Written in Bone

by Sue Black

  The baby was still in the fetal position and the skull bones were misshapen, which is consistent with a vaginal birth. Every one of the tiny bones was recovered, photographed and analysed. The clavicle was 42 mm long, which confirmed that this was likely to have been a full-term birth. There was no evidence of a cause of death.

  I don’t believe Mum was charged with any crime, even though the offence of concealing a birth remains on the statute books. She was probably simply cautioned. The sadness of this case lies not only in the loss of a new life but in the trauma of a mother giving birth to a dead child in stark solitude and the psychological scars she had carried for two decades.

  I gather that the little body was buried in a local cemetery. Although I don’t know if Mum attended, I imagine, given the strong bond she had with her dead daughter, that she would have done, probably along with the family liaison police officers who would have been there for her throughout. Some people think of the police as hard and uncaring, but in my experience this is usually very far from the truth. In cases like this they share in the grief that is heavy in the air and show a deep humanity and sympathy for those they are trying to support.

  As we were unable to establish a cause of death we could not say definitively that this was a stillbirth, but if it wasn’t, this mother had surely been punished enough. Yet while the empathetic among us will view this as a tragic story of loneliness and bereavement, cynics will prefer to see an opportunist who murdered her unwanted baby and sought to conceal the death and her own guilt. It is unlikely we will ever know which interpretation is closest to the truth, but if she was guilty of any real crime, why would she ever have come forward? And I would rather live with hope than scorn.

  ◊

  The clavicle is unusual in that not only is it a reliable guide to the age of a fetus or a young baby, it continues to be useful in this regard right up to the end of the third decade of life.

  As well as being the first bone to start to form in the fetus, it is one of the last in the body to finish growing. At the medial end (nearest the breastbone) is a plug of cartilage that gradually begins to ossify from around fourteen years of age (slightly earlier in girls than in boys). Eventually, as the cartilage continues to be replaced, the bone in the plug will fuse with the main shaft.

  This starts to happen at around the age of sixteen, and a clavicle in a person anywhere between approximately sixteen and twenty-four can look as if it has a thin flake of bone glued to the medial end of the shaft, a bit like a scab on a wound. (Anatomically, “medial” denotes the area nearest to the middle of the body while “lateral” describes the region furthest away from the midline.) As completion of the fusion may not occur until the mid-twenties, it gives us a precisely defined range of possibilities: under fifteen, between fifteen and twenty-five or over twenty-five. So it is one of the first bones we will look to when we are trying to establish the age of either a child or a mature adult from their skeleton.

  Although the clavicle is prone to fracture it is quite a resilient little bone, whether subjected to burial, exposure to the elements or fire. It owes its hardiness to its dense cortex and to the joint being tight with the sternum, which gives the medial end a certain amount of protection. It was this characteristic that provided an important clue to what may have happened to Marcella, a nineteen-year-old sex worker who went missing in the Midlands.

  Marcella was the mother of a nine-month-old daughter. According to those who knew her, she continued in her high-risk line of business in order to support her little girl. One evening, Marcella left her daughter with a babysitter to go out to work and took a taxi into the red-light district of the city. She phoned the babysitter several times to check that all was well. The last call was made not long after 9 p.m. When she did not return to collect her child at around 11 p.m. as she had promised, the babysitter rang Marcella’s mother, who contacted the police to report her missing.

  Having checked all the local hospitals, to no avail, the police considered four possible explanations. First, that Marcella had chosen to abandon her daughter. Second, that she was being held somewhere against her will. Third, that she’d had some kind of accident and was lying somewhere injured, or worse, as yet undiscovered. Fourth, that she was dead as a result of foul play. As Marcella was a conscientious mother, they did not believe the first proposition was very likely. That meant the three other alternatives needed to be followed up as a matter of urgency.

  Marcella’s fellow sex workers were interviewed. Initially reluctant to give out names, descriptions or number plates for their regular clients or unknown kerb-crawlers, once they realized the seriousness of the situation, they helped police to very quickly narrow down a list of likely suspects. The police were left with two names to prioritize, one of which was of significant interest to them.

  Paul Brumfitt had already served fourteen years in prison for two murders: he had first clubbed a shopkeeper to death with a hammer and then, while on the run in Denmark, he strangled a bus driver. He had also wounded a pregnant woman with a candlestick. He claimed that an argument with his girlfriend at the time had triggered this killing spree. With psychiatrists finding no evidence of mental illness, he had been freed from prison on licence and proceeded to rape a sex worker at knifepoint on two separate occasions. He was currently on bail for these offences. Might Marcella have become another of his victims?

  As part of his rehabilitation, since his release from prison Brumfitt had been working as a gardener and park-keeper for the local council. The police, aware that he was renting a small lumber yard, focused their investigation on the yard and on the flat where he was living. At his home they found a small amount of blood which matched Marcella’s, but it was insufficient to justify charging him with murder. At the lumber yard they discovered the remains of a very large, free-standing bonfire, on a piece of ground that had obviously been used to burn all sorts of different materials over a long period of time.

