inflicted on the family by the miscarriage of justice, and to help us find the truth at last—I opened the battered coffin and removed the bones again. This time, though, we spent no time on high-tech 3-D measurements or detailed explanations of skeletal features. In very short order the coffin was reburied—again—but this time it was empty, except for the thin layer of mud inside. This time the bones were coming with me back to Knoxville. This time 05-01 was the center of a new investigation.
When Frankie Davis had dropped the GenQuest bombshell on me, I quickly relayed the news to Paul Phillips, the district attorney in Campbell County, where the bones had been found in 1979. Paul had opened a new investigation, and he’d assigned a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent, Steve Vinsant, to the case. But whose case would Vinsant be investigating? Whose killer might Paul Phillips someday prosecute? Who was this middle-aged Jane Doe? In my files, the case number remained the same—to me, she was still 05-01. But I could no longer think of her as “Leoma.” From now on she would become “Not-Leoma.” I hoped to discover Not-Leoma’s true identity in Knoxville—specifically, in UT’s immense temple to college football, Neyland Stadium.
By this point I had spent much of the past thirty-five years in Neyland Stadium. Deep in Neyland Stadium. Strangely, the Anthropology Department is tucked beneath the stadium’s south and east grandstands, in a dingy bridge wedge of offices, labs, and classrooms. Even more strangely, the grimy, girder-shadowed location was of my own choosing. Allow me to explain. Back in 1971, I was hired to head UT’s Anthropology Department, and to expand it by adding a master’s degree and doctoral program. At the time, the department was housed in McClung Museum, and it was immediately apparent that there was nowhere in McClung for us to grow. We had to go. I was offered a choice: a couple of dilapidated old houses UT owned, or the outmoded athletic dorm, Stadium Hall. I chose Stadium Hall; it was grimy and gloomy, but it was big and it was damned sturdy. In any case, the quarters were only temporary, I was assured. Right.
A brief historical, scientific, and architectural digression seems in order here. The world’s first controlled nuclear chain reaction, in 1942, occurred in a rustic laboratory wedged beneath the grandstands of the University of Chicago’s football stadium. So I understand, and even appreciate, that there is a precedent for substadium brilliance. Still, it strikes me as ironic that at UT anthropologists are housed in the same sort of
quarters where potential atomic catastrophes were quarantined at Chicago.
Even deeper within Stadium Hall from the Anthropology Department’s offices and classrooms—another flight down, wedged between two staircases—is a large room with one wall of windows, two computers, a pair of desks, half a dozen or so long metal tables, and tens of thousands of bones. The bones are Native American skeletons that teams of students and I excavated in South Dakota back in the 1950s and ’60s, when new dams on the Missouri River began creating vast lakes and flooding abandoned Arikara Indian villages. This basement room is the osteology laboratory—“the bone lab,” everyone in the department calls it—and it’s here that the skulls and skeletons of the unknown and the murdered get measured, examined, discussed, and often identified by the Anthropology Department’s forensic faculty and graduate students. If determination, knowledge, and luck combined in sufficient measure, the bone lab was the place where we might discover the true identity of Not-Leoma. Of 05-01.
To identify an unknown victim through DNA fingerprinting—or conventional fingerprinting, for that matter—you must compare at least two sets of fingerprints: the unknown’s prints, and the prints of a known person that could potentially be a match. In the case of the bones we had twice exhumed from beneath Leoma Patterson’s headstone, we had no idea where to begin looking for a potential match. No other middle-aged East Tennessee white woman had gone missing and stayed missing in the late 1970s. We expanded the search area, combing the missing-persons’ data base of the National Crime Information Center for a possible match regionally and nationally, but we found no likely matches there either. That left us with one last, long-shot hope that might lead to an identification. In football, a desperate, unlikely effort to snatch victory from defeat at the last instant is called a Hail Mary pass: You fling the ball far down the field and pray. We were about to try the forensic equivalent of a Hail Mary pass. A young woman named Joanna Hughes was going to throw it for us.
Identity Crisis Page 2