All That Remains

by Sue Black

  The head is more problematic to remove as the neck is comprised of a series of interlocking and overlapping bones, a bit like child’s building blocks, making a clean cut difficult to achieve. The real challenge here, though, is a psychological one. Most perpetrators will inflict this ultimate insult with the body lying prone (face down) rather than supine (face up): it is assumed that having to look at the victim’s eyes may deter them from decapitating a supine body.

  In terms of the practicalities, dismemberers probably decide that it will be easier to remove the head from the back whereas, if you know what you are doing, it is in fact much easier to do it from the front. The prospect of removing the head at all proves too daunting for many, and this may be the point at which bisecting the torso, difficult and unpleasant as that may be, begins to seem preferable. Going for that option is usually a big mistake as the ensuing mess is much more challenging to conceal. While the torso is intact, the internal organs will remain contained within the body cavities, but once they are exposed they will leak copiously and create a really noxious stench.

  Unless the body parts are going to be hidden in the dwelling, they must then be removed from the bathroom and taken out of the premises. Most perpetrators will wrap the pieces in plastic bags or bin liners and clingfilm is also sometimes used, as are other forms of household plastics or linens like shower curtains, towels or duvets. In the process, the killer has to try not to get blood or tissue on the outside of the wrapping or the container in which the body parts will be carried. Bin bags, for example, can be torn by the sharp ends of cut bone and towels soaked with sufficient volumes of blood will leak.

  The notion of the body in the rolled-up carpet generally belongs to the days of Ealing comedies – the most common conveyances now are wheeled suitcases or rucksacks. Nobody looks twice at a person lifting a suitcase into a car or a taxi, or towing it down the road on foot. Offenders then tend to head for somewhere familiar to them to get rid of the remains. Water is the most common choice: rivers, lochs, lakes, ponds, canals or the sea.

  Defensive dismemberment also covers situations where the intention is to obscure the identity of the deceased. In these cases, dismemberment will be anatomically focused. The usual targets are the face (to obfuscate visual identification), teeth (to prevent comparison with dental records) and hands (to destroy fingerprint evidence). Sometimes skin may be cut off to eradicate evidence of tattoos and body parts stripped of all recognisable jewellery.

  Fortunately, these efforts tend to be unsuccessful. Killers may think they know the areas of the body that are key to identifying remains, but the reach of forensic science is greater than many of them imagine. As we have seen, there is almost no part of the body that cannot be used in some way to assist with identification. And over the last generation, the rise of a culture of artistic experimentation on the canvas of the human form has provided forensic experts with a wider range of potential leads. Increasing numbers of us are having ourselves tattooed, or our skin pierced in all kinds of places, or our breasts, buttocks, pecs and even our calves sculpted with silicone implants – all of these personal modifications provide new opportunities for identification, as long as sufficient evidence of the alteration survives.

  Obviously, the recovery of an intact body offers the best chance of success but sometimes badly decomposed or even dismembered remains can still provide important clues to identity. A perpetrator may remove jewellery from piercings, but if the skin is still there, the presence of the puncture marks have a value. The silicone remnants of implants – and if we are really lucky, a visible and still decipherable batch number – can be most helpful in tracking down where surgery has been performed and upon whom. A tattoo might be removed through skinning or dismemberment, but if you understand how tattooing works, it takes only a little bit of anatomical know-how to uncover some evidence of inking.

  The skin has three layers: the epidermis, dermis and hypodermis. The outer layer, the epidermis (the bit we can see), is comprised of dead cells that slough off continually, at a rate of almost 40,000 a day. So any ink laid down here will fade and eventually be lost, as happens when you have a temporary tattoo, such as a henna inking. Beneath the epidermis lies the dermis, the layer tattoo artists aim for with their needles. This has lots of nerve endings but no blood vessels, which is why having a tattoo is going to be painful, but it shouldn’t bleed. Think about how a paper cut, which doesn’t always even draw blood, can hurt like the devil. This is because you have cut through the epidermis and into the dermis, with its sensitive nerve endings, but not deep enough to reach the blood vessels in the hypodermis.

