Written in Bone

by Sue Black

  When questioned about this notable omission in her confession, the detained woman eventually admitted that she couldn’t bear to bury the head because the old lady was looking at her, so instead she cut it off, using the edge of the spade, she claimed, and put it in a plastic bag. She couldn’t leave it behind in case anyone found it, so she had hidden it at her home and thereafter, every time she moved house, she took it with her. The next question, obviously, was where might we find the head now? The answer was that it was in her garden shed, in a plastic bag under a pile of flowerpots.

  The police team was then dispatched to her garden shed. To her credit, she had at least told the truth about this. They returned to the mortuary with the skull in a supermarket carrier bag. My first job was to establish that the skull actually belonged to the body. These were the days when DNA was still in its infancy and the “fit” had to be based on anatomical articulation and whether the sex and age of the head matched that of the body. I had the skull and mandible, and the first and second cervical vertebrae, but the third was missing. Clearly this was where the dismemberment had taken place, and its absence meant we could not directly link the body anatomically to the skull. However, the anatomical features of the skull and mandible showed that they were most likely to be from an elderly female who, at the time of her death, did not have a single tooth in her head. I don’t believe her dentures were ever found.

  But the surprises just kept coming. For a start, it was clear that there were cut marks on the base of the skull and the second cervical vertebra. This indicated that, in addition to the spade, if indeed a spade had been involved, a sharp-bladed instrument, probably something like a meat cleaver, had been used. Even more importantly, I identified fracture patterns in the skull. There had been at least two blows to the head with a blunt instrument, perhaps the aforementioned spade, creating multiple fracture lines. The pathologist was satisfied that it was most likely death had occurred as a result of blunt-force trauma to the back of the skull, and that the head had probably been removed postmortem to conceal the manner of death. Maybe this was the real reason why the carer had taken the head with her every time she moved house.

  The victim had never been listed as a missing person. She had no family to miss her. And how she came to meet such a violent end at the hands of someone who was allegedly her friend I cannot say. Whatever the circumstances, her carer was charged with murdering the old lady by hitting her, probably twice, possibly with the spade, which she may then have used to try to remove her head. When this didn’t work, the carer had perhaps gone to the kitchen to find a suitable alternative. Having succeeded in separating the old lady’s head from her body, she popped it in a plastic bag to take home with her, dug a hole under the patio and buried the rest of the body there.

  She must have had a tremendous clean-up job on her hands before turning her attention to covering up her crime, clearing out the flat and presumably benefiting from her victim’s possessions as well as her pension.

  Perhaps the motive was money, and the crime was committed in cold blood. Perhaps it happened in the heat of the moment, as a result of an argument, or because the carer simply lost patience with the old lady and snapped. I was not privy to whatever explanation she may have offered. What is indisputable is that for over twenty years she seemed to have got away with murder, and yet eventually her conscience, or the increasing strain of sustaining the lie, led her to the front desk of the police station and an astounding confession. She ultimately pleaded guilty to murder, dismemberment, concealment of the remains and fraud related to claiming her victim’s pension and will spend the rest of her few precious remaining days at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Old age does not soften the sentences for our misdemean-ours, especially if they include aggravated murder.

  Most cases end up with a nickname and it was inevitable that this one was going to become known forevermore as the “head in the shed” murder. As I have often commented to crime writers, if they wrote some of the stuff that we come across in real life, nobody would ever believe them and their plots would be dismissed as ridiculously implausible.

  In this instance, the bones told us not only that the head had been deliberately removed but that the old lady had been killed, not died of natural causes. But before we can read a human story in the bones, the first step is to make sure they actually are bones. Sometimes other objects can masquerade as pieces of a human skeleton and if we don’t know what we are looking for, we can be fooled. Parts of the juvenile skeleton are often confused with animal bone, or even stones, because they may look like rounded little pieces of gravel. This is not generally a problem with the neurocranium, because this is usually well advanced in its development prior to birth. But confusion can occur.

  A child-abuse investigation at a former children’s home on Jersey, Haut de la Garenne, gained worldwide attention in 2008 after it was claimed that fragments of a juvenile skull had been found there. The presence of this “bone” was seen as damning evidence and the investigation intensified. It led to lurid speculation that children had been tortured and killed at the home and their remains concealed. However, laboratory testing undertaken to attempt to assess the age of a piece of the juvenile skull bone showed that it was not bone at all, but a fragment of wood, most likely from a coconut shell.

  In the end, the police had to admit that they had no evidence that any murders had taken place at Haut de la Garenne. Of around 170 suspected bone fragments turned up at the site, only three were possibly human, and these were probably centuries old.

  The absence of bodies, though, does not speak to the absence of cruelty, and the investigation did uncover a terrible catalogue of abuse at Haut de la Garenne and other children’s homes on Jersey, dating back to the late 1940s. Several offenders were convicted, though many more escaped justice because they were no longer alive by the time the scandal came to light. But the time, effort and public money that was wasted on pursuing these false leads exposed the police and the forensic experts to severe criticism and threatened to jeopardize a crucial investigation.

