by Sue Black
We started by X-raying the two body bags to make sure they contained no unexpected ordnance. The images were a sobering sight indeed – shadows of jumbled pieces that would become a grim and taxing human jigsaw. The first body bag was opened and, lying on the top, still in his blue sleep suit, was the baby. Although he showed some quite extensive decomposition he was still reasonably intact and could be laid directly on to his own mortuary sheet in the certainty that he was the child aged six months.
With the rest we had to remove the remains bone by bone, cleaning away the adhering residue of decomposing tissue, identify the bone, assess its age and then place it on the mortuary sheet allocated to the corresponding individual. We were able to separate the women. The children’s grandmother was identifiable through her lack of teeth and her advanced osteoarthritis and osteoporosis. The two younger women were more challenging but for one of them, most likely the elder of the two, we had only the right side, which corroborated the story of the survivor. So she was in all probability his wife.
When it came to the children, if we got our analysis right there would be no duplication in terms of their ages until we came to the fourteen-year-old twin boys, since none of the others were the same age as one another. The bottom half of the twelve-year-old girl was recovered and she was identified relatively easily. The remnants of the younger children, aged three, five, six and eight, were sparse, but there was enough there for me to be confident that distinct parts could be separated out from the general tissue mass.
We had something now on every sheet except the bones that would allow us to differentiate between the twins. All that remained of either of them were two partial upper torsos and upper limbs as far down as the elbows. We knew these body parts belonged to the twins as they were the only children of the right age – but how to tell them apart? One set of limbs was associated with a Mickey Mouse vest, so we asked a police officer and interpreter to determine from the father whether any of his children could have been wearing such an item. We did not specify that the child was one of the twins, or even that he was a boy. The answer came back naming one of the twins as a Mickey Mouse fanatic, which enabled us to tentatively distinguish between them.
It was a long day, nearly twelve hours with barely a pause, but by the end of it we had identified and assigned as much of the material as we possibly could and all eleven mortuary sheets allocated to the remains of specific victims contained some definite representation of them. We obtained a list of their names, based on their ages, from the father and started to pack the pitiful remains into separate body bags. When the authorities refused to allow us to release the bodies of the twins as named individuals, my SIO, Steve Watts, went into battle. We explained why there was no way to separate them with any more certainty than we had been able to achieve, we talked them through our rationale and we wore them down into submission.
It meant that as we handed over each body bag to the survivor, the interpreter was able to tell him the name of the person it contained. The interpreters played such a crucial part in enabling us to be accepted by the community and they did a truly remarkable job. It was they who had to talk to the families, take their statements and translate back to them what we had found, all the time trying to insulate themselves from the horrors they had to hear about and communicate every single day of their working time in Kosovo.
While I make it a rule never to get personally involved – I couldn’t do my job properly otherwise – in this case I think we may have crossed the line by a hair’s breadth in forcing the issue about the twins. But we felt a particular connection and responsibility for these identifications, perhaps partly because most of the victims were children and partly because their father had suffered so much and borne it all with such courage and stoic dignity. It was the least comfort we could provide, and we knew that it was not possible for any more sophisticated scientific testing to improve on our professional opinion.
As it was, we still had to try to explain through the interpreter, gently but honestly, why the bags were not full, and why there was a twelfth bag which contained a mixture of remnants. With incredible grace, he accepted it with a calm understanding that was almost otherworldly. It was an extremely affecting day and we were physically and emotionally exhausted. When he shook hands with us all and said thank you, we found it hard to comprehend just how he could thank us for the job we had just done. But as my granny used to say, fate isn’t there for our convenience.
It weighed heavily on us that we had not been able to hand back a tidy set of eleven separate remains, which would have reassured this father that we had been completely successful in our reassignment. But this was not a humanitarian mission, this was a forensic investigation of war crimes, and if we were ever tempted to assign body parts just for the sake of neatness or consolation, we would be guilty of professional misconduct. We had to be certain that, if this human evidence were ever to be examined again in the future, the person we said was in each bag was genuinely the person we believed him or her to be.
We would never have achieved as much as we did without the knowledge and understanding of the juvenile skeleton I had gained from working on our textbook. That day I put into practice everything Louise and I had learned over those ten years of writing, and it brought home to me precisely why it had been such an important project for us both to undertake. I may have been the one in Kosovo that day, but Louise was inside my head all the while, reminding me of details as I checked and rechecked, kept notes, compiled lists and satisfied myself that I was as sure as I possibly could be before committing anything to a sign-off.
The task we undertook in Kosovo was a huge responsibility but it was enormously rewarding. What were the chances that I would just happen to be on hand for that particular case? Perhaps the attitude my grandmother would have taken is the right one: that it was never about chance, that all of it – my move to St Thomas’, partnering Louise, the work on the book – had been leading up to that moment. And beyond, since our book might in the future also enable somebody else to bring some small comfort in another dreadful situation. I certainly feel that even if we never again need to call on all that information, it was worth it just for that important identification in a mortuary in Pristina in 2000, the year it was published. Every time I leaf through it and see that picture of the scapula, I think of the father of those children and our textbook remains in my mind a fitting tribute to that single case.