  Tattooing too far into the hypodermis is futile as the cardiovascular system will remove the ink as waste material and the body will excrete it. The molecules of the dyes used in tattooing are large and designed to be inert so that they are generally not broken down by the body, do not interact with the immune system and can remain successfully trapped in the dermal layer between the epidermis and the hypodermis – a bit like the cheese in a sandwich. Inevitably, some breakdown of the ink molecules will occur (tattoos do fade with time) and these remnants will be vacuumed up into the lymphatic system for disposal.

  Each of the lymph vessels within the dermis will eventually connect into a terminal swelling. We have many of these lymph nodes scattered throughout our bodies, but there is a high concentration of them at the top of our limbs, in the groin and armpit in particular. At these sites they act a bit like a sink trap in a shower that collects hair: as the ink molecules are too big to pass through the nodes, the dye accumulates there. Which is why, in people with tattoos, the nodes eventually take on all the colours of the inks.

  We have always been aware in anatomy of this probably harmless quirk: as a student, when dissecting the armpit of dear Henry, my cadaver-teacher, who had those old-fashioned sailor’s blue anchor tattoos on his forearms, I noted that his lymph nodes were blue with little hints of red from the lettering associated with the image. Today, with tattoos becoming a must-have fashion accessory (in the US, nearly 40 per cent of young people between the ages of twenty and thirty have at least one), we see this far more often and, reflecting the rainbow of colours used by tattooists, the current population’s lymph nodes are truly spectacular in their kaleidoscopic variation.

  Imagine a dismembered torso is found, with no trace of the upper limbs. If it is still sufficiently fleshed, we can look for the lymph nodes in the armpits, analyse any dyes found there and they will tell us whether tattoos have been present on one upper limb or two, and what colour the tattoos were on those missing limbs. Unfortunately, we can’t predict whether the image might have been a dolphin, some barbed wire or simply the word ‘Mum’. But when there is next to nothing to go on, it’s a start.

  Much to my chagrin, one of my daughters has three tattoos (that I’m aware of), visible piercings and very probably other modifications that a mother should never know about. Even I might consider a modest tattoo one day, if only for practical reasons. I have toyed with the idea of having the words ‘UK, Black’ and my national insurance number inked under my watch strap, hidden discreetly from view, after the fashion of Lady Randolph Churchill, who was reputed to have had a tattoo of a serpent around her wrist. Then, if I should be involved in a mass fatality, or my remains are not found for some time after I die, that strip of skin will give the identification team a head start and make their job just a little bit easier. I haven’t yet plucked up the necessary courage. Remembering how anxious I was when I went into our local jeweller’s in Inverness on my fifteenth birthday to give myself a present of pierced ears lobes – I told them that if they asked me to make an appointment and come back, I would lose my nerve, so it had to be now or never – I wonder whether perhaps a tattoo might be just a step too far for me.

  Some defensive dismemberers may make attempts to destroy remains completely, for example through chemical treatment or burning. Dissolving a body is not as straightforward as some people think. Strong a
cids or alkalis are dangerous liquids to work with and obtaining them in sufficient quantity will arouse suspicion. Finding a container they won’t corrode in the process would not be easy, either.

  I once worked on a case in the north of England where a man admitted to murdering his mother-in-law and disposing of her remains. His claim that he dissolved her in a bath of vinegar and caustic soda and her liquefied body disappeared down the plughole was rather let down by his dodgy grasp of chemistry. Vinegar being an acid, and caustic soda an alkali, they would balance and cancel each other out. Furthermore, there is no way that chemicals sold over the counter would be strong enough to dissolve adult human bones, teeth and cartilage into a liquid that you could simply pour down the drain. The acid would have to be super-strong, and the chances of domestic plumbing coping with it are close to zero.

