by Sue Black
When we have a potential identity for our body, DNA extracted from the bone can be compared with a sample from a mother, father, sister, brother or children. It may even be possible to acquire the missing person’s own source DNA, perhaps from a toothbrush, hairbrush or ponytail bobble that still holds some shed hair with cells at the base. In the UK, we may be able to access source DNA from the Guthrie cards retained by the National Health Service. These contain small blood samples taken from almost every baby born in the UK since the 1950s, obtained by a pinprick test on the heel, blotted on to paper and used to test for a variety of genetic conditions including sickle-cell disease, phenylketonuria, hypothyroidism and cystic fibrosis. Almost all NHS authorities keep these Guthrie tests, although their use for the purpose of forensic identification is somewhat contentious as it is not one for which the original consent was given. It was a Guthrie card that provided the match for at least one individual who died in the Asian tsunami of 2004, enabling identity to be confirmed and the body to be returned to the family. The privacy question, and whether the outcome of a positive, or indeed negative, identification can ever justify the absence of consent, is one for the lawyers to debate.
The UK National Criminal Intelligence DNA Database (NDNAD), set up in 1995, is the largest national DNA database in the world. Over 6 million profiles are stored there, representing nearly 10 per cent of the country’s population. Approximately 80 per cent are from men. Recent statistics suggest that the database helps to identify a suspect in around 60 per cent of criminal cases. A full national database of DNA for all UK citizens would be relatively straightforward to introduce and would very probably reduce the number of unidentified bodies and unsolved crimes. However, opinion is strongly divided on whether the benefits of a national system should be permitted to outweigh the right to privacy and anonymity. That is one very angry hornet’s nest and I suspect the arguments will roll on for a very long time.
Sometimes, often in cold cases, an individual’s DNA sample can result in them unwittingly helping to bring to justice an offender to whom they are related. One example is the case of the shoe rapist, who raped at least four women in south Yorkshire in the 1980s and attempted to do the same to two others. After attacking them he would steal their shoes. Some twenty years later, the DNA sample of a woman charged with a drink-driving offence was placed on the DNA database and a familial genetic link to the rapist was highlighted. She was his sister. When the man’s workplace was raided, police found more than a hundred pairs of ladies’ shoes, including those belonging to the rape victims. He was given an indeterminate sentence and the judge ordered that he should serve at least fifteen years in prison.
Although there is no central database for dental records, most UK citizens visit a dentist at some point in their life and so there will be evidence of the work undertaken on their teeth – if we can track down their dentist. Many people have more than one set of dental records. Not everybody stays with same dentist and, with many procedures not available on the NHS, records of private treatment may be held by a different dentist from the one with whom we are officially registered. As increasing numbers of patients choose to go abroad for better, and often cheaper, cosmetic alterations, some of these won’t even be in the same country. Such records are rarely traceable. And given that many dentists only keep documentation for audit purposes, the information available may be hard to interpret in relation to the mouth that is being investigated.
A recent additional complication arises, ironically, from advances in dentistry. In common with others of my generation, I do not have a straight tooth in my head. I have a palate typical of my northern European ancestry which is not wide enough for all my teeth, so they are all crowded in, higgledy-piggledy, like headstones in an old graveyard. By the time I was fourteen, I didn’t have a single tooth that wasn’t filled, either. My trace metal levels of silver, mercury, tin and copper are probably off the charts. God bless the good old Scottish diet and the lack of fluoride in our water. The result is that, although my mouth may not be pretty, it is highly unlikely to look like anybody else’s, especially after root-canal work, veneers and wisdom-tooth extractions over the years. If my body needed to be identified, my dentist would be able to confirm without hesitation that it was mine.
By contrast, many of today’s teenagers have perfect teeth. Their dental braces have ensured that every tooth is straight so that they can flash their bleached Hollywood smiles (teeth are supposed to be slightly yellow, not white), and if they have any fillings at all, these are likely to be white as well and really difficult to spot. I’m sure our family dentist would have trouble confirming the identity of my daughters from their dentition.
