by Sue Black
While the prospect of a new life coming into a family is for most people something to be celebrated, sadly, not all babies are welcome and it is not uncommon for the remains of fetuses or newborn babies to be found concealed in unexpected places. Often it is when floor-boards are lifted or old bath panels prised off, when chimneys are opened or swept, when lofts are being insulated or when old suitcases are discovered at the back of long-forgotten cupboards. Unwanted pregnancies can be covered up and the tiny body of a newly delivered baby, whether born alive or dead, easily hidden in the belief that no evidence of its existence need ever come to light.
But frequently it does, sometimes years after the event. Many of the cases we are asked to examine date back seventy years or more, to a different time. Terminations were illegal and unsafe, but that did not deter women from seeking them, or hinder the back-street industry that met the demand. Women were often driven to this course of action by poverty, and the economic impossibility of feeding another mouth, or by the shame and stigma attached to illegitimacy.
The discovery of such remains raises many questions. The first that spring to mind, of course, are when did the baby die and who was its mother? But often the most relevant questions from the legal point of view concern how and at what age the infant died. The central issue here is whether the child was born alive, and if so, whether it then died of natural causes, perhaps as a result of the absence of medical intervention, or was killed by somebody. If it died prematurely, was this perhaps due to a termination, or was it stillborn?
A stillbirth is defined as a baby born without signs of life after twenty-four weeks of gestation, whereas a child who dies before that stage is viewed as a miscarriage or late fetal loss. The twenty-four-week milestone is important forensically, as it is the current legal limit for abortion and thus deemed to be the age beyond which the fetus has a chance of survival, provided a high level of medical care is available. In other words, it is when the fetus is said to become technically “viable.”
The fetal clavicle can provide reliable evidence in establishing this legal distinction. At twenty-four weeks, the bone is around 27 mm long—half the length of an adult thumb—and can be measured accurately. In a living baby inside its mother, this is done using ultrasound. The image can be quite awkward to interpret so the skilled advice of a radiographer is generally required. In a baby no longer in the uterus, an X-ray or CT scan of the bone can be taken, or, if a postmortem examination is to be performed, the clavicle can, of course, be removed and measured directly.
Finding the remains of fetuses or newborn babies in your house can be quite traumatic for the homeowners, as one couple who bought an old stone croft cottage in a remote part of the Scottish isles could attest. While undertaking some extensive renovations, they pulled up the kitchen floorboards to put in a damp course and new pipework. As they peered down at the earthen foundations below, they could make out what they thought might be bones on the surface of the soil. The island had a rich heritage of ancient burials and artefacts, so they called in some archaeologists working at a site nearby to have a look. The bones were very small. Some were those of animals, but, unfortunately, not all of them. The police were called.
As the local force had no scene-of-crime officers and it would have taken a couple of days to bring in SOCOs from the mainland, they decided to enlist the help of the archaeologists. The dry bones were lifted and transported by air, in two little cardboard boxes, to the nearest mortuary, over 150 miles away in Inverness. I was asked to examine the remains and give an opinion on their age at death, how long ago death may have occurred and to provide any other pointers that might assist their inquiries. The quality of the photographs taken at the location was extremely poor, to the extent that I had to ask what I was supposed to be looking at and where. That was alarm bell number one. Alarm bell number two rang when I asked who had lifted the bones and was told it was “OK because they were archaeologists, and they only picked up the human remains and threw away the animal bones.”
Anyone with forensic training knows that you never throw anything away and should always use experts with the relevant expertise. Even so, this might in the circumstances have been “OK” if I’d been able to depend on the accuracy of the archaeologists’ assessment of the origin of the bones. If they’d had the necessary experience to competently identify human remains, there should have been no animal bones in the boxes. But what I found were animal bones mixed in with human fetal bones. That told me I could have no confidence in the ability of the archaeologists to distinguish between them.
The disposal site would need to be searched again. When it was, I don’t believe anything further was found, although I don’t think a forensic anthropologist was present even then. Real-life investigations are never like the ones we see on television, and there was to be no eureka moment. I gave the senior investigating officer (SIO) a bit of a hard time about the quality of the photographs and comprehensiveness of the recovery and told him I hoped this wasn’t going to turn out to be a homicide, because the evidence was patchy. He was a longstanding friend of mine, and he took it on the chin. But I suspect the experience nudged that police force into sharpening up their search and recovery procedures from then on.
The animal bones in the boxes were small, and from vermin, mainly mice and rats, and it therefore seemed likely that the human material had been a food source for them over time. Indeed, animal gnawing marks were visible on some of the human bones. A new-born baby has over three hundred bones and I was looking at only about 2 per cent of that total. Moreover, it was clear that these had come from more than one baby. Among them were three clavicles: two left and one right, and the right clavicle was not the same size as either of the left clavicles, so obviously not part of a pair.