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One of the questions most frequently asked of forensic anthropologists is how we cope with what we have to see and do. In response, I usually joke that it involves large amounts of alcohol and illegal substances, but the truth is I don’t think I’ve ever taken an illegal substance in my life and, other than the odd Jack or two, even drinking doesn’t do it for me these days. Do I wake up in the night sweating? Do I find it difficult to sleep? Do scenes from my work replay over and over in my mind? The answer to all of the above is a rather boring and mundane no. If pressed, I have some stock explanations about the need to remain professional and unbiased, the need to focus on the evidence, not what it represents from a personal or emotional perspective, and so on, but to be perfectly honest, I have never been spooked by the dead. It is the living who terrify me. The dead are much more predictable and co-operative.
Recently a colleague in a very different field said to me, with incredulity in his voice, ‘You talk of these things as if they are as normal as making a cup of tea. For the rest of us they are extraordinary.’ Isn’t it just part of life, though, that one man’s meat is another man’s poison? Perhaps forensic anthropologists are the sin-eaters of our day, addressing the unpleasant and unimaginable so that others don’t have to. It doesn’t mean, of course, that we don’t have our own weaknesses.
None of us is without fear – it is, after all, one of our oldest and strongest emotions – and we are all afraid of something. During my career there have been times when I’ve had to confront my single, genuine, full-on phobia. It
is one I have lived with since childhood and although I have done my best to cope with it, I have never conquered it. But true self-knowledge often lies in accepting our anxieties and flaws and facing up to our fears. Mine is my utterly ludicrous morbid fear of rodents. Any kind of rodent: mouse, rat, hamster, gerbil, capybara – all of them.
Very recently a local charity which supports our anatomy department was kind enough to give us a Christmas present: they sponsored a rat for us. Chewa (yes, he has a name) is a 3lb African giant-pouched rat who sniffs out tuberculosis for a living. He is a HeroRat and has saved over forty lives. Yes, I am impressed, I really am, but however much he deserves my admiration and affection, I am sorry – he is a rat!
It may seem strange for a forensic anthropologist, who deals every day with the dead, body parts and decomposing matter that would turn many stomachs, to suffer from such an irrational phobia. I agree, but understanding that is no consolation and doesn’t make the rodent community any less terrifying. It has been a recurring issue for me throughout my entire life and, in many ways, I suppose it has even helped to shape my career choices.
It all began on the idyllic shores of Loch Carron, on the west coast of Scotland, where my parents ran the Stromeferry Hotel until I was eleven years old, when we moved back to Inverness. One summer the dustmen (‘scaffies’, as they are known in Scotland) went on strike and the black bags of rubbish started to pile up around the back of the hotel. It doesn’t take long for the air in a thirty-bedroom establishment at the height of the summer season to turn sour and for our furry rodent friends to identify a source of free rancid food. I was nine, and I remember very clearly walking around the back of the hotel with my father one sunny afternoon when he quite calmly asked me to hand him a broom that was propped up against the wall. I complied without a second thought.
My father always vowed that what followed never occurred but, believe me, it did – I know it did, because it has haunted me every day of my life since and resurfaces whenever I have to interact with any furry rodent critters. He had seen a rat, which he proceeded to corner against a wall. I was horrified: to me it seemed enormous, and it was scared and squaring up for a fight. If I close my eyes, I can still see its shining red eyes, bared yellow teeth and lashing tail. I swear I heard it actually growling. I watched, transfixed by terror, as it leaped around, trying to escape, while my father beat it to death, terrified that it was going to jump on me and bite me. He thrashed it until the concrete turned red with its blood and it eventually stopped twitching. I have no memory of my father picking it up and throwing it into the rubbish. Perhaps I was too traumatised. But I never again walked round the back of our hotel on my own and from that moment onwards, I developed an unhealthy, deep-seated fear of and aversion to any and all rodents.
This phobia continued to be a problem when we returned to live in the countryside near Inverness. Our ancient, thick-walled house was sandwiched between a burn on one side and a field on the other. This meant that in the winter, all the nasty little scrabbly blighters used to come in from the cold to live off our heat and raid our larder. I would jump on to my bed at night for fear that a rat would jump out from under it and grab me by the ankle. As I lay in my bed I could hear them scampering across the rafters above my head. Suddenly, one would misjudge its leap and I would hear it fall and scutter down the space in the wall. Convinced that it was going to emerge in my room, I would pull the blankets up around my ears and tuck them around me so that there was no gap for these brutes to get in.
I always walked between my bedroom and the bathroom at night in the dark and in my bare feet. Imagine my fright when one night, as I padded along the landing, I stood on something furry and moving that squealed at me. I freaked out, and for months never left my bedroom at night, no matter how urgent the call of nature might become.