  When clearly defined layers are seen in a fire, it indicates that there have been consecutive fires rather than one big blaze. If a fire is stoked frequently it produces a more homogenous ash. This one would have to be searched methodically, layer by layer, to try to establish what had been burned there and where within the fire it was located.

  Finds from nearer the surface of the ash are, of course, likely to have been placed on a fire later than material retrieved from closer to its base. So it was really important that this fire was carefully deconstructed and its depositional history painstakingly recorded, a job that had to be undertaken by an expert forensic archaeologist.

  Experienced forensic archaeologists are a rare breed in the UK but the police managed to secure the services of the best, Professor John Hunter. It was at this point that the police also contacted me, and I travelled down from Scotland to assist. All I had been told was that the police wanted me to look at some fragments of what they thought might be bone which John had recovered from the bonfire in the lumber yard. I also knew they were looking for a missing woman who they suspected had come to a violent end, and that their prime suspect was linked to the lumber yard in question, but I knew nothing more about Marcella herself.

  John had systematically stripped away the burned debris from the bonfire, separately wrapping and labelling material from each layer and sending it to the mortuary, where I sifted through it. Each bag was opened and its contents spread out on the mortuary table to be examined item by item, much of it with a magnifying glass, to try to determine what might be present. Handling fire debris is dirty work. Everything is black or grey, so you need good eyesight and good light to make sure you don’t miss anything. At the top of the fire was a lot of wood, some still unburned, that had clearly been used as its main fuel. Towards the upper section, some bone was found. It was not human, consisting for the most part of meat bones from food waste.

  As I progressed down into the deeper layers, very small fragments of bone started to emerge. These were not obviously animal and were quite
possibly human. They were grey in colour, which meant they had been burned for some considerable time, and so little of them was left that the likelihood of extracting DNA was close to zero. With several bonfires having taken place on the same spot, the ashes showed there had been repeated burning of the bones that reduced them into smaller and smaller pieces, perhaps pointing to an attempt to destroy them completely and ensure they could not be identified.

  A set of house keys was also found in a lower layer of the fire. When tested by the police, they opened both the front and back doors of Marcella’s home. But on their own, the keys amounted to only circumstantial evidence. Unless the remains could be attributed to Marcella, Brumfitt could not be charged with her murder.

  Few of the bone fragments were bigger than a fingertip—and one of them actually was a fingertip. The bone was small, but I could tell that it was from an adult because the growth areas had fused. I identified another fragment as coming from the leg, from the lower end of the fibula, which forms the outside bump of the ankle. This told me that the growth plate, the area of growing tissue at the ends of the long bones, was fused, but that this had occurred only relatively recently. In females, fusion of this growth plate is normally complete by around sixteen to eighteen years of age. I also had a small section of alveolar bone from the jaw (the socket area, where the teeth sit), which was X-rayed to allow a forensic odontologist to compare our images with any radiography that might exist in Marcella’s dental records.

  And then there was the trusty clavicle. A piece of this, about the size of a thumbnail, had survived the sustained and intense heat of the fire, just enough to enable us to put the age of the victim at between sixteen and twenty-one. We could see that the sliver of bone at the medial end had started to fuse but that this was at a very early stage of development.

  It turned out that what these tiny remnants of a human being were able to tell us fitted with the description the police had been given of Marcella. She was nineteen years old, in the middle of the age range established from the bone fragments, and she was a petite woman, under 5 ft (1.5 m). The police had been told that she often wore very high heels to make her appear taller. She looked so young for her age that it seems she capitalized on her appearance to cater for a particularly unsavoury type of client: one of her working outfits was designed to attract men who fantasized about sexual encounters with schoolgirls.

  The police believed what happened may have gone something like this. Marcella was picked up by Brumfitt in the red-light district and he persuaded her to go back to his flat. There it is possible, given the suspect’s previous offences, that he raped her at knifepoint. For whatever reason—perhaps she fought back, or to prevent her from identifying him—he stabbed her. He was already on bail for rape, so if caught, he would be sent straight back to prison, and he was no stranger to murder. This would explain the discovery of her blood in the flat.

  Although we knew there had been dismemberment of the body, there was insufficient blood in the flat for this to have taken place there. Perhaps Brumfitt transported Marcella’s body to the yard where, over a period of time, her remains were burned, piece by piece, along with her clothes and belongings. The animal bones that were found were perhaps merely the remains of meals that had been tossed on the fire, but they could have been added in a deliberate attempt to confuse anyone who might rake through the ashes.

  Brumfitt was arrested. Initially he refused to answer any questions but finally he broke and admitted to the murder. However, he never elaborated on the details of the killing or the dismemberment. He subsequently received three life sentences for the two rapes and the aggravated murder of Marcella and was sentenced to life in prison, where he currently resides.

  At the trial the judge accepted the identification of Marcella on the basis of three pieces of evidence: the testimony of the odontologist that the piece of alveolar bone matched a previous X-ray, the door keys found in the fire and our age confirmation, made primarily on what the thumbnail-sized fragment of charred clavicle had to tell us. Small wonder that this is a bone much loved by the forensic anthropologist.