  What happened on Jersey goes to show that just because something looks like evidence of what you may be expecting to find, that does not make it so. If you are searching for the remains of children, you are not anticipating the discovery of coconuts. This is the evil of confirmation bias—the tendency to seek out something that confirms pre-set beliefs or theories, and to interpret findings through the lens of that prejudice: a tendency we all have to actively guard against. It is important that things like stones, pieces of wood and even bits of plastic (especially from fire scenes) are investigated thoroughly before conclusions are drawn because sometimes, a bone is just a coconut.

  ◊

  If there is a tremendous longevity and richness in the cultural and emotive imagery of the human skull, the true wonder lies in the structure itself, its purpose, how it forms, how it grows and what it can tell about the life, and perhaps even the death, of the person who occupied it for a short space of time.

  The bones of the adult human skull start to form towards the end of the second month of pregnancy. By the time the baby is born seven months later, virtually all the bones of the skull are recognizable, even when found in isolation from each other, providing you know what you are looking for. The growth and interconnection between the twenty-eight (or so) bones that comprise the adult skull make it one of the most complex areas of the human skeleton to try to understand, and to reconstruct from its pieces.

  At birth, the baby’s skull consists of nearly forty different bones, many of them measuring only a few millimetres. It is an area of the body that undergoes disproportionate growth in utero to accommodate the developing brain, but it must remain flexible if it is to be squeezed safely through Mum’s ridiculously small pelvic canal. The “soft spots,” or fontanelles, in a baby’s head enable the bones to ride over each other during birth and allow the skull to stretch to accommodate a brain that is growing faster than the bone around it. The skull of
a newborn baby can therefore sometimes appear deformed before the bones eventually settle back into position and the six fontanelles close. This starts at the age of two to three months and takes up to eighteen months to complete.

  There are four primary functions the skull must fulfil from the moment of birth.

  1. It must protect the very soft and fragile brain and its coverings.

  2. It must have holes (foramina) to safely conduct nerves and blood vessels, and there must be external openings for the organs of special sense (eyes, ears, nose and mouth) to work optimally and allow us to interact effectively with our surrounding environment.

  3. It must provide space for sequential sets of teeth that are required for biting and chewing and it must develop the paired temporomandibular (jaw) joints that will let the teeth actively grind against each other to begin the process of food digestion.

  4. It must house the upper part of both the respiratory and alimentary tracts to facilitate breathing and the passage of masticated food respectively.

  There are two basic divisions to the skull. The largest is the neuro-cranium, or vault, which is comprised of eight bones in the adult. The job of this rigid cranial chamber is almost solely to perform function number 1: to protect and support the delicate brain tissue. The smaller division of the skull is the viscerocranium, or face, which, by the time we reach adulthood, consists of a further fourteen bones. This takes care of most of functions 2 to 4. In a newborn baby, the viscerocranium is much smaller in relative terms, about one seventh of the volume of the brain box.

  A newborn baby therefore has a relatively big head (that’s the main reason why birth is so tricky) and, because the eyes are a direct outgrowth from the brain, the orbits in the neonatal skull also look disproportionately large. The cartoonists and animators who created the characters for Disney and Warner Bros exaggerated these differences between juvenile and adult heads to subliminally convey “good” and “bad” traits. A cute and non-threatening figure, such as Elmer Fudd, Bugs Bunny’s adversary, was drawn as short and tubby with a big bald head, a small but chubby face, no chin and large round eyes: essentially paedomorphic, or childlike, in appearance. By contrast, an evil or threatening character—Jafar from Aladdin or Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty—would be tall and thin with a relatively small head, small sloping eyes, a big chin and a disproportionately long, thin face. Today’s cartoons and CGI characters may be more sophisticated, but these defining features are still evident.

  The reason for a baby’s distinctive appearance is that the proportions of the skull are allied to two very different types of tissue: the brain and the teeth. As the brain develops long before the teeth, its growth requirements are more evident in the very young. The embryonic human nervous system starts as a flat sheet of tissue which then folds into a straw-like tube that runs down the centre of the body from what will be the brain end to the tail end. In the fourth week of intrauterine development, the brain end bends forward on the future brain stem and starts to swell like a balloon at the end of the straw.

  Neurological expansion in the region of the future brain will continue at a rapid pace and will be at a fairly advanced stage of development before the protective bony scaffold of the neurocranium begins to consolidate around it. Brain tissue, and nervous tissue in general, sends out a signal that encourages bone to be laid down to help protect it, so it is not surprising that some of the earliest bones to develop in the human are in the skull, and in the area of the neurocranium in particular.

  Patterns of growth such as the development of the sphenoid bone, right at the centre of the skull base, can help us to say whether it is from a fetus or a newborn. This bone is formed from six separate parts, two sections of a body and paired lesser and greater wings. In the fifth month of pregnancy the front of the body and the lesser wings fuse together. By the eighth month, this piece then melds with the back of the body of the bone. So at birth, the bone usually consists of three distinct parts: the fused bone consisting of the body and lesser wings, and the two separate greater wings.