In the UK, fingerprints can be taken from anyone who has been arrested or detained on suspicion of committing, or having committed, an offence. Ident1, the searchable database for finger and palm prints, holds over 7 million ten-prints (prints from each of the ten digits) and makes more than 85,000 matches every year with evidence recovered from crime scenes. This system is also used at border controls, where it is estimated that over 40,000 identities every single week are checked by UK visa and immigration officers.
As long as we have biological parameters and a likely identity for remains, one or a combination of these three INTERPOL-approved identifiers will usually enable us to confirm personal identity. Even when primary identifiers cannot assist, often there are secondary sources such as scars, tattoos, clothing, photos or other personal effects which allow us to be reasonably certain that the deceased is a match for a specific missing person.
The bodies we cannot name – like the names of the missing whose bodies have never been found – are those that haunt forensic anthropologists. None more so, for me, than that of a young man whose body was discovered at Balmore in East Dunbartonshire. Further information about him is listed at the end of this book. In an absolutely unashamed appeal for assistance, I would like to describe him here because there may be someone out there who can help us solve the mystery of his identity and allow us to give him back to his family.
The story began for us when our team at Dundee University was contacted in January 2013 regarding some badly decomposed human remains found hanging in a secluded area of woodland in the Balmore area. They had probably been there for between six and nine months when they were discovered on 16 October 2011. Missing person checks and DNA profiling had yielded no matches. The personal effects associated with the remains had revealed nothing that could assist with identification. The procurator fiscal was not of the opinion that the death was suspicious, believing it to have been suicide, but had requested that one last attempt be made to secure identity before the body was buried as an ‘unident’. We were asked to examine the skeletal remains with a view to formulating a biological profile (Dr Craig Cunningham), reconstructing the face (Dr Chris Rynn) and analysing the personal effects found with the remains (Dr Jan Bikker).
The pelvis, skull and long bones all told us that they were likely to be those of a male. His age was put at between twenty-five and thirty-four, indicated in particular by the ageing of his costal cartilages (the soft tissue that connects the rib end to the breast bone), his pubic symphysis (the joint between the right and left halves of the pelvis at the front, behind the pubic region) and the junction between his first and second sacral vertebrae (at the base of the spine). He was probably of northern European ancestry and had fair hair – some of which was still present. His height was between 5ft 8ins and 6ft 1ins (1.75m and 1.85m) and he was of slight frame. No fingerprints were obtainable. He had previously had some dental work but this could not be traced without a possible name.
What was perhaps the best chance of identifying him lay in his many injuries. A healed fracture to the left nasal bone may have been visible in life as a crooked nose. There was a healed fracture to a bone at the base of the skull called the lateral pterygoid plate. Both were likely to have resulted from the same traumatic event, probably several months before his death
. Had he had an accident, or had he been the victim of a serious beating?
An additional fracture to the left side of his jaw, which had been missed in the original postmortem examination, had not healed successfully but may have been sustained at the same time. This should have been treated in hospital with plates and screws but since it had not, he would have experienced tremendous pain every time he tried to eat. Did this relentless agony lead to a decision to commit suicide?
His kneecaps showed some evidence of articular degeneration, unusual in someone so young, and it is likely that he also found walking painful, so perhaps he limped. His upper left central tooth was fractured, possibly in the same incident that caused the injuries to the rest of his face, and the chip would have been visible every time he opened his mouth.
He was wearing a light blue, short-sleeved, V-neck polo shirt with a white printed design on the front featuring text and stamps; a long-sleeved, dark blue, crew-neck cardigan with a front zip; button-fly denim jeans and laced black and grey trainers with a red sole. The length of the jeans was in keeping with the calculated stature range and the waist size corresponded with the small size of the polo shirt and cardigan. Do these clothes ring any bells? Please do look at the list at the end of the book for further details, including brands, logos and precise sizing.