  Even when a confession is forthcoming, sometimes the improbability of the evidence offered by the defendant can be eyewateringly naive. This one then said that he had chopped up his mother-in-law’s body and placed the pieces in rubbish bins around the city. We never did find any evidence of her, and there was certainly none to support the urban myth circulating in his home city about her postmortem presence in his kebab shop.

  The second most common dismemberment classification is aggressive dismemberment, sometimes referred to as ‘overkill’. This is a progression from a heightened state of rage, often reached during the homicide itself, which continues into the dismemberment phase, where it manifests in violent mutilation of the body. It is characterised by an almost haphazard, rather than logical, approach to the act. In such cases it is not unusual for the dismemberment to begin before the victim is dead and it can therefore sometimes ultimately be the cause of death. The analysis of patterns of injury assists in the determination of this category, which typifies the modus operandi of England’s most famous serial killer, dubbed Jack the Ripper, who murdered at least five women, and possibly more than eleven, in the streets of Whitechapel in Victorian London.

  Over a hundred possible identities have been suggested for Jack the Ripper. Disappointingly, there is little evidence to substantiate the claims made for William Bury, the last man to be hanged in Dundee, who was executed for the murder and mutilation of his wife Ellen and had lived in Bow, near Whitechapel, at the time of the killings. But if it was him, I have the neck vertebrae of Jack the Ripper sitting on a shelf in my office.

  Offensive dismemberment, the third type, often follows a murder committed for sexual gratification, or results from the sadistic pleasure of inflicting pain on the living or meting out injury to the dead. This type of dismemberment frequently involves mutilation of the sexual regions of the body and may be the primary purpose of the murder. It is, thankfully, very rare.

  Necromanic dismemberment, the rarest type of all, receives undue and disproportionate attention in films and novels because of its huge scope for the portrayal of gruesome and horrifying acts of violence and depravity. The motivation may be the acquisition of a body part as a trophy, symbol or fetish. Cannibalism also falls into this category. It should be noted that necromanic dismemberment is not always preceded by killing: it can take place, for example, when individuals have access to an already dead body, or involve the exhumation and desecration of corpses. In deference to humanity, decency and religious beliefs, we expect corporeal remains to be left in peace in perpetuity and while society can accept accidental disturbance or planned intervention for justifiable causes, what is not tolerated is abuse of the dead.

  Finally, there is communication dismemberment, often used by violent gangs or warring factions as a threat to persuade their enemies to desist from a particular activity or to coerce others, generally young men, to join their gang and not a rival one. The message is powerful and clear: if you do not do what we want, this is what will happen to you.

  In Kosovo, where I spent most of 1999 and 2000 as part of the British forensic team assisting the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, we saw examples of this form of ‘communication’. A young man, usually an ethnic Albanian, would be abducted, murdered and dismembered into small pieces. Parts of his body would be left on the doorsteps of the families of other young men as a calling card advising them not to enlist in the paramilitary Kosovo Liberation Army. With some, it achieved the desired effect instantly. For others, though, it merely fuelled a nationalistic determination to join the guerrilla warfare against the Serbian militia.

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  As designated experts in the UK, my team is often called upon closer to home to help with dismemberment cases. These can be complicated enough without the body parts being scattered across two different counties, as they were in one such case in 2009.

  The first the police knew of this suspicious death was when a left leg and foot turned up, wrapped in plastic bags, by the side of a country road in Hertfordshire. It was very fresh and had been so cleanly detached from the torso at the hip joint that they thought it might be the result of a clinical amputation from a nearby hospital. They checked first with all the hospitals in the area to see if there were any irregularities with their waste-incineration procedures, but all were adamant it hadn’t come from them. A search of the DNA database turned up no matches. It was clear that the limb belonged to an adult Caucasian male. Height could be calculated from its length, but on the basis of the limited information that could be gleaned from the leg alone, it did not seem to tally with descriptions of anyone listed locally as missing or with any individuals recorded by the Missing Persons Bureau.

