All That Remains

by Sue Black

  Sadly, Everilda had died and been laid to rest in the crypt very shortly after her marriage. When we opened the coffin we found that most of her skeleton was fragmented. What were still intact were her delicate hand bones, inside a pair of finely crafted silk gloves. One hand was considerably larger than the other, which led us to suspect that she had suffered some form of paralysis in earlier life. If Everilda herself was unremarkable, the other contents of her coffin were interesting. Her eccentric husband had buried her with the full military uniform he had worn on their wedding day, 30 April 1839. He had laid two pairs of trousers across her legs, draped his military jacket across her chest and placed his forage cap near her head and his boots near her feet. The uniform was passed into the skilled curatorial hands of the National Army Museum and Everilda was duly cremated along with the other occupants of the crypt. All their ashes were returned for burial in consecrated ground. As time went on, I found myself becoming increasingly intrigued by Everilda’s strange little husband (he was only about 5ft 4ins and had to wear cork inserts in his shoes to reach the height required for admission to the military academy). I read books in which he featured and started to research his life. One day I found a family website bearing his surname. Taking a deep breath, I posted a request asking if anyone had any information on the whereabouts of the diaries I had discovered he was known to have written. In response, I had the most wonderful email from Dave, a direct descendant of General Chesney, who lives near Chicago. And so began an online friendship that has continued now for over fifteen years. As I unearthed more details about his family, he would relay each new nugget to his ailing father, who would wait eagerly for the next instalment. ‘Have you heard from the woman in Scotland?’ he would ask Dave. ‘What has she found out now?’

  That a man who had been dead for over a century could be the catalyst for an enduring friendship between two people who have still never met, and provide a third person with a new interest in his twilight years, is really quite miraculous. There is no doubt that some characters from the past have the strength of personality to reach out far beyond their graves to touch contemporary lives. Skeletons are more than dusty, dry old relics: they are the footnote to a life lived, sometimes retaining sufficient resonance to ensnare the imagination of the living.

  In Iraq after the second Gulf War, with the story of General Chesney percolating in my mind, I found myself one day sitting on the banks of the Euphrates river being guarded by none other than a battalion of the Royal Artillery. Another of those wonderful coincidences I so relish. Out of the blue, I heard myself say to the senior officer: ‘Does the Royal Artillery have a benevolent fund?’ I have no idea where the question came from and nobody was more surprised than me when it dropped out of my mouth. The lovely young man replied that they certainly did. As he went on to tell me enthusiastically about all the good work of the benevolent fund, a clear voice in my head was urging me to continue my research and perhaps to write down the story of the man behind the history. Maybe one day I will, and the Royal Artillery will benefit from my endeavours. I think Francis would approve of that.

  I have to admit that I have a bit of a crush on my little Irishman and that what began as an interest has developed into a minor obsession: I once made my family go on holiday to Ireland so that I could find his grave and, through binoculars from a distance, lay eyes upon the house he built with his own fair hands. Fortunately, I have a very understanding husband who accepts that there are three people in our marriage.

  CHAPTER 7

  Not forgotten

  ‘De mortuis nil nisi bene dicendum’

  Of the dead, speak only good

  Chilon of Sparta

  Greek sage (600BC)

  The position of Dalmagarry Quarry, the A9 road and the location of Renee MacRae’s burning car.

  FASCINATING AS ARCHAEOLOGICAL remains may be, my heart lies in the here and now, trying to help solve more contemporary puzzles that will assist with the identification of the deceased or the prosecution of a guilty person who ended a life or damaged those of others. There is great satisfaction in finding answers for bereaved families and helping to bring perpetrators to justice, or confirming the innocence of someone wrongly accused.

  As a student, having explored the world of the long dead and realising I was not inspired to linger there, I moved on, looking for an immediacy and an excitement that would challenge me at every turn and with every decision.

  I never had any desire to work with the living. Although I appreciate the importance and the tremendous rewards to be gained from healing and tending to the sick, I always had a sneaking feeling that live patients would be more troublesome than dead ones. Being half control freak, half coward, I find that a more mono-directional interaction suits me best – in other words, a job where I am the only one asking the questions.

  Had I chosen medicine, I know for certain that the first time I made a mistake that impacted negatively on the quality of someone’s life or unnecessarily hastened their demise, I would have thrown in the towel. I would have lost all confidence in my decision-making ability and seen myself as a danger to my patients. Some would say that this is exactly the attitude all doctors should have, but I simply could not have continued if I thought I had done harm to someone else. So I think my road was mapped out from my teenage years. For me it was always the dead: all the way from the butcher’s shop to the mortuary.

  Forensic anthropologists don’t always get it right, either, of course. That only happens in those dreadful CSI programmes where the clever-clogs scientist invariably triumphs in the end. What is carved most indelibly on our memories and on our perception of our reputations are those cases that remain unsolved, or where we feel we could have done more. And especially those where, no matter what lengths you have gone to, you cannot with certainty assign a name to an unidentified body, or where you have been unable to find a body but you know there is a strong likelihood that the missing person you are looking for is dead. Anything that prevents the circle being completed leaves you with a sense of unfinished business. These cases sit like mites under your skin and, however hard you scratch, you don’t ever lose the itch until the mystery can be resolved.