As a student, I was confronted with rats in my zoology class: a bucket of dead ones this time, which we were expected to dissect. I would have dissected absolutely anything else but nothing was ever going to persuade me to voluntarily touch a dead rat, let alone pick one out of a bucket. I got my dissection partner, Graham, to choose one for me and pin it out on the wax board. I made him cover its head and nasty little pointed teeth with a paper towel, and then place a second paper towel over its tail, because I couldn’t bear to look at that, either. Only then was I able to cut open its thorax and abdomen with my scalpel, guddle around in its innards and take out a liver, a stomach or a kidney.
When it came to disposing of the corpse, Graham had to unpin it for me and drop it into the bucket (he was a good friend). Needless to say, I was never going to be a zoologist or, for that matter, any kind of lab-based career researcher. As I recounted earlier, when it came to my honours research project, the reason I went into the field of human identification was to avoid the prospect of handling dead rodents.
It was inevitable that this would become a problem at St Thomas’ Hospital, given its location along the south bank of the River Thames. When I walked into my office on my first day there and saw the mousetraps and little bowls of poison along the walls of all the offices, I knew things weren’t going to end well for me here. Inevitably there was going to be a close encounter of the furry kind at some point. It happened one morning when I arrived at my office, walked over to my desk against the window and turned to see a monstrous dead rodent lying in the middle of the floor. In truth it was only maybe four inches long, but as far as I was concerned it might as well have been the size of Chewa.
I rang our technician, John, and screamed at him down the phone to get up to my office immediately and help me. He tore upstairs, bless him, obviously thinking I had been attacked, and found me sitting on my desk, shaking, the tears rolling down my face. I pointed to the dead mouse and explained that there was no way I could step over it to get out of the room. It had me trapped me like a prisoner. He could have laughed and ridiculed me but he was such a lovely man that he just quietly took the mouse away and never mentioned it again to me or, as far as I know, to any living soul. In fact, I think he checked my office for me regularly because I never again found a mouse in it. I felt such a twit but the phobia was fully hard-wired by then.
And then there was Kosovo. Our mortuary at Xerxe, being a former grain store, was a magnet for rodents – hordes of them. Every morning I would plead nicely with our Dutch military security to open up for me and then to go into the building making a lot of noise to chase all the rodents away. I couldn’t have crossed the threshold knowing they were there. I could hear the creatures scurrying along the pipes and squealing in complaint at being disturbed. The soldiers were very kind to me and never grumbled about doing this. Perhaps, seeing what I was prepared to deal with in the course of my job, they understood that I was not in general a complete nut job or wuss, and that my terror was real, if utterly illogical.
My worst experience, though, was at Podujevo, to the north-east of Pristina, where it was alleged that early in 1999 the Scorpions, a Serbian paramilitary organisation, killed fourteen Kosovo Albanians, mostly women and children. The bodies were said to be buried under the local meat market. It was a known ploy to bury bodies with a dead cow or horse on top of them, so that when we dug down and discovered non-human remains, we would assume this was simply the grave of an animal and would not trouble to dig any further.
The day we began to excavate under the meat market was swelteringly hot. We had a mechanical digger to help us and it slowly cleared away the topsoil, inch by inch, until something was spotted by the person assigned to the watching brief. I was standing away from the edge of the freshly dug hole, waiting in the shade of the opened boot of our car, when I heard a bit of a commotion. As I walked towards the hole to see what was going on, one of the soldiers called out my name with an urgency that stopped me in my tracks. Having attracted my attention, he held my gaze, pointed a finger at me and shouted: ‘Stay! Don’t look!’ I did as I was told.
It turned out that the digger had hit the anticipated horse’
s carcass and in the process had disturbed a nest of rats that were using the remains as a food source. As the digger hit the nest, its inhabitants were leaping about in a frenzied attempt to find their ‘rat runs’ and get clear of the perceived danger. Only when they were all gone did the soldier give me the all-clear, smile and say, ‘Go on, get in the hole, girl.’ Yep, it stank. Yep, I was up to my elbows in decomposing horse gore. But there were no rats, so I was happy as a clam.
The soldiers looked after me and my sensitivities – I have no qualms about being a girlie when I need to be – but they didn’t mollycoddle me and I respected them for that. Indeed, mollycoddling was in distinctly short supply in our team: eau de liquid horse is never going to be a cosmetic-counter bestseller but the stench in that hole was worse than anything I had ever encountered, I can tell you. When it came to lunchtime, I was very politely, but forcefully, asked to sit downwind on my own. Oh, the indignity of it all.
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Given the extreme nature of our work and the living conditions in Kosovo, it was inevitable that everyone’s fears or vulnerabilities would be exposed at some point or other. We were all permitted moments when it was OK not to be able to cope. What was important was that, when it mattered, we looked after each other.
Any experience that brings you into contact with mass fatalities or the inhumanity of the human race will, of course, leave its indelible imprint on your life. I have participated in a number of public events with the bestselling crime writer Val McDermid, and we have become good friends. Val is a very smart and perceptive lady and she has told me that on these occasions I can be outrageous and have an audience in giggles, or indeed bawdy laughter, yet the minute we start to talk about Kosovo, she senses that a veil seems to come down as I retreat to a distant place. She says that my tone becomes reflective and the atmosphere is tinged by sadness. I am never aware of that but it doesn’t surprise me.