  Seven days later a left forearm, severed at the elbow and wrist, was found, again wrapped in plastic bags, in a ditch by the side of another road about twenty miles away from where the left leg had been dumped. The DNA was a match with the leg. Two days after this discovery, a horrified farmer in Leicestershire came upon a human head that had been tossed into his cow field. Because the report of the head was made to a different police force, a link with the previously matched leg and forearm was not made immediately. Leicestershire police had been looking for a high-profile missing person and wondered if perhaps the head could be hers – although the remains were very recent, facial identification was not possible because the skin and soft tissue were absent, probably, the pathologist believed, due to animal activity. But our analysis indicated that the individual was most likely to be male, and a superimposition of the skull on to a photograph of the missing person suggested that it was highly unlikely to be a match.

  The Leicestershire police, too, made a fruitless search of the DNA database and for a few days two separate forces were independently hunting for missing body parts in their own areas. The following week, back in Hertfordshire, a right leg, cut into two pieces at the knee, wrapped in plastic bags and concealed in a holdall, was found in a layby on a rural road. Finally, four days later, the torso was discovered, with the right arm, from which the hand had been severed at the wrist, and the upper part of the left arm still attached, all wrapped in towels and stuffed into a suitcase which had been dumped near a field drain in the countryside, again in Hertfordshire.

  A DNA link between all of the body parts was now made but, with no match on the national database, establishing the victim’s identity, and therefore investigating his death and finding the person, or persons, responsible for it, was going to be challenging. Although the feet were still attached to the lower limbs, the hands had both been removed and were still missing, so the dismemberment did not quite follow the normal six-piece pattern. The distribution of body parts, however, was consistent with the most common motivation for dismemberment: ease of disposal. The absence of the hands and damage to the face pointed to the possible additional defensive intent of attempting to obscure the victim’s identity.

  Having a body spread over such a wide geographical area caused a bit of administrative hassle. Who should lead the investigation? The force that found the head? The force that found the first body part? The one in possession of most of the body? It is no small
logistical problem to operate a major incident inquiry across different police forces, not least because of budgetary and staff implications. But as it turned out, this was one of the most professional collaborations we have encountered between any two police forces.

  Dr Lucina Hackman and I headed south to assist. The long journey provided us with a lot of talking time – and if talking were an Olympic event we would take home gold every time. Although we made a little detour on the way to help with another matter involving a drug gang turf war and a facially disfigured body in the north of England, we spent a huge amount of time discussing the dismemberment case. We had a hypothesis that didn’t coincide with the police theories and we needed those seven hours in the car to think it through and talk it out because, if we were wrong, we were going to look like the biggest couple of numpties this side of the River Tweed. But if we were right, there were going to be a lot of very hyperactive police officers running around Hertfordshire and Leicestershire.

  We didn’t agree with the suppositions relating to the MO of the dismemberment. There were a couple of things that just didn’t fit for us and we are a suspicious couple of old biddies. Our first problem was with the sites of the dismemberment cuts. Yes, the pattern was almost classical, but the way it had been done was unusual. Those who have never dismembered a body before – and let’s face it, that is the vast majority of the population – would be most likely to attempt to saw through the long bones of the limbs, the humerus in the arm and the femur in the thigh. Research at our centre has indicated that, when faced with the necessity of dismantling a body, most people would reach for a sharp kitchen knife first of all, and only when they found that, while it could cut through the soft tissue of skin and muscle, it could not cut through bone, would they head to the shed or the garage for a saw, usually either a wood saw or a hacksaw. Those accustomed to cooking might also consider using a hacking implement such as a meat cleaver from the kitchen or an axe from an outbuilding. But this body looked as if it had been ‘jointed’ rather than sawn into pieces, and that is very rare. In fact it was a first for us. We needed to see the surfaces of the bones to determine what type of tools had been used because there was definitely something odd going on.