In short, we had the remains of at least three different babies. Provided all three had been buried intact, I would have expected a minimum of nine hundred bones to be found. The rest had probably been lost over time: either consumed by animals, washed away (the area was very damp) or simply disintegrated by the local acidic, peaty soil. But of course, it may have been that some of them were just not picked up by the archaeologists because they had not recognized them as being fetal remains. It was also possible that the babies had not been discarded intact, and I would certainly be checking for dismemberment marks.
There was no evidence of trauma on the bones, so a cause of death could not be readily determined and dismemberment was unlikely. You cannot tell the sex of a baby from its bones, but you are able to pinpoint its age with accuracy, especially if you have the clavicles. Two of the babies, those for whom we had the left clavicles, were full term, about forty weeks old when they died. The third, the owner of the smaller right clavicle, was much younger, about thirty weeks—still viable according to the legal definition in force today, although potentially not capable of survival if the remains were of historic origin. Bone was sampled for DNA but none could be extracted, perhaps because of preservation conditions or its age.
We believed the bodies were probably historical. Radiocarbon dating could have confirmed this, but I am always reluctant to send baby bones away for testing unless absolutely necessary, especially when so few have been recovered. The analysis requires so much bone to be destroyed that there is a risk there may be nothing left to bury after our questions have been answered. So I asked the police to do some background research and set aside chemical testing as a last resort.
The story they uncovered came largely from local hearsay but it fitted the evidence and would eventually satisfy the procurator fiscal. It dated back to the days after the First World War, when this remote island community led an isolated existence, with no telephones, no electricity, no running water and no public transport. Life was harsh and most families subsisted on the meagre pickings they could scratch from the land or the sea. The houses were small, cold, damp and dark, with thick stone walls, thatched roofs, tiny windows and floors laid directly on top of the soil.
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nbsp; Violet, who was unmarried, lived alone in a typical little stone “but and ben” only 100 yards from the cottage where the bones were discovered. She was viewed by the local gossips of the time as a woman of dubious morality, and described variously as a floozie, trollop and Jezebel, or, in Gaelic, a siùrsach or strìopach.
It was said that, to make ends meet, Violet would sell her favours to the servicemen stationed at a nearby naval base and to well-off local businessmen. She was periodically seen wearing suspiciously baggy clothes and there were times when she moved in for a while with her domineering mother, Tamina, who lived in the nearby cottage, re-emerging later and returning to her normal life. It is what happened during these spells at the cottage that may have been relevant to the discovery of the remains found under the floorboards.
In an era of less than perfect contraception, unwanted pregnancies were an occupational hazard of Violet’s alleged trade. It was claimed locally that she had given birth to anything up to eleven children in total, although gossip is always prone to exaggeration. Whatever the truth, by the time she died in the 1950s, she had only one surviving child, a son. His birth, it was remembered, had been a breech delivery and had required the attendance of a local doctor. This may have been what saved his life.
It was said that, with no means of terminating a pregnancy, Violet carried these babies to full term and moved in with her mother when the time came for her to give birth. Perhaps her relatives chose to look the other way when she became pregnant, hoping that she might miscarry. Perhaps they even benefited from the money she earned. Whatever the case, in those days illegitimacy was a sin in the eyes of the kirk and a stain on the reputation of the whole family—and Violet’s grandfather was a lay church minister. While a blind eye might be turned to a discreet pregnancy, a bastard child would not be tolerated. And yet it seems that infanticide was. The condemnation of the Church was feared far more than the long arm of the law.
Local lore had it that, as soon as a baby was born, Tamina would take it away and drown it in a rusty old bucket normally used for carrying fish. The body would then be thrown under the floorboards of the cottage where, over time, it would decay until there was nothing left but bones.
Violet’s son, who was no longer alive when the remains were found, maintained that, on her deathbed, his mother admitted to having given birth to five babies, and had said that his grandmother had drowned the other four. She told him he owed his life to the doctor’s presence at his birth, which meant his arrival had to be acknowledged and questions would be asked if he suddenly disappeared. Otherwise, Tamina might have drowned him, too.
He never really knew his formidable grandmother. Violet was so scared of Tamina that she kept her little boy out of sight until he was old enough to go to school, when there could be no concealing his healthy existence.
There is, of course, no evidence for any of this, and most of it is probably salacious scuttlebutt. And before any of us rushes to condemn Tamina as a cold, evil serial killer, we need to consider the attitudes of the times. The deeds of the past do not always sit comfortably with our modern morals. Maybe Violet sought the help of her mother; maybe they worked together to maintain the family’s meagre income, ignoring the gossips and disposing of the social embarrassment.
Illegitimacy and infanticide were sufficiently prevalent that in 1809 the law in Scotland had been amended to reduce the sentence for the offence of concealing a pregnancy and failing to call for assistance at the birth. Since the seventeenth century, this crime had been treated as murder, but it now carried the far less severe penalty of two years in prison. And if charged, women could claim stillbirth in the hope of being granted leniency.