  ◊

  In contrast to the clavicle, the scapula, the second bone of the pectoral girdle, rarely provides much insightful information for forensic investigation. Although, again unlike the clavicle, it is quite difficult to break, it can be relatively easily dislocated at the shoulder because the upper limb is not firmly connected to the trunk.

  This is a feature that has long been exploited in cases of torture. The method known as strappado, or reverse or Palestinian hanging, involves tying the victim’s hands behind their back and suspending them from a rope attached to their wrists. With the shoulders in this position, the weight of the body frequently dislocates the humerus from the scapula. Because it is a lax joint, it can be rearticulated, which makes it ideal, from the torturer’s point of view, for repeated assaults. Sometimes extra weights are placed on the shoulders to increase the agony. The pain is said to be excruciating and it can be fatal if the victim is left hanging for too long. The risk of death depends on the age and state of health of the victim, but strappado can lead to asphyxia, heart failure or thrombosis.

  Quite apart from the danger to life and severe psychological effects, it can have long-term physical consequences such as loss of sensation (paraesthesia) in the skin of the upper limb, caused by damage to the nerves in the armpit region, or muscle paralysis, primarily as a result of injury to the axillary nerve.

  The most important muscle to be affected is the deltoid, which covers the front, top and back of the shoulder area. As this muscle is the main one that controls our capacity to lift our arms to the side, a lasting legacy of strappado can be the inability to raise the outstretched arm to shoulder level. This is therefore frequently used by human-rights practitioners as a test to determine whether there is physical evidence to support the testimony of those claiming to have been victims of this form of torture.

  It may be possible for the forensic anthropologist to detect the effects of strappado in a skeleton, provided the individual survived the original torture. Long-term damage to the nerves leads to muscle wastage, and it is likely that, in the regions where the muscles attach, in particular the deltoid muscle, areas of bone reabsorption will have occurred in anyone who was tortured in this way during their life. These marks, which are called enthesopathies, are effectively scars left by the attachments of tendons or ligaments that have been damaged through trauma.

  While such inhumane acts might sound as if they belong in the past, unfortunately these techniques are still employed today to elicit information or confessions or to break the will of the victim or other prisoners forced to witness it. The human body is a marvel of engineering, but we know its limits. In the hands of those who choose to use such knowledge to push the body beyond them, it becomes a cheap and effective weapon.

  The scapula owes its durability to its intrinsic sturdiness and to being protected by surrounding muscle. The origin of the name of the bone may be the Greek skapto, meaning to dig or delve, because of its spadelike appearance. Indeed, with minimal modifications, the shoulder blades of big animals such as cow, horse or deer were pressed into service by many ancient cultures as agricultural implements and used like hoes or trowels.

  Although the scapula is not often pivotal to a forensic investigation, that doesn’t mean we don’t examine it in great detail. A stab or a bullet to the back may well leave its mark on the bone, and blunt-force trauma caused by a weapon like a baseball bat or a metal pole can fracture it. It is claimed that stress fractures can occur as a result of using axillary crutches. Sometimes diseases such as osteoarthritis or infections may be detected from the scapula and congenital or developmental anomalies, although rare, are occasionally reported.

  The bone has its role to play in the confirmation of sex. In general, male scapulae are bigger than the female’s and have larger sites for muscle attachment. Some say it can assist in establishing whether an individual w
as right- or left-handed. However, the main value of the bone is in age determination, especially in subjects between the ages of ten and twenty, when all the different parts that make up the adult bone start to come together to achieve its final formation.

  In the fetus, the scapula starts to form up in the neck region before descending to its final resting position on the back of the chest wall. The congenital condition Sprengel’s deformity is caused by the failure of the scapula to descend, resulting in one unusually elevated shoulder. Sometimes both shoulders can be affected. This is more common in females than in males: about 75 per cent of reported cases are females. It is linked to several other conditions such as congenital scoliosis. An omovertebral bone, a rare anomaly where the scapula is fused to the vertebral column by an extra bone, may be created by the ossification of the soft tissues that lie between them.

  Right at the tip of the bony shoulder is a projection from the scapula, the acromion process, from the Greek for the top of a rocky out-crop (the same source as the word Acropolis). The tip of the acromion process starts to form in bone when we are around fourteen to sixteen, eventually fusing to the body of the scapula at about eighteen to twenty years of age. This is important for muscle attachment as it is a site of insertion for the powerful deltoid muscle. The deltoid forms the contour of the shoulder and controls its movement: when it contracts, the anterior fibres help it to flex the shoulder (bringing the arm forwards), the lateral fibres bring about abduction (elevating the arm to the side) and the posterior fibres support extension (pulling the arm backwards).

  These are all actions involved in many sports, especially those that require power in the upper-limb muscles such as rowing, weight-lifting and gymnastics. If too great a strain is placed repeatedly on the acromion process by the deltoid in the young, the acromion may not fuse to the remainder of the scapula at the end of puberty and remain as a separate bone—the os acromiale. If this does happen it causes no pain or other problems in the majority of cases; in fact, its owner might never know they have it.