  I can think of nothing worse than not knowing where a loved one is or what has happened to them. Are they all right, or has some terrible misfortune befallen them? Are they dead, abandoned on some remote, lonely piece of scrubland or deliberately concealed in an anonymous hole in the ground? These are the thoughts that torture the parents, siblings, children, extended family and friends of the missing.

  Grief is our response to any loss, not just a confirmed and accepted death, and those trapped in the limbo of not knowing whether someone dear to them is dead or alive often find it even harder to cope. It hits them every morning on waking, it is their last thought at night before they fall asleep, and on occasion it strays into their dreams as well. On the surface, with the passage of time, some learn to manage but, without warning, a name, a date, a photograph or a piece of music may at any moment catapult them back into the black pit of endless horrifying possibilities. This typifies the oscillation in the dual process model of grief between ‘loss-oriented’ and ‘restoration-oriented’ responses. A couple whose child disappeared once told me that it was as if their world had gone into a permanent stutter. While you are left replaying the same nightmare scenarios in your head in a continuous loop, you can never really begin to heal.

  It is hard to imagine, too, the crippling, unresolved grief suffered by the bereaved who never have a body to mourn. Though they may be certain in their heads that the person they have lost is dead, their hearts may never acknowledge it. Families of those caught up in a fire, plane crash or natural disaster, for example, may have a reasonable expectation that a body will eventually be found, and having to accept that this is not always the case adds an extra burden to their grief.

  This is why forensic anthropologists will examine every single fragment of a body, no matter how small, in
an attempt to try to secure an identification. The case of a fatal fire in Scotland illustrates how we can make the vital difference between the fate of a person perhaps remaining for ever unconfirmed and a body being named and laid to rest. A remote house was destroyed by a blaze that had probably been raging for an hour or more before a farmer spotted the red glow in the distance and called the fire brigade. By the time the firefighters had been scrambled from a station over twenty miles away and had negotiated the winding, single-track country roads to reach the house, it was little more than a burned-out shell. The roof had collapsed, and the roof tiles and charred remnants of the contents of the attic space had buried everything under a layer of debris over 3ft deep.

  The elderly lady who lived in the house was known to like a drink or two and was a heavy smoker. We were told that in the winter, to keep warm, she would usually sleep on a pull-out sofa bed in the sitting room, where she kept a coal fire burning day and night. We convened a forensic strategy meeting and agreed that her remains were therefore most likely to be found in the vicinity of the sofa bed. Once the fire brigade had certified the building safe to enter, we obtained a plan of the probable layout of the room and plotted the best way to get into it and to reach the sofa bed without disturbing vital evidence. Dressed in white ‘Teletubby’ suits, black wellingtons, face masks, knee pads and double-layer nitrile gloves, we inched our way painstakingly on hands and knees along the walls into the sitting room, clearing the rubble down to foundation floor level with brushes, shovels and buckets, searching all the while for the grey, telltale signs of fragmented bones.

  It was slow work: the house was black from the fire, wet from the firefighters’ hoses, still smoking in places and warm to the touch. After two hours we reached what was left of the sofa bed against the easterly wall and carefully cleared the debris on top of it, but there were no human remains to be found within its metal skeleton. We noted that it had not been unfolded, which indicated that it was unlikely the woman who lived here had retired for the night before the fire started.

  After three hours, we had a second strategy meeting to decide where to search next. The vestiges of the sofa bed were removed and we debated whether we should continue further along the east wall or move west into the main body of the room. While surveying the destruction, I noticed a small, grey fragment no more than 3cm in length and about 2cm wide. We photographed and lifted it. It was part of a human mandible, with no teeth present, that had calcined or burned to such an extent that it was virtually ashed.

  The suggestion now was that the remains might be lying between where the sofa had been and the fireplace. Here we recovered the highly friable and fragmented bones of a left leg, some vertebrae from the spine, melded with a nylon-type material, probably the remnants of the woman’s clothing, and a left collarbone (clavicle).

  So we had, it seemed, found the remains of the elderly occupant of the house. But how were we to confirm that they were hers? We were never going to be able to extract DNA from a skeleton that consisted of scarcely more than ashes. She had worn false teeth, but these had probably melted in the fire. We had to work with what we had. The clavicle held the key. This showed clear signs of having been fractured in the past. A bone that has been broken and has then healed rarely looks exactly the same as one that has never been broken. While a bone does mend, it is something of a patch job, and rarely does it repair itself with such precision that it leaves no clue to its previous misadventure.

  The woman’s medical records revealed that some ten years before, she had fallen and broken her left collarbone. It was enough for the procurator fiscal to allow her identity to be confirmed and grant permission for her remains to be released to her family for burial. There was barely enough to fill a small shoebox, but it was something.