If, as Violet’s son had said, there had been four other babies, I could confirm the remains of only three under the floorboards. But it was possible that some of the bones could have belonged to a fourth baby or, of course, that its remains had been consumed in their entirety by scavengers or had been deposited elsewhere. Forensic anthropologists record an MNI—minimum number of individuals—which does not mean that more may not be represented. The MNI is calculated by establishing where there is duplication of the same bone, or bones of different sizes that may indicate different stages of maturity. We knew we had three clavicles that did not belong together, but we had no way of knowing whether all of the other bones were from the same three babies.
However many there were, some eighty years after the infants had lost their lives, allegedly at the hands of a murderous grandmother, they were finally laid to rest beside the woman who was believed to be their mother. They had no names, but the meagre pile of bones was placed in its own tiny casket. We could not prove that they even belonged to the same family, but anecdotal evidence and circumstance seemed to support the probability. The procurator fiscal was content and surely, after years lying beneath that cottage like unwanted waste, they deserved to be buried with respect.
At around the same time we had a similar case in the north of Scotland, reported by a young couple who had been fitting spotlights in their newly refurbished bedroom. They had cut a hatch into the ceiling to feed electrical cable across the roof space but it kept getting caught on something. They prodded and pushed and eventually a bundle of clothing fell from the space in a great cloud of dust and debris. It was a dress from the 1950s, and wrapped inside were the desiccated remains of a newborn baby.
Almost predictably, the child was full term, as evidenced by the length of its clavicle, and there was no evidence of a cause of death. Sometimes it is not in the public interest to initiate a full-scale investigation. Who do you investigate? Who do you prosecute? Unless the property is still owned or occupied by the same family, how do you establish who lived there at the time? Finding anyone still alive who would have any useful information to offer, let alone tracking down any individual who might admit to being responsible, is almost impossible.
But there are times when we are able to reunite an infant who died at birth with their name, even many years later. It was the clavicle again that assisted us in the case of a baby whose body was found in very sad circumstances. A woman walked into a police station in the Midlands one day and informed the desk sergeant that, twenty years before, she had miscarried a child in late pregnancy. She was unmarried and, having concealed her pregnancy from everyone, she felt she could never confess to the stillbirth.
She told police that she had given birth to her daughter alone on her bathroom floor. She said that the baby had been born dead and never cried. She cut the umbilical cord and wrapped the baby in newspaper.
When the placenta was expelled, she had thrown this in the bin. But she did not know what to do with the baby. She could not bear to be parted from her daughter. However, burying her at home was not an option because she lived in rented accommodation, where she knew she was unlikely to be staying in the long term. She didn’t want to find herself having to move on and leave her child behind. This reaction is quite common, and explains why the remains of miscarried or stillborn babies are often discovered secreted in unexpected parts of cemeteries or in suitcases, as well as in the dark recesses of houses. Since Violet’s time, the population has become more mobile and it is unusual for anyone to spend their whole life in the same home.
This woman needed to find a way of giving her baby a decent burial that both concealed her and allowed her to be moved when necessary. She told the police that, after placing her little girl, still wrapped in newspaper, in an old pillowcase, she bought a very large metal plant pot to stand outside the back door of her house. She put compost in the bottom, laid the baby, in her makeshift shroud, on top, planted a bay tree in the pot and filled it with soil. She said that it didn’t feel right to water the plant with her daughter there beneath it, so she let the tree die. But she kept the pot, and all of its contents, and it had moved house with her several times. At each new home, she stored it in a shed or cupboard to keep it “dry and warm.”
At last, after carrying this secret for twen
ty years, and with it, no doubt, a large measure of guilt and anxiety, she felt she needed to unburden herself by telling someone the truth.
I was asked to attend the scene and assist with the recovery of the remains, if indeed there were any to be found. The plant pot stood some 60 cm off the floor and its circumference was of about the same size. As it was made of metal, we couldn’t X-ray it, so we were going to have to perform a mini excavation.
The pot was taken to the mortuary and placed on a table where, layer by layer, the dry, dusty soil was removed using a paintbrush and a small garden trowel as a miniature dustpan and brush. We kept the soil to one side to be sifted later to make sure that we hadn’t missed anything. The room was completely hushed, apart from the soft clicks of the camera photographing every step of the process. Everyone was holding their breath. A few centimetres down I could see a piece of cotton poking out and carefully removed the soil around it. This did indeed turn out to be a pillowcase, just as the woman had told police. It was intact and I was able to lift it out in one piece. I then cut carefully down the length of the pillowcase and unfolded the fabric to reveal the contents.
If there had been newspaper it was long gone now, but what was present was the perfect skeleton of a baby, its delicate, papery, desiccated tissues still visible where muscles would once have been, filling the spaces between the bones. The body remained largely articulated as the tendons and ligaments had dried and mummified, keeping everything in place.