Who was this man? One suggestion was that he may have been an apparently homeless chap said to have been living rough in the woods around Balmore. He fitted our description and I understand that he has not been seen since, so he remains a possibility. But as the police had no name for him, the trail went cold.
Maybe the man from Balmore didn’t want to be found. Perhaps he was scared and in hiding. Who was responsible for his broken jaw? Why did he choose to live with his pain and distress rather than seek medical assistance? Why did he take his own life? What a strange phrase that is. In what way did he ‘take’ it? From whom did he ‘take’ it? Our language around death can be inconstant and nebulous. She throws up so many questions for us and sometimes we simply cannot find the answers on our own.
I believe that if you have a right to an identity in life, you have the same right to it in death. A few may choose not to exercise that right, but those of us who are left behind have a duty to try to restore it to a person who has been deprived of it if we possibly can. The passage of time does not alter that. It makes the task increasingly difficult, but cases such as that of Alexander Fallon, who was finally identified sixteen years after he died in the 1987 King’s Cross fire, demonstrate that it is still achievable.
Somewhere there must be a family who is missing the man from Balmore. It is our fervent wish to be able to give him back to them.
CHAPTER 9
The body mutilated
‘Let fire and cross, flocks o’ beasts, broken bones and dismemberment come upon me’
Ignatius of Antioch
bishop and martyr (circa 35–107)
The position of the dismemberment cuts on Gemma McCluskie.
THE ACT OF separating a body into parts as a sacrifice or punishment is present to some extent in almost all cultures. Wood etchings depicting the Spanish atrocities in the New World or the eighteenth-century satirical engravings of the Day of Judgement made by anatomist William Hunter all convey a human acceptance of the practice of deconstructing the corporeal whole. And indeed it has been performed in assorted ways in almost all societies at some stage of their history for a variety of cultural, religious and ritualistic reasons. It is only in relatively recent times that desecration of the human form by dismemberment has come to be seen as repugnant and synonymous with criminality, usually murder.
Of course, not all dismemberments are criminal. An accident at work or a sporting misadventure may lead to the loss of a limb, and suicide by jumping in front of a train can cause extensive corporeal dismemberment and wide dispersal, as can violent mass fatalities such as plane crashes, resulting in detached body parts being found or having to be searched for.
Of the 500 to 600 murders a year that take place in the UK – fewer than 1 in every 100,000 members of the population – approximately three are recorded as involving criminal dismemberment, so it is certainly not common. But when it does happen, it fires the imagination of the public and the media and tends to garner more column inches than almost any other kind of crime, providing a rich seam of inspiration for novels, television dramas and horror films.
In the real world, how do you dispose of a body so that no one will ever find it? Everyone thinks they have an answer to that question (many of them informed by watching Dexter on TV) and a theory on what constitutes the perfect murder. But of course, if a murder is perfect, no body will ever be found and no perpetrator punished – the only crimes we hear about are those that are imperfect. If a killer has got away with it, which has certainly happened, we remain in blissful ignorance of how they did it. Even when no body comes to light, prosecutions do, of course, take place, though such cases are more difficult to prove.
A body is a very unwieldy object to handle at the best of times and its size, weight and inability to co-operate can make its disposal somewhat troublesome for anyone trying to conceal a death. Unless the remains are going to stay within the premises where the death has occurred (and bodies do get found under beds, in cupboards and wardrobes, behind bath panels, in attics, basements, gardens, sheds, garages, up chimneys and under new patios and driveways), it will need to be transported elsewhere. Indeed, there is often an urgent requirement to remove it from the scene and for the murderer to literally distance him or herself from the evidence.