  For the fire recovery officers, this case was a wake-up call to the importance of having a forensic anthropologist at the scene. They admitted that they would never have recognised these grey lumps of ash as human remains; indeed, they might well never have noticed them at all, and just cleared them away with the rubble from the fire. Since that incident, in Scotland forensic anthropologists have regularly attended fatal fires along with the police and the fire service. A great working relationship has been forged and it has proven its worth time and again in the recovery of body parts that only a scientist could reasonably be expected to recognise.

  ◊

  The two most troublesome categories of missing persons for our profession are those who go missing without leaving a clue as to where we might start to look for them and bodies to which we are unable to assign an identity.

  We have all read newspaper articles about a young man or woman disappearing while walking home from a party late on a Saturday night. In this type of case, using research undertaken by the UK Missing Persons Bureau, we can speculate on what is most likely to have happened and activate the appropriate search protocols. For example, if a section of the route somebody took home was near water, perhaps a river, a canal or a lake, then these will be the places to check first. Approximately 600 people in the UK each year succumb to water-related deaths. The largest category (about 45 per cent) are accidental, around 30 per cent are suicides and less than 2 per cent are as a result of criminal intent. Perhaps not surprisingly, the day of the week most frequently associated with these deaths is Saturday, the peak time for recreational activities and excess drug or alcohol consumption. Some 30 per cent of deaths by water are coastal, shore or beach-related incidents, about 27 per cent are associated with rivers while the sea, harbours and canals account for roughly 8 per cent apiece. Of the reported suicides associated with water, over 85 per cent involve canals and rivers. Such compelling statistics explain why bodies of water are high on the list of prime potential search locations.

  Research on missing children, too, provides invaluable information for major incident police teams and their expert advisers. Most children feared to have been kidnapped (over 80 per cent) are found swiftly and returned safely with no nefarious intent involved. Usually they have simply wandered off or got lost. Abduction murders, not surprisingly, receive extensive media coverage, but fortunately they are rare. The victims are more likely to be girls than boys, and few are children younger than five. These statistics provide no comfort to families who face this distressing situation, of course, but they are a necessary underpinning to pragmatic intelligence-led policing.

  When a child is not found quickly, foul play does become the most likely explanation, although some families cling to the hope offered by tales of abducted children reunited years later, safe and well, with their parents. Such cases are unusual but they are not unheard of, as the story of Kamiyah Mobley illustrates. Taken from a hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1998, when she was only a few hours old, by a woman who had recently suffered a miscarriage, Kamiyah was eventually found alive and well eighteen years later, 300 miles away in South Carolina, having enjoyed a generally happy childhood oblivious of her true identity. For only a very few lucky families will there be an outcome such as this, and it comes with a heavy price, not least of which is the foundation-shaking damage caused to the child’s sense of identity and belonging. For other children, abducted with more sinister intent, there may be a legacy of abuse – every parent’s greatest nightmare.

  In spite of being well aware that stories like Kamiyah’s are exceptional, many affected families keep a small flame of hope alive across many decades, which perhaps helps to numb the hard edges of their pain. Without a body, and especially when there is no evidence to confirm that their child is dead, they consider that to do otherwise would be tantamount to abandonment.

  Such cases remain officially open, waiting patiently for some new evidence to surface, for as long as there is public benefit in their being so: a surviving family, or the chance that the perpetrator may still be alive to be brought to justice. As a police superintendent reminded me recently: ‘There is no such thing as a closed cold case.’ When a body is found and we
can make a positive identification, the news is never welcome to relatives as it dashes those long-nurtured hopes and dreams and forces a harsh acceptance of the reality of the ultimate loss. And we are only too aware of the further pain that will be caused as the investigation reveals the circumstances surrounding the last days and the death of someone precious to them. But I like to think that, in the long term, uncovering the truth will prove to be a small kindness in finally breaking that stutter of uncertainty and permitting some level of coping and healing to enter their lives.

  I think often about the families whose children are still missing and wonder how I would feel if I had to walk in their shoes. In general I have tried to maintain, as far as I can, anonymity for those whose personal tragedies are recounted in this book but one exception I would like to make is for two missing children, and one mother, who have never been found, in the hope that maybe, just maybe, revisiting their cases might help to find and return them to those who still miss them. Their families have accepted that they are dead, and their one desire now is to know where their loved ones are and to be able to ‘bring them home’. Who knows what turn of events might suddenly jolt someone’s memory or conscience, and if there is the tiniest chance that telling their stories again here could help bring two families the answers they so desperately need, then it is worthwhile. My grandmother, a great believer in fate, taught me that we never know when an alignment of moments might produce the right alchemy for change.

  The first disappearance dates back to my teenage years, and I remember it vividly because it happened on my own doorstep. I could never have imagined then that nearly thirty years later I would become involved in what is currently one of the UK’s longest-running missing persons cases. Renee MacRae, aged thirty-six, of Inverness, and her three-year-old son Andrew were last seen alive on Friday 12 November 1976. Police were initially told that after dropping off her elder son with her estranged husband, she was heading for Kilmarnock to visit her sister, though it later emerged that she was probably going to meet the man with whom she had been having a four-year affair – and who, it transpired, was Andrew’s biological father – William MacDowell.