  All elements of the sphenoid will finally unite during the first year after birth. Being able to identify every small part of the sphenoid, fused or unfused, and understanding the pattern and sequence of age-related change, allows an anthropologist to establish the age of a child with considerable accuracy, just from this one bone. And there are many other bones in the skull that can provide similar quite specific guidance on age, which makes it a rich source of information.

  If the cerebral hemispheres of the brain fail to develop, as happens, for example, in the clinical condition anencephaly, the bone is not encouraged to grow. As a result, the child may survive to birth, but will have a well-defined face with poorly constructed orbits for the eyes and a very rudimentary brain, with fundamentally no rigid box around it, giving the head the appearance of what has been described as a deflated balloon. Babies with this disorder tend not to live for more than a few hours, or days, at most. No brain, plus no brain box, results in a tragically short life.

  The bones of the neurocranium form in a special membrane that surrounds the developing brain and therefore look different from other types of bone in the body. They are in the main constructed out of diploic bone, from the Greek for “double fold.” This looks a bit like a sandwich, with a thin filling of more porous bone, almost aerated in appearance, between two layers of harder bone resembling ivory.

  Sometimes the sandwich structure does not develop normally and areas of thinning may occur, leaving the skull vulnerable to damage. The inherited condition known as the Catlin mark often presents as two large, round holes in the parietal bones at the back of the skull, which is why it is sometimes known as the “eyes in the back of the head’ condition. It was given its name by American biologist Dr William M. Goldsmith, who observed the defect in sixteen members of five generations of the Catlin family, and published his findings in 1922. Here, the bone simply does not develop, but because only small patches of it are affected, this does not appear to have a bearing on life expectancy. However, this area of the skull will be more vulnerable should the individual sustain a head injury.

  The Catlin mark is very different to the acquired holes in the head that occur after trepanation—a historical and cultural activity seen in many parts of the world whereby holes are made in the skull of a (usually still conscious) patient by drilling, chiselling or scraping. The reason for this crude surgery may have been to try to cure crippling headaches or treat mental conditions (or to “release spirits,” to which either type of illness may have been attributed). It was abandoned by most cultures by the end of the Middle Ages, although it was still being recorded in parts of Africa and Polynesia into the early 1900s. Without the benefit of modern-day anaesthetics, the pain must have been almost unimaginably excruciating, but there is a suggestion that the procedure could also give rise to a euphoric “high.” It is incredible that people survived this brutal intervention but the fact that they did is evidenced by many skulls that show advanced healing around the incursion.

  One vicious tool, dating back to the eighteenth century, shows how later procedures may have been performed. The hand brace, which looks a bit like a hand drill, boasts an end piece resembling a chisel with a spike in the middle, instantly recognizable to today’s carpenters as a flat wood bit for a drill. It is no accident that the tools of the orthopaedics trade appear to emulate those of carpentry. Such are the similarities that I heard about one trainee surgeon in Wales who decided he could hone his surgical skills by spending a week on a building site as a carpenter’s apprentice. Apparently, he was very accomplished.

  The forensic anthropologist, then, can be faced with holes in a skull for a variety of reasons, many of which may not have played a part in the person’s death, or indeed have resulted in death at all. It is relatively straightforward for an experienced professional to tell the difference between Catlin marks and trepanation holes. First of all, the position and symmetry differ: Catlin marks tend
to be bilateral, to be found at the back of the parietal bones, and are usually symmetrical in size and position, whereas trepanation holes are more commonly unilateral and can occur anywhere on the neurocranium. The edges of the holes will be different, too. The rims of a Catlin mark are sharp, while with trepanation you can often see a saucerlike depression around the hole, where the bone has remodelled itself, providing the person survived the intrusion and healing had started. If the patient died as a result of the trepanation or soon afterwards, the marks of the tools used in the surgery will frequently still be visible as scores or grooves on the cut surface and unhealed fracture lines may be present.

  Diploic bone is so distinctive that no other part of the skeleton is likely to be confused with it, and this makes it easy to recognize even when all you have to go on is a single, isolated fragment. However, other parts of the neurocranium are not always so easy to identify.

  In trying to find out what had happened to one middle-aged woman who suddenly vanished from a small Scottish town, the only clue we had was the tiniest piece of something that the scene-of-crime officers, the SOCOs, thought might possibly be bone.

  Mary had not been seen since putting her coat on to leave work five days before her disappearance was reported. The last thing she had said to her colleagues was that she was going home to throw her husband out on his ear because she had had enough of his lies and deceit. She had taken a phone call at work that day from their bank to say that there were some irregularities with the paperwork the couple had just signed to request a £50,000 bank loan. There certainly were “irregularities,” because she had signed no such papers. Her husband had forged her signature.

  Mary’s husband had several failed businesses to his name and now faced mounting debts. She had reached the end of her tether with him and had often remarked to her friends that if she didn’t turn up for work one day and the police came looking for her, they should tell them to dig up her back garden.