There are, however, many practical problems to be addressed. Can you safely move it intact? If not, where are you going to cut it up? What are you going to use? What are you going to wrap the pieces in? Because they are going to leak, believe me. What type of receptacle will be big enough? When do you move it? Are you likely to be seen? There may be CCTV cameras everywhere or passersby who might notice you. What kind of transport are you going to use? Where are you going to take it? How are you going to dispose of it when you get there? Can you do it on your own?
If a murder has been premeditated, the killer might have considered in advance what to do with the body, but as most killings occur in the heat of the moment there is usually no forward planning. Once the perpetrator realises the victim is dead, whether or not it was intentional, all these questions and more are likely to flood into an already panicked mind. As a result, the solution arrived at is often poorly thought through and executed on the spur of the moment. Very few people will have experience of this situation. For most, it will be the first and only time they take a life and dismember a body, and so they tend to unwittingly leave a trail of evidence for both police and scientific investigators.
Whether or not a murder has been planned is important as premeditation carries a higher sentencing tariff if the court finds the offender guilty, as does intentional dismemberment of a body. If murder is regarded as perhaps the most heinous of all crimes, the deliberate desecration of remains is seen as an additional insult, a step beyond the boundaries of humanity. Proof of dismemberment is therefore treated as aggravation of a homicide and punished accordingly. The fact that those incarcerated in Her Majesty’s prisons on whole life tariffs are all there for murder and aggravated murder demonstrates how seriously society takes these crimes.
As criminal dismemberment cases are so out of the ordinary, police officers might only ever be faced with one, if any, in their entire career. So they often seek advice from other professionals, including forensic pathologists and anthropologists, with more experience in this area. My team at Dundee sees enough of these cases to warrant being designated UK experts by the National Crime Agency.
There are five main classifications of criminal dismemberment, based essentially on the intent of the perpetrator. Defensive dismemberment is by far the most common and occurs in about 85 per cent of cases. This odd term reflects the functional requirement to get rid of a body as quic
kly and conveniently as possible. The motive is the elimination of evidence and concealment of the offence – which is usually, but not exclusively, murder. In other words, it is a means to an end, as opposed to an element of the original crime. It appears logical at the time to reduce a body to pieces of manageable size that can be removed from the scene efficiently and disposed of without drawing attention to the death.
Statistics tell us that most killers and dismemberers are known to their victims and that the murder is most likely to occur in the home of either the victim or the offender. The dismemberment usually takes place at the murder site, using tools generally available in our kitchens, sheds and garages. Not surprisingly, the bathroom – designed to deal with a lot of fluid and to be easily wiped down and cleaned – is the most frequently chosen domestic site. It also has, in the bath or shower, a receptacle specifically tailored to the size and shape of the human body. So in a case of suspected criminal dismemberment, most scene-of-crime officers (SOCOs) will start their investigation in the bathroom.
Bending down to saw or hack a body in the confined space of a bath or shower is tricky, so spatters of blood and body tissue are common and, however thoroughly the perpetrator believes they have cleaned up afterwards, swabs taken around the walls, the base of the taps and the floor will often reveal traces of blood. Investigating the contents of the U-bend can also be productive, as is looking closely at the surface of the bath or shower for marks left behind by a saw or cleaver. It is hard to cut up a body without the blade catching somewhere.
Defensive dismemberment is generally characterised by an anatomical approach to the process since a body is easiest to handle when divided into six parts: head, torso, two upper limbs and two lower limbs. An intact torso is still a very heavy and bulky section to shift, but bisection tends to be avoided due to the complications of exposing and cutting the viscera. Cutting through bone isn’t straightforward, either, because it is so hard – in life it must be strong enough to support our body weight day in, day out and to withstand knocks and falls. Knives will not do it. Mostly implements such as saws, cleavers and even garden loppers are used. Limbs are often the first parts to be removed. As they are connected only at one end, they get in the way and the axis of the body will be more manageable without them hanging around. Usually the cut is attempted across the single bone of the thigh (femur) or arm (humerus) to sever the limbs from the main trunk.